Agricultural Avatar Says Alternatives to Milk are Delusions.

Dairy farmer Jim Hedley is an aggressive activist for New Zealand’s overwhelming export earner which is milk products. He explains why the nation’s economic underpinning requires a rebel voice in order to protect it from undermining by influential urban society.

Cows have a bad name and so do their owners?

Is it so evil to be responsible for the bulk of the nation’s export earnings? All I hear is what is going wrong with the country, about people who do not have enough money to acquire the things that they say they need. These things have to be paid for and to a very large extent these have to be paid for by overseas earnings.

Dairy farmers are said to be quite literally in clover now with record pay-outs?

The rewards for dairy farmers and thus for the country as a whole are high at the moment. For every kilo of milk solid worth $10 however there remains the production expenses in raising, feeding, and milking the animals which is also at its highest level ever. Electricity is one such spiralling cost.

There is this outpouring about how cows endanger the atmosphere among their many other anti-social acts?

There is an intensifying volume of negative activity relating to dairy farming. It is concentrated in the urban sector and nurtured by the beautiful people. Also by their always attentive members of parliament who have allowed so much dairy pasture to disappear. And do so exactly at the time that the needy are said to require the wealth that the dairy sector generates in order to alleviate their misery.

A constant refrain is to the effect that dairy farming needs so much regulation in order to limit pollution to waterways?

Those of a greener hue have successfully created an impression that until they came along nobody did anything at all about this. Conveniently forgotten is the historic presence of drainage boards, catchment boards, acclimatisation societies among other regulatory and monitoring bodies. The dairy sector has become victim of an urban hysteria. As it becomes more and more evident that dairy is the major earner of our exports I have no doubt that this resentment fervour will intensify.

You are saying that urban opposition to dairy farming has its roots in jealousy?

There is some truth here. It may be the reason for so many collective institutional schemes to make it tough for the industry. There is the campaign quite ludicrous in its way to stop cows belching and so preventing the ruminative process that results in milk. Then there is the campaign to take dairy pasture out of production by planting trees. We have seen the effect of this in the clear felling clogging the very waterways that our dairy critics so ostentatiously pledge themselves to protect. Then there is the failure of the timber-planting offset auctions to generate any value at all.

Forestry has become the official glamour activity. Is this at the expense of dairy do you think?

Urban influencers have become hypnotised such is the extent of this delusion. A number of people who should know better extoll the value of forestry to me as the ultimate attainment in primary production. I say if this is the case what happened to New Zealand Forest Products? The biggest corporate entity of the last century simply collapsed. What happened to our paper mills, the saw mills…? Whether we like it or not New Zealand possesses one and only the one competitive advantage. It is that grass grows all the year around. Such is the government infatuation with forestry that deliberately ignored is the efficiency of grass as a carpet of carbon dioxide -absorbing mass and one that does not need an artificial, subsidised, nebulous and fraying futures market to sustain it.

Why is the value of grass and the animals that graze on it so widely dismissed?

It is that the intelligentsia find it so hard to acknowledge that dairy farming is ultimately responsible for much and even most of the wealth they enjoy. How can these dolts wallowing around in the mud with their belching animals have the power to generate our wealth? Remember the era not all that long ago when we were supposed to stop doing mucky things such as dairy farming and instead focus on buying and selling office properties and trading in shares and foreign exchange markets. The result of this particular state-sponsored illusion was that we lost our entire banking and insurance sector here and overseas.

You dwell upon the state-sponsored nature of these illusory sectors, the ones that contemporary fashion dictates will replace the dairy sector?

Let us not sustain this illusion by imagining that this state of affairs is in the past. It is ever present. In terms of local government it takes the form of prime pastoral land being subdivided into residential blocks. There is now the official government-sponsored “fast-tracking” of dairy pasture near electricity substations to become swathed in solar-generating panels and their batteries.

Why do you believe there is this deep-seated reluctance to acknowledge the critical role dairy farming has in the nation’s economic life?

It is because so many influential voices are the ones that the opinion-forming sector takes their cues from. James Cameron for example declared his intention of removing animals from the food chain and going directly to plant nutrition. In New Zealand he manifested the sincerity of his intention by acquiring substantial dairy farms and converting them to this purpose. This move was accompanied by the establishment of neighbouring vertical integration in the form of vegan retail capability which I notice is not there anymore.

You appear to have made yourself personally rather unfashionable in the course of your dairy industry advocacy?

I have not made myself popular I have to admit. This was emphasised by lurid reports of my being “thrown out” of a district council meeting. I was asked to leave in more mundane words. I was persisting in what I believe is the solution to this whole problem which is that farmers become again part of the governmental scene locally and nation-wide. In the incident you mention I was seeking to lobby for rural wards on district councils. Since boroughs and counties were amalgamated we have the situation in which the town candidates dominate because of the more populous town vote.

Why does the dairy sector fail to confront that fact that the governing coalition is led by the National Party which was founded specifically to look after farmers?

The National Party and its coalition cohorts are focussed on a small group of inner city electorates in which politicians pander and defer to known urban upscale issues which have more to do with grandstanding globalism than they do with the less exciting matter of how this country pays its way in the world. It is not that long ago that New Zealand was in the very top rank of prosperity. The reason we are so indebted is because we are so unproductive. This is because only a diminishing proportion of the population makes things that can be actually sold and especially overseas which is what the dairy industry does.

Hive Mentality Strangles Diversity of reporting

A similarity in background and education of those employed in the mainstream or legacy media has caused an inevitable and unchallenged slant in the sector’s output and this progressive partisan emphasis is most evident in public broadcasting.

Ironically for a vocational category stridently identifying as professional this quest often manifests itself in below-stairs attitudes.

This includes the Fleet Street concealing the cause of Boris Johnson’s demonstrable state of distraction while prime minister confronting his own Churchillian appointment with destiny.

Johnson in No 10 was distracted leaving his wife and entering into a new and modern marriage and now coping in his later middle age with disturbed nights caused by the couple immediately embarking upon parenthood.

All this is pruriently brushed underneath the nursery carpet along with the associated conversion of the roast beef of Olde England barrel chested Johnson to a COP-clutching, diet conscience Guardianesque caricature of his former self.

Across the Atlantic there was a similar hive mind response to the role played during the Biden presidency by Dr Jill Biden. Even though there is the precedent of presidential spouse Edith Woodrow Wilson assuming a dominant role in the governance of the United States while their husband was incapacitated

There is the legacy media spiteful refusal to refer to Donald Trump as half British through his Scots mother.

Politically correct press pack politesse reticence is the tip of an iceberg of a shared long form industrial scale collaboration.

The anti-coal common cause spearheads the legacy’s determination to ingratiate itself with the great and the good throughout the entire Anglosphere regardless of the consequences to everyday people such as its readers and viewers.

Coal we suddenly learn is so precious that the British government intends to revive World War 11 convoys in order to protect inward shipments required to save Britain’s last and strategically vital steelmaker at Scunthorpe

The sole steelmaker is itself a casualty of the world’s highest electricity prices traceable to an institutionalised dismissal of coal, a campaign in which the press actively collaborates.

With most of the media operatives basking in the abstract value of arts qualifications they remain collectively unaware of coal’s contribution to the economy much beyond energy and perhaps cement and steel.

Coal for example is integral to numerous products in their bathrooms in the form of their lotions and cosmetics and toothpaste, and also in things like the outfits they wear such as nylon.

Former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison (pictured) in a jut-jawed brandishing of a chunk of coal during a full Canberra session dared anyone inside or outside parliament to reveal that they were frightened by even the sight of the piece of carbon.

Morrison was elected federal prime minister as the champion of exactly this kind of defiance.

In office Morrison progressively prevaricated and hesitated over coal the abandonment of which sent soaring the precise federal-wide electricity costs he was specifically elected to subdue.

Instead he became visibly enmeshed in the legacy’s own ritual preoccupation over the climate and victim-oppressor catalogue.

The homogeneity of attitude that now threads its way through the press is the inevitable result of the shared drive to recruit staff from a narrow middle class background.

Overlooked too is the way in which the press pack self-defeating perfect harmony on minerals such as coal chimes with the same activist progressive emphasis by its competition which is social media so rapidly eroding the legacy’s own dwindling status.

In refusing to employ those from trade or craft backgrounds or indeed anything manual at all the legacy consciously demonstrates a unified determination not to report the facts but to classify itself as a profession and one that ranks alongside the traditional version such as doctors and lawyers.

Chauvin Personifies Instability from protected collective superior hysteria

Derek Chauvin was a member of the Minneapolis Police Department and in his career he received two medals of valour and two commendation medals.

Derek Chauvin introduces a new emphasis on chauvinism because he became and remains a living example of how the modern influence class especially in its politico media form unquestioningly unites and in a single voice will install as a scapegoat even someone who was doing the duty society expected of him

The mainstream conservative and progressive media on this occasion both join hands by always presaging Chauvin’s name with the title of murderer.

Such is their compulsion to be seen as conforming to the approved theme that the journalistic sphere in its desire to be accepted fails to see that in their unquestioning attitudinal harmony they reprise Napoleon’s fanatical booster Nicolas Chauvin.

Their shrill modern chauvinistic horror is of breaking polite society ranks and expressing an independent opinion.

In the new Minneapolis version of a Chauvin case the entire spectrum of western institutional media in lockstep choruses the approved song book on the victim-oppressor theme ignoring anything centred on public safety.

An old style front-line cop who insisted on engaging with criminals Derek Chauvin (pictured) not a big man in fact quite small for a front line policeman apprehended and restrained the violent career criminal George Floyd

No single element of this quite new opinion moulding class declares or even hints that officer Chauvin’s actions were made in the course of seeking to protect this very class and the working public that sustain this privileged class.

In the communal insistence on always describing Chauvin as a murderer instead of someone who was trying to the job that the community had employed him to do we find the fulfilment of René Girard's Mimetic theory.

This holds that scapegoats are individuals who are instinctively chosen by a community to bear the blame for social crises and conflicts.

In Gerard’s theory this community in arbitrarily implementing the scapegoat mechanism seeks a cause for all the conflict it can pin on the scapegoat.

It now collectively projects its desire for vengeance onto the chosen victim, who is then blamed for causing all the trouble and who is expelled from society such as the permanently incarcerated modern Chauvin, the Minneapolis law enforcer.

This concert of confected outrage aimed at the contemporary Chauvin suddenly became supercharged.

Elected representatives from the White House downward in pledging to uphold public safety now joined in a chorus about the need to disable the police force through “defunding” it.

An exonerating luxury belief system, a superior hysteria, can also threaten external security. NATO for example quite simply stood by passively as its members reinforced the enemy the pact was organised to defend itself against.

A legacy media supposed to expose exactly this kind of mass wishful thinking was itself hopelessly captivated by the dominant polite society suite of ethical beliefs.

It fawned over someone they now described as the “Mother” of Europe and the way in which Angela Merkel for so long and for political expediency compromised in order to stay in office the security of this same Europe and thus NATO by indulging fringe aesthetic luxury beliefs.

Ukraine even exceeds Pearl Harbour in the false security stakes.

There had been the prelude to disaster only years before in which Russia had successfully annexed Crimea knowing that Allied wishful thinking would allow Russia to get away with it.

The way in which superior hysteria cancels out unpleasant facts unbelievably is still dominant in NATO now.

Britain’s government refuses for instance to acknowledge the vulnerability of its undersea power lines to the new generation Russian pipeline and cable cutters.

Under the influence of its dogmatic yet avant-garde government along with its captive media Britain doggedly adheres to eliminating its traditional but non-U power sources and thus knowingly places Britain’s national security firmly in the hands of its sworn enemy.

Population-Food Emergency Fears Contradicted as Fertile Land Use diverted in Europe and Australasia

Determination by governments in Europe and the Westminster sphere to placate their urban and privileged electorates continues to play into the expansionary plans of the Russia-China axis.

These governments insist on appeasing their sophisticate electorates by restricting the supply of base load energy through taking fertile land out of food production, and loading punitive costs on farmers.

The politico-media urban class driving this constriction on food production insists on viewing their role as a crusading one on behalf of the planetary welfare.

Even now and as the advent of World War 3 is freely discussed by these same urban sophisticates and also by their media which needs to humour this class for its adverting revenue there is the shared reluctance to countenance the consequence of this moral crusade.

Russia saw from the start the swiftly developing weakness of the Western middle class in the form of a desire to express communal guilt by rationing access to energy.

Russia exploited it quickly causing for example Europe’s strongest economy, Germany, to handicap itself by closing down its own power stations and using instead Russia for its base load energy.

This morality-inspired gullibility was underpinned in turn by the West’s soothing conviction that there had now occured the End of History, a grandiloquent code for saying peace for all time.

During the Cold War Russia had been governed by at least a troika or collective. It now became ruled by a single individual, a tyrant.

The moral state of hysteria engendered by the End of History stupor is illustrated by the way in which it found its way to the Antipodes, a region considered to be immune in large measure from the old Cold War threat.

Successive New Zealand governments in order to ensure the adherence of its urban middle class electors have deliberately lashed the nation with policies designed to boost the cost of farm output by raising the price of electricity and other such inputs as petrol and diesel.

Incredibly given that farm output is the nation’s economy this has been shamelessly reinforced by a second-tier scheme.

It is to to even reduce farmland acreage and thus the world supply of food by taking swathes of high-yield farmland out of production by various taxpayer funded incentive and subsidy schemes.

The pasture-replacement forestry –planting scheme is noted for its continuously disappointing auctioning of its once-vaunted globally offsetting credits designed to allow credit holders to make countervailing messes in other countries.

An entire state-driven industry which under various guises cooks up and dispenses propaganda remains devoted to boosting the guilt level should the nation falter in its zeal to impose these hobbling sanctions on itself.

Central to this guilt-generating deliberately-imposed delusion there is a state secret.

It is that New Zealand with its hydro dams and geothermal energy is ultra successful in that it is alongside Iceland when it comes to applying renewable power.

The element of deliberate and dishonest self-torturing deception in this borders on the farcical.

But there are some harsh reminders to public individuals and governments should they be tempted to treat this moral movement lobby with anything but the mystical admiration it expects.

Western governments have some gruesome reminders of the insidious power of the urban sophisticate class in enforcing their superstitious ardour.

One of these is the fate of Cardinal Pell whose ability to solve sacred and secular problems saw him installed as the Vatican’s second most powerful figure.

The late Cardinal George Pell explained that the scheme to seek alternatives to base load power amounted simply to a tax on the working class levied by the global financial manipulators responsible for “devising” these alternative power sources.

The compulsion to make manifest the conflict between guilt and unearned privilege has been a feature of this entire category of moral movement and its vengeful advocates.

The previous alarm centred on the world’s population growth led to a similar moral panic about the world’s ability to feed this overwhelming population.

Then there came a transitionary category of such alarms ironically based on the availability of the energy to deal with this explosion of hungry mouths.

Peak oil is one example. Food miles is another.

These in turn coalesced into the current and much more demonstrably and fervently expressed anxiety.

An irony overlooked by its practitioners and advocates and by politicians piously acquiescing in the communal alarm is this.

It is not only the way in which the current angst in so many ways contradicts the previous scares.

It is because Russia successfully duped Europe notably by getting Germany for political reasons to become addicted to Russian base load energy instead of relying on Germanys own ample power stations.

This in the event detonated the current reality acute food insecurity everywhere by cutting off production from the globe’s single largest repository of fertile black (not raw) earth which belongs to Ukraine.

In turn the contagious anxiety spread to Australasia’s bread baskets by taking out of production high yield pastoral land.

This merely to provide the world’s well to do with the offsetting advantage of claiming they are doing virtuous things at the bottom of the world

In turn and as Cardinal Pell fearlessly observed we are witnessing a reverse form of socialism in which workers bear the cost of this new form of unchallengeable look-good contrived politics while the non-productive capital-shuffling class reaps the reward internationally.

Realpolitik Ends Pilgrim Fathers Founded United States Divine Destiny

Renowned International banker Meguerditch Bouldoukian reviews Washington’s seismic global policy shifts

President Trump is conciliatory toward Russia, yet defiantly challenging China?

He seeks to sidestep a two front war. He views China as the priority threat to America. There is this fear of being dragged into a Vietnam conflict in Europe at the expense of confronting what he views as the main enemy which is China.

Russia threatens Europe with World War 3. China in contrast only threatens Taiwan?

Trump views threats in economic terms. Is Russia a threat to the US Economy? No. China in contrast does and is doing so. Not only in terms of trade. But much more dangerously in finance. In harness with its other BRICS partners it is white anting the USD as the world’s reserve currency. This challenge is reinforced by its Belt and Road scheme which in spite of a deliberate Western policy of see-no-evil is an integral part of this scheme.

The White House gives the impression of being as angry with the EU as it is with China?

The White House view is that France and Germany in particular deliberately instigated the current European upheaval. Germany for political reasons and for a long period of time re-financed Russia by relying on it for the supply of its base energy load fuels. This frustration is in turn intensified by the knowledge that the United States itself saw what was going on. But only in recent weeks has it done anything about it. France the Trump White House views as the amalgam of all the EU faults of hoping for the best and spending money on welfare and special-interest causes instead of on defending itself.

Britain meanwhile indicates that it will deploy military forces to defend Ukraine?

The UK has accepted the danger of the European situation and is striking out on it own.

While on Realpolitik, how do see the Trump White House operationally?

A dismaying aspect of the Western view of the United States is the way in which people who should know better fail to understand its political spoils system. This spoils system became notably evident in the way in which the sinking Biden Administration tossed out vast amounts of public treasure to its pet causes especially those in the climatic sector.

This leads us to a co-equal Trump theme of the true cost to the West of artificial restraints on energy output?

An obvious by product of this cause has been to lead us to this brink of a new World War in Europe. This is because governments sensitive to their non-productive upscale socially conscious electors went to Russia for energy instead of using their own resources. I am reminded that for most of the last half of the last century the overwhelming cause of this same class was over-population. The population bomb was going to destroy the planet. The proof that this cause no longer captures the anguish of this class is personified by the cult-like White House figure Elon Musk said to be the father of at least 12 children.

Focusing now on the China sphere of influence how do you see Australasia crunched between the White House and Beijing?

Australia’s position is the most sensitive. Australian commentators resisted the tread softly approach of the rest of the Anglosphere media over the origins of Covid, notably Sharri Markson who correctly identified where it came from, when and how. We must remember a consequence which was Chinese tariffs on Australian wine amounting to hundreds of percent. This leads me to caution the region about its vulnerability to this type of sanction and I cite non-tariff barriers. I notice South Australia at district level pushing back on rural alternative energy industrialisation and this may be in order to forestall electro chemical contamination grounds for imposition of non-tariffs. I should add that both Australia and New Zealand in the current mood present routine tempting targets for United States penalties because of their own favourable balance of payments with the United States.

There remains this belief that the tariffs on China are unfair, vengeful?

I agree about the vengeful bit. President Trump believes that China’s rulers have systematically arranged China’s economy around deliberately building up these trade surpluses. That the CCP has managed the suppression of things like consumer investment and spending so that the economy is a purpose-designed export machine tasked with the expansion of surpluses. In other words it is not a market economy.

You could say in contrast that the ructions in Washington’s bureaucratic sphere in terms of efficiency or lack of it show that the United States operates under a creative and unplanned chaos?

Nations such as those of the EU which greatly benefit from this absence of this method and order and thus accumulate huge balance of payments in their favour also expect the United States to dig deeper still and pay for their defence. I might add that the destinations disclosed or still vaguely indicated about the dispersal if not dissipation overseas of so much US treasure is calculated to dismay any book keeper, not to say banker, however impartial.

Founded by the Pilgrim Fathers it is said that America is the only nation established to do good in the world?

It is this era that we now see dissolving before our eyes. No more Marshall Plans. This is why Trump has stated bluntly that the price of Ukraine relying on America to defend it is to hand over rights to transactional commodities such as its high value minerals. Trump believes that the price of American ideology is its immense deficit. This deficit Trump views as arming China as it sets its sights on displacing the USD with its own reserve currency.

Wall Street Cut-Offs Wake Up an Eager New Zealand

The failure of the Solar Zero distributed energy project backed by the biggest names in global finance continues to stun into silence exactly the sectors that should be evaluating it. They cannot bring themselves to believe that the nosecone signature venture in global progressive alternatives has failed.

Solar Zero went out of business leaving a total sun spot hole of at least $500 million. How could this have happened when all the backers were in lockstep with exactly the same global transnational institutions encouraging as core policy precisely the same venture?

The legendary parties involved were viewed as being a guarantee that whatever happened the Solar Zero venture would proceed and exceed all expectations.

The parties behind Solar Zero included the world’s biggest asset manager, Europe’s most influential bank, and a state investment fund dedicated to progressive ventures.

The investment fund was Blackrock of the United States, the European bank was France’s Societe General e and the state investment fund the New Zealand government s own Green Investment Finance fund.

Solar Zero unbelievable as it now seems was one of three pivotal global renewables ventures in Blackrock’s international portfolio.

Blackrock’s requirement to stock its portfolio of investment ventures of the Solar Zero category began to fade toward the end of last year.

Its strong alignment with renewables investments did it no harm with California’s gigantic pension schemes, or New York’s

But the reversal of presidential fortunes in the United States became an impetus to quit for example the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.

It is still unthinkable that an organisation of this size could walk away from an investment approaching $300 million.

Yet organisations the size of Blackrock operate on a scale base beyond the comprehension of most New Zealand institutions.

They will walk away from an underperforming venture which looks like carrying on that way.

The New Zealand Green Investment Finance fund from its outset had about it an evangelical aura and thus its people would have had limited comprehension of the algorithms governing Blackrock ventures, even the ones with the noblest of intentions.

This government fund remains deeply invested in renewables. It has for example $62 million in the form of an asset facility and a $78 million in a finance facility for Far North Solar Farms Ltd.

This developer is financed by a German investment fund.

Blackrock arrived in New Zealand at the high noon of the former Labour government’s open-handed and unquestioning exuberance for any energy source that did not derive from beneath the earth’s surface.

This government fund management never envisaged that such a lead party could and would close up a business just before Christmas and without regard to such niceties as staff holiday pay.

New Zealand institutions from the government downward have demonstrated a persistent blindness in dealing with very large scale foreign entities simply because they become flattered and dazzled by the counter-party’s enthusiasm to do business with New Zealand.

This vulnerability becomes multiplied when there are external global movements involved which in the instance of Solar Zero were the New York-based multi laterals cheering on the value to the world at large of the project and thus the eminence and wisdom of those sponsoring it.

The Solar Zero experience by the time attendant and long tail liabilities are accounted for will cost the New Zealander taxpayer most of the more than $100 million committed to it.

Even now those involved in the unquestioning public investment fervour that still surrounds anything to do with alternative power seek to divert attention away from the savage outcome of the venture.

There remains a cultural reluctance to accept such inevitable factors as disguised subsidies, political shifts and especially that fund operators in the United States and Europe require hard-nosed early and substantial ROI percentage returns.

There is a lesson here. It is not entirely that financiers of the scale of the ones that backed Solar Zero have thresholds that will be inexorably invoked when an investment turns sour.

It is also this.

What looks nice can turn nasty.

Oil and Gas Lawyer practised at peak of exploration and production era

The death at 91 of Francis Joshua Handy brings to end one of the most geographically diverse legal careers in the oil and gas sector

He worked directly with the New Zealand Shell BP Todd consortium on its contracting for leases and then for the exploration and production hardware in the form of rigs, supply boats and platforms notably with such suppliers as Sedco and J Ray McDermott.

Frank Handy was determined to be part of the productive economy.

The excitement and sense of industrious purpose that accompanied the Maui exploration and production implementation more than half a century ago has largely evaporated from public consciousness.

The zest of this now forgotten productivity era of New Zealand having under development the resources to balance agricultural dependence has become instead submerged under a contrived aura of guilt and shame sponsored by a quite recently evolved new patrician class.

But when Frank Handy moved to New Plymouth the city had about it an atmosphere compared at the time to Houston.

His was the patient calming legal mind to smooth over administrative and operational differences and unite in their common purpose the head office and operatives in the field.

His always elegantly attired lanky frame presented an aristocratic aspect and there was indeed a dynastic tilt to his career.

From the South Island of New Zealand Frank Handy was the son of a clergyman and throughout his life constantly displayed the seriousness of his upbringing, which as he grew older became tempered by an infectious laugh and deliberate irreverence.

In the event he exchanged a career in the church for a more worldly one in the New Zealand government Treasury.

In a surprise career curve he suddenly quit the public sector for the private one, starting off as a law clerk for Scott Morrison.

A quick study Frank Handy had graduated in 1957 MA from Victoria University and then in 1968 LLB

His marriage in 1965 to Lyndsey Watts, daughter of Jack Watts, a decisive National Government Minister of Finance, accelerated the young Handy’s progress in his new legal career.

After several years with Scott Morrison he now became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, Watts & Patterson.

Jack Watts, after leaving Parliament, had begun his own legal partnership with Colin Patterson.

Perhaps to please his new father-in-law Frank Handy stood for the National (i.e. conservative) Party in 1969 to contest the Labour Party working class bastion of the Petone electorate and predictably he lost.

Watts & Patterson as a partnership had organised itself around high-end legal contractual assignments, notably in the auto trade.

When Frank Handy originally joined the partnership its association with the motor trade had led to a global resources orientation which positioned the firm for the Taranaki-based era of oil and gas exploration, symbolised by the Maui offshore drilling.

The conclusion of the Maui era saw him reluctant to return to Wellington and to its inevitably more routine emphasis on commercial work.

Instead he repositioned himself and his family in Aberdeen, then as now the hub of North Sea oil.

Frank Handy eventually ended his tour of duty in Scotland and re-established himself in Auckland with his by now much expanded old partnership.

Rather later he returned to Wellington to fill the gap left by his brother-in- law the late Julian Watts who had departed for London to become the head office company secretary for BP.

An enthusiastic sportsman Frank Handy played the Heretaunga Golf Club. He never lost his taste for ecclesiastical music

As his corporate career drew to a close he insisted on retaining his practising certificate and now established himself as a sole practitioner, a kind of store front attorney, in the distinctive Hibernian Society building on Wellington’s Bond Street.

In contrast to the earlier part of his legal career Frank Handy now deployed his institutional commercial experience for the benefit of hard-pressed individuals, small businesses, and start-ups.

He consistently put himself out for those who found themselves struggling in one capacity or another.

He finally quit practising in 2022.

He is survived by his wife Lyndsey and their three children.

Australia Door Closes as NZ Opens to Offset Renewables Electrochemical Schemes

Under full pre-Trump Restoration momentum the Australasian branch of the Anglosphere displays a no-problems-here attitude to the return of the president.

The region keeps its official foot on the zero throttle in spite of the incoming president repeatedly promising to eliminate on his first day in office all and any restrictions to underground energy sources.

In New Zealand there is a latter day gold rush as foreign investors seek to implement leases on low lying pasture in order to construct solar generating schemes.

In one such valley alone these schemes are already encroaching on premium vineyards.

Forty percent of New Zealand wine exports go to the United States invoking the possibility of retaliation centred on chemical processes designed for arid regions being positioned inches above water tables.

A reason that New Zealand has become a focus for foreign investors trading renewables rights is that Australia surprisingly is actively pushing back on the schemes at district local government administrative level.

In Australasia any indication that restrictions on things like gas, oil, and coal are responsible for inflation are poo-poohed at once by the vast army of public servants in both countries charged with suppressing such fuels.

In a sinister suppression of information any research is instantly choked that might show that public policy against traditional fuels is responsible for a big chunk of the cost of living.

A blanket of verbiage centred on the dawning era of renewables is the response.

Slickly ignored are such facts as every piece of equipment having to be imported, installation costs, and relatively short life span blended with unstated disposal obligations and costs and who exactly is responsible for them.

Australia and New Zealand remain in COP thrall similar to the one that existed in the United States prior to the Trump restoration.

New Zealand’s alleged conservative coalition is an example.

Its right-ish wing component the ACT Party treads around the issue like broken glass by lamely claiming that it has to conform in order that New Zealand can trade internationally with it partners.

In only a few months’ time the biggest partner will quit this demonstrably inflationary dance when president Trump issues his “drill baby drill” proclamation.

Half of New Zealand’s contribution to the state of catastrophe claimed for C02 is said to be caused by ruminants in the course of their grazing.

Such is the fear and trembling wrought by the upscale electorally shifty metropolitan suburbs that the obedient politico media industrial complex dare not even point out the following.

It is that food production is exempt from the C02 agreements and always has been.

The New Zealand open-door policy to these pastoral electrochemical generator projects known as agrivoltaics encourages foreign investors to site generators close to rural existing substations serving agricultural communities.

More worrying is that the government’s clinging to placating the metropolitan privileged is actually leading to international obstacles.

These are not necessarily tariff ones.

They are likely to be centred on the pollution vulnerability of a primary base of foodstuffs now being posed by the environmental effects of this new pasture located industrial variant .

The migration now of these pasture-based solar schemes to New Zealand demonstrates the force of the push back in Australia.

Elsewhere the Canberra government determinedly seeks to quash underground fuels wherever it quite literally finds them.

The Canberra Labour government especially in regard to the incoming president Trump is in a position that can be compared to an organisation that believed that it had seen off a hated boss.

Only to discover a few years later the same tyrant reinstated and more powerful than ever.

Two Australian federal prime ministers openly expressed doltish opinions about Donald Trump.

One of these is the sitting federal prime minister.

The other is a former Labour prime minister who is now Australia’s ambassador in Washington.

Meanwhile in New Zealand the bureaucracy organised zero campaign has successfully steered any debate away from the composition of these schemes.

To an alarming extent the componentry includes long term contaminants such as polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Do Not be Distracted Warns Renowned Arabist

Meguerditch Bouldoukian served as deputy governor of the central Bank of Lebanon 1985-1990 and for more than half a century he has been pivotal in balancing Middle East banking imperatives with those of New York, London, and Paris. The Nobel-nominated Armenian banker is a renowned Arabist and acknowledged as a world authority on correspondent banking. In the eye of the storm he talked exclusively to us.....…

Internationally what will be the ripple effects of a Trump victory?

There are two immediate Trump objectives the repercussions of which will be found everywhere.

There is the determination to make the United States the world’s permanent major energy producer. Freedom of production and distribution of oil, gas, and coal will end inflation in the United States and this will “ripple-out” to Europe and also Australasia. This is because the general populace realises how doctrinal, artificial, barriers to production have caused all prices to spiral well beyond just the obvious and immediate ones of transport and energy.

There is also the pledge to restore the $USD as the world’s unchallenged and indeed, unchallengeable reserve currency.

This will be achieved in harmony with the determination to end outsourcing and restore the United States as the global manufacturing nation i.e. making it Great Again.

So in short you will see a future Trump administration stripping away the ideological impediments, obstacles, to this pre-eminence such as access to oil and gas along with what Trump views as the way United States industrial power has been whittled away by an ideological pursuit of globalism.

He sees all these factors as artificial and self-imposed obstacles to restoring this greatness. I urge anyone in banking, trade, politics not to undervalue the importance of this single objective and thus the perils to any entity standing in the way of its accomplishment

The multilaterals, notably United Nations, are hell-bent on globalization. Your view?

I have discerned a reluctance by the politico-media elites to discuss this. But I want to take the opportunity you have provided me to sound one particular warning to a pending and alarming development.

The UN plans globalization of the World Health Organization ’s Pandemic Treaty. In this globalization, the elite will decide the Vaccines for our kids, will decide where you can travel, and where you can congregate. The UN and its WHO subsidiary which is still under critical review after its initial response to Covid is acting as a totalitarian power and wants to impose WHO’s Pandemic Treaty.

This will be a form of enslavement. This treaty threatens to strip you, of your ability to make personal health decisions, placing immense power in the hands of global elites to control your life. It can cripple our economies, and curtail our fundamental freedom. We must act to stop the passing of this treaty.

How do you rate the chances of the Harris-Walz ticket and if elected what will be the global repercussions?

The US is likely finished as an empire unless its public wakes up in the coming elections. Over 1.2 million Covid 19 deaths, over $40 trillion national debt, and corporate/personal debts. The Democrat party has become corrupt in its single objective of attaining power. Over 1.2 million Covid 19 deaths, over $40 trillion national debt, and corporate/personal debts, as well as 2 million citizens behind bars.

This ticket must enunciate and so clearly defined policies such as for example cancelling the electric vehicle mandate and cutting costly and burdensome regulations and so many elitist dictats which so demonstrably and damagingly play out on its vaunted blue collar base..

Similarly this ticket must at least pay lip service to cutting federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on children.

While we are on the Democrat/Democracy topic there is this other matter that the politico-media elites decline to discuss which is the validity of the process, the procedure, of the federal presidential election process itself.

The election must be seen to be beyond criticism, beyond tampering, and thus must enforce same-day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship. This is routinely skated over by the very sectors that should via their declared mission be scrutinising it.

The degree to which the Democrat de facto open border policy ties into this is similarly remarkable for the way in which it is not discussed by these elites.

Do you fear a world recession?

It may surprise you. But here I am optimistic. The world economy has become multipolar in the 21stcentury. The economy of each nation-state in the liberal free enterprise system has created trade zones around the world which has transformed into “recession-less” economies. Technological changes have made countries adapt rapidly to challenging opportunities. Economic cycles exist as explained by such sages as Kondratiev due to permanent evolution of science, research, innovation, and, of course technology.

As long as the international financial system is dominantly sound, in the West and the East, we do not have to fear a world recession. Even if the domination of the US Dollar has competitors such as the Euro and the Chinese Yuan still each country has its industrial production, the capacity utilization and its macroeconomic structures which evolve according to the forces of demand and supply.

What was the real reason in your view for Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine?

Any former Soviet Republic that is changing its foreign policy against Russia and getting closer to the West and NATO, such as Georgia and Armenia have been punished by the Kremlin. Putin resists expansion of NATO eastward while post-cold war security of Russia is expanding westward. He considers Ukraine is an integral part of Russian national patrimony.

Of course, Kremlin’s ruling elite resent the hostile West through a lens of suspicion and insecurity. The chaotic withdrawal of the US army from Afghanistan gave a sign to Putin to invade Ukraine. I may add here that Trump attributes this debacle to a Biden-encouraged emphasis on a virtuous in-vogue societal priority at the expense of one with accepted military plans and objectives.

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 received a weak reaction from the West. Putin is a calculated risk taker.

You are known to follow gold closely. What do you see now and in the medium term?

The gold price per ounce has gone up from the last century’s $35 per ounce and fluctuates always moving upwards. Since 9/11/2001, my forecast on Nov. 9 2001 that the price per ounce of $277.30 will move upward to around $1,000 per ounce was successful.

In the medium term, the tendency is upwards. There is speculation; however, there is a real demand in this uncertain and unstable world. On December 6, 2023, my forecast for the next 6 months was $2,500 per ounce. It attained that mark and over... today it is $2,627.

Your conclusion?

Should there be a Trump restoration we will witness the advent of hegemony not too dissimilar from the era when monarchs had much more power than they do now. I do accept that there will be a reckoning notably about the causes and effects that led to the Kabul fiasco and also the continuing and current one on the US southern border.

The reverence accorded over the last four years to the global institutions will evaporate, and quickly I am inclined to think also.

In general and in school room scientific terms all policy will be subject to a litmus test: is it going to Make America Great Again?

Lord Scarman direction on critiquing courts is still ignored

Cases centred on pedigree dogs and which ended up in the High Court underline an uncertain focus within the judicial system.

The first case involved dog judging and etiquette at a dog show.

The second and more recent case devolved around the pedigree registration of certain show dogs.

Both these episodes involved the official dog breeder community and its defined rules and regulations.

In both instances the dispute went beyond the established breeder hierarchy and instead wound up in the High Court.

In both separate cases the High Court found itself grappling with the human frailties, rights, wrongs, in addition to the characteristics of exotic pet dog breeds and the required etiquette displayed at show time and also the sale and purchase value of the highly-bred creatures .

How did these two meritless cases which should have been settled at the level of the authorised pet breeder society wind up at the taxpayer expense at the High Court? Note that we are talking here about pet dogs and not the working dog category.

A reason is that there is no screening within the judiciary to eliminate the passage to the court system of such cases involving as they do pastimes which have no bearing on the welfare of the public.

This compares with the judicial system in Scotland in which the procurator fiscal would have intervened and dismissed both cases as trivial and outside any further crown consideration.

With judicial intervention at so many levels now permeating every aspect of daily life many are baffled why relevant authorities as a whole remain paralysed in explaining with any clarity the whys and wherefores of the merit of cases and their subsequent outcomes.

An underpinning reason is a widespread belief at all levels of society that there is a blanket ban on any commentary or conflicting argument to do with anything associated with a judge.

Lord Scarman impatient to the point of being visibly angry was confronted with this issue when the Law Lord toured New Zealand.

“You may criticise the judgement,” he explained.

“But you may not criticise the judge.”

Correctly perceiving that his audience had still not grasped this simple point, Lord Scarman now illustrated it with words to this following effect.

*You may criticise the judgement…

*But you cannot criticise the judge who made it by claiming for example that the judge did so under the influence of drink.

Now much later many who are in a position to comment on judicial activity are struck dumb when requested to do so.

At the time the pet dog trials wended their way through the High Court nobody in any position of authority at all said that the disputes in the public domain were trivial and that they should have been resolved by the individuals involved and the society regulating their hobby.

But everyone held back for fear of offending the bench.

Much of the judiciary is now occupied in delivering verdicts on historical disputes and ancient grievances.

There is the fear of challenging contemporary judgements on these issues and it is exhibited especially by most politicians.

They indicate that having come from the bench the judgement is holy writ.

Two topics now require more than cursory examination.

One is what goes into the court system, especially the High Court.

The other is what comes out in the way of judgements.

For too long those who should ask the questions have become poodles of an expansionary and unchallenged judiciary.