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.
Holier-than-thou ploy triggers unintended consequences
A review of bullying and harassment within Parliament instigated by the Speakers Office which is responsible for who are entitled to work in Parliament and for what they do there has involved this same office in obloquy and sensationalism.
The release of the report was accompanied by dire portents from the Speakers Office conjuring up images of at least one rapist stalking Parliament’s carpeted corridors and this sinister figure accompanied by a cohort of like-minded individuals in the sex pest category.
In the event once the hue and cry settled down this somewhat spooky scenario devolved onto three incidents involving the same people and which had been subjected to historical procedural investigations.
Even so, in the accompanying atmosphere one Parliamentary staffer, male, was “stood down” under the cloud of the word rapist.
Another unexpected blow-back was the public accusation by a former department head, female, that they had been on the receiving end of foul language from the instigator of this same review.
The office of the Speaker is supposed to be the tranquil and unquestioned hub of the opposing forces of parliamentary democracy.
Another role, unspoken, is that this same office detects trouble and nips it in the bud before it sees the light of day.
In this instance the opposite happened.
This same office instigated an official review into a topic known to be of such volatility that whatever the result it was bound to detonate in the public domain.
What went wrong?
A generation ago New Zealand began emerging from its cult of exaggerated masculinity.
Pubs and clubs until very recently were gender segregated and few saw anything unusual in this.
Change, held back, now surged into an opposing extreme in which male characteristics instead of being viewed as admirable became viewed as toxic.
The intellectual class, political class, supposed to act as a pathfinder in this kind of sea-change instead seized upon it to trumpet its own value and did so by exaggerating this shift and in doing so further distorted it.
The churches similarly arbiters, if not shepherds, in this kind of sudden societal shift stood aside.
Both protestant and catholic churches in New Zealand traditionally enjoyed rather more influence than in other British outposts just because of the nation’s remoteness.
They now failed to put a brake on the mounting panic just because the churches themselves no longer had any moral suasion.
The need for Parliament to seek out any dirty laundry and then wash it in public emphasises the extent to which these new and untrammelled forces trigger this kind of high profile self-abasement, aka transparency.
There is another explanation, a rather more worldly one.
Westminster parliaments were never designed for proportional representation.
The German version, the one imposed on New Zealand, was designed to ensure enough opposing forces to eliminate one single outcome---the emergence of a dictator, a tyrant.
There remains therefore the unasked question, the taboo question.
It is centred on which of the opposing forces in New Zealand’s coalition government insisted on an inquiry which beyond its purgative value could only have been a public embarrassment lowering still further in the public esteem Parliament, and specifically the office of the Speaker
Oceania nation resonates as perfect sounding board for social activist Atlantic policies
United Nations exercises a supranational influence over New Zealand’s body politic in a way that has not been experienced since the waning of Westminster’s sway followed soon after by Washington’s.
Nothing emphasises this realignment more than the view that the nation’s highest office, that of prime minister, is but a way station en route to assuming the real power which resides in the real high office which is that of secretary general of United Nations.
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark had, at best, a good outsider’s chance in her determined run for the secretary-generalship of United Nations.
Current prime minister Jacinda Ardern is said to be heading into poll position should she at any time in the next 30 or so years either seek the assignment or be tapped for it.
The nation’s bureaucracy has long been attuned to the United Nations ethos and this was demonstrated by its unquestioning belief in a Clinton victory at the last US presidential elections.
Also discarded in this new version of progressive realpolitik is the alignment that once centred on Canberra, notably during the Whitlam and Hawke eras.
Canberra, like Washington and Westminster has been shouldered aside in this new orientation to a new magnetic north.
Prone to believing polls, whole segments of New Zealand’s government found it hard to disguise their fervour in the forecast electoral victory of Bill Shorten and their sense of loss when this failed to come to pass.
From self-dramatizing inquests into its own rumoured official bullying (actually, officiousness) through hate speech (offensive), diversity and multi culturalism and the unifying climate movement, it is United Nations that now incarnates the yearnings of New Zealand’s parliamentary Labour government.
So what caused the inspirational compass to swing so abruptly from East to West?
Beijing’s Marco Polo attractions continue to fade, and only partly due to awkward and embarrassing trade imperatives.
New Zealand’s political Prester John impulse to lead the East into following its more progressive ways have simply dissolved amid Beijing’s ferocious militarism and intolerance of things like diversity, multiculturalism.
Contrary to a view once accepted as a geopolitical article of faith and voiced by former National Party prime minister Jim Bolger that New Zealand was “part of Asia,” those were his words, the nation instead has reconfigured itself on a trans Atlantic axis.
The New Zealand body politic draws its inspiration from an axis rooted in New York at United Nations.
Britain never truly on-message since Tony Blair’s day is nonetheless dipped into.
But merely to superheat on views on climate from only a very few selective sources such as The Guardian and the BBC.
Then the short hop across the English Channel to the terminus of this particular axis which is Paris, the city of enlightenment for this repositioning.
The body politic involved in this realignment includes the nation’s regional and district councils usually referred to as local bodies.
Once pre-occupied with the administration of roads and rubbish collection their elected members nowadays so often put a priority on the rather more rarified and thus engaging globalist procedures involved in podcasting their support for the policies of United Nations.
New Zealand has been a member of the UN security council on several occasions. Even more significantly its diplomats Sir Leslie Munro and more recently Terence O’Brien have served as presidents of the security council.
United Nations has traditionally sought as its secretary general someone from a non-aligned nation meaning a candidate beyond the Western Alliance or the old communist bloc.
As New Zealand politics at so many levels enters a new, and supercharged phase of institutional moral reformation its elected at so many levels see an opportunity to transcend the mundane in echoing this new Atlantic policy centred on United Nations Plaza on Manhattan’s East River.
Globalism suddenly means more than trade, in which nations are encouraged to focus on what they do best.
It now means a transnational approach to the free exchange of moral movements and without the frontiers and thus the boundaries of geography or even hemispheres.
Antitrust action on information technology sector blamed for opening door to China
In the 1970s and 1980s the United States federal government applied antitrust actions against its two dominant computer and telecommunications companies IBM and AT&T.
The federal government threats and moves to break up these two companies is considered now to have preoccupied the companies to the point at which foreign competition now started to slip through under the cover of the government diversion.
The belief now is that IBM for example became more focussed on coping with the extended anti-trust proceedings than with expanding or holding its 70 percent share of the computer market.
China’s seizing of such a commanding position in this same market is thus regarded as a direct result of the United States federal government’s intervention in the dominance of these two companies.
In short order prior to this trust-busting drive the United States telecommunications and computing sector had come up with three technology breakthroughs: the transistor, the integrated circuit (silicon chip) and the microprocessor.
Only rather later came an understanding that the federal anti monopoly disruption of the information sector had consequences that had not emerged during the much earlier break ups of steel production, oil, and the railways.
Huawei’s appearance as a core telecommunications network supplier in North America is the wakeup call of nightmarish proportions that alerted the United States to the reality that its dominance of this sector was not so much slipping away, as disappearing in a cascade.
Google and Facebook with their subsidiaries such as YouTube and WhatsApp are today’s IBM and AT&T with its Bell System.
They allow the United States to control the narrows of personal point-to-multipoint electronic communication, otherwise known as social media.
Similarly, Apple in its sector and in its turn has been in the shadow of United States federal government trust-busting.
Apple then lost its position in the smart phone market to Huawei.
The reason that the Google and Facebook nexus will remain substantially unfettered is that the United States views itself as a corporate entity whose competition is similarly monolithic in the form of China.
China has what the United States has which is scale.
Experience has shown that smaller countries lacking this and however innovative are unable to lever off this narrower base to present the United States with an enduring threat in this social media category.
France is such a country.
France which is Europe’s most ardent watchdog on the dangers of Google and Facebook was once in technology terms light-years ahead of the United States due to its national effort with its Minitel technology.
The United Kingdom was similarly ahead of this particular game with its Videotex system.
In the event both these technologies languished and are now forgotten because neither country had the population and thus the development base to develop and take to market these early breakthroughs.
Washington will make sympathetic murmurs about the dangers of the untrammelled Google and Facebook duo.
But it has no intention of re-enacting an IBM/ AT&T trust-busting regime for as long as China is breathing down its electronics neck.
Google and Facebook know it.
The knock-down-drag-out story of social media and its favouring of the mega-scale countries is a poignant one and especially so for the Franco-New Zealand campaign to rein in the United States operators.
New Zealand, and this is not generally known, was among the first to refine the programme generation heavy lifting behind the automated coding so important in the development of things such as social networks and their algorithms, the ones which according to the Paris meet, so urgently require “transparency.”
In the event, and justifying current United States suspicions, this programme generation system, led co-incidentally by a Frenchman, was filched by the Chinese under the pretence of buying it.
The only consolation is that these countries are in good company.
Finland’s Nokia, so recently the David in the David and Goliath of smart phones, was acquired by Microsoft another revolving door antitrust candidate.
The same thing happened to Canada, not a particularly small country.
Canada saw its standard-bearing Research in Motion brand Blackberry, once a by-word in the industry and the standard appliance used by politicians everywhere, quickly become motionless, submerged through its absence of hinterland scale.
The United States social media majors cover themselves in feel-good slogans and their representatives when in public have about them the Aw Shucks candour of an Idaho small town family dry goods store proprietor.
Presentation is everything in the world of big-league electronics, especially in the personal communications variety in which the more iron in the fist, the greater the need for the velvet veneer.
Flagship Pike River Re-Entry Policy Threatened by Undetectable Gas
Methane gas has become so politicised that officials are terrified to talk about outside a rigid and approved context and frame of reference.
Nothing underlined the perils attendant on the Labour coalition government’s Pike River mine re-entry fiasco in that a cause of its being aborted was that a “wee” creature had chewed the lead of a gas sensor.
Nothing emphasised the presence and name of this gas as the determination by everyone concerned to avoid mentioning it.
The gas was and is methane gas and it was the culprit in the Pike River mine disaster.
Methane hovers. It is lighter than air.
In its ghostly fashion it cannot be detected by human senses.
Officially we were told that readings on “oxygen” led to the abandonment of the re-entry.
We were told that the “atmosphere” imperilled the re-entry.
The word methane has become so politically-charged that in a contrary way in the Pike River disaster and its aftermath it became conspicuous by its absence.
The re-entry scheme and the reasons for it being aborted encapsulated the basic-science comprehension problem of New Zealand governments since the advent of the professional politician i.e. those who have no background in anything productive beyond word-creation, and posturing.
The notion of the mine being “sealed” was chief among these.
Other than the elaborate and mediagenic barrier at the entrance no other part of the mine is sealed it all.
The mine has been soaking up methane ever since the last explosion there.
Methane gas has been filtering through into the mine from the surrounding geology ever since.
This aggregation will have been accelerated since the official and token sealing of the mine entrance by internal collapses which in turn will have been aggravated by things such as seismic activity, and also by water.
A disused mine is much more dangerous than a working one.
Another threat barely mentioned in the re-entry turn back reasons was the presence of coal dust.
This volatile substance, as with methane, will have collected in the mine over the intervening years.
In this re-entry scheme there would have been no electrics in the mine of the type that powered the ventilation equipment which as the Royal Commission so studiously observed was positioned inside the mine, rather than outside it, the practice everywhere else.
Nobody doubts that methane gas caused the mine to explode.
But the cause of the ignition of the mine methane remains undetermined.
The Pike River mine re-entry has about it the aura of political showboating allied to a victim-culture determination to identify individuals or groups of them responsible for the explosions.
The hunt for SCADA type monitoring recordings centred on the initial explosion and which might prove who exactly did what and when in the lead up to the disaster is only one indicator of this.
Promises to the effect that the re-entry will face a cut-off of one kind or another “by Christmas” only serves to underline the gulf between the productive economy, with all its physical threats as opposed to the politico-bureaucratic one in which threats are reputational.
On one side of this divide is a now long abandoned mine with its deteriorating structure and its accumulated methane.
On the other side, the political ambition to showcase not only a mineral villain, but ideally one or two human ones as well.
Gauche handling of France’s Gauche contrasts with New Zealand premier’s adroit Coup Politique
When Jacinda Ardern shut in the support of her Labour-led coalition government’s ideological left wing support she did so quickly, effortlessly, decisively and effectively.
When Francis’ president Emmanuel Macron tried to the same thing with his eco-ideologues he ignited a carboniferous subterranean smouldering fire akin to those that plague the sites of abandoned mine workings.
The New Zealand Labour government swiftly bonded in its liberal political and media class wing at the outset of its administration with the proclamation of its ban on oil and gas prospecting.
It knew that this bold appeal to high-minded university campus grade purity of thought was going to weld into the Labour-led coalition the climatist movement.
The bold decisiveness of the Labour’s handling of this lock-in contrasts with that of French president Emmanuel Macron.
He was presented at the outset of his presidency with much the same problem in handling the liberal political class base which was responsible for putting him into the Elysees Palace.
In contrast he mishandled the same problem.
The result of this fumbling is there for all to see in, for example, the Gilets Jaunes displays.
These routine and scheduled riots are the result of president Macron’s gauche handling of his own gauche in seeking to apply his own dithering solution to the same problem, that of disarming the fashionable, activist left.
The problem of locking in its media and political class ideological support base was solved by New Zealand’s Labour – led coalition in a military manner that incorporated stealth, deception and surprise to achieve a fait accompli.
The stealth was that discussion about it was limited and restricted and thus there were no leaks.
The surprise was that the oil industry believed that an exploration cloture would be the subject of a fairly prolonged “conversation.”
The deception was that instead of being announced at some environmental summit the scheme was announced to a student gathering.
The decisive delivery was to deliver the anti prospecting proclamation without any warning so early in its term and before the lobbies had the time to do anything about it.
Confronted by this same problem and the same opportunity president Macron in contrast allowed his strategy to become attenuated, drift out of his own hands and thus missed the decisive symbolic moment so deftly exploited by his New Zealand counterpart.
His poor delegation of the problem allowed it fester which had the effect of the accelerating agitation of this noisy ideological base which in France hits in addition to the television studios, the streets for additional theatre value.
President Macron belatedly sought to please this base with its shared and unifying belief in man made global warming and did so with a series of appeasing and symbolic taxation reshuffles.
These were viewed by France’s always restive blue collar, productive, classes as an attempt by president Macron to appease his elitist class support base and do so at the expense of the working classes, this in a nation ultra sensitive to its elites profiting at the expense of the non-privileged.
President Macron‘s decision to increase fuel taxes was viewed as placating the privileged at the expense of the workers
Another move to cater for this elite class was to symbolically reduce France’s speed limit for the benefit of the climatists.
The Gilets Jaunes followed, seemingly unstoppable.
The New Zealand Labour-led coalition’s blunt proclamation sans any trade-offs serves as a standard in the management of the political class and its expectations.
Mr Macron remains mired in his environmental morass in spite of concession after concession.
Current conversations pointedly focus on eliminating the select few universities, notably ENA, that nurture the political class elites that president Macron had so ardently tried to court.
Should France’s Ecole National d’Administration survive the current purge, then a suitable case for study in one of its new classless classes might be the virtuous self-flagellating groupthink in two nations that led the way in renewable energy.
New Zealand did so in hydro electric power, and France with nuclear energy.
New rendition of definite article debuts in television dialect, describes “thuh” Anzac……
A panel on public and official pronunciation convened by MSC Newswire uncovered what it describes as six categories of routine spoken language abuse by professional broadcasters. They are:-
- Handling of the vowel sound “e” in a generalised context in which the word air so often emerged from broadcasters as “ear.”
- Emergence of the definite article now pronounced as “thuh” before words beginning with a vowel
- Latin-language tendency to emphasise second syllable of certain words
- “Ts” rendered as Ds
- Missing syllables
- Protest used without being followed by “against.”
In its second sitting a variety of words and phrases used by broadcasters that employed a non-standard delivery falling far-wide of received and even common usage.
Other examples were bed rendered to sound like “beard” and bear, as in bearing up, sounding like “beering up.”
“Fear” was routinely substituted for “fair” or “fare” and often rendered vice versa. Hair emerged as hear.
Bed rendered as “beard” was also singled out.
Similarly the name of the fruit pear emerged to sound like pier or peer (of the realm)
It was routine to hear about the damage inflicted on society by “six” abuse.
These were the most frequent half-dozen vowel abuses inflicted by broadcasters on their listeners.
The panel claimed however that it had unearthed a new and startlingly systemic departure from accepted usage that had swept through broadcasting in just the past few months.
The panel observed that the definite article was increasingly being delivered as “ther” or “thuh” in front of words starting with a vowel.
The most routine example was a morning independent television magazine programme described by the show itself as “ther” AM Show.
Other renditions in the thuh or ther category before a vowel included “ther” EU; “ther” average and “ther” emphasis, and ther Easter holidays, and most recently still, thuh Anzac day……………
This was an abrupt and still unacknowledged change in spoken English, and deserved to be analysed by academia, according to the panel which confessed to being flummoxed how the common use of “thee” prior to a vowel sound had so abruptly shifted to the non-elided ther/thuh.
“Thuh” only reason for this the panel could discern at this stage was a still unidentified but influential avatar.
The panel also identified as prevalent in the New Zealand broadcasting argot the romance or Latin-based language formula of emphasising the second vowel as dominant, notably in the delivery of the word health to sound like “halth.”
The squished or swallowed “i” sound substituting for the extended “e” sound was again noted by the panel in a word such as wreckage delivered as “rickige.”
Alternately the word wreckage emerged as wreakage,
Another curious and routine romance language rendering was that of the word prayer as “prier.”
The panel claimed that government, public sector, broadcasters were there to show an example and especially so as New Zealand’s tertiary education was increasingly funded by foreign students paying substantial fees to learn English as a second language.
For example the elision of the words “try to” do this or that emerging as “tryder” was instantly understood by native speakers, said the panel, but was unintelligible to second language students who required substantial context to understand it.
The panel was mildly tolerant of various mangled sayings such as “hone in,” for home-in and in something “playing” (preying) on someone’s mind.
It was similarly inclined to be tolerant in the misuse of more complex words such as “expousing” for espousing.
The panel singled out for urgent attention by state broadcasting administrators the correct usage of the verb to protest which was routinely applied in a way that delivered the opposite of the intended meaning.
By itself protest means support.
Broadcasters routinely used it to mean the opposite i.e. condemn.
Protest requires the addition of the word “against” to deliver the desired negative, condemnatory meaning.
Otherwise it proclaimed positivity as in protesting the innocence of someone.
The panel however dismissed the “lazy lips” omission of the first syllable of the rendering of the word police (pleece) as irritating but trivial in that non native speakers still picked up the meaning through context.
In its first report the panel identified what is described as the near-standard, even de facto received, use of the word “woman” to describe in New Zealand a collection of them.
Survivors will seek redress from those who are dead, or, who soon will be
New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care poses unlimited financial liability to public funds.
This is because the historic claims unit which handles compensation claims has been instructed to “cooperate” with, and “support” the Commission.
The historic claims unit is under the umbrella of the Ministry of Social Development.
It is in the business of making what it describes as “payment offers” meaning compensation.
An initial budget of $160 million was initially associated with the Royal Commission.
Now, a year and a half after its inauguration, and at which time its proceedings remain stalled, this is said to have shrunk to half this amount.
It is unclear if this sum is net of estimated compensation payments, or includes them.
When New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition took office it quickly delivered electoral obligations due to certain select constituencies, supporting groups
One of these was to the victim culture swirling around juvenile care and those responsible for administering it, and above all to allow the “survivors” their retributive public voice.
The fact that the Royal Commission scheme was implemented so soon after the arrival of the Labour-led coalition government does indicate though that the previous National government, similarly besieged by the highly organised “survivors,” was doubtful about its unforeseen consequences.
This unlimited liability inherent in the Royal Commission’s procedures has been shrouded in a variety of distractions, notably the sectarian one.
Similarly shrouded is the extent to which the coalition government’s departmental officials, those responsible for estimating things like risk and gross liability, were stampeded by the rush to implement the inquiry.
The Royal Commission’s area of investigation is from 1950 to 2000.
This means it will be reviewing events of 70 years ago.
This in turn means that the “network” as it is often described, of the “survivors” will be seeking redress from those who are dead, or, who soon will be.
Should the accused in loco parentis carers have themselves survived the timescale, many are likely to be of such infirmity as to be unable to defend themselves.
There are many reasons why the watchdogs both within the government, and outside it, notably the press, are silent on this Royal Commission and the unlimited taxpayer liabilities it is likely to set in motion.
The increasing delicacy of it is only one reason.
Continuing Social licence to motorbike gangs imperils control legislation
New Zealand’s numerous motor bike gangs represent the remaining stronghold of an accepted and even encouraged male dominated hierarchy, and one that is known to be singularly brutish.
These gangs are actively encouraged by progressive society for their adherence to tribalism.
These same gangs will now seek to spike the nation’s drastic new gun laws in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosques shooting catastrophe.
Successive governments have stepped as cautiously around the motorbike gangs as they have stepped with hitherto extreme trepidation around dealing with the nation’s gun proliferation.
Attempts to strengthen New Zealand’s gun-control laws have failed in parliament four times over the past 20 years.
Similarly, these same parliaments have shied away from imposing common law on the gangs since they began flexing their outlaw sinews in the early 1970s and prompted a placatory instead of an enforcement response.
Between then and now these gangs generated a service industry dedicated to divining their deeper purpose in a parallel growth sector in the social sciences.
New Zealand has more gang members than it has members of the professional military.
In the international gang context they share a similarity to their Mediterranean counterparts in being as rooted in rural areas as they are in cities.
This dispersal gives them another shared characteristic with that of the cosa nostra in that they abide by their own laws with the common law intruding only in extreme instances in which the public demands that steps be taken.
The artillery of the academia-based socio-political support base is at some variance with the horror that the gangs in full echelon inspire in the rest of the population.
With their full head and sleeve tattoos and gunning the unmuffled engines of their big capacity motorbikes the road gangs are the antithesis of the nation’s underpinning method and order.
Neither is the gang involvement in quasi-militia roles reassuring, notably their recent one in ringing Christchurch’s besieged mosques in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe.
When the gangs began to hit their straps in the 1970s, the official view was that the outbreak was transient, that participants would tire of it, and that the television lights would dim.
In the event much that officialdom did instead fuelled the gangs including the highway law enforcement transition from British to Japanese motorbikes which flooded the market with well- maintained second hand Nortons.
It is now said that the gangs are sidelining their standover ways in favour of migrating their activities into business enterprises of various descriptions.
This prospect reinforces another tacit exculpatory reason for the official social licence extended to the gangs which adds up to the notion that “at least they are visible.”
The government knows that its time frame of atonement, its bringing-together moment, is a diminishing asset in legislative terms.
An indicator was that within the same month as the Christchurch catastrophe a gun importer buying group saw it timely for a mass mail drop promoting repeating firearms.
The government knows that it treads on a common law minefield in extending any more slack to the gangs, or even upholding the present degree of social licence to them.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242