Fuss about citizenship reminiscent of Takaro Lodge Flap.
Midas Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel backed Facebook, Paypal, and Xero. But his founding of crime and insurgency systems developer Palantir currently valued at $20 billion can be considered less than helpful to floundering New Zealand law-and-order systems producer Wynyard Group.
On Wednesday, 02 November 2016 in:- Wynyard Class Action Must Identify Litigation TargetsMSC Newswire reported: “Wynyard for example walked into this kind of Silicon Valley deep-pocket storm when it found itself confronted with sometime New Zealand resident and Tolkien buff Peter Thiel’s Palantir crime product.”
Underpinning Mr Thiel’s right to New Zealand citizenship is his passion for Tolkien.
The name Palantir comes from the Lord of the Rings in which the Palantir was a magical seeing stone that let you see what was happening in lands far off.
Mr Thiel’s skill has been to see what is about to happen in the rather closer internet era once described by Bill Gates as representing the epoch of “disintermediation” in which people dealt directly with the people and services they required.
Mr Thiel’s strong and highly visible support for the election of President Donald Trump can itself be seen now quite clearly.It was based on an understanding that the new President could communicate directly with voters rather than having to deal with them via the intermediary of the established media.
Mr Thiel’s activist support for President Trump can also be viewed as triggering pique from New Zealand’s Labour Party Opposition to the bestowing upon him of New Zealand citizenship.
Otherwise Mr Thiel is a photofit personified of all New Zealand’s activist yearnings.
He supports openly all major societal alternative and libertarian thrusts, notably the right for people to live on man-made islands beyond legal jurisdictions in a concept known as “seasteading.”
He is an ardent proponent of peoples’ right to privacy and put the pervasive celebrity tittle-tattle internet site Gawker out of business by financing the legal action against the site on grounds of intrusion by showman Hulk Hogan.
He is the leader of the second generation of California innovators who sprang up in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs.
This set is sometimes described as the Paypal Mafia, the network of former employees and co-founders that includes SpaceX’s Eion Musk and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.
Mr Thiel now stands identified as the jewel in the crown of the New Zealand government’s campaign to see installed here information technology disruptive-scale investors to seed development in the home-grown industry.
One of the reasons that the government is evasive about this whole daring strategy is that it also encompassed Kim Dotcom.
Like Mr Thiel who emigrated with his parents to the United States, Kim Dotcom was also born in Germany.
It is likely that the government will now informally approach Mr Thiel with a view to his outlining investments other than Xero that can be said to be in the national interest.
Mr Thiel, for example, is said to be actively engaged in life sciences, notably in the field of postponing or even eliminating death.
In some ways the fuss about Mr Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship resonates with the campaign in the 1970s against United States oilman Stockton Rush.
Mr Rush and his family moved to New Zealand to create Takaro Lodge, a hunting and fishing retreat with an emphasis on conservation and located coincidentally in the same Wanaka lakes region favoured by Mr Thiel.
However and all those years ago it became known that Takaro Lodge had been fitted in whole or part with gold plated plumbing fitments.
These gold taps now became a class warfare icon.
Bill Rowling was the first New Zealand Labour Party prime minister from a privileged background.
Newly installed he was determined to publicly demonstrate his working class credentials which now took the form of a campaign against Mr Rush and his lodge and of course his taps.
Meanwhile, out-of-pocket and patriotic New Zealand investors in the until quite recently NZX listed Wynyard Group will find themselves cherishing a singular and not unreasonable hope.
It is that Mr Thiel can be persuaded to put his shoulder to the wheel in restoring their forensic systems producer to solvency.
Mr Thiel is considered the major holder of Palantir.
Wynyard Group had its beginnings in Christchurch with the Jade organisation which in the 1970s invented one of the world’s first programming compilers, i.e. a programme that generated other programmes.
The Wynyard Group investor class action group is currently evaluating its options in regard to the now insolvent onetime NZX main board company.
On their agenda at their forthcoming meeting might now be a motion calling for a formal approach to their newly revealed fellow citizen, Peter Thiel.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Thursday 26 January 2017 ||
More reading: Wynyard Class Action Must Identify Litigation Targets
France’s Political Class Blind to PS votes going to FN
The breaking of France’s presidential glass ceiling by Marine Le Pen promises to be more shattering than any fall-out connected with the now broken presidential hopes of Hillary Clinton.
This is because the fall-out will be a compound one blended from the glass ceiling effect and the upset triumph of President Donald Trump.
The French political class which is far more pervasive than anything their English-speaking counterparts can put forward is only just realising the truth that has been hiding in plain sight.
It is that Marine Le Pen and her Front National Party have a very good chance of winning the pending presidential general election.
As with their English-speaking counterparts the French political classes only in the last few weeks have understood that she is short circuiting the sectors that customarily act as middlemen between politicians and voters.
We are talking here of once-admired categories such as academics, think tank intellectuals, and of course journalists.
Marine Le Pen channeled Donald Trump before Donald Trump started running for President.
The most recent milestone on her own presidential route is the embarrassing back tracking of academics, think tankers, and journalists on the outcome of the primary within the Republican Party for its presidential candidate.
France’s commentators, much more esteemed than their counterparts in the English-speaking zone, had stated that the winner would be the more liberal of the two conservative party front-runners, Alain Juppe.
In the event the party plumped for the more right-leaning Francois Fillon.
As a result of this France’s biggest circulation daily Le Parisien did something that its English-speaking zone counterparts have still signally failed to do.
This was to acknowledge that its employees’ wishes manifested as fact and that opinion now had to be separated from news.
It banned from its pages all tendentious reporting and, more importantly still, opinion polls.
Even so, the French intellectual class, traditionally cherished in a way that its English-zone counterpart is decidedly not now radiates a fresh formula.
This holds that, yes, Marine Le Pen may perhaps be head-to-head with Francois Fillon in the first stage of the presidential elections.
But that she will be washed out in the second stage or run-off procedure in which French voters are required to unambiguously list their preference.
As with their US and British counterparts the commentariat cannot bring itself to ask itself from which sectors Marine Le Pen will draw her votes in this head-to-head or sudden-death challenge.
These votes are increasingly being seen as being drawn from the current ruling party the Socialist Party which has become so unpopular that its chances of regaining the Elysee are not even being considered.
Marine Le Pen has promised to close the book on political correctness and all that it contains. This means globalisation (think EU) and multi-culturalism (think the religiously affiliated version.)
This is music to the ears of provincial France where local products are being swamped by lower-cost competition from the rest of the EU.
She would seek détente with Russia which since the US and EU led embargo has ceased to take France’s surplus farm output.
She will stem the tide of immigrants who are viewed by this same sector (think “deplorables”) as lowering wage rates and putting pressure on accommodation and social services.
Meanwhile Marine Le Pen while keep the emphasis on France’s imperial world-power yearnings, notably in Oceania, where she has long had a soft spot for New Caledonia.
| This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Wednesday 25 January 2017 |
Political Class-Media Armageddons Recalled
Three scaremongering and imminent disaster predicted without qualification by the political classes that would paralyse civilisation in the new millennium have now conspicuously failed to come to pass.
The millennialist threats in terms of the disaster they were predicted to precipitate were:-
The Y2K COMPUTER paralysis was predicted to hit civilisation with the advent of the current millennium, the second millennium. In the event global data processing continued as before. The pretext for the scare was that computer operating system clocks were said to be self-eliminating at the point of entry into the new millennium.
What was the existing evidence to reveal the bogus nature of the claim?
The existence of a operating systems that were timed to run out prior to the millennium. Among these was the widely used Pick operating system, designed originally for the military, and which went on the market in 1973. In the event Pick operating systems having run through two clock changes (its proprietary one and the millennium one) continue to function as originally specified.
What happened? Global computational carried on as before, regardless of the digital changes inherent in the new digital time zone.
Who benefited? Computer service companies which toward the end of the first expansionary period of digital processing enjoyed a burst of activity in systems reworking.
FOOD MILES gripped the minds of the fashionable and media classes in the general superstitious frenzy attendant on the new millennium. This panic theory fed off the Peak Oil one. The contention was that any imported foods ate up miles in bringing them to the mouths of the consumers in the importing nations. Therefore everyone should eat locally, and ideally, organically produced foods.
What was the existing evidence that would have debunked this one?Any sea freight shipping price schedule.
What happened? A surplus of refrigerated shipping tonnage meant that the cost-per- food mile of imported food dropped substantially below that of freighting the same foodstuffs internally the process which further worsened the urban congestion of developed nations. It was also discovered that producing local foodstuffs organically or off season in greenhouses in fact consumed more energy than was involved in bulk carrier freighted imports.
Who benefited? Food miles gave traction primarily to urban non-productive activists. The scare was eventually abandoned as it became obvious that it was now being taken up by nations which saw it as an opportunity to erect non-tariff barricades to keep out imports.
PEAK OIL Anyone who sought to be acknowledged as being fashionable early in the millennium needed to let these two words trip off their tongues. The claim was that all the oil in the globe would simply run out. Or, as a consequence would become so expensive as to be beyond the reach of anyone or any institution. Whole nations we were reliably informed would become paralysed.
What was the existing evidence that would have readily debunked the panic?
Any perusal of North American shale oil projections.
What happened? New resources cut in and oil in relative terms is now cheaper than it has been for a generation simply because there is more of it.
Who benefited? The oil industry and oil producing nations took advantage of this scaremongering which had the effect of exaggerating the value of their product simply by advertising its scarcity.
| From The MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Tuesday 24 January 2017 |
Watchdog is determined to extract Foreign Aid facts
The determination of the public spending watchdog the Taxpayers Union collective to extract from the government an explanation for its foreign aid donations to the Clinton fund has only increased with the dissolution of the Clinton Foundation when a final pledge of $5.5. million from New Zealand is still due.
Foreign aid remains a substantially unquestioned sector of public expenditure with the political class only differing on the extent of the budgetary increases.
Each year the proclamation is made by this non-productive sector that New Zealand’s aid expenditure is well below that of other nations which are said to be more conscious of their responsibilities.
In fact New Zealand’s annual aid contribution is generous in comparison with that of these nations being 0.27% of GNI.
Britain for example has only just met its 0.7 percent GNI target for the first time.
New Zealand’s 0.27 percent meanwhile remains a substantially more generous aid budget in terms of GNI than the budgets among other nations of the United States, Japan, Italy, or in Nordic terms, even Iceland.
The Clinton fund donations have something in common with the Taxpayers Union’s other bone of contention which it similarly refuses to let go of.
This is the Middle East stock handling and processing depot designed to offset the National government’s surprise decision, for Gulf importers, to veto licences for the export of live sheep to the Middle East.
In both these instances the public contributions via the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade might reasonably be considered by accounting standards to fall into the insurance category of expenditure.
The insurance being to ensure a favourable attitude to New Zealand in the event of the Clinton family re-occupying the White House, and in the instance of the Gulf states to ensure against a boycott of New Zealand exports.
Deliberately overlooked in New Zealand’s foreign aid expenditure is the matter of New Zealand having no foreign possessions in which to invest its aid.
For example a major Pacific recipient of British aid remains the Pitcairn Islands which are classified as a British overseas territory and which contain immense strategic value in terms of the sea area that the Pitcairn Islands command.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Wednesday 18 January 2017 |
White House-to-White House Pretenders replace Log Cabin -to- White House
With the inauguration of President Donald Trump three still active United States presidential dynasties make their transition into exile.
Temporary exile, as these Pretenders see it.
In Napoleonic terms the monarchical familial trio are by-passing a remote St Helena and heading to a more lightly guarded in-shore Elba from which they can make their escape when the call comes, as they ardently believe it will.
First among these is the Bush dynasty which has already supplied two republican monarchs, George 1 and then George 11. But which failed to install Jeb 1
Second is the Clinton one which bestowed upon the United States a co-monarchy similar to that of the reign in Britain of William and Mary.
But which so agonisingly failed last year to re-install itself with Hillary now in prime regal Pretender position.
Third, and the most promising of the dynasties-in-waiting is the newest one, the Obama line.
The intervention in the final stages of the anti -Trump campaign by Michelle Obama, and the First Lady’s subsequent mainstream participation in the sorrowful aftermath leaves few in doubt that the Obamas are in dynastic mode as far as the presidency is concerned.
These dynasties do not intend to sit out the next four years which they regard anyway as an interregnum or at best, a regency.
They know that if you intend to end up in the White House, it make sense to start at the White House.
Gathering a war chest will not be a problem.
All those court jesters, fire-eaters, tumblers, strolling player, song-and dance contributors (see illustration) at the Obama White House final curtain call party by their mere appearance pledged their allegiance for another round of fund raising.
The log cabin to White House journey has in applied terms now been replaced by one from The White House back to the White House.
The Clintons have devoted their adult lives to campaigning and they have no intention of stopping now.
The kingmakers of the Democratic Party will look though with much greater favour on a Michelle candidacy in 2020 than on a Hillary one.
This will be an action-replay of the way in which they looked so much more favourably on the original candidacy of Barack Obama than they did on Hillary’s in the primaries of all those years ago.
All this is curious enough. But not as mystifying as the American refusal to comprehend the way in which their republic is so demonstrably changing its course back to the era of feudal family inheritance.
For the Tudors, Plantagenets, and Stuarts read now Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas.
Now though post inauguration these feudal families disperse to their separate fiefdoms to rally their forces for the next round.
The Bushes to the South.
The Obamas back to the crucible of Democratic politics Chicago, but keeping visible a shop window residence in Washington.
The Clintons the Liege Lords of New York back to the Big Apple there to polish the fervour of their vassals and villeins.
From these strong holds they will collect their tithes raise their private armies for the next battle, the one to evict the usurper Trump.
For these Pretenders in place of halberdiers, pike men and archers will be the new model armies.
Swearing oaths of fealty as did the yeomen of yore these will be tweeting technicians, trackers, pollsters, fixers......
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters desk | Monday 16 January 2017 |
Winners and losers in tradeoff
Exactly how a liberal government’s attempt to appease its Green Party MPs led to a declaration of war, however figurative, from the prime minister of Israel is the strangest tale yet in New Zealand’s almost two centuries of farm politics.
Exactly how this state of affairs led to a covert New Zealand taxpayer funded stock handling depot in the middle of a Middle East desert only contributes to a tale which ranks alongside anything from Arabian Nights.
The way in which it made strange bedfellows of meat packing, slaughter house, freezing works proprietors and the Greens is just another chapter in this astonishing saga of shifting and unlikely alliances.
The saga begins with New Zealand’s centrist National government giving approval to the export of live sheep to the Middle East.
Farmers, and farm export consolidators were delighted. Live sheep exports allows them to obtain a premium price for their sheep, instead of having to take the schedule price of the licensed export processing meat companies.
The meat export processors, meanwhile, who derive much of their profit from the animal by- products ranging from medicinals to pet foods via rendering were and remain singularly hostile to live sheep exports. A big chunk of their potential income sails away with the sheep.
They keep quiet about this point of view for fear of antagonising farmers.
Middle East interests, who have substantial investments in the live trade both here and overseas, appear to have been in no doubt that after years of stop-go the live trade would resume.
The Greens now launched their most successful political lobby since the anti-nuclear era. The government backed down on live sheep exports.
The mysterious New Zealand taxpayer funded depot is one by-product of this. It is designed to appease now the would be live sheep importers.
They were and still are only partially appeased.
The anti Israel New Zealand sponsored resolution at United Nations was thrown in as another sop to the Middle East importers by now threatening a Gulf-wide boycott of anything at all from New Zealand .
This byzantine power play engulfing as it does politicians, diplomats and traders from the Gulf to United Nations via the South Pacific has also enraged farmers especially in the Hawkes Bay where much of the trade in its glory days was once centred.
The centrepiece of this was the drafting, notably at Maraekakaho, where the inspecting agents acting on behalf of the Middle East importers would assess the suitability or otherwise of the stock for export.
The fury of the Middle East importers at the broken promise is understandable given the timing of the live sheep shipments with the annual haj or pilgrimage to Mecca (pictured)
All this has simmered Omerta-style under the surface of public and even the farm-politics debate for quite some time.
Another unacknowledged and unmentioned element to this is that for the farmers, live sheep exports allow them to command a premium price for the stock – and to get paid.
The reason why the few established meat exporting processors have such a command on procurement is that they are big enough in terms of resources to ensure that they actually get paid at the other end.
In the meantime, the Middle East will fill its live sheep shipments from South America, notably Uruguay.
Live sheep exports gave farmers premium price plus guarantee of payment.
It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
So in this modern riddle of the sands, who are the winners?
Who are the losers?
The winners:-• The Greens• The meat processors, freezing works.• Uruguay• President Obama
The losers:-* Farmers* NZ Taxpayers* State of Israel
The Lesson:-The episode which began with live sheep and then made the transit of a lame duck US President Barack Obama still has a long way to go. But what is the lesson so far. Here we must touch down on Greece, classical epoch, in order to heed Aristotle who declared .......
A friend to all is a friend to none
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Wednesday 11 January 2017 |
In the latest in our Five Questions For.....series we interrogate the West’s most seasoned operational intelligence officer on Russia......
Major General Peter Williams (pictured) is often considered the most experienced military specialist on Russia and its intentions. He was a member of the allied Cross Mission to the old USSR and this saw him for many years operationally involved in intelligence gathering within the Iron Curtain. At the conclusion of the Cold War he led the NATO mission to the new Russian Federation. Five questions now follow for General Williams:-
What will be the nature of the US-Russia rapprochement under Donald Trump?We are going to have to wait and see just how much free rein Trump finds himself to have. Clearly his personal outlook on the world, including on Russia, is coloured by his own lengthy career as a businessman. He is not a career politician or a Washington insider, but he and his new yet-to-be-confirmed by Congress Secretary of State will find themselves the recipients of advice from the departments of the US government, members of Congress and the US media, much of which will run counter to Trump's instincts and initial aspirations. It will all be about Trump getting better informed about the details of the many challenges to US interests posed by Russia and then coming up with a new, personal synthesis of the existing situation.In a nutshell, it's too early to say how Trump as President will react to the challenges and opportunities presented by the Kremlin, but he will stamp his own character on whatever redefined approach --possibly rapprochement, but not necessarily so-- emerges as 2017 progresses. And then there is the reality of 'events, events, events' - the unforeseeable developments that British prime minister Harold Macmillan once identified as the biggest challenge that would face any politician.
Will the trade embargo quickly dissolve?Almost certainly not. Congress seems much less likely to be in a forgiving and conciliatory mood where Russia is concerned than Trump may currently appear to be. Dismantling trade embargoes is not a simple procedure, not least where they are coordinated on a multinational basis.
Your opinion of the Russian espionage/hacking operations within the US?We will never get a clear explanation about what may have been the precise scale and details of the alleged Russian espionage/hacking operations in the US, but there is no reason, given the track record over many decades of Soviet and Russian disinformation and disruption operations, not to believe that the Kremlin has been seeking to take advantage of the perceived weaknesses of the Obama presidency, particularly during its dying months.
Others such as China, North Korea, and certain other allies will have been doing the same at the same time. The US, along with the West in general including far-off New Zealand, is a pretty soft target for disinformation and disruption operations. Whether any Russian hacking actually managed to affect the outcome of the US Presidential and Congressional election process we'll almost certainly never know for sure.
Where and why did Western-Russian relations go wrong during the Obama years?It is perhaps more accurate to describe what failed to happen, rather than what actually went wrong. Obama and Hillary Clinton sought to re-set the US-Russia relationship, but in truth the rupture went back to 2007 when Putin re-evaluated the relationship and decided that it had not been in Russia's national interests to allow the West to get too close to Russia.By 2007 NATO enlargement had brought the Alliance right up to the borders of the Russian Federation and now the threat of Ukrainian and Georgian membership of NATO was identified as a step too far into the cordon sanitaire that the Kremlin felt must separate the West physically from Russia. The EU had also been expanding to the east in a similar manner, taking into its fold nations that Russia had long viewed as Russian client states.
The 2008 Georgian war put paid to NATO's expansion - even if Russia's military campaign had been tactically and operationally less than flawless, the strategic result was clear: Russia had stopped NATO enlargement in its tracks. The final straw was the EU's active encouragement of the Euromaidan overthrow of the democratically elected albeit utterly corrupt Ukrainian president. The seizure and annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin-supported insurrection in Eastern Ukraine put paid to any chance of rapprochement between Russia and the West in all its forms, not least NATO and the EU.
Taking a world view, where do you see Western-Russian relations in five years?Whatever the situation will be in 2022, it is sure to be different from the situation today where Western-Russian relations are concerned. It is much too early to be able to predict whether Trump will actually launch a process that might deliver a substantive rapprochement with Russia. If he does so, such a rapprochement will not be without its risks, one of which must be a danger of fracturing the current common hard line that the West has been holding against Russia.
In the last year or so, sensing a vacuum in Western leadership, Russian strategy in Syria has wrong-footed the West. Russian military power has enjoyed a significant victory, which will both strengthen the position of the hawks in the Kremlin and will give a boost to Russia's state-controlled armaments sector, which can expect increased export sales as a result of the technology demonstration that the Syrian intervention has provided.
Finally, although I am by nature one of life's cautious optimists and I believe that rapprochement with Russia could be portrayed as a sensible act of realpolitik, it is hard to see just how Trump can deliver the re-set of the US-Russia relationship without which any wider Western-Russian rapprochement seems doomed to fail. If The Donald can pull off this deal, he will have confounded his sceptical enemies and will have earned the adulation of his new-found supporters.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Friday 6 January 2017 |
Le Parisien Determined to Identify What Voters Believe in place of what elites believe they believe.
Paris’ leading daily newspaper, the tabloid Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France has outlawed from its pages all poll-based predictions on the pending presidential election.
The centrist popular daily blames unquestioning reliance on polls, known in France as “soundings” to have led to the embarrassing set of circumstances in which Alain Juppe was unanimously predicted to become the successful candidate of the right-of-centre Republican Party.
In the event, and as MSC Newswire’s European correspondent had predicted, (see our story below) the successful candidate was Francois Fillon who now becomes the favourite to win the pending presidential (i.e. general) election.
In the same forecast, MSC Newswire had also predicted that current president Francois Hollande would not be the Socialist Party candidate in the election. In the event, and several days after our prediction, Mr Hollande stood down.
Meanwhile, according to Le Parisien, the elimination of polls, soundings, and other tendentious content will be replaced by plain and simple reporting.
The objective being to report what people are in fact thinking in place of the former practice of reporting on what a narrow elite believe, or want to believe, everyday people are thinking.
According to our European correspondent, Alain Juppe’s “Happy Identity” slogan was only finding approval among the media.
Similarly Mr Juppe’s involvement with a funds scandal, which had caused him to live in Canada, was taken seriously by voters, if not the media.
Also, the idea of a Clintonesque co-presidency (see front page), while attractive to the media, nonetheless dismayed the public at large, as it did voters in the United States presidential election.
| From the MSCNewswire reporters' desk | Thursday January 5 2017 |
Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....
| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.
Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.
Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.
Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat
The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.
There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.
The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.
His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.
In the event she lost to Sarkozy.
It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene. The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.
Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.
No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.
Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script.
Reformation in US, UK, and France Suddenly Transforms United Nations Hegemony
The old established order, the one founded in traditionally-accepted geopolitical foreign policies began to dissolve at the same time as New Zealand took its seat as a temporary member for the first time of the United Nations Security Council.
The old order was based on policies that would continue and in the United States especially would do so on a dynastic basis. In the other two western alliance members of the permanent Security Council, United Kingdom and France this too was the order of the day.
For New Zealand its willingness to follow the great power party line now that it was a guest at High Table seemed a natural thing to do.
In this special holiday-read article we now examine events of 30 years ago that in so many ways echo delayed action events in the Security Council now and especially so in regard to the way in which New Zealand’s willingness to follow Senior School policies can leave it hanging out to dry.......................
The peak of New Zealand’s world stage role in more recent times and in a sensational sense occurred in 1985 in two incidents in two vastly separated locations.
The first of these dual episodes was Prime Minister David Lange’s appearance in March 1 at the Oxford Union debate on nuclear weapons.
The second came a few months later in Auckland with the blowing up of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior. This then became compounded with the capture of the two French agents responsible for the harbour sabotage.
The very public and compounding challenge to France, a permanent member of the Security Council, one of the five great powers that won World War 2, engendered a crusading atmosphere among the New Zealand political class.
This compounded with the national craving centred on punching above “our” weight engendered such a shared feeling of empowerment that David Lange’s Labour government carried through its sweeping globalist policies that now placed New Zealand in the very front rank of economic deregulation.
Now though and at the height of international acclaim trouble manifested itself in Oceania in the form of Lieutenant General Vernon Walters (pictured with President Nixon) in Fiji on “holiday.”
General Walters at this time, 1987, was United States ambassador to United Nations.
Prior to that he had served as deputy director of the CIA.
Two military coups in succession soon followed this soldierly vacation dalliance with the result that Fiji became a republic.
That same year 1987 General Walters was inducted into the US Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
Sabre rattling followed with the result that military intervention from New Zealand now seemed possible if not likely.
In the event, the intervention came via Australia which now instructed New Zealand not to intervene.
Another problem was that the burden of this message was delivered on a personal basis with Australian foreign office officials making high profile visits to New Zealand.
At this time the Cold War was still in progress.
This reliance on face-to-face exchanges indicated too the state of New Zealand’s military grade longer haul communications.
These were deemed to be unreliable through the activities of deep penetration agents known to have been active in the 1960s if not the 1970s, and therefore likely to have left legacies well into the 1980s.
After the world stage nuclear moral triumphs the Australian intervention over Fiji was a comedown.
Many believe now that New Zealand amplified this by its continuing coolness if not hostility and indeed, utter inability to accept the new republican regime in Fiji .
This regime in the event soon found firm friends in the form of Russia and China. These countries are the other two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council
It was now though that there was born the concept of New Zealand taking a seat on the United Nations Security Council, as one of the numerous temporary members.
As the years slipped by this became a determined goal and eventually a realisable one.
Australia had been a temporary-tier member of the Security Council on numerous occasions.
Luck now played its part as New Zealand’s debut began to take solid form. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the resulting trade sanctions of which New Zealand was and remains very much part of occurred too late in the piece to interfere in the membership process.
The China – New Zealand Free Trade Agreement was a roaring success, so no veto from there.
Britain was a natural supporter.
The United States was appreciative of New Zealand’s help with its Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.
France the other permanent Security Council member had long since buried the hatchet with New Zealand and indeed had taken over Britain’s imperial investment role in things like utilities, construction materials, electronics, financial services, urban transport and via Pernod Ricard, wine.
The permanent members, the great powers, were thus in 2014 in alignment and so New Zealand’s second tier membership went ahead..
Now and given the lead time between membership approval and admission there has taken place amid the three western power permanent members a paradigm shift akin to a reformation, and which can substantially be traced to the breakup of the state system in the Middle East.
The first indication of this shift was Britain’s announced departure from the EU and the ensuing resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron.
The second was the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
The third western permanent member of the Security Council to undergo this shift became France.
This was predicted by MSC Newswire (The End of the Politically Correct—November 24 2016)
President Francois Hollande now announced that he would not be offering himself for re-election in 2017.
As they start packing their bags for the return home the New Zealand delegation to the second tier, the impermanent one, of United Nations, and with the standing ovation accorded to their sponsored resolution, the one on Israel, still ringing in their ears, one or two veterans may cast their minds back, well, 30 years.
They will remember that time in Fiji when the United States seemed to be so present, yet so removed when the Fiji coups took place.
They will remember too just how stern and unfriendly the Australians suddenly became.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Wednesday 4 January 2017
More reading: The End of the Politically Correct—November 24 2016
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