Cancelled Subs believed bomb-proof in newly reinforced Green-Climate-Anti Nuclear shelter
France really did learn at the same time as everyone else that its flagship technology deal to build Australia’s submarines was cancelled. The reason was that France’s channels kept telling Paris that the Australian government would not dare to confront its electorate with anything nuclear in any shape or form.
The more Paris interrogated its own channels the stronger emerged this anti nuclear theme and with it the belief in the determination of Scott Morrison government to stick doggedly with the diesel submarines on order.
These channels included France’s own embassies and consulates and also its lobbyists which had the single purpose of monitoring the progress of the submarine construction contract.
Ex Australian federal prime ministers from opposing parties insisted that the deal would continue uninterrupted if only because of the electoral hazards of inviting anything nuclear into Australia.
The linkage between green-climatism-nuclear is stronger in Australia than anywhere else. One development especially convinced France and its informants that this linkage was now about to be massively and unexpectedly reinforced.
News Corporation had been on the sidelines of this three-sided contention if not actually openly sceptical. It was now about to plunge in on the side of the climatists and thus the anti-nuclears.
As indicators of this about-face began to seep out from places such as the chain’s advertising sales operations, so the belief became even more cemented in that France’s diesel submarines were safe simply because they were not nuclear.
After all News Corporation’s success everywhere was built upon the ability to position its media to take advantage of the public mood by accurately calibrating it.
Australia’s susceptibility to alarms about nuclear technology’s threat to existence is due in large part to it being viewed after World War 2 as a sanctuary from the Cold War with its threat of annihilation.
Its anti-nuclear protest movement kept pace with that of Britain which is where many of this era immigrant wave had come from.
This activism has been constantly fuelled and refreshed ever since by Australia’s presence as one of the world’s big three uranium suppliers.
Though the rest of the western world’s defence establishments found the equipping of France’s nuclear submarines with diesel engines rather odd, this was not a widespread impression within Australia itself.
Australia’s quirky tendency to bypass off the shelf standardised defence options in favour of acquiring a unique production run with its own specifications is not unfamiliar.
France’s channels both official and unofficial backed this by telling Paris that their subs were truly safe and that the green-climate-anti nuclear movement, a movement about to be so massively reinforced by the intervention of News Corporation, would keep them even safer.
This was because any nuclear alternative would be interpreted as the thin end of the wedge, a point of entry, for nuclear power stations.
This theory again rang true in Paris long ultra-sensitive to the eagerness of activists in Australasia to display outrage at the mere scent of anything nuclear.
All these informed hunches seemed to outweigh the gathering shifts affecting the zones and conditions in which the submarines would eventually one day operate.
Such as China’s rapid escalation from a perceived benign autocracy which had rescued “a quarter of the world’s population from poverty” into a most visible threat to global stability.
Then came the Kabul evacuation the images of which demanded a global-strength diversion which now took the form of AUKUS.
At first there was a belief that France all along had known the game was up and was recalling ambassadors and sounding its “fury” to extract from its Australian ex customer still greater contract termination penalties.
And yet. And yet. France paradoxically has emerged from the Cancellation as a good and trusting ally.
There were no tripartite intercepts along the Canberra-Washington-London communications triangle. Hotels suites in Cornwall were unbugged. No sources obviously existed at any level at all within the sprawling Australian side of the project …..
France was as surprised as the green-climatist-anti nuclears.
Maori vocabulary in broadcasts shrouded absence of special inoculation initiative and hoodwinked multiculturalists
Auckland is a merchant city and New Zealand’s largest metropolis. Many of its more prosperous and educated citizens were thrilled when Maori phrases and words were routinely inserted into official situation reports on the virus threat and even to the extent of a new name for their city, a Maori one.
They assumed that this display of diversity-in-difficulty was also a sign that politicians and public health officials had an operational plan for a by now obviously vulnerable segment of the public health community.
It turned out that they had no such plan. The liberal use of Maori in situation reports and press conferences was symbolic rather than applied.
As these same urban privileged with holiday homes and skiing trips already booked found themselves absolutely grounded during the extended Auckland region pandemic territorial lockdown there came a chilling realisation.
It was that the government, so outwardly vocally aware of this vulnerable population group, had not positioned its health services to cope with this same group’s obvious frailty in terms of infection.
The impression, a false one as it turned out, that the Labour government had the matter well in hand was only merely being implicitly reinforced by the health officials giving their televised situation reports and routinely injecting into press conferences Maori place names and location descriptions hitherto unknown to the public at large.
This in turn was reinforced by presenters on the government’s television channel announcing for example that this or that had occurred in “Paremata” which most assumed was in the town of the same name but which turned out to mean Parliament
In the middle of all this came the announcement of a re-structuring of the nation’s health apparatus in which the 20 district health boards were to be centralised.
This explained why the biggest boards, the ones in and around Auckland, had had their attentions deflected from reaching the sector likely to be most prone to the Wuhan virus.
Professional managers in the path of this upheaval now found that they had an additional and severe problem to deal with in addition to the existing one of the pandemic. .
Upon the announcement of the planned realignment the leader of the opposition National Party Judith Collins announced that once in power she would reverse it. Especially the proposed Maori Health Authority part of it.
While all this was going on the government announced a scheme to take away control of water from municipal authorities while establishing ownership rights for Maori tribes.
No wonder that an impression had built up among Labour’s devoted Auckland urban privileged constituency that whatever the government did or did not have a handle on, it was most utterly focused on Maori needs in anything at all and especially in applied public health.
In practical terms the Labour government has made little impact with what it terms as its “deliveries” notably in tackling the house shortage so remarkable in a sparsely populated nation.
Its doctrinal stock-in-trade gloss though was sufficient to hold in a state of thrall the politico-media class along with the rest of the urban privileged.
A disappointment in the government’s ability to reinforce its flagship diversity doctrine with a practical and applied underpinning in the form of a different and tailored approach to countering and containing the virus for the diverse now dents this unquestioning devotion.
Duke and Duchess of Suffolk new California Residence attracts global Media to High Court case in South Seas
Proceedings in the High Court of New Zealand between the representatives of a prominent Russian businessman resident in California and a Wellington legal publisher have caused what is being seen as a benchmark in the ability of journalists to protect the sources of their stories.
The burden of the case is that the Wellington publisher and journalist John Bowie has been ordered to pay substantial costs to the plaintiff’s representatives in New Zealand
There are several firms in New Zealand which have acted on behalf of the plaintiff in the case against Mr Bowie who runs an online legal topics news site.
The case has involved a number of issues from the complainant’s representatives. An outcome is that these amounted to the failure of Mr Bowie to disclose the identities of the sources of the information in the stories that he published in his online Lawfuel.
Mr Bowie has received instructions via the plaintiff’s representatives in New Zealand to make available to them his own personal computer and associated electronic storage devices.
These are the systems that may contain messages and other such correspondence between he and his sources involved in the stories cited in the High Court action.
The New York-based Overseas Press of America has notified its anxiety about the order and also its subsequent support for the National Press Club of New Zealand which took the matter to the country’s Law Commission.
In a development in the case it was emphasised that the costs against Mr Bowie were due to Mr Bowie’s own decision to withhold the sources of the information in the stories that he published in Lawfuel.
Also cited was Mr Bowie’s refusal to reveal to the plaintiff’s New Zealand representatives the identities of the individuals behind the assumed names in the by lines of articles that appeared in Lawfuel
This South Seas case might have remained largely unnoticed internationally had it not been for the unrelated sale of the plaintiff’s California residence to the re-locating royal couple the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.
The property transaction coincidence involving the British royal couple known popularly as Harry and Meghan, pictured above in the film colony with their Montecito friend and neighbour, had the effect of drawing attention to proceedings in the High Court in Wellington.
This in turn now aroused a wider industry interest centred on the impact internationally of the security, the privacy, of the sources behind the stories of journalists everywhere.
In the last century New Zealand became renowned for the prominence internationally of its reporters and cartoonists. In this one it seems that the Oceania nation will be noted in the matter of access to story sources and authorship. See also-
Overseas Press Club of America:
National Press Club submissions received by the Law Commission re Sergey Grishin versus John Bowie in the High Court:
Glasgow Extravaganza Tempts Climate Zealots to make ruinous pledges to United Nations
Politicians and their entourages converging on Glasgow for Cop26 threaten to pile additional economic handicaps on their countries as they showily compete with each other in displays of climate warming zealotry.
United Nations which is staging Cop26 will be the main beneficiary just because it diverts attention away from its own failure in regard to the real crisis, the pandemic, which it failed to intercept and then stonewalled in determining its origin.
Europe is facing an energy shortage due low fuel stockpiles following last winter, which was colder and longer than usual.
Neither will any questions be asked as to why British householders have discovered that a quarter of their power bill is comprised of a green levies surcharge
United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres the ring master for the gathering is already whipping up his audience by claiming that global warming is at an alarm of “fever pitch” crescendo.
This cry will not be taken up by independent power suppliers in the UK going out of business due to the shortage-induced skyrocketing wholesale power rates.
Neither will anyone at the UN feel it necessary to explain for example why as the pandemic, the one they failed to detect, gathered force they egged on such pious devotees as New Zealand at the start of 2020 to declare a distracting official climate emergency.
British prime minister Boris Johnson is a recent convert to the political trade secret that climate is the key to the vote of the electoral aristocracy.
With the hyperbole for which he is famous he likens the world to a perpetual thoughtless adolescent conveniently forgetting that London the city of which he was once mayor introduced the Clean Air Acts.
The platoon-sized delegation from New Zealand scheduled to attend the Glasgow convocation demonstrates the neo-religious brazen immunity attached to any association with the United Nations climate fervour.
At a time when families remain split and cannot unite because of tightly rationed quarantine accommodation there were no qualms about the extensive Glasgow entourage elbowing aside their distressed taxpayers in their own quest for the angelic limelight.
Boris Johnson’s customary bragging and bluster will overcome any reservations from these true believers as Britain enters another winter that may be colder than the last and with fill in energy supplies from Europe uncertain.
His presence at the Glasgow conference will add a new theatricality which is likely to evoke among participants an enhanced tendency to show-off by committing their countries to extreme self-sacrificial economic hobbling.
Already hit in the New Zealand Labour government’s determination to demonstrate to United Nations its climatic purity is the nation’s natural gas supply vital to home heating. Bovine production which underpins the export economy is another example.
Those at the conference are theorists who have never worked at wealth-building careers. Their task is one usually associated with mystics, fakirs, and instant cure peddlers. It is to persuade the voters back home, the ones paying for it, that the damage being inflicted on them is for their own good.
The winner is United Nations which is kept afloat by payments from these nations and about which the taxpayers so levied are told little.
Adding to the unreality of Cop26 is an acute shortage in the United Kingdom of carbon dioxide essential to such essentials as healthcare and food production.
One sideshow at Cop 26 is bound to be the New Zealand side ardently proving that it can out run in the climate stakes anything from newly nuclear Australia whose citizens may feel themselves on home turf due to the Glasgow Stock Exchange (above) site reminding them of the Sydney Opera House.
Retrofitting French Atomic Subs was a customisation too far
The new AUKUS military alliance concludes the most bizarre construction deal in modern military procurement, the one for Australia to retro re-equip French nuclear submarines with diesel engines.
The compromise was itself powered by the most high minded of moral objectives blended with the most practical of political imperatives. The moral objective was to protect Australia from anything nuclear. The political one was old fashioned electioneering based on keeping jobs there too.
What a difference a few years make. Five in the case of the backwardly compatible subs.
In 2016 the year the deal was signed with France many in Australia still hailed China for having “lifted” this was the word always used a substantial chunk of the world’s population “out of poverty.”
Neither was this belief confined to the politico media class. A year before in 2015 the Chinese-owned and aptly-named Landbridge Group won the bid for a 99 year lease of Port Darwin which happens to be Australia’s gateway to the Indo Pacific.
In 2018 the state of Victoria signed up with China’s Belt and Road scheme seen at the time and until it was abruptly cancelled by the Federal government as the very embodiment of political progressivism.
The retro conversion of the French nuclear submarines to internal combustion can be compared to re-powering diesel electric rail locomotives with coal-fired steam engines.
Until even months ago the problems of this 2016 deal for the re-engined French submarines were brushed under the carpet. The quaint arrangement eliminating anything nuclear kept Australia’s Labour Party at bay, and thus similarly the nation’s activist media which is nearly all of it.
The French always saw the problems in re-adapting their standard nuclear-powered submarine package and so insisted on a large order so they could obtain efficiency of scale for the extensive modifications.
Government consortia and private corporates tremble before altering, tampering, with standardised technology packages of any description. Customising a proven technology introduces a chain reaction in which a change somewhere distorts everything else, everywhere else.
This is why most acquirers of packaged, standardised technology, sensibly seek to mould and bend their own requirements around the technology package instead of the other way around.
The Australian 2016 submarine contract requiring the nuclear propulsion to be replaced by internal combustion engines turned the French standard package inside out.
This is because the original nuclear design meant that the submarine would remain operable at sea continuously until the crew food supplies ran out.
More important still the combustion engine propulsion would cancel out the nuclear submarine other great advantage, the one of silence.
Another danger of customising a standardised package is that it empowers the vendor to add costs.
The greater the degree of departure from the standard design, the greater the customisation and the greater the leverage in the hands of the vendor in this case the French government.
The French government owns most of the constructor Naval Group. It sought to compensate for customisation by insisting on a large flotilla of the modified submarines in order to achieve scale of production for the drastic hybridisation of its standard design model.
It was genuinely shocked when the entire somewhat dotty deal was abruptly cancelled. It was a rare example of a tightly-held trade/defence secret.
The French were lulled because nobody in any authority in Australia, or in any other western ally until very recently questioned the contract dogged as it so obviously was with the cost and delays caused by the customisation complications.
Not a whisper reached the French government with its vaunted foreign service, nor Thales the secondary shareholder of the constructor Naval Group, or even Naval’s own operational management.
Washington saw the problem. It now presented a clean deal, one that suited all parties including the British now put back in a position to resume a historical role in Australian heavy engineering.
The fury of France’s response indicates that no amount of penalties and damages will compensate for the abrupt contract termination.
China’s sabre rattling and the corresponding cutting through of the “lifted out of poverty” creed and its replacement by a practical appreciation of a threat is one explanation for the abrupt submarine contract upset.
Another is that the sudden sub announcement was itself a diversion from the impression of the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan. Itself an example of the confusion when political expediency laced with ideological distractions intrude on military planning.
The US-led Anglo Australian submarine strategy cut through a defence dreamtime.
National Leader Caustic comments on Covid Clinicians cracked media indifference
Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles presented Judith Collins with one of the very few high value targets available to the leader of the Opposition. Mrs Collins let fly with her “big fat hypocrite” missile after someone dobbed in the New Zealander of the Year for being away from home at the beach. And not wearing a mask.
Judith Collins targeted Dr Siouxsie Wiles (https://www.mscnewswire.co.nz/page2/item/19280-phillida-perry-s-siouxsie-the-virus-documents-dr-wiles-catching-mass-resentment-for-covid-containment.html) only a few weeks after taking a swipe at Dr Ashley Bloomfield the nation’s director general of health.
Mrs Collins lashed out at the duo because strange as it seems she knew that she could do so without alienating National Party support. They are both Eurocentric tall poppies. Professionals who can be taken down a peg or two without alienating cultural sensitivities.
Politically Mrs Collins is trapped by the culture wars. The most obvious example of the way in which she is manacled is in telling the National Party rural base what it wants to hear.
If she declares that New Zealand’s allegiance to net zero will not make a jot of difference to the climate but will wreck the economy then she wins the farmers. But she loses the urban liberals.
If she strides forth on law and order (gangs) she reinforces her productive sector base. But loses urban professionals (inclusivity.)
Should Mrs Collins wade into immigration on the grounds of a disconcerting benefit-of-the-doubt attitude relating to deporting the manifestly lethal then she again sloughs off this same urban constituency (social justice.)
Mrs Collins is in search of the 300,000 missing National Party votes, the ones that went AWOL at the last general election.
Within the National Party there are various explanations. One is that the rural vote evaporated as farmers went Labour with both their two votes just to eliminate the threat of the Greens.
The other reason is rather more sensitive and somehow more convincing. It is what is known within the National Party as the “Remuera doctors and lawyers wives” vote.
It holds that a household combined vote no longer exists and that one of the householders went Labour or Green, quietly.
Mrs Collins indicated as much at her earlier collective swipe at Dr Bloomfield and former prime minister Helen Clark on the grounds of a proximity to United Nations which Ms Clark once served and then sought to lead as secretary-general.
Mrs Collins knows that the Labour government is wedded to United Nations ideologies.
But she dare not say so because of the Remuera Effect with its many invisible UN devotees (globalism).
Siouxsie Wiles (pictured above by Arvid Eriksson) presents an everywoman persona. Her recognisable and polychromatic aspect removes the kind of gulf so often associated with highly qualified clinicians tasked with informing the general public about the unpleasant.
Much the same thing can be said of the outwardly more staid and conventional Dr Bloomfield in aspect the embodiment of the traditional public servant.
His only visible blend with Labour government doctrine is his willingness to advance the cause of the Maori language (diversity) notably in matters of correct delivery such as with the new name for Auckland.
In his public update broadcast duets with prime minister Jacinda Ardern he correctly renders Tamaki Makerau with the last syllable pronounced as in meow instead of it sounding like cow or toe the usual rendering.
Mrs Collins outbursts directed at the two clinicians seemed to be both petulant and waspish. She knew though that they would be much reported and that they would demonstrate that she would not be intimidated by them and certainly not by their face-value good intentions.
She thus challenged the government’s lock downs and other Covid tactics obliquely, indirectly.
Of all the parties National has taken the biggest beating in the culture wars. Its few media friends able to render on-the-ground support have tended to find themselves subjected to cancellation.
Mrs Collins targeting of the two clinicians at last raised her above the noise level.
Key officials distance themselves from assumption-laden project lacking surprise, deception, contingency
The Kabul evacuation shows hallmarks of a very large scale endeavour that veered sharply onto an unanticipated course. The most obvious sign is that nobody wants to be responsible for it, or own it. This was demonstrated by key people being on holiday at the time.
This distancing from a dodgy project was also evident in the absence of any geographical central point of control such as a situation room.
A common factor in all very large scale debacles is that of the creeping assumption. There is growing evidence that project component members of the Kabul evacuation assumed that other component member groups were effective when we can now see that they were not.
An overriding ingredient to a failed large scale project is that those responsible for its execution refused to carry bad news all the way to the top. The vulnerability of the county-size Kabul city airport is one example here. It was inadequate to the task.
Very large scale projects that go off-course are prone to a self-infused sense of optimism which tends to grow with the importance of the project and which continue through to testing. The belief, one based solely on hope, that the Taliban would cooperate with the evacuation timetable remains the outstanding example.
At some stage very large projects become prone to a distraction. In the private sector this is often due to government intervention in some form. In this instance the government provided its own distraction to its own project.
The round robin collective letter to the US Administration from retired flag officers points out the “divisive” effect of what amounted to the ill-timed launch of what it described as a “wokist” agenda.
Distancing became the trade mark of the evacuation. We can see now how those in nominal control of events placed themselves in the position in which if it worked, they could claim the plaudits. If it didn’t, then their operational connection with events would be seen as tenuous enough to deflect collecting the blame.
They had good reason for ambivalence. The evacuation lacked the two essentials of any military process of any size at all. These are surprise and deception. These two tactical aces were left exclusively to the Taliban to implement as strategies.
Contingency increasingly looks as if was missing too. So was simple office-grade information technology which should have used Afghanistan’s relatively advanced telecommunications network in a pre-planned evacuation roster notification process.
An example of such a standard public point-to-multipoint phased process is the vaccination notification roster used now in NATO countries.
A quarter of Afghans were routine cell phone users and these were exactly the interpreters and other officials who needed to be on such a critical roster alert, one that chimed with a pre-planned flight schedule. No such basic coordinated IT alerting system seems to have been used.
In management terms the US-led NATO operation was a consortium. Information sharing was a pre-requisite and as it turned out incredibly all-embracing in that it in corporate terms it was shared also and intentionally with the enemy the Taliban, the competition.
We are now routinely reminded that all the abandoned NATO heavy duty aircraft have been rendered unusable.
Might not these have been instead just as easily folded into a coordinated evacuation procedure and simply flown to one of the in-range NATO friendly countries complete with passengers, evacuees?
Official statements have similarly focussed on the beyond-repair abandoned wheeled and tracked terrestrial vehicles. This emphasis on heavy armour obscures the much greater value to the insurgents of lighter, very useable, and much more mobile and thus much more useful spoils of war.
This includes NATO’s Thales interoperable radios and Pilkington night vision equipment (pictured.).
NATO’s failure to blow its dumps can be tied to NATO’s failure to act on its own intelligence. Even if this was realistic in its interpretation of what was likely to happen it re-emerged operationally in corporate marketing format as a politicised message of hope characterised by the military evacuating itself first instead of last.
Neither can the evacuation be compared to Saigon. Then the timetable, the initiative, was in the hands of the enemy in Hanoi which forced it on South Vietnam..
In Kabul in contrast setting the timetable was in the hands of the defenders in the form of the US-led NATO alliance.
The United States reputation for method and order rested on its ability to bring to bear on any operation a concentrated array of specialist manpower and their accompanying technology.
The Afghanistan experience indicates that it can no longer do this and that its allies are going to have to factor this realisation into joint operations.
The dissenting retired military brass in their critique probably come closest to the explanation in blaming the affair on deliberately divisive doctrines prioritising the very disunity of purpose that became so evident in the evacuation of Afghanistan.
It was Only Concussion diagnosis dogs brutal nation building team sport
Like a storm cloud gathering over a grandstand long dated football injuries liability looms over the professional contact sport.
Professional personal injury sports liability is the last taboo. It is literally too painful to contemplate.
This threatening cloud began in the United Kingdom with a group claim on behalf of 40 retired professional football, soccer version, players all said to be victims of early onset dementia, suddenly turned ominous also in the football, rugby version.
It emerged that well over 100 former professional rugby players were going down the same litigation claim route and for the same reason. That of early onset dementia.
Still more ominous was the indication from lawyers acting on behalf of these groups to the effect that it was probable that 50 percent of former professional rugby players suffer with dementia.
Professionalization of rugby football placed the game in a corporate framework in which players became employees.
The already intense nature of the sport accelerated and so did the phrase on the contemplation of a star groggy player that he was all right because “he’s only got concussion.”
Professionalization also drew into its slipstream a number of other elements that made rugby players increasingly prone to injury and especially to head injuries.
In the amateur era players had another job to go to, farming is the obvious example, and so could quit the game early if they wanted to.
In the new professional era players with no family business or skill or career to fall back on are compelled to keep on playing an increasingly physically dangerous game for as long as they can stay employed.
One reason that all this has been muted in New Zealand is the Accident Compensation Claims Act which precludes suing for damages over personal injury. A maturing flood of rugby claims on the Accident Compensation Commission will be carried by the community at large.
The class actions brought by lawyers elsewhere is based on the tort of negligence. The claims allege that reasonable care was not taken by the responsible governing bodies to protect players from reasonably preventable brain injuries sustained as a result of concussion.
Pending rugby injury legal actions in the UK evaluate whether rules and strategies imposed were sufficient to protect players against concussion incidents and whether those same rules and strategies were also implemented to allow players the time needed to recover from concussion incidents.
The growth of British class actions is having a snowball effect in the case of the rugby internationals diagnosed with early signs dementia. Lawyers involved say a further 80 former players ranging in age between 25 and 55 also show early signs of dementia.
The gathering litigation momentum in the UK will also embrace the sports medicine fraternity and especially so in the team doctor role in return-to-play decisions.
Clinicians tend to avoid the word concussion, preferring to describe it in terms of brain injury, trauma, and perhaps because of this the word concussion does not generate the sense of alarm it once did.
Before the introduction of seat belts and air bags concussion was a feared outcome of any vehicle collision just because it was not obvious. Those involved in sudden head impacts with steering wheels, dashboards and windscreens were kept under close observation for days after the impact.
So coincident with the advent of the professionalization of rugby football the generalised public fear of concussion began to recede as a threat to anyone involved in any head injury at all and this was especially so on the sports field.
Only in quite recent times has concussion as a trauma re-entered the public medical consciousness and it has done so in concert with the wider perception of dementia and its early onset.
A reason for the scheme of putting rugby management and proprietorship in the hands of a United States-bases corporate entity is that professional sports injuries claims processes began in the United States and so management there has the experience to deal with them.
The matter of an essentially amateur organisation being responsible for a professional sport is one that few wished to confront even though professionalism meant increasingly violent jolting among players who now also started to become much bulkier as the pressure came on them to win.
Many are perplexed by the popularity in this era of gender fluidity of collision sports at a time of the swelling sensitivity and debate on the cult of exaggerated masculinity. The clamour for bigger, and still more capacious publicly-funded stadiums the better to view the spectacle underlines its ancient ritual origins and thus its immunity from gyrating trends, however pervasive they seem at the time.
In Commonwealth nations such as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand rugby football enjoys a priority institutional status based on its role in social cohesion.
Islamists understood that professed horror of imperialism was priority among posturing virtue influencers
The Taliban understood the total preoccupation of United States influencers with their need to exhibit a revulsion for colonialism and imperialism. The Taliban knew that given this constantly-expressed righteousness they would be believed in any undertakings they gave over the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan.
They knew that the political class requirement to display at any opportunity at all this contempt for a colonial past outweighed other contemporary human rights attitudes, most notably even those centred on women, and especially their education.
It was hardly even a coincidence that just prior to the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan that its military high command had itself become preoccupied and thus diverted by issues such whether or not teachings as critical race theory should be integrated into career training.
Overlooked remains the way in which the Taliban exploited the United States cultural class guilt about a perceived colonial history by using it as a psychological weapon to erode confidence in the US presence in Afghanistan as an occupying power i.e. neo-coloniser.
It managed to place in the New York Times a produced piece claiming that really the Taliban only wanted to be like everyone else. It was perhaps the greatest propaganda coup in wartime history. Yet the way in which it revealed the Taliban mastery of the United States invented pr techniques went unobserved.
Whole countries, part of the US-led occupying coalition, now became conflicted about the conflict.
None more so than Australia, an immigrant nation and one much more recently colonised than the United States and with a proportionately even greater imperialist remorse industry.
Here an attenuated government inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan has become part of the rhythm of public life. It flares up now and then into wider consciousness over things like campaign medals and official public notices designating appropriate counselling services.
The effect of the Taliban in adapting modern spin techniques against the inventors and exponents of those same techniques is itself an adaptation of the exercise of eastern martial arts.
It is that of using as a weapon against an opponent the very strength superiority possessed by that opponent.
Indications keep growing that United States officials believed that the withdrawal would be an orderly one.
Why were US coalition listening posts closed down prior to the withdrawal? Ever since the imperial era of the Romans the dangers of being ignorant of what is going on beyond your own front lines has been understood.
There remains the worry for the United States and also for its allies, especially those in the Five Eyes category, as to how there appeared to be this conviction that a scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan was going to be measured in months rather than days.
Can this horrifying miscalculation be sheeted home perhaps to Centcom? What about the CIA whose hand has sometimes been less than sure in tribal societies? What about the NSA? Then of course where were the already distracted Joint Chiefs?
What remains though is the way in which the notion of an orderly withdrawal permeated from the Oval Office all the way through to an already distracted allied coalition.
Why was the Taliban so certain that the US and its occupying coalition would believe what the Taliban told them?
There are already indications that the US administration in raptures of post imperialism ideology was as part of a scheduled withdrawal contemplating aid packages of the type afforded to Germany after World War 2.
History in the region is rather more severe. When Islamists command a country they do so under Sharia, a methodology always deadly to the western interpretation of human rights.
The Taliban effectively sowed confusion in the United States. It did so by applying pr techniques to lever on the need, the craving, of opinion-formulating society elites there to politicise its abhorrence of colonialism, and do so demonstrably.
The Taliban understood also that this moral requirement, an historical one, trumped (it is the only word) other face value seemingly superior imperatives such as those centred on free speech, womens rights, and gender classifications.
How did they achieve such an insight into this mind set? Then understand how to apply it?
A clue is contained in the Taliban New York Times placement coup.
Public relations, spin, are component elements of marketing.
In marketing an enduring rule is to tell the target audience what you believe that it wants to hear.
Winston Churchill Cancelled in big chill-induced doctrinal diversions
The iron grip that United Nations has on the body politic became evident in the aftermath of the coldest day in New Zealand’s year during which there were widespread power failures, outages.
These were caused by power shortages. But attention instead was focussed on the IPCC report centred on global warming.
The government’s own broadcasting channel TV 1 sidelined both the coldest day and the ensuing power cuts to give a triumphant priority to the IPCC report on global warming.
In the ensuing debate in the nation’s parliament politicians of all stripe dodged the freeze and power cuts and competed among themselves in bestowing the most flowery speeches on the nation’s athletes who competed in the Japan Olympic s.
The United Nations doctrines so ardently and so unchallenged under the omnibus climatic banner were then capped by news that the nation’s Green Party had cancelled Winston Churchill. His portrait was unhooked from the parliamentary portrait gallery.
The United Nations syndrome in New Zealand and its success has much to do with applying a civil service bureaucratic theory to the effect that consistent failure and misguidedness is a more successful survival technique than a continuous display of efficiency which may frighten people.
This syndrome became evident when the Opposition National Party seeking to find a hole in the Labour-Green ruling parties turned on the individual most responsible for managing the nation’s evasion of all but a fringe contamination from Covid-19
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the nation’s chief health official, was described as a showboater by the National Party Opposition leader after he became drawn into some United Nations-inspired boondoggling involving Oceania quarantine preference. The director general of health Ashley Bloomfield was described by the National Party’s Judith Collins as a “one trick pony.”
It was clinician Dr Bloomfield who masterminded the nation’s initial Covid cluster infection track and trace operations that deftly isolated the nation from any serious infection outbreak, an outbreak which internationally United Nations agencies should have intercepted
United Nations in New Zealand enjoys a sanctity and untouchability that was once conferred only upon the Vatican.
Advocates are well placed. Former prime minister Helen Clark who was unsuccessful in her campaign to become secretary general of United Nations is one. She is the mentor of the current prime minister Jacinda Ardern who is sometimes said to be a prospective candidate-in-waiting for the same job.
What also froze was the voices of the officials and the institutions in identifying the cause of the outage which was the unquestioned adherence to the United Nations climate warming doctrine.
Paralysed still are voices that might dwell on why, for example, China responsible for more emissions than the entire OECD put together is not bound by the United Nations doctrine even though it was a founder of United Nations
Instead, there is murmuring about it being a “developing” nation, albeit one that Western defence strategists point out is a nation that could emerge victorious in any conflict with some of its fellow UN members such as the United States, and indeed the whole of NATO.
To what extent did the United Nations hysterical focus on climate divert and distract constituted governing authorities everywhere from the true evolving crisis/emergency, the pandemic?
United Nations like the old bureaucratic monolith it is knows the dangers of being seen to back down on anything. So it continues to pour out alarm on the climate and encourages its many acolytes in places like New Zealand to insist on giving climate priority over plague, the real crisis, the one it only discovered at the same time as everyone else.
United Nations failings started to become evident in its core business of peace keeping in places like Rwanda and the Balkans.
Its spectacular failure in being caught off guard by the pandemic has by a stroke of bureaucratic genius been turned into a triumph. Thus it convinces small countries such as New Zealand and its politicians that this blunder was in fact a godsend in that it will build a world less prone to the climate emergency/crisis/extinction.
Immediately after the coldest-day and concurrent power cuts, United Nations indoctrinated acolytes in New Zealand instantly and unknowingly delivered a slick cover up set-piece in turning UN bungling into brilliance.
The pandemic it was widely announced through channels available to the government, which is most of them, had delivered a signal advantage. It had reduced the nation’s “emissions.”
New Zealand’s emissions in UN climatic terms are said to be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.17 percent. A miniscule fraction in other words.
Here though is the centrepiece of United Nations slickness which is use of selective data. New Zealand, a sparsely populated country, is UN disciples declare a polluting threat on a per-head basis.
How did United Nations become the policy high altar for a country such as New Zealand? How did it become a shining city on a hill for so many in a position of power, causing them to suspend any critical judgment?
Why does it inspire such fear and trembling and general paralysis among those charged with holding bureaucracies to account and however gigantic they are?