I attended the Maori Affairs select com­mit­tee today to give my sub­mis­sion on Smok­ing. There surely can’t be a more ridicu­lous pro­ceed­ing than watch­ing troughers line up one after the other beg­ging to stay at the trough.

I can tell you it was an eye opener. The three sub­mit­ters before gave sub­mis­sions that were frankly ridiculous.

There was a cou­ple of sub­mit­ters who’s great idea to stop Maori smok­ing was straight out the Eugenics/Nazi hand­book. If only the other sub­mit­ters and some of the com­mit­tee were smart enough to notice. He ram­bled on first about how much he was miss­ing all his dead whanau killed by the evil tobacco com­pa­nies who tar­geted them, then forced the cig­a­rette into their mouths, then forced them to flick the bic to light it. Then he gave his great idea, a soft­ware data­base the records all of the whanu, hapu, and iwi mem­bers and their par­ents and their parent’s par­ents. Then record all those who smoke and then they would be able to trace the blood­lines to iden­tify new mokop­una who’s blood­line sug­gested that they would smoke. Pure unadul­ter­ated bull­shit. The most unbe­liev­able aspect of his sub­mis­sion was that he was able to mud­dle along for about 30 min­utes un-interrupted.

The next per­son to sub­mit thought it bril­liant to rein­vent myths fairy-tales “Maori His­tory” and re-tell the tales of Maui, Tane Mahuta etc but with a no smok­ing mes­sage. Like Maui couldn’t have fished up the North Island if he was a smoker because he wouldn’t have been fit enough. But that wasn’t all, they then wanted to put all that to music, hip-hop or what­ever and design a kapa haka dance. Yeah that’ll work. Again from this sub­mit­ter there was much wail­ing again about the evil white man’s smoke stick. Again they ram­bled past their 15 min­utes uninterrupted.

Next up was vet­eran trougher Teresa Tay­lor. Who with her daugh­ter pre­sum­ably, the other half of T& T Con­sult­ing told us all about her moth­ers 15 sib­lings who were mur­dered by the tobacco com­pa­nies. Much blame, fin­ger point­ing and griev­ance claim­ing. And all with the “sup­port” of Shane Brad­brook, Te Reo Marama mas­ter trougher who kept pat­ting her back as she recall the tragedy of 15 uncles and aun­ties dying and how she missed them all so ter­ri­bly. As I wiped a tear from my eye i got my box of doc­u­ments ready.

Then the guy imme­di­ately before, well half-man really, he had a body like a half sucked throatie, told us that his par­ents and grand­par­ents smok­ing, now dead, had caused him to have itchy eyes, blood noses, skin irri­ta­tions etc. I won­dered if he had ever heard of hayfever and migraines.

Now it was my turn, I was called. “Cam, bro, your turn, get up here” from Tau Henare. The room went cold, the air crack­led. Death-stares came out. Shane Brad­brook and Teresa Tay­lor shifted from the back of the seat­ing to right up behind my chair. I started my sub­mis­sion and not 2 min­utes into it Metiria Turei inter­rupts me mid sen­tence and tries to call time. I shit you not. then she nego­ti­ated with Tau Henare and they gave me 8 min­utes more. Fuck me dead. I couldn’t believe it. It seems if you are Maori you can waf­fle on with idi­otic ideas and If you are a white Mofo telling the truth about the 40 troughers sit­ting behind you the think it is ok to be rude,and inter­rupt. Well fuck them I thought and car­ried on. Next time I was inter­rupted it was by some Labour moll doing the same thing. I think BK was asleep beside her. Same non­sense, give 2 more min­utes, I was up to 12 min­utes. Then cut off. It seems like they don’t like hear­ing the truth. The whole way through my sub­mis­sion Shane Brad­brook was curs­ing me under his breathe, audi­ble to me only. When I chal­lenged the troughers and the com­mit­tee to tell me exactly how many smok­ers there are, they scoffed at my claim there were no sta­tis­tics fresher than 2005. There isn’t, it was a safe bet.

Loud com­plain­ing started when I said that every­one who has sub­mit­ted before me in the course of this com­mit­tee or will sub­mit after are noth­ing but troughers ask­ing for more money to stop smok­ing. The sim­ple facts are that money won’t work, the only peo­ple being helped by all the money are the troughers and their imme­di­ate fam­i­lies. In 2004 when this Indus­try began under Labour there were 700,000 smok­ers, on one of the troughers web­sites in their 2009 strate­gic plan, a plan I might add con­tained only one num­ber, quoted that there were 700,000 smok­ers. Well they are the experts, that is what they get all the fund­ing for so it must be right. So, for the grand total of $168,712,369 we have not many any progress. We have essen­tially thrown money away and the troughers have glee­fully picked it up.

I’m told that today was the first time media had attended, and they unat­tended as soon as I fin­ished and went out­side, only to be accosted by a woman. Who was more than a lit­tle ticked off with me. The louder she talked the softer I talked. Even­tu­ally she gave up. The media packed up as soon as I did and left as soon as I did, seems they weren’t inter­ested in any­one else’s submissions.

This whole process is a farce, every sin­gle sub­mit­ter except me had a vested inter­est, they are either knee deep in the trough, in charge of the trough or in more than one instance doing both. The whole Tobacco indus­try is noth­ing but a huge fraud per­pe­trated in New Zealand. They have no KPI’s, they mea­sure noth­ing, is it any won­der we are chuck­ing $55 mil­lion a year at this and going nowhere. They were basi­cally ask­ing for more of every­thing. Well I say fuck them. Show us some results. They can’t and they know it.

I learned one thing for sure, this is just another griev­ance drive for Maori who are intent on blam­ing every­one but them­selves, but who is say we don’t deserve it, we have bred this depen­dence and feel­ing of griev­ance. It’s our own fault and for sure no one on that Select Com­mit­tee is going to upset the troughers.

My respect for Metiria Turei evap­o­rated to noth­ing today by her petty pol­i­tics in a Select Com­mit­tee process against a sub­mit­ter who wasn’t on her team and wasn’t brown.

They sure didn’t like it up them.

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Poor old Labour [snig­ger], looks to be a long, very long time in opposition.

The lat­est Roy Mor­gan NZ Poll shows sup­port for John Key’s National-led Gov­ern­ment is up 1% to 57.5% com­pris­ing National Party 53.5% (up 1.5%), Maori Party 2.5% (unchanged) and ACT NZ 1.5% (unchanged).

Sup­port for Oppo­si­tion Par­ties is 42.5% (down 1%); Labour Party 31.5% (down 1.5%), Greens 8% (unchanged), NZ First 2% (unchanged) [WO: WTF are these peo­ple stu­pid], The Pro­gres­sive Party 0.5% (up 0.5%) and Oth­ers 0.5% (unchanged). If a National Elec­tion were held today the National Party would win easily.

The Roy Mor­gan Gov­ern­ment Con­fi­dence Rat­ing is 140.5 (up 1.5 points) with 65% (up 1%) of New Zealan­ders say­ing New Zealand is ‘head­ing in the right direc­tion’ com­pared to 24.5% (down 0.5%) that say New Zealand is ‘head­ing in the wrong direction.’

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Yesterday’s NZ Her­ald car­ried a big woe is me tragedy schlock piece about a mother who drowned her baby by leav­ing it in the bath being baby sat by its twin sis­ter. Now you might think I am being overly harsh but this morn­ing, iron­i­cally a much smaller front­page area, we find out what we really should have found out yes­ter­day.

The mother of a baby girl who died after being found face down in a bath was reg­u­larly vis­ited by Child Youth and Fam­ily which gave her advice on how to pro­vide a “safe and lov­ing home” for her twin daughters.

The Her­ald has learnt Child Youth and Fam­ily had been in con­tact with 21-year-old mother Amber Law­son and had vis­ited her and her 11-month-old twin daugh­ters, Aimee and Ella Pool, at their West Auck­land home sev­eral times.

Aimee died on Sun­day after­noon, five days after being found face down in the bath.

Right, now that is embar­rass­ing for the Her­ald. Just one day after Janet Wil­son pre­dicted this exact behav­iour from Granny. The mad dash to drama­tist a baby’s death missed the vital piece that made this case so not front­page material.

Yes­ter­day she was the fea­ture, now the Her­ald is reduced to trolling Bebo for infor­ma­tion and then like good lit­tle repeaters they repeat it.

The Her­ald has been unable to con­tact Miss Law­son, but a pic­ture on her page of the social net­work­ing site Bebo page shows two baby girls, wrapped in blan­kets, lying on a couch side by side.

I fear Janet was right.

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Just last week Clare Cur­ran was berat­ing Matthew Hooton about a sin­gle sen­tence in a press release where he said that he had had pos­i­tive meet­ing with Labour MP’s over the Mobile Ter­mi­na­tion Rates. She stated that Labour didn’t have a posi­tion and those MPs only had per­sonal views.

So it is some relief that the Labour Party and Clare Cur­ran have set­tled their dif­fer­ences with inde­pen­dent com­men­ta­tor Matthew Hooton and now released their posi­tion on MTR, sup­port­ing reg­u­la­tion. Their press release says;

The Gov­ern­ment should put con­sumers first and reg­u­late mobile ter­mi­na­tion rates to keep call costs down, Labour spokesper­son for com­mu­ni­ca­tions and IT Clare Cur­ran said today.

“High mobile ter­mi­na­tion rates are a bar­rier to entry for new play­ers in the mar­ket, which leads to less com­pe­ti­tion and higher prices,” Clare Cur­ran said.

“While Voda­fone and Tele­com have now offered to lower ter­mi­na­tion rates by around 80 per cent, it still does not go far enough to reduce the major issues for new entrants.

“This is also the view of Com­mis­sioner Anita Maz­zoleni who in the recent split Com­merce Com­mis­sion report on ter­mi­na­tion rates said: ‘… the con­se­quence [of vol­un­tary under­tak­ings] is that mobile ter­mi­na­tion rates will remain sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the Commission’s bench­marks dur­ing the five-year period … and remain higher at the end … . In my view, the bar­rier aris­ing from the prices … con­tin­ues to ensure an uneven play­ing field, and this will impede the ben­e­fits com­pe­ti­tion will oth­er­wise deliver to New Zealand consumers’.

“It is clear that a vol­un­tary agree­ment will keep the rates con­sid­er­ably higher than they would be under a reg­u­lated out­come,” Ms Cur­ran said.

Now it is up to Car­di­nal Riche­lieu to adopt the minor­ity posi­tion and send the mes­sage to Tele­com and Voda­fone that their bung, dodgy net­works should be pro­tected any­more. I am nor­mally not in favour of reg­u­la­tion but in this instance reg­u­la­tion is actual dereg­u­la­tion you have went you don’t have dereg­u­la­tion. Well done to Clare, it is a tes­ta­ment to her nego­ti­at­ing abil­i­ties to get the Labour cau­cus to agree. It can’t be long before she is pro­moted to Deputy Leader when Annette King slides off into retirement.

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Its tiny ..and come with a dinky wee hol­ster. Mar­keted in the US as a “jogger’s pis­tol” (Tech­ni­cally it is a revolver but hey what’s in a name?) – maybe not so con­cealed under lycra – but a .22 Long Rifle. Ille­gal to own in NZ due to the short bar­rel, No wor­ries about pit-bulls or attack by any other mon­grel when out jog­ging if you were per­mit­ted to carry one.

Made by North Amer­i­can Arms, this is the most pop­u­lar mini-revolver sold. Tech­ni­cally it is a revolver but hey what’s in a name?

Think of these as der­ringer style and revolver capac­ity. Way more hurt, basically.

For Oswald there is even a Black Pow­der ver­sion. Not sure what would more effec­tive the pro­jec­tile com­ing out the bar­rel or the flash, bang and cloud of smoke to dis­ap­pear into?

NAA .22 Mag­num Mini-Revolver
Specifications:

• Cal­iber: .22 Magnum
• Capac­ity: 5
• Mate­r­ial: 17–4 pH stain­less steel
• Bar­rel Length: 1 1/8″
• Over­all Length: 4 3/4″
• Over­all Height: 2 7/8″
• Width: 7/8″
• Weight: 5.9 oz. unloaded
• Sug­gested Retail Price: US$214.00
• Part Num­ber: NAA-22MS

- Sent in by an avid reader via Facebook

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Star­bucks are stick­ing to their guns, lit­er­ally.

SEATTLE (AP) — Cof­fee chain Star­bucks Corp. is stick­ing to its pol­icy of let­ting cus­tomers carry guns where it’s legal and said it does not want to be put in the mid­dle of a larger gun-control debate.

The company’s state­ment, issued Wednes­day, stems from recent cam­paign by some gun own­ers, who have walked into Star­bucks and other busi­nesses to test state laws that allow gun own­ers to carry weapons openly in pub­lic places. Gun con­trol advo­cates have protested.

The fight began heat­ing up in Jan­u­ary in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia and has since spread to other states and other com­pa­nies, bol­stered by the pro-gun group OpenCarry.org.

Some of the events were spon­ta­neous, with just one or two gun own­ers walk­ing into a store. Oth­ers were orga­nized parades of dozens of gun own­ers walk­ing into restau­rants with their firearms proudly at their sides.

I’m not a big fan of Star­bucks cof­fee, but i don’t drink cof­fee any­way so I’ll try to use them for my hot choco­lates in future to sup­port their stance that they have no busi­ness inter­fer­ing with law-abiding cus­tomers peace­fully enjoy­ing their coffee.

Tell you what though, I’d rather imbibe my cof­fee in Star­bucks where there is almost no chance in get­ting shot in a hold up. Only some­one want­ing to sui­cide by cus­tomers would rob a Star­bucks now. If you want to take the risk of going to another out­let that bans guns then fill your boots.

Why is it here in New Zealand that we want to lib­er­alise every­thing except guns? Very strange behav­iour. Why do the lib­eral elite phys­i­cally shud­der when firearms are men­tioned? Surely if you are a lib­eral you should enbrace the lib­er­al­i­sa­tion of everything?

You can’t rely on the Police any­more, just ask Navtej Singh……oh wait!

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The image says it all. Labours no inten­tion of revers­ing any increase in GST and Man­grove has sig­naled increases in Income tax as well. They need to come clean.

Labour’s real Pol­icy: Max the Tax

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David “Vodafan” Far­rar has pub­lished a piece of pro­pa­ganda dis­ser­ta­tion from Paul Brislen at Voda­fone about Mobile Ter­mi­na­tion Rates under the guise of being objec­tive. Paul is a good guy, but he is doing his bosses bid­ding, so please don’t shoot the mes­sen­ger. To save you read­ing it I will sum­marise it for you.

Blah blah blah we bribed bought off, man­aged to con­vince 2 out 3 com­mis­sion­ers and we only needed 2. Cool that Tele­com paid half. Blah blah blah how do like us telling you it’s a big win while we give it to you in the chook?

Blah blah blah here’s a lit­tle bit of smoke and mir­rors to con­fuse every­one except our kind host of this post (did you get the cheque yet?) and Ernie New­man. Blah blah some tech speak.

Blah blah blah, aren’t we nice, we even pro­vided the vase­line before we “engaged” with you. If you don’t watch it we will drop that all together. I like the use of “under­tak­ings”, don’t you? All fune­real and all..cool.

Blah blah blah 2 always beats 1 so really cool those secret meet­ing toget our sto­ries out straight paid off. And wouldn’t you know it we also scored 2–1 in the commission.

Blah blah blah more under­tak­ing stuff, did I men­tion the cus­tomers are play­ing the corpse, it was a sug­ges­tion of  that Scot­tish git, he smells funny, you know like his mobile net­work dead things?

Blah blah blah…boy we were so gen­er­ous in 2001, you didn’t even notice the but­tons on our shirt press­ing into your back. Cool how I used XT hid­den sub­lim­i­nally in my para­graph (I won­der what is in that brown enve­lope that showed up in my pocket after lunch with those Tele­com guys).

Blah blah blah The com­mis­sion did a good job for us because we paid them to put up con­cise and clear advice to “assist” them. Always good to blow smoke up their arse so they don’t notice when we withdraw.

Blah blah blah, look I’ve used under­tak­ing 6 times now, would you climb in that box already, no face down, Dr Reynolds and my boss will be with you shortly.

Blah blah, What’s in for us? Truck loads of your cash, espe­cially of you go roam­ing with a data pan overseas…haha that’s a cool trick, root­ing over oppo­si­tion, keep­ing our cosy duop­oly main­tain­ing a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket just so long as their are two players.

Blah blah, right I think I’ve con­vinced you, just to be sure if you’ve grasp this cor­rectly let’s recap. Noth­ing to see here, no your arse isn’t sore, we are really the good guys here, and gen­er­ous too, look how long we are going to spend low­er­ing the rates, that is so good for the con­sumer needed to plan finan­cially out ten years.

Blah blah blah, that Matthew guy is a fuck­wit, and I heard that poi­so­nous wench Boag is in on the lies, utter lies, they should be sued, would be, if I could just stab the boss. You know that they were men­tioned in the Hol­low Men, god when that came out I thought boy we are in for it, some­one has dumped the whole of Vodafone’s cor­po­rate plan­ning emails on Nicky Hagar, turns out it was some silly spat between Bill Eng­lish and that old rooter with the comb over. No one likes that 2degrees crowd. Not even Far­rar and that is say­ing some­thing. Just to sign off, N O T H I N G  T O  S E E  H E R E.

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So much for free­dom of speech – Karl du Fresne adds another per­spec­tive on sterilisation.

NSIDC Reports That Antarc­tica is Cool­ing and Sea Ice is Increas­ing – Another cli­mate change myth explodes in sci­en­tists faces

Pray­ing man­tis vs. hum­ming­bird – from Boing Boing, where do they find this cool shit?

How the venus fly­trap eats a frog – Another Boing Boing find

iPad Gets a Doritos-Themed Par­ody – iPad is still being mocked

The anti-whaling ship of fools – Clare Brown­ing, at The Pun­dit of all places, hooks into the loonies, Koru-Club and the paid lap-blog over Whal­ing. Once again a blog­gers nick­name has stuck. I love it when left­ies pull hair and scratch each other.

Will Twit­ter do the Right Thing and Remove the Offi­cial Hamas Twit­ter Account? – I doubt it, most of these tech com­pa­nies are run by cli­mate change, green freaks who think big bad Israel is evil and the peace lov­ing mus­lim rocket chuck­ers are real human­i­tar­ian in try­ing to edu­cate the obvi­ous stu­pid Israelis that they deserve a free ride.

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Only the French would make this weapon plat­form, it is cer­tainly the odd­est weapon I have ever seen, a scooter armed with a M20 75mm recoil­less rifle.

After World War II, there was lit­tle money for defense spend­ing while the nations of Europe rebuilt their indus­try and soci­ety. When there was some cash to spend, one had to be cre­ative to stretch it as far as pos­si­ble. The French prob­a­bly accom­plished the most astound­ing exam­ple of that with the ACMA Troupes Aeról Portées Mle. 56. Deployed with their air­borne forces, this was essen­tially a mil­i­ta­rized Vespa scooter out­fit­ted with a 75mm recoil­less rifle. Five para­chutes would carry the two-man gun crew, weapon, ammu­ni­tion, and two scoot­ers safely to earth, and the men would load the weapon on one scooter and the ammo on the other, then ride away. More impres­sively, the recoil­less rifle could be fired effec­tively on the move by the best of the gun crews. Total cost? About $500 for the scooter and the recoil­less rifle was war sur­plus. Were they suc­cess­ful mil­i­tary machines? Well, the French Army deployed about 800 armed scoot­ers in wars con­ducted in both Alge­ria and Indochina.

The Vespa car­ried the M20, a U.S.-made light anti-armour can­non, it was very light when com­pared to a stan­dard 75mm can­non but was still able to pen­e­trate 100 mm of armour by so-called HEAT war­heads. The recoil is coun­ter­acted by vent­ing pro­pel­lant gases out the rear of the weapon, thru a ven­turi, which elim­i­nated the need for a mechan­i­cal recoil sys­tem or heavy mounts, enabling the weapon to be fired from the Vespa frame.

Addi­tional photos:

Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4

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via Twit­ter

Dil­ber says it all relly

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PRESS RELEASE from WHALEOIL

For Imme­di­ate Release

Date: 9 March 2010

WHALEOIL to Appear Before Select Com­mit­tee to Expose Min­istry Incom­pe­tence & Troughing

Well known New Zealand blog­ger Wha­le­oil (Cameron Slater) is appear­ing before the Maori Affairs Select Com­mit­tee to expose the exces­sive trough­ing of tax-payer fund­ing by anti-tobacco groups.

“I expect the Com­mit­tee to be shocked and out­raged when I present my find­ings to the Com­mit­tee tomor­row as they hold their inquiry into the tobacco indus­try” said Mr Slater.

“I will be bring­ing along a wine box of doc­u­ments obtained under the Offi­cial Infor­ma­tion Act to demon­strate a com­plete dis­re­gard for the account­abil­ity of tax­payer money by the Min­istry of Health, along­side the incom­pe­tence of anti-tobacco groups who have received mil­lions of dol­lars with lit­tle to show for it.”

“Groups like Te Reo Marama and its direc­tor Shane Kawe­nata Brad­brook received hun­dreds of thou­sands of tax­payer fund­ing from the Min­istry to help Maori stop smok­ing, yet spent most of the time on over­seas jun­kets to exotic des­ti­na­tions like Hawaii (3 times), Bangkok Thai­land, Dur­ban South Africa, Helsinki in Fin­land and Mum­bai India.

“And all the Min­istry got from Mr Brad­brook was a cou­ple of reports and a per­for­mance which resulted in a “damn­ing” inter­nal Min­istry audit report.

It sim­ply is not good enough for New Zealand to con­tinue pour­ing $55 mil­lion into stop smok­ing pro­grammes for lit­tle or no return. The only peo­ple it is help­ing are the NGO troughers rort­ing the sys­tem, who are now ask­ing the select com­mit­tee to rec­om­mend they get more money.

Of all the sub­mit­ters I am the only one with zero con­flicts of inter­ests, there is noth­ing for me to gain or lose by my sub­mis­sion. The rest are either involved in receiv­ing gov­ern­ment money, or decid­ing who gets the gov­ern­ment money or in a few cases doing both.

……….

Wha­le­oil

(Cameron Slater)

whaleoil@gotcha.co.nz

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• What a ridicu­lous judgment

From JoNova

Straight away, this sorts the wheat from the weeds. We don’t learn about the nat­ural world by call­ing peo­ple names or hid­ing data. We don’t learn by chuck­ing out mea­sure­ments in favor of opin­ions. We don’t learn by sup­press­ing dis­cus­sions, or set­ting up fake rules about which bits of paper count or which peo­ple have a licence to speak.

A trans­par­ent, com­pet­i­tive sys­tem where all views are wel­come is the fastest way to advance human­ity. The Royal Soci­ety is the old­est sci­en­tific asso­ci­a­tion in the world. Its motto is essen­tially, Take No One’s Word For It. In other words, assume noth­ing; look at the data. When results come in that don’t fit the the­ory, a sci­en­tist chucks out his the­ory. A non-scientist has “faith”, he “believes” or assumes his the­ory is right, and tries to make the mea­sure­ments fit. When mea­sure­ments dis­agree, he ignores the awk­ward news, and “cor­rects”, or sta­tis­ti­cally alters, the data–always in the direc­tion that keeps his the­ory alive.

Skep­ti­cal Sci­en­tist – Image from JoNova

Unscep­ti­cal Sci­en­tist – Image from JoNova

I won­der which one best rep­re­sents those who declare the debate is over, the sci­ence is set­tled and the over­whelm­ing evi­dence is com­pelling? When the polar oppo­site is true.

IPCC AR4 Com­menter: “I do not under­stand why this trend is insignif­i­cant – it is more than three times the quoted error esti­mates” – Why oh Why is the ice increas­ing when all our mod­els say it is melt­ing away!

The Log­a­rith­mic Effect of Car­bon Diox­ide – This is a real eye-opener fro Carbon-mongers

Emails from “attack ad” sci­ence group posted – Oh the old ad hominem attack instead of show­ing their the­ory works

Methane, The Panic Du Jour – Why dick­heads panic about methane, because the car­bon hoax is rumbled.

Global Warm­ing not to blame for toad extinc­tion – Bug­ger, scrub that one off the mas­sive list of things Global Warm­ing destroys.

Yowzer! “sea ice extended to the equa­tor 716.5 mil­lion years ago” – Would that be called a cycle?

Got the pic­ture, it doesn’t take long to find out that the sci­ence isn’t set­tled, the evi­dence is start­ing to become over­whelm­ing against AGW and the debate most cer­tainly is not over. Now if we could get Nick “Quota” Smith to clean the wax out of his ears and remove the blink­ers we might actu­ally get somewhere.

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Helen Clark finds where the dairy owner is hid­ing the con­tra­band ciggies

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