Representatives from Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine met in Abu Dhabi for nearly 4 hours of talks on Tuesday, with the Trump Admin pitching plans for a new security architecture. Envoys from France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the EU were notable in town… but NOT allowed in the room.
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described it: “The Europeans flew to Abu Dhabi – well, let them sit in the hotel.”
Irish Journalist and Geopolitical Analyst, Chay Bowes, noted that while Russia is demonstrating that it is in the driver’s seat here, the Europeans are being exposed in their weak attempts to stay relevant by following U.S. orders and pledging their support for Kiev… to the last Ukrainian.
It is now widely believed, by a significant portion of the population that state media, in its current form, is incapable of moderating its left wing bias. It seems wedded to ideological positions that make neutrality near impossible. It has moreover given up attempts at even the appearance of neutrality and is happy to wear its bias on its sleeves.
This bias is ideological, deeply rooted and long standing. It is tribal.
TVNZ and Radio NZ have become emboldened in the misplaced belief that they are the filter of what can and cannot be thought and said.
Politicians on the political right seem immovable in their reluctance to deal with our state media … choosing instead avoidance and endless, and utterly pointless, overtures to curry media favour.
In the 2023 election Mr Peters, in an interview with Jack Tame, made a fierce attack on media bias, seemingly signalling that things would change if he was elected. Mr Tame responded with something like “Is that a threat Mr Peters, to which Mr Peters responded “Wait and see”.
The incessant, and inane efforts of the media to manipulate thought, ignore counterargument, influence elections, and dispense their judgments, undermines democracy, discourages free thought, and feeds the excesses of those who already have too much limelight, and who desperately need counterbalance.
It was interesting how often those on the political left, pre- and post-election, emphasised the need for unity over division. This was puzzling given that, in the minds of many, they had been uncompromising purveyors of the latter.
The unity the left is referring to, of course, is unity of thought, and in this they are in lock-step with the media.
People know intuitively when they are being manipulated. The off button can be a lifesaver, but ratings don’t matter to a media that is paid and privileged regardless. The media, confined largely to its urban liberal echo chambers, believes it is right, and being right gives it licence to deny voice to others, to be selective, to damage reputations without conscience, and to disperse privilege … all at someone else’s expense.
Whether there is place for state funded media in a rapidly changing digital landscape is a moot point, but while they are here, and while they are the recipient of state largess, it is reasonable to expect balanced coverage of every story, canvassing of alternative views, and an orientation to diversity of thought and opinion.
If state media is consigned to the dustbin, maybe we could live with that and it could be a major shot in the arm for alternatives.
Unity of thought is to be avoided at all cost. Ideas must be allowed to butt up against each other, this is how they are measured, shaped, tested, refined, and weighed in the balance. The media has an important part to play in this.
Ideas will stand and fall on their merits, we do not need the media to filter, tell us what is important, how we should think, who is good and who is bad, how we should vote, and when we should come into line.
Recent surveys indicate trust in media at well below forty percent of the population, and likely falling.
The media problem is not something to be brushed aside. It needs a response.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
The Kraków killer was so far-right that he demonstrated in favor of opening all borders
El gobierno de Donald Tusk ordenó borrar de inmediato el facebook del asesino que mató ayer a seis personas e hirió a 15 en la plaza mayor de Cracovia después de asesinar a su familia en casa. Porque el facebook destruye todos sus intentos de ayer de presentarlo como… pic.twitter.com/EZmDQmK9Dy
Global corporate media outlets ran a synchronized information operation over the weekend to twist reality, claiming that the gunman in Poland, who killed six and injured more than a dozen, had far-right links.
Enter The Spin
Donald Tusk’s government ordered the immediate deletion of the Facebook account of the killer who yesterday killed six people and injured 15 in Krakow’s main square after murdering his family at home.
Because his Facebook account destroys all their attempts yesterday to portray him as “far-right” and suggest ties to the patriotic, conservative and patriotic forces that, led by Head of State Karol Nawrocki, are resisting the coup attempts by Tusk’s government, backed by the European Commission and the German government. Donald Tusk is lying, once again.
As a liar, he almost matches Pedro Sánchez, another protégé of Von der Leyen. Killing his own family and then killing fellow citizens indiscriminately doesn’t really fit a Polish far-right extremist, no matter how extreme he is.
But what definitively rules out his being right-wing is his Facebook account. There, he presents himself with a sexually ambiguous aesthetic and a gay flag, confirms the fondness for dressing up and painting his nails that those who knew him talk about, and mocks the saintly Pope John Paul II.
Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch challenged the MSM narrative and pointed out the cover-up by the globalists inside the Polish government: Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch challenged the MSM narrative and pointed out the cover-up by the globalists inside the Polish government:
Kraków Killer: An Open Border Activist
Tertsch continued:
The Kraków killer was so far-right that he demonstrated in favor of opening all borders and welcoming all foreigners who wanted to enter Poland.
He also wanted a world without weapons and without borders. A strange far-right figure who lived, acted, dressed up and painted like a woke leftist of ambiguous sexuality.
A danger to everyone, including himself. Perhaps also highly susceptible to manipulation to carry out an atrocity that would allow the Polish government to sow fear and alarm ahead of the Independence Day demonstrations, already being billed as a colossal demonstration in defense of a sovereign Poland and President Nawrocki, and against Donald Tusk’s government.
On Friday, the day before the election and after many had already voted, Chris Hipkins went to Friday prayers at Kilbirnie Mosque in Wellington and promised that a Labour government would implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Christchurch mosque attacks.
You likely didn’t hear about it, because it barely made the news.
Those recommendations include new hate speech legislation. Recommendation 40 would extend our current hate speech law to cover religion. So now Labour has promised a hate speech law for religion.
As reported on the day it happenedIn 2017, when Parliament refused to scrap the old blasphemy law, Hipkins called it “a sad day for freedom of speech”. Now he’s promising a new one by a different route.
Look at how it got there.
In July, RNZ asked the parties where they stood on hate speech law. National said it didn’t support new hate speech law. ACT said the existing laws were enough. The Greens wanted to extend them. Labour said it was still working on its position and would share it “in due course”. At the end of October, Labour published its manifesto. All 101 pages of it. It found room for fit-for-purpose curtains in rentals, compostable labels on fruit and a ban on octopus farming.
It said nothing on hate speech. “In due course”, it turns out, meant Friday prayers on the last day of the campaign. When we launched No Blasphemy Laws, some people asked why we’d fight a law no major party was promising. We’d seen it happen overseas and expected someone would try to bring it back quietly. However, even I didn’t expect it to arrive at a mosque with a day to go.
Politicians should talk to every community. But Labour promised one audience a law that limits what all of us can say, and left it out of the manifesto everyone else was given.
On election night, the coalition had 67 of 131 seats, one more than it needs. Around 400,000 special votes are still to be counted, and specials have historically leaned left. The final result is due on 27 November.
All three coalition parties have told us they won’t bring in new hate speech laws. David Seymour went further, telling us the existing ones “really ought to be gone”. If the coalition holds, this goes nowhere.
But if the specials move a handful of seats, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could govern with the Opportunity Party. The Greens have promised to extend hate speech law. Te Pāti Māori backed the faith groups’ call for it. And now Labour has promised it too.
That would leave Opportunity holding the balance of power. Opportunity says we should be “extremely cautious about criminalising speech simply because it is offensive, insulting or hateful”.
We agree. So I’ve written to its leader, Qiulae Wong, asking her to rule out new hate speech law in any coalition deal. Labour didn’t campaign on it, around half the votes were in before it was announced, and no one has a mandate for it.
If you haven’t already, sign the No Blasphemy Laws petition at noblasphemylaw.nz Whoever forms the next government, we’ll put the petition in front of them.
We met Basil of Reikorangi on the Arts Trail last year and met up with him again this year when we were told he had caught (and consumed) a rabbit. Maybe there’s a natural solution to the rabbit problem for everyone?
For years now, we have been told to stop using plastic straws and instead use paper straws because they are supposedly much better for the environment.
The EU went ahead and banned plastic straws years ago. Anyone who has used a paper straw will likely agree that they aren’t pleasant. After just a short time, they get soggy, taste horrible and dissolve in your mouth. An overall terrible experience.
Now it turns out that the propaganda about paper straws being better for the environment was completely false. Have we then been drinking from the useless paper straws all for nothing? That seems to be the case.
A study commissioned by the South Korean government looked at regular plastic straws and compared them with paper straws and some other straw alternatives. What they found was shocking (or not so shocking, depending on who you ask).
The study did a full life cycle assessment on straws, so it was very thorough. They looked at a range of different categories, like climate change, ozone depletion, human toxicity and more; and they found that plastic straws scored best in 10 out of 16 categories.
Plastic straws had the lowest impact in categories including climate change, acidification, particulate matter and toxicity to humans.
Note, they did not measure potential leeching of chemicals from straws into drinks, rather, they measured based on emissions and resource use among other things and how this could affect humans.
The issue of toxic chemicals in paper straws is a different issue, which I will get to later. And let me tell you that the paper straws don’t do very well there either.
The incredible thing here is that plastic straws scored lower on greenhouse gas impact than paper straws: with the thing that climate activists have been so concerned about, namely CO2, the plastic straws score better.
Paper straws had a worse CO2 score than plastic straws; making them is energy intensive, more so than making plastic straws.
