For those of my generation who do not and cannot comprehend why Facebook exists:

I am trying to make friends outside of Facebook while applying the same principles. Therefore, every day I walk down the street and tell passersby what I have eaten, how I feel at the moment, what I have done the night before, what I will do later, and with whom.

I give them pictures of my family, my dog, and of me gardening, taking things apart in the garage, watering the lawn, standing in front of landmarks, driving around town, having lunch, and doing what anybody and everybody does every day.

I also listen to their conversations, give them the “thumbs up” and tell them I like them.

And it works just like Facebook. I already have four people following me: two police officers, a private investigator, and a psychiatrist.

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And the other downside:-

“The Government cut Youth Aid budgets by $10m over the past year, and we’re seeing the tragic results with the current youth crime wave,” says ACT’s Police spokesperson Chris Baillie.

“Ram raids are now a daily occurrence and children as young as eight and nine are using methamphetamine.

“With many years experience as a Youth Aid Police Officer, I know well the positive impact intervention can have on troubled youth. There needs to be greater involvement in these kids’ lives by Youth Aid, before they commit more serious crimes.

“Sadly, Labour’s soft on crime approach that has seen gang violence erupt is now filtering down to youth offenders. Officers have told me that these offenders have no fear of consequence, and officers are hamstrung by their inability to give chase.

“Family centre operators in areas affected by the crimes have expressed concerns that there are not enough consequences for offenders. These kids can’t just get a slap on the wrist and be on their way to commit more crimes.

“That approach isn’t any good for the victims, and it isn’t any good for the kids who will carry on offending.

“I’ve personally seen young people heading down a dangerous path who have turned their life around after intervention from Youth Aid. The fact that police have highlighted that much of the current crimewave is being caused by re-offenders shows that not enough is being done to steer these kids away from a life of crime.

“We need to address these problems early and ensure Youth Aid officers still have the tools at their disposal to turn these kids’ lives around. Mollycoddling and wagging fingers won’t help anyone.

“For every crime committed there is a victim who deserves better, and when youth is involved, the stakes are even higher – we can’t sit by while young New Zealanders become criminals.”

The United States and its allies pledged new packages of ever heavier weapons for Ukraine during a meeting on Tuesday (local time) at a German air base, brushing off a threat from Moscow that their support for Kyiv could lead to nuclear war.

US officials have switched emphasis this week from speaking mainly about helping Ukraine defend itself to bolder talk of a Ukrainian victory that would weaken Russia’s ability to threaten its neighbours.

Meanwhile, the powerful secretary of Russia’s Security Council said Western and Ukrainian government policy was leading to the breakup of Ukraine, and he accused Washington of seeking to instil in Ukrainians hatred for everything Russian.

NATO allies have lately approved shipments of hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, including artillery and drones they held back from sending in earlier phases of the war, and want their allies to do the same.

“Nations from around the world stand united in our resolve to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s imperial aggression,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, welcoming officials from more than 40 countries to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, headquarters of U.S. air power in Europe. “Ukraine clearly believes that it can win, and so does everyone here.”

In a notable shift, Germany, where the government had come under pressure after refusing Ukrainian pleas for heavy weapons, announced it would now send “Gepard” light tanks with anti-aircraft guns.

“The real significance of this decision lies not in the difference Gepards may make on the battlefield, but in the signal it sends,” said Marcel Dirsus, non-resident fellow at Kiel University’s Institute for Security Policy.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, assess that Russia will rely heavily on artillery strikes to pound Ukrainian positions while moving in ground forces from several directions to try to envelop and wipe out a significant chunk of Ukraine’s military.

Read the rest

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Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked. 

This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.

Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.

When people think of themselves as “anti-war”, they’re usually imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.

Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.

This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest U.S. war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.

Our entire civilization is shaped by domestic propaganda, but the only time you ever hear that word in mainstream discourse is when it’s used to discuss the comparatively almost nonexistent influence of Russian propaganda on our society. All the mainstream alarm ringing about Russian propaganda gives the impression that it comprises close to 100 percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume, when in reality it’s a tiny fraction of one percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume. Almost all of it comes from western sources.

Propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society. It has far more influence over how the public thinks, acts and votes than any of our official mechanisms for doing so, yet it’s barely discussed, it isn’t taught in schools, and even the best political ideologies barely touch on it relative to their other areas of focus.

All the fretting about Russian propaganda from establishment narrative managers comes so close to giving away their secret: that they know it’s possible to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes using media. They just don’t admit that they’re the ones who are doing this.

It’s actually the weirdest thing in the world that there’s something that has been directly affecting our minds our entire lives, and which directly affects the way our entire society is organized, but we don’t talk about it constantly. It should be at the front and center of our attention.

But of course that’s the whole idea. Propaganda only works on those who don’t know they’re being propagandized. The US-centralized empire’s ability to hide its propaganda machine is a foundational element of its brilliance.

Being truly anti-war is necessarily a commitment to finding out not just what’s true about all the war narratives currently promulgated by the imperial war machine, but all the narratives you’ve been fed about the world since you were young. It’s a commitment to truth that takes on an almost spiritual quality in the way it informs every aspect of your life when truly espoused.

It’s important to research and learn new things about the world, but what’s equally important and which doesn’t get emphasized nearly enough is the practice of examining the beliefs you already hold about your society, your government, your nation and your world. Inquiring as to whether they’re really true, and who might benefit from your believing them.

Don’t make the error of assuming you’ll be aware and informed enough to spot all the lies right away. You’re dealing with the single most advanced and powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed, and you’ve been marinating in its effects your entire life. It takes some time. Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in their lives, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.

It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.

by H. Sterling Burnett

For nearly two years now, Climate at a Glance and Climate Realism have detailed the copious amounts of data and evidence that clearly demonstrate the Earth is not facing a climate crisis.

A new, print version of Climate at a Glance was published on Earth Day and is being sold on Amazon where it is currently number two in sales in the category “Science for Kids,” number two in “Climatology,” and number three in “Environmental Science (books).” [bold, links added]

Over the course of hundreds of reports and articles, many responding to alarming and false climate stories hyped in the corporate media, these sites have presented real-world data showing fewer people are losing their lives to extreme weather events and non-optimal temperatures than ever before; hunger, malnutrition, and deaths from starvation have fallen more and faster than at any previous time in history, thanks primarily to record-setting crop growth assisted by increased carbon dioxide; and the lack of evidence that most types of extreme weather—hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, drought, etc.—have become more frequent or more intense because of human fossil fuel use.

The Heartland Institute and its associated researchers are hardly the only organization and group of scholars hammering this point home on a regular basis.

Across the pond, in the United Kingdom, the Global Warming Policy Foundation(GWPF) has for years been doing yeoman’s work to bring the unalarming truth about present climate conditions to light.

Most recently, GWPF published its annual State of the Climate report, by Ole Humlum, Ph.D., emeritus professor at the University of Oslo. In this report, Humlum examined temperature records and trends for the atmosphere and oceans and for weather events.

Humlum finds, among other things, that there is no evidence of a dramatic change in snow cover, rates of sea-level rise, or storm activity.

Some facts from Humlum’s report:

• Global tide gauge measurements suggest sea levels are rising on average between 1 and 2 mm per year, consistent with the historic rise of the past few hundred years, with no recent acceleration or deceleration in the rate of rise.
• Average snow cover for the Northern Hemisphere has been stable since the onset of satellite observations in 1979. Autumn snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has been slightly increasing, the midwinter cover has remained virtually unchanged in extent, and spring snow cover displays a slightly decreasing trend.
• The most recent data on global tropical storms and hurricanes show accumulated cyclone energy is well within the range observed since 1970 and the number of hurricanes making landfall in the continental United States remains within the normal range for the entire observation period since 1851.

Humlum’s report provides much detail about how temperatures are measured on land and oceans, the problems with each of the measuring systems, why there is a discrepancy between the ground-based temperature measurements and satellite measurements, the hows and whys of temperature trends, and how they differ by latitude, altitude, ocean depth, and region and zone.

Humlum writes, “All temperature records are affected by at least three sources of error, each of which differs among the individual station records used.”

After discussing each source of error, he explains, “The margin of error … is probably at least ±0.1°C for surface air temperature records, … [making] it statistically impossible to classify any year as ‘record-breaking,’ as several other years may be within the margin of error.”

So much for the breathless claims made almost every year by politicians, government-funded researchers, environmental lobbyists, and the corporate media that new global average high-temperature records have been set yet again, almost always citing land-based measuring systems compromised by a growing urban heat island bias.

When each “new record high” temperature measured is within the margin of error, it’s hard to establish definitely any new record has been set.

“A year ago, I warned that there was great risk in using computer modeling and immature science to make extraordinary claims,” said Humlum in discussing the takeaway message of his report. “The empirical observations I have reviewed show very gentle warming and no evidence of a climate crisis.”

In the end, most of the alarming claims made about a looming human-caused climate apocalypse are based on flawed computer model projections, not physical measurements of changes in the climate.

The general circulation models widely used by the climate alarm community grossly overestimate warming.

As a result, they have been unable to portray past or present temperatures or temperature trends accurately. Commenting on this and Humlum’s study, GWPF director Benny Peiser, Ph.D., said,

It’s extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis. Year after year our annual assessment of climate trends documents just how little has been changing in the last 30 years. The habitual climate alarmism is mainly driven by scientists’ computer modeling rather than observational evidence.

Well said and entirely accurate.

Original article

No doubt the kerfuffle in Ukraine provoked by the warmongering Mr. Biden and his like-minded cohorts in NATO will provide the impetus for even more spending; as we said before, buying shares in armaments manufacturers is a safe bet. The Jacinda regime approves.

The military spending of all nations combined set a new record in 2021, exceeding the $2 trillion mark for the first time ever, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) revealed in a report published on Monday.

Governments spent a total of $2.113 trillion on weapons last year. The top spenders were the US, China, India, the UK, and Russia, accounting for 62% of the total sum.

According to the researchers, 2021 was the seventh consecutive year in which global military expenditures had grown, despite the strains placed on economies by the Covid-19 pandemic.

While US defense spending slid by 1.4% compared to 2020, Washington remained the absolute global leader, having lavished some $801 billion last year. The SIPRI report also points out that US funding for military research and development – while having dropped by 1.2% last year – still rose by 24% between 2012 and 2021. That suggests that the US is “focusing more on next-generation technologies,” according to Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher with the SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. “The US Government has repeatedly stressed the need to preserve the US military’s technological edge over strategic competitors,” she said in a statement.

Read the rest

by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times 

Heart inflammation requiring hospital care was more common among people who received covid ‘vaccines’ than those who did not, according to a new study of tens of millions of Europeans.

Rates of myocarditis or pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation, are above the levels in an unvaccinated cohort, pegged at 38 per 100,000 after receipt of a second dose of a vaccine built on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in males aged 16 to 24—the group studies have shown are most at risk of the post-vaccination condition—researchers with health agencies in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway found.

“These extra cases among men aged 16–24 correspond to a 5 times increased risk after Comirnaty and 15 times increased risk after Spikevax compared to unvaccinated,” Dr. Rickard Ljung, a professor and physician at the Swedish Medical Products Agency and one of the principal investigators of the study, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Comirnaty is the brand name for Pfizer’s vaccine while Spikevax is the brand name for Moderna’s jab.

Rates were also higher among the age group for those who received any dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, both of which utilize mRNA technology. And rates were elevated among vaccinated males of all ages after the first or second dose, except for the first dose of Moderna’s shot for those 40 or older, and females 12- to 15-years-old.

Researchers pulled data from national health registers, analyzing 23.1 million people aged 12 or older. The analysis was of data from Dec. 27, 2020, to incidence of myocarditis or pericarditis, or the end of the study time period, which was Oct. 5, 2021.

“The risks of myocarditis and pericarditis were highest within the first 7 days of being vaccinated, were increased for all combinations of mRNA vaccines, and were more pronounced after the second dose,” researchers wrote in the study, which was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association following peer review.

Moderna and Pfizer did not respond to requests for comment.

Read the rest

(National Party media release)

The race is on for which Labour minister can build the biggest bureaucracy, spend more money and yet have worse outcomes — and Andrew Little’s health system announcement this week clearly puts him in front, National Health Spokesperson Dr Shane Reti says

“Labour’s health reforms are all about bureaucracy and not outcomes. There was not a single commitment to a health outcome or target in Mr Little’s announcement this week, but volumes were spoken about layers and layers of bureaucracy.

“Locality commissioners, locality co-ordinators and up to 80 locality networks will add to the layers of bureaucracy between patients, providers and the Minister.

“The Government will take until July 2024 to put all this bureaucracy in place – when instead they should be using that time to drive better health results for Kiwis, with a focus on targets and delivery.

“National will focus on health outcomes and not bureaucracy. We will set targets and hold ourselves to account.

“More money, more bureaucracy and worse outcomes. These are the only things Andrew Little’s health reforms will deliver.”