There are several species that bloom in winter — camellia is a well-known example. Here is another with pink flowers — armeria. (Jane Davel)

A more than 900% spike in police call-outs to just five Rotorua emergency housing motels can finally be revealed after the Ombudsman ruled data requested by Stuff a year-and-a-half ago, which the police admitted “paints a very unattractive picture”, should be released.

Back in January 2022, Stuff asked police to provide data on the number of times they had been called to five motels in 2016 – before their use for emergency accommodation – and also in 2020 and 2021.

Police declined to provide that information, citing privacy reasons and commercial interests. Stuff referred the matter to the Ombudsman and more than 18 months later, it ruled police should hand over the data.

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That is the typical length of time required to get an Ombudsman ruling nowadays. Waikanae Watch is still waiting for an Ombudsman’s ruling that KCDC’s Mr Power must release an unredacted account of communications between him, the council and Air Chathams since 2020.

DOC pays staff a bonus of $3,500 to learn te reo Maori. The rangers find the language particularly handy when they’re out in the bush… alone.

I love the way Murray draws those animals. I love the relationships among all the characters and am especially fond of the absolutely original approach to humor. The dog is one of my favourite cartoon characters of all time. Charles Schulz on Footrot Flats

The timeless humour of Peanuts

By Roger Childs

Most readers will be familiar with the Peanuts characters – Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, the little red haired girl, Sally Brown, Pig-Pen and others. There are so many situations people can identify with or just enjoy – 

• The bossy Lucy offering psychiatric advice for 5c. 
• The hapless baseball team with Charlie Brown as one of the worst pitchers of all time.
• Linus with his security blanket waiting in the pumpkin patch at Halloween for the Great Pumpkin to arrive.
• Schroeder, the Beethoven fan, sitting at his piano wishing Lucy would stop pestering him.
• The classroom scenes in which the teacher is never shown.
• Snoopy as the Red Baron and the friend of local birds like Woodstock.

The relevance of Peanuts is one for the ages and ranks Schulz with the greatest cartoonists of all time.

No great shakes at school

Charles Schultz failed every subject in the eighth grade and flunked Physics, Latin, Algebra and English in high school. He was pretty hopeless at sport but did make the golf team. However he lost most of the games he played. Sparky as he was known, was socially awkward and had few friends. He tended to be ignored and was regarded as a loser.

He did like drawing and was proud of his art work, but the cartoons he submitted for the year-book in his senior high school year were rejected by the editors. Later Disney didn’t want his cartoon stories and saw no value in his tales of Charlie Brown and the others. However Schulz had great determination and kept sketching anyway.

Sparky observed that we all face difficulties and discouragement from time to time, but we also have a choice in how we handle it. If we’re persistent, if we hold fast to our faith, if we discover the unique talents each one of us has, then there is no limit to our potential.

Some winners take longer to develop and Charles M. Schultz is a classic case study. 

A late developer

He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 26 November 1922. His father Carl was of German descent, and worked in St Paul as a barber. An uncle named him “Sparky” after a horse in a comic strip. From an early age he liked drawing and dreamed of becoming a professional cartoonist. At the age of 15 he had his drawings of Spike the family dog in the Ripley’s Believe it or not syndicated newspaper feature. Then in his senior year at high school, encouraged by his mother, he completed a correspondence cartoon course. His mother sadly died of cervical cancer in 1943.

After World War 2, Sparky moved into the loft above his father’s barber’s shop and he worked hard at perfecting his craft. He sold some one panel cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post and then had a three year run of his strip “Lil Folks” in the St Paul Pioneer Press. However, the big breakthrough came in October 1950 when the first Peanuts strip featured in 7 newspapers nation-wide.

His dream of being a professional carton had come true at the age of 28. He eventually retired in 1999 and at this time: 

• “Peanuts” was syndicated in over 2600 papers worldwide.
• Books of his cartoons had been translated into 25 languages.
• Television series and films had been produced and songs had been composed.

Charles M Schultz passed away in 2000 aged 77. His legacy lives on and the Peanuts strip continues to grace papers and magazines around the world. The Charles M Schultz Museum is a popular attraction today in Santa Rosa, California.

Multi-faceted humour

Much of the appeal of the Peanuts characters is that they accurately represent the foibles, challenges and up and down experiences of little kids growing up in the United States, and they will always be relevant. His humor was at times observational, wry, sarcastic, nostalgic, bittersweet, silly and melancholy, with occasional flights of fancy and suspension of reality thrown in from time to time.  Charles M Schultz Museum website.

Sparky the late developer is one of the greatest cartoonists ever, and always will be.

They really are pushing hard for the UN Agenda 2030.

by Peter Imanuelsen

The elites are working on a new agenda and you were not told about it. They call it “The New Agenda”. You might have heard about it by another name, namely Agenda 2030.

Thought you could avoid getting brainwashed by throwing away your TV and not watching the news? Well, think again. Now they are pushing “The New Agenda” on your phone.

Yes, in their own documentation, the UN calls Agenda 2030 for “The New Agenda”. That sounds very similar to something else that we are told is just a crazy conspiracy theory.

Now I came across something very interesting. They are pushing this agenda very hard right now, trying to get people to accept and support it. I guess they have noticed that people do not actually want to eat the bugs and own nothing….

On the latest Samsung Galaxy phone, they now come pre-installed from the factory with the Agenda 2030 app to tell you about how wonderful this new agenda really is. Over 300 million phones now have this app installed.

In the app they tell you how important it is to follow “The New Agenda”, in fact, they are working to implement it in full.“We are working on getting back on track for the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda” – Samsung Agenda 2030 app

So what is this Agenda 2030?

They have outlined various different “Global Goals” that they have decided must be implemented and followed. Of course, one of the main ones is called “Climate Action”.Another one is “Gender Equality”, in other words, to implement the feminist agenda.Guess what is really good for the environment according to “The New Agenda”? Migration!

“The 2030 Agenda…recognizes that migration is a powerful driver of sustainable development”

15 minute cities

Ever wondered where the idea of 15 minute cities come from and why they are seemingly pushing this all over the place at the same time? Welcome to Global Goal number 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.In fact, the reason they are seizing the farms from the Dutch farmers is because of Agenda 2030. They need to reduce their emissions by the year 2030 as outlined in this agenda.

The secret agenda

Most people don’t know that this agenda is being planned behind their backs, by the elites that nobody voted for. And the mainstream media is of course not talking about this, and if they are, they are talking about it in a positive manner, brainwashing people into supporting the Agenda 2030.

But this should not come as a surprise. Bill Gates, who not long ago donated a whopping US$ 1.27 BILLION towards funding the “Global Goals” outlined in “The New Agenda”, has also donated $319 million to the Mainstream Media. Of course the media will support it.

by Scott Ritter

Assessing the birth of atomic America, put on display as only Hollywood can, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. I walked away from the theater acknowledging the success of the film in portraying the protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as a fellow human traveler in this adventure known as life. As portrayed by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer was approachable by all who have toiled with the challenges of life, and our imperfect efforts to manage them. That Oppenheimer’s challenges were of a scope and scale unimaginable by most is irrelevant—the audience felt for the man, not the myth, and for this reason the movie is a great success.

In its almost bored depiction of the banality of the bomb that serves as the centerpiece of Oppenheimer’s creativity, however, the movie fails. As much as I appreciate learning to like Oppenheimer the man, I very much wanted to leave the theater in mortal fear of the weapon he helped create. Here the movie struggles—the bomb was all flash and no substance. The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan still resonates with me to this day; nothing about Oppenheimer’s creation stayed with me once the credits rolled on the film. It was Edward Teller’s “Super”—the Hydrogen Bomb—that struck fear into the hearts of moviegoers, a bomb whose destructive power was symbolized on a map, using a drawing compass which placed circles around the major cities of the world showing the circumference of the “Super’s” lethal reach. I felt no such fear when contemplating Oppenheimer’s creation.

That Oppenheimer’s “gadget” is the causation of calamitous chaos never resonates. Oppenheimer struggled, both in life and on screen, to compel those with whom the secret of nuclear death was shared to comprehend the absolute necessity of putting the atomic genie back in is bottle. Oppenheimer, having helped unleash this awful power, understood the mortal sin he and his fellow scientists had committed. Conceived to defeat the forces of Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer’s “gadget” was instead given birth to intimidate the Soviet Union—ostensibly our wartime ally—at the expense of the Japanese, who were ready to surrender but first had to be made an example of.

This dearth of destruction directly linked to Oppenheimer’s weapon diminishes the impact of his later remorse over having breathed life into it. Moreover, it makes it difficult to use Nolan’s film as the foundation upon which Oppenheimer’s dream of banishing the destructive power of nuclear fission and fusion from the arsenal of mankind, limiting its utility to the production of energy, simply that—a dream. There was a time when mankind feared the immediacy of its nuclear annihilation. Children grew up learning to “duck and cover,” while adults learned to promote détente over confrontation, abiding decades of Cold War because they feared the consequences of the nuclear fire that would transpire if the conflict between competing superpowers ever went hot.

Today’s generations have forgotten the evil echoes of everlasting doom that thundered across the Alamogordo desert on a July morning back in 1945; they did not steal furtive glances in the evening sky during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if the setting sun might be the last they experienced, or if its dying light would be replaced by a bright light as if “hundreds of thousands of suns rose up at once into the sky,” like Krishna in the Baghava Gita. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer claims to have thought to himself at the moment his theoretical gadget turned into the reality of man’s collective demise.

Foregoing the finality of the fate they have inherited, humanity has become immune to mass death. People die every day, this much is true. But the world no longer fears the imminence of nuclear mass death—the termination of all life as we know it. Such a reality is beyond imagination, because we simply no longer imagine it, even though its cause resides amongst us, unseen because we opt to be blind. Oppenheimer could have been the movie that helped rip the blinders off the present occupants of planet earth, awakening them to the reality of the precipitous path we all are walking along, the edge of a nuclear abyss from which there can be no salvation.

God’s good graces cannot save those who refuse to save themselves. The hubris of men whose intellectual capacity was limited to finding out the flaws of men so that they might be destroyed is well-captured in Oppenheimer, the movie. The consequences of their actions are not. From their petty cataloging of human frailty came the growth of a nuclear weapons establishment the scope and scale of which is beyond the capacity of most Americans to comprehend, as is its purpose. The notion of facilitating the mechanism of our inevitable demise—because if the nuclear genie is not returned to its bottle, it will be unleashed again—in the name of our collective security is a cruel trick played by the American government on its citizens. We exist, it seems, to promulgate the very means of our destruction, perverting the purpose for which we were brought into this world, which was the perpetuation of the existence of our species.

Helplessly hoping humanity will have a collective awakening is a fool’s errand. I watched Oppenheimer in the vain hope that this film would be the vector for the transmission of the kind of insight that occurs when one is brought back from the edge of disaster. I left disappointed because the movie did not deliver in this regard. That I expected such a revelation from theatrical art was not far-fetched—after all, it was ABC’s “The Day After” which helped alter the thinking of President Ronald Reagan in 1983, propelling him down a path that led to the initiation of nuclear disarmament between the United States and the Soviet Union. But then again, that was the purpose of “The Day After”—to scare the American people into an awakening where nuclear disarmament was not only desired but demanded. 

Oppenheimer, unfortunately, was created to entertain. In this it succeeded. But as a vehicle for the salvation of mankind it fell far short of the mark.  As I imagine the inevitability of the end of everything I have fought to preserve and protect, I am overcome by anger at what I had become—a defeated warrior for peace waiting for some unseen (and unbeckoned) cavalry to ride to his rescue. “The Day After” did not occur in a vacuum—it aired nearly a year and a half after a massive gathering of one million Americans in New York City’s Central Park to demonstrate in favor of nuclear disarmament and arms control. The actions and voices of this multitude of Americans empowered ABC to make “The Day After,” and liberated Ronald Reagan politically so he could steer America down the path of nuclear disarmament. 

Oppenheimer cannot, on its own volition, change the world we live in. Only we, the people, can do that.I therefore implore anyone reading this article to join me in New York City on August 6 in the joyful juxtaposition of knowledge over fear, or life over death—of self-determination over fatalism. Let us take charge of our future by demanding today what J. Robert Oppenheimer sought so many years ago—the return of the nuclear Genie into its bottle. August 6 marks the 78^th anniversary of the destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the hands of one of Oppenheimer’s “gadgets.” Help me and my fellow speakers and participants bring relevance to the moment, to awaken the fear that should exist in the bowels of everyone who has a brain about the dangers presented by nuclear weapons, and rekindle hope in the hearts of humanity about the absolute need to rid itself of these awful devices before it is too late.  

Oppenheimer (180 minutes) is screening at the Shoreline.

The orginal caption referred to a six mile (10 km) handicap — perhaps this was 3 times up and down between the Waikanae River and Waimeha Stream mouths? See earlier posts.

(Seen in Pokeno)

The Climatists are as sneaky as the Covidians.