I read of Sir Jon’s death yesterday, and well remember the last personal exchange with him. We were travelling together to Porirua each as speakers to a Probus club.
During the trip I mentioned to him that within my ballet career while I had danced in the role of the Rag Doll on the Opera House stage in Wellington, I had never danced the role of the Fairy Queen in “The Sugar Plum Fairy”.
His immediate response to me was “Don’t worry, my dear- neither have I’.
I tried to enter my comment to the Stuff article but it was blocked.
The cost of living for the average New Zealand household increased 7.4 percent in the 12 months to the September 2023 quarter, according to figures released by Stats NZ today.
The 7.4 percent increase follows a 7.2 percent increase in the 12 months to the June 2023 quarter.
“The cost-of-living increase for the average household as measured by the household living-costs price indexes was larger in the 12 months to the September 2023 quarter than the 12 months to the June 2023 quarter,” consumer prices manager James Mitchell said.
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There is a great deal of evidence suggesting loss of morale among doctors and nurses.
The moral of the people in these medical professions seems to have declined as politicians, bureaucrats and “administrators” gained more authority and power to control their lives and professional services.
Medicine used to be all about doing the best one could to help individual patients when they were ill.
The difficulties, long hours and sacrifices were rewarded by a sense of deserved satisfaction, self-esteem and pride for being of real service to real people in times of real need.
Then along came the politicians, bureaucrats and other “outsiders” with their ambitions for prestige authority, power and control of everything and everyone else including medical services.
Patients were renamed “consumers” and their medical professionals were renamed “providers” whose obedience and loyalty was owed to the politicians, bureaucrats and administrators… The former self-regulation of these professions for the benefit of the patients was taken over by the people in governments for the benefit of “the state” and their idiotic ambition of a “health care delivery system” like a fast food enterprise that they owned, controlled and managed.
The once sacred , confidential and personal relationships between doctors, nurses and the patients they cared for were destroyed and the only real incentive left was THE MONEY that could be earned by obedience to the new bosses regardless of whether it was best for the “consumers” or not.
Unfortunately, money cannot replace the lost sense of satisfaction, self-esteem and deserved pride derived from serving and caring for other individual human beings and that is why the “health care delivery system” is such a failure.
I used to be a doctor, experienced the decline and destruction of the medical profession, got out, did something else that was more satisfying and rewarding and have not regretted it at all. I am not surprised that so many other medical professionals are choosing to leave this corrupted system.
The United Nations has revised its grim figure of the rising death toll from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, saying that it has surpassed 5,000 as of Monday. It stands at 5,087.Separately, over 90 Palestinians have been killed in escalating West Bank violence, which over the weekend included Israel launching a rare airstrike on Jenin. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are still holding at least 222 Israeli and foreign captives – a number which has again been revised upward.
European Union foreign ministers are meanwhile gathered in Brussels for an urgent meeting to take up the contentious issue of a ceasefire. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has been calling on world bodies to back a ceasefire. In response, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said:
“Personally, I think that a humanitarian pause is needed in order to allow the humanitarian support to come in and be distributed, seeing that half of the population of Gaza has been moving from their houses.”
Bloomberg is reporting Monday morning that EU leaders are set to endorse a call for a “humanitarian pause”. “The European Council supports the call of UNSG (U.N. Secretary-General Antonio) Guterres for a humanitarian pause in order to allow for safe humanitarian access and aid to reach those in need,” a draft statement of the summit reads.
But Washington, Israel’s staunchest supporter, is not expected to back a ceasefire – despite reports President Biden has sought for Israel’s military delay the expected imminent ground invasion, in order to buy more time to negotiate the freedom of more hostages.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Sunday news shows made this clear. Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’ Face the Nation, asked him:
“UNICEF says 1,524 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip during these bombings. Why isn’t the US calling for at least a temporary ceasefire?“
Blinken then claimed that children dying on either side has hit him “right in the heart” – but he stopped short of directing any criticism at Israel’s indiscriminate and unrelenting bombing campaign.Instead, he defended it.
Blinken said in reference to October 7 Hamas cross-border attack:
“Israel has to do everything it can to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Freezing things in place where they are now would allow Hamas to remain where it is and to repeat what it’s done some time in the future. No country could accept that.”
He then cited unverified reports that Hamas has actively blocked Palestinians who are also American citizens from leaving the Gaza Strip.
“We’ve had people come to Rafah, the crossing with Egypt. And to date, at least, Hamas has blocked them from leaving, showing once again, its total disregard for civilians of any kind who are — who are stuck in Gaza. So really, the ball is in Hamas’ court, in terms of letting people who want to leave, civilians from third countries, including Americans get out of Gaza.”
There are a reported up to 600 Americans stuck in Gaza, with one Palestinian-American telling NBC that “America’s not helping us, Biden’s not helping us, the embassy is not helping us.”
The United States is still bolstering its military presence in Middle East waters, readying for any contingency, even as it’s said to be pressing for furthering back-channel negotiations and delaying an all-out Israeli assault:
It was becoming increasingly clear Monday that the U.S. wants Israel to not only allow more humanitarian assistance into Gaza, but for the country to let ongoing negotiations over the release of hostages held by Hamas to continue before it launches a ground invasion of the Palestinian territory. Israel said Monday that Hamas was still holding 222 people captive.
Two sources told CBS News the U.S. has sought to slow Israel’s plans for a ground invasion in order to prioritize the release of hostages and the distribution of aid, a message Washington is said to have been conveying primarily through defense channels.
The Pentagon is calling its moving two aircraft carrier strike groups into regional waters an act of “deterrence”.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had announcedSaturday:
“Following detailed discussions with President Biden on recent escalations by Iran and its proxy forces across the Middle East Region, today I directed a series of additional steps to further strengthen the Department of Defense posture in the region. These steps will bolster regional deterrence efforts, increase force protection for U.S. forces in the region, and assist in the defense of Israel.”
The White House has Iran in mind, and its proxies Hezbollah and Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen, the latter who days ago tried to fire missiles on Israel, but which were intercepted by a US warship off Yemen’s coast. US THAAD and Patriot missile batteries have been sent to Israel.
Blinken said:
“This is not what we want, not what we’re looking for. We don’t want escalation. We don’t want to see our forces or our personnel come under fire. But if that happens, we’re ready for it.”
And Austin simultaneously affirmed the statements, saying:
“What we’re seeing is a prospect of a significant escalation of attacks on our troops and our people throughout the region.”
It’s clear Hezbollah has held off committing itself to a major war with Israel, which could very well happen the moment the IDF mounts a major ground assault into Gaza. Hezbollah’s arsenal, with the help of Iran, is far superior to that of Hamas’, and is said to include tens of thousands of rockets of varying sizes.
There’s still been regular exchange of rocket and mortar fire, with Israeli sources reporting Monday that the Iron Dome intercepted an inbound drone from Lebanon via the sea. It was intercepted over Ein Hamifratz, south of Acre. At this point, several dozens of Israeli towns and communities have been evacuated from near the northern border.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr., or Bobby) is man of vision, a nonconformist who dared to challenge the conventional thinking on a wide range of issues, incurring the wrath of the establishment in the process. Bobby is a registered Democrat, and when, this past May, he threw his hat into the ring regarding the 2024 Presidential election, I had to suppress my enthusiasm, knowing full well that the Democratic Party elite who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016, and cooked the books for Biden in 2020, would never give the nephew of John Fitzgerald Kennedy a fighting chance to win the nomination for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election. Frankly speaking, how I felt about Bobby didn’t matter, because as a registered Republican in the State of New York, I was irrelevant when it came to issues pertaining to the Democratic primary.
This, of course, didn’t mean I had gone deaf, dumb, and blind to the Kennedy phenomenon. Back in February, I had spent some quality time in a Washington, DC bar with Dennis Kucinich, the man who would go on to be appointed as Bobby’s campaign manager when the Kennedy scion announced his bid for America’s top job back in May. Dennis was excited about the prospects of a Kennedy run, and that night we outlined what we believed to be the list of positives that accrued to a Bobby candidacy. The list was long and, although fueled by beer and pretzels, rational. Bobby was the anti-candidate, the perfect antidote to the ignorant arrogance of Donald Trump and the incompetent ignorance of the incumbent, Joe Biden. If Bobby could find the sweet spot between the two candidates, Dennis and I strategized, then he had a very good shot at taking home the grand prize—the presidency of the United States.
I struggled with Bobby’s candidacy early on over his stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and Russia in general. His position seemed to be influenced by the experiences of his son, Conor, a law student at Georgetown University who skipped out on an internship at a prestigious law firm to instead spend the summer of 2022 volunteering to fight with the Ukrainian Army against Russia. Conor, who had no prior military experience, was initially trained as a drone operator and, later, as a machine gunner in a unit that included other American soldiers of fortune. After two and a half months in Ukraine, Conor returned to the United States, where he is currently finishing up his law degree at Georgetown.
Bobby said that he “knew [Conor’s] views about the war were not aligned with mine.” Noting that Conor wasn’t naïve about Ukraine (“Ukraine has problems…there’s corruption”), Bobby said of his son, “He doesn’t like Putin. He thinks he’s a gangster and a bully and he doesn’t like bullies.”
