The Herald reports:

A 10-year, $6.7m Rotorua council investment into a sewage sludge technology that provided no return reinforces councils should not try to act as businesses, a local government expert says.

A ratepayer representative says, in her opinion, the venture was “hugely ill-advised” and raises questions about how the project continued so long, cost so much and had “no benefit at all”.

However, others say councillors were doing their best by ratepayers with the information they had at the time, and they can’t be judged in hindsight.

Of course they can and should be judged. They cost Rotorua ratepayers almost $7 million.

On top of the council’s $6.7m, the previous National government contributed about $3m and Crown Research Institute Scion contributed about $1.85m.

What do they all have in common? None of them were spending their own money. Not a single investor had skin in the game. Its easy to be convinced that something should be invested in, when there is no consequence to you for getting it wrong.

The Herald reports:

An alleged “white supremacist” living in a state house is accused of terrorising his Christchurch neighbours who say they are living in fear for the safety of their children and grandchildren.

The former skinhead and his associates are accused of a prolonged campaign of intimidation and abuse, which has allegedly seen armed police deployed to the street, a kids’ pool shot out with slug gun pellets and threats made on the life of a 4-year-old girl.

He lives in a Woolston Kāinga Ora property with his parents. Neighbours have described a litany of incidents dating back almost a decade resulting in multiple police callouts, countless complaints to Kāinga Ora and various criminal charges and court proceedings.

They say the man is a white power sympathiser and the tenants pose a risk to the community. Neighbours are questioning why the family is allowed to remain in the taxpayer-funded home.

Labour’s policy of never evicting tenants, no matter what they do, must end. The policy has turned Kainga Ora into the worst landlord in New Zealand. It’s bad enough that taxpayers are subsidising his rent, but what is worse is the terror the neighbours endure.

Terrible behaviour should haver consequences. One of those consequences should be you lose you nice cheap taxpayer subsidised state house if you’re an anti-social arsehole that terrorises the neighbours.

Jerry Coyne writes:

Here’s another kerfuffle that two academics from New Zealand called to my attention. I am letting one of them comment on a recent exchange about a paper involving Maori burning of land, which apparently produced carbon deposits in Antarctica.

The paper below was published in Nature last month, and suggests an explanation for high rates of carbon deposition found in Antarctic ice cores starting about 700 years ago: levels three times higher than in previous centuries.  As the abstract below shows, the most likely explanation was soot being blown towards Antarctica from either Tasmania, New Zealand, or Patagonia.  But the record of fire use (“paleofire” studies), the directionality of carbon distribution, plus the timing (Maori settled New Zealand around 1300), suggests suggests that New Zealand was the source, probably from Maori burning of forests or fields that caused ancillary wildfires. 

So these scientists were trying to work out why there was a high level of carbon in Antarctic ice cores from 700 years ago. And they conclude the most likely explanation was burning of forests in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

This research then got noticed in NZ, and the usual suspects huffed and puffed and here is what a Waikato University Dean said:

“The association of Māori with fire is longstanding. Mahuika goddess of fire gifted her fingernails of flames to enable us to have fire for warmth; fire for sustenance; fire to provide nutrients for the earth. We attribute and honour Mahuika. She is part of our whakapapa. Her mokopuna Māui attempted to reduce her power by tricking her into giving up all of her fingernails but she was able to outwit him, planting her flame into the trees so that fire would be freely available. Fire also defined our boundaries of authority as expressed in this whakataukī ‘ka wera hoki i te ahi, e mana ana anō’ meaning ‘while the fire burns, the mana is effective.’ We claimed occupation of our territories by the principle of ahi kaa, that is, we kept our home fires burning.

“Through our Ātua, gods and goddesses, we developed deeply embedded practises and rituals and our relationship with fire was interdependent, reciprocal, beneficial and also very practical. Upon arrival to these lands, we relied on the aruhe or fernroot as part of our staple diet. We relied on the moa and other birdlife for food. Burning became part of our practises; regular burning allowed plants to regenerate and some of the minerals in the ash provided rich nutrients for the land. Regular burning facilitated hunting and access to hunting grounds. Such practises would be typical for any newcomers creating homes on unfamiliar lands to allow time to become acquainted with seasonal cycles, climatic conditions, finding the best places to lay out their plantations and hence their new settlements or kainga. No doubt some burning would not have been controlled as well as they may have planned, but this can be understood. It is not unlike any other peoples adjusting to new lands and new conditions.

“The internationally authored paper by scientists who examined Antarctic ice core records to find that carbon emissions increased significantly from wildfires after Māori first arrived in Aotearoa is devoid of context, devoid of cultural understandings and is yet another example of what we have grown to expect from western science. It relies on measurements, modelling and silo thinking and the paper whether intentional or not, posits Māori as the ‘naughty’ offenders. Moreover, it reeks of scientific arrogance with its implicit assumption that somehow Māori have a lot to account for in terms of contributing to carbon emissions and destroying the pristine environment of the Southern Oceans and Antarctica. Goodness knows why Māori are primarily emphasised, and for what purpose this article was written. Obviously these authors have not caught up with the positive changes in research and science in this country where Mātauranga Māori within the MBIE Vision Mātauranga policy demands Māori involvement, Māori participation and Māori leadership. This involvement starts from the basic premise that we as Māori will tell our own stories and control our own knowledge. Mātauranga Māori is a living knowledge system rooted in our environmental encounters which was outward looking and relationship based. We are connected in kinship even to fire through Mahuika as the spiritual goddess of fire. Similarly we have relationships with the Southern Oceans and the Antarctica through our stories of voyaging and navigation and food gathering. Our relationships with marine life, bird life and the oceans are well recorded through our intergenerational continuum and held in our tribal lore. These are places to which we also have longstanding relationships where we will not intentionally embark on destructive practises. The principle of kaitikaitanga or guardianship is a mantel of responsibility for us and one we willingly share to improve the wellbeing of our oceans and planet. Please do not distort your scientific evidence nor hide behind the intricacies of scientific modelling to position Māori as the problem. I am sure that you can do better than that.”

Need more be said.

In many countries you can just buy an RAT at the supermarket or pharmacy. In NZ the Government will not allow you to buy your own test and for some stupid reason has decided only unvaccinated people about to travel can get one. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

It is interesting to do a cost comparison of what the Government has delivered against what it promised.

The latest estimate for light rail is it will cost $608,000 per metre of light rail. That is $6,080 per cm.

Instead they have delivered 710 cm of press releases at a cost of $50 million so that is a cost of $70,422 per cm of press release.

So the press releases are costing more than ten times per cm as the light rail will!

Neale is right on this. Both the banner and the noose imagery is disgusting. We should have zero tolerance for this. Anyone who thinks like this is a danger to society.

Over 2,000 people have voted in the 2021 Kiwiblog Awards. The winners are:

• National MP of the year – Christopher Luxon narrowly wins with 26% followed by Chris Bishop on 25%, Shane Reti 24%, Nicola Willis 13% and Simon Bridges 12%. The top three were all within a few score votes of each other.
• Labour MP of the Year – Louisa Wall wins this year on 43% followed by Chris Hipkins on 38%, Jacinda Ardern on 11% and Nanaia Mahuta on 8%
• Minor Party MP of the Year – A battle between the ACT Leader and Deputy and David Seymour gets 83% and Brooke van Velden 17%
• MP of the Year is also a big win for favourite David Seymour on 62%, with Christopher Luxon on 19%, Nicola WIllis 10% and Simon Bridges 8%.

Congratulations to the winners, and the runners up.

The PSC has released annual workforce data. Some key extracts:

• Average salary up from $75,400 in 2017 to $87,600 – a 16.2% increase
• Median salary up from $64,300 to $76,600 – a 19.1% increase
• The number of staff earning over $100,000 gone from 15,055 in 2020 to 18,301 in 2021
• Public service FTEs up from 47,252 to 61,097 – a 29.3% increase
• Public service staff up from 48,871 to 62,853 – a 28.6% increase
• Core crown personnel costs gone from $6.9 billion in 2017 to $9.4 billion in 2020, a 36% increase
• Public sector salary costs gone from $3.6 billion in 2017 to $5.3 billion in 2020, a 50% increase

Stuff hands out its 2021 Political Awards:

• Worst Political Mistake: Judith Collins’ attempted takedown of Simon Bridges
• Worst Political Mistake Runner-up: The Government’s communication over the move from elimination and the alert level system to the traffic light system.
• Political U-turn: The Auckland Harbour bike-bridge
• Political U-turn Runner-up: 90% vaccination targets
• Rookie on the Rise: Chris Luxon
• Rookie on the Rise Runner-up: Rachel Brooking
• Opposition MP of the Year: Chris Bishop
• Backbencher of the Year: Louisa Wall
• Politician of the Year: Chris Hipkins
• Politician of the Year Runner-ups: Nicola Willis and Grant Robertson

This is an astonishing turnover of senior management for any entity, let alone the Reserve Bank. Monetary economics is a pretty specialised occupation. Previously you would have senior managers who might have been there for decades. And now we have a near total clean out in just three years.

If I was on the Reserve Bank Board, I would be asking hard questions about this.

Newshub reports:

Harawira said, however, “we’ve had to stand down about half of our people” from helping to provide that protection following the vetting process.

“That’s really killed us,” he told Morning Report on Wednesday.

This suggests that half the members of the self-appointed border patrol failed Police vetting. Isn’t that rather concerning?

“Our people, over the last 18-20 months, have included bus drivers, gang members, doctors, lawyers, mothers, teachers – all sorts of people. Now, all of a sudden at the last minute, it got dropped on us that everyone had to be vetted.”

I wonder what the relative proportions are of say doctors and gang members on these checkpoints?

Voting is now open for the 2021 Kiwiblog Awards.

The contest for National MP of the Year is between

• Chris Bishop for his relentless scrutiny of the Government on Covid-19
• Simon Bridges for his book, for helping unify the caucus, and portfolio performance
• Christopher Luxon for ascending to the leadership, and doing everything right since he did
• Shane Reti for his competence and credibility in health and vaccinating in Northland
• Nicola Willis for showing up the Government constantly in housing, but also working on bipartisan RMA reform to make new builds easier

The contest for Labour MP of the Year is between

• Jacinda Ardern for leading the response to Covid-19 and keeping Labour ahead in the polls despite everything
• Chris Hipkins for his management of Covid-19
• Nanaia Mahuta for driving through major policy changes that Labour wants
• Louisa Wall for her independence and achievements as a backbench MP

 The contest for Minor Party MP of the Year is between:

• David Seymour for leading ACT to their highest levels in the polls, and coming second in the preferred PM polls
• Brooke van Velden her her astute management of the new ACT MPs, and effective advocacy against the Government

Finally for overall 2019 MP of the Year, it is between:

• Simon Bridges for his survival and comeback
• Christopher Luxon for uniting the caucus and making National look more like a Government in waiting
• David Seymour for making ACT into a party of effective opposition and proposition
• Nicola Willis for showing you can drive policy from opposition, and her relentless showing up of the Government

You can vote in the embedded survey below, or at this link.

Paul Homewood writes:

Extinction Rebellion is no local grassroots NGO. Instead, it receives major financial support from American and UK millionaires. …

That would be referring to Rory Kennedy (daughter of former U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy) and Aileen Getty (a granddaughter of former U.S. oil businessman Jean Paul Getty), who started the Climate Emergency Fund which has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Extinction Rebellion. Getty’s foundation even touts its support for Extinction Rebellion. …

Not quite grassroots, is it?

Richard Hawkins writes to the Royal Society of NZ:

I have read Professor Jerry Coyne’s long, detailed and fair-minded critique of the ludicrous move to incorporate Maori “ways of knowing” into science curricula in New Zealand, and the frankly appalling failure of the Royal Society of New Zealand to stand up for science – which is, after all, what your Society exists to do.

The world is full of thousands of creation myths and other colourful legends, any of which might be taught alongside Maori myths. Why choose Maori myths? For no better reason than that Maoris arrived in New Zealand a few centuries before Europeans. That would be a good reason to teach Maori mythology in anthropology classes. Arguably there’s even better reason for Australian schools to teach the myths of their indigenous peoples, who arrived tens of thousands of years before Europeans. Or for British schools to teach Celtic myths. Or Anglo-Saxon myths. But no indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.

The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not “Western” science, not “European” science, not “White” science, not “Colonialist” science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what “tradition” they may have been brought up in. True science is evidence-based not tradition-based; it incorporates safeguards such as peer review, repeated experimental testing of hypotheses, double-blind trials, instruments to supplement and validate fallible senses etc. True science works: lands spacecraft on comets, develops vaccines against plagues, predicts eclipses to the nearest second, reconstructs the lives of extinct species such as the tragically destroyed Moas.

If New Zealand’s Royal Society won’t stand up for true science in your country who will? What else is the Society for? What else is the rationale for its existence?

Yours very sincerely
Richard Dawkins FRS
Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford

The part in bold needs to be repeated. Science is science. There is no such thing as European science or Western science. Just science.

The inquisition underway by the Royal Society of NZ is making them an international laughing stock. Even just on Twitter, millions have seen tweets from international heavyweights who can’t believe what is going on. These include Dawkins (2.5 m followers), Peterson (2.0 m), Young (0.2 m) and Pinker (0.7 m).

And the Dawkins tweet has been retweeted over 1,000 times so all the followers of those 1,000 people will have seen it.

Peter Burns writes:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.

It was a dark time in his homeland. Total war had engulfed the world, and a totalitarian regime was controlling the country. Bonhoeffer pondered how this came to be. He thought about the nature of evil, but came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. Rather, it was stupidity.

For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless. …

Herd behavior is among the pre-eminent causes of stupidity. Numerous scientific studies have shown how individual humans can be swayed by the crowd to adopt positions which go against all logic. In a classic examination of human folly, psychologist Solomon Asch looked at how individual people respond to the majority group around them.

Do they conform to the group’s view? Or do they strike out on their own contrarian (but ultimately correct) path? The results were mind-boggling, but incredibly telling for showing how stupidity arises. In the course of the 12 experiments on conformity, around 75% of the participants conformed to the majority view at least once.

This means 3/4ths of the people doing the study were pushed to say an answer which was clearly wrong, just by peer pressure from the group around them. This type of a process is at the core of how stupidity allows evil to rise up.

This is why we should welcome contrarians. Why we should appreciate those who argue against groupthink.

When Leon Festinger studied a UFO cult back in the 1950’s, he came across a curious thing. The cult leader, Dorothy Martin, a housewife from Chicago, foresaw that the world was going to end on the 21st of December, 1954. Seeing that we are still here, it is evident the prophesy was BS. Yet, many people believed it and gathered on that fateful day in a non-descript house.

They sat there, waiting for doomsday. To their great astonishment, it never came. When the hour for the end of the world arrived, nothing happened. What amazed the researchers who infiltrated the group were the reactions of many of the members. Faced with this apparent negation of their beliefs, many of the faithful did not abandon them.

Instead, their belief in Dorothy Martin’s BS grew even stronger. Festinger and his fellow researchers called this the backfire effect. Journalist David McRaney has a great definition of it. “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”

Convictions win over evidence.

We are living in an insane society. On one hand, you have people believing Trump won the presidency, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, you have people ruminating on the eternal sin of “white people”, whoever they are. As an individual who tries to use reason and common sense, you often end up feeling isolated amid all the madness.

The world is depressing at the moment.

This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, that while insanity might be rare in individuals, it is generally the rule in groups, parties, nations, and epochs.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Sadly often true.

Radio NZ reports:

The police have been actively gathering and analysing detailed information on rising rates of crime and violence at emergency housing, despite insisting for months they do not “specifically” collect such data. 

There’s been a “campaign of denial”, says National, accusing the Government of taking a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to a growing crisis in New Zealand. 

Two Cabinet ministers are also standing by public comments they’ve made, and in one case responses to parliamentary questions – now brought into serious question with a number of reports and inter-agency communications in the public domain. 

It’s become clear that there is a link between rising violent crime and emergency housing. This is because the Government has mismanaged emergency housing, and just throws young vulnerable families in with gang members.

But it would be embarrasing to admit this, so for months the Government has denied there is any data on crimes at emergency housing, because if they admitted there was, it would have to be released.

RNZ has reported stories of people terrified of conditions in some accommodation amid commonplace instances of violence, criminal activity and gang intimidation – both residents, and those living and running businesses nearby. In September this year, there were about 4500 children living in emergency accommodation. 

Despite a number of requests for information, the police have consistently refused to make any comment to RNZ, but now it’s emerged they hold reports covering emergency housing-related offences, the impact on the wider community and demands on police, dating back to July 2020.

So 18 months of data they have hidden from us.

It later states “police demand across the 19 emergency locations has significantly increased (140.3 per cent) from 2019/2020 to 2020/2021”. 

“Offences at emergency accommodation locations have approximately doubled (+97 per cent) from 109 to 215” over the same timeframe. 

Offences have victims – often other people at emergency housing. This is a monumental failure by the Government to keep people safe.

A reader writes in:

Just yesterday we discovered that when the traffic light situation comes into effect, young people won’t be able to sit their drivers license unless they have received both vaccinations. This means, for instance, an unvaccinated 15 year old will not be allowed to sit their Restricted driving test.

There will be many young people caught in this, who are still making their way through the vaccination programme. Already wait times to secure a test are up to three months, and rebooking will delay a lot of young people’s ability to progress through their licensing journey.

There are hundreds of teenagers booked to sit their tests over the coming weeks who won’t be able to do so. We spoke with Waka Kotahi yesterday, who hadn’t appeared to have thought this through yet.

Not sure if it’s of interest to you – but shows the issue with pushing legislation through with zero consultation…!

Maybe passing the laws under urgency within 48 hours, without consultation, was a rather bad idea.

Brendan O’Neill writes:

Is silence still violence? If it is, then a whole lot of people, from the Hollywood set to the virtue-signalling left, are guilty of some serious violence right now. Their silence on the Waukesha massacre, on the slaughter of six innocents by a man wielding his SUV as a deadly weapon, is deafening. More than that, it is sinister. Dancing grannies, an eight-year-old boy, people singing and cheering at a Christmas parade, all mown down. Six killed, 62 injured, in what police are treating as a suspected act of intentional homicide. That is, mass murder. And yet there’s been nothing from Hollywood stars who normally love to hold forth on terrible acts of violence. Influencers seem to have been struck dumb. There are no blacked-out squares on Instagram. The big woke corporations aren’t pumping out pained, concerned press releases. It’s just tumbleweed, everywhere.

Even worse, they are downplaying it.

Even the media coverage is radically different to the kind of reporting we see in the wake of other forms of violence. It is passive, treating the massacre almost as a natural disaster. Or as the evil handiwork of the SUV itself. ‘Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by [an] SUV’, said the Washington Post. Caused by an SUV. The agency of the suspect is diminished. The problem, it seems, is killer SUVs. 

It’s almost a parody – SUVs don’t kill people, drivers kill people. The murders were not caused by an SUV, but by a person.

It falls to the police, and then the courts and a jury, to work out why Darrell Brooks did what he did, and whether this was, indeed, intentional homicide. But there are things we already know about Mr Brooks that make the silence of the woke elites even more curious, and shameful. We know he posted invective against white people on social media. He wrote about ‘knokkin white ppl TF out’. He shared commentary on the problem of ‘white privilege’. There seem to have been flashes of anti-Semitism in his thinking, too. He shared an image of Hitler and a meme saying the Jews in Israel are ‘false white Jews’. He appeared to be echoing the eccentric black-nationalist belief that African-Americans are the true descendants of Israelites. Shouldn’t this be more widely discussed – the fact that a man suspected of intentionally slaughtering six white people at a Christmas parade had posted anti-white comments online?

It would seem this should be at least worthy of discussion.

To see how perverse the woke set’s relative silence on Waukesha is, just do this simple thought experiment. Imagine if a white man drove a car into a crowd of mostly black Christmas revellers and killed six of them. Imagine if it was discovered that this white man had posted social-media comments saying we should knock black people the fuck out. Imagine if he had dabbled in white-nationalist thought experiments online. What do you think would be happening right now?

It would be the most famous story in the world, for months on end.