The US has now had over 250,000 people die from Covid-19. I’ve just looked through the stats for the seven most affected OECD countries and it is interesting the difference in additional deaths in the last four months.

This is the increase in deaths from 17 July to 17 November for each country:

1. US 83%
2. France 53%
3. Belgium 51%
4. Spain 47%
5. Italy 33%
6. UK 17%
7. Sweden 11%

The US continues to be the country that has experienced the largest increase in deaths per capita in the last four months. France and Belgium are pretty terrible also though.

Radio NZ reports:

Even the best-case scenarios suggest a minimum sea level rise of 50 centimetres by the end of the 21st century. It could be as much as three metres.

As always I turn to the IPCC as the consensus on the science. Not because it is necessarily right, but it is the most authoritative source. Their 2018 report on sea level rise (page 277) shows that the best case scenario for business as usual is 31 cms, and as low as 15 cms under different policy scenarios. It is simply wrong to say the best case scenario is 50 cms. It is between 15 and 31 cms.

The assertion it could be as much as three metres is also flawed. You can’t say it is wrong because I could assert that a large meteor could hit the planet in 2025 and it could happen.

But how does the three metres used by Radio NZ compared to the IPCC. What is their worst case scenario for business as usual? It is 110 cms, not 300 cms.

So Radio NZ should apologise for misrepresenting the scientific consensus.

A lot of criticism of this Herald headline. Most readers would take that to mean Trump is or was planning to use nuclear weapons.

Instead it is a reference to a possible US attack using conventional weapons on an Iranian nuclear facility. Hugely different.

Matt Nippert reports:

Auckland Council interest rate hedging swaps have accumulated $2.74 billion in unrealised losses and fixed the cost of its $10b in borrowings at double current market rates, documents show.

Incredible, and still no one is willing to apologise or be held accountable.

“Auckland Council’s Treasury Management Steering Group includes a PWC partner and other private sector experts in debt management and investment policy. Its policy reflects that of other large council and corporate entities and is regarded as good practice,” the spokesperson said.

If losing $2.7 billion is regarded by the Council as good practice, I’d hate to see what they regard as poor practice

Newsroom reports:

Not every Pike family feels the same.

Marion Curtin has spoken out reluctantly and occasionally – mainly, she says, to correct the record. The Christchurch retiree, whose son Richard Holling died at Pike River, is appalled re-entry went ahead.

“To me it was politically motivated before the previous election,” she says. “I objected to my son’s death being used as a political ploy.”

She backs the National Government’s “insight and knowledge” about Pike River. Having endured the Canterbury earthquakes, she says the millions of dollars spent on re-entry could have had a better use.

“I have never been shown or told anything that justified re-entry.”

Curtin can’t wrap her head around the idea of justice for Pike River. “Justice for what? There was an explosion in a coal mine.” It was an accident, she says, and nobody knows for sure what happened. Everybody involved, even company management, has suffered, she says.

“If anyone can prove to me that somebody in that mine at the time lit a match or did something that was blatantly stupid that caused the explosion then I would feel that it was a deliberate act. But if it was, that person has already paid with their life so what else do you want?”

The notion that the reentry will lead to some evidence that would be significant has always been farcical. It is almost certain the $50 million spent will result in no bodies found and no useful evidence.

A reader writes in:

The result at 50.7 per cent voting “no” and 48.4 per cent voting “yes” tells me the current law is not working.

It’s 50/50.

What would the result have looked like if it was ‘decriminalisation’ rather than full recreational legalisation. I think Labour and the Greens went too far.

No pot smoker I know (and I know a lot) wanted cafes – they just want to go about their lives without fear of being prosecuted.

This is an opportunity squandered.  Very  conservative US states have voted pro cannabis and  the tax revenue being generated appears substantial.

Very good points from the reader.

Norton released:

Nearly two thirds of Kiwi respondents (66 percent) believe they’ve encountered disinformation first-hand and 13 percent say they’ve shared information later shown to be incorrect or intentionally misleading according to new research released by NortonLifeLock (NASDAQ: NLOK), a global leader in consumer Cyber Safety.

According to the online survey of more than 1,000 New Zealanders, conducted by The Harris Poll, more than 8 in 10 Kiwi respondents (82 percent) are very concerned about the spread of disinformation but 55 percent feel powerless to stop it. And 56 percent of Kiwis surveyed often question whether information they see on social media is disinformation or fact. Disinformation is verifiably false or misleading information that is created and spread deliberately with the intention of deceiving, misleading and creating division.

Disinformation is information that isn’t just false, but that the creator knows is false. This is different to misinformation when people wrongly think something is correct.

Disinformation has taken a toll on relationships, with many Kiwis having argued with someone (37 percent), unfriended/unfollowed someone on social media (28 percent) or taken a break from social media altogether (21 percent) because of disinformation.

Taking a break from social media is often a good idea.

A guest post from Liam Hehir:

The Herald reports:

The Government is coming under pressure from all sides as housing prices continue to skyrocket. …

The median price for a house in Auckland has hit $1 million, and prices nationally have increased 19.8 per cent year-on-year, bringing the median to $725,000.

The Reserve Bank recently announced an untargeted lending scheme, which is expected to further inflame property prices.

Labour campaigned in 2017 on abolishing the urban rural boundary in Auckland, which massively artificially inflates land and hence house prices. This would have made a huge difference, if implemented.

Sadly they broke their promise and have quietly dropped this pledge. So it is no surprise that house prices continue to rise.

The Herald reports:

Wellington City Council is putting together a budget of infrastructure with a rates increase forecast of 23 per cent next year.

The council is about halfway through its review of its Long Term Plan, which signals how it will divvy up its budget for the next 10 years.

Mayor Andy Foster says it’ll be one of the most challenging budgets ever considered by the city council.

They’re about to enter what’s commonly referred to as the “trade-offs” stage. This is when decisions are made around what’s prioritised to bring down projected rates increases.

It’s understood the starting point is an increase of 23 per cent for 2021/22.

That’s not a starting point. It;s a political suicide point.

It’s understood one example given at a workshop on the issue yesterday was the council selling the Convention Centre, which is still being built, and leasing it back.

Another option is not to do the convention centre at all. If there is an economic case for it, let a private oeprator build it.

Young said shorter opening hours at libraries could be considered as well as cutting back on consultation.

“At home if you have a big drop in income, you cut your costs.”

Exactly.

Newsroom reports:

The marriage of convenience has turned into a nasty divorce. Billy Te Kahika’s NZPP and Jami-Lee Ross’ Advance NZ joined forces in July and campaigned under the Advance NZ banner. They received less than 1 per cent of the vote and on October 25, Ross announced that Te Kahika had quit as co-leader. …

“On November 6, Billy and NZPP received a letter from Jami-Lee stating that the policies that the parties co-wrote were in fact owned by, and the copyright of, Advance NZ and NZPP had no right to them whatsoever.”

Stace says many of the policies that are listed on the Advance NZ website were taken directly from the NZPP website’s “What we stand for section,” which had existed since June 2020.

Not sure you can own a policy!

Sure you can claim copyright over the exact text, but parties are allowed to have similiar policies.

In the same letter Ross warned Stace and Te Kahika not to use his colour scheme on their website, or social media pages.

“In particular I am referring to the use of the following which I’ll refer to as “the JLR branding”: the unique cobalt blue layered flag effect background with lightning bolt and the red and blue rectangular block name design with the Advance NZ star design.

“The JLR branding now forms part of the unique Advance NZ “get up”. It was commissioned by me in 2019 and enjoys protection under our copyright and fair trading legislation as well as protection against passing off at common law.” I authorised the use of the JLR branding by Advance NZ and it has become a valuable asset for our party in which we have built up considerable goodwill and reputation.”

Laughing out loud at the assertion that the JLR branding is a valuable asset.

Stace says he emailed Ross on November 13 asking for half the funds in the account to be transferred to NZPP’s own BNZ account.

When he didn’t hear back from Ross, Stace says he asked police to investigate because he believes under the memorandum of understanding, Advance NZ owes NZPP close to $30,000.

When Newsroom approached Ross for comment we were emailed a copy of a letter sent to Stace, later that day, from Advance NZ’s lawyer, Graeme Edgeler.

Edgeler dismissed the idea that NZPP is owed any money.

Looks like most of the money may end up being spent on legal fees 🙂

Stace said he started to notice a change in Ross when the result of the election became clear. Advance NZ got 0.9 per cent of the vote, well short of the 5 per cent needed to enter parliament. Ross had earlier chosen to withdraw from the contest for Botany, the electoral seat he held as a National MP, saying he wanted to concentrate on lifting Advance NZ’s party vote.

“As soon as the election ended Jami-Lee started growing a beard like Billy. He started using phrases like Billy uses. I’m a private investigator and I notice things.

LOL. Is he suggesting JLR is going to make Billy TK disappear and start impersonating him.

Stuff reports:

Supermarkets will be subjected to a year-long “market study” by the Commerce Commission to see if they are offering consumers fair prices and their suppliers a fair deal.

Those two things are somewhat contradictory. The better the deal for suppliers, then the higher the prices are for consumers.

Groceries are one of our most regular expenses, so we want to make sure pricing is fair,” Clark said.

The average household spent about 17 per cent of its weekly expenses on food, and that had been increasing year on year, he said.

What is interesting is if we look at the increase in food prices over the last three Government terms, as measured by the Food Price Index.

• Oct 11 to Oct 14: 2.2% increase
• Oct 14 to Oct 17: 2.6% increase
• Oct 17 to Oct 20: 5.8% increase

Maybe the problem isn’t the supermarkets, but Governments increasing costs on proeducers and employers?

From 538:

• The manual recount in Georgia is two thirds complete and no significant errors have been found
• Senate is confirmed at 50 GOP and 48 Dem so the two Georgia special elections will determine control
• Of the 435 House seats, Dems have 219, GOP 205 and 11 undecided.
• Of the undecideds GOP lead in six, Dems in three and two are within 0.1% but with GOP just ahead
• So GOP could end up with 211 to 213 seats which would be a gain of 12 to 14

The Herald reports:

“Absolutely incompetent and absolutely staggering loss,” Cunliffe wrote on social media.

He was responding to a Herald article about the council booking $1.4b in balance sheet losses on interest-rate derivatives in the past two years after its strategy of fixing interest cost long-term backfired when interest rates fell. …

Mayor Phil Goff, who declined repeated requests by the Herald last week to discuss or justify the hedging losses and whether ratepayers were locked into now over-priced loans, did not want to lock horns with his former Labour colleague today.

Instead he issued a statement through a mayoral spokesman, saying: “Any claim that there will be ‘real’ costs to the council is factually incorrect.

The Council is paying $1,4 billion more in interest than it would otherwise have to, if it hadn’t fixed at high interest rates. That is pretty real.

Cunliffe – who Goff appointed finance spokesman when he was Labour leader from 2008 to 2011 – said: “Could there be a clearer case of a sackable offence?

“Who is resigning over it? 1400 million reasons to hang their heads in shame.”

If this was a private company and someone made a decision that cost the company $1.4 billion, I’m pretty sure they would be long gone.

Stuff reports:

Labour has ruled out doubling sick leave before Christmas, despite a push from the Green Party to do so.

Green Party workplace relations spokeswoman Jan Logie said bringing forward Labour’s plan to double sick leave from five to ten days would make sure people stayed home if they had Covid-19 symptoms, keeping the whole country safer. …

“Getting this done before Christmas is critical to ensure peace of mind for businesses and workers alike. To not be able to offer extended sick leave for workers during this busy Christmas period puts us all at risk.”

So the Green Party want a law change rammed through Parliament using urgency, without even allowing affected employers to have a say on the law change.

Remember the days when they were the principled party that opposed urgency and bypassing select committees?

Glenn Greenwald writes:

One of the effects of the ensuing intense controversies was that I was unable to finish an article I had been working on for months at the time: a lengthy, deeply reported examination of the internal war engulfing the ACLU, fueled by a raging conflict between its more traditional lawyers who still believe in the primacy of free speech and the need to defend it and the newer political liberal activists and lawyers who do not.

The ACLU used to be a strident defender of all speech, including speech that it detested. It now has become an organisation that is pro-censorship of speech that some people find offensive.

The same has happened in NZ with the misnamed NZ Council for Civil Liberties. Once upon a time they were defenders of free speech, but now they more often are apologists for restrictions on speech.

On Friday morning, Abigail Shrier — author of a new book exploring the rapid, massive increase in teenage girls self-identifying as trans boys and undergoing permanent gender reassignment therapies and surgeries in their teens — published an article in Quillette describing the extraordinary efforts by major corporations and various activists to prevent her book from being purchased

A taboo topic. In a sane world you should be allowed to have a view fully in support of trans people being able to undergo gender reassignment, but also have a view that some (not all) young people may not know their gender identity and could conflate it with their sexual orientation.

The recent protest by Spotify employees over Joe Rogan’s podcast was triggered in large part by his decision to invite Shrier onto his program. Many liberal employees inside the streaming service demanded this episode be removed. “Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leadership’s response in [Rogan’s] conversations,” was one of the questions posed to Spotify’s CEO at a tense staff-wide meeting, along with a demand to know why that program had not been deleted from the platform. 

Note that what is being discussed here are not efforts to criticize or protest Shrier and her book. Nobody disputes such criticisms would be appropriate. It is much more extreme than that: an effort to prevent others from hearing her views in her book — i.e., censorship: not state censorship, but corporate censorship.

Exactly. If Shrier is wrong, then tell us why. Instead though there is a concerted effort to prevent people from being able to access her book.

But for numerous reasons, the ACLU — still with some noble and steadfast dissenters — is fast transforming into a standard liberal activist group at the expense of the free speech and due process principles it once existed to defend. Those reasons include changing cultural mores, an abandonment by millennials and Gen Z activists of the long-standing leftist belief in free speech and replaced by demands that views they dislike be silenced (which in turn causes Gen X and Boomer managers and editors fearful of losing their jobs or being vilified to succumb to this authoritarianism)

This is why I eventually joined the Free Speech Coalition. Groups like the NZCCL and the Human Rights Commission only defend speech they agree with. You need a group that will defend speech they vehemently disagree with.

I know that the legal and cultural assault on trans people is very real, and fervently believe trans people have the absolute right to full legal protection of and respect for their identities (Shrier herself has repeatedly said she also believes this: “I fully support medical transition for mature adults,” she wrote in her Quillette article).

But the question of whether young teens are being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria, and at what age they are capable of making choices to permanently alter their bodies and identities, is of course a question society is exploring and should be able to explore in good faith without being demonized as bigots.

Exactly.

Not many things I agree with Glenn Greenwald on, but this is one of them.

UPDATE: Also worth reading this post on Medium about autism and transgender. It was published on Medium as it was effectively blackballed elsewhere.

Stuff reports:

Victoria University of Wellington says it may consider financial compensation for victims of Jack Body, a former lecturer and famed composer alleged to have sexually coerced, stupefied and abused male students over decades.

The university’s plan for redress, which it hopes will be co-designed by the survivors, comes as new allegations surface from former students of Victoria University’s New Zealand School of Music.

Body died in 2015, a week after being awarded Arts Icon status, one of the highest honours in the New Zealand arts world. But after the university asked alumni of its New Zealand School of Music to donate to a memorial fund in his name, a number of them opted to speak out.

They told a Stuff investigation that Body got students drunk in his home and asked them to take their clothes off for photo shoots, and, in one case, sexually assaulted a student during an assessment meeting on campus.

Credit to Vic for stepping up. Less credit to others though:

A post by RNZ Concert presenter Nick Tipping on Facebook drew dozens of comments, including some by the deputy chair of industry body Sounz, Eve de Castro-Robinson​, who claimed the allegations came from “those with a strong agenda against Jack” and that the investigation was a “witch hunt” and “sensationalist clickbait”.

If someone rapes you, I guess you can be considered to have a strong agenda against that person.

But in another post, de Castro-Robinson admitted she had known Body “crossed boundaries”.

“We all knew it was happening to different extents. I warned Jack against compromising himself with students myself, years ago. Any of us in Academia know the rules of conduct.

So “we all knew” and they did nothing about it because his talent with music was more important! Appalling.

“I have in no way condoned the behavior [sic] nor disbelieved those in the article, merely pointed out the correct channel for this sort of thing is through a proper complaints procedure rather than for a journo to splash unproven, unsubstantiated allegations concerning a dead man on popular media.”

There is no proper complaints procedure if your rapist is dead.

And if those assaulted by him had spoken up earlier, then there would be fewer victims.

Sounz executive director Diana Marsh this week sought to distance the organisation from de Castro-Robinson’s comments, saying they “in no way reflect our views as an organisation”.

Is she still the deputy chair?

De Castro-Robinson declined to be interviewed but released a statement, including an apology.

“I reacted with my personal response. The late Jack Body was a friend, colleague, and an influential figure in New Zealand contemporary classical music without peer.”

De Castro Robinson said she had “benefited enormously” from Body’s music, support and kindness, and felt compelled to protect his personal and professional legacy.

“However, any such allegations of abuse must be fully investigated, and I unreservedly condemn any form of sexual harassment or assault. I regret my comments, and if I have offended anyone, I strongly apologise for any misjudged statements.”

As apologies go, it is around a 3/10 on the apology scale. You don’t minimise it by saying “If I have offended anyone”.

How about “I let my friendship with Jack Body cloud my judgment. I apologise to all the victims of Jack Body for my comments which were wrong”

Newshub reports:

A lobby group concerned about a major trade deal New Zealand signed this evening says the COVID-19 pandemic provides a strong reason why such agreements should be ditched.

Why? On second thoughts, I don’t want to know. The “lobby group” is no doubt the usual collection of Marxists who just hate trade.

Leaders from all 15 countries watched via video as Ministers signed the deal: from Auckland, Trade Minister Damien O’Connor signed for New Zealand.

Speaking afterwards, he told reporters it would bring security and certainty to exporters.

One of the aims in coming years is to progressively lower tariffs across many areas.

The RCEP itself doesn’t appear to lower a single tariff. It reduces some non-tariffs barriers and may lead to lower tariffs, but by itself it doesn’t do that much. Still a worthwhile step in the right direction.

But Edward Miller, from It’s Our Future, fears New Zealanders won’t benefit.

“We’re seeing a huge secret agreement being negotiated where we don’t know what the risks are and from the economic modelling that we’ve seen there’s very little economic benefit to be gained.

“So we don’t know why the government continues to do secret deals that are against our national interests.”

Miller said there had been no effective public consultation over the deal, some parts of which attack New Zealand’s national interests.

You notice Miller provides no details. He just recites cliches.

Miller said It’s Our Future would keep pushing the government to pull out of international trade deals.

Their actual agenda – no trade deals at all. Never mind that freer trade has pulled several hundred million people out of extreme poverty. They’re still against.

Stuff reports:

The Labour Party have appointed long-time staffer Rob Salmond as the party’s new general-secretary.

Salmond has worked for the Labour Party in a variety of roles for many years but is best-known for his role in the Chinese-sounding names controversy.

A sensible appointment for Labour. Rob’s skills align well with what the party organisation needs.

He was working for the party’s research unit in 2015 when it attracted huge controversy by analysing the names of home-buyers in Auckland and tallying up those that “sounded” Chinese. At that time Labour was attempting to prove that overseas buyers were helping to heat up the housing market.

This caused a huge outcry at the time, and has followed around Labour MP Phil Twyford and Salmond ever since.

Salmond told Stuff that he regretted the incident and apologised to the Chinese community, albeit with some qualification.

“The important part that I regret is in helping put that together I didn’t appreciate the way that some people who didn’t share our values might interpret what we did and use it to harm members of the Chinese community,” Salmond said.

Oh that is rather precious. We did nothing wrong in blaming house prices on people with Chinese sounding surnames. The problem was other people blamed them also!