Pasta News Network - New Zealand

The man who attempted to bring down New Zealand's national grid says he's "having a great time in prison" and is a "Corrections success story".

Taupō man Graham Philip, 62, was sentenced on seven unprecedented charges of sabotage two months ago after attacking Transpower infrastructure in November 2021 to draw attention to his anti-vaccination views.

The attack sparked a fire and resulted in $1.25 million in damage. All further details, including precisely what he attacked, are permanently suppressed. He was the first New Zealander to ever face a sabotage charge since the law was introduced shortly after World War II.

One way to make a statement I suppose.

A golf coach who was “humiliated” after being dismissed for not getting the Covid vaccine will receive more than $15,000 from his former employer after successfully arguing his dismissal was unjustified.

Benjamin Harwood had worked for Whangamatā Golf Club Incorporated for a little over a year when he was dismissed in December 2021 following the club’s “no jab, no play” policy.

Harwood took the club to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA), arguing that the policy was “unreasonable and unfair” and failed to fairly consider alternatives to dismissal.

Marking an employee, who is primarily outdoors, as a high risk vector for Covid spread is not an isolated case sadly. Also shows people had and continue to have little understanding of how pathogens work.

Regardless, a small win for democracy and principles.

"This is a reverse Robin Hood scheme. It's taking from people who don't have a choice about what kind of vehicles they drive like farmers and tradies and it's giving it to people who can afford to buy the expensive luxury vehicles like a Tesla," National's transport spokesperson Simeon Brown said.

But while it's supposed to be revenue-neutral, since April when the tax part of the scheme began only $62.8 million has been collected from the heavy emitters tax - while just over $95 million has been paid out in subsidies.

Good Job.

For many Australians, the rent crisis is just starting. Advertised rents have been soaring, but mainly for new rentals – so called “asking rents”.

The broadest measure of rents actually paid – the rents on the 480,000 or so capital city properties the Bureau of Statistics uses to calculate the consumer price index – has climbed only modestly, increasing 3.5% in the year to October.

Rent cuts during the first year of COVID mean the Bureau’s measure of capital city rents is just 2.2% above where it was in February 2020, ahead of the COVID lockdowns.

But advertised rents are climbing steeply. According to property consultants SQM Research, they are an extraordinary 35% higher than in February 2020.

Balanced article from The Conversation (which usually leans very far left).

What would fix this properly though, is having a sound and sensible government that understands printing / lending money creates inflation.

"The bill comes due." - Baron Mordo

Major institutions have added new rules which state that the use of AI is cheating, with some students already caught using the software. But one AI expert has warned universities are in an “arms race” they can never win.

ChatGPT, which generates text on any subject in response to a prompt or query, was launched in November by OpenAI and has already been banned across all devices in New York’s public schools due to concerns over its “negative impact on student learning” and potential for plagiarism.

Next week: "Australian universities discover cohort of foreign students no longer passing, after introduction of oral presentations and 'pen and paper' exams impacting KPI's"

Voltaire, the clearest of Enlightenment thinkers, wrote in 1765: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

250 odd years later, these words resonate possibly louder now than they did then. Controlling ‘the Narrative’ via propaganda and suppression of dissent has always been central to enacting tyrannical measures, but never before have those in power had at their disposal such potent levers of ubiquitous modern technology and communication to enforce global censorship. As the world begins to wake up to the devastating effects of the past three years surrounding the emergence of COVID-19 and the response measures enacted by our governments, it is now beyond doubt that this censorship has cost the lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the globe.

At this point the Twitter files are the gift that keep on giving. But I do not think it is all altruistic on Elon's part.

A case has recently been in the news and is being decided by the Supreme Court. It concerns a cake designer who doesn’t want to bake cakes for homosexual “marriages.” Is the cakedesigner free to refuse, on grounds of freedom of religion—the designer’s religion doesn’t recognize such “marriages” as legitimate, or must homosexuals be served, because the cake-making service is a public accommodation that must be open to any customer who can pay for the service provided? This question frames the basic issue the wrong way. If you offer a service or sell a good, you should be free to sell it to whomever you want, or to refuse it sell it.A sale and purchase is a voluntary transaction that requires the consent of all the parties to the deal. Thus, if a cake designer doesn’t want to sell cakes to homosexuals, he should be free to refuse. He isn’t required to claim that selling the cake goes against his religion. What if he just doesn’t like homosexuals, but doesn’t allege that his religion backs him up in this dislike? He should be free to “discriminate” in any way he wishes. In arguing in this way, we are following the principles of the greatest twentieth-century theorist of a free society, Murray Rothbard.

In a functioning society we can be honest with each-other and understand we are all different.

Even now he can’t possibly know the full impact of his influence. I suspect, for example, that he is unaware of the crucial role he played in American political life when only two years ago, young men were being drawn to the invidious politics of the so-called Alt-right as an alternative to the false moralism of the social-justice left. They were drawn to his brave stances against speech controls, but he knew better than to side with any mob on either side of the extremes. He schooled even his new fans in the evils of every brand of identity politics – and the moral urgency of universal human dignity – and justly earned the wrath of alt-right leadership. Thus did he contribute to saving a generation from perdition in extremely volatile times. For this, he deserves the gratitude of every genuine liberal, but, so far as I know, he has never been publicly credited for this achievement.

While the international Tibetan basket weaving forum may not admit it, and despite Peterson's (((background))), he is one of the few that genuinely tried to reach out to the "lost boys of Kek".

And in the big picture, he's got a good track record on being correct. Trying to make everyone special on a macro level is a recipe for disaster.

Dr. Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is “certainly no scientific basis” for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilisation cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power.

There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps – all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences.

Your energy output / capacity is tied directly to the strength of your economy. That should tell you enough.

The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on relible, economic, and environmentally viable energy. The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none if these qualities. This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators. It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis. Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcicng is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate. Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

"We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act."

17 pages with graphs. Pro-nuclear stance which I would be inclined to agree with given the other current available alternatives to coal / oil / gas.

Worth reading in full, as referenced by today's Daily Sceptic article.

From 2021:

A previously symptomless 86-year-old man received the first dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. He died 4 weeks later from acute renal and respiratory failure. Although he did not present with any COVID-19-specific symptoms, he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 before he died. Spike protein (S1) antigen-binding showed significant levels for immunoglobulin (Ig) G, while nucleocapsid IgG/IgM was not elicited. Acute bronchopneumonia and tubular failure were assigned as the cause of death at autopsy; however, we did not observe any characteristic morphological features of COVID-19. Postmortem molecular mapping by real-time polymerase chain reaction revealed relevant SARS-CoV-2 cycle threshold values in all organs examined (oropharynx, olfactory mucosa, trachea, lungs, heart, kidney and cerebrum) except for the liver and olfactory bulb. These results might suggest that the first vaccination induces immunogenicity but not sterile immunity.

Figure 1 is worth a gander.

Inquiring minds have questions.

We also find that after controlling for vitamin D blood levels, veterans receiving higher dosages of Vitamin D obtained greater benefits from supplementation than veterans receiving lower dosages. Veterans with Vitamin D blood levels between 0 and 19 ng/ml exhibited the largest decrease in COVID-19 infection following supplementation. Black veterans received greater associated COVID-19 risk reductions with supplementation than White veterans. As a safe, widely available, and affordable treatment, Vitamin D may help to reduce the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The money shot:

When we extrapolate our results for vitamin D3 supplementation to the entire US population in 2020, there would have been approximately 4 million fewer COVID-19 cases and 116,000 deaths avoided