Motorway madness

The National Govt has decided to push a part-overground, part cut and cover motorway through South Auckland.
The route goes through a few hundred houses and some 'greenspace' parklands.

It appears that much of the 'parklands' is there because it is on the route of what was originally planned as a rail extention.

Apart from the folly of more motorways in this day and age, isnt there some imorality in assuming land supposed to be for rail?

But not to worry, the place will be improved:

Ms Lee, a list MP and National's candidate in the June 13 Mt Albert by-election, made the comment at a candidates' meeting last night........Ms Lee told the meeting people drove to the electorate from south Auckland, and that the new motorway extension could divert some of that traffic and criminals from Mt Albert.

Jared Diamond, LamaLera

Jared Diamond is in hot water. He wrote in April 21, 2008 New Yorker a story of tribal vengeance. Naming names, accusing then of serious 'crimes' according to stinkyjournalism
nzherald has a summary of the story
New Yorker says it stands by the story, a $10M lawsuit is abroad
google
theaustralian(pdf) has a complaint from Mako John Kuwimb

Daniel Wemp and Henep Isum file a summons and sue for 10 million dollars in the Supreme Court of the State of New York--charge famed UCLA scientist and best-selling author Jared Diamond and Advance Publications (aka The New Yorker magazine and Times-Picayune newspaper) with defamation, April 20, 2009.

The original Jared Diamond, Annals of Anthropology, “Vengeance Is Ours,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2008, p. 74 is supposed to have been removed, or paywalled? or available google

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re #44 buddy66

Maori settled in Aotearoa-New Zealand some time before 1380CE. they had "sweet potatoes" (kumera) and one "potato", both from Polynesia, assumed to originate from the Americas, (in an unknown epoch)
Maori has a culture with no grains, no metals, no meat-or-transport-mammals (their dogs didnt feature heavily in diet, presumably because they were difficult to feed)
They rather rapidly drove the large Moa birds to extinction, and taught seals to avoid humans.
Of the skeletons unearthed from pre-whaler times, few are above 30 years old.

Maori built no stone buildings, but their wood, bone and jade carvings and tattoos are now held in the highest regard.
...It seems definitely established that Maori practiced cannibalism. Not merely ceremonial, but practical. On long journeys South to get Pounamu (Jade) they are said to have taken slaves to be eaten on the trip.
They did store kumera in pits. This seemed to have sustained/provoked a culture of constant (summer) warfare. While I Hitch-hiked through Northland NZ, a Maori driver pointed out to me that almost every hilltop showed remnants of terracing, where pallisaded forts (Pa) had been constructed with immense labour. Primarily to protect kumera pits, also to protect young women from raids.
The warfare was limited in impact because the wooden palisades were effective defence against hand weapons. Maori had darts, but no bows afaik.

...My driver told me the story about one Southern (Waikato) war-party who traveled North, and attacked a Pa. Failing to seize it, they were about to leave. The defenders, desiring to prolong the fight, sallied out and seized the chief of the Waikoto tribe (nb Waikato is a region not an Iwi-Tribe name), took him inside the Pa and strung him up between two trees. The battle carried on. The attackers changed their name to "Sons of the outstretched one"
Once whalers and sealers arrived ca 1800 with muskets,axes, and planked ships, balances of power changed dramatically.

my comment posted in boingboing

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LamaLera whalers
Video of Indonesian ' Traditional Whaling"
aljazeera
Now I'm a passionate defender of the whales (I wear a sea shepherd Tee) but I'm inclined to give these guys a few.
Anyone who jumps, onto a sperm whale with a non-explosive harpoon deserves something.
Small boats, no motor, only paddles.

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They catch around 30 whales a year. If theyre all sperm whales thats not so bad. Perhaps a compromise... more than the one per year, less than 30?
LamaLera Sahul Sea near Flores


for $575 you can floresexotictours have
"...your adventure with local boat to find out the sperm whale or other animals ie: dolpins, manta rays, turtle. if you are lucky you will directly seeing how the people catching the whale by using traditional gear."
I dont think I would go on a boat of any size to see any whale being killed...

unemployment, Pipelineistan, NAC

unemployment.
Such a lot of my relatives are in "IT" these days. Every time I ask, I find out they are installing and maintaining 'packages'
None are 'writing software'.
The great threat to corporations in the 80s was that they needed independent minded 'programmers' who wore odd clothes, had odd ideas, worked odd hours and threatened the whole normal suited thing.
Programmers didnt even need to apply for jobs. Dozens of 'agencies' would push their skill-sets.
Even poorly socialised Aspies could get jobs in Manhattan and Sydney.
Now 'IT' workers are expected to push their own barrows, the agencies are mostly gone.

Eventually the commodification of software, the simplification of databases, and the proliferation of 'Computer Science' degrees removed the threat of radical thinkers being required at the heart of capital.
I recall sitting at the executives table in the Ford Motors HQ in Wellington. The company treasurer said to me 'oh you contractors are just fly by nights' or words to that effect. Waving the good cutlery, I replied that I had been on-site longer than the salaried DP manager.

As for anger at loss of jobs. The 'missing revolution' of the 90s ( 30s, 60s had theirs) was due to wealth, cheap oil, and the spread of PCs and optical fibre which seemed to indicate an infinite velocity of money, and huge houses and cars for those in the trough. - thats trough as in pig swill,, not trough as in deep economic low.
Now unemployed, shamefaced at past excesses, looking around for a rational 'movement' which isnt anywhere to be found.
Its gonna take a deep deep low, with a huge pile of pain, before the West people get upset enough to even grumble
copy of comment at mercurynews

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Pipelineistan update
tomdispatch

The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states that "Chinese interests" will not be "threatened from [Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties." In translation: no Pentagon bases allowed in that country. "

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about
Wanda Sykes

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Apartheid

White South Africa did of course seek to control blacks. However it never tried to deny black people their very existences or to wish them away completely as we see here. We have not experienced military occupation without any rights for the occupied. We were spared the barbaric and diverse forms of collective punishment in the forms of house demolitions, the destruction of orchards belonging to relatives of suspected freedom fighters, or the physical transfer of these relatives themselves. South Africa's apartheid courts never legitimized torture. White South Africans were never given a carte blanche to humiliate black South Africans as the settlers here seem to have. The craziest apartheid zealots would never have dreamed of something as macabre as this wall. The apartheid police never used kids as shields in any of their operations. Nor did the apartheid army ever use gunships and bombs against largely civilian targets

.
net

Zionists like to boast about shooting pregnant Women
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Colon Cancer
Broccoli sprouts
kingsseeds
. 2 grams of seed will produce 15g of sprouts which is sufficient for a daily intake.
are bound to cost, royalties to JH... NZ$74/kg = 15c/day

livingfoods
Pig whip worms - seriously, these are very effective against inflammatory bowel disease - doubt you could easily source these in NZ
they dont breed in humans, so you keep taking ...
......
Me, I am losing interest in health .... Oh yeah life goes on,, long after the thrill of living is gone
a massive dose of N Acetyl Cysteine might save me
healingdaily
600 mg. (30 Capsules) US $14 for 150 caps 15.6 c/g
.........
N-acetylcysteine did not prevent A/H1N1 virus influenza infection but significantly reduced the incidence of clinically apparent disease.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
t N-acetylcysteine (NAC,1 g/kg per day, orally) significantly decreased the mortality in infected mice
nb 1g/kg is a lot !!!

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flickr

Aya Sofia and Blue Mosque, OK are definitely different entities (little sister is jaunting to Turkey en route to Geneva gig in Northern Spring
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LED Light Bulb To Replace CFLs?
from AboutMyPlanet.com by VeganVerve

... Lemnis Lighting co ... Netherlands ... new 6-watt LED light bulb. ... Pharox LED Light ... equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent ... able to be used with dimmer ... life expectancy ... 36,000 hours.
... $50 ... but 60-watt incandescent l= 900 lumens. ... these bulbs is only ... 300 lumens.

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guardian
Am I a bit WTC obsessed?, or obsessed with the BankersTrust/Deutsche tower??
I am still amazed how they hung a flag over my office window (21 years later. nv g


Seems it is finally being dismantled

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ps remembering 1980

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Chernobyl
Nearly 370 farms in Britain are still restricted in the way they use land and rear sheep because of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident 23 years ago, the government has admitted.

guardian

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Society of Sloth

org
warsocialism

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Jan Molenaar, Hubble Shuttle

Jan Molenaar in Napier
classic example of State power. On a Ganja charge, send in the dog handler. If the citizen objects effectively, Follow up with military light armoured vehicles.
Nasty secret: Western societies are inhuman and solitary. The only experience of community you may experience is your local droogs community: trust, secrecy, loyalty , sometimes betrayal, but humanity at least.
Now I'm a huge fan of feminism and lesbianism, but its clear that the half-assed womens lib of the 70s has left women conflicted and bitter. Ulrike Meinhof did her best, but you cant liberate the people short of smashing the state.

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... Backdated advice for men: accept that the West is solitary, lonely and isolated: its the place where you make your money. You only need a million, or even just a half a million. If you make much more, you will get obsessed with pointless things like luxury and fancy labels and cars.
... Dont get hung up on the loneliness, head out of the West (Thailand, Sri-Lanka, Kenya, Russia, RP etc etc ) for human contact, on vacation, and permanently once youve made your half mill.
... Sadly now the West is crashing, it may take your mill with it, especially if youve put it in ING mortgage funds. There may now be no way to get it together. True group anger and resistance is a rarity 1930s, 1960s ... dont expect resistance now,, the current youth are dazed and bamboozled, they wont utter a peep, beyond their whining attempts at music.
Still no excuse to get bitter and twisted and off the local drugs dog handler.
My advice is: avoid crank and ethanol, but its likely I will be ignoring my own advice. I expect my future will go something like: condoms full of Shabu rupture internally in LAX, private security guards tazer me to death.
I promise my flat will not be booby-trapped.
...
Ich gehöre nicht zur Baader-Meinhof Gruppe

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Last shuttle to Hubble

I recall in Bay Ridge in 1980, I glued together a plastic model of the shuttle. My buddy DJ, an iconoclastic escapee from the IDF, was rather dismissive of my toy enthusiasm, until he discovered that the cargo bay perfectly fitted beer cans. I'm from the James Taylor generation, protested against USA while gluing plastic lunar module legs on. Nearly made it in pre-Reagan Manhattan, wow, back then, in old America, volunteerism was high, executive salary was only 40x a workers pay - vs 400x in 2008.