Annie Goldson Film Documents Fringe Players at Hinge of Modern Times

The Age of Aquarius took its time in making landfall in Oceania. It was said that someone who missed London’s zany swinging 60’s could catch up simply by arriving in Wellington in time for the 70s which is where and when Red Mole started.

A theatrical free form group merging elements of vaudeville, the fringe, and the circus Red Mole had some early commercial success by teaming up with the undisputed Queen of the capital’s night life throughout the 1970s.

This was Carmen (pictured) who had begun life as Trevor Rupe and switched genders to headline the capital’s after hours entertainment through a mixture of courtly savvy and an instinct for what the punters really wanted.

A benign figure and sidewalk philosopher Carmen noted that the “Day people have no idea what the Night People do.”

Carmen’s scene was a natural fit for the Red Mole louche and deliberately outrageous version of the performing arts complete with the players timeless posters.

After bedding in at Carmen’s venue Red Mole which had started as an indignant in-your-face touring troupe decided it was insufficiently self-renewing, too comfortable and had better start the rigours of touring again.

Fretting about going over old ground the players now took a step which was to distinguish them from any other Antipodean group in this category at this time.

Red Mole went straight to New York arriving literally out of the blue in the heart of the Times Square and Broadway theatre district at a time when the Great White Way along with the rest of New York was in the throes of bankruptcy.

A good looking and forceful collective Red Mole started door knocking and in due course discovered a manager and sites for their gigs.

Annie Goldson’s archival footage blended with contemporary recollections of group veterans and families outlines a hard scrabble existence braced with performing stints in the seedier bars of this milieu in order to get the cash to keep Red Mole operational.

Art is a cruel mistress and there is the impression that the moment the group got a steady earner they were possessed of an urge to try something else, somewhere else.

In road-film style we follow the Red Mole group into Central America and it is now that troupe members start to question the stress and uncertainty of their life style an instability emphasised now by the pregnancy of one of the founders.

In the end the troupe ended not that far away from their point of departure back in New Zealand in Wellington’s Island Bay suburb long a haven for those of artistic sensibilities.

There followed the early and unexpected deaths of the two founders Alan Brunton and Sarah Rodwell whose daughter Ruby is on screen to retrace the troupe’s colourful path in the New York theatre district.

Ruby is drawn in with other thesp veterans to bring audiences up to date with the bitter sweet denouement of what might be described as a pioneering venture in collective theatrical touring counter culture.

The defiance of the group was picked up by one New York critic who noted its “anti-colonial” theme.

Was Red Mole transformational in a politico-performing sense?

When it started Equity was an industrial union and there was attention to quavers instead of quotas, and people still married people of the opposite sex.

By the time the Red Mole thespians finally hung up their papier mache head masks everything had changed.

Their formula of attention-getting defiance had become standardised, the norm. Everyone in politics, the media, and show business was doing it.

The film is curiously sub titled as “A Romance.”

The romance was surely between the troupe and their art because here their devotion as portrayed in the feature documentary was constant in that they hewed to it always and never falling prey to the tempting diversity of soft options taken by so many of today’s practitioners.

Prime Minister Kennedy School University Class of ’23 Saw Kudos become Chaos

When former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern was appointed to several Harvard University Kennedy School fellowships she could hardly have dreamed that Harvard would become that same year the epicentre of global intelligentsia class warfare.

Harvard’s dealings with New Zealand have been immense and quite literally down to earth.

Harvard has been the major foreign investor in forestry and dairy farms in quite recent years.

It controlled what is considered the largest planted forest anywhere, the Kaingaroa Forest in the North Island.

Harvard then acquired immense tracts of dairy farming in the South Island.

Not so well known is that Harvard’s “external” investing was managed from New Zealand and with New Zealand agribusiness specialists managing and directing it based in New Zealand and operating from Harvard itself.

Since the glory days early in the new millennium Harvard has retreated from much of its investment in forestry in and around the North Island’s Central Plateau.

A particular problem was legal access to forestry internal trucking roads.

While forestry lost some of its early gloss Harvard University’s colossal and little-perceived planned long term stake in New Zealand dairy farming seemed to appear increasingly promising.

For example an unexpected development in the Central Plateau while Harvard was in full surge in investing in it was the conversion of pine forestry plantations into dairy farms.

The upheavals in only recent weeks at Harvard now offer an explanation why the university pulled out of the dairy sector here.

The explanation is that dairy as the millennium moved on became increasingly prone to accusations that it by definition conflicted with Harvard’s by now flourishing cultural policies.

Cows became the focus of the emitting into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases.

The acute progressivism revealed now at its rawest at Harvard points to an accelerating momentum of the anti-cow campaign dating to the abandonment of the immense New Zealand dairy farming investment.

This now revealed susceptibility meant that the university at this time felt itself compelled to quit anything at all identified as conflicting with utter adherence to contemporary mores and this included eliminating ruminants.

The very large scale intervention by Harvard University in the primary sector in New Zealand was an overlooked text book example of intergenerational or very long term investing.

The New Zealand managers who drove the investing scheme in both hemispheres are now retired.

In contrast the much more visible connection between the South Seas and the university became personified by the appointment of Dame Jacinda (pictured) to fellowships at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

No single institution in the English-speaking world evoked the detached patrician prestige of Harvard..

Parking a career in the Harvard Yard was the touchstone of anyone’s CV and especially so if they intended to walk the world stage. .

Yet in just a few days the halo of pristine elegance became irrevocably smeared as the university was revealed as just one more institutional participant in the twisting and turning inherent in compromising with what has become a bare knuckle clash of cultures.

Instead of being above the battle the university was immersed in it, central to it, even generating and sustaining it.

Among those who selected Harvard as their pathway to an even greater participation on the world stage was former New Zealand prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern now freshly ennobled.

Dame Jacinda’s trademark internationally is as an exponent even the leader in the applied empathetic political navigation to avoid exactly the type of mass interpersonal ruckus that Harvard now drifted into.

Her Harvard tour of duty at the Kennedy School, itself a blending of politico-academic superlatives, was twinned and timed geopolitically with her role as a trustee of Earthshot an exalted promotional ritual.

Though associated with the British Royal Family the environmental kudos scheme is in fact run by a collection of cross-government organisations and philanthropies. Among these coincidentally is a Kennedy foundation.

It is now almost 400 years since John Harvard bequeathed his library and real estate and thus founded the university.

Few could have seen how at this very late stage the university could have become such a visible hub for every single element of today’s applied intellectual class warfare in the West.

Mt Olympus overnight became transformed into a seething, sulphurous brawling volcano of resentment as the most entitled and privileged broke cover and revealed the extent of the squabbles long hidden behind those so recently-revered ivy-clad walls.

All this overshadows the era in which New Zealand became the international focus for what was described in management schools at the cusp of the present millennium as intergenerational investing.

Triumphs Turn to Shame in New Zealand guilt transfer politics

Jostling foreign financiers queue to fund industrial solar utilities in New Zealand and to secure the key governmental consents to implement them.

Amnesia settles over the country about what happens when infrastructure is gleefully put in the hands of foreigners.

New Zealand’s rail network is the most recent example.

Officialdom saw the sale as the pathway to immense foreign investment.

The opposite happened.

After a honeymoon period devoted to adorning the rail network with carefully arranged localised publicity packaging the investment went in the opposite direction.

The new foreign owners sent the money back to themselves.

A number of years went by for this to become evident.

Only when the share price of the New Zealandised rail operator collapsed did the extent of the prolonged absence of investment become obvious notably in the state of the permanent way.

The excitement now surrounding the foreign controlled solar power utilities introduces also the unstated problem of them being planned for dairy farms.

Dairy is New Zealand’s biggest export product category.

Similarly they are planned for tourist destinations.

Tourism is New Zealand’s biggest foreign exchange earning sector.

The unstated value of these projects is the value of the consents to build them, and the value of these consents as tradeable financial instruments.

These solar utilities require equipment the size of industrial buildings.

It is no coincidence that the solar power installations enjoy a life span compared to the trees in the forestry schemes that they are increasingly replacing.

This is 30 years.

The difference is that at the effluxion of this time the trees are scheduled to be harvested, while nobody has yet specified what will be done with the heavy Chinese-manufactured machinery strewn over the dairy pastures.

The solar rush has much to do with the uncertainty penetrating the once unchallengeable forestry schemes.

The forest fires that destroyed so much forestry in the north west of the United States just recently also devoured immense swathes of countervailing sequestration rights for the industrialists.

Locally the onslaught of cyclone Gabrielle demonstrated the fragility of pine forestry in the face of the severity of weather that the afforestation policies were supposed to avert.

Industrialists and their financiers scour countries such as New Zealand looking for convenient and highly accessible land which can be quickly converted into solar industrial utilities.

There is too the search for impressionable administrations prone to the visionary style of politics found in New Zealand.

Here the level of meek compliant conformity is manifested for example in shame even in the nation’s successful and enduring pioneering implementation of geothermal (see diagram) power, the last century’s pre-eminent contribution everywhere to alternative electrical generation.

It is never mentioned.

The reason is that the multilaterals which have so successfully dictated New Zealand farming and energy operations refuse to classify it as a renewable.

An institutionalised search for collective guilt takes increasingly curious forms.

One was the Labour government’s deliberately burying the fact that New Zealand was topping the world renewables charts by generating 93 percent. True, the lakes were full.

Any trumpeting though would have conveyed quite the wrong impression which is one of complacency to the government’s real masters in the northern hemisphere.

They are high profile diplomats, actually public servants, that the government sincerely believed held the future of New Zealand in their hands.

The Labour government also hushed up its own triumph achieved in July this year which was the signing in Brussels of its EU Free Trade Agreement.

The reason?

The major export to be sent to Europe under the free trade agreement is dairy.

The need for high value dairy pasture to fill this market competes and conflicts with the demand for this same land for the solar utilities so beloved by the same foreign diplomats.

Broadcaster Wary of going Under Knife after Hospital jab in New Zealand

Celebrity South Seas talk-back host and radio station proprietor Sean Plunket was anticipating a surgical ablation operation having suffered a minor heart attack in quite recent months.

The New Zealand political commentator’s pulse accelerated when he found himself prominently described in social media as “hateful scumbag Zionist.”

It quickened even more when he discovered that the author worked as a heart surgeon and in the same department in which the news man was scheduled to undergo his own cardiac surgery.

Mr Plunket now rang the hospital and was put through to the social media posting surgeon.

His equilibrium was hardly restored when the surgeon revealed that, he was in possession of Mr Plunket’s case notes.

Mr Plunket’s full name is Oliver Sean Plunket and the surgeon addressed him as “Oliver.”

As Sean Plunket’s tale was unrolled before his radio audience as the show stopper became a heart stopper.

According to Mr Plunket when the surgeon discovered that his caller was Sean Plunket, the surgeon hung up on him.

Unravelling subsequently the surgeon’s own social media postings Mr Plunket’s heart rate would not have improved with the disclosure that the practitioner viewed everything through a deeply religious prism.

Mr Plunket’s antecedents are Irish.

He has consistently voiced total, unqualified and unequivocal support for Israel in the Hamas conflict.

His radio station The Platform which is actually an online streamer fills the vacuum created by aloof influencers in free-to-air broadcasters and the daily newspapers.

These take their cues from The Guardian and the BBC which results in a voguish uniform nationwide progressive positioning on anything at all.

In contrast The Platform rubs the nose of its audience in the knaveries going on all around it, tearing away the layers of professed noble intentions shrouding the underpinning special interests and their motives.

Aware of The Platform’s disdain for chic posturing the mainstream studiously ignores the disruptive vernacular coloniser made landfall in its midst.

Mr Plunket in the bizarre circumstances surrounding his imminent heart operation can now be seen as the commentator who effectively brought to an end this South Seas nation’s cherished view of itself.

This is its perception of itself as a country of religious tolerance.

A carry-over from the Front Page era Mr Plunket’s long career has been unusual in that it has been characterised by his making the news in addition to reporting it, or commenting on it.

Victim culture’s arch critic now contemplated his own victimhood via participatory journalism in a turn of events that by his own testimony was unwitting, accidental.

His revelation that religious activism has penetrated a citadel of his country’s professional structure which is heart surgery indicates still further erosion of the nation’s once fabled reverence for its professional institutions.

On a daily basis he continues to chip away at the established media’s reliability and impartiality by drawing attention to the way in which it receives pay-outs from the taxpayer.

His proud boast is that The Platform neither seeks nor will accept the government subsidies doled out to the rest of the media for seeing things its way.

As an ardent foe of the imported cancel culture and nudging 60 years Mr Plunket in his risk assessment may be contemplating taking his chances and cancelling his own pending surgical procedure.

In contrast his latest and seemingly accidental participatory story will see his mainstreamer peers even more anxious to wheel him into whatever or whoever awaits him in the operating theatre.

Graphics Designer Georgia Shattky captures The Science fall from grace

A revealing moment in the film about microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles is when she worries about funding her laboratory. Then she appears to find hope in a just-arrived message from an institution only to discover that it too has turned her down with a rejection slickly encased in condescending and patronising words that she finds the money elsewhere.

Nothing terribly unusual in this. Except that the nation is in the grip of the Covid pandemic and that one single category of resources that might reasonably have expected to be financed at this time might have been an infectious diseases research establishment.

Professor Wiles goes on to describe in a matter-of-fact way how she devotes much of her time to raising the laboratory funds herself notably through public appearances

The incident is crystallised forever in the film about the turbulent microbiologist MS Information.

It asks more questions than it answers. Why exactly at the height of the fear and trembling about Covid was a specialist research laboratory being treated, well, as if it were merely an irritating subset of a social studies centre?

The microbes of the Covid infection are too miniscule to be seen by the naked eye.

Yet Professor Wiles became the epicentre of a larger-than-life debate with on one side the great and the good celebrating her in gala evenings.

While on the other side of the urban spectrum the vile imprecations of an alternately screeching and thuggish faction using any and every communications channel available to them.

These bizarre multipliers of these extremes in the film become hyper exhibited when building facades become screens-within-screens, literally murals (pictured above.)

This technique enabled by the film’s graphic designer Georgia Shattky (pictured below) acting as the film’s general effects artist calibrates the grotesque scale of the fervour of the frenzies evoked by the microbiologist.

The public narrative now surrounding Professor Wiles instead of concentrating on infectious diseases especially in their mass infection form now became firmly focussed on the microbiologist as a gaudy character.

The film depicts how in an extraordinary inversion of sociology’s hierarchical theory Professor Wiles’ medical status faded the more established society in the form of urban intelligentsia gave her public approval by in short order crowning her Woman of the Year and then New Zealander of the Year.

The film traces  how all this made her the target of increasing vitriol for her perceived role in the vaccination and lockdown schemes for which she was now seen to be personifying.

The film witnesses how Professor Wiles as someone who might reasonably be considered a bona fide practitioner of The Science became viewed instead as an exponent of numerous cults such as the climate one and somehow an adherent of “Bill Gates.”

Professor Wiles has to point out that the word “Lucifer” with which she remains routinely coupled in fact is a description of light and its luminescence.

The film portrays her as a counterpuncher; one who gives as good as they get.

Underneath the polychromatic giggly exterior there is a firm upholder of the science resolutely determined to eliminate anything or anyone who deflects her from her purpose.

The film emphasises the way in which medical doctors such as Siouxsie have become components of street-level public debate when in contrast barely a generation ago they filled in as antipodean versions of the gentry, even a localised aristocracy.

The film defines the way in which the words and actions of this so recently Olympian class are now so routinely challenged.

Those believing that their own views on things such as microbes, viruses and pathogens in general are deserving of a public airing nowadays elbow aside clinicians and expects their utterances to be taken as gospel- which they often are.

Information for screenings nationwide available at https://www.msinformationmovie.com/screenings

Georgia Shattky

Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security.

Indications that New Zealand is an exceptional focus for Kremlin attention and at the highest level are justified by sightings of someone in newsreels and photo stills who looked like strongman Vladimir Putin immediately after the sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov and by a Radio New Zealand report to the effect that Putin posing as a shoe salesman travelled extensively here in the Cold War era.

Now a leading authority has stated that New Zealand is operationally in the very front line of hostile global intelligence gathering.

William Holstein’s just-published book is Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security.

Mr Holstein (pictured) urges everyday New Zealanders as well as national security officials to always take seriously any indication at all of Russian intervention in daily life.

The Russians kill people all over the world and try to make it look like it was an accident, or that someone else did it, he commented over the premature death in Wanganui of self-confessed double agent Derek Round.

"Some people around the world may think of New Zealand as an impossibly remote and quirky country, easy to ignore. But in the world of intelligence, New Zealand is absolutely at the heart of the West's efforts to protect its democracies from the likes of China and Russia,” stated Mr Holstein.

This is “because it is a full-fledged member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network.

“Whatever the Americans, Canadians, British and Australians know, New Zealanders know it also.”

He added that as the “undeclared” Third World War evolved attempts to crack Five Eyes through its New Zealand portal would intensify.

This was likely to be shrouded and more easily accomplished through New Zealand just because the Five Eyes member had this singular remote and quirky self-image.

Meanwhile the Putin presence in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 Mikhail Lermontov cruise ship running aground while it was under the helm of a Cook Strait pilot has seemed over the intervening years to be perfectly probable given the likenesses of what does resemble the Putin countenance.

The mystery of the sunken cruise vessel’s strong room has never been explained.

When Five Eyes security services sought as rapidly as possible to access the vessel’s safe compartment, they found it had already been cracked.

Russian divers had got there first.

The notion of Putin on his rise through the KGB ranks having some kind of responsibility for New Zealand has become reinforced in recent years with the discovery that he has in fact a working command of the English language.

This reinforces the belief from a prime source and broadcast by Radio New Zealand, itself government-owned, that he circulated here with some ease as a Soviet-bloc shoe salesman.

Then subsequently and testified to by several media sources Putin re-appeared as a member of the official USSR delegation investigating the cause and effects of the cruise liner grounding.

William Holstein’s theme is how the old Sino Soviet bloc until almost the last few months succeeded in convincing the Five Eyes membership that the bloc’s intent was peaceable and that it sincerely intended to achieve this by lifting living standards at home and everywhere else.

These now openly-aggressive nations always knew that this is what the Five Eyes member governments earnestly wanted to believe.

The public mood in New Zealand as far back as the 1960s was reluctant to accept the way in which the upper reaches of its public service had been penetrated.

The split of the New Zealand Communist Party into a Russia aligned group and a China aligned group can also be viewed now as presenting consequences not appreciated or evaluated at the time or subsequently.

The more recent demise of Derek Round (See: Derek Round Murdered Cold War Double Agent & Society Figure Fits Russian Pattern) saw a steering clear for example of any wider analysis of any instigated intervention in the form of cut outs.

Bill Holstein’s long view always ran in the face of self- convincing official views such as the one so recently and so consistently enunciated in Australia about China “lifting out of poverty” a large chunk of its populace and standing ready to do the same thing everywhere else

His portrayal of the old and now overhauled communist bloc as a kleptocracy dedicated to stealing any information not in fact nailed down contrasts with an enduring New Zealand susceptibility.

This is the willingness, ardour, to be seen to be accepted internationally by participating unquestioningly and at any price with contemporary old world moral causes that are actively, cynically, openly and successfully exploited by this same sinister re-engaged partnership.

Political Parties Covered Up Gigantic NZ Foreign Contingent Liability Debt

New Zealand’s general election was a political line dance because all the main parties performed the same sequence of steps and all ended in the same position as when they started electioneering.

They all sidestepped the unspoken issue of how the nation is to fund its foreign commitments in the matter of zero.

The nation’s Treasury frames this debt obligation in the widest possible terms as somewhere between $3billion and $24billion.

Given the disappointing outcomes of the offset auctions the liability looms as being at the more expensive end of this spectrum.

The other participant in this hesitation waltz was the government subsidised media which knew on which side its bread was buttered. They avoided the unspoken issue too.

Not one of these entities believed it lay in their sphere of responsibility to reveal that this liability means money earned in New Zealand will be paid outside New Zealand and will never come back.

The parties coyly displayed solidarity on this non-disclosure. New Zealand First seeing there was no light between National, Labour, and ACT now managed a late run.

Yet it too dodged the issue.

This was not so much to avoid offending those who consider themselves refined and who live in leafy suburban enclaves as to avoid drawing attention to its one-time massive pine planting policy plank.

A gigantic tranche of New Zealand cash is scheduled in just a few years to be transferred overseas with no corresponding benefit to the taxpayer.

While the parties bickered over health benefits, identity privileges, and the size of the public service they adroitly danced around the billions to be paid out overseas with no tangible benefit to anyone but the politicians already planning to establish and embellish their global reputations as the instruments of giving it away.

The cost of living was the background music of the election campaign. Yet nobody pointed out how the transfer of so much earned money to the global multilaterals was scheduled to push inflation skyward simply because it would have to be borrowed back to pay for things like health and the public service.

Dishonestly none of these guardians of the public prosperity intervened to say that with the continuing fall in the NZD the money will have to be borrowed back at increasingly alarming rates of interest.

As it delicately skirted the forbidden issue the National Party especially in its soft shoe shuffle laid the groundwork for the election result.

This was its failure to win anything like an outright victory meaning the ensuing coalition boondoggling with partners who had done the same thing – dance around the real issue of the immense sum of public treasure about to b dissipated somewhere between New York and London.

The main political parties diverted attention from their vainglorious and foolish involvement in embarking on the undertaking and then sustaining it just as its consequences started to loom.

This is at a time of an already serious drain on international funds when the monthly trade balance shows a startling deficit of $2.3 billion.

Politicians of parties which had entered into this commitment and sustained it failed to mention any of the escape routes offered to them such as the war in Ukraine and the resulting global food shortage.

Instead during the general election they laid down diversions.

This included going after public servants knowing that government departments have contingency plans for just this political eventuality and which centres on re-hiring back as consultants the fired staff.

This is why the general election was a line dance. National, ACT, Labour and late entrant New Zealand First ended in the same position as when they started.

They did so by dancing around the contingent liability that they created and knowing that money earned here will be spent somewhere else and with nothing to show for it here except for deprived social services and other cutbacks such as defence.

Grandstanding New Zealand politicians seeking international acclaim embarked upon and sustained a massive financial commitment based on selective modelling and which is now coming due at the very time that country is least able to pay it.

Properties Lose Value in unregulated Solar Gold Rush in New Zealand

The sudden advent of scores of solar generating schemes on flat land close to electricity sub stations has reduced the value of nearby residential properties.

This is because real estate agents are required to notify buyers of the solar schemes and their documentation is tagged accordingly.

Estimates of the reduced value are said to be in the region of 30 percent.

An additional problem for residential property owners is that due to fast tracking by the Labour government these industrial solar schemes are largely unregulated.

Examples are end-to-end schemes close to schools and hospitals which are banned in other countries.

This fast tracking has largely overlooked the dangers of fire, and also the contamination problem of these schemes being built over water tables.

International finance companies are pouring into New Zealand to take advantage of what electricity supply officials describe as a gold rush.

These financiers include BlackRock of the United States and Germany’s Aquila Group.

The solar scheme developers are from Australia, Britain the United States and Ireland.

They are all ardently canvassing farmers with flatland close to substations in order to establish solar power station farm leases.

The major political parties Labour, National and ACT remain silent on this.

This is because they believe themselves to be dependent on the urban backing of activists in professional occupations with their taxpayer-subsidised electric cars.

The drop in value caused by solar generator designations hits hard especially those who have moved to rural communities as part of the Covid work from home campaign.

An unregulated aspect is the capacity of these solar generating plants which are scheduled to deliver to the national grid perhaps 175MW apiece and do so without being classified as industrial utilities.

Encouraged by these open fields close to substation connections the developers are free to install these projects over fertile flat land and close to residences and even whole communities.

The absence of restrictive regulations means also that they can be installed close to high value agribusiness export centres and also tourist areas.

An example of this is the back-to-back generating schemes planned for the Martinborough district and which will amount to 1000 acres of farm land with over half a million photovoltaics with battery structures and switching plants.

These assemblies are 15 feet tall and will dominate this high value tourist and viticulture district.

The absence of any regulation combined with the rush-to-install means that a number of elements are being deliberately ignored.

These include the fire risk experienced overseas and also the difficulty once the 30 year leases expire of remediating the pasture underlying the equipment which is mainly manufactured in China

Undefined is the question of who will be responsible for removing these immense installations either before or at the end of their generating life.

One developer alone is now well into establishing 11 solar stations throughout New Zealand. This is the Australian based Far North which is backed by Germany’s Aquila Group.

A similar number of generating stations is anticipated under BlackRock which was so enthusiastically ushered into New Zealand by the Labour government.

Notable reasons why real estate agents are required to formally document the hazards of these power installations which in the absence of regulation are planned for residential areas include:-

• Danger of fire
• Contamination to aquifers, water tables caused by the toxic components of the equipment which also requires chemical spraying.
• Vulnerability of the building-sized arrays to cyclone-scale wind
• Disposal of generating equipment at any time
• Visual dominance because existing trees are cleared for maximum sunlight exposure for the equipment.

Submersible Power Station Symbolises Abrupt Shift in Class Politics as General Election Nears

The social licence accorded to pine plantations is transferring to solar power schemes as the hazards of pine are being revealed in the extreme weather that these forestry schemes were supposed to avert.

The emphasis is on solar power in spite of still even more obvious hazards.

These are illustrated by the official determination to ramrod through the Auckland solar farm at Helensville in spite of the site having been underwater this year for several days at a time.

Quietly the government seeks to transfer responsibility for the troublesome pine plantations to local government.

The covert nature of this backtracking is easily achieved because the main political parties until even a few months ago demonstrably supported the plantations as they basked in the international approval for them.

The transfer of official and all-party enthusiasm into solar is now also encouraged by the dismal failure of repeated carbon dioxide pine plantation related auctions where reserve prices were not met.

The decision to sideline timber with its attendant problems in favour of shifting the emphasis to solar is a tacit one.

The reason is that both Labour and National went all out on the timber scheme and disregarded alternatives available to them under international covenants.

This is why the emphasis is now on solar.

The impression given is that these vast solar installations will be equipped with shoulder-high panels with sheep safely grazing beneath these modest structures.

In fact the panel arrays scheduled for sites such as Helensville and Wellington regional tourist areas will be the size of houses.

So will associated ISO container sized structures for electrical current flow control and battery equipment interspersed among these panel arrays.

Aware of this new electronic emphasis international finance companies are positioning themselves to take advantage of these solar projects with their higher value over the pine planting schemes.

They are doing so because these electromagnetic installations carry more direct and realisable trading payloads internationally than the increasingly uncertain offsetting benefits of the tree plantation schemes.

The gigantic BlackRock investment firm of New York is not usually publicly clutched to the bosom of a Labour party, let alone one in government, and with such glee.

But New Zealand’s Labour government shone with pride in announcing that the investment banking colossus was setting up in New Zealand to work with the government in establishing a flotilla of solar projects.

Not so well known is the German Aquila Group headquartered in Hamburg which is already active with financing at least three scheduled large-scale solar projects in both islands.

A political mystery is why the government keeps silent about New Zealand this year achieving a 93 percent of its reticulated power from renewables in the form of its dam sites and the now little-mentioned geothermal technology.

The reason for politicians keeping silent about this international triumph is so extraordinary as to be unbelievable.

It requires us to step back to that moment when Christopher Luxon took over as leader of the National Party opposition.

In what must rank as the greatest example of candour in Oceania, he proclaimed quite simply that his objective was to win back the 413,000 National supporters who had defected to other parties. He was definite about the number.

They are the reason why in New Zealand the parties delicately edge around the whole power topic, and especially around its costs to the taxpayer.

They skirt also around the one about prime farmland by definition being low-lying, but close to community grid sub stations, being taken out of production and carpeted with electro chemical solar industries

We now come to the official silence about the 93 percent renewables achievement. Such an announcement would have given the 413,000 privileged voting sector the impression of official complacency.

It could have conveyed an impression of self-satisfaction.

To the effect that the governmental foot had eased on the renewables pedal in a political smugness indicating a fading of faith, of a diminution of the earnest intensity needed in pursuit of this clique’s single issue; King Charles’ cause……

The single issue climate voters are known to dwell in the more upscale metropolitan suburbs, and especially so in Auckland where the mainstream media conscious of these individuals high net worth ignores the bizarre and newsworthy matter of the Helensville submersible solar farm evolving in their midst.

The party leaders meanwhile know that their general election outcome is quietly residing in the nation’s urban and virtuous drawing rooms which are so far away from the sound and the fury on the streets about schools, hospitals, crime, farms, supermarkets, homelessness.

In their determination to appease and cultivate this well-to-do voting sector politicians will put the rest of the electorate to any expense. They deliberately ignore that New Zealand is anyway almost 90 percent renewables and in fact substantially ahead of exactly the northern hemisphere countries which they are so eager to impress.

In their anxiety to demonstrate their eagerness politicians will stoop to any approach as they prostrate themselves and thus their country too before these internationals.

An example is the way in which they deliberately ignore the nation’s innovations in renewables technology.

Geothermal especially escapes official memory, even consciousness, in the politico-bureaucratic collective and weird determination to demonstrate a kind of juvenile we-can-do- better humility to its northern hemisphere superiors, as they are viewed.

Prigojine Liquidation Confirms Fate of California Banker Sergey Grishin

The death of Sergey Grishin of alleged sepsis in a Moscow hospital concluded intense cross border personal litigation centred on revelations about the oligarch’s private life and which in turn was to lead to his liquidation.

Oceania’s leading web site on legal topics Lawfuel had picked up details of the banker’s domestic life and it was now that the California-based oligarch sought to close down such intrusions by making an example of the Wellington-based Lawfuel site.

The saga involved white shoe law firms on both sides of the Pacific in a case that occupied New Zealand’s own High Court and saw orders for seizures of computers and documents at large as the oligarch exploited every avenue available to discover the source of the stories about him that by now were appearing in Fleet Street.

The ferocity of the oligarch’s focus on Lawfuel prompted New Zealand’s National Press Club to make submissions to the nation’s Law Commission and to do so in tandem with its New York - based affiliate the Overseas Press Club.

The doggedness of the oligarch’s pursuit of Lawfuel continued to the end and was marked most recently by orders served on the site’s host in the United States.

Sergey Grishin was constantly associated with the intervention at the time of the collapse of the old USSR with plundering its central bank in a series of opportunistic manoeuvres.

More certain is that rather later he somehow achieved a large measure of control over the Rosevro bank and at a time when Western money poured into Russian energy.

The Rosevro bank, still a mid-level Russian trading bank, was a leader in transferring this money back to the West.

Furnished with a slice of these funds Grishin now moved to California where Grishin busied himself with a content factory for the tittle-tattle sphere of social media.

He and his wife became society figures, a profile capped when Grishin sold at a discount according to realtors his Montecito estate to Harry and Meghan.

Even now, and even after the rather brutal details of his marriage melt down started to appear in the feminist press and as far afield as New Zealand Grishin might have side stepped the long arm of the Kremlin.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed this for Grishin who found himself having to condemn it, and to note also that he wanted a United States passport.

Along with scores of others he now went on a list of miscreants who had caused hindrance or embarrassment to the Kremlin autocracy.

He too now became liquidated under a procedure of plausible deniability in which the manner of his demise shrouded the outcome which was a blunt warning to others to keep their heads down.

How was Grishin lured back to Russia?

Now we find a similarity with the extinction of Evgeny Prigojine tempted back by the Kremlin by redemptive promises of spearheading the Kremlin insurrections in Africa.

Prigojine was confident enough to have carelessly omitted sweeping his own Embraer aircraft for remotely activated and barometric bombs.

Grishin was no Prigojine. Significantly though his demise came when Russia is anxiously demonstrating to China that Russia must be considered an equal partner in the de-dollarisation scheme, the one to replace the USD as the world currency.

Grishin with his high profile in California and surrounded by an aura of having broken the Russian central bank plus his proven laundering of Rosevro money was walking, talking evidence of Russian banking porosity, unreliability, and above all, vulnerability.

His sale of the Montecito estate to the Sussexes for the price of a Sydney or Auckland “mansion” had failed to elevate him to royal circles.

Cafe society in California seemed more preoccupied with his domestic affairs rather than his ability as an international currency manipulator.

So when the Prigojine forgive and forget format call to Grishin came from Moscow to do big things there such as leading the development of the new world reserve currency……………………