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……………………

Retribalism Reprised

An air of barmy escapism and not entirely due to the temperature hangs over Europe in the form of an unwillingness to face reality.  In France’s second biggest city Marseilles there was a signal reluctance to accept the causes and effects of the most recent identity riots, for example.

The riots were clearly awaiting a flash point for the looting-to-order to proceed. This was duly achieved with the main lootable businesses in the commercial area, the ones with higher end products, having their armoured glass fascias shattered and duly  being cleaned out.

This was in spite of a military garrison in the centre of the city, not to mention, at a pinch, the Foreign Legion being headquartered nearby.

In the event the subsequent official debate centred on the conduct of the police force which in a remarkable display of restraint had handled the riots without loss of life.

Members of the police force now went to jail, reports our man in Europe’s hot spots (pictured.)

In the heatwave attention swung onto the elderly and the retired.

They are a much greater force in French life than this category represents anywhere else.

The reason is the complex system of France’s pensions and associated retirements. There is also the matter of France’s post war baby boom being so exceptionally numerous and now having to be supported by the smaller families of subsequent generations.

The height of the heatwave coincided with the commemoration of the allied landings in the south of France and  the terrain is dotted with monuments large and small to the fallen in the Second World War, most poignantly to the fighters of the Resistance.

So how is it that the French after being invaded three times in the last 150 years continue to misread Germany?

One answer is that France cannot comprehend the nature of German cohesion.

Another and more likely answer to the riddle is that France fails to understand that the Germans will go along with a prevailing mind set regardless of at which end of the political spectrum the mind set happens to be.

France once the overwhelming leader in European energy began to march to the beat of the German moral superiority drum when it began cutting back on its own power generation and relying on other countries instead.

Another thing that the French cannot start to understand is the similarity of outlook shared by Germany and Russia.  Written out of European history books is that way in which before it sank into tyranny German governments between the wars intervened to stop Russo-German joint ventures.

Meanwhile out of Europe or at least the Brussels EU version, we find the United Kingdom wishing away the fact that it is becoming the disunited Kingdom.

This threat it is true shows signs of evaporating in the self-governing Wales. Here, retribalisation takes the form of distractions.

One is the army of language superintendents whose irrepressible enthusiasm often takes the form of welshifying Welsh signage that is in fact already in Welsh.

In Scotland separatism is ever-present and much more serious. Its seriousness is in its desperation and it  grows as Scotland becomes ever more dependent on London, a state of affairs much enhanced by Scotland losing its global banking sector in the 2008 bust.

Britain in quite recent times has evolved a Californian style ethos in some of its biggest cities. One of these is London. Another and not so well known is Bristol.

It was Boris Johnson’s ability as mayor of London to act as a kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial bulwark to the massing avant-garde neo hippy hordes.

Johnson’s bulwark against the mass progressivism saw Johnson as the obvious shoo-in to do the same thing for the nation as a whole by serving as its  prime minister.

A feature of European society as we have noted is the inability to confront the obvious and we now come to one of the outstanding examples.

Boris Johnson as prime minister was utterly distracted by a romantic remarriage, a modern one, which saw him well into middle age having to serve as active father to his new born brood.

Modern marriage is important here because in such alliances one of the partners has to set the tone, call the shots, and the impression was and remains that it was not Johnson.

Nobody wants to discuss this, most of all Britain’s mass media with its otherwise fixation on gender topics.  When furtive pieces to this effect have crept onto web versions they have been removed when observed by more senior guiding lights.

Another curious thing is the way in which something important in one country is treated as unimportant in another even though the problem is caused and shared by the same countries.

Immigration is the example here.

In Britain the boatloads of immigrants crossing over in anything floatable from France is a gigantic issue with parliamentarians calling out in wonderment how Britain kept at bay the forces of Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler yet is powerless to prevent the arrival in rubber dinghies of so many dispossessed transiting via France.

Yet in France the issue is not an issue. It is ignored or deflected, as in the instance of the diversion in the form of the jailed hard pressed Marseille police.

An explanation is that in Britain the immigration impact can be solved by the Royal Navy. In France in contrast  it can only be absorbed and managed, and generally be coped with.

In both countries the heatwave, canicule, as it is known in France absorbs any preoccupation with the war in Ukraine, a war of attrition on the European mainland and traceable to a pious gullibility of European states to evaluate things as they actually were and still are.

There has settled on these countries a new age of piety in which truly pressing priorities must be shrouded and dissipated in rituals of bygone years.

Colonial Era Evocation Cancelled Melbourne Commonwealth Games

Melbourne’s abrupt cancellation of the Commonwealth Games signalled the advent in the English-speaking realm of an instant official end to a mass cultural convocation, in this instance a sporting one.

The cancellation was itself emblematic of the Victoria government. The Australian politico media sphere is always wrong footed by the way the state government emerges unscathed  from its bad news.

Its formula is to simply get it out of the way as quickly as it can.

Lesser governments would have given the issue a slow death with standard “reviews” and “interventions” with much use of the word “resilience.” The Victoria state government knows that bad news feeds on time and talk. So compress the time and thus the talk.

No attenuated “conversations” nourishing  the news cycles from this cunningly purposeful administration. 

Costs  were said to have tripled. Not so well known is that anticipated revenues had shrunk dangerously,  noticeably the international broadcasting income.

Originally described as the Empire Games the event was formulated as a device to cement together the member nations in what at the time was still the world’s largest ever empire.

Therefore the acceleration of the now fevered Australian focus on colonialism and its harmful effects on first nationers would have also entered the Melbourne equation.

What a difference a year makes. Especially to the Royal Family, the traditional centrepiece  of the Games. What sort of a reception would the royals have received at the now-abandoned Melbourne games? The Queen presided at the 2006 Melbourne games.  

Exactly what parliament among Australia’s proliferating  parliaments would have been designated as the official Games parliament?

The games and their value has been approached in recent years with caution. An ambivalence is the value of the games in which losses incurred are said to be outweighed by the aggregate  revenue to the host of the resulting visitor-tourist spending.

Many now call this cost effectiveness into question because it is known that certain tourists will deliberately avoid a games venue because of the inconvenience and because they know that prices have gone up.

All this does not explain why the Melbourne Games were cancelled so instantly and so decisively.

What happened was that the more that the politicians “evaluated” the games, the more they saw contrived trouble on the cultural front with the games being viewed as the provocation.

Australia was always the home-away-from-home for the Commonwealth Games. It is the most successful competing nation with the most medals in the history of the event.

There was Sydney in 1938 which was the first to be staged in the southern hemisphere, Perth (1962), Brisbane (1982), Melbourne (2006) and the Gold Coast (2018). 

The Lucky Country with its in-depth self-sufficient economy knew that it could shoulder the inevitable contingency costs of any magnitude in staging these extravaganzas because of the value in presenting its preferred image of fresh-faced unified candour blended with the energy of limitless possibilities.

The accountants of these games in more recent years regardless of venue have been shunted into the background.

Myths were necessary, one being  that the cost of the special accommodation for the athletes would be offset because this accommodation would somehow be transformed into sought-after permanent housing.

The Victoria state government meanwhile would not have broken ranks with Canberra on anything so important. The Federal and state governments colluded because they both saw that on the political balance sheet the Games now presented a bigger debit than a credit.

Outside the world of competitive sport nobody is shedding too many tears.

It is hard not to hear from the Palace a profound sigh of relief. 

It has learned to be wary about overt displays conjuring up images of the imperial era. 

The first politician to publicly challenge the value of the Commonwealth Games was New Zealand MP Georgina Beyer (pictured) who quickly eliminated the event from New Zealand consideration on the simple basis that the true costs could not be estimated, that they would spiral, and thus have to be met from other budgets, notably the social welfare funds.

The Member of Parliament would also have perceived the shift in groundswell in which the games magnetism was migrating  to showcasing differences rather than disguising them in choreographed exuberance.

Ms Beyer’s transition from male to female and the resulting attention frequently obscured her ability to grasp the reality of any issue at all - a talent demonstrated initially  during her years in local government.

In the end the abrupt cancellation of the Melbourne games was because the games were on track to becoming a shop window for dissonance instead of cohesion.  Wounds were going to be displayed rather than concealed. Salt in the form of undiluted media attention was ready to be poured on them.

After the no-arguments about face by Melbourne and by implication Canberra too the “friendly” Games have entered a dismayingly unfriendly  era and ushered into it by one of its loyalists.

Oceania nation 93 percent renewables energy while MPs lured by trans-Atlantic careers

Dazzled by the prestige of global assemblies and their high minded objectives there has emerged even in recent weeks a suspicion that many in New Zealand politics even see their futures in these exalted organisations instead of coping with the nation’s down-to-earth issues centred as they are on crime, homelessness, cost of living and balance of payments.

The problem for the everyday inhabitants is that this higher calling takes the form of politicians of most stripes claiming that any faltering in imposing on their taxpayers extreme and costly climatic political measures would be interpreted as “dragging the chain.”

Mid-year New Zealand’s energy consumption reached 93 percent from renewables, almost edging out the world champion Iceland..

Nurturing the guilt factor and thus their international opportunities this was hushed up.

Both parties are now frantically back pedalling on their exaggerated and distorted undertakings to these international organisations.

The scheme now is to pass the responsibility (i.e. the buck) to local authorities in the matter of plastering over the countryside wherever the opportunity arises with swathes of pine plantations.

Being shallow rooted and quick growing these are vulnerable to being swept away by the very climatic shifts that the plantations were somehow supposed to avert.

The failure of the government’s last two offset trade units auctions has contributed to the need to hedge, offset, responsibility for these very offset plantations.

At the outset New Zealand went overboard in trumpeting its virtuosity in conforming to international standards. Discarding other alternatives it went all-out on the pine plantations and this signalled the institutional anxiety to conform and to be top-of-the-class internationally.

This can now be seen to have had the direct opposite of the intended effect.

Examples include the pitted and pot holed roads created by the immense road trains carrying the logs.

There is the matter of the government’s direct financial incentives to acquire electric cars which are substantially heavier than the fuel version, and thus contribute to the pot hole outbreak.

The Labour-led government early burst of virtuosity in choking oil and gas exploration and which was materially responsible for the nation’s only oil refinery closing has had the effect of eliminating the local supply of the now badly-needed petroleum-based road surfacing additives required to cope with potholes.

Around half of one percent only of New Zealand is actually built over. With the exception of mountain range summits the rest is covered by vegetation of various descriptions.

The existing natural vegetation includes native, indigenous trees. It is only a few years ago that these were considered so sacred that use of these trees in anything so frivolous as wall coverings in government buildings caused these coverings to be to be ripped out.

How did the pine plantations replace these indigenous (and durable slow growing, deep rooted)) trees in the offset plantation pantheon?

The current official tilt centres on “community” (i.e local government) involvement in the pine plantations will be viewed as a poisoned chalice by these same district and regional administrations.

Official estimates range from a taxpayer exposure of $3 billion to $23 billion to the zero campaign. After the mid year disappointing auction with its carry over from the previous disappointing auction the notion of an exposure of even $30 billion is mooted.

It is not long ago that pine plantations were being cleared for dairy farms instead of the quite recent reversal now in which dairy farms are converted into pine plantations.

With their costly internationalist yearnings the local show-off politicians might take note for example that the OECD average of seven percent of social housing to their total housing stock compares to only three percent in New Zealand.

Proclaimed measures notably the pine one to prepare for the realities of warming sea temperatures and thus the southern migration of the hurricane season instead only drastically added to the problem.

Local government and its ratepayers will be wary of taking up co-governance on this once-fanfared scheme to curry international favour.

They will be aware too of the way in which local authorities now expected to shoulder the official pine plantation burden must cope with reducing “wilding” pine which for reasons still to be explained remain outside internationally-sanctioned respiration calculations, as does indigenous vegetation and indeed grassland too.

How exactly do the unchallengeable international referees in this social justice venture distinguish between a pine tree that happens to be just growing and one that is part of one of their certified special purpose plantations?

Unexplained in the reverence to anything from the multilaterals is the iron-dome formulation of the nation’s contribution of 0.15 percent to world carbon dioxide. In this formula most of this existing respiring cover was eliminated in a calculation that seemingly could only accommodate an authorised and artificial counter balance by the planting of the foreign pines.

Covid Arbiter’s Ascension to Public Intellectual bucked the trend

Fairground fortune-teller coiffed microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles has become the unlikely and even only politico-bureaucratic high profile survivor of the Covid era.

Others might have been ennobled yet Dr Wiles is the only one to remain in the public gaze equipped with such useful tools of contemporary prominence as personal newspaper columns.

Now she is framed in a full scale film Ms Information prominent on the marquee of the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Other mainstays of the Covid era have faded from public consciousness. These include the era’s prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern and director general of health Dr now Sir Ashley Bloomfield.

Contemporary revisionism holds that the government hard line in dictates such as long duration lockdowns were too stern, severe, not to say unnecessary.

Dr Wiles propelled into public figure status in the immediate run up to the Covid pandemic in these remote South Seas was another hardliner.

She urged officialdom to concentrate on the virus itself and not on what she saw as side issues such as the economy, notably in its tourist form.

Her role as a harbinger was bizarrely offset by her presented persona as a mother, wife, and indeed housewife operating out of a modest timber frame bungalow directly fronting onto a nice Auckland side street.

Was it this Everywoman context that enabled the British scientist to escape the poisoned darts of retrospective retribution that pierced the flesh of the other officials and experts?

It is true that as a technical figure she avoided entanglement with the policy and operational implementation underpinning notably the harsh isolation regime.

It is true also that woven into her personal diary of the plague years was the pervasive non-organic yet compellingly mechanised social media.

Some conjecture that the microbiologist might reasonably have switched off all her devices. Yet science “communication” is part of her stated job description. So all her devices regardless of content had to stay live. Quite literally she is an actual social scientist.

Some might also say that she diagnosed curious elements of the mood of the society in which she now found herself practising.

Such as the innate distrust of the “expert” and especially so if they happened to be female.

Consciously or unconsciously the Edinburgh graduate also understood that in these southern latitudes there is no such thing as gratitude and not much admiration either. These tend to be exclusively channelled into sport.

Therefore she correctly judged that whatever or whoever eventually emerged from the Covid era it would not be heroes.

Her rejection of white coats and test tube festooned laboratories in favour of gaudy street attire, kitchen backdrops, and blunt language is evidence that she anticipated the post plague years hostility to overtly exercised authoritarianism.

A curious by product of the Covid era is that its rallying calls such as “Be Kind” and “Team of Five Million,” tend nowadays to be repeated somewhat cynically

Dr Siouxsie Wiles’ subsequent apotheosis as a significant public figure remains a picaresque outcome of the Covid era. The film Ms Information produced by Alex Reed and Phillida Perry and directed by Gwen Isaac portrays the real life “social” scientist’s ability to make people feel simultaneously soothed and threatened.

Mass communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan defined media entities as being either hot or cool.

They are hot if they are obvious. They are cool if you have to work them out…..as you do with the irreconcilable differences of Dr Siouxsie Wiles.

The film applies a prism to the multi-faceted Dr Wiles’ compelling evolution from microbiologist to public intellectual.

Catch Ms. Information as part of the 2023 NZIFF, screenings in Auckland on 23rd and 24th July, and 6th and 7th August in Wellington. Information for screenings nationwide available

https://www.nziff.co.nz/2023/film/ms-information/

New Zealand Prime Minister Sabotage of first luxury Adventure Lodge Mystery Explained

The death in circumstances of extreme adventure of undersea explorer Stockton Rush III rekindles memories of the bizarre and even sinister vendetta visited upon his father Stockton Rush Snr while the family was resident in New Zealand.

The episode was notable because the campaign was directed by New Zealand Labour prime minister Wallace Rowling whose political trademark was an apparent lack of passion about anything at all.

Stockton Rush II, the father, established Takaro Lodge near Lake Te Anau. It was the first international style tourist lodge complete with surrounding villas and its purpose was to become the base for the well-off to make adventure journeys into Fiordland.

The low slung central chateau was sympathetic to green values and today’s eco standards and the villas easily blended into the landscape.

Yet reports continued to appear in the media centred on its luxuries especially on its gold bathroom fittings.

It was this concentration on conspicuous consumption symbolised by the gold taps that seemed to drive to distraction Wallace Rowling then finance minister.

The upshot was litigation during the 1970s to and fro all the way to the Privy Council in London running up in two hemispheres tens of millions of dollars of costs in today’s money.

The stated reason for this was that Stockton Rush Snr in establishing and operating Takaro Lodge had somehow failed in terms of “duty.”

Now and following the death in a submersible of his son Stockton Rush Jnr there are some indications that the strange vendetta had little to do with the luxury lodge or indeed with New Zealand at all.

The Stockton Rush family and Wallace Rowling it is now known were all resident in Seattle (pictured when the Rowlings were there) at the same time during the mid 1950s

Central to this story is that in the mid 1950s Rowling won a Fulbright Scholarship and it was this that saw him living and teaching in Seattle, the home base of the Stockton Rush dynasty which traces its origins to the Founding Fathers.

Did Rowling have an emotionally bruising encounter, perhaps centred on schooling? Did the future high-flying New Zealand Labour Party politician believe himself to have been high-hatted, belittled by the dynastic tycoon?

Was there friction perhaps at a Seattle PTA?

Stockton Rush Snr, the father, was that rare North American sportsman in that he played and followed rugby football. This leads us to another possibility. Was there an incident in Seattle on the sideline, or even on the pitch itself?

If Rowling considered an honourable and incisive political figure seemed unlikely to hold a grudge then so did ”Tock” Rush, as Stockton Rush Snr was known.

An imposing patrician figure the oilman was pleasant to everyone he met. He tried to help out wherever he could. He was a noted philanthropist.

He was obviously embarrassed by the compounding media furore on embellishments designed for the North American lifestyle tourists symbolised by the gold taps at his Takaro Lodge .

His name badge at any Wellington official function such as the American Chamber of Commerce designated him as merely representing an outfit named “Menlo Atherton Associates.”

His Takaro Lodge generated jobs, demand for local materials, boosted the district’s tourist earnings, and promoted the region internationally as a premium lifestyle destination.

Nowadays Takaro Lodge still under foreign ownership presents a modest picture compared to say a modern iteration of this high end destination theme such as the majestic Wharekauhau Country Estate.

Coincidence among coincidences it is just down a rustic road from the wilderness getaway of James Cameron responsible for generating the contemporary fascination with Titanic.

Wallace Rowling always known as “Bill” was defined as a politician by his piping voice which became increasingly high pitched the more he became vexed and this characteristic awkwardly coincided with the advent of adversary television interviewing.

Did the suave Ivy League Tock Rush become the lightning rod for Rowling’s anger at what we would now term the elites?

In the event the government harassment was successful. Stockton Rush Snr was forced to quit Takaro Lodge after just a few years and with it his dreams of founding an environmental wilderness appreciation tourist centre.

How different things would be now if the adventurous Stockton Rush dynasty had been allowed to pursue its niche tourist destiny in New Zealand?

Instead their South Seas aspirations were deliberately and officially thwarted at every step on the familial favoured path which was the road less travelled.

The treatment handed out by the New Zealand government to the high end tourism investor Stockton “Tock” Rush 11 seems just as shocking even now as the death in pursuit of extreme tourism off the coast of Newfoundland of his aquanaut son Stockton Rush 111.

High Tech heats up von Neumann Bottleneck as do questions on Official Offsets incentives

Artificial intelligence opens up a refrigeration future for New Zealand not seen since the development of frozen meat exports.

The reason is that artificial intelligence processing hubs require cooling on a similar scale to the nation’s meat packing houses known as freezing works.

International data processing hub operators are prospecting in New Zealand for these cooling sites.

A futures and trade-offs market is developing as global companies prepare for the quantum increase in demand for accelerated coolant for the circuitry hubs.

Extra cooling is required everywhere because contrary to a widespread belief, and one propagated by the industry itself, there is no such thing as neural or fuzzy electronic processing that flows like input over the human brain.

What happens is a massive acceleration of the binary impulses through the von Neumann bottleneck.

The faster the binary blips are crammed through this von Neumann bottleneck the greater the electronics under process will come to emulate the output behaviour of the human brain i.e perform virtual or imitated artificial intelligence.

In this process immense heat is generated and it has to be cooled down so that the supporting circuitry does not melt.

It is here that artificial intelligence intersects with that other heating preoccupation of this era which is the atmosphere version.

These hubs for eco ethical reasons are required to be cooled by renewables and this is the reason that New Zealand has become such a focus for these sites

These schemes began to take form under the cryptocurrency upheaval. Cryptocurrency uses a DIY banking method known as blockchain which is allied to but is not actually artificial intelligence.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence are the reasons for the intensity centred on acquiring renewables sites, anywhere.

The Klondyke of this latter day gold rush is the now famed Kaipara River site near Auckland. It has been flooded numerous times this year, often underwater for several days at a time.

But it is near to a national grid substation connection so its value remains unimpaired and so does the determination of its promoters to put a solar generating site on the floodway.

Other similar schemes are planned for other low lying tourist and dairy areas simply because of ready access to the national grid.

As with so many elements relating to the climate and officialdom little is revealed or known about the underpinning arrangements other than that they are on medium term leases.

Who owns them, and for how long? Then what happens?

This fuzziness applies also to the arrangements in removing the imported electro mechanical equipment at the conclusion of the lease, its disposal, and similarly with restoring the underlying pasture.

Artificial intelligence known then as expert systems was launched in 1965. Locally, Victoria University introduced a dedicated artificial intelligence unit 45 years ago.

The current wave of excitement has much to do with the convergence with entertainment such as de-aging, itself an application of facial recognition.

The generative description relates to its ability to learn as it goes along by expanding its own experience in such things as conversation as in the responsive talking or chat robots.

The inclination of the industry is to pretend that the bottleneck named after binary processing pioneer John von Neumann has somehow melted away under neural waves.

This deliberately nurtured fallacy disguises the accelerating intensity of the heat caused by the ever increasing rapidity with which the two binary symbols in the form of the presence of something or the absence of it must be rammed through this same bottleneck in the form of vast even infinite arrays of them functioning under what is known as parallel processing.

The data hubs required for all this need more and still more cooling and there are signs that the promoters will cut any deal to obtain the required eco refrigeration.

The counter trades allowing organisations and even whole countries to offset what they are doing in their own backyard by doing something else in someone else’s are the concealed driver in projects such as the Kaipara River one.

The demand for these trade-offs will increase and the reason is that the refrigeration required by the data and server centres is predicted to boost the greenhouse effect by a recognisable percentage.

Countries for example such as Germany and Switzerland have hitherto sent their energy demands to Russia

They have economies centred on an exceptional reliance on the ultra heavy electronic processing required by applications described as being in the artificial intelligence and blockchain sphere.

They are increasingly turning to remote offsetting schemes such as the Kaipara River one.

Descriptions such as neural or fuzzy are designed to hide the dependence of these data processing centres on old fashioned crackling mechanical circuitry and the resultant need for cooling.

Meanwhile the contractual wiring, the covenants, the official promises underpinning these schemes dependent as they are on imported equipment need to be revealed.

This is especially so after the less than encouraging outcome of the recent government offsets auction.

The notion meanwhile that computing had somehow transcended the laws of physic is an indication of how myths can become accepted and embedded even in a hard-edge industry such as high tech.

All Party Global Acclaim Quest Swamps Pending New Zealand General Election

Distracted, bemused and somewhat entertained by the antics and pratfalls of its parliamentarians the wider electorate is successfully diverted from the hiding in plain sight fact that the pending general election has little to do with them at all.

All the main parties are already fixed in their posture which is an international one centred on year zero and they are all determined to camouflage its damage to the productive economy.

Official figures reveal that attaining northern hemisphere goals will cost the New Zealand taxpayer somewhere in the range of $3 billion to $24 billion.

This is why the government and in fact all the main general election contesting parties prefer to nourish the attention-diverting sideshows which are the staple of its subsidised media.

Even the terrain-wrecking policies of its tree regimen were successfully washed away in a sideshow centred on who was or was not, and why, taking advantage of their position to advance their own personal position.

The issue of the language used in road signage became instantly diverted into a students association identity preoccupation

Could not someone have cut through this with a simple statement such as that the signage priority was safety first and would thus be rendered in the language recognised by the majority of road users?

Then came a conflict of interest saga about who had shares in Auckland Airport and how many times they had been cautioned……………………..

Either way the effect was the same, the airport shares spat successfully obliterated the opposition National Party’s infrastructure policy.

This was karma and the reason is that the modern era of New Zealand’s ambition to style itself as the eco avatar on the global landscape can be traced to the last National government.

It thrust the nation into a straight-jacket of noble intentions including fine detail specifying for example tree conformations.

This now became sanctified by the incoming Labour government which supercharged the existing hair-shirt with a contrived energy shortage accentuating the pain side of the pain-gain purifying equation.

The boot-camp campaign was uninterrupted by Covid and in the event even enhanced by it as the Labour government let it be known that the Covid choreography was itself a blueprint for a similar approach on zero.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine failed to ignite any thaw in the by now indelible belief system even though the supply shortages accelerated world fuel prices everywhere.

The all party silence on all this had greatly profited from a drift to arts and societal education and away from subjects designed to enlighten students on, for example, the good carbon (dioxide) and the bad carbon (monoxide.)

A once global perspective had become narrowed to voguish societal trends.

.There was little appreciation and thus perspective that only several years before it was invaded Ukraine, the largest repository of humus in the world, had overtaken Russia to become the world’s largest grain exporter.

While countries notably those who had for political reason outsourced their energy requirements to Russia now fully alarmed started clutching their remaining nuclear and coal fired power stations New Zealand in contrast maintained full stride as the standard bearer of world purity.

For a country dependent for 80 percent of its livelihood on food exports and with 85 percent of its power from hydro electric and geothermal this determination to prove the nobility of its intentions seems strange.

The main parties irrevocably haloed in the justness of their cause had locked themselves in to the extent that the slip road away from this righteous path provided by the Ukraine invasion was completely ignored.

A collective craving to occupy the world stage and to be seen to be riding high on it is an identifiable mass movement in this South Seas archipelago.

The last of these occurred in the late 1980s when the politico-media-mercantilist class became persuaded that the nation could become a world stage participant in finance.

The result was that the nation lost its entire presence in this same global market.

This included its only trading bank.

Steely Campaign Start Reveals shared National-Labour Constituency

New Zealand’s general election has taken on characteristics of a crusade and it was hardly surprising that its start can be traced to the fiery furnaces of an Australian steel works.

Here, government leaders (pictured) with hard hats and hard-line vote harvesting intentions gathered with the steelmakers to consecrate the government’s donation of at least $140 million to assist the works achieve zero goals.

This episode in which taxpayers subsidised a flourishing international steelmaker which records annual profits of several billion dollars might have been greeted with gasps of amazement, especially as it was a Labour government handing over the support.

In steelmaking terms the National Party is the sinter to Labour’s pellets.

Labour knew it had neutralised its opposition with the hand-out to BlueScope subsidiary New Zealand Steel.

The reason is that both parties know that in its donation the government slickly checkmated the Opposition.

Both know that the election is about the 413,000 “missing” National Party voters.

They know too where these errant voters live which is in the upscale city suburbs.

There is the understanding that the New Zealand general election will follow the example of the Australian federal election with its result predicted months before in this news site, see Australia Federal Election looks Weather Dependent.

Usual election considerations though more acute than ever have been brushed aside such as the more than 80 per cent of all homeless people turning up to community emergency housing providers and who are turned away.

The only figures that matter are the 0.15 percent that New Zealand is modelled as contributing to 0.04 percent of the world’s atmosphere in the form of Co2 which is critical to photosynthesis and thus the world’s food supply.

These fractions the main parties believe overwhelm electoral mainstays such as the cost of living which has been boosted by an artificially created energy shortage designed to capture the votes of this already favoured intelligentsia with its need to proclaim its planetary-size conscience.

Teals loom over the New Zealand general election like vultures or doves depending on who is contemplating them.

They were intentionally or unintentionally identified by Christopher Luxon upon his ascension to the leadership of the National Party, all 413,000 of them.

The Australian experience demonstrates that they are female or identify as such.

Their single issue preoccupation means that the government and the opposition share a focus and one which reveals some curious vistas.

One of these is the Let-Them-Eat-Cake one.

Here the government allocates a substantial budget to advertise to its subjects that if they are worried about feeling the pinch of advancing energy costs then they should turn down their heating, and spend less time in the shower.

This is a most revealing glimpse paradoxically magnified by the all-party silence with which it was received.

The political parties know that the blue-green teal bird nesting as it does in the more well-to-do suburbs is a wily bird requiring exquisite feeding and that if this is not forthcoming will fly away in any direction.

A spillway on Auckland’s Kaipara River which has flooded four times in recent months is relentlessly scheduled to be carpeted with a solar power station.

Worries about rare earth’s changing the composition forever of the soil of dairy districts are brushed aside in the rush to plant reactors on any low lying, cyclone-prone, river-girt pasture with ready access to a community sub station.