And meanwhile, the Iranian regime continues political executions at the rate of nearly 6 per week ...

"Only Trump could be stupid, ignorant and immoral enough to start a (just) war against an evil regime, and to leave them better off and more powerful than before the war. What a complete pile of shit he is."

~ @RyanSchenck

"I am still shocked that Secretary Rubio announced that 'The operation is over - Epic Fury,' without achieving any of their war objectives: 

(1) no removal of enriched uranium and elimination forever of Iran's nuclear program, 

(2) no constraints on missile production, 

(3) no end of funding for terrorists & 

(4) without liberating the Iranian people..

"Epic Fury is going to be remembered as Epic Failure."

~ @MichaelMcFaul

TRUMP, Jan 13: "Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!... HELP IS ON ITS WAY"

"Donald Trump promised to come to the aid of Iranian protesters if the regime used lethal force against them. This undoubtedly played a role in their rising up. Now, possibly thousands lie dead ... this is another low point in a presidency of low points: making promises without the means to back them up, and now people lie dead. Shameful. This is the issue with a presidency incapable of thinking through second- and third-order effects. ...
    "Trump was very specific in the support he offered. 'Knock hell' out of the regime. It is clear that promise was made when the US was not in a position to deliver."

~ @AndrewFox

"If this deal is actually signed, it would be a fitting end to a campaign that began as 'Epic Fury' and is ending as 'Epic Disaster.' What started as a war supposedly aimed at toppling the regime and dismantling its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities may instead leave Iran’s regime stronger than before — empowered by sanctions relief, still retaining significant missile capabilities, continuing support for its proxies, and almost certainly preserving uranium enrichment on its own soil. And then there’s the additional 'bonus' nobody even mentioned at the outset: the Strait of Hormuz is now firmly back at the centre of global strategic risk. The truly grim reality is that this may still be the best available option for the administration out of a set of deeply flawed alternatives. At least Iran is [possibly] unlikely to obtain a nuclear weapon in the immediate future. But the central question remains: what was the strategic logic of launching a war whose end state may ultimately be worse than the conditions that existed before it began? A failure from beginning to end."

~ @Danny(Dennis)Citrinowicz

"Of all the objectives floated before and after the war began, almost none have been achieved.
    "Yes, the US and Israel destroyed a lot of Iranian military assets. But strategically, Iran still holds the uranium, the regime, and the Strait. ...
    "What I see is an American president desperately looking for a way out of the mess he created. So the administration is trying to put a bow on it ...
    "This whole catastrophe rested on a false assumption that the regime would collapse once the supreme leader was killed. Everybody knew Iran would try to block the Strait. You cannot just bluster through everything and expect reality to bend to you."

~ former Commander General USArmyEurope Ben Hodges

"[A]n end to the conflict and long-term peace requires an end to the evil Islamic regime of Iran. Any 'agreement' is just a new Munich Pact of 1938 with the failed promise of 'peace in our time'."

~ @AdamMossoff 

"Freedom is not entitlement."

"This is because we believe in freedom. ...

"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs ha[d] in [1990s] Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.

"It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

~ PJ O'Rourke from his 1993 'Liberty Manifesto'

RELATED:

• Cue Card Libertarianism: Rights - NOT PC 

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."

~ Thomas Sowell from his 1993 book Is Reality Optional?

"Emotion has its place. You might argue that it was appropriate in crisis situations like the pandemic, the Christchurch shooting, and the White Island eruption. ...
    "But emotion can only go so far, because wanting something to be true, because it's kind, is not the same as it actually being true."

~ OJB from their post 'I Blame Women!'

"It is not kind to keep borrowing against future generations’ futures. It isn’t kind to promise the world and deliver sweet F all. Remember Ardern was going to house all of NZ’s homeless within 4 weeks of becoming PM, end child poverty, and build 100,000 houses? How wonderful! And what happened? ..."

~ Ani O'Brien

Nicola Orwell [updated]

Over the weekend, we were watching the recent George Orwell doco Orwell 2+2=5 on DocPlay. Worth it, except to the extent it (deliberately?) confuses economic power with political power -- the very important distinction, as Harry Binswanger explains, between, the Dollar & the Gun. (And the film's own language does get somewhat Orwellian itself towards the end.)

Anyway, two quotes from the great man came to mind as I read Finance Minister Nicola Willis attempting to explain why her government spending more is nonetheless a 'saving.'

"What [her] Government has largely done,"explains Luke Malpass, "is to cut in some areas to fund increases in others." In her words:

It is not a saving in the sense that we are spending less as a government; it is a saving in the sense that, in the absence of making those savings, we would not have been able to fund increases to health and education and essential services without borrowing more.

As Orwell writes:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And:

When one hears a politician using a word like 'socialist,' 'communism,' 'freedom,' 'patriotic,' 'realistic,' 'justice,' and the like, one is not sure what he is saying, but it is clear that he is not saying anything meaningful.

Add to that last one the word 'saving.'

1984 was not supposed to be an instruction book; it was supposed to be a warning.

Look! Look! Come see how much 'saving' Nicola has been doing year on year! 

[Source: NZ Treasury's official Financial Statements]

UPDATE: To put some more context into what Willis's 'savings' look like, here's Matthew Horncastle, who's been reading the NZ Govt's Financial Statements, which say that last year, Willis's government took in $169.8 billion in revenue.

The majority of that is taxes. Forced. Compulsory. Taken from working people, business owners, and families under threat of legal consequence. There is no opt out. 

    They spent $183.5 billion. That is $13.7 billion more than they collected. 

    Net government debt is now $182.2 billion. That is $140,000 for every household in New Zealand. The interest bill alone is $8.9 billion a year. Every single year. That is more than the entire budget for law and order. More than defence. More than housing. Just interest. Just the cost of the debt that already exists. 

    And debt is still growing. In 2019 net Crown debt was $58 billion. It is now $182 billion. In six years the government tripled the national debt and handed every New Zealand household a $140,000 bill they never agreed to. 

    That is not governance. That is generational theft. 

    Free people should not be working to service the borrowing habits of politicians who will never personally bear the consequences of what they have spent. 

    Get the books back to surplus. Cut spending. Stop borrowing. Let productive people keep more of what they earn.
    This is not complicated. It just requires the courage to do it.

"Ironically, New Zealand First did not place New Zealand first."

 

"We are discussing the soon-to-be ratified NZ-India free trade agreement and the opposition by Messrs Jones and Peters. It’s proving a popular strategy, but it has been my observation, perhaps unfairly, that New Zealand First can sometimes be a little, shall we say, imprecise when it comes to their interpretation of the facts. ...

"[T]he treaty allows for 1000 software engineers, 1000 civil and mechanical engineers, 700 construction managers, 500 teachers and 1200 nurses. That’s 5000 in total. This isn’t 5000 a year. It is 5000 at any one time. And then they have to go home. ...

"[W]hat [else] do we get in this agreement? ... We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Not billions. And without dairy this isn’t a game-changer as the Prime Minister describes it but it is, for those industries affected, transformational.

"The other nonsense being peddled by NZ First is the obligation to invest US$20b into India; this is not what the document says. The wording is clear; we shall promote foreign direct investment '…from investors of New Zealand into India with the aim to increase investment by US 20 billion dollars within 15 years…'

"This is an aspiration, not a commitment. I suspect that this was included to give New Delhi cover to justify the internal political cost of reducing tariffs. ...

"It is significant that the Labour Party stepped up to support a treaty that was in the nation’s interest. They [belatedly] placed country ahead of party and for this Labour deserves our appreciation. Ironically, New Zealand First did not place New Zealand first. ...

"Like the trade deal with China, the initial document isn’t the final one. It opens a bilateral economic engagement that will improve the quality of life for residents of both countries.

"Luxon and his trade minister deserve respect and credit for this achievement."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Reading the NZ-India free trade agreement made my stress levels rise'

Envy

"Socialism is driven by envy of the rich, not concern for the poor."

~ paraphrased from George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

"[The envious] do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. '''

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech'

These days, they're just skulling the hemlock

Being an insightful entrepreneur is no guarantee of any other smarts.

Turns out too many tech-bros are talking up turning off. Where Socrates famously told his jury in the case for his life that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” too many Silicon Valley so-called "thought leaders" are advocating the un-examined life as the ultimate productivity hack.

Ted Gioia has the story:

At his trial in 399 BC, Socrates faced the death penalty on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. But in reality, philosophy and free inquiry were put on trial. Socrates had spent his life asking too damn many questions. And now the authorities wanted him to shut up.

Socrates was given a chance for a rebuttal. He had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much—and now he had one last chance to talk himself out of it.

His response ranks among the greatest moments in the history of Western culture. In a famous phrase, Socrates told the jury that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

That was why he asked so many questions. “Examining myself and others” is the “greatest good” of which we are capable, he insisted. If we abandon introspection and critical thinking, we descend to an animal life—and that is unworthy of us as human beings.

The jury was unconvinced. And a short while later, Socrates was put to death with a dose of poison. His days of asking questions were now over.

It’s now up to us ask questions in his place. In many ways, that is the story of Western culture.

It used to be. And now what's happened?

A prominent venture capitalist [let's call him Marc Andreessen] recently boasted that he aspires to “zero” introspection—“as little as possible.” This mindset, he claims, is a huge productivity boost. The less time wasted on thinking, the more time you can spend on doing.

“If you go back 400 years ago,” he adds, “it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

That’s an odd statement, and reveals a total ignorance of Socrates’s plea for an examined life—which is, to be blunt about it, the origin story of Western [reason], philosophy and science.

No introspection. Total ignorance. Who would have thought there'd be a connection.

Without Socrates and his legacy, there is no Silicon Valley. There is no venture capital. There is no IPO on the NASDAQ.

What does a life with introspection even look?

A good example might be Forrest Gump ...

All this leads to the obvious question: How do we spend our time after we give up introspection. We’re fortunate that tech bro influencers are already offering solutions....

This viral video—with more than one million views!—recommends staring at walls for extended periods. “Believe it or not,” explains Luke McCarthy, “this helped me have one of the most productive weeks of my life.” ...

Is this really a productivity hack, or just incipient mental illness?

"Commerce first taught nations to see with goodwill the wealth and prosperity of one another."

"[C]ommerce first taught nations to see with goodwill the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. 

    "It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race"

~ John Stuart Mill from his 1848 book Principles of Political Economy, under the heading 'Indirect benefits of Commerce, Economical and Moral; still greater than the Direct'

"There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.”

“The message from history is so blatantly obvious, that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty, that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.”

~ Matt Ridley from his book: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

She makes a good point

Comic strip, of course, by the late Charles Schulz

"Chris Bishop’s primary responsibility is reforming the RMA. ... The bureaucratic class has magnificently undermined his agenda."

"[Chris] Bishop’s primary responsibility, other than completing Steven Joyce’s highway from Warkworth to Whangarei, is reforming the RMA. ... [G]iven how central the reform of the Resource Management Act has been to this government, it defies comprehension that National didn't arrive with a draft ready to go. ...

"The excellent folk at the NZ Initiative have done an analysis of the two proposed [replacement] laws [which eventually emerged]: the Natural Environment and the Planning Bills. Nick Clark, the researcher, concluded, '...in the translation from principles to legislative text, something has gone wrong. Key elements have been weakened, complexity has crept back in, and an extraordinary amount of the systems' substance has been deferred to secondary instruments that do not yet exist.' ...

"The desire to place property rights at the heart of the legislation has been superseded by placing mana whenua into their customary central role in managing the land. ...

"[Also, i]f passed, these bills will not be the final word. That will be left to ‘secondary legislation’, or regulation; binding rules made by the minister of the day that determine how the law is to be applied. The proposal is for parliament to delegate its authority to the executive with minimal oversight. This time next year, Minister Swarbrick could use this secondary legislation to mandate her own vision into reality.

"Did we vote for that? ...

"[T]he bureaucratic class ... has magnificently undermined his agenda. This should have been self-evident thirty months ago ... "

~ Damien Grant from his post 'Chris Bishop has emerged as the main pretender to a shaky crown. How shall we assess his performance?'

No, the state did not ban speaking te reo in 19C schools.

While considering Elizabeth Rata's recent Research Report into the History of New Zealand Education -- which I recommend, by the way -- I remembered a long-ago 'Cue Card' that appeared here on the topic of Education, contrasting liberal, conservative, and libertarian views on the subject:

The 'liberal' view [of education] is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education has shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure.  

The view of conservatives is generally that public education needs to be made more efficient. With more efficiency, they say, 'delivery' of education will be better.

Libertarians however maintain that state education is all too efficient: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the state’s chosen values. After generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe' and politically correct -- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good and for forty-two percent of whom the reading of a bus timetable or the operation of a simple appliance is beyond them.

In previous decades the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture. Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctination doesn't.

The government's recently chosen values are "fairness, opportunity and security." We know that because [then-Prime Minister] Helen Clark said so. Orwell would have recognised these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training. "What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," says Ms Clark in the same speech, acknowledging that this is the way to make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula. 

Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.

They still don't.

But I made an error in the above 'Cue Card,' which Ms Rata's Report neatly corrects.

It is of course a historical fact that it's wasn't so much that the state banned the speaking of Māori in schools. What actually happened, as she reports, is that from George Grey's Education Ordinance of 1847 on, Māori were insisting that their children be taught in English, the lingua franca of the day. This is from Māori parents, Māori politicians, and Māori tribal leaders.

This is unsurprising. English was the entry into 19th century industrial technology – metallurgy for the new era of factories, rail, road and steamships, animal husbandry for livestock farming, and soil cultivation for grain and fruit production. Older crafts included leatherwork and blacksmithing. Combined with the English language, technological knowledge added to the already established Māori involvement in national and international business and trade.

The 1858 Native Schools Act continued the 1847 Ordinance's requirement for English language and industrial training. ...

The purpose of the Native village schools was to ensure that children would be bilingual: Māori at home and in the community and English acquired at school. English was a foreign language to many children so second language teaching methods and English content was used.

These were schools located in Māori villages, at the specific request of Māori elders, often with Māori parents attending classes as well, And in those "native schools" as they were called 

W. Rolleston, first inspector of Native Schools ... noted [in 1867] widespread dissatisfaction with the syllabus and with Māori as the language of instruction.

There was too much of the Bible taught, and too little of other subjects. They were taught moreover in their own language, whereas what they wished to learn was English.

The 1867 Native Schools Act directly addressed these concerns. Māori Members of Parliament supported implementing the Act. Karaitiana Takamoana (Eastern Maori) noted that the missionaries had been teaching the children –

“for many years, and the children are not educated. They have only taught them in the Maori language. The whole of the Maoris in this Island request that the Government should give instructions that the Maoris should be taught in English only”

Four more petitions to Parliament followed: In 1876 from Te Hakairo and 336 others; in 1877 from Renata Renata Kawepo and 790 others; and in 1877 from Riripi Ropata and 200 others. 

The schools gently prised education from the hands of missionaries into those of the state. They were funded by the taxpayer, with control of government funding and the school management transferred to village committees "at least 5 who are elected annually by parents of the children at the school." But above all:

The [Native Schools] Act required teacher competency, English language instruction, and syllabus quality:

The English language and the ordinary subjects of primary English education [said the Native Schools Act, 1867, S. 21] are taught by a competent teacher and that the instruction is carried on in the English language as far as practicable.

In short, while training Māori in English was one of the state's chosen values, it was at the express invitation of Māori parents, patriarchs, and politicians -- and was not to the exclusion of the Māori language itself.

* * * * 

Ms Rata discusses this topic and much more in a fascinating podcast interview with the NZ Initiative's Michael Johnston:

Free trade is good. A reminder. [updated]

Getting a free-trade agreement with India over the line has been harder work than getting oil out of the Straits of Hormuz. But over the weekend it finally happened, and the agreement was signed.

It's true, as Murray Rothbard used to say, that genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty or its deformed cousin, a “trade agreement” -- all it needs is repealing our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-'dumping' laws, and other restrictions on trade. Which, to be fair, is most of what this agreement seems to offer.

A relaxation of rules, not any new ones.

Over the centuries, getting it understood that trade is good -- a win-win -- has been even harder work. It's been 250 years since Scotsman Adam Smith wrote 700 pages to explain that very point. Yet as Daniel J. Smith, Gabriel F. Benzecry point out, "Returning to The Wealth of Nations, one is struck by how little progress has been made in educating the public about sound principles, a task that must be renewed with every generation."

The Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and voluntary exchange that inspired America’s founders also laid the foundation of modern economics. Yet two and a half centuries later, persistent policy blunders — protectionist trade barriers, ballooning national debt, and stubborn inflation — reveal how far we have strayed from the Scotsman’s insights, endangering the principles upon which our republic was founded.

Protectionism is becoming so endemic once again, so normalised, that it requires a major effort to implement its opposite. It's big news when shackles come off. freedom free-trade 

The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge — it’s a failure to teach and apply enduring principles. ...

Yet even as those principles are applied we can see and applaud the results. Even as the world's population has increased rapidly, we see that the most important growth with more population is not more stomachs to feed, but more minds able to produce -- and (in Adam Smith's words) more people ready to truck, barter and trade. The very simple fact, as Marian Tupy reminds us, is that "for every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent."

For every 1% increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3% — according to @HumanProgress's new Simon Abundance Index.

In other words, when people are left even moderately free to produce, resources grow at a faster pace than the population.

It was Malthus, writing after Adam Smith, who ignored so many of his lessons and saw only the stomachs to be fed. 

The Malthusian mind never [saw] the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt.

The record is clear. Smith explained how it works 250 years ago. Let's applaud when more of it is allowed to happen.

UPDATE: Another reminder: 

It's not nations that trade. People trade.

And they will if you just get out of their way. 

#ANZAC: "And year after year, the numbers grow fewer, who remember what it was we're not to forget"

 

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

"It's gratifying, in a way, that we start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.
    "This is healthy. This much is good.
    "'Lest we Forget!' we say"
    "It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting....

"THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to two nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster. 

"In the end, the attempted occupation [of the Gallipoli peninsula] was decided upon partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop ..." 

[T]he reason they embarked [was] not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar [and to] gift Constantinople to Russia.... as an altruistic gift to an 'ally' who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust ... the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families.... 

    "Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.... [in pursuit, said Churchill, of] 'a victory such as the war had not yet seen.'
    "It never would. It never could. 
    "Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal. 
    "It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could have meant something. It was a total unmitigated disaster, but at least, now, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might be clearer. 
    "The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched 'birth' (in some way) of our nation is very much less so."

~ composite quote excerpted from NOT PC's posts 'Lest we forget what?' and 'But what were the ANZACs fighting for, Grandad?'

It's been raining a lot

It was the explosion heard almost around the world, yet now all but forgotten. The Hunga Tonga/Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami devastated much of the island kingdom of Tonga, displacing hundreds of people from the outer islands, and propelling a record-breaking amount of water vapour into the Earth's stratosphere -- enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

As an underwater volcano, it thrust an unprecedented amount of water into the sky, increasing total stratospheric water content by about 10% -- enough to cause a rapid change in atmospheric chemistry. That additional water vapour from the eruption is still up there, still decaying steadily, not expected to return to its pre-eruption range until around 2030.

Talking to a friend recently about the rain, the floods, the wet weather events in the last few years, you have to wonder whether that massive uptick in stratospheric water might still be playing a part?

Hunga Tonga erupted in January 2022. MetService recorded 53 severe weather events in 2022, and issued 182 severe weather warnings. In January 2023 Auckland had its worst flood in memory, a record 539mm of raining falling in January. Cyclone Gabrielle arrived in Feb 2023. Extreme rain events occurred throughout 2024, from extreme rainfall events occurred throughout the year, from Dunedin to Westland. The North Island got a Red Alert and the South Island a state of emergency in May 2025 for record rainfall and strong winds. And this week Wellingtonians were stuck with severe flooding and landslides after 77mm of rain fell in less than one hour, causing the worst flooding event since Wellington's disastrous 1976 storm.

Naturally, NIWA says "nothing to see here." (They don't seem to have even mentioned the eruption since 2024.) The influential 2025 Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report frustratingly focusses more on temperature than rainfall. But just as the atmospheric water increase still lingers, so too a few studies suggest some lingering interest in the question -- examining especially how much the eruption  may have nudged rainfall patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, including New Zealand.

A January 2026 study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found some statistically significant extratropical regional climate responses to the eruption, driven by circulation changes. A recent finding from the Austrian Polar Research Institute), published just weeks ago, found that the eruption continues to influence stratospheric patterns, increasing chances of extreme precipitation events at mid-latitudes-- which includes New Zealand.

Yet while they're happy to go on the record about their modelled "causes" of recent rainfall events, the largest volcanic eruption this century remains the climate event no local climate scientists want to talk about. 

I can't imagine why.

Let's (not) make a noise!

"‘LET’S MAKE A NOISE FOR THE MIGHTY WESTS TIGERS!’ the ground announcer shouts to the crowd, his voice booming through portable speakers that are spread around the oval.

"‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU, TIGERS FANS,’ he continues, ‘I SAID MAKE A NOISE!’

"Why sporting administrators feel the need to fill breaks in the game with pumping music or high-pitched screeching of ground announcers is beyond me.

"Can you imagine an Ashes game at Lords, thousands of the Barmy Army singing, trumpets playing ‘Jerusalem’, and all of it drowned out by ‘We Will Rock You’ or ‘Hells Bells?’ Can you imagine decades-old home-grown supporters’ chants of an old firm clash between Rangers and Celtic interrupted by the shrieks of a ground announcer, or the cheery drunken chaos of the Bay 13 crowd of a Boxing Day Test match drowned out by rock music? They just can’t let us enjoy the natural noise of the game. ...

"The groans of despair at a last-second loss, the jubilation of an unexpected come-from-behind win are sounds that add to the atmosphere of the game, not the loud music and cliched slogans of chant champions and ground announcers. Why can’t we just enjoy the unscripted barracking of the game?

"‘AND NOW,’ the ground announcer’s voice blasts through the speakers again, ‘HERE COMES YOUR WESTS TIGERS.’"

~ Paul Harman from his post 'Time’s up, Ground Announcer'

"Every dollar collected through a capital gains tax is a dollar stolen twice"

"Capital gains tax represents one of the most egregious examples of double taxation in the federal code, yet politicians treat it as if they're taxing 'unearned' income for the first time. 

"You earn $100,000, pay income tax on it, and save $70,000 after the government takes their cut. You invest that already-taxed money in shares, real estate, or bonds. Ten years later, you sell for $140,000. The government swoops in again, demanding capital gains tax on your $70,000 profit. They're taxing the same economic activity twice: your initial productive work that generated the savings, then the delayed consumption that made investment possible. 

"Capital gains represent nothing more than the time value of money plus compensation for risk. When you save instead of consume immediately, you defer gratification to provide capital for productive investment. That $70,000 you invested didn't sit idle; it funded business expansion, job creation, and economic growth. The return you earned reflects both the productive use of that capital and inflation's erosion of purchasing power over time. 

"The double taxation becomes even more perverse when you consider inflation. If your $70,000 investment becomes $140,000 over ten years, but inflation averaged 3% annually, your real purchasing power increased by roughly $18,000, not $70,000. Yet the IRD taxes the entire nominal gain, including the portion that merely kept pace with their own monetary debasement. 

"Every dollar collected through a capital gains tax is a dollar stolen twice; once from your labour, again from your thrift."

~ Handre [translated from American]

"Neoliberalism." "Austerity." Bollocks.

There are people who think the world in recent times has been suffering under something called "neoliberalism" in which "social spending"is savaged ....

... and others who claim governments have recently been inflicting something called "austerity." Here's the UK's "austerity" measured over the last three centuries. Their experience is not unique ...

[Hat tips Zeitgeist Explorer and A. Comte] 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine."

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.  

"It was never a zero-sum game in my mind. You’re always trading with your customers and your employees and your suppliers for mutual benefit, mutual gain. That’s the miracle of capitalism. That’s why humanity has been lifted out of the dirt in the last 250 years. The Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this trap that we were in, which really was a zero-sum game. ...

"The biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. 

"They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound. 

"All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are. Where do all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well. 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."

~ Whole Foods founder John Mackey on the Win-Win Mentality That Lifted Humanity Out of the Dirt [hat tip David Senra]

Simple Swarbrick

"Mainstream Media reports that the Green Party will campaign on mass electrification for the election, saying the sun, wind, water and geothermal energy 'don’t come through the Strait of Hormuz.'

"Chloe Swarbrick with that wild-eyed enthusiasm that only she is capable of offers a simplistic solution. I use the word 'simplistic' advisedly. She herself says the solution is simple. ... Swarbrick said the Government needed to create a national electrification plan ...starting with improving access to 'cheap, easy loans for solar panels and batteries' ... 'tak[ing] control of our country’s own needs by powering ourselves, with every renewable resource available in abundance around us.' Would that it were so easy. ...

"[T]hink about a few things.;

• Is what Swarbrick proposes really a solution?
• Does she really know what she is talking about?
• Is she aware of the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry in our day to day lives and how much we depend upon it?
• Have she and the Greens really thought through this policy or is it an easy one to articulate.
• Or in fact are Swarbrick and the Greens speaking and policy making from a position of unawareness or ignorance of the nature of the problem?

"And if the answer to the preceding question is in the affirmative, do they have any business being near the levers of power. ...

"Think about it and ... about the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry and how much we depend upon it."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Unawareness, Blind Ignorance and a Sense of Unreality'

"The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy."

Former Aus PM Paul Keating -- aka the Lizard of Oz -- has deservedly unloaded on the pathetic race-baiting of newish Aus Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor.  "Many people, me included, wished him well in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. How dispiriting is his cowardice."

The Liberal party, battling an extreme version of itself – One Nation – has again fallen back to its default political policy: racism.

Angus Taylor, announcing a policy at primary odds with an immigrant nation, says a Liberal government under his leadership will adopt Trump ICE-style policies to weed and “boot out” people who fail to adhere to “national values” and who are responsible for the erosion of national culture including the Balkanisation of communities.

And, to hammer the point, sitting beside Taylor at his policy launch was Mr Racial Opportunism himself, John Winston Howard, late of anti-Asian migration in 1988 – the picket fence suburban racism of his first round as Liberal leader, and the wilful anti-humanitarianism of his electorally-driven Tampa atrocity of 2001. ...

Angus Taylor came to the Liberal leadership with a reputation of being mainstream Liberal; that is, a keeper of the Liberal party’s best longer-term instincts both in social and economic policy.

And many people, myself included, wished him well in consolidating the Liberal base and in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. If not righteous, decent.

But by adopting racism with its shabby appeal to differentiation and primal instincts, Angus Taylor marks himself out as a political leader unworthy of the leadership of a party that has managed Australia for the greater part of the last century and which celebrated the country’s unifying values.

Racism is not simply immoral and abhorrent, it is absurd. The notion that some of us are in some way different to the rest of us – in some way born differently, of some alien biology. ...

The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy. The fantasy that Australia in the modern age can return to a monoculture. A monoculture which fails to acknowledge or accept that a continent of our scale is able to turn its back on the multilateralism of neighbouring states or on the vitality of their societies. And, more than that, shun them while disparaging any contribution they may make or bring to us as migrants.

How dispiriting for the rest of us is Angus Taylor’s cowardice in not even attempting to stand and argue for principles that have been integral to Australia’s strength – principles his party has long championed.

RELATED:

=>Welfare State Leaves Boat-People to Die

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:01 am | Libertarianz Party

"New Zealanders who wish the 434 Afghan refugees on board the Tampa moored off Christmas Island would just 'go away' are exposing the dark underbelly at the heart of the Welfare State," says Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell....

=>Better Way for Boat-People

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:06 am | Libertarianz Party

"There is a better way forward for politicians wrestling with a way to deal with the 434 homeless Afghan refugees that no country wants to admit," suggested Libertarianz leader Peter Cresswell today....

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man."

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man.
    "After escaping slavery, his first job was loading coal onto ships. It was new, hard, dirty work. Here's how he describes it:

"'I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own.
"'There was no Master standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and my newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.'

"Dirty, backbreaking work—and he describes it as rapture, pleasure, a new existence. 

    "Next time you struggle to find meaning in whatever it is you do for paid work, think of Frederick Douglass."

~ Gena Gorlin, quoting Frederick Douglass from his Autobiographical Writings

"Taxes ... "

"Taxes are the price you pay to fund the things that you protest against."

~ Spike Cohen

'Who Deserves Our Support?'

"Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?

"Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. ... if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs.

"You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion).

"But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilisation does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these 'sides' [if any] better represents those values? ... it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between [semi] free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.

"Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to 'Free Palestine' or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world."

~ Stewart Margolis from his post 'Who Deserves Our Support?'