This is the damning fact:

Epidemiologist Michael Baker told Stuff it was difficult to properly monitor influenza and other winter illnesses, because high-quality surveillance programmes were discontinued, including the Ministry of Health not renewing its contract for the FluTracking tool for cost-saving reasons.

The battle that New Zealand education forgot.

Typical bullshit from Peters, trying to manufacture anti-Māori conflict.

Acknowledging both the Māori and European discoverers of New Zealand is good. Both discoveries are, themselves for their peoples, true.

IMHO the interesting fact is that not all iwi have whakapapa that asserts Kupe as the navigator who discovered Aotearoa. Some iwi have whakapapa that asserts that it was Maui*.

This isn't a problem. Both Kupe and Maui could have independently done so. The same way that one might argue that Cook and Tasman both discovered this land mass for Britain/Europe.

* if you're interested: Maui fishing up the north island is an allegory to seeing the island rise up over the horizon as if being lifted out of the water. Maui was a navigator/wayfinder of repute, as was Kupe.

Not quite totality.

My daughter's school.

I'd hazard a guess that getting the Birkenhead or Takapuna fire station's teams on site in less than 17 minutes would be challenging anyway, let alone the Silverdale team on site that quickly.

But, fuck you Simeon Brown:

At the time, Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown said he was "angry" on behalf of those impacted by the fire due to it happening during the strike.

Firefighters, nurses, teachers: give them whatever the hell they ask for. None of them do those jobs for the money you facist nationalist pigs.

Oof.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/goodnewseveryone/p/517753/berry-nice-to-meet-you-bumper-fruit-crop-could-lead-to-huge-mating-season-for-nzs

After a four-year wait, the abundant fruiting of the rimu tree could inspire the world’s heaviest parrots to boost their population

There's something I'm missing in this one.

Stumbled across this archive.

It has some of the multi-part comics aggregated for easier reading.

Congratulations NZP you and your guns successfully escalated this situation to as bad as it could possibly get.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32180471

This male has been so beautifully red this year, but he is very skittish and non-assertive. His mate is much more outgoing and easy for me to catch.

I saw him pop up in the pine tree the birds all stage from to come get some peanuts from me. The jays usually beat him to them and he either flies off or is left with nothing after letting them have first shot.

He hoped around to a few branches planning his moves... And that of course got the attention of the jays there were new peanuts! 😔

I was trying to get focused on him in the tree, but he chose that moment to fly over. I quickly tried to refocus my binoculars and managed to snap this photo of his disappointment in getting nothing but empty shells once more.

Better luck next time!

This one immediately before picking up the nut came out pretty well too.

Pennsylvania, US Pixel 7 > cheap binocs > dirty patio door

In Thanks to Them Belos calls Flapjack "Evelyn" just before crushing them.

The haunted hayride also depicts Evelyn as a red bird.

Obviously this is no mere coincidence, such things just don't happen accidentally in scripts as solid as TOH.

The Bat Queen establishes that an old enough palisman can become independant/witch-like (as such). So there's kind of precedent for a witch-palisman transition.

Kind of like Mark's comic about Flapjack "always choosing Caleb/Hunter".

Neat.

... and enjoyed Mark's art even if I wasn't getting the whole picture.

So, I decided to watch the show: TOH is one of the very best shows I've ever watched, and I've watched a lot, over a very long time.

Very, very rarely does one genuinely grieve that characters' stories have ended. This was one such case for me.

All I've got to do now is pluck up the courage to watch it again...

Well, at least one person in the Greyhound racing industry is an awful person: Rachel Rae in this case.

The article itself is poor, as it cherry picks just parts of some of the submissions, but there's an interesting point glossed over which is not well known.

Julian Batchelor - representing Stop Co-Governance - made his submission using a presentation on the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi, arguing there would be no need for Treaty Principles if the "true, bonafide, English final draft of the Treaty was in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975."

Emphasis mine. I find it ironic that Batchelor thinks that a draft should be enshrined in law and that they've implicitly acknowledged that an original English version doesn't exist.

There is no actual final English draft of the Treaty, at least if there was one it has been lost to time. It's accepted by historians that Hobson, Busby, and Henry and William Williams assembled the several drafts they had between them on the evening of 5th Feb 1840. The Williams' then translated (which took all night, literally, they finished at sunrise on the 6th) Te Tītiti and deliberately used the transliterated term kawanatanga (governorship) introduced by the missionaries for use in the New Testament rather than rangitiratanaga (sovereignty) because they all knew that no chief would sign away their rangitiratanga (or arguably believe they could surrender it). Hobson, Busby and the Williams' were particularly concerned that Māori be spared the experiences most British colonial natives had in the past.

Te Tīriti was then translated into English and these two documents were sent back to the crown.

That didn't take long.

From the shitty article, it's not clear who manages that list and gets to expand it. Is it the police or parliament or the judiciary? Also, no exploration of what the police want to add to the list.

Hopefully it's just low level gangs that don't make the national news headlines... but part of me suspects that it'll include any anti-establishment groups like Greenpeace and SAFE and the Palestinian flag any iwi and anyone else critical of the government.

Edit: sigh, I guess I have to word that second paragraph better. Try applying the lesson in this poem and see if you think this legislation could be expanded andused in a similar fashion t events it describes:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

We're at the first stanza, except it's "gangs".

One said Māori were like seagulls: if you feed them "more come - and then they start crapping on you."

Another said that over the years there'd been a "self-serving reinterpretation of the Treaty to benefit the Māori elite".

Yet another reckoned that before Pākehā brought colonisation and war Māori "were killing each other anyway".

There was talk of what percentage of Māori ancestry should count, and an assertion that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wasn't brave enough to investigate Māori organisations with charity tax status.

Holy fucking shit. I hope that even Seymour might have winced at these comments.

A right wing politician speaking to a room of rich white racist retirees who think the natives are too uppity and need taking down a peg or two; if ever there was a generation who I wish would just shuffle off this moral coil.

Oh FFS.

Regardless of the racially charged headline... the only reason to arm police with sidearms is to make it easier for them to kill people extra-judicially. That's the only function a side arm has.

Police already have easy access to firearms in their vehicles.

Apparently 68% of police see Judge Dredd as an idol.