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The media was again incredibly frustrating at the 4pm covid update yesterday, and in this mornings Herald. Having Audrey Young doing a grumpy old woman routine asking the same gotcha question a million times ("why are we not told these business now?", and the switcheroo "why were this businesses blindsided by releasing their information before informing them?") was bad enough but her personal annoyance has become the subject of her piece this morning in the paper, where for some vague reason the PM needs to be involved to rev up the MOH over some quibble that Audrey doesn't like. What is frus...

viz., "a supra-national entity that has laws, courts and the means to enforce the peace." RedLogix 1.1.1.1.1.1 In my view that while the ICC was undeniably a good idea, it never attained the commitment across the board to permit it to succeed. I'll go back to my original parallel; the reason why nation states are mostly lawful and peaceful places is that ordinary citizens forgo the right to coercion and revenge and place it solely in the hands of the nation state. In the case of the ICC that never really happened; while most nations signed up to the ICC, there was never ...

The nuclear weapons ban treaty is groundbreaking, even if the nuclear powers haven’t signed The Conversation 22, 2021  Tilman Ruff- Honorary Principal Fellow, School of Population anobal Health, University of Melbourne,  The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted at the United Nations in 2017 and finally reached the milestone of 50 ratifications in October.…

RedLogix 2.1 Interestingly that article starts with a description of appallingly bad safety standards at a major petrochem site in the 1960's. Yet remarkably everything has changed in the 50 years since; the events he describes are pretty much unthinkable in a developed country today. In particular: One day, Sherman was standing in a room, leaning over a large pipe to check a filter, when an operator in a distant control room mistakenly turned a knob, sending hot, almond-smelling, liquid chlorinated hydrocarbons coursing through the pipe, drenching him I worked for decad...

Invercargill and Dunedin have been closed by floods once a decade or so. Graeme 1.1.1 Large parts of Dunedin are below mean sea level, some around a metre. Invercargill is just above, but close enough that a flood combined with a high tide makes things pretty wet. Both suffer from being built on very weak ground, especially Invercargill, so both are never going to be more than they are now and unlikely to get much future investment. It's not only airports that are at risk from sea level rise. The State Highway and railway going past Dunedin Airport are only slightly h...