Geoffrey Smith

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

✍️🤡🤙

[NuZillund @NuZillund]

A land value tax on older vulnerable people who worked and paid into the system is morally wrong

Forcing old people out of their homes is morally wrong

Doing this so you can give it to Wokeington and people who don't want to work is morally wrong

It's basically stealing

[NZ MAGA Mike #MAGAmikesMEMEmarathon @NZMAGAMike]

Sweet gig.

[Geoffrey Smith @phat_geoff]

@aniobrien Is that treason?

[Geoffrey Smith @phat_geoff]

@zipitsweety Non

[Kevin Sorbo @ksorbs]

Property tax is theft too.

[Geoffrey Smith @phat_geoff]

@ElliotIkilei Can we tax them for the huge capital gain that they are charging?

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Do you agree with Jeremy Clarkson?

[NickMowbray @NMowbray23]

YOU'RE WEEKLY REMINDER OF WHERE YOUR MONEY WENT UNDER THE LAST GOV. ( a few of thousands of examples)

1. Wallaby eradication — $2.7 million to kill 18 wallabies. $153,000 per wallaby and 26,000 labour hours. Cheaper to fly them home business class.

2. Virtual job expos — $835,000. 126 people attended. $6,626 per Zoom attendee.

3. Global health recruitment campaign — $514,000. Result: 3 interviews. $171,000 per interview.

4. Let's Get Wellington Moving — $35m on consultants. Just $250k on actual construction. You read that right.

5. Auckland Light Rail — $229 million. Six years. Not one metre of track. Burning $1.2m/week on consultants at peak.

6. Three Waters — ~$1.2 billion torched on a policy nobody wanted, scrapped before delivering a single pipe. Included $14,500 to write a job description for a CEO who never existed.

7. iReX ferries — $500m+ sunk. Ballooned from $551m to a projected $3 billion+ before cancellation. (NZ First also had fingerprints on the original deal — worth being upfront about.)

8. RAT tests — $531 million sitting in warehouses. Storage at $100,000/day. Approved over a year late.

9. Mongrel Mob meth rehab — $2.75 million. $239k catering. $157k marae hire. $100k hiring a van.

10. Shorter shower campaign — $2.8 million. Printed in 7 languages. To tell you to take shorter showers.

11. Auckland Harbour cycle/walking bridge — $51 million on planning before scrapped. No bridge.

12. Lake Onslow pumped hydro — ~$100 million on feasibility studies. Not a shovel in the ground.

13. Workforce Development Councils — $65 million/year for bodies critics said delivered little tangible value. Disestablished.

14. RNZ/TVNZ merger — $20 million. Abandoned by Labour themselves.

15. Ethnic women in politics research — $842,000. A university grant could've done it for a fraction.

16. "Ulu Cavu Wig Tour" — $73,000 in taxpayer funding for the Arts Minister's husband's tour.

17. Abandoned China immigration office — ~$3 million in rent on an office closed for over a year.

18. Promoting Australian citizenship to Kiwis already in Australia — $10,000. Funding the brain drain with our money.

…and we could keep going.

We should never FORGET Labour. Just a small fraction of their wasteful ways.
@NZNationalParty @actparty

[ScienceFocus @ScienceFocusonX]

Your body has a hidden survival mode that kicks in when you stop eating.

And one Japanese scientist cracked the code on it.

His name is Yoshinori Ohsumi.

In 2016, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering something wild: when your cells get starved, they start eating themselves.

Not in a bad way.

They hunt down broken, damaged, useless parts inside themselves and recycle them for fuel. It's called autophagy, which literally means "self-eating."

Think of it as your body's internal cleanup crew, triggered the moment food stops coming in.

Damaged proteins? Gone.

Worn-out cell parts? Recycled.

Cellular junk that builds up over time? Cleared out.

Ohsumi spent decades quietly studying yeast cells in his lab while the rest of the science world chased flashier topics. Everyone overlooked this process. He didn't.

His work now sits at the center of research into aging, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and type 2 diabetes.

One man. One microscope. One discovery that rewrote how we understand the human body.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from the patience nobody else has.

Source: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 — NobelPrize(.)org

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

It's not vegan leather. It's plastic.

It's not oat milk. It's a beverage made by enzymatically processing oat starch and emulsifying it with rapeseed oil.

It's not vegan cheese. It's coconut oil, modified starch, and titanium dioxide pressed into a slice.

It's not plant-based meat. It's pea-protein isolate, seed oils, and methylcellulose extruded into a patty.

It's not a butter alternative. It's an industrial spread invented by a soap company.

It's not a milk alternative. It's water with oats and additives, sold for double the price of milk.

Every product on the plant-based shelf has been linguistically rebranded to borrow the legitimacy of the food it replaced.

The cow has not been consulted on the use of her name.

The sheep has not consented to the term vegan wool.

The marketing department in London has consented to all of it.

The animals predate the marketing department by ten thousand years.

The marketing department will be gone before the animals will.

[Gaye Ess @gaye_ess]

😆😆😆

[Winston Peters @winstonpeters]

It has been reported that police have recently visited Renee-Rose Schwenke about a so-called 'offensive' social media post she posted. Not threatening, not inciting violence, just that it allegedly offended someone.

If this report is true, this is '1984 thought-police' level overreach. It should seriously frighten every New Zealander who believes in freedom of speech.

This is not about whether this particular post was offensive or not. There will always be personal responsibility and consequences for people voicing their opinions that are viewed by some as tasteless or gormless or offensive - but those consequences should not be by way of a police visit.

No one has the right to not be offended, nor do they have the right to be protected from having hurt feelings. In fact it is precisely the right to be able to offend which is the foundation of freedom of speech in our country.

This has happened overseas with more regularity where social media posts, opinions, views, expressions, and even jokes are now deemed offensive by some authoritarian power and have been met with threats from police, arrests, or even convictions in court.

We never thought we would see this happen here and it has a chilling effect on where we are going as a country.

As Oliver Wendall Homles Jr said, freedom of speech also comes with responsibility of speech - you cannot falsely yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre without there rightly being a consequence. We already have laws around 'responsibility of speech' ranging from defamation to incitement of violence, and that is important - but people's freedom to have their own free opinion is something which should be aggressively defended.

We don't all have to agree with each other's opinions, but we should all fight for each other's right to have them. This is the essential foundation of our free democracy.

If we start to accept this kind of overreach by police to curtail individual freedom of speech, our democracy will fall into the type of totalitarian oblivion that will destroy our country.

[🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ @NZFreeSpeech]

Government scraps BSA: the right call, but regulator and department overreach is the wider problem 

The Free Speech Union welcomes the Government's decision to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority and investigate voluntary self-regulation options, says Jillaine Heather, Chief Executive. 

“This is the right call. For more than 20 years, Parliament declined to extend the BSA's jurisdiction over the internet. The BSA tried to take that power for itself anyway. A regulator cannot help itself to powers Parliament has refused to give.” 

“Credit to every New Zealander who refused to accept backdoor censorship. Over 12,000 Kiwis signed our petition asking the Minister to put the BSA back in its box. They were right, and the Minister has now agreed.” 

Live cases must be dropped now 

“The BSA is currently prosecuting three complaints against The Platform under a jurisdictional theory the Government has just repudiated. The Authority cannot continue to exercise a power Parliament is about to remove. Those cases must be dropped immediately. The process is already the punishment.” 

The wider pattern of overreach 

The BSA is one symptom of a broader problem. Regulators unilaterally expanding their remit or government departments quietly building the machinery of speech regulation in advance of, or in place of, the public debate that should precede it. The Department of Internal Affairs is the clearest example, pressing on with structures and proposals on online content and “safer online services” while the open conversation about whether and how New Zealanders want online speech regulated has not yet happened in Parliament with public input... [Continues online] 

🔗 Read the full media release: https://t.co/suzOZP30cW

[The Salty One @the_salty_one_]

Alert! Policy idea for the next election...

Every school must have the New Zealand flag on a flag pole.

Agree?

We need some civic pride!