Just in case ya wondering… 

Over the last three years NACT have… 

Stopped work on Auckland light rail.
Stopped all work on the Lake Onslow renewable battery project.
Scrapped the smoke-free law to fund tax cuts.
Scrapped Fair Pay Agreements.
Gave $3 billion in tax cuts to landlords.
Paid himself $52,000 to live in one of his own 30 properties, on top of his $471,000 salary.
The so-called party of infrastructure … cut Cook Strait ferry deal, then paid $8 million for consultants to tell them they need new ships. $700 million wasted in total. Still no ships.
Stopped the Clean Car Discount, after Luxon took an $8,000 discount himself.
Blocked statistical reporting on who does and doesn’t pay their share of tax. Think about that!
Broke its election promise and didn’t scrap the app tax.
Scrapped Three Waters, pushing costs onto ratepayers and increasing rates.
Used $4,150 of taxpayers’ money to pay for his te reo Māori classes after saying, “People in the real world should pay for it themselves.”
Halved the crayfish take for locals, but cut the commercial take by only one-fifth.
Gutted freshwater protections so cruel intensive winter grazing could continue to pollute water ways.
Took $80 million from hospitals.
Cut DOC funding by $125 million.
Scrapped the First Home Grant.
Gave half a million dollars of taxpayers’ money to their mate Bill English to do a “review”.
Blew $8 million on consultants for a proposed tunnel under Wellington.
Wasted $4 million on a six-person advisory group to talk about crime and reduce youth offending. They achieved nothing.
Gave big tobacco a $216 million tax cut.
Refused to reinstate Jobs for Nature while unemployment soared.
Reduced the qualifications needed for relief teachers.
Introduced new road tolls.
Deprioritised police responses to mental health and family violence call-outs.
Slashed $107 million a year from school lunches, costing more than 2,000 local jobs.
Spent more than $6 million on the Treaty Principles Bill, despite saying it would not support it.
Spent half a million dollars per child on boot camps despite it not to working for most kids.
Stopped school rebuilds.
Put $150 million towards partially privatising schools.
Scrapped the Productivity Commission and set up the Ministry for Regulation, which is four times bigger and more expensive.
Put a toll on a road that had already been built and paid for.
Stripped $30 million from a programme funding teachers to learn te reo Māori.
Cut the allocated $750 million for the new Whangārei Hospital.
Broke its promise and downgraded the Dunedin Hospital rebuild.
Allowed commercial fishing in highly protected areas. Yes you read that right.
Increased ACC levies.
Broke its pre-election promise to lower the bowel cancer screening age.
Halved support for apprentices.
Took away the first-year Fees Free scheme for tertiary education.
Removed the Reserve Bank’s mandate to support maximum sustainable employment.
Took away support designed to help people back into work.
Sacked 700 scientists.
Cut the First Home Loan scheme.
Halved the government contribution to KiwiSaver.
Halved the Community Conservation Fund.
Defunded Māori services by $757 million in one Budget.
Changed the RMA to allow farmers to discharge pollution into rivers without consent.
Gave $300 million to oil and gas companies.
Went back on a law to ban cruel pig sow crates.
Raided the Climate Emergency Response Fund.
Put a tax on everyone’s power bill.
Spent money and time making English an official language, while saying there wasn’t time to pass modern slavery legislation.
Cancelled a 70-million-litre diesel storage facility, then had to build another one at a far bigger cost.
Gave the racing industry more than $1 million in fuel subsidies.
Let the fishing industry write rules that would have resulted in no size limits for them. Those changes are now on hold for if they get back in.
Raided $100 million from the Tourism Levy that was meant to go towards conservation.
Is trying to change DOC’s mandate towards generating profit rather than protecting conservation land.
Is stripping fisheries management powers from regional councils and handing them exclusively to Fisheries New Zealand.
Changed the law so citizens can’t take polluters to court.
Rigged the voting system so people can’t vote on voting day unless they’ve enrolled a month earlier.

 

Treos! (and then we were…)

Had a rather unsuccessful inaugural Twitch Streaming attempt today.  Emanuel was not available so I tried to take over the streaming side, and would you believe, missed by ‘that‘ much. I was in Tech Hell, so the other 2 guys were doing most of the heavy lifting.

So rather than the constantly Freezing live video feed, here is one of the audio responsive graphic toys to watch instead.

Found out later I had 1 setting wrong.

Catching up to current browser tech!

Experimenting with what can be done with HTML and Java  (well, maybe I just mean IN BROWSER) with audio and MIDI inputs…

AND … yeah im sort of obsessed with this monochrome graphic style.

 

Nowhere2Turn

As things become more toxic with the rise of fascism and ultra-capitalism and the billionaire oligarchy, the options for respite seem more and more limited…

Production: Kirke Godfrey (ShapedNoise)

Vocals:  Vicki Valenci (

Written:  Vicki Valenci and Kirke Godfrey

REASON’s to be Cheerful

REASON TURNS 25!

Propellorheads reason was, and still is an astoundingly powerful and intuitive environment for music creation.

After burning out from working professionally in creating music for moving image,(after several years) the only tool I could face was Version 1 of a new program by Propeller Heads called REASON.

It replicated a load of the hardware tools I had been using before I retired, allowing the unique routing and manipulation the hardware had provided, but with the incredible convenience of software. It  was also extraordinary stable at a time where most music software was … significantly less so…

If you’re wondering about getting into music software… CHECK IT OUT!

We have ALL seen this before … 

Despite decades ago, the entire planet going to war to try to stop it, it seem we have learned nothing.

Here we go again…

•obvious tip of the hat to Underworld.

Music, Lyrics, Production: Kirke Godfrey

Photograph: Hans Runesson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_with_the_Handbag


More Jagged version. Somehow evokes the sickening Nazi aesthetic

Little Box of Folded Fun

The very xlnt Tim Prebble was kind enough to lend me his  MakeNoise 0-coast. For a tiny little box, its remarkably deep and flexible (in a very MakeNoise way)

For those that don’t know Tim, he is a sound designer and recordist and makes pretty definitive sound libraries for film sound design under the handle Hiss and Roar

Before I returned it I sampled the living be cheeses out of it, both multi-sampled, and a load of long freeform noise generating.

I’ve since thrown a selection of exerts of these into my µFreak and are in some ways able to recreate some of the mayhem of the original.

WARNING– MAYHEM:

Save 20k lives, get death threats.

Jacinda Ardern

“It still baffles me that a leader that did her best, with undeniably good intentions, saved a minimum of 20,000 Kiwi lives, had her team shepherd the economy right through to November 2023 in a way where National inherited “better finances than expected”, all with one of the lowest debt to GDP levels in the OECD, as well as securing and keeping higher credit ratings in her tenure, and did her best to preserve water infrastructure in public hands, taking the political hits and death threats to herself and her family as graciously as anyone could, could have this level of reaction.”


Opinion

Mountain Tui

Should be Obligatory Reading EVERYWHERE

Omar El Akkad’s confrontation of the West’s hypocrisy over the continuing genocide in GAZA. 

This is a book with an undercurrent of anger through it, but it’s not a book that shouts.

Instead, it’s a quietly convincing indictment of the West’s institutions and of its moral failings, and a thorough laying out of an argument about breaking away from the ideas and ideals we’ve held ourselves to.

Although, of course, it criticises right-wing institutions, one of the book’s biggest targets for critique is the Western liberal.

LINK to Interview  HERE

 https://sarahshaffi.com/

 

Incomprehensible

Unless you have been paying attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism_in_North_America

 

Donald Trump and Fascism

Some scholars have argued that the political style of Donald Trump resembles the political style of fascist leaders. Such assessments were first made during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign,[37][38] continuing over the course of the Trump presidency as he appeared to court far-right extremists,[39][40][41][42]including his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election after losing to Joe Biden,[43] and culminating in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[44] As these events have unfolded, some commentators who had initially resisted applying the label to Trump came out in favor of it, including conservative legal scholar Steven G. Calabresi and conservative commentator Michael Gerson.[45][46] After the attack on the Capitol, Robert O. Paxton, a historian of fascism, went so far as to state that Trump is a fascist, despite his earlier objection to using the term in this way.[47] In “Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past”, Henry Girouxwrote: “The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism.”[48]Other historians of fascism, such as Richard J. Evans,[49] Roger Griffin, and Stanley Payne, continue to disagree that fascism is an appropriate term to describe Trump’s politics.[44] Jason Stanley argued in 2018 that Trump uses “fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions”.[50]

 

FUCK RACISM

Born and raised in a VERY racist homeland.

Sadly watched as… “people I grew up with” * succumbed to the viral toxicity.

Now sickening to see even the idea of racism, being inverted by the right wing…that acknowledgment of those things is now a thought crime in Aust .

Interesting / hilarious to see some of these people deciding to self identify as being racist ‘outed‘ by this comment despite not being named)

The definition of self incrimination!  Narcissists will Narcissist! 

Not so… 

5 years ago Tim Exile created a completely amazing global music creation application called Endlesss.

Inception incredible
Execution ingenious
Experience involving
Swerves utterly inexplicable
Insolvency fucking inevitable

Gutting to watch such a stunningly brilliant idea…

Squandered.