Here’s a Saturday long read for you 🌸

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I hired and worked with Jamal for a year. www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

There’s a really great chance of getting rid of Reti for good now that @garypayinda.bsky.social is onboard for Labour in Whangarei. Great news 😊

No, QAnon was not right. But #MeToo is.

The important thing is not whether the Trump performing sexual favors for Bill Clinton thing is true. The important thing is that we all pretend it’s true, and that someone asks Trump about it every day.

I feel like we have the opportunity to turn David Lynch's quote into this moment's "Keep Calm and Carry On" and it's a far better rallying cry too.

Te Anihana is still missing. Unclear if police are actively looking for her as well as 'appealing to the public'. Auckland police renew appeal as Te Anihana Pomana missing for over 10 weeks www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland/...

Accompanying an elderly parent to the docs is similar to a going along with your adolescent kid… you don’t talk much, but there’s substantial eyebrow & 😬🙄😶 game happening.

If anything Fonterra owns is sold, the purchase price has to include the reimbursement to every New Zealander of the full cost of past & future environmental damage. We’ve been fully subsidising that for decades.

The new Bluesky logo is bluuuurk. Dated and immature. Like it would go well with comic sans.

Random carpet cleaner dude: Where do you live? Me: Tutukaka Dude: Oh, it’s lovely there. Does your husband like fishing? Me: 🙄

This is a thousand years worth of Creative NZ government funding

Legislating so that Meta, Alphabet et al pay corporate tax on all profits generated in NZ, meets NZ content standards & protect NZ users from harm has what downsides exactly? I get that they might withdraw their services... as of right now this is feeling more like a blessing than a threat tbh.

Probably my last time in Ōtepoti/Dunedin for a while, makes me a little sad. 4yrs of regularly visiting my kids here is coming to an end Will probably find excuses to keep visiting :-)

Been letting my old horse free-range munch my lawn whenever he wants & he's taken to "parking" himself in the garage for naps.

Oh btw, the "East West Link" has been resurrected. NZTA is pushing an investment case to spend $3.7-4.1 billion to get <1% back in economics benefits ($49.5m) each year. Who the fuck is still asking for this? #nzpol

Congratulations to our 2024 Emerging Māori Writer in Residence Shelley Burne-Field (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Rārua, Te Ātiawa), who is the winner of the 2025 Pikihuia Award for Poetry in English, judged by Tayi Tibble

I think “Small Dictator Energy” and “I am Aunt Tifa. I hear you’re looking for me.” are my favourite #NoKings signs so far.

Do Aucklanders have recommendations for exceptional cobblers who can be trusted with fixing/restoring precious vintage shoes? These are very important to me and need a little TLC. Thank

Sucks to read & realise Aotearoa/NZ has completely stalled (or have we gone backwards?)

The LLM pivot-to-porn monetisation strategy happened faster than I’d thought…

So dear pupper Sprout left us yesterday age 15. He grew up with my kids and spent his later years shadowing my elderly Dad. He’s got a good spot on the lawn looking out to sea now. RIP Sprouty, you’re a good boy.

"I had to work 10 times harder than the average man just to get the same level of recognition," Jane Goodall told us in 2020. "But once I had made a name for myself, I let the data speak for me."

Imagine how great it would be if every rapture fool actually did disappear in a flash of light.

Sitting on the tarmac in Nairobi and the engineers have just had to “reboot” the ✈️ and I do not like.

Oh damn, Robert Redford. RIP. I’ve re-watched Out of Africa twice in the last month (while travelling around Kenya in Tanzania). He was superb.

& yet people will sleep rough on the streets tonight... He's one person, we are 7 billion - what the fuck are we scared of?

honestly fuck Tesla - they don’t even have the excuse of working purely for shareholder interest at this point

surely we can come up with something better for 7 billion people than being lorded over by a bunch of plundering elderly murder and torture enthusiasts who whisper to each other about printing spare organs so they can immiserate others in perpetuity

Nobody is “grooming” your kids to be gay or trans but people ARE grooming them to be Nazis.

"Windmills [sic] kill birds"

Tim Minchin’s long devolution into Australia’s answer to Russell Brand is not unexpected but still fucking disappointing.

Explain to me again how we aren't completely fucked? Cause we seem completely fucked to me.

of course they have 🙄

Mock my words? Make my day? Mork my Mindy? #dickhead

Had an Oriental 🐈‍⬛ that thieved like a demon. Mostly soft toys/ ornaments that looked marginally like him. Sometimes undies. Had a thing for gloves. Once a wallet (sadly empty). RIP Turtle.

This is exactly it. So many victim’s voices have been squashed, sidelined or ignored in this debacle. But no, instead they’re going to go and talk to a convicted perpetrator.

This stinks exactly like the shit the US conservatives/republicans have been pushing for decades, cynically swinging the democratic process in their favour. This govt is continually handpicking and pushing the worst of US politics on Aotearoa…

Trump’s sexual predation was clearly demonstrated & proven so many times over the last decade (often in his own words) & magas simply did not care. Seems they only care about the undermining of their precious conspiracy theories & warped world view, casting themselves as the primary victims.

I bloody love this (and the @99pi.org podcast of course).

⬇️ Yes. (See also: Theil sincerely believes environmentalism is an international plot to enabl world authoritarianism, initiated by the (actual) Devil. Who he also believes is currently embodied here in Earth by… *drumroll*… Greta Thunberg.)

No, a LOT of them think that. Science may be one of the most social forms of knowledge production we have. Arguably it’s at least as social as creative writing. Actual scientists will tell you this. Yet, millions of people think they can do science alone with an LLM.

I could not hate this more.

Gotta ❤️ friends who know how much I appreciate fresh hand-caught kaimoana. That’s me sorted for a week.

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

A reminder that after years of speaking out against Epstein and giving other survivors the courage to come forward, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41. Let's not forget that there are real human tragedies behind everything we're discussing.

As a doctor who attends these sorts of things, I can tell you 2 things with certainty: 1) these are on a rotating schedule planned years in advance 2) no one considers advertising rules when planning these (e.g. Europe has conferences and strict rules) It's embarrassing that RNZ published this.

“Vibe physics” is exhibit seventysixhundred in the “billionaire status does not equate to intelligence” case