I again note that tanking Johnson and Corbyn to reviled public enemy status required most of the press working together on concerted hate campaigns over many months. This Labour government has achieved the same thing with mostly supportive media, just by being themselves.

Once again.

Luxon has acquired a real taste for boot polish.

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

From The Archives:

A warning. All the worst people in the country are now shitting themselves. The mother of all campaigns is now going to be directed against the Green Party. It will be an unrelenting smear campaign. The Greens need to be ready for that - and so does everyone on the left.

The Labour party didn't just lie. They ran a disgusting gutter campaign. The sort of campaign you'd expect from far right hatemongers. What they did in Gorton and Denton must never be forgotten. They must never get away with it.

Reacting to Labour's devastating loss to the Green Party in Gorton and Denton, Keir Starmer claims that only Labour can unite communities. I agree. He convinced Muslims to vote for a white working class woman representing a party led by a gay Jewish man.

-increase speed limits: kids getting hit by cars -make school lunches cheaper: mouldy slop for kids -cut IT jobs: hospital IT system failing -cancel ferries: no new ferries -ban gang patches: more gang members Results!

If you were wondering if ol boy-genius Starmer would see sense anytime soon, a thread containing his immediate reaction to getting rinsed by the greens in a by-election

In some parts of the world, a rich person using their wealth to undermine a media outlet for ideological reasons would be considered a bad thing, but here it is a “masterstroke” archive.ph/kBPiZ

I've just published a reference for anyone using git while trans, explaining how to hide or remove your deadname in git repositories Please share ❤️ code.curly.kiwi/2026/02/27/u...

Cause, effect. National owns this by scrapping permanent speed reductions around schools.

Remove your data from US owned providers wherever you can.

This is one of those canaries in the coal mine that tells you Israel and the USA are about to start another illegal war, and airlines expect Israel to be hit by lots of missiles despite all the Iron Dome hype.

Could not put it better myself. NZ politicians considering the proposed ban on under-16s accessing social media need to understand that supporting it is a vote to create digital ID and support speech-suppressing surveillance. @duncanwebbmp.bsky.social @teanau.bsky.social @fran4dunedin.bsky.social

National intentionally causes the conditions for homelessness (because high unemployment keeps wages down), then gets upset that they have to see homeless people.

20 years later, Councillor Goldsmith (now Minister) finally got his wish, he gets to see homeless people arrested. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

This doesn't seem worth having a Discord account

How is Wellington City Council such an amateur operation? "documentation for a vast majority of contracts could not be located .. nearly half had no listed contract manager, leaving council staff unable to verify active contracts or monitor financial commitments"

US envoy Mike Huckabee says it would be ‘fine’ if Israel took all Middle East land Rightwing Trump ally tells Tucker Carlson Israel has biblical right to land from ‘wadi of Egypt to the great river’ www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

All the best capital cities are doing it

Useful graph for the debt scare folks. Govt debt-servicing costs are super low these days. So much headroom to invest in the many, many things we need for the long-term, yet still we beg for eye-wateringly expensive private finance.

Of course the police have no guidance on whether hand gestures to police indicate drunkenness; instead they rely on the (extremely un-)"professional judgment" of their officers. Which leads to unlawful arrests, home invasions, and aggravated assaults.

The lesson the US government has learned from Anne Frank is to make damn sure the diary gets burned along with the bodies.

Next steps for Parliament: declare that Winston is a citizen, legalise rugby, allow burgers to be made of meat

So if you want to unlawfully summarily dismiss someone without notice, just give them a pay rise to $200k first? They won't have any rights to bring a personal grievance or legal proceedings in respect of the dismissal. www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/governm...

Interesting weather in Wellington for Air NZ's 5-passenger electric aeroplane to show up on ADSB. (BETA ALIA CX300)

Disestablishing your ministry for the environment in the middle of a giant environmental disaster is certainly A Look.

Imagine if they randomly invited the king of Saudi Arabia to NZ after the CHCH massacre. Australia makes no sense to me. Full of random creatures and even more random decisions.

This is also half the reason for @fyi.org.nz going down so frequently: 95% of our traffic is from AI scrapers. They don't limit their request rates or react to site slowdowns, and just keep hammering away even if all requests are timing out.

Rember when that Mayor you all ran out of Wellington wanted Nick Leggett to resign www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

A single image that captures NZ's dominant belief system and economic model #nzpol www.reddit.com/r/newzealand...

The only reason there's an 'affordability' issue as the population ages is because the government refuses to tax rich people. The richest 350 families only pay 8% tax, and if Nicola Willis changed that, then the affordability problem goes away #nzpol www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This

It certainly doesn't sound like the "suddenly new covid enquiry" setup to provide a report to the government a few weeks out from the election has a lot of space for nuanced analysis of the "while lessons can be learned we need to keep what was happening elsewhere in mind" variety.

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

This is disgusting antisemitic language from the Australian PM - Herzog is the head of state of a genocidal regime, not the head of state of all Jews. We are not Israel, and the only people who win when Jews and Israel are conflated are antisemites and Zionists.

You can ban protest, but you can't stop protest without using violence. Better to just allow peaceful protest in the first place. (And maybe don't invite apartheid leaders to your country.)

The NSW government will talk about the importance of maintaining “social cohesion” while perpetrating violence against citizens who seek to exercise their right to protest. This is horrific.

I guess when you're an ex-minister every problem looks like a ministerial problem.

IT'S FEBRUARY 2026. THE RAIL ENABLED HYUNDAI FERRIES FOR I REX WERE MEANT TO ARRIVE BY NOW. Instead we have no rail enabled ferries, the two we have are clunky as fuck, and there will be no replacement ferries until 2029 at the earliest.

Democracy dies in broad daylight.

This is brilliant news, and also shows why the Labour Party wants to abolish most trials by jury, and how important it is they don't get away with it:

Here's a fun pair of charts (from a discussion on the Bad Place). I think the original sources is this Squirrel post, which makes the point that confidence tracked the empirics pretty well until Clark's second term www.squirrel.co.nz/blog/odds-an...

Do not continue to swim under turd

Theme for Wellington today. 💩

This bit is quite telling. And if the police won't do it, then the IPCA need the power to do it for them.