I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

Bad Santa - in today’s NZ Herald

This year’s Presidential Christmas card.

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

"It's filled with lies. Only about the president. The rest might be true. Unless it's friends of his. Then it's not. But *anything* about *him* is a lie. He's innocent. It's all "rigged" against him. He didn't do anything wrong (yeah, I mean, we don't think it was wrong, but legal?). Pinkie swear!!!

Did anyone else’s iPhone decide to lose half your contacts in the latest update or is this a result of my email migrations?

Russell…. Do the bins. @publicaddress.bsky.social

If you know you know

Radical bearded cleric issues new fatwa -->

If this doesn't motivate you to vote in the Midterms, nothing will.

My phone tells me it's eight years to the day since I screenshotted this dogbrained marvel of a sentence by Brandon Lewis. It's one I still dig out every once in a while, so I can marvel at it with the quiet reverence you might give a haiku, or a particularly devious crossword clue.

Holy cow. So pleased everyone is safe.

Cool money-making idea: set up fake company, lie to get massive contract from government, buy yourself yacht with your new millions, get made a baroness for your hard work, fail to fulfil contract, wind up the company when you're ordered to pay money back. Isn't that clever? ♥️

EVs hit 38% of the UKs new car market cleantechnica.com/2025/12/22/e...

“They’re also eating the dogs!!”

Shoot this into my veins

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Betty Reid Soskin, the National Park Service’s oldest ranger, has died. She was 104.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.

CBS News EIC Bari Weiss had concerns about the CECOT piece, I’m told. The network decided to hold the segment pending, among other things, comment or an interview with White House officials next year…

Amazing. Never let them tell you voting (and in this case voting with your wallet) doesn't work. So few Canadians are buying Jim Beam that they're closing production for a year as a result. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Why did CBS delete this promo and cancel this from airing in full?

After slashing $7b worth of infrastructure projects in 2023 Remember our first IREX boat would be doing revenue services just in time for the Xmas rush by now. But thanks to Willis we have to wait until 2029 for sub optimal replacements instead

Health NZ refuses to recruit and fund safe number of district nurses, so union reports them to Worksafe. archive.ph/xT5yv

Three Waters anyone?? #nzpol

Having spent half an hour dealing with a chat bot (sorry, "agent AI") it might well be great for companies but it's shit for customers. It takes TOO LONG to get an answer out of these bots and then I see the disclaimer "may be fake" at the bottom. I know it's cheaper but honestly... WTF?

Also, Google does not make it easy to transfer photos from Google Photos to anything else. The download links don't seem to work and eventually tell me "you've downloaded this five times that's your lot" and nothing has happened. Beware.

Biggest issue so far with Proton Mail -- no way to list all your inboxes on one screen so you have to toggle back and forth between log-ins. Plenty of folk asking for this so hopefully it's not innate to the system and they can introduce this fairly useful requirement sometime soon.

FREE KINDLE BOOKS UNTIL 25 DECEMBER – THE THOMAS CROMWELL ‘QUEENMAKER’ SERIES carolineangus.com/2025/12/21/f...

If your feed is full of one type of any posts that's a skill issue. Curate your feed! Block, mute, follow... these are your tools. Use them liberally. There is no algorithm to push crap at you so if you're seeing crap there's a reason for it.

This is a very concerning story (apologies for the awful AI) 'Inland Revenue failed to alert the police about the alleged violent kidnapping of a whistleblower after he threatened to expose a multimillion-dollar tax fraud scheme in the kiwifruit industry.' www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ird-faile...

One day something will happen — a wedding, a graduation, a job promotion, Jake Paul getting knocked out, Andrew Tate getting knocked out the next day — and you’ll want the right outfit to celebrate. Buy that special outfit now, so you’re ready when that next unexpected moment arrives.

Migration away from Google continues: 1: Have moved email to Proton. 2: Have set up family accounts and got them all sorted. 3: Moving all my photos from Google Photos. 4: Copying all files over from Dropbox to Proton. 5: Have set up Kagi for search. 6: Will cancel subs and be done with them all.

Hang on... how old? Am I really very nearly that old? Am I now older than John Spencer was in the first season of The West Wing? 😳😳😳

Statement from Bill Clinton and he’s right. This isn’t about him. They are using him to deflect off Trump. They are hiding the files, pictures and redacting trump from them.

We are already in a Kessler scenario (which is a spectrum anyway), it’s just slower than imagined.

this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will

Some of these redactions are almost like modern art

We've seen this in journalism. Get rid of local reporters and sub editors and photographers and rely on wire copy and photo bureaux to share the exact same copy as every other publication. Editorial just takes up space between the ads.

Tapper: This is one of the documents the DOJ released. It’s 100 pages. It’s all black. That’s the transparency we’re getting.

This is a blatant violation of the law and a continuation of this administration’s coverup on behalf of a bunch of pedophiles and sex traffickers.

In today’s Weekend Herald

Ah, dick heads gonna dick. Perhaps “reading for comprehension” should be added to your reading list since you seem incapable of arguing with what I actually wrote but instead seem insistent on arguing about something. I. Did. Not. Say. Sigh.

There are old posts on my site that are every bit as valuable today as when they were first published. This one from 2013 is up there: billbennett.co.nz/chasing-face...

I mean, I thought he looked pretty great, also I will watch this special

Ahem. From an earlier time I wrote this: thespinoff.co.nz/society/30-1...