Neal Curtis

If you're wondering why the roads are always full, we now have more cars per person that the USA. We sit behind a few tax havens and principalities. All research on this tells us more roads just brings more cars. #NZpol

A reminder that you don't need to understand everything you see

A story in Private Eye, headlined "Minority representation on TV causes outrage". The article reads: "There has been widespread support for prominent Reform MP Sarah Pochin after she complained about the over-representation of minorities on television. Said one angry viewer, "She's right. Every time you turn on the telly there's another Reform MP being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg." She added, "I respect their way of life and their strange customs, but Reform MPs comprise only 0.7 percent of the House of Commons. Yet Nigel Farage is on Question Time more than Fiona Bruce." "I'm not prejudiced. Some of my best friends are swivel-eyed loons, but enough is enough. There are too many people with angry red faces on television."

Private Eye nailing it.

'original painting on paper' view looking up at the intersecting angles of stone steps, railing, and line of manicured trees in winter

Frédéric Forest

Paris - 1
January
2024

A comic with three rows of panels. The first row has four panels. Each panel shows Dipper the corgi sleeping, as a pumpkin headed creature slowly sneaks in behind him. By the fourth panel, dipper is starting to wake up but has not registered the creature yet. The second row also has four panels, sort of. In the first panel, Dipper sees the creature and freaks out. In the second, he starts to run away, pressing up against the white panel border, which bends around him like it is made out of fabric. As he continues to run, he tears off the border between the third and fourth panels, which wraps around him like a sheet as he falls over. In the third row, there are now only two panels, because the borders dividing what was panel 1 from 2 and panel 3 from 4 are torn. In the first large panel, the pumpkin creature lifts off it's pumpkin head, revealing it was Hilde the cat all along. She laughs at her successful prank. Dipper lies on the ground, covered by the white sheet. His front legs have poked two little holes in it. In the second large panel, Dipper sits up, still covered by the sheet. The sheet combined with the two holes his arms made cause him to look like a dog-shaped ghost. Hilde screams.

Boo!

I understand politicians have to make compromises, but if I had to meet the human equivalent of a moral void, I wouldn't look like someone just gave me the keys to the tuck shop.

I am genuinely surprised our idiot PM did not mimic Trump's dumb thumbs up. At least he can tell the grandkids that while he didn't manage to destroy the Treaty, he did get to meet the Mango Mussolini and was there at the new dawn of fascism.

First contact

I'd like to report a murder

"The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them." ~ Turkish proverb

It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better, be better, form a more perfect union.

Apart from love, St. Valentine is also the patron saint of fainting, epilepsy and bee keeping.

cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thu...

In response to the launch of the Alt-Right Unreality-verse, I've made a small monthly donation to Wikipedia. Despite my reservations about it, we cannot let fascist allegiant billionaires control access to knowlege.

Pronouns matter now?

YouTube video by LBC 'Her comments breach common decency' | LBC

Overt, violent racism is now openly part of mainstream conservative discourse, but it hasn't happened over last 12 months. It was evident in 2015 when ppl asked for this discourse to not be platformed & legitimised. Trying to put it back in the bottle now is too late.
youtube.com/shorts/u2Hrh...

"After more than a decade of engaging in shameless bothsidesism, whataboutism, and fanatical, greed-driven appeals to far-right eyeballs, America’s corporate, legacy media appears poised to fall victim to the grave, fascist threat it helped bring about"
zeteo.com/p/the-maga-f...

A man wearing a dark green uniform coat stands in front of an orange wall inside a building with marble floors and red-brown walls. His hands are clasped in front of him, and he looks slightly upward. The lighting casts a soft shadow behind him.

There are so many Hitler particles emanating from this.

The source for those fascist-styled US worker posters is the US Department of Labor's Facebook account.
m.facebook.com/story.php?st...

CNBC headline: "Elon Musk’s AI-powered Wikipedia competitor goes live after a rocky launch". I've struck through "AI-powered" in red, and replaced it with "Wikipedia-powered"

Grokipedia attribution text: "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License."

fixed that for you

See post and thread.

Grokipedia and the Coup Against Reality Itself Grokipedia, the copycat of Wikipedia launched by Elon Musk isn’t just a string of AI generated slop, it is a weapon. The launch of "grokipedia" is a calculated, strategic escalation by the billionaire...

I wrote about how "Grokipedia" is a new front on the war against reality itself. It's an attempt by the oligarchic class to seize the means of knowledge production itself and create a weaponized unreality.

www.thedissident.news/grokipedia-a...

three rows of five panels each. the top one depicts a cloud of gas being shocked by a supernova that leads to its collapse. the second tier shows this collapsed cloud swirling and then forming a star, which as it heats sends a thin layer of remaining material farther from itself, vaporizing what's close, pushing gas out further. the final row, shows tiny particles, then clumped objects, then larger clumps, continuing over each panel, till finally a larger spherical object dominates the frame - a bit like a moon - but really the seed of an early planet...

to anyone still up... attraction and collisions have led to planetesimals... Things are starting to take shape. 15/30 panels done, a solar system is emerging...
#Nostos #Unflattening 2

one simple fix here is to make a world that you'd actually want to bring a child into, and put everyone who says that doing so would be expensive and unrealistic into an individually-sized tupperware® container

Gateway to the fascist knowledge-verse.

You know how the NZ govt are scrapping the Art History curriculum? You run the risk in 30 years time of people looking at new images like this and not going going YIKES OH NO OH FUCK THAT'S BAAAAD. Like I am right now. HOLY. SHIT.

A day to unfurl the United Tribes Ensign selected a year earlier by W[h]akaputanga o Nu Tireni at Waitangi in 1834 — the first flag of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Cover of Life mag in 1970, showing John Cleary gasping for breath.

John Cleary, shot in the chest by National Guardsmen on May 4, has passed away at age 74.

He was a 19-year-old architecture student in 1970 when he was shot and critically wounded.

altered poll from stuff. do you think labour's capital gains tax is a good idea. yes forty nine percent. no fifty one percent

so Stuff changed the poll questions, you know what to do bsky

www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3608...

#nzpol