The labour units known as human beings
Diary of the last twelve hours
7.15am
Private Eye likes to call Richard Branson Beardy and tends only to write about him when he does something inconsistent or venal or hypocritical or self-serving. So there aren’t many editions that don't have some kind of story about him.
This morning Beardy's in space; the first to get up there in the race of billionaires, a much-derided contest of manhood.
A Space correspondent explains that the flight has ascended, plane-like, just to the edge of space. Beardy has, if you will, just put in the tip, then turned to come plunging plunging deeper ever deeper back into earth's atmosphere.
Can't help thinking about the more than a billion he has poured into this and the 8 houses in Auckland it could have bought for some needy young people assisted by the bank of Mum and Dad.
Seriously, though, the more you read about it, the more of a bad joke it sounds. This Salon piece is marvellous. In essence: the kind of space existence these billionaires rhapsodise about is a very very long way off. What they’re doing is to the largest extent, and to paraphrase greatly, excessive wasteful bullshit.
Bezos and Branson will not be sipping champagne next to their space-pool on Low-Earth Mar-a-Lago. Even if Axiom gets their space hotel built, it's going to be cramped and dangerous, and when the toilet breaks, someone's going to have to clean up the floating shit. For all their wealth, billionaires do not have the power to make space a more comfortable place to be than Earth. I can't tell if they grasp that or not.
Hold that thought of Beardy in space though, it’s reminded me of an awesome Lightning Hopkins song for later.
9.45am
Following the football through to its anguished collision and thinking will poor England forever want for a safe pair of hands?
9.55am
Hello readers of the free editions! On Fridays what happens around here is I hand out awards to whomever has been especially dismal that week. But honestly, it's only Monday and I already see a logjam coming, so let’s get stuck in now
Dismal Award The First goes to a dire column in the Sunday Waikato Invader. The first thought is, oh Kerre McIvor is being lazy again. But is that being unkind? Is it possible that actually she’s trying really really hard and this is the best she can do? Oh dear.
She offers that there are two types of New Zealanders. The first is the kind happy to hide behind Jacinda's skirts and has no clue how things really are and wants to close the door on the rest of the world. The other kind is the ever-valorised hero of all Newstalk ZB argument: the valiant hero who makes their own money and provides jobs for others and engages with the world rather than trembling behind skirts.
The reason she's doing this DIY anthropology is she wants to stick up for restaurants in their hour of need of cheap labour and she's doing this by reframing a losing argument about market forces into some proposition of patriotic economic valour.
Don't you hate it when you spend thirty years advocating market forces and then market forces turn around and bite you? How are you supposed to engage with the world and be a job creating hero with this sort of closed-border, no-cheap labour shit?
She's trying to cast prudent caution as a lack of guts but no thanks, I'm not buying.
To borrow a pithy phrase from Bernard Hickey: health=economy
There’s also a halfhearted effort at exploring the notion that our capitalist economy might need some tuning, but in a couple of sentences she's beating a relieved retreat from having had to acknowledge that hospo wages have not moved much in thirty years to say Hey look at this colossal straw man I got from a commentator:
people want to buy their bread for a dollar a loaf and have supermarket workers paid $40 an hour
Well slam dunk. Obviously no number between 20 and 40 would work either so we can tell the unions to shut up and keep washing the dishes.
Why not get this guy on your show to see if you can get some better material.
Dismal Award the Second goes to Popup leader for using her Sunday afternoon to lodge her 94th complaint to the manager.
The government is making important decisions they never campaigned on and without adequate consultation, she wails, and offers a Festivus-quality Airing of Grievances about various projects being prepared to deal with the Climate Crisis except of course, it's hard to make them sound like a bad thing unless you leave that bit out, so she does.
Off she goes, objecting to taxes and bridge and various aspect of policy that have been or remain to be consulted about, debated, inspected in select committee and so on before saying: New Zealanders are starting to feel left out.
Ma'am I'm sorry but I think you're a little confused. You already have your chance to debate, all over the place. What you're really saying is I think I'm not getting my way and that does not suit me and, well, that's a different bumper sticker.
Everyone gets a say and everyone gets to take part, but not everyone gets to decide what happens. Have you thought about trying to win enough votes?
Dismal Award the Third for this arresting piece of candour.
I don't wish to be too revolutionary but I wish to dissent from this notion of job creators mattering more than the people who take the jobs and do the work - the McIvor Manifesto, if you will. I just find it a bit - how to say it? - fucked.
Dismal Award the Fourth to whomever put their double cab ute in this much strife. I can’t tell from this angle whether they were doing construction or feeding out but anyway bad luck driver, here's your award.
Also: thanks for the grand metaphor.
I find it somehow captures the reasoning in a Kerre McIvor column, the direction Judith Collins is taking her party, and what the EMA thinks of the labour units known as human beings.
11.35am
Running the streets of the seaside village and seeing a lot of people on school holiday duty and thinking: man, there's an awful lot of my cohort who have grandchildren these days.
1.15pm
Get bidding!
1.25pm
4.20pm
Here, in honour of Beardy’s Big Flight, is Lightnin' Hopkins.
This line (and the lead up to it) made me laugh a lot! "Have you thought about trying to win enough votes?" Well played.
I won this Lightnin Hopkins album playing poker. Not as cool as it sounds. It was either that or Earl Scruggs.