Homepaddock

When a man walks into a gynaecologist’s office and demands an examination, it’s safe to say that the problem lies between his ears, and not necessarily his legs.  – J0 Bartosch

For actual women, there’s nothing affirming or pleasurable about lying on a crackly paper sheet while a nurse shoves a chilly speculum up your fanny. No woman skips into the room for a cervical smear. At best, it’s awkward and a bit uncomfortable. At worst, it can make traumatic experiences resurface. Yet for the men who reduce womanhood to a performance, roleplaying even the banalities of women’s lives can give them something of a kick. From menstruation to pregnancy to breastfeeding, female bodily functions are routinely fetishised by men who claim to be women. – J0 Bartosch

 ‘Trans’ is a huge and growing pornographic genre. Even on mainstream pornography sites, you can find films with titles such as ‘anal exam during shemale physical’ and ‘lucky trans patient receives extra threeway exam’. It’s clear that some men get off on being treated like women in the examination room.

The sanctioning of Acharian for telling the truth, for refusing to play along, will send a warning signal to medical professionals across France – submit to the demands of transgender activists or face retribution. Should Acharian decide not to appeal, there will be a chilling effect. Men will be emboldened to demand that doctors play along with their desires. Anyone who wants to stay in practice will have little choice but to comply. It will warp the very purpose of medicine. – J0 Bartosch

We were never supposed to know all this bad news. We were only supposed to know the news of our family, our village, and perhaps that of a few towns away. Now, we have the entire world’s tragedy and suffering available to us daily, but we’re not taught how to cope with that. So, it’s about looking for the things in life that will bring you the good stuff as well: the happy news stories and the joyful connections. If we only focus on what is wrong and what can’t be done, we feel useless and helpless. And these are all very dangerous places to be.– Donna Ashworth 

 It’s important to start looking for the things you know will raise you up and start blocking out the things you know are dragging you down needlessly, without an end or a reason. For us humans with hearts that beat, opening your phone or laptop or putting on the news can be overwhelming. You can feel as though the suffering is so great and there’s little to be done. But actually, if every single person looked at it slightly differently and saw that when we save our own mindset and protect our own heart and look for the light, there is an energy and a vibration to that. It vibrates and knocks onto your neighbour, which knocks onto their neighbour, which can become a collective force. –  Donna Ashworth 

Why are some people brave? Why are some people afraid? Can you create bravery? Can you share it? Can you grow it? Can you give it? Can you gift it? When I started to think about this, I began to see all the very minute ways in which we’re brave, and these rarely are the ways that we acknowledge or attach the word brave. We think of ourselves as brave when facing something difficult or going through great times of change, but we don’t think about all the ways in which we’re brave every single day. I started to see that bravery is something that can be nurtured in the way that we nurture anything in our lives. I began to look at bravery as a little plant that I could put on the windowsill, and by giving it light and nurturing it, I could grow it. It has been such a lovely journey. – Donna Ashworth 

I started to notice so many ways I’m brave that I don’t give myself accountability for, and I started to see bravery existing in our day-to-day lives. I see it in how we care for each other and our friendships and relationships. I see it in how we show every single day and keep going, in how we accept ourselves and new versions of ourselves, and in how we parent our kids to be better than we were. I see it in our ability to rewrite the mistakes of the past. I see it in how we choose to do our best and constantly try and grow. So, I have seen that there are so many beautiful aspects to the word bravery and so many ways in which we’re all doing it every single day.

It is brave to exist in the world that we live in now and to constantly reach for more within ourselves and outside of ourselves. Nothing requires more bravery from a soul than that journey to make yourself better and to see that, yes, you are enough, but also that there are things within you, within all of us, that need to be looked at and healed.  – Donna Ashworth 

It’s wonderful to want to be better. It’s even more wonderful to see that you’re already enough, have tried so hard, and have done so much. So, acknowledging all that you are, all that you have tried, and all that you have brought and shown up with is the very first step to making anything better. It’s to see how much you’ve already done. Then, try to look at one single way you are brave right now. Once you see one way, you will start to see a cascade of other ways in which you are brave.

Remembering all that is wonderful when you want to work towards something to begin. Have the faith to take that first step, and know that there will be an unraveling, a meeting in the middle, and that a little bit of magic and miracle is always at your disposal. But you only need that little bit of bravery to start. Then the bravery fuels more bravery. So, quite literally, if you want to start something, whether it’s to write a book or go for a walk, just start the act. We get caught up in preparation and wanting things to be perfect, but I’ve learned through this that nothing will ever be perfect. We must go ahead imperfectly, or there will be no going ahead. If you’re waiting to be prepared or feel ready and to have all your ducks in a row, let your ducks go. Let your ducks run around and just begin. – Donna Ashworth 

I am coming around to the idea, though reluctantly, that there is much hidden or subconscious racism in our society, though not where it is most expected or searched for. This is particularly noticeable when modern journalists attempt to parse morally complex events, alleviating their psychological discomfort by weak attempts at displaying their goodwill. Shallow conventions of speech become a refuge from the unbearable weight of history. – Theodore Dalrymple

What struck me in the newspaper’s reporting of this development was the way in which the letter w, as in “white farmers,” was written in the lower case, while the letter b, as in “black farmers,” was written in the upper case. 

Of course, The i is far from alone in employing this typographical quirk: the day before, I had been reading for review a book published by an eminent and generally excellent university press in which was to be found exactly the same phenomenon. Indeed, it is now widespread, at least in certain circles. What does it mean? 

Clearly it is an attempt to be “nice” or “good,” and to demonstrate that one is being such. One is trying to make up in some way for all the wrongs done to blacks in the past, to atone for those wrongs, and to elevate their victims at the same time. It is morally grandiose, for it represents an attempt to take on one’s shoulders the great wrongs committed not by oneself, but by ancestors or merely people who share one’s race. In this sense, it is a gesture that is racist: it ascribes guilt or innocence by membership of race and not by personal conduct. It also brings with it great relief of a burden, at least psychologically if not in logic, for it serves to emphasise that the expression of correct opinion rather than good behaviour is the principle criterion of personal virtue. Opinion is easy while conduct is hard. Thus, for modern people, opinion is the royal road to virtue. – Theodore Dalrymple

What kind of people could be so downtrodden, so mired in injustice, so pathetically incapable of helping themselves, that differentially capitalising an adjective that others apply to them could do them good, or bring them any, let alone great, relief?

We do not do this with the Fat and the thin, for example, the tall and the Short, the clever and the Stupid. We should not be so foolish as to suppose that capitalising the word Fat would protect the fat from the medical consequences of their adiposity, or even from their self-consciousness about their shape. The stupid are not to be made clever by means of a capital letter.

The supposition that by capitalising the word black, but not the word white, some benefit is being conferred on black people is both condescending and demeaning to the supposed beneficiaries. Among other things, it supposes that they are defined purely or largely by how others refer to them in newspapers or other publications. It suggests that they can, and indeed need to, be rescued or saved by the merest gesture of those higher in the social scale than they.

What weakness! What incapacity! What helplessness! How feeble must they be whose salvation can be bought in so cheap a fashion! How completely is their fate determined by their skin colour!

This belief in turn raises the question as to why the typographical Mrs. Jellybys believe these people need, and are able to benefit from, such typographical assistance. The answer is obvious: those who believe it have a deep-seated contempt for that category of people they claim to want to help: in short, they are racists. If institutional racism means anything, it means the university presses that capitalise the word black but not white. They are both institutions and racists.

I need hardly emphasise the implicit racism of those who employ the term “people of colour,” with its implication that all humanity except for whites is one big happy family, united by its victimisation and with no divisions between them worth mentioning. – Theodore Dalrymple

Good privacy is an essential part of providing services and doing business in a digital economy. Today’s findings should be a reminder to government organisations that good privacy practices aren’t an optional extra but are fundamental to the work they do,” – Michael Webster

It is the job of parents to provide for their children, including sustenance. Perhaps there are good reasons in some cases why a parent cannot. In others, the parents may simply be negligent, which is also not the fault of the child. But when the state steps in, that is not “free.” For a minimum wage worker it takes more than 3/4 of an hour to generate the tax revenue to cover a school meal. For a farm hand, that might be 100 cows milked. Schools are there to educate, not to provide gourmet dining experiences. If the meals meet basic health and safety standards and offer reasonable nutrition, then complaints about them not being particular appetising comes across as entitlement. – Liam Hehir

What this report does find is proof, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that even when you stack the public service full of people the way the Labour Government did, they are still incompetent.  – Mike Hosking

It basically confirms the Public Service Commissioner’s findings last week that the public service isn’t fit for purpose. It has too many meetings, there are too many departments, we need a few gotten rid of, and if you designed it today it wouldn’t be like it is.

There are no safeguards, no regard for privacy, and the issues around privacy in the report shows it’s just a litany of uselessness.  – Mike Hosking

At least one head has rolled, but you can’t make this stuff up. It’s gliding on, it’s worse than most would have thought and it’s not even over. 

The worst may well still be to come.  – Mike Hosking

I’m just gonna leave this here… pic.twitter.com/viCUiRTylS

— Hazel Appleyard (@HazelAppleyard_) February 18, 2025

Simplifying even more ruthlessly, you could make it a metaphor for New Zealand’s economic history: the tension between the pursuit of self-sufficiency and security, and the embrace of global opportunities and market signals.

And to extend the metaphors: the government may have bought some time by slowing the drift toward the rocks, but it now seems to be realizing that the ship isn’t under control. And it can’t be certain how reliable the crew will be — at least judging by public appearances. – Point of Order

We are in a time where the cold, hard truth of what we thought was going to be easy, isn’t. It might not even turn out to be real. 

The last thing we need is KiwiSaver funds playing dumb games like the banks and looking to deny legitimate activity, the financial life blood, it needs to produce goods and services people actually want. 

What we want in KiwiSaver is a pool of money that grows. That happens by investing in relevant activities that turn a dollar and pay a dividend. 

Morale indignation doesn’t fund retirement.  – Mike Hosking

Banning pesticides and losing half our food to pests isn’t ‘going green’.

It’s food insecurity by design.

— Simon Maechling (@simonmaechling) February 19, 2025

These were innocent civilians – babies, a mother, an elderly man – used as human shields, their fate hidden for months to break their families, and their little bodies hid and held as bargaining chips for leverage to secure the release of convicted mass murderers – ­including those responsible for killing Israelis in the October 7 massacre. “Hamas did not just murder them – it used them … And now, in a final act of Nazi-style pure evil, Hamas is parading their deaths as propaganda on a stage, draped in lies and grotesque celebrations.

Let this sink in: The same terrorists who abducted a mother and her babies from their home, who starved them in underground dungeons, who let them die in captivity – are now celebrating their deaths on a stage. This is Hamas. A death cult that revels in the suffering of innocents. – Hostages and Missing Families Forum

The presidents of three American societies of evolutionary biologists and ecologists have written a joint letter to President Trump and members of the US Congress stating that “extensive scientific evidence” contradicts the view that “there are two sexes . . . [which] are not changeable.” Also the view that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce”. Their statement is false and their letter is riddled with hypocrisy. In my opinion Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce” is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.

The fact is, of course, that paper after paper in the scientific literature refers without qualification or equivocation to “males” and “females”. Biologist authors correctly assume that their readers will know the meanings of  “male” and “female” without further explanation, and will accept the authors’ unsubstantiated recognition of the sex of the animals they study. – Richard Dawkins 

MMP was expected to break the old Parliamentary duopoly of National and Labour and lead to far more inclusive and diverse political debate. Certainly, the increase in the number of parties in Parliament has spread the range of views being heard in the House, but it is doubtful that this has led to a greater level of debate about those views. – Peter Dunne

The demise of political debate as it used to be, in favour of the fervent, dogmatic statement of party opinion as incontrovertible fact as we have now, has dramatically changed the nature of political discourse around the world. The absolutist way the Trump Administration and its allies operate is the obvious extreme example. But our political system is not immune from these features. The redefinition here of political debate to be less about the exchange of ideas than the statement of pre-determined positions should be viewed with increasing concern, rather than just becoming accepted, the way it seems to be.

Over fifty years ago, the satirical television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus attacked the then emerging lowest-common-denominator approach to resolving complex issues in a skit where the existence of God was decided in a wrestling match, by two falls to a submission.

Sadly, that is precisely the same approach we are taking to complex political issues today. – Peter Dunne

If the data has been misused, and at the moment there are no individuals you can point the didgeridoo at and say they misused that information, but there is a police investigation ongoing. There is no clear evidence that could go before a court, that the data was misused. But if it looks like a rat, smells like a rat, and it’s got a long tail like a rat, it does make you raise your eyebrows. You need a definitive answer: was the data misused or not? At the moment we have suspicions, we have rumblings. And while those rumblings continue, then it puts the whole judicial process and the whole electoral process in doubt. 

I mean, you look at the CEO of Manurewa Marae winning the seat and you think really, did she? Was it fair and square? I don’t know. Labour was being rolled left, right and centre. She might just have got lucky. I smell rats.   – Kerre Woodham

Tamihere’s point that Māori organisations are subject to different rules because of prejudice is worth considering.

He is probably right that the general public enjoys a bit of what we used to call Māori bashing but in this case government agencies seemed to make allowances beyond the call of duty. Instead of giving the private Māori agencies a hard time, they seemed to have suspended justified doubts about the information-sharing arrangements and given them a free pass. – Martin van Beynen

I wonder if the bureaucrats responsible were also so frightened about being accused of racism and prejudice that they were prepared to overlook obvious red flags about undeclared conflicts of interest and other potential problems. The Māori agencies provided with personal information operate on the Whānau Ora principles of autonomy and empowerment and it must be difficult for bureaucrats to insist on legitimate processes and procedures when confronted with demands that “we will do it our way, thank you”.  – Martin van Beynen

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he wants a bureaucracy that says “yes”. He is right to want that of course, but a lot of current rules would need to change.

Under current rules, far too much is too hard. Try expanding a port or hosting aconcert at Eden Park. Or try importing building materials or opening a supermarket.

New Zealand’s regulatory culture of “no” has become so pervasive that even the simplest reforms now spark fierce resistance. – Bryce Wilkinson

This reflexive negativity illustrates a deeper problem. New Zealand’s economy is being strangled by excessive caution and regulatory overkill. 

There is a galling irony here. New Zealand pioneered bold economic reforms in the 1980s. Today we debate whether tourists can check work emails from cafes.

Some numbers are telling. Property developers now spend $1.29 billion annually navigating consent processes. For small projects, paperwork can account for 16% of total costs. – Bryce Wilkinson

Even our tax system seems designed to say “no”. When businesses invest in new machinery to boost productivity, New Zealand’s depreciation provisions are among the most restrictive in the OECD.

The problem extends beyond infrastructure and investment. Our supermarket sector exemplifies how regulation affects market structure. Planning rules and zoning restrictions have historically made it difficult for competitors to establish themselves. The Overseas Investment Act created additional hurdles for potential foreign entrants. While various factors have influenced competition in the grocery sector, government policies have contributed to an environment that favours established players.

Similar patterns emerge in construction. A few firms dominate the supply of critical building materials, contributing to high building costs. This is not merely about scale in a small market. The building code and certification process favour established products and make it slow and expensive for new or imported products to gain approval. Even common materials used safely for years in Australia or Europe face lengthy and costly verification processes here. The result is higher costs for builders and homeowners alike. – Bryce Wilkinson

Reform need not be complex. Sometimes it simply means removing bureaucratic obstacles. Trust regulators in other developed countries rather than retesting everything here. The coalition agreement’s proposal to automatically authorise medicines approved by other trusted countries shows the way.

Other countries show what is possible. Several nations have successfully tackled regulatory burdens through systematic reform programmes. – Bryce Wilkinson

Some promising changes are emerging. The Government’s plan to strengthen landowners’ property rights when replacing the Resource Management Act should speed up land use decisions. The proposed fast-track consenting process, if properly implemented, could cut years off approval times for major projects. Immigration settings have begun to ease.

But these reforms face the same headwinds as the digital nomad proposal. Every change, no matter how sensible, must overcome a chorus of imagined risks and hypothetical problems. There has been no visible progress in authorising overseas-approved medicines, despite the proposal featuring in both coalition agreements.

Those objecting to developments need to be confronted with the lost value to the community of getting their way.

The Prime Minister is right about the problem of our negative and utterly risk-averse culture. But changing our bureaucratic culture requires more than speeches. It demands sustained effort to identify and eliminate unnecessary rules, requirements and restrictions. – Bryce Wilkinson

Whatever the macroeconomics, don’t let anyone tell you rising housing prices aren’t good for incumbent New Zealand governments. When they go up, governments get re-elected, with few if any economic indicators so closely correlating to a governing party’s poll results.

Yet the real economic gain if the OCR falls as fast as the Reserve Bank now thinks – and therefore an additional political gain – is that it should fuel greater investment to help meet the Reserve Bank’s growth forecasts between now and late 2026. – Matthew Hooton

Fonterra farmers are on track to receive a record $10 per kg of milk-solids this season, nearly 30% more than last year, while paying lower interest rates. Beef prices are also looking up.

Part of that is because of bad news, that the New Zealand dollar has fallen nearly 6% on the trade-weighted index since the start of the financial year, and over 6.5% against the United States dollar.

We’re all poorer, but beggars can’t be choosers and with no one believing we’ll ever run a current account surplus with the rest of the world, beggars is what we are.

The lower dollar means farmers will also have to pay higher prices for feed, tractors, equipment, domestic transport, and international freight, but the Government will be hoping they spend a lot of their bonanza domestically, so the money spreads to the cities. – Matthew Hooton

The Reserve Bank doesn’t have much of a reputation for being right over the last few years. Its critics argue it overreacted to Covid and kept the OCR too low for too long.

Then, the critics said, after it belatedly took inflation seriously, the bank kept the OCR too high for too long, causing last year’s recession to be worse than it needed to.

Some will argue it indicating faster OCR cuts than previously expected may yet prove to be another example of it being less prudent than it ought to be. – Matthew Hooton

But, if the Reserve Bank is not vigilant, inflation can sneak back into New Zealand via imports and the things we export, driving up general inflation and leading to higher interest rates than now forecast.

Perhaps that very fear may be useful in encouraging us all – farmers included – to be more prudent than we might otherwise be as the economy reverts back towards the mean.

We better hope so, because if inflation does creep back in via a falling dollar, that would risk the Reserve Bank having to raise interest rates in election year, cutting families’ disposable income, keeping unemployment higher and causing house prices to fall, less than a year since Luxon claimed credit for rates falling.

And you know what that means, don’t you? The only winner would be Chris Hipkins and his allies to his left. – Matthew Hooton

When the current Leader of the Labour Party was Prime Minister, on 7 March 2023, in the name of his government, over five million New Zealanders were mailed Census papers. They said on the front page that filling out the forms, stacked full of highly confidential questions about one’s personal life, was “required by law”. At the top of the page, a sworn statement was made by the NZ government, namely that “The information you provide will be kept confidential by Stats NZ and is protected by the Data & Statistics Act 2022”. That never happened. . . 

Is there an apology from Labour’s Hipkins who was PM at the time? Don’t dream of it. Is there an apology from his Minister of Statistics, Deborah Russell? Don’t dream of it. No. It’s another Wellington fix: just get the current Acting Head of Stats NZ to resign. For many years – until 2020 – Stats NZ was led by a person who had never even studied statistics. But the guy who was Captain of the Ship, Former PM Hipkins, at the time when 5,000,000 Kiwis were misled into thinking that their most private of data, including on “sexual identity, whether they have any variations of sex characteristics (also known as intersex status)”, personal income, private address, ancestry, and more, would be kept confidential – he just walks away from it. So look out. You may see your Census 2023 data posted on the Web one day, for everyone to have a laugh at. The moral of the story is: don’t trust the government. – Robert MacCulloch

I put up with a lot of misogyny in sailing over the years but I was never forced to undress in front of men. – Tracy Edwards

Certain people in governing bodies of sport seem to be prioritising the feelings of a few men over the rights of women and girls in sport. They are issuing a quagmire of confusing language that’s unacceptable.

To have single sex changing spaces is deemed proportionate and legitimate under the Equalities Act.

‘I would never expect to have to take my clothes off in front of a man. Women have fought hard behind the scenes to make sure they have safe, segregated changing areas. – Tracy Edwards

If the government and the sports bodies are serious about wanting female participation in sport, they need to stop this madness now. – Sharron Davies

No one, whether they call themselves trans, non-binary or anything else, should be able to use whatever toilets or changing facilities they choose.

That is a safeguarding fail and an intrusion on the privacy of everyone else. Single-sex facilities provide dignity and peace of mind to men and women alike. No one’s identity gives them the right to take that away from other users. The Royal Yachting Association needs to think again. – Fiona Mcanena

It is a fascinating moment, isn’t it, when Reagan’s vision of the West is finally swept into the dustbin of history by a Republican president.

And that is the only solid conclusion one can make after this week of astonishing incompetence and madness. We only saw Donald Trump’s foreign policy darkly in his first term — constrained, as he was, by a handful of white-knuckled Republicans in the executive branch. Now we see it face to face. It’s a vision where international law disappears, great powers divide up the planet into spheres of influence, and the strong always control the weak. It’s Trump’s vision of domestic politics as well. And of life.  – Andrew Sullivan

On this much, Trump is right. The Ukraine conflict is at a stalemate; the human toll is vast, unimaginable, and mounting every day; there’s no chance of repelling Russia from its current occupation — but there is some chance of driving a hard bargain to ensure a stable, new border and an independent rump Ukraine, with security guarantees against any future invasions from Russia.

And so I’ve always been in support of a tough peace negotiation that would have to reflect the facts on the ground. I was prepared for concessions from the West in the end, alongside some guarantees against future aggression. Even if it was realistic to understand that victory was impossible, we could still find a way to protect Ukraine’s fledgling democracy and remaining territory, keep the democracies aligned against Putin, and maintain the broad structure of the post-war settlement, alongside international law.

But that is not, it now seems obvious, the Trump position at all. What he is doing is not about making a tough peace deal with Russia, recalibrating NATO, or protecting Ukraine’s democracy. He is merely setting the terms of a new alliance and relationship with the criminal Russian dictatorship — directed against the European democracies.

More TDS from yours truly? But what other conclusion can one draw when the president cuts the Ukrainians and their European allies out of the dealmaking, has already conceded Ukraine’s conquered territory before any talks, insists that Ukraine started the war, that Zelensky, and not Putin, is the dictator, and is demanding reparations in advance … from Ukraine, not Russia! The reparations amount to a US claim on 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral deposits forever. It’s the equivalent of “We’re gonna take Iraq’s oil.” It’s a form of imperial pillage. But it’s vintage Trump. – Andrew Sullivan

In fact, Vance’s speech and Trump’s remarks make it clear that the US is no longer in alliance with Europe at all, but with Russia against Europe, and Europe’s liberal elites. The goal now is to replace those elites with Moscow-friendly governments, bent on repatriation of illegal migrants. Hence the stunning endorsement of the AfD by Elon Musk — the second most powerful man in the Trump administration.

After what the president and vice president have said this week, it’s fair to say, I think, that NATO is effectively over. No one can even faintly believe that the US under Trump would abide by Article 5 to defend another member state. Trump has just told the Baltic states: you’re on your own now. If you resist Russian control, you’ll deserve what you get.

It’s not just the end of NATO, but a new doctrine of US power. That doctrine now reflects Trump’s deepest conviction: that might is right, that weak countries should surrender to strong ones, and that this is in America’s interests, because we are the strongest. Trump’s aggression toward Canada, Panama, Gaza, and Denmark is not just trolling the libs. It’s of a piece with his view that the strong should always control and bully and plunder the weak. This is Ukraine’s real crime to Trump. They dared resist absorption by a bigger, stronger neighbor. – Andrew Sullivan

The logic of this might-makes-right worldview is why Trump believes that the US should now own Gaza. By which authority? he was asked. “By US authority,” he answered — meaning, of course, not US authority (we have none in Israel) but US power. Trump is clinically incapable of understanding any system of mutuality, because he cannot tolerate being anyone’s equal.

The replacement of international law with spheres of influence based on power alone means, in turn, that the US will have no case against China’s future absorption of Taiwan, Russia’s re-occupation of all of Ukraine and the Baltic states, or Israel’s looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. My own view is not that the US could have continued its current course indefinitely; but that any retrenchment should have kept the architecture of international law and support for liberal democracies, as much as we could. Trump has effectively thrown in the towel; and handed large swathes of the world to Putin, Xi, and, to a lesser extent, Netanyahu — the only world leaders he respects and understands. – Andrew Sullivan

This means, it seems to me, that the idea of the West is now over. By the West, I mean the idea that the democracies that beat the Nazis and outlasted the Soviets were and are instinctively America’s friends — “We were with you then; We are with you now,” in Reagan’s words — that the world is divided between autocracy and democracy, and that although we need to deal with tyrants realistically, and accept limits on our power in this new multipolar world, we are still emphatically the leader of “the free world.”

Those three words — “the free world” — mean nothing to Trump and never have. And he has now fatefully told the entire world, including our former allies, that this is America’s position now as well. He has updated Reagan with these words: “We were with you then. We see no reason to be with you now. In fact, we’re siding with a dictator who threatens you.”

This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.

This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again. – Andrew Sullivan

If you want to understand how supermarkets can retail a can of fizzy drink for less than a dollar a can, it is because they have the market power to drive their suppliers to the wall.

This might seem terrible, and perhaps it is, but there is a direct correlation between what a supermarket pays for a good and what they sell it for. – Damien Grant 

I mean, I’d like a pet Aardvark, but we need to understand what we are saying. While we are flashing a bit of commercial leg to attract new investment, we are clubbing the existing supermarkets with ever more creative regulations. – Damien Grant 

Retail is hard work. You have labour laws that inhibit productivity, rising levels of theft and an education system that struggles to provide staff with the required levels of literacy and numeracy as well as reckless government policies causing prices to jump faster than your customers’ incomes.

Prices are not rising. Our income is falling in absolute terms which means we can afford less each year and rather than accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions politicians are blaming the supermarkets and punishing them accordingly.

And then wonder why no one else wants to come and open a competitive chain? It is a mystery. – Damien Grant