Werewolf

Newsflash: PM Christopher Luxon does not take any responsibility for the condition in which the New Zealand economy currently finds itself. Not his problem. He’s done his bit. At a meeting in Rotorua on the weekend Luxon criticised employers for their alleged ‘parent child” relationship to the state. Allegedly, firms need to become “adult, adult, adult” and expect a lot less from central government.

The Werewolf essays on classic children’s books focusses this week on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about war’s on children True, it may seem weird to try and warn teenagers about the horrors of war by writing them a story about teenagers who kill each other in a TV reality show. Nine times out of ten, you’d end up with yet another example of our violence-soaked culture, rather than a cautionary tale. So all credit to author Suzanne Collins for pulling it off with her Hunger Games trilogy.

Earlier this week, when Christopher Luxon ruled out forming any government with Opportunity, it was like the ugly kid in class suddenly announcing that he’s not going to the birthday party if that charismatic new kid in school is going to be there. Everyone shrugged. It felt more like petulance than a power play. It is little wonder that Opportunity is on the rise.

Soaring temperatures, bigger storms, more lightning strikes hitting tinder-dry conditions. Wildfires in Canada, France, ad Spain. Could climate change possibly be to blame? Not according to US President Donald Trump. He seems pretty certain that the fires affecting North America are entirely Canada’s fault. ….. You know, we got to stop the fires up there…maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs. But it was terrible. I mean, you had businesses closing.

The Werewolf series of essays on classic children’s books focusses this week on Cynthia Voigt’s great story of a young girl’s resourcefulness, against the odds. Curiosity has always been a good friend of creativity. Reportedly, Cynthia Voigt got the idea for Homecoming after looking one day at some kids in a supermarket parking lot, and wondering what would happen if their parents never came back to the car for them.

People with more wealth enjoy better health, and their children get a head start in life. Pretty obvious, really. Yet criticism of this state of affairs is often attributed to the politics of envy. We hear a whole lot less about the politics of contempt, although that seems to have driven the recent changes to our voting laws. For no good reason, the right of citizens to both enrol and vote on election day has been abolished.

Well, the football World Cup is over and the good guys won, geo-politically speaking. Meaning: Spain was the first European country to officially join the case that South Africa brought before the International Court of Justice over Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. Spain has also refused to let America use its military bases in Spain for its illegal war on Iran. Recently Spain significantly expanded the access of undocumented migrants (especially children) to residency in Spain etc.

With rare skill, this book weaves together two quite different types of stories. The ‘external’ story is about the dilemma that faces the field-mouse Mrs Frisby when her son Timothy comes down with pneumonia and needs to rest at home. Alas, this is just when Farmer Fitzgibbon decides to plough the paddock where they live, which will destroy her home, and kill her child.

True to form, US President Donald Trump has found a way to try and monetise the war he launched against Iran. Trump is proposing to slap a 20% fee on all cargo that sails through the Strait of Hormuz under US warship protection. The Bloomberg news service has estimated that a 20% charge for a fully loaded oil tanker would come to a total fee of around $US32 million.

More than anything else, Abel’s Island is a tale about love enduring through peril. It is also about the beauty of solitude. Over the course of its 119 pages, it tells the story of Abelard Hassam de Chirico Flint of the Mossville Flints, a foppish and well–to-do young mouse of inherited fortune, who gets marooned on an island after being swept away in a storm, while chasing after the windblown scarf of his beloved wife, Amanda.