Dutch growers eye pot of gold as weed test trial rolls out

By AFP
AFP
Updated 5:04PM December 15, 2023, First published at 8:03AM December 15, 2023
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Ashwin Matai looks proudly at hundreds of his cannabis plants growing under fierce LED lights, knowing that, as of Friday, his prized weed is no longer illegal in The Netherlands.

“I call it a historic moment,” the 34-year-old said after The Netherlands decriminalised the production of cannabis in certain regions as part of a four-year test.

It is a common misconception that cannabis is legal in The Netherlands, world-famous for its “coffee shops” that in fact sell pot, not coffee.

In fact, consumption is illegal but “tolerated” under a policy dating back nearly five decades.

But the production and supply of cannabis was neither legal nor tolerated, meaning growers like Matai were forced to operate in the shadows.

From Friday, coffee shops in Breda and Tilburg, two cities in the southern part of the country, are legally allowed to sell pot from registered suppliers – all legally.

One of those 10 farms is “Holland High”, where Matai is “cultivation director”. He said the trial would be of huge benefit to consumers.

Matai grows more than 45 varieties of cannabis in his “culture room” heated to 25C, where scissor-wielding staff cut and prune the plants with almost surgical precision.

“The product will be clean, tested, pesticide-free. We know exactly what comes in, what comes out so the consumer will get a much safer product,” he said.

Before the pilot program, coffee shops were in a legal grey area that was exploited by gangs, resulting in petty crime and anti-social behaviour.

“All the coffee shops, our own retail infrastructure, who are selling cannabis over the counter, the way they get supplied is all a mystery,” Matai said.

Before the trial, it was a “cat and mouse game” with the authorities. The people who do their best to supply the coffee shops were “taking risks, every day”.

The firm had to move its plants from its illegal plantations to its above-board greenhouse over a period of two weeks, in a military-style “special operation”.

They used “scout cars” to warn of police patrols while they were shifting the gear.

Holland High chief executive Edwin van der Knaap, said about €35m-€40m ($57m-65m) had been sunk into the project, with the first deliveries expected from February.

More than 33,000 plants from dozens of varieties are cultivated on the farm, which the managers claim is the most “technologically advanced” of those participating.

Pre-rolled joints and edible cannabis products are also produced there.

Van der Knaap said he was “very confident” that the trial would end in a full decriminalisation – “the only way possible”.

“Fifty years ago, The Netherlands was sort of leading in the cannabis space, was sort of the hot bed of cannabis,” he said.

He felt that moves to legalise the drug in the US and Canada have left The Netherlands trailing behind but hoped the trial would change all that.

“We are well positioned to take The Netherlands back to the forefront of the cannabis industry,” he said.

Quite possibly the unfunniest idiot to have existed in human history. Whose brilliant idea was it to give him a speaking gig at Bazza’s “state tribute”?

geez! .. this must have been a riotous shindig .. the only place on the web I’ve heard it mentioned is here on the “cat”….

If I was given an image of a bit of flesh with no accompanying provenance except feelz, I’d be wondering.

It’s not just that.
That screenshot was the only surviving image from a phone which had “100% died”, without any time-stamp.
There seemed to be no curiosity about how that could be.
Britnah claimed it was a government phone and suspected the phone was remotely wiped by some Mossad-like agency.
Except we then find the images have magically been recovered. They were on personal phone, not a work phone.
One would think at that point, enquiring minds might say, “That’s great news Britnah! Have you got the original of that bruise photo?”
But no.

What planet is Lisa Wilkinson on?

The Project star’s interview with Brittany Higgins portrayed Liberal staffer Fiona Brown as an uncaring party hack who helped cover up a rape. Now those claims are being blown apart.
By stephen rice
From Commentary
2 hours ago
7 minute read

What planet is Lisa Wilkinson on?

Her interview with Brittany Higgins crucified Linda Reynolds’ chief of staff Fiona Brown, portraying her as an uncaring Liberal Party hack who, it seemed to suggest, helped cover up the rape of a young woman for political convenience.

Yet in the witness box at Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation trial this week, Wilkinson has claimed The Project portrayed Brown as a “caring” person and was “complimentary” of her.

That will be news to anyone who watched the program, and certainly news to Brown herself, whose life was turned upside down by the unproven – and almost entirely unchallenged – allegations levelled against her after a lifetime of distinguished public service.

The Project gave Brown a starring role as a chief ­villain – second only to the alleged rapist – in the story Higgins told. But Lehrmann wasn’t named in the program. Brown was.

Higgins claimed that she told Brown in their first meeting she had been raped in Reynolds’ office; that Brown had viewed the CCTV footage from that night but refused to let Higgins see it; that Brown had not supported Higgins after that night, and in fact offered Higgins a “payout” to get her out of the way in the lead up to the election.

“It was like standing in front of a firing squad”, Brown recalled in an interview with The Australian earlier this year. “And it was the day that my life ended, as I knew it.”

“The worst thing you can say about a woman is she walked past another woman’s rape,” Brown says.

None of it was true, she says. But her world fell apart. Colleagues shunned her.

At one point not long after, she walked into the sea in a bid to end it all, saved by a caring young surfer who took her by the hand and pulled her back to shore.

Brown has been left so traumatised she has asked to be excused on medical grounds from giving evidence in the defamation case. Justice Michael Lee has yet to rule on whether she will be required to testify.

Wilkinson and her colleagues are trying to prove they acted reasonably and in the public interest in the way they handled Higgins’ rape allegations.

The TV veteran might have used her two days in the witness box to clear up some of the misreporting around the case.

Instead, Wilkinson doubled down on her claims that Brown was part of a conspiracy to cover up a hideous crime – “taking orders from the Prime Minister’s office” – while simultaneously claiming she had been “nice” to Brown in the program.

The Sofronoff Inquiry completely debunked the idea there was some kind of political conspiracy to bury the rape claim but Higgins and Wilkinson have clung to it like a liferaft through this trial.

A somewhat puzzled Justice Lee pointed out that Brown had arranged a meeting for Higgins with the AFP, and had taken her down to AFP offices.

Lee: “Do you think it’s consistent with a systemic cover up of a rape allegation for someone to escort someone to an AFP office?”

Wilkinson: “I think if Ms Brown had been properly trained in dealing with a survivor of sexual assault, the internal AFP would not have been a place to take them.”

So now Brown is being condemned for taking Higgins to the police.

You couldn’t make it up.

“You’d agree that it would be wicked conduct … being involved in the systemic cover up of a rape allegation?” Lee asked.

“Yeah, it was about keeping the details away from the media,” Wilkinson said, before retreating to her claim that Brown should have been happy with her treatment at the hands of The Project.

Wilkinson wouldn’t concede that any of the allegations in the show were even critical of Brown.

She rejected the idea that viewers would have been left with the impression that Brown applied pressure on Higgins not to go to the police.

Not at all. When she began the program by stating that Higgins was “forced to choose between her career and the pursuit of justice” she hadn’t meant the young woman had been pressured by Brown not to go to the police. No, what she’d meant was that Higgins had put pressure on herself.

In her interview with Wilkinson, Higgins claimed that the first time she spoke to Brown was “the first time I vocalised I’d been raped.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that Brown completely denies that Higgins said anything about being raped, and has contemporaneous notes that record their conversation.

Leave aside, too, the improbability of any woman, let alone her boss and, in this case, a universally respected public servant, callously ignoring the plight a woman who says she’s just been raped.

Let’s just consider Wilkinson’s denial, under oath, that anyone might have thought less of Brown over this claim.

“The impression conveyed by that is that Ms Brown is some kind of vile apparatchik, correct?” Richardson asks.

Wilkinson: “I totally disagree.”

Richardson: “She comes across as cold and unfeeling?”

Wilkinson:“I totally disagree.”

Does it show Brown as caring? Richardson pushes.

It’s “neutral”, says Wilkinson.

Then there’s Higgins’ allegation – vehemently denied by Brown – that her boss had watched CCTV of her and Lehrmann in Parliament House that night and refused to let her see it.

Higgins: “It really hurt. It felt like a betrayal for them to sort of withhold that one really small thing that I needed just personally for myself to process to move on.”

No, that wasn’t critical of Brown either, according to Wilkinson.

And on it went.

Brown had allegedly told Higgins: “If you can’t deal with it, you can leave.”

“You portrayed Brown as a terrible human being,” Richardson suggested.

“I disagree,” said Wilkinson.

Then there’s Wilkinson asking Higgins what support she’d got after (allegedly) telling her she’d been raped.

Higgins: “Oh, we were given … we have an employee assistance program. I remember she gave me a brochure. She told me I could take the rest of the day off, and I did.”

…

Wilkinson: “Did she call the police?”

Higgins: “She said internal mechanisms were already at play.”

Again, let’s leave aside how, in the first meeting where Higgins’ discloses that she has been raped, some kind of internal “mechanism” could already be underway.

Let’s leave aside the program’s failure to reveal it was Brown and Reynolds who urged Higgins to go to the police.

Consider instead Wilkinson’s claim that this was an example of Brown being portrayed as “nice”, because “she gave her a brochure and told her to have the afternoon off.”

“That’s your answer?” Richardson asked, incredulous.

“Yes”, Wilkinson responded. “That’s a caring gesture.”

“Not a callous one?”

“How is taking the afternoon off a callous gesture?” Wilkinson asks.

Well, perhaps because a boss telling a woman who has just claimed to have been raped, not to go to the police or a doctor or a counsellor, but to “take the afternoon off” would be about as uncaring as it gets.

But that’s assuming Wilkinson wasn’t already fully aware of this – an assumption we must make, because she was giving evidence to a court under oath.

There were plenty of examples The Project could have shown of Brown actually being caring.

They could have shown Brown’s text offering Higgins to have her dad come along to the meeting with Reynolds – but the producers blurred that part of the message.

That was just “the vagaries of prime time television”, Wilkinson explained: “there’s a fairly short attention span that viewers have for very, very long messages.”

It would have been nice to have shown the note Higgins sent Brown months after the alleged rape and after Higgins had moved on to another office: “I wanted to say this in person but – I cannot overstate how much I’ve valued your support and advice throughout this period. You’ve been absolutely incredible and I’m so appreciative.”

Except that Higgins, unsurprisingly, hadn’t shared that message with The Project.

What Justice Lee will make of Wilkinson and Ten’s defence against Bruce Lehrmann remains to be seen.

But she and her colleagues live on Mars if they think their treatment of Fiona Brown looks like fair and reasonable journalism.

Dumbgold said he advised her against making the speech, she denies this.

Whatever you may think of Drumgold, I always thought it implausible that he would green light that speech.

I think the remaining hostages are dead. Israel knows it.

Reluctantly, I do agree with you.

This article summarises the day quite well, despite the many displays of the Gold Coast Porkers.

What an arrogant piece of work the toad is.

Chlamydia Ford hauled off to be a sex slave….

but you do realise, violence is a distinct possibility?

Take a heavy wooden walking stick. Get up against a wall, and go for the elbows and the knees.

This is the mob the slut married to the walking corpse biden employed to celebrate Christmas in the White House:

https://nypost.com/2023/12/14/news/dorrance-dance-used-for-wh-christmas-video-backs-defunding-police/

They support BLM, antifa and regard whites as the great oppressors. Biden is demented and has the awareness of a goldfish but the people around him must know this. The only issue in dealing with them is which calibre to use.

My plain white t-shirt …

Bless you, Rabz.

One third of hamas rockets fail, iirc they’ve fired around 12,000.
That’s 4000 on densely populated Gaza.
How many of the dead and injured children are directly at the hands of their lords and masters.
Did the brave journalist ask?
I’m sure hamas has the numbers at their fingertips.

‘Lazy, and perhaps politically expedient’: Judge lashes DPP over rape cases

Exclusive
By natasha robinson
Health Editor
8:55PM December 15, 2023

A NSW judge has called for the “lazy and perhaps politically ­expedient” referrals of baseless rape accusations to the court to stop after the case of a man who spent eight months on remand in jail and faced a jury trial despite never committing a crime.

The “deep level of concern” over the abrogation of the prosecutor’s duty to interrogate complainants’ allegations – raising the risk of false convictions – has been exposed in a NSW District Court case in which a man faced trial despite clear evidence the sex he had with the alleged victim was consensual.

The woman had alleged the man sexually assaulted her, ­because she was so drunk she had a blackout and could not ­remember the events, despite it being clear she had “enthusiastically participated” in sex and consent was obtained every step of the way.

The man spent eight months in prison before eventually being granted bail and then acquitted by a jury on December 4.

In an application for a costs certificate following the trial, it was revealed the complainant had made five virtually identical allegations against other men. But a much-criticised piece of NSW legislation that fails to provide exceptions to admit tendency evidence relating to prior sexual history largely prevented the jury from knowing about the pattern of accusation. Had the jury known, the accused would have been “acquitted within minutes”, according to District Court judge Robert Newlinds.

His excoriating judgment granting a costs order, which is causing shockwaves at the NSW criminal bar, has exposed concern within the judiciary and among criminal lawyers as to the impact of the MeToo movement on the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution’s assessment of sexual assault cases, with a pattern emerging in which prosecutors take a reflexive “believe the victim” stance, and prefer to let the jury decide rather than discontinue hopeless cases.

“I think the prosecution took the lazy and perhaps politically expedient course of identifying that the complainant alleged she had been sexually assaulted and without properly considering the question of whether there was any evidence to support that allegation, and just prosecuted so as to let the jury decide,” Judge Newlinds said in the costs judgment.

“This must stop. Justice has not been served and will not be served by repeated cases being ­prosecuted based on obviously flawed evidence.”

The accused, who was given the pseudonym Mr Martinez by the court, faced trial in late November after being charged in June 2021 with four counts of sexual intercourse without consent. He was initially refused bail, which was then granted eight months later by the NSW Supreme Court.

The charges arose after Mr Martinez, who identifies as non-binary and prefers to use the pronoun “they”, had sex with the complainant, who was a friend. The complainant had had a lot to drink, but the evidence indicated the woman had initiated sex and participated enthusiastically in four occasions of intercourse.

BTW, how is the Save the World hunger strike in Canbra going?

I tend to believe attraction is hard wired. There’s no accounting for taste. Of course, acting on it is a choice.

Vivek Ramaswamy
@VivekGRamaswamy

LGBT movement: you must believe both of those things at once, or else you’re a bigot.

Hungary blocks €50bn of EU funding for Ukraine

Saw a Kerry O’Keefe snippet on Soshul Meeja talking about the Bairstow run out.
“You’ve got to treat the popping crease just like Julian Arrange treated the Ecuadorian Embassy. I mean, you just never leave, no matter what.”

https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2023/12/if-this-is-what-shes-like-in-court-you-can-only-imagine-lisa-wilkinson-in-real-life.html

Sigh !!

No politician has been as cool or possessed the cred as the Goug.

This one sounds pretty cool, while munching an apple.