Last Straw

Nice idea: the NZ Greens have a website for creating your own online billboards: voteforus.co.nz
My favourites: freedom to dance, young girl, native bush, Tuis, lakes, to glide, unspoiled beach, cabbage trees, swimming as kids, romance on the beach, the rope bridge, young lasses, earth, and, my favourite, living in harmony.
(via No Right Turn)
Update: added mine: kayaking down [...]

No Right Turn on why the Maori seats matter. Quite something.

A huge controversy has blown up in the UK after a couple of comedians made a lewd phone call and it was broadcast on BBC radio. The broadcast received two single complaints on the day but after The Mail on Sunday lead with the story a week later that eventually ballooned into the tens of thousands.
As of tonight one [...]

This was hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry on Dispatches tonight. Is he really advocating the abolishment of fractional-reserve banking, a system where banks create money out of thin air and are required to keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see this unbelievable scam terminated, but does Hugh [...]

Despite the Israeli government’s threat to forcibly stop them the Free Gaza group made a second successful sailing to Gaza Strip today. Their first sailing, on 24 August, made them the first people to freely enter Gaza Strip in forty-one years.
Israel has imposed an immoral and illegal1 blockade on Gaza Strip since June 2007, in an attempt to undermine [...]

I hear the NZ National Party and the NZ Herald have been fostering the idea that the party with the most votes should lead the government, even, it seems, if that party can’t form a coalition to represent the will of the majority of voters.
Suppose for a minute that we didn’t have two major parties [...]

Blossom Goodchild, the scammer who claimed aliens were coming to town on 14 October, now has her own Wikipedia page (since deleted).
I can see the point of recording it, considering the number of people she hoodwinked, but I wonder how many more book sales she’ll receive as a result of a dedicated webpage on Wikipedia.

This is Sam Harris, author of Letter to to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, speaking at Beyond Belief.
Harris’ thesis is that questions of morality are perfectly within the realm of scientific enquiry and, that because human well-being is realised at the level of the brain, an emerging and maturing brain science will have a [...]

Brilliant interview with Chomsky where he gets to the nub of things as usual.
People should vote against McCain and for Obama – but without illusions.

Part II: Chomsky on the economy
Current crisis demonstrates anti-democratic nature of financial system

Spencer Ackerman on a conference call held by the McCain campaign:

I just got off a conference call held by the McCain campaign to deny that Al Qaeda … is rooting for their man. To describe the call as panicked would be an understatement.

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any discussion about why Al Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq and a bellicose U.S. all across the Muslim world to radicalize Muslims to its terrorist cause and drain the U.S. of its financial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bankruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason why, as the CIA eventually concluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 by releasing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic continuity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Scheunemann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”