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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 the Whanganui River and kiwi road sign.
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 of the comedians has resigned, one is suspended for twelve weeks and a senior BBC manager has also resigned.
The public outrage has more to do, probably, with their obscene pay packets than the anything else but what I find so repulsive about all this is the contrast between the accountability of people involved in a petty prank and the accountability of people involved in the unspeakably more horrendous matter of the invasion of Iraq.
Here we have a silly but ultimately harmless prank gone wrong. A few complain and people are apologising and resigning left right and centre.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and mob launch a war of aggression, the “supreme war crime,” on a pack of lies, resulting in the destruction of a country and untold people’s lives destroyed or ended. The largest protest in human history ensues and not only have these people never apologised, resigned or been brought to justice but a plurality of British voters re-elected them.
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 Hendry understand how anti-establishment such a suggestion is?
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 Hamas, who won the elections in January 2006, and as collective punishment of Gazans for electing them.
The blockade means Gazans have been unable to travel in or out of Gaza Strip to see family members or go to universities they’ve been accepted into, or receive medical care. It also means an increasing lack of things like spare machinery parts and all the other things that go into running a civilised world.
This kind of cowardly collective punishment has been carried out before in this part of the world and that is estimated to have cost the lives of a million people, half of whom were children.
Let’s hope Free Gaza is just the beginning of the breaking of this siege.
Notes: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 but instead a number of small parties and the party with the most votes won 5% of the vote. What they’re actually suggesting, in a modern democracy no less, is that this party should form the government simply because it received the biggest block of votes.
This is called majoritarianism, a throw over from feudalism and a very limited form of democracy that 84.5% of voters in New Zealand elected to get rid of in 1993, when we chose the astronomically fairer system of proportional representation in MMP.
If National is incapable of co-operating with other groups in our society to form a representative majority then tough bickies. They’re a mollycoddled bunch of bloody whiners if you ask me and their long record of looking after themselves at the expense of the rest of the country should mean they never have their hands anywhere near the levers of power again.
No Right Turn has some thoughts on a recent Colmar Brunton poll on the same topic and Russell Brown responds to the Herald:
The Herald is free to make an argument that a National-led coalition of three parties would be a sounder government than a Labour-led coalition of four parties, but it should do so without making presumptions on the public will. If a majority coalition can be formed without betraying undertakings made before the election, then by definition it represents the will of the majority of voters.
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 lot to say about right and wrong.
While I have an easy time understanding the idea that morality is part of evolutionary inheritance I’ve always felt a little uneasy about how one reconciles value for diversity with a thesis that seems to suggest an homogenisation of cultural norms, but Harris goes some way to alleviating these concerns in this talk.
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.
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.”
