The weblog of Christiaan Briggs
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.
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