Advertisement
Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:49 pm, September 4th, 2010 - 13 comments
New Zealand is one of the oddest places geologically (Japan is similar) in the world because of our position between two plates and because we are at the twist where the plates change how they interact with each other. But the position of the Christchurch earthquake is a long way from the plate boundaries. Highly Allochthonous has a look at the mechanism of the quake.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:26 am, September 4th, 2010 - 108 comments
The Christchurch earthquake was a shallow high magnitude earthquake close to a urban population centre. That is the disaster scenario for planners. It is a disaster, but not a major disaster. The enforcement of building regulations ensured that the city took damage, but survived largely intact.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:41 am, August 29th, 2010 - 9 comments
The site has now been reconfigured to be a multi-site system. This will allow us to start setting up child sites for more specialized topics in the future. It should allow us to keep expanding our range of posts with the ever increasing number of authors.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:52 am, August 27th, 2010 - 12 comments
There have been 6000 published* posts, 192 thousand comments, and many millions of page views. I’d guess that this multiple-author blog has a wee bit of an audience.
And the server has been stable….
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:20 am, August 22nd, 2010 - 36 comments
Australia is about to enter a new era in politics. They appear to have a hung parliament this morning according to the Sydney Morning Herald. There are a number of marginal seats in the balance. The single Green MP in the lower house and a number of independents will determine which major party forms a government.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:45 am, August 21st, 2010 - 20 comments
Reading about Act ritualistically disemboweling themselves this week has been interesting, and has quite a few implications for the political landscape at the next election. The factor that has been attracting my attention was highlighted by Fran O’Sullivan this morning – where did those defense papers wind up. Apparently with The Veteran at No Minister, who wins kudos from me by acting responsibly to the leak.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:55 pm, August 18th, 2010 - 33 comments
Watching ACT at present must be similar to watching a red giant finishing consuming all of its helium, expel its envelope, and collapse down to dwarf star. A breaking Herald report on the back story of the ACT leadership assassination says Heather Roy’s “leaked documents…portray Act leader Rodney Hide as an abusive, intimidating bully”
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:57 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 48 comments
We managed to miss The Standard’s third birthday a few days ago despite some earlier avowed intentions to make a fuss over it. The site started on August 15th 2007 and has grown into a massive community project of the left since then. Long may it continue….
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:45 pm, August 13th, 2010 - 30 comments
In Morning Report yesterday there was a clear question and statement on the difference between weather events and climate. This is a question that always seems to confuse our CCD’s (climate change deniers and skeptics). So it is worth examining it a bit in the view of some of the unusual weather that has been happening recently. A increased frequency of such events is going to be the main effect of climate change over time, leading eventually to famines.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:02 pm, August 6th, 2010 - 16 comments
A story in the Heralds Sideswipe offers and interesting insight into veteran professional politician John Banks, and his priorities and social evolution. I’d suggest that women and any males who aren’t still living in the 19th century take note – and vote against the knuckle scraper.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 4th, 2010 - 70 comments
Why in hell are John Banks and the irresponsible Citizens and Ratepayers dominated Auckland City Council giving me (as a ratepayer) the risks of rebuilding Eden Park. They (and I) already have more than enough risks to handle in the massive costs of the leaky building liabilities.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:00 pm, August 1st, 2010 - 34 comments
The activities of the dishonorable Minister for Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett has been increasingly reminding me of the blogger Whaleoil. Consider the number of common points of obnoxious behaviour. The similarities are quite striking. The main difference is that one is a blogger opinionating on current affairs and the other is a minister of the crown with the responsibility for large numbers of dependent people.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:28 am, July 31st, 2010 - 14 comments
The Economist has a great article looking at the American propensity to deprive their citizens of their liberty for trivial offenses. We have the same stupid political ratcheting here that causes it. A large part of that is fueled by groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust. There needs to be a broad agreement across the political spectrum about such hysterical groups before they cause more damage.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:46 pm, July 30th, 2010 - 10 comments
While there are some ministers who are pretty scared of fronting up for their portfolios, Kate Wilkinson is one of the worst.
There is also this little gem about a Minister that is happy to be anywhere that Sean Plunket isn’t. I guess this image will get a lot of use. Anyone got a good caption?
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:00 am, July 30th, 2010 - 9 comments
A recent poll in New Hampshire showed that being endorsed by Sarah Palin was an immediate turnoff to moderate voters. Similarly the RWNJ’s of the ‘tea party’ have managed to succeed in getting ideologically ‘pure’ but politically lower quality candidates selected where the GOP has undemocratic systems in place. Is this the beginning of the end for the RWNJ’s in the US as voters reject their candidates? Now if only WhaleOil would endorse candidates here…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:28 pm, July 29th, 2010 - 241 comments
It sounds like Chris Carter has shot himself in the foot, or rather in the handwriting.
Phil Goff and the caucus look like they have taken the required quick and decisive action.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:40 pm, July 25th, 2010 - 7 comments
National have been undemocratically shutting down the avenues to amend their ideologically stupid legislation. They ignore submissions to select committees and abuse the parliamentary process of urgency. The only effective means of diverting them from pushing through unworkable legislation is proving to be protests and direct action. Consequently you can expect to see a lot more of it.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:00 am, July 25th, 2010 - 1 comment
We have it all wrong. What Brownlee was really trying to say. From William Joyce
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:03 pm, July 20th, 2010 - 6 comments
There is a great review of “There Once Was An Island: Te Henua E Noho†at Reading the Maps. It is well worth reading and so are the comments. However ‘maps’ also opined on the weekend about where the film was shown. It expressed my feeling of being caught in some dreary surreal cyberpunk novel with the protests, police, fat cat capitalists, the desperate on their slot machines, and a documentary about losing your culture to the climate and change.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:30 pm, July 18th, 2010 - 9 comments
Today has been a busy day. Lyn and Briar have the NZ premiere of their documentary shortly, which limited what I could do today. But I stopped off at the protest outside of the National party conference and met The Rat. The speakers were right – it does have a strong visual resemblance to John …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:57 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 15 comments
At Hot Topic, Gareth has a post on Christopher Monckton attempting to stifle the well-justified criticism of himself . For some reason he seems to think that it is ok for him to criticize working scientists despite having little knowledge of the subjects. However he seems to think they should not be able to analyze or criticize his level of stupid ineptitude.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:17 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 26 comments
From the Flicker pages of William Joyce, we have this cogent visual comment on Murray McCully and his diplomatic skills. But the image needs a good caption… 
Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:07 am, July 14th, 2010 - 15 comments
The documentary “There Once was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho” that my partner Lyn Collie has spent her ‘spare’ time producing for the last four years is about to get it screened in New Zealand at the film festivals starting this weekend. This documentary directed by Briar March has won multiple awards at its festival screenings worldwide. I still find it pretty good myself even after having to sit through it many times during post-production. Tickets are selling fast.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:47 am, July 11th, 2010 - 20 comments
“Why, if you are an international rugby fan, would you leave Eden Park and hop on a train, eschewing the delights of Kingsland’s cafes, going directly past the thriving night life of Ponsonby and taking a right on to a bleak windswept wharf instead of a left to the maelstrom that is the Viaduct?”
Indeed!
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:34 am, July 8th, 2010 - 28 comments
The Herald has a headline article on John Keys “Party Central”. But their cartoon really said it all. The question is:- How many ‘good’ ideas does it take before John Key manages to get one to actually work?
Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:47 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 46 comments
I had to laugh at this comment by Mako about my least favorite wingnut… More desperate anti-Brown smearing from Slater. His latest allegation is that ‘Looney Len’ wants every school to plant 500 trees a year. A waste of our precious education budget! he wails. Child slave labour! he howls. ‘Surely one of his backers …
Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:30 am, July 6th, 2010 - 9 comments
There are a lot of risks New Zealand will face when more deeper water off-shore oil exploration goes ahead. The more you look, the greater the risks appear. Brownlee and the crazies at the MED don’t look like they know what a risk assessment is. Consequently they’re getting screwed. Perhaps they should read Gordon Campbell…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:54 pm, July 4th, 2010 - 5 comments
The current incumbent of the Bagehot column at The Economist is stepping down with a few relevant comments about current relationships ebtween the politicians, journos, and the public.
The opinions could have been written about the poor state of journalism here.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:00 pm, July 2nd, 2010 - 2 comments
Enigma have for a long time one of my favorite sounds to listen to while programming from the early 90′s onwards. There have been bug-hunting exercises where Enigma has literally been on my playlist all day. You can just queue all of their albums, knuckle down, and kill those tiresome and frustrating bugs. Since it is going to be a programming weekend, including some site tweaking….
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:55 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 24 comments
I’m tired of hearing about the ‘medieval warming period’ and ‘hockey-stick’, which are respectively almost two decades and a decade old. It came up in comments today again, and I get the impression that CCDs are firstly euro-centric and secondly never seem to look at the current evidence. There have been many studies that substantially support the ‘hockey-stick’ and none that support the MWP. The Crock of the Week did this video explaining it…
Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:29 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 22 comments
Peter Sinclair in Crock of the week uses some old classic movie and TV footage to point out the debunking the ‘climategate’ myth. Quite simply this hack of the e-mails hasn’t changed any of the science of climate change and is as ineffectual as most of the anti-science inquisition has been over the last century. It really just shows how pathetic and ineffectual that the CCDs are becoming.
Comments