Jill Ovens, Service & Food Workers’ Union
Mark Rocket, RocketLab
Det. Emmett Lynch, Police
Jan Pryor, Family Researcher
Michael Hope, FDANZ
Peter Watt, Electricity Commission
Tim Rainey, Leaky Building Syndrome lawyer
Melody Scales, Summer City music festival director

Etc.

L

A friend of mine once commented to me, on how coincidental it was that the names of National MPs often represented their political outlook. ie Powers, Rich, Banks, Key, Strange.

Lew though it may be a coincidence, it may come as no surprise to many, that, as you say the un-elected body appointed by Rodney Hide and the Nats charged with Auckland’s governance have named their consultative group the Super City Advisory Board (SCAB).

The New Scientist magazine once noted that there is a very high statistical incidence of Dentists called Dennis.

In articles carried over several issues of New Scientist, N.S, further discovered that this sort of naming coincidence is often reflected in other fields of human endeavour. The writers at N.S. coined the term Nominative Determinism to describe this phenomenon. Their point being that they thought that people’s unconscious preferences often played a role in shaping the choosing of names and professions and vice a versa.

http://www.consumingexperience.com/2005/02/jobs-reflecting-names-nominative.html

It makes me wonder whether this phenomonen is at work here.

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf108/sf108p14.htm

What a crock! People drink to forget, some drink to socialize, some
drink because its there, some drink to have memories, some to forget,
some drink out of boredom. But the idea that we should never feel bad!
Please! we need bad moments to assess good ones as good. If
we don’t have bad moments, do away with them, then we are no
better than zombies living in a false life.

Edit: predictive text on anti-spam word thing: not helpful.

This civilization was both enabled and required by the discovery of tools (arrowheads, fire, and catastrophic monoculture agriculture) that in turn enabled us to expand outside our natural rainforest habitat, become carnivores, become settlers, eliminate natural predators, and hence expand exponentially our species’ numbers and consumption of resources.

This allowed us to completely pillage the planet, just as quickly, to the point that we now have nothing left for other species or for future generations, and this has precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on Earth, and the destruction, in the blink of an eye, of an ecological balance that was co-created and sustained collectively by all-life-on-Earth for millions of years.

Reality isn’t something that can be dodged no matter the technology.

Nonetheless you correctly identify the problem – cultural. It will need a generational change here in NZ to get to that point. Regulation may help but it is far far from the solution imo.

Ask someone why they drink (especially a binge drinker). The answer is usually something like, “It makes me feel better”.

Hardly anyone asks the next question, “Why did you feel so bad in the first place?”.

L