Open mike 14/05/2010

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, May 14th, 2010 - 19 comments
Categories: open mike - Tags:

Open mike is your post.

It’s open for discussing topics of interest, making announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.

Comment on whatever takes your fancy.

The usual good behaviour rules apply (see the link to Policy in the banner).

Step right up to the mike…

19 comments on “Open mike 14/05/2010 ”

  1. RedLogix 1

    Disaster in the GoM

    Superb pics. Very sobering

  2. Tiger Mountain 3

    Mathew Hooten like the winter flu virus reappears just when you have pleasantly forgotten about it/him. On breakfast TV he displayed some incredible body language when denying that “smile and waves’ Tuhoe dinner remark was scripted.

  3. Ha

    Neil fom Dunedin had a comment read this morning on Morning Report.

    “Tuhoe could never eat John Key. He is far too slippery to stay on the plate!”

  4. Fantastic logic from far north mayor Wayne Brown; “Hello! Mining central, being Australia, has more tourists than we do and I would encourage you to send a reporter up here for a look”.

    Australia has lots of mines, Australia has more tourists than us, therefor mines are good, well mr Brown, i bet they have more pedofiles, more IV drug use, more people in gangs, and more suidices, maybe that’s what gives them more tourists than us, not the fact that they have more mining.

    Seriously where do they find these idiots?

    Not one bit suprised at DPF’s fawning over his comments.

    • Lew 5.1

      Yeah. Brown conveniently ignores the fact that Australia’s main tourist attractions are mostly a couple of thousand kilometres from their mining operations.

      L

  5. Doug 6

    Oh dear!!
    Goff appears lost in voteless wilderness, throwing out policies and words that he thinks might be popular, but not really knowing what to believe or having any overarching strategy or new thinking.

    Bernard Hickey
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10644846

  6. mach1 7

    Bernard ‘the boomers stole all the house’s’ Hickey has an opinion……..SFW.

  7. toad 8

    Double Dipton’s li’l bro wades in where Big Gerry floundered and sank. They must be getting desperate.

  8. Armchair Critic 9

    “…Conor English said the country could not rely on only agriculture as the main driver of the economy. It needed a “second engine“…”
    See, all I need to do is cut and paste straight out of the article on Stuff (without giving the full context), add a bit of emphasis and suddenly there it is – even Bill’s brother supports the idea of building Auckland’s new trains in Dunedin.

  9. prism 10

    Having been involved in rugby 1956 to 1971 Sir Colin Meads must have wielded a lot of grunt. Interesting comments he made on RadioNZ on the apology for the racist choice of players to go to South Africa. He said that SA was such a good team it was too good a chance to forego playing them. That was of course more important than trying to break the dreadful enslavement of SAs blacks.

    I think he has stuck to the point that sport is separate from politics. Very amusing to hear that argument used by those wanting to play a national team against another national team, ie both teams representing the political state they derived from.

    Just as well the Nazis didn’t play good rugby, as it would have caused untold conflict amongst our players and administrators when deciding whether to support WW2 or go and play. The Olympics before 1939 were a case in point showing the difficult balance between sport focus and human revolt against ‘inhuman’ nation states.

    • corkscrew 10.1

      For shame you don’t know your history German Rugby was at its zenith in the 1930’s they beat France twice and were on the cusp of becoming a world power.

      BTW where is Ranji Wilson’s apology? We had coloured too!

  10. Quoth the Raven 11

    A couple stories on Obama: Obama Administration Sides with Bush DOJ, Asks Supreme Court to Keep Canadian Rendition Victim Maher Arar from His Day in Court

    The Obama Administration has opposed Mr. Arar’s petition for certiorari, arguing that his case was properly dismissed, and that the Supreme Court should not consider it. The Obama administration could have settled the case, recognizing the wrongs done to Mr. Arar as Canada itself has done. Yet it chose to come to the defense of Bush administration officials, arguing that even if they conspired to send Maher Arar to torture, they should not be held accountable by the judiciary.

    Obama on Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan: “I Am Accountable”

    That statement is quite remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is not true. How are President Obama or Gen. McChrystal accountable? Afghans have little, if any, recourse for civilian deaths. They cannot press their case in international courts because the US doesn’t recognize an International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over US forces, Afghan courts have not and will not be given jurisdiction and Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear that the Justice Department will not permit cases against US military officials brought by foreign victims to proceed in US courts. So, what does it mean to be accountable for civilian deaths? Public apology? Press conferences? A handful of courts martial?

  11. Croc 12

    Big Increase in South Island Dairying

    It would appear that common sense is sorely lacking at the local government level. ECAN has continued to over allocate water in the Canterbury region even though by their own figures most areas are already massively over allocated. http://www.ecan.govt.nz/services/online-services/monitoring/groundwater-allocation/Pages/zone-map.aspx

    It is therefore not surprising that expansion in New Zealand’s dairy herd was concentrated in the South Island from 2008 to 2009, where numbers grew 13 percent to 2.1 million. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1005/S00392.htm. The Canterbury herd grew 10 percent last year to a total of 918,000. All this in an area that has never been naturally suited to intensive dairy farming.

    The environmental effects of dairying have long been documented http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/land/water-quality-selected-dairying-farming-catchments/html/page2.html and it has been a long standing attitude of Federated Farmers to try and greenwash this data, especially regarding the Canterbury region http://www.fedfarm.org.nz/n1099,10.html.

    And now that ECAN has been taken over by Rodney Hides self-appointed cronies and funnily enough Federated Farmers welcomed them with open arms http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1004/S00562.htm excited about the opportunity to ‘advance resource management policies, in particular freshwater management, allocation and developing Canterbury’s immense water storage potential.’ Have they even seen the water allocation data? Their ignorance is mind boggling.

  12. lprent 13

    Added numbers to each comment, including the sub-comments.

    This should work even if we zap the parent comments (usually because the commentator has been previously banned), so people can see something of the context that people were responding to.

    The number should be invariant (still checking), in which case you should be able to refer to it. Helps with navigating the threads.

  13. lprent 14

    I’m now looking at WSIWYG editors.

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