Author Archive
Rough Justice
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 am, July 31st, 2010 - 16 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.
Where’s Kate? Wanted for media avoidance…
Written By: - Date published: 5:46 pm, July 30th, 2010 - 11 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?
Pray you don’t get endorsed by Sarah Palin
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, July 30th, 2010 - 10 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…
Just plain stupidity
Written By: - Date published: 5:28 pm, July 29th, 2010 - 242 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.
National = Ideological Stupidity.
Written By: - Date published: 1:40 pm, July 25th, 2010 - 8 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.
We have it wrong…
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, July 25th, 2010 - 2 comments
We have it all wrong. What Brownlee was really trying to say. From William Joyce
The irony of the confluence
Written By: - Date published: 1:03 pm, July 20th, 2010 - 7 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.
Met the Rat, went to a documentary
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, July 18th, 2010 - 10 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 […]
The peer goes potty
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 16 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.
Needs a caption?
Written By: - Date published: 3:17 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 27 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… 😈
Go see a doco
Written By: - Date published: 9:07 am, July 14th, 2010 - 17 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.
Party failure
Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, July 11th, 2010 - 21 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!
Cartoon says it all
Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, July 8th, 2010 - 29 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?
Blubbering into oblivion
Written By: - Date published: 4:47 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 47 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 […]
Blowhard and the starry eyed suckers at the MED
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, July 6th, 2010 - 12 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…
Bagehot is dead, long live Bagehot
Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, July 4th, 2010 - 6 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.
Enigma: Gravity of Love
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, July 2nd, 2010 - 4 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….
Crock of the Week – “The Medieval Warming Crock”
Written By: - Date published: 5:55 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 25 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…
Crock of the Week – ‘Climategate’
Written By: - Date published: 3:29 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 24 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.
Brownlee concerned about safety? Yeah right.
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, June 22nd, 2010 - 14 comments
The New York Times has a excellent article on the failure of the last line of defense on the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Even as they are lambasting the regulatory framework that allowed the failure to happen, I’m looking at it and seeing how pathetic our regulatory framework is by comparison. Somehow I don’t think that Gerry Brownlee is capable of making it better.
The harsh reality of climate change
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, June 19th, 2010 - 1,346 comments
The most comprehensive collection and analysis of global temperature trends comes from NOAA.Their global temperatures report for May 2010 makes sobering reading. Since 1880, the globally hottest 10 years have happened in the last 15 years. It looks like 2010 will beat the previous hottest year in 2005, and we’re still at the least energetic part of the sunspot cycle.
Solar storms: harden your networks – its getting warmer.
Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, June 11th, 2010 - 37 comments
The sun is emerging from its deep sleep of the Solar Minimum. The increased sensitivity of human networks from satellites to power grids is starting to worry people who know what they’re talking about enough to cause them to have held a meeting on it. The sun produces sunspots in a reasonably regular eleven year […]
The tiresome title of Professor Emeritus
Written By: - Date published: 8:30 am, June 9th, 2010 - 28 comments
There has been a series of posts at Hot-topic and other sites looking at the actions and background of climate change skeptical scientists. But what is fascinating generally is that many are retired professors far from the cut and thrust of the peer reviewing of their work that is a major and critical part of the scientific process. Many people seem to imbue a larger mantle of authority over a title than its meaningless value deserves.
A quiet day
Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, June 4th, 2010 - 6 comments
The Internet is a modern wonder. However if you have to run servers on it, often the biggest wonder is that it works at all. There are so many things that can go wrong with the transport of data from one place to another.
One of those glitches happened to us yesterday.
Maintenance during the weekend
Written By: - Date published: 9:32 pm, May 27th, 2010 - 27 comments
During the weekend, amongst the other chores, the system will get an operating system upgrade. I’ll also be doing a general check for filesystem errors and look for stray files accumulating after its first 30 odd days of operation.
In theory, this should only result in a few minutes of outage. However…
An addicted technophobe; a politician
Written By: - Date published: 1:17 pm, May 18th, 2010 - 12 comments
Apparently, President Obama has delivered a speech ‘ranting’ against technology. The opinion in The Economist is worth a read just for the joy of reading the hilarity between the lines. ‘WITH iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather […]
Hooten has “loose lips” syndrome as well
Written By: - Date published: 5:27 pm, May 17th, 2010 - 26 comments
It is always amusing listening to Matthew Hooten being a spinster on politics. But it was rather ironic for him to be in a conversation about John Key’s “loose lips” on NatRad this morning. He talked about this site posting conspiracy theories, but he was talking about a post at Tumeke and attributing to us.
“Loose lips” appear to be rife amongst the right-wing politicians and political commentators these days.
Parliament in lockdown
Written By: - Date published: 9:48 am, May 17th, 2010 - 20 comments
Nope, it isn’t the budget. It appears that there is a bomb scare. At the beehive there is an evacuation. It appears that people in the rest of the parliamentary complex are not allowed to leave, and no-one is allowed to enter. Pretty freaky how easy it is to shut down the a core of […]
Shed some sunlight on a limp response
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 pm, May 15th, 2010 - 33 comments
David Farrar has finally made a comment on my “Hey Chubby…” post. It raises more questions than it answers. So I ask some of the obvious questions, and conclude that he has forsaken the principles of “free speech” that he so enthusiastically espoused only a few years ago.
Wind power is (too) successful?
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, May 15th, 2010 - 20 comments
You sometimes have to wonder about headline writers sometimes (including myself). But take a look at this one from Bloomberg.com, a site with a focus on investment. Windmill Boom Curbs Electric Power Prices for RWE RWE AG is a power utility and wind farm operator in Germany. The reason that they’re getting reduced prices for […]
Joke? Or deliberate insult?
Written By: - Date published: 12:07 pm, May 13th, 2010 - 158 comments
There appears to have been a recent and sudden shift in the attitude of John Key and the National party towards Maori. Marty Mars has drawn my attention with a ballistic comment to the latest insulting and distasteful ‘joke’ by John Key about the Tuhoe.
Update: His ‘joke’ has now gone international. Our clueless Tourism Minister has just ‘lifted’ our profile abroad. Thanks John…
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