Open mike 08/11/2014

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, November 8th, 2014 - 37 comments
Categories: open mike - Tags:

tppa-protestOpen mike is your post.

The Standard is not a conspiracy – just a welcome outlet for the expression of views. Leaders that command respect will not be undermined by this.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).

Step up to the mike …

37 comments on “Open mike 08/11/2014 ”

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  1. lprent 1
    8 November 2014 at 8:27 am

    Test comment. Ok that is working.

    Time for breakfast

  2. karol 2
    8 November 2014 at 8:38 am

    Ummmm…. micky’s US election post is empty – nothing there but a front page.

    • lprent 2.1
      8 November 2014 at 8:41 am

      He might have been written it last night between the time I put the site back up, after the backup was last taken, and before it failed again.

      I have changed it back to draft.

      • karol 2.1.1
        8 November 2014 at 8:44 am

        Thanks.

      • mickysavage 2.1.2
        8 November 2014 at 6:06 pm

        Yep not sure what happened there. It also happened with my post yesterday “Noel Pearson remembers Gough Whitlam” The text all disappeared …

        And a couple of comments today did not go through. I just upgraded to Yosemite on my Mac. I wonder if this is the issue?

  3. millsy 3
    8 November 2014 at 9:56 am

    The parties of the Right have a clear idea what they stand for, they present a united front, and they dont water down their policies when in power – they back themselves to implement them.

    That is why they win elections.

    I see no such deciciveness from the left – anywhere.

    • Draco T Bastard 3.1
      8 November 2014 at 10:02 am

      Yep, the Right don’t compromise while the Left do. This results in the ‘centre’ continually shifting to the right. Time for the Left to stop compromising and to start calling the policies of the right what they are – radical and damaging to society.

    • Aerobubble 3.2
      8 November 2014 at 12:31 pm

      When you have the microphone, when your targeted by Slater, when everyone can do your job (4 vying for leader). When government has cut news and media chase anything but their duty to provide coverage. When sitcom has to be there, at his paid vent, next to the story, and draw the attention away by laughing his head off…
      …sorry… no. Any credible leader of the opposition must recognize the lay of the land, that to win, keeping Greens neither onside or offside, that running like he was a fourth per party, was what lost it. The right own the media, deal with that.

      Oh, and just saw theNation, again what’s with Labour they know what they did wrong, can all preciously protect their own perfect ability while totally missing their own points. That they cannot win just saying they can, or they need to connect, or they understand.

      Take the Greens, they are gifted this opportunity to keep their integrity, that they are serious about climate change, and that means science based. So when an mp drops a clanger about Ebola, they quickly drop him from the portfolio. Now hopefully they can follow through and have him resign from Parliament, that would communicate they are science based party. How could any Green candidate not seriously resign and boost the brand? Waiting.

      Labour have no such luck, too a mp they know how to have a hug and make up. No daggers allowed. Labour will only be a 40% party when it has a Leader with a fewloodbaths behind them, trophies on the wall…

      The way to win however means the Greens become the larger party, and that means daggers for those undermine the science based party. When even the pope sees no contention between science and faith, its even more essential that unscientific statements are resign able offenses.

  4. Ross 4
    8 November 2014 at 10:08 am

    Water down their policies? Like referring to WFF as “communism by stealth” and then not discarding it? Or what about promising to leave GST alone only to increase it?

  5. weka 5
    8 November 2014 at 10:11 am

    Kiwi educating Jon Stewart on the NSA, Snowden and what’s been going on in NZ. Funny too.

    http://thespinoff.co.nz/07-11-2014/set-visit-duking-it-out-with-jon-stewart-on-the-daily-show/

  6. weka 6
    8 November 2014 at 10:38 am

    Saturday is Aaron Schwartz day.

    “Aaron Swartz fought for an Internet grounded in community, creativity, and human rights. By co-creating platforms like RSS, reddit, Creative Commons, and the technology that became SecureDrop, he helped make information accessible. Perhaps more than anything, Aaron Swartz helped hundreds of thousands of people participate in the political processes that determine the laws we have to live under everyday.

    There are so many things that Aaron accomplished by the age of 26 that we thought it may help to make a companion for the film, a guide for those who want to watch with a deeper understanding of the issues behind Aaron’s projects.”

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/aaron-swarts-work-internets-own-boy

    Schwartz killed himself last year. He had been arrested for hacking into JSTOR, the database that carries academic journal publications and articles that are usually paywalled. Schwartz believed that scientific and academic knowledge should be freely available not just to the elite. The state hounded him and refused to drop or lessen charges, despite the university and JSTOR not wanting prosecution to go ahead. Conviction would have meant spending the rest of his life in prison.

    Schartz was a highly regarded hacktivist, and obviously was seen by the government as extremely dangerous because of his tech skills and his potential to affect soceity around issues to do with freedom and information ethics.

  7. les 7
    8 November 2014 at 10:41 am

    just watched the 4 contenders on The Nation…fascinating…they all have something to offer…Nanaia was impressive,haven’t seen her in action much,Robertson has the media presecence,Parker needs to work on presentation has a touch of the ‘shearers ,um,er…and Little,like his pragmatic approach,what he says,but the way he says it is a cure for insomnia.

  8. fdx 8
    8 November 2014 at 10:43 am

    After the Phil Judd debacle by the NZ Police with their amateurish attempted prosecution and other similar silly incidents of offence charging I believe it is high time we have a office for prosecutions completely separate from the police as they have proved time and time again that they are to trigger happy with their overcharging and charging of offences that are trivial and a waste of court time.
    It would be nice it one could easily recover costs from the police when is has been shown that a mistake, whether by accident or on purpose has been made in respect to a prosecution, maybe then they would think a bit more carefully when charging someone over something trivial or in some cases something that never happened at all.
    It would be great if we had a completely separate police complaints authority that actually had some teeth and the police actually took some notice of their findings instead of routinely ignoring the outcomes and arrogantly continuing on as if nothing happened.

    • Murray Rawshark 8.1
      9 November 2014 at 1:34 am

      I think we need to do away with the adversary trial system and have inquisitional magistrates. They could actually head for the truth of an incident, rather than deciding which set of lies to believe. They could even perhaps dismiss cases much earlier on when the police were obviously fabricating testimony.

  9. joe90 9
    8 November 2014 at 11:02 am

    Friends in high places.

    ┌П┐

    The deal was widely considered a good one for both sides, but Chase emerged with barely a scratch. First, the ludicrously nonspecific language surrounding the settlement put you, me and every other American taxpayer on the hook for roughly a quarter of Chase’s check. Because most of the settlement monies were specifically not called fines or penalties, Chase was allowed to treat some $7 billion of the settlement as a tax write-off.

    Couple this with the fact that the bank’s share price soared six percent on news of the settlement, adding more than $12 billion in value to shareholders, and one could argue Chase actually made money from the deal. What’s more, to defray the cost of this and other fines, Chase last year laid off 7,500 lower-level employees. Meanwhile, per-employee compensation for everyone else rose four percent, to $122,653. But no one made out better than Dimon. The board awarded a 74 percent raise to the man who oversaw the biggest regulatory penalty ever, upping his compensation package to about $20 million.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106

  10. North 10
    8 November 2014 at 11:07 am

    Right On you good thing Mark !

  11. greywarshark 11
    8 November 2014 at 12:23 pm

    Slavoj Zizek on the decline of the Left

    • Ad 11.1
      8 November 2014 at 1:12 pm

      Zizek is right in one sense that what he calls the left has been in sustained global decline for 20 years – and the simultaneous crises of Us Democrats, Australian Labor, NZ Labour, and French Socialists marks 2014 as the left’s own GFC. Call it the Global Fight Collapse.

      But the braver analyst is prepared to forecast where newer points of resistance will successfully emerge.

      I think there are strange points of resistance we have seen emerge over the last 3 years:

      1. Hackers.
      Big data is being successfully exposed and hacked. The hacker community are the unruly anarchists of old. Not all of them are redeemable for some future project. But they are a vanguard. In time, I believe they will turn into dedicated cells bent on wrecking the big data machines, whether those are state actors or corporations is less relevant.

      2. Radical Islamists.
      They are an affront to every Renaissance and Social Democrat value hard-won over the last four hundred years. And yet they successfully resist and defeat the US-orchstrated intelligence, military and capitalist orders at any and every theatre they choose. The world Hardt and Negri proposed would occur after the second invasion of Iraq simply has not happened: the US and its imperial reach has been significantly and permanently curtailed.

      3. Climate change movements.
      Despite oil price stability forecast well into the next decade due to technologies and vast petro reserves, the rise of such movements against extraction corporations and in public consciousness has been steadily growing. Some have formed at a micro level with organic gardens, local markets, purity and hygiene obsessions, some directly against extractive corporations.

      4. The continued rise of strong states.
      China, Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia and many others continue to show the power of very strong state ownership and economic manipulation, compared to Britain, the US, Australia and little old New Zealand. The strong state remains the number one goal of social democrats and all their forms the world over. They are not a substitute or necessary pair with social democratic liberal values of tolerance, media freedom, and civil rights. They are simply yet another rebuke to a hegemony of our stake and cruel version of capitalism.

      There’s more examples but I’ll stop for a bit. I am seriously bored with Zizek’s Left melancholy. None of the above constitute the old left’s values. They’re not about workers, identity politics, or redistribution.

      But each one contests their own kind of hegemony. Each one forecasts differential futures to the standard dystopian forecasts of Leftocalypse. Not all of them intersect. All in different ways are distasteful. But they are sources of successful rebuke and liberation on their own terms.

      I’m sure there’s more once I get to further thinking.

      • Tracey 11.1.1
        8 November 2014 at 4:15 pm

        Anons

      • greywarshark 11.1.2
        8 November 2014 at 10:04 pm

        Thanks Ad. But if none of these approaches is going to replace the Left, and the Left is what is serving the mass of the people, maybe these are merely new identity politics.

        Groups going after their own goals and finding that righting a wrong, some wrongs, cocking a snook at the established order, is a lean, mean and achievable goal for them. What about the workers though?

        While we in NZ were achieving a remarkable resistance to nuclear adventurism, there were things happening here that needed our full attention and maybe didn’t get it. We have had a bad economic model now for 30 years as a result of not giving enough attention to the plans and attitudes that are now unhappily for us, entrenched. And digging them out requires surgery.

        • Ad 11.1.2.1
          8 November 2014 at 10:28 pm

          It’s a false assumption that “the Left is what is serving the mass of the people.” Far easier to characterize the left as the old identity politics.

          Perhaps the whole of the world is telling us that grouping the world into “workers” and “everyone else” is no longer the most effective or favored way of assisting the world.

          I believe we are well on the way to losing the Left, in order to re-find it. And my post above at 11.1 tells me we don’t yet know what that looks like yet. But it’s happening.

          • greywarshark 11.1.2.1.1
            9 November 2014 at 2:38 pm

            True Ad things are changing. Less workers and more beggars, who are would be workers, or have been rejected for so long they are past settled, regular activity. Who is going to represent such untrendy people. The no-labour people. And the low-income people who can’t afford to support the union in the manner they need and have come to expect. The groups acting for the unemployed don’t get a big income and big successes that buck them up, as do the unions when they get everyone organised or some rise in the basics.

            The Labour Party are asperashunal to deal with people you can feel proud to stand beside. The poor get beaten down and aren’t very stylish, until fashion sets up a trend to the shabby chic or something where pretending that you are part of the near if not underground culture is the thing.

            Don’t rely on the churches – they want you body and soul or if they say they want to help, they probably raise half the money for the charity from selling over-priced articles to the poor such as furniture. There is a bit of support from the wealthy who mercy is strained through a fine mesh, usually at fund raising events where they can dress up.

            They are regularly putting up their prices to more like second hand shop prices. Though on clothes, they do have half-price or lower specials on the things that others have rejected. Then you can get your turn, and some have skips where you can fossick for free.

  13. Tracey 13
    8 November 2014 at 4:01 pm

    excellent speech by dayle takitmu

    passion and phrases easily understood to explain dangers of tpp. get her on tv and radio. get her on the road. we need passion in speech like she exuded today. passion lightz the fire within others

    “. DAYLE TAKITIMU

    Indigenous Rights and Environmental Lawyer

    Te Whanau-a-Apanui

    Dayle is an indigenous rights and environmental lawyer who has led her iwi, Te Whanau a Apanui, in their struggle against a deep sea drilling permit off the East Coast. She holds a law degree from Victoria University, and is a graduate of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Academy in Geneva. She has lectured in Commercial Law and Treaty Jurisprudence, and has presented at the Maori Legal Forum, the Environmental Law Forum, the International Indian Treaty Council and at the United Nations Treaty Expert Seminar hosted by the Cree Nation. She is currently researching climate change law, is actively involved in biodiversity policy development, and acts as a negotiator for her tribal nation. She continues practice as a legal advocate; representing an array of clients in indigenous, Treaty and environmental issues. Through her law firm, October Law, she represents clients in civil court, direct negotiations, mediation, joint venture relationships between iwi and industry, and as a spokesperson at various United Nations meetings. She is a Trustee of the Aotearoa Indigenous Rights Trust, and champions the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the (draft) Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

    Dayle’s iwi Te Whanau-a-Apanui have supported her leadership in opposition to the exploratory oil drilling permit granted in 2007 for the Raukumara Basin. Many other iwi and environmental groups throughout the country now stand in solidarity with the iwi on this issue. 

    “

  14. Paul 14
    8 November 2014 at 6:07 pm

    In the Herald
    NZ ‘third most prosperous country’
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/personal-finance/news/article.cfm?c_id=12&objectid=11355472

    A quick google finds out that this is according to the Legatum Institute.

    The Legatum Institute sounds like an extreme right wing think tank, from the stuff below. Good on the Herald for providing detail on the background to this shady organisation.

    From wikipedia.

    “The Legatum Institute, the publisher of the index, is a privately funded think-tank founded in 2007 and located in Mayfair, London. It is funded by the Legatum Group, which includes Legatum Capital, a portfolio investment fund manager; Legatum Ventures a double bottom line investment fund, the Legatum Foundation, a philanthropic organisation; and the Legatum Center for Development And Entrepreneurship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a collaboration with MIT that funds graduate student entrepreneurs from developing markets.”

    “Legatum is a private, United Arab Emirates-based, investment organisation and thinktank. Its headquarters are in Dubai International Financial Centre.”

  15. North 15
    8 November 2014 at 7:25 pm

    Teina Pora – Privy Council – http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11355475

    This link goes to a wickedly poorly written article, at least in its headline and its essential insinuation. We must not forget that the query by one law lord – “Why didn’t Pora name Rewa ?” – doesn’t necessarily mean a thing, as much as the callow writer seemingly and certainly stupidly might want to frame it as central and the death knell of the appeal.

    A matter of ‘Devil’s Advocate’ (excited know-all child you) – as one might expect from a a member of an appellate tribunal. ‘Testing……just testing, thank you Mr Krebs’, sort of thing.

    Jonathan Kreb’s response – “He didn’t know Rewa…..” strikes me as pretty substantial. Even the response of ‘Mr Solicitor’ (our Solicitor-General Heron QC) could be taken as quite uncrushing of Pora. Reference, which assumes without evidence that Pora was present with that man, to the ‘heaviness’ of Rewa and his standing in a gang rival to that of Teina Pora.

    While I’m here, is anyone else completely unimpressed by hack Jock Anderson, former ‘Truth’ man I understand, purveyor to the masses of rubbishy legal scuttlebuck, sometime Mora ‘Panel’ member – and his ready obseqiuosness to powerful men (and grudgingly, women) of ‘The Law’. Another example of the crap that passes for New Zealand journalism.

    • Murray Rawshark 15.1
      9 November 2014 at 1:43 am

      It’s simple. Teina Pora didn’t name Malcolm Rewa because the detectives responsible for this framing had not mentioned it to him. It is absolutely sickening that the crown is still going through with this farce. Teina is said to have had the mental age of an 8 year old at the time. Those cops should be charged with child abuse.

  16. Ergo Robertina 16
    8 November 2014 at 10:11 pm

    http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/322750/who-loves-ya-baby
    Interesting research reported in the ODT today demonstrates dogs’ empathy for babies’ crying, suggesting they experience an emotion which is absent in about 1% of humans.

    On a related note I also enjoyed this story, a horse visiting hospital to say goodbye: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11217366/Horse-brought-to-hospital-to-say-goodbye-to-its-dying-owner.html