Open mike 23/04/2010

21 comments on “Open mike 23/04/2010 ”

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1. The Voice of Reason 1

   23 April 2010 at 8:15 am

   Shock election result: British neo nazi’s lose to a jar of marmite:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8637473.stm
   • Draco T Bastard 1.1

     23 April 2010 at 2:04 pm

     Unilever said in a statement: “Neither Marmite nor any other Unilever brand are aligned to any political party.

     BS, they’ll be aligned with the Tories.
2. prism 2

   23 April 2010 at 9:57 am

   Not only marmite but they have a picture of Winston Churchill as well. Trying for emotional response as the party that represents the sort of things that Churchill represents? He was a conservative and I never heard that he was an extremist – just rallied Britishers to keep their chins up in WW2.
   • Draco T Bastard 2.1

     23 April 2010 at 2:08 pm

     Your talking about someone who suggested gassing the Kurds.
     • Bill 2.1.1

       23 April 2010 at 4:01 pm

       The British used chemical weapons in their 1919 intervention in North Russia against the Bolsheviks, with great success according to the British command. As Secretary of State at the War Office in 1919, Winston Churchill was enthusiastic about the prospects of “using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”—Kurds and Afghans—and authorized the RAF Middle East command to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as experiment,” dismissing objections by the India office as “unreasonable” and deploring the “squeamishness about the use of gas”: “we cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier,” he explained; chemical weapons are merely “the application of Western science to modern warfare.”

       http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199804–.htm
3. prism 3

   23 April 2010 at 10:13 am

   Talking about NACTS pusch on Canterbury. We NACTS say the country is short of money for public services but can pay our understanding compatriots $900 each a day?
   On Nat Radio this a.m. they listed six men? who would be serving the central government and among them mentioned David Caygill who they referred to as a previous Labour minister as if he was a present Labour inclusion. I wouldn’t think that he was even a paid-up member now – don’t see why he should be when he was one of the assassins of the real Labour Party. He has been a tight dry functionary of ACC, the Electricity Commission, 2005 the Electoral Commission supposedly representing Labour. Now he is a dry deciding on a distinctly wet subject.
4. Bored 4

   23 April 2010 at 11:09 am

   Caygill was part of the Douglas junta along with Palmer, Prebble and Moore. In a previous era of rationalist thought they might have become Marxists as opposed to market neo libs (you can prove almost anything with reason so long as you dont question the precepts of the starting position: thats a given, a matter of faith). Appointing Caygill as a Commissioner and saying he a Labour man really takes the cake.

   By the way, there is a Save the Whale protest here today at Pariliament, very worthy BUT given there are 10,000 wahles, 10,000 gorillas etc that people (rightly) protest about how about a word for the 5000 WRYBILL plovers!

   One body alone (ECan) are capable of saving this species. All they have to do is leave the water in the rivers.
5. Pascal's bookie 5

   23 April 2010 at 12:00 pm

   The credit ratings agencies seem to be ignored a wee bit by the proposed reforms in the US, along with a bunch of other shit being ignored as well…

   but this smells like one hell of a class action suit, reforms or not.

   “Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster _ the CDO market. Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,” the employee wrote on Dec. 15, 2006.

   Plenty more at the link.
6. prism 6

   23 April 2010 at 12:21 pm

   30,000 NZs left to live in Australia last year. Oh dear the NACT policies aren’t having any effect. NB Must build up more robust recipe. Add more salt, no more chilli, ugh. More salt, more chilli. Ugh, ugh. Throw out dish and recipe. But won’t that make us look like prats? Don’t worry, nobody’s looking, just get King John the C. to smile and wave to distract the crowd.
7. Killinginthenameof 7

   23 April 2010 at 12:29 pm

   Hi, Does anyone know where I can get a white poppy in Wellington, having a bit of trouble tracking them down?
8. lprent 8

   23 April 2010 at 1:55 pm

   Added a poppy for the weekend…

   Ummm I might redo it after work to get a better image….
   • Armchair Critic 8.1

     23 April 2010 at 1:56 pm

     Nice
9. Draco T Bastard 9

   23 April 2010 at 2:31 pm

   http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/04/economic-superstitions.html

   Economics is our modern superstition well, one of them, at any rate, and one of the most popular among the political class of today’s industrial societies. Like any other superstition, it has a core of pragmatic wisdom to it, but that core has been overlaid with a great deal of somewhat questionable logic. My wife’s Welsh ancestors believed that the bowl of milk on the back stoop pleased the fairies, and that’s why the rats stayed away from the kitchen garden; the economists of the twentieth century believed that expanding the money supply pleased well, the prosperity fairies, or something not too dissimilar and that’s why depressions stayed away from the United States.

   In both cases it’s arguable that something very different was going on. The gargantuan economic boom that made America the world’s largest economy had plenty of causes; the accident of political geography that kept its industrial hinterlands from becoming war zones, while most other industrial nations got the stuffing pounded out of them, had more than a little to do with the matter; but the crucial point, one too often neglected in studies of twentieth century history, was the simple fact that the United States at midcentury produced more petroleum than all the other countries on Earth put together. The oceans of black gold on which the US floated to victory in two world wars defined the economic reality of an epoch. As a result, most of what passed for economic policy in the last sixty years or so amounted to attempts to figure out how to make use of unparalleled abundance.

   “Unparalleled abundance.” The foundation stone of modern civilisation and it’s economics and something that is no longer true. We’re somewhere in the near vicinity of Peak Oil which means the energy supply that has allowed us to ship perishables around the world fast enough for them to still be fresh, that has allowed us to mine gargantuan amounts of soil for the rare metals and minerals contained within it, is coming to an end. And yet, our governments and political parties keep looking to doing the same things that has brought that age of “unparalleled abundance” to an end. More growth, more wealth and more consumption when these can no longer be supplied by a depleted Earth.

   We have two choices: 1) To keep going the way we are or 2.) to plan and act for the decline in that “unparalleled abundance”. Keep going the way we are and civilisation will crash and crash badly. It won’t happen immediately but over the span of several decades. To plan and act in for the decline will mean a reduction in consumerism, a reduction in illusionary wealth but it may mean that we get to keep some of the things that make life easier such as electrical power and a viable transport system* but we can only do it as a community.

   * This, by definition, excludes national highways
   • nzfp 9.1

     23 April 2010 at 4:17 pm

     How do we know when Peak Oil has hit? Is it defined by the price of oil in the market?

     On November 11 2009, Phillip Davis of online financial magazine Seeking Alpha, in an article titled “The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff “ reported that “$2.5 Trillion – That’s the size of the global oil scam”. Davis goes on to state:

     It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in “Madoff Units” ($50Bn rip-offs). $2.5Tn is 50 times the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, but it is less than the monthly excess price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.

     Further reading of Davis’ article and we find that in 2000, Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the online commodities and futures marketplace “Intercontinental Exchange” (ICE).

     Davis goes on to say “[b]efore ICE, the average American family spent 7% of their income on food and fuel. [2008], that number topped 20%. That’s 13% of the incomes of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, over $1Tn EVERY SINGLE YEAR, stolen through market manipulation”.

     The fraud was soo big, that on November 17 2009, Dan Jones of Oil&Gas magazine in an article titled “The $2.5 trillion global oil scam” commented “[a]fter a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating “round-trip” trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price”. Davis’ elaborates further in his “Seeking Alpha” article stating that “[n]o commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.”

     Due to the manipulation of the oil market, in 2008 “Index speculators [had] stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years”.

     F. William Engdahl, author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” wrote on 2 May 2008 in an article titled “PERHAPS 60% OF TODAY’S OIL PRICE IS PURE SPECULATION”

     The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds.
     • Draco T Bastard 9.1.1

       23 April 2010 at 5:28 pm

       Peak Oil is tied into reality and not the delusion of the market. Yes, people (otherwise know as psychopaths) did and do carry out fraud in the market. This has no bearing on the simple fact that oil is a limited resource that goes through the Hubert Peak as all limited resources do. As such the peak can be calculated using known reserves and extraction. The problem arises in that a number of oil producing countries, especially OPEC, don’t report their reserves accurately. Saudi Arabia’s reserves haven’t gone down since OPECs decision to limit production to a proportion of the countries reserves. The telling point, though, was that when oil prices reached the peak back in 2k7 oil production didn’t go up.
10. Armchair Critic 10

    23 April 2010 at 2:58 pm

    Speaking of symbols….
11. gingercrush 11

    23 April 2010 at 3:36 pm

    Um anyone here worried about the proposals DPF leaked in regards to the Law Commission report but more important the crap Jim Anderton is spouting. I don’t see it as Nanny State as DPF describes it. But it sure is getting closer to the prohibition days. Jim Anderton being mayor of Christchurch would be a disaster considering his views around Alcohol.
12. bobo 12

    23 April 2010 at 4:17 pm

    So the Herald has such big breaking news stories today announcing the winner of a supercity logo, very appropriate logo for Aucklanders obsession with garden centres. How about some news on the actual supercity restructuring takeover.
    • Tigger 12.1

      23 April 2010 at 5:01 pm

      Looks like two oysters below some graphics of targeted missiles from the War Games movie…so how many people protested at Parliament today Granny…?
13. Draco T Bastard 13

    24 April 2010 at 3:20 am

    The Impossible Hamster
14. prism 14

    24 April 2010 at 10:22 am

    Alcohol does need controlling. Outside the bar and liquor selling outlets who are anxious about the effect on their businesses, the childish tantrums that objectors make against controls are indefensible. One way that sounds useful is this lock down idea, stopping new people entering after a set time and the patrons to finish their drinks and leave by a set time.

    Jim Anderton is a very stalwart bloke in what he believes in, seems a very straight-talking, honest man. But he had family tragically involved with drugs. He is totally against marijuana management and one of the outright ban group.
    But what’s new. Anderton is likely to be a good active Mayor. Christchurch should consider him.

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