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Here we go again ... | Nov 13, 2003 10:11
Anybody get the feeling that Winston Peters would actually rather not be in a governing coalition? Yesterday he announced New Zealand First's non-negotiable bottom line for coalition - an annual round of binding referenda. To the polls every November, then.
National leader Don Brash didn't dismiss the idea, but Helen Clark was quick to raise the spectre of California, which has arguably been rendered ungovernable by decades of direct democracy - which has sometimes been no more than a tool for vested interests. The Herald story pointed out that senior Act party people were sitting at the back of the room for Peters' speech, and that the Business Roundtable had greeted the idea warmly. (Remember the Campaign for Better Government - the right's richly-funded put-up campaign organisation that tried to kill the vote for MMP?)
Peters steered clear of California in his announcement - preferring to point to the Swiss experience with "direct democracy". But Switzerland is a very different country.
Political parties are traditionally fairly weak - more so than unions. Direct democracy has been central to the political culture for more than a century, as has a living tradition of public meetings. TV is dominated by a stable public broadcaster, and print media ownership is varied. Would New Zealand under binding referenda be closer to that - or to the mess that ballot initiatives have wrought in California? It would be easier to feel comfortable with such a proposal if it wasn't being wielded by an incurable demagogue like Peters.
Typically, Peters' back-of-a-fag-packet policy doesn't appear to call for a quorum - a proportion of registered voters required to make the referendum binding on policy. So only a simple majority of those who bothered to vote - and our experience with indicative referenda is that few people do - would be required to overturn policy and thwart the will of a Parliament elected by many more. It would become very difficult for elected governments to make hard choices.
Peters' proposal to curb the "Labour dictatorship" by cutting the number of MPs from 120 to 99 - and thus gutting the select committee process - is simply fatuous, but it will no doubt play well enough with New Zealand First's traditional constituents. God. Spare me from this man and his base populism.
Salam Pax's video on the BBC site is cool - funny, poignant, messy and, in the way he manages to be, uplifting. He talked about his foray into videoblogging in his last Guardian column. But I wish he'd attend to his normal blog. Raed has posted a couple of brief messages, but they're in Arabic …
The super-rich George Soros puts his money where his mouth is, with another $US5 million donation aimed at the "central focus" of his life - getting rid of the Bush administration, which he regards as abusing American power and seeking to create a state of permanent warfare. He has so far given $US15 million to various liberal organisations. I did love the comment from a Republican party official: "George Soros has purchased the Democratic party." Now that's rich.
Soros is being joined in his mission by fellow squillionaire Peter Lewis, who New Zealanders may remember as the pot-smuggling billionaire.
End of the world ... | Nov 12, 2003 12:16
I got an email yesterday that stopped me cold. Public Address uses web-based feedback forms so as to avoid having our individual email addresses exposed to and harvested by spambots. Yesterday, I got some spam. Via the feedback form. Nooooo …
So either Battery Limited of Shenzen province or its agent has employed a gimp to manually visit web pages and paste in an unsolicited commercial message, or there's a bot out there looking for language typical of contact forms and posting messages when it finds them. For my email, the subject, name, return email and message body fields were all filled.
This is really unnerving and we're now looking at what we can do to fuck up such a bot. I had a quick Google and couldn't find any reference to this sort of thing. Anyone know much about this?
NoRightTurn pointed to an NBR poll which suggests that "New Zealanders have undergone a dramatic change of heart in their feelings toward traditional ally the US … Two years ago most New Zealanders said they felt positively about the US (54%) but when asked that question now only 29% of people said they felt positively about the US, down 25 points."
Apart from the obvious issue of the Bush administration throwing America's hard-won global goodwill on the bonfire, two points: 80 per cent positive feelings about NZ is better than cringing in the other direction. Two: Less comfortably, the poll subjects seem to have felt negative about every other country in the world bar Australia - and Britain has suffered a particular drop in the affections of the New Zealanders. Like the Pew Surveys, I think this poll is symptomatic of what will be a signal legacy of the Bush II era: a general public loss of faith, worldwide, in international relations. If the poll had asked people their feelings about the United Nations, they would have plunged too. The WTO? Ditto. What a rotten achievement.
In the curious way that the authoritarian Right lately has of bending right around to touch fingertips with the old Left, the Bush administration seems set to defy world opinion - and further wreck the entire basis of multilateral trade - in snubbing the WTO ruling on its illegal steel subsidies. In theory, Jane Kelsey fans should be happy - protectionism in the national interest is good, right? - but I don't think they will be.
Now it's time for the transatlantic trade war. The WTO has given the European Union permission to impose huge penalty tariffs on US imports, which could easily double in price. Another genuinely rotten Bush II achievement - and one which is going to be deucedly difficult for the usual cheerleading squads to spin.
The latest thing? Or just an old trick with a catchy new brand? Freeway blogging in California.
Peter McLennan at DubDotDash mused about favourite nights at The Box and got a cracking list of highlights from its erstwhile owner and founder, Simon Grigg. Harvey Keitel, Mick Jagger, John Lydon, Simon had them all in the back of his club, guv'nor …
Real numbers | Nov 11, 2003 11:04
I'm delighted to see that Tracey Nelson's ability to analyse rugby in a way that actually means something has earned her a story in The Listener. Her stats from the All Black-Springbok game on Saturday are online now. Haka founder and top bloke Paul Waite also has a happy thinkpiece on the game.
Idiot/Savant from NoRightTurn is collecting political coordinates in an attempt to map the New Zealand blogosphere. Bloggers, you take The Political Compass Test and then you tell him your scores. For what it's worth - the test is calibrated on American cultural assumptions - I got a -4.62 on both axes, placing me snugly on the libertarian left.
Margaret Wilson appeared to have pacified her critics for now by drawing our first Supreme Court bench directly from the existing Appeal Court. There still lingers the impression that Wilson typically not only fails to heed oppositional blather - and by golly there's been a lot of that on the issue of ending appeals to the Privy Council - but reasonable criticism and concern. As Gavin Ellis pointed out last month, for many people the issue is less cutting the ties with the Privy Council (long overdue in my book) but the means of selection of our new highest court. The attorney general has failed to engender enough confidence in the new system. On the other hand, Parliament as a whole has been notably unconstructive through the whole thing. Sigh …
Feedback from Nick Turner on yesterday's stuff about Deborah Coddington and Alister Taylor:
Instead of writing a book about yellow ducks, wouldn't Deborah be doing NZers a real service by writing another book similar to her paedophile index - this time an index of people who (whether deliberately or through culpable incompetence) rip off their customers, an index of serial scamsters. This would be very much in line with Act's ethically clean principles.
Couldn't possibly comment. Anyway, even Stephen Franks seems a bit rattled by the Act party's current problems. His comment yesterday on the government's plans to review the rules on foreign ownership of prime coastal land - that Act would rather see New Zealanders become wealthy enough to buy their own multi-million dollar coastal properties - was positively obtuse in the face of the reality of what's actually happening in places like Nelson. After all Stephen, with house prices spiralling in unlovely 'burbs like Stoke, where will all the servants live?
Life Sciences Network has the NZPA story on the pine tree non-scandal that unaccountably failed to make the major papers last week.
Most amusing protest in a while: waxing for peace. A campaign in underway in Britain (well, Brighton for now) urging women to join in on National Get Rid of That Bush Day. The posters say "Wax 'em off, put 'em in an envelope and send 'em to Tony Blair with a message stating ... 'I got rid of my Bush now you get rid of yours."
I installed MacOS X 10.3 Panther yesterday, after doing the usual backup of my home directory (I think next time I'll take my music files out before I back it up) and sundry maintenance. First impressions? It's good enough, but not really the massive leap forward it's been greeted as. Best feature? Expose, the most dashing use yet of the system's 2D drawing layer, which flips every open window into a flat-plan and back. When you tend to have multiple windows open in multiple apps the way I do, it's incredibly useful. And it looks so cool. Worst feature? It looks like 500MB of RAM just isn't enough any more …
PS: Ars Technica has just posted what's reckoned to be a typically perceptive Panther review, but it's currently Slashdotted up the wazoo …
Sitting Ducks | Nov 10, 2003 11:19
Not such a great week for the Act Party, then. Indeed, let us count the ways in which things are turning pear-shaped for the party that formed to knock off Roger Douglas's unfinished business and got lost down the blind alley of populism.
There was, of course, Donna Awatere Huata, who stormed through the weekend in what appeared to be her own version of reality. The party either can't, or won't (for fear of losing nearly $100,000 of Parliamentary funding) properly cut her loose, even though she is surely doing it damage simply by being there.
Then, on Friday afternoon, there was another outbreak of the decidedly iffy, as the party's newest MP, Deborah Coddington, was obliged to issue a press statement in response to a call from the Sunday Star Times.
The SST had the story - which has been developing for a while - that Coddington's partner, Alister Taylor, faces supreme court action from the New South Wales Fair Trading Commission for failing to produce copies of two expensive vanity books - one on Australians who had won honours and awards and the other on those who had carried the Olympic flame - after taking the money.
Eight hundred people have complained about Taylor's business practices and former Aussie PM Gough Whitlam - quoted on one of the Australian Roll of Honour marketing brochures as endorsing the series - is flatly denying having given his endorsement or even having seen one of the books.
Coddington, a former director of Roll of Honour, severed most of her business ties with Taylor before entering Parliament, but problems with this company are hardly anything new. Vanity publishing of this kind is not only tacky (and vaguely predatory) by nature, it's rife with other problems - especially when, as Roll of Honour does, you allow people to write their own entries and don't check them. In one remarkable case, a man was able to concoct a fictional military record and have it published by Taylor. Taylor has, in the past, published some genuinely important New Zealand books. These days, however, you wouldn't touch him with a bargepole.
Things got even worse for Act with this morning's Herald, which had two rollicking stories based on strategy papers written by Richard Prebble and his MPs. There's too much great stuff to relay here, but highlights included Prebble's lament about credibility:
If a centre-right government is to win, then we must destroy Labour's economic credibility and establish ours. This will not be easy. Labour has high economic credibility. Act has never had economic credibility. We need a strategy to give Act economic credibility.
Prebble's distinctly two-faced attitude to Act's prospective coalition partner:
National has no strategy. I do not think there is anyone in their caucus. John Banks seems to be the best prospect. We cannot promote another leader, but I think we should not do anything to prevent it.
What are our lines towards National? A great party that will never recover. National must go for the middle ground. Our objective is to have National voters think Act for the list.
Act's research chief Peter McCardle on the party's Parliamentary secretaries:
Well, as best as I can tell, most spend a lot of time watching the clock and smoking. Actually you would think they could at least try and look busy, wouldn't you?
And finally - this is apparently not a joke - Deborah Coddington's literary ambitions:
I am also working on a children's book, the 'Little Yellow Duck of Freedom', after I heard an item on the radio about a container which fell off a ship in the ocean, broke apart, and released over 10,000 floating toys, including yellow ducks.
Scientists have used these ducks to study oceanic flows and winds etc. However, I got the idea of using a yellow duck, bobbing all around the world, overcoming disasters, meeting other ducks, and spreading freedom, choice and responsibility.
The thing is, none of this will elicit a jot of sympathy from anyone. Ever since Derek Quigley departed, Act has, with the occasional exception of Stephen Franks, presented as mean-spirited and cynical. The fact that its Machiavellian wangling in National's leadership change has had the ironic effect of slashing its poll rating will be causing a few chuckles in Wellington.
Labour, meanwhile, was having its own conference in Christchurch. Hugh Sundae asked Helen Clark this morning if Labour might be in danger of the same sort of embarrassing strategy leak as Act. "We don't tend to commit too much to paper," she observed dryly.
What did emerge from the conference were a couple of clear nods to a centre-left identity. A firm - but again delayed - commitment to a standard four weeks' leave for New Zealand workers, which Brash has already promised to repeal. And an attempt to halt the foreign land-grab on New Zealand's coastlines, which I expect will go down very well, not just with the public but with economists fretting about the impact of property prices.
Best on-the-ground comment from Baghdad I've read in a while. The Times' Simon Jenkins' Baghdad will survive even Western bunglers:
Yet the explosions are a sign to every Iraqi of what has apparently failed to materialise, at least in Baghdad and its surrounding region, which is order. Sitting in the bomb-gutted office of the American-appointed Mayor of Fallujah yesterday I could sense his despair. He had survived five assassination attempts and had just read of $87 billion being devoted to the rebuilding of Iraq. None was coming his way. There was no American soldier near his building. Requests for flak jackets and better guns had been ignored. His pathetic bodyguards were huddled behind sandbags, awaiting the next rocket. It reminded me of the Alamo.
Just up the road stands Saddam's appalling Abu Ghraib prison camp. It passes belief that what should have been bulldozed as a publicity gesture was blithely reopened as the local Guantanamo Bay. A crowd outside was desperately seeking news of inmates. One had a son arrested two months ago after an Apache helicopter had seen him on the roof of the family home looking out after an explosion. He had vanished. Most of the crowd had news of relatives only from smuggled pieces of paper.
Anyway, thanks for all the emails - from as far afield as Japan, New York, Hawaii and Singapore - during the 95bFM alternative rugby commentary on Saturday night. We enjoyed it - especially after we got the crowd noise effect working properly after about 20 minutes, which really helped the atmosphere. We'll be back this Saturday for the semi-final against Australia, and hopefully the weekend after that for the final.
As regards the game, we got to see a little more of what Mitchell and his team have been keeping under wraps - Spencer's running game in particular. I'm picking that the poke down the touchline for Howlett to chase (Wendell Sailor turns around like a big old truck) will be deployed against Australia, but that we'll have to wait till the final for the banana kick. It's fascinating. Anyway, good story about Mitchell in victory ("indistinguishable from Mitchell in defeat") in the Observer.
Twiggy in trouble | Nov 07, 2003 11:51
Donna Awatere Huata is nothing if not indefatigable. As constitutional experts line up to declare shock and awe at what has been expressed in the traditionally modest language of an Auditor-General's report, the exiled Act MP still insists she has been cleared.
The sudden circus has been enhanced by the fact that the post-stomach-stapled Awatere Huata now presents like an Extreme Makeover contestant. Sort of Twiggy in trouble - or perhaps Yoko Ono on speed.
What has been found is that her relentless lobbying of government agencies procured nearly $2 million in funding for groups with which she was linked.
As Act continues its desperate bid to cut her loose, other parties are doing their best to assure everyone that they had nothing to do with it. A notably forthcoming Trevor Mallard is blaming the last National government, which is in turn pointing out that Labour has had four years in government to put it right.
They're both right to an extent, but the fact is that the seeds of inappropriateness were very much planted in 1999 and before. As the Dom Post's story says:
It found that the Education Ministry was hamstrung in its initial negotiations with Mrs Huata because the last (National) government approved funding for her four-minute reading programme without seeking official advice and without negotiating what would be provided in return for its $253,000 grant. However, it criticised the ministry for not keeping detailed track of how money was spent and letting the scheme be tried in schools that did not meet agreed criteria.
The New Zealand Herald story expands on the theme:
One of the main projects involved a four-minute reading programme backed by the Ministry of Education, but funded through a trust which Mrs Awatere Huata was linked to, and which her husband chaired.
The Audit Office report shows how former Maori Affairs Minister Tau Henare, then a Mauri Pacific MP, and former National Treasurer Bill Birch were instrumental in the $253,000 programme being approved without any public contesting for the contract.
This tends to tally with the general feeling of a failure of good governance which helped shift National from the Treasury benches in 1999 - and, of course, came crashing into the election campaign at the last moment in the form of a scandal which saw the then Immigration Minister, Tuariki Delamere, dismissed after bending the rules to accommodate an investment scheme in which Awatere Huata's husband Wi was a key player.
The story became a severe embarrassment to Act leader Richard Prebble, who thunderously denounced Delamere only to discover that Awatere Huata had been lobbying Delamere to clear the scheme on her husband's behalf.
Act, as it has since, weighed in with papers and promises to investigate, but Prebble declared his wayward MP to be in the clear because she had not been "directly lobbying" for the scheme, just checking on its progress. The behaviour might better have been addressed in depth then.
But, then - just as other parties' MPs get caught driving drunk or something - Act does have terribly bad luck with this sort of thing. There was the bizarre and unsatisfactorily resolved business of Owen Jennings hosting a pitch for a pyramid scheme in his taxpayer-funded Parliamentary office. And, of course, Rodney Hide's paid appearance at a seminar for a scam investment scheme in which his fellow New Zealanders were fleeced of $10 million.
The enduring impact of the Donna debacle, it is clear, will be a further tightening up of practices. Which is, in a way, the shame of it. Process and contestability add overhead to everything that private agencies and trusts try to do. She has made it harder for everyone else.
Now, to yesterday's scary pine tree story in the Herald. NZPA's Kent Atkinson wrote a story unraveling the Herald's beat-up which was delivered to newspapers yesterday afternoon. But, amazingly, it doesn't seem to have been used either by the Herald or the Dominion Post - or anyone that I can find.
I have a copy, but of course I can't use the whole thing here. So this is the guts: the allegation by former Forest Research scientist, Dale Smith has been investigated three times before, and will now be investigated again. Smith claims a biosecurity breach involving pinus taeda embryos sourced from a lab at Princeton University.
There is no visible evidence that the pinus taeda tissue was contaminated with the pine pitch canker fungus (which is nasty), just, it seems, the observation that Princeton's lab is located near a part of the US where pine canker is endemic. The embryos were grown in sterile culture at the lab and underwent a phytosanitary check on entry to New Zealand. Given the form in which the plant tissue arrived, it seems unlikely that the fungus would not have grown quickly and prominently had it been present.
Dr Smith insists that the pinus taeda was grown in the same greenhouse as some locally-developed GM pine seedlings (which is where the GM angle comes in - otherwise you could take the GM out of the story and it would be exactly the same). If they were, they don't appear to have been there at the same time. Forest Research's Dr Tom Richardson says the taeda plants, grown under a short-term research contract for an overseas client, "were in and out of our facility long before the GE material was being worked through." If someone knows different, they should get on and say so. Biosecurity is vital to our economic future, and I'm happy to see the allegation investigated for a fourth time. You can't be too careful and all that. In the meantime, I can't help but wonder about hysteria.
That didn't stop a number of Hard News correspondents yesterday confidently declaring the story as an indictment of "the risky GE pine field trials" and another "little scandal". I'm happy to hear debate about this issue, and I have a good deal of respect for sensible advocates on either side. But some anti-GM people, as has been the case all along, are some of the most angry and intolerant correspondents I have ever had. One advised me thus yesterday:
Do yourself a favour and stop riling the large percentage of your reader base with your shameless GE defending.
Well, if shameless means "without shame", I guess so. But for the millionth time, I resent being pushed into any kind of advocacy stance. I'm just trying to interpret it as I see it, and sometimes I do see things that bring out my contrarian side.
The idea that I should trim my thoughts to avoid "riling" people is repugnant. I see a deficit in the debate and I look to fill it; it's sort of what I do here. I don't even claim to be right, but I am unnerved by a developing GM absolutism that wasn't there even two years ago. Anyway, over. Please don't email me to tell me what I am or accuse me of saying things I didn't say. Thank you.
Onto less controversial technologies: to wit, the Big Mac - a supercomputer made of 1100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s which is poised to leap into third place on the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers. The Slashdot discussion was excellent - skim through the Score:5 posts for an interesting argument about discounts, supercomputers and processor design. Well, I found it interesting …
And don't forget, footy fans, that Jeremy Newsboy, Damian Christie on myself will be presenting the 95bFM alternative commentary on tomorrow night's Rugby World Cup quarter-final between New Zealand and South Africa. We'll have phone-outs to Finlay Macdonald and Dion Nash, and half-time entertainment from Downtown Brown. The programme begins at 8pm and kick-off is at 8.30pm (note that I briefly had the wrong time listed earlier this week - 8.30 it is). You can pick it up in Auckland on 95FM, or over the Internet on the 95bFM streams via servers at Xtra and Ihug. I just hope that we'll see a result that'll have us back next week …
Less than free | Nov 06, 2003 10:30
Another little defeat for free speech in the US, with the extraordinary cowardice of CBS's dumping of The Reagans in response to conservative pressure. My impression is that while The Reagans might not be very good - it's a made-for-TV movie, for goodness sake - it is not terribly inaccurate. Face it - Nancy was a superstitious control freak, Ronald tended to confuse real life and his movies even when he was President, and he was, by both word and example, unsympathetic to AIDS victims.
Anyway, see Cowards at CBS play us for fools, See the Cowardly Eye Blink, 'Reagans' furor reflects larger battle and, most of all, Billmon's elegant work of forward-looking satire on the issue. Very funny. And scary.
Scary GE headline for today: GM pine trees in disease probe in the Herald. The allegation of a historical biosecurity breach seems worthy of further examination, but would it be churlish to point out that the virus is alleged to have come into the country with non-GM pine embryos, and that the only involvement with GM seedlings is a - hotly disputed - claim that the imported seedlings once shared a greenhouse with GM pine seedlings?
I do think it's a good thing that people doing this kind of research are now under pressure to cross all their Ts and dot all their Is - and that Crop & Food had to stop being vague about its deal with its research partner this week. That's what advocacy ought to achieve.
It's a lot more useful than anything achieved by the dickheads who wound up wrestling with a middle-aged woman as they tried to gatecrash the Erma onions hearing this week. Fuck off and donate some time to the City Mission, you idiots. (Sorry, my sincere intent to be respectful and sober on this issue slips occasionally. Must try harder.) I think it's sad that Madge, which was specifically invited by Erma to present a submission, couldn't do so because it is $24,000 in debt. When you walk around Auckland and Wellington and see all those expensive billboards of four-breasted women, you have to wonder about spending priorities. At some point it has to stop being about marketing and start being about engagement with the process.
BTW, typically, the mainstream press hasn't told us much about who did actually address Erma this week. I was starting to wonder whether "University of California genetics professor" David Williams actually existed for a while this week, because I just couldn't find anything about him, apart from the praise in this press statement from Jeanette Fitzsimons.
So, I asked around, and it turns out he's a New Zealand-born medical geneticist based in San Diego who breeds GM mice for research programmes. He has connections with Garth Cooper and the Sustainability Council and apparently his evidence to Erma was very interesting, and, according to someone who was there "amounted to a plea for them to require Crop & Food to undertake detailed laboratory molecular characterisation of each onion line before a field trial rather than using the field trials to determine the lines which should be selected out."
This is an extremely expensive way to go, and according to the crop scientists, a waste of resources. The agribiotech people tend to regard Williams (and Cooper for that matter) as at least partially motivated by a belief that money spent on GM crop research would be better going to GM medical research. The medical GM people don't seem too keen on the crop folks either. I wouldn't know, but scientists will argue, and I'm glad to hear the arguments.
Conrad Heine pointed out The Economist's interview with Michael Cullen from late September. Like Clark, Cullen seems more at ease, and more forthcoming, talking to British journalists. Worth reading.
NZPundit writes warmly of this opinion piece from The Independent by Johann Hari, much of which I agree with. But in his eagerness to reshape reality to meet neocon theory, Gordy ignores all that and concentrates on this:
All decent people - including those who opposed the war - must now work to establish a consensus in Britain and the US behind the path that Iraqis, in every single poll of their opinion, are begging the two countries to take: stay for a few years to ensure a transition to democracy, resist the bombers attacking those who have come to help, and gradually accord more and more power to the Governing Council in advance of elections.
"Every single poll"? Let's take the Zogby poll, the one that Dick Cheney has been waving around as evidence of public goodwill towards America amongst rank-and-file Iraqis. As a new column by Nick Kristoff indicates, Cheney has been very economical with the truth:
Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my numbers at all."
Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their model for democracy "hands down," and he and other officials say that a majority want American troops to stay at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23 percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent want the U.S. to leave in a year or less.
James Zogby has also written about the misuse of the poll figures, oddly enough for the Arab News. Gordy has a useful reply to my somewhat snippy response to his forums, but it's quite clear to me that Cheney misrepresented the poll for his own purposes, and got a free pass from the press for quite a while afterwards. But denial is a river in Iraq these days, isn't it?
For what it's worth, I think the Americans have no choice but to stay, and hope that workable democracy can be forged sooner rather than later. No sane person should want the Baathists and jihadists to hold sway. But claims to be winning the war of ideas just look like more of the same blindedness and bumbling that created the situation in the first place.
You might want to have a read of this column by Patrick Cockburn on CounterPunch:
Saddam Hussein should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis know that he ruined their country with his disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But in Baiji a clerk at the local registration office for births and deaths said he noticed that over the last couple of months parents of newborn babies had started to name them 'Saddam'.
Frankly, I'm rather more inclined to trust Salam Pax ("War sucks big time. Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in your name.") than Cheney or Rummy. And speaking of Salam, it looks like he's fixing to break his silence of several weeks, perhaps blogging this conference in Budapest, which looks very interesting. Wish I was there.
Game on! | Nov 05, 2003 09:54
It can now be told: Jeremy "Newsboy" Wells, Damian Christie and I will be presenting an alternative commentary on 95bFM for the All Blacks' World Cup quarter-final against South Africa on Saturday.
The programme will commence at 8.00pm and the kick-off is at 8.30pm. The idea is that you, the punters, watch the television with the sound down, and listen to our witty and perceptive call on the game, with appropriate sound effects. More details will be forthcoming later in the week.
I ought to make it clear that we're not knocking the official TV One commentary, just offering an alternative for the bFM audience. You'll be able to hear it in Auckland by setting your FM receiver to 95 in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions, and elsewhere by pointing your web browser to the 95bFM Internet streams - in MP3 form from Ihug and Windows Media via Xtra.
The tricky bit, of course, is that the All Blacks' inexorable roll towards the RWC final was stymied somewhat by the team's shabby performance against Wales at the weekend. The possibility that the ABs could go out at quarter-final stage - representing their worst-ever World Cup performance - arises.
It will be an injustice to whichever team goes out on Saturday - and an indictment of the IRB's hapless effort at seeding for the tournament. But that's what will happen. Scary.
Tracey Nelson has supplemented her customary All Black game stats on Haka! with a one-off column looking at exactly how Wales scored those tries. The birds-eye view indicates that set pieces were fine, and players got to the breakdown in their usual numbers - but key defensive lapses (not just in close, but out wide, where Howlett's wing wasn't covered when he was caught out of position) and a failure to protect the ball at the tackle let Wales into the game.
What we can expect to see against South Africa, I think, is a little of what the All Blacks have been saving for the later rounds. They've unveiled a minimum of set moves in the competition so far, preferring to mostly shovel the ball wide and trust in the pace on the outside - a bit like the traditional Wellington game plan.
It was an indictment of how far they got in a hole against Wales that the move that led to Spencer's try had to be hauled out on Saturday. The plan, I suspect, has been to pretend that Spencer doesn't have a running game until at least the semi-final.
Now, this is amazing: Simon Waldman, a staff member at The Guardian discovered a 1938 copy of Homes and Gardens which included a feature on Adolf Hitler's mountain home ("There is nothing pretentious about the Fuhrer's little estate … as host he is a droll raconteur"). He scanned the pages and posted them to his blog, correctly reasoning that Home and Gardens' gush provided an interesting angle on history. Somewhat inevitably, he was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser …
Memory of some more recent history: back in April, a senior US official promised that the Iraq reconstruction bill for the American taxpayer would not exceed $US1.7 billion. This week, the White House gained congressional approval for $US87 billion to rebuild the country. Surely some mistake here?
Most interesting perspective on the Iraq war lately: this Washington Post interview with former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who has been helping coalition forces with their inquiries. By his telling, Saddam completely misread the strategic situation and blew whatever chance he might have had of putting up a fight. Aziz confirmed the view that there were no chemical or biological weapons.
A somewhat overlooked facet of the nation-building effort in Iraq: Paul Bremer has decreed that Iraq's new tax system will consist of a single income and corporate tax at a flat rate of 15%. It's tempting to regard this is a kind of scary economic science experiment, but a similar tack in Russia does seem to have shown some merit in applying a low, flat tax in countries where people have generally taken the path of avoiding tax altogether.
Jane Clifton's Listener column on Don Brash's clumsy coup seems to be the best-informed and most perceptive account this week of what went down and how - but it's not available online, so you'll have to buy the magazine (another bottle of the Schlumberger, thanks Finlay). You can, however, read my column this week on the free, fringe world of game emulators. Lots of fun to be had there …
You should also pop on over to the revamped Mediawatch site, where we have multiple transcripts from the programme, including the recent Louise Chunn interview, Colin Peacock on trouble at the ABC, the interview with Professor Gay Hawkins about trans-Tasman media relations, and Tom Frewen unpicking TVNZ's first charter-compliant annual report.
Wary as I am of statutory minimum sentences and other forms of gimmick justice, I think there's a case, as suggested in this story, for making the endangerment of children an aggravating factor in prosecutions for methamphetamine manufacture. It's one thing for some crazies to try and cash in on the boom, quite another for innocent children to be exposed to chemicals that could permanently damage their health.
Anyway, some more thanks from last week in Welly: thanks to Renaissance for the loan of the 12" G4 PowerBook (really sweet little machine - but I'd have 500MB of memory in it if it was mine; MacOS X will take all the RAM you can throw at it and love you for it), Andrew at Spikefin for the mouse, Julie at Tuanz for the patience and Simon for the fresh rainbow trout - that was nice.
The Westpac scam | Nov 03, 2003 12:22
Public service message: if you received an email headed 'Westpac Bank E-mail Verification' today, don't act on its contents. It's a phishing scam and its perpetrators want to empty your bank account.
As it happens, I am a Westpac customer, but the scam itself is unlikely to have been targeted in that way. I copped it on three different email addresses this morning, including the one that's not normally such a spam-trap. The body of the email is thus:
Dear Westpac Bank Member,
This email was sent by the Westpac server to verify your e-mail address. You must complete this process by clicking on the link below and entering in the small window your Westpac Banking Customer ID and Password.This is done for your protection --- because some of our members no longer have access to their email addresses and we must verify it.
To verify your e-mail address and access your bank account, click on the link below. If nothing happens when you click on the link, copy and paste the link into the address bar of your web browser.
No genuine organisation of any competence is ever going to send out an email like this, but there will doubtless be a few punters who click the link.
The scam uses a WWW redirect service run at da.ru - the same Russian-registered, US-hosted site implicated in at least one of the PayPal scams, which ran along similar lines. That sends you through to the fake Westpac site (turn cookies off in your browser if you feel inclined to look at it), which pops a little window inviting you to enter your Westpac customer ID and password and click "verify". The spoofed page seems to be based on last year's site design - the real Westpac site looks different now, although I wonder what sort of metaphor a happy customer with her eyes shut makes for.
So anyway, I'm back from a week in Wellington where, ironically, I was so busy that the week's political dramas pretty much passed me by - although my taxi driver on Tuesday correctly predicted that Don Brash would win the leadership vote.
Brash will be neither quite the horrowshow his detractors claim, or the saviour that some wishful thinkers expect. However much he denies his, his policy inclinations are absolutely to pick up on the unfinished business of the 1990s: more tax cuts, more privatisation (including in health, education and even welfare) and a far less accomodating social safety net.
The problem is that once you've reformed the economy, driven out cost and achieved price stability, this sort of thing starts to look markedly less desirable to the public. National in the 90s foundered in part because carrying on with The Project was going to cause enormous social division and make people unhappy (for their own good, you understand) and insecure, yet it was philosophically ill-equipped to do anything else. Cavalier macroeconomic reform is one thing when you're trying to bring a basket-case back to life, quite another now, as Rod Oram pointed out in the Sunday Star Times.
The funniest thing about the whole business is that Act, a considerable force behind the Brash bid, appears to be finding out what its supporters really think of it, if the SST poll is anything to go by. About half of Act's support appears to be wedded to neo-liberal economics, rather than the grubby little populists at Act and now that National appears to have moved away from fudgy centrism, they're outta there. Hilarious.
But the idea that a Brash-led parliamentary party will take the dry and moral high road appears to have been dashed by the news that Murray McCully has been given a senior strategic role, and a promise to abolish the Ministry of Women's Affairs (with the scrapping of a spokesperson for a start) isn't going to play well with the female vote, even if Brash does appear to have Jenny Gibbs in his camp.
Of course, the National Party's problem remains the National Party. The Brash regime last all of three days before bitterness spilled over and Nick Smith was shipped away to try and calm down. It's hard to see that sore being healed over, especially if and when Brash's poll honeymoon fades.
And then there's the Greens, who are, it seems, back to making threats they really wouldn't want to carry out. Jeanette Fitzsimons says the party would be prepared to deliver an Act-National government to power unless Labour "negotiates" on GM. The aim is clearly to procure some legislative change that would have the effect of restoring a total ban on GM field work. Rather than play a game of genetically-modified chicken with the Greens - again - it's likely that Labour is already wooing Winston Peters should it need him and his slightly silly party. Don't be too surprised if the next government involves New Zealand First in some fashion.
Meanwhile, anti-GM groups continue to demand more research into the technology, then furiously oppose the research when it's proposed - the proposal in this case, being a 10-year trial of locally-developed RoundUp-resistant onions on two 7m-square plots near Crop and Food in Lincoln. Given the way that conventional onions have to be doused in multiple chemicals, and the fact that onions are not at all promiscuous pollinators, this would seem to me really worth investigating. But no. Apparently we shouldn't investigate anything. Ever.
Has anybody noticed that way self-professed "realists" aren't delivering quite so many lectures to us lesser mortals about foreign policy these days? This no doubt has quite a lot to do with the fact that realism appears to have played a regrettably small part in policy and preparation over Iraq. The New York Times' Blueprint for a Mess looks at the extent to which zealots in the Bush administration were willing to lie to themselves and others about what was really going to happen in Iraq.
I'm also a little tired of being told - against all reason and humanity - that not only does Israel have the right to defend its interests by keeping its foot on the throat of an occupied people, but that it actually has a chance in hell of working. Now, the Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon has said the unsayable - that the Sharon government's policy is not only immoral, it is making things much, much worse for everyone.
But, of course, objecting to Israeli government policy is, per se, anti-semitic, according to some people in this Guardian story. It's hard to be optimistic in the face of that sort of thinking.
Anyway, thanks to all in Wellington - the Tuanz Interactive Awards went very well, and it was a real pleasure to be able to pick Sidhe Interactive's Stacey Jones Rugby League - for PlayStation, Xbox and PC - as the winner of the Craft Award. The game has achieved the highest pre-sales into Australia of any console game, ever - more than 30,000. How cool is that?
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