Posts by Russell Brown
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When I saw the farmlands swinging from floods to drought in the same season, my first thought was that this wasn't a climate problem, it was a problem with water infrastructure.
Damn right. It might be the most under-reported economic story in the country at the moment.
Why didn't the farmers work together to provide the dams, reservoirs, canals, dikes and so forth that would get them through all these recurring 100-year droughts?
(Of course the NZ farmer would rather eat his own children than work collectively.)Funny thing is, working collectively used to be a hallmark of how things were done in New Zealand. Combined with bountiful markets it did ultimately tend to produce a stultifying absence of risk, but it certainly wasn't all bad.
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What hurts you at the supermarket hurts developing countries more. Paul Deady talks to Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the Centre for African Studies at Berkley UC about the effect on the ground of soaring commodity prices and scarcity of land.
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Sure, Russell. But perhaps those of us who are a little sceptical about the hype -- especially when nobody had actually seem the fracking text -- don't give a shit about starving peasants.
Eh?
So far, I'll give MFAT and the Government 10/10 for the kind of media management that generates uncritical press the IOC would kill for. I just hope the likes of Fran O'Sullivan are going to come home and commit journalism that's a little more substantive than 'open slather on cooks and Kung Fu masters! hooray!"
We're trading with China anyway, a lot. To be the first nation to do so under a rules-based structure seems a good thing to me.
Opposing opinions can be found in some number amongst screeching Kiwiblog commenters.
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And I'll happily bet the farm that there will be a fair proportion of the Labour caucus talking up personal and business tax cuts through gritted teeth during campaign season, since DPF asked. I don't see the point of Guyon Espiner chasing them round chanting, "do you believe in tax cuts" either.
You're deliberately missing the point.
If the putative anti-tax-cut Labour MPs had in fact been in an official capacity addressing interest groups -- trade union meetings, perhaps -- and assuring those those audiences that they personally thought Cullen's tax cuts were a load of crap, then absolutely, journalists would be (and should be) asking them about it. Casting this as some sort of crackdown on thoughtcrime doesn't really add up.
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*cough* Should I start pointing the pant-filling squeals of bias whenever a story unflattering to the Government appears, or do we both have much better things to do with our time?
Well, quite. But given the shrieking response to this one fairly slight story, I dread to imagine what the reaction would be to months' worth of 'Democracy Under Attack" headlines.
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xkcd seems rather apposite today...
I feel bad because for so long I didn't know about xkcd.
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And embedding has been disabled. Bastards!
Bollocks. That should've worked -- even without the official embedding code. And here's me thinking Google wasn't Evil ...
And here's me saving the BBC from having people see a Nike ad on their page.
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During last week's brief visit to Britain, Prime Minister Helen Clark was interviewed by the BBC's Sarah Montage for its serious interview slot, HARDTalk. It's on YouTube in three parts, and, thanks to the Patented Public Address Embederator, it is also below.( Update: The videos still won't embed, even with our little fix, so you need to click on each screen grab. Bah.)
In the first part, Clark ventures little in response to questions on the prospects for a New Zealand republic:
She seems quite assured discussing goals for sustainability and carbon neutraity. She says "I'm convinced that climate change is a huge and pressing problem.":
And the final part dwells on the economic and ethical implications of a free trade agreement with China:
Comments for that last one have been disabled on YouTube ...
Thoughts?
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__One woman came to his aid. In hindsight, I wish I had done the same. Eventually, he was led to safety inside the Law School. The man guarding the door asked the people chasing Olsen to back off. One replied: "But he's a fascist!"__
For some reason in my mind I heard Eric Idle (a la Monty Pithon) follow the last bit with "killing's too good for 'im"
But seriously, I realised last year around the "terror raid" time that the ability of some self-professed "anarchists" to coldly dehumanise anyone at political odds with them was really quite creepy.
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wow that's more just some good mate, that's helping change a life.
i thought it was great when you did those ads, and wow
this has made my weekend
I'm not meaning to say I was the hero -- the other neighbour spotted things sooner and has done much more -- but it's really brilliant that three different households in the street have rallied so quickly, and that they had that ad campaign in their minds. I reckon it's a real vindication for the campaign.
The only people who don't seem to get that the huge jump in reported family violence is a good thing are Family First.
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