Posts by Alistair McBride
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…,
"Intriguingly, New Zealand's overall 2012 ranking is actually one place up on 2010 -- but if you compare our 2010 and 2012 country profiles, you'll see that our score (high scores are good in this instance) on "water resources (ecosystem effects)", which includes water quality, has gone from 94.98 to 40.3. We're ranked 43rd in the world there."
Intriguing? Definitely! To more than halve the "score" in two years would suggest either we have screwed up our environment in a mighty way in a very short space of time, or else the measurement goalposts have been shifted. My eyes would seem not to be seeing that degree of environmental degradation, but then I may have the wrong goggles on. What is really behind this "shift" in values?
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust,
"off the cuff" and "on the hoof"…?
It might seem that way but that is the cover for the real agenda being slipped into the public discourse. That was a deliberate and carefully constructed piece of media massaging. Which bit of disinformation do the experts and critics respond to first in order to get the story flowing right – just read the responses here? And the news media doesn't know which bit to pursue either having been sucked in over the last four years. -
Legal Beagle: Police: "Ambrose not guilty", in reply to Biobbs,
The general understanding of turn the other cheek is about forgiveness. It actually is instruction to a slave who having been struck (backhanded) on the cheek (the left) by his master turns his other (the right) inviting the master to treat him as an equal – the blow that follows cannot be delivered as a backhander but only as a punch. Palestinian society in Jesus' day had an interesting set of fines for brawling and which hand hit which part of the face.
By proffering the other cheek the slave is claiming full personhood. It is not Jonkeys place – he has the power. Ambrose is the victim here – in more ways than one! -
I'm curious about the use of the word "mandate." In the church I belong to after a number of closely contested decisions it was recognised 51% did not constitute a workable mandate because it meant that the "losers" then spent the next period of time lobbying to get their view uppermost. Now any matter voted on if it doesn't get more than 2/3 of the votes is left on the table as it were until a workable majority is achieved. It seems to me that a 48.5% total vote tally, even though the policy was well signalled, does not reach the threshold for a working majority on the issue and that the opposition parties will spend the next period of time working out how to undo the sell-out and change the legislation. Irrespective of my own perspective, that seems to be a waste of resources and will result in a messy legislative fight later on.
Building consensus is where the mandate will come from and I do not believe National is committed to that at all. -
Hard News: Windows 7: Actually Not Bad,
Click to Flash plug-in has sped up my net browsing amazingly whether using Safari or Firefox. Nisus Writer Pro (or Express) is a good second tier Mac OS X WP programme. I started using it way back at 4.1.3 and it has been very dependable all along. It dovetails very nicely with the Bookends bibliography tool – much more simply and smoothly than Bookends does with Word 2004 or 2008.
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Hard News: The son that got away,
I'm glad that young man has found somewhere safe to voice his views. Keep up the good work. The piece on the Canadian law was excellent.
I guess I'm one of the liberal ones who would have gasped (& clergy too). I caught an item with Larry saying he wanted the law defined so that a parent could use a ruler or a belt as you had more control than with a hand, and couldn't believe my ears, so a smack to a grandchild would be no big deal it seems. It is for me – the relationship with my grandchildren is too precious to worry about power and control. Where is Larry's head really at? -
Hard News: Safari 4 beta: seriously quick,
I'm happily running both 10.5.6 and Safari 4 on my iBook G4. I'm finding that Safari 4 is much smoother than 3 and my 18 year old was so impressed that he got me to load it onto the old eMac which is also running Leopard. Both machines plus an excellent broadband connection from orcon are making life on the interweb that much easier.
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Southerly: E=mc^2... Your Views,
Hey I think George used the wrong metaphor about IW. "dug up" should be "pulled out of the flights of imaginative fancy"
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Hard News: So far from trivial,
I too am bothered about the way the media have gone about their work here. Their exposure of Ms Dunn-Powell's plight leaves her vulnerable and in the public gaze.
Yes T.V is in the industry and his actions both then and now are appalling, but there is a pack mentality working here which has focussed on him which does not operate on most of all the other perpetrators. A few high profile offenders outed will not expose the scourge of domestic assault. Name and shame will only force the issue behind the closed doors of our already closed front doors and make it more difficult for the victims of the abuse to come out. -
Random Play: Food for Thought,
Maybe I'm a bit of a pedant, but I still have trouble with the use of the word "iconic". In its original sense an ikon pointed to something else (usually greater than the thing eg "God"). So something that is "iconic" should or ought to have that same sense within it.
Real Groovy is a great store in terms of what it provides, but to call a shop, even an on-line one "iconic" when its sole purpose is to point customers to itself is really stretching things.
Mind you that goes for its use when applied to various people or Paua-shell houses as well.