Posts by James George
-
Fair bit of tosh in there which is unsurprising since I've yet to read any take on kiwi pot in the 70's that wasn't chocka with tosh.
EG I left aotearoa for a coupla decades in january '76, by that time large scale thai sticks (buy a kleensack full containing 1000 sticks for $1000 kick the kleensack for a coupla oz 'loose' sell sticks for $200 per hundred n loose for another $350) had ended about 18 months before everyone was bringin in #3 & #4 hammer instead - more portable and a lot more profitable.
NZ green had moved well past 'cabbage' by then and was competitive with sticks but there were still droughts - my farewell party everyone arrived with hammer or coke - no dope until march.
Sure there were still some sticks around but not in the quantity of yore I was gonna spin another yarn about the circs leading up to the drop in thai availability but those 70's drug yarns are boring predictable and vary little from country to country. Suffice to say we all had a lot of fun and the income rarely outstripped expenditure. eg a private sesh at antoines or clichy -everyone thought frog tucker n plonk were the bees knees which shows how naive we all were. -
"harm reduction' is so 1980's. It takes me back to the good old days when Bob Hawke and co used to fund injecting drug users conferences at the Melbourne Sheraton - complete with in house dealer.
These cliches mask the huge intrusion upon human rights that criminalisation of people's right to do to themselves as they wish by way of drug legislation, is.
By playing the silly game of pretending that all this intrusive sticky-beaking of citizens is somehow for people's own good.
The actual cause and effect mechanism of harm reduction/minimisation is never clearly articulated, because any rigorous examination of drug policy and its attendant legislation would reveal that this arcane set of rules exists chiefly as an employment scheme for holier than thou drongos of the school prefect archetype, as well as being a funding vehicle for a huge range of self appointed do-gooders desperate to get their particular dime store psychology franchise up and running.In return the political class gets sufficient power to smash any individual considered problematic. For example the dotcom raid could never have occurred without the general public's apathetic acceptance of law enforcements 'right' to go anywhere do anything - that acceptance was created by years of comic book imagery about 'the evil pusherman'.
Further, the political class' willing obeisance to law enforcement even though blind freddie can see these laws are unjust, unworkable and illogical, leaves law enforcement who are alleged to be objective, feeling obligated to the politicians.
Without anti drug laws the numbers of police could shrink by at least 40% and that means a shitload less middle and senior managers as well as less wooden tops.Hence the alacrity with which the police adhere to every KeyCorp whim.
Best of all pollies get a law enforcement machine with priorities that are the twin furphies of drugs and terrorism which doesn't have the time nor the resources to be nosing around politicians or their obliging lobbyists, much less the lobbysts' employers - even if they did have the motivation to do so.Messing around re-litigating obscure elements on the fringes of this injustice won't change anything. It will create a public awareness that the media approves of a construct that is by far the most egregious example of failed 20th century social engineering ever inflicted upon kiwis.
-
I cannot understand what all the fuss is about - talk about do as I say not as I do. The very same media peeps n hangers-on who coagulate in spots like this spent most of september 2014 chasing down stories about dotcom minutiae - the sleazier the better.
No mention of state house sales or any other of the issues about keycorp's corrupt government and their policies.
As a result the cronies won and like all crooked bullies they intend to use their power to ensure there won't be any future resistance.Those in the media who held their noses and did the dirty to keep their jobs 'for the sake of their families' or whatever other selfish bulldust they rationalised at the time, are now learning that neoliberalism doesn't respect selfish hypocrisy unless it's the bosses who are the selfish hypocrites.
One thing worth pointing out is that when Greece was bludgeoned and blackmailed into accepting the German austerity plan, one of the first things to go was public service broadcasting. It didn't get sold or privatised because no one wanted to buy a media outlet in a collapsing economy.
So the left managed to take over much of the at the time 'useless' infrastructure. This how Syriza won an election, they weren't dependent on the usual neoliberal mouthpieces to filter their messages.
Aotearoa can only get rid of the crooks if something similar happens here.
In other words we're gonna be stuck with KeyCorp and/or the equally corrupt and self serving LittleLibLite for the foreseeable future because most of the types who could help to turn the joint around are too busy stabbing each other in the back, playing musical chairs for an ever decreasing number of well paid gigs.
This is what happens when ideology is regarded as old fashioned and boring.
Everyone is out for themselves racing to kick the hindmost. -
I dunno why everyone was hangin off Key's statement to Parliament when more than two weeks before, the amerikan secretary of state announced on Al Jazeera that NZ troops would be on a training mission with Oz .
The slavish devotion to the Key sock puppet's words makes kiwis weeks behind what is happening out there in the real world.In fact it is this inward looking focus promoted by media turds which means that the ignorati who lap up the endless tide of propaganda are always scratching their heads wondering WTF?
Take IS whose popularity (and despite the bulldust the hacks around here push these guys are immensely popular throughout the Arab speaking nations) is largely derived from one simple issue. These guys are the only organised force prepared to bite spit scratch and claw at the whitefella hands that have been simultaneously strangling em and sodomising them for the last 150 years.
If you want to get a handle on why look no further than Egypt where a genuinely popular uprising was deliberately perverted by a judeo-xtian plotted and resourced sabotage.
Right now the people of Gaza are copping it up the ass from Israel while egypt is is levering open their mouths with a rusty screwdriver so Sisi can stick his dick in there. Meantime Barak Obama, Dave the dickhead Cameron and Merkel and all the rest of the gang are cheering him on like a mob of drunks at a buck's night.Let the ignorati carp on about IS all they want but as far as the people most affected by IS are concerned, nothing IS do could come close to the evil shit that 'the west' and it's zionist proxy have been doing.
New Zealand is sending troops there because we are weak and greedy - accept those realities and then maybe we can do something to fix it.I don't expect it tho you're all too busy waiting for Key to drip feed you information about your own country which the septic tanks were told weeks before.
-
Mmm - it is possible to rabbit on considerably about the strawman facility of the contention " Journalists are not, with a few exceptions, biased in a partisan sense." Everyone is biased so what? Who cares why they are biased? Why is it a better thing that a 'journalist' distorts what he/she observes because he/she is a careerist looking to make a name for themselves amongst the proxies for foreign media proprietors or rightwing political appointees to TVNZ/RNZ, than they do it out of loyalty to some reactionary political movement they had been indoctrinated into by other media figures?
Maybe the likes of John Armstrong are traditional high tories who dream of lying in a pit of desperate young boys whose hunger makes them eager to fulfil a bourgoisie's every whim, who knows I don't.The awful reality is even if that were true it is unlikely that NZ's media would ever inform the public - it would likely breach one of the myriad 'unwritten' rules NZ journos follow - always because they don't repeat gossip - that is beneath them apparently, even as they seek to overturn or circumvent judicially imposed suppression orders put in place under the same lie.
The fact is that in both cases - journalists' rules about public figures (especially themselves) and court suppression orders, it is only those with enough 'juice' powerful rich or both that manage to ensure the rules apply to them. Never acknowledged of course even when it really matters - as in the Colin Craig issue where if it did transpire his relationship with his PR person was less than professional that would be an issue particularly germane to the political stance Craig takes.
The motive for bias is totally irrelevant the issue is about why NZ journalists allowed that bias to permeate pretty much every piece of coverage during the election. Even worse the prejudices were uniform. During the campaign not only did every journo distort realities about minor parties reducing the election to a two horse FPP contest which national was bound to win, they all told the same lies and distorted reality the same way.
Difficult to believe that was serendipity at work. Across all the media the 'angle' these so-called journalists used was uniform dismissing it as unpartisan entirely misses the point.Here's an example of the havoc they wreaked with ordinary kiwis' reality - A somewhat pensive article in today's Herald. It is about Hone Harawira and is written from the point of view of a journalist who seems to have only now realised what a terrible thing it is for NZ that Hone is no longer an MP (anyone with half a brain who considered that for more than 30 seconds would have worked that reality out long before today) -anyway the 'reporter' went up to Home's electorate and reported what Maori voters had to say about this.
Here is one opinion that tells us exactly how the repeated distortions of NZ's media were played out in voters' heads:
"Our old people went and fought world wars and here we are about to put this German fella into Parliament and he is already suspect - a lot of people saw that straight away".
Which is the worst of the many lies and distortions from NZ's media revealed in that sentence? That the NZ media deliberately set about covering Mana-Internet as one party or that they deliberately misled voters into believing that Dotcom himself was a candidate, or that they played up the Hitler's book thing without mentioning the Churchill and Roosevelt souvenirs so much that voters came to believe Dotcom was a nazi?
Doubtless many readers will claim that all that is revealed is the speakers ignorance, but we now live in a society where many of the citizens spend so much time struggling to keep materially above water they simply don't have time or energy to read past the headlines. Instead of acknowledging this and catering for it, the 'poor tired media' who are paid to get to the bottom of issues, then report them as truthfully as possible, preferred to use the paucity of time ordinary kiwis enjoy, to deceive them and cheat them into going against everything they believe.A fucking disgrace is the only way to consider the role of kiwi media in this horror show.
-
I dunno why Kiwis imagine that our security services pay the least regard to the law. It has been shown time and time again that they do not. Over the course of the time I've lived in Aotearoa there have been numerous instances of both SIS and GCSB acting outside the law and it is always dealt with in the same way, the way that it was dealt with when KDC caught them 'at it'.
First of all the sadly misnamed 'security services' deny they were acting illegally, then, if forced to admit that the unwarranted interceptions/searches/ break-ins did take place, they do as their masters in the US do.
They drag out a lawyer's opinion which states he/she believes that reading the terms of the act very closely , that they can in fact behave in this manner even though it was absolutely prohibited by legislation.Once again we must remember that both GCSB and SIS were expressly forbidden from spying on citizens or permanent residents, yet an Englander recruited into NZ intelligence, seemingly on the basis of his Royal Navy experience, obtained a law degree at night school while working for GCSB, then provided an opinion that the prohibition could be ignored, so GCSB went ahead and spied on KDC plus 87 NZ citizens.
They would still be doing this right now, without our knowledge, and supported by John Key's sophistry & semantics, if KDC hadn't had the resources to confront NZ's intelligence services and force the truth into the light of day.What happened next? KeyCorp regime retrospectively changed the law, stripping away basic protections from all of us.
I can't believe we still have to talk about this, yet there is a collective amnesia which is enabled by the media that not only plays down this awful assault on our rights as citizens - along with the governments deliberate sabotage of the rule of law, it portrays the whole dreadful scenario as 'a good thing'. We are meant to think that this wasn't a horror story designed to dis-empower us all, it was in fact a classic example of the government protecting the citizenry. As they say, you couldn't make that shit up.The CIA pulled the same stunt in the US. They tortured hundreds of innocents, killing quite a number in the process, on the basis of a careerist lawyer with his eye on the main chance giving them a letter saying he didn't believe starvation, beatings and water boarding constituted torture.
Most of the people who copped this treatment were not al Quaeda masterminds, they were tourists with Arabic sounding names who had bee travelling through Afghanistan at the time, (It is important to remember Afghanistan was at peace, for the first time in about 150 years, between the Taliban taking over the government and the start of the US invasion)
Once the US made it known there was a $5000 reward (payable in gold) for 'suspects' every war ravaged no-hoper in Afghanistan went on the lookout for a Patsy and a good whack.
These dodgy legal 'opinions' frequently stay hidden because they have been marked 'Top Secret' or whatever. Right up until someone manages to find a piece of thread linked to them and pulls on the thread in exactly the right way.
Who can possibly know what manner of illegality is currently countenanced by our security services just because somewhere in some drawer in Wellington they have tucked away a piece of paper from a desperate with an LLB who reckons it is all good?
There is no point in claiming "the law says this" or "the legislation says that". The only way to truly know what is going on, would be to send in a mob of honourable Kiwis from across the political spectrum who have sufficient mana and nous to rip the truth out the security agencies sweatily self-interested paws.
-
Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to phplad,
I can not work out where in the chain our journalists are manipulated to the point they usually arrive at exactly the same conclusions and consistently fail to address the important questions, surely it is not just peer pressure.
.
Unfortunately it is. Look no further than Brown's comments. Most people who were at the town hall on Monday night got there by dint of getting in early queueing up and running the gauntlet of Steve the Pimp's ( I can't remember his full name - the bloke who runs topless hookers up Queen St once a year - that bloke) slanderous mercedes convoy.
Many of those who had queued up for hours were turned away but not the 'kiwi media' who arrived late to their reserved seats all clustered together (big mistake organisers) and instead of actually engaging in the event sat back and examined it like it was a piece of shit they had to scrape off their expensive shoes.All the while chortling amongst themselves at 'amateur hour' There was a time when reporters in NZ came from the communities they were reporting to and shared the pain along with the good times, but nowadays they all seem to want to be some sort of new elite far removed from the hoi polloi.
They gossip among themselves and defer to the likes of Fisher considered to be the rising star (in a fucking dull constellation it must be conceded) and preen and groom each other like 70's rockstars - if only they had an nth of the talent of those pricks.Fisher decided he had been let down, he had imagined his story would be the game changer - the Warners letter delivered into his hot little hands prior to the event, as promised,
When that turned out not to be so he threw a tanty - all that work he put into Dotcom for the last two years, work that was meant to make him, David Fisher, the star of NZ's media, had turned to shit, so he lashed out.
Of course all of the rest of the crew who have been traipsing around in Fisher's shadow - his retinue, posse, call it what you will, also followed suit and made the entire scene, despite incredible revelations from Greenwald and Amsterdam, about the purloined letter too. -
Too angry at the weak two bob each way commentary to post what I really think.
Instead of continually reporting everything from the way NZ's tiny cabal of self appointed journos see everything and overlaying it with acres of subjectivity, why don't you have a crack at the facts.
The issues are easy to hide if they get buried in media goss about the press conference, but that is the way NZ's 'journalists' have reported everything about Mana Internet since the election campaign began.
This is why NZ's weak, never ask the big boys a tough question, 'don't push too hard or he won't buy me a drink afterwards' media never manage to uncover anything that wasn't dished up to em all plated and ready to eat.
And that's why many of us consider them to be parasites. -
NZ media have been backing off at the mere smell of a lawyer's dusty briefs since the first kawhai got wrapped in paper and ink, but only sometimes.
If one were to compare the alacrity with which Philip Fields was pursued by both print and broadcast media, despite Fields threatening to bring on the briefs at every turn with the sluggish, nay moribund, speed they have 'hunted' Ede, it is apparent that it isn't only concern about getting caught in legal crosshairs that slows 'em.
Those 'journos' who have the seniority and experience to have had first hand experience of various instances of being closed down by 'them upstairs', and who are willing to discuss the circumstances, all too often concede that the threat of legal action felt like more of an excuse than a reason.That at least has been my experience when talking with the parasites of the 4th estate, about this issue.
-
Yet here you all are again talking about the two dimensional media creation that is John Key instead of issues around the governance of the Key regime.
This is what is happening up and down the country as the 'chooks' fall over themselves reporting on the creep's reaction to the revelations about his abrogation of NZ's security to the NSA, such as "How did it make you feel Prime Minister" instead of what the revelations actually mean for a small independent state's struggle to remain a democratic society immune to coercion from much larger outside forces.