Posts by Hebe
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Capture: Two Tripods, One Night, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Ribbons and crystals are purdy. Light art is great; lifts my spirit every time I see it. Hope we have more in Christchurch soon.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Lilith __,
Cake stall cake? Good one; the cake stall was my project this year. The amount of love and care put into some of those offerings was amazing. I really wanted to take pictures but didn't have a spare moment. I used to think daily newspapers were hard work; they are nothing compared to a school fair!
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Jos,
For the love of peas
I like the way you capture the little things I have always loved: spirally pea vines this time.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
at the Cashmere Club during the Tai Chi Festival. 10 Nov 2012
Do you have any more pictures Gudrun? I was supposed to be there; but the school fair became overwhelming and I couldn’t leave to get to the festival. Cracker fair though: perfect weather; good sized crowd not too few or too many; great food and entertainment, lots of socialising, and it looked like people were spending.
@Lilith: You were at the fair too? I shall pass on the carrot cake compliment! Tai chi fest?
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
There has to be something in the water,
or the air…Something in the water might help!
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
I talked to an American tonight who expounded at length on Obama’s failings in a way that didn’t seem to me to bear much relation to observable reality.
It does make you wonder what the hell’s going on.
My theory (today's one) is that many middle Americans' financial futures and investment incomes have been so badly hit by the global economic meltdown, with no outlook for it improving, that they are scared; terrified of losing everything. So people who are usually reasonably rational are looking for someone to blame. Obama is President so he must be to blame; never mind that the mess was created by a couple of decades of financial and political chicanery on all sides.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
Bloody hell. I had restrained myself recently from getting too excited about the US election, telling myself I was misexaggerating how barmy the right are. But a couple of days before, I was talking with an old friend in the US who, though we often differ politically, agrees with my take
on the fundamental human decencies needed in a society. I mentioned the election in passing; what a mistake. This person went into a vitriolic denunciation of Obama very like the Perigo piece.Apart from seriously denting (irretrievably maybe) a long friendship, I am bemused by the hateful invective entering the mainstream. This isn't just being a sore loser, it's a new kind of nasty and malevolent. I fear for us all.
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Capture: Cats Love Cameras, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Nora, where's (y)our daily cat?
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to DexterX,
the Republicans need to lose again and only then will the GOP purge itself to the degree it begins to position itself where it will have a chance of a win.
Demographics are against the Republicans
Or the GOP could take a cue from John Key: appear to be the changed demographic (ie younger and more friendly), get elected for the first term and set up the process changes that lead to the agenda being fully pursued in the second term. More likely, and those US demographic changes will take decades to bed in.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I’ve seen a lot of people comment on this. We have to remember that in the states they have vastly more knowledge at their fingertips about which precincts have returned their votes, and which have left to do so. Within each precinct they have a lot of information about how many democrats, republicans, independents, democraphics, income etc – it’s all matched up with the census and so forth.
So if they’ve got half the precincts in, and they show a 5% swing in a direction, they can extrapolate that using fairly simple maths as to what the final result is likely to be. Hence when Rove sends the reporter down the corridor to talk to the analysts, they can say “yes, the places yet to return are largely democrat leaning, Romney isn’t going to make up ground there”.
It’s not an exact science, but it’s fairly impressive in most cases the data they have and what they can do it with it, and very well resourced (what the political parties do with it is astounding).
Yes. They are far more data-matched in the US, but I have spent election nights in NZ with old hands here who do similar extrapolations based on historic knowledge of which booths lean which way (easier in a small country of course) and other indicators. But that has been in private, not on global TV where a call on a state result really needs to be over 90 percent certain.