Posts by Bob Munro
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yup i am amazing at how stupid some American voters are, I saw an interview with one where he said he'd vote for Mcain over Obama.
And the Guardian sent their man down into the hollers of West Virginia and found plenty of like-minded souls.
Sean Wilentz, professor of History at Princeton and official historian
to Bob Dylan (and therefore infallible in my eyes) lays out the case
that Obama can't win. -
The thought has just struck me....simply because its on the CD player this arvo as I browse the blogs...
I was doing the same in my little corner of the universe, listening to the
Gram Parsons Anthology after being led there by a lovely version of
Return of the Grievous Angel by Lucinda Williams and David Crosby, on a Parsons tribute album.I knew Parsons had died young but not the circumstances.
In the late 1960s, Parsons became enamoured with Joshua Tree National Monument. Alone or with friends, he would disappear in the desert for days, searching for UFOs while under the influence of psilocybin or LSD…
He died there in 1973 at the age of 26 from a lethal combination, purportedly of morphine and alcohol.
Parsons' body disappeared from the Los Angeles International Airport, where it was being readied to be shipped to Louisiana for burial. At the funeral of musician Clarence White earlier that year, a drunken and distraught Parsons had stated that when he died he wanted his body cremated at Joshua Tree and his ashes spread over Cap Rock, a prominent natural feature there. However, Parson's stepfather arranged for a private ceremony back in New Orleans and neglected to invite any of his friends from the music industry.
Maintaining his alleged promise, road manager Phil Kaufman and a friend managed to steal Parsons' body from the airport and, in a borrowed hearse, drove the body to Joshua Tree where they attempted to cremate it, by pouring five gallons of gasoline into the open coffin, and throwing a lit match inside.
What resulted was an enormous fireball. Police chased them, but, according to one account, they (the Police) "were encumbered by sobriety". The two were arrested several days later, but since there was no law against stealing a dead body, were only fined $750 for stealing the coffin. The burned remains were eventually returned to Parsons' stepfather and interred in New Orleans.
The site of the cremation was marked by a small concrete slab and is presided over by a large rock flake known to rock climbers as 'The Gram Parsons memorial hand traverse'. The slab has since been removed by the U.S. National Park Service and was relocated to the Joshua Tree Inn, which was where he was staying at the time of his death. At the site of the original memorial now are simple rock structures and writings on the rock which the park service sand blasts to remove from time to time.
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Thanks Russell.I hope it's all factual. I belted the last bit out rather quickly. I think there might have been a Minister of Conservation ruling which helped enforce the relocation of the snails (after permission had been granted to go ahead with mining under the Resource Management act): which could at a stretch indicate government involvement. Also I'm not 100% sure if the $25 million was lost turnover or profit. In this media release Solid Energy say it has cost them $10 million. Either way the coal is still there. There was just a delay in mining it.
I don't really care much for the ins and outs of politics these days, I've seen a few governments come and go in my time. But this sort of advertising really gets me going. And it's the 'I'm such a clever dick' attitude behind it that gets the blood pumping.
I mean what is ACT's policy on the funding of PHARMAC? Are they saying money will be made available from the taxpayer based on a pressure group's ability to get media profile?
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What happened if a druid, confused by the cold, plays someone elses melody?
He'd be off Key.
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Not gone, just working for Act. But I am still racked by guilt every night about what I did to him:
I'm happy to wade into John Ansell as well. The example quoted in Russell's link to an upcoming ACT ad comparing spending on giant snails with not spending on herceptin is comparing apples with something not even remotely like a fruit.
You do have to steel yourself when the people like the Russell Browns [Public Address blogger] attack you. You get used to it, but I didn't realise I'd get used to it quite so quickly. It really stung the first time."
However, that is what Mr Ansell is aiming at - describing his job as "to make ads that make news, that are controversial enough that [the media] will not be able to avoid putting them in the news."
He said right-wing parties internationally had difficulty portraying that they had "heart" - and his main job was to put heart into right-wing policies.The strategy showed in a presentation he made to Act's conference at the weekend, when he showed an ad depicting "the priorities of Labour."
It said Labour could afford $25 million to save an endangered snail, but could not afford the same amount to fund Herceptin for women with breast cancerSpending on herceptin or not is a decision carefully made by tax payer funded PHARMAC by experts who weigh up the always competing demands of spending on drugs.
Spending on relocating snails was done with SOE Solid Energy's money. The $25 million figure wasn't an actual cost it was the turnover (not profit) that didn't happen because of the time delay in coal production until the snails were relocated. The delay was caused by successful opposition to destruction of the snail's habitat under the Resource Managenent Act by the Forest and Bird society and Save Happy Valley campaign, not the government.
There is no connection whatsoever that I can see in comparing the two figures. It's a calculated lie made pernicious by trading on the fears of vulnerable sick people. ‘Heart’ indeed.
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This is a all a bit like the Roald Dahl story William and Mary where the long suffering wife discovers after her husband’s death his brain and eye are being kept alive in a basin of cerebrospinal fluid. She prepares to exact her revenge on his still sentient being after all the indignities he had visited on her during their married life.
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I thought, that's an amazing photograph. Then I read down and people were reading all kinds of 'Strange Fruit' stuff into it.
I'm afraid I did too. I could see the positive allusions but Billie Holiday was the first thing that sprung to mind.
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The Bag has evidence of Obama clearing the final bar.
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Funnily enough the ability to order up more Jonathon Hunts and other un-imaginable horrors appears to be rapidly approaching. I was following connections to this story in yesterday’s New York Times about futurist Ray Kurzweil. The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
The ideas are fleshed out in this Wired article.
According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.
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Too late already. Yippies burst back on the scene but brutally squashed within minutes.