Posts by Jake Pollock
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Godwin's Law leaps from the internet into a townhall debate.
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Med insurance is just a mechanism - a failed, expensive[*], disgusting mechanism - for possibly achieving health care if you're lucky enough.
The cost of which has nearly doubled since 2001, and will double again in the next ten years, while incomes have remained stagnant.
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But haven't you heard? He'd kill your grandmother and Stephen Hawking in the name of socialist healthcare.
To be fair, Obama did have a go at bumping off Stephen Hawking just the other day. I have photographic evidence.
Seriously though, I was watching Fox the other day (in Pittsburgh, PA), when on came this ad:
The 'call you senator' was replaced with 'call Senator Casey' who, perhaps not incidentally, is up for re-election next year and came in in 2006 with the so-called Blue Dogs.
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Islander and Jeremy: It appears to be going through one of its apparently semi-regular meltdowns, but The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has some of Elsdon Best's work. Not, unfortunately, Maori Religion & Mythology but a few of his minor ones on related subjects.
Not available on Google Books either, sadly.
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Well as long as we're giving San Francisco travel advice, if you find yourself in need of a decent cup of coffee, go to the Farmer's Market at the wharf in downtown S.F. on Saturdays. I can't remember the name of it (and don't particularly want to reopen the great coffee debate), but it's coffee that actually tastes like it's seen a coffee bean at some point. Also, there's a cart that does a really good Mexican breakfast, and busking hipsters, some of which will be playing banjos, which I'm sure will please Bob.
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Joel Tenenbaum's trial is now underway. He's the guy being sued by the RIAA for $4.5million. You can follow him on twitter and his his website. He also has an article in the Guardian about the joys of being sued.
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For the historically minded, the first sentence of that bill is factually wrong and also misleading. The Atlantic slave trade (which was different from the institution of slavery) was abolished in 1807 by the British, who then used their considerable naval power to eradicate the trade over the next few decades. It wasn't abolished as an institution in British plantation islands until later, and persisted in Cuba, Brazil and the United States for longer still. And, of course, not all slavery was Atlantic slavery, as it existed throughout Africa, and the Eastern trade went as far as the Bay of Bengal.
Today, one popular estimate suggests that 27million people are in some form of labour that we could describe as slavery. But, for the purposes of that bill, I'm not sure that much of what we could actually import could be described as 'slave labour'. Some sugar from the Dominican Republic, pretty much anything from Mauritania, but the vast majority of modern slavery is either: debt peonage in places like India, Nepal and Pakistan (in which the labourers aren't owned, they just owe their labour for a debt which can never be repaid); sex slavery and trafficking, which is rife throughout the world (and estimate 50,000 women are imported into the US each year from Latin America, Asia and Russia and form Soviet States) but not the kind of export industry that would be affected by that bill; and domestic slavery, which exists in every single major metropolitan centre in the world, including London, Paris and New York, which likewise can't be prevented by such a bill.
Basically, the people who made the underpants which you fret over work in terrible conditions, but almost certainly don't meet the definition of slavery proposed, and it's hard to say what dimension of the world's fastest growing and most iniquitous criminal activity would be affected by such a bill.
And to be clear, I say all this not because I secretly support slavery and worship free trade, because I don't, but because it's an incredibly complex issue that in its modern form cannot be eradicated by 19th century means (i.e. by trade sanctions and naval power), which is what makes the first sentence of the bill so problematic. I don't know why National didn't vote for that bill, and it probably wasn't for the reasons I outlined above, but to say 'support this bill or support slavery' is incredibly misleading.
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What difference would it make?
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Wait, does all this talk about the integrity of 'Eddie' mean that John Key isn't building a giant rollercoaster?