Posts by Russell Brown
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This just in on the police spying case ...
Rochelle Hume, deceived partner of police informer Rob Gilchrist, totally pwned him after she realised what was going on -- gathered evidence by tapping his phone and installing a script on his computer that forwarded his emails to her.
The righties in The Standard's comment are making much of the fact that she may have breached the law. I would submit that that would be a spectacularly messy prosecution to bring. You could put a price on the movie rights.
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Though if it was me, I'd be leery of those forest credits.
I don't think they'd be that stupid.
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I'm slightly regretting the form of this morning's post, constructed thus because I didn't have the time to go through and excerpt and comment on (with appropriate hyperlinks) key passages from the arguments listed.
Oh well. It's nearly Christmas ...
I see Jon Johansson is of much the same mind as me:
And speaking of the Herald, come on Mr. Editor, I’m dying to hear what you make of National’s use of urgency last week. Let us know. Will you contemplate publishing the faces of all the MPs who voted for it? Will you do it every month up until the next election? How outraged do feel about the government not letting any opposition MPs (including one of the government’s own support party’s) even view these bills before being able to debate them? Wasn’t that an Attack on our Democracy?
The contrast between the Herald's stentorian denunciations of the last government and its vague, weaselly commentary on this one does the paper no credit at all.
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I dunno if my self-employment is down to my truanting, my weird sleep patterns, my protracted illness, or having a special-needs child. I have never been very comfortable working in a hugely structured environment IF those structures don't make sense to me.
I've never liked having to be somewhere on principle, and I dislike the wasted time and endless distractions of going to an office to work. I like to have control over the use of my time.
One of my jobs is as a technical writer and involves codifying and constructing structure - making and explaining rules. I think having someone who's a bit of a rebel in that job is well handy.
I seem to have ended up being good at codifying complex information in a different way. It was one of the things I enjoyed about writing my Listener columns -- the challenge of relating something important, but complex and jargon-ridden, in as clear a way as possible.
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He discussed that issue in a recent post in his blog at stuff. As he sees it, he himself has nothing to do with the National Party, but his wife, Janet Wilson, her company does work for Key, so technically he only has a connection through her is his argument.
That's the gist of it - read his post for further elaboration.It's not actually her company, it's theirs. But Key is her client, not his.
For me the issue is more the quality of Ralston's arguments.
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All this talk of wagging has made me wonder: are truants more likely to end up self-employed?
Interesting question. I was thinking more in terms of what this thread says about the people who wash up here: we seem to have high-achievers who truanted, and high-achievers who didn't.
Although, as I said, I wasn't really a truant, just someone who understood the system well enough to duck things where necessary. My high-achieving tended to mitigate my occasional tendency to get myself in trouble by doing reckless things.
I once wrote a notice for the school newsletter in the name of a teacher who was apparently searching for his lost copy of The Illustrated Kama Sutra. It so nearly went in ...
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And by that rationale the Herald should have run a front page editorial under the byline Democracy Under Attack, and promised to publish monthly the photos of those who voted for the urgency motion.
Or at least offered something a little stronger than the hilariously half-hearted phrase "not on".
But credit where it's due, the HoS editorial is well written.
It is.
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I suppose I should answer this properly ...
Is your personal TV Station payment for your support of Operation 8 & the extended police powers?
That's an absurd suggestion of the kind generally associated with lower-quartile Kiwiblog commenters.
I do not have "a private TV station", although that would be cool. I host a TV show, which is still pretty cool.
And although I have explained extensively my view that the activities of a number of those arrested in October last year warranted the attention and intervention of the police, I am very much concerned about the general police surveillance of groups like Greepeace, as revealed in the Sunday Star Times. On the face of it, it's an unacceptable fishing expedition into legitimate protest groups.
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Is your personal TV Station payment for your support of Operation 8 & the extended police powers?
Huh?
Discuss in 500 words or less the poster's rationale for putting forward this question without mentioning his own pro-Labour bias. You have 30 minutes starting now. Eyes down please.
Huh?
A Newspaper has multiple positions on issues of public policy and political tactics.
Stone the crows.
It's more that the Herald was thundering away editorially about the proper practice of Parliament a week ago, but seems fidgety and diffident about criticising National's extraordinary use of urgency. The Herald's editorial voice is often like this -- it gets trappped in its own arguments. And yes, I know it is written by different people on different days, but it is presented as the voice of the paper and should demonstrate a reason degree of consistency.
The HoS editorial is more crisply and directly written than the meandering efforts from the mothership. It makes it point clearly, with reference to both fact and principle.
And the Ralston column is hackneyed, inconsistent, wrong on facts and one of the worst things he's ever written.
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