Posts by Russell Brown
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Monteith's New Zealand Lager - The new Vanilla Coke of beers, drinkable and (hopefully) forgettable. A metalic after taste that was really, urrgh.
I should have thought twice when ending Lent with the new Monteith's Lager priced at $18.90 a doz compared to SteinLager Pure at $25 a doz.
At $18.90 it's overpriced and should try to compete with Flame Beer.
Wondering what was ment by International Beers in your commentary Russell - mayby the dreaded Snow Flake Beer only sold at the dodgyest of bars in the 90s?Really? I did say it wasn't a craft beer. It just seems like your classic dry, quenching, consume-from-the-bottle hot day (or nightclub) beer to me (I had one from the glass but it didn't seem right). I certainly don't find it unpleasant. I'm actually having one at the moment ...
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Craig Ranapia reaches out across the political divide in support of the Greens' Locke after the Green MP's past was questioned by Michael Cullen.
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The Guardian has a thorough and fascinating story on the various civilian death estimates.
There's a particulary interesting point about the Lancet studies:
Sitting in his office in Camden in north London, where every surface is covered with wobbly piles of files, the Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, admits that the figure "seems crazy". "But the second study validated the first one. The pre-invasion mortality rate is the same in both, and the upward lines of the post-invasion rate are exactly the same", he says.
He is particularly pleased by information unearthed last year by a Freedom of Information request by the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones. This found that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence described the methods used by the second survey as "close to best practice" and added that the "study design is robust". The adviser warned the government to be "cautious" about criticising the survey findings .
It covers the criitcisms of the second study, and concludes thus:
Alas for Bush and Blair, most statisticians do not support their case. Nor can any journalist or other independent witness who has seen the pain of the bereaved still living in post-invasion Iraq or the millions who have escaped to Jordan and Syria. Estimates of the Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam's regime amount to a maximum of one million over a 35-year period (100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the 1980s; 400,000 in the war against Iran; 100,000 Shias in the suppressed uprising of 1991; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers). Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29,000.
Only the conservatively calculated Iraq Body Count death toll credits the occupation with an average annual rate that is less than that - some 18,000 deaths in the five years so far. Every other source, from the WHO to the surveys of Iraqi households, puts the average well above the Saddam-era figure. Those who claim Saddam's toppling made life safer for Iraqis have a lot of explaining to do.
It's a great piece of analytical wring.
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Hmmm. I think I'll spend the long weekend reading up and developing a view.
I'm often suspicious of zeal driven by today's headlines. There was huge outrage about the extensively televised events of Beslan that wasn't there when the Russian government was massacring Chechnyans in their homes. And we never thought about boycotting the Russians.
(Although we did join the Moscow Olympics boycott Ironically, it's hard to not to think that if the Afghanis had just waited till the Soviet Union broke up it would have all worked out much better.)
I find the arguments against a trade relationship less convincing than the qualms about whether the PR opportunity of an Olympics is due that leadership.
On trade, frankly, we're there already. Our economy is so entangled with theirs, there's no going back. And for at least some Chinese, economic openness has brought material improvement and new freedoms. There is a sense of emergence.
In the past, I've tried to apply a test: does the wealth reach the streets? Trading with a nation in which change can occur outside government is different from doing business with a plutocracy that keeps all the money.
OTOH, spending a little while reading humans rights sites makes me wonder how that government got the chance at the Olympics anyway. But what would be the effect of a boycott? Would the leadership recognise the error of its ways, or just seek vengeance?
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I'm not defending everything he's ever said or done, or even the Green's position on trade agreements - all I'm saying is that, best I can tell, he has a genuine and admirable commitment to human rights internationally. And I'm pretty sure that that is the motivation for his current actions.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply he wasn't a god guy, but the Greens' approach to China as a whole is generally very negative, especially on trade.
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Sigh ... why bother actually reading reports and stuff when you can just quote Garth McVicar?
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Dr Cullen did(later on) actually produce an article that backed his comment ( re Pol Pot).Keith Locke had supported the new regime. Admittedly it was written in 1975, but it was written by Keith Locke.
Lots of people, including other governments, initially saw the new Cambodian government as an improvement on the old, corrupt one. But Locke never wrote anything in support of Pol Pot.
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Also: let me see. The *cough* "MSM" reports on a press release from a politician, while the blog goes to the source and looks at it critically.
Yep. And as i pointed out, the first round of reporting on the survey was also based solely on a press release, from a government-funded organisation, and reported a completely different story.
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In fact, this statistic is meaningless unless related to a breakdown of bicycles per person, or perhaps per household. Get Keith on the case immediately :-)
What I want to know is, are Asians more or less likely than the general population to commit bicycle-related crime? Eh? Eh?
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Well, I'm not so sure. I think its fair comment to compare and contrast when they -- and much of the Labour Party -- took a much harder line on economic, sporting and cultural contacts with South Africa.
You don't think trying to compare apartheid South Africa with modern China is just a wee bit of a contrivance?
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