Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Ross Kendall,
After we’ve self-righteously enjoyed telling off these frightful Kanucks, can we now discuss returning all the stolen land back to its rightful Maori owners?
From the current Stuff homepage. Yesterday's trolls don't appear to have rated a headline.
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Hard News: Reassure Me: cannabis,…, in reply to BenWilson,
...people probably lock into favourites and would sorely miss all the yummy additives that are in commercial tobacco.
While cigarettes are commonly laced with additives to promote even burning, the last I looked these weren't common in rolling tobacco. Of course there's the odd horror like Port Royal, which is probably great if you like RTDs. The flavours that make tobacco palatable mostly come from slow oxidation in the curing process. Attempting to oven-dry the stuff a la cannabis produces a lung-wrecking nasty that, if it weren't for the addictive properties of nicotine, would put anyone off tobacco for life.
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Hard News: Reassure Me: cannabis,…, in reply to BenWilson,
As with tobacco, which is piss easy to grow, I doubt that most people would bother.
Tobacco certainly is "piss easy to grow". In Eastern Australia it's a common weed. Botanically speaking it's an oversized petunia. I suspect that the reason that dairy robbers haven't turned to cultivating the stuff is that it requires a hell of a lot more expertise and processing to render it smokeable than cannabis does.
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Hard News: Let Canada do our cannabis homework, in reply to Dennis Frank,
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Hard News: They want to blow it all up, in reply to Neil,
I think his argument has a lot of merit - the success of liberal values has made life better for a great number of people. Vastly lower mortality rates in child birth for example.
As Bart Janssen has noted, liberal values have failed to deliver this increased quality of life to the social underclass. What's worse is that the kind of advances that you cite were achieved by the deliberate exploitation of the underprivileged:
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to ,
In your selective about science face, Greenpeace.
If you're serious about clobbering Greenpeace over their scientific selectivity you'll have to dig a bit deeper than linking to a shallow puff piece that appears to offer little more than highly selective quotes from corporate PR material. While New Scientist has published a number of genuine arguments in favour of GM agriculture in recent years, they're mostly behind their paywall.
That said, I'd be cautious about treating New Scientist as some Vatican-level source of scientific authority. They've managed to rub members of the scientific community up the wrong way on more than one occasion in their quest for sensationalist cover stories.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to simon g,
Stuff then started deleting the abusive comments faster than the trolls could type.
"Stuff then started emptying the bucket faster than the hard-working kiwis could vomit into it"?
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Hard News: Friday Music: Radio With…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
I remember Ray telling us the Island of Real couldn't fit all the people who tried to get in each weekend...
There was a dodgy theory that the Island was popular with students because it had carpet on the floor like at Mum & Dad's.
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Hard News: Bourdain, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Courtesy of the youngers,listening to a fair bit of contemporary music - from pop to anti-folk. There seems to be a deep vein of sadness, wistfulness, and irony gentle or savage, running through most of it. Feels in striking contrast to the optimism (and anger) of 60s music, for example.
How about some feel-good Javanese metal? Several decades of imbibing Smoke on the Water with their mothers' milk doesn't seem to have done these kids any harm.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Sacha,
Silly old men give old men a bad name.
"Show Barry some fucking respect." (Scroll down to "I hate being scooped".)
