Posts by Phil Palmer
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Five! Five broad headings! Our chief weapon is surprise....
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What they should have done is come out batting, and tackle the issue head on, and talk about cost of living, talk about petrol, talk about what the truckers want and what the Government is doing
Er, I thought that's what Annette King did on Close Up. I don't like her much but I was quite impressed.
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John Armstrong however spectacularly misses the point with this piece of stupidity:
Neither did it help Clark that Key had not been involved in the 1993 sale. Yet, even if he had been, what would that have proved?
I think you are all missing the point, which is that Key was forced to explain, and in doing so to convey subtle distinctions and to look as if he was being evasive with technicalities. It's almost as though Labour deliberately mis-phrased the allegation. This targets Key's greatest strength, which is his fresh-faced innocence, and makes him look slippery. Kinda Rovian, eh?
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If an off-duty cop had been in the store, called 111 and identified themselves and stated that the scene was secure, and still the police had waited, then I'd be asking some hard questions. In the absence of any such scenario, though, I cannot fault the police for their actions.
I find I'm still a little bemused by this. Who actually could have made the call? What about an on-duty cop? Since s/he was not supposed to be there, as an important health and safety meeting was going on outside, it might have been improper for him/her to make the call. How about a bishop, or a justice of the peace? Maybe a ship captain or an airline pilot, on or off-duty? Or the local MP? How about a council officer, or an elected councillor? A bank manager? A scoutmaster? A barrister? A High Court Judge? A Notary? A Chartered Accountant? Any serving member of the Armed Forces, or only an officer above the rank of captain? A coastguard? The president of the surf life-saving club? A veterinarian? I think we should be told.
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Honestly, like the SUV thread I fear this one will not change anyone's opinion.
It's changed one of mine. I used to think that the guy in the gun shop who shot a hold-up artist was unjustified.
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The fact that the police may be wonderful people doing a difficult job is neither here nor there. The issue is that they are useless. They need to either shit or get off the pot. Sure, an officer might have to make the calculation that his/her pay doesn't cover the risk of entering premises where there may still be a gunman as well as a dying man, but there would have been many people on the scene, relatives of the victim, who would have made the calculation differently. They are, after all, Sikhs. But the police would as a first step prevent them from doing this.
Second, I notice that all the victims in the recent tragedies are "Asian". I don't believe this is a coincidence; I don't believe the Asian population of South Auckland is large enough to warrant such a conclusion. The victims are Asian because the scumbags who attack society may not know much about sociology or even what or where Asia is, but they sure as hell know how to find the weak spot to attack. The anti-Asian racism in NZ fuels and enables these attacks and it has got to stop. Immediately.
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When I saw the farmlands swinging from floods to drought in the same season, my first thought was that this wasn't a climate problem, it was a problem with water infrastructure. Why didn't the farmers work together to provide the dams, reservoirs, canals, dikes and so forth that would get them through all these recurring 100-year droughts?
(Of course the NZ farmer would rather eat his own children than work collectively. The FFU is there to spout off, not to build things. I know that. But business is business.)
The issue seems to be the high price of land that determines that none of it is going to be set aside for the provision of water. And the price of land is driven up by the easy availability of loans and the high indebtedness model that, for example, dairy farmers develop under. All brought to us by our friendly local (i.e. offshore) bank with no discussion or oversight.
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Rich
Thanks for checking. I have been trying to follow a link to tibetanbuddhism.tribe.net and at first was a little paranoid that the free trade deal meant that China was going to frighten the nz internet into censoring itself, then just became plain irritated that the site was for some reason blocked. But those mung beams, they just shine on crazy like...
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OT - apologies - but is anyone else having trouble accessing xxx.tribe.net sites, or is it just ihug/vodaphne users?
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The Obama speech is thirty-seven minutes long, which is a big deal on my poor little attention span when you include download time. So how many of the 4 million visits actually "read the whole thing"? Though 4 million shows of interest is still quite impressive.