Posts by anth
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Romney's transition website went live for a while
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
That the shotgun was in a safe is irrelevant, as its very presence in a panic room would be prima facie evidence that it was owned for self-defence and that’s not considered a lawful purpose.
On the other hand I believe that gun owners are required to keep their weapons secure, and presumably the safe room is the most secure part of the house.
If there had been a home invasion and he’d sat in that room until the police arrived they’d probably have praised him for being a responsible gun owner who neither took the law into his own hands nor let the evil-doers get hold of the gun. That didn’t happen of course, all we know is that the gun wasn’t used.
Well, in a way there was a home invasion and he sat in the panic room until the police arrived. It wasn’t quite as I meant in the previous paragraph though.
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I do wonder how deep-seated the biological/psychlogical urge to ‘other’ those who are different is.
No idea.
A study from last year suggests that this is related to oxytocin, often called the "love hormone" because it was previously known for the role it plays in bonding (eg sex, childbirth). More discussion here.
It does, to a greater or lesser degree, seem to be quite deep-rooted in the human psyche. How do we deal with that?
If love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin (or hormone) then it'll be pretty hard to deal with.
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Wikileaks have released some cables related to the US involvement in creating NZ laws and funding a copyright enforcement unit,
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The Herald seems (unusually) to have uncovered a few slight overestimates around the Rugby World Cup (TM) for instance.
The RWC being the "third biggest sporting event in the world" is apparently for cumulative attendance at a competition between national teams, and for the 2.2 million who went to matches at the last one. The "national teams" bit gets rid of a lot of competitions where the winner would be an individual, or a club or trade team, not to mention various national (rather than international) competitions. I'm not sure that cumulative attendance is all that good a measure either; it would make the upcoming RWC (1.65 million assumming that all tickets are sold) less important than the Super 14 (2.02 million).
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There has been at least one survey where most of the tourists said they'd have visited those castles etc regardless of whether the royal family were still treated as such. For at least some of those sites getting rid of the royals would be an improvement from a tourist point of view, allowing greater access.
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How about something a little more uplifting: Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields"
Admittedly this was in response to a suicide bombing, and sources less related to the Eqyptian government describe it has being partly an anti-government rally.
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Hmm, maybe the threshold should be kept but dropped to 1% to save having to explain the Sainte Lague method.
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Keep MMP, change this single-seat rule.
Keep MMP, get rid of the 5% threshold.
Yeah, it'd have been easier for Winston Peters and Graham Capill to get in or stay in but they wouldn't have had much power unless they'd got enough votes to bring a few others in with them. The people in those electorates could choose the candidate they wanted rather than having to vote strategically. The bigger parties wouldn't worry about having to tailor a policy or two to either bleed votes off the fringe parties to get them below 5%, or to give them space to differentiate themselves.
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It's nice that the people of Auckland voted ...
It'd be better if ...I'd say having a similar number of voters per councillor should be pretty high on the list of things that'd be nice to have.