Posts by Alfie
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to nzlemming,
But can you imagine the GOP’s response if a Clinton did it?
A presidential candidate encouraging a foreign power to conduct and act of espionage against his political opponent? They’d be shouting "treason" from the rooftops and bringing out their assault rifles.
The Independent reckons Trump is flirting with electoral disaster, the GOP is backpedalling as fast as they can, and the New York Times is scathing.
If Mr. Trump is serious in his call for Russian hacking or exposing Mrs. Clinton’s emails, he would be urging a power often hostile to the United States to violate American law by breaking into a private computer network. He would also be contradicting the Republican platform, adopted last week in Cleveland, saying that cyberespionage “will not be tolerated,” and promising to “respond in kind and in greater magnitude” to all Chinese and Russian cyberattacks.
It's also emerged that Trump has ripped off the slightly sick-making ‘USA Freedom Kids’ dance group which opened his early rallies. They're threatening a law suit against Trump. Join the queue, kids.
And a quick aside to the DNC… here’s the US Green Party’s Presidential candidate Jill Stein destroying some dim-witted Fox News interviewers with commentary from The Humanist Report. (Link via The Standard).
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to David Hood,
Bring those jobs back to America by electing Donald president.
In the meantime, Trump has pissed off the GOP again by going off message, encouraging Russia to hack Clinton’s personal server and release whatever they find there. The man's seriously unhinged.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
If your local substation trips, then a small number of inverters will try and drive all the local loads – which they obviously can’t do, so they’ll go into a trip/restart cycle, which might break stuff.
As Moz says, that ain't gonna happen. Our solar system is grid-tied and while we have manual isolation switches with bloody great warning signs, an essential part of the sign-off is automatic shutdown whenever the grid fails. We had a six hour (planned) outage last week and our solar simply shuts down until it detects live power from the mains. Then it boots up and resyncs again.
What Moz is discussing is actually quite cute -- a dual system with mains power wired seperately from an off-grid solar setup charging a UPS. That would also provide a way of getting around the lines companies stupid "solar tax" which the Commerce Commission seems set to approve.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
was stoush or stooshie (sp?) first?
It seems that the word ‘stoush’ applies primarily in New Zealand and Australia and appears to be derived from the Scottish word stooshie. And your spelling was correct David.
While appreciating your desire for ice block simplicity, surely the Chinese block travelling thousands of kilometres to market whilst remaining frozen also increases its total emissions?
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Here's the Wikileaks DNC email dump -- 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments which they describe as "part one of our new Hillary Leaks series." Implying there's more to come.
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Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sums up the sad spectacle that was the 2016 Republican Convention. A campaign trail which was “more TV show than democracy” populated by fading celebrities. A very one-sided affair with “10 cops for every reporter and 10 reporters for every protester.”
It wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump’s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess.
We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of “New York, New York” while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald’s acceptance speech…
But nah. What happened instead was just sad and weird, very weird. The lineup for the 2016 Republican National Convention to nominate Trump felt like a fallback list of speakers for some ancient UHF telethon, on behalf of a cause like plantar-wart research.
It's also worth checking out Jon Stewart's RNC rave when he guests on The Late Show.
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As you might expect from a party getting behind the orange misogynist, the RNC has some tasteful merchandise on offer.
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John Drinnan has an interesting story in the Herald looking at the Fairfax decision to run a monthly eight-page China Watch “PR/propaganda sheet”.
Fairfax claim that being paid to run PR for the Chinese government won’t compromise their editorial status in any way. Drinnan begs to differ.
But in my opinion, the willingness to run politicised content overwhelms that distinction. Who is next – North Korea?
The good news is that China Watch features so much heavy handed PR and boosterism, only a moron in a hurry would confuse it for editorial.
The same liftout will also appear in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review, the London Telegraph and the Washington Post. Last month ABC’s Media Watch discusses the ethics involved in taking money to spread propaganda. They also look at how the Chinese government “trains” journalists and its influence on Chinese language papers abroad. It’s worth a watch.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Even though his ancestor was briefly part of the Ottoman Turkish government I suspect the well-upholstered Boris is merely an almost six-foot stool…
Love your work Ian.
This Matt Kenyon graphic accompanying Jonathan Freedland's Guardian story -- "With Boris Johnson in charge of diplomacy, Britain has insulted the world" -- sums up the Bojo situation perfectly.
It's been a helluva few days. Brexit and the Bojo fiasco, Trump creeping ahead of Hillary in US polls, bitter UK Labour Party infighting, a new variation on lone-wolf terrorism resulting in mass deaths in Nice and now a military coup underway in Turkey. It feels like Western stability is going to hell in a handbasket.
Honestly, if you have any interest in European and world politics, it feels like the western world as we know it is crashing down in a big heap at the moment.
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May's radical cabinet cleanout has certainly shocked a lot of people. Writing in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee describes it as a "brutal clear-out of the Cameron era". Her depiction of Osborne is sublime.
With a hiss of sulphur George Osborne exits stage right, never again his smirking budgets to pound the half of the nation relying on housing benefit or tax credits. He had to go – not just for serial failure, but in the culture change sweeping away the Cameron clique: Notting Hill and public school replaced with grammar-school grafters.
The biggest surprise has to be the appointment of Bullingdon old boy Boris as foreign secretary. This man has already insulted a huge swathe of the world's leaders, is pro-Israel and flying in the face of existing UK policy, believes the UK should be fighting alongside Assad and Putin. Yep... that's gonna go well.
Consider for a moment that this appointment also places BoJo in charge of MI6. Now that's a scary thought.
One area where Britain has always led the world is satire -- this from John Crace.
Time for a breather and some lunch. Theresa switched on the news to find that, in his first address to Foreign Office staff, Boris Johnson had promised to re-colonise Africa and pose naked as Mr November for President Putin’s 2017 calendar. Maybe it hadn’t been quite such a good appointment after all.
