Posts by Paul Campbell
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This completely undid me, I'd moved to the US in '84 and it was like NZ had fallen off the edge of the earth, someone sent me the EP, we didn't have a record player, it sat around for weeks, I had no idea what it was about, a friend at work made me a tape, I put it on as I got on the train, sat in the BART with tears rolling down all the way across the Bay
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OnPoint: Leviathan, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Intercept has a report on Key retracting his vow to resign if it was shown that there was mass surveillance of New Zealanders.
I'm not sure you can just retract a political promise like that - the real issue of course is that at the time Key made that pledge the GCSB was doing mass surveillance ... and Key was the minister in charge, he was supposd to know what was going on - in short he was probably lying when he made the pledge.
Of course now he's saying that he can't talk about it because it was secret - apparently it was OK to talk about it when he was just making stuff up.
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we were talking about Key tonight - and largely agree he's losing it, the outburst in parliment over Iraq, his recent pressappearances - the teflon is flaking he's starting to look a lot like Muldoon in his last days
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so the GCSB is grabbing all phone calls in and out of the pacific, recording them and passing them to the NSA and friends for further use.
But the GCSB is prohibited from spying on NZers – I can’t see how they can possibly do this without examining in detail each and every call to see if there’s a kiwi involved (“oh hey, Auntie May from Auckland is here, let me put her on”, “oh there’s a kiwi in that IRC channel, we can’t record that”)
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having lived 1 block of of Telegraph in North Oakland for a largish chunk of my adult life, moving back to NZ in the summer of ’04 (when the book is set) I have to say …. um no
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Today's Tremain in the ODT is an interesting cartoon, on many level's ... supposedly showing Key trying not to catch whatever is ailing Abbot ...... but that's also a Micky Mouse Key meeting Abbot to show off his Mickey Mouse Iraq policy ... 16 advisors .... then again it might be Mickey Mouse's Key ....
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I think that bringing foreign soldiers onto your soil with diplomatic passports, essentially making them unaccounatble for their actions is a dangerous thing for anyone to do (be it Iraq or NZ)
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Hard News: Haphazardly to war, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Further to that aside, the Radio Pacific talkback show that Muldoon hosted in his dotage presented him as a suburban lily-fancier, with the issues of the day leavened with calls from fellow lily-heads. In real life Muldoon apparently knew squat about lilies, the expertise was all Thea’s.
my take from Nat Radio this morning was not that he didn't know anything about lilies, just that he had poor Thea do all the gardening
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There aren't always good guys - a Ukranian friend's analysis of what his home country has become largely comes down to that.
But there are ordinary people who's lives have been disrupted and destroyed - peace in Iraq and Syria largely depends on their welbeing becoming everyone's primary goal, not on who gets killed - we do peacekeeping well, maybe that's what we should be doing here, creating and defending safe zones rather than killing from above
