Hard News: The Clamour to Cringe
98 Responses
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Damn you and your quicker draw on the 'Post Reply' button.
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Bamping will soon be a leading search term, with people trying to figure out what the hell it is.
I've been telling people kiwi bamping is our equivalent of quokka soccer.
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Kiwi Bamping article on Wikipedia by day's end?
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The new NIE on Iran represents an extraordinary change in international relations. I hope it is true, but intelligence is never to a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, it is always guesswork to a significant extent, so you never know what the truth really is.
According to the NIE, firstly the Iranians DID have a nuke bomb program which is a very significant finding, and secondly they stopped work on it in late 2003 for "cost benefit reasons". Interesting timing and reasons, don't you think?
Would part of their cost calculation be the real possibility that a certain Cowboy would actually go after them and their nuke bomb program? Why else would they stop work on the program in late 2003? Just maybe the looked west across the border and thought to themselves "Fuck!!" (in Persian of course)
So maybe the US killed 3 birds with one stone? Saddam's regime, then Libya's nuke program which Gadahfi coughed up in late 2003 and now Iran stopped work on their program in late 2003 as well?
So Iraq is going better, AQ in Iraq has had its head handed to it and it looks like North Korea has made a strategic decision to stop being a trouble making hermit kingdom and to rather stop causing trouble and engage with the outside world.
Maybe things aren't going so badly after all?
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Damn you and your quicker draw on the 'Post Reply' button.
Wait till you see how fast I can get the domains and point Wiki at them...:-). Actually no, I vote that Bamping be defined as 'Talking about it on a blog but not actually doing it'. Then it really will carry all the hallmarks of an addictive drug, better than sex, carried out underground.
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Maybe things aren't going so badly after all?
Tell that to all the dead people's families. In person. Make a tape, put it on YouTube. I'd really love to see it.
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Yes, things are going just peachily for all those civilian dead and displaced...
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Hmmm. I think Ben and I have to link pinky fingers and say 'jinx' before we can post again...
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This isn't to suggest that our education system is perfect (or that league tables are everything) but it appears to be outperforming nations with much higher per-capita income than ours.
Exactly. PISA is a league table run by/for the OECD for econo-political purposes. It measures what it wants to find - inequality of test performances - and manipulates that data into international comparisons.
PISA has nothing whatsoever to do with learning and teaching, it's an education management audit system.
Do you support national league tables?
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And yet last week we saw the report that NZ reading skill takes a drop. Of course, if you read the article, it shows that our reading level has risen very slightly, and that it's our international ranking that has dropped.
So we haven't gotten dumber, just everyone else got slightly more smarterer...
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Then it really will carry all the hallmarks of an addictive drug, better than sex...
Dude, one of us is doing SOMETHING wrong.
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Hmmm. I think Ben and I have to link pinky fingers and say 'jinx' before we can post again...
My goodness. I'll bamp to that.
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Derail: New Wikipedia scandal -Prepare for soul searching news stories about it and Web 2.0.
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Wow, I thought, so many comments on NZ education already!
... but it turns out it's just one bamping after another ... -
Dude, one of us is doing SOMETHING wrong.
:-) Reminds me of an old gf when I told her Schwarzenegger once claimed pumping iron was better than sex. She said "He must have really bad sex".
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Bamping is New Zealand's answer to krumping.
No no, NZ's answer to Krumping is Crumping.
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No no, NZ's answer to Krumping is Crumping.
Is that like, telling tall tales in a slow drawl, driving Toyota pick-up trucks, and making fun of short blonde men called Scotty?
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Iran, I don't see how it's possible to be the least bit sure about any of the claims by intelligence agencies about anything.
to be sure, but given that this latest NIE on Iran is substantially different to that in 2005 it does suggest they have based this on what they believe to be good new intelligence. They could possibly be be wrong or lying - which would mean that Iran still has an active nuclear programme. But I really do think that the combined US intelliegnce agencies wouldn't be sitting on that just to make Bush look bad, whatever Podhoretz's conspiracy theories.
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Hmm. My couple-of-hours-old thread on "Kiwi Bamping" at my favoured messageboard (yes, a Star Wars one, I am a geek) now outranks Scoop's story in a 'Kiwi Bamping' google search and is sitting pretty at number 1.
I really feel like I've achieved something today.
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Derail: New Wikipedia scandal -Prepare for soul searching news stories about it and Web 2.0.
Man, what has the Register got against Wikipedia exactly? Do they have a 'one-anti-Wikipedia-article-a-month' policy or something?
To quote the Register in this instance...
...a rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.
Or, to put in less 'shock-horror' terms, a few of the senior editors have a 'private' mailing list where they discuss issues to do with the site. Surely this is stunningly non-controversial.
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I'd replaced the zeitgeist story with a (they say) changed version of the google release before I saw about the bamping. I had a look in case I was going to have to rain on the whole parade, but it's still there.
Let's bamp, bampers.
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to be sure, but given that this latest NIE on Iran is substantially different to that in 2005 it does suggest they have based this on what they believe to be good new intelligence.
Maybe. Or maybe nothing has changed except the attraction of being made to look incompetent by the actions of a moronic lame duck president with the worlds greatest arsenal at his fingertips, and a lot to hide, cover up, and answer for, and no track record of ever accepting blame personally. How would we ever know? Given that this is a 180 degree flipflop, is it really rational to move from high certainty that Iran is working on the bomb to high certainty that they destroyed the whole project 4 years ago? Did what happened 4 years ago change in the last couple of days?
For them to have been so completely hoodwinked into thinking Iran was working on the bomb,despite all protestations from Iran to the contrary, and the sheer scale and risk of such a project, implies that there's just a hell of a lot of "making shit up" involved in all this awesome "intelligence". We can choose to eat it up or start to become skeptical about everything they say.
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We can choose to eat it up or start to become skeptical about everything they say.
you might be right but i think if the NIE assessment turns out to be wrong then it's more likely to be an honest mistake than some sort of skulduggery (a view based purely on not much). Certainly Ehud Barak thinks its wrong and Simon Tisdall concludes his piece with
The irony here, amusing if it were not so deadly serious, is that having been badly wrong about Iraq, a chastened intelligence community, erring on the side of caution, may also be wrong about Iran.
But for the time being I'll take the unjustifiably optimistic view that Iran did respond to international pressure and that for all the bluster on both sides this is all heading for a negotiated settlement.
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__...a rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.__
Or, to put in less 'shock-horror' terms, a few of the senior editors have a 'private' mailing list where they discuss issues to do with the site. Surely this is stunningly non-controversial.
I hear there's this website that's all about Wellington that has the same kind of secret organisational tactic going on. We must out it! Make them go public with their ageist agendas and secret snark attacks and gossipy incliques and cliches!
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