Written By: - Date published: 4:58 pm, October 16th, 2010 - 12 comments
An article in The Economist looks at the failing basis of polling techniques in the USA. It isn’t that much different to the circumstances here.
“The proportion of those called who end up taking part in a survey has fallen steadily, from 35% or so in the 1990s to 15% or less now, according to Mr Keeter. Reaching young people is especially difficult. Only old ladies answer the phone…”
Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, October 10th, 2010 - 19 comments
With all of the political activity over the last week, there are a few items that missed getting covered as well as the ones that we covered extensively. Rather than do individual posts on the idiots of the week, I’ve written an omnibus post of my notes from the last week.
Written By: - Date published: 11:55 am, October 8th, 2010 - 3 comments
Due to widespread demand (ie BLiP), I’m going to try to find a Friday funny each week. This particular video is a pretty good spoof on Paul Henry. The only problem is that for comedic effect you’d normally need to go further than the origional. However going further than Henry requires more international incidents. TVNZ needs to fire him.
Written By: - Date published: 3:48 pm, October 6th, 2010 - 45 comments
There has been an interesting ad from Greenpeace running around the site today. It is obviously intended to go viral before the lawyers from Fonterra get it into court… I think I might help out a bit… So should you – dump it onto the social media.
Written By: - Date published: 2:18 pm, October 5th, 2010 - 95 comments
Paul Henry has been suspended from TVNZ. He will return on air on Monday 18 October. That simply isn’t good enough – he needs to be sacked because he is a recidivist offender who appears to be incapable of learning. As Mike Treen says “Paul Henry has become the poster boy for bigotry. He has no place on a national broadcaster paid for by taxpayers – taxpayers who include many of the people he humiliates.”
Written By: - Date published: 1:23 pm, October 1st, 2010 - 62 comments
Remember how John Key used to talk about GST? Here is a video reminding everyone of the past before he did his usual flip-flop to favour the rich while increasing costs on most people. The GST increase and the consequent inflation will make almost everyone worse off unless they are wealthy enough to bribe the NACT’s.
Written By: - Date published: 3:26 pm, September 19th, 2010 - 36 comments
Periodically I have a look at the stats captured for the site. This time I thought I’d show you some of them for the last three months. I’ve picked out what browser and operating systems people have been using.
Written By: - Date published: 2:54 pm, September 13th, 2010 - 12 comments
Reading the New York Times this weekend, I found this wee gem.
Compared to my iPad, I’d have to say (sadly) there is at least one thing that newspapers are better at. However I don’t think that this will prevent me from avoiding bloating landfills.
Written By: - Date published: 2:49 pm, September 4th, 2010 - 14 comments
New Zealand is one of the oddest places geologically (Japan is similar) in the world because of our position between two plates and because we are at the twist where the plates change how they interact with each other. But the position of the Christchurch earthquake is a long way from the plate boundaries. Highly Allochthonous has a look at the mechanism of the quake.
Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, September 4th, 2010 - 109 comments
The Christchurch earthquake was a shallow high magnitude earthquake close to a urban population centre. That is the disaster scenario for planners. It is a disaster, but not a major disaster. The enforcement of building regulations ensured that the city took damage, but survived largely intact.
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, August 29th, 2010 - 11 comments
The site has now been reconfigured to be a multi-site system. This will allow us to start setting up child sites for more specialized topics in the future. It should allow us to keep expanding our range of posts with the ever increasing number of authors.
Written By: - Date published: 7:52 am, August 27th, 2010 - 12 comments
There have been 6000 published* posts, 192 thousand comments, and many millions of page views. I’d guess that this multiple-author blog has a wee bit of an audience.
And the server has been stable….
Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, August 22nd, 2010 - 37 comments
Australia is about to enter a new era in politics. They appear to have a hung parliament this morning according to the Sydney Morning Herald. There are a number of marginal seats in the balance. The single Green MP in the lower house and a number of independents will determine which major party forms a government.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, August 21st, 2010 - 21 comments
Reading about Act ritualistically disemboweling themselves this week has been interesting, and has quite a few implications for the political landscape at the next election. The factor that has been attracting my attention was highlighted by Fran O’Sullivan this morning – where did those defense papers wind up. Apparently with The Veteran at No Minister, who wins kudos from me by acting responsibly to the leak.
Written By: - Date published: 5:55 pm, August 18th, 2010 - 37 comments
Watching ACT at present must be similar to watching a red giant finishing consuming all of its helium, expel its envelope, and collapse down to dwarf star. A breaking Herald report on the back story of the ACT leadership assassination says Heather Roy’s “leaked documents…portray Act leader Rodney Hide as an abusive, intimidating bully”
Written By: - Date published: 9:57 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 49 comments
We managed to miss The Standard’s third birthday a few days ago despite some earlier avowed intentions to make a fuss over it. The site started on August 15th 2007 and has grown into a massive community project of the left since then. Long may it continue….
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, August 13th, 2010 - 32 comments
In Morning Report yesterday there was a clear question and statement on the difference between weather events and climate. This is a question that always seems to confuse our CCD’s (climate change deniers and skeptics). So it is worth examining it a bit in the view of some of the unusual weather that has been happening recently. A increased frequency of such events is going to be the main effect of climate change over time, leading eventually to famines.
Written By: - Date published: 12:02 pm, August 6th, 2010 - 17 comments
A story in the Heralds Sideswipe offers and interesting insight into veteran professional politician John Banks, and his priorities and social evolution. I’d suggest that women and any males who aren’t still living in the 19th century take note – and vote against the knuckle scraper.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 4th, 2010 - 73 comments
Why in hell are John Banks and the irresponsible Citizens and Ratepayers dominated Auckland City Council giving me (as a ratepayer) the risks of rebuilding Eden Park. They (and I) already have more than enough risks to handle in the massive costs of the leaky building liabilities.
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, August 1st, 2010 - 35 comments
The activities of the dishonorable Minister for Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett has been increasingly reminding me of the blogger Whaleoil. Consider the number of common points of obnoxious behaviour. The similarities are quite striking. The main difference is that one is a blogger opinionating on current affairs and the other is a minister of the crown with the responsibility for large numbers of dependent people.
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 am, July 31st, 2010 - 16 comments
The Economist has a great article looking at the American propensity to deprive their citizens of their liberty for trivial offenses. We have the same stupid political ratcheting here that causes it. A large part of that is fueled by groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust. There needs to be a broad agreement across the political spectrum about such hysterical groups before they cause more damage.
Written By: - Date published: 5:46 pm, July 30th, 2010 - 11 comments
While there are some ministers who are pretty scared of fronting up for their portfolios, Kate Wilkinson is one of the worst.
There is also this little gem about a Minister that is happy to be anywhere that Sean Plunket isn’t. I guess this image will get a lot of use. Anyone got a good caption?
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, July 30th, 2010 - 10 comments
A recent poll in New Hampshire showed that being endorsed by Sarah Palin was an immediate turnoff to moderate voters. Similarly the RWNJ’s of the ‘tea party’ have managed to succeed in getting ideologically ‘pure’ but politically lower quality candidates selected where the GOP has undemocratic systems in place. Is this the beginning of the end for the RWNJ’s in the US as voters reject their candidates? Now if only WhaleOil would endorse candidates here…
Written By: - Date published: 5:28 pm, July 29th, 2010 - 242 comments
It sounds like Chris Carter has shot himself in the foot, or rather in the handwriting.
Phil Goff and the caucus look like they have taken the required quick and decisive action.
Written By: - Date published: 1:40 pm, July 25th, 2010 - 8 comments
National have been undemocratically shutting down the avenues to amend their ideologically stupid legislation. They ignore submissions to select committees and abuse the parliamentary process of urgency. The only effective means of diverting them from pushing through unworkable legislation is proving to be protests and direct action. Consequently you can expect to see a lot more of it.
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, July 25th, 2010 - 2 comments
We have it all wrong. What Brownlee was really trying to say. From William Joyce
Written By: - Date published: 1:03 pm, July 20th, 2010 - 7 comments
There is a great review of “There Once Was An Island: Te Henua E Noho†at Reading the Maps. It is well worth reading and so are the comments. However ‘maps’ also opined on the weekend about where the film was shown. It expressed my feeling of being caught in some dreary surreal cyberpunk novel with the protests, police, fat cat capitalists, the desperate on their slot machines, and a documentary about losing your culture to the climate and change.
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, July 18th, 2010 - 10 comments
Today has been a busy day. Lyn and Briar have the NZ premiere of their documentary shortly, which limited what I could do today. But I stopped off at the protest outside of the National party conference and met The Rat. The speakers were right – it does have a strong visual resemblance to John […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 16 comments
At Hot Topic, Gareth has a post on Christopher Monckton attempting to stifle the well-justified criticism of himself . For some reason he seems to think that it is ok for him to criticize working scientists despite having little knowledge of the subjects. However he seems to think they should not be able to analyze or criticize his level of stupid ineptitude.
Written By: - Date published: 3:17 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 27 comments
From the Flicker pages of William Joyce, we have this cogent visual comment on Murray McCully and his diplomatic skills. But the image needs a good caption… 😈
Written By: - Date published: 9:07 am, July 14th, 2010 - 17 comments
The documentary “There Once was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho” that my partner Lyn Collie has spent her ‘spare’ time producing for the last four years is about to get it screened in New Zealand at the film festivals starting this weekend. This documentary directed by Briar March has won multiple awards at its festival screenings worldwide. I still find it pretty good myself even after having to sit through it many times during post-production. Tickets are selling fast.
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