Written By: - Date published: 3:59 pm, February 2nd, 2010 - 24 comments
Gordon Campbell has written in Werewolf an excellent pre-review about the Defense White Paper due for release in March. Needless to say whatever it returns with will be controversial because it helps to define the direction of the next few decades of expenditure and focus for our military.
Then we will not have some of the remarkably stupid ‘debate’ by the ossified that happened in the early 2000’s as the Labour government implemented the Quigley review of the armed forces. This pushed the army to the fore, and relegated the other two services to a support role.
It was clear that many in that debate never bothered to read the Quigley report.
Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, February 1st, 2010 - 21 comments
Peter Dunne on his record against Jeanette Fitzsimmons is really an exercise in ego instead of substance
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, January 31st, 2010 - 25 comments
John Key is now stands as being first in NZ for being ‘clueless’ on searches in Google. He is number seven in the world as being clueless. The google-bomb is still running! It will be interesting to push him to number one in the world.
Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, January 29th, 2010 - 43 comments
Ok, I promised a review of the comments in 2009. Here are the usual suspects with both the number of comments and the number of bytes in the comments so you can see who talks a lot and how much. This was a little tricky because I used the e-mails to select the top e-mails, […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, January 29th, 2010 - Comments Off on Maintenance time
On Friday at 7 p.m the server is getting kernel upgrades and other maintenance upgrades. They reckon that it will take 10-15 minutes. In the past this has taken from 5 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the disk state. Be warned and don’t get alarmed – the server hasn’t gone down.
Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, January 27th, 2010 - 29 comments
Today my partner Lyn Collie will be at the world premiere at Festival International du Film Documentaire Oceanien in Tahiti of the documentary that she has been producing part-time all the time I’ve known her. My congratulations to both her, the director Briar March, and the many other people who have worked on this documentary since they started working on it in 2006 for getting it out and being seen.
Written By: - Date published: 10:26 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 24 comments
I was pulling out the stats for 2009 so I could update Tumeke blog rankings about who authors on this site so Tim could update the names under our site name. Rather than just send it to him, I thought I’d post it here and send him a link 😈 Because I wanted to understand […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:42 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 23 comments
No Right Turn has a post about the weirdness of the police forces in Britain at present. Elements of our own police force have been acting just as weirdly about ‘terrorism’ over the past years bringing a new era of police stupidity and police doing actions that are subsequently found to be illegal1. Joking about […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:32 pm, January 16th, 2010 - 56 comments
When you get a cold snap in the local weather, it means that somewhere else got somewhat warmer. Weather is a case of local shifts in energy balances. Climate changes on the other hand are an overall shifting due to underlying changes in energy inflows and retention. You can really only see them looking at […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:22 pm, January 11th, 2010 - 62 comments
This is just too funny. One of Ian Wisharts sources in AirCon which he quoted from ‘verbatim’ turns out to have been a kiddies resource from 1999 – which he still mis-interpreted. Gareth at Hot-topic has been tearing apart some of Wisharts recent posturing, and posted this comment Wishart, responding to some prodding, says this […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:10 pm, January 9th, 2010 - 72 comments
Gareth over at Hot-Topic has written a delightful post “Popgun for hire: A$20,000 detailing one person who is making money off climate change. No it isn’t the scientists. It is our favorite Potty Peer – Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Some of the CCDs have been saying that there is a “climate change industry” and […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:57 pm, January 8th, 2010 - 42 comments
Granny reports that there have been more arrests. Damn, we’re due to head off to Young Labours summer school in Otaki shortly. Be interesting to see if she will accept the restricted bail conditions preventing her from going within 500 metres of the tennis court. Especially as I’m not sure if that would cover the […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:40 pm, January 8th, 2010 - 16 comments
Marty wrote on taxation expert Craig Elliffes opinion series in the Herald a few days ago. The third in the series wound up with statement at the end that exemplifies the major issue with the Tax Working Group and its process. At the tax conference of the Tax Working Group, Susan St John of the […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:52 am, January 7th, 2010 - 79 comments
Idiot Savant at No Right Turn points out that the police (once again1) are violating the law surrounding protest and dissent. The post is reproduced with permission. Two years ago, we saw a significant victory for the right to protest in New Zealand, with the Supreme Court ruling in Brooker v. Police. The court reinterpreted […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:29 pm, January 3rd, 2010 - 12 comments
John Banks is steadily dropping away from a possibility of gaining the Auckland super-city mayoralty. A Herald online poll has John Banks falling to third in preference behind Steven Tindall – who has not even declared that he is interested or would run. Len Brown is far higher in preference. Self-selecting online polls are about […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:29 pm, January 3rd, 2010 - 41 comments
There is a weird article in the Sunday Star Times about a US lecturer missing out on a job because she objected to “the Kiwi habit of going barefoot”. This has been on my mind since summer started. At work the minority of kiwis, immediately shucked the shoes that we’d been wearing during winter and […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:03 pm, December 31st, 2009 - 64 comments
Well it is the end of 2009. So here are some final thoughts on the implications of the political shifts in the climate change debates this year. It has been marked from my viewpoint of an irreverable shift from arguing with CCDs (climate change deniers) to CCSs (climate change skeptics) which on the whole has […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:18 pm, December 30th, 2009 - 7 comments
Haven’t had as much time as I’d like for updates so far – there are some who have been insisting that I be social over the break! There is also a vast oversupply of wine in cupboard, beer in the fridge, and diet forthcoming in the new year where beer is forbidden (red wine is […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:51 pm, December 29th, 2009 - 20 comments
Phil O’Reilly of Business NZ has an opinion piece in the NZ Herald today decrying businesses that trade on the ‘clean and green’ image of New Zealand. He writes as if it is a solely a tourism issue. This is a spin line that David Farrar at Kiwiblog swallows hook, line, and sinker. However the […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:59 pm, December 26th, 2009 - 4 comments
One of the nice things that has shown up over the last few years is the slow rise of Internet videophone technology. I’ve been using Skype for years for various purposes, largely for doing conferences with remote programmers when playing with ideas during projects. But you know a technology is making headway when you see […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:01 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 9 comments
One of the stranger Internet campaigns has being going on in Britain. It has resulted in this excellent track being the Xmas number 1 single this year (it is in my programming playlist for special bugs). Far better than the usual mulch, and enough to wash out the taste of John Keys version of Snoopys […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 27 comments
No Right Turn has a post The blogosphere is not above the law. Since the beginning, there’s been a meme on the internet that the law doesn’t really apply here, and that we can get away with anything. But while there may be practical difficulties (particularly if people are smart and careful), it certainly does, […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 5 comments
In the US it is easier than NZ for home-owners to walk away using the jingle mail options in the US. However in NZ it is far too easy for businesses to do the same. Slate Magazines article “Everyone’s Defaulting, Why Don’t You?” by Daniel Gross points out the absurdity of expecting home owners hit […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:08 am, December 23rd, 2009 - 12 comments
Poring around the nets while I’m on holiday is turning out to be quite interesting looking at summaries of science. I’ve been picking out some for discussion here. Here is a post from Knol with a summary on why Europeans are so pale. They discuss well-known ultraviolet / vitamin D linkage with the consequent diseases. […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, December 22nd, 2009 - 6 comments
There are always consequences to the type of mass unemployment that we’re starting to see in NZ at present. However there looks like being an unexpected one. Spontaneous abortion of male fetuses as a response to mass layoffs. The Economist science section has an article “Girls on top” that discusses this. According to Ralph Catalano […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, December 21st, 2009 - 25 comments
There have been some new results from the search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) at the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) in Minnesota. This showed up in The Economist science section last week with an excellent summary of what they were looking for and why in the post “An early Christmas present?. Around a […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:55 am, December 21st, 2009 - 11 comments
The UMR poll for the Auckland super-city mayoral race is interesting reading. The headline difference (PDF) of 11% towards Len Brown over John Banks has been extensively reported. The poll of 482 people, while small, is even more interesting when you see the breakdown of figures – and a lot worse for John Banks. The […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, December 16th, 2009 - 25 comments
James at Editing teh Herald has started the Golden Garth awards aimed at rewarding the recipients at the Granny. You should all get over there and suggest candidates. I’m puzzling on it myself because there are so many good candidates. I’m aware that some think that the Dom Post is worse than the Granny, but […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:06 am, December 16th, 2009 - 1 comment
Over at FairDeal, NZEI have announced that the support staff in schools have managed to get a wage increase. The campaign by support staff members and the wider union has finally resulted in a settlement of the support staff collective agreement. There is now a $14 minimum rate for Grade A, a $14.62 minimum rate […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:41 pm, December 13th, 2009 - 53 comments
David has a new innovation at the sewer. The old comment voting system has been enhanced to, amongst other things, hide comments when they receive enough votes against. I had some fun testing this last week under various logins that I set up some years ago and keep active. It looks like an innovate quantitative […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, December 11th, 2009 - 5 comments
The final Auckland Drinking Liberally takes place NEXT TUESDAY upstairs at THE KINGSLANDER and features political commentator/national campaigns director for Finsec/all round nice guy Andrew Campbell. Andrew has a weekly spot as the leftwing commentator on National Radio’s Nine-to-noon show on Mondays. He’s coming to give us his ‘end of year review’ and what to […]
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