Hard News: Turning the page
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Perhaps the name reminds you of Hank Quinlan, Orson Welles' corrupt Police captain in Touch of Evil.
Woo - great spotting!
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Danyl
You comment on Wishart's blog? You're a braver man than I, Gunga Din.
seems like a pretty crummy kind of absolute power if you ask me . . .
Yeah, Joe Stalin would be rolling in his grave at that definition. I wonder how he will explain away Ms Helen "ABSOLUTE POWER" Clark having to face general elections every three years.
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Ho, ho, This gets better. Someone on Wishart's blog called "ian" says:
New Zealand's prime ministers can be compared to the "Stuart royal executive"
Damned Stuart's, so absolutist that they kept getting their heads cut off and deposed...by Parliament.
Ducks in a barrel this, but it'll keep me amused for another 10 minutes.
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So there you have it - Clark has the kind of absolute power where you have to play sides off against each other on an issue by issue basis, which seems like a pretty crummy kind of absolute power if you ask me . . .
Good God: I just read the thread. Is that all it's going to be? Eve's Bite Goes to Parliament?
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Is that all it's going to be? Eve's Bite Goes to Parliament?
My prediction is that the book will have one or two genuine scoops or items of interest but that they will be lost in a blizzard of implausible conspiracy theories.
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Detective Inspector Harry Quinn
... useless sidebar info - Harry Quinn is Keith Quinn's brother. "Lomu..! Lomu...!"
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Wishart's put out a trioka of books in the last year. In addition to Eve's Bite and Absolute Power, he also wrote The Divinity Code. A telling review of the latter from Christan News, an outlet with the (half-joking?) masthead line "Sponsored by the Elusive Brethren & Right Wing American Fundamentalists" and therefore friendly with his arguments, had this cracker of a line:
At some points in the book Wishart goes off on tangents not particularly relevant to the truth of Christianity e.g. the possible existence of Atlantis.
So, Lyndon, the big reveal is unlikely to be reptilian. My money's on amphibians.
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I say this only in the interests of Wishart not making a complete dick of himself, again.
Did it work? No?
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So, Lyndon, the big reveal is unlikely to be reptilian. My money's on amphibians.
Bah! I've said it before and I'll say it again: Wishart's second-rate compared to David Icke. He's already been there with his revelation that the Windsors are anthropophagic (well, we can hardly say cannibalistic) reptiles (beat that, Mohammed al-Fayed!).
Did it work? No?
Tinfoil hats, matey. Absolutely impenetrable.
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Key has just been quoted on Radio NZ news rejecting the police conclusion and saying he believes there was an external super-hacker.
Jeez ... Just let it go.
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Come to think of it, that tinfoil armour concept should be be further investigated by the army, as should cognitive dissonance overall. I have visions of crack squads who are utterly immune from harm because they simply refuse to accept that they've been shot, are bleeding, that their guts are spread all over the battlefield. Furthermore, if Wle E. Coyote trained the airforce, we could have a combat wing again without any planes - pilots simply run off cliffs carrying heavy guns and refuse to look down.
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Kracklite: Come to think of it, that tinfoil armour concept should be be further investigated by the army
The US army has gone down this path already, as chronicled by Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I reviewed it a while back <gratuitious vanity-link alert>:
Given a budget and personnel, the army of tomorrow tries all sorts of bizarre, but cheap, experiments. There is a room with six men, ostensibly clairvoyants, who try to visualise where Saddam Hussein is hiding. In their spare time they entertain themselves by trying to find the Loch Ness monster. And there is Guy Savelli, a legend in occult military circles because he once stopped the heart of a goat simply by staring at the animal.
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Key has just been quoted on Radio NZ news rejecting the police conclusion and saying he believes there was an external super-hacker.
Of course he did. I mean, he's hardly goign to fess up himself, is he?
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I really doubt that John Key - who stood to be made Finance minister in a triumphant National Government - was leaking highly sensitive documents to Nicky Hagar the week before the election.
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I went a long to a lecture on the Divinci Code and Jesus by an AU/AUT (?) lecturer of no note.
Part way through and a wee religious bias was clear. He could only use the bible as a primary source (ok), but wouldn't address the possibility of an unwed mum Mary or a gay Jesus, to explain Jesus not being married.
He took the Divinci Code far too seriously and as a threat to History (& I think his faith).
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Key has just been quoted on Radio NZ news rejecting the police conclusion and saying he believes there was an external super-hacker.
Jeez ... Just let it go.
Someone should assist Mr Key pick his battles - he keeps picking other's.
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Well, all he has to do is rely on the good old "he said, she said" balance in the media, and general apathy/exhaustion.
Police investigation says: No hacker. An inside job. (Reason: evidence).
John Key says: Might have been a hacker. Definitely not an inside job. (Reason: coz I say so).
And if you still dare to question what is blatantly bullshit, John's gotta message for ya: "Get lost".
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Jon Ronson's THEM was a tv series here in Blighty. If you think he was pissing about with wannabee Islamic terrorists at least one of them was convicted and sent down for some time recently. There is a very interesting moment in the video where head terrorist looks at his group of 'recruits' and tells him that Jon and his camera man are Jews...
That they are all in a Scout hut at the time only slightly diminishes it. Although there is the element of the banality of evil there too. Like the original Dr Who and the Autons, iirc I was about 8 when that came out and I remember being genuinely scared walking along George St in Dunedin with my Mum that the hands of the shop dummies were going fall off and a gun emerge...
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Jeez ... Just let it go.
I sort of agree with you. But you've got to love the two word response to Nicky Hager's demand for an apology for the ""baseless allegations" that he obtained the e-mails illegally: "get lost".
Of course, Mr. Hager could sue Don Brash, John Key and everyone else (including myself) who've suggested any such thing for defamation, and reveal exactly how he obtained them in an open court. After all the one person who can definitively settle the question is...
Of course he did. I mean, he's hardly goign to fess up himself, is he?
And if Hager obtained them illegitimately, he's hardly going to fess up himself and throw his credibility (and livelihood) down the crapper, is he?
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And if Hager obtained them illegitimately
Nice smear, Craig. You might also think Hager would have been in the cops line of sights and was cleared.
According to Brash the same cannot be said for his National party colleagues.
Of course, Mr. Hager could sue
The idea that you run to a court as soon as you think you are defamed is nuts. It generally only works for really rich folks or corporations. The rest of us try and keep our heads down and avoid costly forays into the courts. An "nut job media" type trick is to accuse someone of shit and then if not sued point to this as evidence of guilt on the part of the defamed party.
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And if Hager obtained them illegitimately, he's hardly going to fess up himself and throw his credibility (and livelihood) down the crapper, is he?
Nicky Hager has built his career on getting people to trust him and give him information that he puts in his books, and researching publicly available information. He didn't steal the material for any of his other books, and he's said the same thing about all books - people thought this information should be made public, they gave it to me and I've done so.
Nicky Hager is never going to tell the public who gave him the documents, it would wreck his career. It's not unreasonable, particularly given that the police have said that they weren't stolen via hacking, which is what he's been saying all along, that he's telling the truth and someone indeed did print them off and give them to him.
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Nice smear, Craig. You might also think Hager would have been in the cops line of sights and was cleared.
Nice to see you calmed your stomach for a moment. Not to actually bother reading what Harry Quinn actually said, but here goes:
“How the thefts occurred still largely remains a mystery,” said Detective Inspector Quinn. “We have eliminated the suggestion that an external ‘computer hacker’ had breached the computer security within Parliament but there remains many other potential ways in which the crimes could have occurred.”
[...}
“There are strong indications that the e-mails were in printed form at the time of the theft, but with the thefts perhaps happening at any time over the two- year period it is very likely that they were stolen during several incidents,” Detective Inspector Quinn said.
So, good spin Don -- but the problem for me is that nobody's been cleared of anything. Hager himself -- or his sources -- could definitively settle this, and they're entitled not to. But please spare me the faux outrage from Hager, when his vindication is in his own hands.
An "nut job media" type trick is to accuse someone of shit and then if not sued point to this as evidence of guilt on the part of the defamed party.
Thanks, Don. Having been threatened with a vexatious defamation suit more than once - and being perfectly well-aware of the costs involved -- I don't need any schooling from you on this point. Still, nice to see I'm a "nut job" for even suggesting a pretty obvious recourse for Hager if he felt "the National Party" had defamed him. I made no comment on the validity, or probable success of such an action.
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Has Nicky Hagers writing improved?
"Secret Power" cured my insomnia for a while with its heavy language written in a pretty Stalinist style.
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Nicky and his sources are even gloating about the inability of the sources to be found.
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Kyle:
I particularly loved this passage:
Mr Hager told Radio New Zealand this morning that he continued to get material from National and other parties, but he had no plans for another book.
"I am still regularly getting information from the National Party as I do from other parties."
He said some of the sources were still in the National Party and he had recently been in contact with the people who leaked him information.
I now have precisely no confidence in the security of personal information the party holds about me, or anyone who was in any senior staff or leadership role while Brash was leader.
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