Posts by Jono
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When my partner and I moved in together three years ago from separate flats with neither of us owning a tv, she convinced me we could live without. I disagreed but said I would give it ago.
We still dont have one and that is more than fine with me.
I say this as former huge tv fan, a regular 45+ hour a week watcher, and pourer of scorn on relatives and school friends who didn't have tv's when I was growing up...hippies, weirdos, Christians and homeschoolers!
I doubt I could go back now, the state of news and current affairs would do my head in, as would reality tv. Yelling at the radio is bad enough but I dont have the time or energy to waste on tv now (dog, then baby etc). I do admit to sometimes feeling a little disconnected from what the national community is experience/talking about but I suspect that I know as much as your average person about what is going on (a little conceit, but perhaps I know even a little more) but without all the noise and lights and breathlessness and emoting (Katherine Ryan notwithstanding)
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Its not just here that they hate urban limits and smart growth. Andrew Sullivan's stand-ins at the Atlantic comment on the conservative dislike of urbanism and growth limits here and here
Its just another article of faith, with apparantly quite deep philospohical underpinings, promulgated here by the likes of the Centre for Resource Management Studies* and Demographia.
*Kaiwaka may be the Centre for Fine Dutch Cheese, Brethren Leathergoods, and Awesome Christmas Lights but given its fine location miles from the coast, in a cold valley, with a state highway dividing it in half, I can't say its represents awesome town planning.
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The Nat Rad coverage this morning caused me to swear at my steering wheel. I cannot imagine any situation that would cause me to hit my son in the face, I just simply cannot. He is only six months old and no doubt will in coming years (if anything like his stubborn and argumentative parents) cause us great trial. But punching him in the face for anything? Inconceivable.
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And while we're at it, I heard this on the radio yesterday: data security services company schills research showing NZers want bigger, better, faster biometric banking security because they phe4r teh haX0rz.
And the Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg punks the Transport Security Administration , leading to a series of posts and reader mails about the farce of security theatre in the US.
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I was talking to a ex-policeman colleague yesterday and he mentioned the very, very, very high bar that was set for a case he was involved in where they didnt have the body and needed the heel-prick blood to match with (presumably, as he didnt go into details) other crime scene evidence.
Did this also happen in regard to the Sounds homicide?
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Just how long has it been for ol' Red? I remember him from usenet at least ten or twelve years ago...I wonder if its the same dude.Or like the Dred Pirate Roberts, does the baton get handed on following the ineivetable haemorrhage?
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This is the second time this meme has cropped up on Blogs today, but how widespread was it before the election?
It feels like an extension of the "Helens got no kids = Labour is anti-family" equation.
It doesnt matter if it isn't "reality-based" as long as it fits with the reality the opposition was pushing, and I wouldn't be surprised if was being whispered at play centres and church lunches for the last God-knows how long, along with all the other smears.
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My mums church has just re-established a foodbank in her garage. The last time it operated was from 1991-1995. I remember those years in rural northland as unrelentingly wet, grim, laced with lonely suicides and empty storefronts. Some towns have recovered, others have yet to do so.
The Bible says there's nothing new under the sun and the Byrds paraphrased about there being a season for everything, not that it makes it any easier to swallow.
So I also offer my thanks to Clark and Co for a (comparatively) sunny last nine years, which served as a backdrop to growing up, finishing a Masters degree, travelling overseas, losing a parent, getting a job, buying a house and having a baby.
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Lyndon, I am not saying that what we have had since shortly after the 2005 election hasn't been coordinated and cynical (giving them the benefit of the doubt about whetever honest initial miffed reaction there was to be had).
I guess I was thinking specifically in terms of what has happened in the US with the McCain campaign and the strategy as rather more calculated. That is, having seen the writing on the wall, they are stoking the fires about the election being stolen by ACORN-enabled vote fraud so as to get up a head of steam to take them through to the 2012 Palin redux.
I lived in the US in 2002-03 and was working in a fairly heavily democratic-voting sector and they were still/still are drawing on Gore-2000 and their righteous anger to get them through the day. This was pre-An Inconvenient Truth and to the faithful, Gore was a rockstar....Gore!!!
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Are what we are seeing in this Herald editorial and recent chatter about overhangs the first salvos of a campaign to deligitimise the possible LPGUFNZFMPWhatever governing arrangement that might pip them to the post?
IIt feels to me like a preemptive cry of "Stabbed in the back".