Posts by rodgerd
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Like the 2% death rate in stomach bypass operations - nearly all occur in the first 20 ops. So they can become skilled overseas.
A friend of mine is having spinal surgery this year that he turned down 5 years, because the failure rate (where failure = paralysis) has dropped from a few in a thousand to a few tens or hundreds of thousands, simply as surgeons have become more expereienced.
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So in 20-30 years time we've got two classes of retirees: those that did well with their Kiwisaver provider and those that didn't. The latter will include those that opted out in the beginning, meaning their nest egg is tiny.
Not much different from now, then, is it?
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It's not much of a conspiracy though is it
To steal a good quote else: Clearly it is that world view shared by Noam Chomsky, Richard Perle, Stephen Gould and Steve Pinker, Arnold Schoenberg and Jack Benny.
(From http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/05/how_to_destroy_wikipedia.php#comment-433743 )
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In the end, I don't think your grandchildren are going to look back on us with too much generosity
Who's we, white man? I'm part of the generation who's paying for the mess built up from when people voted Nordy out for haviung a balanced budget in favour of debt binging until recently. I'm with my grandchildren.
But I guess that would require a little more than sound bites designed to scare the crap out of people, wouldn't it?
There's also not turning into a pissy bitch at the drop of a hat, so you both have something to work on.
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I'm interested that you appear to think "lifestyle" doesn't count, only income. Really?
If only income counts, people moving to Oz are muppets. They could be getting way richer in Europe or North America.
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Simon sees as Jewish lobbying is better characterised as US evangelical lobbying. Jesus isn't going to come back on his own, you know.
It's a pity the term Zionist got derailed from the original Jewish and Christian groups who campaigned for the state of Israel in the late 19th century to a nutty anti-Semetic/conspiracy theorist term of abuse, because it was a neat way of encapulating said groups.
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Imagine the confusion if American, Christian and Anglo Saxon were used almost interchangably...to me, that's the situation we have with Israel/Judaism/being Jewish.
What, you mean like the way everyone with white skin in NZ is supposed to call themselves a European?
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groveled to Israel of recent. The Republicans don't need to, we know where they stand.
What, as the last group of politicians to attempt to moderate Israeli behaviour? It was Bush senior who threatened to remove some of the huge subsidy paid to Israel unless they stopped the "facts on the ground" strategy of appropriating Palestinian territory via settlements.
It will take twice as long for an Israeli-Palestinian solution
Unfortunately there are rather a lot of people who don't _want_ a solution. Just as a lot of fuckwad Americans were happy to subsidise IRA terrorists (many of them New Yorkers, in a rather black irony, all things considered), based on romantic stories of the 'old country', long after most Irish had lost value for them, there are plenty of people outside Israel who are far happier with a millitant, expansionist Israeli state than one at peace with its neighbours (just as, on the other side, there are many people who wouldn't want a Palestinian state at peace with Israel).
Plenty of the support for the more radical/anti-Arab/millitant factions in Israel comes from groups (apocalyptic Christians, as one random examples) who don't have to live with the likely long-term consequences of Israel being locked in a constant state of hostility with its neighbours.
And that's before even considering the Israeli domestic politics, upon which I cannot claim to be well-informed, but what I hear from better-informed friends makes my hair curl. Well, more than it is already.
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There are some critics - New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani come first to mind -- whose sensibilities are so out of tune with my own, that if they praise something to the skies, there's an 80% I'll lhate it, and vice versa.
One of the things I appreciate most about Roger Ebert is that he is generally able to evaluate movies as to whether they are succeeding at the type of movie they wish to be, as opposed to the more common trait of simply pouring acid on anything that does not match the critic's preferences, which is the more common approach.
One of the few things I've ever read by TS Eliot that I liked was an essay on the value of criticism... and yet I find myself unable to wholy agree with the prevailing sentiment in this discussion. While there are plenty of reviewers and critics who are simply rubber-stamping PR to make a liviing via glossy (games, retaurant, movie, car, whatever) magazines, there are also more than a few who seem to relish a cult of personality where the reviewer has become bigger than the audience, bigger than the art or product, bigger than everything except the critic's own bloated ego.
I can certainly understand artists being uninterested in yet another slagging from someone who is known more for their sharp tongue than their insight, just as I can understand their lack of interest in maulings at the hands of frustrated wanna-be artists (most of the most vigourous and least balanced crticism of Tarantino I've seen over the years seems to come from film school grads who seem embittered mainly about the idea that someone went from video stores to making movies with Harvey Keitel).
Critics, like referees, can be important, but it's not uncommon for both to take themselves entirely too seriously. And without wishing to sound like I'm poking at Graham, music criticism is the area I find worst of all; pick up a copy of a random music rag and for the most part the reviews are arrant, name-dropping crap that hardly ever tells me whether I'd actually want to listen to the music in question. I've had more luck going to record stores and reading lyrics in liner notes as a guide to whether I'll like an album than I have with _Real Groovy_.
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Copeland [...] provides a clear centre-right choice for voters rather than the 'centre-power' choice that is Dunne.
Right. Because pro-death penalty, pro-jailing homosexuals, both Future New Zealand policies last time round, are "centre right" positions in New Zealand.
Can I have some of your crack?