Island Life by David Slack

Conclusions must be supported by the evidence, according to the Minister for Clarity, Trevor Mallard.

Hear, hear! In this age of reason, we must not be leaping to unsupported conclusions. Here is a taste of what lies ahead as this clear-eyed policy is applied more broadly to our daily business.

Maths curriculum

2+2 = unproven

840,000/49= not known

Ministers’ speech notes

And in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, redacted.

Film

And the Oscar goes to Alan Smithee

Judiciary

You are a blight on civilised society, Christie, and you are hereby sentenced to be advised

Music

And in the end,
the love you take
is equal to the love
you censored

Here are the last rousing lines of a speech by Winston Peters in the election of 2002.

If you are concerned about immigration - and what Kiwi who thinks about it for a few moments is not alarmed by the current mess - then you have only one choice in this election
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to bring immigration under control
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
If you are concerned about the division that continues in our city and in our country because of a Treaty industry that has taken on its own life - then you have only one choice.
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to put an end to the Treaty Industry.
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
If you are concerned about your safety and security and the falling social standards - as we must all be when we witness the attacks on the police that we saw here in the weekend - then you have only one choice in this election.
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to regain control of our streets and to arrest the disastrous decay in our social fabric.
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
In seeking your support to once again serve you and our community I am also seeking your support for my Party so that we have the strength in numbers to fix these things.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been honoured to serve you. 18 years ago I promised that if you voted for me then there would never arise in Parliament any issue of economic or social importance, without people first turned and asked - what does Tauranga think? I have kept that promise and today I renew it.
In the words of my namesake, "Give us the tools

and we will finish the job".
Can we fix it?
Yes we can!

On the eve of Super Tuesday, it is worth reflecting on New Zealand’s contribution to the contest.

Hillary Clinton’s parents, as we have long known, did not get around to finding her a name until she was a toddler, at which point they called her Edmund.

Barack Obama, we can now see, is also a student of life down here at the last bus stop on the planet. “Find me the most successful politician they have down there and get his speech notes” he must have told a researcher. We can see from the foregoing passage that the researcher was drawn by the force of magnetic rhetoric. Alternatively, Obama enjoys watching children’s television on a slow afternoon, but that is not the inference I feel inclined to draw in the midst of the heady spirit of Kennedy reincarnation.

Why are the words ‘Yes we can’ working so well for Obama, when they presaged near obliteration for Winston?

This kind of oratory is not easy to carry off. Obama has the preacher cadence pitch perfect, and that’s important, but what matters more is the sense that he might really mean it. I don’t know if he does or not, but the numbers suggest that many people have been persuaded.

Peters has been the critic and the rebutter and the master of the gotcha for so long that when he holds himself out as a potential leader with constructive intent and a will to share the ball with the rest of the team, it just doesn't sound credible.

Get down from the table, Mabel, the money’s for the beer.

Whenever you get to your feet to give a speech you have to understand this: you can choose to use many different styles of delivery; what matters most is that it sound authentic. There’s no point trying to be Martin Luther King if you’re not advocating for the largest of ideas, and there’s no point trying to advocate for those ideas if you don’t really believe them.

As few as three words can sound profoundly different coming from two different speakers. Obama wants you to see a torch. Winston can’t help himself; he wants you to see the joke.

Context matters, too. America has been wrenched by terrorism, war and dissent. Here, our Public Enemy Number One is a man adorned in moko with a taste for street theatre whose wife is giving him grief for disrupting their domestic tranquility. We have been delivered an economic lifeline in the form of galloping world demand for dairy products and naturally, we fret that it now costs fifteen dollars for a bigger block of cheese. Rural spending rises, cholesterol levels fall, and it’s all as the young people say, good.

One matter troubles me, though, and it’s this business about people leaving the country. Let’s say there’s a young guy who grew up in a Christchurch State house who is proving to be very good at dealing in currency. He’s got a good job in Auckland and we want him to stay here. We look out across the uneven playing field and we ask: is this something we can fix? ‘Yes we can’ we say and we cut taxes sufficiently to make this young man ambitious for New Zealand. He stays right here in Auckland, doing trades for the next twenty years. He has two kids, buys a house in Howick, watches the All Blacks lose another four world cup tournaments and teaches his boy to play soccer.

One day when he’s 43, he decides to go into politics, and in just a few years time, he’s running for Prime Minister against another guy with the same background who went to London, spent quite a lot of time above the Atlantic, sat on the board of the federal reserve, and got entranced by the Irish tiger economy.

Can we work out which one people will assess to be the more capable Prime Minister? Yes, I think. We can.

So farewell
then Tea Ropati
from Her Majesty’s
District Court in
Auckland.

Not guilty
on all charges means
you can unpack your
toothbrush.

Time for a drink with
Mr Gotlieb,
but maybe
not at the
Whiskey Bar.

They say we don’t
do things differently
around
here.

But where else in
the world would you
find
a character witness
called the Mad
Butcher?

I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.

At the very least don’t give them earworm.

I have been mucking around with my DuckSpeak engine and other word-counting programmes to see what insight we might get from the two leaders’ state of the nation speeches.

If you haven’t already gleaned it from the news reports, the most-used words are “young” and “youth”. You can see it represented in pretty picture form here. The bigger the word, the more frequent its use. Here’s one for John Key’s speech and here’s one for Helen Clark’s.

If he didn’t think it was a good idea before he walked towards Waitangi with a child’s hand in his, Key has certainly understood it ever since: expressing his ambitions for the country’s kids casts him as tomorrow’s man. Thanks to this month’s statistical aberration in the murder rate, we also learn that this putative Dad of the nation is prepared to consider a dose of tough love where he thinks it might be needed.

Well, this is all good news to a troubled media-attentive nation, especially if you are of the mind of the talkback radio caller yesterday afternoon who phoned in from Clendon to endorse the strategy. After the caller had spent some minutes lamenting the effect of Tupac, Fifty Cent, Eminem and TV violence, Willie Jackson sympathetically asked him how things were feeling right now down there at Ground Zero. Oh, the caller said, it was all quiet around his neighborhood; they never had any trouble where he lived. Close-knit communities shaken to the core: a staple of the Six O’Clock news; a semi-mythical and tantalisingly elusive entity when you go poking your microphone about for a vox pop.

What I’d really like to see in either party’s plans for our young people is some encouragement to be inventive - something that suggests there is a way to make money other than buying and selling houses; something that proposes a career other than lawyer or accountant or panelbeater or dare I say it, market trader. We have plenty of all those. What we don’t have are many exporters. We need a whole lot more. That’s where the climb back up from number 22 starts, and yet they’re almost as small a minority as violent kids.

I am not one of those nutters who pesters Radio New Zealand and Parliament with extravagant claims that the SIS has inserted an electrical probe in his rectum. My complaint is that the the Prime Minister of New Zealand has tried to attach a spying device to my Macbook Pro.

Let us work through the evidence methodically.The device is an Airport Express, which I bought yesterday, along with an Airport Extreme base station, to replace my dead router and try once more to to equip our house with proper wireless coverage.

I can’t tell you how many other routers and giant dishes and intrusive pieces of electronica I have had hanging off walls and shelves inside and outside our house. Karren probably could. To say she does not much care for electronic devices cluttering up the house is to be as euphemistic as to say that Howard Hughes was a bit fussy about the housekeeping. She mostly bears it with good grace, but get around a friend who’s not a fan of computers and empty half a bottle of wine into them both, well, then I find out how unwelcome my clever gadgets are.

Let me tell you why Helen Clark would put up with them. Her reputation as a control freak and a detail wonk is formidable. Tell her anything, she’ll recall it a decade and a half later. She has no need for a vast database or a mile of files. It all fits in that awesome cerebrum or, at a pinch, in the H Drive. But to have this groaning human database, you must first gather the raw material.

You can’t be everywhere; but tiny little spy instruments can.

Let’s say I walk into an Apple store. Let’s say it’s the new MagnumMac store in the still-new and yet already completely appalling Westfield mall in Albany. Let’s say they give you prompt and attentive service and a few minutes later you’re leaving the store with some software and two boxes: one holding an Airport Extreme Base station, shrink-wrapped in cellophane and the other - the Airport Express - au naturel. I vaguely registered the anomaly at the the time, but it wasn’t until I got the packages home and installed the equipment that it dawned on me that the item might be pre-loved, and worse; that the explanation might be perturbing.

The Airport Extreme installed in a fashion that was so elegant, so trouble free that I almost wept for joy. In mere minutes, two windows pcs; two windows laptops; one Macbook pro and a wireless printer were having secure, encrypted and intense digital relations with one another and best of all, I could walk my laptop great distances about the house and the signal remained strong.

It Just Worked.

I should have stopped there, but I had also bought the Airport Express, because I had read that you could use it to extend the range. Never before had I been able to get a decent wireless signal out of the office and up to the next floor of our house to the lounge. I now had a really good signal, I thought, why not try to get an even better one. I plugged in the Airport Express and it was at this point that - to paraphrase- several hours of perplexing suboptimal computer behavior took place.
Paraphrasing all the way to the point of this story, it became apparent as I tried to configure the Airport Express that Someone Had Passed This Way Already. The Express already had a user name and a password. Matthew Hooton will have already guessed what that name was: and he is right:

My Airport Express had been given the username: “Helen.”

What could this mean? Apple and their resellers pride themselves on selling goods of the highest quality, so the possibility that MagnumMac had induced me to pay full retail for a pre-loved item was of course one that I dismissed out of hand. Someone had clearly been tampering with their merchandise. So I started calculating backwards. My very reliable router had been supplied to me by my former neighbour the Techsploder, who favours only the most reliable of equipment. And yet this equipment had died a sudden and violent death.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn. A fatal untraceable malign charge had been sent through the air, colliding with my Wired Country signal, fatally wounding my router. I had predictably gone to the nearest Apple shop to get a new one. They knew precisely where to go and they knew precisely what equipment I would ask for, because I am a predictable lefty.

If this government, which as any fule kno, is hellbent on quelling dissent in election year, were determined to interfere with the country’s bloggers, all they would have to do would be to doctor a blogger’s Airport Express and rig it up to mangle any outbound Internet traffic of a critical tone.

It suddenly all made chilling sense. They had very nearly gotten away with it, but in their haste they had omitted to remove the telltale digital DNA, namely the username and password.

I still have not been able to guess the password, and you are welcome to make suggestions.

“LittleCreep”

“WeHaveMovedOn”

No dice.

“Sustainability”

“Cancerous”

Nope

Perhaps it might be an expression overheard as she was at her work:

“RichPrick”

“ForFucksSakeTrevor”

Still no luck.

I have reconfigured the other unit to remove all recognition of this supplemental and unnecessary unit.

But questions remain.

Should I try to guess the password and thereby make it possible to reset the unit? (The reset button refuses to cede its territory). If I did, I could then put the unit on TradeMe, because I have no need for it.

I could go in to MagnumMac and pretend they had sold me a used item as a new one and ask for a replacement which I would then sell on TradeMe, but I tried this strategy on the phone today and they clearly knew I was concealing the truth that the unit had been hijacked by black ops people in Wellington.

Get this: they say that if it’s already got a username and a password on it, then I should bring it in and they will reset it for me, (and frankly: good luck with that - 20 minutes on the phone with Apple support couldn't budge it) but they won’t swap it for a new one. Now, given what we know about the Consumer Guarantees Act, I don’t think they'd be saying that if they didn't know I was hiding the fact that Helen Clark was behind the whole thing. Oh no. They’d just give me what I’d paid for, in a shrink wrapped box, no questions asked.

Of course they would.

And they would be saying: we do apologise for the inconvenience.

If it were my shop, and I was considering the years of future patronage they might anticipate from someone like me - I’m thinking of, for example, the Macbook Air and a couple of Imacs - they might even say “well if you don’t need that, we’ll take it back and refund your money. “

If they really wanted to humour me, they could even pretend they’d already taken it back once before.

But maybe they guessed correctly that I had only gone there because Ubertec were out of stock. Ubertec would never play ball with the black ops people.