I went along on the first day. Bit worried by a couple of things, but nothing too significant. It’s all good (mostly). I’ve got my own work to do. Stuff no-one else can do. Reckon I’m best supporting from the sidelines.

My favourite line was ‘The beginning is…

Buy free-range eggs. Or cage-free, in a tight week.

Low "tech" always a good start.

BTW has James dropped by yet to tell us that…

Briliant joining of dots between Occupy Wall Street and #eqnz.

Is it harsh to say that our politicians are like their brethren elsewhere – more interested in representing narrow private interests than the country or…

Good line.

caffeine deficiency

Moved into Aotea Square, onto the grass area. Several hundred people. Surreal situation; Range Rover were demonstrating their new Landrovers on the hard…

Occupy Chistchurch.
Gives a reasonable view of the turnout. A few remained behind to mind the camp while most marched to Riccarton & back. Nice mood.
Bit chilly tonight for the brave campouts though.

Done

That is what I suppose is great about actually going down to the local square to show a united front. Lots of people physically supporting one and another by being there in person. Pretty cool in my book.

If only he were like the other John...…

Wow. Cheers…

Cheers Andin-there is a huge repository of stories in these motu, the ordinary stories of people- I only know some of them. from the south…

I know NOTHING!

I always wondered what the origin of that name was, fascinating, thank you!

If he was Kai Tahu he should've known...we started interbreeding with takata-pora in the late 18th century. Pale mongrels from wayback ( except my uncle Bill was very brown – and my mother is very pale (and green-eyed & redhaired when young. What we…

I suggest rather more than one bird, if she was a beneficiary...my mother is our whanau beneficiary (Kaimohu is our titi-island) and we were brought up on…

He was my greatgreatgreat-grandfather, and his name was Kahuti/a. He was a rakatira, had become a bit estranged from his daughter Motoitoi (she cohabited with Richard Driver, pilot for Otepoti harbour, and produced…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhdSzho-OWU

Oh ok, I thought you were referring to the use of physical torture techniques. Butcher's techniques.

(And this is not getting my glazing done.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with using knives and heat etc to cut up and sear flesh. It’s how we cook food.

However, when you use those techniques on a living person, for whatever ends, that is morally wrong.

Except I’ve totally forgotten about the use of…

*Inherent*, you mean?

(Oops, missed quoting the highly relevant ‘Torture?’!)

Exactly. Can’t be used in any way possible that is compatible with any reasonable definition of ‘good’.

No matter what American legal experts might get paid to say.…

Given the immediacy of some of the issues we are facing I'm going to go out on a limb and discount mass interplanetary…

Torture?

Blueskin Bay is named after the old guy who lived there alone when the Pakeha settled there.

There is a marae on the end of the peninsula. I once flatted with a woman making sculpture out of flax. She was very miffed when her overtures…

A friend of mine grew up in communist Poland. One day, we were sitting around in the pub, and I mentioned his jokey t-shirt. Then we compared stories of what we thought now would be like when we were growing up. Mine was the…

That's the whole point of having handy asteroids in orbit to mine and make things on. You go to a particular type of…

... Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of demands from the group so they can then systematically disregard them and continue going about their business, polls showed this week. "The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals…

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941

Don't mock New Plymouth! We have more than the usual share of multinational corporates active locally (e.g. TAG Oil), and are one of the bastions of unsustainable WTO-dictated agriculture – palm kernel is one of the major import flows through our…

After reading the article I'd attribute that phrasing to a journalist who doesn't know the difference between the two.

Mate, you're making an old cynic like me feel like a veritable pollyanna. And I really can't be having that – the position of house nihilist is already taken, thankyou very much.

So, to mashup my metaphors and aphorisms: since no…

True.
It does seem that certain kinds of abilities are now considered redundant.
Okay (shrug) -so, I bequeath a library to my literate & sideways thinking own/whanau? Could be much worse things to leave 'em, eh?

one day I will learn to cut & paste – meantime just google or wiki-

"Pre-Estuarine rock paintings also include depictions of extinct animals and enigmatic beings that combine the features of humans and wild yams"! How amazing!

All great links, thanks.

Well, I'm…

Moving rock art destroys spatial references...

Rio Tinto has a Cultural heritage specialist!...

Half of all ancient Aboriginal art could disappear in next 50 years...

[[http://www.skynews.com.au/offbeat/article.aspx?id=669235&vId=|OK not Australia…

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over hoping that this time the outcome’ll be different.

Why do we keep screwing up? What are we doing or not doing with that information?…

Rather a large number of my whanau in Dunedin were using eh? during my childhood ( some 20/30 years earlier than your's – as were the Pakeha side of the family there, and…

I think everyone does.

Fear, hopelessness, despair.

But I also know how to turn that into something productive. It’s what keeps me going.

I might sound like I confidently know all the answers, but I don’t. I know nothing. I’m just muddling along best…

Yes, I do have something called common-sense nihilism. And, yes, there is a Common-Sense Nihilist Party. These are art works, and I am an artist. You can’t convert to common-sense nihilism, by internal definition. I am the only…

+1
I've never grown to like the new building – but I'd been away from Chchch for many years before that was built-

Not quite, David – the Bradshaw paintings are not like so-called ‘traditional Aboriginal art’ but are quite like San art. Bradshaw paintings go back approx. 50-60,000 years BCE – and San,…

I’ve lived through despair. That sucks.

I’m going to believe in something again. Something of our very own. Something more than just making paintings for others despairing.

If it sounds a bit idealistic, even a bit (which is somewhat scary) religious, so be it.…

With this thing, you need to believe and to commit. Because it's right. And because it's true. Because it makes sense.

Now I and many others could spend any amount of time you like giving you whatever reasons you need to convince yourself intellectually…

I've lived thru idealism, it sucks.

Real broadband means most audio-visual representations will be locally produced by cultures all over the world (our schools leading the way here), and broadcast…

With this thing that’s going on, everyone has a part to play. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has a place to stand.

For it to work, everyone has to do their bit. Everyone knows what they're good at. So do it.…

Such as bringing your very fine mind to the problems at hand. Where you see people struggling with something, give them a hand, tell them the way you see it.

I’m not sure where you live. But…

How much of TV3's (and the rest of t3h meedja) output is still house pr0n? Fluctuations in housing prices are front-page news for Granny on a regular basis.

QED

This doesn't…

Such as? Not being rude, but I'm in aporia too, so I'm teachable.

Ur, no: the interrogative nei? (in the South, not ne? as in other parts) quickly became eh? in the South, and has spread pretty well everywhere here (as well as
North.)

I've long maintained that Kylie Mole is one of our greatest triumphs of cross-Tasman linguistic colonisation.

Nor are they limited to Auckland, though they are more common in conversations from Māori than Pākehā

Did wonder if Auckland's browner, younger population might be a…

Yes, I might well. I've never heard of it before. Cheers!

Speaking of neglected sf, has anyone read 'Floating worlds'? By Cecelia Holland. Also I think 1966. Classic anarchist sf.

Great scene at the start when people come to…

I don't think it's something you merely watch and hope about. It's something you play a part in. You have something to contribute. Something important.

I don't know this. That's what makes sense to me, based on what I do know.

However, I do know that their paintings haven't changed in any kind of radical way. Nothing like the way ours has. And I know that,…

I'm so sad about that building! I too have childhood memories of it. One was of seeing a mouse and wondering if it had come to eat the biscuits the librarian was surreptitiously munching.

No offence, DCB, but how do you know this?

Yes. From the point of view of the conquered it was not profitable, of course. But it's only very recently that loot has not been a basic expectation for a soldier, and much more if you are high ranked. The highest classes…

Because it visibly demonstrably hasn’t. They…

One interesting thing connecting some (possibly all?) Australian and American cultures is the way their languages are oriented around space.

You don't say 'in front of me, behind me, above, below'. You say 'south, west, north,…

Ok, gotcha and I'm with you on that. I have wondered how the dispersal of the rural family unit will change China in the decades to come. I…

I don't see why Aboriginal culture and technology would not have changed radically over that 20,000 years: if it hadn't it would surely…

It was a way of dealing with scarcity.

But everything else you say is spot on, I reckon. The last thing we need are cult-like leaders. You say scattered. I say focusing. From a whole variety of perspectives.

I also liked that they knew how to calculate Venus rising at dawn over a particular site. It's not a simple calculation since it varies from year to year with a complicated cycle. When asked how they knew…

1 Take two sticks.

2 Place one stick in the ground at a good vantage point for watching the sun rise.

3 Place the other stick in the ground so that, when you're standing over Stick 1, the sun rises in a line with Stick…

It did, and it still does. But I dispute that war…

Of course they’ll date it, thanks in part to Bruce’s work on radiocarbon accuracy no doubt.

My point was that it hasn’t needed to change since before Stonehenge. You can’t date it…

Ha! Quite. Difference between spears and bombs eh?

Prof Norris and his Aboriginal partners used Nasa technology to measure the position of each rock in relation to the sun, and to demonstrate the connection with the solstices and equinox.

"It's truly special because a lot of people don't take account of Aboriginal science,"…

For the first at least, when the Conquistadors rocked up to America, they found a couple of shipwrecked European sailors who’d already been there for a while.

One had acclimatised, wore native clothing, had…

I think this is the phrase both you and others are missing.

Let’s not forget that, 2000-odd years ago, the rich Romans in Britain had things from everywhere from Africa to China in their houses.

And 2000 years before them the rich Egyptian.

I agree with Rich that your definition of "war"…

The isolation I was referring to was the possible breakdown of extended family relationships in favour fo the pursuit of material gain.

And the list of recent and ongoing wars is quite a long one. Many of them we hear nothing…

Really? Do we have a linguist in the house who can elaborate?

Oh, and good bolding!

If you live a first world country, yes it is. On your own doorstep.

But that's relatively new – last 2-300 years. And arguably not true if, say, you grew up living in fear that the dastardly commies would chuck an ICBM into your home town.…

Ye gods, ‘foraging’ soldiers.

I’m a big fan of Sigismondo Malatesta. When he was 13 years old, the bastard…

There are 7 billion or so of us and only about 5-6% of us live in places which could be described as war zones. Peace is the…

Pretty much. Some of the best innovations of military technology, for civilians caught in the middle, were the ones that meant the soldiers camped on your land weren't also eating all your food. Easy to forget that conflicts where one side had…

Damn straight. No Napoleon without his context. It's not nature vs nurture or the thing vs its context or any other similar binary opposition but the interaction of the two that matters.

However, the equation also…

Hardly just Napoleon; the whole machinery of Revolutionary France and their need to defend themselves from their neighbours led to military innovation (the draft, for instance,…

I totally agree. All I have to add that it’s the simultaneous interaction of those two dynamics that’s so amazingly productive.

Just look at what Te Kooti did. He arrived at the Chathams a prisoner at the start of winter and was told…

I think your definition of ‘war’ is a little too narrow and formal. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of very many ‘purely military’ expeditions over the scope of history which didn’t go hand in hand with conquest or trade protection/expansion.…

I agree, it's there, and it's hugely important to how mainstream NZ society operates. Being overseas I certainly notice how different NZ culture is to other…

Mum was extremely surprised I never bothered living anywhere else. But why would I? Everything I need and want is right here.

We’ve made a very nice home for ourselves. Few tweaks, and it could be great.…

Heh.

I dispute your allocation of proportions. Maori influence on Pakeha culture is all-pervasive, subtle, and deep. Right from the get-go to the present day.

I grew up thinking I wasn't very English, until I lived somewhere else...

He's handily written a book all about it! After walking what must be the entire coastline of the country, closely looking at stuff and talking to people. For many years.

Bruce is an old family friend. He's a stand…

All of those people started out with their neighbours. The Conquistadors cut their teeth in the Reconquista. Alexander started with…

I've heard a little about that. It's an extraordinary historical story.

The short answer is pretty bloody well, all things considered.

(And there's nothing wrong with being a bit unfair!)

That's a bit unfair. No one's going to sum it all up in a couple of sentences, but I understood what David was saying.

Pre-European Maori culture was an extremely highly sophisticated stone-age culture, an off-shoot of the culture that explored and colonised the Pacific, from Taiwan to Hawai'i to Easter Island to New Zealand.…

Both my parents were born in England and came here. One by…

Gengis Khan? Ancient Romans? Alexander the Great? The Spanish Conquistadors? I disagree that colonisation doesn't count…

well you do – the rest of us hear that and think "Aucklander" ....

(or "Aussie")

For all of human history but the twentieth century – excluding colonisation, because that usually wasn’t…

One thing I became very aware of when I lived in London was that British people had a very different attitude to home, visitors and the sharing of food and drink than the one I'd grown up with.

I reckon we should think of ourselves as an essentially Maori society. Look at Te Kooti. He took what the Pakeha had to offer and used it. Just as the Pakeha took what the Maori had to offer and used it. We end…

Nor much of Central America.

But let's not let the Castros off the hook that easily

Yep. I'm uncomfortable as hell with the notion that Fidel gets some sort of a pass just because he's done certain things well. The Cuban exiles…

Yes, we might be a republic already.

Well, the history of the planet seems to be tightly woven with struggles between factions that to the outside eye are indistingushable, for causes that are incomprehensible. Civil wars are generally the most vicious.

they are essentially the same place....linguistically…

Down the other leg of the Trousers of Time, as Terry Pratchett so beautifully puts it.

And Malaysia/Singapore and Indonesia – divided in 1820 by a ruler in Whitehall so that the Dutch and the Brits could stop fighting and exploit the spoils.

Ironic when one considers that hating Malaysia is a national obsession these days in Indonesia – they are essentially the…

For that to work you have to posit a Stalin-free Russia, and then WWII goes in very different directions, and with a different WWII...this is a very fun game,…

And that didn't stop Rodney Hide from effectively saying that autobahns are bad because Hitler made them work.

Or if the UN hadn’t intervened in Korea. Or if the French hadn’t had a revolution (too early to tell?). Or, or, or….

Yes. Similarly, I have to wonder what the Soviets might have achieved if there hadn't been the Cold War for 40 years. Or what Vietnam could have…

Interesting!

Then, many of the engaged 'free' nations in the region have hardly been bastions of civil rights or the good life for their peoples in the years…

Not least because it has suffered a constant trade embargo from the most powerful capitalist nation in the world since the revolution. If the USA decides you must suffer for your beliefs, then suffer you will.

PAS in-joke. A certain republican cheerleader turns up occasionally to sermonise and try to convert all us lefty heathens to the One True Path.

Public health performance is most creditable in Cuba — as is its amazing public literacy initiative.

But we should…

Yes, but there were certain common threads…

Got no idea what you're referring to. My point was just that there's more than one way to have a thriving population.

Careful, you'll be tempting the arrival of James Bremner with some spurious link to illustrate just how ill informed we out-worlders are.

The counter to that is that many people in the mid-late '90's were part of or involved in the…

I think he may be referring as much to healthcare, public transport systems not found in many parts of the world, an abundance of food, peace, employment and the…

Oh, seriously, I hope so. A coherent, democratic movement for reform would be a historic achievement.

But America's such a weird place.

Democracy is coming

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of…

The crisis that underpins the GFC is decades of government that have failed to exercise governance and ensure the regulation of financial markets and institutions.

Consumption taxes have rewarded government's during the "false expansion"..

It is great that the OWS…

He seemed to just fall into that job. Fancy a bank having an offshoot called a Private Bank. Cosy.

You are referring to wide screen TVs, the Internet, an I phone, fast-food, facebook, pop music and a degree of isolation?

And a great example of the osmosis of the ruling elites, who model their behaviour on an organised crime gang.

There's a massive debate to be had, and I hope it can begin on this thread, preferably with rather less of the atmosphere of a chimpanzee's tea party than we sometimes find here.