Posts by Kyle Matthews
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My parents (well, their builder) have spent much of the year building a new holiday home at Waikawa Beach (just north of Otaki). With five grandchildren, four of them under four, across three families, it's a new venture - a holiday home, owned by a family trust, which will hopefully outlast many of us.
The house looks out on sand dunes, over which you can just see a hint of the sea. The beach itself runs for at least a mile, and there's a lagoon with water of just the right depth for the young tikes to explore. Kayaking, collecting driftwood for the fire, throwing ourselves into the surf, and long walks along the beach while four dogs chase each other in and out of the waves will fill my holiday.
My holiday will be a split shift, for complete insanity. I'm flying up on boxing day with son and daughter, until the 30th, when the little one and I fly back down for me to deposit her back with her mother. Then on New Years Eve the girlfriend and I, plus two dogs (bearded collie, kelpie) drive the length of the island and board the 10pm ferry. We'll see the New Year in somewhere in the middle of Cook Strait, and get off the boat and hopefully find a car parked for us. Straight back to Waikawa for another week.
While there I will be visiting a Garden Centre and buying two native trees, one for each child. We will plant them carefully and say some words about what the trees mean, along with the children. Five grandchildren will mean five trees, some will be planted with placenta which have been carefully stored.
The house has four bedrooms, two couch-beds in the lounge, and a mezzanine floor in the garage that marae sleeps another four or five. We can get 20 inside at a pinch. Add to that a three room tent which would hold another ten, and I can imagine future New Years Eves where we host an army.
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I don't know. I wouldn't in the least be surprised if there's always an element in any political organisation who are rather excited at the whole Secret Squirrel element. Real Life political activism is rather boring, thankless and progress is painfully slow. But this is cool -- like being in your own episode of Spooks
See Craig, if you want excitement, you're on the wrong side.
In 1995 I was running campaigns at Otago University, and went to the CHOGM protests. During that year the Maori Students Office at Auckland University was found to have bugs in it, shortly after the Asia Development Bank Protests.
It's only paranoia if you're wrong :)
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Legally, when does the evidence seen by the judge, which... warranted the warrant, become public? Does anyone know?
I believe the arrests were timed because the expiry of the suppression of the evidence which led to the warrants was coming up, and once that expired, the media were going to run stories on it, and talk to the people involved. Or I might be conflating two things there, so don't quote me.
But I'd have to wonder if the police didn't get a search warrant for Te Qaeda, whether they would have used spies to get more evidence to present to the judge. The extent to which spying can be used without warrants would surely be a major focus of any inquiry into spying on political groups.
I think if the police were able to get someone inside the Te Qaeda groups, they wouldn't have bothered with the surveillance. It's much more difficult, less reliable, and a lot more dangerous - that cop that died earlier this year was killed when trying to plant surveillance. Particularly surveillance of people who have guns.
They didn't have that, so they resorted to the warrants and surveillance.
I'm surprised how uniform the refusal to see any principle in common is.
To me the principle is: "police should only 'spy' on people, when they have a reasonable suspicion that they have, or are going to, commit a crime of some serious nature".
So I see no common principle here. In Te Qaeda, that principle applied, in the material that Gilchrist passed on (I'd hesitate to call what he did spying) it didn't.
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You can't know that a group you are thinking of spying on is doing illegal stuff until you look into it deeply.
A lot of police surveillance is done when the police already know that a crime is being committed, the surveillance is being done to get enough evidence for a conviction, or to confirm who committed the crime.
At least some of the Te Qaeda surveillance was done with a search warrant issued by a judge. Based on information presented to the judge which they presumably found at least moderately compelling.
The difference with what this Gilchrist chap has passed on is that it didn't require any laws or warrants, it was information that the police could get legally. The reason you wouldn't want to investigate the two things together is that one would be an investigation of police actions under anti-terrorism laws, the other would be police acting under no law - because no law was required for them to do it, it's a moral question.
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that depressing creature: a very bad film with a very good one inside struggling to get out) that pays the bills
There's a list of 50 films I want to see (the list, not the bad films).
"Movies that would have been really good if they had had a different writer/producer/director".
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National on Corrections is going to be endlessly entertaining. Having called for the CEOs head a couple of years ago, they're now touring prisons with him and complimenting corrections staff.
Like this wee quote from the Minister:
“The Corrections sector was sadly neglected by the Labour government. It is clear that prisons are under pressure as a result, and that more beds are required around the country.
Sadly neglected by building four large new prisons? And committing to finally get rid of Mount Eden?
We've gone from complaining about the cost of building prisons, to having to now soften up the public for building more because of changes to bail laws will mean... more prisoners!
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<quote>Before someone stands up and starts sqealing "false moral equivalence", let me retort with a statement of what should be the bleeding obvious. We can't have a civil society without confidence that our legislators, civil servants, judiciary and law enforcement are as virtuous as Caesar's wife. And those who fail to be scrupulous in their observance of the rule of law cannot be tolerated.<quote>
I can't see how the last four lines of this disprove any claims of false moral equivalence.
I thought Oliver did the interview pretty well. If it had been me I would have asked him "who pays you money to be this stupid?", which probably wouldn't endear me to the guest.
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Oh wait, now I've seen the interview to the end. Who employed that twit to edit a major newspaper? Shouldn't he be helping produce Investigate or something?
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Wow. That NBR guy didn't think very hard before he opened his mouth.
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I am genuinely interested in the game playing situation for the newest generation of Mac's though.
I have a mac at work, so don't have any experience with that. But a quick google search indicate that people seem to be getting directx games working in windows on a mac.