Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I actually felt sorry for the guy who got stoned and turned himself in to the cops just so he could get a trip out of his house.
It was actually worse than that. He'd called the cops to ask them to deal with a troublesome female companion who wouldn't leave. It was only because he'd left his jacket inside that they came in and saw evidence of a spotting session on the stove. The young cop kept at him to show them the pot -- there actually didn't seem to be any in left the house -- and the guy was in tears.
I suspect that some people will have taken the message that it's better to deal with your troublesome girlfriend yourself rather than ask the cops to intervene.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Tom Semmens,
yet we can’t find $700,000 to maintain current funding of women’s refuges.
Nicely observed.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
chews through enormous amounts of public money (courts and prisons don’t come for free)
No one seemed willing to say on Drug Bust how much that helicopter operation cost. It was very excitingly portrayed though.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Matthew Poole,
He's so tightly wedded to his ideas that Rod Oram, as espoused in a recent RNZ interview that I was listening to in the gym, suspects he'll really struggle with the compromises that are integral to really playing in politics.
I suspect so. Oram's earlier assessment of the first Productivity Taskforce report made the point that it didn't even pretend to look at any measurement or evidence of what had happened in the New Zealand economy in the last 20 years. There's no need to ask such questions when you already know the answers.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Danielle,
Um. Some of us genuinely smile with exposed teeth. Sorry we’re harshing your mellow with our perceived creepy fakeness or whatever.
It’s not about you or anything you’re doing right or wrong.
Kathy Sierra talked about this in one of her Webstock presentations. The theory being that the old-brain response to eye contact and baring of teeth is rooted in the fact that, once upon a time, if you could see both a creature’s eyes at once, it was going to eat you. The baring of teeth really only serves to confirm the fact.
Some people – most notably some on the autism spectrum – lack the wiring for a more sophisticated reading of facial expressions and gestures, and default to a less sophisticated one. They can’t understand why they feel so uncomfortable with “normal” social gestures and may in fact be relieved to be told they feel squicky because deep down they know the other person is going to eat them.
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Hard News: Heads up for music, in reply to Danielle,
ETA: we no longer even have CDs. We just got Sonos. I wish to marry it.
Ooh. Local retailer?
We snuck in Cat 6 cabling to our renovations and I'm still not quite sure how best to exploit that for music in the house.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to chris,
Certainly he may not have been an avid fan of Māori culture, but would he have despised it?
My contention is that he would have. It is basically composed of things he thought were the work of the devil. I honestly do not believe he would have had a shred of respect for Maori culture, in which song and idolatry (and I do not use that word in any negative sense) are so central.
Would the Māori resistence and resentment towards the imperialist colonialists not count in their favour? Or would Cultural features such as art and music simply overshadow this?
He regarded all the other resistance movements in Iraq as backsliders and mere nationalists. So, yeah.
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Hard News: Doing battle alone, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I haven’t actually been able to buy a copy of Metro with Stephenson’s story in it – I suppose it’s a good sign that it must have been selling out around Wellington – and without Media 7 exposing this story not once but twice, I’m afraid I would not have heard about it.
Thanks, Stephen. An unsung figure in this is our producer, Phil Wallington, who has been supportive of Jon for a long time. I do feel that this story has been an extremely important one for us to get behind, and it was useful and gratifying to land via this blog a source who confirmed much of what Jon had written.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Che Tibby,
yup. and piss-taking aside, Green is the most viable alternative.
Where the Greens work for me is at the personal level. I have a lot of time for most of the caucus as members of parliament.
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From the summary of today's Amnesty International report on New Zealand's human rights performance:
In August, Defence Minister Wayne Mapp confirmed there was a risk the NZSAS had been involved in the transfer of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and that he had launched an investigation. Nine months later, and despite mounting fresh evidence and allegations, the Government has not released the findings of its investigation despite promising to do so and has refused to agree to an independent investigation.