Posts by Tom Semmens
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No I don't like cycling. To repeat, I live in Auckland. If I wanted a hobby that involved transportation I would take up something safer, like being a Kamikaze pilot.
I am pretty sure that a survey of Waikato stonemasons and carvers (mental note: many unemployed in cow bell country are Maori. Maori can all carve, I went to Marae once and saw it with mine own eyes. I'll drop Pita an email today. It will give him something to do while he is routinely ignored by the government) would see a rise in economic activity in relation to the great Cathedral rising majestically, if slowly, over the fields of Putararu. not only that, but I am pretty sure the skills of Gothic stonemasonry and carving exceed those required of the builders of a cycleway. So it would upskill the workforce. And provide intergenerational employment. Unlike a cycleway, which I imagine will bear an uncanny resemblance to a derelict Roman Road within a generation.
Putararu could be a New Zealand Lichfield, which would keep all those with a colonial cringe and a yearning for the green and pleasant fields of Home (AKA "England") from getting to homesick.
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Cathedrals take hundreds of years to build. In function if not form it would perform the same role as a cycle way. Being a Cathedral town brings eaxctly the same sort of people as you find on a cycleway - religious zealots, pilgrims, students of monumental follies and the religious bureaucracy. There are lots of unemployed wood working types in the Waikato - they could carve the Gargoyles. A Cathedral keeps out the weather. You can do useful things in it, like knight all the new knights we are going to have. Bob McCroskie approves, which is important. And last, but by not means least, all those flying buttresses are completely unsafe in earthquakes, so no sooner would we finish it than that once in two hundred years earthquake would knock it down again, which means we have to start all over...
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New Zealanders hate bicycles. Most of my friend tell me they secretly go out their way to see just how close they can get to cyclists without actually hitting them when they are out driving. They report it is quite good fun and cheap, which is handy in these times of austerity. Mind you, I live in Auckland where the antagonism between bikelists and the motorists simmers away with all the energetic enthusiasm of Shia vs. Sunni in Baghdad.
But anyway. New Zealand isn't suited to bikes. It is windy. And rainy. And hilly. For the self-scourging aesetics of the bicycle movement the physical realities are of no moment since they seek their reward on a higher plain.
But for the rest of us, asking us to pay for cycleways? Why not just subsidise the building of a Gothic Cathedral in Putararu?
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Who was it who mentioned the smelly secrets of Mercer's cheese shop? that place is magnificent. Lots of cheese, in a shop that fufills all the criteria of the fabled European cheese shops as featured in "My Little Pony" books. In fact, the shop has even had to install a gun turret outside to protect its contents.
AND the samples are generous.
AND the prices are very reasonable, especially compared to what the robber barons just up the road at Fonterra HQ charge for their bland family 1kgs.
Hmmm, come to think of it that big Fonterra factory next to State Highway One and close to the Waikato river DOES resemble one of those sinister Schlosses one can see perched above the Rhine.
Anyway, I suggest everyone makes the time to stop at Mercer for some cheesey comestibles whenever down that way.
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*sigh* One day the settler class in this country will wake up and realise they've stopped being anxious colonists in a foreign land. God knows when that'll be though.
Probably sometime after their grandparents used the gutted RMA to chop down the last Pohutukawa blocking the last unimpeded view from their pink McMansion in the last undeveloped beacj in New Zealand.
Its at moments like these when i understand some of the little puzzles, things like why Maori T.V. is the only station that seems to actually of this place (rather than a clone of some local station in the U.S. Mid-West) or why so many businessmen don't seem to give a fuck about the country's future. It is because so many Europeans still don't get it about there home is, and it is because many of our businessmen actually DON'T give a fuck about the future of New Zealand.
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I managed to upset Darth McHang'em!
http://www.safe-nz.org.nz/press.htm
It appears my day of reckoning is at hand. Man, I wish that was done on IRC the mods would totally kick him for a threat like that.
*Wanders off to find a longer stick to poke the SST with* -
What ever happened to the opposition? Well:
1/ Phil Goff largely agrees with Key. He is the right of the labour party and has a lot of baggage. And since everyone knows he is just an interim leader, he has trouble being regarded as fresh or interesting.
2/ The media are not interested in what Labour has to say.
3/ National are playing with what should be to any intelligent observer a fairly artless PR strategy but is currently being reported like holy writ (see 2/).
Anyway, whether it be Iraq in 2003 or New Zealand in 2009, it always takes about a year for the opposition to get its act together and start fighting back.
I am beginning to think this administration is starting to resemble Dubya's - elected on a platform that proves to be at best a very malliable interpretation of what they said it was, with a leader who is just pleased to be there, with the resultant vacuum being filled with fiefdoms and lobby groups.
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On private prisons: Here is something I was mulling over in the bath last night. I know you are supposed to follow the money in journalism, but please, someone tell me I am just succumbing to conspiracy-itis...
A/ The Sensible Sentencing Trust has exactly the same rhetoric and policy solutions as the groups funded by GEO Corp & it's ilk in the United States - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prisons
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B/ The Sensible Sentencing Trust refused to register under the Charities Act despite the tax benefits, because doing so would force some transparency over who’s paying the bills.
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C/ The Sensible Sentencing Trust refused to register under the Electoral Finance Act - http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/594921 - because at least partially it would require transparency over their funding.
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D/ The Sensible Sentencing Trust funded a trip for high profile ACT candidate Stephen Franks to the United States (or did GEO Corp. really pay for that trip? Who knows, the SST won't tell us - Yes, know I am indulging a bit of pleasurable Wishartism there) and it clearly did a deal with ACT to get their law and order nutjob David Garrett into parliament. Now, if National were to privatise prisons under GEO Corp. and ACT were to get it's "three strikes" law onto the books it isn't hard to work out who stands to make a lot of lollie from all those extra billions we will have to spend on the new prisons to house the estimated extra 14,000 prisoners and the onging cost of running them, is it?
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I listened to the woman from the WSJ who wrote that article on Morning Report. Once I got back from the loo after being physically ill by Sean Plunkett's fawning, I decided that this story has nothing to do with new Zealand and everything to do with a shameless corporate America fighting back against the Obama administration. Her New Zealand is little more than a Shangri-La stick with which to beat a U.S. domestic drum.
When it comes to economic nationalism i was channel surfing the other night when I came across some sort of pannel discussion on CNN about the economic crisis. I was astonished at what I saw and heard. The arguments were all about getting wages up, getting the minimum wage back to its early 1980's level and an even handed discussion of the various pros and cons of different aspects of aiding the U.S. economy. It was a salutary reminder of just how hard right the media, business and political elites (and I include Phil Goff in that) are skewed in this country. And that is why our media is "soft peddling" these issues. Neo-liberalism is now so ingrained as the received wisdom in this country the media is quite incapable of thinking outside the boundaries of it'ss dogma and an ideological self-censorship reigns.
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Steve: i agree. A 30 minute ambush in which it looks like the Sri lankan team bus was hit by only acciddental fire from fourteen heavily armed gunmen indicates to me at least the possibility that they weren't the target, and until someone claims responsibility we can't rule out the target was actually the police.