Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Assad is largely entrenched because the US
The Assad regime is predominantly supported by Russia and the USSR before them NOT the US.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Euan Mason,
This implies that the intricacies of the situation justify gassing people.
No it implies that Russia might just know enough about the situation to realise that a) UN peacekeepers might be about as much use as ...
and b) that simply removing Assad might do more harm than good - and yes it is possible to do more harm than gassing people.But most importantly I don't know and I'm unwilling to be as black and white about the situation after seeing what such an approach has done in other similar countries.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Euan Mason,
a member with veto power behaves badly then it goes off the rails
You are referring to Russia I presume. I guess my only comment is that Russia has had a long standing political and economic relationship with Syria. There's a chance they know more about the intricacies of the situation than folks in the Western world are giving them credit for.
Or they could simply be supporting a regime that is of benefit to them for purely selfish reasons.
I'm not sure I know the answer.
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We went through Egypt Jordan and Syria a few years back, about a week in each country. Our guide through Syria was great, the people we met greeted us as guests and were enthusiastic about their country and about trying out their English on us. Even when we had no language in common people were happy to communicate as best we could. They were accepting of differences in culture in a way I never expected.
We all vowed to go back to Syria if we could because it was beautiful and the people were great. It looked and felt like a country that was getting better.
To see what has happened there now is heartbreaking. We drove through some of the towns that have now been devastated.
But one thing I do remember is that Syria was more complicated than I knew. It was clearly a country that has had so many influences over the past several thousand years that generalising is really silly. It may be easy to say Assad is bad from NZ, but we know nothing about the factions fighting against him and we know almost nothing about the recent political history. In the same way as they knew nothing about NZ.
I think it will be very hard to figure out which faction is "good", if any. We know the use of chemical weapons is abhorent and that pretty much sets the stamp on Assad as "bad". But removing him will leave a power gap that nobody really wants and nobody is certain that who fills that gap will be better.
Personally I'd be really happy to see NZ out of it, rather than discover halfway through that the side we picked to support is as bad or worse than what they replaced.
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Southerly: Continuing After A Short Interruption, in reply to Hebe,
have you any links to info on that?
Sorry Hebe. It's stuff I read over a decade ago. I remember the content but not the authors. It probably was something I read in Nature Biotechnology in an article about development of new anesthetics and why we need them. But I can't give you a proper reference sorry. You have no idea how guilty it makes me feel to not be able to give a reference.
Here's a link to the team who isolated the heart muscle rejeuvenating factor I read it initially in The Scientist which is great for science news.
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Southerly: Continuing After A Short Interruption, in reply to Don Christie,
grow younger
There is growing evidence that growth factors (hormones) circulating in the blood maintain "youth". These growth factors increase the rate of healing after injury and it's recently been shown that they are involved in keeping the heart muscle young. As you age the concentration of these growth factors declines ... and you get old.
BUT
If you (mad scientist moment) graft a young individual to an older individual you can reverse many of the aging effects present in the older individual. This has so far only been done with genetically identical (so you don't get immune rejection problems) mice.
So theoretically one solution to your sore foot might be to graft Bob onto you for say ... a month or so.
More boringly the scientists who are doing the work on heart muscle aging have actually isolated one of the specific growth factors and so maybe some day injections of a similar hormone could be used to rejeuvenate old hearts ... I wonder whether it makes them less cyncical as well?
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Basically it comes down to this: do the people of NZ tell multinational companies what to do in our country, or do they tell us what to do? It would be nice to vote on that.
But it is way more complicated than that. Multinationals have as much economic and political power as many countries. We don't expect our ambassadors to tell foreign countries to "fuck off", we work around the bad things to try and get as much good as we can, aka diplomacy. Same applies to the multinationals. We benefit from their trading activities and we have always done so.
The issue is how much harm do we accept for that benefit and where does that harm occur and where does that benefit occur.
This National govt has pretty much decided that most any harm is acceptable and makes no bones about saying the most benefit will occur in the hands of the wealthy ... and that will be good for NZ (according to National).
Labour might draw the line in a different place and The Greens would draw a thrid line. But neither will actually tell the multinationals to "fuck off" because frankly that would do more harm to New Zealanders than anything else they could do.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Hebe,
That would require co-operation, true power-sharing and mutual respect in public.
Point well made, we can hardly expect politicians to behave like adults it would be just asking too much. Small achievable goals, with a cookie after each.
"Today minister, you will remember wipe your chin after you dribble."
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Southerly: Continuing After A Short Interruption, in reply to Emma Hart,
I didn’t know it might be my girly delicate flowerness.
Even worse if you happen to be anything other than european extraction.
Clinical trials are MUCH more diverse now. But one of the big problems is general anasthetics - they typically have much worse side-effects on the non-white male population that they were originally tested on.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Just what, precisely, is the difference between these three? They all seemed to be saying the exact same thing. They, Robertson especially, also seemed to endorse each other.
I don't think the aim of this exercise is to show any of them as bad choices. Quite the reverse, the aim for Labour has to be to demonstrate they have three really capable potential leaders. That's why it's a pity they didn't take the opportunity to show off Adern's skills as well.
I really don't think you'll see significant differences of policy from any of them. It's about how well they can deliver the same song, can they capture the audience, what is their stage presence, let the audience decide.
You know I suspect Key may live to regret the metaphor he gave Labour.