Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to ,
They are capable of making some very crappy kitchen ware, but I'm trying to keep an open mind on the food production skills.
An adage worth repeating: Food from China that isn't Chinese food, isn't food. Then again, there's Wuchang rice.
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The Sallies in NZ appear to have learnt from their ill-advised blunder of the 1980s, when they publicly opposed homosexual law reform. Unlike the US, where they've become active deliverers of privatised welfare and even probation services, they've largely kept themselves aloof from any political taint.
The Church's willingness to become a tool of Government policy seems to be at the discretion of its local hierarchy. Closer to home, John Howard took what seemed a highly provocative approach when he appointed the very willing Salvation Army Major Brian Watters to head his ramped up punitive approach to drug law enforcement.
Declaring that "The wages of sin is death", Watters literally played the role of Christian soldier in the Australian war on drugs. "I say it's a phoney war. We're running around with popguns and they're chocolate soldiers. If we had the same approach towards stopping the invader in 1942 as we've got towards this problem now, we'd all be talking Japanese today."
On his retirement in 2005 Watters went on to a stint on the UN's International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna.
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Not sure if this is the same tree, but definitely the same park and species. Looks like it would have been fun to get up close to the canopy. BTW these Australian banyans were presumed to be sterile in NZ, as they require a particular micro wasp to pollinate them. Then back in the 90s the wasp showed up in NZ. So the odds are that they're out there somewhere in the bush now, in their juvenile strangler phase.The pic at the top is the giant at Pahi, on the northern Kaipara, from late 2012.
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Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I can't believe that they are thinking of building subdivisions on Pukekohe soils, as intimated on TV1 news last night.
The Pukekohe area was the setting for many of the stories in Roderick Finlayson's unfortunately neglected Brown Man's Burden. The dispossessed Maori that Finlayson knew and wrote about in his IMHO often superb short stories had, in the wake of the land wars, been reduced to servitude to mainly Chinese market gardeners.
Te Puea Herangi made it her mission to better the lives of those she saw as her people. "I want the people on the land,. I want land in order to draw my people back from Chinese gardens. Maori women are living with Chinese gardeners. I had some stolen from me at Ngaruawahia. If the men cannot get a living many of them go to the Chinese. There are about 400 of my people at the Chinese gardens around Auckland, and 300 at Pukekohe. They have gone there to work because they need food and clothing. My scheme will help to bring people back to their land.”
While most of these events happened back before WW2, their effect is being felt right now as the Te Puea Marae open their doors to the homeless.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
It's an old, established and quite boring industry,
Perhaps it was more fun in the olden days. A friend who drove in Auckland back then had a story about picking up a bunch of queens one Friday night. As they were waiting at the lights at the intersection of Customs and Queen one of his passengers leaned out the window and shouted to a young bobby on the beat who'd stationed himself outside the Dilworth Building "Get off my corner you slut!"
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Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to ,
I would rather be homeless in the United States than I would in New Zealand, but I don't know any ware else to compare that Australia and i't prepare to be homeless here than there.
While Sydney's warmer than Auckland it can be chilly in winter. When Robert Louis Stevenson visited there from Samoa he described it as a "sub-Antarctic hell-hole". The 1960s block where I spent the decade prior to 2003 had over 180 units and its own coin-op laundry. Sometimes during the winter months I noticed that someone had been dossing down in the cubby hole around the laundry's large hot water cylinder. No-one seemed fussed about it, though the 'tenant' would have had to hike for around five minutes to the nearest public toilet and cold running water.
While walking to someone's place for dinner one evening I was surprised by the number of men, and a probable older woman, sleeping on grilles right out on the footpath, where hot air was escaping from below. This was in the vicinity of St Vincents Hospital, on the Darlinghurst-Paddington border. Dinner was delayed while we waited for a missing guest, a trainee psychiatrist. When he finally showed up he explained that he'd spent the past couple of hours with an emergency team trying to raise a response from a woman who'd been deemed 'at risk' and hadn't been answering calls.
When she eventually got around to opening her door she casually explained that yes, she'd heard their attempts to contact her, but as she'd assumed they were 'probably just the mormons' she'd carried on watching TV. I couldn't help but wonder why resources seemed to be available for some, while others were at that very moment sleeping rough only a block or two away.
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Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to Tinakori,
John Campbell's cartoonish sense of reality has always been his achilles heel.
Whereas your competingly cartoonish take on events keeps you trapped behind a goofy pseudonym. Pot-kettle.
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In Silencing Science Shaun Hendy mentions the Herald's Jamie Morton as one of NZ's dwindling number of specialist science journalists. This interview is from the Sunday before last.
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Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to Don Christie,
That could work.
Heh. Further to that, I found this to be a rippingly good read.
Spare us from those who know better than we what's best for us. -
Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to Ray Gilbert,
Don't forget that Greenpeace have also made errors of judgement around information in the past. Brent Spar anyone?
True dat. Having just finished Silencing Science (thanks for the link Sacha) I can't see Damian's "half joking" proposal for "being ruled by a benevolent wise council of elders" as anything other than some kind of throwaway exercise.
Shaun Hendy makes a case for a thoroughly democratically based engagement by scientists with the public, grounded in mutual respect. While he seems under no illusions about the nature of the vested interests ranked against the free flow of information, he even provides examples of where he believes that he and other scientists have mishandled communication in the past.
While he seems careful to give Sir Peter Gluckman his due in his role as John Key's science advisor, he goes into plenty of useful detail about how he believes that the limitations of the position have failed the public. His advocacy for the role to be balanced by the public having their own non-partisan equivalent, modeled on the present Commissioner for the Environment, is convincingly made.
Given the disastrous performance of the largely politically appointed ECAN, I really can't fathom why anyone would come away from reading Silencing Science to advocate for shoulder-tapping a bunch of suitable chaps and chapesses to further erode democracy.
