Posts by Tom Semmens
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Unfortunately, the minister for the trucking lobby and the prime minister would rather die in a ditch than see successful public transport or Len Brown succeed, respectively. And when you add the fact that the finance minister comes from Southland, where the fear of loathing of Auckland recently forced a friend of mine to move back to the 09 to get away from being the object of community hate, you start to get the picture.
Also (and linked to the above) to many New Zealanders (and politicians) there seems to be something profoundly unsettling about a metro. Here in bucolic Middle Earth we don’t do cities and we certainly don’t do underground rail. I mean, underground? Rail? That way lies the corruption of Saruman the White! It is somehow an un-New Zealand project. Accepting that Auckland is a city in a way Dunedin or Palmerston North is not is to accept that the country is no longer a collection of over-grown suburbs where the detached bungalow, the internal combustion engine and glorious outdoors is the the supreme expression of our collective values.
A Metro isn’t just a public transport system. It is a socialist threat to our way of life.
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Or perhaps we just apply Occam’s razor and assume Brook Sabin got his B-team journalism “degree’ with a minimum of effort and really is just looking for a nice gig in PR, and wouldn’t know journalism if it bit him on the arse.
I listened/saw two ancient examples of interviewing on the weekend. One, from the BBC radio documentary “After the Dictators” by Owen Bennett-Jones had a 1960’s BBC journalist crisply trying to interview the Malawi strongman Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda and the other was Brian Edwards gently teasing information out of a shy lady from Hastings about a shonky photographer on some creakingly old episode of “Fair Go”. Brian Edward’s interview made for riveting television, just to see an excellent interviewer in action for once, and both were, in there own way, examples of interviewing you just don’t get anymore from journalists who were actually journalists.
Made me sad to hear and see them, and contemplate the utter ruination of NZ journalism today.
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The problem will be solved by cracking down on solo Mums, the wanton whores!
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Is it just me or is the NZ paper media totally ignoring this,
Apparently the RWC coming to NZ will cause a minute variation in the planet's gravity.
Meanwhile, a classroom project in Geraldine correctly picked every score in the knock-out stage of the tournament.
I read in the Herald that Steve Hansen was spotted "looking dishevilled but happy" by revellers outside a kebab shop at 3.30am. When recognised, he raised his kebab and slurred "WE DID IT" which brought cheers from onlookers.
Did you know the one of the vehicles used in the RWC parade in Weellington was actually assembled by Quade Coopers father in a Brisbane assembly plant?!??
Wendy Petrie has discovered that Zac Guilford is her fourth cousin, twice removed. Closeup will explore this remarkable blood bond at seven...
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That’s a cooking show, right?
Sound more like breakfast TV to me, but it could be a breakfast TV with a fine cooking segment.
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And all revolutionaries supplant tyranny with tyranny.
And all bumper stickers are stupid.
What about the American revolutionaries? The Glorious Revolution? Tunisia today?
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to DexterX,
The Bastion point protest today would be suppressed here with batons, pepper spray, riot shields and all the other paraphernalia of the scientific police state.
I see that the first police riot in connection to suppressing the "Occupy" movement in the United States has occurred in Oakland. Watching video of it has put me in mind of Plato - "Every care must be taken that our auxiliaries, being stronger than our citizens, may not grow too much for them and become savage beasts."
One of the reasons the Occupy movement has put so much emphasis on peaceful resistance and replacing clear leadership structures with cell-like devolved decision making is, I think, the recognition at at least a subconscious level of the need to develop new responses to the routine use of illegal spying by the police on protest organizations and the militarization of policing tactics brought on by the new authoritarianism of the surveillance state. Police in the English speaking democracies, shielded by politicians like Judith Collins, now seem to want to react with a hair trigger to the slightest hint of provocation or challenge from citizens. And what is worse, they seem to have adopted as their best practice model the unrestrained violence of the US military for policing their own civilian populations.
To me the peacefulness of the occupy movement is deceptive. It represents a considerable investment in courage - everyone involved knows they may be victims of a police riot at any moment - and the last hope that change can be achieved through protest. Suppress the Occupy movement and make no meaningful reform and the next response will be a pendulum swing to the Red Army Faction, mark my words.
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Magic beans. Clearly the answer.
This government really, truly, believes that the market will provide for all the corrections required and give us all a lovely soft landing when:
Cheap fossil fuels run out.
China’s economy tanks
Australia goes into recession
The European finance system collapses
Aliens invade
Zombie contagion affects most of the world
Climate change means it doesn’t rain for three hundred years.Of course, this hands off, do nothing, blind faith in the neo-liberal God of the market doesn’t mean they take a huge pay cut and retire to their own homes in their electorates to do nothing.
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If National are truly planning to win an outright mandate by simply getting Key photographed with the All Blacks as much as possible and claiming they are not responsible for the economy then their complacency may get a rude shock. Key's reception by the crowd at the final was lacklustre at best - I don't think being photographed in the dressing room with the players after the match went down that well either, several comments I have read were to the effect he hadn't the right to be there celebrating in such an intimate environment.
He has over-egged that particular pudding, methinks.
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We caught the train back to town, and as icing on our cake our carriage was full of Argentinian rugby fans who turned the ride into a raucous demonstration of what a Boca Juniors game might be like.