Publish and Be Damned

There doesn't seem to be any sign in NZSL for bloggers. I suggest two fists with middle fingers extended, pointing downwards and jabbing as if typing, followed by a swift slap with the right hand (mimicking an old manual carriage return).

Noises Off!

The NZ Left are secretly in love with Robert Muldoon. Vocal proponents of the NZ Left spit tacks against Rogernomics in a way that they don't rally against Muldoon. This is because they are in love with Muldoon's autocratic conservative interventionist style, noting that he only made a few bad gambles. Muldoon's means justify their ends.

Pablo's critique of the NZ Left keeps throwing up core problems involved with this love affair, even as he pines for its return to power. Take the Left blogs, for example. Red Alert, The Daily Blog and The Standard love playing censor to the free thoughts of their commenters. This isn't about weeding out trollers or spammers, but silencing divergent voices.

Pablo wasn't even allowed to comment on Chris Trotter's reply to Pablo's post. He had to republish it on his own site. Giovanni Tiso's comment was also refused permission for publication. Here it is:

"I must vehemently protest you drawing Gramsci into this. Firstly, the sentence you quote means the exact opposite of how you're presenting it. ‘Sono pessimista per l’intelligenza, ottimista per la volontà’ comes from one of the prison letters. As he explains it, it means that he has taken to be utterly pessimistic and bleak in his analysis of any given situation, in order to muster the strongest possible will to change it. And by change Gramsci always meant radical change. He hated reformists. To suggest otherwise is deeply offensive to his memory, seeing as his refusal to compromise and soften his stance is what led directly to his imprisonment and ultimately to his death.

There is very little doubt in my mind – as there could be in anyone who had read his work – that Gramsci would have nothing but contempt for the contemporary New Zealand political class. To suggest otherwise is frankly bizarre."

There, that wasn't so bad now, was it? It wasn't offensive or worthy of censure, surely? How many other valid but improper thoughts have been thrown down the memory tube for the greater good of the collective?

Divergent voices are not welcome with the true NZ Left. They have no need for outside influences. They already know everything. There is no dialogue in their dialectic.

And still they wonder why the voting public won't trust them. The old man always said that the Labour Party are experts of rationalising defeat, because they've had so much practice at it. Some things never change. They just die out.

Little Fish Finger and the Dotcom Proxy

Whale Oil and his spy network have attempted to piss on Kim Dotcom's parade by leaking the newly-launched Internet Party's strategy plans. If the evidence presented on his blog is correct, three things become immediately apparent.

1) There's good money in puppetry these days. The Malcolm MacLaren of NZ Politics, Matthew Hooton, has refused the role as Act's lead singer, preferring his current lucrative and relatively anonymous run in the dark arts of ventriloquism. Martyn Bradbury's imminent candidacy for the Internet Party in Auckland Central must have jumped him up the ranks of New Zealand's Highest Earning Socialists with his $8000 a month contract. He might be in the Top 100 now. I really should wax my muppet up.

2) The IT crowd and unions don't mix well. Innovation and adaptivity are not terms unions are familiar with. Failing Dotcom coming to the party armed with some Vorsprung Durch Technique and the history of German business union relations, I see strained alliances ahead for Bradbury. It's the old Left problem of "the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy".

3) First Len Brown's laundry, now another opposition party exposed in a war of attrition and asymmetric transparency. The public now knows more about the workings of the Internet Party on its day of launch than they know about the National Party. It's going to be a very dirty election.

Twatting the Messenger

A few thoughts on the political stories du jour.

# Foreshadowing 2015-17; Member for Doublespeak, Winston "No Baubles" Peters, has used the word Orwellian in a sentence, thereby signalling that he will support the GCSB spy bill. After a few sweeties have been thrown in, of course.

Having birthed his nemesis over a cup of tea with John Banks back in 2011, John Key will have no choice but to hitch Winston to his wagon in 2014 to stay PM. Werewolf Peters will join Zombie Banks at the reins of the same government for the first time since the 90s.

Little wonder Key is trying to voodoo up any Green Lab coalition in the public imagination. No-one has yet imagined the terrible price of a Nat/ NZ First/ Act coalition. Charter schools popped out of nowhere post-2011. Dagg knows what Peters will fart out for his price in 2014.

# The Law Society's written submission on the GCSB Bill is getting a justifiably glowing response around the blogs. Ex post facto, I'd nail my proxy to their words as well.

The security services don't work for New Zealanders. They're sworn to serve the Queen and her successors, not us. Their Big Daddy, GCHQ, is a squalid corrupt shambles. Dagg knows what the state of the GCSB is like, but judging Kitteridge's words, I wouldn't trust them with the keys to the nation's grid.

# Cannabis law reform has proved an acid test in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti by-election, separating the realists from the conservatives. It's good to see a Mana candidate speak well on the subject. Hone Harawira has always been too conservative to grok the problem, as have the Maori Party gerontocracy.

# And finally, Peter Dunne. After considerable stirring of my mixed feelings, I must conclude that the worm has turned and good riddance.

United Future lucked it on the back of a worm in the 2002 election, a subject I spoke of for one of my post-grad papers in 2006, just before one of my meltdowns. Dunne killed cannabis reform with his coalition agreement with the Clark administration, ruining some sensible plans from Labour's Tim Barnett, who had seen through Civil Unions and Prostitution Reform.

That kind of damage is unforgiveable. No sympathy for Captain Sensible. He has ruined so many lives, his least of all.

Mental Health Break

Dear readers; as you might have surmised, I've come down with a case of Weltschmerz. Normal service will resume in the fullness of time. In the meantime, looking at the Outlook for Thursday, what with some bloggers marooned already and everything, here's a bit of music therapy while everyone battens down the hatches.

Nice weather for the Mutton Birds:







And back to the Mutton Birds, dedicated to Busted Blonde and Brunswick:

Obligatory Lazy Link Post

There is no news today, so here's an obligatory post of interesting things.

# Aaron Gilmore might be getting attacked by batsmen swooping and diving around his head like mental magpies. Thank Dagg Pablo and Manhire are awake and staring in horror as the new GCSB and Communications Intercept Bills move at warp speed into select committee stage of indeterminate length and intensity.

This is real, and much more dangerous than some bug-eyed born-to-rule cretin with bent antennae screwing with a one seat majority government. Even if you're naive enough to believe in a benevolent John Key appointing everyone from the Governor General to the GCSB Head, think what some future, less scrupulous prime minister might do with that unbridled power. What would Muldoon do? And when the hell did NZ did decide to adopt the US presidential style of appointees to the new royal court anyway?

# I've finished reading Patched; The History of Gangs in New Zealand. It's way too early to blurt to conclusions, but the thesis of pivots proved illuminating. On a completely different subject, the NBR headlines a call for an end to the NZ Police's lethal car pursuit policy. It is certainly responsible for more carnage than any of the other gangs in New Zealand right now.

# This week has seen the moral panic over fake cannabis come to some kind of crescendo with Duncan Garner hitting the bong. For the public good, of course. We wouldn't have all this madness if BZP was still legal. Or real cannabis.

If we're to sit through exploitation media on the divide between the clueless and the guileless, give me this witty Dragnet remake over any of the MSM drivel any day:


# And finally, the Telegraph looks at the life of one of the most respected of this household's gods, an icon of iconoclasts, Richard P. Feynman. He made a great leap from observing the nature of spinning plates.

Nerd Be Busy

Speak of the neoliberal devil. Chris Trotter has written yet another neoliberal attack, this time in the guise of defending Russell Brown from a flange of gorillas.

Trotter recites from Gordon Dryden's Out of the Red, which I have fished out of the library and sits in front of me presently. There's an inscription inside:

To Trev,

A good country starts with good mates.


For the good times,

Gordon Dryden
October 1978

In the fullness of time, I'll get back to Trotter on that score. My brain is currently soaking in Jarrod Gilbert's Patched; The History of Gangs in New Zealand. It is utterly compelling reading. Between the Hunter S Thompson Hell's Angels cultural influence through to more personal experiences (e.g.), every law and order geek needs to read this book.

In the meantime, it is worth bearing in mind that TV2 was Roger Douglas' brainchild. And Norm Kirk was a homophobic, anti-abortion social conservative. Keep some proportion and perspective. No need to snowball everything.

The Shit Matrix

According to the Daily Blog, all of life's ills can be directly attributed to neo-liberalism. Since early February when the blog began, hardly a day has passed without neo-liberalism being wheeled out for a good old drubbing. In comparison, Marx has only appeared 35 times.

There is only so many ways you can arrange the words "Hate Neo Liberals" before it gets boring and repetitive:

Hate Neo Liberals
Neo Liberals Hate
Neo Hate Liberals
Liberals Hate Neo
Liberals Neo Hate
Hate Liberals Neo

Might I humbly suggest that the Daily Blog mixes things up a bit for variety. For example, anagrams of "Hate Neo Liberals" include:

Hone is Alterable
See Hairball Note
Alienable Others
Her Lot a Baseline
Ethereal Albinos
A Loneliest Rehab
A Relabel on Shite

Digging in the Dirt

The past is a different country. They do things differently there. It can be an illuminating place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. There be dragons.

It's ANZAC Day, and fresh from one blogger dodging one set of lawyer monkeys, it seems another is set up against some gorilla class action.

Russell Brown sought to revisit a controversial current affairs program from 1990 in this week's Media 3 program. A visibly frustrated Russell Brown explained during the show that several pieces were cut on legal advice, and Roger Douglas had thrown legal action at them to try and torpedo the entire program at the last moment. The blog post For the Public Good Revisited has been pulled, although nothing online is ever offline.

Which is a shame, because I was rather looking forward to a look at the events of that era. My dead old man was in the thick of it, and all I've got so far is his side of the story:

Without that guidance, Lange made a complete mess of the 1987 campaign. He offended some women dramatically on a television interview while he was on tour in the South Island. I think it was at Rangiora (It was in fact Geraldine - goNZo). In my own electorate, I had gone to considerable pains to prepare the way for Lange at the Palmerston North Teachers Training College in the morning, only to have him in the afternoon verbally abuse some student again on television over his shirt or some other trivial matter. These were two major television blues that forced the Labour Party to spend around half a million dollars on TV adverts in addition to what we expected to spend, in order to cover his misdemeanours in this regard.

What I did discover is why so many Lefties have bad blood towards my old man, and probably against me personally. The evidence is lacking but they want so hard to rage against the de Cleene.

How about we frame it thusly, in order to defuse the tensions? Just as the Tuhoe Terror defendants don't have to justify a goddamn thing to the police or the public, neither do the Dark Artists have to justify historic campaign financing now.

How much have things changed? Here's what being a minister outside of cabinet was like before reform (Book of Trev, same chapter as above):

I would rather in retrospect have been under-secretary of finance to Roger Douglas than I would have been Minister of Pies & Ice-cream in the cabinet. There were several reasons for this. The first was financial. Under the Higher Salaries Commission, Ministers and under-secretaries were paid one hundred odd dollars tax-free a day for the time they were not in Wellington. The idea was that they were doing their job elsewhere. I thought this was ridiculous but it rendered my under-secretaries' pay up with a cabinet minister. I didn't have to go down to Wellington on Monday and was paid this $100 for fishing and shooting. That later, on our own instigation, was altered and is not the position now. That was the ridiculous nature however of much of the way of fixing salaries for ministers and under-secretaries in those days.

How much has stayed the same? Well, the statute of limitations has expired on whatever corruption lies behind John Banks and his campaign financing. If you can keep the corpse buried for six months, you can never be guilty.

How about we work on current affairs like that instead of picking over really old bones? Unless someone has a bone to pick, that is.

Thought of the Day - Stoned by Monkeys Edition

If there's one thing dumber than picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the drum, it is picking an argument with an infinite number of monkeys on keyboards.

In other news, Colin Craig has withdrawn his defamation suit against national treasure The Civilian.

Colin Craig; dick, cunt or arsehole?

Messianic millionaire Colin Craig has sicced the lawyers on national treasure The Civilian. The deeper story is difficult to tell, seeing how all the juicy bits end in dead links. Oops. Now the entire site is down.

Now would be a good time to consider where Colin Craig fits into the Team America schema of dick, cunt or arsehole. Colin Craig seems to be an exception to the rule. Going on form, I'd say he's more of an overly-sensitive pudendum.

Mistaking the Map for the Territory

The Real Steve Gray, who is way more popular than me, has taken offence at today's NZ Herald cartoon, the one where Emmerson's got Wall, Hague and co. raising the big gay flag like the famous Iwo Jima war porn.

Although the Iwo Jima pole-dance wasn't staged, as I noted in the comments section, it certainly wasn't the first flag raised as the myth take goes. Colonel Johnson wasn't happy with the size of his flag at the Iwo Jima landing, and sent men up a mountain with a much bigger flag. Not all of them lived.

In NZ-speak, teh gays took Tongariro in 1986, by far and away the old, largest and most necessary territory. In 2002, they planted a flag on Ngauruhoe, the youngest cone. Now, they have reached no greater height. It's the big Ruapehu.


But if you still don't dig it, let's kill the metaphors and go with a story.

The proudest moment of my time collecting signatures for the Change the Flag referendum was the day I convinced a member of the old Maori Battalion to sign for a new flag.

First, I told him that both my papas had fought in the World Wars. As I understood these men, they weren't fighting for Blighty or Empire. They were fighting for their families, their land, their way of life.

The flag they fought under was a symbol of the land and people, not the other way around. People are more important than flags, and their symbols should have meaning for them. Symbolism without meaning is mere pomp, and we are not bloody Brits here, mate.

The Art of Noise

Sandfly Blog has an interactive montage of the NZ blogosphere's front pages, as ranked by Open Parachute's Monthly Meter Readings. It would be great to get an update of it once a month, and then animate it. Possibly with this soundtrack:

Journal of Record

I'm really digging the Weekender Edition of Bryce Edwards' Politics Daily. Friday's edition was a 869 page digest of what happened this week, including many items of interest that flew over my head earlier in the week like a Vogon Constructor fleet.

# When whistleblowers get lost in government IT. Not content with losing my emails, or stuffing up EQC, ACC, etc., Internal Affairs loses evidence of massive pokie fraud before finding it again, after considerable prodding by the guy with his neck sticking out. The Great Rugby Racing Beer Swindle continues.

# The Whingeing Pom in Pram has evidently won his kind of justice, by having local council correspondence to him omit the macron above the a in Kapiti. It's mad stuff like this that makes me lean towards Option A for Wellington amalgamation. Like latter day juries, local councils and community boards are refuges for control freaks and moralistic wowsers, not a true reflection of the community at large.

# It could be worse. It could be Palmy. The city council there is looking at banning smoking in public places. That is, when it is not trying to gag one of its councillors for making stupid racist comments. As always, I advise people not to tell me to stop smoking, as Tuckering may offend.

# The lost continent of Zealandia always seemed more myth than history to me (Landmarks seemed so authoritative on the subject). Not any more, after the latest conflagration of earth scientists in Dunedin presented their papers. Contrary to one old scientific opinion, NZ's flora and fauna was not shat out of a seagull.

You can subscribe to the NZ Political Digest by emailing Bryce Edwards here.

Odds and Sods

A random assortment of niggles and observations.

# Brickbat to Martyn Bradbury / Maritime Union's new Daily Blog. I am not going to click through to read every damn repost and Bomber polemic from the RSS feed. Your signal to noise ratio does not warrant a headline or summary feed in the way I accept from, say, Public Address. Put the full post in the RSS, you hit count-obsessed idiots.

# For some reason, the signal to noise ratio over at Tumeke has improved dramatically. It's crystal clear, matter of fact. No static at all.

# Google is throwing a Googly over the Swedish neologism ogooglebar, among other matters. Harden up, you tax-dodging excuse for a new paradigm. The Old Reader is still looking the better alternative for the soon-to-be-extinct Google Reader, if only they can get the bugs and lazy load settings sussed.

# Alain de Botton, you poor wet Brit. Please stop banging on about the need for athiests to have secular churches. We used to call them pubs, bars, nightclubs and cafes, before they were put out of business and turned into daycare centres. Adult spaces just need space and tolerance, and there's not a lot of that going around right now.

# How come parents can feed their babies opiates and I'm not allowed to smoke cannabis at the age of 43? Even parts of Yankland are freer right now than these small narrow islands (A shout out to Colorado, Washington and even California, with a higher medpot store density in L.A. and Denver, Colorado than Starbucks. If it wasn't for all the thick racist bible thumpers, it might almost be worth going there).

The Day Google Shot Reader

Winter is coming to bloggerheads everywhere, as Massive Moneybags Google advises that it is shutting down Google Reader on July 1st. Geeks are sweating, economists are freaking out. I'm none too happy myself.

Alternative platforms are crashing around the world as panicking freaks and geeks crash at their doors with DDOS tactics that would make Black Friday at Macy's look civil. The comments thread at Marginal Revolution has a few suggestions.

Feedly was my first stab at a Plan B. Fingers crossed, but unless the lag clears once the DDOS stampede/migration wanes, that platform's acting like a big bloated pile of Beta. It's as if Adobe Acrobat Reader took over RSS feeds, such is the sub-optimal load time.

Plan C, Netvibes, met the same fate. I don't like phones in general, let alone smart phones, so the cross-platform appeal is lost to me. The cleanest Just Works platform so far seems to be The Old Reader. We'll see. So far the server is overloading so badly, it won't accept Reader imports right now.

I have no idea who is behind any of these alternative ventures. I don't particularly care. The feeds must flow. Screw the Gulf of Cyber-Tonkin.

Reader popped out of Google Labs, from the same nerd who birthed Blogger. Something's afoot on this platform too, and I'm wondering how long before, like some nomadic techno-hermit, I'll have to migrate this blog to another site as well.

That would really hurt. My trust in Google is already shaken by the Reader assassination. Another blow might just be brand-fatal for Google as far as this user is concerned.

Charter House Rules

David Farrar has joined the fray in defending the decision to bail-out Wanganui Collegiate after a scathing Dom Post editorial today. He uses the specious argument that to allow the private Anglican school to close would just burst rolls elsewhere:

If Wanganui Collegiate closes, then their pupils will all enrol in other schools, which will also cost the taxpayer $3 million. Trying to say that you would save this money if the school closed is absolutely misleading.

Farrar's conjoined twin Cameron Slater has used the same narrow defence earlier:

Clearly hoping for a greater tragedy than the school being supported by government Goulter complains about the $3.8 million spent to save the school and the $1200 per student subsidy private schools receive.

Either the maths is beyond Mr Goulter (incompetence) or he is dishonest. Some simple and conservative calculations show that Wanganui Collegiate School existing for even the last twenty years has saved the taxpayer in excess of $65 million. That is based on 450 students multiplied by $7500 (the difference between full funding and paying the private school subsidy) times 20 years minus the $3.8 million. Over the full life of the school it is many times that but the picture is already clear.

The defence is so thin, people are blowing holes in it with pea shooters over at Kiwiblog.

There's a lot more fun yet to be had with the newly-nationalised Anglican school. For example, take the school's pig Latin motto, Vestigia nulla Retrorsum. It is a Magic Motto previously used by Moina Bergson Mathers, a mystic of the Golden Dawn (Crowley and his Shit Poets' Society).

What a day that was

Speech from the throne, in the 150 most-used words

Rather than listen to the prime minister attempt to murder the English language today, I read his speech from the throne instead, then fed it into the Mangle-wurzelator. As you can see, the key to a brighter 2013 will consist of "New Zealand Government's progress, continue also better public services, new support Christchurch Government, reduce people next".


I'll be following the roll-out of work in prisons to other incarceration sites. It's good that the inmates are getting more active, rather than seeking apparent redemption in boredom. One large concern bothers me, in that this shouldn't be some cheap-ass scheme to be exploited for slave labour like the US Prison Industrial Complex.

It would be good to think that at least some of their earnings were put aside as savings for their inevitable release from prison. Instead of dumping them on the street and hoping they won't fall back to old ways, perhaps they might just bootstrap themselves to a better life.

I didn't bother reading David Shearer's speech. The reflections of others are dire enough. The auto-cue at Labour's Summer Camp was delving into lampoon-proof self-saucing satire as it was.

..........

Lockwood Smith is getting kicked upstairs to the Brits, following his stint as the best Speaker the House has seen in living memory. Although communications to his office still didn't handle metaphors well. i.e. the small burning effigies of Richard Nixon were never going to incite a riot, Mr Smith. No more than lighting a cigarette would, at least.

It's all downhill from here as the Nat talent tank runs dry and David Carter proves not just reluctant, but outright hostile to the idea of being the big wig and woolly throne Speaker.

Can't say the Greens or Labour are thrilled with the set-up either. The Speaker's choice is a consensus of Parliament by means of a convention that Key has ignored this time. Winter is coming.

..........

The Herald gives a bible basher a pulpit, where she goes on to explain how her Missionary position stopped cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. One antidote to this sermon is the simplistic but nonetheless gripping tale of how Christianity brought guilt and other plagues to Tahiti, in Paradise Lost.

..........

Has Israel jumped the gulag? Evidence that Israel has broken the Nuremburg Laws on forced medication, whilst simultaneously implying a white supremacy eugenic charter. HT Tyler Cowen.

Time to Byrne one down:

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

In my summertime study of How Things Change, this podcast featuring Cory Doctorow and the Titanium Physicists has proved invaluable. Titled Death and Heat Death, this long-form happy mutant conversation includes Goblin Milk, multiverses, infinity, mortality and identity, and how to explain to a child that their father is dying.

UPDATE: Forgot to note that there's also an explanation that tidying one's room actually increases entropy in the universe.

Friday Night Brain Teaser for Bloggers and Other Junkies

Imperator Fish has diaried a day in the life of Sherwin T. McFadden. It took me until 9:42 am to work out who it was. Do you know anyone like Sherwin T. McFadden?

On an entirely unrelated topic completely, I am not one to wave corpses around for a cause. I knew Stephen McIntyre too. My thoughts on his passing are complex and return to looping through acts, omissions and random shit, which is none of your business. Suffice it to say, you need a thick skin in any political game.

Good news everyone! Ann Vernon (previously mentioned here) has had her day in court and walked out the door discharged without conviction. So there's some justice.