2008 March

To Brighten Your Monday

photo credit: RaidersLight

Here’s a story to restore your faith in humanity and just generally brighten up your day.

Kyle Springs is a 7-year old boy. Kyle and his family are on the way to hospital for his chemotherapy treatment. While everyone is at Dennys enjoying a Lumberjack Slam (or similar) some worthless cruft of mankind burglarises their car and steals his homework, his cancer medicine and worst of all, his PSP. Oh yeah, and this all happened the day before his birthday. I guess some people have all the luck

A ray of light in this otherwise perfect story of misery is that the office of the Dallas police had a quick whip-round and raised over $1000 to buy him a new PSP, games, movies a little left over for some cancer medicine. Nice one, but I hope the crim is caught and the cops hang him up by his figgin!

TVNZ 7′s Kingmaker Debate

TVNZ 7 is launching on Sunday with a “Kingmaker Debate” where the leaders of the “minor” political parties will have a chance to air their policy and stances. This is a good move, especially since it seems that in the coming election the minor parties will become more and more important! Along with other planned political and factual programming for this channel, Freeview is not looking to be a total waste.

From the Press Release:

The Kingmaker Debate will bring together the leaders of the minor political parties: Winston Peters from New Zealand First, Jeanette Fitzsimmons from the Greens, Pita Sharples from the Maori Party, Jim Anderton from Progressive NZ, Peter Dunne from United Future and ACT’s Rodney Hide.

It also appears that there will be some chance of audience interaction – specifically message boards that will be active throughout the show where viewers can discuss the content and “have a say”

Idiot/Savant seems upset that he will miss the debate since he’s not willing to drop a dollop of cash on a shoddy decoder. Understood, as neither am I, but lucky for us – according to this the show will also stream live on tvnz.co.nz

Well, I Guess That’s almost a Policy…

*snicker*

The Standard.

Douglas Throws Down

photo credit: benchilada

Sir Roger Douglas has thrown down a challenge to Clark/Key.

The page itself, although fairly content-free, is a pretty accurate picture of the ACT party. Namely, “We stand for this, this and this. Don’t like it? Too bad”. And to be honest it’s quite refreshing to see political figures stick to their policies and eat the concequences. If people don’t like your policies, you don’t get in. It should really be that simple, which is why the National Party make me nervous when they don’t announce policy, or announce only the popular policy. I sometimes get the feeling we’re being lined up for the bait-and-switch, especially when Key squirms.

Anyway, on to Sir Roger and the ACT Party:

“As such, I am challenging them to answer three simple questions:

“Of my reforms, which do you think have been bad for New Zealand and which would you yourself not have implemented?

“If you have the courage of your convictions, why have you not reversed those policies – or even promised to reverse them?

“Will you, in fact, be reversing them – and, if so, when?”

Now, me economics numpty in comparison to Sir Roger, but I imagine that damn near anything would be better than the mess that was left behind by Muldoon. The economy needed a severe kick in the pants and he was wearing the boots. Lange’s government unleashed him to shake it all up and decant the cruft left by the previous incumbents.

Good things:

• GST to replace the dizzying amounts of different sales taxes
• Cut the marginal tax rate by half (!) from 66c
• Other changes, most notably to do with super funds

Then it seems he got a little carried away after the next election…

Bad things:

• Sweeping privatisations of almost all government-owned assets
• Flat income tax rate in the low 20% range (!)

Of course, Lange lead a Labour government and couldn’t enact his promises with such a financial regime, so long story short, Douglas was out on his ear. After a scuffle with Douglas, Lange resigned and the party disintegrated. Some went towards Alliance/Progressive, some to Vision 2020, now known as ACT.

Douglas appears to have great plans, should he score the cabinet post nobody wants him to have (even the National Party). Those plans indicate that he wants the same ol’ Rogernomics, in a new New Zealand. Nobody denies what he did for our country when we needed it, however to decide that we need it now is simply delusional.

Disclaimer: I was but a child during Rogernomics and Ruthenasia so this article is based on research I’ve done and not so much first hand experience

Media Coverage in Tibet

photo credit: Hans Luschtig

Since China has a lockdown on all media escaping their empire, coverage in Tibet has been wherever underground you can find it.

The Wired blog Threat Level has a great round up of media and reports of the events happening in Tibet for those who wish to escape the bounds of the state-owned media and override their censorship.

Note that the China Digital Times is an online newspaper, a multi-contributor blog site that’s based in California and therefore is not subject to the “Great Firewall of China”

“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore

Update: BoingBoing also has some outstanding coverage here.

Dear Labour: Do Not Sell Our Souls

photo credit: Hans Luschtig

I, for one, do not buy the lines being fed to us from Helen about “finding out the full story behind the riots”. Clark, a leader who damn near built her government on supporting Human Rights, vocally opposed the government at the time (Shipley/National) when they minced around the matter of Human Rights and violations of. This is not far from her empty words about recognising Kosovo’s independence.

The death toll is 80 and climbing, there are multiple reports of peaceful protesters being shot down in the streets. How much more story do you need? China is the oppressor, the aggressor and Tibet is in need of support.

From Reuters:

[China] has declared a “people’s war” of security and propaganda against support for the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, underlining that it will not heed calls from around the globe for a lenient response to the riots.

The first suspicion behind this dodge is the pending Free Trade Agreement with China. Especially considering that our Government has previously had no trouble speaking out about previous situations, such as Zimbabwe. I imagine Labour, looking down in the polls, wants to woo some voters away from National and it’s looking to take the business-friendly path, but it’s unacceptable that it’s at the cost of giving the hard word towards obvious human rights violations.

The China FTA simply isn’t that valuable and the concessions we will have to make are far too large. Don’t sell our souls on behalf of trade. Denounce the violence and brutality now!

Update: Clark says something. However, it isn’t much more than what she said up until now.

Update #2: The Greens, with their usual tenacity, say screw the FTA and condemn China now.

Match it for Pratchett

photo credit: Myrmi

Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, suffers a rare form of early-onset Alzhemer’s disease. This was diagnosed recently as the cause behind his recent “phantom stroke”. Thankfully, this hasn’t impaired his ability to write and he still feels a time for “at least a few more books yet”.

Terry, at the age of 59, has recently come up against the underground status of the disease and the support given to suffers relative to other diseases such as cancer patients. In fact, the amount of funding in Britain for Alzhemer’s disease research is a mere 3% of the total given towards cancer research and support. He dryly remarks, in typical Pratchett style:

The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own drugs because I’m considered too young to have Alzheimer’s for free. I could get hold of crack more easily.

Last week, the author announced a whopping £500,000 donation towards Alzhemer’s disease research and Discworld followers the world around have decided to conduct their own whip ’round to collectively match Terry’s generous gift.

If you wish to make a donation you can do so here with a simple credit card payment.

via. Boing Boing.

Can the Democrats Blow It Again?

(click here to view)

David Horsey Seattle Post-Intelligencer Mar 9, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

Funny, but fairly true. The Republic spin and attack machine is a formidable force, with some pundits predicting someone like Obama may not be able to stand up against it. If the Democrat candidates spend all their money and momentum duking it out over the primaries, who’s going to give the badass and butch McCain the beat down the Republican Party sorely deserve? McCain easily took the nomination since Mittens dropped out and Huckabee took an embarrassingly few amount of votes, showing it doesn’t pay to pander to the fundies!

Since Obama is looking to take Texas (on account of the caucus, Hillary did not win it as the media initially reported) and Hillary has only taken Ohio against Obama’s ~13 state winning streak. Obama has an easy 100 delegate lead over Hillary (including super delegates) but neither have reached the total delegate count needed for nomination so it looks like this will go down to the convention and we won’t know who the nominee is until about August I believe.

Meanwhile, McCain has time to put in the spade work for his campaign and it could be a lot closer than the odds are letting on…

Young People vs. Rugby Culture

photo credit: Hijeje

The Dominion Post says that a report by a Wellington Rugby Union asserts that less kids are playing rugby and therefore are lazy and apathetic. Well, if they’re not playing rugby it’s obvious that they’re sitting around in front of the TV and therefore don’t care about anything. Pull the other one.

Perhaps they’re a little sour that while Rugby numbers are down (31,000 to 29,845), Soccer numbers are UP (20,667 to just over 22,000)!

I can’t find the actual report anywhere, but The Dom Post actually have a reasonably balanced article on it – with quotes and questions to a lot of other sports figures and organisations (SPARC, Danyon Loader and some others) to balance out the junk from the report. An interesting piece but to jump from “Kids are playing less rugby” to “Generation Y should be ‘Y Bother’” is ridiculous and makes it sounds like it was written by a bunch of NZ First voters.

Xbox to be Blu

photo credit: DeclanTM

Around the Internet, we hear that Sony and Microsoft are in talks over an Xbox Blu-ray disc drive. No surprises here, HD-DVD lost and Xbox picking up Blu-ray will force the consoles to battle on the merits of their games.

This all seems still a little up-in-the-air, non-confirmed and liquid but I did hear a little rumor from another source – scribbled on my whiteboard when I got into work! Apparently they’ll be here by Christmas and cost NZD$400 – a whopping $150 more expensive than their HD-DVD drives. Also, they’ll work on your Vista PC over a USB connection, as the HD-DVD drive did.

If true, this levels the playing field between PS3 and Xbox360 a little. Although PS3 will still be the cheapest BD-Live (Profile 2.0) player. Xbox360 Arcade edition + BD player will be ~$750 when the PS3 is around about $650 at the moment. Should be interesting to see if anything comes of this and if my whiteboard was correct, or just making things up.