'BULLSHIT & JELLYBEANS' REMINDER : With Christmas and the next Free Radical magazine both nearly upon us, the semi-official 'Not PC'/Free Radical /'Darnton V Clark' Xmas barbecue is imminent: this Friday, December 1, and you're invited.Details here.
Invite Don Brash to join ACT, to stand in 2008 as East Coast Bays candidate against McCully, and to be finance spokesman and deputy leader. It will be your best ever chance to revitalise ACT, now that the Nats are on the slow train to their comfort zone of platitudes and status quo politics.There's more than one way for The Don to make finance minister, and more than one way to cannibalise the Nats.
Worried that giving rivals a free ride would undermine his profits, Mr Trujillo is threatening not to lay the fibreGood for him. Says Trujillo. “Those who risk capital to earn returns shouldn't have to subsidise those that don't.” Quite right.
I've been listening all week to Nicky Hager telling us we have a "right to know" what was in Don Brash's emails, that the theft of these emails is in "the public interest," and how he has no regrets about publishing a book filled with someone else's mail. A book published as the result of theft.
And here's something else Hager might like to think about: the story of the News of the World 'journalist' currently in the dock in London for intercepting and publishing private communications. Clive Goodman (right), who intercepted the calls of royals, MPs and celebrities, has been told by the judge that he faces jail time. Hager meantime has been led to believe by our own complicit media that he faces a best-seller.
From a Sixty Minutes interview with US General John Abizaid (right), the four-star commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East (transcript here; video here), comes this excerpt. INTERVIEWER: "We hear very little about the victory in Iraq these days. We hear a lot about how to manage the defeat. And a lot of…""We hear..."? Who from.
GENERAL ABIZAID: "What defeat?"
INTERVIEWER: "How we minimize…"
GENERAL ABIZAID: "That's your word. You talk to our commanders in the field – they don't believe that they've been defeated. Defeat is your word, not my word. Can Iraq stabilize? Yes, Iraq could stabilize."
More 'useful' academic research revealed in the Herald today. Story here. Waikato University School of Education sociologist Toni Bruce has been conducting research on (in her words) "the intersection of sport and the media - analysing both the content of the media and how media workers (sports writers, TV commentators) understand their roles."Overall, our analysis revealed that Sportscafe constructed a discourse about gender that privileged new lad masculinity and reinforced the marginalisation of women, while masking its messages in boyish humour.
Wow. You can sure see why she gets the big bread. She also noted that "sexualisation" was a prevalent theme on Sportscafe, with "regular sexual innuendo and sarcastic references to sexual prowess (or lack thereof)," and recorded her male students who played soccer saying they had to "negotiate their sense of masculinity because they were not taken seriously because they choose not to play rugby." Poor lambs.When National MPs oppose measures to control smoking or gambling, or to allow greater subsidies for or advertising of pharmaceuticals, the public has every right to know whether those interests have been giving the party money.We need, concludes I/S, "an end to money laundering and anonymous donations."
Johann Hari from London's Independent newspaper is surprised that ten days after Milton Friedman's death he's been eulogised for his monetarism, praised for his proselytising on small government and buried with his errors, but few have raised the "one issue [on which] Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose. Over forty years," notes Hari, "he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written."He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr’s drugs tsar, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”Read on here for more. Challenge yourself.
Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.
Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,” he said. “But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”
News for Prisoner fans like myself:BBC NEWS: Remake for cult show The Prisoner
Patrick McGoohan played Prisoner Number 6 in the original Cult TV series The Prisoner is to be remade into a six-part series for Sky One, the broadcaster has confirmed. Director of programmes Richard Woolfe promised a "thrilling reinvention" of the drama about an ex-secret agent trapped in an isolated village.
Too early however to tell if this is good news. Like all fans of these TV shows, we remember with horror the Avengers film... In the meantime, click to hear this important message from that first series:
UPDATE 2: Here's "a further embellishment" to the bingo game, courtesy of David Slack: Take a drink every time you hear John say anything Helen wouldn't. So much of this is motherhood and apple pie, I think you'll have plenty left in the fridge at the end of the game.And I think he's likely right.
"What you can be assured of is that our policies will always be measured against our core principles. Let me be also clear that I make no excuses for saying those polices will be harvested from wherever we see the best results being achieved.
I am interested in what works, and not what should, or could, or might work in theory."
"...no one with any awareness of the world can be ignorant of [global warming]... all of us, across the political spectrum, with the exception perhaps of the Greens, have taken too long to put the protection of our environment at the forefront of our thinking. That needs to change. In the National Party we have taken steps to do this, and we will be taking more steps."And those steps do not feature property-rights based solutions.
An Artist's Voice: A Radical Perspective
The Carrot and The Stick
What motivates you to be the best that you can be? For me, it is the carrot and the stick. By visualizing the best results of my skills and the disasters of my worst attributes, the process somehow manages to kick my butt in gear to correct my mistakes and light a white-hot fire underneath me to relish my best.
Many of you have read the Mini-Tutorials, which show the wonderful ways artists create and solve art problems. Now, I would like to introduce you to my more polemical side, A Radical Perspective. It's a new website on aesthetic commentary.
The first article to go up is the newly revised Pandora's Box Part I
The joy of creation is one of the great gifts of human ability. It is not easy and it is not automatic: there can be many painful twists and turns, and many mistakes made. Yet when it works--when all the complex building blocks come together to express something meaningful--it transports the soul.
Good criticism is about identifying what works and what doesn't. All critics have a perspective and an agenda. Mine is radical: I believe in uncompromising and innovative methods, fundamentals, and art that values human existence.
From that perspective, I hope you will enjoy it when I take off my gloves and engage my more polemical nature.
Enjoy life and art,
Michael Newberry
November 25th, 2006
"When people join my campaign," said Reagan, "they are supporting me; I am not necessarily supporting them."To imply otherwise is outrageous collectivism. And to lie about such an innocuous association is just stupid, and -- like all lies -- in the end fatal.
[Honest hard-working] men are today working in a philosophical vacuum. Unless a philosophy of reason salvages our culture and civilization, civilization cannot move forward and the work of such men will be for nought. Their work will constitute the rubble of a civilization that committed suicide because it rejected a fully consistent philosophy of reason.
LET ME admit it: we Kazakhs owe Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat’s creator, a debt. Not only is he capable of making many of us — myself included — laugh out loud, but his spoof documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, has resulted in the kind of media attention of which previously I could only dream...
Architectural drawing is an art all its own. Have a look at this year's winners of the KRob Architectural Drawing Competition, the sort of stuff you have to do if winning architectural competitions is your thing. I have to confess that too often the slickness of so much architectural drawing is intended simply to obscure the banality of the architecture delineated, and my own preference for architectural drawings are those that are clear, explanatory and still delightful in their own right -- and there are very few of the latter to be found here. There's an example on the right. The 32nd Annual Ken Roberts Architectural Delineation Competition.One of the worst forms of social incompetence reared its ugly head that day, apathy in its worst form. The helpless owners and employees of businesses that were looted and burned, right in front of a church-going public, with only a few daring to lend a helping hand. A public severed of their social responsibility and altruistic values through years of mindless propaganda of hatred and the principle of “them and us” in the name of democracy. But above all that, is the total failure of our Police force to plan for such social occurrence, and to protect the property and rights of the business sector that has been the target of hate campaign by the leaders of the pack ‘Akilisi Pohiva and ‘Uliti Uata... The government has been trying to appease the Pangai Si’i Mob in a number of ways, but with the irrationally intoxicated mind of the pack leaders, they take any indecision by government as a weakness of leadership and it fueled their arrogance by the day.Strong stuff. PRs [ie., MPs] Who Instigate Terrorism Should Resign
As thick as two planks - but bloated on self-esteem - the verdict on too many of our media reporters and interviewers.
The climate of unpleasantness the media systematically built up around Don Brash in recent months, intensifying because of the contemptible act of his emails being stolen, will be a pyrrhic victory for the fourth estate. It is already regarded as among the lowest of professions in this country. It will now be reckoned as the lowest. But it never seems to strike home why this is the case.
Your beer update this week comes from a cricket-addled Neil Miller from the Real Beer website:
I have heard more stories about indifferent staff, inexplicable delays, corked wine, cold food and off beer at the Loaded Hog than all the other bars in Wellington put together.I want to join our American friends this day in giving thanks to their Pilgrim Fathers, and more importantly, their Founding Fathers (I hope they are doing that!), for creating the greatest country on earth, Western civilisation's highest achievement: the United States of America.Read on here for why this really should be a thanksgiving day for us all.
