Public Address - Hard News (Home)

They have a point | Jul 19, 2006 11:45

National's immediate response to the release of the QC's report on Philip Taito Field yesterday was fairly predictable: it called for a commission of inquiry. The problem is, National always seems to be calling for a commission of inquiry. You get the impression they'd demand a royal commission if Judith Tizard was seen crossing against the lights.

But in this case, they have a point. Field wasn't hung by Noel Ingram's report, but he certainly hasn't been cleared either. John Armstrong's column is frankly scathing.

At best, Field has conducted his affairs unwisely; at worst he has systematically taken advantage of the "gratitude" of those he has helped with immigration issues (it should be noted that simply helping people with immigration issues is not the problem: MPs and ministers do that all the time). Whether it's worth paying for another couple of lawyers' holiday homes with a full commission is debatable, but there's no reason this shouldn't go to the privileges committee. And that appears to be the path National is now pursuing.

Will the Speaker, Margaret Wilson, send the matter on to the committee? She'll certainly be under some pressure not to. Field has huge support in his community and in his electorate, and the Labour-led coalition has a one-vote majority on everything but confidence (where the Greens abstain as per their agreement). No government really wants to wade into that, but in avoiding it, Labour will basically choose to avoid further public damage to Field's perceived integrity by publicly damaging its own.

Elsewhere, WTF is up with Bush? In the midst of a major crisis in the Middle East there was his inadvertently broadcast chat with Tony Blair, in which he appears incapable of sustaining any gravity and possessed of an understanding of the situation that might kindly be described as folksy. And then there's this: Bush walked into the room for an important summit and gave the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, an uninvited neck massage, by which she was surprised and apparently not pleased. I'm sorry, but that's just weird. Photos and video via AmericaBlog.

Scoop has William Rivers Pitt's Cheerleading the Apocalypse, about you-know-what. He looks in on the dispensationalist Christians who vote Bush and buy those stupid books by the million:

A lot of them are thrilled by what is happening in the Middle East. An internet forum called "Rapture Ready" offers some insight into that particular breed of right-wing Christian who cannot wait for the Apocalypse. "Gosh!!!" writes one poster, "Here we are making plans to move to the east coast and we might not even have to move after all. I say, come quickly Lord!!!"

"Israel is not a land of un-walled villages so this is probably a war that will result in that," writes another poster. "Then Gog and Magog will come. But I believe we could be raptured before. I believe before Damascus is destroyed God may rescue His children out of there." Yet another poster writes, "In another thread, someone brought up the fact that the kidnapping of the first Israeli soldier that started this whole thing was on June 25th, and if you count from that day to August 3rd ... it is EXACTLY 40 days!!!!! I find that to be a HUGE coincidence.".

Perhaps it's unfair to focus on the tens of millions of deluded fundamentalist zealots who can't wait for the actual end of the world. So Rivers Pitt consults a prominent conservative commentator:

It is all quite terrifying, but most frightening of all are the voices being raised in support of widening this crisis into total war. William Kristol, editor of the far-right periodical The Weekly Standard, has openly stated that the crisis should be used as an opportunity to attack other Middle Eastern nations. "While Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel," wrote Kristol in an article titled "It's Our War," "they are also enemies of the United States. The right response is renewed strength - in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities."

It should be noted that Kristol was one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has been working out splendidly thus far. One hopes there are some wiser heads somewhere who will remember this, and take Mr. Kristol's advice with a large grain of salt.

I'll say. By some reports there are already 100,000 displaced people in Lebanon. That's a huge number. Until you look at the very last paragraph of Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death, a horrifying report from Baghdad for The Times of London, where you learn that 889,000 Iraqis have fled the country since the invasion and 644,500 of them are refugees in Syria and Jordan. That's a 2005 figure, so it's reasonable to assume the number of people displaced is now over a million. This, according to the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, is "the biggest new flow of refugees in the world". How many people are displaced within Iraq is anyone's guess, but the widespread reports of ethnic cleansing suggest that number may be even larger.

But that's war. That's what you're talking about when you have one.

And finally, Jock Anderson's Caseload website is very much open for business. It looks good, but I think he's on the wrong track obliging user registration before any content can be viewed, especially if he wants to derive advertising revenue. Jock, lighten up mate: your first job should be drawing a crowd. Then you can take names.

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Mindshare vs. moolah | Jul 18, 2006 10:51

So YouTube hits 100 million videos a day. And surely, any day now, they'll be slapping ads all over the place and cashing up big-time. Well, not so fast. As Ars Technica points out, the DMCA provides YouTube with a defence against copyright complaints, so long as it styles itself as "a service provider" - nothing to do with us, we're just hosting some stuff for people - but that status would be removed if it was seen to be directly deriving revenue from clips it doesn't own or have rights to.

It may have won all the mindshare a one-year-old start-up could desire, but the way forward for YouTube is still not entirely clear. In its favour is the fact that very few people really want it to go away.

On the other hand, an earlier Ars Technica story noted the Recording Industry Association of America's idiotic attempt to get nasty over copyright infringement in "video karaoke" clips on YouTube. Oh Yes. Because 12 year old girls miming to Christina Aguilera songs in their bedrooms are killing the music industry. I'm sorry, but for fuck's sake …

Has Deborah Coddington lost the ability to write English? That would be a not unreasonable conclusion in the basis of her column claiming that Judith Collins is a candidate for the national leadership because she is currently "the only one in the National caucus with big kahunas." Was there not a sub-editor who could guess what Debs was desperately trying to say there? But fnaar, fnaar anyway …

And is Rosemary McLeod having a homosexual panic? Che discusses.

Amid it all, Christopher Hitchens (hat tip: Hitchens Watch) declines to follow the script in an interesting radio interview about the Middle East with celebrity winger Hugh Hewitt, and LGF Watch detects strange days in the right-wing blogosphere.

Lots of people are loving The Daily Show's coverage of the "Net neutrality" debate. And Lewis Black, also on the Daily Show, is pretty funny. And , finally, for fans of House, there's an unsubtle parody.

This just in: Tim Selwyn sentenced to two months' jail on his sedition charge. He has also been convicted of fraud charges including using false identities and stealing $11,000 in Work and Income benefits. Ouch.

UPDATE: Bomber's post at Tumeke says Selwyn got a total 17 months jail - with the historic fraud offences making up the bulk of the sentence. The bringing of the sedition charge leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, but I guess civil disobedience is best undertaken from the moral high ground, and having undertaking extensive fraud, including obtaining IRD numbers in the name of dead people, Tim didn't have that.

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Depressing | Jul 17, 2006 10:34

Here's a grim irony: Ya Libnan, an online news service that grew from a blog founded to cheerlead for freedom and democracy during last year's "cedar revolution" now finds itself keeping a body count and venting outrage as its authors' "beautiful country" is "destroyed so effortlessly and with such disregard." Ya Libnan's fair-weather friends in the commentariat have, naturally, moved on. Sorry folks.

As conveyed in news reports and blogs, the attitude of the Lebanese public has been clear enough: pissed off with Hezbollah, and angry, distraught and appalled at the destruction Israel is wreaking on their country. Looking away for a moment from the loss of life (130 Lebanese, almost all civilians, many children; 10 Israeli civilians - could have been much worse if the Hezbollah rocket attack on the railway station hadn't missed the rush hour), the economic damage inflicted in a few short days is horrific. Lebanon's modern airport has been attacked again; bridges and roads taken out; tourists, investors and diplomats are fleeing any way they can. The rebuilding and re-engagement of recent years is being laid waste. Didn't we want a democracy here?

This post, made in some anger by a moderate, democratic anti-Hezbollah blogger, in response to comments posted to his blog by armchair generals, is compulsory reading. This is a guy who namechecks Mark Steyn for goodness sake - yet he now concludes:

I still don't hate the Israeli people. But there is no way I'll ever be able to trust Israel, and there is no way I'll ever be able to feel comfortable with all of the rightwing, massacre apologists who pompously spout rhetoric at suffering people.

What kind of a result is that? More in the same vein in a report from Beiruit:

Our politics were as schizophrenic as our shopping baskets. The first day, everyone I talked to was furious at Hezbollah. "How can I express my anger?" wrote a Lebanese friend in a mass e-mail blazing with sarcasm. "Maybe by saying bravo to Hizbollah, thank you to Hizbollah. Thank you for ruining the entire season for the poor Lebanese who have been struggling so hard to cover the losses of last year's events... for destroying the tourism industry and infrastructure? for weakening yet again an already weak government and flushing all the hopes of millions of Lebanese down the drain? should I say more?"

But then Israel bombed the airport, and suddenly, surprisingly, I was hearing cautiously approving statements from people who'd always railed against the Shi'ite militia before. These were Christians and secular Muslims, not Hezbollah partisans, but they saved their wrath for Israel and the US. "I am angry, definitely, at the Israelis," said my friend George, who until now had always been adamant that the Party of God should give up its arms, like all the other militias that sprang up during the Lebanese civil war.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of news story the Arab world is reading:

Twenty civilians, including 15 children, were burnt alive yesterday in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack on residents fleeing border villages in south Lebanon. An Israeli missile incinerated a van in the deadliest single attack of the campaign launched after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight last Wednesday.

Police said the van was carrying two families fleeing the village of Marwaheen after Israeli loudspeaker warnings to leave their homes.

Rationalisation of the week (as endorsed by Instapundit): it's all fair because Hezbollah is using the whole of Lebanon as a human shield.

Interesting interview with Mark Perry of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, who appears to know what he's talking about. Particularly illuminating with respect to the kidnapping incident that sparked the attacks.

And Billmon keeps score and concludes that: "With or without Iranian help, Hezbollah is making mincemeat out of the myth of overwhelming Israeli superiority. How this will ultimately play out remains to be seen, but it certainly raises the stakes, at least for the Israelis."

I saw An Inconvenient Truth yesterday and planned to write about it today. Tomorrow perhaps.

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Some week ... | Jul 14, 2006 10:01

Tze Ming raises a good question when she ponders the relative silence of the Anglophone blogosphere after the atrocity in Mumbai this week. I thought about that too. The most trivial reason for me is that I've been caning my brain through the gears all week on paying work. You may have noticed more than the usual degree of whimsy in Hard News.

More significantly, I'm not sure what to say and I suspect I'm not the only one. On the ground, Islamists and Pakistani nationalists might not look very different, yet they represent two very different scenarios. One is the familiar enemies of freedom murdering the innocent; the other is an ally in The War on Terror.

Moreover, I don't have a mental map of Mumbai. I don't know how it looks, where people go and how horror might appear. I've walked around New York, I know how it smells and how the people are. I even know a little, vicariously, about Baghdad: the names of neighbourhoods, the Green Zone, the writings of people who live there. And when the bombs blew last year in London, almost my first response was to map out the locations. I know what it is to be a Londoner (part of me still is) and I easily guessed the destination that bad morning: The Pub.

UPDATE: Reader Peter Lees has provided a description:

I do know Mumbai having visied many times over last 30 years, and have many business friends there.

It is a series of Islands joined together in a long strip of land about 50kM long, with the train line down the middle.

You live either on West or East Mumbai, depending on which side of trackyou are.

And most go to work on the trains and/or buses. Motor Bikes are popular too, as few can afford cars.

The 13 million plus people come from all over India, all Castes, all Religions, all Colours and mostly get on with each other.

They work together, travel together on buses and trains, and the problems between different groups that occur elsewhere in India, are generally absent.

That is why Mumbai people are shocked at these bombings etc - they could understand if they occurred in Delhi, or other places, but the idea of this strife in Mumbai is totally foreign to them.

As an example, an office I know well with 25 staff has Hindu (all castes) Muslim, Sikh, Christian (mostly Catholic) - they all work in harmony, meet after work, and some car pool.

There's some other stuff on too, of course: notably Israel's psychotic over-reaction to the capture of a handful of uniformed soldiers. Some grim humour might be found in the fact that those members of the commentariat who hailed the "cedar revolution" - at last, Lebanon had a government free from the yoke of Syrian tyranny! - have been doing double-time in the search for rationalisations for Israeli forces entering that shining sovereign state and killing people. The doublethink specialists at Powerline have come up with a goodie: the uniformed Israeli troops who were captured aren't troops, they're children. And the 15 children killed in Lebanon in the past couple of days? Terrorists, obviously. Meanwhile, Associated Press has also passed through the looking glass and has taken to describing the 14-year-old girl raped and murdered by US troops in Haditha as a "woman".

Meanwhile, reality was not so much warped as turned inside out and given a thorough rogering at the funeral of former Enron CEO Ken Lay, where the dead corporate criminal was compared to Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, as well as James Byrd, the black man dragged behind a car till he died by racist thugs.

Couple of important pieces of commentary: historian Andrew Bacevich's What's An Iraqi Life Worth? and Alan Wolfe's Why Conservatives can't Govern. See also John Dean interviewed on The Daily Show about Conservatives Without Conscience.

Closer to home, both DPF and No Right Turn blog the unhappy results of this week's report on the living standards of the poorest New Zealanders. The short version seems to me to be: although many fewer people subsist on benefits now, those who do are increasingly being left behind. Stop wittering on about throwing-money-at-the-problem and throw some money at the problem already. Not enough to live on is not enough to live on.

More on coins: several Hard News readers have noted that the outgoing 10 cent pieces work like quarters in many US vending machines, and Paul Campbell says "the old 1c piece is also roughly the same size and weight as the US dime - back in the 80's when we were living in the US we'd periodically have visitors descend upon us with pockets full of 1c pieces - the bank at Auckland Airport must have had people changing $5/10 at a time into them every day - at the time a dime was worth about NZ20c."

And, finally, if you think life's been a little rugged lately, check out what Matt Nippert's been through. All Matt's friends have been very glad to see him again, and I'm looking forward to him becoming an Aucklander again next week. Dude: my place, the rugby, lamb shanks …

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Things I never knew | Jul 13, 2006 11:24

We have such educated readers. Gabor Toth got in touch to point out some things about our soon-to-be obsolete silver coins that I didn't know. July 31 will be really the end of an era. But I'll let him explain:

One of the sad (but little known) things about the upcoming coinage change is we will lose an extraordinary link with the past that goes back hundreds of years.

Our current five and ten cent coins are based on the sixpence and shilling respectively. These date back to the reign of Edward VI in 1550. Our 50 cent piece is based on the half crown introduced in 1526 during the reign of Henry VIII. The size and weight of these coins were standardised during the time of George III and they haven't changed since. NZ is one of the last countries to still use this Georgian standard (well - until the end of the month anyway).

Our 20 cent coin is a youngster in comparison. Based on the florin (two shillings), its size and weight were not standardised until the early 1850's.

Matt Barrett had a rather different, but equally interesting, angle:

Thought you might be interested to know a little piece of trivia regarding the old 50 cent coins.

In Switzerland, of all places, they are readily accepted by most vending machines in place of 5 Franc coins. 5 Francs are about $6 NZD - so, as long as you don't mind ripping off the Swiss, you can do quite well.

It doesn't hurt that all manner of things come via vending machines - most profitably, train tickets and cigarettes.

So - stock up on those 50 cent coins before they go out of circulation, should you ever intend to find yourself in Switzerland.

That, of course, would be wrong …

It can sometimes be hard to get more signal than noise on the climate change issue, but Jim Hansen's piece in the current issue of the New York Review of Books is a work of pinpoint clarity. Hansen, you may recall, is the senior NASA climate scientist who came under heavy manners a little while ago for speaking publicly on the issue, and his review of books by Tim Flannery and Elizabeth Kolbert, plus both the book and movie versions of An Inconvenient Truth is compulsory reading.

Don't say we never do anything for you. My online rugby buddy Steve Hodge kindly excerpted Ali Williams' much-in-demand dumping of George Gregan in Saturday's test match and I've uploaded it to YouTube to share the love.

This being the week for both YouTube gems and altered states, I'm happy to pass on Craig Foltz' recommendation of this clip of James Brown off his tits on television. He does feel good.

NZHistory.net.nz has a couple of interesting new things. There's a section on the nuclear free movement in New Zealand, that - nice! - links to our publication of the Lange speech. And a 20th anniversary feature on homosexual law reform.

The Kiwi Herald gets to the nub of the child poverty issue.

And Tumeke's auction of the flag they wouldn't sell on Trade Me (ie: the one Tame Iti shot) closes at 4pm tomorrow.

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