What makes a US presidential candidate unelectable?

Over ninety percent of Americans could imagine themselves voting for a black President. Slightly less than ninety percent would vote for a woman - slightly down on 2000 (because, one could theorize, respondents see the question as being about Hillary Clinton). Over half could vote for a gay candidate. Jews, Catholics - not much discrimination there.

But if you want to find someone that less than half of Americans could vote for...that person would be an athiest.

And the number who could vote for an athiest is falling.

Technically, that's not bigotry. Just nutty.

The UK Sunday papers are saying Tony Blair will go on 9 May and Gordon Brown won't be challenged. As Jay Leno said, so, President Bush has toppled yet another government.

Josie is very excited. Paris for the French elections, the UK for the end of Tony Blair's government. Makes you wonder what will happen when she gets to the US in late May.

Apropos that section 59 issue, Tina Fey said:

"Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted during an interview this week that he has smacked his children, though only because he believed reports that they were carrying weapons of mass destruction."

Is that the dullest post headline in the history of the internets?

Anyway...Boing Boing posts this:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced. Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.

The act of posting, of course, being an example of exactly what the post is about.

As is the act of posting about the post.

As is...

Except in Italy.

Meanwhile...exactly!

one of the favorite topics of discussion on conservative blogs was the inevitable crash of the euro in favor of the mighty dollar. Most of this had nothing to do with any thought about economics but instead a general association between perceived penis size of your country and the value of its currency

What an abject humiliation it is to be reined over by these people: John Harris on what the weekend's events tell us about the class minefield that is Britain today | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited.

Why would anyone want to call themselves a 'subject' of these people? These people so up themselves that using the word 'toilet' or greeting someone with a form of words they don't care for is enough to have their entire family damned as unsuitable.

These up themselves poms, with no discernible personal qualities of their own beyond the ordinary somehow, see themselves fit to pronounce on the qualities of the people they leech on? And their 'subjects' invite that?

The royals and their hangers-on are leaking this stuff! They are revealing the core attitudes at the heart of monarchy. If you support the monarchy, it is necessary to subscribe to their views.

How emasculating. How self-hating. How humiliating. How repugnant the royals are to every value of modern civilisation, enlightenment and humanity.

Antarctica is haunted, apparently, by the ghosts of the Erebus crash. I'm sure this thoughtful and fantastically well- research article is a great comfort to the families of the passengers. (Oh - do ya think the editor looked at that piece before credulously running it?)

Accepting the truthiness of this story, a number of questions might be posed:

Do penguins have ghosts too?

Do living penguins get the ghosty heebie jeebie thing going on? Do they hear pecking in the night? Are ghost penguins spooked by ghost people?

Do the ghosts get...ummm...bored? You know, with all the ice and white stuff and the long, long winters?

What's that thing about only showing up when there is one living person around? Is there an ethereal tapu on haunting more than one person?

Who, or what, make the ecto rules?

Does anyone else think the ghosts are a bit, y'know - perverted? The whole peeping thing? The going 'boo' thang? How come only the perverts get ethereally preserved? Why don't normal, right-thinking ghosts rein in the perverts a little? Why don't they lean on the omni-present to give the living a little space and dignity? Just saying.

Do ghosts get cold? Why don't the ghosts go somewhere warm? Like those old people who retire to Miami. And Tauranga*.

Do ghosts in warmer climates take tourist trips down to the ice to see the wonders they never got the chance to check out while they were flesh?

Then there are the energy issues. We can safely assume that, since ghosts have a corporeal presence sufficient to produce endogenous energy (i.e. noise), they contribute to global warming. I mean, plainly, ghosts do not take in energy. The creation of noise (footsteps) is the creation of energy. That energy then changes its form - it can't be destroyed, so it must turn to heat. THIS IS WHY THE POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING. Caspar's frying the ice!

Now, if we consider the seventy-five billion people who have lived and died, ever, and assume a proportion become ghosts eternally, exothermic** energy is only increasing. Every year. There is nothing we can do about it until we all stop dying. Or haunting. We should drive our 4WDs happily now, knowing it's not our fault. Climate Change is caused by the dead people!

* Possibly not everyone who retires to Tauranga is old. Some of them seem positively teenage.

** I don't have any idea what 'exothermic' means either. It just seemed like a clever, sciencey-sounding word to use right there in that sentence.***

***http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/hell.asp

Putin is repellent: BBC NEWS | Europe | Kasparov arrested at Moscow rally

Just because someone is a good writer, musician or actor does not make them an expert political analyst, nor their views about the world more interesting. And, if we think of, say, Harold Pinter, the opinions of even bad writers can be stunningly dull as well.
But if artists are to be allowed to comment publicly I guess a writer is possibly more likely to say something funny. Kurt Vonnegut:

"So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget."

If you haven't read Galapagos, it's worth every page. Slaughterhouse Five I thought was a bit dire, but I might go back and read it again. I was put off Vonnegut for a long time because people said he was a science fiction writer. Bollocks. He writes hypothetically, which, when you think about, every fictionalist does.

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president."

Update: Brilliant - Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P. - International Herald Tribune

Ramos-Horta is trailing in East Timor.

This means Xanana might not become the Prime Minister to replace him. It means there might be a wholesale clean-out of the post-independence government.

As a fan and friend of Xanana I'm not so happy about this. As a democrat, this is fantastic. I wonder how many of the global media who queued up to describe Timor Leste as a failed state during last year's military unrest will now celebrate the democratic momentum? No, I don't wonder. None will.

"There's a big scandal going on with ... 'American Idol.' Sanjaya is apparently being kept on the show because there's a web site called votefortheworst.com, which urges the voters to vote for the worst possible choice. Bush heard about it and said, 'Hey, it worked for me.'" - Bill Maher

Yet another example of the idiocy that infects commentary about trade...

In a plausibly sensible article, Philip Bowring goes from arguing in the first two pars that it is unlikely either South Korea or the US would have bothered with their 'free' trade deal "if they believed there was a realistic chance now that the Doha Round of trade negotiations would have a positive outcome" to saying with terrible certainty a mere twelve paragraphs later, "In theory, these deals might add up to freer trade, but in practice multilateral agreements - preferably global ones - are the only ones that deliver it."

In other words, things that never happen deliver the most.

No wonder then his point is both that the agreement should never have been made and it must not be rejected.

Everyone paying far too much for food and agricultural products is fine. But everyone paying the same for music? There needs to be an inquiry.

The European Union insists that Russia should open its gas pipeline, saying "We are seeking a level playing field, a win-win for both sides."

Opening the gas pipeline "would make prices more transparent. Consumers would also have more choices for their suppliers, and European industry could become more competitive as a result of cheaper energy," the EU Commissioner says.

Just as in agriculture, for example. The average EU tariff for agricultural products is 18.6 percent. It is 146 percent for frozen beef and 168 percent for skim milk powder.

Meanwhile the US is adopting "a new policy" of imposing tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods on the grounds that its government subsidies violated international trade laws.

"The message that we have been sending all along to all of our trading partners is that we want fair trade and that we will use every tool at our disposal to guarantee that our workers and our companies have a level playing field," the US trade secretary says.

The US has a tariff on our whey powder of 108 percent, on dairy spreads of 122 percent and on butter of 92 percent.

Paris cops have shot and killed someone after PSG football club fans nutted off.

Parc des Princes is just a short bus ride down the road from us. PSG is our team. A few weeks ago I took Maria to a night game there. There were armed riot police all over the show; plainly for a reason.

* In possibly related news - We got a complete PSG outfit for Maria to wear: Shorts, socks, shirt and a fantastic hoody sweat shirt. Now she won't wear any of it because a boy told her only boys wear that stuff.

In Rwanda, France is playing on the side of the angels. No one gives Rwanda much attention. You can't care about everything. The butchery there and in Burundi was the single most despicable act of genocide in recent history and there has been some pretty hot competition for the title.

When there are monsters around, you can (a) ignore them and let them get away with; (b) invade; (c) organise international action to hold murderous thugs to account for crimes against humanity anywhere in the civilised world.

The last option is the only good one.

The advocates for the Iraq invasion are recanting in all directions.

I've been reading Bob Woodward's book, State of Denial, cataloguing the unbelievable incompetence of the invasion.

Elementary questions about weapons of mass destruction and post-invasion administration weren't asked before the invasion. It just beggars belief - not even asked!

I mean, wouldn't you expect the President would have a meeting at some point where he said, 'where are the first chemical weapons attacks going to come from? What will happen to our guys when the attacks come? How will we deal with that?' If he had just asked that, he would have found out no one really knew because there wasn't any real evidence there were any chem weapons. And wouldn't he have said 'who is going to run this place after the fighting? What will they need? How will the government work? What will the people do? How do we know that?' Cos if he had asked any of that, the emptiness would have been exposed. It's understandable that superiors in the chain of command bullied seniors to suppress doubts or tailor their advice - that's how large organisations always work. But real leaders think through their vision for what will happen and search through their organisation to see how it's all going to work. Direction comes from comprehension. It just didn't happen. I can think of a few reasons why, but I'm still staggered.

The incompetence of the post-invasion US regime is breath-taking. Paul Bremer has to have been one of the greatest disasters in US history. Tommy Franks was not competent to run a candy bar. Just a loud-mouthed oaf. Abizaid is a weak, over-promoted fool.

But the interesting, troubling problem is that in all the told-you-so commentary going round, no one has an adequate answer to 'what happens next'? That is, except for the people who just want to up and leave and watch the slaughter like they watched the slaughter in Srebinica.

It will take the US ten years to get out of Iraq.

A continuing series about news you shouldn't miss.

In Tonga, wilful destruction is the predictable result of the decay of a laughable, undemocratic, incompetent and backward monarchy, which has been tolerated for far too long by governments in the Pacific including New Zealand. Call me a neo-con, but why shouldn't we offend Tonga's monarchy? What are they going to do about it?

Milton Friedman is dead. I'm sure when I studied economics you used to get an A for getting the 'i' and 'e' the right way round. I didn't get so many As. I can still spot bollocks at a thousand paces.

The BBC claims he never lost an argument - that would be, except with the facts.

Friedman got the Nobel Prize for inventing the Nairu - the Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, also known as The Theory Of Why Unemployment Is Good And We Have To Have Lots Of It. It was perhaps the most destructive idea to blight developed economies in the late twentieth century. And there were plenty of candidates. He said low unemployment was incompatible with price stability. What the theory actually is, is a discovery that full employment is slightly redistributional. It shifts money from the owners of capital to people who would otherwise have nothing, not even an income from their labour. One reads about Nairu vainly searching for reflection that the cost of unemployment has to be paid for in the costs and consequences of unemployment. Factor that in and the theory collapses. Friedman never coped adequately with that simple objection. I'm, also amused at the illiterate obits describing Reagan as a Friedmanite. That would be because Reagan himself did, but Hullo! Reagan ran the most Keynsian economic policies since Roosevelt: A massive blow out in the fiscal deficit? Theory that tax cuts pay for themselves in faster growth? It's all in the General Theory. Friedman actually said, "If this is monetarism, I am no longer a monetarist".

Back in France, as the cops noted, there is daring and then there's stupid.

Someone recently, in conversation, accused me of being opinionated on this blog. Yes, me! Imagine it!

Anyway, in order to restore the balance, allow me to update you with clippings of interest from developments on the global newswire.

The formidable Rudi Giuliani has started his shot at the presidency. Much as I would like to see an Italian president, he won't make it. There is no way through to the Republican nomination for a New York liberal with progressive views about human relationships.

Al Jazeera's new network is nearly ready to launch. Looking forward to this. We get most of our TV news now from the BBC, CNN and Euronews - respectively, news for the pompous, news for the dumb and news for bureaucrats. Possibly we are all three. I wish we could see more attitude in television news. French talk programmes are wall to wall and there is something for every taste, but I can't follow it well enough. Al Jazeera is another tributary flowing into the great lake.

These kooks are no relation. Just sayin'...

Not that I want to laugh at the misfortune of an over-hyped, brown gadget or anything...but the world's biggest tech blog, Engadget, tried to install a Zune for a test.

HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahhh, feeling the Microsoft love, that special, special love. Especially loving that 'restart the machine when you uninstall'. And the app crashes. Ah, the memories. [Wipes tear from eye]. When I used Windows...Good times. And handing over your phone number to make the software go. You've got to love Windows, don't you? No. No you don't.

Meanwhile Super Frenchie discovers t-shirts that say 'Texas is bigger than France'. Read his outstanding return of serve.

This is awesome.

The French Socialists edge closer to selecting their candidate.

One might notice, from the linked article, Rainbow Warrior bomber Laurent Fabius, who is the candidate of the left, is opposed to Turkish entry to the EU. That's right. That's the left position.

Go Sego (whose involvement in blowing up ships in Auckland is limited to her brother actually attaching the bomb to the hull, and her expressions of admiration for him and her absence of sympathy for the murdered victim).

This site continues to receive daily hits from searchers looking for Ségolène Royal nude.

Bruce Reed says:

Any surviving GOP members of Congress can stop worrying about going to jail for selling their vote, because nobody will want to buy it.

Meanwhile Rue Rude has a list of the war records of US politicians, broken down by - well, y'know - whether they are pro war or not.

In 2000 the average FTSE 100 chief executive is paid 39 times more than the average employee.

Now, a ceo in the same position is paid 98 times more.

This apparently reflects a move to more performance-based remuneration.

Hands up everyone who is surprised that corporate performance has not accelerated at the same pace as remuneration.

Hmmm? Didn't think so.

Why do shareholders pay so happily for so little?

Harry Hutton asks:

But are they right to hang Saddam Hussein, of previous good character, for a first offence? Will the death penalty deter other people from committing genocide? It will be egg on face time if they string him up, then it turns out they got the wrong guy.

Chortle.

Meanwhile, ever the contrarian (yes, how I admire the contrarian), Hitchens says don't lynch him.

There is a story I am not sure I believe about an octopus climbing out of its storage tank one night by pushing the lid off with a tentacle, sliming its way down the side of the tank and making it most of the way across the floor towards the door before the morning shift arrived. It is said to have happened at the Wellington marine resource centre - and good news for the centre - it has finally, finally received a resource consent.

The existing cramped facilities are open about one Saturday a month. It's one of the best activities for kids in the region. The rich Cook Strait marine life is breath-taking and the resource centre is a window into its amazing diversity. You can't leave the centre without a renewed respect for the Wellington marine environment. So when the centre wanted to expand to allow more people to see it, and provide better educational and marine research facilities, naturally it ran into a wall of opposition - from raving environment - destroying fanatics who claimed having the centre on the same coastline the airport juts into, teaching kids how beautiful the marine environment is, could somehow compromise that coastline. As if the coastline was unchanged...well it isn't.

Wellington needs to unlock more of its south coast. It is one of the most spectacular pieces of coast in New Zealand and too many moralising hippies get away with locking it off from the majority.

When I left Wellington the campaign to get the resource centre a licence was in full swing. I remember looking at its posters at the airport and wondering if it would be any closer when we came back. Two years later and its closer only in that a piece of paper finally says we're allowed to have the centre.

Well good.

One of my former law lecturers infuriated me by decorating his political philosophy in the opulent coat of professional analysis. It's an intellectual ruse - and an ugly one. So I took a shot.

The French PM calls for television cameras at cabinet. This is a great idea. Secrecy at cabinet is an outdated idea. Yes, many discussions will move elsewhere - but they do anyway. It's only people who have never been near manoeuvring for cabinet decisions who think actual decision are taken there. If it's so important to have closed cabinet meetings, why are city council meetings open?

Meanwhile Mme Royal calls for citizens juries to monitor the work of elected representatives. Another excellent idea. Accountability is the biggest problem of the public sector. Democracy is a pretty good accountability tool, but it is blunt. Citizen juries that representatives had to appear before would another layer of transparency.

Reporters are surprised Mme Royal's support rating is falling. Err - it's falling from 72 percent to 57. Name anyone who can sustain a 72 percent rating once their policies become known. (Though Bob Hawke pulled it off for a while). She is hugely dominant. But the lesson for her is to tack back towards the vague. Specifics never win anyone votes.

According to the Independent on Sunday, the item most commonly stolen from shops in Italy is Parmesan cheese.

Poor Macca. Divorcing a one-legged prostitute who accuses him of wife-beating and he's still the boring one out of Lennon and McCartney.

Popbitch

Armed kids hijack and burn bus.

Brit tabloid reporters faint in pleasure.

If the Ford Motor Company is the Vatican of mediocrity, then its bishops of bland are imperilling Jaguar. I hope the Germans buy the Jaguar marque. The Germans know how to make a car.

Ford is losing less money on its prestige brands than on its mainstream motors. But anyone can see why it's failing: It makes dull dull dull cars that no one really wants, that don't meet the rising demand for environmentally sensitive, muscular, versatile, performance. Its cars cost too much, and did I mention they're dull? Fords are dull dull dull dullity dull and only bought by people who think they should. Plus taxis and musty fleet buyers.

Oh and why are they losing money even on prestige national brands? Because Ford has clung for too long to a protectionist defence against competition that locked in high cost structures and dismal ideas. Car manufacturing should be the most globalised industry in the world. Instead it's almost the least. The sooner Ford and GM are bankrupted the better if they take with them their malignant manufacturing processes and gargoyle designs.

UPDATE: I've reflected on these exuberantly excessive thoughts over lunch and decided I don;t mean it at all. I don't really want them to go bankrupt. That's silly. I do want Ford to spin off Jaguar and its other prestige brands into a prestige brand managing owner. I want Ford to be a marketing and design company that demands and promotes innovation among a global network of innovators. Why aren't cars any much different to how they were in 1975? Or 1955 for that matter, when you think about it? Because the people who design cars today made their careers starting out in the 70s. There is no way an innovator will take over car production at Ford or GM. The only reason they survive is they have blocked, through tariffs and vertical integration, the innovation that would produce something transformative. (No I don't mean ABS braking and lighter metals; I mean something that transforms how we get from A to B, just as email and the Internet have transformed how we write letters home). They need top radically transform their structures. That's what I really mean.

Bush has banned Vegemite from the US!

Is there no depth of depravity to which this monster will not stoop?

(Boy that Aussie-US free trade deal is good for the Aussies, eh?)

Update: More on this here. (Check the comments for a couple of gems, too.)

Hillary Rodham Clinton has a statistically significant lead if she uses her maiden name, but not if she is just Hillary Clinton.

What could this mean?

French fears over globalisation are pronounced. It was one of the strongest themes in the vote to reject the European constitution. It underlies much of the fear about immigration too. Ironically, it's mostly misplaced. France owns so much of the world's intellectual property, and has such a strong brand, that it is potentially one of the major beneficiaries. But there are also a huge number of people whose jobs will be sent overseas. They're staring at ten percent unemployment and thinking 'this isn't for me.'

Enter Ségolène Royal, who has come out promising to tax French businesses for moving jobs outside France and to tax their products again when they are imported back in.

"We have to prevent this wildcat outsourcing...The capitalists have to be frightened."

How could this not stop you in your tracks: The Lancet says 600,000 people have died in Iraq since the invasion - mostly from gunfire.

Even by the solemn standards of the region this is an unusual catastrophe.

Lancet has been criticised over the integrity of the data and I'm a little suspicious of the number. The figure is an extrapolation from 547 confirmed deaths. Researchers say they have death certificates for ninety percent of them. If that was good methodology, wouldn't it be simple just to collect up all the death certificates and confirm the figure? It's an outrageous carnage there but I personally won't be using the Lancet figure.

Meanwhile, from Slate:

By failing to distinguish clearly among the overlapping security threats presented by rogue states, nuclear proliferators, and supporters of terrorism, Bush helped bring his own nightmare to life.

Exactly.

And add to that, with his eye off the ball Afghanistan is falling apart.

This analysis is interesting. The intellectual thrust behind Bush foreign policy is the projection of American power to secure democracy and markets. The analysis in the link assesses the strategic implication - that American post-Cold War strategy has been to prevent the emergence of China, Russia Japan and Germany as global rivals. (Notice which two Security Council members are not rated as even potential emerging powers.)

So the evidence is (a) the projection of power is not such a good idea when your power turns out not to be quite as omnipotent as you thought; (b) they need the merging powers to tame the actual, existing hurting-now threat, but they've piqued them all so badly they can't get the help they need; and (c) apart from anything else - the US is not willing to pay the bill to look after the strategic interests of China and Russia (see Bosnia, Conservative-cut-and-run). So the strategy has locked in its own failure.

"Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage." Damn, this had to happen in New Zealand. (link via Boing Boing).

You know that old joke about why Jesus wasn't born in Australia? (Couldn't find three wise men - or a virgin). It looks like Australia has set out to find three wise men itself. They've being asked to vote on whether there are any Australian intellectuals. The lost of nominations is satisfyingly brief.

"Australian intellectual." And the word oxymoron appears nowhere?

Intellectual is not a description many would chose for Ian Chappell, but he is one of the most engaging Aussies. Read this wonderful interview. (Andrew Denton's a pretty good interviewer, no?) There is a particular Aussie character like Chapelli you have to love: Hard, funny and with a deep commonsense streak of a fair go. (Sorry, can't remember how I found this).

And...Har de har har from the Yellow Pages.



Wish I'd thought of that. From here.

Worried that voters all over Europe are telling it to naff off, the European Union has come up with the sensational idea of

a "major communication effort" on enlargement

Whenever someone's daffy ideas are taking a pounding their first resort is to blame the way they are communicating their ideas. It saves the ego from dealing with the reality that there is a problem with the substance.

This 'major' effort will fail. In fact it will backfire.

It is another example of top-down, 'tell the punters what's good for them' arrogance.

To the extent that it manages to connect with anyone at all - and a top-down campaign will usually struggle to do that well - it will only intensify the anxiety Europeans are feeling about enlargement.

It will be undermined by a muddy message because they don't really know what they are trying to say anyway (gee, could that be why it's so hard to convince the punters?) .

And it will be white-anted by member states as politicians read the writing on the wall.

This is third rate professional communications expertise at its worst, funded on the taxpayers' coin of course. But watch the noses go in the trough for it.

South Korea's foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon will be the next UN Secretary General.

He is getting the job because he is a vanilla nobody who has never upset anyone and never will. Which is exactly - exactly - what the UN doesn't need right now.

But there was no other possible outcome. Anyone who proposed meaningful reform would not be electable. Still, they could have considered someone with a track record of strong management. Diplomacy is not really the problem at the UN.

The inability of international organisations to reform themselves may be the seed of their destruction.

I don't understand why this is, but in the autumn everyone goes on strike. I mean to say, they're all on strike all the time anyway, but in autumn they are seriously on strike. It's something to do with coming back from holidays and being grumpy.

Anyway, Rue Rude has a brilliant list of everyone who is on strike at the moment:

Buses and metros, on strike Wed 4th October in Paris, Nancy, and eight other cities
Customs agents
Employees of the cable company Noos
Starting tomorrow, union demonstrations, including employees of the SNCF/national trains, nationwide against the privatization of Gaz de France
Taxi drivers at CDG/Roissy airport, who meet tomorrow to decide what actions to take. "We are preparing a new strike," said a union representative.
Employees of Sudrail
Employees of Total in Moselle
The CGT union, announcing a metro and bus strike in Paris, Dijon, Nancy, Angoulême and Lorient on Wednesday.

Ouch.

I know you're relying on me to keep you up to date with global developments. If you want to skip over the geo-politics, the funny stuff is towards the end. So here we go:

I'm amazed the confrontation between Georgia and Russia isn't getting more attention. This is very serious. The Russians were sullen enough about their former satellite states not being dependent on them any more. They are going off the deep end at the prospect of buffer states joining Nato. Putin's ominous warning that Georgia shouldn't rely on outside help is realistic. What could anyone else do? No one is going to confront Russia, least of all in Georgia. Poor little Georgia. Not that Russia will invade. They're much more sophisticated. They have simply cancelled their grudging and slow plans to leave their Georgian military bases. So Georgia is effectively occupied by Russia right now.This will prevent Georgia joining Nato. You can't be a member of Warsaw while Russians are all over your military facilities. (although if we think of Philby, Burgess Blunt et al, it never stopped the Brits). This will increase pressure on the Georgian leadership. Splits will deepen between the old guard who say it is strategically better to cozy up to Russia and those who want to confront Georgia more. Russia's next move will be to wind up the pressure on Georgia further. There will be subtle acts of provocation and outrageous acts of terrorism. Georgia will be back in the Russian fold in two years.

In Austria, Social Democrats have won more votes than Bolger-esque chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel. But as far as I can see it's a mistake to call this a swerve left,a s most media commentary has to date: The cards are mainly held by two racist far right parties, parties Herr Schüssel is happy to cozy up with. First rule of politics - learn to count. The Social Democrats won 35%, the Greens 10%. It doesn't make 50.

Donald Rumsfeld is refusing to resign. This, apparently is news. How surprising it is that when his opponents demand his resignation, he says 'no'. Kinda interesting that a congressman gets politically destroyed for sending a sleazy email to a 16 year old boy, but you kill more people than Saddam Hussein and the consequences are zero. Ideology aside, Rumsfeld went out on a limb with the Iraqi invasion in embracing a theory of military transformation - that the days of huge mechanised military action is over and have has been replaced by small, light, very fast and very sophisticated military action. So they invaded Iraq with a minimum of numbers. The theory was right in terms o the success of the invasion and horribly wrong for occupation (although, ironically, there is an unholy alliance between those calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and those who say not enough troops were sent in the first place). Anyway, Rumsfeld embraced transformation not just for military reasons but because a lighter, swifter invasion force means you can do it more often; if Iraq had been dealt with in 2003 (as the White House hoped), it could have threatened to go on to Iran, maybe Syria and so on, with little political cost. This is the heart of the neo-con world order - the projection of American force to secure democracy and free markets. It relies on the successful projection of force. Iraq has proved it doesn't work like that. So Rumsfeld should be fired because he let the neo-cons down. Anyway they won't do it now, just before the elections but the best tactical option for Bush now would be to say that the next phase in Iraq requires a new approach and remove Rummy. That would give him the chance to recover a lot of political capital.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with this, but the logic is compelling: the logic of carbon-based climate change is that opposition to nuclear energy is endangers the planet. Nuclear energy is nutty in NZ, on both cost options and because of the seismic activity. But in many parts of the world it makes sense.

Of course not everyone is preoccupied with the great issues of statecraft, war and the decline of the planet. In Norway - funny old Norway, eh? - they are much more concerned with the habit of boys peeing while standing up. Ah yes. Don't laugh, it's a matter of time before this is banned everywhere. The principal behind the ban says:

young boys are simply not good enough at aiming, and the point was to have a pleasant toilet that could be used by both boys and girls.

So yeah. How they gonna enforce this?

And finally in technology news, who on earth would buy Microsoft's clunky, large, ugly, uncool ipod-killer rather than the sleek, sexy gorgeous ipod? Huh?


PS: Don't you miss the good old days when I did this every week?

Is John Stewart the world's funniest guy right now?

Funny, funny guy.

Here he rips George Bush for claiming the Geneva Conventions are vague because they prohibit 'outrages against human dignity'.



Although...it was Jay Leno that had the best one-liner of the week:

"The Senate has voted to approve the building of a 700-mile fence along the 2,000-mile border of Mexico. This is what happens when you let President Bush do the math.

If you want something just about as funny, though, check our David Letterman's Great Moments In Presidential Speeches.

Murdering, lunatic thug Robert Mugabe has postponed next year's Zimbabwe presidential elections.

I don't know why, seeing as he already had the ballots printed 'n all.

Oh that's right, to avoid being dragged off to stand trial for crimes against humanity. That's why.

This vindicates some of us.

Told to admire every syllable Shakespeare produced, some of us in study have occasionally felt some of it was rubbish.

The Queen Mab speech, for example. What was that there for? Possibly he wasn't egg yolked when he penned that though. Quilled it.

Anyway, it just goes to show the long, honourable and intimate history of booze and brilliance.

Hard to think we were in Bangkok only a couple of weeks ago. I've never been through a military coup so that would have been a new experience.

We were thinking next time we fly home we would book the same route - stay a night in a five star hotel in Bangkok because it is cheap, the hotels are fantastic and it's exactly half way so you arrive feeling a bit fresher. But maybe those plans will be on hold for a while. But if we were still there we would be confined to the hotel - which, when you look at the pics from rooftop pool, is not the worst drama ever.


Meantime, not to be glib about it, the junta has rounded up members of the previous government, dissolved the parliament and banned political parties. These are not precisely the actions most likely to convince anyone there will be a speedy return to democracy.

You know I'm not one to worry overly about incursions on our civil liberties in the name of avoiding people being blown to bits by lunatic suicide bombers. There are, what four million CTV cameras in the UK now, and I think, 'so what?'.

But you know I can't help feeling it's all gone a bit far when it is apparently now an offence in the UK to be in possession of a garden gnome.

Actually it was the 12th of September, I remember that very clearly.

The phone rang and rang. Eventually Josie shoved me out of bed to get it. It was about 5.00AM and I thought it would be a producer on a breakfast news programme calling to set up a 7AM interview. I thought I even knew what the mini-scandal they were chasing would be. It was Sam Fisher, who worked with me. He told me some planes had been flown into the World Trade Centre and I had better come to work. I was bleary and thought he meant a cessna or something.

I told Josie what had happened. She said she'd heard my cellphone ringing all night. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I did. You just cursed the reporters and went back to sleep."

Our Jim was the acting PM. I cleared my phone messages on the way to work. The mailbox was already full. (In 2001 a cellphone held twenty messages. During big news events it could fill in half an hour). I wish I had kept those messages - there was the Acting PM on the phone at around 1.30AM saying I better give him a call because he just happened to be up watching CNN and planes were flying into buildings in New York and this is going to be global, and jeeesus another one just hit! And then a full description and the very first thoughts on what would have to happen. Would have made great oral history.

At the office the big government agencies were gathered around the table. I remember being aware I was the only one with coffee. Treasury, Reserve Bank, PM's Department, security services and two or three of the minister's staff. Foreign Affairs didn't make it. Hmmm. Jim chaired and started by asking, first of all, 'is NZ in any danger'. And for a split second it dawned on me the answer could be yes. On our watch. That's when I understood.

It turns out there is a man who works in the Beehive basement whose job it is to be ready for stuff like that. He had a large book full of scenarios and turned to the 'overseas terrorist attack' chapter then began to list the things we needed to do and stuff we needed to know. The gravest immediate risks were copycats and financial threats in the chaos. Immediate decisions would have to be made - to close financial markets and airports. Or not. To introduce special security measures and ground planes. To pledge support for retaliation.

And at that time we didn't know if it was going to spread or if a state actor was involved. If a state was directly involved, the US would have to respond. The chances of an immediate retaliatory strike were receding as hours went by. But there is nothing like wondering if half the world will be at war before dinner. What would we do?

The PM was in the air. She was turning back. She was stuck in the global airjam. Decisions had to be taken. Twenty years of studying politics, philosophy and law, you come across a few ethical dilemmas: But when instant decisions have to be made suspending some basic rights - at the border, for example - the truth is, there is no debate. Decision-makers are totally reliant on the thinking and preparation that's gone on before.

We watched the TV in amazement. News reporters were far ahead of intel services, as they always are. In the UK a moronic press secretary got fired for sending around an email saying 'today would be a good day to release bad news.' She deserved to be fired. Why put that in an email? The rest of us just quietly did it without making the fuss. Josie, in another ministerial office, had a huge public announcement lined up, preparing reporters for months. It was buried.

But the main impression was the calm of our departments methodically working through decisions. Readiness. And, thankfully, immense distance from the flames. I remember Mark Prebble coming in and handling government business with calmness and assurance, counselling with professionalism and accuracy. I remember ringing foreign affairs and asking for info about what other countries were doing and saying so I could work on a statement to Parliament. Some idiot told me the request would have to go through the minister. Nothing like everyone pitching in. I found the info myself on the Internet. But other departments were ready and responded.

I wrote this:

New Zealanders share the despair and terrible loss that the whole of the civilised world feels at the loss of thousands of lives.
Our grief and our horror has been expressed in many ways:
In the flowers sent spontaneously to the US Embassy in Wellington this morning.
In the shocked conversations as New Zealanders woke up to the terrible news.
And as the nation gathered around radios and televisions and tried to make sense of this, a shared determination grew.
A determination felt by all decent people that the perpetrators of this violence must be brought swiftly to justice.
That the international community must work together to find everyone who has made this happen, and to punish them.
New Zealand will stand with all other democratic countries to do whatever is necessary to prevent and remove threats to peace and the devastating scourge of terrorism.

Within months we were in a political crisis over intervention in Afghanistan. For God's sake, how could anyone have opposed that? Looking back now, is there anyone who thinks the Taliban should still be there, left alone? Five years on it's hard to believe bin Laden is still alive, that he and his feral beheading partners were given a massive reprieve -strength even - by a lunatic decision to open a new front against an entirely different enemy in Iraq - who had nothing to do with the attack! We heard the sickening 'blame America first' commentary within hours - long before that simian George W Bush did anything. And right up with the poverty of that reprehensible world view - it's a disgrace bin Laden hasn't been roasted on an open fire in one of those caves he lives in and that most of the world is at even greater risk of suicidal, nihilistic attacks by theocratic fascists.

It's as if the early morning wake up call had never been answered.

One of my favourite comms blogs has picked up the story about the National Party's 'making National cool' powerpoint.

Whoever thought it was possible to make a major political party 'cool' should be starring at amateur hour anyway. Name one cool major party, in any country.

Tony Blair's NewLabour came closest. But its effectiveness was in making Labour friendly, responsible, relevant and predictable. The Cool Brittania part of the campaign flopped.

Worrying about 'coolness' analyses the wrong problem.

Honestly, National must make more political communications gaffes than any party I've ever seen. I know I'm a pot calling the kettle black here but National don't seem to be capable of analysing their glaring problems. Not that it's easy to do that in a democratic party.

As a discarded very small-time smart-arse lefty pundit one looks with the deepest envy and admiration in the direction of the king of all smart-arse lefty-pundits, the smartest least discarded of all: Michael Kinsley.

Last week he had brain surgery.

Imagine having the grace and wit to make your 'first words' on coming round from brain surgery:

"Well, of course, when you cut taxes, government revenues go up. Why couldn't I see that before?"

Haw haw haw.

As a devout Catholic Yousef Youhana averaged in the high forties in test cricket, which was not bad. Since he converted to Islam and became Mohammed Yousef he has averaged over 90.

Give the Black Caps copies of the Koran at once.

At least it would strike terror into the Aussies.

It's hard to see why the Germans are even going to turn up tonight, other than I suppose, Italy need to have some meat on the spitroast.

Consider these persuasive details:

Italy have conceded only one goal at this world cup - and that was an own goal. No one can score against the Azzurri.

Italy has not been beaten in 23 consecutive matches.

During this unbeaten run they have faced Germany - back in March. Italy won 4-1. Count em. 4-1.

Italy and Germany have played four times in previous world cups. Italy has won twice and two games were drawn. Check that: Germany has never beaten Italy in a world cup. Today's not looking good for them either.

In four previous World Cup encounters, Italy have won twice and drawn twice.

Let's not forget 1982. To tell you the truth, I haven't forgotten 1982, not for one minute. 3-1. 3-1! To us.

Also, fate is on our side because Italians are cooler. Ask anyone.

Check out this video of what it was like on Saturday night.

Gosh that global warming is terrible, isn't it?

In unrelated news I see NIWA says New Zealand had the coldest June since 1972.

Outside at the moment on a clear, beautiful Sunday afternoon, it's about thirty degrees.

What a night.

England were rubbish. Complete rubbish. They were very disappointing, and Rooney is an angry, over-rated thug.

One of the commentaries said the rest of the world will not be disappointed because England and their fans have so little grace and joy in their football. How true. To see the raving after the game explained a lot about English football hooliganism. It's all the ref's fault. It's the fault of the Portuguese! Well, yeah - that's in the nature of competitive sport. The other side aren't meant to help.

Out they went on penalties again.

Then France looked spectacular. Zizou was amazing. The French sparkled. They were dangerous attackers, commanding midfields, rock solid in defence. Barthez is a football giant. But Zidane performs magic with such effortless cool he makes it look like he is out for a stroll.

Before the match Carlo stood on our balcony calling out "allez Les Bleus". And Josie found him there with neighbours calling back to him from half a dozen apartments over the street. "Allez Les Bleus. Allez Les Bleus." The same neighbours erupted when Thiery Henry nailed his goal and then drenched the street in noise and excitement at the full-time whistle. We jumped and cheered and hugged and punched the air. The Paris streets filled with honking cars and cheering fans.

Joe told me the Brazilian goalie lived next door to him - Next Door! - in Auckland this year for a few months on an English language exchange. So Joe told me he was supporting both France and Brazil.


France should get past Portugal in the semi. If Italy beats Germany, we will face a dark test of national loyalty in the final.

Meanwhile, I'm up to 82nd in the world cup daq, with a million pound payout to come on both France and Portugal. Damn the money isn't real.

3-0. Led by Totti, the Azzurri sparkled with little backheels and clean, crisp passing combinations.


We're in the semis.

Meanwhile I've moved up to 185th place in world cup gamble:



I got a huge payout last weekend, so my percentage gain - and thus my overall place - will fall quickly this week unless both Portugal and France go through.

How many hundred thousand people are playing this world cup daq?

I don't know, but there are so few still in front. Today's chart position: 239.

I know you're rooting for me.



If only the cash were real.

I can't imagine many sporting calamities worse than Italy going out to Australia in the second round of the world cup.

Still, getting past them with a dodgy penalty in the fifth minute of extra time is a bit less than satisfying.

But then again, I was at Wellington Stadium when Jonathan Kaplan stole the Bledisloe Cup off the All Blacks by playing on and awarding consecutive penalties until Australia got within shooting range and John Eales put that kick over in the fifteenth minute of extra time. No, I still haven't recovered, actually.

So a dodgy penalty in the fifth minute of extra time? Tough. Read it in the papers tomorrow.

Notice that percentage gain in the last week and the ever-rising chart position.



I know how dull it is. But not to meeee. It's all about me. I promise to stop posting this soon. Just as soon as the figures reverse and I start tumbling.

Italy 2; Czech 0.

Italy go through top of their group, avoid Brazil and get probably Australia in the second round.

I'm following the World Cup by trading 'shares' on the BBC's world cup daq. A week ago I was ranked about 80,000th. Now I'm up to 2231.



Unfortunately, the cash is not real.

Dammit.

I meant to note this during the Korea game the other day...all but three of the South Korea team have the name 'Lee' or 'Kim'.

Imagine the Seoul phone book.

But I know what makes me laugh.

Someone uses a rock and a lump of wood to prop up a sculpture. Then the sculpture gets taken away. And an art museum thinks the rick and block are the sculpture. So they put it on display.

This is spectacular.

A Welsh company invented a device that repel teenagers - a high pitched whine that only kids can hear because us grown-ups go deaf starting with the top range, right?

Then the little blighters turned it round, in what the NYT fittingly calls 'technological jujitsu', and now the kids are using the high pitched whine as a mobile phone ring tone so they can hear their phones ringing and adults can't. In classrooms, for example.

Paris temperatures over the last day:



And what Wellington's wind looked like on the barometer:



Cool global weather programme, eh.

Good start.

The tide changes roughly every twelve hours, which is about how frequently events in Iraq have been described by one war apologist or another as a tide change.

The killing of the murderous maniac al-Zarqawi is may be a sea change, George Bush says.

Perhaps he'll be right.

Or perhaps over time someone will reflect on the improbability that a single goon was able to frustrate the combined armed forces of the US and the UK. And then Mr Bush will say al-Zarqawi was just one figure whose importance can be over-stated. Just like Osama bin Laden, whom neither Mr Bush nor his cronies any longer talk about.

"Finally, A Human Evolved To Hold Whisky, Smoke A Cigarette And Operate A Mobile Phone Simultaneously."

In other science news, Popular Science reports tinfoil hats don't actually stop the government from reading your brain waves.

Not that there is new found interest in royalty or anything, just because they let us in their nice house...

But it seems the chief of the metropolitan police has said, 'New evidence and witnesses have emerged in the investigation into the death of Princess Diana.'

Can't help thinking I can help Sherlock solve this one: Her driver got juiced and smashed the car into the wall of a tunnel at very high speed. Mmmkay?

Perhaps the coppers are looking for the clues left by this dude in Sweden who killed his partner and dumped her in the lake then Googled for 'blood stains', 'fabric cleaning' and 'murder without body'.

We're going to the fi-naal...

UPDATE: On Saturday morning Josie interrupted my shower to say the game was on the tele in the hotel breakfast room. She knew the significance of this - I haven't seen a minute of the Super 14 all year. The picture quality was of a quality we could almost say I still haven't. No surprise the Canes got no ball and spent about one and a half minutes in the whole game in the Crusaders half. I picked the result - and ended the season (note please, after not having seen a minute of a game before the final) in the top 5000 out of 140,000 players in the Virtual Super 14. Quite a come back from being something like 79,000th after three rounds.

UPDATE II: Check this out. Third in the highly competitive Russell Brown Public Address virtual super 14 contest - without seeing a game!

If Graham Henry needs any help picking the ABs, just email me here.

UPDATE: Damn.

In a couple of weeks the continent will come to a stop. Nothing is more important than global football supremacy. Millions will travel to Germany and most will watch their team leave empty-handed. For all but one, dreams end in despair. Failure is the destiny of the contender.

Tonight, the best clubs in Europe preview the excitement and skill of the World Cup in the Champions League final. The club-level skills may be a little better than the national teams; the clubs pay what it takes to bring together the best in the world.

Tickets can be bought from touts for €2000.

Apparently the city is full of ticketless Arsenal fans. Win or lose, they will be a model of behaviour post-match don't you think?

Maria and Carlo were recruited to the Gunners cause at birth by their uncompromising uncle. They both own Arsenal shirts and there might be a Thierry Henri shirt there too.

Let the cannon sound.

Chap walks into the BBC for his job interview. In IT. His name is Guy someone and he has a bit of an accent because he's from the Congo. Receptionist hears the name 'Guy' and thinks he's the chap named Guy who's here for a live on air interview. So Guy is trotted into the studio, and he sits down thinking it's some kind of strange BBC thing where even the IT people have to do a screen test.

His face when he realises he's on air is priceless. And then he bravely tries to carry off the interview.

UPDATE: In excellent follow-up journalism, glass-house occupants like the Times (and countless others) pronounce the interviewee was a cabbie. He wasn't

I read on Stuff there is rising hysteria in NZ about the declining performance of boys at school, compared to girls.

The issue is not unique to New Zealand. Check out this update on the issue globally from author and management consultant Tom Peters.

The issue has some potential to profoundly change society. If girls are going to be the main income earners, there will have to be some cultural adjustment.

It's ironic that people get uptight when boys don't do as well as girls, but you never see the same astonished reaction when some racial groups do better than others; much less when some social groups do much better than others.

Why is that?

Personally I'm not surprised that boys' are doing worse than girls at school. There are hardly any men left teaching, especially in primary schools. What else would happen?

Serious historians, when they have a serious pint to make, choose a serious academic journal right? Like, say Rolling Stone?

Anyway, the latest Rolling Stone has a pretty convincing argument for why Bush is the Worst President In History. It's a good round up of the case against him, without all the nutty stuff about stolen elections, Haliburton and the Cheney shooting that guy. In the face.

It's worth a read.

Coincidentally, Carl Bernstein in the new Vanity Fair has a stinging attack on him too.

When popular culture is running against you like this, you're done.

Okay, most personal blogs are little more than (very) light weight news aggegators.

Rather than genuinely creating original content, blogger links to news stories, and a community of readers forms on the basis of mutual interest in the topics.

Never one to eschew the prevaling flow of the stream, allow me to swim once again downstreram with the fastest moving salmon and bring to you a choice of up to date humorous links.

A few tips on how to be a successful evil overlord:

I will never employ any device with a digital count-down. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable. I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

Remember to thank me for this link when you are in a position to use it.

A nihilist's resume. Under skills:

I eschew all so-called personal development, instead dying under the premise that, when I'm a biodegrading mess of worm feed hopelessly buried beneath a fathom of dark earth, being able to type 70 words a minute really won't do me a modicum of what you so ignorantly refer to as "good."

And an art history professor explains to his four year old daughter that the market value of her work is far below a thousand words:

Your picture feels incomplete to me. Formwise, it's a staticky blue cloud hovering in space. There's nothing dynamic about it. You didn't even push down on the crayon very hard, so there isn't really any depth of color.

The front page headline of Le Parisien today asks of the French PM, "Quoi serat, Villepin." What'll it be, Villepin? News media are getting stuck in to him. He looks finished. A few months ago he was a rock star.

The thing that puzzles foreigners living here is that protestors expect to defeat the government. In most democracies, the government does something lots of people don't like, they take to the streets to express their disapproval and if they're still angry next election they vote the buggers out. Here, no one talks about reprisals at the next election; they expect to win the protest. They say it's undemocratic if the elected government can simply pass laws over the top of the mob on the street.

The Guardian has good photos of the 'carnival like' atmosphere on the street yesterday -- as most called it, though I watched CNN for about an hour as the police tried to clear the moron trouble-makers from Place de Italie after the match and from the comments of the dimwit in the studio you would have thought a revolution was starting.

I was very critical of the police methods in the car-burning riots this year, but you have to admire the way they handle these marches. They recognise there is a substantial element trying to provoke them and they are careful to engage without escalating. They form squads, grab a trouble-maker and pull out, without getting into the full-on confrontation the idiots are seeking. Then they slowly break up the trouble spots when they must be tempted to pull out the artillery as the stones and bottles rain down on their shields and helmets.

The poms are enjoying it. Dodgy Airlines had a flight interfered with and put up a news release on their website headlined "Jet2.com condemns French strike action and calls for lazy frogs to get back to work!"



That'll be good for business.

Meanwhile the president of the Sorbonne university says protesting students are ignorant and stupid.

"Today's youth don't have dreams, they have illusions."

Yep, the money quote. I'm pretty certain every old codger in history has expressed the same view. They must be right because after all the world is going to hell in a basket. Oh wait a minute...

There is a nice piece on how the city feels here.

No food without politics. No politics without food. Vive la France.

Humbling flash animation about Iraq here.

(Via Canadian speech writer Rob Cottingham).

Eeewwwwwww.

CNN employs morons.

One special idiot on CNN is Kyra Phillips:

This fool, this gibbering American numb nut, this expert on the democratic protests of June 1989 felt confident enough to declare on air that a few water cannons in Place Du Republique this week looked like tanks rolling over the top of seven thousand students and killing them.

What a tit.

She was not a reporter during Tiananmen Square. I did cover Tiananmen Square, albeit by phone. I talked to large numbers of people there every day for several weeks. I also covered the marches around Paris. One event was hideous, outrageous mass murder. Another was light-hearted enough that I took the kids along to see the balloons and the bands. CNN can't tell the difference.

What a ridiculous, second-rate junk broadcaster CNN has become.

Meanwhile the Sun newspaper apparently advised its readers users, "Don't Go To Paris." This advice I agree with -- IF YOU ARE A SUBSCRIBER TO THE SUN. Do Not Ever Leave Your House. If you are stupid enough to spend money on a newspaper like the Sun, you are too stupid to make it to the train station. You are a retard. An imbecile. A vacuous dolt. A drivelling, drooling simpleton. A boneheaded, slack-jawed ninny and the rest of the world doesn't want you here.

Just to let you know.

Paris is not like Baghdad. Some students are peeved with their government and vamp up and down the boulevards with placards. That doesn't mean the city is inflamed in civil war. You have to go a long way out of your way to see the fun. You have to be looking for trouble to find a water cannon. Even if you get tear gassed, it will not be the most wretched experience of your life.

Reading the Sun or watching CNN would be a worse experience. And much worse for your mental health.

Come to Paris and you face the risk of choking on a baguette. You do not face the risk of being injured in student protests unless, like this guy, you want to be.

At one point, the cops were lined up long, fifty in a line, standing wait. In front of them was a deep row of open space. Herb, drunk and laughing, walked straight in front of them, and started to put on hero poses, flexing his muscles. He has the build of a stringy professor. He started to wiggle around and Gary flew in front, miming photographer motions. They were isolated. The crowd grew silent and, while Herb and Gary put on a show worthy of Blow Up, the cops became increasingly agitated.Finally, one of them stretched out and pulled Herb’s hood, throwing him down on the ground. They wrestled briefly until the cop managed to pull out Herb’s flask of gin, pouring it out in front of him and the watching public. Herb stood alone with a smile on his face. He shoved his hand in his pocket, searched for a moment, then pulled out triumphantly his backup flask of whiskey. The crowd roared with laughter and Herb skipped gaily back towards us.

Protests over the job contract are spreading and there is a general strike planned for next Tuesday.

Someone got beaten up last Saturday. That was the march I covered, and I'm amazed it ended up like that.

This photo is doing the rounds on the blogs. I think it's fake:



Here are more photos from the demo.

Cyclone Larry is due to come ashore in North Queensland sometime around day break.

It looks very bad.

"This is the most devastating cyclone that we could potentially see on the east coast of Queensland for decades," Mr Pagano told reporters in Brisbane. "There is going to be destruction - we are very certain this cyclone will not peter out."(Residents) should be really considering about evacuating any low-lying areas ... that may become mandatory in the future."

My brother Damon lives about 20 minutes drive north of Townsville. His house is on the beach.


UPDATE: Ecch...where he is: Just a bit of rain.

I went to cover the big Paris march against the government's CPE law, which introduces easy-fire' rules for under-26s.

I'll post fully on the demo later, but I have posted some pics here.

I'm filing for a couple of media, so I'll post links here. Apparently there was light rioting after the match as police tried to clear Place de la Nation, where the march ended. I missed that - I left the main march around 5.00PM to look for organisers. The march was then very calm and there was no sign of trouble at all.

Just on the numbers - the government is saying 80,000 marched and organisers 300,000. I've been in crowds of 80,000 before but I've never seen a demo as big as that. It was too big to count from one end to the other, too big for a single person to find both ends. I stood on a corner and counted ranks that were conservatively thirty people wide. In five minutes at least 120 ranks passed (some ranks are wider than others; some stop, others keep moving). I estimate it would have taken two hours for the march to pass that point, but I could be wrong by half an hour either way. 30x120x24=86,000. So the official estimate would be nearer the truth. I should also record I did the count after crossing the Seine, when the march was thinner than it was at the departure point. Many people were not marching, but attending. So I would think over a hundred thousand altogether. No lower than about 85,000, certainly no higher than 140,000. Lot of people. Not the biggest Paris has ever seen. (You'll see how sensitive counts are to the width of the ranks, the speed of the march and other errors of asumption).

I love this:

New Zealand Post made $34.7 million after tax in the six months to December, largely as a result of rapid growth at Kiwibank. ...The result was driven by Kiwibank – which contributed a $5.4 million profit.

The bank is signing up 2500 customers A WEEK. We thought it was doing well when it hit the business case target of signing up 450 new customers every week. Now it's doing that every day.

I was there at the act of conception of Kiwibank, at the drama-filled pregnancy and at the somewhat surprising delivery. Would it be bitter to go through all the quotes I've stored up from experts, reporters and commentators who vowed the bank would fail? Yes of course. And don't begin to get me started on the political campaign against it. But I'm thinking, if the bank is attracting 2500 customers a week, the market wants it, right? So, ummm, everyone who thought the idea of a New Zealand-owned bank was stupid, is the market now wrong?

The argument here is that women leaders make much more of a difference to women. Did Margaret Thatcher? No. The claim is nonsense, which undermines the entire point of the article.

Over here, there is an interesting backgrounder on Muslims in Amercia. They're not radicalised as Muslims in Europe are, because they're better integrated. That, incidentally, fits my view about the Paris riots last year. Worth noting: Muslim households in America have a higher average income than American households as a whole. A quarter of Muslim household in the US - a quarter! - have household incomes over US$100,000 a year, or more than NZ$150,000.

By comparison, the average weekly household income in New Zealand is US$42,000 (something here is not right - this makes our household incomes about the same as those in the US. I suspect the US figures are out of date, but I am assuming the comparison of relative wealth still holds).

There are figures at the link for average weekly income by household, but I couldn't find up to date figures on the number of NZ households earning over NZ$150,000. It obviously must be less than a quarter - so Muslim households in America are far better off than average New Zealand houses. The implication is clear. We must all praise Allah.

Bonus factoid: The richest households in New Zealand? Couples with adult children. They have an average wekly income of $2031. Unfortunately, there are only 4500 of them.

Finally, the never ending supply of ironic names. Hello officer Fagley.

Here's the stupidity of selecting Hamish Marshall, who is not an opener, ahead of Lou Vincent, who is the form batsman of the New Zealand summer.

There is a case to be made that John Bracewell knows something about the one day game but he shouldn't be allowed within a hundred miles of a test side.

Apparently, Wellington was the sunniest main centre over the summer.

Mmmm, and I'm thinking also the windiest and the coldest.

Check out this for kitchen toys:


And over here, someone takes literally the expression 'Communist Party'.

"Dancing was an indispensable social skill when I was young," says the European Union's Commissioner for Communications, Margot Wallstrom, on her blog.

Oh yes, Margot, you could dance! You could sing! Dig it Margot! You were the dancing Queen!

Margot closed her eyes and travelled back to that night. Bjorn, Agnetha and Freda rocked quietly on the radio of Olafs' Dad's Volvo. His skin was still hot from the sauna. Her head spun from the vodka. As he leant to her and bent to kiss her neck, she inhaled the delicious scent of herring...of God how she missed him. How she missed the rough texture of his reindeer-hide jacket. How she pined to be seventeen again and twirling on the ice with Olaf...oh, Olaf, only you Olaf!

Her slender long fingers extended silently to the phone. A thousand miles and thirty years away in her misty daydream she let herself begin to tap out his number. If only to be seventeen again. If only to be held once more in Olaf's arms, to massage each other after ice fishing in the midday dark. If only to let our lips tangle again as we softly sing 'Fernando' to each other. To take off our clothes and run through the snow. To frolic in the eighty degree steam of the sauna. To laugh with you Olaf!

The line connected and purred as it rang that distant number of her youth. And suddenly the crushing snap of reality, as Magnus walked in. "What are you doing darling?"

Margot slammed the phone back on its cradle. "Oh just updating my blog....ummm, how does this sound?

"I find it strange when European leaders refer to other Member States as 'foreign'… Have we not come further in co-operation in this European Union? And I of course regret very much what seems to be a nationalistic and protectionist tendency in Member States."

"I dunno," Magnus said.

"Maybe they refer to other Member Stats as 'foreign' because... they ARE foreign."

Couple of things I've been meaning to catch up on...

There are two ways to make lots of money with a website. Sam Morgan's way, and this way.

Adopt a comedian (movie link - don't bother unless you have broadband).

Visual hunting assistance for Dick Cheney.

Damn this happening while I was out of the country: Apparently, there's been a beer price war.

"discounting by the three major beer companies - DB, Lion Nathan and Independent Distillers - had caused the latest price drops."

It's just not my day.

Meanwhile, on an Oscars theme, you know how in the movies you always see some dude shoot a padlock open? With a handgun? It's all bollocks.

Finally, don't be clicking this link at work unless you own the company. It takes you to the Phallic Logo Awards - for real logos. For example - here is the logo of the Brazilian Institute for Oriental Studies. Yup.