Author Archive
A strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty
One of my regular pleasures is a BBC podcast called Witness. I recommend it. Details here. This morning I listened to the episode ‘JFK in Ireland’. And, as often happens, a passage of his words jumped out at me: When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with […]
Why would you NOT use AdBlock?
Here’s Facebook … Why would anyone not use AdBlock? – P
Consequences of our thoughts
Via my (very beautiful) niece* … Twee, but true. – P * This has kicked around in my wife’s family (therefore my kids’ grandparents) for ages. Good advice. from The Twits
Smears, spin and subliminal messages
Some people have expressed concern about how I use language on this blog. This, from Ivan, recently, got me thinking …. I find your posts to often be … sinuous, reptilian, complex and sometimes (seemingly) self-backslapping in nature and like a property developer’s version of an unsolvable rubiks cube. People are scared to admit they […]
A different kind of internet gagging. And the subtle wit of Judge David Harvey @djhdcj
It’s sometimes possible to ‘get a sense’ of an author by what they write. (Not always.) I’ve talked about the work of Judge David Harvey, New Zealand’s ‘internet judge’ quite a bit here on The Paepae. (See these posts.) I admire him. Because my interests in media/internet/publishing intersect with the sort of cases he handles, […]
Better than a power cut, I guess
If my responses to your comments and emails are a little slower than usual, here’s why: That slender cable is my (and my neighbours down the street from that point) connection to the outside world (phone/internet). It’s been like that since the 8th of June: 8/6/13 10:57 am From Telecom Support: Your Land Line issue […]
Synchronicity. When random song ‘choice’ makes you chuckle …
One of the cool things about having plenty of memory in your iPhone (and why I got a 32GB one) is you can put heaps of music on it (as well as my podcasts etc). Then, as happened today, occasionally the shuffle in my Nike+ Running app tosses up a song I haven’t heard for […]
Pretty civilised, really.
I was with my wife (She was driving, officer. It’s her car!) on our recent trip to Wellington when we popped around a corner in Newtown and followed the car in front of us … right into, apparently, a Bus Lane. We spotted a bloke in a hi-visibility jacket (I think that’s the whole point […]
This is what I mean by ‘chilling’ …
Here’s NZConservative blogger Lucia Maria, replying to [public] correspondence with the successful applicant in the recent internet take-down and gagging order case I referred to in Is this what we want? Internet ‘take down’ and indefinite gagging orders? and Steven Price: ‘wider factors to consider’ in recent online gagging order. As I do (and others […]
Sir Robert Muldoon: ‘Always On the Record’
I remember an interchange I had with Sir Robert Muldoon back when I was a young Press Gallery reporter and he resembled an aged warrior chief — still with teeth, and claws and MIND more than sharp enough to puncture those he wanted to, don’t-you-worry-about-that. It’s here, in comments on my post ‘Banks: Doing the […]
Steven Price: ‘wider factors to consider’ in recent online gagging order
So… it’s not just me who feels uneasy about aspects of the recently-released blogger restraint & gagging order I discussed in my post ‘Is this what we want? Internet ‘take down’ and indefinite gagging orders?‘. Steven Price is a media lawyer, a law lecturer at my alma mater Victoria University of Wellington, and a legal […]
‘I am Bradley Manning’ video
‘It’s time to stop the war on whistle-blowers.’
Finding safety in a ‘boring’ normal life
I like cartoonist Guy Body whose work the NZ Herald publishes. I bought the original of one of his cartoons which reflected public debate sparked when we published Olly Newland’s book The Day The Bubble Bursts. (You can see it in this post.) Guy perfectly caught the very dangerous ‘group think’ phenomenon which props up […]
Life is a series of ‘LIVE crosses’
As some of you may know, I’ve worked as a radio journalist over many years, and got my ‘skills and training’ (that’s just a wee inside joke) with Radio New Zealand, first covering local news (2ZB), then network news (National Radio, Morning Report and Checkpoint etc) then in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I’ve also worked […]
