ACT: ‘Zero backing. Zilch, nil, nothing at all.’

I heard someone joke that ACT's party conference over the weekend was 'standing room only' ... because it was held in a LIFT. It wasn't that bad apparently.

John Armstrong attended the ACT Party conference over the weekend, with “80 or so party members present” … introducing his wrap up piece in the NZ Herald this morning like this:

Act kicked off its annual conference on Saturday having just been kicked in the teeth. Delegates woke up to the news that the previous night’s Roy Morgan poll had the party registering zero backing. Zilch, nil, nothing at all. Gallows humour might look at the bright side. At least Act’s support can only rise from there.

Perhaps ACT has reached their natural level of popular support? Given National’s takeover and installation of conservative retread and sometime-wowser (as opposed to libertarian) John Banks as party ‘leader’, what’s left for the party to do?

In some ways I’m surprised at the zero percent figure. It reminded me of this good-humoured commemorative stamp design (featuring ACT’s acerbic propagandist Cathy Odgers/Cactus Kate) issued when party support fell to one percent (below). Many thinking, surely, that would be ACT’s nadir.

Seems like just yesterday. Cactus Kate commemorative stamp design — OK, it was (arguably) funny at one percent support ... but at ZERO percent?

Hmm. Zero support. Is this what the National Party’s ‘regime change’ intervention has wrought for ACT? Maybe.

Shallow roots?

A telling line in Armstrong’s report about how the former National Party Laura Norder cabinet minister and one term Auckland mayor John Banks was received by the party faithful was to describe the speech as “his first as both party member and leader”.

Well, yesss. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a meteoric rise. But remember: former National Party leader & PM-in-waiting Dr Don Brash, having destabilized his ‘good friend’ Rodney Hide with Hollow Men-ish PR dark arts, only himself joined ACT just in time to step in and accept the mantle of leadership.
So, maybe one could say Banks is following in a new ACT tradition? Where will it lead?

Some would say ACT doesn’t look like a party with particularly deep traditions or principles
— or, if it had them in the past, perhaps it’s not particularly attached to them. There’s a point where political pragmatism becomes indistinguishable from something else … but I can’t think of the right word at the moment …

– P

An obituary for Facts

Read and enjoy: Rex Huppke’s Facts, 360 B.C. – A.D. 2012 – an obituary.

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

I read the Allen West comment about communists in the House, snorted at its ludicrousness, and thought no more about it. (Andrew Breitbart’s defense of Tea Party animal West [video here] was an indicator, if we needed one, of West’s … ‘reliability’ re truthfulness).

Rex Huppke’s response was so much better.

– P

Ouch

Negative attack is one way to diminish your rivals, but it’s not building a vision …

“You have to campaign to govern, not just to win,” [Gov. Mitch] Daniels told Matthew Tully of The Indianapolis Star. “Spend the precious time and dollars explaining what’s at stake and a constructive program to make life better. And as I say, look at everything through the lens of folks who have yet to achieve.”
According to Mr. Tully, “after a pause, Daniels added with disappointment, ‘Romney doesn’t talk that way.’

From After Endorsing, Indiana Governor Criticizes Romney — NY Times

Parody of the ‘booty shot’

Classic:

image: kevinbolk.tumblr.com (click)

Revised:

image: kevinbolk.deviantart.com (click)

Artist Kevin Bolk:

This is a parody of this promo art for the Avengers movie. I couldn’t help but notice that in most of the ad material, the guys are all in heroic stances but Black Widow is almost always in an impractical, curved-spine “booty shot” pose. Figured I’d flip it around for my lady friends out there. Seemed only fair.
Them’s some strong male characters, amirite?

Excellent!

Leonard Cohen’s manager sentenced. He wishes her peace.

Leonard Cohen in Weybridge, Surrey, on his world tour. Photograph: Matt Kent/Redferns via The Guardian

Leonard Cohen’s former manager Kelley Lynch whose [alleged] theft of his retirement funds while he was, for years, in a Buddhist retreat has been jailed — not for the theft, but for her harassment of the singer after he fired her.

Here’s a sentence from his statement to the court:

“I want to thank the defendant Ms Kelley Lynch for insisting on a jury trial, thus… allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing,” he said.

“It is my prayer that Ms Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”

Pretty wonderful sentiment, huh?

via The Guardian: Leonard Cohen’s poetic thanks as former manager and lover is jailed for harassment … which also carries another article suggesting we, as Cohen fans, maybe should be grateful to Kelley Lynch for forcing him out of retirement and sparking a late burst of creativity. Well, I know what the writer means.

I have seen Cohen in concert Live twice now, in Montreal and in Wellington, and those concerts were damn near perfect. I found them and think of them as ‘holy’ experiences that I am so glad to have been able to enjoy. Wonderful.

– P

Crafar farms decision déja vu

Rubber stamped for a second time …

Good bye hectares? I heard 'business leader' Graeme Harrison on Morning Report today literally saying: "Can a foreign investor come in with a ship, hitch up a piece of land and take it away? No." See link below.

Overseas Investment Office docs (hat tip: NZ Herald): Recommendation | Decision summary

Sir Graeme Harrison on Radio NZ National’s Morning Report (before the decision was announced).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

MP3 file for non flash users

Updated with audio links

OTT?

The NZ Herald gave a bucketload of real estate to their story about a grieving family’s claims that too much Coca Cola killed their mum.

20120420-120049.jpg

Don’t you think?

– P

Slight purple tint is intentional. Irony. (cf: ‘Purple prose’.)

Slow motion mayhem

Wow.

(via Jolisa Gracewood)

Free access to information … to ‘hate’ it?

'Information wants to be free' ... partly so we can DECRY it. (image: vimeo.com/20907711)

In the middle of a worthwhile Guardian article quoting Tim Berners-Lee on the need for web users to be able to get their data out of social media and proprietary ‘silos’ (see: Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook), is this interesting sentiment:

“Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn’t put it on to a web app [a form of open software] you know we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can’t link to it, so I can’t tweet it, I can’t discuss it, I can’t like it, I can’t hate it.”

Note, the desire for access to information and freedom to ‘hate it’.

Earlier, the same article refers to Berners-Lee’s view — expressed with the authority that he as inventor of the world wide web and only a few others can claim — about the ‘centrality’ of open data access to the vision of the web:

Berners-Lee has in the past warned that the rise of social-networking “silos” such as Facebook, and “closed world” apps such as those released by Apple, which cannot be indexed by web search engines, threaten the openness and universality that the architects of the internet saw as central to its design.

I’ve been thinking about ‘openness’ since my brief comment this week about some political bloggers stalking their targets and so-called enemies by ‘friending’, ‘following’ or ‘liking’ them on social media … then using that platform or information obtained to repeatedly and publicly abuse, denigrate or ‘sledge’ them.

That behaviour makes me queasy (even though I pointedly quote others’ tweets myself now and then). At times it feels like there’s a kind of misuse of social media going on. (Yeah, that sounds like an oxymoron to me too.)

Watch what you’re doing

It’s more than the privacy-intrusion stuff we discuss on ThePaepae.com now and then, e.g. when considering the Herald on Sunday tracking a private person to her front door(!) ‘using Facebook‘.
A reporter gaining access to your personal Continue reading →

Origin of the word ‘deadline’

20120417-223327.jpg

I visited my pal and fellow publisher Roger briefly in Wellington last week. One of the many things we share in common is a quirky interest in words — old or new, interesting words and unusual derivations. Roger mentioned the word deadline which we live and die by (ahem, not literally, keep reading) in publishing and the media had its origin in military prison — referring to an area around a military penal institution outside of which prisoners were liable to be shot … by their guards.
As in, Cross the line: shot, like, dead!*


I was agog and looked it up, sure enough, there’s a prison reference in Oxford (right), also in Wikitionary, but angling seems older …

Etymology

The context of a due date originated in journalism, probably from an earlier usage in printing, representing a guideline marked on a plate for a printing press (inside which all content should appear). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, early usage refers simply to lines that do not move, such as one used in angling; slightly later American usage includes a boundary around a prison which prisoners must not cross.

Noun
deadline (plural deadlines)
A date on or before which something must be completed. ‘I must make this deadline or my boss will kill me!’
(archaic) A guideline marked on a plate for a printing press.
(archaic) A line which doesn’t move.
(archaic) A boundary around a prison.

Dictionary.com:

  • 1. the time by which something must be finished or submitted; the latest time for finishing something: a five o’clock deadline.
  • 2. a line or limit that must not be passed.
  • 3. (formerly) a boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without risk of being shot by the guards.
  • … does anyone have any other sources?

    – P

    * Which reminds me of a graphic I saw on a TV tower in Singapore — I asked my friend naively what the sign meant (it looked in part like a soldier aiming a rifle) and she said, ‘You climb the tower and we shoot you!’ Oh.

    Tumblr makes us LIARS

    I don’t know if you’re aware that this blog has a Tumblr — used infrequently and pretty informally.

    Today I popped over to have a look and saw this, which made me laugh:

    Oh yes? Agree, sure ... but Read? Understood? ... seems unlikely

    Is it cynical of me to suggest there’s no way the majority of tumblr’s teenage clients will have read the approaching ten thousand words(!) updated Terms of Service.

    No way.

    How many will read this amount of words? (To quote Scribe - "Not many, if any.")

    Funny.
    – P

    Romney faces a ‘Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’. OMG!

    "...Mitt Romney repurposed a phrase from Hillary Clinton, citing a "vast left wing conspiracy" brewing in the media and liberal advocacy organizations to derail his campaign." What if he's right? (click to visit CNN)

    Highlights from Kevin Liptak’s CNN post: Romney cites ‘vast left wing conspiracy’

    Romney was making an appearance on Breitbart TV [Comment: surprise!] and was asked by host Larry O’Connor whether he was ready to take on “the media and these nonprofits groups that are working together.”

    “There will be an effort by the quote vast left wing conspiracy to work together to put out their message and to attack me,” Romney said in response. “They’re going to do everything they can to divert from the message people care about, which is a growing economy that creates more jobs and rising incomes. That’s what people care about.”

    Romney’s choice of words echoes Clinton’s assertion in 1998 that a “vast right wing conspiracy” was behind the sexual harassment charges her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was facing at the time.

    … Romney said dealing with journalists, many of whom he said were biased, was a perpetual problem for Republicans.

    “Many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding and I know that’s an uphill battle we fight with the media generally,” Romney said, before praising O’Connor for offering a conservative voice.

    The candidate said he was unfazed by the prospect of doing battle with the left’s vast operation.

    Oh boy. This US election is definitely going feed my addiction again.

    – P

    PS That line about ‘biased’ journalists trying to “divert from the message people care about” reminds me of something … what was it? Oh yes. ‘public interest’ vs ‘the issues that matter’

    NY Times smears former collaborator Assange: ‘a nut job’

    What a sleazy smear. But just the latest in a long line.

    His reputation has taken a deep plunge since he shook the world in 2010 by releasing, in cooperation with The New York Times and several other news organizations, masses of secret government documents, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most news organizations edited and redacted the papers to protect lives. Mr. Assange put everything on his Web site. To some he was a hero, to others a spy, but nowadays he is most often portrayed as a nut job.

    from The Prisoner as Talk Show Host

    Shabby work NY Times. The very same article credits Assange as an interviewer …

    On his talk show Mr. Assange was a little stiff but sounded rational, didn’t talk much about himself and asked Mr. Nasrallah some tough questions about Hezbollah’s support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. He even cited reports, found by WikiLeaks, that suggested corruption and high living among some members of Hezbollah. (Mr. Assange cited S.U.V.’s, silk robes and “take-away food” as signs of decadence.)

    …but really what the hell does “Mr. Assange was a little stiff but sounded rational” imply?

    Nasty.

    – P

    Oops. What? He wants us to LISTEN to the murderous ultra-right nut job? Er, well, gee. OK.

    In my experience, sometimes when one is interviewing someone in the news, particularly a LIVE interview, things can take an unexpected turn. Your subject says things that you didn’t expect.

    This morning, roused very early by an insistently affectionate cat (still getting over her spell in the cattery while we were at the beach last week) I tuned into BBC Radio 4’s PM programme and heard Eddie Mair’s interview with a Norwegian clinical psychologist Dr Roderick Orner about the 30 page ‘manifesto’ Anders Behring Breivik, the ‘ultra-right wing Nationalist’ who has admitted killing 77 people, presented to his trial.

    Eddie, I think, had been expecting a ‘How is this guy insane? Let me count the ways’ track from the psychologist, but listen as he’s given a short course in the need to engage in debate with even those we characterize as ‘hateful extremists’ as part of our commitment to democracy. (This was the very same point I tried to make to Martyn Bradbury here: ‘On a collision course‘.)


    MP3 file

    Here’s a link to the 4 min 18 sec 4.1MB MP3 file for non-flash users (like moi).

    Highlights:

    “We should be very cautious about labeling things. We should be listen very carefully to what he says and not think of it as a man who is mentally ill who speaks. This is a man who is now the voice of the extreme right, of extreme ultra-Nationalism and of fundamentalism. And he speaks on behalf of forces that are loose in Europe and in other places in the world. If we just write this off as the statements of a madman we will suffer for this in the long term because we will not have listened to what he said. He’s warning us.”

    “I think [to fail to listen to him because he is ‘a mad man trying to justify horrific actions’] would be something we would come to regret very much indeed.”

    “One of the key points that we learned from Breivik last year was that here is a man who has refused to engage in debate. Part of his counter accusations now is that nobody has given him, and his body of opinion, a platform in which to have discussions.”

    “What is so [is to] important to engage fundamentalism is to have open debate. This is not [to] justify his actions in any way but debate is a crucial aspect of democracy — all opinions should be represented.”

    There are all sorts of justifications for refusing to engage in debate. Most of them, in my view, pretty weak.

    – P

    ‘New media’ absorption — another signal

    Sorry to bang on about it, but the ‘blogosphere’ is more and more entering and becoming part of what some self-described ‘True Bloggers’ appear to think of as their mortal enemy, the ‘Mainstream Media’ (boo hiss) 🙂

    Today’s exhibit:

    Oops, now the barbarians at the gate are wining Pulitzer Prizes — how 'maverick' of them!

    Congratulations to the Huffington Post and Politico — both of which I read (often through their excellent iPad apps) along with the BBC, the multiple-award-winning NY Times, Washington Post, Guardian

    – P