Frustration

Who ever coined the term " smart phone " needs to be shot.

 NB. Not posted from my Blackberry

Putin and the Femen

The Femen came to my attention a few years ago with there unconventional take on protesting for womens rights


" FEMEN (Ukrainian: Фемен) is a Ukrainian protest group based in Kiev, founded in 2008. The organisation became internationally known for organizing topless protests against sex tourists,international marriage agencies, sexism and other social, national and international ills.^{[1][4][5][6][7][8][9]}Some of the goals of the organisation are: "To develop leadership, intellectual and moral qualities of the young women in Ukraine" and "To build up the image of Ukraine, the country with great opportunities for women"


Hard to argue with ? Well no, lets face it sex tourism is prostitution if it is between consenting adults and is transactional, international marriage agencies offer a similar service on a longer term basis. I might add that if my spam mail is anything to judge by there are no shortage of Ukrainian woman who seem to want to get out too the west via marriage.

I am not convinced that attractive young women getting naked is going to convince the world that heading east  for a bit of R&R or marriage is a bad idea. That leaves us with social, national and international ills.

I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin fits the bill on those criteria so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to read this

"The women, who were not identified, told reporters they are members of Ukraine's FEMEN protest movement, which regularly carries out topless protests.

The three women initially pulled off their tops and shouted "Putin is a thief!" to reveal slogans painted on their chests and backs which read "I steal for Putin" and "Kremlin rats".

I guess this is part of the " developing leadership, intellectual and moral qualities of the young women in the Ukraine ", despite the venue being Moscow.

" The FEMEN protesters also tried to steal the ballot box with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's vote before being detained by police,their group said in a statement on its blog.

The protest occurred just minutes after Mr. Putin and his wife Lyudmila had left the scene.

"Three Ukrainian nationals were found guilty ... of petty hooliganism," the court spokeswoman told RIA Novosti."

I can't help getting the feeling that the Femen stuffed this one up. Putin is a former KGB career officer and is unlikely to be moved in any way by beautiful young women making the point that  he is a corrupt bastard tackle out as it was.

Now had the Femen  attempted this tactic with Berlusconi when he was PM of Italy, who knows ?

"THREE women who were arrested after protesting topless at a Moscow polling booth have been handed short jail sentences.

A Moscow magistrate's court sentenced the trio to five, 10 and 12-day sentences respectively."

Seems a bit over the top to me, three good looking women get a bit naked  and go to gaol, Putin corrupts the political process and becomes president.

Not again ? MV Rena take II

MSC MV Carole suffers same fate as MSC MV Rena ? 

The 294 meter long, 60639 dwt container vessel MSC Carole went aground on a reef near Jakarta, Indonesia (-6° 1′ 35.904″, 106° 53′ 12.4794″).  The MSC Carole was en route to Jakarta fromFremantle when it struck the reef near the entrance to the harbor.  The vessel was proceeding at 7.5 knots and is firmly stuck on the reef.  Initial attempts to refloat the vessel failed.   Reports state there is no sign of any fuel or pollution being released.  The reason why the MSC Carole struck the reef has not yet been reported.  The MSC Carole is the second largest container vessel currently operating in the world.

This is starting to look like  a company culture is developing.

The evil Kim Dotcom.... Not really

As far as I can tell Kim Dotcom has broken no New Zealand laws, yet on the 20 January this year the New Zealand Police arrested him at the request of the FBI

" On January 5, 2012,^[41] indictments were filed in the United States against Dotcom on criminal copyright infringement charges along with Július Benčko and 5 other associates. On January 20, 2012, Kim Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested inCoatesville, Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand Police, following an armed raid on his house. Authorities were cooperating with the United States' FBI and Justice Department...


" According to Dotcom's defence, the police operation against Megaupload was unnecessarily grandiose: "... armed officers arrived in helicopters and dropped into the Dotcom mansion courtyard.


"According to head of security, Wayne Tempero "... the force was incredible ... Had they simply asked us we would have opened the door to any room they wanted to enter." He said Mr. Dotcom seemed shocked by the police action. "I remember him saying "copyright infringement" and shook his head, like he's going "what the hell?". We weren't building bombs in the cellar, we didn't have a meth lab bigger than the South Island here. This was a normal family house


What the fuck is going on here? The raid was on TV it was a gross over reaction by the NZ police and armed offenders squad. Now Mr Dotcom was living in anything but a normal family house he was living in a mansion but all of this is very interesting in a gossip type way as is his estimated 50 million dollars but it is totally irrelevant to the central question  of when did  New Zealand law enforcement agencies start taking  orders from the FBI?

The usually rational centre right Kiwiblog has this to say today

" Kim Dotcom needs $220,000 a month to survive ...I knew the cost of living was going up, but I suspect Mr Dotcom wants that sum of money available to him for other purposes – maybe travel."


Not to be outdone Keeping Stock on the same issue.

" Surprisingly, we don't have a lot of sympathy for the Dotcoms' plight. The figures that they have presented to the Court today are absurd, and will be abhorrent to many. They are asking for more than four times as much PER MONTH as the average New Zealander earns annually.

If Kim Dotcom thinks that this is a way to sway public opinion in his favour, we'd suggest that he has been poorly advised.

And if Kim Dotcom hasn't been doing anything illegal, why does he need to spend $6000 per week on bodyguards? Hmmmm...."

These are blogs that purport to support freedom and oppose unnecessary government intervention in the lives of New Zealanders. Mr Dotcom is German but a NZ resident and entitled to the protection of NZ law. That we are prepared to give up sovereignty to the FBI scares the crap out of me.

This man has not broken NZ law. The agencies of the NZ government should not be under the control of the American entertainment industry unlike the FBI appears to be.

If there is a case to answer then it is civil not criminal under NZ law and Hollywood and there lapdogs the FBI can file a civil case in our courts. I hope Mr Dotcom wins. I hope the NZ Police are forced to pay compensation out of their operational budget. I hope they are forced to beg our parliament for additional funding to cover for the compensation, because maybe they will learn to say no.

New Zealand sovereignty is not up for sale presumably for some mythical free trade agreement that America will never sign or if they do put so many get out of honouring it clauses in it it will be worth less than the paper it is written on.  

Sunday " Lunch "

Significant Other and I decided that having a leg of lamb for Sunday lunch was a good idea on Friday. She didn't have a roasting dish but I have several and of course being a typical Kiwi bloke they are all the usual family hand me down variety with the outside being discolored from years of use. I pulled it out of my bag on Saturday and realised on the spot that it was unacceptable. Before she could call her niece to remedy the situation I took immediate action and put 40 minutes of elbow grease into cleaning the old dish and got it to an acceptable standard. I also pulled out the leg of lamb and pointed out that their was a lot of meat on it and with vegetables we could actually feed us her nephew and niece as well as R and her three kids.

I had a $30 one card reward voucher to spend at Countdown so we popped down to get some veges and other staples. Significant Other was appalled at the the Countdown prices, given that the whole shop came to $37 and we had a 10kg bag of rice, veges, milk and other stuff I can't recall for a cash outlay of $7.00 I wasn't to concerned but I am fairly sure she will not be making the move from Pac & Save any time soon.

Sunday involved a trip to the baker to get some croissants for breakfast  I managed to secure the last 4 which meant Significant Other, Niece and me had a pleasant breakfast  followed by church, now having not looked inside a church since my grandmothers funeral well over 20 years ago I was unsure what to expect. It soon became apparent that this was no ordinary service it was in fact the pastors final performance and tributes rolled in throughout the service, including an memorable analogy that involved "Saving Private Ryan " made even more remarkable because the orders came direct from President Lincoln in the White House. I have no idea if " Saving Private Ryan " was based on fact and this was an attempt to fictionalise it or perhaps Roosevelt was the modern incarnation of Lincoln, given it was a christian event I decided speculation on Dalai Lama style reincarnation being a newly discovered exciting feature of the American Presidency might not go down well.

This is of course the point at which the wheels started to fall off. Sunday Lunch was being provided by the church to farewell their pastor a man who ran a congregation that clearly had no concept of classical theology but a man whose pastoral care I have come to admire greatly, that alone convinced me I could probably get along with him and I did, ironically on his last day in the ministry.

Clearly when you are putting a leg of lamb in the oven at 2.30 pm you are no longer cooking " lunch", R's daughter S about 12 was astonished that I was cooking my explanation that we were cooking a Kiwi meal and I was the only person who could cook Kiwi meal was dismissed as she was learning to cook at school however I gather the modern equivalent of home economics hasn't reached legs of lamb yet as she didn't want to prepare it for me when I gave it to her.

For all that the kids were really patient from left J2, J1 and S.

J2 the youngest amusing us trying on Significant Others nephews shoes.

No pressure well at least not for R. " Lunch " was a success although it started at about 4.00 and took till about 5.30.

Leftovers, actually given the dish was overflowing with vegetables and I carved the lamb onto a separate platter I was not unhappy with uptake particularly given we gave a rice option, the kids loved drowning the rice and lamb in gravy but still ate the veges. The only incongruent note was when a friend of Significant Others nephew  told me he enjoyed the beef and he hadn't had it cooked this way before.

Lots off dirty dishes. You can see the roasting dish bottom right. I bet it has been scrubbed spotless by now. I am not allowed to do the dishes if Significant Others nephew is at home and I felt a bit sorry for him. He had been off for a weekend camp organised by the refugee service and arrived back in time for " lunch " and of course the dishes.

 I make a lot of dishes when I cook and yes I was laughing when I took this but I did feel a little bit guilty about the work I had created for him.

Significant Other is keen to do another lamb roast, she watched everything I did. I doubt I will even be allowed in the kitchen when it happens and I suspect that it will be a fusion dish incorporating some African cuisine ideas.

Photo. On my way home

I was catching the Half Moon Bay ferry back to the city tonight and unfortunately didn't spot this until I was walking down the jetty to board so only had time for this photo.

I guess it is better to discover the runabout isn't seaworthy when launching rather than out in the harbour.

" The worst day fishing is better than the best day working "

Maybe not.

Republican Insanity Explained

I was actually looking for a different republican insanity story, trust me there is no shortage, when I stumbled over this headline

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

It was "Cult" that attracted my attention.

"But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP."
Lets face it you don't get much more insane than the modern GOP.

"...it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy."

As you can see the article is a bit dated but I can fully understand the authors reaction.

"It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages."

The article lists many examples of this type of behaviour.

"Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself."

And that is a real risk, the American right seems to have lost the plot.

" John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

Remember Rick Perry threatening to take Texas out of the Union in May last year ? That he legally couldn't do that seemed of little consequence to him.

" Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students."


We thought Muldoon was bad and trust me he was but he was an infant compared to the modern Republican Party and National in NZ cleaned up the mess something the Republicans are incapable of it would appear in America.

" This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear."

He He  ".. Obama's policy of being black."
What is interesting though is his analysis of the Democrats.

" While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?"

While I am a fan of Obama I do think he could have been more forceful and less compromising with the lunatics that are the current GOP, I accept politics is at the end of the day the art of the possible and no more so than in the USA.

" It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest."


This is the part that mystifies me about the American people when the housing crisis hit we were bombarded with images of people in trailer parks flying the Stars and Stripes, hell in most countries they would be burning the flag and a hell of a lot more, just look at Greece.

Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

Separation of church and state is something most western democracy's take fairly seriously.


"If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power."


It is a sad but I think apt conclusion should the Republicans in this guise ever regain office and inevitably they will.