September 2012

Another politician gives himself an upper cut.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has declared he has “unfettered legal power” over telecommunications regulation, including the ability to request Australian telcos “wear red underpants on their head”.
The bizarre comments were made by Senator Conroy at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information conference in New York last Monday, and were reported by communications publication CommsDay yesterday.

The comments were made in the context of Senator Conroy arguing against a proposal by the International Telecommunications Union that could push up the price of broadband in Australia. The proposal could see telcos charged more for international submarine cable access, the costs of which could ultimately be passed onto consumers and push up the price of broadband.

Senator Conroy told the conference: “The regulation of telecommunications powers in Australia is exclusively federal. That means I am in charge of spectrum auctions, and if I say to everyone in this room ‘if you want to bid in our spectrum auction you’d better wear red underpants on your head’, I’ve got some news for you. You’ll be wearing them on your head … I have unfettered legal power.”

That’s what you get when you put an ex-unionist in a position of power.

The luckiest truck driver in Russia.

The Herald subbies really do have a problem with airplane stories:

Five minutes with Google should have enabled then to realise that Spitfire fighter planes never had a glass cockpit.

I blogged yesterday about the danger to media and politicians of blindly following Campbell Live’s DotCon PR spin.

The Police Commissioner is now backing the cop who was under attack this week - which might be a warning for all the journos who repeated the DotCampbell claims to go away and look at the notes of their court reporting – if they have any.

The SST shows that no transcript of the court case has been released – so all the journos who repeated the story this week will have done so on the strength of a single quote selected by DotCampbell, without any context and without any info on the line of questioning in the run up to the quote.

The cops are hamstrung because they can’t comment on a live court case – but the SST suggests the cop at the centre of this was talking about something completely different to what is being claimed by DotCampbell.

This could be very uncomfortable for media and politicians who haven’t bothered to do any fact-checking.

Wrong, just wrong:

The Democrats continue to attack:

This pommy bastard seems like a good bloke.

“For a Labour government in 2015, it is quite right, and the public I think would expect this, to have a proper zero-based spending review where we say we have to justify every penny and make sure we are spending in the right way.”

In a dig at David Cameron, he said not even the £12 billion foreign aid budget would be exempt from scrutiny. The Prime Minister has been criticised by backbenchers for letting hundreds of millions of pounds in overseas aid go to consultancies.

Giving money to the misbegotten might be popular in the liberal elite wanker circles, but just pisses off normal people.

Mr Balls’ language is likely to antagonise the unions and has already put him slightly at odds with Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader.

Even better he is a Labour MP who is willing to tell the unions to stick it.

Europe is a prime example of why we all should be skeptical of unelected liberal elite wankers who think they know best. The whole place is rooted because of their stupid single currency.

As many of us have long argued, both these phenomena are but symptoms of what in essence is just a good old fashioned balance-of-payments crisis. This has been greatly exaggerated by monetary union, which is also preventing the application of time-honoured solutions. Utopian pursuit of the single currency is damning Europe to economic oblivion. Political hubris has eclipsed economic common sense.

Utopia was never created by bureaucrats….and never will be.

In a non-nonsensical diatribe a PPTA “leader” calls upon Victoria University to massively restrict freedom of speech:

“I was surprised when an e-mail from Victoria University arrived inviting me to a lecture by Mr Feinberg, as these slots are normally reserved for experts or academics to speak on a particular topic. In this case, the ACT lobby seems to have broken through the University’s peer review process and managed to get a snake oil salesman from America on stage.”

At the PPTA they must be too busy looking for innovative ways to educate to underclass tail in NZ to even both checking on say…Wikipedia…to find how recognised and honoured Feinberg is in the US.

Mike Feinberg is Co-Founder of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation and the Superintendent of KIPP Houston, which includes 21 public charter schools: eleven middle schools, seven primary schools, and three high schools. To date, 90% of the KIPPsters who have left the KIPP Houston middle schools have gone on to college. Mike received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and a Masters of Education from National-Louis University in 2005. In 2010, Yale University awarded Mike an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters. After graduating from Penn, Feinberg joined Teach For America and taught fifth grade in Houston, Texas.