David Shearer appeared on Larry Williams’ show last night to clarify…uhm….er…his…ahhh…position on…um lowering power…um…power prices.
There you go, all cleared up…got it. Read more »
Brig Harry Honnor, CB, MVO
Yesterday while the media and almost the whole of New Zealand watched the funeral of Sir Paul Holmes there was another funeral being held, in Paihia, of a Kiwi war hero, Brig Harry Bowen Honnor, CB, MVO
Shamefully our media have not covered the funeral of a true hero. There are very few images of Harry Honnor, but I found the one in this post of him receiving his Korean Presidential Unit Citation from the Auckland based Consul General for the Republic of Korea, Mr Dae-hee Lee, in Whangarei on Long Tan Day, 18 August 2011.
My father in law served under Harry Honnor in Vietnam, in the Battle of Long Tan.
The Veteran blogs about it at No Minister:
We said good bye to Harry Honnor on a magic BoI day at Paihia yesterday. The service was held at the beautiful old stone St Paul’s Anglican Church on Marsden Road just across from the beach. He was farewelled with full military honours which brought Paihia to a standstill and something different to the many hundreds of tourists who witnessed the event.
Brigadier Harry Bowen Honnor will be remembered with affection by generations who served in the 1940′s, 50′s, 60′s and 70′s as a soldiers soldier, a tough but much respected commander and an icon of the Paihia community where he made his home following his retirement in 1983. Read more »
The rest of Korea is coming for your attention and your tourist dollars after Psy’s Gangnam Style paved the way.
How will this help with the rebuild?
Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker is to visit South Korea and Israel for eight days.
He will leave this Thursday, returning to Christchurch on Friday May 11.
While in South Korea, Mr Parker will travel to Christchurch’s sister city Songpa-Gu and also speak at a business breakfast in Seoul hosted by the Kiwi Chamber of Commerce.
A highlight is a visit to the Korean Antarctic Programme.
After Korea, he will travel to Israel for the International Mayors’ Conference, to be attended by 73 mayors from around the world. The invitation to Mr Parker follows a visit to Christchurch in April last year by Israel’s Speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin.
Mr Parker returns to South Korea on May 10 where he is a guest speaker at the 2012 Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Conference in Seoul.
Christchurch City Council said the cost of Mr Parker’s travel was being met by the conference organisers. His wife will accompany him and Mr Parker is paying for the cost of her travel.
While Len Brown is off in China trying to find investors for his Rail Loop idea he would do well to look at the Korean city of Yongin that has gone broke funding a light rail system:
The city of Yongin in Gyeonggi Province is about to suffer from the aftereffects of serious financial difficulties which arose from its impractical light-rail business. Civil servants of the local government, including the mayor, must now endure the ‘humility’ of returning their annual pay awards. Shockingly enough, impact of the adult’s misjudgement will be shared by young children as well, as the city has to stop its projects on improvements of educational environment, including provision of school lunches and language-teaching facilities.
and
The city of Yongin completed construction of the light-rail ‘Ever Line’ in June 2010, with 1 trillion 3.2 billion Won spent on it. However the line has not yet been open due to problems with MRG (minimum revenue guarantee) with Yongin Light-rail Inc. and controversy over fraudulent construction work. The city is planning to use the additionally issued municipal bond to cover the primary reparations (515.9 billion Won) with regard to the Yongin Light-rail, which was decided by the International Court of Arbitration last year.
I was directed to this article about the Left Flank Guard via the tipline. It is an interesting commentary on the tactics used by groups on the left. The article is from a web site dealing with Korean history and this is the introduction to a piece on how justify support for North Korea.
In politics, a direct attack is not always the most effective. One way to proceed is to target someone or something that is seen to represent a more extreme, a more pure representation of your opponent’s ideas and concentrate at least some of your efforts here. Let us call this the “politics of envelopment.” One of the most misguided responses to such a threat of a politics of envelopment, however, is what I will call a “flank guard” form of active defense. Alas, on the political left, and especially among those who, including myself, might be described as democratic socialists, this approach is all too common. The “left flank guard” often takes the form of a spirited defense of even the most indefensible extremes on our flank. The most common ways this is actually carried out is by means of evasion (of accusations), dramatic reversals (“On the contrary, you are the terrorist!”), distraction (“Look at those literacy rates!”), and good old fashioned omission of inconvenient truths.
With the end of the cold war, the “left flank guard” has mostly been deployed in the defense of authoritarian leaders who emit that nostalgic socialist scent (e.g. Venezuela), historical figures who are seen as worthy leaders of revolution but who lost in their struggle for power (e.g. Trotsky), or any resistance or liberation movement that is seen as the best current option for opposing some hated regime (e.g. Hamas). The important point to make here is that few of those in the left flank guard really believe that freedom of expression should be curtailed as it is in Venezuela, that enemies of the revolution should be mercilessly slaughtered, as did Trotsky, or that theocracy is a good supplement to generous social policies. Yet, for some reason, their defenders believe that the survival of our political cause requires us to take a stand and vigorously defend those whose oppressive policies and brutal violence often far outmatch those of our current opponents.
My correspondent notes that:
Korea has been in the news of late with the North chucking artillery all over the place.
Gizmag has featured a cool weapon that South Korea is deploying.
The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with ‘enhancement feature’ for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets.
Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade, or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it, including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct both the video system’s aim and the direction of the guns after recoil pushes them off-target.
Each 140 kg (308.6 lb.) unit can be rigidly mounted or put on a moving vehicle, where the gyro stabilization would be a huge asset. They can operate in fully autonomous mode, firing first and asking questions later, or they can be put into a manual mode for more human intervention. All machines communicate back to headquarters through a LAN cable or wireless network.
DoDAMM Super Aegis 2 autonomous robot gun turret
I can see these being extremely useful for Corrections.
My little brother was recently honoured in Seoul, Korea by being made an honorary citizen.
He is the GM of the Park Hyatt Seoul and has lived in Korea for the past 5 years, first at Incheon building the Hyatt there and then as GM at Hyatt Jeju.
He lives a life I wouldn’t want but he is very good at what he does. I have only seen him in the past 20 years about 6 times since he took up his career with Hyatt. He has lived in Dubai, Perth, Adelaide, Saipan, Guam and Korea.
Anyway this I believe is a high honour and one he deserves for his hard work.
My Brother is far left.
Chris Trotter is angry. He’s mad as hell and he is blogging about it.
LISTENING to Radio New Zealand-National’s “Focus on Politics” yesterday evening, I was incensed and depressed, but I can’t honestly say surprised, to hear Phil Goff dismiss Labour’s founding objective – “the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” as “nineteenth century history.”
It got worse, with Phil adding ideological insult to historical injury by declaring that the modern Labour Party believed “a well-functioning market system is the most effective and efficient way of organising an economy”. Yes, he was willing to “recognise market failure”, but only to the extent of ensuring “an adequate level of regulation”.
As the indignant hum of Mickey Savage spinning in his grave grew louder, Phil then proceeded to define Labour’s twenty-first century mission as being all about “how you make a modern capitalist system work more effectively, and work in favour of all of the citizens of a country – and not just the chosen few, the elite at the top.”
Phil Goff had better watch out. The left is mobilising. It is mobilising to get Goff and this blog post is the signal that all is not well within Labour’s ranks.
Phil Goff, will be carryng on with a Alfred E. Neuman-esqe demeanour showing he cares not a jot for un-reconstitued pinkos like trotter calling for his head.
Even today, the Party’s constitution declares, as one of its foundation principles: “Co-operation, rather than competition, should be the main governing factor in economic relations, in order that a just distribution of wealth can be ensured.” And among its objectives one can still read of Labour’s determination: “To ensure the just distribution of the production and services of the nation for the benefit of all the people.”, and “To educate the public in the principles and objectives of democratic socialism and economic and social co-operation.”
While these principles and objectives remain firmly enshrined in the Labour Party Constitution, it ill-behoves its leader to tell Radio New Zealand-National’s political editor, Brent Edwards, that they amount to nothing more than “nineteenth century history”.
And his attack doesn’t end there;
I would also take issue with Phil’s description of contemporary capitalism as “the most effective and efficient way of organising an economy”. Leaving aside the recent massive failures of capitalist institutions across the globe, it is extremely difficult to see anything remotely “effective” or “efficient” about an economic system which constantly drives millions of human-beings into both relative and absolute poverty; contributes massively to social and racial polarisation across the globe; trashes the planet’s fragile ecology, and brings closer with every passing day the prospect of catastrophic climate change.
That Phil apparently believes it is possible to make such a system “work more effectively [for] all the citizens of a country and not just the chosen few – the elites at the top” tells me that he fundamentally misunderstands the market system he claims to support.
Wow, he basically just called Phil Goff a moron.
One thing about Chris Trotter, he wears his socialism proudly upon his sleeve, and doesn’t hide it all.
A capitalist economy, unmodified by the ameliorating reforms of a politically organised working class, will always fail to deliver for the overwhelming majority of the population. That’s because capitalism is intended to advantage the few at the expense of the many, and can only lead to the political domination of society by “elites at the top”.
To guarantee that the economy works more effectively for the majority, it is necessary to challenge the idea that private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange leads to a fair and equitable society. It has been Labour’s historical mission to lead that challenge, and to play a decisive role in the struggle against capitalist ideology.
The history of the past century has made me extremely wary of mounting that challenge primarily by the application of political violence and repression. My preference is for the principled and peaceful promotion of social-democratic ideas throughout the population – for making socialists of conviction rather than socialists by compulsion. Certainly, that means that the journey will be slow, and that there will be occasional reverses, but it most emphatically does not mean that we can ever afford to give up the challenge; put an end to the journey.
And that is where Phil Goff is in deep, deep trouble from within the ranks of Labour. He actually doesn’t believe in all that and the people Helen Clark recruited, molded and nutured in politics all do. Chris Trotter is simply voicing their frustrations and if Trotter is saying this out loud then as they say there is “trouble at mill”.
If it is your view, Phil, that the quest for democratic socialism may be dismissed as something belonging to “nineteenth century history” then I say “The hell with you!”
And, to the members of the NZ Labour Party I say: “Find yourselves a new leader.”
There it is, a call for the tumbrils, and for Phil Goff to be riding them to the scaffold.
Michael Barone at RealClearPolitics looks at the strategy John NcCain has used to blindside the Democrats.
John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama’s OODA loop.
That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It’s an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
“The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy,” Boyd’s biographer Robert Coram writes. “The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary.”
Indeed, with the Palin selection McCain did precisely that. The Democrats and more importantly the media were rattled.
The McCain campaign shrewdly kept the information that she was on the short list and that she was the choice to a half-dozen people, who didn’t tell even their spouses. The Obama team failed to Observe.
The Obama team were genuinely surprised as were most of their media supporters.
Then they failed to Orient. Palin, as her convention and subsequent appearances have shown, powerfully reinforces two McCain themes: She is a maverick who has taken on the leaders of her own party (as Obama never has in Chicago), and she has a record on energy of favoring drilling and exploiting American resources. Instead of undermining these themes, they dismissed the choice as an attempt to appeal to female Hillary Clinton supporters or to religious conservatives.
A fatal error that most left-wingers fall into and one our own Helen Clark is falling into now. Instead of orienting their attacks on the real person they attack on their own “straw person” view of the opponent.
Then team Obama and its many backers in the media failed to Decide correctly, so when they Acted they got it wrong. Their attacks on Palin tended to ricochet and hit Obama. Is she inexperienced? Well, what has Obama ever run (besides his now floundering campaign)? Being a small-town mayor, as Palin said, is like being a community organizer, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”
Is she neglecting her family? Well, how often has Obama tucked his daughters in lately? For more than a week we’ve seen the No. 1 person on the Democratic ticket argue that he’s better prepared than the No. 2 person on the Republican ticket. That’s not a winning argument even if you win it. As veteran California Democrat Willie Brown says, “The Republicans are now on offense, and Democrats are on defense.”
Perhaps the Obama campaign strategists expected their many friends in the mainstream media to do their work for them. Certainly they tried. But their efforts have misfired, and the grenades they lobbed at Palin have ricocheted back and blown up in their faces. Voters are on to their game.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 68 percent believe “most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win” and that 51 percent — more than support McCain — believe the press is “trying to hurt” Sarah Palin. The press and the Democratic ticket are paying the price for decades of biased mainstream media coverage.
Thi is exactly the same for Helen Clark and Labour, they have decided that the election campaign is going to be nasty from National and so have preapred their own nasty campaign. They have acted upon it and boy didn’t Clark just look nasty on television last night? The problem is that National and John Key has got inside Labour’s OODA and aren’t playing that way. This will rattle Clark just as it has rattled Obama. Labour will be racting to National and the Democrats will be reacting to the Republicans.
