Word of the day

Charlatan – trickster, con artist, swindler, quack; person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception; person who pretends or claims to have more knowledge or skill than he or she possesses.

At the fete

The Queen of Victorian Oamaru with one of her foot soldiers and the Mayor and Mayoress.

Morris dancing.

Another

Another dead child as a result of violence.

Another mother living with a man who was not the chidl’s father.

Another group of adults telling stories which don’t add up to the facts.

Strong, stable government, less spending

Quote of the day:

“We want to provide strong and stable Government … in my view it would not include Winston Peters …. He has a history of breaking up Governments and costing a lot of money.”  John Key.

A day at the races

North Otago is celebrating its Victorian Heritage this week.

Most people who work in the historic precinct dress up to the Victorian theme all the time. During heritage celebrations many locals and visitors also don the clothes our earliest European settlers wore.

Yesterday we spent a very enjoyable afternoon at the gala race day.

Boru provided live music:

The Queen’s guard took a break from guarding to chat to visitors:

While the Queen herself took part in, and won, a celebrity race:

 

We were treated to fine food from Sally Anne of Fat Sally’s and Portside fame, had  lots of laughs and I made an $8 profit from betting.

Today the historic precinct hosts the annual Victorian Fete and World Stone Sawing championships.

Coincidence?

The placement of these Labour campaign posters and pro MMP ones could be a coincidence.

But this, from Whaleoil, makes it unlikely:

I have had various reports from around the country that the union heavy Campaign for MMP has got their troops out and about delivering Labour party pamphlets along side their own. Reports are from several electorates. The people delivering the pamphlets are sporting Campaign for MMP buttons and hand delivering Labour and Campaign for MMP brochures simultaneously.

If this is true it says a great deal about the lack of on the ground support some Labour campaign teams have lost their volunteers and are now having to resort to union dominated campaign teams from the MMP crowd.

It also shows clearly the links between Labour and the Campaign for MMP.

The loss of active party members has coincided with the increase in power for parties under MMP.

The concentration of power in a very few hands is not good for democracy and is a very strong argument to vote for change in Saturday’s referendum.

P.S. the authorisation statement on the MMP posters is Campaign for MMP, not a person. Advertising for parties or candidates requires the name of a person, not an organisation, does this not apply to promoters for referendum advertisements?

November 20 in history

On November 20:

284 – Diocletian was chosen as Roman Emperor.

762 – During An Shi Rebellion, Tang Dynasty, with the help of Huihe tribe, recaptured Luoyang from the rebels.

1194 – Palermo was conquered by Emperor Henry VI.

1407 – A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans was agreed under the auspices of John, Duke of Berry.

1695 – Zumbi, the last of the leaders of Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil, was executed.

1620 – Peregrine White, was born – first English child born in the Plymouth Colony (d. 1704).

 

1700 – Great Northern War: Battle of Narva – King Charles XII of Sweden defeated the army of Tsar Peter the Great at Narva.

1739 – Start of the Battle of Porto Bello between British and Spanish forces during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

1765 Sir Thomas Fremantle, British naval captain, was born (d. 1819).

 

1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacked the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).

 

1841 – Maketu Wharetotara, the 17-year-old son of the Nga Puhi chief Ruhe, killed five people at Motuarohia in the Bay of Islands.

1845 – Argentine Confederation: Battle of Vuelta de Obligado.

1889 – Edwin Hubble, American astronomer, was born (d. 1953).

 

1900 – Chester Gould, American comic strip artist, creator of Dick Tracey, was born.

1908 – Alistair Cooke, British-born journalist, was born (d. 2004).

1910 – Francisco I. Madero issued the Plan de San Luis Potosi, denouncing President Porfirio Díaz, calling for a revolution to overthrow the government of Mexico, effectively starting the Mexican Revolution.

 

1917 – World War I: Battle of Cambrai began.

1917 – Ukraine was declared a republic.

1923 – Rentenmark replaced the Papiermark as the official currency of Germany at the exchange rate of one Rentenmark to One Trillion (One Billion on the long scale) Papiermark.

1925 Robert F. Kennedy, American politician was born (d. 1968).

 

1936 – Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, was killed by a republican execution squad.

1937 Parachuting Santa, George Sellars, narrowly escaped serious injury when he was able to sway his parachute just in time to avoid crashing through the glass roof of the Winter Gardens during the Farmers’ Christmas parade.

1940 – World War II: Hungary becomes a signatory of the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis Powers.

1942 Joe Biden, 47th Vice President of the United States, was born.

 

1943 – World War II: Battle of Tarawa (Operation Galvanic) begins – United States Marines land on Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands and suffer heavy fire from Japanese shore guns and machine guns.

1945 – Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

1947 – The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.

1952 – Slánský trials – a series of Stalinist and anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia.

1956 – Bo Derek, American actress, was born.

 

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ended: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ended the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

1969 – Vietnam War: The Cleveland Plain Dealer published explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre.

1974 – The United States Department of Justice filed its final anti-trust suit against AT&T.

1975 – Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain, died after 36 years in power.

1979 – Grand Mosque Seizure: About 200 Sunni Muslims revolted in Saudi Arabia at the site of the Kaaba in Mecca during the pilgrimage and take about 6000 hostages. The Saudi government received help from French special forces to put down the uprising.

1984 – The SETI Institute was founded.

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released.

1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.

1991 – An Azerbaijani MI-8 helicopter carrying 19 peacekeeping mission team with officials and journalists from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan was shot down by Armenian military forces in Khojavend district of Azerbaijan.

1992 – Fire broke out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage.

1993 – Savings and loan crisis: The United States Senate Ethics Committee issued a stern censure of California senator Alan Cranston for his “dealings” with savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating.

1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels signed the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war.

1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declared accused terrorist Osama bin Laden “a man without a sin” in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, was launched.

2001 – In Washington, D.C., U.S. President George W. Bush dedicated the United States Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building, honoring the late Robert F. Kennedy on what would have been his 76th birthday.

2003 – A second day of the 2003 Istanbul Bombings destroyed the Turkish head office of HSBC Bank AS and the British consulate.

2008 – After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its lowest level since 1997.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Murcid - lazy, slothful; shirking work or duty.

Inspired by this.

Has farming harmed salmon fishing?

Salmon farming hasn’t harmed angling, on the contrary it has helped it.

Why then are anglers so concerned about the prospect that trout farming might be permitted in New Zealand?

I haven’t found any policy from any party promoting this although Don Nicolson, then president of Federated Farmers and now an Act candidate, did talk of the benefits of trout farming.

7/10

7/10 in Stuff’s Biz Quiz.

Stone carving auction tomorrow

Sculptors from around New Zealand have been carving huge blocks of Oamaru Stone on Takaro Park for the last couple of weeks.

 

Their work will be auctioned tomorrow.

The ODT reports on it here and the Oamaru Mail report is here.

The stone comes from Parkside Quarries.

The dog that didn’t bark

In all the fuss about the teapot tapes has anyone seen or heard any criticism about the Diplomatic Protection Squad?

That something could sit on a table beside the Prime Minister without being noticed or questioned does not reflect well on them.

But he hasn’t once criticised or blamed them for doing, or not doing, something.

That is how it should be although not every Prime Minister has had that respect for the police.

Meanwhile, the NBR, has a story behind its pay wall saying the Greens deny paying for the vandalism of National’s hoardings.

It quotes Russel Norman saying he had nothing to do with the attacks and didn’t know who paid for it.

How long before every other Green MP and office holder is asked the same questions?

There’s a dog not barking somewhere. Someone needs to find it and its owner,  where’s Sherlock Holmes when we need him?.

People will be losers if privacy not protected

In respect for my blood pressure I don’t often listen to talkback but every now and then I tune in to hear what people are thinking.

This week the storm in a teapot story was a popular topic but I was pleasantly surprised that a majority of callers were saying it had all been blown out of proportion and were backing the Prime Minister’s stand on the principle of privacy.

This has been confirmed by a Fairfax Media poll:

Voters overwhelmingly think the “tea party tape” of the conversation of John Key and John Banks was a breach of privacy and should have been wiped without being made public. . . .

The Fairfax Media-Research International poll asked if the recording was a breach of privacy and should have been destroyed immediately.

A net 58 per cent agreed, with a net 29 disagreeing.

But respondents were equally divided when asked if the event was all about publicity, so all aspects should be available for reporting.

By a narrow margin – 45 to 41 per cent – voters polled said there was no such thing as a private conversation in public.

But 63 per cent felt politicians should be able to talk about controversial ideas without fear of those discussions being made public, with only 22 per cent disagreeing.

The poll of 507 people had a margin of error of 4.2 per cent.

The issue of whether or not the conversation was private is to be considered by the High Court on Tuesday.

If it decides that it wasn’t, we will all be the losers.

In New Zealand we have remarkably free access to politicians. If they know that anything they say in a conversation in a public place could be regarded as public they will be far less willing to engage with people and politics will become even more stage managed than it already is.

It could also hamper the media because politicians will be even more carful about off-record conversations and backgrounders.

Perhaps that’s why we’re now seeing what Keeping Stock calls mea culpe season.

Pike River tragedy unresolved

A year ago today 31 men went into the Pike River mine.

Two survived the explosion which happened that afternoon, the rest died in the mine.

The first anniversary of a death is a big milestone which usually helps families and friends in their journey through the grief maze. They know they have survived all the firsts – birthdays, Christmas, mothers’ and fathers’ days – without the one for whom they are grieving and can realistically hope that the next year will be better.

But the coming year will bring more of the same for the relatives and friends of the Pike River men. They still have to endure the Royal Commission into the disaster and a court case of those being held accountable for it.

And they still wait in hope that the bodies or remains might be recovered.

The Pike River mine disaster is still an unresolved tragedy.

It could take many more months before it is resolved and regardless of how it is resolved it can never bring back those 29 men who went to work a year ago today.

November 19 in history

1095 – The Council of Clermont, called by Pope Urban II to discuss sending the First Crusade to the Holy Land, began.

 

1493 – Christopher Columbus went ashore on an island he first saw the day before. He named it San Juan Bautista (later renamed Puerto Rico).

1600 King Charles I of England was born (d. 1649).

 

1794 – The United States and Great Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which attempts to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.

 

1805 Ferdinand de Lesseps, French diplomat and Suez Canal engineer, was born (d. 1894).

 

1816 – Warsaw University was established.

 

1847 – The Montreal and Lachine Railway, was opened.

1863 – American Civil War: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the military cemetery ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

 

1881 – A meteorite landed near the village of Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.

1905 Tommy Dorsey, American bandleader, was born (d. 1956).

 

1916 – Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn established Goldwyn Pictures.

 

1917 Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India was born (d. 1984).

 

1930 – Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow committed their first of a large series of robberies and other criminal acts.

 

1933 Larry King, American TV personality, was born.

 

1941 – World War II: Battle between HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran. The two ships sank each other off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of 645 Australians and about 77 German seamen.

 

1942 – World War II: Battle of Stalingrad – Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launched the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR’s favor.

 

1943 – Holocaust: Nazis liquidated Janowska concentration camp in Lemberg (Lviv), western Ukraine, murdering at least 6,000 Jews after a failed uprising and mass escape attempt.

 

1944 – World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the 6th War Loan Drive, aimed at selling $14 billion USD in war bonds to help pay for the war effort.

1950 – US General Dwight D. Eisenhower became supreme commander of NATO-Europe.

1954 – Télé Monte Carlo, Europe’s oldest private television channel, was launched by Prince Rainier III.

 

1955 – National Review published its first issue.

1959 – The Ford Motor Company announced the discontinuation of the unpopular Edsel.

 

1961 Meg Ryan, American actress, was born.

 

1962 Jodie Foster, American actress, was born.

 

1967 – The establishment of TVB, the first wireless commercial television station in Hong Kong.

 

1969 – Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed at Oceanus Procellarum (the “Ocean of Storms”) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.

1969 – Football player Pelé scored his 1,000th goal.

 

1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel.

 

1977 – Transportes Aéreos Portugueses Boeing 727 crashed in Madeira Islands, killing 130.

1979 – Iran hostage crisis: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.

1984 – San Juanico Disaster: A series of explosions at the PEMEX petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City started a major fire and killed about 500 people.

 

1985 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time.

1985 – Pennzoil won a $10.53 billion USD judgment against Texaco, in the largest civil verdict in the history of the United States, stemming from Texaco executing a contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil had entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty.

1988 – Serbian communist representative and future Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic publicly declared that Serbia was under attack from Albanian separatists in Kosovoas well as internal treachery within Yugoslavia and a foreign conspiracy to destroy Serbia and Yugoslavia.

 

1990 – Pop group Milli Vanilli was stripped of its Grammy Award because the duo did not sing at all on the Girl You Know It’s True album. Session musicians had provided all the vocals.

 

1992 The Fred Hollows Foundation was established in New Zealand.

1994 – In Great Britain, the first National Lottery draw was held. A £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of correctly guessing the winning six out of 49 numbers.

 

1996 – Lt. Gen. Maurice Baril of Canada arrived in Africa to lead a multi-national policing force in Zaire.

 

1998 – Lewinsky scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings against U.S. President Bill Clinton.

1998 – Vincent van Gogh‘s Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells at auction for $US71.5 million.

1999 – Shenzhou 1: China launched its first Shenzhou spacecraft.

2010 – An explosion in the Pike River mine trapped 29 men.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Bandersnatch – an imaginary wild animal of fierce disposition; a person of uncouth or unconventional habits, attitudes, etc., especially one considered a menace, nuisance, or the like.

Into the mouths of babes

A National Party human hoardings team was being boldly blue yesterday.

A teacher at a nearby day care centre was heard shouting “go Labour,” several times from the outside play area.

She had a number of pre-school children with her and they joined in shouting, “go Labour’”too.

She wasn’t heard coaching the children but it is difficult to imagine three and four year-old children coming up with those words, and that view, by themselves.

Putting political words into the mouths of babes is overstepping a line between professional behaviour and personal views.

If I was a parent of those children I’d be furious that they were being used in this way, regardless of which political party they were being encouraged to support.

Fair’s not fair with MMP

Proponents of MMP like to say it’s the fairest system because every vote counts.

The results contradict that.

National supporters whose votes allowed Peter Dunne into three successive Labour-led governments show that under MMP your vote can count for the opposite of what you intend.

People who voted for New Zealand First to get a Labour-led government in 1996 would be equally unhappy and the greater lack of unfairness is that MMP can allow the leader of a minor party to determine the government.

David Farrar points out in his Herald column that Winston Peters could get to choose the next Prime Minister.:

 If NZ First makes five per cent, then there is a reasonable chance Peters will hold the balance of power. His caucus will defer to him absolutely. . .

. . . if he holds the balance of power in 2011, make no mistake he will choose Phil Goff over John Key, and there will be a Government that can only pass a law if it can get the Greens, Winston, Hone, and the Maori Party to all agree to it.

The parliament might reflect how people some vote but I doubt that many would call the outcome for government fair.

He has not pledged to allow the largest party to govern. He has merely said they should be able to first try and form a Government. That may mean he’ll talk to them for ten minutes before he picks up the phone and makes Phil Goff Prime Minister.

Many New Zealanders, unaware of how MMP works in practice, will be shocked. They’ll say how can the guy who leads his party to a massive defeat, getting (for example) 6% less support than they got when thrown out in 2008, end up Prime Minister?

But this is a design feature of MMP, not a defect. MMP will more often than not require minor parties to decide after the election who will be Prime Minister. Sometimes their preferences will be known before the election, sometimes they will not be.

John Key and National have been up-front about coalition partners and have categorically ruled out Peters. Phil Goff and Labour have ruled out Hone Harawira and Mana but are saying maybe to Peters and New Zealand First.

Peters in his usual Humpty Dumpty manner has said something that will mean whatever he wishes it to should he be in a position to use the election results to his advantage.

What’s fairer, stating your intentions so voters are clear what they’re voting for before the election or waiting to do covert deals afterwards and leaving voters to find their votes have counted for something they don’t want?

What’s fairer, a system which gives power to the people or hands it to an individual?

MMP is perfect for demagogues such as Peters. He selects who will be on his party list, and they become MPs based on his personal popularity, despite the fact 99% of New Zealanders could not tell you who the top six candidates on his list are. Their loyalty is purely to him, not to the New Zealand public.

What’s fairer, a system that gives more power to parties or better representation for people?

MMP gives far too much power to parties, which in the case of more than one of the wee ones means the leader. That leaves people will poorer representation and that weakness is exacerbated by the geographical size of the electorates.

I wrote about that in a column for the ODT’s Paddock talk on Monday.

P.S. Motella illustrates the horror of what could happen next week.

Friday’s answers

Thursday’s questions were:

1. Who said: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”?

2. Who was the Greek god of liars and thieves?

3. It’s mentire in Italian, mentir in French and Spanish and kōrero parau in Maori, what is it in English?

4. How much does New Zealand First still owe us?

5. Can you name any other NZ First candidates apart from its leader?

Points for answers:

Andrei wins an electronic box of Rare Earth Jesey Bennies for a clean sweep with a bonus for the question.

James got four.

PDM got three and a wry grin for #2.

Grant got four with another grin for #2.

Adam got four with a bonus for being so adament for #5.

Answers follow the break:

7/10

7/10 in the Herald’s changing world quiz.