Posts by Andrew E
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I sincerely hope we're not being so naive as to think that government sponsored exchange programmes are not designed to have influence, however subtle at first, on those participating in them. There's a fair amount of evidence that government involvement in exchange programmes is not purely altruistic. Here's one result from a search on the subject.
The Economist's obituary of Irving Kristol is also matter-of-fact about the CIA's involvement with Encounter magazine. A fund for exchanges set up at the height of the cold war would be pretty miraculous to have escaped the attention of agencies wanting to peddle influence and gather information. Equally, just because the cold war ended, it doesn't mean that countries are no longer interested in establishing cultural hegemony.
-
NZLemming wrote:
A Science and Technology cooperation agreement between the US Department of Homeland Security and New Zealand, relating to enhancement of each country’s domestic and external security capabilities, is slated to soon be signed.
I may not have been watching but this was a complete surprise to me. Anyone know about this?
Yes, I knew about it. But then again, I keep an eye out for those things.
Readers of this thread might also be interested in the book, available online for free, National Security and Open Government: Striking the Right Balance. In particular, the chapter Nato's Security of Information Policy and the Right to Information by Professor Alasdair Roberts (starts on page 149). This details NATO's (and thus US) influence on restricting the availability of information, in spite of countries having OIA-type laws. New Zealand very probably has a bilateral 'Security of Information' agreement with the US, which may well go beyond pure defence and intelligence sharing. A common feature of these agreements is that they explicitly 'trump' OIA laws, enabling governments here to withhold informaton on the basis of s. 6(a) or s. 6(b) of the OIA.
-
My first girlfriend was Jewish. She didn't receive any repeat calls from those selling the Watchtower once she informed them of this....
-
Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
I commend to you the Dagestan Wedding report.
Yes, I saw the link to that from the twitter comments on the right. One of the best lines in that cable:
"Gadzhi gave us a lift in the Rolls once in Moscow, but the
legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a
Kalashnikov carbine at our feet." -
Wikileaks got off to a bad start with (some) others in the access to information community when it threatened those who did something other than praise its actions.
-
I imagine loads of perishables rotting in various airports in Asia & US.
And a lot of Kenyan farm workers being laid off.
-
Syncing files to your computer means going through iTunes and looks, frankly, like a bit of a pain in the ass. Roll on a better solution for that.
John Gruber, on Daring Fireball wrote about this at greater length, but summed up:
What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really.
Agree with the lemmings and excessive income comment. I like Apple products, but never get 1st gen products. Fools and their money....
-
Or, you need a pliant government that happily allows a daily newspaper monopoly in every city.
Yes... have wondered about that one for a while. Has this ever been referred to a competition commission (or similar)?
-
But this, in turn, raises the question of why the media is in such a sorry state? If a majority of the public really wanted better journalism, wouldn't we have it?
No, we wouldn't. The public - all of them that I've encountered - do want higher quality reporting and commentary on public affairs. But print news media is a dying commodity entertainment product, and high quality journalism costs money that eats into owners (most non-existent already) profits. Broadcast media could do better, but again, high quality journalism costs money and may not be 'sexy' in televisual terms. And that's before you get into any conflicts of interest between news programmes on advertising-funded TV channels.
-
If Labour is serious about concentrating on the economic issues it should make sure its policies don't result in a continuation of the growth in the gap between the poor and rich, which is what happened last time.
However, that is tinkering at the margin compared to the real challenge for a future government: beginning to prepare the country for life when the impacts of climate change in other countries start to have downstream effects here. It is not going to keep them out with what passes for a Navy, so what is it going to do with all the boatloads of refugees when they arrive?
Someone up the thread mentioned 'sustainable growth'. When are people going to learn that is an oxymoron?