Posts by Simon Grigg
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I would think a national music awards could and should be organized, supported and funded by a govt arts body
not at all, it's a celebration of success and a PR opportunity. That's all. A government funded thing for worthy lower level musicians would last about ten minutes before the nation fell asleep. I think it very successfully walks a line between rampant commercialism and the need to recognise the artistic side of the industry.
Sure it gets it wrong sometimes, but that's the nature of these things.
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$3.50 per disc cost to manufacture
If that's standard now it's jumped 100% since the last time I manufactured in NZ in 2004.
So the real cost is $100 plus $60
Maybe the lower level musician could add 10c per head to their door price to cover it...lets face it if they can't pull enough punters over a year to cover that then they may be too lower level to seriously take part
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I'm afraid that when you say Curtis, I think of Ian. That would probably be a unit of existential melancholy?
Or it could be Tony....thus a unit to measure the speed one spins with a rose in ones mouth whilst attached to Marilyn Monroe
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Here's the doco..it's "Baiting The Bear", sorry.
To me, Teller strikes me as one of the most obsessive and considering his long and powerful influence, the most malevolent of those old Cold Warriors.
The current VPOTUS has a bit of a jump onto the lower ends of the Teller scale, albeit without the barking mad quotient, which we will call the Curtis, that so defined LeMay and others. Maybe a benchmark is required.
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Scary. I get shocked looks when I explain that Dr Strangelove was originally planned as a serious drama.
There was a fascinating documentary a few years back called Taunting The Bear about Le May's obsessive behaviour in the fifties and sixties when he consciously and consistently tried to provoke WWIII, not just once or twice but as an ongoing policy. The guy wanted a nuclear holocaust and was perhaps as close as any side came to to it. In 1949, as head of SAC he proposed an attack on Russia with 133 warheads in one month, without warning.
Jack D. Ripper was mostly Le May
The body fluids stuff was based, as I recall, on actual Le May words.
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Read(not just watch) Charlie Wilsons war and understand how much of a part the US funds played in making Afghanistan unmanageable. There was not one single action that Reagan took, but he supplied the principles by which everyone could judge how actions would be acceptable. He certainly hastened the end.
A couple of things, Charlie Wilson was a Democrat, and the initiative to arm the mujahideen was a Carter initiative, not Reagan (who did expand it).
Zbigniew Brzezinski says (its in French but a part of the translation is here):
We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would...... The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, "We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War."
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I'd imagine the twelve CDs probably cost more than the $100.
at cost..depends on the packaging but no..about $30 max. The rest of the price of a CD is royalties and margins
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@SagenNZ
It was more complicated than that. The US started depth charging Soviet submarines and one on of those the capatin decided he was under attack and decided that he had to hit back. He made the assumption, since he'd lost communication, that war had broken out. His 2iC, Vasiliy Arkhipov calmed the situation.
The bigger threat to the whole thing was Curtis LeMay who was, being generous, verging on obsessed, almost mad. As head of SAC he was determined to go to war and there was a very real chance he was going to ignore Kennedy and strike anyway. He was pissed off with peace, if you will.
He's a very, very good argument for not letting aging cold war warriors anywhere near the button.
As to Palin being liberal with the truth...here's another one.
The EBay story was a half truth...yes she put it on Ebay, but they didn't sell it and when it was sold it lost Alaska half a million dollars. But its become GOP folklore and has been happily picked up by more than a few. Amongst them poor old John MCain, who now has it turning a profit.
Is just me, or is he now looking and speaking far older than his years would suggest?
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Oh you mean you think I should be following the lead of the owner of this blog and Andrew Sullivan and repeating irrelevant shit that has just been made up elsewhere by fanatical anti republicans.
Oh dear you just don't get it do you..you repeating things over and over again, vapidly sloganing, saying "fact", and providing litanies of half-truths and misrepresentation, doesn't make them true. Why rebut when you don't listen and accuse others of 'making things up' regardless of how they may document them. I myself am very careful not to use Huffington as a source in discussion as I know it's partisan, and I've not been to Kos for god knows how long..a year maybe.
But your basis and substance seems to rarely go beyond the recital of the GOP Litany.
There are plenty of folks who come on here and discuss with substance..I wish you were one of them, but to date you're not.
If you can't go beyond that, then don't come around here or anywhere else and accuse people of 'making things up'..back to yer Helengrad twaddle.
I have better things to do.
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I think you hit the nail on the head of their real value though,
...........drunken parties
the 3 drunkest times in my life have all been RIANZ awards after parties..dear oh dear....there was the party at the nice lady from CBS' house, with a couple of (still) major pop stars and Paul Rose, white shagpile and red wine.
That was the night I learned the strong lesson that one never schedules a meeting with the bank manager the next morning.
Those days are gone though and from what I hear the after parties are fairly tame now.