Posts by James George
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don't particularly care about facebook that is a medium designed for superficial tossers.
How about giving her the simple dignity of defining Sarah on her own terms. One of the things she loathed was the way so many people she had no idea existed, claimed to know her & always defined in her terms of her father, a bloke who she quite frankly didn't really want to be bracketed with.
Herkt's description is so far from the truth I can't help but wonder if he falls into that category. -
Whole column is as tacky it gets. You'd think after 40 years memories of Sarah could be left to those who knew her instead of this lame tabloid trash getting dragged up again. The dead can't sue for libel eh. Herkt's career peak was editing a taxpayer paid for magazine for junkies so that is to be expected but what's Brown's excuse.
-
I wouldn't have given two cents for any of the shiny assed careerists who seem to be the staple of most seats in the opposition held by NZ Labour Party except that there is one fella who showed himself to be rather different - not a cringing neo-liberal deregulator, last time Labour was in power.
When David Cunliffe was selected as Minister of Telecommunications I was skeptical about the result.
For most of the Clark government's stewardship Telecom had been allowed to abuse their monopoly running roughshod over any other more innovative start-up by using its control of the copper network to simultaneously rig prices and stranglehold traffic manage the opposition.
It occurred to me Cunliffe had been given the job because his smarmy grin would deflect any attempt to fix our network in favour of propping the Telecom monolith.
Imagine my surprise when he used his 'communication skills' to dish it out to Telecom execs and the telecommunications regulators whose strings those Telecom execs pulled.
I don't much like blokes who are just 'too good' at getting the message out, my experience of them has usually been that their only real message is 'See me I am the only thing that matters', but Cunliffe appears to be a bloke who uses those qualities to improve the situation for others as much as himself.
He got into hot water with the old guard of the Labour caucus for speaking out on issues they had decided back in the Lange Douglas years- except Cunliffe was saying they may not have made the correct decision, that there is a place in a small economy for regulation - adjustment to prevent dominance & abuse by the fellas who have grabbed all the cash.
Good on him for saying so and if Labour pick him as their leader I will vote for them next year - for the first time since the 80's.
I'm cynical enough to appreciate it could all go very wrong, that Cunliffe could turn out to be nothing more than a more highly skilled player than the rest of the shiny asses, but since I already know the others are all hat and no head what is there to lose? -
Hard News: A handful of battling billionaires, in reply to Tinakori,
Bruce is the one in charge of the sheep dip - reputed to be in breach of rule number 1.
-
Oh OK went away for a couple days. Juan Cole as a warmonger is easy. As a democrat policy advisor it is true he was very outspoken when the rethugs led the invasion of Iraq. Not that the dems actually did much useful to block the illegal invasion of another sovereign state. Congress repeatedly wimped out on issues like Abu Ghraib. In the end the only issue democrat pols following Coles' advice did was to campaign about the medical treatment of injured american soldiers.
Yeah right! You join the army to kill people you get injured, big deal. You need a kick up the ass not sympathy.
Cole is an old school orientalist very similar to the english orientalist/arabist scholars, they favour and advocate arming the Sunni ruling elite in Shia dominated states such as Iraq. We see the upshot of that now in Iraq where Sunni elements are resourced by the US to pressure the Shia led democratically elected government in the hope of driving a wedge between Iraq & Iran.
Right now those same Sunni groups are slaughtering civilians in Syrian towns bordering Iraq.
US policymakers go all "Its terrible al Quaeda are doing this" publicly while conspiring with the people they demonise.
Juan Cole repeteadly editorialises in favour of the foreign terrorists who are destroying Syria's infrastructure in exactly the same way the same groups reduced Libya, once the leader in North Africa & the ME for health & education (yes & women's rights). These groups lynched black Libyans whose Libyan ancestry often exceeds that of many Libyan Arabs, on the specious grounds they were 'foreigners'.The old colonel who was a Berber himself, had done much to break down the racial & language divides between Libyan people. That has gone & the country is in agony, but the oil is getting out to France & england so Cole thinks its all great.
Juan Cole applauded the destruction of Libya just as he supports the armed groups in Syria.
Its kind of difficult to get a feeling for opposition to Cole if you read his blog since he censors comments heavily.
Here is a critique of Cole's take on Syria from back when Cole could have made a difference by speaking out against the arming of terrorist groups.
http://mideastreality.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/exactly-why-barack-obama-and-juan-cole.htmlHe is a mouthpiece for liberal interventionism who cloaks his warmongering under a facade of 'reasonableness'. A thoroughly despicable human being.
-
I have no liking for the Koch brothers but any comparison between Koch & Murdoch that finds the Kochs more 'evil' is an indication that the person making the comparison is relying on partisan political views from people such as the Democrat and warmonger Juan Cole or, holds partisan views them self in this case probably a tribal social democrat or similar ilk.
The Kochs are odious elitist assholes but at least they probably believe what they are doing. Murdoch is a mercenary; the classic example of the corporate psychopath who will do anything at all if he thinks it will make a dollar. -
oops - principle not principal
-
So "I'd rather have Murdoch than the Kochs own The Times, if it came down to that choice," he said. The Koch brothers, he charged, "use money and media to misinform, misdirect and make miserable all of us." is to be regarded as credible?
You have to be joking. Murdoch's News Ltd/plc/international/corp has committed all of those sins and more.
News Ltd just imported Murdoch confidante & former editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph and, for the past 12 years, The New York Post into Australia to oversee News Ltd's co-ordinated attacks on Bruce Rudd during the lead up to Australia's general election.
Why? Because Rudd is committed to ensuring the National Broadband Network (NBN) is sufficiently resourced to provide genuine competition to Foxtel cable TV monopoly which jointly owned by News Corp & Telstra is Newscorp's most valuable Australian asset.Jeff Bezos will not have bought the WaPo for the warm & fuzzy feelings he hopes to get when it runs another Watergate type expose.
The WaPo has long been a tool of both halves of the neo-liberal American Empire Party and that won't change under Bezos' stewardship.
What will happen is that WaPo will largely be left alone to pursue its status quo agenda except when government regulation anywhere by anyone threatens Amazon's profits.
Then WaPo will be used to nuture politicians sympathetic to Amazon's situation.
Say for example NZ pollies planned to actually pass laws which would give local retailers an edge in the market by making amazon collect gst on all goods sold off their site delivered here no matter who the actual vendor was.
A few quiet words to a couple friends on the hill who would, in return for favourable coverage in their home district/state launch tirades against NZ's food safety or tourism standards that would make today's story in Xinhua about Fonterra seem advertorial.
Yeah Bezos doesn't give a flying f**k about NZ sales but he is interested in preventing a 'thin end of the wedge' situation.
US corporations are increasingly dependant on offshore markets, Google has gotten itself into a fine pickle with englander parliamentarians over its tax dodging scheme whereby nearly all of its european bosses live & work in London despite corporate structure claims Google Euro is in fact an Irish based entity that paid less than 6 million quid tax on profits of many Billions of pounds.
Does anyone really imagine Google would have copped that grief if Larry & Sergey owned, say, The Guardian?It amazes some of us that when Clark tried to one good thing for the people of Aotearoa once she saw defeat was inevitable, by outlawing corporate funding of political campaigns, thereby ensuring that every citizen's voice carried as close as possible the same weight as everyone else's, most kiwis lapped up the media's claim to be 'protecting free speech' without asking themselves why it was that news publishers had become so altruistic.
Repealing that law was about the first thing KeyCorp did after election, because a political brand such as national's which emphasizes money ahead of citizens, couldn't survive in system where the media can't be bought.
So now rather than the Nats having to reconnect with the voters, we see the brand that the media continually sell to the mugs as 'the only alternative' brand, Labour, ditching citizens in favour of lounging about Sky City's corporate box.
Reed Hundt's job as Federal Communications Commission chair, was got courtesy of Barack Oblamblam and the democrat party machine, of course he's gonna favour Murdoch over the Kochs.
Murdoch fishwraps occasionally back the left hand half of the neo-liberal party eg The Sun's support of Tony Bliar in england's 1997 general election.
The Koch brothers only ever back the right hand half US neo-liberal political parties, the Republican Party, so Hundt's dislike of Koch owned newspapers is a given - rather like Peter Dunne picking power over principal by supporting GCSB legislation.
I do wish kiwi media commentators looked at vital issues such as why has no NZ media outlet published a complete translation of the Xinhua editorial . -
I stand corrected Mr Ng, but if you are right that there was only one large unprotected and unaudited national network, rather than hundreds of smaller localised sub-networks, the decision to eschew both auditing and security controls defies belief.
Even back in the early 90's when big departments moved from 'dumb' terminals on a mainframe to 'intelligent' nodes capable of accessing both mainframe and smaller local apps, the idea of hooking all the nodes into one big network would have been kicked outta consideration immediately. Not just from a security standpoint, which even back then would have created opposition, but because local chiefs want to be able to maintain some opacity from centralised oversight or worse, from their peers, rivals on the career ladder. Of course statistical collation and other essential forms of data mining by central authorities, was possible on these local networks, but HQ examination of nuts n bolts required co-operation from the local site.One network - that makes the call not to insulate kiosks irrational. It would have been relatively simple and inexpensive.
I guess I better read the report. -
Sorry to 'daisy chain' but all sorts of ideas are flicking up, not least of which is that we thought at first this was an Active Directory issue. An Active Directory is the method of setting tasks, access and privileges in networks that feature windows server technology, but it may be that winz offices are just conglomerations of independant free-standing PCs with no real control over who acesses what. In other words privacy breaches are the default as every worker can access every other worker's product through shared directories.