At some point, the alternative currency philosophy was going to hit the open source/p2p movement, and give us a dangerous mutant.
It has arrived in the form of bitcoin.
If you can begin to grasp the implications of an untraceable, untaxable, global, uncontrollable-by-governments currency, you ought to know about this.
Moreso if you can’t.
Filed by billy at 11:47 pm under oblivion,politics,technology,the world,utopia
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Govt confirms NZers will pay for any oil spill resulting from drilling offshore in deep water (
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1105/S00072/govt-confirms-nzers-will-pay-for-oil-spill.htm)
So, basically, what we are saying is, hi, foreign companies, come exploit our resources, and don’t worry if you fuck it up catastrophically, it’s sweet, we’ll cover your ass.
Not so much 100% pure, as 100% stupid.
Especially when you consider how unready we are to actually deal with an oil spill, as Jez shows with pictures so simple even John Key could grasp their meaning.
I guess this is what being blinded by ideology means.
Filed by billy at 1:59 pm under new zealand,no mercy for john key,politics
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The Herald has posted a list of the laws National has passed under urgency in the first two years of this term. I have ranted about these as they happened – click the No Mercy For John Key category tab for more. And it has been around the blogosphere, but it is interesting that a conservative mainstream media venue is now voicing it.
This shit is sobering reading. A government which announced no policies pushing through laws based on an extreme right wing vision, without allowing any democratic process.
(Note this list doesn’t include the most recent batch, including the Copyright File Sharing one….)
Posting here mostly to have the list easily accessible for posterity.
Laws which passed under urgency without any select committee consideration between December 2008 (when National came into Government) and December 2010:
9-Dec-08: Bail Amendment Bill provided for bail to be denied if there was any risk of a defendant absconding, interfering with witnesses, or offending while on bail.
Article continues below
Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill implemented national standards in primary schools.
Employment Relations Amendment Bill introduced 90-day trial period for small companies and allowed bosses to consider KiwiSaver contributions when negotiating pay increases.
Sentencing (Offences Against Children) Amendment Bill required courts to take into account factors such as the defencelessness of victim, abuse of trust and attempts to hide the abuse when sentencing for child abuse or ill-treatment.
Taxation (Urgent Measures and Annual Rates) Bill introduced tax cuts, cut some aspects of Kiwisaver, including holding employer contribution levels at 2 per cent rather than increasing up to 4 per cent.
16-Dec-08
Energy (Fuels, Levies, And References) Biofuel Obligation Repeal Bill removed Labour’s requirement for an increasing proportion of petrol and diesel sales to be biofuels.
Electricity (Renewable Preference) Repeal Bill removed Labour’s 10-year ban on new fossil-fuelled thermal electricity generation.
17-Feb-09
Electoral Amendment Bill repealed Labour’s Electoral Finance Act and reinstated the old Electoral Act as an interim measure.
13-May-09
Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill was the first of three bills for the new Super City in Auckland. It provided for the end-date of the previous city councils, set up the Auckland Transition Agency to manage the change, and restricted the powers of the city councils until the new Auckland Council was born.
24-Nov-09
Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill allowed court cells to be used to house prisoners as a last resort.
Policing (Constable’s Oaths Validation) Amendment Bill was a technical bill to retrospectively validate the oaths of a swathe of police officers following a change in the swearing-in procedure.
30-Mar-10
Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Bill replaced Environment Canterbury’s elected council with government appointed commissioners until 2013. Gave powers to impose a moratorium on water and discharge permits.
Immigration Act 2009 Amendment Bill brought forward the date at which implementation work could start on changes from new Immigration Act, including set up of Immigration and Protection Tribunal.
28-Apr-2010 (Extraordinary Urgency)
Excise and Excise-equivalent Duties Table (Tobacco Products) Amendment Bill increased tobacco tax in three stages.
20-May-2010
Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill increased GST to 15 per cent and cut income taxes.
22-Jun-10
Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill aligned NZ law with international Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (the Cape Town Convention).
Policing (Involvement in Local Authority Elections) Amendment Bill allowed police officers to run for local council and be councillors without having to leave the Police.
14-Sep-2010: (in extended sitting hours, rather than Urgency)
Canterbury Earthquake Response Bill gave government greater powers to deal with recovery after the September earthquake. Set up the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission.
28-Oct-2010
Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill so-called Hobbit Bill – specified workers on film productions are independent contractors unless they specifically entered into an employment agreement.
Summary Proceedings Amendment Bill (No 2) made offences such as theft purely summary offences if the property involved was less than $500.
I would really like these guys to be voted out. Because voting them back in accepts and endorses this, and will free them for worse.
Filed by billy at 12:29 am under new zealand,no mercy for john key,politics
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You all should be reading the latest series of posts on No Right Turn about what National is doing economically.
Basically, their do-nothing policy of economic mismanagement means we have a recession and no money. They are blaming the earthquake for having to cut the budget of the tiny $800 million they had allotted for government spending, mostly on health and education, which will negatively effect the worst-off kiwis. However, with the other hand, they are still managing to pass laws which will give $500 million in tax cuts to the wealthiest New Zealanders.
Instead of having the poorest New Zealanders paying the cost of the earthquake, we could split the load more fairly via an earthquake levy. Of course, John Key won’t do that.
This government is consistently acting against the majority of its people.
Stark when pointed out.
Filed by billy at 2:50 pm under new zealand,no mercy for john key,politics
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I had a post brewing about the middle east/north african revolutions. Libya kind of superseded that, though it still is there in draft. In it I note at length I have no grip on what is going on.
Anyway. Plunging on in.
Libya.
Messy.
A no fly zone to stop civilian massacre = a good thing. Governments murdering their own people is one of the major causes of preventable death worldwide.
That is where it stops being simple.
Regime change? No mandate, no plan. And at a guess no one wants to occupy Libya, unless someone (maybe France?) is really desperate for a bigger slice of the oil pie there.
Knocking off Gaddafi and installing a Western-friendly dictator-lite under the guise of democracy? Standard operating procedure for the last century, but probably not what the people have in mind. Also: see regime change.
Funding and arming the opposition and letting them figure it out themselves? Some kind of defacto splitting of the country between Gaddafi and opposition forces? Awkward. Also, the opposition is a diverse popular beast.
Continuing the suspension of slaughter and hoping that it resolves itself? aka “Wait and see.” Not exactly dynamic, or satisfying, but probably what needs to happen.
Chaos has come to town. Who the hell knows.
Filed by billy at 7:10 pm under politics
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So I have seen some bits of Glen Beck’s show a few times now. (One of the oddities of having satellite TV.) I had heard the legends but never experienced it.
He wears glasses and a sweater with a collar peaking out. He has a couple of blackboards, which he writes stuff on, in big letters with arrows. He moves around between these blackboards and other big simple displays. It is quite like a school teacher designed for multiple angles to give it dynamism on TV. He speaks earnestly and with concern about the fate of the world.
What is weirdest is that it is oddly comforting. Simplistic explanations that make no real sense as they wash over you, but delivered with passion. If you didn’t know anything about the world, it would be a convincing act.
It is pretty surreal. The content makes it more so. What is fascinating to me is that in his own way he is quite genuine and concerned with what is going on in the world. He is trying to deal with the complexity of the world, and the massive changes underway; the economic, ecologic, and energy crises underlying the decline of America’s dominance, and explain it to his people.
I hope he is genuine because if he isn’t he would have to be completely insane, rather than just … wrong.
As it is, he is simply someone who, from my perspective, has made a number of flawed fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and what is important, and then proceeds to analyse the world from that starting position. (NLP cofounder Richar d Bandler observes that crazy people have often just made one bad assumption, the proceeded logically from there, until they make a whole crazy world which confirms it. For example, if you think the CIA are watching your every move, then innocent things, the car parked over the road, take on new meanings, etc.)
The overall effect makes me wonder what it would look like if the left had some sort of equivalent. I am imagining David Icke with an hour a day in primetime to explain to people what the hell is going on. Over time he would seem a lot more reasonable.
And, more importantly, why don’t we have some sort of equivalent? (Forget Icke for the moment; that was not a serious suggestion.) The format Beck has hit upon is weirdly powerful. Where is the primetime TV preacher for a saner political view?
Filed by billy at 10:56 pm under politics
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Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.
Stiglitz continues to talk economic sense, in this case how to reduce deficits, and also explains why it will continue to be ignored…
There’s only one problem: it wouldn’t benefit those at the top, or the corporate and other special interests that have come to dominate America’s policymaking. Its compelling logic is precisely why there is little chance that such a reasonable proposal would ever be adopted.
Wifi hacking dangers: “Like it or not, we are now living in a cyberpunk novel,”
The Last Ring Bearer: apocryphal revisionist history of Lord of the Rings.
Somehow missed that they think they have found a gas giant 4 x bigger than Jupiter way out at the edge of the solar system… introducing Tyche
Psyops moving into social media
It’s recently been revealed that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people. As disturbing as this is, it’s not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors
And hey, why not some total crazy:
DNA from William Burrough’s shit to be turned into bio art
In this project, a DNA sample from William S. Burroughs will be isolated, amplified and shot into the nuclei of some cells.
What is the process? –
1: Take a glob of William S. Burroughs’ preserved shit
2: Isolate the DNA with a kit
3: Make, many, many copies of the DNA we extract
4: Soak the DNA in gold dust
5: Load the DNA dust into a genegun (a modified air pistol)
6: Fire the DNA dust into a mix of fresh sperm, blood and shit
7: Call the genetically modified mix of blood, shit, and sperm a living bioart, a new media paint, a living cut-up literary device and/or a mutant sculpture.
Maybe he would approve.
Filed by billy at 11:34 am under culture,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the moose,the world
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The earthquake has come at a convenient time for the National government, eclipsing the release of the Welfare Working Group’s report.
The proposed welfare reform is fundamentally about getting people actively looking for work. Collapsing all benefits into one “jobseekers” benefit, defined in essence by the criteria to be actively seeking work, punishing the long term unemployed, and those who have children (in quasi-eugenic policy).
This criteria, as demonstrated in In A Land of Plenty, is purely a piece of economic theory in action. An unemployed underclass actively looking for work keeps wages down, which, according to the dominant economic theory – the one that doesn’t work and has led to the ongoing global economic crisis – will keep inflation down, and if only inflation can be kept down, sunshine and bunnies will reign in the land. That is the whole of the faith.
Being forced to actively look for work, in this light, has nothing to do with actually getting a job that isn’t there. Jobseekers are the stick keeping wages down and workers willing to put up with crap conditions because at least they have a job. This is fine as a purely numeric theory if you disregard that actual humans are involved.
The proposed reform refuses to acknowledge the wider economic situation. Jobs aren’t there because the economy is broken. The government isn’t doing anything to create jobs. They have no ideas and no plan but sticking to a failed ideology that requires treating people like shit. The proposed welfare reform is like a game of musical chairs, except there are many thousands less chairs than players, and the losers get screwed.
Also, in the wake of the Christchurch disaster, there are going to be many people in our second biggest centre whose livelihoods are gone. Just in time to queue up for some dehumanisation.
Last word taken from Gordon Campbell’s summary:
In sum, welfare reform on this scale will not only punish and marginalise the poor – with all the health/law and order costs that will create in its wake. It will also present employers with a golden opportunity to permanently undercut the wages and conditions of all but the elite and skilled members of the New Zealand work force. Obviously, New Zealanders can vote for this package or reject it – but we need to very clear what sort of society we would be endorsing in November by supporting it. IMO, the welfare gulag envisaged by the WWG and (apparently) endorsed in large part by the Key government, is foreign to the country that most of us have known.
Filed by billy at 2:30 pm under new zealand,no mercy for john key,politics
3 Comments
Heh. Has been a while. Trawling the mutants list, we find:
* Josh Harris (of We Live in Public fame) makes a bid to head the MIT media lab
“If I become director of the MIT Media Lab, the institution’s primary focus will be to build a working singularities effect of the future, now, in order to understand how it all works.”
* Psychedelic sequence removed from Avatar would probably have made it more interesting.
The ritual consists of the initiate having to eat a worm as well as endure the sting of a scorpion-like creature. The worm is significant as it eats from the “sacred tree,” presumably the Tree of Souls, and contains a psychoactive alkaloid. The scorpion provides a potent neuro-toxin that brings the Na’vi close to death. When combined together, the two compounds unleash a powerful psychedelic experience that allows for the initiate to go on a “dreamhunt” and attempt to contact their “spirit animal.”
* The Big Deal. Heavy think pieces from Vinay Gupta, who is way out ahead of the curve, about what the hell is going on.
I’ve recently written four essays, The Big Deal (#thebigdeal) which combine to paint a new picture of the current state of the world and a future picture showing how grass roots political power can achieve what current models of governance, including government, cannot do alone. This work is partly a critique and expansion on the British government’s Big Society concept, but it also draws heavily on my own experience in futures, complexity science and engineering for the bottom billion. It is an attempt to model the world in a new way; a way which reveals otherwise hidden paths to achieve change.
Yet to read them but flag them necessary.
* Ten myths about welfare. Actually not via the mutants, but this is getting around. If you are in NZ you probably need to read this as we roll into election year.
* Uncontacted Amazon Indians face annihilation Kind of amazing that this sort of thing is still happening. Also amazing that it can still happen, that there is anyone left out there.
* According to this fun sliding tool, all income growth in America in the past three decades has gone to the top 10% of the population. Thus income has declined for the bottom 90% of people. (Yay for unfettered capitalism!) The same sort of trend is probably at work here, as these things go.
Filed by billy at 1:08 am under consciousness,culture,new zealand,politics,the world
2 Comments
Go, Egypt. Go, people.
Of course, now the real task begins. Setting up and maintaining the life you want to lead. Because the way things are will do all it can to propagate itself in a new guise with pretty words and a new face at the top.
And yeah, once again, it is amazing to have it reaffirmed that massive change is in fact possible, out of seemingly nowhere, peacefully, through the actions of people working together to make things better.
This is what the future looks like.
We can change. The choice is when, and to what.
Way back I quote Ventura thusly:
We are neither governed nor ruled. We are ignored. That most of usdon’t make a peep about it is perhaps an indication that we deserve to be ignored. We’ve demanded to be flattered, agreed with, and comforted; we’ve demanded almost anything but competence. Only a massive shift in public sentiment – and public action – will change things, and no one knows if that’s afoot.
[...]
The only antidote for a failure of democracy is the exercise of democracy. What every government fears most is a million citizens peaceably assembled at its front door, people who won’t go home until they get what they came for.
Wow, and just while trawling through old quotes, here is James Baldwin
But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power – or, more accurately, an energy – which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered – or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price payed by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims – the barbarians – are revolting against all established civilized values – which is both true and not true – and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.
(No Name in the Street, 1972)
And as ever, Bucky needs to be reaffirmed:
whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch and go relay race until the very end.
People do stuff, and make stuff happen. Inactivity is also doing. What is your activity, and inactivity, producing in the world? And what do you think the world needs? Because when enough people feel the same, the streets are full.
Filed by billy at 2:41 pm under consciousness,politics,the world,utopia
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