- HOLY SHIT THIS NEWS IS BREAKING -
by Dominic Szekér | 2:10 am, 23/08/2010
Oceans are awesome, in both senses of the word. They are incredibly enormous. Their depths will crush you faster than Judith Collins crushes boy racer cars (but without wasting tax dollars).
by Cameron Birnie | 11:09 pm, 22/08/2010
The 90 000+ classified US military documents released by Wikileaks last week have revealed a refreshingly honest if startlingly grisly picture of the realities on the ground in the ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan. Ubiquitous cover-ups of civilian deaths, extrajudicial assassination squads, the rise and rise of the Taliban …
by J.R Holmes | 2:02 am, 09/08/2010
As you read this, look at the date. It’s approximately two weeks before 20 August, right? You have until then to get yourself enrolled, in Dunedin, on the Electoral Roll.
by Dominic Szeker | 1:13 am, 26/07/2010
For most of human history, it was likely that you would live and die a stone’s throw from the place you were born. You would kill your dearest for a mule and ladies would spread their legs quicker than Courtney Love if you had a pony.
by Dominic Szeker | 3:14 am, 20/07/2010
Gerry Brownlee recently gave the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras exploration rights to the Raukumara Basin, just off the coast of the North Island. Apparently this decision is motivated by economic growth for all New Zealanders.
by Dominic Szeker | 3:14 am 20/07/2010
Gerry Brownlee recently gave the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras exploration rights to the Raukumara Basin, just off the coast of the North Island. Apparently this decision is motivated by economic growth for all New Zealanders.
Don’t confuse this with a long-term vision of economic growth that cultivates skilled, local industry. It is rather the logical extension of policies of unsustainable economic growth in pursuit of instant capital.
A quick buck often equates to a big risk. Brownlee, however, holds the blind neo-liberal faith that massive corporations won’t shoot themselves in the foot and hurt ordinary people in the process. “I'm of the strong view that any of the oil companies who might be interested in pursuing their options will themselves, for the matter of their own liability, want to make sure that they are as safe as they possibly can be.” How reminiscent of former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who helped devastate the world’s economy by generically prescribing deregulation. After it was far too late: “I made a mistake in presuming the self interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and the equity in their firms.” Whoops.
A risk should be taken only if there is the capacity to deal with any potential fallout. But even the world superpower cannot cope with oil rupturing from the ocean floor. The US is home to MIT (which invented the internet), funds NASA (which landed a man on the freakin’ moon), has a Cold War-sized military (43 percent of the world’s military expenditure), and they still can’t clean up BP’s mess. According to the army, the oil industry is in the “best position” to deal with it. A pity, then, that said industry is, succinctly: recidivistic, useless, and shit.
In order to avoid substandard opinions from idiots, intellectual types developed quantitative methods of risk assessment. Unfortunately, Brownlee can’t utilise this hard work, as he can’t do basic arithmetic. Remember his attempt to pacify New Zealand’s anger at his abuse of protected land? The mines would be like the size of a postcard on Eden Park, he said. Well, it’s actually relative to 121 postcards on Eden Park. Two orders of magnitude out! How could anyone trust him to properly analyse the environmental, economic, and social risks involved in oil exploration? We can’t. The States had Kevin Costner to rescue them with centrifuges (seriously). Let’s hope to god Sam Neil has a gigantic sponge side project on the go.
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