NZ Basketball Shambles

Wellington’s Saints finish the National Basketball League regular season with an unbeaten record at home, sitting at the top of the table with 14 wins over 4 losses. Media coverage: small story inside back page of newspaper, no art.
Meanwhile, the Auckland Stars get kicked out of the playoffs because they didn’t pay their league fee.
Just six years ago we finished fourth in the basketball world championships, and now we’re stumbling around in the very definition of amateur league. Man.

Step Forward, Steps Back

Sometimes study is like this: you spend all day trying to get through your articles-to-read folder, and when you finish you’re glad that there’s only 10% more articles in there than when you began.
(Because the thing about reading journal articles is they reference other articles and you realise you have to read those too. And so on.)

Israel announces willingness to bomb Iran

Israel warns it will attack Iran:

“If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. “Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable.”

Me, Feb 2006:

The strategy is not to actually start another war – there is no resource to invade and conquer Iran, and Iran’s not in a position to move outside its borders – but to create a diplomatic situation that will allow Israel to conduct a bombing campaign on Iran without censure from the rest of the world.
Israel is champing at the bit to do this, and they know there’s not a thing Iran can do to stop them or retaliate against them. But the diplomatic costs would be huge, still. A bit more fearmongering around Iran is necessary before this option really becomes viable.

This Friday, We Are Linky It

Art on the street:
Little People (via GrizzlyDog):

Via the knifeman, an incredible animated wall – I watched this with my mouth hanging open:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Also:
A life in polaroids, with sad ending. (via xenogram)
And file under ‘useful’, the psychologist who turned ordinary folks into aggressive prison guards in the deeply unsettling Stanford Prison Experiment tells you how to resist all kinds of influence.

World Environment Day

Today, Wellington is hosting World Environment Day, which occasion it is marking with a public debate (yesterday), a free concert (tomorrow), a family day (day after tomorrow)… er, there isn’t really anything on today at all, is there?
The exception being the panel discussion, “How can we decarbonize the planet”, with a pretty impressive panel – climate change Minister David Parker, head of the UN Environmental Programme Achim Steiner, President of Kiribati Anote Tong and head of the IPCC Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
As a dscussion it never really got going. Each person made personal remarks, and after that and a late start there wasn’t much time for questions at the end, and the questions were all rubbish anyway (par for the course at every single public event I’ve ever been to, the questions are *always* rubbish).
The speakers made much of the value of putting price signals into the economic system to encourage responsible behaviour. Pachauri made the (to me) astonishing claim that acting to mitigate CO2 emissions might well incur a negative cost (i.e. make money! All speakers indicated that NZ was not without influence on the global stage, claiming that advancements in carbon emission reduction here would be watched very closely all around the world. Both Parker and Pachauri outright said that New Zealand could inspire other countries into action.
It was a good session, if not particularly stunning and not as enlightening as I’d hoped for. Nice to see the lecture theatre packed to the gills for it, too.

Drinking Liberally 2

The second Drinking Liberally in Wellington happened last night. Michael Cullen, Finance Minister, came to talk on the back of his electoral-fighting budget – he spoke well about his background and the principles of social democracy, then took a bunch of questions which challenged him on his claims to being a Keynesian and asked about the Treaty resolution process, among other things. Before and after Cullen was mingling, and I was pleased to see a fair few faces there who were also at the one before, even though once again I couldn’t stick around much past 7pm.
It all felt a lot more sure of itself this time, it seemed that the mingling and conversation which was so hesitant at the first one was pretty engaged this time out. All as it should be – the concept is a perfect fit for a small capital city with a strong liberal base and plenty of bars… It was promising, and I’ll be along again, hopefully to get some solid chatter time in for a change.

MND: OneTrackMind gig Saturday

So, you get told you’ve got at most five years to live. What do you do?
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Welly crew will have seen on the cover of this week’s Capital Times a dude who’s skateboarding over 200K from Taihape to here. He’s part of the Ride For MND massive, and he’s heading down for the One Track Mind fundraising gig. Ride For MND was set up by Duncan, who was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and decided he was going to do his best to raise money for MND research.
I’ve known Duncan since schooldays, and he’s really tight with my sister and her husband and with a bunch of other good friends of mine. So, Wellingtonians, this: please try and get along to the gig. It’s $10 on the door for a great night, and you are contributing to a really good cause.

Ride for MND in association with a lot of people, presents:

Barnaby Weir (Black Seeds)
Sleepy Demons
The Postures
Daniel Bohan – The Antihero
Newtown Street Justice
+ Munt FM & VBC DJs spinning the latest in aural awesomeness
$10 Doorsales only.
SATURDAY 7 JUNE 2008
BODEGA

If you can’t make it along, but want to contribute, there’s a donate page over on the Ride For MND site.
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So, then. This is what you do.

Things To Do In Dubtown

Wellingtonians! Two things of interest in ol’ Dubtown tonight:
Drinking Liberally – hang out with liberal folks and talk politics and whatever. Guest speaker tonight: Finance Minister Michael Cullen. 5.30 kickoff at Southern Cross, Cullen speaking 6.00 to 6.40.
Malty Media – this week with opening tyoons from guest DJs, DJ Scout and the Defenestrator, before Aquaboogie and Jet Jaguar resume the authoritas. 7 to 9 in the pm at Katipo.
I’m gonna get to both, I hope.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2004)

Many of the people I mentioned this to responded the same way: “that is one depressing film”. So it was.
The key image is the Russian cargo planes that land and depart from an airstrip on the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. This leads to an exploration of many problems: the voracious Nile Perch, an introduced species that completely outcompeted the native fish and proved unfishable by traditional methods, forcing industrialisation; the demand for Nile Perch overseas that means all the best parts of the fish are too expensive for the locals to eat; the lack of options for those scrabbling to make a living off the fisheries; the lack of local ownership of anything of substance (the fisheries are run by an immigrant Indian/Pakistani cohort, the planes are owned and flown by Russians, etc.); the orphan street children, manufacturing their own narcotics so they can sleep rough without fear; the unchecked spread of AIDS and HIV; the deliveries of foreign arms to sustain local wars.
The film keeps peeling back layers to reveal connections between its problems it depicts, until you are left with a picture of a system that has found temporary stability as it devours its own foundations. Because it is stable, it resists change fiercely; because it is a large and complex system, each individual actor seems powerless to move things in a different direction. And that, I suspect, is why it comes across as depressing – there doesn’t seem to be a way to unpick the terrible knot in place. And implicit in it, although never onscreen, is us – the Western consumer, with our demand for products for our markets, the effects of which set the base conditions that lets everything else unfold as it does. We are profoundly implicated although the film doesn’t come close to pointing the finger – it doesn’t need to.
Anyway. Wikipedia reveals a controversy over the film – unsurprisingly, the Tanzanian government have spoken out against the film. More curiously, a French writer has attacked the film, calling it a colonial exercise, and feuding with the producer – all the relevant links are to articles in French that are beyond my limited grasp of the language. Francophones are invited to follow the resource links at the bottom of that page and report on the substance of this controversy…