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Yesterday the NZ terror raids took another bizarre turn, with a heavy-handed police raid on a pensioner active in Green campaigns. Beloved Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons was party of the political response:

“It is hard to see how disrupting a workshop on yeast-free bread-baking and seizing the underwear of the organisers of the very popular Eco Show, under the Terrorism Suppression Act, is contributing to protecting the New Zealand public.”

What is clear is that this operation is losing its claim to the benefit of the doubt. It is increasingly hard to believe that the police have the evidence to back up this series of raids. Furthermore, I have to wonder how deep the SIS is in this – the scale of surveillance being alluded to by police is surely beyond the means of the police; the SIS must be involved in some way, at the least sharing surveillance data, and at most driving the whole operation. Probably somewhere in between.
Strange times.
Some excellent commentary at buzzandhum and spleen. If you’ve been following this, check them both out.
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And a bit of Friday linky to round things off. Just two:
The Map of Humanity. An incredibly detailed map of a fictional world where everything is named for virtues, vices, and places real and imagined. Gormenghast Castle is just north of Derry; the nation of Lust includes the cities Xanadu, Babylon and Manchester. Incredible.
And the best story the Onion’s done in years: Reaganomics finally trickles down to area man.

Debz has blogged and it is worthy.

Not long after suffering the devastating loss to the French in the World Cup quarter finals, New Zealand once again endures a mighty blow to its patriotic chest. We were beaten. By the Irish.
The media is, as expected, in a frenzy over this widely unexpected defeat. It is not certain if our nation pride will recover from such a painful loss and the ramifications could be wide spread. After all a literature-loving nation such ourselves can hardly expect that we will be able to simply chalk it up to experience when we all had our hopes on Lloyd Jones bringing home the coveted Booker prize…

Read the rest.

The oddest story in NZ this year has rolled on without much of an increase in clarity. The DomPost led with the words “Napalm Bomb” the other day, although there don’t actually seem to be any napalm bombs anywhere. Nevertheless, homegrown Maori terrorists – man, this a dream story for the NZ media and they’ll run with it as long as they can.
For my money, the best responses to the whole mad affair are at Hard News and No Right Turn. Check ’em.
I watched the Breakfast Club the other night. What a fantastic film, even though when Ally Sheedy emerged from her Molly-Ringwald-induced prettification Malc and I turned to each other and said “I preferred her when she was emo”, or words to that effect.
In other news, still marking marking.

It sounds like the excited fever dream of the rightest of right-wing bloggers: peace activists, greenies and Maori rights agitators training together in secret terrorist camps plotting to blow up and murder the innocent!
Except that was pretty much the story the police told of their unprecedented raid today.
Melanie Jones’ original article said that “peace” groups were implicated – her quote marks. This is gone from the newest version, but for most of the day this comment remained. Is there a fake peace group in New Zealand? Or a peace group that has so lost its way that it thinks armed terror is legitimate? Of everything that came out today, this bit was the most mind-boggling to me.
Judging by the number of times people found this blog by searching on their name, it seems a high-profile peace campaigner was one of the arrested parties. I’ve never met them but find it hard to believe they would be smuggling grenades into a remote camp or participating in weapons training there.
But I could be wrong. Something’s definitely up. I await more information.
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Elsewhere, Salon has an article calling for the abolition of the US electoral college. This has been a longstanding interest of mine. Electoral reform is perhaps the most important battle that progressive movements need to fight – check out the article if this stuff gets you thinking too.

So Wellington re-elected Kerry Prendergast. She is a virulently hated mayor; so much so, in fact, that I had a period where I was very worried that there was some nasty misogyny at the basis of it. After confiding these doubts to others I’ve been reconvinced that, no, it’s not that we hate women or hold them to higher standards, it really is because of what she has done.
She is also, however, a mightily well-supported mayor. In the elections just completed, she doubled her nearest rival’s vote count.
This suggests two things. First, that being so hated and so well-supported at the same time means she has been a very divisive figure in Wellington. And second, that the mayoral election suffered from the lack of a clear opposition figure around which the Kerry-haters could comfortably rally. She was head and shoulders and torso above everyone else in terms of profile, except for the disturbing spectre of wacky typo-guy John McGrath. The Single Transferable Vote system should have made it impossible for splitting the vote to be a factor, so it can only be lack of a candidate who actually appeals to the anti-Kerry crowd; either that or the anti-Kerry crowd really is massively outnumbered. I shudder at the thought of that.
I note with disapproval that Ms Prendergast wants to get rid of STV.
In any case, I blundered and didn’t end up voting. Remembering too late that my electoral roll address was still lodged as Scotland; I didn’t get that sorted out fast enough. Stink.
New Zealand’s mayors do make me shake my head. John Banks? Michael Laws? We’re doing it to ourselves.
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I am intrigued by the prospect of an England-Argentina final in the Rugby World Cup. Malc and I have been discussing with appalled fascination how the Brit red-top press will be eager to revive the spirit of the Falklands… Argentina need to make it through South Africa to get there, though, and that won’t be an easy task.
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And I am marking. I have lots and lots of marking. Don’t talk to me, I’m marking. Marking now. Marking.

[UPDATED – see the end of the entry]
As the course I’ve just finished tutoring spent some time using Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as a resource, I was interested when I was linked to this from the NZ Centre for Political Research:

“Politics in Schools on Trial: Schools around New Zealand that are using Al Gore’s controversial film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to promote the Government’s climate change agenda should be warned that a High Court ruling in Britain has just found that the film is unfit for schools.”

Well, no, actually. The “NZ Centre for Political Research” is (cod-libertarian) ACT MP Muriel Newman and her friends. (See previous post on spam-mistress Muriel.) She has close ties to the extremely dubious neoliberal policy thinktank the Maxim Institute, who are quoted in the article, and who I’d wager forwarded it on to her in the first place. The message stands apart from its bearers, of course, but the provenance of this piece is *extremely* dubious. So lets do some digging.
A quick google on the name of the protagonist here, Stewart Dimmock, shows that the first half of Muriel’s NZCPR piece on this was a straight cut-and-paste that has been circling around the right-wing blogs.
A crucial piece of spin right away: Stewart Dimmock is described as “a lorry driver and school governor from Kent”, but there is no mention that he’s also a member of UK neo-liberal political party The New Party (http://newparty.co.uk/index.html). Characterised as a man of the people standing up for common sense, he is in fact deeply partisan himself. Notice that the substance of his attack is that the film is “political spin” – typical new-Right strategy, framing a scientific argument as a political (and therefore opinion-driven) one.
The New Party’s press release is the source of Muriel’s article. I note that it turned up on the Reuters wire and ran in NZ newspapers without reflection or further investigation.
So we have a classic new-Right attack on climate change, by the same people that attack the IPCC report and think it’s all just scaremongering. (I note with bitter amusement that the New Party’s policy page on “Fair trade” is about getting rid of farmer subsidies in France so the UK could compete fairly. No kidding.)
But, of course, that’s just attacking the messenger. What about the content of the story? Well, check out the rather differently-weighted version of events on the BBC. Key section:

Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan had earlier said: “It is important to be clear that the central arguments put forward in An Inconvenient Truth, that climate change is mainly caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases and will have serious adverse consequences, are supported by the vast weight of scientific opinion. “Nothing in the judge’s comments today detract from that.”

Okay, that’s all secondary stuff – reportage and opinion. Let’s go to the source. Here’s the actual judgement.
There’s lots I could say about this. Of special note for me is how Justice Burton accepts that “partisan” can mean “having an agenda” and “political” can mean “serves as evidence that would affect public decision-making”. For whatever reason, the education dept. doesn’t challenge this, so we end up with a definition of “partisan political” that seems to me absurdly broad. The terms become nearly meaningless, and quite divorced from the usage in Muriel Newman’s article.
(Basically, Burton confounds the premise with the response. A film about the risk of an earthquake in Wellington and implying that we should take steps to prepare would be “political” and “partisan” by this measure.)
Justice Burton does better later on when he’s talking about the duty of ‘balanced presentation’, which he takes to mean “fair and dispassionate” – not as a requirement to counterpoint Gore’s flick with climate change denial films.
Note paragraph 17, in which Justice Burton, and both the claimant and defendant, accept the IPCC report as a good representation of the scientific consensus, and that the four main hypotheses of the film represent this consensus. In other words, the fundamental message of the film is explicitly supported in the judgement.
Justice Burton’s nine “errors” (he even puts the word in speech marks in his judgement) are thus not material to the core of the film – although, as they all push in Gore’s “partisan political” direction, Burton finds that they should be noted as not mainstream.
It’s worth reading the judgement for these errors, because they’ve almost all been misquoted by Muriel Newman and the right-wing bloggers. The one that threatens the validity of the film the most addresses a 650,000 year graph. Newman’s article says:

“The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.”

But when you actually look, the judgement says:

“In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.”

So Newman’s source – the New Party – outright lied about what the Court found. Justice Burton doesn’t say a word about CO2 lagging behind temperature rises. Burton said, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”, which isn’t much of a condemnation. They certainly suggest what Mr Gore asserts! In any case, this point is something to dig into in future – Gore’s stuff could be shonky here.
Overall, the Court found that Inconvenient Truth needs a bit more guidance to point out the dodgy bits that we already knew were in there; but that its role as a teaching tool is clear and not in dispute.
The Muriel Newman article was almost entirely hype and spin. Go away, Muriel. Go away, Maxim. You’ve already lost this argument. Cope.
[NOTE: actual lawyers are invited to weigh in with criticism of my reading of Burton’s judgement.]
***UPDATE*** Check out this for more on the “errors”.

One of the great things about sport is that it’s a narrative engine. You have a bunch of people striving ot achieve some physical goal, and as they do so a story emerges, complete with its highs and lows, setbacks and achievements, personal challenges, tests of character and calm, and unexpected reversals.
The Ultimate crowd I play with enthusiastically blog about their games, and I like that. They recognise the narrative going on in it. I don’t always read their game write-ups, but I always enjoy it when I do.
I have a before-breakfast theory that the cultural space previously occupied by folk tales has now been replaced by sport.
Last night I was on the sweet end of a good story – and it put a good feeling on my evening that has stretched through to today. Basketball, and after a turgid performance we were down 8 points with less than 2 minutes to go. And somehow we came out firing, Erin knocked down two three-pointers in a row and our defence held them scoreless so in the dying seconds Mike slid into the lane and found a lay-up to tie it up. It was a huge comeback that sent us to golden-goal overtime, where again our defence stood firm and again Mike found his way through to score (and get fouled on the play to boot). What a way to win!*
The story works best with the knowledge of what came before, of the character of the game and the mood of the players and even the backstory, but that final turnaround felt good because no-one expected it, especially not us.
What is most interesting to me, though, is that the story you take from something is different for everyone. Everyone ascribes importance to different elements of the narrative. Everyone sees different cause and effect links playing out. Everyone thinks different things matter. Witness the All Blacks loss to France last weekend – NZ, and the rugby world, are arguing about why it happened and what the story actually was.
I prefer to ascribe the All Black’s loss to the simple fact that this is sport, and in sport there is always uncertainty, there will always be the chance of the unexpected. The All Blacks were on the bitter end of that uncertainty this time. We have to expect it, and in fact cherish it. The uncertainty that sunk “a nation’s hopes” is necessary for us to like sport at all.
(My previous best ever comeback was as a high-schooler, where our basketball team made up a seven point deficit in two minutes. That was fun too.)

This evening turned out less stress-free than I had hoped. But still.
A few weeks ago, word spread that Stephen Fry has a blog. I was immensely pleased to note that his first post, or “blog essay”, which appeared completely unheralded and unexplained, was a 6,500 word piece on smartphones.
I haven’t read that essay yet. Nor have I read his second, and much more general-audience friendly post, on the perils of fame, this time an even healthier 9,000 words. I have been busy.
Nevertheless I recommend them to you, because it’s Stephen Fry.
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Also: Peter Sellers, Dr Strangelove-era, takes us on a 90-second tour of UK accents.
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Zzzz….

This past month has been stupid.
Today I closed off the last of my current ultra-urgent-deadlines. I have been on a treadmill for ages. Feels good. Still more to do, but nothing ultra-urgent on the horizon.
So I’m going into the sun now. It shall be glorious.
Also: Ever wonder about Canadian Women’s hockey ?

The All Blacks’ ignominious defeat by the French has plunged New Zealand into mourning because our national psyche has been wounded, mental health experts say.
Tears of a nation spill over
Don’t take it out on anybody else
So much more than just a game
‘Smell of death’ in All Blacks dressing room