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We're in a crazy period. Home values have been rising and "flipping" is starting up again in places like Miami and Las Vegas, today the stock market is going through the roof, setting a new record. The jobs report tells us that jobs are being created at a very slow pace and that new unemployment claims are down.
At the same time, the new jobs don't pay as well as the jobs they are replacing and the income gap is wider than ever.
Is it time for a revolution?
Views: 1026
LOL I think the religious selfRIGHTeous are so used to obfuscation and misdirection that they run to that every time there is any argument, even if there are valid ones that they could bring up instead.
I agree with the pea-shooter comment, although that is why I think we should be allowed to own anything that the police are allowed to posses. That puts us on equal footing. Hell, many sheriffs across the country are on the side of an armed citizenry, understanding that the police are NOT there to protect you, but to investigate after the fact.
I guess my biggest concern is the chipping away of rights for no good reason. First it's "large capacity mags" and "assault-style weapons", then it's any semi-automatic weapon, then it's any weapon at all. That's not a huge leap. In OR and WA, they are claiming that any weapon that is capable of accepting a magazine over 7 rounds is an "assault weapon", which includes almost every handgun. The bills won't pass, but it's scary that they are even being brought up.
In my area (NY) we are still trying to get a resolution against the "SAFE ACT" and trying to get the local town supervisor to start it since the county keeps passing the buck. Pretty soon all we will be allowed to carry is pea-shooters (if we are in the right area and if we are lucky). I think matching fire power with criminals might be closer the mark but then again then it would be an arms race. In all their "fixing" (politicians) it would be better to leave it alone as far as adding more gun control and perhaps repeal crap like the "Sullivan" law.
Maybe they should have a law to force everyone to have one hand tied behind their back and then see if the criminals abide by it along with everyone else. Might be interesting.
Doesn't matter - everyone without a hand tied behind their back, gets arrested, and the streets are criminal-free. Great plan! I'm surprised you thought of it.
We do not need to match fire power with criminals. We need to match fire power with the people who would enslave us, which means LEOs. If LEOs do not intend on repressing us, then they will stand beside us. If they do, then they will stand against us.
The whole point behind the 2A is for the citizenry to maintain a militia to protect the Republic against threats foreign and domestic. It has nothing to do with protecting the government, it is specifically designed to defend against a tyrannical government.
It's funny when people argue against that statement, saying that the gvmt has bombers, tanks and nukes. These people simply don't understand the difference between suppression of civil liberties and annihilation. What would be the point of the gvmt and the rich annihilate subjects that they fleece money from and destroy national resources? Assuming that is what we are talking about shows how closed minded and irrational pro-gun control advocates can be.
The govt might try a fierce suppression of the earliest protests in order to terrorize the majority into becoming sheep. It might work; it might not.
Ya know, it's a sad state of affairs when someone can say that and be right. Even sadder is that I don't think it's overt terrorism by the government that gets the majority to support government oppression.
Not to sound like a crazy conspiratorist, but I certainly wouldn't put it past our government to create terrorism in order to get people to allow them to over reach without resistance. Not that I'm saying that it is, in fact happening, but I certainly couldn't put it past many of them. Just sayin'.
How about the "Operation Northwoods" which President Kennedy put his foot down on. According to this, it really happened plus other nefarious deeds that would qualify some of the top people in government as terrorists.
China did that in the Tiananmen Square protests. It worked.


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Browse by Artist
|Artist: Juncker, Justus 1 of 1
|Sportsmen in a Tavern, 1775-1800
Justus Juncker
German, 1703-1767
Oil on canvas
9 x 14-1/2 in. (22.9 x 36.8 cm)
Norton Simon Art Foundation
© Norton Simon Art Foundation
Not on view
Juncker was a German by birth, but studied under several Dutch masters. He copied the works of de Wyck, de Heem and van Huysum, among others, and his style reflects the detailed realism of these artists.
This painting provides unique insight into the common social character of the period. The unsettling perspective is balanced by the inherent stability of the low-ceilinged room and the triangular positioning of the figures. Juncker was particularly renowned for his portrait studies. The men, in their smoking and drinking, have been faithfully recorded as individual characters in the scene.
View Provenance
|Artist: Juncker, Justus 1 of 1

subset: commoncrawl


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Waving Girl - rough
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Moderator: Brett
Coach wrote:We all know the story of MJ getting cut at Laney. But who are some others who got cut, persevered and kept on playing. Only to make it to the NBA!
Coach wrote:John Scott, what are you talking about? How does your comment have anything to do with my topic? You sound very negative. Lighten up Francis. By the way, Jordan played JV, not freshman and yes sir, he was cut by the varsity team and played JV.
You need to get your facts straight.
rlee wrote:Whatever one's perspective on what the "truth" of the story is, it still seems like a good object lesson for Coach's purpose. If a player who is unable to make the varsity as h.s. sophomore turns out to be MJ, this is a pretty good demonstration of how hard work, drive, discipline, and committment can transcend "failure".
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In their heyday, Long John Silver, Blackbeard and Jesse James stole plenty of money and jewels.
Bless Pete, somewhere out there are hundreds of old treasure maps with bloody directions scrawled on 'em as to where all those strong boxes are buried.
That's how you keep secrets from prying, greedy eyes.
It seems foolish to bury good stuff, though, seeing how something always happens to prevent us from digging it up later.
Sometimes, well-meaning folks will fill boxes with current information and plant it in places they call cornerstones.
I've always heard that our last thoughts or conversations before bedtime may come back to us in our dreams.
There's a good bit of truth to that.
While visiting with family in Maryland on Jan. 17, I noticed the television newscasts were filled with film clips of the late Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the impact his life made.
There were a lot of announcements of the many downtown activities going on in and around Washington, D.C., on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Make-believe gives a growing boy the chance to take a magical trip where his imagination rules the roost.
There are no illegal substances involved, and even better, there are no folks judging or finding fault with your choices.
That's the beauty of being a youngster.
But no matter how hard we try, reality eventually sets in and we have to face the task of returning to the present.
Try as we might, we just can't click our heels together and wish change into being. It takes hard work and willpower to get things done.
Somehow during middle of the night, that blanket at the foot of the bed got pulled up snug around my shoulders.
I felt all comfy and cozy until my feet touched the bare oak floor.
Bless Pete, it's cold.
As I navigated toward the kitchen to flip on the coffee pot, my better half stirred.
"Turn the heat up," she said. "We have a baby in the house."
You know, I seriously doubt if that child was as frosty as great-grandmama.
It's hard to admit the truth about yourself, but once you do, it's as refreshing as a cool, crisp morning.
I don't drink or smoke and try hard not to fuss (unless I'm in a long line at Walmart).
For me, worrying is the downfall.
I guess I'm a natural worrier and fret about all kinds of stuff.
When I was little, I worried about learning those poems we had to recite while standing in front of the classroom.
Then, I worried about those fifth grade spelling bees that Mr. Joe Connors held weekly.
The first day of a new year is coming up fast.
Frankly, I have no idea what 2010 has for any of us.
Hopefully – if things go my way – I will be 77 years young in February. My family members will also add another candle to their birthday cakes, too. Maybe the extra candlelight will make all of us wiser and healthier. For most of us, the wealthier part is out of the picture.
During the last few years, I've shared many of my memories of growing up on Chesterfield Avenue right here in Lancaster.
I guess I was just too young to understand or didn't know better.
Having a manger scene in front of the courthouse or in your front yard was an accepted norm.
Now, as one of the brightest (and best, I dare say) young men on the rolls at First Baptist Church, I didn't bat an eye when Mama started getting her "boys" ready for the annual telling of the Christmas story out in the church sanctuary.
She was more than my mom; she taught my Sunday school class, too.
After making a quick dash to the grocery store last week, I found myself pinned against the ice cream case by a faithful reader.
"You do write a whole lot about times long ago," she said.
Well, yeah, I thought to myself. That's what "Remember When" is all about.
I share some stuff from long ago, hoping that folks can recall similar events from their younger days, too.
But that did put me in a thinking mood.
Up here in Maryland, the cold winds are scattering the remaining oak and maple leaves across the back of the house.
And wouldn't you know it, we're fresh out of hamburger buns, colas and frozen French fries.
But we were at a point of no return, having thawed out hamburger patties.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Christmas. But I liked it a little better a long time ago when we took it a bit slower.
Whatever happened to really enjoying Thanksgiving?
At the rate things are moving, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see Cupid hovering above store shelves in the next two weeks.
Bless Pete, let's slow down a bit.
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The Lancaster News is your source for local news, sports, events, and information in Lancaster County and Lancaster, South Carolina, and the surrounding area..


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These are my thoughts on yaoi, and a few other things.
Clear divides mess things up, so I'm trying to write this down without them, and leave it as the big tangle of story, sex and society which it is. See, I read comments like this from Henry Jenkins, about why he thinks fandom is the wonderful thing it is:
I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.)
...I don't think he's in the right territory at all. None of his theories chime with my feelings about participating in fandom - hell, I still consider myself to be fen even though it's years since I last read and wrote fan culture in serious volume. My mental and creative faculties are elsewhere, but I am fen, and can step back inside at any moment. Not all stifled people are fen; many fen are not in the least frustrated or unchallenged by life, but are still fen.
He's asking the right questions - why is fandom happening, why is it so huge, why is it pathologised and made legally suspect by the mainstream, and why is it women? But his answers are sat firmly within the lines; fandom, to him, is about creating and about intelligence. Maybe he's dealt with the rest of fandom elsewhere, and I've just not read it, but I don't see how you can answer these questions without saying that fandom is about sex and fandom is about being part of a society where sex is explored in ways that are wildly un-mainstream.
Look, how can you even start to talk about why women have made fandom if you're not talking about sex?
Step back from fandom and look here, where Bitchy Jones has delivered again:
The vagina accommodates what's offered
The reason this makes me froth isn't because of the whole thing where of course size matters. Different cocks feel different. Different shapes and sizes work better than others. But it's way more complicated than what your ruler tells you.
I'm crosser even than usual, because this statement - viewed as a kind of meta - just it feels like such a perfect encapsulation of the way female sexuality is viewed by everyone from Freud up. The vagina accommodates what's offered! Yeah, right. Female sexuality will basically adjust itself to meet the needs of whatever is being asked of it.
'Cause as we all know female sexuality is all fluid and undefined.
Thus a sexually liberated woman will simply be open to anything. Any sexual experience at all. Being whatever is convenient. In a way that men are simply not expected to be.
In fandom the opposite is true. Endless wanks about OOC aside, it is not only cool but celebrated for women who make fandom to assume men are open to any sexual experience that piques the author's interest. This is way more important than the original canon story - I've even been part of two different anime fandoms (Weiß Kreuz and Digimon) where many active readers and writers (me included) had not seen the canon, and were just in it for the porn and because the characters are fun to play in your head with.
And fandom porn isn't just sexual. Fandom is full of emotional pornography. A male character is open to any emotional experience that is convenient (and pleasurable) to the writer. When people talk about fandom aesthetics, or slash aesthetics, it's emotional porn rather than sexual porn that's the litmus test. Fandom takes the idea of arousal and pulls it past the line marked sex, and drags sex along with it. I'm mad about Alis Dee's current Batman/Superman thing which she totally needs to write more of; it hasn't sprouted a name yet, last I heard, so she calls it 'untitled identity porn'. Identity porn! Superhero fandoms are made of it.
Then there's fanthings which are so huge and absorbing, but rarely if ever stray into explicit sexuality. What would either Jenkins or Freud make of Bridlewood Manor? [If you're a fen of any stripe and have nothing to do this weekend, I strongly advise you to lose your mind to those 650,000 words of pure win. I did so myself on Easter weekend five years ago. The first chapter has some awkward dialogue but the other 93 are perfect.] How do you want to frame Mitsugi's diligence, endurance and talent, and the fact that she's channelled it into fanfic? I am happy to call it epic porn.
Livejournal has helpfully exploded again, which has a way of prodding these things along. The thing about all new accounts being either paid for or smothered in advertising doesn't concern me directly. What was more interesting was the filtering of the Popular Interests list (now thankfully reversed).
There, sexually explicit terms - 'bondage', 'porn', 'hardcore' - were edited out; so were queer terms - 'bisexuality' and 'faeries'; and so were references to fandom - 'fanfiction' and 'yaoi'. That's a pretty clear line between content that is welcomed and content that is not. Look at how it winds.
Every time fandom falls out with particular websites, it's about sex. And the people on the other side of the argument - many staff, seemingly all the site owners - are almost all men. Six years ago it was Xing Li over at ff.n, wanting all explicit fandom off his site because it was that which generated the lion's share of work for the complaints team. Fandom didn't want to draw a hard line between sex and not sex, so migrated - sure, people still use it, but I for one haven't met anyone on ff.n since the sex went, haven't felt like there's anything happening there. And so, Livejournal. (The Fanlib debacle punctuates here - it's the only row I can think of that was about ownership and revenues, not sex. Here the female writers vs male site-owner thing was brought to the limelight). Livejournal has no intention of eliminating sex entirely - they're not that stupid - but the succession of site owners that have antagonised fandom - first Six Apart, now SUP - have picked sex as their sticking point with fen society. Write about sex, sure, but not in public - we can't let sex and fandom show up on the Popular Interests page. Write about sex, but not any sex - only sex that won't make us uncomfortable, only sex that would be okay if it was more than just a fantasy. (I still don't get how writing or drawing an imaginary sex act is ever going to harm anyone, ever, no matter how suspect or harmful said sex act would be IRL. One thing the women in fandom seem to know, and their detractors do not, is that there's a difference between fantasy and reality).
You know, I keep talking about the women of fandom, but I think it's time to talk about the men. They're certainly around; the first fandom group I was ever part of, on a videogames site, was about half male (doubtless due to the gamer demographic), and while it was often about sex (more so when women wrote than when men wrote, too), the community didn't enourage explicit sex. Even then, this half-female group soon came to blows with the male admin and an all-male group of trolls who happened to be his friends, not about sex but about the way we communicated, the way we gave each other verbal rewards and criticisms. So men are there, especially in gaming fandoms. But I'd like to point out two differences:
a) I've seen fanporn written by men, but I've never seen straight men joining the gleeful subculture fandom has made on the far side of what's culturally normal wrt sex. I've also never seen them hold their writing about sex as being an important part of their survival in this world the way, say, Ponderosa and Chalcedony Cross do. Female homosociality is a crucial part of the porny environment.
b) Many popular parodists and humourists in fandom are men. There's Neil Cicierega, Brian Clevinger, Chris at Gigaville, Jack Bullions (whose site is no longer online, gah). Note that none of these four use prose or illustration, which are the most common mediums for fanworks, especially fanworks about sex (though vidding has gained a lot of ground in the last five years). Instead they're doing animation, webcomics or script-form humour.
Note that parody is, I think it's safe to say, the only socially mainstream - and legally clean - form of fanworking. Clevinger even sells t-shirts which feature his canon characters spouting his words, and that's more or less okay.
Do men do parody because it is acceptable, or is parody acceptable because it's consistently men who make the social rules, and who decide what goes on the largest fen-infested websites? (In both the internets and in wider society men get to decide what fictions are acceptable and who they are acceptable for). Here I have to link to How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, one socialist feminist's view of the whole situation.
And at Bitchy's place, people are discussing whether women are a feasible market for porn.
Women - not all women, but this large and dedicated group of women - went off and made their own porn with their own rules, porn where women colonise finely defined niches while men - maleness, imaginary men, abstract object men - are used in any way that brings arousal to women, and sites like Livejournal have been quite happy to generate a shittonne of money from this freely provided content.
Did I say imaginary men? Not always. There's RPS - real person slash, where the male 'characters' used are real people; actors, sportsmen, rockstars. Real person fiction is past my emotional squick line - I couldn't even explain why, I just can't read it. Some people want to cross that line, suspend their disbelief regarding the real lives of these men, and make fiction about them because they're beautiful and it's hot, emotionally and sexually and all other kinds of hot.
I'm in three RPS comms because I love the pictures of men, especially the ones where they really should've known about the slashgirls if they were planning on posing with each other like that. And you know what? There are no lines, no conventions to follow about what sort of sexiness is allowed - anything goes. There's no age limit. People write Jose Mourinho / Roman Abramovich fic, and other people call it damn hot. People perve over photos of seventeen-year-old cricket players, sexualising their physical features and wondering who they're going to pair them with in a couple of years' time.
In fandom as a whole, it's pretty much a given that it's okay to write explicit material about 15-year-old characters. Hence the entire Gundam Wing fandom, and the mid-series Potterverse. Iirc these stories are actually illegal in Australia; illustrations featuring underage people having sex may soon be illegal in the UK - though that's about men who view lolicon hentai, not about the women of fandom. There's barely more debate over the teenagers who read and write porn - sometimes about imaginary people close to their own age, sometimes not. Back on ff.n, a porn reader-writer's seventeenth birthday was always heralded with glee that they were finally allowed to read the stuff they'd been reading and writing for the last x years. Many of the best fanworks I've ever read were written by girls aged between 13 and 15 (though now I think about it, that's more often in the realm of emotional fantasies than sexual ones). Livejournal's new age-based content filtering has the outcome that these girls can still write about explicit sex if they want to, but their porn can only be read by members who are over the age of 18. Teenagers can no longer communicate about sex to other teenagers on LJ, because talking about sex is reserved for legal adults, whoever's producing the content. I'm sure they lie about their age, as we all used to back on ff.n, because the truth is not acceptable.
...And in a total other corner of internetland are these poor, sad people who are all put out because they want lesbianism to be something that doesn't involve women doing things to turn on other women. I hope they grow up and climb out of the f/f dating pool, seeing as it's clearly too hot for them. But look, I have to ask, have they met these fandom women at all? Do they have any radical theories to offer about why so many women are putting their time and energy into making and sharing porn - porn that features people and situations that are way off from mainstream pornography? (Oh, look, some of them blame demons for why lesbians find other lesbians stonking hot. You couldn't make this stuff up.).
I owe fandom. I was as messed-up about sex as every other teenager - I knew I wanted it, and my body wanted it, but everything that was supposedly to do with sex was misogynistic, repellent and deathly dull. Until fandom showed me how to go my own way, to not be convenient or accommodating to sexuality as laid down by straight men, but to enjoy and create and dream about male and female bodies, my way. It's sad, but it's true. Ta, fandom.
I've just gone and edited the top of this post because it originally said something that I've not wound up writing about. I'm going to put that something down anyway, in the hope that I'll figure it out later - it's just a model that occurred to me years ago that I can't easily justify but which makes way more sense to me than what Jenkins said.
It is that the nature of fandom is akin to that of religion, and I think it entirely possible that many religions - so often tied to myths, to storytelling - originated as the same sort of social exchange that you find in fandom. Take a story, make a community around it, rebuild the story to bring out what's meaningful - and pleasurable - to you, make your own new rules about what goes wrt sex, and wrt community, identify with the story and communify around the story and the storytelling.
I'm stopping here, but tomorrow I'm going to post about fandom cults!, because they're all kinds of fun and freaky.


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Fast Data: A Brief Analysis of Trends
Data is one of your most important assets. Fast Data implies real-time analytics – the ability to analyze your business and marketplace in real-time. Fast Data can give you significant competitive advantage by helping you to predict and respond to situations instantaneously. Today we announced [1] that the combination of Cisco UCS and Actian Vectorwise Analytical Database can provide such capability at much lower cost of ownership than traditional solutions. Demonstrated by industry standard TPC-H publications, the extreme performance is coming from the ability of Vectorwise to scale extremely well in multi-core environments and effective caching of large data sets enabled by Cisco UCS extended memory technology eliminating IO bottlenecks.
These two benchmark results achieved the best performance and price-performance for 2-socket servers in 100GB [2] and 300GB [3] scale factors, new additions to our 60+ world record performance records on Cisco UCS since its introduction just three years ago.
Let us look at some historical trends in application performance. In a paper titled Transaction Performance vs. Moore's Law: A Trend Analysis [4] my colleague and I demonstrated that transaction performance trend over the past 20 years has amazingly been in line with Moore's law (See Chart 1). Here the composite Query-per-Hour of 332,481 at 100GB scale factor for example shows greater than 200 times improvement in performance in 10 years for 2-socket servers, far better than Moore's law as shown in chart 2. Will these trends continue unabated ? Likely for the foreseeable future with all the enhancements in hardware and software architectures …
Chart 1: Average transactions-per-minute per processor vs. Moore's Law
Chart 2: Average TPCH queries-per-hour @100GB for 2-socket servers vs. Moore's Law
[1] Actian Delivers Record-Breaking Performance on Cisco Unified Computing System: http://www.actian.com/press/cisco
[2] Cisco UCS C250 M2 Extended-Memory Server, 332,481 QphH, $0.15 USD/QphH@100GB, Available on 2/12/2012. http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_result_detail.asp?id=112021
[3] Cisco UCS C250 M2 Extended-Memory Server, 331,658 QphH, $0.34 USD/QphH@300GB. Available on 2/12/2012. http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_result_detail.asp?id=112021301
For most recent information please visit www.tpc.org
[4] R. Nambiar, M. Poess, Transaction Performance vs. Moore's Law: A Trend Analysis: http://www.springer.com/book/978-3-642-18205-1
In an effort to keep conversations fresh, Cisco Blogs closes comments after 60 days. Please visit the Cisco Blogs hub page for the latest content.


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Toshiba reveals Cell TV specs
'Future of TV', apparently
Toshiba has whet the appetites of couch potatoes everywhere by releasing the final specifications of its most advanced HD TV yet.
Toshiba's Cell Regxa 55X1: advanced
The 55in Cell Regza 55X1 – which essentially incorporates the same CPU found inside Sony's PlayStation 3 – provides "state-of-the-art picture quality", Toshiba claimed, and is supposedly a statement on the future of TV.
That's a very bold claim, but will Toshiba's latest flagship set live up to expectations? Yes, if the specifications are anything to go by.
Headline-grabbing specs include a 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a 1250cd/m² luminance, a 512-zone LED array backlight, a 240Hz refresh rate for super-smooth images, and a whopping 3TB of of integrated hard drive storage.
Two of those terabytes are dedicated to the set's built-in "time-shift" DVR, which will simultaneously record up to eight digital TV channels.
Users can retrieve content using a keyword search facility, Toshiba said, while each of the eight channels can be displayed at the same time using a multi-image picture-in-picture feature.
Regza 55X1's image quality is also unsurpassed, Toshiba implied, when watching web content accessed through the TV's broadband connection. "Super resolution" tech, for example, corrects noise compression on low-resolution internet content to produce sharper and clearer images, the firm said.
The set – which measures 1333 x 966 x 400mm, including the stand – also supports DLNA connectivity and will display JPEG images. Toshiba didn't say how many HDMI ports the 55X1 has.
Toshiba hasn't forgotten the all-important styling, though, because the TV has smoked aluminium finish and "alumite deposition process" that supposedly adds to the set's luxury feeling.
If there's anything to dislike about the Cell Regza 55X1, then it's the launch date: this December, and only in Japan. ®


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The House of Representatives' Privileges Committee is considering whether or not public servants should be given free reign to defame completely innocent individuals to their Ministers. Well, that's an exaggeration ... but read on anyway.
Upon my return to New Zealand (did I tell you I've been away? To America!?), I found a very nice letter waiting for me from the Hon Chris Finlayson. He was writing to me in his capacity as chair of the House of Representative's Privileges Committee, wondering if I would care to make a submission to its upcoming inquiry into a "Question of privilege concerning the defamation action Attorney-General and Gow v Leigh."
I would have liked to have done so. Unfortunately, by the time I opened and read this letter (did I tell you I've been away? To America!?), the submission date was a good two weeks past. So I shrugged, laid it aside and thought no more of the matter. Until, that is, I read Vernon Small's account of the Privileges Committee hearings into the matter.
This column got me thinking again about what I might have said to the Committee. And seeing as I've started using Pundit posts as a forum to say things I really ought to have said earlier, I'll do so again.
The central issue that the Privileges Committee is considering is relatively straightforward to understand, but tricky to resolve. It arose out of the Supreme Court's decision in Gow v Leigh - a case I discussed in a previous post here, so won't cover in detail again. In the course of that judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that the absolute privilege against any legal consequence that attaches to those who speak during a proceeding in Parliament does not extend to public servants who are advising Ministers of what to say to Parliament. Consequently, if a civil servant gives a Minister information about an individual or organisation that is false and defamatory, and the Minister subsequently repeats it in Parliament, then the civil servant potentially can be sued for defamation (even though the Minister cannot be, because the Minister enjoys absolute privilege with respect to her or his remarks).
It would appear from Vernon Small's account of the hearings on this matter that at least some members of the Privileges Committee are somewhat unhappy with this outcome and think that Parliament ought to legislate to override it. That conclusion is one that is open to it. The scope of parliamentary privilege is, after all, a question of law and Parliament is the highest lawmaking institution in the land. If it wants to change the law as decided by the Supreme Court to instead say that civil servants do enjoy absolute privilege, then of course it can do so.
However, before Parliament decides that the Supreme Court's decision on where the boundary of privilege should lie is so wrong as to merit legislative override, there are a few points to consider.
First, and most obviously, there is an unavoidable element of self-interest involved when Parliament legislates in regards its own privileges. That doesn't mean that Parliament shouldn't ever visit this topic - after all, someone has to decide the matter, and Parliament is (as I say) our highest lawmaker - but it does warrant taking an extra-hard look at the reasons why it wants to make changes in order to correct for any bias that may have crept in to MPs' thinking on the issue.
Second, any decision to reverse the Court's decision on the law ought to reflect an assessment of the merits and/or consequences of the actual judgment and not be a convenient occasion to make a statement about the respective roles of the judicial and legislative branches. It would be wrong, for instance, to change the law simply to "send a message" to the Court about Parliament's status at the apex of our constitutional whare.
I hasten to note that I'm not alleging this is what the Committee is thinking of doing here. Rather, I'm just reflecting on the fact that there is an occasional tendency for New Zealand politicians to react to perceived judicial slights or challenges to their activities with grumblings that the judiciary really needs to be put back in its proper place. While there always will be a tension around the boundaries of each branch's role in our constitutional set up, responding to that tension with muscle-flexing demands to "respect my authoritah!" is not conducive to the sort of mutual respect and consideration that we want to see between the judiciary and Parliament.
Finally, there is the substantive question as to whether or not the Supreme Court did get it wrong in its Gow v Leigh decision, thus necessitating some parliamentary action to change the law. To decide that, we need to actually look at what the Court said. As I've noted, the Court concluded that civil servants generally (and Mr Gow in particular) do not enjoy absolute privilege with respect to their communications with Ministers - even where those communications are for the purpose of providing the Minister with information to convey to the House of Representatives. However, as I also noted in my previous post on the topic;
Even if Mr Gow's briefings to Trevor Mallard contained some inaccuracies ... [the Supreme Court found] he enjoys the protection of "qualified privilege". This permits a person who is communicating to another who has a right or a need to know the relevant information to pass on an untruth about another, provided the speaker is not motivated by ill-will or takes improper advantage [of the occasion].
Obviously a public servant briefing a Minister on a question the Minister must answer in the House is communicating information that the Minister has a right or need to know. Which means that if Erin Leigh is to be successful in showing that the briefing defamed her, she will have to do more than show the briefing contained falsehoods. She also will have to prove (on the balance of probabilities) that Mr Gow was motivated by "ill will" towards her, or that he "otherwise took improper advantage" of the opportunity to brief the Minister.
So the real question for the Privileges Committee is whether the Supreme Court was correct to afford Mr Gow (and other civil servants in his position) a merely qualified privilege, or ought he (and other civil servants) enjoy the same absolute privilege that MPs and others enjoy when speaking during a "proceeding of Parliament".
Well, let's consider this issue from first principles. Why does absolute privilege attach to speech during a proceeding of Parliament? The law recognises it for two interconnected reasons.
One is to do with "comity", or the respect that Parliament and the courts ought to show to one-another's respective constitutional roles. So, Parliament's status as the highest lawmaker in the land means it ought to have full and exclusive control over its own internal proceedings (including deciding whether or not someone has told untruths during its proceedings, as well as what ought to happen as a consequence). The courts ought not to try and exert any form of control over those proceedings, as this would be to in effect subject Parliament to an external institutional authority. Furthermore, members of the judiciary ought not to get involved in assessing the rights and wrongs of what it said in Parliament (much less the motivations of those speaking), least doing so exacerbate the ever-present tension that exists between these two institutions. Basically, the courts should stay off Parliament's turf (just as Parliament should stay off the courts' turf when it comes to deciding individual cases according to law).
The other is a consequentialist-based claim that in order for Parliament to function properly as an institution - in terms of making law, holding the Government to account and representing the people - those who are involved in its proceedings need to be able to operate free from concerns about how their words may be viewed by the courts. Note that this isn't the same as saying those involved in parliamentary proceedings ought to be free from concern about how their words will be viewed outside of Parliament, full stop. Of course MPs (and perhaps others) will be (and should be) very worried about how the ordinary punters view what they say while engaged in parliamentary proceedings. Instead, they should not have to be thinking about any particular legal consequences that may follow from their words, because otherwise they may hedge and trim their views to avoid the risk of subsequent court cases. And we don't want those speaking in Parliament to be hedging and trimming their views to avoid legal trouble - we want them to be forthright and bold in saying what they believe to be true for the benefit of us all.
Put together, these two reasons then are considered weighty enough to trump any individual's right to gain a legal remedy if their reputation is unfairly and falsely maligned during a parliamentary proceeding. In other words, we are prepared to impose an individual loss (in the sense of preventing a person from gaining a remedy for harm caused to them) for the sake of some greater collective benefit (in the sense of a smoothly functioning, sovereign legislative body). But the fact that we are balancing potential harm to the individual against assumed societal good is then critical to the issue - the absolute privilege that Parliament enjoys is not costless, and the wider that privilege is drawn, the greater the potential cost to some individual or set of individuals may be.
So how then do these twin reasons for granting and absolute privilege play out when we consider the position of public servants (and perhaps others?) who are called on to brief Ministers (and perhaps MPs?) for the purpose of enabling those Ministers (and perhaps MPs?) to answer questions in the House (and perhaps ask questions or contribute to general parliamentary debates)?
Well, it is hard to see how the "keep off Parliament's turf" rationale really applies here. After all, the House exercises no control over the relationship between Ministers and their officials, much less MPs and other possible sources of information. Sure, it could try to do so as a matter of theory, by deeming those who provide a Minister with false information that then gets passed on to the House to be in contempt. But I think a degree of realism is called for here - there simply is no chance that this theoretical power would ever be exercised in practice. Rather, the House would leave the issue to be dealt with by the State Services Commission, as a matter of employment law.
Consequently, if a court were to entertain a defamation action against a public servant on the basis of what that public servant told a Minister, it would not be intruding into territory that ought to be the sole preserve of Parliament to monitor. This fact then means that the sole justification for extending absolute privilege to the public servant when providing information to the Minister lies in the consequentialist-based harm that may be done to that institution if public servant's do not have the benefit of that privilege. In other words, if public servants don't feel able to speak fully and freely with Ministers without fear of attracting subsequent legal liability, then they may hedge and trim their communications in a way that denies Ministers the information they need to fully answer questions posed to them by the House.
Obviously, this would be a bad outcome for the House as an institution. But how likely is it to occur? Remember first of all that under the Supreme Court's reading of the law, public servants still enjoy qualified privilege to protect them when speaking with Ministers (as, indeed, does anyone who is speaking to an MP in the course of their duties). This fact means that unless a plaintiff can prove that a public servant abused that privilege by acting out of ill will or otherwise taking advantage of the opportunity, the public servant enjoys the same degree of legal protection as if the privilege was absolute. Therefore, the only speech that will attract actual liability is where a public servant sees a chance to settle some score with an individual or group that the public servant doesn't like and gives a Minister false and defamatory information, which the Minister then passes on to the House .
Deterring public servants from that sort of behaviour (or, providing a legal remedy where they still do so) does not seem problematic. In fact, stopping it would actually improve the functioning of the House - there is no benefit in the House receiving false and defamatory information. However, the fear is that public servants won't just stop maliciously passing on false and defamatory information to Ministers. Rather, any fear of potential legal liability may lead them to be overly cautious in repeating controversial or unproven allegations, least they later be found to be false and a court decides that the public servant acted outside the bounds of their qualified privilege. So, the desire to avoid any possible liability may lead public servants to not pass on true as well as false information to Ministers. Which in turn may lead to Ministers misleading the House by not having the true information needed to respond to its questions.
I suppose it could be the case that individual public servants become so risk-averse that they deliberately run the risk of sending their Minister into the House with less information than they themselves hold. But I wonder if this fear does not misread public service culture - my observation of "inside the beltway" practice is that public servants are more terrified of being the cause of a Minister's embarrassment and wrath than anything else in this world. Furthermore, we need to remember what a public servant becoming liable for a defamatory statement to a Minister actually means in practice. The public servant won't have to hire lawyers and worry about damages. Those will be covered by the public servant's department. So at most the public servant will be somewhat inconvenienced by having to provide affidavits in defence of the action. And that would seem to be a risk that public servants face on a daily basis, insofar as their advice may result in Ministerial actions that are subject to judicial review and the like.
Finally, the question ultimately is an empirical one: does giving public servants a qualified as opposed to an absolute privilege when advising Ministers on how to answer questions in the House lead to those public servants to be less forthcoming with information? And because it is an empirical one, it should be answerable by observation. The Supreme Court's ruling in Gow v Leigh is now over a year old. So, has there been an appreciable change in public service behaviour when supplying Ministers with information to answer questions in the House? Have Ministers had to return to the House to correct their answers more often than in the past, due to receiving less true information from their advisors and thus providing misleading original answers? Is there survey evidence of public servants to support a claim that, since this ruling, they have become less prepared to pass on controversial or unproven allegations to their Ministers?
Because in the absence of such evidence, we simply are left with a claim about the result of the Supreme Court's decision ("Ministers won't get as truthful advice, which means the House will not get the information it needs") that may or may not be true. And it seems to me there is more reason to doubt that it will be true than there is to believe it. And so if there is no appreciable net benefit to the House in giving public servants an absolute privilege, then there is no reason to deny the rare individual who is maliciously defamed by a public servant to her or his Minister the right to gain a remedy from the courts.
One last point. Granting public servants an absolute privilege in respect of their advice to Ministers on how to answer questions in the House means just that - they will face no legal consequences for their speech. I've been talking about this issue in the context of liability for defamation. But let's imagine a situation where a public servant actually does maliciously pass on false information to a Minister while advising her or him on how to answer a parliamentary question, causing that Minister to defame some individual in the House. If that public servant does enjoy absolute privilege, can the State Services Commission impose employment consequences on that public servant for that action? And would doing so be a potential contempt of the House, in the same way as TVNZ's actions towards Mr Fraser were?


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From the wild zone
TWO weeks ago filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson found himself marooned on the East Timorese island of Atauro, staying in an abandoned colonial hotel and watching a group of theatremakers wrestle their way through the development of a project called Doku Rai. If Courtin-Wilson first felt like an interloper, walking in to ''this anarchic artist colony in hyperdrive in some kind of wild Shangri-La'', he soon found his feet.
By day two he was commandeering fishing boats and sailing them to the furthest corners of the island's reef, devising how best to simulate a levitation scene in a nearby forest and chasing sunsets with a motley array of cameras. There were 12-hour brainstorming sessions, visits from a local choir and moonshine-laced jams with villagers that exhausted even the hotel's trusty electricity generator.
The making of Doku Rai dates back to the filming of Robert Connolly's Balibo in 2008 - it was in Dili that Thomas Wright, who played Balibo Five journalist Brian Peters, met Timorese artists Osme Goncalves, Melchior Fernandes and Etson da Costa Caminha. Wright, who co-directs the Black Lung Theatre, found an easy rapport with the Timorese men. He was taken by their charisma and gravitas; the way they'd chosen art as a way of responding to the violence that had decimated their homeland.
Wright formed an alliance with Major Michael Stone, the president's chief military adviser, who facilitated numerous trips to Dili for Wright to develop his understanding of Timorese culture and history. His plan was to return to the island to devise a collaborative work that pooled his skills with those of his new-found friends.
Four years later - two months ago - Wright returned to Timor-Leste with an Australian crew of 12 artists, creatives and production people and the funding to keep them, and a Timorese contingent of four, busy on script development and rehearsals for nine weeks.
Courtin-Wilson arrived the day of the first run-through and was struck by the ''particular kind of brotherhood, respect and support'' the group had forged. His job was ''two-pronged: to create a short, experimental video piece to appear within the context of the show'', while also recording a film that can travel overseas and lure international arts bodies into touring the work. In two weeks, Doku Rai will premiere at the Darwin Arts Festival. Melbourne shows will follow.
Courtin-Wilson has worked in theatre before, even if he's best known for his films: Chasing Buddha (2000) told the story of his aunt, Tibetan Buddhist nun Robina Courtin, and her work with inmates at Kentucky State Penitentiary; Bastardy (2008) followed the life of ''addict, homosexual, cat burglar, actor, Aboriginal Jack Charles''; Ben Lee: Catch My Disease (2010); and now Hail, which screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival tomorrow. On the way, he's collected a slew of awards - no mean feat for a 33-year-old who won his first gong as a 17-year-old Footscray City Secondary College student with a short titled Charlie's Toy Meets Madeline Moritz.
Hail grew out of a project with Plan-B, a theatre group for former prison inmates. Courtin-Wilson was hired to shoot footage for a production and met Daniel Jones in workshops. He was struck by his intensity and volatility - ''initially he f---ing terrified me'' - and a friendship formed between the two. Courtin-Wilson, who had already spent years traipsing after Jack Charles, began shadowing Jones on his daily exploits, meeting former inmates and friends. When Jones' father and brother later died in quick succession, he moved into his flat to ''see him through a rough patch''. He found Jones ''a mercurial, exciting guy to be around. During the time I slept on his couch he'd pace for six or seven hours just telling me stories. I've never heard him repeat [one].''
It was after this spell that Jones began to see theirs ''wasn't just a transaction that would produce a film. It was a real friendship.''
Soon after, Jones appeared in Cicada, a short film that took its maker to the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. It depicts Jones recounting an experience from his childhood: one day, running to collect darts in his parents' pub, a bloke came in with a sawn-off shotgun and blew the dart player's head off. While the short featured Jones playing himself, Hail, Courtin-Wilson stresses, is a fiction that, while based loosely on Jones' life, should be watched as a movie, not a documentary.
That line blurs frequently throughout the film, however. Jones wears the face of a man who has seen everything his character has; his lover in the film is played by his real-life partner Leanne Letch. Their love story forms the heart of the film, feverish in its intensity and the madness it provokes. Most characters are Jones' friends, others were recruited from the streets of Richmond, Footscray and Preston.
Filmmaker and actor developed a father-son rapport: ''He was very protective of me. I was 26 and naively optimistic about human nature. There were certain people I wanted to meet [serious criminals] … but he always had my back.''
I was naively optimistic about human nature.
During casting sessions, Courtin-Wilson's North Fitzroy warehouse was overrun with former inmates and junkies, with Jones and Letch assuming the role of in-house security guards. ''There'd be people walking out the back trying to steal computer monitors. Someone stole all our coffee mugs. Dan [Jones] would be like: 'This guy's on the jerry for your laptop. Get that bloke out of here.'''
Courtin-Wilson was seduced by Jones' street smarts: ''He has this acute perception of the person standing in front of him. He sees five times as much as most people see.'' He and Letch proved ''intoxicating'' to be around: ''They're like a couple of teenagers … they have this hyper-present way of living in the world.''
The timing of Hail's screening at the festival is serendipitous: Jones recently returned from the US, where he's played the lead role in ''a black comedy set in southern states''. The film's director saw Cicada at Cannes and emailed two years later to ask Courtin-Wilson of his whereabouts. ''He'd written a lead role for him and didn't even want him to audition.'' It's been a validation for Jones, Courtin-Wilson says, because in his previous work ''people think Dan's just been playing himself, which is misleading because [he's also given] amazing performances''.
Courtin-Wilson has several projects on the boil, one a feature film that was shot in Cambodia with Michael Cody and unfurls as ''an ill-fated love story between two people living in harrowing circumstances who escape and travel up the Mekong. A metaphysical love-story road movie,'' he says with a wry smile. He's also developing a feature titled Blue Heaven, a creation-myth film he hopes to shoot in Scandinavia. He's drawn to the idea of casting children to create ''a cinema that's predicated on pure sensation, not overwhelmed by the tyranny of the cause-and-effect narrative [but governed by a sense] of perpetual immediacy''.
It's a through-line connecting each of his works - a sense of being absolutely present and here in the moment. One gleans that's a world where he feels most himself.
■ Doku Rai runs at Arts House from August 29 to September 2.
■ Hail screens at ACMI 2 tomorrow.
■ The Age is a festival sponsor.
Visit the MIFF website for session details or to purchase tickets


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A free and public event arranged for today by the Sangamon County Republican Party featuring GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner has been moved to a larger venue.
The event, scheduled to begin at 12:15 p.m., will take place at Boondock's, 2909 N. Dirksen Parkway.
The event had been scheduled for the Knights of Columbus Hall on West Street.
Rosemarie Long, who chairs the Sangamon County Republican Party, said the event was moved to make sure there's enough room to accommodate the crowd.
Long said she arranged the event so Republican precinct committeemen would get a chance to meet with Rauner. She said Rauner may spend some time with just that group in part of the building, but the program is open to the public and there will be refreshments.
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, is also scheduled to attend.


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At Carlow, we offer you a variety of programs in diverse fields providing you a high quality graduate education. We review a variety of factors in our consideration of each applicant. Most graduate programs have rolling admissions and applications are reviewed on a regular basis, however, we encourage you to submit your application early for best availability.Also see Steps to ApplyWhile specific programs may have differing requirements for admissions (see supplemental application materials required in some programs), in general, we require that you:
Programs are offered in a variety of formats (including day, evening, and online programs) at several locations (including Greensburg, Cranberry, and Oakland). Candidates for admission are thus encouraged to submit their application materials early for best availability.


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A developer going by the name of Fletch has created a map of Bin Laden's Abbottabad Complex where he lived from 2005 till his death on 2nd of May 2011 for Counter Strike.
It's not a new concept to have real life locations appear in computer games including those from real missions that have been carried out by world millitary but some would suggest that releasing a map like this so soon after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, is in poor taste.
It's an interesting topic for debate that may have some very good points for both sides of the argument. What seems clear is that Fletch does not intend to create a mission in which players recreate the Navy Seals mission from the 2nd of May but instead have missions based on the concept.
One mission using the map he is constructing is an aftermath in which terrorists defend evidence in the base from being taken by Counter Terrorist Forces. Though some believe that just the location alone being in a computer game so soon is in poor taste and perhaps even means for provocation for more terrorist action.
What do you think? Do you play Counter Strike? Do you feel this map is in poor taste or will you be playing it yourself?