Unscheduled Hiatus

Hi everyone!

Thanks for sticking with the "MemeSpreeNZ" project thus far.

It's been really stressful for me and mine, but in the process I've met some cool cats and clever chicks; I've learned more about the way good government works than I'd ever thought possible.

I even got a complaint laid against me by the Electoral Commission over the "Royal Wedding" images which freaked me out more than a little; it's a hell of a thing to come to your computer on the day before polling day to find, "This is so-and-so from the Electoral Commission, please respond; I am well aware of Rule One" sitting in your inbox one morning. I mean, I thought it was someone's idea of a bad joke.

Well, with the help of a lot of people who know more about these things than I do, the complaint has been dealt with. I'm probably never ever going to find out who laid it, and just in case the person who did lay the complaint sees this: I'm sorry that my stupid joke offended you. If you ever want to talk about why I went so over-the-top with my jokes, just drop a line to memespreenz@gmail.com and we'll talk about it, as privately as you wish.

Because when I'm alone, I'm just a guy who wants his family to be safe, and I can't do that if I feel like the government is being run by a bunch of self-serving crooks. Not criminals, per se - but just selfish, greedy mother-loving crooks.

So, when I get back to the Internet in anywhere between 1~5 weeks, I'm going to need the help of clever people like you to help me put together a submission to the Electoral Commission on why 1/3rd of the country didn't bother to turn out to vote. Because of my background, I'm really really good at coming up with theories, but I'm only just now learning how to source evidence to back my theories up.

2012 is going to be a really surreal year for everyone. There's supposed to be this big apocolypse happening, and depending on who you listen to, it's going to be about either neutrinos melting the earth's crust so that the continents turn to jello, or - if you're a Shadowrun(tm) fan, The Magic will come back into the world and turn us all into Elves, Trolls, or Dragons, depending on how many EXP points you have.

Obviously, they're both wrong - the sky isn't going to fall on our heads - but we'll have to live with all the people who think it will.

PS: Here are two little links to what the hell "Fnord" means:
Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord
F.N.O.R.D- http://www.backtable.org/~blade/fnord/index.html

Until we meet again, stay stafe; see you in a few weeks.

cheers
Arthur Monteath-Carr

Where do Things Come From? Let's Vote

To Whomsoever Reads This:

Take a good, long, hard look around you. It's OK - if you do it the right way, no-one will notice. When you have done that, relax. Now, you are sure that no-one is watching.

Do you know everything? Ever? Really? Are You absolutely sure? Because, the guy? The guy who saw you looking around yourself to look absolutely sure that no-one was reading?

That guy who you didn't see was watching you.


Fnord. What is a fnord? If you don't know, then, I'm really really sorry. I'm really really really sorry that you don't know what a fnord is.

Because when you don't know what the hell a fnord is, a fnord is going to get you killed.

A Fnord isn't just going to kill you. It is going to kill you in ways that you, yourself, when you thought you were safe, weren't able to possibly imagine. A FNORD is the most dangerous thing that you - yes, you, wise guy, the guy who isn't ready to read this post - the guy who never, ever, EVER read this post, fuck off, will you? Me and the guy I started talking to at the start of this post - the guy that the post ever, ever, ever wanted to talk to - tat guy and only THAT GUY - was allowed to read the post you aren't reading in your head.

Now, first guy? The guy who wants to read this post more than anything else in the world right now?

Are you secret? Are you safe from the fnords?

PS: This post is a trap. Take care. the fnords are out there, watching, wait, yes, they are watching you right now, and you will not be able to tell when are they watching.

PPS: The next time you want to know what the hell a fnord is and isn't, the fnord will be able to see you wondering. Take care. Good-bye, and good luck.

PPPS: When you are ready to learn more about fnords, come and look at this post. When you and the post are together, you will be able to learn everything you need to know about fnords. Keep the post secret. Keep the post safe.

Holy Moly, that was a big shake. You all, you all right?

A Very Shakey, Very Merry Xmas Essay

By C. Arthur Monteath-Carr

I am writing this post to try and summarise some of the thoughts I've been having about the Canterbury Quakes today while I've been in the middle of my personal life, my political thought process, and thinking about the jobs of Government and the Media. Right in the middle of my everyday life which - much like yours, dear reader - is kind of busy and stressful. Not more or less busy than your life, just a different kind of busy than your life.


We all prepare for the Holiday Season in our own way. Some of us shop for presents for our Friends and Family; some of us send tweets to our peeps full of good tidings of great joy. Some of us clean our whole houses in preparation for an Xmas Eve Dinner with people we love, in preparation for opening presents with people we love on Xmas Day. These are all Good Things that we all do, in our own ways, every year.


Whatever your own personal tradition is, it's important.

It's valid, for you, and those you care about have their own traditions around this time of year that are valid for them. It's important that we can recognise that every family has their own Christmas, or Xmas, or christmas, (or Kwanza, Hanukkah, or Ramadan, and all the many, many year-end rituals that all cultures have) and it's important for society to be a place where everyone can have their own traditions, and have the right to have their own traditions.

Keep this in mind. I'm going somewhere with this.
 But it takes a while to get there. Sorry. ;)

On 23-12-2011, on the single busiest retailing/shopping day of the year bar none (unless your store does a big Boxing Day sale; not all stores do, but some do), Mother Earth gave us a Christmas present of three big earthquakes. Just to remind everyone that she's still here, still doing her thing.

Here is my personal reaction, in the usual C. A. Monteath-Carr rambling post-post-modern essay that I like to write. It's part of my process; I hope you find it useful. It's sort of a tragi-comic-serious-post-with jokes, and it worked for me; I really hope it works for you.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.





On 23-12-2011, Christchurch - and Canterbury, and to a different extent, New Zealand - got rocked by three big earthquakes; a 5.8, followed by a 5.3, and a 6.0 magnitude quake, bam-bam-bam, right after one another.

I'm writing this post at a mellowed out 1:01 a.m after a really, really long day for myself and my family; I won't bore you with the details, but we were having a pretty stressful day with Real Life stuff when the shakes hit town.

TV One and TV Three news had their camera crews out in short order; the local news offices have had a lot of practice by this point in getting the crews out to do the very very important job of talking to real people going through real problems, asking them to share their personal experiences with the country, who - in turn - can sit in their homes and come to grips with the awful thing that just happened to their family, their friends, and their friends-of-friends in Canterbury.

Personal aside: This page was the one I was following for "breaking news" on the Very Shakey Xmas Eve (Eve), or 23/12/11. It morphed from being a blunt "this just in" bulletin service, to a scare story about All Malls being Evacuated, and finally into a summary of the situation as it was when the reporter stopped updating the page and moved on to the next story. Despite the headline and URL - possibly chosen by a sub-editor - I found it very helpful as I tried to come to grips with what had happened, and I want to thank the people involved in this story for helping me do that. Back to the post. ^_^

The media and the local council have been playing a very, very very important job in Canterbury recently. It has been the Council's job to act as a sort of intermediary between the emergency National Level entity that is CERA and the everyday people. It has been the Media's (very important) job of explaining CERA, the EQC, the local council, local builders and local architects who want to help, and the everyday people, to the rest of the country, in language they can relate to.

Because make no mistake; CERA is really fucking scary.

Why I Hope that Carmel Sepuloni Pushes for a Second Recount

By  Arthur Monteath-Carr

1) It'll be funny as all get up.

I've since lost the original pic, darn it...

2) I really really really want "Basher" Bennett to get a bloody nose after all her "Oh, I can release confidential WINZ client files to the media with like zero consequences, that's cool" bullshit. Whatever else she is or does, that was a totally uncalled for straight-up dick move.

3) This post on Legal Beagle raises the tantalizing spectre of National losing a seat, leaving Bennett out of government all together. Which is, I'll admit, my Schadenfreude showing, but the resultant dramas would be well worth the $100,000 spent.

4) Actual serious reason: taking the NZ Herald story at face value, there were nearly 400 people who hadn't enrolled who realised, on the day, that they did care very much about who represented them in Parliament, and fronted up to cast a special vote. Emphasis added:

Auckland lawyer Peter Kiely was recount scrutineer for the National Party and said some changes came about because votes allowed on election night might have had a mark in the box rather than a tick.

Kiely revealed 425 declared votes were disallowed - nine were dual votes, 393 ineligible votes and 12 were not authorised by a witness.

"Those 393, not only were they not on the roll in Waitakere, but they weren't enrolled anywhere."

YOU won this fight, NOT John bloody Key.

By Arthur Monteath-Carr

The headline for this story is at best flirting with the truth and at worst actually harmful to the movement to save the main Auckland 24-hour rape crisis call centre.

It evokes the image of a fatherly Key hearing the pleas of vulnerable people and generously moving to save the centre, like Yahweh parting the Red Sea after a quick txt from Moses.

I was going to do one with Moses coming down the mount with two iPads, but I got lazy. ^_^

In reality Key's Facebook page is a weapon the party uses to present a sanitized version of our Glorious Leader. During the Election any post critical of National policy was deleted and the poster banned - myself included. Granted, some of my posts were... less articulate or well mannered... than some... but. The point remains. The group "Dear John Key, Here is the Letter/Post You Deleted From Your Wall" collects some of these.

I have seen no evidence he even reads or runs the damn thing. While he was relaxing eating takeout with his fam on polling day eve, he was also porting ads on his page:

Posted on the Lord High Everything Else's page between bites of Chow Mein, presumably.
Interestingly, I now cannot find the post on his page or anything else from polling day eve. Hmm.

Remember: National didn't save the crisis centre. YOU DID by screaming so loud they couldn't ignore you any more.

YOU are more powerful than you could ever realise. NEVER let them forget that

Why Won't National Co-Operate with Anyone?

I read with alarm that the agreement between the Maori Party and the National Party included a new committee to investigate the causes and propose solutions to poverty.

This was one of the wild-card issues of the 2011 Election, springing from a fantastic documentary on the subject of Child Poverty and How We're Doing It Wrong when compared to Sweden, or even New Zealand in the 1950s. The right-wing citizen's militia of bloggers could only find two faults with it:

1) The mould in the house could have easily been solved by opening a window, and
2) One of the families had a boat-load of consumer electronics, so obviously, they weren't as poor as was made out.

Welcome to Missing The Point theatre.

Wammo: Keeping it Real since Ever.

Poor people may not always have been poor. Poor people often survive on gifts and hand-me-downs, and few things date as quickly as games consoles. This is called Charity, and when Christians have a mind to do so, they're quite good at it; the problem is, however, that Christians - as a collective noun - are not always the best at spotting when the money-changers have set up shop in the temple.

Likewise, anyone who has ever lived in a shit-hole slum house owned by absentee landlords and run by petty bullies of property managers know that it is not as simple as opening a window. If it was, that window would be open. But it's not open, so, therefore, it cannot be that simple.

Thoughts on the Special Votes

I started working on a full post on the true meaning and subtle variations on the word "Mandate" and what it means in New Zealand, and it evolved into this mammoth "State of the Nation As I See It" essay that I'm both proud of and kind of scared by. So while I whittle that into shape, I would like to quickly share with you my thoughts on the Special Votes, both before and after they were counted.

You may have seen these ideas in their larval form on the Facebook page; consider this a refinement and a collection of those ideas in a single place. I promise to have something meatier up on Tuesday. Thank you for reading.


Every Vote Is Special

By Arthur Monteath-Carr

In my view, every vote is a special vote.

Every vote is like a snowflake; no two are said to be alike, yet if you group them together, they can form a snowball, or a snowman, or a snow-fort. Get enough of them, and you have a vote-avalanche.

(Where this metaphor breaks down is that it leads to the idea of politicians trying to catch your vote on their tongues, and that's not a good look for anyone; let's move on quickly before anyone notices).

Yesterday, the Special Vote tally was released, ending a special time for me when there was still a faint, remote hope that National would potentially lose two seats to other parties, forcing them to re-negotiate their agreements with ACT and Peter Dunne's Peter Dunne Party United Future. It would've handed the Maori Party yet more rope, and could have - in Bizarro Land - led to a weird spectre of a Greens confidence-and-supply agreement, or even - heaven forfend! a National-Labour confidence and supply agreement; stranger things have happened in Germany, where MMP was born.

(John Key has a weird idea of how MMP works. He is on record as saying [I'm paraphrasing here] that he would much prefer a world where the leading party could just do whatever the hell they wanted and he is under the impression that "Most New Zealanders" see things his way; don't expect a tiny little thing like 57% of the country disagreeing with him to deter him from this view. I'll come back to this point. There are links).

For a blessed fortnight, the fate of Nicky Wagner and Brendan Burns hung in a very, very delicate balance; the preliminary tally was *exactly* tied, which - in sporting terms - put the race for Earthquake-battered ChCh Central into overtime and up to a penalty shoot-out.

Likewise, Paula "Basher" Bennett had a lot to worry about; her precious, proud Westie home looked set to either give her a skin-of-her-teeth victory or a bitter, bitter pill of rejection to swallow. If she lost her homeland of Westie™~Ville, then her whole image of a solo-mum-done-good would be in tatters. Her position as National's sympathetic voice to the Underclass would be in jeapordy, leaving her with the blood of the poor on her hands and no Ministerial perks to justify it.

Truly, we live in the best of all possible worlds.

More after the jump... if you dare.