Author Archive

Political code words: signals to the faithful

I don’t know Dick Quax personally but my daughter met him out campaigning and said “He was lovely”. The former Olympic runner is heir-apparent to FYT (fine young Tory) Jami-Lee Ross‘s super-city Auckland Council seat now that Jami-Lee has begun his sentence term as National Member of Parliament for Botany following Pansy Wong’s resignation under [...]

Yes, you are accountable for your words… but even more so for your actions.

Some interesting, contradictory, discussion about the role of social media in news journalism… we’ll have to get our heads around the issues with this stuff, by the look of things. This appeared in my Twitter timeline (ahem, feel free to follow @onthepaepae) this morning: … having been promptly re-tweeted by a number of journos I [...]

Ugh! Adding insult to injury!

Apropos our discussion about targeting the gullible in Calling all gullible gamblers! and All that glitters is not gold … I guess ‘self-knowledge’ can be seen as by-product? Visit Mark Joyner for more of his personal development brain puzzle cartoons. NOT funny! (Well, OK, just a bit.) Thanks to Sarah for sharing. – P

With one swift blow, Kate knocked the wind out of the duplicitous toady …

Nice to see conservative blogger Cactus Kate calling conservative blogger David Farrar for being a National Party mouthpiece the other day … Labour’s argument goes a little something like this. Their core voters are married couples with two kids earning say $50,000. In the House today Labour bombarded the National Party with examples of such [...]

Greener grass in yonder paddock …

I’ve met the bright guy quoted in this Financial Post story Don’t be tempted by US firesale. It seems he is quoted warning Canadians about buying the wrong type of distressed US property in an article largely warning not to do it at all. How oddly dissonant. It may sound like a dream come true, [...]

All that glitters is not gold

All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told … . Food for thought from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice — quoting legendary fable and proverb collector (plagiarist?) Aesop and forebears. Fool’s gold The mineral pyrite, or iron pyrite, is an iron sulfide with the formula FeS2. This mineral’s metallic luster [...]

Great pic!

OK, it’s not an original idea but, my hat’s off to shutterbug Sarah Ivey for this very engaging execution of the form — Nadia Lim, winner of Masterchef NZ leaps for joy at One Tree Hill. Well done! credit: NZ Herald

Inconsistency: hoist on our own petard?

This article The Other Torture Debate by Arthur Brisbane is worth reading to help understand how a journalistic ‘aspiration’ for an appearance of impartiality can lead to very poor decisions. In what I saw at the time as a prime example of the thin end of the wedge, the NY Times seemed to adopt the [...]

Is this how Shaun Stenning’s victims bite back?

Wow. At the risk of being terminally self-referencing, I just became aware of a campaign to retweet links to the mammoth comment thread here on ThePaepae.com about the refund movement aimed at Shaun Stenning’s twalk and snipr internet marketing schemes and Dollar Rose ‘investments’ (see Is this how Shaun Stenning handles a request for a refund?) [...]

Everything we know about you guys is wrong

I just watched How to Train Your Dragon with my son and some friends … it’s a magnificent, heart-warming movie, which incidentally addresses one of the perennial themes of ThePaepae.com — recognising our fear of ‘the other’ or ‘the out-group’ (in this case, dragons) and that fear’s role in conflict. Embedded in the storyline is [...]