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Calendar Facts

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While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).
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Aatch
2483 days ago
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Did you know that leap day might happen twice this year because of a decree by the pope in the 1500s? Apparently it was even more extreme during the 1990s
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3 public comments
Covarr
2483 days ago
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Did you know that the blood moon drifts out of sync with the iPhone calendar because of libation of the mason dixon line? Apparently that's why we have leap seconds.
East Helena, MT
abackstrom
2483 days ago
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Did you know that Toyota Truck Week might happen twice this year because of an arbitrary decision by Benjamin Franklin? Apparently there's a proposal to fix it, but it might be unconstitutional.
Rumney, NH, US
alt_text_bot
2483 days ago
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While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).

The Song Of Her People

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Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

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Aatch
2575 days ago
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Is that a reference to Danielle Corsetto's Guest Comic?
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River Declared a Person

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“[S]ome people will say it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality,” said New Zealand’s Treaty Negotiations Minister, “but it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies, or incorporated societies.” Well, it’s a little stranger than that, but I agree with his point.

If corporations can have legal rights (and they do, especially the ones I represent), there’s no reason a society can’t give rights to any other non-human thing. It might or might not be a good idea, and people can and certainly do argue about which rights a thing should have, if any. But the basic theory is fine, and not especially new.

So it is okay, in my view, that the Whanganui River in New Zealand is now legally considered a person.

Here comes the part where I regale you with my extensive knowledge of the historical background to this dispute, knowledge I gained just now on Wikipedia. A Dutch person “discovered” New Zealand in 1642 (it’s named after Zeeland). Turned out there were already people on it—Polynesians called the Māori—although they had “only” been there for maybe four hundred years at the time. If it seems surprising any place on Earth was uninhabited for that long, look at a map and think about how long it’d take you to paddle to New Zealand. (The answer turns out to be “about 3,000 years.”) The next European visitors were James Cook et al., in 1769. Later, after the usual chaos, warfare, and mass death from disease, the British ended up in charge. They did, as usual, sign a treaty with the natives, and, again as usual, “there is no consensus as to exactly what was agreed.” Over the last few decades in particular, there have been a number of disputes and apologies and settlement agreements. This is one of those.

Māori is an official language in New Zealand, which is why if you look at the bill the first thing you see is:

Te Pire o Te Awa Tupua (mō Te Whakataunga o Ngā Kerēme e pā ana ki Te Awa o Whanganui)

which I think just means “The Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act.” It’s longer in Māori, but also sounds significantly more awesome. It looks like the legislation itself is in English only, but the commentary is in both languages. So you could choose, for example, either:

Ka whakaae mātou he huarahi mahi matawhāiti pai tēnei, ā, ka whakatau kia whakaurua atu he rara hou hei whakamana i tēnei.

or

We agree that this is a prudent course of action, and considered inserting a new clause to this effect.

Take your pick.

Anyway, the Whanganui, on the North Island, is the country’s longest navigable river. Most of it is now in a national park, and wow, is that gorgeous. But for several hundred years, it has been the home and eel-fishing grounds of several Māori tribes. According to the bill commentary, it “has a long history of providing physical and spiritual support to Whanganui iwi,” the people of the area, and they have a long history of wanting more control over it.

The Settlement Act does that in the novel way of making the river a person and assigning it guardians. Sections 12 and 14 make it a legal person called “Te Awa Tupua”—not just the river but “all its physical and metaphysical elements”—and that it “has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Of course, a river can’t actually do anything except flow, and so the bill creates the office of “Te Pou Tupua” to act in its behalf.

This has two officials, one nominated by the iwi and one by the government. The only requirement seems to be the nominator’s satisfaction that any nominee has the “mana, skills, knowledge, and experience to achieve the purpose and perform the functions” of the office. The bill doesn’t define “mana,” but I guess you know it when you see it. I, at least, would fully support making “mana,” or maybe “mojo,” a requirement for nominees here in the U.S. (and maybe the “necessary mojo” should also be a requirement for presidents?). If senators were debating whether Gorsuch “had the mojo” to serve on the Supreme Court, I’d probably watch those hearings.

Those with sufficient mana etc. to serve are given the power to take legal action in the river’s name. The river (and the office) is an entity for tax purposes, although it looks like it’s a charity. It has trademark rights. To the extent the Crown owned a “fee simple estate” (you too can know what that is, if you go to law school) in the riverbed, it is now vested in Te Awa Tupua—so the river now owns itself again, sort of, except for certain listed rights. It looks like fishing rights are not affected, so the river can’t keep people from throwing hooks in it, which seems like an important right for a legal person to have. But again, the actual humans involved in all this can define the rights however they like.

The bill also contains a quite lengthy apology by the Crown for various things, which is nice, and declares that the legislation is a final settlement of all historical claims. We shall see.

Again, while this may be the first time a river has been declared to be a legal person, and the reports say that it is, this is really no different than creating a thing called a “corporation,” giving it certain legal rights, and giving certain humans the right to act on its behalf. To some extent, obviously, there is a symbolic component to this bill, but that’s not a new thing for legislation, either. It appears to be a step forward in relations between the Māori and non-Māori, at least, and that can’t be a bad thing.

The Māori certainly seem happy about it in this parliamentary video, which I love for multiple reasons. First, it begins with a short statement in their language, so you can hear what it sounds like, at least when a white guy speaks it. Second, I love the contrast between the European parliamentary system, where they quietly and formally take care of business, and the response of the Māori in the gallery. The Speaker (who is, sadly, not wearing his feathered cape for this) just says “the ayes have it,” and then, after a pause, “I understand there is to be a waiata.” And then there is indeed a waiata, which is a traditional and in this case very lengthy Māori song. This isn’t the “haka,” the fierce warrior waiata, but there is a big bald guy waving a club. So that’s cool.

Again, I would watch a lot more hearings if they concluded with somebody saying, “I understand there is to be a waiata,” and then there was in fact a waiata. It doesn’t have to be ten minutes long, necessarily, but still.

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Aatch
2754 days ago
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For a little more context, these kinds of things tend to just be formalising existing systems. Either for symbolic reasons, or to ensure that the existing systems can remain.
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Good Reason to Kill #51: Told My Wife to Keep Her Shirt On

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Here's how this one starts:

Robert Pierce, whose wife Catharine was involved in a topless gardening dispute in 2010, is set to stand trial on assault charges after police say he assaulted a Regional Transportation District security guard who told his wife she could not be topless at the Boulder Transit Center.

Really, they had me at "topless gardening dispute."

These are by no means the only two toplessness disputes in which the Pierces have been involved, it seems. Mrs. Pierce is said to be "known in Boulder for gardening topless outside her home," which was the cause of all the hullaballoo in 2010. Apparently the Pierces were threatened with eviction at that time, except that it turns out being topless outdoors is not a crime in Boulder. It is against the rules of the Regional Transportation District, though, which is why RTD security asked Mrs. Pierce to remain shirted on July 17.

Of course the parties disagree about what happened next, but a security guard claims that Robert Pierce started poking him in the chest and then escalated to actual punching. (There are also wrestling allegations but I'm not going to try to sort those out.) The fracas resulted in Mr. Pierce being arrested for assault and both Pierces being banned from RTD property for a year. The assault charge is set for trial on November 25.

According to the report, Mr. PIerce told police he was just trying to protect his wife, that he is President Eisenhower's son, and that he plans to run for sheriff of Boulder County. I guess I wouldn't rule out the possibility that his dad might have been named "President Eisenhower," but it seems most likely that all three of those claims are false.

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Aatch
3649 days ago
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Additional tidbit from the Denver Post article: "The couple also were detained in 2013 by police in Ohio. Robert Pierce had said he was going to "kill Obama and take him down," according to a police report. No charges were filed in that incident."

Seems like these two are a right pair...
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Impulse Purchase

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Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

"Write what you know," they say. Okay, here are some comics about spending all your money on guitars!
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Aatch
4203 days ago
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SimCity Modder Tells Us Offline Regional Play Easily Done

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A key moment in the week’s SimCity shenanigans was unquestionably the appearance of a video from a modder, Azzer, announcing he’d found a way to remove the game’s offline timer. The final nail in the ridiculous-claims coffin, this mod demonstrated that everything but the asynchronous multiplayer was running on your home machine. We got in touch with the man behind the mod, one Azzer, and he had a lot more to say. In his opinion, the information coming from the servers is so rudimentary that despite Maxis’s claims, there shouldn’t be any problem at all in simulating the regional play offline.

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Aatch
4221 days ago
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