Posts by Simon Grigg
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when you're sitting on 27% what have you got to lose. His legacy is set in stone anyway. I imagine the hard word came down from Dick and he had no choice.
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I think they really need to stop saying "al Qaeda!" as a reflex. It looks like one of the suspects already arrested is a doctor from Iran, and thus extremely unlikely to be involved with a Sunni Islamist group.
the blanket Al-Qaeda-isation" of the GWOT (c) is quite a phenomena at the moment if you follow the daily media releases from Centcom and Pennsylvania Ave.
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How do you view Nelson Mandela?
or Paul Revere for that matter...my understanding is that "loyal" settlers were fair game in 1776.
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thanks for the link Russell,.. like you, I've been slightly out of touch for five days....but mine was a conscious avoidance of any cyber link whilst in big bad old Jakarta on a holiday. My first five days without the net of any sort for the best part of a decade I think. JKT is incredibly wired but I simply didn't.
Dubber's follow up to that story was rather interesting too, as he found himself having to explain basic copyright parameters to the staunch Mr Birch
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in Singapore, they hang you for drugs and police officers in tight trousers cruise the parks to entrap gay men. Well, I'm not sure that happens any more, to be honest.
Mediacorp actress got caught with coke at Velvet Underground in one of those not uncommon stings at nightclubs where the whole place is searched and and a large random percentage is made to undergo on the spot testing in the vans outside. The police then take her phone book, phone, PDA and computer and haul every one in them in, her parents and grandparents included, for urine and hair tests......they still do that sort of thing
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if Europe wants to act as any sort of counter-weight to the US then it has to have something to do that with and at present that's not the case.
I'd say those that observed such are wrong. Western Europe, whilst not at Cold War levels, remains fairly heavily armed and equipped.
As Rich pointed out Germany alone has some 250,000 in it's land forces, and the French some 140,000 full timers. The Eurofighter and the Rafaele are both very much equals of anything in service in the US, with the exception of the rather financially bloated overkill of the F-22, and between the two countries they have almost 1,000 choppers.
It's nothing to do with capacity.
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try as I might I can't find any link between anything in your post, Craig, and Fay Ritchwhite, oh, and I have add to the previous poster's query...when do certain pollies have to pony up and answer a few questions about all this.
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But with all the lying that went on with Iraq, and the hideous mistakes made in post war reconstruction how can that not affect humanitarian intervention?
but I also note that's its not affected the ability of the right (the ones ElBaradei calls the "crazies") to sell to the US mainstream the idea that bombing Iran, with all the consequences, is perhaps a reasonable thing to do.
It might be a tougher sell than last time, but in a nation where everybody else's hard right is the middle ground, not one presidential candidate on either side has had the balls to say "this is all barkingly insane, and you are buying to the same lies you were sold five years ago as fact"...
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In Saigon I had 74 channels on my TV. In Singapore it's illegal to own a satellite dish.
Singapore feels to me like a festering crisis waiting to explode. You can't throw that much education into a population without them sooner or later saying no.
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Michael..average is put here at 70 for the nation as a whole. I have no idea about workers in tyre companies but I'd take anything you heard in a factory in Christchurch as gospel with a very large grain. The dis/misinformation about Indonesia I hear in NZ never fails to astound me.. Occupational safety is not to western standards, or often close, especially in the construction and engineering industries. That said, free health care for workers, and their families seems to be fairly prevalent for much industry here. Everybody I know who employs provides such, and the law gives a month's paid holiday (usually Ramadan when Java and Sumatra close down), as well as a month's bonus per year after 12 months employ (ie you get paid 13 months per year). Smaller firms often tend to have relationships with whole villages and families that goes far beyond that which you'd see in western countries, and in my experience eight hour days, with overtime rates, and normal breaks etc are the norm.
I've spent a fair amount of time in large furniture factories in Java and, with one major exception (Danish owned..they went bust few months later), the spraying rooms were ventilated and masks worn, pretty much to western standards. How much good they do when everyone is puffing on a Kretek is a question. The bathrooms, however were another matter.
When I was at university I worked in the Westfield Freezing Works in my breaks, in the Fellmongery. God knows how many chemicals I was exposed to there..many very nasty..does it still go on in other places in NZ? I don't know, but OSH standards there were shocking. We are quick to point the finger I think at times.