Posts by Simon Grigg
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As for Bertie, bless him, being German, technically Germany wasn't German until...history nerds, help here please.
1871, blame Bismark (although arguably the German Confederation predated it by some 60 years but that was more like a prototypical EU) ....and Bertie's wife was Teutonic anyway, of French extraction. The English haven't held their own crown since 1066.
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yes, but he's c-in-c....he knows the Iraq thing is f**ked, so his only option is, as he sees it, to ensure his legacy, is to broaden and damn the madness. Cheney hasn't listened to saner voices before, I don't think he'll start now
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(oh and 50/50 war between Iran and US)
I can't help think that you are being overly optimistic if yesterday's Gulf of Tonkin styled performance is anything to go by. The ramping up has begun....
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"How does a New Zealander start a small business?
Buys a large one!"taken to an extreme in the case of Ansett
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Fair enough Tom, although just as a last thought, I, when in Auckland love to walk and I do it for miles. Always have..
Last time I was there in November I took a stroll along k Rd from the top of Queen Street, stopped in at couple of second hand record shops in the wonderful St Kevins Arcade, saw a couple of friends further down the road. Turning into Ponsonby Rd I bought some olives at the Italian Deli, had a coffee with half the musicians in Auckland and Marcello at Santos, where I also spent time with the iconic Tim Murdoch, had another coffee with Roger Perry and a couple of the George FM crew at Il Buco, bought a Mojo at Magazinno, wandered further along, seeing countless people I know, when I saw Graham Hill / Humphries and talked at length with him as we've not seen each other for quite a while...he was in a sidewalk bar..then strolled to the Belgian Beer bar at 3 Lamps in the old PO to meet my wife..took a couple of hours or maybe four. And believe me, it all rolled together and was a joy....its my 'hood to turn a phrase..all of it
Auckland can be a wonderful city to walk in.....as a city I love that about it.
And the council estates in Brixton / Stockwell and the like...seemed to sprawl for miles to my eye...ugly as sin...
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I think you have a different view of what constitutes a "city": I'd hardly count LA as one
perhaps so, but having lived in London, and spent long periods in NYC I would counter that you perhaps you are confusing the idealism of what you would like a city to be (as you hint at later in your post) with the reality.
I suspect the idealism of "what used to be a city" is just that...London, Paris and much of old Europe were little more than populated sewerpits for most of their existence. The city ideal, if it ever existed may have been for a brief moment in the thirties.
London, I lived there for three years and know it well, has great physical beauty in places but often only street deep. The essence of London, and the part I actually enjoy the most exists beyond the tourist facade, away from Piccadilly, or even Soho, in places like Brixton or Mile End or Hoxton..you know, where the people live and exist and the day to day fire of the city comes from. These places are not always pretty, and they sprawl. NYC, too, is not downtown or midtown Manhattan, although thats a part of it. I've found as much, probably more, excitement in the ramshackle streets of The Bronx or Brooklyn...not pretty, but, damn, thats a city.
I'm not sure what the CBD figure really is meant to prove. Most Aucklanders would say the city doesn't have one. I would hazard that Jakarta, which is one of the ugliest cities on the planet (although I love it), with some twenty million, has a very low "CBD" worker total...its so spread out and, like Auckland has about half a dozen centres (and thats not including the smaller cities it's gobbled up), but it's a huge metropolis, a city by any definition. Auckland is not that, but its the only place in New Zealand that really has any claim to be a throbbing twenty four hour city, albeit a small one.
Denpasar, quite close to me, has a daytime worker population of about a million, but at night drops down to about 400,000, and that to me still feels like a big town, which in Asian terms its only just.
This is not meant to be a criticism of Wellington, I, like most Aucklanders (I might not live there but claim to be one even though I spent much of my youth in Wellington) don't really buy into, or really even notice the vitriol that flys north. Its a non event...of no consequence and always feels like a pointless waste of energy, so I'm not trying to buy into a reversal of that.
The common complaint I hear from native Aucklanders when they venture south, or even tourists, is that, after three days in Wellington there is nothing to do. I don't buy into that argument at all, as a city or a town is about knowing where to go, what to do, knowing the nooks and crannies..and so it is in Wellington when you are with someone with local knowledge. And so it is in Auckland....Ponsonby rolls into K Rd, into the city into Parnell and to me it seems like a continuous journey with thriving interacting organic communities in each direction. People live, work and exist in all these places and they function as parts of the whole.
BTW...if you've ever had the unpleasant experience of having your wallet lightened by the Irwin families famous Australia Zoo, you really appreciate Auckland's.
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Darryl,
This seems a very far cry from your latest position that bin Laden was merely 'aware of the CIA's presence'.
The phrase "aware of the CIA's presence" did not come from me, it came from Fisk...I merely quoted that entire paragraph to counter your claim that Fisk said the idea that Bin Laden, or his associates were funded by the US or ISI was, to use your word "nonsense". He said nothing of the sort...the paragraph from Fisk's interview with Bin Laden the US right drew such solace from was the one I quoted, but when the likes of Fox ran their rebuttal pieces they didn't use the full paragraph, preferring to edit it down, and changed the drift of it somewhat.
Oh, and the CIA denies it funded MAK? After 9/11, is this a surprise, and I would hazard, even a credible denial.
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Darryl,
No, I'm not moving the goalposts. Your response to Stephen confused two different things, whether Bin Laden was a CIA asset per se, which, I agree, is doubtful, and whether the organisations he, and his cohorts were involved with, especially MAK, and the Egytian Brotherhood received funding. Which is not doubtful.Zawahiri, who I think you will agree is one of Bin Laden's cohorts, admitted American help in 1980....if it was not funding and weaponry..what would it have been?
What we do know is that both those groups were the primary source of Arab manpower to fight the Soviets, which was not inconsiderable, and they were, despite your claim, a major player:
From Eye Spy (but I could've used quite a number of sources):Osama bin Ladin entered on his current path of holy warrior in 1979, the year Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. He transfered his business to Afghanistan--including several hundred loyal workmen and heavy construction tools--and set out to liberate the land from the infidel invader. Recognizing at once that the Afghans were lacking both infrastructure and manpower to fight a protracted conflict, he set about solving both problems at once. The first step was to set up an organized program of conscription. Together with Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdallah Azzam, he organized a recruiting office--Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK - Services Office).
MAK advertised all over the Arab world for young Muslims to come fight in Afghanistan and set up branch recruiting offices all over the world, including in the U.S. and Europe. Bin Ladin paid for the transportation of the new recurits to Afghanistan, and set up facilities to train them. The Afghan government donated land and resources, while bin Ladin brought in experts from all over the world on guerilla warfare, sabotage, and covert operations. Within a little over a year he had thousands of volunteers in training in his private bootcamps. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 fighters received training and combat experience in Afghanistan, with only a fraction coming from the native Afghan population. Nearly half of the fighting force came from bin Ladin's native Saudi Arabia. Others came from Algeria (roughly 3,000), from Egypt (2,000), with thousands more coming from other Muslim countries such as Yemen, Pakistan and the Sudan.
Superpower vs. superpower
The war in Afghanistan was the stage for one of the last major stand-offs between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Americans at that time had the same goals as bin Ladin’s mujahedin--the ousting of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In what was hailed at the time as one of its most successful covert operations, America’s Central Intelligence Agency launched a $500 million-per-year campaign to arm and train the impoverished and outgunned mujahedin guerrillas to fight the Soviet Union. The most promising guerilla leaders were sought out and “sponsored” by the CIA. U.S. official sources are understandably vague on the question of whether Osama bin Ladin was one of the CIA’s “chosen” at that time. Bin Ladin’s group was one of seven main mujahedin factions. It is estimated that a significant quantity of high tech American weapons, including “stinger” anti-aircraft missiles, made their way into his arsenal. The majority of them are reported to be still there.From Global Security.Org:
There is a frequent claim that the CIA directly funded bin Laden. Top CIA officers involved in the effort say, no, their support went directly to the Afghans, or to the Pakistanis. (The Pakistanis, in turn, supported bin Laden and the other foreign fighters in Afghanistan.)
Which, if true, more or less substantiates Stephen's claim too.
Indonesia....the US went to quote some lengths to keep Suharto in power in 98, with William Cohen, US Defense Secretary and various CIA advisers taking a hands on approach to suppressing the peoples revolution, Cohen even flying in with a team to advise the military just before all hell broke loose
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Darryl,
I Know its Wikipedia but here's a linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maktab_al-Khadamat
Fisk actually wrote:
Some of his current Afghan fellow fighters had been trained earlier by the CIA in the very camps that were the target of the recent US missiles--but whereas they had been called camps for "freedom fighters" when US agents set them up in the early eighties, now they had become camps for "terrorists." He and his comrades never saw "evidence of American help" in Afghanistan, he told me, but he must have been aware of the CIA's presence.
Quite a different thing from saying it's nonsense. Myself, I think its illogical to think that some of the billions funneled into the Soviet-Afghani fracas by the CIA did not get to MAK, either directly or otherwise. Bergen's dismissal of the link seems to be little more than "they didn't specifically target funds to him (B-L)" but to deny that Bin Laden was known to them, when one considers his role in MAK, must be treated as either dubious or an admission of utter incompetence. And its semantics to argue that organisations that Bin Laden played major part in, were not funded in part by either the CIA or the ISI.
From Zawahiri to Abdallah Schleife of NBC as early as 1980:
"Sure, we're taking American help to fight the Russians," Zawahiri replied. "But they're equally evil."
And we know that the US did not stop supporting the Anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan until 1989.
Perhaps the cheque did not have "Pay to the order of O.B.Laden" written on it, but he (by which I mean the various groups he was involved with) surely benefited from said support.
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Wellington feels like a proper city: the sort they have in other countries. In comparison, Christchurch and Dunedin are merely towns, and Auckland is just an oversized suburb.
I have to beg to differ, Auckland does feel like a city. As a voluntary expat who sees a lot of big big cities, most cities I travel to are chaotic, sprawling and essentially badly planned. Think NYC, London, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Sydney, LA. As they grow, they sprawl
Whilst I might not think that it looks as it should in places, its the only town in New Zealand that can really make a claim to being a city in global terms. The chaos (which is not that bad....traffic? What traffic...try Jakarta or even Denpasar) is part of what defines it as a big city.
I love Wellington but its a polite large town.
And, frankly, sit on North Head on a sunny Regatta Day and try to tell me that it is not as astonishingly beautiful in every direction as any urban area anywhere. Even the bloody container wharves, bless them....