Posts by Stephen Judd
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I've always enjoyed the German approach where people with multiple PhD's are allowed to pile them up along with their other honorifics. Thus I once attended a talk given by a Herr Professor Doktor Doktor X.
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Ian, when it comes to my train of thought, you can only be described as a derailleur.
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I’m taking dictation from the lovely and helpful Kathy here:
Of course, despite the economic and environmental benefits of cycle commuting, there will always be people who are implacably convinced of the superiority of car travel. Paradoxically, it is these die-hard motorists who should be the greatest supporters of an improved cycle infrastructure in Christchurch. After all, every person who converts from car to bicycle will shave another car-length off the rush-hour traffic queue.
Indeed. An argument I will be storing for later deployment in other contexts.
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Thanks Ian -- we did just that. For people catching up, a modified version of the original Copenhagize Chch post here has appeared in the Press today. I guess I could have inferred that from Matthew Reid's comment but I'm a bit slow on the uptake today and thought maybe another fine Haywood work had got into print.
The final paragraph is a real zinger.
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Craig old bean: I don't think there's much of a double standard going on here. Wouldn't anyone characterise Rupert as ruthless? Or power hungry? I just searched Google for "Rupert Murdoch"+ruthless, and "Rupert Murdoch"+power-hungry and I got truckloads of results characterising him this way. I don't think it's unfair to label a person who aspires to emulate him the same way, no matter what sex they are.
And yes, if you seek out to marry someone whose character I disdain, I will, prima facie, assume you might also have a bad character. Seems pretty reasonable to me, let alone with the actual back story Deng has.
I think you protest just a bit much in this case.
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Yes please. Combed The Press website, couldn't find it. I have an expat Cantabrian here who would love to see it (as would I).
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Am I the only person whose brain immediately supplied the followup: This is your National Library on drugs?
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Clint, that's a reasonable hypothesis. My counter would be to re-ask the question how do you verify someone is SIS, and to point out that minor newpapers don't have the resources for fact-checking that bigger ones do. Stripped down as they are, I bet that the Herald, the SST, the DomPost and the Press are still all likely to be able to bring a bit more skepticism to the table.
The last person I met who claimed to work for the SIS was a frequent drinking buddy and a plausible man*. Then he was arrested and convicted on fraud charges and turned out to have used his personal charm and ability to lie to extract large sums of money from people and run up very big bills. In my mind, claiming to work for the SIS is a prima facie sign of a fantasist. But how do you contradict or prove such a claim? Interesting eh.
Assuming you are correct though, this is a serious matter. What should we make of an intelligence service that leaks? That deserves as much investigation and concern as an investigation that never found anything.
* People who lived in Hamilton in the late 80s may remember the case of Kevin Barnard.
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My immediate thoughts are:
1) We don't even know that the person talking to Tulett is an SIS officer. How do you authenticate someone who claims to be SIS? I wish someone would ask Tulett this question.
2) Tulett's direct quote from the officer is "It all looks suspicious, but a lot of what the Israelis do raises suspicion. So lots of smoke but we haven't found any fires. The file remains open though." cite. Surely if there was something better and bolder to claim, a leaking agent would have mentioned it. In particular, whether the famous passports were actually forged/stolen/invalid, a very odd detail to have omitted and one which a person in an investigation certainly should know.
3) Matthew Dentith's explanation, which I rather like, is that the SIS is a paranoid and not very competent organisation with insufficient oversight. It needs to do things from time to time to justify their budget and their powers, and a leak such as this very much helps them do that.
4) As far as I know, there were four calls, but only one conversation, Key being too busy at the other times. Why would Netanyahu call? Well, he is an Israeli PM and Israel takes the safety of its citizens very seriously. He is also the leader of a very unstable coalition in a small country, and it's helpful to him to be seen to do things. And offering help in an emergency is an excellent way to rebuild relations after the 2004 incident.
To me it's not meaningful to say "the case is far from debunked" -- it's not even established as a case. In fact, even the leaker, if they are genuine, has had nothing of substance to leak, only a chain of surmise. Preconceptions are what make this credible.
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He runs a private specialist S&R firm. If you're an Israeli trying to get an emergency team together, who else would you choose? And "liberated" makes it sound like he busted them out. But in fact, it seems that he just worked the local authorities in India. A colourful chap, obviously, but you do seem to be over-egging the pudding.