Does Bronagh know?
(that's about as serious as I feel right now)

Yeah, of course. The irony though lies in the US comment that such is but a 'flap'. Have you been through the…

Perhaps this current government's decisions, but the article notes that:
Papers show that officials repeatedly…

NZ gets upset by the severe abuse of the global passport system and it’s, were are told, all about selling stuff to the non-Israeli Middle East. I’m guessing there will be no issue for me going into the US next time on a stolen passport then?

I think there is…

I'm finding it interesting just how much of the US "analysis" comes down to buying and selling. Says a lot about their view of…

lamb flaps...

US diplomats disparaged New Zealand's reaction to a suspected Israeli spy ring as a "flap" and accused New Zealand's government of grandstanding in order to sell more lamb to Arab countries,…

I guess the official information act isn't as sexy as WikiLeaks.

The first cable I dipped into, a Swindells job, reports on Clark's 2005 State of the Nation speech and the forthcoming election campaign.

Even by the bullshitty standard of so many of these cables, Swindells really was an ass.

nah, Japan has it too.

In addition, U.S. pharmaceutical companies continue to worry that the government will ban direct-to-consumer advertising, one of the industry's few pathways around Pharmac's controls (ref C). Several companies, especially those marketing so-called lifestyle drugs for such conditions as hair…

Yes, although Roche is a Swiss company. They presumably have to fund their own PR plan, rather than having it covered by their government's foreign service.

That's how you spell "Herceptin". [EDIT – ops, hadn't scrolled up as far as Danyl's post.]

I think that's far more damning than last week's story.

It's one thing to promote understanding of your social and political culture through an exchange scheme. Quite another to use…

So which people from our health sector were invited into the programme, like the journos who were named last week?

This cable which details the US embassy involvement in the campaign to force Pharmac into wasting money on expensive drugs, should be the subject of considerable scrutiny

The tactics described in that cable sound awful similar to the pro-Herceptin campaign a couple years later.

Does anyone really give a toss, with the exception of Palinite neo-domino theorists flogging a dead unicorn?

And Nicky Hager apparently has the lot.

But I was referring more to the apparent note of caution from The Guardian. It wasn't clear whether the…

Not sure how SuperScrabble works, but with my friends back home we had fashioned our own version, by merging two boards together and using the letters from both sets. Much fun.

That seems to be been the case for a while. The SMH has had access to…

What a bizzarre conclusion to draw,…

The broader plan of WikiLeaks is to move beyond the arrangement with the five newspapers currently involved, and to partner with other news organisations who can highlight stories of particular interest to specific regions. We hope that, if so, it…

That's true enough. It wasn't completely without lasting effects though. Class 4a in a small provincial college abandoned its attempts at learning about how to talk about ''the pen of my uncle' in french. Text books got handed in and…

So it seems that some retired ex "govt officals" snuffling their free gin while being entertained by the US that all we wanted was to save a few dollars here and there when we pulled the Nookularfree rabbit out of the hat. Bizarre.

And we…

and here is why:

INDONESIA threatened to derail a visit to Jakarta by President Barack Obama this year unless he overturned the US…

Odd. He's only worth 9 points unless he's on a double or triple word score.

...and all with no application of Hegel it seems.

Deborah Coddington will be happy: http://pundit.co.nz/content/stop-whining-and-suck-it-up

I think there’s very good reason why Obama’s team is made up of people like Holbrooke

Zbigniew Brzezinski ?
and David Axelrod ?

And I could provide a passable blow-by-blow account of the Punic wars. Too bad that's not the topic. The…

People can consider the same information and reach different conclusions.

My views aren't that result of having less information than you. I could, off the…

It was a silly aside but it is Xmas and it would be nice to turn up to a house with a bottle of Cloudy Bay rather than something from their international competition. I do try to wave the flag…

AusAID does have an impressive Indonesia dossier, which makes particular geopolitical sense for Australia. Just as economic development and stability in the Pacific certainly makes geopolitical sense for NZ. Shame that doesn't help with the NZ wine…

All of those were failures of US hegemony rather than pointers to its non-existence. There were not many countries world-wide where the US was not trying to exert some sort of…

The fall of Saigon, the Iranian revolution and then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all occured in that period.

Around the time when I was born the Communist Party had…

I wouldn't say optimistic, I was right behind the Soviets in my primary school years.

It's not trolling if it's uttered in good faith, just an argument considered faulty by others.

I think the extent in which the US wasn’t hegemonic in the second half of the Seventies may be somewhat overstated.

Blimey, that's a somewhat optimistic re-writing of the period.

We are, you must remember, reaching the point where a significant number of adults do not remember the Cold War, because they weren't born or were too young to notice.

In 1976 – 80 the USA did not have "hegemony over the world".

It’s hard to forget the entire cold war, but it does appeared to have…

@Danyl:
I’m kind of glad the SST is taking the tabloid approach

Really? I think the tabloid aspect of the stories coming out of the cables are a. boring (ok that Dagestani wedding cable was fascinating, but US State…

Let’s forgive [Holbrooke] for a life spent “placing big-power concerns ahead of human rights,” as Daniel Southerland put it, in one of the East Timor books I still have sitting in front…

And so he simply had to gift him weaponry. Really, what was the poor man to do?…

Carter and Clinton admit that…

An encouraging report about the quality of New Zealand aid spending

Ah yes. I remember the starving people's of SE Asia Magic Bullet we were going to supply and save the planet with. The Milk Biscuit. A tasty treat undigestible to lactose intolerable guts.

I gather Nicky Hager had some interesting discussions with the Star Times about what was a good story from the cables. He didn’t think the “International Visitor” cable was a big deal, but the newspaper really wanted it.

Of course. It had celebrities in it.

I'm kind of glad the…

What I do know is that the currently…

I gather Nicky Hager had some interesting discussions with the Star Times about what was a good story from the cables. He didn’t think the “International Visitor” cable was a big deal, but the newspaper really wanted it.

Of course. It had…

So he gave them more guns and planes? Really Neil, you are so far off the mark here it's not worth pursuing it. Look back through this…

actually, I do. But I am a bit tired of the condescention. Carter inherited the remnants of the cold war as fought by Kissenger and Nixon. He didn't have a lot of good options and Indonesia was not a…

I'm reading it at the moment.

Actually some were communists (PKI – Partai Komunis Indonesia) but many were simply scores that needed settling. In Bali between 5 and 10% of the population was slaughtered.

You miss Rob, don't you?…

philosophical quibble: they were communists (if it’s the butchering i’m thinking of), and hence not his countrymen, if you follow my argument.

The resemblance was beginning to strike me too #shudder

Gosh Neil – the OV-10s were sold in 1976 to Indonesia. They were grounded in 1977 for lack of spares.…

well, OK I concede the point. Holbrooke stopped the killings in Bosnia. I hope you don't mind me pointing out that Melosevic was the primary cause of the…

You miss Rob, don't you? C'mon, admit it. :-D

You have to wonder. Like arguing with a bot, only less fun

It may pay to read
Good general advice

That would have been difficult. The US arms used in the invasion of East Timor were sold to Indonesia by the Ford and Nixon administrations…

And I'm not sure you actually read anything anyone posts.

I'm just grateful that Holbrooke had a better grasp of an awful situation where three nationalities and their various militias were doing all sorts of horrific things to each other…

To quote from the article that Simon believes contradicts that:

Triumph and controversy will go hand in hand into the legacy of Richard Holbrooke. That includes the…

I'm not convinced you know what that word means

An encouraging report about the quality of New Zealand aid spending.

That was the one, thanks. Donating tractors when what was required was the ability to locally manufacture spare parts for water pumps...

As for East Timor, if you go to the original document Holbrooke reportedly informed Suharto of Jimmy Carter's,…

The quote above came from The Nation, Neil – a 155 year old respected organ of the centre-left most closely affiliated with those radicals The Democratic Party. It's hardly an extreme…

For that matter you could say that Bush stopped Saddam. So long as you're quite happy to look at recent history through a straw.

The US stopped Melosevic. It's a fact. No misrepresentation .Of course there are still plenty of left-wing sites that saw and still see this as merely US imperialism. But lucky for the people of Bosnia and Kosovo Clinton took no…

Actually Neil it's a part of a fact somewhat misrepresented:

Triumph and controversy will go hand in hand into the legacy of Richard Holbrooke. That includes the story of Bosnia and the Dayton peace accord, for which he is being hailed…

Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and “secret speech,” irony…

Rather embarrasingly, it took me a couple of seconds to realise 'Eng' did not stand for 'Engineering' (well, you were talking about robots....).

I was about to ask you for some Engineering-Literature recommendations.

I am speechless.

NB: Kiwiblog link — contents may contain random bitterness.

litt-er-ick (Chiefly British) literick
/ˈlɪtərɪk/
-noun (c)

a fallacious attribution of historical origin. The reduction of a complex set of interacting historical/ cultural phenomena to a singular simplified common genesis.

>:/

"to booze and rub shoulders" never looks all that good on the application.

some sort of diploma in journalism would work, as would "write a book of significance to everyone, fuck yeah twatcocks"

who ever thought “bells + gunpowder = cannon”? not the chinese.

Nice litterick.

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon|The earliest known cannon, though not driven by gunpowder, was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria, in the 3rd century BC....

...Like firearms, cannon are a descendant of the fire lance, a gunpowder-filled tube attached to the end…

Come to think of it, I was once invited to make a Fulbright funding application after I’d done some presentation at Parliament, but I never got around to thinking of a good purpose for it.

It was a useful point to make, and I've appreciated the backgrounder. I was just questioning how days later we were still focussing on the Fulbright programme…

I like that

i have a vague suspicion Rb would like to be taken on that trip.

look out for seed pods man...

It came up a lot in the last couple of days, but no reference at hand. Wikipedia suggests that he was enlisted to work under Komer (who was the brain of the PP) in a committee that operated separately from…

Oh, fine. It was my impression that people were thinking that way, I thought it…

Holbrooke was instrumental in stopping Milosevic, that's a fact.

Any reference for Holbrooke being part of the Phoenix Program?

You're reassuring me that this does actually go back in the main to something I/S wrote. It's neither how Hager presented it nor the media spun it, nor the terms in which it was discussed here. One could be excused from the…

Though I still have a not quite convinced feeling – OECD definition seems to imply ODA is on a cash basis, but I think it’d include the cost of food aid under welfare. US law…

The primary "military" objective of the Pentagon is to get more and…

Well, I/S described it as a " journo conversion program" and said the journalists had been " recruited by the US as agents of influence". That sounds fairly scandalous.

There…

wikipedia gives GNI per capita (using exchange rates) as:
US – USD47240
NZ – USD26830

I haven't confirmed that these are for the same period as…

supposedly scandalous International Visitor programme.

You know, the only person I have seen using the word "scandalous" with the International Visitor programme is you Russell.

At which point he proceeded to ensure that the US congressmen that were trying to raise issues about the occupation be silenced. He's also the Richard Holbrooke who cut his teeth in the Phoenix Program and who…

The Indonesian invasion was in 1975, Holbrooke joined Jimmy Carter's administration in 1977.

Was it something that I/S said?

T'was.

Here, I've poured you another one :)

Evil! Evil!

It was lovely to meet you.

...Reshiprocally ... hic

I find it very reassuring that Obama has such people handling foreign policy.

I find it makes me exceptionally wise and articulate.

The Fulbrights are established under the same act as the supposedly scandalous International…

that's because sometimes with weapons it's the cultural imagination that counts, not the original purpose.

who ever thought "bells + gunpowder = cannon"? not…

Who suggested that? I'm asking unrhetorically here. Was it something that I/S said? Because all of a sudden Russell started trotting out names of past Fulbrights and I kind…

Word, Mr Kracklite.

That can't be, because with Obama in charge things have changed and we don't need WikiLeaks and we'll have peace in our time.

nice to see the rule of law working in some countries though.

although, The Guardian has him still in the slammer after the Swedes appealled.

And the Guardian has crashed I guess from the live blog hits.

If this is just a hearing, one wonders if the US have any idea what a trial would be like.

Perhaps this one? Which can be summed up as: "Achieve highly when they try, but Could Try…

The really nice guys – a steam of horrendous civil rights abuses including the mass rape -murder of Chinese-Indonesian women in 1998 and all sorts of nasty shit in West Papua as I type. They have immunity from civil law in Indonesia and are almost a state within a…

Lie Down with dogs, get up with fleas.

More seriously, I don’t find that merely amusing, I find it sinister. Moral fundamentalism allows no compromise, no grappling with the issues of the real world where we are all compromised. If all judgments…

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas

Kevin Bacon must be the nexus of all evil on earth.

During the Keating era Australia provided a huge amount of…

a huge part of the US aid budget actually goes Israel and Egypt (around 20% I think) and is political in nature. It still gets included.

@islander:
was not quite a lot "aid" given…

I don't think that's it works – by definition foreign aid has to go overseas…

Wrong kind of 'aid'( insofar as I'm concerned) but seems to be a classic example of self-interested help

And, are we factoring in individual Kiwis aid-donations, or…

None of which defends our own record, especially when put next to our neighbour. We are a…

Oh, and while I'm not defending our rate, possibly better per capita spent in recipient countries, as I believe a fair amount of US aid money is given to US corn farmers and the like?

I believe the phrase American imperialism was coined back then, yes. I still have the literature.

Nah, the term American Imperialism was coined long, long ago and came into popular usage during the aftermath of the Spanish American War and paved the way to Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance or "the…

It didn't use to be like that. We used to spend a lot of money, for instance, in Somalia. With much the same effects of the money spent by the US south of their borders. So you could say it's probably a good thing that we give less…

PS: So far as I can tell, two wealthy countries with per-capita aid spending below that of the US are New Zealand and Italy. Shame, bro.

Agreed. Especially considering the commitments made to 0.7% GDP by rich countries.

I did see an article recently suggesting that by one measure NZ…

Yep, I'm aware of the history, but the sum of US relief aid since January's earthquake in Haiti — which I think we'll agree…

Very true. That's why I noted the two big funds, which do seem to be "clean"…

I don't think that was what I said, which was that I have trouble thinking of one positive that has come US Foreign Policy in the past 15 years. As a general statement I think that is true. It's…

VUW advises that the goatskin parchment they print the certificates on is guaranteed to last 500 years, so yes, nutritious.

I'm told they also boil up quite well and can sustain an impecunious post-grad for weeks.

i think the doctor would term that a house call.

congrats Gio.

that bit of paper is really good for covering the cracks in the plaster you can't afford to mend...

A cynic might comment that they need to continue subsidising their farmers...

I was going to make a similar point. During one recent food shortage in Africa one country had a surplus harvest. The request to the WFO was to fund one to buy maize from the other. The USA…

A cynic might comment that they need to continue subsidising their farmers...

In any event, from Wikipedia:

In July 2009, the World Food Programme reported that it has…

US in the 09 data ranks 1 for net donations (USD28665m), rather less well for donations/GNI (0.2%)

NZ for comparison is poor on both, with USD313m and 0.29%

but... they're the world's biggest economy. in 2009 they spend almost five times as much – $US16b* – subsidizing food production. money that prevents farmers like ours sending…

No argument there. The top 5 per capita contributors to the WFP are (or were): Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden.

But the fact that nearly half of the entire budget…

man is a machine.

Nice! I'm not remotely cynical about graduations, think they're damn fine events and think anyone who's got the talent and discipline to complete…

What we have these days is far more opportunity to identify and push back against wrongness, WikiLeaks is part of that…

Again, no other states approach this level of commitment.

Say what? In terms of %tage of GDP other states make far bigger contributions. You should know that Russell.

accepted. also goes a long way to explaining the scholarship programs IMHO – buying positive press.

worked for me, if i'd not been an exchange student there i'd probably freaking hate the place.

This is so laughably far from the real-world effects of the Fulbright programme – both in terms of participants' views and careers – that I'm going stick with amusement.

And this is why I disagree with I/S. I'm not a recent or close student of US foreign policy but generally…

Oh, sure. But…

i get that USA does a lot of good things.

The USA. It’s no Luxembourg.

i think Joe is lucky he didn't try AI him. damn cow-cockies.

@RB. i get that USA does a lot of good things. the trouble is the perception they like to sell of themselves – the one where they could all be crew off USS…

That, plus he could be pretty sure you weren't going to fight back.

Could have been a test.