Posts by Rich of Observationz
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One of the paradoxes of such classified equipment is that on the one hand it offers an advantage, but on the other, if one is shot down, the wreckage can be analysed by an enemy, so there is often reluctance to deploy the very best, gee-whizz hardware.
You can bet that the ISI has sold photos and the like to the Russians and Chinese and will be auctioning the actual wreckage to the highest bidder.
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This includes the mainstream press, and I'm a little surprised that it includes you.
I regard it as encouraging that the soft left are quite *so* spooked by Hone. That suggests that the Mana Party has a bit of momentum and might get somewhere at the election.
(You don't get this sort of vilification directed at Penny Bright or Grant Morgan, for instance).
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You are aware that Hone Harawira was misquoted.
What he actually said was that:
“they [bin laden's family] mourn for a man who fought for the rights, the land and the freedom of his people”.
That got distorted from being Bin Laden's family's view into being Hone's own view. I'd just comment that Hone was possibly not aware that Bin Laden was a Saudi, not Afghan or Iraqi and that his family (George Bush's business partners) might have found him a bit of an embarrassment.
many of the innocents who died in Iraq in the wake of the US invasion were the victims of al Qaeda’s hideous Iraqi franchise
Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. Prior to his falling out with the US, his regime was aggressively secular. While it was bad news to oppose him (for religious or any other reason), women could walk unveiled and be treated as equals and non-Islamic majorities were tolerated.
When the US and its allies/vassals started attacking Iraq, Saddam seized on Islam as a way of building a coalition against them. Iraqis not aligned with Saddam also were drawn to militant Islam as an ideology that opposed the people that had invaded their country. Hence "Al Quida in Iraq" sprung up as a suitably scary moniker.
Had the US not invaded, such an organisation would never have existed.
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So, if you were an American imperialist, you could view killing 100,000+ brown people in revenge for 4,000 USians as reasonable, because USians have higher status (in your view) than Iraqis and Afghans.
Alternatively, as Osama, you could regard making the US spend over a trillion dollars in return for a few thousand bucks worth of flying lessons and a couple of dollars for boxcutters as being an equally balanced transaction. And all the dead people went to paradise, or not, depending on their worthiness.
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
That sounds very reasonable. The USB recording turntables I have seen have been the low-end Numark with a phono-preamp / USB card inside.
Are you using an old amp - I didn't think modern amps had phono ins? Or have you got a DJ-oriented soundcard like the Native Instruments Audio 8. They have built in phono ins?
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So, the "hot intel" from the computers is that they had an "asipration" to attack American trains.
No details as to which trains, how they were going to make them derail (hey, if it was NZ they were hatin on there'd be an easy way. Just wait for a spot of rain, and they'll be off the line of their own accord) or who was going to do the deed.
Just an "aspiration". A bit like how many third-formers have an "aspiration" to make a bomb and blow up Miss Smith's car.
I wait for further hot bits of "intel" with bated breath.
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I think you'll find that such a transaction tax was first suggested in 1972 by James Tobin.
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If the US were to get into a terrible conflict with Zoroastrians, would they need to equip their warships for sky burial? Complete with onboard vultures?
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No more than with existing census data. One just has to ensure that the material is kept confidential (something I know Stats are extremely diligent at) and only released in aggregated, non-identifiable form.
Departure and arrival records are already shared with many agencies, and births and deaths are a matter of public record, anyway.
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UTU
I saw that and thought it was a cleverly subversive sub. To the management at the Dom Post, revenge killing is clearly a Good Thing, so they were happy to run it. For at least some of their readers (and I suspect, for the headline writer) it's not.