Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to Paul Webber,
Under MMP you need a coalition partner because no party gets more than 50% of the party vote
Not neccesarily.
National got 58/122 MPs at the last election and ACT 5. If ACT had disbanded and all their voters switched to National (as one might expect), then National would have got 63 MPs and had an overall majority of one.
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Hard News: Going Social, in reply to Kracklite,
Spot on the money.
Although, it isn't that different a form of life - it's still carbon chemistry, but with As replacing P.
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C'mon, I'm sure the man has enough musical taste to not tolerate the Hauraki playlist of the more tedious MOR from the 50's, 60's and 70's.
(Or can one do radio announcing without listening to the music, or whilst listening to entirely different music? Can't see why not, technically).
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The Saudi thing is one of the more interesting matters to arise. It's put a British cabinet minister (Aitken) in jail in the past, and led to the UK Attorney General stopping legal proceedings that would probably have put numerous captains of industry inside.
Basically, in return for selling weapons to Saudi, the regime (who are Best Friends with the royals and the UK/US establishment) expect multi-billion dollar kickbacks. Tthese kickbacks get shared with middlemen, such as Adnan Khashoggi and his sidekick Mark Thatcher.
In order to fund this corruption, the price of the weaponry gets inflated, which also results in the UK taxpayer (and anyone else dumb enough to buy their kit, like NZ) paying a sizeable chunk of the bribe.
One can speculate how high the money trail goes, but most of the last few UK Prime Ministers entered politics as comfortably wealthy lawyers and the like, were paid a salary in the low GBP100k range, and have somehow become vastly wealthy in retirement.
Go figure.
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Random Play: Alt.Republic: The rolling mall, in reply to Tim Hannah,
By "mall" I meant a full on Westield or similar. If you just mean a group of shops undercover, the central city has several malls.
Also, I don't regard J-Ville as Wellington. I know it has the same council (and it's the J-Villites and Tawans who elect all the crap councillors and got peeved when Kerry got the boot), but it's really a separate nearby town.
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I'm very glad that Wellington has no mall. the nearest ones being in fringe burbs like lower Hutt.
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s/Iraq/Iran
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If we were considering a handful of emails where the authenticity was disputed, then Assange's credibility might be an issue.
But there are a metric fuckkilotonne of messages, the authenticity of which has *not* been denied.
So are we meant to now just forget that we know that the Saudis want to attack Iraq, China is on the verge of cutting North Korea loose or that Pakistan is viewed by the US as a failed state?
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I doubt that Al Q actually produces much of a volume of documentation. Then again, as a largely imaginary body, maybe they have caves full of imaginary analysts cranking out reports. Might explain the lack of actual terrorism.
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Value Added Tax? Aka GST?
Imposing such a tax is a requirement to join the EU, which Turkey has been trying to do for years.