Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I do still wonder how Farrar can face getting up in the morning and writing a blog post in the knowledge that it will be another opportunity for those people to air their inane and abhorrent views.
You know him, but:
I'd suggest that the mainstream right actively encourages those views as a way of ensuring the support of the disaffected and neutralising any tendency for them to get behind radical movements of a progressive nature.
The relationship between the mainstream and fascist right wing in Europe before WW2 is quite educative - see Rothermeres, Halifax, German aristocratic military, etc. (If I can even raise that area without being told off for breaking a rule set by an American lawyer in 1995).
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Countless security experts queued up to tell me so.
Did they have Whale Oil?
So, Mr Slater, you're a right-wing gun nut with a history of mental instability....
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Southerly: Things to be Grateful For: A…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
You need a tow-car.
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Apropos of the culinary tips for emperor penguins, I had hare at the White House in Greytown a few weeks ago, and can well recommend it.
Should another penguin wash up our shores, cooking and eating it (assuming one can find a way of overcoming the described recalcitrance in being slaughtered) would seem to be a plan. It would certainly be more humane than keeping it at the Zoo as a political distraction for weeks on end.
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Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Islander,
And now, we find that the 'backpackers' left Christchurch at the first available opportunity on an Air Force 757.
Were the RNZAF offering compassionate flights to anyone wanting to get out of CHC after the quake? I don't remember that - Air NZ started doing $50 flights shortly after.
Seems to me that there must have been some sort of official interest beyond them being ordinary kids.
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Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Sacha,
Yeah, and thinking about it, the last international flights out of AKL are about 2330. You’d need to nail it to make an early evening Nelson-Auckland or whatever to catch that. It’s possible, but not the sort of logistical (or financial) effort you’d expect from an ordinary backpacker.
[ I had to rush to the UK last year and it took from Sat first thing to Monday night to sort everything out and get going ].
If one was prepared to go to Aus, there are more options. But it sounds more like a bolt for freedom than a flight home by a traumatised tourist.
I do have a theory, grounded in very little. The guys were actually, as suggested upthread, engaged in large scale smug druggling and had a seriously illegal quantity of class-As in the van. Having presumably failed to discreetly remove them, they split the country before they got tracked down. Unfortunately, certain (probably uniformed) persons with access to the red zone have unofficially removed said substances and marketed them. This information is being kept quiet, and large amounts of smoke generated to avoid embarrassment for the powers that be.
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It's only 5 hours drive to Nelson. less to Picton or Blenheim. Could get domestic flights from there.
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It does strike me that rather than having NZSIS run around doing secret investigations, this sort of thing should be properly and openly investigated by the police.
Rather goes to indicate that having a secret service is a waste of money - the only miscreants they ever seem to come up against are Israelis, and they've largely failed to catch any.
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Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Yeah, maybe they were doing something constructive. Sad if their having a criminal government impaired such good work.
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What we have here is a leak from an agent
They aren’t known as leaky people. Perhaps the Israelis have been strongly spoken to on this and were thought to have flicked it off unsatisfactorily, so level 2 is to tell the media so as to make it clear that “we” knew they were up to something and don’t approve.
Or the plod found out. They’ll leak anything, if it serves their plan, or just gets them free beer.