Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to James Bremner,
. . . tinfoil hat brigade.
Being, in your case, anyone who you or those you currently parrot don't happen to like. Unless they're female, when they're the hairy armpit brigade. Bet that really cracked you up the first time you heard it.
Say "Obambi", James, you know you want to.
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I don't know how "client state" is defined in the sense that it's been raised here, or even whether it's somehow assumed to be a satisfactory situation when a nominally sovereign state orders its affairs because of some economic or political dependency.
What I do know is that the currently Arizona-based Freeport-McMoRan owns the vast majority share of Grasberg, the world's most profitable mine, in Indonesia's troubled Papua province. Because of the disputed nature of Indonesia's claim to that part of the world, Freeport relies on its close ties with the Indonesian military to ensure its operations. That's been the case since the 1960s, and despite the ongoing human rights abuses and ecological damage, no US administration has ever brought any serious economic leverage to bear on the Indonesian Government to alleviate the situation.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
. . . Indonesia was not a client state that the US could tell what to do.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Holbrooke was instrumental in stopping Milosevic, that’s a fact.
Talk about breaking as many eggs as possible in order to make a pathetically tiny omelette.
The “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was just the excuse that the anti-reform elements in the Chinese Communist Party and PLA needed. -
. . . with Obama in charge things have changed and we don’t need WikiLeaks and we’ll have peace in our time.
Not even kids' bedtime stories are safe from that awful Mr Assange. What a horrid, horrid man.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Simon Grigg,
. . . my dad tells that they used to fly through Jakarta on the way north to Singapore and it was de-facto ignored that our Canberra bombers were dropping bombs on their guys in Borneo.
Fascinating, thanks for that.
During the Keating era Australia provided a huge amount of assistance to the Indonesian military. When the US Congess cancelled the Pentagon’s training programs after the 1991 Dili massacre this was stepped up, and included officer training of and joint exercises with Kopassus, the special forces commanded by Suharto’s son-in-law.
New Zealand operated a Mutual Assistance Program with Indonesia from 1973 until 1999. At its height around 1000 Indonesian military personnel were supposed to have visited NZ for training each year. At the time of the 1975 invasion of East Timor there were six NZ army officers in Indonesia conducting a small arms training course.
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Hard News: The next creative industry?, in reply to Neil Graham,
Thanks for those Neil, Conflux looks very nice.
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Hard News: The next creative industry?, in reply to Nick Shand,
“The Academy thought we cheated by using computers”
O the irony. The sheer mind-numbing hand-made frame-by-frame drudgery that underlay Tron Mk.1’s visual effects wouldn’t have been possible without the many poorly-paid fingers of the Taiwanese studio that gave the world the Care Bears.
It was an era where “computer graphics” were hyped as being far more advanced than they really were by employing a horribly labour-intensive old-school fakery. By the mid-90s technology had caught up, and the kind of sweatshoppery that involved such horrors as nitpickingly hand-painted mattes gave way to the brave new world of digital fx serfdom.
Have fun kids.
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Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to nzlemming,
. . . more or less “cuntocks” . . .
Cunthooks = literally, fingers.
Chafugginlooginat cunnox?
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Hilary Stace,
A minor threadjack to report that Giovanni, in his scarlet and black doctoral robes, cut a dashing figure in the graduates' parade down Lambton Quay just now.