Posts by Rich Lock
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Tobacco smuggling in Europe is a big problem.
Google 'tobacco smuggling in the UK'. Here's a couple of examples from the results:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1169049.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/southeast/series6/smugglers.shtml
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Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to Russell Brown,
I really wish some people would embrace that, rather than just carping.
I like the revamped Wynyard Quarter. I'm looking forward to a lot of the events down on Queen's Wharf.
There. You made me say it. You realise I'll shrivel up like a salted slug now, right? Happy now?
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Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to BenWilson,
If a child fell in, what the hell would I do?
Down at the end nearest the two cement towers, there are lots of shiny shiny interesting things really close to the edge of the wharf. I had a look over the edge, and there's around a 6-7m drop, into water that at that point looks to be about 30cm deep, over a concrete slab.
I decided at that point that our toddler was better off back at the playground.
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Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to Andre Alessi,
Kea back in service this morning, although on present form year-to-date, it may not last the full six weeks of RWC before breaking down and slowly drifting without power towards Rangitoto with a full complement of O/S VIP's on board.
I've been thinking of starting some sort of illegal betting syndicate in Devonport based on the Kea being in or out of service. I'd clean up, even without a few dodgy backhanders to the Fuller's mechanics.
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Ozborne apparently once exploded a goat onstage
Are you sure it wasn't that he bit the head off a bat? Which actually happened and is well documented.
And it's O-s-b-o-u-r-n-e :)
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I've thought about this a bit more, and I think it's not really about the plan, the plan B or the lack thereof.
You're correct that they called for an extraction (and there was a problem with that which meant they were stuck). OK, shit happens. They got compromised and had bad comms, and that's just bad luck, arguably not necessarily something that they could have been reasonably expected to plan for. But they're soldiers and had a job to do. Having to make a collective decision on whether to kill a civilian in cold blood was just an unfortunate side-effect of getting on with the job.
However, the debate is framed in a way such that the underlying assumption is that they had a duty/right to be there in the first place, doing their super-secret soldier stuff.
Perhaps a better question to ask is whether they should have been there at all, and thus put in position where that decision had to be made. And then perhaps we could go on to ask about the involvement of the NZ SAS, and why they are there. Game time for the troops? Supporting our US allies as they achieve....well, what exactly is it that they've achieved over the last 10 years?
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Matthew Poole,
What has changed, in the intervening 10 years, that would've given them a better way out? A reduction in morality so that the qualms about killing someone who's innocently going about their daily business are dispatched with? A marvellous advance in technology so that they can't be discovered? Those are really the only two ways that wandering goatherds could cease to be a problem.
To be honest, I don't know. However, there is an implication in the story which suggests that they didn't have a plan B. An integral part of pre-mission planning is going through as many 'what ifs' as they can think of. 'What if we're compromised by non-combatant locals' should, I would have thought, been quite high up the list. It appears that it wasn't.
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Yes, one might assume that ten years later they might have found an effective way of dealing with being found by goatherders. But apparently not.
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If anyone is interested, there is a 'keep MMP' campaign.
http://www.campaignformmp.org.nz/
They are not (yet) all that active, but hopefully that'll ramp up. Apparently there's some sporting event on or something.
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to jb,
They have extraction strategies, being compromised by locals or targets is factored into the operational risk analysis.
Well, one would hope so. But it rather frequently doesn't seem to work that way, and that does beg an obvious question.