Open mike 11/04/2010

6 comments on “Open mike 11/04/2010 ”

• Comments are now closed

1. MikeG 1

   11 April 2010 at 12:33 pm

   There were a couple of interesting articles by Christopher Adams and Liam Dann in the Weekend Herald about NZ manufacturing jobs going overseas, but the R&D staying in NZ. Interestingly there was no mention that the current Govt policy doesn’t seem to support R&D in NZ, or how are we as a country going to grow the talent that great R&D projects require. NACT policy seems to be promoting the reverse of this.
2. Pascal's bookie 2

   11 April 2010 at 2:38 pm

   This is tragic. Just horrible.

   WARSAW — A plane carrying the Polish president and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders to the site of a Soviet massacre of Polish officers in World War II crashed in western Russia on Saturday, killing everyone on board.

   President Lech Kaczynski’s plane tried to land in a thick fog, missing the runway and snagging treetops about half a mile from the airport in Smolensk, scattering chunks of fuselage across a bare forest.

   The crash came as a stunning blow to Poland, wiping out a large portion of the country’s leadership in one fiery explosion. And in a chilling twist, it happened at the moment that Russia and Poland were beginning to come to terms with the killing of more than 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps in the same place 70 years ago….

   …Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed. They included Poland’s deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of Parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.
3. prism 3

   11 April 2010 at 3:07 pm

   Many New Zealanders will share the great sorrow of the Polish people at the news of the plane crash that has killed the Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other government officials in Russia.
   This is a particularly stunning blow because they were there to attend a memorial service at Katyn for the deaths in 1940 of thousands of Polish men who were prisoners of war under Russian control. 70 years on this site adds to its tragic past. (Many Poles fled their country and Google says that Chicago has the biggest group of Polish descent outside Poland in the world – a Polish diaspora).

   Excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry for the Katyn massacre about how near 22,000 Polish males, 8,000 of whom were army officers) were killed by the Russians. They did not admit it till 1990. They still do not classify the killings under any legal classification that will allow the perps to be tried.
   “The “Katyn massacre” refers specifically to the massacre at Katyn Forest, near the villages of Katyn and Gnezdovo (ca. 19 kilometres (12 mi) west of Smolensk, Russia), of Polish military officers in the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp.”

   “Since Poland’s conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer,[6] the Soviets were able to round up much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian[7] and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship.[8]”
4. Pascal's bookie 4

   11 April 2010 at 3:08 pm

   Moderated for ‘commun1sm’.

   Bloody Mcarthyite sysops! Help I’m being oppressed. 🙂

   [lprent: 😈 ]
5. prism 5

   11 April 2010 at 5:03 pm

   Watching an afternoon tv thing on clamping of cars in Britain. Interesting the English have let it go practically unregulated and there are cowboys going round, self-employed contractors getting &45.00 a clamp, holding motorists to ransom.
   One guy had only been in Britain four days and didn’t have the money to pay the large fee and tried to drive off with the clamp still attached, a mother was wanting to get her children to school and looked fairly hard up. If she wanted the car she had to find the money from her limited budget.
   It is a very harsh imposition to discourage all by charging such high fees, may be equality but it’s not a level playing field out there.
   It’s an example of the poverty of policy that has been allowed to grow while British Labour have been using the “middle way” that Helen Clark followed.

   NB In Scotland it is illegal to clamp cars – they consider it is tantamount to extortion!
6. lprent testing 6

   11 April 2010 at 6:26 pm

   Testing without SuperCache. Ok that appears to work.

   We’ll try that for a while.

• Comments are now closed

• Log in
• Donate
• Contribute post

• Articles RSS