Defence

Excess water and salt on deck can lead to slipping hazards as well as accelerated rusting of the deck and equipment affixed to it. Ordinary seamen often bear the brunt of the swabbing duties, and many look forward to earning their able seaman’s ticket and being done with swabbing.  — Wikipedia

via The Brigade

Labour has announced that they would bring back the SAS sooner if they became the government, inside 90 days:

Labour would bring New Zealand’s SAS soldiers home from Afghanistan within 90 days of assuming office.

The move was announced today as part of the party’s defence policy.

It was originally embargoed to 7pm but was released early after the embargo was broken.

Defence spokesman Iain Lees-Galloway said Labour would bring the current rotation home within a month and a half and would not send another group.

The Provincial Reconstruction Team would remain in Bamiyan province until 2014.

” We should not be putting the SAS in the middle of a civil war between a corrupt government and a brutal, fundamentalist opposition, where allegiances are constantly shifting and accountability hard to establish,” he said.

Uhmmm…

Nov 26 + 90 days = Feb 24 if you calculate strictly by days. If you use 3 months then 26 February.

The SAS are due home in March.

So Labour are promising to bring home the SAS a whole one week early! Whoopee that’ll win more votes.

Yet another stealing underpants strategy.

300 military personnel are to lose their jobs according to Stuff:

More than three hundred military personnel have been told this morning that they have lost their jobs.

They include 81 officers and 227 personnel from other ranks.

The biggest impact is in Wellington where 108 jobs are to go, with 70 job losses at Trentham and 38 in Wellington.

Other bases to be hit are Waiouru (28), Devonport (45) Linton (20), Ohakea (21),Whenuapai (28) and Burnham (28).

Many of the people affected are long serving personnel. There are 110 warrant offices, 83 sergeants and senior sergeants and 61 majors or those holding equivalent ranks in the navy or air force.

Fourteen Lieutenant Colonels will also lose their military ranks.

» Rank and location of affected staff

The decision affects less than 5 per cent of total military personnel and the Defence Force said that many of those who have lost their jobs were encouraged to apply for civilian roles.

The tipline has been running hot for months about Murray McCully’s extensive use of the 757. I’m reliably told that if the finest of Blue Cheeses aren’t on the menu much yelling and screaming ensues.

A few of interesting bits of gossip have come in over the Tip Line.

Clark on the Bludge in New York

It seems that Helen Clark was on the bludge recently in New York. Turns out that despite a salary of over $500,000 USD there is no accommodation supplement and she had to find her own accomodation.

Yes it is hard to believe but this veteran trougher from the public purse, despite a lifetime of troughing and owning a multi-million dollar property portfolio herself was trying to score free accommodation in New York by requesting accommodation in the UN Ambassador’s house until she found one.

Her request was politely declined.

Pork Chop and Gilda K troughing it up at Yum Char…plus the cat fight amongst the witnesses

The other story involves one of the biggest Pigs in Auckland. Pork Chop and Gilda K were seen troughing up large, and I mean large at Grand Harbour, one of the best Yum Char’s in Auckland. The two of them looked positively miserable. I wonder who the nasty person was who sent BBQ Pork Buns, Roast Pork and BBQ Pork to the table?

Perhaps Pork Chop as seeking solace after the down-low bust-up of the relationship between the Chop’s and their star witnesses in the Saunders/Chop case. Firstly the word is that a bit too much snooping went on when the Chops were looking at one of the witnesses laptop for the emails. The other interesting thing is Mrs Chop’s lawyer seems to have ditched the case leaving Drew without representation.

Ohhh…I wonder why that happened. Perhaps it is the same old problem that Mrs Chop always has…the little issue of paying ones bill.

Shayne and Stephen up a tree….

This is really interesting considering the ongoing Employment Dispute between HoS and StePhen Cook.

StePhen Cook who has sued for unfair dismissal after apparently being accused of selling class A’s in the bogs at HOS is having a good whack at Shayne Currie. His affidavit against Shayne apparently contained sexual harassment claims (obviously not towards Pork Chop – we know Shayne is not that desperate).

Eye Spy

Is it true that Jonathan Marshall to be the new About Town guy? Could this be the end of Pork Chop, after lying about being offered the job, as Marshall is way nasty, hard working and gay so knows all the goss. He also doesn’t eat as much so will be welcome at more events than the woman with the ever expanding arse.

Labour’s polling in Mt Albert isn’t giving David Shearer any sense of comfort.

Despite being parachuted in by Phil Goff just two months ago to compete for the Labour nomination for Mt Albert, Shearer’s wife and children remain in Amman, where Shearer was based as the UN coordinator for Iraq.

Shearer has not yet resigned from his UN post, but remains on leave to contest the election. He’s retained his own golden parachute back to Jordan in the event that Melissa Lee pulls of an upset win in Mount Albert.

The UN website still has Shearer listed as the Deputy Special Representative.

My information suggests he hasn’t resigned his post. He has said he wants to bring his family back to New Zealand. He won’t do that unless he gets a job as an MP.

Has David Shearer lied to the media and the people of Mt Albert when he said he had resigned his position?

The Whaleoil tipline is running hot from informed folk in Wellington telling me that Judith Tizard will shortly announce that she too is off to a cushy job at the UN?

Unwanted in New Zealand and Auckland Central it looks like she may have scored the ultimate in unaccountable jobs.

If anyone can enlighten me further I would appreciate it.

From Wikipedia

1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday.

• Jim Bolger was Prime Minister and National the Government
• January 1 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt replaces Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru as United Nations Secretary-General.
• January 1 – George H. W. Bush becomes the first U.S. President to address the Australian Parliament.
• January 8 – George H. W. Bush is televised falling violently ill at a state dinner in Japan, vomiting into the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa and fainting.
• January 22 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Beit Lid massacre – In central Israel, near Netanya, two Arab suicide bombers from the Gaza Strip kill 19
• February 10 – In Indianapolis, Indiana, boxer Mike Tyson is convicted of raping Desiree Washington.
• February 18 – Iraq disarmament crisis: The Executive Chairman of UNSCOM details Iraq’s refusal to abide by UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
• March 18 – Windows 3.1 is released by Microsoft.
• April 2 – In New York, Mafia boss John Gotti is convicted of the murder of mob boss Paul Castellano and of racketeering, and is later sentenced to life in prison.
• April 9 – United Kingdom general election, 1992: the Conservative Party, led by John Major, is re-elected.
• April 20 – The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, held at Wembley Stadium, is televised live to over 1 billion people and raises millions of dollars for AIDS research.
• April 29 – In Simi Valley, California, a jury acquits four LAPD police officers accused of excessive force in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King, causing the 1992 Los Angeles riots and leading to 53 deaths and $1 billion in damage.
• May 9 – Cameron Slater married Juana Atkins in Auckland, New Zealand
• May 13 – Falun Gong is introduced by Li Hongzhi in China.
• May 19 – In San Francisco, U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle gives his famous Murphy Brown speech.
• May 25 – Jay Leno becomes the new host of NBC’s Tonight Show, following the retirement of Johnny Carson.
• May 25 – In Australia, Lindy Chamberlain receives compensation for wrongful conviction on murder charges.
• June 1 – Venezuelan revolutionary Carlos (the Jackal) is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• June 15 – During a spelling bee at a Trenton, New Jersey elementary school, U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle erroneously corrects a student’s spelling of the word potato, indicating it should have an e at the end.
• June 22 – Two skeletons excavated in Yekaterinburg are identified as Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Tsarina Alexandra.
• June 23 – Mafia boss John Gotti is sentenced to life in prison, after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering on April 2.
• July 6–29 – Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq refuses a U.N. inspection team access to the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. UNSCOM claims that it has reliable information that the site contains archives related to illegal weapons activities. U.N. Inspectors stage a 17-day “sit-in” outside of the building, but leave when their safety is threatened by Iraqi soldiers.
• July 10 – In Miami, Florida, former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega is sentenced to 40 years in prison for drug and racketeering violations.
• July 13 – Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister of Israel.
• October 3 – After performing a song protesting alleged child abuse by the Catholic Church, Sinéad O’Connor rips up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, causing huge controversy, leading the switchboards at NBC to ring off the hook.
• October 31 – Pope John Paul II issues an apology, and lifts the edict of the Inquisition against Galileo Galilei.
• November 3 – U.S. presidential election, 1992: Bill Clinton defeats incumbent U.S. President George H. W. Bush and businessman H. Ross Perot.
• November 11 – The Church of England votes to allow women to become priests.
• November 20 – In England, a fire breaks out in Windsor Castle, causing over £50 million worth of damage.
• November 24 – Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom describes this year as an Annus Horribilis (horrible year), due to various scandals damaging the image of the Royal Family, as well as the Windsor Castle fire.

Also from Wikipedia

17 (seventeen) is the natural number following 16 and preceding 18. It is prime.

In mathematics

Seventeen is the 7th prime number. The next prime is nineteen, with which it forms a twin prime. 17 is the sum of the first four primes. 17 is the sixth Mersenne prime exponent, yielding 131071. 17 is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1.

17 is the third Fermat prime, as it is of the form , and it is also a Proth prime. Since 17 is a Fermat prime, heptadecagons can be drawn with compass and ruler. This was proven by Carl Friedrich Gauss.^[1] Another consequence of 17 being a Fermat prime is that it is not a Higgs prime for squares or cubes.

17 is the only positive Genocchi number that is prime, the only negative one being -3. It is also the third Stern prime.

As 17 is the least prime factor of the first twelve terms of the Euclid-Mullin sequence, it is the thirteenth term.

Seventeen is the aliquot sum of two numbers, the odd discrete biprimes 39 and 55 is the base of the 17-aliquot tree.

There are exactly seventeen two-dimensional space (plane symmetry) groups. These are sometimes called wallpaper groups, as they represent the seventeen possible symmetry types that can be used for wallpaper.

Like 41, the number 17 is a prime that yields primes in the polynomial n² + n + p, for all positive n < p – 1.

Consider a sequence of real numbers between 0 and 1 such that the first two lie in different halves of this interval, the first three in different thirds, and so forth. The maximum possible length of such a sequence is 17 (Berlekamp & Graham, 1970, example 63).

Either 16 or 18 unit squares can be formed into rectangles with perimeter equal to the area; and there are no other natural numbers with this property. The Platonists regarded this as a sign of their peculiar propriety; and Plutarch notes it when writing that the Pythagoreans “utterly abominate” 17, which “bars them off from each other and disjoins them”.^[2]

17 is the tenth Perrin number, preceded in the sequence by 7, 10, 12.

In base 9, the smallest prime with a composite sum of digits is 17.

17 is known as the Feller number, after the famous mathematician William Feller who taught at Princeton University for many years. Feller would say, when discussing an unsolved mathematical problem, that if it could be proved for the case n = 17 then it could be proved for all positive integers n. He would also say in lectures, “Let’s try this for an arbitrary value of n, say n=17.”

Similar to Feller, Prof. Vadim Khayms of Stanford University is also known to use 17 as an arbitrary value during lectures. His Computational Mathematics for Engineers course includes 17 lectures.

17 is the least random number^[3], according to the Hackers’ Jargon File. There is a proven theorem that 17 is the value most likely to be picked as a “random” number when such is needed in journalism which is derived from the Feller number.^[4]

It is a repunit prime in hexadecimal (11).

It is believed that the minimum possible number of givens for a sudoku puzzle with a unique solution is 17, but this has yet to be proven.

There are 17 orthogonal curvilinear coordinate systems (to within a conformal symmetry) in which the 3-variable Laplace equation can be solved using the separation of variables technique.

17 is the first number that can be written as the sum of a positive cube and a positive square in two different ways; that is, the smallest n such that x³ + y² = n has two different solutions for x and y positive integers. The next such number is 65.

In Science

• The atomic number of chlorine.
• The Brodmann area defining the primary visual processing area of mammallian brains.
• Group 17 of the periodic table are the Halogens.

From Wikipedia

May 9 is the 129th day of the year (130th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 236 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1502 – Christopher Columbus leaves Spain for his fourth and final journey to the New World.
• 1671 – Thomas Blood, disguised as a clergyman, attempts to steal England’s Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.
• 1887 – Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show opens in London.
• 1901 – Australia opens its first parliament in Melbourne.
• 1926 – Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett claim to have flown over the North Pole (later discovery of Byrd’s diary seems to indicate that this did not happen).
• 1927 – The Australian Parliament first convenes in Canberra.
• 1936 – Italy formally annexes Ethiopia after taking the capital Addis Ababa on May 5.
• 1941 – World War II: The German submarine U-110 is captured by the Royal Navy. On board is the latest Enigma cryptography machine which Allied cryptographers later use to break coded German messages.
• 1942 – World War II: Belgrade becomes the first Axis-conquered city to murder or eliminate its Jewish population.
• 1942 – Holocaust: The SS murder 588 Jewish residents of the Podolian town of Zinkiv (Khmelnytska oblast, Ukraine).
• 1945 – World War II: The final German surrender to Marshal Georgy Zhukov at Berlin-Karlshorst is signed by Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff as the representative of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel as the Chief of Staff of OKW, and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg as Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine.
• 1945 – World War II: Hermann Göring is captured by the United States Army.
• 1945 – World War II: Vidkun Quisling is arrested in Norway.
• 1949 – Rainier III of Monaco becomes Prince of Monaco.
• 1974 – Watergate Scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon.

Births

• 1800 – John Brown, American abolitionist (d. 1859)
• 1874 – Howard Carter, British archaeologist (d. 1939)
• 1918 – Mike Wallace, American journalist
• 1920 – Richard Adams, English author
• 1949 – Billy Joel, American musician

Deaths

• 1789 – Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, French artillery specialist (b. 1715)
• 1977 – James Jones, American writer (b. 1921)
• 1978 – Aldo Moro, Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1916)
• 1986 – Tenzing Norgay, Nepalese sherpa and 1st sherpa to climb Mt. Everest (b. 1914)
• 2001 – James E. Myers, American songwriter (Rock Around the Clock) and producer (b. 1919)
• 2008 – Jack Gibson, Australian rugby league footballer and coach (b. 1929)

At 3pm on May 9, 1992, my soon to be wife alighted from a maroon Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III and walked down the aisle to meet me. By 3:30pm we were married and still are 17 years later.

How much longer do we have to wait for Brian Edwards to fulfill his promise made on RNZ – the Jim Mora show – late last year to quit NZ if National won the election?

Why did David Shearer wait till he got the nomination before resigning his UN position, insurance?

If Shearer isn’t carpet-bagging in Mt Albert, was he carpet-bagging in Whangarei in 2002?

Is seven votes with three from head office really democratic?

Goff’s mate flies in to grab Labour nomination – Labour is gambling on an international high flier holding on to Helen Clark’s Mt Albert seat as National’s prolonged honeymoon threatens an upset in the formerly safe seat. [Stuff Politics]

Pity the main stream media can’t get their basic facts right.

Labour intends to lean heavily on Mr Shearer’s international credentials but National has already singled him out for attention, dredging up an academic paper in which Mr Shearer suggested the UN should hire mercenaries in some war zones.

Labour claims it was the work of a National Party dirty-tricks brigade.

“I would pit David Shearer’s work on behalf of humanity, putting his life at risk, winning a medal for saving refugee kids, against [Prime Minister] John Key and any one of National’s dirty-tricks brigade,” Mr Goff said.

Right let’s get some ground rules operating for this by-election. Anyone not crediting the true source of stories will only get the most low budget cocktails in the blogmobile with the top shelf reserved for journalists that acknowledge sources properly. Michael Field and Tracy Watkins are now on the low budget plan.

Goff also misses the point, it can hardly be dirty tricks when a) it is all true and b) Mr Shearer stands by his comments.

Of course never mind that National had nothing to do with it in the first place.

While doing a bit of research on Phil Goff’s chosen candidate for Mt Albert we came across some interesting articles written by the former student and UN worker.

I must say that previously I was against this carpet bagger but having read his articles (more to come btw) I have so say that I endorse David Shearer for Mt Albert, but with one proviso, he stands for ACT and not Labour.

I think that perhaps this is Phil Goff’s master plan to dramatically move Labour to the right and David Shearer is the new Sir Roger Douglas called in personally to save Labour from the clutches of socialism. I think Goff’s strategy is brilliant and really stamps his mark on the party.

Anyway back to David Shearer. Anyone who advocates, rather strongly for the privatisation of the military is someone that should be moved into parliament with great alacrity. Move over Heather Roy this guy has nothing on you and certainly makes all the claims of a secret agenda for privatisation by National pale into insignificance.

Some of his pearls of wisdom;

The principal obstacle to regulating private military companies has been the tendency to brand them as “mercenaries” of the kind witnessed in Africa 30 years ago,rather than to recognize them as multinational entrepreneurs eager to solidify their legitimacy

Out-fucking standing. I’m right behind him. Fighting should be left to the professionals and who better than professional for-hire soldiers. I think Shearer must have been channeling Eben Barlow. But wait there’s more as the ad goes;

Consequently, regulation can be best achieved through constructive engagement.

Brilliant, a freemarket Private Military Company environment. Could it be he is suggesting that?

The prospect that private military companies might gain some degree of legitimacy within the international community begs the question as to whether these firms could take on UN peacekeeping functions and improve on UN effort.

He is, he’s my man for the job. I wonder what the former MP for Mt Albert and now the new UNDP Administator thinks about her possible replacement suggesting that UN peace keeping forces should be replaced by Executive Outcomes and Sandline. Would someone pop onto a plane and ask the former super model.

There is no denying that they are cheaper than UN operations. EO cost Sierra Leone’s governmen$t35 million for the 22 months it was there, versus a planned UN operation budgeted at $47 million for eight months.

Saving money by outsourcing, this guy is music to my ears. I could almost conceive voting Labour.

Military companies may in fact offer new possibilities for building peace that, while not universal in applicability, can hasten the end to a war and limit loss of life. Moreover there is no evidence that private-sector intervention will erode the state.

Despite the commercial motives of military companies, their interventions, if anything, have strengthened the ability of governments to control their territory.

One thing bothers me though. The UN currently uses Fijian peacekeepers, could perhaps Commodore Bainimarama get around the planned embargo by forming Fiji Peacekeeper Incorporated?