Air pollution on the up?

[MikeJones]

A nation commits an act of murder and terrorism on foreign soil and that is comeuppance? You have a very odd view of the world. As for Oxfam I would think an organisation that was founded for famine-relief would have a vested interest in Global Warming given the potential for future famine resulting from a changing climate. Amnesty International is a stretch however.

Mike

[nzmarkj]

Sea Shepherd are way out of line - illegally and dangerously interfering in legal activities. I wouldn't shed a tear seeing SS boats getting their comeuppance as per Greenepeace's 'Rainbow Warrior'. After all, if you operate contrary to the law, and live by the sword...

I understand that the Rainbow Warrior was tied up at the wharf in Auckland, not breaking any law, and not intending to break any law, when the French Secret service, contrary to the law, blew it up, murdering a crew member. The French wished it to stop drawing attention to their continuing nuclear testing in the South Pacific. This instead backfired, drawing attention and condemnation of their activities, leading eventually to the cessation of the tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_o ... ow_Warrior

[bgd]

Rainbow Warrior, I remember watching a documentary about that many years ago, very funny.

- The spies posing as a honeymoon couple who couldn't stand each other - they got caught
- The navy frogman who slept with 14 women in 10 days - poor reflection on NZ women

Other details escape me now. It was a NZ production so might have been a wee biased.

[JR8]

A nation commits an act of murder and terrorism on foreign soil and that is comeuppance? You have a very odd view of the world. As for Oxfam I would think an organisation that was founded for famine-relief would have a vested interest in Global Warming given the potential for future famine resulting from a changing climate. Amnesty International is a stretch however.

You seem to think I’m condoning what they did, which I’m not. You need to consider the build-up, as it wasn’t a bunch of tree-hugging hippies simply sitting on a boat in Auckland harbour...

----
‘She then travelled to New Zealand to lead a flotilla of yachts protesting against French nuclear testing at the Moruroa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. During previous nuclear tests at Moruroa, protest ships had been boarded by French commandos after sailing into the shipping exclusion zone around the atoll. For the 1985 tests, Greenpeace intended to monitor the impact of nuclear tests and place protesters on the island to monitor the blasts. The French Government infiltrated the Auckland offices of the organisation and discovered these plans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_W ... %281955%29
----

That is what I mean by ‘living by the sword’: They illegally entered French territory and intended to do so again. And it’s unclear to me what else one might have expected, the French have a very long track record of acting above the law when ever it suits them (Examples: selling arms to Argentina during the Falklands war, destroying trucks of sheep/cows/wine etc that are passing passing through their country as they believe it competes with French producers, etc).

Oxfam certainly have vested interests, one of which is paying their staff lots of money, and morphing their goals such that they are never finally met which would mean the charity having done it’s job and closing.
Most charities do the same, which is why you rarely hear of any that close. An egregious one is the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which operates on the bequest of the family of the chocolate manufacturing Rowntree family. Their goal is eradicating poverty, but they define it in terms of ‘relative poverty’, so if the average home has a 42” plasma TV (owns their home, takes foreign holidays, has a car or two, eats out twice a week, etc) those that haven’t are deemed to live in relative poverty. Sounds mad I know, but that’s how it is. And since an element of households get wealthier year on year, then the hurdle to be out of (relative) poverty gets higher each year. Last time I read one their reports (a few years ago) they defined something nuts like 40% of UK households as living in relative poverty, hence their mission and payroll has no end. As they say, ‘Nice work if you can get it’.

[JR8]

[delete dupe posting]

[Strong Eagle]

I can't remember if I got this link here or elsewhere. Apologies in advance if this has already been seen.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/singapore-indo ... ty-1521643

[JR8]

Those photos are quite staggering. I don't think I've seen it as bad as that since I first moved to SG in the summer of '94, where for example I couldn't see the sea from an 18-20th hotel room on beach Road. [Park Royal, about 400M from the sea].

Likewise apologies in advance if I have posted this before. This was during a taxi transfer across NW Sabah in April 2010, i.e. one of the sources. They seemed to be burning off cane and palm. This moonscape went on for hours of driving, I've never seen anything like it before or since. At times the smoke was so bad the driver slowed down from the apparently usual 80MPH to 20 or even 10 and slower, as we navigated a particularly bad patch.

[ecureilx]

I can't remember if I got this link here or elsewhere. Apologies in advance if this has already been seen.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/singapore-indo ... ty-1521643

Likewise apologies in advance if I have posted this before. This was during a taxi transfer across NW Sabah in April 2010, i.e. one of the sources. They seemed to be burning off cane and palm. This moonscape went on for hours of driving, I've never seen anything like it before or since.

Burning Sugar Cane has been going on for years, in many country, as the roots of the cane are hard to remove and burning them actually nourishes the land. But to burn on such wide scale ?

BTW, SE, there is a local joke that finally Singapore is free from Malaysia, as the other end of Causeway became hidden by Haze

And I also found out that most of my Malaysian Friends who live across the causeway prefer to trust the Singapore NEA reading that their own AQI reading, as Malaysia is not measuring PMI 2.5

Back to JR8, about sensational news headlines (agreed, it is from Dailymail .. )

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nkeys.html

If you read it casually, it is like all Coconuts are plucked by Monkeys, and you gotta stop drinking coconut juice and anything that comes from Coconut.

[JR8]

Last week they'd be wall-to-wall promoting coconut water, with chapters of glowing articles. This week they're wall-to-wall telling us how we should hate ourselves for exploiting monkeys who go and harvest it.

This IS the Daily Mail, and this IS how the UK tabloid press works!

[MikeJones]

You seem to think I’m condoning what they did, which I’m not. You need to consider the build-up, as it wasn’t a bunch of tree-hugging hippies simply sitting on a boat in Auckland harbour...
....

Perhaps you need to choose your words more carefully then? Comeuppance: a punishment or fate that someone deserves.

Sounds a lot like condonation (which apparently is a word ) to me. And I'm not suggesting the RW crew were a bunch of innocents, I'm fully aware they were intending to break the law. However that still does not justify committing and act of terrorism on allied soil. The French had boarded and confiscated Greenpeace vessels before so why not do it again? As far as I can tell they were sick of looking like arseholes on TV news so decided to preempt things. Of course getting caught, then having to threaten the economic stability of NZ to get their (fairly incompetent) agents back didn't exactly make them look very good either.

Anyway back on topic, the haze, it's my first year here so can't compare to previous years however a couple of colleagues have just come back from KL and say it's even worse there at the moment.

Mike

[MikeJones]

Last week they'd be wall-to-wall promoting coconut water, with chapters of glowing articles. This week they're wall-to-wall telling us how we should hate ourselves for exploiting monkeys who go and harvest it.

This IS the Daily Mail, and this IS how the UK tabloid press works!

Ahh the Daily Hate and Fear, next week they'll be warning of an influx of immigrant monkeys employed in the chestnut picking industry I much prefer the Daily Mash http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/ though at times it can be hard to tell the difference

Mike

[JR8]

Perhaps you need to choose your words more carefully then? Comeuppance: a punishment or fate that someone deserves.

I did choose my words carefully. There are situations where you might hold a strong personal belief, but exercising it, especially vs a state, and even more so against one who seemingly writes their own international remit such as the French, puts you directly in the firing line. Consider the X-over with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden etc. And if you do such actions, then you have to accept the potential consequences.

During the Falklands war the French were supplying the Argentinians with French-made aircraft and missiles. I don't recall precisely now but it was via some back-door route like Uruguay or Paraguay. And the French had no direct interest in Argentina, or the Falklands, and were allies of ours in NATO, it was simply an opportunity for them to commercially profit. Perhaps you need to re-gauge your measure of what's *apparently* justifiable via a French perspective. Like I said, don't underestimate what the French state will do, and even more so when their direct national interests are at stake (as with the RW). Their track-record is there for all to see, and you'd have to be naive in the extreme to believe that somehow those risks wouldn't apply to you.

One of those French Excocet missiles, launched from a French Super-Etandarde fighter killed 20 of the British crew of HMS Sheffield. That was despite not detonating, and if it had it might have wiped out all 280 on board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_%28D80%29

Sounds a lot like condonation (which apparently is a word ) to me.

Sounds like common sense to me. In the same way see how you fair if you decide to go and intervene in the SGn state affairs, based upon your personal beliefs. Then in the unlikely event that they're restrained enough to let off with a warning, then plan to do it again on an even larger scale.

And I'm not suggesting the RW crew were a bunch of innocents, I'm fully aware they were intending to break the law. However that still does not justify committing and act of terrorism on allied soil. The French had boarded and confiscated Greenpeace vessels before so why not do it again? As far as I can tell they were sick of looking like arseholes on TV news so decided to preempt things. Of course getting caught, then having to threaten the economic stability of NZ to get their (fairly incompetent) agents back didn't exactly make them look very good either.

Allies.... lol. That was precisely Greenpeace's error of judgement; they presumed they could egregiously and repeatedly take the p*** out the French state and get away with it. As with the Darwin Awards, there tends to be a comeuppance as a result of extreme naivety.

And once again, to be entirely clear, I am not condoning the bombing of the RW, it's simply that I'm not in the slightest surprised that the French did it. I hope that is clear. And lastly I think it's fair to say that the French don't give a damn about what anyone thinks of their state's actions...

[JR8]

Ahh the Daily Hate and Fear, next week they'll be warning of an influx of immigrant monkeys employed in the chestnut picking industry I much prefer the Daily Mash http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/ though at times it can be hard to tell the difference

Quite. One of the Mail's nick-names is The Daily Wail, something it seems very good at

[nzmarkj]

Makes sense JR8: And its against a background of New Zealand's non-nuclear stance, which first meant kicking up a fuss when any US or UK warship turned up, in case it had nuclear weapons, and then went on to banning visits from any warship, because they wouldn't confirm or deny the absence of nuclear weapons. Western intelligence knew what was up before the attack, but didn't pass on the information to the NZ'ers, because intelligence co-operation had dried up in response to NZ's idealistic position. It was a not so gentle reminder, of sorts, to get back in line.

Reminds me of what a friend said about ex-pat life in Singapore: : "its just like a country club, so it never pays to annoy the committee members"

"Allies.... lol. That was precisely Greenpeace's error of judgement; they presumed they could egregiously and repeatedly take the p*** out the French state and get away with it. As with the Darwin Awards, there tends to be a comeuppance as a result of extreme naivety.

And once again, to be entirely clear, I am not condoning the bombing of the RW, it's simply that I'm not in the slightest surprised that the French did it. I hope that is clear. And lastly I think it's fair to say that the French don't give a damn about what anyone thinks of their state's actions..."

[x9200]

Ahh the Daily Hate and Fear, next week they'll be warning of an influx of immigrant monkeys employed in the chestnut picking industry I much prefer the Daily Mash http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/ though at times it can be hard to tell the difference

Quite. One of the Mail's nick-names is The Daily Wail, something it seems very good at

I like the comments below the articles. Do they engineer that too?