You have to admire Phil Goff in para­chut­ing David Shearer into Mt Albert. In Shearer he has a can­di­date that can appeal to both sides of the polit­i­cal spec­trum. By all accounts he is a nice guy, well liked and has an impres­sive career of pub­lic minded ser­vice, par­tic­u­larly of late at teh UN in Iraq.

Shearer cer­tainly does appeal to both sides. Clear­lyhe is the favourite for Mt Albert hav­ing the defacto endorse­ment of the party machine from Welling­ton. But also impor­tantly he has crossed the cen­tre line and appealed to right wingers such as myself, David Far­rar and now Matthew Hooton.

Matthew Hooton has writ­ten a superb arti­cle in the NBR out­lin­ing just exactly why David Shearer is the per­fect can­di­date for Labour. In fact with David Shearer in place the by-election becomes a two horse race between tweo very strong con­tenders. David Shearer and Ruseel Nor­man. National’s can­di­date whomever it is will fall well down the rank­ings behind those two, down with the other minor parties.

Hooton writes about Shearer;

Labour has no choice but to select Mr Shearer as its can­di­date this Sun­day, with any other deci­sion rep­re­sent­ing a pub­lic humil­i­a­tion of Mr Goff by his own party. Mr Shearer should then win the seat convincingly.

His selec­tion will mean Labour will never again be able to cry “pri­vati­sa­tion” when con­testa­bil­ity of ser­vice deliv­ery is sug­gested, and will open the pos­si­bil­ity of a more sen­si­ble debate about the cur­rent struc­ture of the SOE port­fo­lio. New Zealan­ders can only gain, both as con­sumers of pub­lic ser­vices and investors in state assets.

This is pre­cisely why Labour and Phil Goff must select David Shearer, to move Labour across the cen­tre line. It could be that David Shearer is labour’s John Key and we could be look­ing at the next Labour Prime Min­is­ter. Andrew Lit­tle then faces a dilemma, back the party or go for the Clark­ist candidate.

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Just got some offi­cial pho­tos of the BlogMobile.

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National torn over Mt Albert can­di­dacy – The National Party is embroiled in a back­room power strug­gle over its Mt Albert can­di­date, with the hierarchy’s favourite, Melissa Lee, try­ing to tip out grass­roots toiler Ravi Musuku. Ms Lee is a list MP and one of National’s… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

Spam jour­nal­ism this morn­ing from Patrick Gower. The National Party isn’t torn at all over Mt Albert. Only Ravi Mususku is. He just hasn’t got it yet that this by-election is impor­tant. So impor­tant that National doesn’t want cannon-fodder fed into the attack.

What Ravi fails to under­stand is that he was cannon-fodder. party folk won’t tell him that but I am far too hon­est. When stand­ing in a safe seat against the then incum­bent Prime Min­is­ter you are only going to to get mowed down.

When a by-election comes along after the for­mer Prime Min­is­ter resigns there is a whole new set of dynam­ics. The per­son­al­ity that held the elec­torate together behind Helen Clark has gone, in a flash it turns out and hasn’t even both­ered with any speechs or oth­er­wise to mark the occai­son. She could bolt fast enough….making a mock­ery of putting Mt Albert first…..more like putting her­self first.

Ravi needs to get with the pro­gramme and fall in behind like the loyal sol­dier he is. If he plays nice the party will play nice. If he plays dumb he will get mowed down. Sim­ple really.

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Read­WriteWeb has a use­ful post on what they call Jour­nal­ism 2.0. It is a blo-jo view­point of blog­ging ver­sus jour­nal­ism with­out the whiny assed angst of the likes of Colin James or Deb­o­rah Hill-Cone.

Both of them would do well to read it and see where the world is heading.

Begone, You Self-Interested Tech Cynics

I have always been in the tech­nol­ogy busi­ness. I like writ­ing about the tech­nol­ogy busi­ness because I find it fas­ci­nat­ing and there are a lot of really smart peo­ple to talk to. But techies can spout the most self-interested baloney when it comes to con­tent. The Web 2.0 vision of user-generated con­tent is mil­lions of pas­sion­ate experts cre­at­ing con­tent that really clever algo­rithms deliver to audi­ences. The peo­ple who cre­ate those really clever algo­rithms become rich beyond the dreams of avarice while throw­ing a few crumbs to the con­tent cre­ators. Don’t try pay­ing a mort­gage with AdSense or other CPC-affiliate rev­enue deals.

To a techie, “con­tent” is just some­thing to throw in a soft­ware sys­tem. Con­tent cre­ators don’t talk about “con­tent.” They talk about their art or craft. Jour­nal­ism is a form of art, albeit closer to craft than art. To a techie, art is just con­tent. Which is more impor­tant, code or art? If you had to choose between a world with­out com­put­ers or a world with­out art, which would you choose?

But let’s not get car­ried away with this. Jour­nal­ism is still just a job.

Would Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ists Have Exposed Watergate?

Yes, they would have.

We don’t need to pro­tect jour­nal­ism with pub­lic money or grants. The greater social good will be deliv­ered by thou­sands of peo­ple on the ground report­ing what is hap­pen­ing. That mas­sive flow will be ana­lyzed and edited (“curated”) by a small num­ber of experts who are moti­vated and trained to uncover the truth.

It won’t be per­fect. But the cur­rent sys­tem isn’t per­fect either. It is fair to say, though, that scum­bags won’t rest any eas­ier. They will still be exposed.

Sac­ri­fices will be made. One can­not imag­ine for­eign bureaus sur­viv­ing in any­thing close to their cur­rent form. Instead of hav­ing a few stringers on a loose con­tract, media firms will have a stan­dard­ized deal that applies to any­one who cov­ers fast-breaking news. That way, who­ever is on the spot becomes a “just-in-time stringer.”

Is that bet­ter or worse than what we have now? It’s worse for the peo­ple work­ing today in for­eign bureaus on good salaries. But mostly, it’s just different.

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Fiji dead­line tonight – Fiji will be auto­mat­i­cally sus­pended from the Pacific Islands Forum at mid­night tonight if it doesn’t meet the con­di­tions of the dead­line set by the regional body, For­eign Min­is­ter Mur­ray McCully said yes­ter­day. The forum set May… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

Tonight at mid­night we will see just how suc­cess­ful the Pcific Forum has been fol­low­ing the diplo­matic lines of Aus­tralia and New Zealand with regard to Fiji.

I doubt that Frank Bain­i­marama will even lose a min­utes sleep tonight wor­ry­ing about being chucked out of the Pacific Forum.

Mean­while China will con­tinue to pour money into Fiji fur­ther seper­at­ing Fiji from the rest of the Pacific.

The sad thing is that this could have all been avoided with some sen­si­ble dis­cus­sion instead of lec­tur­ing and pos­tur­ing. In a few years time we will won­der just what went wrong as China extends its co-properity sphere across other Pacific Nations.

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Water chief tar­geted in smear claim – A senior Auck­land pub­lic offi­cial tipped to over­see the Government’s Super City plans is being smeared in an anony­mous doc­u­ment cir­cu­lat­ing in the city. Mark Ford, the chief exec­u­tive of Water­care Ser­vices, is believed to be the… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

There is an active smear cam­paign going on around water in Auck­land. The Her­ald reports that at least two oth­ers have received the smear doc­u­ments. I believe the smear has gone wider than that because this blog­ger was also emailed the doc­u­ments.

There is some­one out there who is in all sorts of a lather about a non-event. I think per­haps they need to put the cap back on the flagon well before sit­ting down at the com­puter and typ­ing this tosh up again.

One thing is for sure, they don’t like Richard Worth for some rea­son. Though I have no idea of the rel­e­vance of the alleged con­nec­tion between an Inter­nal Affairs Min­is­ter and Water Ser­vices??? There isn’t even a con­flict so why bother even rais­ing it.

Clearly a nutjob conspiracist.

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The more I read about David Shearer the more I like him. I think he has a great deal to offer New Zealand espe­cially with regard to our mil­i­tary and Police.

Today at lunch we dis­cussed this at length and thought that per­haps the Police could be opened up to con­testable fund­ing based on results. If Pri­vatis­ing Pro­tec­tion is taken to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion then why couldn’t we lever­age this method to bet­ter fund out­comes in Policing?

If a mur­der is con­ducted, for instance, then com­pet­ing polic­ing organ­i­sa­tions could bid to work on the solv­ing of the crime with a large amount of the fee paid only upon suc­cess. Same for action against anti-social crimes in par­tic­u­lar areas and so on sav­ing us money and get­ting bet­ter results at the same time. Arguably we already have this sys­tem in place with secu­rity com­pa­nies but those are funded by indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies directly. I think the con­testable fund­ing model could really have merit.

We also got around to dis­cussing how New Zealand could pos­si­bly replace the Air Force Strike Wing capa­bil­ity and then we realised that the solu­tion was actu­ally star­ing us in the face.

Once of the major rea­sons that Helen Clark gave for get­ting rid of the Strike Wing was the ongo­ing costs of main­tain­ing such advanced tech­nolo­gies and upgrad­ing them. With David Shearer’s bril­liant work on out­sourc­ing of mil­i­tary and secu­rity and his right­ful ques­tion­ing of the abil­ity of sov­er­eign nations to ade­quately defend them­selves the solu­tion surely is to sim­ply out­source our air force.

I won­dered if this was pos­si­ble but a quick Google Search soon proved to me that indeed it could be.

In a cav­ernous air­plane hangar in Quincy, Illi­nois, two hours south of Chicago a pos­si­ble solu­tion exists;

A decade ago, only sov­er­eign nations could afford to buy and main­tain sophis­ti­cated, high-performance fight­ers. But Kirlin’s unmarked hangars con­tain an air force more for­mi­da­ble than that of many coun­tries. He has 30 jets in fly­ing con­di­tion, 10 in line for main­te­nance, and dozens more to be deliv­ered. His MiG-29 Ful­crums, designed in the late 1970s to go head-to-head with the hottest US planes, are the only pri­vately owned Ful­crums in the world. Kir­lin breaks into a big smile when­ever he looks at them.

Right so, yes we can have an air­force and with a strike capa­bil­ity far in excess of any­thing we had before. The idea has much merit, so much so that USAID is con­sid­er­ing build­ing its own pri­vate air­force as well, using paid for con­trac­tors to deliver. I did won­der if we could just hire Black­wa­ter.

Turns out we can and they do have exactly what we need;

August 27, 2007: Secu­rity com­pany Black­wa­ter U.S.A. is buy­ing Super Tucano light com­bat air­craft from the Brazil­ian man­u­fac­turer Embraer. These five ton, sin­gle engine, sin­gle seat air­craft are built for pilot train­ing, but also per­form quite well for counter-insurgency work. Brazil. The Super Tucano is basi­cally a prop dri­ven trainer that is equipped for com­bat mis­sions. The air­craft can carry up to 1.5 tons of weapons, includ­ing 12.7mm machine-guns, bombs and mis­siles. The air­craft cruises at about 500 kilo­me­ters an hour and can stay in the air for about 6.5 hours per sor­tie. One of the options is a FLIR (infrared radar that pro­duces a photo real­is­tic video image in any weather) and a fire con­trol sys­tem for bomb­ing. Colom­bia is using the Super Tucanos for counter-insurgency work (there are over 20,000 armed rebels and drug gang gun­men in the coun­try). The air­craft is also used for bor­der patrol. The U.S. Air Force is watch­ing that quite closely. The Super Tucano costs $9 mil­lion each, and come in one or two seat ver­sions. The bub­ble canopy pro­vides excel­lent vis­i­bil­ity. This, cou­pled with its slow speed (ver­sus jets), makes it an excel­lent ground attack aircraft.

Black­wa­ter already has a force of armed heli­copters in Iraq, and appar­ently wants some­thing a lit­tle faster, and more heav­ily armed, to ful­fill its secu­rity con­tracts over­seas. Ini­tially, Black­wa­ter is get­ting one two-seater, for pilot train­ing in the United States.

Bril­liant! David Shearer really needs to be selected urgently then John Key in the spirit of co-operation in this time of eco­nomic cri­sis needs to take David Shearer into cab­i­net as Defence Min­is­ter. He will eas­ily be able to restore a Strike Wing capa­bil­ity and at a frac­tion of the cost sim­ply by out­sourc­ing to the likes of Blackwater.

Not only that but Black­wa­ter now also has capa­bil­ity in sev­eral areas that could be extremely use­ful if we decided to out­source aspects of the Navy and Army including;

Black­wa­ter K-9 – Train­ing canines to work in patrol capac­i­ties as war dogs, explo­sives and drug detec­tion, and var­i­ous other roles for mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment duties.

Black­wa­ter Air­ships, LLC – Black­wa­ter Air­ships LLC was estab­lished in Jan­u­ary 2006 to build a remotely piloted air­ship vehi­cle (RPAV).

Black­wa­ter Armored Vehi­cle – Black­wa­ter recently intro­duced its own armored per­son­nel car­rier, the Griz­zly APC.

It comes in 4×2, 4×4, and 6×6 ver­sions with three dif­fer­ent Cater­pil­lar diesel engines are available.

Its armor, called the “Black­wa­ter High Threat Armor Pro­tec­tion Sys­tem” is claimed to defeat .50 cal­iber rounds as well as IEDs. It is con­structed of AR500 steel, and incor­po­rates angled walls and a v-hull chas­sis to deflect the blast waves pro­duced by explo­sives. It uses Fiber-Tek armor rein­forced belly and low­ers, with a fully enclosed drive train. ArmorThane tac­ti­cal coat­ing on the inte­rior and exte­rior reduces spall probability.

There are two top-side egress hatches, five gun ports (two on each side and one in rear), and trans­par­ent armored win­dows, capa­ble of NIJ level 3 pro­tec­tion. The Griz­zly makes use of for­ward and rear 400,000+ can­dle power halo­gen search­lights, which can be oper­ated remotely. It also has a ring­mount roof tur­ret, capa­ble of mount­ing a 12.7mm machine gun, which may be oper­ated from a remote weapon sta­tion.

Black­wa­ter Mar­itime Solu­tions – Black­wa­ter Mar­itime Secu­rity Ser­vices offers tac­ti­cal train­ing for mar­itime force pro­tec­tion units. In the past it has trained Greek secu­rity forces for the 2004 Olympics, Azer­bai­jan Naval Sea Com­man­dos, and Afghanistan’s Min­istry of Inte­rior. Blackwater’s facil­i­ties include a man­made lake, with stacked con­tain­ers sim­u­lat­ing the hull and deck of a ship for mar­itime assaults. Black­wa­ter received a con­tract to train United States Navy sailors fol­low­ing the attack on the USS Cole.

It has also recently pur­chased a 183ft ves­sel, the McArthur, which has been out­fit­ted for dis­as­ter response and train­ing. Accord­ing to Black­wa­ter USA, it fea­tures “state of the art nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems, full GMDSS com­mu­ni­ca­tions, SEATEL Broad­band, ded­i­cated com­mand and con­trol bays, heli­copter decks, hos­pi­tal and mul­ti­ple sup­port ves­sel capa­bil­i­ties. The McArthur was built in 1966 by the Nor­folk Ship­build­ing & Dry­dock Co. and served as a research ves­sel for the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion until its decom­mis­sion­ing in 2003. The ship will be home-ported in Nor­folk, Virginia.

See, there are solu­tions for even the replace­ment of the expen­sive and under utilised LAV III’s whereby we only pay for what we use within the out­sourc­ing model. I can cer­tainly see merit espe­cially with the Word Cup com­ing up for use of the K9 units and the Mar­itime forces for bor­der, fish­eries and smug­gling control.

David Shearer must be slected for Mt Albert, fo the sake of the nation.

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Great news folks, DPF and I met with Shane at VnC Cock­tails today to work­out the details of the Bar­rons pro­vided BlogMobile.

This years Blog­Mo­bile will be a Burst­ner Argos 747. Barron’s sold 67 of these last year, and from the spec I can see why. DPF and I will cer­tainly be in con­sid­er­able com­fort in this beast.

The very best news though is that it will be fully stocked with VnC Cock­tails so I can forsee the media camp­ing in the Blog­Mo­bile in order to get some liq­uid refresh­ment in case their par­si­mo­nious bosses don’t come through with an enter­tain­ment allowance.

I am wait­ing for offi­cial pho­tos but this is what one looks like.

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hat tip Velofille

From Side­swipe, a litle bit about the tragic con­se­quences of Silly First Name Syndrome.

Name Of The Year, a web­site that has an annual con­test to deter­mine the odd­est name, has this year picked Amer­i­can foot­baller Barke­vi­ous Mingo, beat­ing Vel­vet Milk­man and Nutri­tious Love. Other final­ists included Iris Macadan­g­dang, Iona Knipl, Atilla Bucko, Taco Van­dervelde and Crys­tal Metheny. But hard to beat was Wis­con­sin school teacher Mar­i­juana Pepsi – her mother’s soci­o­log­i­cal exper­i­ment, unlike sis­ters Kim­berly and Robin – and twins named Win­ner and Loser. Win­ner became a life­time crim­i­nal and Loser a New York police detective.

When will peo­ple learn? When?

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Inven­tory at Keep­ing Stock was watch­ing the Gen­eral Debate yes­ter­day and noticed that the new Mr Nasaty of the Labour Party and wannabe leader Shane Jones made his speech from Phil Goff’s increas­ingly vacant chair.

Is this the first sign of Jones mak­ing his move?

Is it BBQ’s or Hangi that are hap­pen­ing around the Labour cau­cus now?

The last thing Phil Goff needs right now as he seeks to move the party right through David Shearer is an attempted coup.

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Cullen leaves Par­lia­ment for final time – Michael Cullen, an MP since 1981 and finance min­is­ter for the last nine years, left Parliament’s debat­ing cham­ber for the last time tonight after a vale­dic­tory speech marked by the clev­er­ness and wit for which he was so well-known. The… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

Thank the good Lord for that. Finally.

You won’t be read­ing any felch­ing of the c**t on this blog, unlike some oth­ers I could men­tion but won’t because they aren’t in the VRWC any more.

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Fiji likely to be expelled from Forum: Key – Fiji is likely to be sus­pended from the Pacific Islands Forum on Fri­day – the dead­line for hold­ing demo­c­ra­tic elec­tions, Prime Min­is­ter John Key said. Fijian Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said today the coun­try would not… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

Bad move John, bad move.

All this move will do is push Fiji closer and closer to China. Some­one other than the fools at Mfat needs to be advis­ing you on Fiji.

I can help there and put you in touch with sev­eral folk who have the ear of Frank Bainimarama.

Don’t be cap­tured by the bureau­crats, actu­ally make a difference.

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There is a dif­fer­ence between head­lines for a news­pa­per and head­lines that turn into links. On a news­pa­per the head­line must grab atten­tion for you to read it and like­wise for a link to the arti­cle on a website.

How­ever I think web savvy users are inoc­u­lated to the more sen­sa­tional head­lines and instead go for quirky. Which leads me onto the premise that there are some links that you just HAVE to click.

The Her­ald had one such link today.

Man admits goat attack

Now here was I think­ing oh no! not another ani­mal fucker giv­ing the lov­ing touch to a goat. For some strange rea­son goat sex also pro­vides a huge num­ber of vis­its as well. DPF has found out that Pen­guin sex does the same.

So I click through and to my utter dis­ap­point­ment it is a story about a truly sick indi­vid­ual who bloody tor­tured a goat by drag­ging it behind his car. Good grief that is so dis­gust­ing when he could have just given it a kiss and slipped the back legs into his gumboots.

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Ques­tion 12 today looked innocu­ous and then all hell broke loose.

12. AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) to the Min­is­ter of Defence: What steps has he taken to review defence policy?

Hon Dr WAYNE MAPP (Min­is­ter of Defence) : Last Tues­day the Asso­ciate Min­is­ter of Defence and I launched the 2009 defence review. This review will result in a white paper early next year that will set out the Government’s defence pol­icy. There has not been a defence review since 1997, and the world has changed a great deal since then.

Amy Adams: What reports has the Min­is­ter received on the var­i­ous ways of run­ning defence?

Hon Dr WAYNE MAPP: There are, in fact, a vari­ety of ways in which defence forces can oper­ate. For exam­ple, I have read a report enti­tled “Out­sourc­ing War”, which dis­cusses mil­i­tary com­pa­nies like Black­wa­ter World­wide, and sug­gests that we “rec­og­nize them as multi­na­tional entre­pre­neurs eager to solid­ify their legit­i­macy.” Inter­est­ingly enough, this report came from Mr David Shearer, a man with con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence in Iraq and, I under­stand, Mr Goff’s pre­ferred can­di­date for Mt Albert’s by-election.

Hon Phil Goff: Can the Min­is­ter con­firm that the per­son he is seek­ing to under­mine at this point has over the last 10 years con­stantly put his life at risk, has won gal­lantry awards for sav­ing the lives of chil­dren in refugee camps, and, in fact, has done far more for human­ity than John Key and the dirty-tricks brigade in the National Party who are seek­ing to under­mine him?

Hon Dr WAYNE MAPP: I cer­tainly have heard of Mr Shearer’s rep­u­ta­tion. I have also heard that he has writ­ten, in fact, four arti­cles and books: the first is enti­tled “Dial an Army”, from The World Today in 1997; the sec­ond is “Out­sourc­ing War”, from For­eign Pol­icy in 1998; the third is Pri­vate Armies and Mil­i­tary Inter­ven­tion; and the fourth is “Privatising”—

Oh lookie there, the National Research Unit got off its col­lec­tive arse and found a few more arti­cles. My word, it looks like David Shearer really is the Tro­jan Horse from ACT, writ­ing no less than 4 arti­cles or books on the topic shows some seri­ous­ness about the topic.

Phil Goff then got mon­stered with more sup­ple­men­taries show­ing that David Shearer is very much a Goff man with Goff’s pen­chant for sell­ing off Defense Assets.

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This is an advance view of a new mag to hit the streets in Mt Albert shortly.

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