About SJPONeill

Retired(ish) and living on the side of a mountain. I love reading and writing, pottering around with DIY in the garden and the kitchen, watching movies and building models from plastic and paper...I have two awesome daughters, two awesome grand-daughters and two awesome big dogs...lots of awesomeness around me...

So what if…

Posted on 12 December 2009 by SJPONeill

…we all got together as a planet and deliberately decided to make it worse…?

At Blunty the other day John Birmingham offers comment on the Swiss’ totally mindblowingly stupid decision to ban minarets on buildings…”Switzerland’s Muslims, for instance, are reported to be mostly refugees from the Balkans who had already been thoroughly Europeanized over many centuries and who would have been almost perfectly suited to demonstrating that Islam and Western, secular modernity can live in harmony.” Hands-up any person who wouldn’t be offended and feel victimised and discriminated against after this dumbness…Across Europe, Muslim communities that are decades, sometimes centuries, old are being isolated and driven into the arms of the jihadists and takfirists – those whose other passion is hate…

I’ve commented before on the Islamic Brotherhood’s stark and blatant reluctance to get involved and sort out problems in its own backyard – if they could get up off their diamond-encrusted backsides to do so – if only 1% of all the aid that Saudi poured into the various Palestinian liberation movements over the decades was invested into modern day Palestine, it would be, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Spread the wealth around carefully and the unemployment, unrest and lack of hope that feeds the jihadists would blink out of existence overnight – Palestine might even become the reborn centre of Islamic study, learning and science as Islam once lead the world before the takfir nutjobs took over.

That Saudi is not interested in helping the Palestinians and is in fact quite happy keeping them marginalised as third class global citizens is quite clear in this article from Coming Anarchy “…As many as a quarter of a million Palestinians live in Saudi Arabia, but they are prohibited to hold or even apply for Saudi citizenship because of Arab League instructions barring Arab states from granting them citizenship in order “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” Yeah, right…The palestinians have been used and abuser by their Arab and muslim ‘brothers’ for decades and they have the balls to refer to the US as ‘The Great Satan”? You really have to wonder if it occurs to OBL and his ilk that if they want the US to butt out of Middle Eastern affairs, the way to do it is to promote STABILITY in the region. They are quite right when they say that Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are Arab/Muslim problems…jolly good, but when it’s time to step up to the plate and do something about it, everybody remembers they had something else to do in their gold-plated swimming pools…of course, when the Saudi water table finally dies, and the gold-plated swimming pool is full of sand, it’ll probably be too late…

Last month The Strategist made comment, as did I in Rattatattatat… on the Salinas Police Department’s request for assistance from the US Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey to assist in countering its gang problem (7 murders in 11 days!!). Coming Anarchy has just picked up on Washington Post article on the same story but instead of recognising the initiative for what it is, Coming Anarchy has disappointingly misused it to leap on its own little bandwagon of police militancy…it’s not hard to see why the planet might be going to hell in a hand basket when simple innovative initiatives like those in Salinas are used as just another excuse to beat the police. The simple fact is that COIN doctrine (from the top to the lowest TTPs) is eminently employable in law enforcement and that not only should that concept be fostered and nurtured but we should be encouraging the military to pass on its lessons from expeditionary COIN campaigns – who knows they might even learn something in return…? How might Jim Gant’s tribal strategy be employed to counter the gang culture? It’s all about stability in the end…perhaps this is an idea for a paper to complement Josh’s one on fighting P in New Zealand? I don’t have a copy of this on hand but will see if I can upload it next week…

Falklands ’47

The actual idea for the title of today’s post came from Paper Modelers…I looked at this aircraft, an indigenous Argentinian redesign of the Mosquito and wondered…what-if the Falklands War had taken place some three or four decades earlier – might we have seen Argentinian Calquins forcing strikes against a small British fleet armed with the latest in naval aviation, the Supermarine Attacker; Sikorsky R-4s conducting early airmobiles; and the Black Buck missions conducted by the original Vulcans (before they did all those horrible things to the leading edge!)…I had thought that this might fit into the Axis of Time Birmoverse model but couldn’t get it to fly with the high tech edge that Allies had at the end of that WW2…

The 2 Ds…

I really like this post on children at play from The Strategist – Peter I think has turned off the commenting option but I think that the underlying theme in his humour is important enough to offer my own thoughts here: the two D’s of developing children: dirt and danger…if they don’t know it’s OK to get dirty and take risks as children, then they won’t as adults and will always want the nanny-state to be there for them… Yes, yes, yes to all the mindless nanny-statist chorusing the need for supervision…it’s not like we’re proposing that all newborns be left out in the wild to see if they can survive on their own – if we did that, we’d never get a National Caucus together – but let children figure things out for themselves instead of pushing the panic button every time they try to add a bit of dirt and dead bug to their diets…I remember, many many years ago, when Guy Fawkes was still fun, the rich kid up the road made his own nebelwerfer using a milk crate with (holding 5×5?=)25 bottles, each with a skyrocket linked to a central fuse – ABSOLUTELY spectacular when launched at a 30 degree angle!!! We used to make our own cluster bombs by attaching strings of crackers to skyrockets so they would scatter and explode after the rocket burst…all good clean Kiwi fun…and we turned out OK…

The Dog Show gets a new fan

Posted on 10 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Sorry it's so dark but it's a pic of a black dog in a dark room and you can only lighten so much in GIMP.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment regarding how dogs think…last night, I had a quick Channel surf after Nightline to see if there was anything worth keeping the TV on for…I didn’t think so but there was a rerun of The Dog Show on TV6. All of a sudden, Kirk and Lulu had not only woken up but were paying close attention to the show. The Dog Show was a local TV hit in the 80s here: it’s certainly not Cruft’s but is a competition about a man, his dogs and some of the dumbest stubbornest sheep on the planet – each episode pits working dogs and their bosses against a series of challenges to herd a group of sheep through various obstacles and/or into a pen…sounds rivetting, I know, but it actually is quite addictive and gained a mega following down here…

Normally the dogs show zero interest in TV, the one exception being It’s Me or the Dog, a UK show about sorting difficult dogs and owners, along the lines of The Dog Whisperer – but even that never caused the reaction that The Dog Show got last night. Both dogs sat up and watched it the whole way through (so much for short canine attention spans!) and I had to shift Kirk behind the coffee table so that he didn’t try to stick his head through the screen again…

Virtual PC 2007

And speaking of dogs, I tried out a Microsoft product last night and had pretty low expectations, having been in the Microsoft productspace before…but…I have to say that this time the experience was anything but a dog. The problem is that as each generation of operating system come sit, there are always some casualties in the compatibility stakes and these are usually games – a lot of the time, they are not great loss but there are a number of DOS games that remain classics but which just will not fly in a Windows environment. These include Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Megafortress, Wing Commander, the Dynamix sim series (Red Baron, A-10, Aces of the Pacific), Tornado and Falcon 3.0. Fortunately, DOS gamers have been well supported by a DOS emulator called DosBox; the interface is very DOS and command liney but there are a number of Windows GUI interfaces, my preferred one being DFend. Most DOS games work well under DosBox and the programme provides access to modern peripherals like joysticks etc….

…but…

…the losers so far in this game have been those games that will only run under Win95/98 and which spurn later versions of Windows (maybe they know something we don’t?). I was gutted when I ‘upgraded’ to XP that favourites like Interstate ’76, USAF and the Close Combat series (and they are even made by Microsoft!!) no longer worked. On a whim the other night, I Googled again for Win95 Emulator and after sifting through a kazillion blogs and threads bemoaning the lack of compatibility with older games, stumbled across Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 – yep, it’s been available for over two years!! Ignore any messages that it doesn’t work on XP Home – it does – the download is just over 30Mb, 90 minutes or so on the trusty dial-up (cheers, Telecom – NOT!), installation is painless and the setup for a virtual drive is intuitive and painless. You do need to have the installation disk for the OS you want to virtualise AND the verification code that goes with it – I had a moment of panic re the code but located it in the puter drawer (big thumbs-up to Carmen’s file system). When installing Win98, I felt the cold hand of total informational terror clutch my heart when the window said “Formatting Drive C: 2% complete” but everything in the Virtual PC window IS airgapped from your real C: drive…in 1995, OS2 Warp reformatted by drive and that’s how I lost every file I had from my early computing days and study at Waikato. Game installation and play has been simple and very painless. The only problem has been trying to find a MPEG-2 driver for Win98 so that the video segments of Wing Commander III will play. Retro gamers out there, check it out…!

The fortnight in food

Posted on 9 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Time for a break from all this contemporary related stuff and back into the kitchen…when I created the Food category, I had visions of contributing to it at least once a week – monthly is probably closer to it, which is kinda strange as Carmen is away at the moment and I am spending a lot more time in the kitchen.

Last night I had forgotten to defrost any meat for dinner so did a quick Google for something simple and fishy, settling on a fish loaf which wasn’t much more than a couple of eggs, a tin of fish, herbs, milk and breadcrumbs. You can’t get much simpler than that and it came out pretty good. Next time round though, I think that I could make it better by either replacing the breadcrumbs with cooked rice and/or adding a topping of mashed potato and kumara on a layer of peas with significant quantities of grated cheese on top.

The rain over the last fortnight has kept the temperatures down and last week I really felt like something spicy to warm me up a bit. I found through the power of Google, a South African mince and potato dish with loads of herbs and spices, including apricot jam and chutney for extra flavour. It made a surprising quantity + was very filling with rice so it lasted three nights, evolving into a stir-fry rice dish on the third night with any other leftovers in the fridge. Definitely a keeper.

I do a lot with sausage when I am on my own because they are cheap, simple and don’t (normally) involve much mess – also because you can do some much with the humble sausie…fried with veges and greens, the meat in a salad sandwich, curried with beans and rice, roasted with veges…I like to buy a big bag, syphon off some for now and toss the rest in the freezer for those times when planning has left a bit to be desired or when it is simply juts late and I’m hungry…I did do roast beef three weeks ago but while it came out OK – and lasted four days – the coord skills for when to toss in the veges still has me stumped – there’s at least one more left in the freezer so will have to study up some more before I have a crack at it.

Not too much on desserts because I’m more of a savoury than a sweet tooth. I do a mean self-saucing butterscotch pudding but it’s kinda boring when I am on my own so the only dessert I have had recently has been a Fruju from the freezer, although if fresh fruit counts, I have been known to finish off dinner with an apple or a banana…

The twins are here for the weekend so that will keep me on my toes – it’s real easy to work out their preferences at the table: if it’s on the floor, it’s off the list!!

Reality

Posted on 8 December 2009 by SJPONeill

According to Phillip K. Dick, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

My reality today is that the sun is finally out, things are drying out and I can finally dig down and fix the storm water feed into the water tank – realities of rural life are than it is not cool to run out of water in summer…happy reality is that we now have four chicks that have survived at least one night in the unshelled world and were last seen stepping out of their coop with mum to enjoy some sun as well…

When I visited on Friday, the Air Power Development Centre loaned me some reading in the form of a collection of recent RAAF papers and my mission when the sun goes down (that’s me, the doctrinal vampire that only comes out after dark or when it is raining…) is to devour the first paper and start to form some thoughts on air power, COIN/CIT/CIA and the COE…I think that it is very interesting that the aircraft shown is not an F/A-18, F-111 or even the F-35O but the trusty Herc; similarly the ground vehicle is not an M-1 or ASLAV but the less glamorous Bushmaster…is this a deliberate statement? If so it is a very powerful one when evolving to meet the realities of the complex environment…

Should I stay or should I go now?

Posted on 7 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Should I stay or should i go now?
if I go there will be trouble
and if I stay it will be double
so come on and let me know
The indecisions bugging me

~ The Clash

I’ve been busy with other matters the last week or so and a bit lax in monitoring the blogspace…John Birmingham’s Blunty had an article last week on Australia’s commitment to Afghanistan and, in the comments, refers readers to “…a great piece by my old boss, Gen. Jim Molan…” Interesting to get some more local opinions on the global debate on Afghanistan and the way ahead. I googled for the lyrics from The Clash and was amused to see this comment on the web site – although posted years ago, it’s still pretty pertinent to today’s discussion:

Mr. Peabody	08/03/2006 07:59:18
Really getting sick of this overplayed tune. Should you stay or should you go? Here’s a clue: If you have to ask, get off your knees, salvage what little you have left of your dignity, and GO!

Although anyone who is genuinely interested should read the original articles, there’s couple of extracts I considered worthy of quoting direct. Firstly from Blunty:

Mr Flinthart’s comment bears a stand alone response. The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy, including a new and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which has crippled our ability to win this first conflict, and to deal with the Iranian regime’s pursuit of WMDs.

So what are the aims?

To destroy the Taiban and AQ? If so, FAIL. As long as the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency is using Omah and bin Laden as their glove puppets, there will always be a competitor for the Afghan government, such as it is.

To contain them, denying Fascist Islam a state from which to plot and launch more attacks? More reasonable and defensible as a strategy, and yet it also rides the Fail Whale because the Bearded Enemy already controls a number of significant state actors, some of which are pursuing WMD capabilities quite openly. Why do they get a free pass when Afghanistan doesn’t. It’s best if war aims are internally consistent.

As for the ‘Afghan’ people, Mr Flinthart is correct. This conflict, or rather this element of the wider conflict, is lost without them. But rather than asking what do they want, a precursor question is probably ‘Who the hell are they, anyway’. Desk Jockey, I think, made the telling point about long standing and often hyper local ethnic and religious enmities underlying the greater geo-strategic architecture. Afghanistan does not have ‘a people’ it has an atomised, massively riven enclave of tribes, families, ethnic groups, war lords, state sponsored criminal gangs, foreign jihadi and so on. Is it even possible to speak of enough of them wanting enough in common to begin building a coalition from which a rough patchwork state might be fashioned? Probably, but it’d be a helluva job.

And in the end, pointless, because we’re not willing to fight.

JB | Outer Angrystan. – December 03, 2009, 9:40AM

And from Gen Molan’s piece in The Australian:

Australia is assisting Afghanistan for any number of reasons: as part of our alliance responsibilities; for our own self-interest in combating terror; for humanitarian and moral reasons, and because we are there and it is harder to withdraw than to not commit initially…If we think that we have a special relationship with the US, and every aspect of our defence and security policy is based on this assumption, then now is not the time to hang back, hoping not to be noticed.

The crux of the matter remains what are we there for? I have to agree with JB “…The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy…” Operation Enduring Freedom achieved its aims in dealing to Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan by the end of 2002 – sadly it seems that more people hung their hats on the name of the operation and not it’s objectives. The most common justification for maintaining commitments to ISAF is now the difficulty of extraction although it is a fairly safe call that many will learn from the US drawdown in 18 months as the pressure starts to come on to those nations that have been dragging the chain…did someone say Europe and the Islamic states?

The absolute #1 rule of warfare is to have a clear and visible mandate…no one ever said it better than Princess Leia “When you broke in here, did you have a plan for getting out?” The #1 rule of COIN/CIT/CIA is to address the underlying causes of the conflict. The #1 rule of COIN is NOT to promote the rule of government! That is but one of many means to the end of addressing the core issues and creating governance as an absolute leads directly to the mess that Afghanistan has become – how do you promote the rule of something that simply does not exist? One of the comments to the Blunty article asks “…why not Balkanise this so-called nation? There are minority groups who would probably be delighted with that outcome. Maybe it would be easier to define and defend the aspirations and rights of, say, the Hazara and allow the Incredibly Medieval Bearded Nutters to concentrate in one place? Surrounding and relatively enlightened statelets might provide a refuge for the perpetually oppressed (women, gays, atheists etc)…” Not quite as polished perhaps, but certainly a similar theme to that of Jim Gant’s One Tribe at a Time proposal: instead of building something new that is not working, why not build on what is already there?

Even though, 18 months is not nearly long enough to develop anything sustainable which brings us back to the original question: Should I stay or should I go now?

FFS!

And under the FFS heading this morning, there has just been an article on Breakfast that the NZ Army is adopting a crocodile from the aquarium in Napier as it’s new mascot…google a little more and it’s actually all of the Army, not even all of Linton Army Camp…in fact, just one little movements company..see Stuff here…

I sing you to me…

Posted on 6 December 2009 by SJPONeill

…just finished watching Australia…and really liked it…in my younger days I had a soft spot for those Aussie mini-series like Sword of Honour, The Flying Doctors, The Last Frontier, etc…I think that they are something that Australia does really well and that it’s a good indicator of the domestic maturity of your film industry when you can make a movie about yourself where everybody DOESN’T die in the last five minutes, that isn’t controversial or revisionist and that keeps legends alive…we’ve become very good at making other people’s movies here, when will we see New Zealand?

To be honest, I still have a soft spot for movies with a upbeat conclusion – I really don’t need much reminding that the world can be a bad place and that the bad guys usually win and the little guy always gets ground down – I just don’t want to be reminded in ‘my’ time so I guess I am a bit of a sucker for true blue hero stories…more so when accompanied by a good soundtrack. Waltzing Matilda makes me sad from the time I first saw the original On the Beach: no longer upbeat but haunting…

Drill and Colours and things…

Posted on 6 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Why do we need drill? Surely there are better more effective ways of instilling teamwork and leadership and discipline into soldiers? Why should the government invest such considerable quantities of public monies on the maintenance of Colours and banners when Defence is allegedly so under-funded? Surely these things are anachronisms, relics of bygone glories that have no place in a modern army?

“He remembered the battle: the noise, loneliness, fear: the shame of running, the terror when you didn’t. Running was a decision of the moment, but not running away went on and on. A rational army would run away.”

A rational army would run away. And it would. To stand and fight, to endure the unendurable, to achieve the impossible – to be involved in actions emblazoned throughout history – requires a special type of person, a properly trained soldier. And probably not so much trained in some areas as conditioned.

Camerone. The Alamo. Bastogne. Gallipoli. Rorke’s Drift. Hill 834. Chosin. Agincourt. Wake. Maleme. Monte Cassino. Little Round Top. Long Tan. Kapyong. Waterloo. Minquar Quim.

I have stacks to do but all this rain has been sapping my motivation – or maybe I am just going through a bit of computer rejection syndrome…I am quite excited that the second batch of chickens might actually survive – a design error saw batch 1 unable to hop back into the nest after they hopped out so the cold got them – there are two hopping and chirping around the coop at the moment with another hatching last time I checked them…

Anyway the opening paragraphs above are from a paper I started to write 10+ years ago, the subject of which is as topical now as it was back then in pre-war days…I think that the quote in the middle is from Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer…

Once was an Empire

Posted on 4 December 2009 by SJPONeill

The sand of the desert is sodden red

Red with the blood of a square that broke

The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead

And the Regiment blind with dust and smoke

The river of death has brimmed his banks

And England’s far, and Honour and name

But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks:

“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

Vitai Lampada (They Pass On The Torch of Life), Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)

I’m on the road again today with an early start so here’s another quote from my little notebook to keep things alive…the full text can be read here. I like how this article on the University of St Andrew’s site describes Vitai Lampada:

Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada was typical of the war poem of the 1890’s, aping the heroic images of Tennyson: “The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead/ And the regiment blind with dust and smoke;/ The river of death has brimmed his banks,/ And England’s far, and Honour a name;/ But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:/ ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’” The intention of this kind of poetry was to stir the heart of the reader with pride and fill the head with awe at the magnificent bravery that separated the Englishman from his rivals on the battlefield. It allowed people from any social class to feel that they were part of something precious. Certainly, Vitai Lampada was hugely popular with soldiers and public alike upon its publication in 1898, but by this time a new kind of war poem was coming to prominence, one whose roots lay in the growth of radical thought and humanitarian opposition to war.

In looking up Vitai Lampada, I came across this opening paragraph of a review of a book [Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 751 pp.]:

In my far-off, happy, schooldays there was always one thing above all of which you had not to stand guilty. This was lack of moral fiber. Intelligence and learning were a bonus, but moral fiber was an essential. It produced regular, strenuous boys ready to meet the kinds of ideal celebrated by our school poet, Sir Henry Newbolt. When the Gatling was jammed and the colonel dead, and the sands of the desert were sodden red, the voice of the schoolboy would be heard, calling on everyone to play up, play up, and play the game, so very like Tony Blair and George Bush do today, albeit keeping themselves at a safer distance from the sodden desert.

So very right, when it all unravels, all you can do is stand up and play the game – or activate your exit strategy and bail to leave someone else holding the baby…

Hmmmm….

Not sure why yesterday’s post didn’t go out as scheduled – most likely operator error at this end! Still, I had a great visit to the Air Power Development Centre yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon with a Kiwi entrepreneur working on a very cool development project…hopefully more to follow on that one in the New Year…

My Creative MP3 player has now finally gone completely toes up – it has had a very hard life – and I need to find an inexpensive (see comment re very hard life) replacement that it is hopefully Audible-compatible as I miss my talking books when on the road.

It was nice to visit civilisation for a day but good to get home last night except that IT WAS STILL BLOODY RAINING here – how is anyone meant to dry grass for hay when it keeps BLOODY RAINING…?

Accidental Guerrilla Part 2

Posted on 3 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Well, that did get better as it progressed…I found the first two chapters close to interminable, loved Chapter 3 on Iraq and the last Chapter on the way ahead; I didn’t like the chapter of allegedly supporting case studies: nothing annoys me more than someone flogging a dead horse of a model when the evidence in the case studies simply doesn’t supply the model, in this case, that of the Accidental Guerrilla.

I agree that foreign fighters and Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror‘ are significant forces in the irregular activity world, however I simply do not accept that national guerrillas become such ‘by accident’. Opportunist, reactive or responsive would be better adjectives for national guerrillas in that they react to and/or seize an opportunity presented by the actions of national or international interventions (civil and/or military).

The other major factor that detracts from The Accidental Guerrilla is its over-fixation on Islamic terrorism, instead of upon more general terrorism and insurgency. By labouring the Islamic angle, the author may be going some way to further the rift between Islamic communities and the rest of the world.

Similarly, the whole concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ just grates…war is by definition is a complex activity that resists simple definitions – one which also tends to punish those who fail to respect this fact. To postulate that hybrid war is either new or different from any other form of war is illustrative of a concept inability to consider and learn from history. Another contribution to the global game of buzzword bingo…

David Kilcullen writes very well when recounting his own experiences, and considerably less well when trying to support his theoretical model. To get the most out of The Accidental Guerrilla, read the preface, Chapter 3 The Twenty-First Day, and Chapter 5 Turning an Elephant into a Mouse in conjunction with Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq. It’s probably entirely coincidental that both books are written by Australian Army officers – or maybe not – maybe that slight aspect of distance from US and NATO issues provides an subtle but important difference of perspective. These readings will give a reader from most backgrounds a firm grounding in issues and approaches for the complex environment. I have a dozen or so pages of notes and will write a more detailed review in the next week or so…

The bottom line on The Accidental Guerrilla is that it is worth reading – the preface, Chapters 3 and 5 outweigh the slog through the other chapters…having said that, down here we have a beer company called Tui which sponsors a range of topical billboards across the country, using the Tui slogan “yeah right“…here’s some Tui moments from The Accidental Guerrilla (yes, I really do like it but these were too good to pass up):

Buy a crate on the way home tonight…

New modelling technology

Posted on 3 December 2009 by SJPONeill

For paper models anyway…also pretty handy if you like with work with hard copy proofs and not these digital on-screen thingies…

It’s called a CISS…Continuous Ink Supply System…to replace the piddling little cartridges that go in the printer…great for when you are doing that big print job and don’t want it interrupted by ‘Ink cartridge(s) empty’…it cost us NZ$55 for a set of standard cartridges that are considerably smaller than the CISS tanks; the CISS was NZ$75 delivered and is refillable which is both greener and practical.

I keep the tanks behind the printer, out of the way of small hands and paws, and the feeder tubes from the tanks to the dummy cartridges run through the channel used for the USB cable. I only installed it last night and printed out a couple of pages – to my aging eyes, the print and colour quality is as good as it was before so I’m happy – I’m less happy about the fact that this printer persists in printing greys as greens.

Where do you get a CISS? Melco Technologies…

I am still working my way through Accidental Guerrilla (I kept typing Accidental Tourist for some deep subliminal reason) and hope to have some coherent comment tonight after Coro…

How do you build a credible and effective government and security forces in 18 months?

Good question…