Investigate May 09

NO ONE GETS CLOSER

GET ‘AIR CON’ – IAN WISHART’S NEW BOOK – DETAILS INSIDE

INVESTIGATE May 2009:

Leader World Helen Clark’s real mission:

Helen Clark’s UN agenda • Global Warming • The God Debate

Briefing documents call for UN to become world government – global taxes – UN military – ‘wealth transfer’

igh Tides H Is Antarctica really melting?

A new book savages the global warming claims

F orest Chumps More flak flies over Treelords deal

Issue 100

The God Debate

Agnostic writer Simon Gemmill’s latest

$8.30 May 2009

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Contents 26

34

FEATURES

26 Mission Incredible

It’s one of the biggest geopolitical stories to cross the desks of NZ media, and they missed it. Helen Clark’s appointment to the United Nations Development Programme just happens to dovetail with plans to turn the UN into a world government. But to do that they need to push massive reform, and guess who’s been given that job? IAN WISHART has the briefing papers, and the full story

40

34 Snow & Mirrors

The shrill cries of “global warming” have been getting louder in recent weeks, with claims of a one to two metre sea level rise making many coastal towns uninhabitable. But is it true? IAN WISHART details the real facts in an extract from his newly-released book, Air Con

40 Dumbing Down Britain

48

In part two of his biting analysis of what’s going wrong in the UK, HAL G. P. COLEBATCH lays out the evidence of a country with only decades left to avoid collapse

48 Forest Chumps

Our March story on the Treelords deal continues to cause shockwaves, as MIKE BUTLER explains

54 The Gemmill Hypothesis

Agnostic writer SIMON GEMMILL questions the existence of God, and the problems with religion

54

16

Editorial and opinion 06 Focal Point

Volume 9, issue 100, ISSN 1175-1290

Editorial

08 Vox-Populi

The roar of the crowd

16 Simply Devine

Miranda Devine on sex diaries

18 Mark Steyn

The problem with pirates

18

20 Eyes Right

ichard Prosser praises Virender R Singh

22 Line 1

Chris Carter enjoys Fox News

24 Soapbox

Farmer Steve discovers carbon credits

Lifestyle 14 Poetry

Amy Brooke’s poem of the month

64 Money

Peter Hensley on borrowing

66 Education

Amy Brooke on changing focus

70 Science

DNA – a double helix sword

66

72 Technology

Smart phones the new frontier

74 Sport

Chris Forster on NRL vs Super 14

76 Health

Claire Morrow on smoking

78 Alt.Health

The biological clock

80 Travel A secret Laos

72

84 Food

NZ EDITION Advertising Sales

Richa Fuller Fuller Media 09 522 7062 021 03 74079 richa@fullermedia.co.nz

Contributing Writers: Melody Towns, Selwyn Parker, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Design & Layout

Heidi Wishart Bozidar Jokanovic

Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Fax: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine PO Box 302188, North Harbour North Shore 0751, NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 SUBSCRIPTIONS Online: www.investigatemagazine.com

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92 Music

All content in this magazine is copyright, and may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions of advertisers or contributors are not necessarily those of the magazine, and no liability is accepted.

We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax.

94 Movies

Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd

Wine and eggs: unusual

86 Toybox

The latest and greatest

88 Pages

Michael Morrissey’s autumn reads Chris Philpott’s CD reviews State of Play ‘brilliant’

80

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> focal point

Editorial

You’ve got five months…

I

f you think this issue is big on Helen Clark and climate change, has softened up citizens to accept a much greater role for the State in there’s a very good reason. By our reckoning, New Zealanders everyday affairs. We are all being told it is a global problem that requires have just a few months to shake themselves out of their lethargy a “global solution”. Same thing with climate change. You are being and get seriously informed on the myths about global warming, scared into accepting the TINA theory: There Is No Alternative. or our government and more importantly the bureaucrats appointed Everything is coming to a head this year, and Copenhagen by the last government will sign us up to the new ‘Kyoto’ Treaty and could flick the switch on what has commonly been referred to as you personally will be paying for it for the rest of your life. “the New World Order”. Once a phrase only used by conspiracy It’s not actually ‘Kyoto’, but at Copenhagen this Christmas the nuts, now even the United Nations uses it to describe its agenda, United Nations hopes to have the world sign up to compulsory throwing off any pretence now as to its real intentions. carbon emissions cuts that make Kyoto look like child’s play, and A phrase that’s been pie in the sky for three decades is suddenly a agree to compulsory new taxes in the name of climate change heartbeat away from becoming a reality because, this Christmas, the which will actually be used to pay for a massive, and sinister, over- Copenhagen Treaty will open a funding floodgate with new global haul of the UN itself. taxes on carbon emissions. It will, in effect, put blood in the veins of Which is where Helen Clark comes in.

Frankenstein’s political monster – the beginnings of a world governYou see, none of these events are accidental. ment structure. Without funding, it couldn’t happen. But with climate As Air Con makes painfully clear, the United Nations Development change as the excuse, it’s all on.

Programme (UNDP), now Which brings us again to being run by Helen Clark, Clark. She claims she only The UNDP wanted a tax on has been pitching since 1994 heard about the UNDP posito “become the principal custion in January. Personally, I “global pollution” (carbon tax) for todian of our global human don’t believe that for a second. security…a major restrucThe Socialist International the purposes of funding the UN turing of the world’s income documents that form the distribution, production and basis of our cover story reveal consumption patterns may therefore be a necessary precondition.” that organization has been working hand-in-glove with the UN to Those words can be found in the Human Development Report push forward the global government idea, and find a way of fundof 1994, written long before the global warming scare really took ing it. Clark’s role is to implement the massive reforms planned serious hold. But look at what the UNDP said about how it would for the UN. fund a UN world government: The essence of the proposed Copenhagen Treaty is that devel“Global taxation may become necessary in any case to achieve oped countries, like New Zealand, the US etc, will face hefty carthe goals of global human security. Some of the promising new bon cuts and fees per tonne of carbon emitted. We can either “buy” sources include tradeable permits for global pollution, a global the right to burn more fuel from a third world nation, or alternatax on non-renewable energy, demilitarization funds and a small tively our manufacturers can set up more factories in third world transaction tax,” said the UNDP. countries to use their less harsh carbon restrictions, in exchange Remember, that was 15 years ago. You’ll find pretty much the same for the investment. agenda documented in this month’s cover story from much more This is the mechanism of “wealth transfer” the UN is talking about. recent utterances by UN officials and an organization called Socialist Absolute Power was an important book, but in our view Air Con International, of which one Helen Clark is a senior member. is without doubt the most important general book we’ve ever pubBut here’s the really interesting thing. The UNDP wanted a tax on lished. You have roughly five months to convince the National “global pollution” (carbon tax) for the purposes of funding the United Government not to sign New Zealand jobs and taxes away at Nations, NOT for the purposes of discouraging pollution!

Copenhagen. Your time begins, now.

Which brings us to 2009, and a climate change scare that has truly become apocalyptic, the way the UN and its media handmaidens spin it.

This year is crucial. The world has suffered an economic collapse that

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

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> vox populi

Communiques The roar of the crowd EDUCATION NIGHTMARE The articles by Colebatch, and Brooke lay bare the evidence of failures in government schools to educate. Investigate must be commended in opening up another field that is problematic of the nanny state. Please dig deeper. More insight can be gleaned from the writings of George Herbert Meads (Mind, Self and Society 1934) on best practises in education philosophy. Gatto, J.T. likewise uncovers the thinking behind the development of state schools over the last 100 plus years. As an award-winning American schoolteacher, his book ‘Underground History of American Education’ expands on the damage, failings and reasoning behind the philosophy of state education. Read online at http:/www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapter/ ....an abridged advertiser: ‘history tour’ elaborates further.]

Counsellor/authors such as Whitfield, C.L [Healing the Child Within 1987]; Cloud, H. [Changes that Heal 1990] and Backus – to name but a few – add to one’s understanding on emotional intelligence (E.Q.), the process to individuate and develop skills in objective communication. The psychological damage of negative language and bullying, flourish in ignorance. Emotional health, E.Q., and real education flourish, as the likes of Meads and Gatto observe – when teachers with a love of their craft, foster the joy of self learning in those they coach. A skill that opens rich possibilities and choices over a lifetime.

I shall look forward to reading more from the pens of Amy Brooke, and Hal G.P. Colebatch. Could western society be ready to re-examine its (misplaced) trust of the ‘nannystate school system’ for the disciplines that give a real education? Perhaps we might even see homeschooling encouraged by the State.

Keep up the good work – it’s so encouraging.

Trevor Chadwick, via email

AIR CONNED I have not yet read your book Air Con, though I intend to shortly but I am an avid reader of articles on the subject of global warming, now known as climate change since global warming doesn’t really seem to be happening. I am struck by the fanaticism of believers and the way that they persecute non-believers and climate change sceptics, attaching antagonistic labels like “deniers” to them. To query global warming is a heresy, at least in the eyes of the believers which only confirms to me the place of global warming as the new world religion. Its high priests are people like Al Gore, travelling the world on private jets that produce thousands of tons of emissions and paying the equivalent of an average annual NZ income to heat and light his palatial US home while preaching a INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

series of incomplete half truths – really a clear cut case of do as I say, not as I do. Investigate is right about one thing at least – the taxes and levies that the uncertain science is being used to generate and promulgate are going to pose enormous costs to householders, escalating in years to come.

Here in Christchurch our local paper is a believer in global warming and avidly supports Earth Hour, a largely ceremonious, once-yearly one-hour dousing of lighting. The incongruousness of the paper’s position seems lost on its journalists who run stories like last year’s piece about a schoolgirl who turned off lights in the family home, lit candles and then jumped into the family car and drove around the neighbourhood to see who else had done the same. Fire risk and CO2 emissions in roughly equal proportions.

Then there was a story this year about an American scriptwriter who emigrated to NZ to escape the possible effects of climate change in her own country, buying a property bordering a stream in Canterbury where she promptly cut down willow trees growing along the watercourse. Apparently the irony of a global warming supporter travelling a great distance utilising air travel and, upon arrival, cutting down carbon sequestering trees was lost on the paper. Furthermore, Christchurch citizens are encouraged to leap into their vehicles and attend a program of inner city events commemorating Earth Hour, as if the substitution of sitting in your unlit home with car travel around the city somehow does not produce greenhouse gas emissions on this one evening. It is sheer lunacy wrapped in a kind of mindless fervour. In the midst of all this, the paper continues to ignore the small, hardcore band of dedicated cyclists who bike to work each day, producing no CO2 emissions, apart from those of the rider. Canterbury topography is excellently suited to a cycling commute. Additionally, the average cyclist commuter probably does more in one day to ameliorate the effects of global warming by replacing his car with a bike for the commute than turning off the domestic illumination in a whole street for one hour per year achieves.

The global warming lobby seem to skate past the fact that if things are going to be even only just one quarter as bad as the socalled experts would have us believe, we must immediately cut out all unnecessary travel and transport. Tourism must stop. Air travel must become a thing of the past and cruise ship tours must cease. Vehicle driving must become strictly controlled, either by fuel rationing, applying maximum annual mileages or by allowing use of a car only on one or two days per week, while alternatives, particularly cycling and public transport must receive much more attention. Food must be grown and consumed locally. Personally, I’m tired of seeing my local supermarket full of American apples

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transported around the world while local growers receive prices so poor that entire productive apple orchards are being levelled in this country. Development of new coastal settlements must cease immediately. Who is going to pay to relocate all these coastal dwellers in twenty years time when their homes are under water?

None of these things are happening, so, if climate change is real, why not? It must go without saying too, that if global warming is happening and the cause is CO2 emissions then the world cannot afford to have every citizen of China and India driving vehicles, travelling extensively and eating imported foods such as dairy products.

Finally, there is an issue which most in the media seem content to overlook. The climate change issue provides the Greens, many of whose members are communists or hard core leftists, with a vehicle for them to enact prescriptive legislation controlling the daily lives or movements of people. It also provides them an opportunity to help destroy western economies. If the above changes were implemented it would devastate our economy to little effect while worldwide CO2 emissions will not reduce until the emissions of the big three – China, India and the US are controlled.

Charles Kuipers, Kaiapoi, North Canterbury

THE LAST OF OLD ENGLAND I read your article with great interest, being an immigrant from England, and was amused at the paragraph in which Mr Colebatch criticises the spelling of recess, and wonder whether he’s confusing that with access, otherwise that is the correct spelling of the word.

I have my own theory as to why there is such a general decline in Britain which is that, for all of the 21st century to date, and much of the latter part of the 20th century, we have been governed

by Socialists who historically have taken the nation’s wealth and spent it. Their ideology that we are all equal – though some more equal than others – requires taking more from the rich and giving it to the poor. What they fail to see time after time is that the only people they hurt are those in the middle – the people who work hard, pay their taxes and survive on what they earn. The rich merely move their money (and/or themselves) out of the country into safe tax havens and the so-called ‘poor’ sit tight and take the handouts. There are, of course, many exclusions from all types, and I apologise to those who are not like the rest, but, broadly speaking, that is the situation in Britain. Add to that the enormous immigration problems of the past forty or so years in Britain – especially England – from the Asian invasion (circa 1960) to the Eastern European invasion of recent times – and it is not difficult to understand why a welfare system (paid for entirely out of an additional workers’ tax) which was introduced in 1948 to provide the indigenous population with assistance for their health, pensions etc, should be cracking under the strain of trying to uphold said health and welfare of the world and his wife.

I could go on for chapters but would just add one more point.

Leaving the fiscal shambles to one side, the Socialists also decree that it is politically incorrect to be proud of your country, your neighbourhood, your school. They have removed corporal punishment from schools, banned smacking, lowered the age of voting to 18 and introduced a ‘no blame’ culture which in fact points more fingers now than it ever did before. Britain has been well and truly trashed – take note Kiwi’s, does that all sound a little too familiar?

Linda Cutts, via email 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

DIDN’T SEE THE WOOD… Your article about the Central North Island forest deal in a recent issue was spot on as far as it went, but a couple of very relevant points were missed out that the tax paying public should be aware of. It will not, unfortunately, affect the outcome of Cullen’s generous payout (plus “top ups” to other previous claimants around NZ!!) but it will show people who care how the history of early NZ is being changed by important relevant material being omitted from the decision making process.

For example; Prior to Captain Gilbert Mair’s purchase, on behalf of the Govt of the day, the matter of true ownership of the first block that was the subject of your article was tested in the Rotorua Native Land Court back in the 1870’s.

Surprise, surprise, the only true owners of that first block were deemed to be the Ngati Manawa tribe based at Galatea (near Murupara) All the rest who were jumping up and down saying “It’s ours” were firmly told “No it’s NOT”.

Guess who were the main beneficiaries of the latest handout ($500 mill plus all the land & trees)? Yup, you’re correct. The very tribes who were told in the 1870’s, “No you’re not”.

Work that one out! How did THAT happen?

The other point that wasn’t emphasised enough was the fact that this huge pine forested area of land is operating under 11 separate Crown Forestry Licences, so one could assume that there were 11 separate purchases by the Governments of the day. If the first block which Gilbert Mair negotiated with the Ngati Manawa for was purchased for 15,000 Pounds (about $4.5 million in today’s money), then it would be reasonable to assume that the remaining 10 areas were purchased from the owners for an equivalent amount based on area. So, the question arises, “why are we busy paying compensation for supposed wrongs and paying for the land all over again?

Who was wronged? If the Ngati Manawa held up the Paramount Chief ’s tangi for TWO years so that Gilbert Mair could attend, he was obviously held in very high esteem by the tribe. So THEY were obviously happy with the deal as others who sold off the remaining blocks must have been.

So I ask again, who has been wronged? And how can the very group who were denied ownership by the Native Land Court back in the 1800’s be the beneficiaries in the 2000’s? Who presented important evidence to the decision makers on behalf of the NZ Public who have owned & worked that land for over 100 years?

I fully realise that having raised these matters in public that I will be castigated by the PC brigade for being a racist etc. Well I’ll just have to join Dr.Michael Bassett’s( ex-Waitangi Tribunal) club who would prefer that these types of cons were put out into the public’s eye and to hell with the consequences. For too long these secret backroom deals have not been fully exposed to public scrutiny, until publications like “Investigate magazine” come along.

So, I’ll just sit back and wait for the bullets to start flying! Make the first shot count is my best advice to the PC Brigade.

D Snignim, Bay of Plenty

EVOLUTION OF AN ARGUMENT Warwick Don chides me for having a “penchant for selectively quoting from evolutionary writings.” (Vox Populi, April). But one has to be selective when reading material that has been selectively arranged to present a particular view – evolution.

I am also reminded about a missing question mark but this omission (not deliberate) does not alter Mayr’s concerns over a

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 11

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Issue 98

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HE GOT BEAMED UP Ian you have to take this by the balls given the years of articles regarding NZ national and domestic defence right down to polic14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

ing. I am not a police basher, however William Alexander Stewart’s evasion makes the NZ Police Force look nothing short of incapable of protecting kiwis. I have to ask myself, “has this guy got a Klingon Cloaking Device if he can elude an entire police force while on P”?

How safe am I in NZ against domestic or international attacks if an entire division of cops cannot catch a drug-addled individual?

This is a true indictment as to the capability of NZ Police.

I should launch a website, “Where’s Willie?” for everyday kiwis to find him first.

Name and address supplied

Poetry Is it poetry? Then send submissions to Poetry Editor Amy Brooke: amy@investigatemagazine.tv

CAT AND DOG Curled in the long lane Of the leafgrown autumn rain Two met on quivered foot and snarling grain Said cat I come and go And none but one shall know What passing step my nightfall feet may show Said dog I stay and hear And none shall know my fear While lord and lady sleep whom I hold dear Said cat this word is grave That none but you shall save The striding ones whose word has bound a slave Said dog my heart is true And steadfast more than you And love binds more than words what I can do Said cat no craft nor art Can turn my ways apart And no reward can buy nor sell my heart But when in creeping night My lord cries out in fright I summon back his soul for his delight Said dog my teeth bite deep Whether I wake or sleep No friend am I to you - beware my leap But the cat is gone from the lane With the flying leaves and the rain And the sentry dog is back at his post again.

David Greagg

Letters to the editor can be posted to: PO Box 302188, North Harbour, North Shore 0751, or emailed to: editorial@investigatemagazine.com

credible reconstruction of the path from ape to man. Mr Don goes on to explain that the inexperience of early paleontologists was the reason their attempts to reconstruct the sequence of changes from ape to man was flawed. This was, and is because the “trade secret” of paleontologists is the knowledge of the almost lack of complete evidence of transitional intermediates.

Even Richard Dawkins, in his The Blind Watchmaker admits that, in the context of the Cambrian strata there is “a very large gap in the fossil record.” And paleontologist, Steven Stanley claims: “The known fossil record fails to document a single phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.” This same author is referred to by Mayr in his sub-chapter, Stages of Hominization and to whom he is “relying particularly on.” p240.

To summarize Mayr’s outline of his three Stages of Hominization in What evolution Is (p240, Rain Forest, Tree Savanna and Bush Savanna) he envisages tree dwelling chimpanzees in the first stage.

Then in stage 2, through environmental changes in the landscape there was a developing trend to bipedalism to allow apes to travel between clusters of trees. In the final 3rd stage, once again affected by climatic changes (ice age etc) the more advanced groups “invented” fire and discovered ways to use their hands (now free from locomotion) for defence/attack strategies using rocks and clubs and primitive tools.

It is supposed that the obvious relationship between brain and hand manipulation helped develop the size and quality of the brain which led on to the final arrival of Homo. However, the significant development from tree dwelling chimps to humans does not address the fundamental problems, particularly when bipedalism requires a change in the spinal column to the human S form (in profile) and to the position of the acetabulum (hip joint) to adapt for the centre of gravity for man. Added to those major skeletal, muscular and neural changes is the problem of the gradual change in the opposable big toe (hinged like the thumb) to move like the human big toe. Even the gradual shortening or loss of hair would become a survival problem for a baby ape who clings to the underbelly of the mother when alerted to danger.

Any of the above “gradual” changes would have left an ape with a mis-aligned spine, a partly dis-located hip joint, a gammy foot and an unattached infant – an ape hardly fit to survive.

It is unfortunate that Warwick Don concludes his contribution to the debate when he says: “For assuredly, evolution is scientifically regarded as a fact to the same degree as gravity and an oblately spherical earth.”

Well, I have seen a cricket ball fall to the ground and watched a ship emerge over the curvature of sea but I have yet to see any evidence to fill the yawning gaps that by now should be well filled with fossil examples of transitional intermediates between species.

Where are they?

Mr Don accuses me of dishonesty. This is, unfortunately how evolutionists stoop to personality defects when they have run out of objective answers to honest questions. The “persistent and dishonest creationist ploy” I am accused of does not discredit the valid questions I have about Mayr claiming evolution (theory) to be a fact and for Warwick Don to give him the cheer lead.

Malcolm Ford, Whangarei

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 15

> simply devine

Miranda Devine The myth of the hot mamas

T

he sex therapist Bettina Arndt’s latest book The Sex In other words, men and women do about the same amount of Diaries has been selling like hottie-cakes, with 10,000 off work in total – about 50 hours a week each. It’s called division of labour the shelves in the first three weeks. But it’s not just book and it has long been the negotiated settlement of marriage. sales that are up. There may be an Arndt-led recovery of Men have tried to up their share of housework – by 8 per cent bedroom hanky panky if wives heed her message that their poor – since 1992. But it doesn’t seem to have increased their share of deprived husbands deserve more sex. sex, judging by The Sex Diaries.

Based on the bedroom revelations of 98 Australian couples over In her chapter “Laundry Gets You Laid?”, one of Arndt’s diasix to nine months, it has lifted the lid on the unspoken topic of rists describes her husband as the “domestic God”, yet their libimen and women’s biologically mismatched sexual desire. dos are still worlds apart.

From the Hindustan Times to the E Yugoslavia website, Arndt’s Another diarist, Mary, 42, has put her husband on sex “starvaexhortation to women to do their “wifely duty” and beef up the tion rations” until he does more housework. sex supply, has certainly been a headline grabber.

But, she admitted: “[My husband] argues that even if I were a “It simply hasn’t worked to have a couple’s sex life hinge on the lady of leisure with a maid and housekeeper and no need to work fragile, feeble female libido,” says Arndt. “The right to say ‘no’ … I still wouldn’t be interested in sex. I deny, deny and deny, but needs to give way to saying ‘yes’ more often.” deep inside I have to admit there is a chance he might be right.”

Of course she has been excoriated by feminists for saying Housework is just one of the excuses used by women to fend that much marital disharoff their partner’s advances. mony might be overcome if Only 10 per cent of Arndt’s Arndt is not suggesting women women just “put the canoe in female diarists had higher the water” and start paddling, sex drives than their parthave sex against their will, but even if they don’t feel like it. ners and her book is full “Bettina Arndt rape cheerof the anguish of the other to heed new research that shows leader” was one furious blog men, whose wives have just response. “F*** you, Bettina lost interest. they may still enjoy sex even if they Arndt,” was another. Eva Cox Arndt said yesterday that of the Women’s Electoral female libido is so fragile it didn’t crave it in the first place Lobby launched a counteratis easy to find excuses not tack, claiming that it’s men’s to have sex. But desire is a own fault they aren’t getting enough sex, because they don’t do decision. Women “have to make a decision to put sex back on the their fair share of housework. to-do list because if you allow these other things to swamp your “After an evening of organising kids, dinner, the shopping, sexual interest your relationship will be in real trouble”. the washing, the homework, etc, maybe [women] are too tired Of course, “resentment is a passion killer”, and unequal share to want sex.” of household duties has long been high on a woman’s list of It’s an old excuse. As Arndt says, any time men complain about resentments. something, even in the anonymity of a sex therapist’s book, femi“But it strikes me as being so unfair that women feel entitled to nists hit back with the housework furphy. The fact is, when you voice their complaints and demands of a relationship, yet a lot of add up in-home and out-of-home duties, men work just as many men have at the absolute top of their wants and needs more sex hours as women, and sex has very little to do with it. and it’s been totally ignored.

The latest ABS social trends survey, released last week, found “How can we justify simply shutting up shop or forcing a man that women do almost twice as much housework as men – 33 into a life spent grovelling for sex?” hours and 45 minutes a week.

The picture Arndt gets from her male sex diarists is in large part But while men might not do as much vacuuming and ironing, a lament for love denied. They love their wives but desperately they spend a lot more time than women working outside the house need the intimacy they used to have. They feel cheated. in paid jobs – an average of 31 hours and 50 minutes a week, com“I am totally at a loss as to what to do,” writes Andrew, a 41pared with women’s 16 hours and 25 minutes. year-old diarist, married for six years, with two children. He and 16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

his wife used to have sex every day but are down to once every five or six months. “I do love her and I think she loves me but I cannot live like a monk.

“What makes women think that halfway through the game they can change the rules to suit themselves and expect the male to take it?”

Arndt is not suggesting women have sex against their will, but to heed new research that shows they may still enjoy sex even if they didn’t crave it in the first place. Mismatched desire need not spell the end of a couple’s sex life.

The other side of the equation is women’s guilt at their own lower sex drive.

Understanding that male and female sex drives are different was the key to rapprochement in the bedroom, she said. “It’s all about walking in each other’s shoes. Most of the women are upset that they don’t want sex. It’s not a deliberate thing … but we have to find a way around it if we have marriages lasting 40 years.”

Since the book was published, Arndt has been inundated with emails and messages from frustrated men.

But she has also touched a nerve with women. The day after Arndt appeared on the ABC’s Lateline to promote her book, a friend told her that every woman in her tuckshop group had sex with their husbands. devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 17

> straight talk

Mark Steyn

Our reprimitivized future

T

he Reuters headline put it this way: “Pirates Pose of today’s badlands were relatively ordered not so long ago, and Annoying Distraction For Obama.” many of them are getting badder and badder by the day. Half a So many distractions, aren’t there? Only a week ago, the century back, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British North Korean missile test was an “annoying distraction” and Italian, poor but functioning. Then it became a state, and then from Barack Obama’s call for a world without nuclear weapons a failed state, and now the husk of a nation is a convenient squat and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming. from which to make mischief. According to Chatham House in And only a couple of days earlier the president insisted Iraq was London, Somali pirates made about $30 million in ransom and a “distraction” – from what, I forget: The cooing press coverage booty last year. Thirty mil goes a long way in Somalia, making of Michelle’s wardrobe? No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, piracy a very attractive proposition. that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administraIt’s also a low-risk one. Once upon a time we killed and caption’s plans for federally subsidized daycare, just as Pearl Harbour tured pirates. Today, it’s all more complicated. The attorney genwas an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First eral, Eric Holder, has declined to say whether the kidnappers of World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz the American captain will be “brought to justice” by the U.S. “I’m Ferdinand’s dinner plans. not sure exactly what would happen next,” declares the chief lawIf the incompetent management driving the New York Times enforcement official of the world’s superpower. But some things we from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their termi- can say for certain. Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged nal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to “All the some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or News That’s Fit to Distract.” made him walk the plank, Tom Blumer of Newsbusters pious senators would rise to Somali pirates made about $30 notes that in the last 30 days denounce an America that there have been some 2,500 no longer lived up to its million in ransom and booty last stories featuring Obama and highest ideals, and the net“distractions,” as opposed to work talking-heads would year. Thirty mil goes a long way about 800 “distractions” for argue that Plankgate was Bush in his entire second recruiting more and more in Somalia, making piracy a very term. The sub-headline of young men to the pirates’ the Reuters story suggests the cause, and judges would attractive proposition unprecedented pace at which rule that pirates were entithe mountain of distractions is tled to the protections of the piling up: “First North Korea, Iran – now Somali pirates.”

U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by Er, okay. So the North Korean test is a “distraction,” the Iranian high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense. nuclear program is a “distraction,” and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, which over the centuries did more vessel in international waters is a “distraction.” Maybe it would be than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted now declines even to risk capturing their Somali successors, havwith the Rest of the World relabelled “Distractions.” Oh, to be ing been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo- European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would opportunities – Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague – but be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live with the land beyond the edge of the Queen’s gardens ominously on welfare for the rest of his life. I doubt Pirates of the Caribbean marked “Here be distractions . . . ” would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown As it happens, Somali piracy is not a distraction, but a glimpse Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in of the world the day after tomorrow. In my book America Alone, council flats in Manchester and going down to the pub for a couI quote Robert D. Kaplan referring to the lawless fringes of the ple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver map as “Indian Territory.” It’s a droll jest but a misleading one, me benefits check, lad.” From “Avast, me hearties!” to a vast welsince the very phrase presumes that the badlands will one day be fare scam is not progress. brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot In a world of legalisms, resistance is futile. The Royal Navy sail18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Suspected pirates keep their hands in the air as directed by the guided-missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf as the visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) team prepares to apprehend them

ors kidnapped by Iran two years ago and humiliated by the mullahs on TV were operating under rules of engagement that call for “de-escalation” in the event of a confrontation. Which is to say, their rules of engagement are rules of non-engagement. Likewise, merchant vessels equipped with cannon in the 18th century now sail unarmed. They contract with expensive private security firms, but those security teams do not carry guns: When the MV Biscaglia was seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden last year, the Indian and Bangladeshi crew were taken hostage but the three unarmed guards from “Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions” in London “escaped by jumping into the water.” Some solution. When you make a lucrative activity low-risk, you get more of it.

As my colleague Andrew McCarthy wrote, “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.” Very true. Somalia, Iran, and North Korea are all less “civilized” than they were a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense they have made undeniable progress: They have globalized their pathologies. Somali pirates seize

vessels the size of aircraft carriers flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies run Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state provides nuclear technology to Damascus and Tehran. Unlovely as it is, Pyongyang nevertheless has friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund non-state actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere non-state actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever-bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of stateof-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future. © 2009 Mark Steyn

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 19

> eyes right

Richard Prosser

Didn’t police shoot a man carrying a golf club?

V

irender Singh is my hero this month. The Justices of and wrong, and be a senior serving front-line Police officer at the the Peace who threw his case out of the Manukau District same time. This was an old man, unwell, alone and almost cerCourt are my heroes, too. Between them they’ve struck tainly afraid, being targeted yet again – for the tenth time in fact a blow for truth, justice, common sense, and the rights – by a group of youths who were quite prepared to challenge him of the ordinary citizen to go about their lawful business, and to should he confront them, a group which the Police had obviously live without fear of crime and intimidation. Actually Virender given no regard to on the nine previous occasions when they had struck about four blows, if the number of teeth lost by one of the violated the man’s privacy and destroyed his property; a group who drunken, stoned, young thugs who stabbed him while trying to presumably weren’t planning on changing their ways voluntarily. rob his store, is anything to go by. Singh should have been given a What else was he supposed to have done? Call the Police? Has he medal. Predictably, however, our terminally PC Police Force chose given up on trying that option, I find myself wondering? Would to charge him, instead, with the unforgivable crime of defending you have sent three carloads of armed officers to his assistance, I himself. Thanks to the sanity of the Justices, the tiring mantra of wonder, would you have arrested the vandals, would you in fact “thou shalt not take the law into thine own hands” has received have done anything at all? Probably not, I would posit; they would a much deserved slap in the face. have been too young, it’s only a sign, there’s nothing you can do On the flip side, Sergeant Cathy Dalton of the Wanganui Police is until or unless they actually beat up the old boy or break down his not my hero this month. In fact in my opinion she’d be a candidate door or rob him or kill him. No, there’s nothing you can do – or for quite another award; ‘Criminal-Promoting Liberal Fool Who can be bothered to do – about the thugs themselves, the criminals, Shouldn’t Be A Cop – of the the vandals; but the victim Month’, or something similar. here, the old man, well, It was more than reasonable for you can call out the Armed The reason for the Sergeant incurring this writer’s ire is of Offenders Squad on him, course the case of Wanganui Virender Singh, confronted by knife- and then leave him, waitpensioner Terry Taylor, who ing, for weeks, on his heart wielding robbers, to beat the little in March confronted a mob of medication, for a decision half-a-dozen mindless louts who on whether you’re going to scrotes over with a hockey stick. It charge him or not. What a were destroying the For Sale sign on his property, for the tenth miserable pathetic excuse for was completely unreasonable of the good Policing. You should time in eighteen months.

Taylor, 67 and on heart be utterly ashamed. In fact Police to charge him because of it medication, stood on his patio you should resign from the and held an unloaded air rifle Force, because your behavacross his chest while the six teenage vandals kicked down his sign. iour is unacceptable. It is unacceptable to me as a law-abiding When one of them advanced towards him, Taylor pointed the slug taxpayer. It is unacceptable to public opinion. It is unacceptable gun at him. Only then did the little jerks in question run away, to the precepts of freedom and the right of the ordinary citizen but not without having the temerity to call the Police themselves, to live a life without fear or intimidation. and report that shots had been fired.

It’s not “only a sign” which is being vandalized here. It’s a man’s Twenty minutes later, Taylor, frail and aging, and a victim of privacy and property which is being vandalized, his sense of safety repeat vandalism, was confronted by three carloads of armed and security, his right to live without angst, worry, or concern.

Police, and forced out of his home with his hands in the air on This is as much about assault and violation as any rape or home pain of being shot. invasion, because little thugs like those in question, unless they Sergeant Cathy Dalton called his behaviour “unacceptable”, are stopped, grow up to become the rapists and home invaders and said he could face charges. of tomorrow.

Beg pardon? Sorry, lady, but it’s your behaviour which is unacI acknowledge that the Police are a little unhappy about air ceptable. I simply cannot believe that anyone can have an attitude guns in general at the moment, with one of their own having so divorced, so diametrically opposed, to the fundamentals of right been murdered with one only a few weeks back. But I find myself 20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

asking why the Police Commissioner himself, on whose discretion air guns remain available to unlicensed purchasers, has done nothing in response to the recent spate of air gun related crime – including the killing of one of his own officers – other than to sit on his hands? Who do we have to blame for this?

One old man with an unloaded slug gun, driven to desperate ends by Police inaction, is not a threat to society. Six young thugs who believe themselves to be above the law, are that threat. So are the cops who fail to see the difference.

A person can use “reasonable force” to defend themselves, or indeed to defend another person, in this country. But who defines what is “reasonable”, and what factors are taken into consideration when assessing this?

“Reasonable” force must be viewed against the unreasonableness of the situation in which it is required to be employed. As things stand, if 9/11 had occurred in New Zealand, the Police would probably be wanting to lay charges against the passengers of Flight 93 who stood up and took on the hijackers. Dear me, tut tut, what unacceptable behaviour, taking the law into their own hands like that. They should have waited calmly until the plane had landed, and then allowed the proper authorities to deal with the situation.

We can’t be condoning vigilante action, now can we?

If a man with a knife confronts me in my home at three o’clock in the morning, is it unreasonable that I shoot him with a rifle?

Probably, under the law as it stands; in Court, the Police – for it is they who would be the prosecuting authority – would argue that it was ‘only’ a knife, that I could have fended him off with a chair, that I could have negotiated calmly, offered him a cup of tea perhaps, or dialed 111 and then retreated to a safe room to wait for help. True, I probably could have done any of the above, but is it reasonable to expect me to contemplate such actions in the situation as described? It’s the middle of the night, I’m shocked, scared, not very awake, and my instinct is to protect my partner.

Looking back on the circumstances, from a third person’s perspective, with hindsight and the safety of distance, provides for a very different assessment of what may or may not be reasonable when one is looking at the sharp end of a knife. What if he’s ‘only’ armed with a baseball bat? I think it fair to opine that my shock and fear are probably going to be comparable, and my reaction is very likely to be the same.

In reality, I am going to employ as much force as I possibly can, as quickly as I can, in order to prevent the intruder from doing whatever he is doing, or whatever I fear he may be intending to do. I am going to employ whatever force it takes, to immobilize him, or to remove him from my home, or both, in order to render him incapable of doing harm to myself or my loved ones, and to achieve this end as swiftly as is possible.

In reality, this means that Mr. Intruder is quite likely to get shot. I am not concerned about being reasonable. It is unreasonable for him to be there in the first place. I make no apologies to the liberal of heart or otherwise weak of thinking, for I believe my survival to be more important than your bizarre and illogical sensibilities. I do not think it is reasonable of you to expect me to do otherwise.

This, I believe, is the benchmark by which our self-defence laws must be set; that the safety of the innocent must, in the interests of natural justice, take precedence over any concern for the safety of the offender. The offender offends by choice, and without any concern for the rights of the victim. The victim has an inalienable human right to self-preservation, which transcends both the

authority of any Government, and the wording of any current law. Any harm caused to the offender, in any unlawful action, by any action of self-preservation on the part of the victim, must be made, in law, to be of lesser importance than the success of the victim’s actions of self-preservation; and the victim must not be held in any way accountable for any harm which might come to the offender through the victim’s actions in pursuit of self-preservation or the protection of others.

At the very least, the determination of “reasonable,” with regard to the use of force when employed in the defence of oneself, or of others, must take regard for the effects of the undeniable instinctive human responses, to attack, violation, and threat.

It was more than reasonable for Virender Singh, confronted by knife-wielding robbers, to beat the little scrotes over with a hockey stick. It was completely unreasonable of the Police to charge him because of it. So one of the poor wee dears lost a few teeth. Diddums. How sad. Maybe he shouldn’t have been there in the first place – have the Police or the bleeding hearts not thought about that? They hadn’t gone there to buy wine gums, now had they – no, they’d gone armed, and with the intention of committing crime, namely to steal more alcohol.

And I would contend that it was also perfectly reasonable for Terry Taylor to confront vandals with his unloaded slug gun, though a couple of barrels of buckshot might have been an even better option, given that the Police weren’t interested in doing anything about it themselves.

It is high time the Police began exercising their discretion, where cases of self-defence are concerned, with common sense and in keeping with society’s demands for protection. In refusing to do so, they are being a very unreasonable Force indeed.

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www.stressless.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 21

> line one

Chris Carter

It takes a fox to catch a rooster

S

ince the arrival of Fox News on New Zealand’s Sky TV, political corruption...lie down with dogs and you are bound to despite Fox’s unashamedly parochial domestic U.S. pro- get fleas...In the case of JK and brother Bobby, a number of big gramming, the opportunity for Kiwis to gain a true insight ones travelling at high speed and wearing copper jackets! into much that we really didn’t know about the yanks, for But back to Fox News and their refreshing portrayal via great me at least, has been a real eye-opener. Working on the principle reporting as to what America is really all about in these troubled that it is most unlikely that in history there has ever been a truly times. Firstly the Dark-Side. Without a shadow of a doubt, we unbiased branch of the media, it’s nevertheless a real treat to at in New Zealand can take much comfort indeed from having the least hear about a country from a news organisation not almost good fortune to be ruled mostly by simpletons, if, for no other entirely staffed by sneering and cynical anti-American hacks. reason that fools usually don’t have the brains to figure out the Of course the U.S. Media, not unlike ours, has long had the finer points of grand theft and serious corruption. You want to habit of assembling sound bites to portray in a good light, the become a US Senator, a Congressman or for that matter have a go current push towards socialism (thankfully starting to be reversed at the Presidency? Well mostly being a bit dim doesn’t appear to here in Godzone), making Fox, from within the U.S. Media scrum be too much of a handicap providing that you look the part and appear to be very much right of centre, when in truth it is bound don’t mind selling your soul. Everything appears to revolve around to appear that way when virtually all the other networks make money, like lots of it, with the necessary investment to get you, Karl Marx appear to be a Capitalist. say into the Senate, being as of nothing as opposed to the returns Like many other people who you’ll then be making over are into news and views from the next several decades, Maybe we should perhaps take around the world, I was fasciexcept of course from the nated to watch the ascension Federal Piggy Bank, to your another look at flogging off TVNZ of Barack Obama from the crooked electoral backers. maw of the entirely corrupt Fox News appears to be news, if for no other reason than to the one branch of the US Chicago political machine to become essentially anointed as media who regularly questake away government temptation tions how it is that Senators POTUS almost entirely due to the “Three Wise Monkeys” and Congressmen, who approach to his candidature by the mainstream media. Certainly, after all are only well paid Civil Servants, can nevertheless accuapart from Fox News, despite the wealth of evidence that Obama mulate fortunes to rival those of a Saudi Prince. Certainly over associated with and indeed counted amongst his friends some of time the occasional Senator is arraigned as a sort of sacrificial goat Chicago’s dodgiest people and organisations, the rest of the media before the Federal Court over some minor fiddle that he’s been gave him the traditional “Kennedy” pass i.e. no speak, see or hear involved in, but nothing that ever explains the raw wealth that no matter what he’d been up to. the bulk of these sleek Washington politicians exude from every Kennedy, the also sainted darling of the US mainstream media, well groomed pore. interestingly enough also owed his Presidency to the bent Chicago Now, as you can well imagine it takes more than a little courpolitical machine, ably assisted by a Mafia Godfather by the name age as a branch of the media to butt heads with very powerful of Sam “Momo” Giancana. Sam who, as a favour to his old boot- politicians who have under their direct control every government legging mate Joe Kennedy in return for a firm promise from his agency from the armed forces through to the IRD and everything son Jack not to roger the Mafia when he became POTUS, got in between with which they can and will make your life miserable damn near everyone in Illinois to vote for the Kennedy ticket, even with. Yet almost alone, Fox News has not only done so but has those yet to be born or even dead for decades. Sam Giancana was grown into the largest cable news network in the States even to shown typical Democratic gratitude for winning the election with the point where in the last viewer-ship ratings, including CNN, the new President taking Sam’s girlfriend Judith Campbell as his Fox rated nearly double all the opposition combined. This reminds Mistress, while brother Bobby as Attorney General then beat the me a bit of the young feller in the old story who was part of the Mafia around the whiskers at each and every opportunity. Lesson multitude cheering the King as he passed by in his invisible, yet here though for any tempted to sample the delights of Chicago supposedly exquisitely embroidered cloak. “But the tosser is as 22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

naked as a jaybird, I can see his bare bum” the kid is said to have cried, or something like that, whereupon the crowd snapped out of their blind adoration over what they had been persuaded to believe, realised that they had been had, and they laughed at the exposed monarch’s parts, so he fled the country. The King, of course, had been getting away with this scam for ages, there being no one in the kingdom with the nerve or the desire to simply speak the obvious truth.

Not too dissimilar to the current situation in the USA, I believe, where a very talented scam artist has very ������������������������ skilfully��������������� persuaded the bulk of the population that he is in possession of certain Messianic skills and that in company with his non-tax paying leftist apostles he will change the face of the Universe, starting quite naturally in Washington. Fortunately he did not have to start by running the money lenders out of the temple as most of them had already left town, do doubt heading for places without an extradition treaty so that they might enjoy their loot in more tranquil surroundings. The new POTUS however had dreamed up a new wrinkle to the old loaves and fishes trick, much easier by far to turn a few forests into bank notes and spread them hither and yon like a whirling dervish.

That the currency would quickly be devalued by the sheer volume of the $Trillions being cast about is but a capitalist myth was the cry.

Perception will quickly overcome reality; it’s all just a matter of faith. And so it was that the scribes dutifully reported these wondrous economic miracles and all was then seen to be good...well that is excepting for the evil and wicked Fox News scribes who shamefully cast much doubt upon “The One’s” divine ability to count much past one plus one. However, early on in these days of religious awakening such were the cries of hosanna and the like that few of the faithful even heard the gentle cries of the nay-sayers, or indeed even remembered the ancient warnings re false priests and even the real bad sod to keep an eye out for, with the wings, forked tail and terrible breath. Sadly however, well certainly from the point of view of the “One’s” finely honed religious/political machine, eventually the vast flocks of worshippers became, well, a little bit bored with the same old “yes we can” parables, and by way of a change, not unlike, some felt at the time, being tempted to bite into one of Eve’s forbidden apples, took a bit of a peep on the telly at the one news channel that, God protect us, dared to question the Word itself.

Yes indeed Fox News Channel began to tempt the faithful into

Fox News appears to be the one branch of the US media who regularly questions how it is that Senators and Congressmen, who after all are only well paid Civil Servants, can nevertheless accumulate fortunes to rival those of a Saudi Prince examining reality, common sense and even how it may be possible that Benny Hinn and Obama might be kissing cousins even!

Certainly those still able to perform simple mathematics quickly worked out that indeed they, their children and even great, great, grand children would stagger henceforth, very likely until the real coming of the Lord, under the monumental burden of debt that Mr Smoothie had been telling them that he had just printed or borrowed from the Chinese. That the gormless British PM Gordon Brown managed to protect himself from the likes of Fox News broadcasting heresy, as he in his turn, single handedly turned the UK into a financial desert, simply came about as a result of Gordon’s innate cunning. He had the advantage of owning the BBC and telling them what they can say, and even how to say it.

Perfect solution and straight from the old fascist handbook eh? The lesson to learn from all of this I guess is to make damn sure that we keep about us a stroppy and very determined media that isn’t scared to protect the public interest by digging out the truth from wherever it might be hiding. Maybe we should perhaps take another look at flogging off TVNZ news, if for no other reason than to take away government temptation. After all, it always has been hard to call the boss a lying toe rag even if he is a politician!

Chris Carter appears in association with www.snitch.co.nz, a must-see site.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 23

> soapbox

Farmer Steve

The following commentary was written by an American farmer this month after a briefing on the implementation of a carbon credit scheme in North Dakota. As you can see, Farmer Steve and his colleagues are beginning to realise that selling their souls will come at a hefty price down the track…

I

have changed my mind about participating in the carbon Let’s be clear. credit program. And have resolved to give the money I received Carbon is not a new commodity! No new wealth is being created to St Jude’s Children’s Hospital. here! Is this the way we want to make a living? Let me ask you, Here is why. what if their satellites determine that your land has lost carbon?

Recently I sat in the fire hall with a few dozen farmers. We had You will get a bill, not a check, right? If you make a tillage pass been invited to hear how we can get paid for carbon credits. you will get a bill for emitting carbon, is this not correct?

The speaker explained how their satellites can measure the carIt is also a fact that this income will, in short order, get built bon in our land individually and how much money we could get. into your land cost. You will keep very little and be left with the Then asked for questions. burden of another bureaucratic program.

I asked “what is the source of this money”?

Let’s be honest, we feel compelled to take this money because The presenter said it comes from big companies that pollute. of the need to be competitive, however we also need to hold I asked “where do they true to our values and lead get this money”? He had no by example that means placNo good citizen is opposed to answer. ing our principals ahead of So I answered for him, using the earth’s resources wisely, money. asking, “won’t it come from No good citizen is opposed everyone who pays their to using the earth’s resources however, wisdom means a person power bill”? He then agreed wisely, however, wisdom and said “that could be”. means a person who has both who has both intelligence I then said isn’t this about intelligence and humility. In the theory of man made global my view many of the propoand humility warming? he said “we are not nents of man-made global going to talk about that”. Here warming have the first and they are on the prairie soliclack the second. We are able iting land for carbon credits to exercise our freedom in tempting us with free money. this country because we I believe that agreeing have abundant, reliable and to take their money means affordable power. It is ironic you agree with taxing catthat we sat in front of the flag tle gas also, because methin that fire hall and considane is a greenhouse gas 20 ered trading our liberty for times more powerful than money. carbon. I believe taking this I’ll leave you with a quote money without considering from Roy Disney: its source makes us no bet“Decision making becomes ter than the bankers who lent easier when your values are money to people, knowing clear to you” they could not pay it back.

[The above was first posted Collecting their fees then selling the bad loans in bundles to some- by Farmer Steve on the blogsite WattsUpWithThat, and is reprinted one else. They did not care where the money came from either. here by permission] 24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Soapbox is an occasional column in Investigate. If you have an issue you’d like to sound off about, email 750 words to editorial@investigatemagazine.com

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IANWISHART.COM INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 25

Mission INCREDIBLE Media commentators missed the big story in Helen Clark’s appointment to the United Nations Development Programme.

As IAN WISHART explains, she takes the helm in the UN’s number three position just as the UN pitches to become an overarching world government, with real executive powers and effective control of the armies of all UN members.

Clark didn’t join the UNDP to concentrate on third world charity work, but with a much bigger brief:

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Clark tasked to pave the way for World Government

W

hat is at stake is to launch a reform process of the general UN system in view of fostering a new global agenda and building a New World Order.”

They could be the utterings of a raving conspiracy nut. Or perhaps the writings of one of those intellectual villains from any one of a dozen James Bond movies. But they aren’t. Instead, these are the words of one of the world’s major lobby groups – a collection of world leaders and left-wing politicians who meet each year for global conferences and policy initiatives. They call themselves Socialist International, and that paragraph kicked off a major 40 page briefing document that appears to set the stage for a new role for the United Nations: turning it into a fullfledged world government.

Socialist International is not a small-fry organisation. Affiliated to the controversial and secretive Bilderberg Group, its membership list includes heavy hitters – New Zealand’s Helen Clark co-chairs the Asia-Pacific Committee of Socialist International for example, and her predecessor in the UNDP role, Kemal Dervis, also has strong links to Socialist International. President Obama’s climate change ‘czar’ Carol Browner was listed as a senior official on the Socialist International website on January 2nd this year, although that reference has mysteriously disappeared following her appointment to the US administration.

The organisation’s use of ‘climate change’ as an excuse to introduce world governance has been backed by no less a figure than British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “The first meeting of the SI Commission for a Sustainable World Society – the body established to address the global environmental agenda, climate change and the issues

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 27

of governance required to deal with these common challenges – took place at 10 Downing Street on Monday 19 November, 2007 hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown,” begins one news release on the SI site.

B

ut it’s the contents of a document entitled “Reforming the United Nations for a New Global Agenda” that appear to contain a blueprint for the future of the United Nations, and it appears no coincidence that Helen Clark, a Socialist International member since 1976, has just been appointed with an agenda to reform the United Nations.

In her interview with the Listener’s Ruth Laugeson this month, Helen Clark hammered the point home: “The Secretary-General, when one reads his speeches and comments, he’s looking for a fresh face for the UN…As I see it, he’s very reform-minded about the organisation. One of the questions I got asked at one point along the way was ‘New Zealand’s had a tremendous amount of public sector reform, haven’t you?’.”

Clark would know. Laugesen writes in her preamble to the interview that Clark’s role will be bigger than people realise: “Her brief will extend well beyond the UNDP’s US$5 billion budget. During her four year term she will also chair the UN Development Group, an umbrella group for the 33 UN agencies, funds and departments that play a role in development around the globe.”

What you can expect to see is a new, streamlined UN, with a prototype already being trialled at country level: “There’s been a pilot [programme] going on that,” says Clark, ‘the One UN pilot.”

“The One UN” will see “one leader of the UN in a country, one programme, one budget…My job will be to be rolling that out further,” Clark says.

But the UN Reform briefing paper prepared by Socialist International in 2005 signalled exactly what Clark was talking about: “������������������������������������������������������ The UN Funds and Programmes should be streamlined and merged in order to avoid overlappings, increase the efficiency and enhance the role of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).”

Another item on Socialist International’s agenda is a cleanout of senior UN staff in favour of those capable of ushering in the New World Order they talked about: “There should be a one-time review and replacement of personnel, including through early retirement, to ensure that the Secretariat is staffed with the right people to undertake the tasks at hand.”

Socialist International boasts that its extensive global networks make it perfectly placed to help the United Nations usher in unprecedented global change, “provided…�������������������������������� that socialist and progressive governments in advanced countries show the political courage to both explain and honor their internationalist commitments.”

If you weren’t aware that Labour and other socialist governments had “internationalist commitments” that transcended loyalty to their people well, now you are.

Funding the United Nations as a de-facto world government won’t come cheap, and the Socialist International briefing paper makes this clear when it talks about raising US$100 billion for development aid each year: “The mobilization of these resources may require … some forms of international taxation such as a carbon tax or a tax on the production or sale of armaments, or a small profit tax surcharge on the income of large corporations.”

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

This echoes a call in a previous UN Development Programme report which also calls for a world carbon tax to fund a bigger, stronger United Nations, and a tax on all financial transactions in the world, known as ‘the Tobin Tax’.

Overhauling the UN will also be accompanied by overhaul of the World Bank and the International Monetary fund, with more of a focus shifting wealth from the West to the Third World: “S��������������������������������������������������������������� ocial and redistributive policies should form an integral part of IMF and World Bank financed reforms and that the measurement of growth and economic welfare should take into account environmental effects and the use of finite natural resources.”

All of this ties into the climate change scare, and is part of the real agenda behind global warming publicity – transferring wealth under the guise of a planetary emergency. The proposed reforms being thrashed out for this December’s new climate change treaty at Copenhagen would see multinationals encouraged to close down factories in the West and re-open them in Asia and Africa, where carbon restrictions won’t be as harsh for the developing countries. In effect, millions of jobs in New Zealand, Australia, the US, Britain and other OECD countries will vanish as manufacturing is moved elsewhere, and the carbon taxes and emissions schemes will be used to incentivize multinationals to invest in the third world.

Helen Clark, in her Listener interview, hints at this: “The climate change talks at the end of the year in Copenhagen: the developing countries’ needs are going to have to be paramount. Because whether we can bring developing countries into the framework will make or break our efforts to deal with the climate change problem.

“That’s going to mean funding, and it’s going to mean technology transfer.”

But that’s just a tiny part of what’s looming around the corner.

The UN Development Programme has been pushing for a world government structure since 1994, and now Socialist International is weighing in with its vision of “one person, one vote” across the globe: “����������������������������������������������������������������� The question of legitimacy is at the heart of the ‘international system’. Legitimacy requires a certain degree of ‘global democracy’ that would gradually increase over time. At the same time, realistic global governance cannot ignore existing power relations in both the economic and military sense. A blueprint that ignores the resources controlled by various actors and their relative weights in the world would not be feasible. The reform agenda must try to balance three divergent requirements: 1. Global democracy, which in some fundamental sense must give equal weight to each human being; 2. Recognition of the endurance of nation states which do have ‘equal’ legal status as sovereigns and remain fundamental ‘units’ of the international system; and reflection of the divergent economic and military ‘capabilities’ of nation states. It is obvious that India, Japan, Sri Lanka and Barbados, to take four examples, while being “equal” sovereign nation states, have very different economic and defense capabilities which must be reflected in the architecture of the international system.

3. It is important to stress that a United Nations adapted to the needs and realities of the 21st Century should be the overall institutional setting for both the political and the economic sphere. The current arrangements need to be replaced by new ones, changing from the post World War II representation to constituencies, weighted votes and universal participation, and

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 29

adjusting the policies of those institutions in favour of the actual needs of today’s world.”

Precisely how the United Nations can turn itself into a “legitimate” global democracy when more than three quarters of its member states are totalitarian or undemocratic regimes, remains to be seen. And a simple “one person, one vote” would effectively become a global government ruled by communist China. So if “reform” of the United Nations does indeed include this move to become “the overall institution”, some pretty tough challenges lie ahead in terms of working out the structure.

Socialist International’s briefing paper alludes to the problems of existing standing armies and military capabilities of nation states, but as part of the reform process it anticipates the UN ordering the transfer of military capability from nation states to the UN, via “peacekeeping” allocations, an idea first mooted in a UN global governance paper in 1994: “The international community must provide increased funds for peacekeeping, using some of the resources released by reductions of defence expenditures. The cost of peacekeeping should be integrated into a single annual budget and financed by assessments on all UN member countries – with an increase of the peacekeeping reserve fund to facilitate rapid deployment.”

Essentially, as nations reduce their militaries the extra money is provided to the UN to enable it to maintain a rapid deployment force of soldiers. Over time, the UN military capability and readiness could allow it to intervene almost instantly anywhere in the world.

Under the blueprint already being used at the United Nations, it will become illegal under international law for countries to have large armed forces unless those forces ultimately report to the United Nations as Commander-in-Chief: • “Military force is not a legitimate political instrument, except in self- defence or under UN auspices; • The development of military capabilities beyond that required for national defence and support of UN action is a potential threat to the security of people.

• Weapons of mass destruction are not legitimate instruments of national defence.

• The production and trade in arms should be controlled by the international community.”

For “international community”, read “United Nations”.

Reform of the UN Security Council is also proposed, with the European Union expected to take a seat as a permanent member of the UN SC, replacing Britain and France. That would mean the EU, USA, Russia and China would become the permanent members with powers of veto, leaving the US potentially isolated.

“The EU should speak with one voice both at open and closed Security Council meetings. The medium-term goal should be to have a permanent EU seat in the Security Council, replacing the nation states,” says the Socialist International report.

Additionally, Socialist International proposes widening the Security Council to include more Third World and Arab nations.

The biggest proposed change to the Security Council, however, is the removal of the power of veto entirely: “The UN should aim at a veto-free culture in the Security Council. There is no doubt that the veto-based decision-making structure has a number of negative features. Sensitive matters often trigger repeated vetoes, which means that the Security Council is unable to act in areas that are in fact clearly within its area of competence. One example of this is the Israel-Palestine conflict, in relation to which the Unites States has exercised a veto on sev30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

eral occasions, thus blocking any real decisions by the Security Council concerning the conflict.”

The briefing paper from Helen Clark’s Socialist International overlooks the reality that, without the power of veto, nuclear war in the last 50 years would have been a certainty.

This 2005 document preceded the global economic crash by three years, but it contains in its pages details of a proposed new global economic administration to coordinate the entire global economy: a) “Hence there is a need to establish on a global coordination level a new United Nations Security Council on Economic, Social and Environmental issues [UNESEC] – a Council for Sustainable Development.

The ‘knotted gun’ sculpture outside UN headquarters in New York is meant to express that in future, only the UN will be armed

“Socialist International’s briefing paper alludes to the problems of existing standing armies and military capabilities of nation states, but as part of the reform process it anticipates the UN ordering the transfer of military capability from nation states to the UN, via “peacekeeping” allocations” INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 31

b) This Council should be composed and function in a manner that takes into account the difficulties facing the current UN Security Council. The eventual permanent members should be more representative of the world as a whole and of all the major economic regions, including the United States, Europe, China, Africa, Latin America, Oceania and Asia. In other words, it should reflect the world of 2005, not the world of 1945. c) The Council for Sustainable Development should be independent of the Security Council and have the same standing with respect to international economic and social matters as the Security Council has in peace and security matters. It should be in a position to improve coordination between international economic, financial, social and environmental policies. It should be a deliberative forum aimed at contributing to world social and economic justice, stability and prosperity on the basis of the UN Charter. It should have the task of: • continuously assessing the state of the world economy and ensuring macro-economic coordination; • providing a long-term strategic framework for sustainable development; • securing consistency between the policy goals and activities of the international economic, social and environmental institutions; • producing common guidelines on the priorities of the global agenda, monitoring their follow-up and acting as a coordinating body for trade-offs between trade, employment and the environment.

“Once a year the Council should meet at the level of heads of state and government together with the chief executives of all main global agencies related to sustainable development.”

The plan will also see some kind of global control of financial markets, coupled with a “redistribution of wealth” agenda: “Socialists and social-democrats agree that with increasing globalization and, in particular, increasing integration of financial markets, there is need for a global regulator of these markets as well as an institution that can help countries that experience financial crisis. Markets do need regulation and supervision, and when they have become global, these functions must also be global.

Moreover, the developing countries generally, and even more so, the least developed countries, should have access to concessional resources, both, because they cannot cover the costs of providing for global public goods from which everyone benefits such as environmental protection, disease control and security and, as a matter of international solidarity, there should be some redistribution of income from the most fortunate to those most in need also across national borders.”

By now you should be beginning to appreciate how the new world order will work. The UN Security Council will become stacked with members undoubtedly approved by Socialist International, and the USA will lose its power of veto, substantially or even entirely. Because of new funding streams from carbon taxes and a global financial transaction tax, the UN will have its own revenue and be capable of putting its own “peacekeeping” military force into action. Meanwhile, the new Sustainable Development Council will have the same draconian powers to direct how the world economy should develop and how resources should be collected and spent. Countries wishing to dispute would get a hearing in the UN General Assembly, but if they didn’t have the political support they could be ordered to tow the line or face increasingly harsh sanctions from the UN community.

32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Voting rights on the new Sustainability Council would be based on “three main criteria: a country’s share in world population, GDP and contributions to the UN global goods budget.”

In other words, the more you contribute to the UN, the more say you have in governing the affairs of other countries.

“The voting powers that result from such a scheme must have two essential characteristics: they must appear reasonable and appeal to the demand for legitimacy present in world public opinion, and they must be acceptable to the nation states that would have to agree to the reform.”

If you are wondering how Helen Clark fits into this massive reform long term, UNESEC will be the face of “The One UN”: “The UNESEC would be the governance umbrella for all specialised economic and social agencies currently in the UN system, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Environment Organisation (WEO) to be created, and so on, as well as the Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO…What is proposed is a UNESEC which acts as a strategic board for the entire international system in the economic, social and environmental sphere.”

S

ocialist International adds that UNESEC “would be a source of strengthened legitimacy for all institutions, particularly the IMF and the World Bank and thus give multilateralism the necessary global support, desperately needed in order to efficiently tackle the global challenges we face.”

Much of Socialist International’s work on this concept, incidentally, was written by Helen Clark’s predecessor at the UNDP, Kemal Dervis. So it’s fair to say that this document has an excellent pedigree as a likely indicator of what Clark’s real role will be.

Every government needs its own judiciary to enforce its legality, and some kind of military strength to enforce its power practically. We’ve dealt with plans for UN militarisation, and the judicial power will come through the International Court of Justice, colloquially known as the World Court. Socialist International wants “������������������������������������������������������ Security Council enforcement of World Court decisions and other international legal obligations” to be incorporated as part of the reformed UN. Climate change and other environmental issues will come under the global control of a new UN agency: “���������������������������������������������������������� A World Environmental Organization, grouping existing programmes, would be able to muster more authority and influence than the existing programmes (like UNEP) can do in isolation.

This new body should be created with the authority to define and enforce laws, to establish the official data on environment and to develop a worldwide monitoring system.”

In a section of the report specifically addressing the proposed global government, Socialist International writes: “New ways of enhancing democratic representation and citizenship at world level should be envisaged.”

Part of that process of gaining “legitimacy” is for topics being considered by the UN to be also debated in national parliaments, with your local MPs slowly becoming “global MPs” representing your interests directly at the UN – this quote taken directly from a 2004 UN document: “Member States should make way for an enhanced role for parliamentarians in global governance. They should instruct the Secretariat to work with national parliaments and the InterParliamentary Union, as appropriate, to convene one or more experimental global public policy committees to discuss emerging

priorities on the global agenda. These committees would comprise parliamentarians from the most relevant functional committee in a globally representative range of countries. In an experimental five-year period, different organizational arrangements could be tested and, through periodic review, refined over time.”

Socialist International sees world government as inevitable: “At some point, contemplation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly will be needed to complement UN General Assembly, where the states are represented. Such a development should be supported by the gradual emergence of truly global citizenship, underpinned by rights drawn from the 1948 declaration on Human Rights and the 1966 Covenants on civil and political rights and economic and social rights.

“International democracy is feasible and politically necessary.

Such an Assembly should be more than just another UN institution. It would have to become a building block of a new, democratically legitimate, world order.”

Key players in drafting the New World Order include “NGOs, trade unions, women, indigenous groups, local authorities, academia and the business sector”, with the ultimate aim being a “Global New Deal” – a phrase now being used by British Prime Minister (and Socialist Internationalist) Gordon Brown: “UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called the G20 Summit in London a “Global New Deal” and solution to the current financial crisis,” reported the Jakarta Post this month, one of thousands of news agencies around the world carrying the new phrase. But here’s

how Socialist International described the plan four years ago: “Bearing in mind these two objectives of the UN reform process, the way forward is to develop new political instruments to mobilise more actors at international, regional, national and local levels in order to change the power relationships and force real and meaningful reforms. New global alliances are needed to strike a new Global Deal and to put a new global agenda underway.”

UN Development Programme head Helen Clark has confirmed British Prime Minister and global ‘New Dealer’ Gordon Brown is one of her backers: “I sounded it out first with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They said, ‘You’d be terrific at that…you can get buy-in from very significant players’,” Clark told the Listener this month.

As a former vice-president of Socialist International, Brown would have been a key player in shoehorning Clark into the UN’s third most powerful position on a reform agenda driven by the organisation she’s been a member of since 1976 – Socialist International – and blueprinted by the previous UNDP head Kemal Dervis.

Despite her protestations to the contrary, it would be a fair bet that Clark’s ascension to such a role has been planned for quite some time.

To read more of the UN’s agenda for global government, the proposed new global tax and its direct relationship to the climate change scare, read Ian Wishart’s new book Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming, available from Whitcoulls, Borders, PaperPlus, Dymocks, Take Note, The Warehouse and good bookstores everywhere from April 27. n

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 33

Are Climate Scientists Misleading The World About Antarctic Ice Loss?

34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

A barrage of scientific announcements since the start of the year have heralded the beginning of global warming Armageddon – the melt of Antarctica. This month, as the tiny Wilkins Ice Shelf broke away from the continent, the media and some climate scientists hyped it up even more.

IAN WISHART, whose new book Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming has just been released, shoots down the scare stories in this short extract

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 35

W

hen climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen just a few weeks ago, they presented the world with a global warming nightmare – a rise in sea level of more than a metre within the next 90 years and possibly double that.

The news ricocheted around the planet, but for the most part it was a political stunt.

Because Antarctica is the storehouse for so much of the world’s fre�������������������������������������������������������������� sh water, the question of whether the ice continent is really melting or not is crucial to the global warming debate. By some estimates, if all the ice on the Antarctic mainland thawed out, sea levels would rise up to 85 metres worldwide, submerging all seaside towns and most major cities deep underwater.

The scientists are agreed, however, that the West Antarctic ice sheet is more vulnerable to climate change than the interior of the continent. And the West Antarctic sheet contains enough water to raise global sea levels by five metres.

What chance is there, however, of a total melt? After all, ice melts at 0⁰C and the West Antarctic temperature average is still about 34⁰C below zero. The average across the whole of Antarctica is 46 below.

With atmospheric CO2 levels of 7000 parts per million in prehistoric times (in contrast to 385ppm now), the entire planet’s average temperature was still only 22-24⁰C, an increase of eight to ten degrees on the current world average. What would it really take in terms of CO2 emissions and temperature change to unlock Antarctica’s ice?

NASA’s Drew Shindell, a global warming believer, argues that West Antarctica “will eventually melt if warming like this continues.”1 One of the authors of the Nature study on Antarctic warming published in January, he claims a temperature rise of just 3⁰C could be the catalyst for that region to enter meltdown.

But we’ve seen temperature fluctuations of double that on the Western Antarctic ice sheets in the past century, so presumably there’s far more to it than simply plucking a number out of the air and constructing a theory around it to scare small children and Green Party voters with of a night.

One who knows a little about scaring people is Al Gore, who spins a great little yarn about the collapse of West Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf.2 “If you were flying over it in a helicopter, you’d see it 700 feet (213m) tall,” says Gore in his movie. “They are so majestic, so massive. In the distance are the mountains, and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent. This is floating ice, and there is land based ice on the down-slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. They thought this would be stable for about a hundred years, even with global warming. The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting in January 31, 2002, in a period of 35 days, this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly.

They went back to figure out where they had gone wrong. That’s when they focused on those pools of melting water.

“Even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. The landbased ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. There’s a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. It’s like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts doesn’t raise the level 36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

of water in the glass, and a cube sitting atop a stack of ice cubes, which melts and flows over the edge.

That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

For the record, no Pacific islanders were evacuated to New Zealand as a result of the Larsen B collapse, probably because it caused a sea level rise of about 0.1 millimetres (1/100th of a centimetre) – not enough to cause anyone to scamper up a beach let alone shinny up a palm tree to escape the wave. The world’s oldest man, using a Zimmer frame, could outrun a sea level rise of that strength. Al Gore’s claim is bogus.

And for what it’s worth, although glaciers are melting, they’re not melting much. Australia’s national science organisation, the CSIRO, has been keeping close tabs on Antarctic melt in the wake of Gore’s movie, just in case they have to evacuate Australians to New Zealand as well. Thankfully, it doesn’t look likely.3 “Measurements by satellite techniques based on gravity indicate mass loss at a rate of 138 ± 73 billion tonnes per year during 2002-2005, mostly from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet.

That is equivalent to a rise in global sea level of 0.4 ± 0.2 mm per year.”4 Remember, that’s not 0.2 cm, that’s 0.2 millimetres (2/100ths of a centimetre or 7/1000ths of an inch). If that rate of sea level rise continues, we’ll all be enjoying the benefits of a 1.8 centimetre rise in sea levels by the end of this century.

For what it’s worth, and in direct contradiction of the early 2009 claim that Antarctica is warming overall, satellite measurements5 suggest the East Antarctic north of latitude 816 gained (not lost) up to 52 billion tons of ice per year, between 1992 and 2003. That’s around 500 billion tons of ice added during the decade said to have been the warmest in the past hundred years. “A gain of this magnitude,” reported the study authors, “is enough to slow sea level rise by 0.12 mm per year”.

As for Gore’s claim that Larsen B is definitely a victim of global

warming, scientists at the front line describe it as regional warming.

“Temperature rises on the Antarctic Peninsula have been five times faster than the global mean, that’s 2.5⁰C since records began in the 1940s,” notes British Antarctic Survey glaciologist Dr David Vaughan.7 “Geographically this is unusual and it is also unusual in historical terms.8 There has been no similar warming in the last five hundred years but I am not alarmed about any immediate impact on the rest of the world from the Larsen B collapse. It is still too small in size to cause a rise in sea level or affect the amount of radiation reflected back into the atmosphere (albedo). However, the event gives scientists like us an indicator of which processes to look at in order to predict what’s going on over the next hundred years. This will be relevant to sea level rise.”

“If the Arctic was still slightly smaller overall in 2008 compared to 1979, the Antarctic was larger.

The University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Centre posted the results of its own analysis in January 2009, reporting that globally, sea ice coverage in 2008 had returned to nearly the same levels satellites first recorded back in 1979” INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 37

A much more measured commentary than the former Vice President’s.

A study of the Larsen C shelf however, adds even more perspective. Scientists monitoring that sheet don’t think the highly unusual warming of the West Antarctic Peninsula is the direct culprit in the Larsen collapses.

“The thought is that warmer ambient temperature – about 2.5 degrees centigrade in the last 50 years – alone isn’t breaking up the ice shelf.”9 Instead, the culprit is thought to be “a slightly warmer ocean assaulting the ice from underneath, carving out huge cavities and channels that thin and weaken the shelf.”

Which is the El Niño scenario yet again – warmer ocean currents from the north circulating down.

Indeed, there’s supporting evidence in a recent study10 that backs away from modern global warming as a major player in the Larsen B collapse.

“Ice shelf collapse is not as simple as we first thought,” conceded Professor Neil Glasser, after he and a colleague discovered Larsen B had been a disaster waiting to happen, or as they put it, “an ice shelf in distress for decades previously”.

“It’s likely that melting from higher ocean temperatures, or even a gradual decline in the ice mass of the Peninsula over the centuries, was pushing the Larsen to the brink”, said the National Snow and Ice Data Centre’s Ted Scambos, who co-authored the paper.11 Centuries. Long before humans built factories. And if that’s the cause of the Larsen collapse, it’s probably the same for the Pine Island Glacier and the rest of West Antarctica, such as the Wilkins ice sheet. o make things more difficult, there is a raft of assumptions being made about Antarctica which should really be admitted as “guesswork”. For example, the Larsen B ice shelf collapse on the peninsula in 2002 was said to be the biggest since the last ice age 12,000 years ago, and the shelf itself was said to date from that time.

The American Institute of Physics wasn’t quite so definite, saying only that the Larsen shelf “probably” dated back to the ice age.12 In truth, we don’t actually know. Antarctica was only discovered in the loose sense of the word by Captain Cook in 1772, and no one set foot on Antarctica until the 1820s. It wasn’t until 1892 that Captain James Larsen, of ice shelf fame, discovered his ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.13 Another study, of the “currently healthy” George VI ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, reveals the ebb and flow of ice shelves is quite common. ScienceDaily reported that this particular shelf “experienced an extensive retreat about 9,500 years ago, more than anything seen in recent years. The retreat coincided with a shift in ocean currents that occurred after a long period of warmth.”14 And yet, in 2009, the George VI shelf is in perfectly good nick.

The shelf is sea ice, similar to that in the Arctic Circle, and it’s the Arctic that provides strong evidence against claimed lifespans of ten thousand years for Antarctic sea ice.

In September 2007, European satellite images revealed the fabled “Northwest Passage” – a sea route between the UK and Asia across the top of the Canadian Arctic Circle – opened for the first time in recorded history.15 In case that sounds impressive, recorded history in regard to the Passage only began in 1978 with satellite monitoring.

That aside, the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic in 2007 was, nevertheless, spectacular. It prompted speculation that the Arctic might not freeze up again, that perhaps the tipping point had been reached on global warming. Somewhere in the region of a

T

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

million square kilometres of sea ice just melted away.

Yet the following winter, it all came back and the Northwest Passage froze up, just as it has most years. Had we not known, thanks to satellites, that the ice had melted enough to open the passage in 2007 and close it again a few months later, the world might have continued ignorantly believing that the Arctic sea ice in 2009 had been there undisturbed for thousands of years too.

“Global warming seems of little help to explorers,” noted the K2Climb.Net explorers’ website wistfully in January 2009.16 “Arctic sailor Henk De Velde reported: “As seen on the 2008 late July ice map; a NW passage will be impossible for a small boat this year.”

“Eclipse hunters Nike and David Speltz travelled on an Arctic ice breaker for a view of a total solar eclipse. At the exact North Pole, Nike celebrated by taking a swim on the spot. The couple’s live images over Contact 4.0 showed an extensive ice shield covering the Arctic sea late summer.

“This – and sat pics showing the same thing – still didn’t deter Britain’s Lewis Gordon Pugh. In spite of a trailing ice breaker (and media crew), Pugh’s attempt to kayak 1,200 km to the North Pole in order to raise awareness for global warming was stuck in thick ice only days after departure.”

You’ve got to love serendipity!

Although the Northwest Passage opened up again late in the northern summer of 2008, by December of that year there were signs the Arctic sea ice was making up lost ground by gaining in extent after hitting its 2007 low.

“Average Arctic sea ice extent for the month of December was 12.53 million square kilometres (4.84 million square miles). This was 140,000 square kilometres (54,000 square miles) greater than for December 2007 and 830,000 square kilometres (320,000 square miles) less than the 1979 to 2000 December average,” reported the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in January 2009.

In February this year scientists were embarrassed at the discovery they’d underestimated the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by as much as 500,000 square kilometres, because of faulty sensors on the ice.17 That’s an area of extra ice bigger than California and twice as big as New Zealand.

But if the Arctic was still slightly smaller overall in 2008 compared to 1979, the Antarctic was larger. The University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Centre posted the results of its own analysis in January 2009, reporting that globally, sea ice coverage in 2008 had returned to nearly the same levels satellites first recorded back in 1979.18 Not that this prevents global warming believers from pushing their agenda. The UN’s International Polar Year project, set up with the understanding it would support the IPCC’s claims about global warming, reported late February 2009 that studies of the polar caps have proved the worst – melting is happening even faster than expected.

Critics of the UN IPCC, like Steve Goddard, spent the next few days rolling all over the floor laughing:19 “It was reported last week that the IPY (International Polar Year) released a study claiming that both polar ice caps are melting ‘faster than expected’,” explained Goddard.

“Given that NSIDC [the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre] shows Antarctica gaining ice at a rapid pace, I find myself surprised that IPY would release a study saying exactly the opposite. But then again, an IPY official reportedly forecast that last summer (2008) might have an ‘ice free Arctic’ [it didn’t].

“Columnist George Will reported that overall global sea ice area

is normal, and was correct. Dr. Meier [from NSIDC] confirmed that on January 1 global sea ice levels were normal.

“The UIUC [University of Illinois Arctic Centre] graph shows global ice levels well within one standard deviation of the 19792000 mean. [NASA’s] Dr. [James] Hansen was correct that according to global warming theory, both poles should be losing ice – though we know now it theoretically should be happening more slowly in the Antarctic. Yet 20 years later we actually see the Antarctic gaining ice, which is contrary to Dr. Hansen’s theory, contrary to IPY claims, and probably contrary to Steig’s questionable temperature analysis,” concludes Goddard.

This is one of the most frustrating things about the global warming issue: the scientists pushing it keep singing their tune no matter what the evidence actually shows.

Given that sea ice is much more responsive to temperature changes than glacial ice, i.e., much faster to melt or regrow, the University of Illinois’ figures have caused many to wonder whether there’s any significant global warming at all, if the ice extent hasn’t materially changed in thirty years.

“Each year,” wrote DailyTech’s Michael Asher, “millions of square kilometres of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly – defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

“Sea ice is floating and, unlike the massive ice sheets anchored to bedrock in Greenland and Antarctica, doesn’t affect ocean levels. However, due to its transient nature, sea ice responds much faster to changes in temperature or precipitation and is therefore a useful barometer of changing conditions.

“Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC’s Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures

“In February this year scientists were embarrassed at the discovery they’d underestimated the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by as much as 500,000 square kilometres, because of faulty sensors on the ice.

That’s an area of extra ice bigger than California and twice as big as New Zealand”

in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

“Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier.

Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.”

Not only did the ice grow back, it grew back faster than it ever has since satellite monitoring began. In fact, it grew back even faster than it melted in the first place.

To read more about the real story behind global warming, including the rest of this extract, get Ian Wishart’s Air Con from your nearest bookstore or online at www.ianwishart.com n

FOOTNOTES 1. www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre50k5bm-us-antarctica-warming/ 2. http://forumpolitics.com/blogs/2007/03/17/an-inconvient-truth-transcript/ 3. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_drives_recent.html 4. The same CSIRO report also notes that the estimate conflicts with other data suggesting either a very small loss or an actual net gain in Antarctic ice. But for the sake of running with this point, I’ll take the most alarmist estimate at face value.

5. “Snowfall driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea Level Rise”, Davis et al, Science, 24 June 2005, Vol 308, no 5730, pp. 1898-1901 6. Up till now, satellites have been unable to measure ice mass close to the south pole itself, because of limitations in the orbit paths and instrumentation they carry. A European satellite launching this year is expected to fill in the blanks. It is reasonable to assume that if East Antarctica’s northern plains were adding ice mass, so too the colder south polar cap.

10.“Antarctic ice shelf collapse blamed on more than climate change”, Journal of Glaciology, referred by ScienceDaily, 11 February 2008, http://www. sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080210100441.htm 11. “A structural glaciological analysis of the 2002 Larsen B ice shelf collapse”, N Glasser and T Scambos, Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 54, No. 184, 2008 12. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/xIceShelf.htm 13. A better estimate of Larsen B’s age is 2000 years, based on ocean sediments analysed from beneath it, but they simply tell us how long ice has been overhead, not necessarily how thick or thin the ice has been, or whether it has been there continuously.

14. “Antarctic Ice Shelf Retreats Happened Before”, British Antarctic Survey, reported in ScienceDaily, 28 February 2005, http://www.sciencedaily. com/releases/2005/02/050224115901.htm 15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6995999.stm

7. http://climatex.org/articles/climate-change-info/larsen-ice-shelf-b-antarctic-2002/ 8. Regional hotspots are entirely consistent, however, with El Niño and other oscillations.

9. US Antarctic Programme, http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/science/contentHandler.cfm?id=1546

16. http://www.k2Climb.net/news.php?id=17941 17. “Arctic ice extent underestimated because of ‘sensor drift’”, http://news. slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/0420255&from=rss 18. http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13834 19. “Poll and Polar Ice Trends”, 2 March 2009 http://wattsupwiththat. com/2009/03/02/poll-and-polar-ice-trends/#more-5955

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 39

the dumbing down

of Britain Civilisational Sunset Gains Momentum

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

In part two of his analysis on the West’s death by intellectual suicide, HAL G. P. COLEBATCH documents just how deep the rot has gone

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 41

A

December, 2004, report by the Programme for International Student Assessments, surveying more than 250,000 students in 41 countries, and sponsored by the OECD, showed that in the preceding three years, British students had gone from fourth in science to 11th, from 7th to 11th in reading, and from 8th to 18th in maths. Of the OECD countries surveyed, it was found only in Turkey, Luxembourg and Mexico were more pupils handicapped by a lack of qualified and experienced teachers. Further, no country had a greater difference between State and independent schools. Among the factors which improved performance were access to classic literature and poetry.

The declining British performance in reading, in contrast to increasing marks in national tests, was strong evidence that any apparent improvement in educational performance was illusionary and a result of lowering standards, since the PISA standards were held constant.

Almost 1,000 teenagers aged 13 to 16 were challenged in an online survey by the exam board OCR to produce the name of one living scientist. Two managed to do so, both naming celebrity environmentalist David Bellamy. Among the others answers offered were Madonna, Leonardo da Vinci and Chemical Ali. Clare Kenyon, OCR’s director of general assessment, said: “The results show the growing apathy of today’s students about science ... it is startling that no students named those responsible for recent scientific advances, for example Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, or Professor Colin Pikkinger, who headed the Beagle 2 space probe to Mars project ... who will carry on [Britain’s] great tradition of scientific discovery? Universities are reporting falling numbers of science students and there is a widely reported shortage of science teachers and lab technicians.”

This impression that science was of no public political interest compared to, say, sport or rock music, was reinforced by the publication in 2003 of Stuart Lyon’s Harnessing Our Genius: British Science in the 21st Century (Centre for Policy Studies, London), which argued that publicly-funded science research, apart from possibly the Defence-related component, had hardly any policymanagement at all. It looked like a great regression from the 1950s, when, despite some silly invocations of “scientism” as a panacea and an unpleasant enthrallment to motions of modernity which resulted in soulless tower-block housing and other disasters, science and technology and the benefits they could deliver humanity were at least seen as important.

Britain, which had once led the world in daring exploration, had, by the beginning of the 21st Century, become one of the world’s most outspoken critics of manned space flight. Lord Sainsbury, speaking in 2003, virtually described it as a waste of money, and said of the International Space Station: “We believe that it does not offer value for money and we do not support it.” Certainly manned space exploration was expensive and hazardous, but for many it seemed essential for the human spirit, as well as for the long-term future of the human race, that it push on with this quest whose ultimate rewards could not yet be known (perhaps, for a start, the capacity to land on collision-threatening asteroids and push them out of the way), and where some real progress and advancement was already taking place. The rewards of space-flight may be on a vaster scale of magnitude than, and at present as unknowable as, the rewards of sponsoring Columbus’s expedition. To turn away from such a challenge entirely, even rejecting a role as a junior 42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

partner, would be to accept a defeat, a diminishment, alien to much of what is best in the human and the Western spirit, that spirit which had broken through the “ceiling” which had limited and held down human life since the beginning of Mankind. But perhaps the motive was jealousy.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, perhaps even for the first time since Alcuin held up before Charlemagne the prospect of a new Athens being created finer than the old, there seemed a feeling not merely of progress temporarily slowing, or being put on hold during reconstruction as in the austerity period after World War II, but, in many ways, of actual regression, like something in science-fiction of the gloomier kind. This was despite the fact that various advances and discoveries did go on, however little public attention they received.

This, no doubt, due in large part to the endless diet of what has been called “dark, gritty, socio-political entertainment,” without hope or other positive qualities, often set in landscapes of industrial decay, and the Nihilism of much contemporary and post-modernist literature and art. Whether or not the plummeting native birth-rate, something Britain now shares with most of Europe, is a sign of loss of hope for the future, or even loss of a sense of the continuity of the human race, is another matter, but the various phenomena may be connected. The Times of 27 January, 2006, reported: “Foresight, the Government’s science think-tank, predicts that by 2055 oil will have become so short that ‘travel will be a rare luxury,’ and that ‘people will have to shift to a less mobile society’.”

I don’t believe this will happen: one remembers Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 predictions that we would all starve to death in the 1970s.

It was predicted on good authority in 1925 that oil would be exhausted by 1935, and by the Club of Rome in 1972 that it would happen in 1992. In 1977 US President Jimmy Carter predicted all the proven reserves of oil in the world could be used up by the end of the 1980s. Increasing demand will lead to the development of new fuels and extraction techniques, more efficient engines and, one hopes not unreasonably, the development of new powersources (Germany in World War II was able to run its economy and its vast war-machine very largely on synthetics).

However, if it is true, it will not only be travel that will be a rare luxury: so will be food, housing, education, medical care, civilization and life be rare luxuries. And even rarer for the next generation. A world really without fuel would be plunged – apparently quite soon, before today’s children have grown old – into a new Dark Age without hope of recovery. The response to such a prospect is surely to take research and development more seriously.

What is worrying and depressing about this report is its frisson of hopeless acceptance of deepening darkness and squalor – as if the can-do gumption of the scientist, the technologist, the inventor, the engineer and the entrepreneur to improve the human lot was over (What had Captain Cook’s vessels been called? – Adventure, Endeavour, Resolution and Discovery!). Frederick Forsyth put the same thing in slightly different terms: “Soon we will have to construct a new generation of nuclear reactors or see our old folk die of cold.”

Further, while research and development was of course going on, both in the government and private sectors, it was hard to know how much this was depending on downstream effect of the trained scientists and technicians – the human capital – educated and qualified in previous times.

As the Millennium approached Trade and Industry Secretary

Stephen Byers announced some exhibits would be given places of honour in the Dome and “Millennium Product” status: a thousand years of British inventiveness would be marked for posterity by Viagra, the Teletubbies and a waterless urinal. Also a toothbrush, a waterski system for people in wheelchairs and an acoustic fence to fend off unwanted fish. Mr Byers described these as part of a “truly varied list which reflects the talent and innovation in Britain.” Peter Mandelson, the Minister in charge of the Millennium Dome project, commented that: “The impact of Christianity on Western civilization will be central to the Millennium experience.” I commented at the time that to speak of the impact of Christianity on Western civilization was a little like speaking of the impact of Shakespeare on Hamlet.

Anyway, among the various symbols, logos and exhibits selected for the “Millennium experience,” including especially those in the vast, vacuous Dome itself, things associated with the use of brains were conspicuously missing.

Prime Minister Blair hailed the Millennium Dome in terms of rapturous meaninglessness.

Two years before the opening he proclaimed that it was Britain’s opportunity to greet the world with a celebration that was: [S]o bold, so beautiful, so inspiring, that it embodies at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of future [sic] in the world.

This is the reason for the Millennium Experience: not the product of imagination run wild, but a huge opportunity for Britain. It is good for Britain, so let us seize the moment and put on something of which we and the world will be proud ... We will say to ourselves with pride: this is our Dome, Britain’s Dome. And believe me, it will be the envy of the world.

The exhibitions, like the Millennium symbol itself, featuring a weird pin-headed, chickenbeaked, thunder-thighed female, appeared part of the ethos of official ugliness as well as meaninglessness which is a major aspect of the assault on middle-culture. A sort of purple Siamese Twin was also considered but apparently dropped. Journalist Liz Lightfoot wrote of taking her family to the Millennium Dome on the day it opened to the public and of eventually arriving after a long wait in deafening but impeccably multicultural steel band music at the “Body” exhibition (featuring a large distorted human body which people could walk through. It was necessary to see this figure to appreciate its full crudity and ugliness). They entered through some brown curly wires, which she told her children were meant to be intestines: “What’s that bug, then?” asked John. “Have we got bugs in our tummies?” asked Jamie, looking horrified. It was only two days later, watching television, that I realised the curly things were supposed to be pubic hair and the bugs were lice.

“It was reported that as of 2006, GCSE students in Britain would only be required to learn “soft” science – mainly disputed about the benefits and risks of scientific development – while traditional “hard” science would be offered as an optional extra” INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 43

The lice were animatronic and waved legs and feelers. Design, expense and budgeting must have gone into their creation. The mentality of those responsible for the various steps of the process seems more puzzling the more one thinks about it (“So bold, so beautiful, so inspiring!”). The Dome’s “Content Editor,” Ben Evans, said: “We’re accused of having low standards and pandering to the lowest common denominator but I don’t apologise for that at all.” The giant pubic lice were apparently an expression of his desire to make it “family-orientated and inclusive.” It was announced that Mr Jerry Springer would host the Miss World contest at the Dome. Words like “decadent” are easy to misuse and often hard to define, but thinking of what might have been done to commemorate the Millennium it is hard to see the Dome as anything else. More recently, designs for an “edgy” new artistic frieze at the Eurostar terminal at St. Pancras Station were announced. They included a human derelict, a suicide, and passengers boarding a train driven by a skeleton, symbolising death.

There is something very wrong here.

A

n unflinchingly-progressive ex-South African Australian journalist named Andre Malan (who believed Blair “a torch-bearer” for his generation of “liberal-minded guys”) in the course of a series of obsequious features on Blairism written while visiting London early in 2000 ejaculated with awe-struck sycophancy that: “Even in purely commercial terms the dome will more than pay for itself. The intangible benefits it will bring in terms of fun, education and inspiration are beyond measure.”

In the country that invented the railway, a senior Minister, Peter Hain, admitted in 2002 that the railways were the worst in Europe.

It was reported that as of 2006, GCSE students in Britain would only be required to learn “soft” science – mainly disputed about the benefits and risks of scientific development – while traditional “hard” science would be offered as an optional extra. The science curriculum had already been diluted in recent years, as combined science qualifications took the place of qualifications in separate disciplines.

The Sunday Times reported: “The statutory requirements for pupils to learn science will be watered down ... there will be no compulsion to master the Periodic Table – the basis of chemistry – nor basic scientific laws that have informed the work of all the great scientists.”

Between 1996 and 2006 the number of students in Britain taking A-level physics fell from 45,000 to 30,000, with a bigger population. A survey of vice-chancellors shows that 48% of universities have been forced to provide special lessons in literacy and numeracy for first-year students.

In 2006 there was a fall of 7.8% in university applications to study history and of 8.5% in applications to study the classics.

Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell, said this was “no bad thing.” There were rises in application for “vocational” subjects such as nursing, social work and pharmacology. However there were big falls in computer science (10.3%), electrical engineering (7.3%) and electronic and general engineering (18.6%).

When the British Sports Minister boasts: “The Government has been a huge supporter of football,” what social and cultural result does she expect? The Prime Minister claimed: “Our rock music is taking America by storm,” rather than “Our inventions are taking America by storm,” or even “Our chess is taking America by storm.” It is hard to avoid the feeling that there is a connection 44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

between the general dumbing-down of culture and cultural preoccupations and lowering of educational standards and what looks like a great slowing of technological progress – apart from Information Technology, which is internationally-driven – compared to the first 50 years of the 20th Century. It must be emphasised that the kulturkampf attack on core values and middleculture is at least as much an attack on science as it is on the humanities and on the social and spiritual aspects of civilisation.

Robert Zubrin, an astronautic engineer, writing in The Case for Mars, published in 1996, invited readers to compare the period 1966-1996 with the preceding 30 years and with the 30 before that.

He argued that during the period 1906-1936 the world was revolutionised by electrification, telephones, radio, motor cars, aviation, motion pictures etc. Then in 1936-66 came communications satellites, interplanetary spacecraft, computers, television, antibiotics, nuclear power and major improvements in aircraft. He continued: Compared to these changes, the technological innovation from 1966 to the present seem insignificant. Immense changes should have occurred during the period but did not. Had we been following the pervious sixty years technological trajectory, we would today have videotelephones, solar-powered cars, maglev (magnetic levitation) trains, fusion reactors, hypersonic intercontinental travel, reliable and inexpensive transportation in Earth orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture, and human settlements on the Moon and Mars. Instead, today we see important technological developments, such as nuclear power and biotechnology, being blocked or enmeshed in controversy – we are slowing down.

The picture might be said to be more complex than this, and perhaps this is too pessimistic. There are hundreds of universities, and other institutions, all over the world carrying out major research. It has been said that a majority of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today.

Apart from the dramatic advances in IT and computers, there have been advances in medical and all manner of other technologies proceeding without necessarily great fan-flare. Unmanned spaceflight at least has continued to progress. It is unlikely that there will be a shortage of candidates for Nobel Prizes in the foreseeable future. Further, in modern conditions new discoveries in science and technology often tend to be less obviously dramatic because they are incremental or the results of team efforts rather than the results of singular geniuses. Thousands of research projects go on all over the world and many of them will bear fruit. Television programmes such as “Discovery Science” do attract large – and apparently growing – audiences.

However, there as an argument to be made that the cultural element supportive of science and technology – at least in some countries and cultures – is weakening in many areas, and the effect of this may not be felt for some time but will be drastic when it really comes. Prime Minister Blair, interviewed in Newsweek in 1998, said films like The Full Monty, about a group of unemployed

“There’s a great sense of confidence and adventure and a greater sense of comfort with ourselves.” The country, he declared, was discovering an exciting view of its future which was: “look, what we’re actually good at is being inventive, creative, dynamic and outward-looking” – Tony Blair men in the dying industrial town of Sheffield who became male strippers, reflected a new mood: “Not merely in the sense that it’s a highly successful film, and that says something about the state of the British film industry now. There’s a great sense of confidence and adventure and a greater sense of comfort with ourselves.” The country, he declared, was discovering an exciting view of its future which was: “look, what we’re actually good at is being inventive, creative, dynamic and outward-looking.” The 1999 American film October Sky is the true story of a group of boys in a dying American coal town in 1957, rather worse than Sheffield, with basic school and nothing to look forward to except a few years cultivat-

ing black-lung disease in the mines before they closed. They built and launched model rockets, taught themselves physics, chemistry, trigonometry, metallurgy, machining and systems-control.

All became successful and one became a leading NASA scientist.

The contrast with The Full Monty, and the implications, are too obvious to need stating.

In the 1950s and early 1960s the old Walt Disney Show for children would conclude with a picture of a rocket taking off and the words “Dedicated to you, the leaders of the 21st Century.”

Something of this remains in the official culture of America – a feeling of optimism, advance, progress, courage. It is hard to find INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 45

in the official or officially-approved culture of Britain today, though it existed not long ago.

Then there is a line uttered by a character in the American film Jurassic Park II, to the effect that there are two kinds of boys: those who want to be astronomers and those who want to be astronauts.

Only in America, I think, does this notion retain any strength at all, and even there it is problematical today. This does not only affect science and technology but other disciplined branches of thought as well. Robert Stevens, former Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, wrote in the Spectator of 14 July, 2001: I returned to find All Souls, which comes closest to having the resources to be the centre for the study of humanities in England, taking pleasure in issuing a press release about its fellows dancing around the quadrangles under the leadership of a wooden duck.

T

he University of Staffordshire offered a course in David Beckham studies, presumably to complement the course in Princess Diana Studies on offer from a Welsh University.

Napier University in Edinburgh (Edinburgh!) commenced a course titled: “Having the Donut and Eating It: Self-Reflexivity in The Simpsons.” In Australia the Adelaide University introduced a course on Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, which deserved a better fate.

The possibilities that might arise from conflating this with the Diana course, or perhaps of a double major in Buffy and Diana studies, seemed endless. Former Blair advisor Tim Allen wrote in the Spectator of 23 February, 2002: Flick through last week’s Radio Times and you will find that one channel was showing some pretty remarkable programmes ... Porn Star, described as ‘A visit to the set of an adult film shoot at a house in California, featuring interviews with the director and one of the stars.’ ... Nude TV, in which, apparently, ‘the most private and misunderstood part of a man’s anatomy is laid bare.’ And if that doesn’t turn you on, how about Toilets: Fear, Phobia and Fetish, a documentary on Saturday uncovering ‘some of the secrets behind closed cubicles’?

So which trashy satellite channel has stooped so low as to compete for viewers by screening porn and crap? Well, it’s the BBC, actually. The corporation’s new digital channel, BBC Choice, appears to be packing its late-evening schedule with precious little else. Its early-evening schedule is hardly more highbrow. Last week it managed to cram in 26 hours of gameshows and 12 hours of showbiz news and chat.

In the same year the BBC axed the science-education programme Tommorrow’s World, which at its peak had had an audience of millions.

Gresham’s Law is applicable to many areas of human activity. Attractively easy and popular but useless university courses will reduce or drive out rigorous and demanding courses such as physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry which demand real intelligence, discipline and work, but which also make a community capable of scientific progress and the advance, or at least the maintenance, of scientific and technological civilization.

Theories of post-modernism and deconstructionism are powerful tools for implanting the idea that one course is no more useful, desirable or true than another. Leading theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has written: We inherited a science, physics, that had been progressing so fast for so long that it was often taken as the model for how other kinds of science should be done. For more than two centuries, until the present period, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly.

But today, despite our best efforts, what we know for certain about these laws is no more than we knew back in the 1970s.

46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Speaking at the 50th anniversary of the Singapore People’s Action Party in November, 2004, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister from 1965 to 1990 and one of the most intelligent and successful national leaders in the world, said Britain’s “media and politicians are anti-elitist, denigrating excellence, wanting to dumb other people down to the lowest common denominator, to avoid anyone being inferior.” He warned that top British universities were under pressure to take under-achieving students from state schools, “So students of their public schools of excellence are disadvantaged by not getting into the top universities. Singapore must not go this way.”

The Daily Telegraph of 7 February, 2009, reported: British teenagers had lower IQs than their counterparts did 30 years ago. Tests carried out in 1980 and 2008 showed the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period: Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle-class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.

The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called “Flynn effect” which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.

Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having “stagnated” or even dumbed down.

The only explanation for this appears to be the general dumbing down of the culture which has taken place under the present government, and with that government’s and its associated elite’s connivance or active support in innumerable ways, including the progressive dilution and lowering of educational standards and tests, including the virtual destruction of the grammar school system, and support for the more moronic and anti-cerebral varieties of popular entertainment, all this partly in the name of anti-elitism and the promotion of anti-western “cultural diversity,” and because of the activities of the deliberately and strategically destructive adversary culture.

In February, 2009, a cancer victim, Ms Jade Goody, became a national celebrity, her fiance being allowed out of prison on their wedding day for an extra period of time by the special intervention of the government. This adulation was despite the fact that, while in common with millions of other people, she faced death by cancer with a certain fortitude, her other achievements were indistinguishable from zero. Max Hastings commented: Jade Goody has been given £1million for exclusive photographs of the ceremony and has had her £315,000 wedding paid for by wellwishers. Complete strangers have wept for her and queued to bring presents to the doors of the gated estate where she exchanged vows …

The country ridiculed her in 2002 when she said on Big Brother that Cambridge was in London, called East Anglia ‘East Angular’ and thought it was a foreign country. But how they took her to their heart, queuing to buy her perfume and her two autobiographies.

However, Hastings and other commentators pointed out, another young woman, Gail Trimble, was simultaneously being abused and vilified on the Internet for being “brainy”: “Gail Trimble, the girl with the planet-sized brain who scored 825 of the 1,235 points amassed by Corpus Christi, Oxford, on the road to last night’s final of University Challenge, which they won – has become the new public pariah.

Across the country, bitter bloggers have sniped … ‘Smug’, ‘brain-

rupturingly irritating’, ‘vicious bitch’, ‘a horse-toothed snob’. . . Jade Goody’s story is undeniably a tragic and gripping one; but how extraordinarily inverted our values have become when she is treated like some modern-day Joan of Arc staring death in the face, while another young woman has bile poured upon her for the wicked sin of intelligence.

Similar disturbing reports of an educational dumbing-down have come from the US, where, for obvious reasons, a collapse of scientific and technological education would now have immeasurably more catastrophic consequences for the entire world.

Commentator Mark Morford wrote of a longtime Oakland high school teacher, who had seen generations of teenagers: He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years …

He cites studies, reports, hard data … But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens’ decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words “agriculture,” or even “democracy.” Not a single student could do it … [O]f the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler …

Testifying before the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in March, 2008, Bill Gates asked for more visas for foreign computer scientists and technicians because Microsoft could not get enough US-born ones, despite the very high salaries being offered. He said 60% of students in the top US computer-science departments were foreign-born. Peter Wood, Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars, commented that Gates was hardly the first to sound the alarm. In 2003, the National Science Board reported steep declines in “graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents” in the sciences. The precipitous drop in American science students has been visible for years: In 1998 the House released a national science-policy report, “Unlocking Our Future,” that fussily described “a serious incongruity between the perceived utility of a degree in science and engineering by potential students and the present and future need for those with training.” …

Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market’s demand for their knowledge and skills.

That market lies a long way off — often too far to see. But they are not insulated one bit from the worldview promoted by their teachers, textbooks, and entertainment.

Even in the leading scientific and technological societies, scientifically and technologically-educated people are, and always have been, a small minority. America has millions of illiterates and Britain and Europe probably an even higher proportion on a population basis.

Further, the number of people with an emotional and cultural commitment to the notion of progress through science and technology is probably even smaller, and this notion is under widespread and multi-fronted attack by various manifestations of the adversary culture. A survey conducted in 2007 by the US National

”In February, 2009, a cancer victim, Ms Jade Goody, became a national celebrity... This adulation was despite the fact that, while in common with millions of other people, she faced death by cancer with a certain fortitude, her other achievements were indistinguishable from zero” Science Foundation, suggested one in five American adults believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. However, one in five British pupils who took the basic science GCSE in 2008 also believed this. Space flight has gradually dropped out of public debate – in the US space policy has been mentioned hardly if at all in recent Presidential election campaigns. n INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 47

48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

ESSAY

Forest Chumps Costly Treelords deal creates new grievances

The murkiness surrounding last year’s pre-election “Treelords” gifting of the Kaingaroa Forest to Maori continues to deepen, as MIKE BUTLER opines

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 49

T

he lack of evidence of injustice surrounding the Central North Island forest land settlement, as reported in last month’s Investigate Magazine, is one of numerous problems surrounding the so-called Treelords settlement.

The Central North Island Forests Land Collective Settlement Act rubber stamps an agreement in which the Clark-Cullen minority government transferred Crown land worth $195.7-million, accumulated rentals worth approximately $223-million, and an annual income stream of about $13-million to the Central North Island Forest Iwi Collective.

The deal that purportedly settles historical grievances, sets the stage for further grievances, and illustrates how the settlement process itself has been captured by a chosen few and takes place largely outside the New Zealand political process.

I put in a written submission opposing the settlement on the grounds that because the claim was contentious, and involved a substantial publicly owned asset, it would be foolish to rush it through.

In an oral presentation to the Maori Affairs select committee, at a hearing at the Wairakei Hotel on August 6, 2008, the only point I managed to get across was that the settlement process has proceeded without mandate from non-Maori, and before proceeding, public support for the treaty process should be put to the vote.

About one minute into my submission, I found myself arguing with seven Maori MPs in front of a room containing several hundred tribal representatives waiting their turn to present a submission.

National Party MP Tau Henare disputed my view that the settlement process has proceeded without mandate from non-Maori.

“Parties of all hues have had treaty policies,” he said. “I guess if you don’t agree with any you don’t vote, and move to Australia.”

Fellow National Party MP Georgina te Heuheu said that my view was causing a problem for her people (which she quickly corrected to “the National Party” to clarify that she was not meaning Maori as a whole, or Ngati Tuwharetoa, since her brother-in-law was a key beneficiary of the settlement). “The National Party wants to settle all historical claims by 2012? And you say this is being rushed through,” she said.

Green MP Metiria Turei used her legal background in citing the case of a West Coast forestry settlement, in which compensation was paid to a group of non-Maori claimants, in a bid to prove I knew nothing about the settlement. “What would your position be on the West Coast receiving $120-million for losing logging rights? . . . I’d say you don’t know anything about this,” she said.

A transcript of the argument would have been interesting, but requests to the Parliamentary Library and the Maori Affairs select committee reveal that no record was kept.

Details of historical breaches are conspicuously absent in the act, in the deed of settlement, and in the Hansard record of speeches during the three readings of the bill in Parliament. In a curious backto-front approach, the exact amount of the settlement is known, and is made “on account with respect to the iwi groups who are yet to negotiate their individual comprehensive settlements,” according to the deed. Te Arawa have completed the process.

A clue to what the Treelords settlement is all about goes back to 1989, when the Government of the day passed the Crown Forests Asset Act 1989, which provided for management of the Crown’s forest assets, and transfer of those assets, while at the same time protecting the claims of Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi Act. The issue of ownership of Crown forest land arose during the 50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

mid 1980s, when Maori interests expressed concerns about government plans to transfer Crown land to new StateOwned Enterprises.

Once those assets were set aside, it was only going to be a matter of time before they would be transferred from public ownership to private Maori ownership.

Why? Because the official version of the Treaty of Waitangi refers, in article two, to “their lands estates forests fisheries and other properties.

Since a $170-million fisheries settlement was concluded in 1992, a forests settlement was presumably required.

Note also that the phrase “lands estates forests fisheries and other properties” is absent in the Maori version of the treaty, and in the Littlewood version of the treaty, which is most probably the lost final English language draft of the treaty.

Meanwhile, one would expect a thorough treaty negotiations minister to have a list of claims on the table so that he would be able to cross off the claims deemed settled by this deal.

This has not happened.

Therefore, theoretically, all 120 claims, from Taupo, Rotorua, and Kaingaroa, detailed in the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2000-page WAI 1200 report, could require separate settlement packages on top of the Treelords payout.

Since details of historical breaches remain undefined, clues to what those alleged breaches may be found in the WAI 1200 report, which outlines problems relating to: a. Crown provisions for the purchase and lease of land. b. The introduction of a title system. c. The transformation of customary rights into individualized shares. d. Shrinking shareholding resulting from a rule of equal succession. e. Public works land taking. f. Reduced autonomy over land decisions.

In that report, claimants argued that: a. The Crown was obliged to consult with tribal leadership before the native land court was introduced to their area.

b. Since the introduction of the land court would affect the “rangatiratanga” of the chiefs, the crown was obliged actively to protect Maori, and c. That the Crown was obliged to work with Maori to design a process that would allow settlement and active Maori engagement in the economy. (WAI 1200, Part III, Ch 8) d. The claimants cited the Waitangi Tribunal’s Rekohu Report, concerning Chatham Islands land disputes, which argued that the introduction of individual title had prejudicial effects on Maori.

Although a populist view is that of land-hungry settlers defrauding noble savages of their livelihoods, few alleged Central North Island breaches were to do with uncompensated land taking. Most breaches seem to relate to the unintended consequences of a pater-

nalistic colonial government trying to do what to them seemed right for vulnerable and uneducated natives.

Most of those grievances are technical, or to do with the perceived failure to consult, or argued shortcomings in active protection, according to the WAI 1200 report.

One such “paper grievance” is that created by the Rekohu Report, relating to the introduction of individual title having prejudicial effects on Maori. This has the potential of creating perpetual grievances, and therefore, perpetual compensation.

During the select committee consultation process, none of these issues were discussed, since they were left out of the bill.

The March Investigate report “Treelords: Show us the evidence” reports that Chief Peraniko of Ngati Manawa entered into a sale INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 51

and purchase agreement with the Crown in 1880 in which 120,000 acres changed hands for about 15,000 pounds.

The land had been brought before the Native Land Court the year before, in 1879, “when in spite of opposition from neighbouring tribes, it was awarded to Ngati Manawa.

The Native Land Court was established in 1865 to translate customary Maori land claims into legal land titles recognisable under English law.

One hundred and twenty years later, people claiming Ngati Manawa descent had forgotten about the sale, were clear about the Native Land Court awarding the land to their iwi, and called the collective’s proposal “a rip-off.” (Daily Post 25-06-08).

In the Daily Post report, Murupara Primary School principal Pem Bird, of Ngati Manawa, clearly recalled that the Native Land Court awarded the land to Ngati Manawa in 1879, but did not mention the sale in 1880.

Ngati Manawa kaumatua Maanu Paul, who had applied to the Maori Land Court for an injunction to stop the deal, told the Daily Post that his iwi and Ngati Whaoa were “the big losers” since he believed they were “entitled to more than 60 per cent of the total Kaingaroa estate.” (Daily Post 25-06-08) Ngati Manawa were allocated 6.0225 percent of the Treelords settlement, while Ngati Rangatihi got 3.1625 percent. The big winners were Tuhoe with 26.3125 percent, and Tuwharetoa, with

nised the likelihood of subsequent claims. “At the establishment of the Native Land Court, communally owned land was individualised, but now that we are going back to a point in time before the individualisation of land, who compensates those people who have just been left out, vis-à-vis the individual shareholders in the land?” he said.

“So whatever we do, out of this we will create, I think, another set of grievances, more than with any other settlement I have seen.”

“We have created, most probably, if people are clued up – and I am sure they are – a situation where in five or 10 years’ time, they will trot back in and say they have been hard-done-by and can we please sort it out, because we were the ones who made the grievance and gave them the ammunition to have a go at us,” he said.

Unexpected applause erupted as I left the select committee hearing near Taupo, on that balmy day last August, feeling that the research, writing, driving, and waiting to present my views was a complete and utter waste of time. Later, I was surprised to find that everyone presenting submissions that day were wasting their time – because the select committee, and in fact parliament, is actually powerless in treaty issues.

Henare told parliament, during the second reading, that “the select committee has no jurisdiction to change the settlement. In fact, the House itself does not have any jurisdiction whatsoever to change the settlement.

“The issue of ownership of Crown forest land arose during the mid 1980s, when Maori interests expressed concerns about government plans to transfer Crown land to new StateOwned Enterprises” 25.9125 percent, according to the Collective’s Allocation agreement. (www.cniforest.co.nz) Considerable effort went into establishing support for the settlement among members of the collective. According to the then Treaty Negotiations Minister Michael Cullen, the collective held over 70 hui in total, with each iwi in the collective determining its own endorsement process. Some used postal votes, and others hui votes. The Crown convened four public meetings in the central North Island area to hear the views of iwi and the public directly, and written submissions were also invited.

To gauge support from everyone else in New Zealand, the three readings of the bill were passed with voice votes, with the “ayes” drowning out the “noes”, so there is no indication of who voted for or against it. The Hansard record reads like the minutes of some colonial mutual admiration society. Every speech was full of verbal backslapping – high on superlatives and short on information. Every speaker was singing from the same song sheet.

At no stage has there ever been an opportunity for all voters to show whether or not they support this agreement, or in fact any of the 21 settlements to November 2007 totalling just over $743-million.

During the second reading of the bill, MP Tau Henare recog52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

“So with all due respect to the mana of the House, this process is a bit of a farce,” he said. “It seems a bit on the nose that we call for submissions, that we spend money going up the line and hiring out a hall at the hotel, and that we call hundreds of people together so that parliamentarians can listen to their submissions, only to find out that we cannot do anything about it,” he said.

Good legislation benefits all people. The Treelords settlement benefits a few at the expense of everyone else.

The fact that the nature of historial breaches remains undefined in Central North Island Forests Land Collective Settlement Act means that it is likely that those grievances will be settled on top of the massive Treelords transfer of assets.

The fact that treaty business is conducted outside the mainstream political process creates an environment which fosters corruption.

The March edition of Investigate labelled the deal a massive election bribe, and a rort. Because parliament can only rubber stamp these deals creates an opportunity for shrewd neo-tribal capitalists, to gain access to free money.

Moreover, effective legislation requires wide public support.

There is no way of telling whether or not there is support for the treaty settlement process, since voters and taxpayers have never been given a choice. n

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The Gemmill Hypothesis Why Some People Don’t Believe in God

54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Agnostic writer SIMON GEMMILL continues his search for the meaning of life, by questioning the likelihood of God’s existence

B

efore delving too deeply into this, let us remember that the truth of a matter has nothing to do with how many people believe it. It’s worth pointing this out, because as we know, most of the world believe in a deity.

And because God and religion are often intertwined, it’s worth crossing between whether or not one should believe in God, and whether or not one should follow a religion.

Many people’s objections to religion are tied up with why they don’t trust religion, so we shall not try to separate the concepts: God, and religion.

For most people, the God/religion connection is strong: many religions use arguments to prove that there is a God, and take a small logical leap, and infer that because a God exists, their religion is the right one.

The following matters will henceforth be examined: 1. Why people believe in God 2. The implications of that belief for them 3. Why some people don’t believe in religion 4. The ramifications of that non-belief for them Why Believe?

There are many reasons, which refer to such concepts as Design and First Cause. It is argued that the universe could not be here just by chance. A car or a house does not just happen, someone makes it. Therefore, a complex thing must be designed. If you’re the type to argue against this, by pointing out that posing God as Creator achieves nothing, because now there’s another thing to be explained: how did this incredible being, who knows how to make universes just get there? Surely they were created. And surely, if logic leads us to no thing existing without being created, then a Creator, especially a very impressive one, must also have a Creator; thus we still do not know why there is something, rather than nothing. We either have a Big Bang that happens for INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 55

no apparent reason, other than that it could; or a Creator, who existed, for no other reason, than that he could. Now, as a theologian friend aptly pointed out to me, Christians postulate that God is the First Cause (a bit like scientists claiming that the Big Bang was the first cause…), therefore God does not need a Designer. And theologians’ objection to the statement “Any complex being requires a Designer” is that “God is simple, not complex.” The last time I had this discussion with my theologian friend was a long time ago, as she was rather maddened by my suggestion that if the universe needs a Designer, so does God. She informed me that God was First Cause, thus didn’t need a Designer, and claimed that he must be the First Cause, otherwise we have a logically unpleasant reduction-ad-absurdum – the list of Creators would be endless… But I maintained that if there has to be a First Cause, it might as well be the Big Bang. At least, it’s a 50/50 chance – either God just got there by accident, or the universe did. Still an accident. There’s still no accounting for – as Carl Sagan pondered – why there is something, rather than nothing.

The claim of First Cause is merely dogma. It requires assent; it does not prove itself. Logic may lead us to the notion of a First Cause; however, it can never lead us to a deity. Especially not the deity of a specific religion, such as Christianity.

God doesn’t need a Designer because theologians decided he doesn’t. It’s not a fact, it’s not even logical.

If they can’t understand how the universe could just appear, how the heck can they believe that God either just appeared, or was always there? The worst argument, yet commonly used, is that God exists because he necessarily Must Exist. His existence is a logical necessity, for the universe to be created. I don’t believe that logic can really achieve such a feat. No more than the logical arguments against time-travel (such as that if you went back in time and shot your grandfather, that’s logically impossible, as once he’s dead, who shot him? And if you didn’t exist, you didn’t shoot him, so you’re still alive, if so, you shoot him… etc, ad absurdum) can prevent scientists from discovering time travel.

Implications of God’s Existence The most common claim from any religion, and we’ve all heard it, is: the universe requires a Creator, it has one, therefore Christianity (or… insert religion here…) is true. What a logical leap! There are so many religions, the Creator could be the deity behind any one of them; and for all it’s worth, even if there is a Creator, he/she/it may have nothing to do with any of the religions.

Why Some People Don’t Believe For many of us, the first objection isn’t against a Creator, but against religion. Now, religious people, allow us this: you assume that proving God exists proves also that your religion is the True 56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Religion, out of hundreds of different ones, and don’t feel the need to justify that. So, we have a leap of our own: it goes: “If religion is false, there is no God.” But here’s why we say that: there are many non-religious people who can admit that maybe the complex universe we live in could have been created, but some of us protest against this idea for the reason stated above: that solves nothing, we still don’t know why we’re here.

We’ve gone from a universe we can’t explain the reason for, to a deity whose origins we can’t explain. So what?

That’s no help.

However, we really object to religious people’s claim that if there is a Designer, then their religion is true. Many people share the anti-cult sentiment: there are enough documentaries on television about cults to illustrate this fact. Now, imagine this: non-believers feel the same way about religion that the average person – religious or not – feels about cults: “Who is this guy, to claim he is the mouthpiece of God?” we cry. And this is a more serious objection than religious people realise: why on Earth would you believe some guy, just coming up to you, and telling you God’s talking to him? We lock people up and put them in straitjackets for that behaviour. We also base religions on them. We trust a guy in robes, or the author of an ancient text, yet we lock others up. We give no logical reason for the distinction we draw here.

What’s the difference between a religion and a cult?

Numbers. In anthropological ‘religious studies’ texts, the term “new religions” is used. What a great euphemism for a cult. Now, a cult either succeeds and grows, or turns creepy and dies, or something in-between.

The worst possible argument for a religion being more reliable is its number of followers. Our ancestors went along with the Flat Earth idea, witch hunts, book burnings, crusades – in Christchurch we even honour those drunken, looting, raping, pillaging scoundrel crusaders of old, with a rugby team named after them – people believing something, or stopping believing it, has no impact on its veracity. For argument’s sake, all the major religions could be wrong, and a tiny cult could be right. Its five members surely think so. Therein lies the ingenuity and humour of Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, making the televangelist’s cult turn out to be right on the mark. We mock people for believing, along with four others that their leader is the Messenger of God, then we roll up to our church to listen to the Word of God, along with our thousands of co-followers – thinking, that just because we’ve got numbers on our side, we’ve got a better chance of being right.

There are some atheists who don’t believe in God for purely scientific reasons: that the Big Bang explains God away for good.

Theologians argue with this, saying that God is the first cause, but then, what difference does it make, whether you accept that the Big Bang just happened, or that God just happened? Logically, they’re both equally valid, or equally messy and complicated. No one really knows why everything began, do they? Many theists either

argue that God created the Big Bang, or that it didn’t even happen, God created the universe as it is, 10,000 years ago. Once again, they cannot explain why there’s a God, so they’re not really doing better than science, which humbly tries to explain our origins without reference to superstition.

Most unbelievers, including agnostics, start by failing to trust religions, their leaders, and their texts. Then reach the conclusion that either a) there is a God, but he has nothing to do with the so called ‘revealed’ religions (revealed!? Why should we believe for a second they didn’t just make it up?!)… or b) what with religion being synthetic frippery (made up nonsense), there’s no reason to trust these people who claim that their deity is real. Whereas science is fairly reliable. Think not? How then have we cured diseases, sent un-manned ships to Mars, unravelled the human genome, etc, etc? It’s more worthy of trust than religion, which seeks to control people, their minds, their actions, and their money.

In Conclusion Just as many theists jump across the pond from claiming Design and Creation to claiming that all their miscellaneous dogmas must also be true, many atheists conclude that since religions, which all claim to tell us all about God (aka the Creator) can’t be trusted, whether they be small cults, or big ones, therefore infer that the God the religious people keep harping on about, is as made-up as their other beliefs. Some theists can believe there’s a God, but not follow any particular faith.

And some atheists reject the deity concept regardless of religion’s claims of lack therein: they just don’t see why the evolved universe needs a Designer, and feel that, if there is a Designer, then the quest must begin for the Designer’s Designer. Which theologian and atheist alike agree is not worth the hassle.

But hey – maybe we’re wrong – maybe there is an infinite regress; maybe the universe is going through endless Big Bangs and Big Crunches; maybe there’s an infinite number of universes…

As Xenophanes said: “The certain truth there is no one who knows, about the gods of the things therein; and, even if someone were to utter something entirely true, he would not know it. All is merely guessing.” If only all the human race could admit that fact. The truth is… something we’ll never know.

Science, philosophy and religion alike are all searching for answers. The trouble with religion, unlike science and philosophy, is that it requires rigorous, mindless assent. Only in mysticism and ‘liberal’ religion do we see an openness to different ideas, a willingness to embrace science, and even the humble admission of not knowing. But then there are the religions that say you’ll go to Hell if you don’t believe 100% in the specific dogma you’ve been taught, even if there’s no proof for it, rational reason to believe it,

and even if it just sounds plain silly. Faith will save you? Or ignorance will save you. Maybe it goes with Adam and Eve not eating the fruit. We shouldn’t have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

Thus we should have been just like the cows. Thus religion is anti-knowledge; anti-science. (Don’t believe me? Have you heard of legal cases in the USA in which people force schools to teach Creationism rather than, or alongside, evolution? Placing the Bible above science, and rejecting science if it contradicts the Bible, is an anti-science, and anti-free-inquiry, as one could get; surely if a religion is true, science would not prove it wrong…) Hence a small handful of doubters eschew it, and try to live a rational life instead. Refusing to believe that a smart God would make them believe in stuff that’s just stupid, and punish them for using the brains he gave them. Would an all-knowing, infinitely wise God really believe some of the crap we’re told we should believe in order to save our souls, if it were told to him/her/it? Or would he respond: “Hogwash! That doesn’t make sense!”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 57

T h e G e m m i l l

h y p oth e s i s :

an answer

Readers may have their own responses to various of Simon Gemmill’s points, but IAN WISHART couldn’t let the opportunity pass to address the question of God as First Cause, in this extract from his book, The Divinity Code

O

ne of the intriguing things about the world’s creation myths is how many of them evoke a time when there was just an empty void. Creation ex nihilo may have been a foreign concept to the Babylonians, but it wasn’t to the New Zealand Maori, or America’s Apache Indians, or the Japanese. What made all of these primitive peoples, and many others besides, conceive the idea of a timeless, limitless void, out of which both the heavens (stars) and earth emerged? Why did these tribes, from right across the planet, not take the much simpler view – as the Hindus and Buddhists did – that the earth had always existed or that it endlessly recycled itself?

An early Tahitian creation myth, recorded by a passing ship’s captain in 1855 and published the following decade, reads: “In the beginning, there was nothing but the god, Ihoiho, afterwards there 58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

was an expanse of waters which covered the abyss.” Similar, again, to the Maori legend and the supreme being Io. The creation myths across the Pacific, again, go much deeper and further back than the cultures that now remember them.

What, then, is the picture that science paints for us of the moment of creation? According to cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the event that kicked off the Big Bang was so incredibly powerful that the entire universe went from being the size of a grain of sand to filling the void of space in literally milliseconds. Now that’s a feat that matches the poetry of “he spread out the heavens with his hands”.

The idea that something so insignificantly tiny could explode with such intensity beggars belief. As a point of trivia, there’s a good chance the watch on your wrist is powered by a lithium bat-

tery. What you probably don’t know is that you are wearing material as old as the universe itself. All of the lithium in existence was produced during the first four minutes of the Big Bang explosion.

If God indeed exists, his signature is written on the battery powering your wristwatch, or notebook computer.

Does science know why it went Bang? No, we don’t have a clue.

Sure, there are theories. Scientists like Edward Tryon have tried to argue that the universe is the result of what he called “a vacuum fluctuation”. Although this sounds suspiciously like what happens when you accidentally suck a sock up the hosepipe, in fact he was talking about a quantum event.

Scientists studying quantum physics have long known that particles seem to miraculously appear and disappear, sometimes with quite spectacular energy effects. Could the universe, won-

ders Tryon, simply be a quantum event that popped into existence and didn’t disappear again? Another to theorise along these lines more recently is British physicist Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics.

The argument seems quite tempting, until you crunch the numbers. Quantum events are happening all over the place, even as you read this. But the universe is an incredibly large place. There must be quadzillions of quantum events happening every second throughout the universe. There are 86,400 seconds per day, or nearly 32 million seconds a year. And according to science the Big Bang happened nearly 15 billion years ago.

Now, we know from history that if any one of the quantum events happening all around us turned into a Big Bang, it would wipe the slate clean and destroy the universe as we know it. Yet, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 59

despite the enormous, incalculable opportunities for a new Big Bang originating somewhere in the universe in the past 15 billion years, the event has never happened again.

Tackling Paul Davies specifically, astrophysicist Hugh Ross argued on his website that Davies had been caught in his own trap. In one part of God and the New Physics, Davies argues that God did not cause the Big Bang because causing, by definition, can only happen within a time-bound realm, not a timeless one.

Davies overlooks the transcendence of God, however – virtually all religions argue that a Deity capable of creating the universe is just as capable plunging his hand into it from outside to stir the mix. I digress, however. Hugh Ross pinged Davies on the theory that the universe may be a quantum event: “Noting that virtual particles can pop into existence from nothingness through quantum tunnelling, Davies employs the new grand unified theories to suggest that in the same manner the whole universe popped into existence. Ironically, his argument against God’s creating can now be turned against his hypothesis.

Quantum mechanics is founded on the concept that quantum events occur according to finite probabilities within finite time intervals. The larger the time interval, the greater the probability that a quantum event will occur. Outside of time, however, no quantum event is possible. Therefore, the origin of time (coincident with that of space, matter, and energy) eliminates quantum tunnelling as ‘creator’.”

I

n simple language, there’s still no natural explanation for the Big Bang because everything we can think of as a possible explanation relies on laws created in the Big Bang. This is the inherent and fatal weakness of the “who created God?” questionline: only things confined within this universe and bound by the laws of time are known to require causes.

To his credit, Paul Davies has conceded the weakness of the argument and now grudgingly concedes there is an apparent design in the universe.

In a column written for Britain’s Guardian in 2007, he addresses the problem.

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient “coincidences” and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if “a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics”.

“To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos.

Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.

“Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn’t exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear’s porridge 60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. So what’s going on?

“The intelligent design movement has inevitably seized on the Goldilocks enigma as evidence of divine providence, prompting a scientific backlash and boosting the recent spate of God-bashing bestsellers.

“Fuelling the controversy is an unanswered question lurking at the very heart of science – the origin of the laws of physics. Where do they come from? Why do they have the form that they do?

Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply “given”, elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter.

Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.”

Davies looks at some options, such as the theory of an infinite number of multiple universes, and perhaps we just happen to live on the universe capable of supporting life. It’s not a truly scientific theory, because it can never be tested, and Davies recognizes this: “The multiverse theory…falls short of a complete explanation of existence. For a start, there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from?

The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

“The root cause of all the difficulty can be traced to the fact that both religion and science appeal to some agency outside the universe to explain its lawlike order. Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. But appealing to a host of unseen universes and a set of unexplained meta-laws is scarcely any better.”

Having abandoned the quantum theory, debunked the multiverse theory, and rejected Intelligent Design because, well, it implies a Designer, Davies searches for a replacement theory and comes up with a belief that the universe miraculously (but entirely naturally) altered its own laws during the Big Bang to ensure a life-friendly outcome.

“In the first split second of cosmic existence, the laws must therefore have been seriously fuzzy. Then, as the information content of the universe climbed, the laws focused and homed in on the life-encouraging form we observe today. But the flaws in the laws left enough wiggle room for the universe to engineer its own bio-friendliness.

“Thus, three centuries after Newton, symmetry is restored: the laws explain the universe even as the universe explains the laws.

If there is an ultimate meaning to existence, as I believe is the case, the answer is to be found within nature, not beyond it. The universe might indeed be a fix, but if so, it has fixed itself,” concludes Davies.

Are you convinced? To me, he sounds desperate, conjuring up a universe that thinks for itself. It’s probably a reflection of the desperation he himself expressed in his book, The Cosmic Blueprint.

“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all ... it seems as though somebody has finetuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming.”

Rather than go into all the technical jargon about which atomic elements are crucial for life as we know it, I’ll paint a broader picture of the “monkeying” that has taken place, and why it is so

As this graphic from the US National Science Foundation illustrates, the ‘engine’ that drives bacteria is, genuinely, an engine, and it looks similar to those designed by human engineers. Richard Dawkins believes the construction of this engine from 50 separate components was purely “accidental”.

significant that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are now feeling seriously threatened by the latest scientific discoveries.

One aspect of the Big Bang is that the energy and timing of its explosion were incredibly precise. If this allegedly random event had fluctuated by even a nano-second in its crucial first minute, the whole showboat would have sunk without trace on the spot: no universe, period. If the acceleration forces of the Big Bang had been a mere nano-fraction stronger, the material needed to form stars and galaxies would have been flung too far and spread out too much to coalesce into stars and galaxies. If the Big Bang had been a nano-fraction slower, the gravitational pressures would have caused it to implode back in on itself.

Luckily, in this random scientific world where God does not exist, Goldilocks won the day and the universe was born.

Before leaving this section, it is worth examining what another of atheism’s “rock stars”, Richard Carrier at Infidels.org, has to say about the cosmological scientific evidence for God. Carrier, a historian studying for his Ph.D. and currently working as a librarian’s assistant, is a strident opponent of any claims that God had a hand in anything. Naturally, this fine-tuning issue is like swallowing a sea-urchin intact for Carrier, and he argues strongly that we shouldn’t leap to conclusions.

“While the creationist thinks God explains the “fine tuning” of the universe, he fails to see that every possible universe which can contain intelligent life will appear “fine tuned” no matter what its cause.”

I don’t know that I accept his reasoning. Look at it another way. The reason science is increasingly getting excited about the “fine tuning” is because we appear to be alone. A universe teeming with life on every planet would not raise suspicions about fine tuning; if life arose here, there and everywhere then there would appear to be nothing particularly special about the residents of Planet Earth.

Carrier’s argument is only valid if the “every possible universe” he talks of turns out to have just one planet with life on it. In that case, I agree, the residents of every universe would have reason to feel suspicious and ‘fine-tuned’. But employing the multiple universe theory is the scientific equivalent of reaching for an old alchemy textbook, or perhaps Hogwart’s Invisible Book of Invisibility. We can’t see any other universes. We can’t reach any other universes because, by definition, the laws that govern this universe prevent that. Nor is there a shred of evidence that any other universe can, or does exist. And even if it does, as cosmologist Paul Davies notes, it only pushes the first cause problem back from “who created the universe?” to “who created all these universes?”

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Carrier, funnily enough, doesn’t want to admit that he has a problem here.

“We already have evidence that universes exist (we live in one), and so we already have some grounds for positing multiple universes to explain the parameters of ours, e.g. there may be a million universes with different parameters and only one has life (and thus we are in it, since that is the only place we could be). This is no more ad hoc than positing God, and is arguably less so, since there is less reason to invoke an unknown type of entity (a god) than a known one (a universe).”

Again, sounds plausible. For a nano-second.

We know “universes exist”, he says, because “we live in one” [my emphasis, really it should be “we know a universe exists because we live in it”, because there is not the slightest piece of scientific evidence that universes exist, or are even capable of existing] therefore it is reasonable to assume millions of universes exist. On that logic, my clone could be God. After all, I exist so there could be billions of me and, using Dawkins’ dodgy math, one of the other Ian Wisharts is actually quite likely to be God. Or maybe I’m a “universe” in one of my other lives. Do I hear faint yelps of “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism”in the darkness?

A favourite atheist argument is to claim the universe could equally have been created by a “flying spaghetti monster”, which is really an appeal to the absurd to make the idea of a divine Creator

out of his house each morning for a week, and find all of his sheep slaughtered and giant animal tracks nearby, along with half-metre high piles of dung, the farmer would be wrong in assuming that something very, very big was attacking his sheep? Because, using Carrier and Lowder’s logic, it would be wrong to postulate the existence of something not conclusively proven to exist. Instead, the farmer should assume the culprits are rabbits.

The truth is, as Socrates once said, science should “follow the evidence where it leads”. Darwinists often accuse Christians and other religious believers of “appealing to a God of the gaps” – meaning that when something can’t be explained it is weak to immediately postulate God as the reason, when there may be perfectly good natural reasons.

This is true, but in turn there is a big difference between that, and the new situation where scientists are not finding “gaps”, but instead seeing clear evidence of what appears to be design in the universe. I can’t stress this point enough: using God as an explanation for disease, in the days before science knew about bacteria, was using God to fill a gap. But finding something closely resembling a Mazda rotary engine inside a bacterial flagella cell, or discovering massive evidence of fine-tuning of both the universe and the earth/moon system (on separate unique occasions), is positive evidence of God, not merely a negative inference from a gap. It demands explanation, in and of itself.

“If the acceleration forces of the Big Bang had been a mere nano-fraction stronger, the material needed to form stars and galaxies would have been flung too far and spread out too much to coalesce into stars and galaxies. If the Big Bang had been a nano-fraction slower, the gravitational pressures would have caused it to implode back in on itself” sound equally daft. Appealing to invisible, undetectable other universes, however, is equally a question of belief, not science. Anyone who appeals to multiverse theory is explicitly admitting the need for a Creator to explain the Big Bang. It is, in essence, an appeal to “Science of the Gaps”.

There is a point when atheists, too, must face the reality that their own religious beliefs transcend scientific evidence and begin to make a mockery of true science.

That’s fine, if Richard wants to call his god “Multiverse Theory”, that’s his business. But let’s not pretend it is “science” in any accepted definition of the term.

Carrier instinctively knows that the cosmological evidence for the fingerprints of God is getting stronger by the day. He can feel it. That’s why his essays are peppered with escape clauses: “Maybe one day we will end up with God at the end of our investigations, but right now there is little encouraging news…” “…In his 1999 debate with Phil Fernandes, Jeff Lowder made an equally crucial point: if the actual parameters of the universe do require an explanation, God is not necessarily the most probable option, since to give such an option greater weight than others which do not include a god we must have additional evidence that something like a creator-god actually exists.”

So let me get this straight: if a farmer, living on a small island known to be inhabited only by sheep and rabbits, were to come 62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

Take the experience of geneticist Francis Collins, “the man who cracked the human genome”, as the Times of London put it. Like many others, Collins was stunned to find enough intelligent code in one human cell to fill more than an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica. All this time, the late Carl Sagan’s SETI project has been scouring space for signs of a simple Morse code, while genetic engineers have been decoding what Collins regards as a direct message from the Creator of the universe and life itself: “When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Richard Carrier and other atheists would have us ignore the positive evidence, and instead reach for any other possible theory, including that the universe itself “wished” these things into existence. At the end of the day, the best argument Carrier can muster on the Infidels website comes down to either that, or a variation on deism – a deceased god: “In fact, it gets worse when we consider the possibility that the creator no longer exists – imagine a lonely god who has a choice, to live alone, or to die, and in dying create a universe from his exploding “corpse” which will have populations of people who

can then live the god’s lost dream of knowing love and never being alone. Perhaps the god stays alive, so he can share in this love, but is powerless, having given up his body for the creation of a universe.

“This is plausible, coherent, logical, and actually better explains things – it perfectly explains how god can be good and yet silent and inactive, how the universe can function so cold and mechanically and deterministically, how humans can be so confused, divided, and uncertain about god’s nature or thoughts, etc. Indeed, this theory explains everything, [Carrier’s emphasis] far better than any actual creationist theory proposed today.

“By all sense and reason, this theory should be adopted by creationists – yet they adhere to a weaker theory, oblivious to the selfrefuting character of declarations like that of Mr. Walker when he writes “when I look at the wondrous universe that surrounds me, I have no problem in accepting a being that I can’t fully explain” and yet fails to see how the atheist, with just as much right if not more, can and does say exactly the same thing – but the “being” the atheist sees and can’t fully explain is the universe itself. How much simpler this is – it requires adding nothing to what we see or know. Instead, creationists refuse to accept “a being that they can’t fully explain” (the universe) and because of their refusal are compelled to invent a god to provide the explanation that they insist is necessary. They don’t notice that they then do a complete about-face, and act in an exact opposite manner when it comes time to explain their god. Inconsistency is the creationist’s hobgoblin.”

Not really; it appears to be an equal-opportunities hobgoblin.

We’ve now discovered that the intellectual grunt behind one of the world’s main atheist websites lurks in boltholes named “deism” and “pantheism”, because even he can see the writing on the wall.

He just doesn’t want that writing to be in Hebrew.

T

he multiverse theory, incidentally, took an even more Daffy Duck turn in late 2007, when its proponents at Oxford University (where Dawkins works, incidentally) suggested that perhaps every time there is a physical change anywhere in this universe, it creates a parallel universe. Thus, if you have a car crash and die, somewhere in another universe you pranged your car and lived, while in a third universe you didn’t prang at all.

I kid you not. Apparently, everything you touched today created a new universe somewhere, as did everything everyone else touched and every tree leaf blown by the wind. “Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out — in its own universe,” reported the study.

Do you have any idea how many quadzillion universes are created every single day, just because we touch things? Of course, there’s no proof. The scary thing is these guys are on public salaries. Which is more likely, that one God created the heavens and the earth, or that by turning the 320 pages of this book you personally created 320 new universes? 321, if you count the possible universe where a rampaging T-Rex survived the extinction, burst into your bedroom and ate you while you were reading this book.

According to Oxford University, that universe must exist somewhere. Halfwits.

Perhaps the final proof needed for this chapter however comes from Richard Dawkins himself. It turns out he does believe in God, he just hasn’t come out of the closet yet. Here’s the clue, in his words: “There is no limit to the explanatory purposes to which God’s

infinite power is put. Is science having a little difficulty explaining X? No problem. Don’t give X another glance. God’s infinite power is effortlessly wheeled in to explain X (along with everything else), and it is always a supremely simple explanation.” [his emphasis].

Now look at Dawkins as he invokes exactly the same simplicity to get himself out of a tight spot on the Big Bang: “It is tempting to think (and many have succumbed) that to postulate a plethora of universes is a profligate luxury which should not be allowed. If we are going to permit the extravagance of a multiverse, so the argument runs, we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and allow a God. “Aren’t they both equally unparsimonious ad hoc hypotheses, and equally unsatisfactory? People who think that have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection. The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistically improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple.” [my emphasis] Hey presto! Scientific atheist has big problem explaining away X (Big Bang), wheels in natural selection’s alleged infinite power (multiple universes exist, and we just happen to live in the one with life), and best of all, the explanation is supremely simple.

Dawkins believes in God. He can’t escape the scientific evidence for Creation staring him in the face. So he too, like Richard Carrier, has named his deity “Multiverse”.

Now that even the world’s most vocal atheist fundamentalist has been sprung endorsing a God argument and/or a “Sky Fairy” named “Multiverse”, I think it is safe to declare that “a” God exists.

The question now turns to this: which God might that be…?

FOOTNOTE: The answer to that question, and the reasoning behind it, can be found in Ian Wishart’s The Divinity Code n

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think life | money

It’s worse than that, Jim Government borrowing to fund future not the answer, writes Peter Hensley “This can’t be right” said Jim. He was in his usual position at the dining room table soaking up the morning sun as it streamed in through the wide french-doors which opened up on to the deck. It was a typical crisp autumn day and he was perusing the morning paper quoting tidbits for Moira to comment on. This daily ritual annoyed Moira no end, but after being married for almost fifty years she had given up asking him to stop. “It says here in the paper that one in five people with a home loan expect 64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

to miss paying the mortgage in order to buy groceries.”

“Get it right Jim” she replied, “it says that the survey found that people nowadays rated pay TV, mobile phones and internet connections higher than paying the mortgage.”

“It wasn’t like that in our day, we made damn sure that the mortgage was paid on time, every time” Jim said empathically.

Moira knew that wasn’t always the case, but mostly she had to agree with Jim on this issue.

They had practiced it themselves and instilled the importance of debt reduction with their children and she was thrilled that three out of their four offspring were now debt free and the youngest, who was still under forty was well on the way to having his mortgage repaid within the next five years.

Jim was pleased that the wind had dropped as their good friends Paul and Debby were due around for afternoon tea. It meant that they could enjoy tea and some of Moira’s excellent baking on the deck overlooking the sea. But first he had to attend to some household chores.

Today being Thursday it was cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming. Ever since he retired Moira insisted that he take on some of the regular domestic tasks. This he did willingly, however in the early days he was a bit hit and miss on how often he should complete his specific duties. It did not take him long to devise a roster system which ensured that each duty was completed in an efficient manner and within the expected time frame. Moira accepted the compromise even though Jim would wait until Thursdays to do the vacuuming, when it was obvious it could have been done a little earlier. After forty years doing it her herself, she was pleased that he was finally contributing with the chores.

Paul and Debby arrived a little late because they had to help collect one of their grandchildren from school and drop him at piano lessons. Paul blamed it on the recession as their youngest daughter had to work an extra hour at the supermarket and could not make it to collect Jace from school. His comment to Jim hinted that unless things picked up a little, the piano lessons would be going by the way side. Their kids had not been as careful with their take home pay as Jim and Moira’s and they always seemed to have too much month left over at the end of the money.

Initially Paul thought that they would be able to chip in and pay for the piano lessons as Jace was showing a lot of promise, however with the way things were going for them that was not going to be possible.

They too had been hit by the global turn down in markets and the income they had been enjoying from their own investments had decreased by almost 20%.

Debby was more than a little put out as she did not enjoy being late. She stayed in the kitchen with Moira hoping to both help with afternoon tea and also to bend Moira’s ear. She knew that Jim and Moira’s kids were financially OK, whereas their

own kids appeared to be constantly behind the eight ball. They always had the latest car and boasted between them as to who had the biggest mortgage, almost as if it was a badge of honour. She was annoyed that her own daughter was so desperate for cash that she took every extra hour that was available at the supermarket, even if it meant that the kids weren’t picked up from school on time.

Moira’s sixth sense knew what was troubling Debby, but she had little sympathy for her. The solution was painfully obvious and it came in two parts. The kids had to learn how to spend less than they earned and they also had to formulate a plan of how to get out of debt. Until they acknowledged they had a problem, it was never going to fix itself. The piano lessons would have to go and the kids would have to select cheaper hobbies and sports interests. Horse-riding for Jace’s sister was an extravagance that did not fit into the budget of a couple who was now earning the average household income. But then again they did have a bigger than average mortgage of $350,000 (interest only) which was consuming half of their take home pay.

Meanwhile on the deck Jim and Paul were trying to solve the global economic crisis.

When Moira and Debby turned up with afternoon tea they had to acknowledge that it was going to be tough. Britain, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the five nations with an aging baby boomer generation all have current account deficits, meaning the respective Governments are spending more than they are collecting in taxation revenues.

The excesses are approximately 10%, and they have signaled to the world that for the short term at least, they intend to continue to borrow their way out of debt.

Not only that, they have announced tax cuts and are each encouraging their citizens to spend their way to prosperity. The Australian Government has even gone to the extent of giving each and every citizen $900 cash to do just that.

Paul and Debby have watched their kids borrow their way into more debt than they can handle and now they sit back in amazement and watch the Government of their own country do exactly the same.

Now Jim could sense that this topic of conversation had the potential to ruin his appetite for Moira’s legendary baking. Whilst he was disappointed for Paul and Debby’s kids, he commented that the global recession was having little impact on their own lifestyle.

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“The solution was painfully obvious and it came in two parts. The kids had to learn how to spend less than they earned and they also had to formulate a plan of how to get out of debt Jim and Moira, like the majority of their friends, were debt free and had a diversified mix of income investments which supplemented NZ Super. They had listened to their adviser who encouraged them to include a small exposure to gold a couple of years ago and this would act like a small insurance policy if the global economic experiment took them all to hell in a hand cart.

Jim had to admit that it looked like we are only part way into the perfect financial storm and he was still waiting for the pending tsunami of debt to finally engulf the western world.

A copy of Peter’s disclosure statement is available on request and is free of charge. © Peter J Hensley

EVE’S BITE

THE DIVINITY CODE

“…the most politically incorrect book” in New Zealand. He is absolutely right…Prepare to be surprised and shocked.

Wishart may ruffle a few feathers but his arguments are fair as his evidence proves. If you are looking for a stimulating mental challenge, or a cause to fight for, Eve’s Bite will definitely satisfy. – Wairarapa Times-Age

Wishart takes up the gauntlet laid down by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and in fact, uses Dawkins own logic and methodology to launch a counter-attack against unbelief.

Challenging…thought provoking…compelling – keepingstock.blogspot.com

Discover the truth for yourself. Get these two books today from Whitcoulls, Borders, PaperPlus, Dymocks, Take Note, and all good independent booksellers, or online at

I’m having a cracking good read of another cracking good read – The Divinity Code by Ian Wishart, his follow-up book to Eve’s Bite which was also a cracking good read – comment on “Being Frank”

www.evesbite.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 65

think life | EDUCATION

The real value of education?

Ask Socrates – not the Ministry of Mis-education, writes Amy Brooke We don’t have to look far for the link between the present shameful epidemic of school bullying, binge-drinking, boyracing and casually amoral sexual behaviour of a feral underclass in New Zealand – and in wider Western society. Moreover, it is by no means confined to the supposedly underprivileged: not when drunken middle-class teen yobbos gatecrash parties in their hundreds, attack police and teachers, or turn on and intimidate their wellbehaved peers.

Essentially, we’re at war – a kind of social war being waged by the mindless products of a rootless, destructive, and immensely ignorant sector of society, including parents and their near-barbaric offspring- indoctrinated with the grievances of overblown 66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

egos – or simply purposeless and adrift.

What we’re now involved in is a social revolution against the very forces which traditionally stabilize Western society – an innate sober conservatism and the ultimate message of Christianity – stressing that man has obligations beyond those to himself and his mere tribe. Socrates’ calm assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living is echoed in the Christian call to be constantly in touch with one’s own conscience – a hallmark of what was once Western civilization.

In his superbly written book The Abolition of Britain,* Peter Hitchens, evaluating the profound changes affecting us all today, examines the battlefield of contemporary politics in what is an unfinished revolu-

tion beginning in Britain in the 17th century, eventually fanned by Marxism, and diverted into the state socialism of the 20th and 21st centuries. This battleground encompasses our schools and their curricula, their anti-religious – i.e. specifically their anti-Christian propaganda; the denigration of what he calls the British tribe; and the watering down of examinations to cover the attack on actual knowledge – and the decline of educational standards. All this in the name of spreading the gospel of a new society where everyone and everything is equal. Nobody should be first in class in our state schools; nobody should win races, or prizes: group pseudo-learning replaces individual study, and the quiet needed for concentration. Our libraries,

once peaceful refuges for learning, have become buzzing drop-in centres. Museums are there for hands-on infotainment and happenings.

This attack on high culture, dismissed as élitist in favour of proletarianising society, was epitomized in the Left’s intent, in Britain, “to shut down every ****ing grammar school in the country” in an attack on the excesses of class and hierarchy. It soon morphed into a rebellion against authority itself – and against genuine standards of excellence. And what better place than the education system to socially engineer and change a society? What better way to have the young feel superior to, turn on and reprimand their parents for perceived environmental offences, for personal and living choices which the state disapproves of ? The next step is to report them to the state, as with the anti-smacking legislation.

The essential fascism of indoctrinated teachers marshalling their classes to action, to write letters to the editor, to wave placards, invent slogans, dream up social improvement programmes, to opt for Young Leaders’ training and egos – it all comes at a price. This includes discouraging the best and brightest from the teaching profession; the promotion of the mediocre (as with a local headmaster talking about “bums on seats”; another favouring hiring staff wedded to the soap operas of Shortland and Coronation Streets) and above all, the shocking decline in literacy itself, without which people are separated from their roots.

This includes our history, the stories of and lessons from our past. But even more powerful is that of literature, and all the dimensions it encompasses – including philosophy and the deeper thinking once constantly present and debated in society – as well as underlying our use of language.

By 1987, for example, the complaint was that “ even among candidates for admission to the best universities who have specialised in English, only a minority can spell with consistent correctness, use punctuation properly and construct complex sentences grammatically.”

Yet in June 1999 “no fewer than 576 university teachers of English wrote to The Times Higher Education Supplement, attacking the government’s ‘doctrinaire preoccupation with grammar and spelling’ – as well as its alleged ‘hostility to regional and working-class forms of speech’ ”.* It is the conservative, very few genuinely knowledgeable teachers still left who have to

deal with this explosion of ignorance. The majority of English teachers are now part of it. The enemy is not only within the gates, but enthusiastically exercising control over our young, with the approval of a well-entrenched Ministry of Education endorsing the failed ‘progressive’ theories of these past 50 years and more.

The imposing of the banalities estranging our young from the culture of their parents and grandparents has not been unopposed.

As Hitchens reminds us: the novelist Kingsley Amis, deeply depressed by the collapse of knowledge and good judgment in the literary and political world, wrote a withering satire at the end of the 1970s – Russian Hide and Seek (1980). Evelyn Waugh’s suggestion that the Labour government of 1945 was similar to living under foreign occupation was echoed in Amis’s claim that only a ruthless foreign invader could possibly make things worse.

At this stage, near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is clear that our state education system is a failure.

Claiming success in literacy because students can recognize graphic signs, identify the actors in videos and summon up sufficient skills to Google information for assignments – but have no real knowledge to evaluate this – possibly useful training for computer technicians, even for skilled trade occupations – still does not equate to an education. The empty-headed products of our mis- schooling, unwashed by anything remotely approaching a quality education, are testimony.

As poet Philip Larkin said in his poem,

Church Going – “Someone will forever be surprising /A hunger in himself to be more serious…” (Spectator 13/9/08) But our schools and universities these decades past have increasingly failed to feed that hunger.

The link with today’s bullying, bingedrinking aimlessness and shamelessness all indicate not a lack of today’s poisonous focus on self-esteem, but the neglect of education’s most important aim. In essence, this is the growth of mind and spirit – together with the imaginative, empathetic understanding of the links between each individual and others – not only with family, classmates, neighbours, and all sharing our space and time, but also those with who have been before us – and with what they had to teach us.

Each child’s relationship is not only with these, but with the natural world – its animals and all else occupying it – as well as our universe. Our mental inheritance is the adventures of the mind, those of deep learning, arguably the greatest and most satisfying adventures of all.

John Masefield’s poem Sea Fever contains his most quoted line: “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” That star became Star Trek – quoted in The Final Frontier.

But, of course, great poetry has long been being removed from the state schools’ curricula. How many young New Zealanders have even heard of it?

So where are our children’s frontiers? © Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 67

think life | EDUCATION

National educational standards Essential or waste of time, wonders Dr Len Restall Ph.D The rumpus being created regarding establishing National educational standards is alarming as if it is some evil activity to undermine the fine work done in most schools within NZ. Sure, the results from standardised tests may not always be pleasing and may lead to constructing league tables relating to school performance.

The reality is that individual and school performance will be variable and tend to show some schools in a more favourable light than for others, but is this wrong or unnecessary because it may show some performances better or worse than others?

Accountability is of high importance for education and it may be seen more practically from the results of achievement tests, particularly when they are based upon National standards.

At present we have some form of national testing in the NCEA examinations for secondary schools but this only refers to those students having sat the examinations. This alone may not be really indicative of the total school performance as some schools may only count the performance from those students the school specially recommends to sit an examination, thereby giving some false result. I can recall one particular school claiming 100% pass at the previous school certificate exam, but this 68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

only referred to the students nominated to sit the exam. In some cases, league tables of school performance are made and good schools from those not so good, as far as results are concerned, can easily be seen but not necessarily completely understood. The whole ethos of school examinations in particular is to view or measure performance related to some criteria.

The establishing of standards will generally be debateable but should not be too difficult. The goals within education and curriculum areas can be established and used to see if students have at least reached the standard. This doesn’t at first seem to have problems, but like most plans that appear simple will have distracting features. Will this lead to teaching only up to the standard? This is not necessarily a bad thing for at least the pupils will be required to reach a desired standard. Objectivistic teaching, or the teaching of specific objectives within a lesson, tends to be the current form of teaching and has been in use for a long time. It is not necessarily a bad thing but should be included in most teaching systems in conjunction to other forms.

Assessment within education can take various forms and recognising the importance of each form can be useful and worthwhile.

The role of evaluation and measurement together with the many techniques available to the teacher are indispensable and should be an inevitable part of the learning process. Unfortunately, evaluation within the classroom may be seen as some extraneous activity to check up on the personal performance of the teacher, the student, or the school. But it should nevertheless be an important feature of learning and should underlie all good teaching and learning.

A good teacher will usually be concerned with the results of his or her teaching, and will continually be evaluating his or her performance and to improve the effectiveness of the teaching. If there is not some discernable change in behaviour of the students it is unlikely that learning has taken place, although the learning of avoidance may have occurred. The various effects of individuality differences among students, and the factors relating to motivation affecting learning, may be best observed as a result of measurement and evaluation.

It is contended by this writer that the main emphasis in evaluation should be for the pupil and the learning process, and secondly a means of comparing one school with another. When comparing to a set standard any wide variance may be more easily seen and the results from the evaluation may be changed.

During teaching, a teacher may make a formative evaluation to monitor progress during instruction to ensure that good feedback can be gained from the student’s success or failure. This will invariably be a continuous form of evaluation by the teacher. Should continuing failures be observed, then some diagnostic evaluation will be required in order to correct the learning problem. Unfortunately it may be that schools may be more inclined to make summative evaluations at the end of some course of instruction. Each of these forms of evaluations is necessary in order to gain the best results from education. It is from the summative form of evaluation that comparisons can be made with other schools. Measurement is not a dirty word but should be an integral part of education.

With National standards being established not only can accountability assessment be assured but also the educational standards be seen and any discrepancies corrected and dealt with. This writer maintains that National standards resulting from wellconstructed tests are essential to ongoing NZ education, which is one of the best systems in the western world.

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think life | SCIENCE

DNA: A double-helixed sword DNA tests on inmates sometimes prove they’re guilty, writes Laura Bauer US prison inmate Charles Hunter of Kansas insisted he was an innocent man, that the system got it wrong.

So did Charles Williams, a Texas prisoner convicted of three rapes that happened two decades ago.

Just do DNA testing, both pleaded with prosecutors and advocacy groups. Science would set them free, just like it had some 230 inmates before them.

Only one problem. Science didn’t prove Hunter and Williams innocent last month.

It proved their guilt.

In an era of DNA exonerations, where headlines scream of wrongful convictions and photos highlight vindicated inmates leaving prison, these aren’t the results destined for a made-for-TV movie.

Not as much is heard about the inmates 70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

who plead for DNA testing – and get it – knowing full well they’re guilty.

“We’re obviously not going to put out a press release when we ask for DNA tests for somebody and it comes back nailing them,” said Rob Warden, executive director of the Centre on Wrongful Convictions at Chicago’s Northwestern University School of Law. “It’s not news when the criminal justice system operates the way it’s supposed to.”

Such cases have played out quietly across the country since 1989, though, when David Vasquez was released from a Virginia prison a free man.

In the past five years, The Innocence Project out of New York exonerated 43 percent of the inmates whose DNA it tested.

But almost as many inmates – 42 percent

– had their convictions confirmed. The tests couldn’t exclude them.

Still, few talk about the ones whose DNA can’t be excluded and stay behind bars.

But last month, prosecutors in Kansas and Texas did. Each prosecutor sent out news releases telling the public that DNA confirmed the convictions of Hunter and Williams.

In both cases, results could not exclude the two men as matches. And in both cases, advocates or prosecutors had spent hours investigating and thousands of dollars on testing.

“I had faith the justice system had done the right thing in 1979,” Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson said in his release detailing Hunter’s results. “My faith was upheld; Hunter was our rapist.”

In Texas, Dallas County District Attorney

Craig Watkins sent out his own release, telling the public that DNA pointed to Williams in not just one rape, but all three. Watkins said at the time that he’d like to see Williams punished for wasting everyone’s time.

“Charles Williams is yet another example of an inmate attempting to slip through the cracks of the system, but with modernday DNA technology there are no cracks,” Watkins said. “Once again, this just proves that post-conviction DNA testing works both ways.”

When Hunter was charged with breaking into the homes of four Lawrence women and raping them, DNA testing wasn’t an available tool for law enforcement. It was 1979 and Hunter was 16.

Though he initially told authorities he was involved in the crimes, Hunter later proclaimed his innocence and insisted for the next 30 years that he was wrongly convicted.

At one point, he reportedly said an inmate name “Marvin” raped the women.

Jean Phillips, director of the Defender Project at the University of Kansas, said her staff had contact with Hunter over the years and “nothing really told me he didn’t do it.”

But when The Innocence Project contacted her, she agreed to be local counsel.

“They said, ‘We don’t know, he may have done this,’ “ Phillips said. “ ‘But we’re going to do this because we don’t know.’ “ And that’s when post-conviction DNA testing is vital, said Eric Ferrero of The Innocence Project, which was created in 1992.

“The simple truth is, until you do DNA testing you don’t know if someone’s guilty or innocent in these cases,” Ferrero said.

“You learn fairly quickly in this work not to focus on how guilty or innocent somebody might seem ...

“The goal in each individual case is to learn the truth.”

Sometimes, advocates discover there’s no evidence to test. It’s been lost or it’s too old to get a complete profile. Tests can also be inconclusive.

DNA testing can costs thousands of dollars in each case, not to mention the countless hours of work. The amount of money needed for testing depends on how much evidence needs to be analyzed.

Sometimes projects pay the bill for testing, other times prosecutors can use grant money.

Warden, of the Centre on Unlawful Convictions, said when his group first filed motions to do DNA testing in old cases, he figured the inmates’ requests alone was

one sign they might be innocent. The centre’s goal is to identify and rectify wrongful convictions.

“I thought nobody would even want DNA testing if it wasn’t going to exonerate them,” Warden said. “We were rudely awakened.”

Of the 20 post-conviction DNA cases his centre has been involved with, 17 inmates were exonerated. The remaining three couldn’t be excluded as a match.

“As a result of those experiences, we won’t file a DNA motion for anybody without giving them a stern warning,” Warden said. “We say, ‘You don’t want to do this unless you are absolutely certain it will exonerate you.’ “ After that warning, a few inmates have “gracefully backed out,” Warden said, including one man who said he didn’t want the testing because prosecutors may have planted his DNA to make him look guilty.

Phillips has counselled university students who handled cases where tests didn’t exonerate the inmate.

time, we do confirm their guilt and we do have a further understanding of the truth.”

But, why ask for DNA testing when you know you are guilty?

Maybe it’s a last resort, “grasping at a final straw,” Warden said.

Like former Illinois death row inmate Willie Enoch, who claimed his innocence in a 1983 murder and pushed for DNA testing, and yet it came back confirming his conviction.

“Here he was, facing execution shortly,” said Warden, who had some involvement in Enoch’s case. “I think he thought there’s a chance it won’t be testable. If it’s not testable, that could be argued in the future.”

Or maybe inmates “just hold out hope,” Phillips said.

Miguel L’Heureux, a Kansas University graduate, worked under Phillips’ supervision at the Defender Project in 2004. During his second year of law school he investigated the case of Kansas v. Oliver Smith.

Smith was convicted in 1989 of raping

“DNA testing can costs thousands of dollars in each case, not to mention the countless hours of work. The amount of money needed for testing depends on how much evidence needs to be analyzed. Sometimes projects pay the bill for testing, other times prosecutors can use grant money “I tell them, you shouldn’t feel bad,” Phillips said. “You should feel good, because the criminal justice system got it right and ultimately, isn’t that what we all want?”

Of the 235 post-conviction DNA exonerations to date, Dallas County in Texas leads the US with 19. In at least as many cases, though, DNA tests could not exclude inmates, confirming their convictions.

The office conducted an audit of inmate requests for DNA testing and came across the case of Charles Williams, who was convicted of rape in 1991. He said he was innocent, but his request for testing had been previously denied.

“It seemed like one where a test would confirm his guilt or exclude him,” said Mike Ware, head of Dallas County’s conviction integrity unit.

DNA not only confirmed his guilt in that one assault, but in two others he had been charged with, prosecutors said.

“Yes, it’s a waste of time and money to do testing on someone who is guilty and knows they’re guilty,” Ware said. “But at the same

and killing a woman whose husband he knew. The case included some of the first DNA testing for the state of Kansas.

But the DNA available at the time wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now, and Smith insisted he was innocent. L’Heureux and the Defender Project were able to persuade a judge to allow evidence to be retested.

“We really thought we had a good case,” said L’Heureux, who worked hundreds of hours on the case. “It was something we believed in. ... I had come to believe he (Smith) was wrongly convicted.”

In 2007, the test results came back.

Smith couldn’t be excluded. And L’Heureux, now a practicing attorney in the Chicago area, still remembers that “sinking feeling in my gut.”

“Why would someone push for DNA testing when they’re guilty?” L’Heureux asked. “I don’t really know the answer to that.

“Perhaps when you’re facing a lifetime of prison, you come to terms with that by creating a new reality. You make yourself innocent.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 71

think life | TECHNOLOGY

Smart life New apps change how you use mobile devices, writes John Boudreau SAN JOSE, Calif. – They tell us where to eat, how to find friends, when to make a left turn.

Oh, and they can also make a phone call.

An explosive proliferation of software applications – and easy ways to get them, most notably through Apple’s App Store – is changing our relationship with mobile phones. The always-connected era is dawning. The cell phone is becoming more a companion than merely a means of oneon-one conversation.

“I can’t live without it,” said James London, a 19-year-old student, cradling his iPhone. “It’s like water or food.”

Though Apple was the first company to create an easy and orderly way for developers to sell smart phone software, the rest of the industry is trying to catch up.

Owners of all the major mobile phone operating systems – Research In Motion, Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Google’s Android – are gearing up online application stores. Independent app sites are also popping up, offering unauthorized software for the iPhone.

Soon, nearly every imaginable function of the office and home entertainment centre will be delivered to the computers that fit our palms.

“I’m a big believer that the mobile phone will become the remote control of our 72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

lives,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless industry analyst. “Anything that we touch and see and feel, and whomever we communicate with – we will control that with our mobile phones.”

Though the recession is slowing sales of so-called smart phones, futurists view app-packed mobile devices as the next tech tsunami to hit society and fundamentally change how people navigate life.

“It’s a new category of activity,” said veteran Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo.

“Voice (functions) are an afterthought.”

Already people are using their smart phones to locate friends at nearby bars and restaurants or find a service station with cheap gas. They stream TV to their phones, update Facebook pages on the go and play sophisticated games.

The Shazam program allows people to instantly identify a song and artist by holding the iPhone up to, say, a radio.

The Trapster program for iPhone and BlackBerry uses crowd-sourcing to avoid speeding tickets – the phone signals a warning when entering ticket zones. The Android Cab4me app helps hail a cab.

“It’s my lifeline,” said Grace Redmond, a 20-year-old San Jose State University student. “My iPhone was broken today. It ruined my day.”

Redmond, who grew up in Virginia,

relies on GPS-enabled programs to help her get around, and avoid getting lost. She found the Urbanspoon app indispensable during a recent vacation to Seattle. “My phone told me where to eat,” she said.

Giovanni Valasco, a 24-year-old Campbell, Calif., resident, treats his iPhone like a pocket Yellow Pages by using a business listings program. “I use it all the time.”

Student London worries about an affliction common to BlackBerry users: sore neck. “I’m constantly looking down at my iPhone – every 10 minutes.”

Because their smart phone is with them everywhere they go, people develop far closer attachments to the devices than to their home PCs or laptops, said B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University researcher author of “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.” Sharma said people using smart phones spend 70 percent of their time doing things other than talking.

“They have become devices people use for productivity and leisure,” he said. “They save time and they kill time.”

Last year, some 34 million smart phones were sold in the United States alone, about 20 percent of the nation’s overall mobile phone market of some 173 million units, according to research firm IDC. But by 2013, it predicts nearly half the mobile phones purchased in the United States will be smart phones.

“The sea change is starting to happen,” said IDC analyst Sean Ryan.

But there are barriers to smart phone ubiquity. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the cost of data plans.

“The prices of service plans are big impediments for many people,” said Shaw Wu, analyst with Kaufman Brothers. “It’s not cheap.”

But service providers have a lot at stake – analyst Sharma said they pulled in $34 billion last year in data charges – and are likely to compete fiercely, which could push down costs and expand consumer options.

Hints of the future can be found at Apple’s App Store, which now offers some 27,000 iPhone applications, according to 148Apps. com, a San Francisco Web site that reviews iPhone apps. Some of those are given away for free, while many are sold for less than $3. As of mid-January, Apple said there had been 500 million downloads from the App Store, which opened in July.

“It’s like a concierge. When you have a problem, it can help solve it for you,” said Stanford’s Fogg. “Nothing is as close to us all the time – not even your spouse or partner.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 73

feel life | SPORT

Code wars – Super 14 v NRL The indigenous sport of New Zealand is facing a fresh invasion from a finelyhoned Australian native. Rugby’s professional venture in the Southern Hemisphere is struggling for traction in its 13th year as the NRL evolves and capitalises. Chris Forster surveys the argy-bargy on both sides of the scrum

It’s not exactly a level playing field for the Super 14. The complicated windows of test rugby and the demands of the stillpowerful International Rugby Board relegate the competition to a mid-February start. That means the best talent from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have to compete directly with cricket tours and fans who’d rather walk the dog on the beach or invite the whanau over for a BBQ than watch pre-season footie on a bone dry ground in sultry weather conditions.

Try-less games, bewildering rules, flustered referees and a plethora of aimless kicks all make the game a bit of a hard watch. This is at half-empty stadiums like Eden Park and AMI Stadium in Christchurch – with huge, gaping holes where the construction’s underway for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. It’s not 74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

a pretty picture. And that’s a problem for the real numbers that make the whole concept sing – pay-TV subscribers on SKY Sport.

By the time the NRL kicks off in midMarch the grumbles have turned to rumbles and the fans are keen for a bit of world-class footie. The world’s top rugby league competition delivered with two golden point thrillers on the opening Friday night as the Broncos pipped the Cowboy and the Storm edged out the Dragons. The Warriors weren’t exactly on song but still scored four tries to three to beat the Eels in front of 20 thousand fans at Mt Smart Stadium.

Rugby league’s Australian flagship has also taken a punt on twin referees to marshal a far more straightforward set of rules, and it seems to be working a treat. The two-pronged

approach can rule quickly and accurately on things like offsides, forward passes and offthe-ball tackles – and players can’t get away with blue murder any more. The smart ones know it and the result is an even quicker, free-flowing brand of NRL, and less of those tedious TV umpire rulings with endless replays. Australia’s pay network Fox Sports was reporting an average of 5 minutes had been shaved off each game. That’s less time for big props to rest up and more gaps for the attacking weapons to score tries.

Rugby’s Experimental Law Variations – or ELVs as they’re more interestingly called – are the bugbear that could make or break the game. They were set up to keep the ball in the play, reduce the power of suffocating defences and reverse rugby’s biggest flaw of penalties winning matches, rather

Nzpa/ Wayne Drought

than tries. They were designed to make this very English game more of a spectacle for the television audience and speed it up to compete with rugby league.

But a variety of trials at different levels, topped by the Super 14, have had mixed reviews. England and its Six Nations allies don’t want a bar of it. They like things like endless rolling mauls and tense matches dominated by territory and kicks at goal, with the occasional breakaway try to the unemployed outside backs. It’s a traditional thing and they’ve strongly resisted changes.

After all the Super 14’s waning popularity is pretty low on their list of priorities.

NZRU CEO Steve Tew got another face full of hypocrisy at the recent IRB powwow in the UK. “We thought it was a ridiculous situation

where the 6 Nations were en masse rejecting more of the variations that they hadn’t trialed – which raised a few eyebrows it’s fair to say – given they were telling us it didn’t work”.

The most despised rugby journalist in our part of the world is Stephen Jones from the Times of London.

As you’d expect he’s leading the written charge to cut the ELVs down to size.

This man has made a career out of belittling the Super 14, the All Blacks and the Wallabies.

In a recent blast Jones wrote “if there was a law to ban pouting and throwing toys out of the pram, there would be blanket red cards for New Zealand and Australia”.

But Jones’ ranting aside it is an ongoing issue for New Zealand and its SANZAR partners every time the Southern and

Northern Hemispheres collide to sort out a global consensus.

Many of the rules, especially the problematic area of contesting the ball at rucks and mauls seem set to be chucked out when the IRB makes a final call later in the year.

The NRL has a huge advantage in this area too. It’s derived from the New South Wales competition of 1908 – and has 15 teams from Australia’s eastern states – plus the Warriors in Auckland.

David Gallop is into his 7th year as CEO – and while he doesn’t exactly exude charisma – he does have an astute business sense and the power to crack down on any weaknesses that threaten the future of his code.

Bad behaviour is a constant issue, perhaps more so than rugby.

Defending champs Manly were rocked by a booze-fuelled sponsor’s function one week out from the 2009 season, which resulted in sex charges involving a 17 year old girl laid against star fullback Brett Stewart. The media is constantly leaking stories about alcohol and sex-related misdemeanours to keep all the news outlets in copy in the week days between matches.

These stories may even generate more interest in the game, in a perverse sort of way. Not that rugby union players are exactly angels when they get a night pass to go out on the town.

But Gallop runs a tight ship. He’s not afraid to ban players if the clubs fail to take action – and the four week suspension for Stewart for his public drunkenness is a prime example.

It all comes back to entertainment for the Super 14. SANZAR is now looking at expanding to a Super 15 in 2010, possibly with an Australian-based Pacific Islands team or maybe a team involving Japanese players.

But the early starts are unlikely to change unless the international windows are rearranged. The long seasons combined with lack of training time for key players certainly aren’t helping the mediocre fare in February and March.

If there is to be a saviour this season it’s likely to be Waikato Chiefs.

A memorable Saturday night at Eden Park in late March single-handedly injected some life into the gasping corpse.

Sitiveni Sivivatu ran in 3 of their 9 tries from an attack-minded backline as they spanked the Aucklanders black and Blues by 63 points to 24.

The mischievous ELVs were behaving that night and the Chiefs finally delivered a brand of rugby to compete with the NRL. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 75

feel life | HEALTH

You know you’re smokin’ in it?

Claire Morrow reviews anti-smoking initiatives “Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative”, said Oscar Wilde, and I agree with him on the matter, except when I don’t. In the near future, New South Wales will follow other Australian states in the introduction of even more anti-tobacco legislation, following South Australia’s world first ban: it is illegal in some Australian states to smoke in a car, when there is also a child (person aged under 16 or under 18, depending on the state) in the car. What little debate there has been on the topic forces the thinking person to wonder how the matter can be 76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

best resolved whilst keeping all of one’s ideals intact. On the one hand, I dislike nanny-state laws; the government has no business telling you what to do on your own property, and the research is sketchy, at best. The comments various politicians have made in response to questions about how far they would be willing to go with legislation are terrifying. However, one feels a little peculiar decrying a law which is in the best interests of small children.

Truly anti-anti-tobacco warriors will argue that the evidence that passive smoking is bad for you is less than conclusive,

or alarmist, or misreported, or all of the above, and they’d have a fair point, up to a point. The harmful effects of breathing second hand cigarette smoke are not known; you’d need a massive longitudinal study following many people for many years, and controlling for at least all the obvious variables (changes in exposure over time, social factors, air pollution, etc) and there is not one. However, it should be obvious that a hypothetical child sitting in a car with the windows up while cigarettes are being smoked is not going to benefit, health wise, from the situation. At what point second-

hand exposure to tobacco smoke may do damage is uncertain.

Smoking remains a topic controversial enough that those who will debate it tend to find themselves arguing towards limits which are intuitively unreasonable. It’s not fashionable to say so, but occasional limited exposure to the chemicals in cigarettes is unlikely to do you irreparable harm, in my opinion, if only because the human body is admirably resilient. At the other end of the spectrum are the opposing team of fools and charlatans, who are unpersuaded that smoking is bad for you.

Litigants, suing tobacco companies, claim to have not known the dangers of smoking. I have no quarrel with people who want to smoke, or enjoy smoking, or simply don’t want to quit, but the “I didn’t know it was bad” line is taking it too far. If, after years of observing older smokers and their coughs, and hearing vague rumours of the evils of tobacco, a person sets fire to a tube of leaves and voluntarily breathes in the smoke, I’m pretty sure they know it’s not healthy. Smoking will, for certain, damage your body. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, maybe your heart, or lungs, or peripheral circulation, or all of the above; you’d be better off if you didn’t smoke.

If you’re not going to quit smoking any

time soon, try getting more exercise; common sense must indicate that an athletic smoker is at least somewhat better off than an unfit one. And if you are going to quit? Well, you’ve got a lot of options.

The most successful way to quit smoking is to take medication, and also have other support strategies in place. There are several prescription medications on the market that really do make it easier to quit smoking; reducing the desire to smoke,

a lighthearted decision. A quit-smoking strategy which may make you ill should not be the first line approach for the futureex-smoker, although it might bear consideration as a last resort. Most of the other methods available, such as nicotine replacement therapy, group therapy, planned counselling and so forth, work for some people, some of the time. Or you could just stop smoking. Going “cold turkey” on the cigarettes is demonstrated to be the least

“It should be obvious that a hypothetical child sitting in a car with the windows up while cigarettes are being smoked is not going to benefit, health wise, from the situation. At what point second-hand exposure to tobacco smoke may do damage is uncertain and the impact of withdrawal symptoms.

Many people find them effective. They do, however, have significant side effects for a small number of people. The chance that you personally will experience severe side effects such as seizures, mood swings, neurological disturbances and so forth is small, of course. However, taking a medicine which tinkers with the way your brain works in a way we don’t understand is not

effective method of quitting, but that’s not strictly accurate. When “just stop” is combined with things like planning (choosing a time to quit and being prepared), education (why smoking isn’t good), and tactics (how to cope when you want to smoke), it is a fairly good approach. Quitting smoking may not be enjoyable, but you’ll live.

But, then, you can make that decision for yourself.

HEALTHBRIEFS Lack of phosphate causes bacteria to kill u U.S. medical researchers say they have discovered a lack of the mineral phosphate can turn a common bacterium – Pseudomonas aeruginosa – into a killer. University of Chicago scientists said their finding could lead to new drugs that would disarm the increasingly antibiotic-resistant pathogen rather than kill it. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the most serious hospital-acquired pathogens, is a common cause of lung infections. It is found in the intestinal tract of 20 percent of all Americans and 50 percent of hospitalized patients in the United States, the scientists said. It is one of hundreds of bacteria that colonize the human intestinal tract, usually causing no apparent harm. But once the host is weakened by an illness, surgical procedure or immunosuppressive drugs, the researchers said Pseudomonas aeruginosa can cause infection, inflammation, sepsis and death. The researchers said it’s been long known that after an operation, levels of inorganic phosphate fall. The researchers hypothesized phosphate depletion in the intestinal tract signals Pseudomonas aeruginosa to become lethal. To test their theory, they let worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) feed on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli grown in both low-phosphate and high-phosphate media. Only the worms that ate Pseudomonas aeruginosa with low levels of phosphate died. The research is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New online drug pharmacy laws in effect u New rules governing the operation of online pharmacies became effective this month, designed to prevent the illegal distribution of drugs. Officials said the new Drug Enforcement Administration regulations implementing the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act will help prevent illegal diversion of medications to people for whom the drugs aren’t intended. The DEA said the act was named for 18-year-old Ryan Haight who died after overdosing on a prescription painkiller he obtained on the Internet. Now that this law has been put into force it will be harder for cybercriminals to supply controlled substances over the Internet and easier for us to prosecute them, said DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. These regulations add important new provisions to prevent the illegal distribution of controlled substances through the Internet. Its implementation will increase Internet safety and help prevent tragedies like Ryan Haight’s death from happening again. The act amends existing law by adding new provisions, including: 1) New definitions, such as online pharmacy and deliver, distribute or dispense by means of the Internet.

2) A requirement of at least one face-to-face patient medical evaluation prior to issuance of a controlled substance prescription.

3) Registration requirements for online pharmacies.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 77

feel life | ALT.HEALTH

Baby at the buzzer Older couples race against their biological clocks to start families, writes Cassandra Spratling Kim Harper started a career before starting a family. After graduating from Michigan State University in 1990, she travelled, earned a law degree and began working as an attorney. When Harper married in 2006, she and her husband, Jeff, hoped a baby would soon follow.

“We didn’t marry until I was 38,” Harper says, “and we always knew we didn’t have a lot of time to waste.”

A year passed; no baby.

Like many women who marry later in life, Harper didn’t think much about her fertility until she’d reached the age at which many doctors warn that healthy pregnancies don’t come easily.

78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

“What a lot of women do not know is that we are born with all of the eggs that we are going to get. And a lot of those eggs are used before we get out of puberty,” says Kim Hahn, founder and CEO of Conceive magazine. “We are not like men; we do not regenerate eggs.”

Concern about her age prompted Dawn Crowley’s doctors to encourage her to get pregnant even before her planned marriage.

“When I told my doctor we wanted to have children after we married, she looked at me and said, ‘I understand the need to be married, but you’re 38 years old. I suggest you try right now,’” recalls Crowley, who is now 40.

The Birmingham, Mich., resident married Jim Crowley, 50, in August 2007. They gave birth to a healthy 7 1/2-pound girl, Kate, six months later.

The statistics might surprise some women: At 20, the odds of getting pregnant when everything is timed perfectly are about 25 percent per cycle. By age 30, the odds drop to 10 percent to 15 percent each month, and by age 40, it’s 5 percent, reports Conceive magazine.

Women who get pregnant between the ages of 35 and 45 face a 20 percent to 35 percent chance of miscarriage, according to the American Pregnancy Association.

That’s on top of common complications

such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes.

By the time a woman is 43, the risk of having a baby with chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome rises to 1 in 50, from 1 in 1,500 at age 20, according to pregnancyinfo.net At age 35, the rate is 1 in 350.

The rate of in-vitro fertilization has increased 17 percent from 2003 to 2007, with the greatest increase seen among women ages 35 to 37, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. But age also seems to play a role in the success of the procedure. Younger women – those younger than 35 – have about a 40 percent chance of having a live birth with IVF. By the time a woman is 42, the live birth rate with IVF drops to about 11%.

Children born to older parents are more likely to develop autism. That’s especially true for first-born kids, according to a study in the December issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. Also, a Swedish study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that children with fathers older than 45 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia.

The trend of women having babies later in life shows no sign of slowing down.

The National Center for Health Statistics reports that the percentage of women giving birth for the first time at age 35 or older has increased eight-fold since 1970 – from 1 percent to 8 percent.

The birth rate among women ages 30 to 34 grew 2 percent from 2006 to 2007.

Among women 40 to 44, the birth rate grew 1 percent to 9.5 births per 1,000 women – one of the highest rates ever.

“It makes sense that women are waiting longer to start families – college, careers, not meeting the right person earlier in life,” says Dr. Kristen Wuckert, an ob-gyn at Mission Obstetrics and Gynecology in Warren, Mich. Years ago, she says she might have seen an older woman once a week; now it’s a daily or twice-a-day occurrence.

“Another reason women wait is because they can. We have a lot more options, albeit expensive ones, to help in getting pregnant.

It has also become more the norm than the exception.

“We see celebrities in their 40s and older doing it – why not us?”

Gwen Coles turned to artificial insemination when she was 39 and still single.

“My biological clock was ticking and I was tired of waiting for Mr. Right,” says Coles. After the fourth try – when she had

nearly given up – it worked.

Twins – a boy, Brandon Kaleb, and a girl, Michelle Ashley – are now 14.

“I feel so blessed to have them,” says Coles, a retired police officer.

Men are not immune to the effects of aging, either, says Dr. Ronald Strickler, a reproductive endocrinologist with Henry Ford Hospital. “Older men are more likely to have problems that interfere with sperm production,” he says.

Illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia also contribute to erectile dysfunction, he says.

“The decline ... is not associated with an event as happens when women experience menopause; rather, it is silent. It can begin in the 40s or wait until the 70s.”

For couples like the Harpers of Southfield, Mich., it’s all about timing. Sometimes life’s stages are out of sync with biology.

Because pregnancy wasn’t happening quickly, Harper was referred to a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Beaumont Hospital for a battery of tests. The tests showed that her reproductive health was fine, and six months later she was pregnant.

But Harper’s was not a trouble-free pregnancy. She developed gestational diabetes in her first trimester, which can lead to jaundice, respiratory distress and low blood sugar and excessive weight in babies.

Jeff Harper, a 42-year-old engineer, admits that he wouldn’t let himself get too excited during his wife’s pregnancy.

“People younger than us wind up losing a baby; with our age I knew the odds were even higher,” he says. “My overall philosophy is to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

But for the Harpers, ultimately the best prevailed. A healthy, 7-pound Katherine Anne Harper was born Jan. 18.

“She was tiny and beautiful and perfect!

Her cry was like music to my ears,” Kim Harper says. “I still thank God every day for my amazing little miracle!”

MATURE MOMMAS

Halle Berry was 41 when she and Gabriel Aubry, 32, had Nahla Ariela Aubry on March 16, 2008.

Salma Hayek was 41 when she and Francois-Henri Pinault, 45, had Valentina Paloma Pinault on Sept 22, 2007.

Naomi Watts, then 38, and Liev Schreiber, 39, had Alexander (Sasha) Pete Schreiber on July 25, 2007.

Nicole Kidman was 41 when she and Keith Urban, 40, had Sunday Rose Urban

on July 7, 2008.

Jennifer Lopez, then 38, and Marc Anthony, 39, welcomed twins Max and Emme Muniz on Feb. 22, 2008.

Marcia Cross was 44 when she and Tom Mahoney, 49, welcomed twins Savannah and Eden Mahoney on Feb. 20, 2007.

Jane Hajduk, then 42, and Detroit native Tim Allen, 55, had Elizabeth Allen on March 28, 2009.

FERTILITY AND AGE: WHAT WOMEN SHOULD KNOW

Women are born with a finite number of eggs. As they age, the quantity and quality of the eggs decline, which may make conception more challenging.

Here’s advice from Conceive magazine on how to maximize your fertility.

In your 20s

Research how your method of contraception affects conception. The effects of several contraception methods can delay conception four months or more.

Get tested for STDs like chlamydia and gonorrhea, which can damage reproductive organs if left untreated.

Stop smoking, and avoid alcohol and recreational drugs.

Maintain a normal weight. Being overor underweight can make it harder to conceive.

Start taking a prenatal vitamin. Experts recommend that women of childbearing age take 400 micrograms of folic acid daily.

If you have not conceived in 12 months, consult a doctor.

IN YOUR 30s

Try not to stress out; stress itself does not impede conception directly, but high levels of stress can halt menstruation or make menstrual cycles longer.

Get familiar with your optimal fertility period. If you have a 28-day cycle, you probably ovulate around day 14, so you should have sex on days 10, 12 and 14. If your cycle is not regular, you should start earlier and continue later.

If you have not conceived in 6 months, consider seeing a fertility specialist.

IN YOUR 40s

Be proactive; consult a fertility specialist.

Get pre-screened for potential risks like silent diabetes and hypertension.

Learn your mother’s menopause history.

If she entered menopause in her mid-40s, chances are you will too.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 79

taste life travel

Bargains to be had in Laos Bread and Buddhism in Laos’ pleasing little town, Anne Chalfant reports

LUANG PRABANG, Laos – Upon arrival in Luang Prabang we scurried as fast as our overcurried tummies would allow to L’Elephant, a French restaurant.

Bread? Cheese? After two weeks in Thailand, where rice rules the plate, we were starved for both, and L’Elephant obliged with fresh-baked baguettes and mozzarella that melted in the mouth like chocolate.

As we sipped French wine, we were charmed by the twirling ceiling fan and French colonial architecture.

But the delicacy of the French touch ended outside the front door on the potholed, dirt street. Laos is an impoverished, communist country with a healthy tolerance for Buddhism and an apparent disinterest in infrastructure.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of Buddhist 80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

culture is surprising. Temples are everywhere, and Buddhism is openly practiced.

Each morning at 6:30, 100 orange-robed Buddhist monks line Luang Prabang’s main street carrying their baskets, into which the faithful dish rice and meals to feed monks and their young apprentices.

Tourists have only recently discovered Luang Prabang. Backpackers found it first when Laos first reopened to tourism in 1989.

Since then, UNESCO added the city to its list of World Heritage Sites in 1995, and increasing numbers of Westerners – mostly European and Australian – began arriving.

Despite rubbled roads and buildings in disrepair, there is real charm in this small city of 26,000 with its swooping-roofed wats (temples), a hill in the middle of town, and schoolgirls in long navy-blue silk skirts and white blouses.

And the locals are schooling themselves in tourism. They don’t see the world beyond those communist borders, but they study English at night and are eager to please. The lack of sophistication is delightful to the traveller used to a snarkier world.

Laotian language is also pleasant to listen to. Say “hello” – sabai dji (“saba ji” with a lilting sound. Sing-song your way to “thank you very much” – khdwp jqi ldi ldi (“kop chi lie lie”).

Of course, travelling is always fun when you’re racking up the bargains – a French meal with wine for less than US$15, hotel rooms for a song. Laos is one of the least expensive, yet culturally interesting nations one could visit.

And yet, the bargains can be bittersweet.

The Internet cafe I frequented had excellent high-speed access – and charged 40

cents an hour. Each morning the father/ owner jiggled his baby and served customers while the mother chased the toddler and ran to make photo CDs for 50 cents.

When I paid for my online time, I told the man to keep the change – his look of startled appreciation left me embarrassed that it was only a dime.

Then there was the night market. I left in tears during my first visit. It was like walking past beggars, yet the 40 or so women were selling their beautiful hand-woven silk scarves and wall hangings – thousands of hours of labour – for US$10.

“Please buy my scarf, madam” a woman begged as she gestured at her gorgeous silks. As I leaned down and peered in the dim light – was that a burnt orange or a red to match my family room? – the vendor misinterpreted my hesitation, drop-

ping the price to $9, then skipped to $8 – this woman who lived in a one-room shack and had no familiarity with family rooms, much less the finer points of interior decorating.

After a few similar episodes with other sellers, I fled to my hotel room to pull myself together.

The second night I had a new strategy: $100 in my pocket and a determination to drop it as fast as I could. As I quickly selected a silk, the seller burst into a smile and did a little seated dance. “First sale tonight – this good luck for me!” she beamed.

It’s less agonizing and a better bet for the family room to buy silk by daylight.

Xang Khong Village is a few minutes away by tuk-tuk ride – little three-wheeled taxis that transport you in a wink. In the village, women sell weavings in front of their shacks,

but the largest selection is at Lao Silk Textile, where unsuspecting silkworms lie in their baskets, should you wish to look.

Silks here are exquisite and inexpensive, and the women in our group would have warmed up their charge cards to haul home silk by the yard. But charge cards? Not a concept. Lao Silk Textile takes only cash in the same anything-goes fashion as all merchants in this town – pay in dollars, or Thai baht or Laotian kip – or any combination thereof.

Our group of women travellers also would have carted home suitcases filled with inexpensive clothing made from Laotian silk, which shows real French colour sense, with colour pairings more artful and sophisticated than Thai silk. But unlike in other Southeast Asian countries where seamstresses dash out of doorways INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 81

to offer to make you clothing, the communist-trapped Laotians are not cued to the Western woman’s gluttony for clothing.

There is one shop, OckPopTop, that sells some articles of locally made clothing.

Still, the lack of outside exposure is what makes Luang Prabang appealing. It has that sense of being an undiscovered place.

To be sure, a handful of entrepreneurs from the outside world have set up shop, working with Laotians to create wooden bowls, silk bedspreads and pillows, and there’s also a wonderful jewellery store, Naga Creations. Its owner, Fabrice Munio, a Frenchman from Africa, is as enthusiastic about Luang Prabang as he is gifted at creating jewellery. I bought lovely Vietnamese pearls, then, as an afterthought, I asked if he had the “stop fighting” Buddha – its arms held forward in the “halt” position.

Munio did indeed, and he hung it around my neck and grinned charmingly as he said it was “a very expensive price,” and gave it to me for free.

So I did not leave this town Buddhaless, nor did I go breadless for more than a meal. We even found bagels and possibly the world’s best cinnamon rolls at JoMa Bakery Cafe.

Our days in Luang Prabang weren’t all about shopping and eating; we also visited the Royal Palace, with several interesting Buddhas, including a reclining one. We saw temples, including Wat Xieng Thong, with roofs that sweep to the ground and a tree of life mosaic. We felt we were seeing a greater variety of Buddhas here – Buddhas for all reasons and seasons. We were enamored with the “stop fighting” Buddha who holds up both hands.

It’s an apropos symbol, for Luang Prabang is a peaceful place. Some might say this derives from its location on the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers – a location considered by Laotians to be most auspicious, something like a Laotian version of feng shui.

At the very least, it allows you to sit in a cafe overlooking the river for a pleasant meal – most likely more curries but also the sweetest mouthwatering mango and coconut ice cream.

Luang Prabang does have a good airport. which we flew out of when we departed for Bangkok. However, we had arrived in Luang Prabang on a two-day trip up the remote Laotian portion of the Mekong River, traveling in an open wooden boat with a roof. The journey from Huay Xai, Thailand, included a night’s stay at an 82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

attractive rustic lodge, LuangSay, which also operated our boat.

The lodge’s setting was lush jungle overlooking the river, and it was nearly mosquito-free – they had sprayed mosquito repellent before our arrival. We did sleep under mosquito nets for the first time in this trip, just in case.

For the traveller who wants to lose civilization, the LuangSay boat trip fits the bill – we saw no roads, bridges or cities, and just a handful of villages. The scenery only changed as mountains grew larger and greener as we got deeper into Laos.

We stopped at a few tiny villages – one where Hmong children rushed down to the boat to stare awestruck at the white-faced giants tottering down the plank propped on a boulder.

Our lodging in Luang Prabang was the very pleasant Villa Santi. The courtyard was rich with tropical plants, and rooms were small but comfortable. That was, until the episode on the last night.

It began when my roommate Tricia Fischer, an easygoing 30-year-old from Denver, emerged from showering in the bathroom.

“You’re going to wonder,” she announced, “why the bathroom is flooded with water.

Well, I’ve been using the shower sprayer to chase three cockroaches down the drain.”

Tricia was still very calm.

Then she opened the door to peek and then – “Omigod, they’re back and they’re huge!!!” she shuddered.

I rushed to the bathroom door, then slammed it when a cockroach the size of a playing card waggled its antenna at me.

Thus ended our detour into gentle Buddhist culture. Who cared if that cockroach might be Grandpa – we wanted it good and dead. The poor housekeeper arrived with her spray can, then we called her back for a second round when the whole cockroach family started climbing out of the fumigated drain. Then we called her back again to remove dying Grandpa from the bathtub, on his backside with legs a-waving.

But we were, after all, in the tropics, and I was surprised those were the first creepy bugs we saw.

We left Luang Prabang with some regret, knowing that this unique city will draw more tourists and turn up more sophisticated tour-operators.

Still, it may be hard to resist the call of a Southeast Asian city that combines Asian intrigue with pain au chocolate.

IF YOU GO SLOW BOAT TO LAOS u LuangSay Mekong River Cruise to Luang Prabang. Sail for seven hours a day for two days in an open wooden boat with a roof. The boat holds 25 guests and has a bar and serves lunch. White-jacketed Laotian guides answer questions, and the boat makes a stop at several villages and the caves of Pak Ou, filled with thousands of Buddha images, most of them small. The caves are not far from Luang Prabang. For information, contact 00-66-9-7000662. E-mail info@asiavoyagesonline.com; Web site is www.asian-oasis.com.

BY AIR u You can fly into Luang Prabang on Thai Air. WHEN TO GO u November through February are the best months, beating both the rain and the heat.

CURRENCY u U.S. dollars and Thai baht work well in most stores; street vendors may want Lao kip, but you get a big pack of paper bills for a small amount of American currency. 50,000 kip is $5. There is an ATM machine in Luang Prabang, but machines are not located on every corner.

DOCUMENTATION u You must have a visa for entry, which you can order in advance or buy at some border crossings. It costs US$30 at the border, but make sure you have crisp new U.S. dollars. They can be fussy about this. You also need a departure tax of $10 U.S. to get out of the country.

LODGING u There are a number of guesthouses in Luang Prabang; some of them looked quite nice.

We stayed at Villa Santi, a great location and the former residence of King Sisavang Vong’s wife. You can also get a great massage in your room here for $10.

Room rates start at U.S. $150 a night. Book at www.villasantihotel.com. Or call 00856-71-252157, or e-mail reservations@villasantihotel.com.

GUIDEBOOK u Joe Cummings and Andrew Burke’s 2005 “Laos” guidebook from Lonely Planet ($19.95) offers in-depth information on travelling in Laos.

Antarctica

south georgia & falkland islands

this is the ultimate antarctic expedition, combining the very best of the wildlife of the southern ocean, the heroic exploration history and the majestic scenery of south georgia and antarctica.

The Falklands are home to the largest concentrations of albatross in the world. South Georgia astounds all that visit, King Penguin colonies sweep across the landscape, Elephant and Fur Seals duel for breeding opportunities, whaling stations speak of mans excesses and Sir Ernest Shackleton lies buried all against a backdrop of ice covered peaks. Then there is Antarctica, it possesses some of the planets most impressive wildlife and dramatic landscapes. This is truly an experience of a lifetime.

ARGENTINA FALKLAND ISLANDS

CHILE

Stanley Ushuaia

Atlantic Ocean

Pacific Ocean

1- Elephant Island 2- King George Island 3- Livingston Island 4- Deception Island 5- Cuverville Island 6- Petermann Island

Drake Passage

Gerlache Strait 5

6

An ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

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4

3

2

1

Danco Coast

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SOUTH GEORGIA ISLAND rc l

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escorted departure:

1st – 20th December 2009 on Clipper Adventurer w:

www.wildearth-travel.com e: info@wildearth-travel.com t: (03) 365 1355 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 83

taste life FOOD

Wine and eggs?

Lunch in Bordeaux leads to a new pairing perspective, writes Bill Daley The morning had been spent stomping through some of Bordeaux’s most storied vineyards in a cold Atlantic wind, and now lunch was being served at Chateau Palmer.

The cozy first course was a deceptively simple one: eggs baked in a ramekin with red wine, bacon and onions. We all dug in, using tablespoons and sturdy strips of toast, as the last of the springtime chill seemed to melt away.

And, of course, there was a wine to help warm us, 1994 Chateau Palmer.

Drinking a $200 bottle of red wine with eggs was an epiphany. It seemed odd and 84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

exciting. The French preference for eggs at lunch and dinner and served with wine seemed so opposite from the Anglo tradition of eggs at breakfast or brunch with, at most, a Bloody Mary on the side.

But experimenting with eggs at other times of the day, perhaps cooked and served with wine, makes lots of sense now. First, Easter has just passed, and 62 percent of U.S. mums bought at least two dozen eggs to mark the occasion, according to the American Egg Board. Do something besides just hard-cooking them. Second, hard times mean people are looking for

more affordable sources of protein such as eggs.

But there’s a catch: “Eggs are notoriously tough on wines,” said Evan Goldstein, president of Full Circle Wine Solutions, a spirits and wine education company based in San Francisco.

Goldstein, a master sommelier and author of “Perfect Pairings,” a food and wine matching book, said dishes in which eggs have a starring role can dampen the profile of many dry wines.

“The egg cuts down on the acidity, it cuts down the impact of the wine dramatically,” he said. “You get something that’s a mere shadow of itself.”

His solution? Pour a very acidic, crisp wine. Experiment with sparkling wine, gewurztraminer and riesling.

The eggs worked with the Chateau Palmer, he said, because the red wine and bacon sauce in which the eggs were cooked had enough acidity to switch the flavour focus from the egg itself.

Bacon, mushrooms and ham are “bridging ingredients” that help “smooth” red wines, such as pinot noir and syrah, to work with eggs, said Natalie MacLean, a Canadian wine writer who runs an online food and wine matcher at her Web site, nataliemaclean.com. For whites, she wants unoaked wines.

“I love unoaked chardonnay or sauvignon blanc with eggs because they don’t have those heavy tannins and oak flavours that battle with the sulphur compounds in eggs,” MacLean said.

The lack of oak is important, said Joshua Wesson, senior director of wine, beer and spirits for The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., better known as A&P. “If you want to make someone suffer, serve them a barrel-aged chardonnay with an egg salad sandwich,” Wesson once declared.

“You also need to consider the texture of the eggs,” he said. “Look at scrambled eggs. If they are soft and runny they present a different challenge to a sommelier than if the eggs were firm. Wine, as a liquid, has trouble relating to another liquid-y food.”

A light, even ethereal wine that matches the lightness and delicacy of the scrambled eggs would work, Wesson said. A dry manzanilla or fino sherry, or a very dry sparkling wine, are some of the better options.

The message is clear: Experiment with your favourite egg dishes and your favourite wines. You may be pleasantly surprised.

BAKED EGGS, BURGUNDIAN STYLE This recipe is an adaptation of a dish prepared by Olivier Gibault, the chef at Chateau Palmer in Bordeaux. His recipe comes from Claude Lebey, the author of popular restaurant guidebooks in France. Use large ramekins or individual casseroles to bake this dish. Serve with a bottle of Chateau Palmer, if you have it, or go with the title of the recipe and choose a Burgundian pinot noir.

Prep: 15 minutes Cook: 45 minutes Makes: 2 servings You’ll need 4 eggs 4 slices bacon, chopped 1 tablespoon butter 8 pearl onions, peeled 1/2 cup red wine 1 cup beef stock or broth 1 sprig thyme 1/2 bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Method 1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly butter two ovenproof large ramekins. Gently break two eggs into each ramekin; set aside. Blanch the bacon in simmering water for 5 minutes to remove some of the salt and smoke flavouring; drain on a paper towel. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-low heat. Add the bacon; cook until crisp, 8 minutes. Remove bacon to paper towel-lined plate.

2. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat. Add the onions; cook until softened and transparent, about 5 minutes.

3. Add the wine to the saucepan, stirring well; cook to reduce wine by half, 5 minutes. Add the broth, thyme and bay leaf. Simmer, covered, 10 minutes. Uncover; simmer 15 minutes. Remove the thyme and bay leaf. Remove any fat from the top with a small spoon. Taste; if sauce seems too thin, continue to reduce until the sauce has a good consistency.

4. Spoon sauce over the eggs. Distribute the bacon and onions evenly among the ramekins. Place the ramekins in a shallow pan; fill pan halfway up the sides of the ramekins with simmering water.

Bake until you see the whites coagulating, 12-15 minutes. (For a more cooked yolk, cover the ramekins 1 minute.) Season with salt and pepper. Nutrition information Per serving: 341 calories, 60 percent of calories from fat, 23 g fat, 9 g saturated fat, 451 mg cholesterol, 11 g carbohydrates, 20 g protein, 724 mg sodium, 2 g fibre INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 85

touch life > toybox

Stylus Photo TX800FW With exterior design by the noted Italian industrial design team at Castiglione Morelli in Milan, these piano-black premium performance printer harmonises with the home lives and work needs of customers, communicating style and quality while conveying substance and ability. The premium Stylus Photo TX800FW features comprehensive connectivity including WiFi (802.11b/g), Ethernet, Hi-Speed USB 2.0, PictBridge, and multi-format card reader. The TX800FW has an elegant and intuitive 7.8 inch touch panel that lights up only the buttons necessary to bring essential controls to users’ fingertips, and a large 3.5 inch colour LCD screen for easy selecting, copying, enlarging, rotating, cropping, and printing photos without a computer. For fast and efficient document management the TX800FW has an automatic document feeder to copy, scan or fax multi-page originals, and both printers have dual paper trays and an optional duplexer for double sided copying and printing. The TX800FW scans at up to 4800 dpi optical resolution (48-bit colour) for high quality scanning of images and documents with brilliant clarity and accuracy. The Epson Stylus Photo TX800FW is $499 RRP inc GST

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Making the most of touch screen technology, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic delivers easy and fast access to all music, video and photos through a one-touch ‘Media Bar’ drop down menu. The Media Bar also offers a direct link to the Web and to online sharing. Because the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic supports Flash content, individuals can surf even more of the web. The innovative ‘Contacts Bar’ lets people highlight four favorite contacts on their home-screen and, through a single touch, track a digital history of recent text messages, emails, phone logs, photos and blog updates. Among the highest screen resolution available on a mobile phone, the 3.2” widescreen display brings photos, video clips and web content to life in vibrant color and true clarity. With a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and 30 frames-per-second playback and recording, the device is ideal for VGA quality video recording and playback. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic also features a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. With a single touch, images or videos can be shared via a favorite online community, such as Ovi Share, Flickr, or Facebook. www.nokia.com

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Canon EOS 500D A resolution of 15.1 Megapixels records each moment in rich, intricate detail, ready to turn into poster-size prints or crop to perfection. When light levels fall, an ISO range of up to 3200 – expandable all the way up to 12800 – lets you carry on shooting in the darkest of conditions, while Canon’s DIGIC 4 processing ensures that noise doesn’t spoil images. This is particularly ideal for when you can’t, or don’t want to, use flash. Alternatively, you can switch the Canon 500D to Movie mode and record events as they unfold. Capture every last detail of a wedding, a day out with friends or your baby’s first steps by shooting in stunning Full HD (1080P), then simply connect via HDMI to any HDTV to watch the results. For times when the action just won’t stop, the Canon EOS 500D offers a choice of 720P and VGA resolutions, allowing you to shoot and store longer movies on your memory card. [Source: letsgodigital. org]. www.canon.co.nz

Sony HDR-TG5V Handycam Designed for travelers who pack lightly, Sony has unveiled a new high-definition camcorder that combines powerful performance and simple operation into a sleek, portable body. The HDR-TG5V Handycam camcorder captures 1920x1080 high-definition video and four-megapixel photos. With a compact design, the model includes 16GB of flash memory (a portion of which is used for data management), embedded GPS, minimal buttons and a new intuitive user interface for the touch-panel LCD. The camcorder’s built-in GPS antenna and NAVTEQ digital maps geo-tag your videos and photos so you can document your destinations on a map. With 16GB of embedded memory, the HDR-TG5V camcorder holds more than six hours of high definition video footage (LP mode) so it is virtually ready for capture right out of the box. You can also capture content onto Memory Stick PRO Du media (sold separately) for additional recording time. www.sonystyle.com

Samsung Instinct s30 Instinct s30 is ideal for customers looking to simplify and increase the productivity of their business and personal lives with quick access to corporate calendar functionality via Microsoft Outlook. Sprint Mobile Email Work provides access to corporate email, contacts, and calendar from Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, 2003 or 2007 accounts, or IBM Lotus Domino accounts at no additional charge. Instinct s30 offers a Speech to Action button providing many functions using voice activation including call, text, picture messaging, traffic, movie, sports, news and search. Speech to Action brings the user seamless integration with Sprint Navigation, powered

by Telenav, with GPS-enabled audio and visual turn-by-turn driving directions, one-click traffic rerouting and more than 10 million local listings. www.samsung.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 87

see life / pages

Freedom to believe Michael Morrissey retraces the surrender of Japan, and the history of Islamic science NEMESIS: The Battle for Japan 1944-45

By Max Hastings Harper Press, $79.99 If there is one event that is burnt (literally) into the world psyche, it is the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered soon after and it always seemed as though it was devastating cause and straightforward effect.

Yet, as this book (and other similar books) reveal, it wasn’t that simple. Many Japanese cities – particularly Tokyo – had already been wasted by Curtis LeMay’s incendiary bomb firestorms. The number of people killed by the Hiroshima blast was actually less than those killed in the Tokyo raid. So although the new devices were technologically impressive they weren’t as awful as they might seem to the Japanese, already brutally accustomed to comparable destruction of their cities.

It is difficult for the western psyche to comprehend the Japanese mentality which prefers honourable death to dishonourable surrender. Anami, the war minister, and some of the generals were prepared to fight on. Just as important in the equation of Japan’s surrender was the invasion of Manchuria by the Russians. But more important was the possibility of Japan being invaded, the Emperor’s hegemony and of course the perceived betrayal of surrender itself. When the Americans assured Japan that the Emperor would remain intact that freed them up to make the formerly unacceptable decision to capitulate – though the Emperor himself had to make that decision.

Even then, there was an attempted coup to reverse the decision which thankfully was thwarted. At the time of the surrender, Japan still had seven million troops (four million on the mainland) so an invasion would have been a bloodbath that the Americans were extremely reluctant to attempt. Both the Emperor and the theatrical MacArthur gave speeches of great dignity on the matter of surrender.

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One criticism that I would make of this well-researched and finely written book, is that it gives no more than half a page to the effect of the bombs and nothing about their technology. Hastings’ strategy is to concentrate on the politics of surrender. This account makes it clear that the massive industrial capacity of the United States enabled it to make planes and ships at an ever increasing rate, ensuring that in all decisive battles the Americans outnumbered the Japanese in military hardware. The naval blockade meant Japanese soldiers were often half starved whereas American combatants were always well-fed. Also, some Japanese commanders such as Admiral Kurita made odd mistakes – Kurita withdrew when he could have obtained a victory. American admirals such as “Bull” Halsey also erred as did General MacArthur but the end result was never in doubt.

Nonetheless, the Americans often underestimated the Japanese capacity to “dig-in” – and therefore be incredibly difficult to defeat – on such notorious battle grounds as Iwo Jima and Okinawa – conflicts described in tellingly grim detail. Because the Americans had the more advantageous position, superior firepower and weapons technology, their casualties were usually light compared to those of the enemy. American might and prowess is painfully contrasted with the Chinese Nationalists’ corruption and ineptitude against the superior Japanese Army – a victory that made them arrogantly confident about further conquest.

In the end, if the massive conflict is viewed through a Tolstoyan lens, it seems almost inevitable that the Japanese would not have readily surrendered (thus prompting the highly effective kamikaze pilots) and the Americans would throw everything they had against them including atomic bombs. Arguably, their once (or twice) only use, by graphically demonstrating how terrible they are, dissuaded their subsequent use in the even more destructive form of hydrogen bombs.

planes, pipes down into the ocean to bring up cooler nutrient-rich water and burying carbon dioxide in the form of char.

Depending on your perspective, Lovelock is a gloom-obsessed pessimist who sees only planetary mayhem in his crystal ball or a qualified optimist who believes the earth will survive long term – though the human race may be greatly diminished in numbers.

Oh, and did I mention, New Zealand will be among the more advantageously positioned countries in the coming crisis? If this is so, our present migration policy will inevitably undergo a prodigious expansion as the inhabitants of globally warmed countries seek cooler climes.

SEA OF POPPIES

By Amitav Ghosh John Murray, $ 38.99

THE VANISHING FACE OF GAIA: A Final Warning

By James Lovelock Allen Lane, $35 If immortality is bequeathing one idea that is likely to last, James Lovelock has made the cut. Gaia is a term that has passed into the language, along with its alarming cousin, global warming. Gaia, the Greek name for earth goddess, was suggested by the famous English novelist William Golding, as the most apt term for Lovelock’s hypothesis that the Earth was a huge self regulating mechanism that responded inexorably to large scale alterations on the surface or in the atmosphere and therefore was in some sense, alive.

It is both a reassuring and alarming concept. If the earth is alive, then in a sense we are defeated in our attempts to best her – she will have the last say whether we like it or not. And reassuring to the degree that Gaia will ensure the earth survives no matter what is done to it. Richard Dawkins was scathing in his rejection of the idea, as were many other scientists, but Lovelock, who is about to turn 90, has stuck to his notion with great tenacity. However, scientists such as H.D Holland, professor of geology at Harvard, and James Walker at Yale, were at least prepared to debate the idea. In 2003, Lovelock won the Woolaston Medal in part because of his Gaia theory and later awards have brought more acceptance.

Lovelock contends that the Earth and life sciences have tended to work separately and the Gaia notion brings them together. He further contends that scientists have fallen in love with models to the detriment of experimentation, observation and measurement.

One of Lovelock’s most controversial stances is his promotion of nuclear power which makes him a bitter enemy of Greenpeace and other comparable organisations. The figures quoted by both sides flatly contradict each other so both cannot be right. For instance, a government committee said that there was enough nuclear waste to fill five Albert Halls and Lovelock says the correct figure is one Albert Hall. I am not qualified to comment on these figures but I feel uneasy when Lovelock says – non facetiously – he would welcome its burial in his rural environment of Devon for it would provide a useful source of heat! He plays down the problem of radiation to a degree I find scarcely credible.

Lovelock also considers other radical energy-enriching technologies such as the synthesis of food, releasing sulphur from aero-

In my view, the current crop of Indian writers are among the world leaders in world fiction – Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandler, Vikram Seth, Hari Kunzru, David Davidar – the list goes on. To which I would like to now add Amitav Ghosh whom I have not previously read.

The time is 1838, the place is Calcutta though much of the action occurs aboard the Ibis, a raggedy schooner and former slave ship, but at the time of the novel’s action, carrying a cargo of indentured coolies plus opium as well as a colourful assortment of lively characters. The dominant theme is opium and the portrait of an unfortunate wrecked piece of humanity called Ah Fatt who mercifully is later shown as a resurrected fellow with reflexes so sharp he can catch flies on the wing, is one of many memorable portraits this period-rich novel brings to vivid life.

Dickens and Dostoyevsky were two leading nineteenth century novelists who loved the richness of the cities in which they wrote – namely London and St Petersburg. In like manner, Chandler made Mumbai a “character” in Sacred Names, and Calcutta is sumptuously evoked in a Sea of Poppies. We smell Calcutta, we visit her opium warehouses and dens, get to know her costumes and wedding rites – we almost taste Calcutta and as is often the case with such an evocation, the reader may be forgiven for thinking the city peaked in exoticism some centuries ago. And perhaps it is a less colourful place today – container ships rather than slave and opium ships with nimble lascars in the rigging.

This is a complex novel with several interwoven narrative strands.

The principal character is 20 year-old Zachary Reid, a sort of merchant navy Hornblower – young, bold, dashing destined to be promoted on ability merit and have occasion dalliance. Though not initially aware of it, he is being groomed to be a pirate by Serang Ali, a lascar (richly incomprehensible argot from this scallywag).

There are blackguards like the bullying Crowle and the avaricious, ruthless Englishman Benjamin Burnham who confiscates financially ailing merchant Neel Rattan’s property, by framing him for forgery. And yes, the greedy unscrupulous English are the villains in this tale. Then there is the ever resourceful Paulette, escaping from her deviant employer who when she is not permitted to join the crew, disguised as a man, has herself made up to an aging hag.

And there is Deeti, who grows opium poppies out of financial necessity but never touches the highly addictive product, whereas her husband is a doomed addict.

Ghosh shows the Western reader no mercy when it comes to local terminology – atta, alu-posth, puja, nukha, taw and sindoor are bad enough but wait till the likes of Captain Doughty, an INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 89

Englishman, soaked in the local argot lets fly: “No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough .... the real tumasher came later in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! ... Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives ... oh they were grand old-mauls, those Rascally burra-khanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled!”

And there’s a shipload more where that came from, me hearties!

While in the contemporary fashion, Ghosh lists his sources (unsurprisingly, several of them dictionaries), no glossary is proffered. Not only are we floating on a sea of poppies we are marooned in an ocean of nautical, Lascar, Bengali, Anglo-Indian, and Hindustani terms.

While Ghosh is undoubtedly showing off his research, he leaves it to the diligent reader to ferret out the meanings on their own. While one half of my brain wants to grizzle about hard work, the other half says it’s part of the spicy brew that makes a Sea of Poppies such an intoxicating read. This is sumptuous and swashbuckling yet literary stuff well worth a read – or should that be a sail?

MAN IN THE DARK

By Paul Auster Faber and Faber, $35 Paul Auster is a gifted novelist. Gifted but sombre. His antiheroes are like characters from a Beckett play – isolated, cheerless, their worlds, both inner and outer, equally bleak. No surprise then, to find the central protagonist of Auster’s latest novel is a seventy two year-old misery guts named August Brill who lost his wife to cancer some years back and is now recovering from a car accident while thoughtfully meditating on what a failure his life has been. His escape from drear reality is to conjure up a parallel America which did not go to war in Iraq, where the Twin Towers were not destroyed – a better, more peaceful America the reader might suppose.

Wrong! The United States is riven by a second Civil War and thirteen million are dead. Brill’s equally miserable and baffled central character, Owen Brick, is informed he has been forcibly co-opted into military service and ordered to kill someone ... and that some one turns out to none other than August Brill.

Auster is of course playing one of his Austerian games – the “writer”(or someone very like a writer), is at odds with his characters (Auster himself, if you like), a character turned writer who wants to escape from the page and kill the creator. In a TV version of this sort of story, no doubt the character would confront the creator but in this more realistic version, Brick winds up dead and it feels as though Auster has opted for a premature copout from his own counter-drama of contemporary America. In the world of Brill, his son-in-law goes to Iraq in quest of a more vivid sense of self and winds up kidnapped by terrorists and brutally beheaded, his fate available for the world to view as one of these pornographic videos that have become horribly common on YouTube. This episode has the feel of authorial haste and this is one novel that would have benefited from being larger, more expanded than the constricted work it is.

I was a big fan of Auster’s early novels like The Music of Chance or Moon Palace which had less metafictional manoeuvrings and more straightforward narrative, gripping the reader more successfully. It’s hard to care about any of these characters whether it be Miriam, his daughter or Katya, his granddaughter or poor headless Titus, or even Brill himself. They are two-dimensional puppets whom it 90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

is difficult to believe Auster cares that much about. So neither do we. As one reviewer has noted, Auster seems to have lost his magic.

I hope he gets it back because his cool prose often rises to a finely wrought music. In his earlier work, he aspired to be the successor to Beckett, Kafka and the theatre of Cruelty or the Absurd, but in his more recent novels, the former haunting quality has become more of a clever and heartless five finger exercise.

SCIENCE AND ISLAM

By Ehasan Masood Icon books, $39.99 Though small, this compact book covers an astonishing amount of rich historical terrain. It should prove an exciting voyage of discovery for readers who know little or nothing of the glorious flourishing of science that occurred during Islam’s golden age from the eighth to the sixteenth century. One point this book makes clear is that commercial and technological dialogue between Islam and the West did occur. For instance, Harum al-Rashid sent Charlemagne an elephant in 801 AD as well as a chess set and a water clock, a device unknown in Europe.

We may have been astonished to read that Albertus Magnus made automata (ingenious clockwork robot-like machines that performed practical tasks) in the thirteenth century – consider then that the Banu Musa brothers made automata back in the ninth century! They also accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Already, by the eighth century, Baghdad had become the leading city of the world with a population of a million and the rich artistic and scientific life of the city was partly due to the controlling aristocratic family, the Barmakids.

One of the most astonishing figures among a galaxy of scientific talent was Abbas ibn-Firnas. He produced the clearest glass yet made, created a sky simulation room, comparable to our planetariums with stars, clouds, thunder and lightning. He also constructed a large wing like a modern hang glider from silk and eagle feathers.

Al-Zarquali made a sophisticated astrolabe, proved that the aphelion shifts slightly each year and measured the shift to a degree of accuracy that contemporary science has barely improved.

Another giant was the well known ibn-Sina who we know as Avicenna. His Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin and became a standard textbook for six centuries, being published in some 60 editions. While Avicenna was subsequently attacked in the fifteenth century, his considerable influence is undeniable. AlZahrawi composed a volume of practical medicine which ran to 30 volumes. Among his inventions were the forceps to aid childbirth, a scissor-like instrument to extract tonsils and all kinds of hooks and pincers. Masood’s history moves quickly but is sketchy – more like an introduction to a vast topic that merits a much larger book.

Europe and the West had an ambiguous attitude to Islamic learning. They both used it and attacked it, were influenced by it, then denied its influence. Masood concludes his mini encyclopaedia of science and Islam by noting that contemporary Islamic science is in a parlous state with only two scientists from Muslim countries having Nobel prizes in science. Whereas in the past – according to Masood – science benefited from authoritarian rulers, that is certainly not the case today. Masood doesn’t give any clear answers and tends toward the pious notion that in early times Islam encouraged science. He concludes with some ambiguity, “If science is to return to the nations of Islam, it must do so without interfering in people’s freedom to believe”.

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see life / music

Three long years Chris Philpott finally gets to hear the Gomez follow-up Gomez A New Tide It’s been nearly three years since Gomez last hit stores with their fantastic album How We Operate – an album this reviewer described as “songwriting at its best” (Investigate Magazine, July 2006) – so it was with high anticipation that I popped A New Tide into my CD player and sat back for a listen.

Picking up where Operate left off, this latest collection of tracks sees singer and primary songwriter Ben Ottewell building on the accessible sound of that record, and going all out to appeal to as many people as possible.

While it would be easy for such a move to turn into a major disaster, in the hands of Gomez it works – opener “Mix” starts off as a stripped back acoustic ballad before giving way to rowdy distorted guitars leading into “Little Pieces”, one of the rockier songs in the groups’ repertoire, and easily one of the catchiest hooks on this album.

It doesn’t all work quite as well, with tracks like “Bone Tired” and “If I Ask You Nicely” finding the group traversing overly-safe territory they don’t need to be in, but this is a decent collection of tracks nonetheless and should appease the group’s loyal fanbase.

Thrice Live At The House Of Blues It can be difficult to judge a band based on a live album – there are many variables, such as the sound quality at the show, the recording method, whether the group perform at their best, and so on – but Live at the House of Blues is as good a documentation of a band as any greatest hits collection around.

Not too well known in mainstream circles, Californian group Thrice, led by singer Dustin Kensrue, are one of the more artistic and ambitious bands to emerge in the current emo-rock scene.

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That variety and ambition is plainly obvious here, as Live at the House of Blues is a two-disc affair made up of tracks from the groups entire back catalogue, with particular focus on their fourdisc concept record The Alchemy Index.

Being a live album, the songs are looser and on many occasions more enjoyable than their studio counterparts, but it also has its glitches – the audience is too loud in several parts, and the singing can sometimes tend slightly to the pitchy end of the scale.

That said, this is a veritable best-of collection, performed well enough that it doubles as a great introduction to the band, and certainly worth checking out.

Nat King Cole Re:Generations Perhaps one of the more interesting albums to hit in recent times, this is one of those few times that – going in – I had no idea what I was about to hear.

Re:Generations is a posthumous collection of unreleased Cole tracks that have been grabbed, chopped up and twisted by a variety of the world’s top producers, and ending up as a collection of the most interesting collaborations I’ve ever come across.

Imagine my surprise at the disc kicking off with the sound of a record starting up, a smooth piano/string arrangement and Cole’s unmistakable voice blaring out the words “I was wrong”, before giving way to a dance beat and a funky bass line, courtesy of CeeLo Green, on opening track “Lush Life”.

The album carries on from there, with artists like Will.I.Am (Black Eyed Peas), hip hop collective The Roots and indie-rockers TV on the Radio performing on remixes courtesy of guys like hip hop producer Just Blaze (the man behind releases from Jay-Z, TI and Snoop Dogg) and keyboard player Salaam Remi (Amy Winehouse’s band), combining Coles’ genius with modern hiphop, dub and latin influences.

There simply isn’t a weak track here, making this one album you must have a listen to.

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see life / movies

State of Play riveting, brilliant Russell Crowe shines in this year’s conspiracy thriller blockbuster, says Roger Moore STATE OF PLAY Starring: Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright Penn, Helen Mirren, Jeff Daniels Directed by: Kevin Macdonald Rated: PG-13 (for some violence, language including sexual references, and brief drug content) 120 minutes As dense as a Watergate-era newspaper and as immediate as a blog, State of Play is an absolutely riveting state-of-the-art “big conspiracy” thriller. It’s an often brilliant collision of political scandal, murder, a privatizing military and the rapidly evolving journalism that may (or may not) remain democracy’s watchdog once newspapers, “instant history,” are rendered history by a culture that has abandoned them.

An all-star cast headed by Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck Americanizes (somewhat) and gives the Hollywood touch to what began life as a terrific BBC-TV thriller in 2003. It’s the story of a scruffy but accomplished reporter (Crowe) using and protecting his college roommate (Affleck), now a congressman, when the House member’s secret girlfriend mysteriously dies and scandal erupts.

Reporter Cal suspects there’s more to this death than a simple DC subway suicide. His rattled onetime pal, Congressman Collins, seems to catch on, too. Maybe this Blackwater-ish defence contractor that is being investigated by Collins is to blame.

Cal reluctantly brings in the Washington Globe’s fresh-faced and snarky new political blogger (Rachel McAdams) on the story.

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The veteran reporter forgets his ethics as he digs for his friend and sees connections between the subway suicide and a murdered pickpocket. The blogger struggles to learn basic legwork of reporting on a story that has murderous implications.

Robin Wright Penn is the wife wronged by the affair, Jeff Daniels is the political heavyweight struggling to do damage control and Helen Mirren as the feisty editor (Bill Nighy played the role on TV) who curses and demands a story “before it’s ready.” State of Play is an embarrassment of acting riches, with Oscar nominee Viola Davis having a one-scene cameo as a coroner, Jason Bateman making a brief, pivotal appearance and Harry Lennox as that most hard-boiled of hard-boiled cops.

“Who do you think I am, Bambi’s baby brother?”

In condensing the British series (set in London at Parliament) into a compact two hours, some of the political flavour is lost and some of the surprises, frankly, spoiled _ revealed abruptly.

But the charismatic cast, brisk pacing and snappy dialogue (writers Billy Ray, Matthew Carnahan and Tony Gilroy are credited) mask some of those shortcomings. Crowe makes his character the life of the piece, quick-witted, sarcastic, bluff and smart. But is Cal as smart as he thinks?

State of Play is a puzzle picture, all too ready to take us down one primrose path only to trip us and make us consider another.

And then another. The last of those misdirections seems unnecessary, but director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) keeps the pulse pounding and the mind racing as he juggles the film’s several plots, always with his ear tuned to the last word of that title: Play.

Reviewed by Roger Moore

HUNGER Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham Directed by: Steve McQueen Unrated: Nudity and violence 96 minutes Hunger is rooted in the particulars of a true story, but the film grasps for universal truths. In 1981, Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands, locked up in Belfast’s Maze prison, began starving himself. He took the action to protest being classified as a criminal, rather than a political prisoner entitled to rights under the rules of war. He was joined by other IRA inmates, drawing international attention to their cause. Ten weeks later Sands was the first to die, wasted to a skeleton at 27.

The English director Steve McQueen, an award-winning avantgarde video artist, uses these facts as the foundation for an examination of the human capacity to inflict, and endure, punishment.

Hunger isn’t a biography of Sands, a message picture about Northern Ireland or an allegory about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It’s a probing, clinical, oddly beautiful examination of one man’s decision to die, to face the moment we all must on his own terms.

The story advances by images more than dialogue. It begins with a prison guard (Stuart Graham) whose morning wash-up begins with special attention to his skinned knuckles. He’s not a villain but an ordinary family man, a pawn in an extreme situation created by others. His drive to work begins with a check under his car for explosives. His job routine is strip searches and beatings.

The IRA prisoners refuse to wear prison uniforms, going naked or covering themselves in blankets. They protest prison conditions

by smearing their excrement on the cell walls and urinating into the halls from under their doors. Their own bodies are the only weapons they possess. The guards must drag them from their cells and wash them by force, beating them in the bargain. It’s a process that scars both the captives and their jailers.

McQueen observes from a detached viewpoint, finding stomach-churning sensory power. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s cool, precise compositions locate incongruous glimpses of beauty in this nearly wordless opening sequence.

The 96-minute film is almost half over when the focus shifts to Sands (Michael Fassbender), politics and dialogue. The prison priest (Liam Cunningham) engages Sands in a lengthy debate over the ethics of his hunger strike. In a static, unbroken 20-minute shot that is the movie’s heart, Sands justifies his philosophy of resistance, debating whether dying as an act of protest is suicide or murder. The sequence is superbly played as Sands defends his stand and the chaplain endeavours to talk him off the ledge. The argument isn’t stacked in either man’s favour.

The last panel in the triptych follows Sands’ physical decline and death. Fassbender went on a medically supervised crash diet for these scenes. His transformation to skin-and bones is shocking, but not sensationalized. McQueen doesn’t exploit his emaciated frame as a masochistic spectacle, but regards it like a religious icon. Like a fasting mystic, Sands begins to experience visions of soul-piercing beauty, hallucinations that McQueen captures with self-assurance rare in a first-time director.

This is strong stuff, a tour of hell on earth presented in scenes of unbearable tension and pulse-spiking violence. Hunger ends as something else, though, in a vision of transcendence and grace.

Reviewed by Colin Covert ACE INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009 95

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The story of an interview From stage to screen, Nixon’s the one for Frank Langella, writes Steven Rea “I really did think it was going to be seven weeks, in and out,” says Frank Langella, recalling his decision, in early 2006, to star as Richard M. Nixon in Peter Morgan’s play, Frost/Nixon. Set for a short run at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London, the play – about the series of interviews conducted by talk show host David Frost in 1977 with the only U.S. president ever to resign from office – won hugely favourable reviews.

Suddenly, the New Jersey-born Langella, and Michael Sheen, who played Frost, found themselves moving to a bigger house in London’s West End. In April 2007, the intense tete-a-tete drama opened on Broadway, where Langella went on to nab the Tony Award for best leading actor in a play.

And then Ron Howard climbed aboard and decided to make a movie out of it. Langella and Sheen reprise their roles, joined by Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell.

“It’s taken actually a little over 2 1/2 years of my life,” says Langella, on the phone from New York.

“So you never know. It’s another good lesson in choosing something because you really want to do it, versus because you think it might have commercial potential. ... Very often you choose projects that you 96 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM May 2009

think are going to do great things, and they fizzle and die.”

Langella, 70, found himself among the contenders for a bestactor Oscar nomination for his performance as the 38th president, forced to step down in the wake of the Watergate scandals. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe.

“He is an epic tragic figure,” says the actor, who remembers watching the president make his historic announcement on TV, in August 1974.

“I was sitting on the floor of a little house I was renting in Williamstown, Massachusetts,” he remembers. “I was doing a play at the Williamstown Theatre Company, and rehearsal was cancelled, or put back for a few hours, so we could all go to my house and watch the resignation speech.”

For playwright Morgan, Langella was the only man for the job of portraying the tarnished former commander-in-chief.

“We agreed that he had to be an American, not a Brit, and they came back with half a dozen names, and the director and I immediately felt that Frank should go to the top of the list,” recalls Morgan, in a separate interview. “Frank has the physical stature, because Nixon was a tall man, but more than that Frank has this extraordinary stage experience. He is, quite simply, a master. ...

“And we were thrilled that he said yes. But don’t forget, he only agreed to come and do the seven-week run. No one, none of us, could have predicted any of this!”

Morgan, 45, has made something of a specialty of investigating the private lives of public figures. He wrote The Queen, for which Helen Mirren nabbed an Oscar (with Sheen portraying Prime Minister Tony Blair). Morgan adapted The Other Boleyn Girl, about Henry the VIII’s palace love life, and scripted The Last King of Scotland, about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. (That one, too, won an Academy Award for its lead, Forest Whitaker.)

“It’s almost this little genre of its own that’s popped up, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it,” Morgan says. “Presumably, there’s something there about that sort of weird trade-off between a very public figure and their private humanity. The relationship between the personal and the office. For example, the queen is the queen, but she is also Elizabeth Windsor, and she’s trapped somewhere in between. ... There’s a constriction, a sense of imprisonment.

“And it’s the same with the president, as I imagine Barack Obama is about to find out. . . . To some degree you are dehumanized, because from the moment you take office you are known as ‘Mr. President’ and you’re known as Mr. President for the rest of your life.

“And yet you are still very much a person.”

And it was Nixon the person – his human failings – that led to his downfall, says Morgan.

“If he weren’t a paranoid, pessimistic human being, he wouldn’t have done what he did in 1972. Because he was never going to lose that election, he was always going to beat (Democratic nominee George) McGovern; all the polls suggest that. ...

“He was the architect of his own demise, and yet simultaneously he was a man who was clinging to power at all costs, and that seemed like a really interesting place to go, as a writer.”

And if you were to throw that tragically flawed man into a room with a supercilious chat-show host – the “part-entertainer/partpolitical interviewer” Frost – it seemed that there was potential for something, well, Shakespearean in scope.

“Our humanity will always humiliate us,” Morgan notes. “Our needs and desires are so weak, we are so fragile, and just in that sense alone, how easy is it to be human and also achieve greatness when there is so much in our humanity that conspires against greatness?”