Investigate, September 2010

INSIDE: ORAL SEX CAUSES CANCER - SCIENTISTS WARN IT RIVALS TOBACCO

INVESTIGATE September 2010:

Auckland’s Mayoral War

Why some of the six mayoral candidates believe building a supercity is a super mistake

Supercity War • Red Squad Rebel • Blood Diamonds Issue 116

Red Squad Rebel Why Ross Meurant believes NZ is in danger of becoming a police state

Blood Diamonds Sam Gregory’s exclusive report

from Zimbabwe’s diamond mines ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Hal Colebatch on space, Amy Brooke’s education quiz, Robert Mann on fake degrees

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C ONTENTS Volume 10, Issue 116, ISSN 1175-1290

F EATURES

32

Red Squad Rebel

Former top cop and politician ROSS MEURANT argues new surveillance laws will give police and bureaucrats too much power over ordinary New Zealanders

Auckland’s Mayoral War

Blood Diamonds

Superbugs: We’re losing

Six hopefuls are vying to become New Zealand’s first “supermayor” but ironically not all believe supercities are a good thing. JOHN BANKS, LEN BROWN, SIMON PRAST, PENNY BRIGHT, ANDREW WILLIAMS and COLIN CRAIG make their final pitches to Investigate readers

You’ve seen Naomi Campbell being cross-examined on blood diamonds. Now SAM GREGORY has filed an exclusive report on how Robert Mugabe is set to make a fortune on diamond trading

Old disease horrors are returning as bugs fight back, and less money is invested in antibiotic research. TRINE TSOUDEROS has the story

40

Oral Sex & Mouth Cancer

Experts are shocked at a massive increase in mouth, throat and head cancers caused by oral sex, and warn it may soon overtake tobacco as a primary cause. See Alt.Health

Cover: Ian Wishart

58

52

EDITORIAL & OPINION

76

Focal Point Editorial

Vox-Populi The roar of the crowd

Simply Devine

Miranda Devine on Apple’s fall

Mark Steyn

16

Easier said than done

Global Warning Joe Fone

Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on Winston Peters’ return

Line 1

Chris Carter on Hone

Poetry

Money

Contra Mundum

Education

Soapbox

Science

Matt Flannagan on atheism

Robert Mann on fake degrees

Peter Hensley on investment Amy Brooke’s education quiz Gladiators

Technology

Toshiba warranties

Online

The dangers of casual search

26

94

Amy Brooke’s poem of the month

Fading Empires Hal Colebatch on the space race

24

LIFESTYLE

Sport

Chris Forster on Tour de France

Health Ovaries

Food

Yolking it

Pages

Michael Morrissey’s spring reads

Music

Chris Philpott’s CD reviews

Alt.Health

Movies

Travel

Cutting Room

Oral sex & cancer Albania

Lebanon

Is 3D a flash in the pan?

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart | Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart | NZ EDITION Advertising 09 373-3676, sales@investigatemagazine.com | Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, 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 Heidi Wishart | Design & Layout Bozidar Jokanovic | Tel: +64 9 373 3676 | Fax: +64 9 373 3667 | Investigate Magazine, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND | AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart | Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com | Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 | SUBSCRIPTIONS – Online: www.investigatemagazine.com By Phone: Australia – 1-800 123 983, NZ – 09 373 3676 By Post: To the PO Box NZ Edition: $85; AU Edition: A$96 EMAIL: editorial@investigatemagazine.com, ian@investigatemagazine.com, australia@investigatemagazine.com, sales@investigatemagazine.com, helpdesk@investigatemagazine.tv 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.

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FOCAL POINT

Editorial

Compulsory super, yes or no?

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, NEW ZEALANDERS OVER whelmingly rejected compulsory superannu-

ation schemes, mainly because the initiative was proposed by one Winston Raymond Peters who wasn’t very popular at the time.

Now, John Key’s National Government is strongly hinting that it too is thinking of heading down the compulsion route.

Thirteen years ago, I supported the idea.

Now, I’m not so sure. In that time we’ve seen the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2000, and the financial crash that began in 2008 (predicted by Investigate contributing writer Selwyn Parker from early 2007).

Various politicians tell us we have too much capital invested in our homes and baches. That’s political code for saying they want their mates to have access to new sources of capital they can strip-mine.

Because here’s a truism, if savings becomes compulsory, the brokers will be sitting on growing piles of money to squander on no end of daft schemes that favour themselves or their friends.

We’ve seen, in the finance company collapses, how the directors and shareholders of those firms often used investors’ funds to prop up their own pet property or business ventures. Are we to believe this won’t happen again under Kiwisaver or compulsory super? Is the answer to New Zealand’s savings crisis really just pouring money into the stockmarket or venture capital?

I’m a great believer that people should be encouraged to save, but I’m not in favour of compulsion, not when it appears more or less a fishing trip in piggy banks.

For a start, you’ll take a hit on your wage and salary. Suddenly, five or nine percent of your income is going to be deducted before you get it and placed in a fund you won’t be able to touch. If employers are required to match that, it will come out of your future wage entitlements – businesses cannot just

‘magic up’ cash without a corresponding increase in productivity.

Personally, I’d far rather choose to pay off my mortgage or credit cards than throw money at the sharemarket or any number of badly performing unit trusts whose boards of directors are stacked with ex-politicians.

Why should corporates benefit from forced raids on the wallets of every New Zealander, at the expense of property or other investment choices?

Maybe I’m just being reactionary, but for

6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

a government that got elected on a platform of ending ‘Nanny State’, there’s been way too much of ‘Nanny knows best’ in the past 12 months for my liking.

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VOX POPULI

Communiques The roar of the crowd

Immunisation a tough call

I can sympathize with Elijah Tavui’s Parent’s Beth & Silika. The choice of whether or not to vaccinate isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

As parents we always want to do what’s best for our children, especially when it comes to nasty diseases like MeNZB. I know as a parent it wasn’t an easy decision to decide whether or not to vaccinate our children for MeNZB. Also there was a lot of fear and pressure put on parents to vaccinate.

Like all medical decisions we make for our children there are always risks, and I guess at the end of the day we hope and pray that our children aren’t the ones to fall into that small percentage of risk and complications.

None of our children were vaccinated for MeNZB, we lived in a very low risk area for the disease. The chances of getting it were very minimal.

But, and here’s the big BUT, on the 2nd Jan 08, 4.30am we rushed one of our children to Nelson hospital because we suspected he might have MeNZB. After an initial misdiagnosis he was started on antibiotics and responded well for the first hour and suddenly took a turn for worse and by early afternoon our son was rushed to ICU in a critical condition. A retrieval team was sent from Starship Auckland to stabilize him in preparation for the air ambulance to Starship’s Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). His condition was so serious he wasn’t expected to live or if he did survive he could have had severe complications. For two days his life hung in the balance as he battled for his life.

Fortunately he did start to improve and was moved to a general children’s ward at Starship a few days later. He had to learn to walk again, had triple and double vision and just felt so sick and had severe headaches and joint pain. After 12 days in Starship he was flown back to Nelson by air ambulance

to recover. It took him nearly the rest of the year to get back to school full-time. I guess we were lucky as our son has made a full recovery due to excellent medical care and help from above. I certainly hope Elijah Tavui will make a full recovery.

I can now understand why the government brought the vaccine in, as MeNZB is a hideous disease that strikes fast and deadly, unless treated promptly it leaves its victims either dead or seriously disabled. Sometimes my wife and I felt damned if we vaccinate and damned if we don’t. Our children have now had their MeNZB Shots. As I said earlier parents want to do the very best for their children and make decisions accordingly.

Just a caution, MeNZB can strike at anytime any age and the effectiveness of any vaccines children had during the immunisation campaign has probably worn off by now. As for my family we hope and pray that lightning wont strike our family twice.

Check out the Meningitis Trust Web page http://www.meningitis-trust.org/ for signs and symptoms.

Ian Faulkner, Nelson

Vitamin C megadose for Menzb?

In the light of the meningococcal toddler in hospital with amputated legs, and the continuing needless death toll from the swine flu, I wonder how many saw the 60 Minutes story (TV3 Wednesday 18th August 7.30 pm) about how Vitamin C saved the life of a Waikato farmer who would have died if his family had not fought tooth and nail for him.

Countless thousands of dollars were spent (not to mention the investment in high tech equipment used) on keeping this patient alive in ICU and yet all it took to save his life was a simple bag of Vitamin C. Furthermore, vitamin C when used intra-

8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

venously, can also be used to reverse meningococcal disease, yet they won’t use it for that either.

This documentary shows what happens when someone, with money and determination, refuses to accept the death sentence handed him by the doctors, and demands and legally enforces that they administer vitamin C to him. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the money, or know that such a remedy is possible, so we continue to have preventable deaths from both swine flu (and meningococcal disease.)

The question is – if Vitamin C can save a life in such a seemingly hopeless situation – could it be used effectively at a much earlier stage?

Many New Zealanders will be asking this question.

A few dollars invested in research may give us the answers that could prune many millions off our expenditure on health.

Meningococcal Septicemia – MRSA – NDM-1? Vitamin C at 100 mgs is unlikely to do it but at 100,000 mgs it might save many lives.

Hilary Butler, via email

Dancing with dragons

Good appraisal and glad to see some strength in the honest critique of the Chinese Communist Party without fear from losing out on some financial gain etc.

Unfortunately the biggest story coming out of China today and the biggest challenge to CCP all over the world today is the issue of the Falun Gong – which the writer of your article did not even give a mention.

This is the biggest challenge to the communist regime today where reportedly they spend a whopping 4% GNP on trying to eradicate Falun Gong.. Not only in China but also in the rest of the world- 114 countries where Falun Gong are present.

See: A Decade of Courage, Chinas Deadly harvest. [http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/ pg_ShortFilms/2009-07-15/175082977802. html] You may also be interested in The Nine Commentaries and the effect his has had on the psyche and liberation of the Chinese people inside China. [http://ninecommentaries.com] As of July 20, 2010, 8:34 pm EST, 77,142,799 people have submitted statements withdrawing from the Chinese Communist Party or its affiliated organizations (for the text in Chinese of all of the statements, please visit the Tuidang website: English <http://declaration.epochtimes. com/> | Chinese <http://tuidang.dajiyuan. com/> ). Those who are current members of the CCP or its affiliated organizations are resigning their membership with these statements; former members sever all association with these organizations. All are renouncing the CCP completely.

And yesterday on July 20 was the commemoration of an 11 year of inhumane persecution of Falun Gong inside China . Please read a letter sent to the Canadian Government by ex Canadian MP secretary of State for Asia and Pacific and all time maverick David Kilgour: http://ahdu88.blogspot.com/2010/07/stopinhuman-persecution-of-falun-gong.html If you want your magazine to ethical when conveying the truth then you need to involve this resilient group of people when talking about China, religions and human rights.

Jana Shearer, via email

Family Planning Association– the death peddlers

Further to the “Collateral Damage from the Culture Wars”. The Family Planning Association [FPA] should be seen as the enemy of the family and the promoter of a culture of death. What plans does Family Planning have for our families?

They continue to seduce our children and undermine parental responsibility. The Association lobbied vigorously to have the law recognise that children under the age of 16 can be given contraceptives without the knowledge or consent of parents. The Association also lobbied against an amendment to the Care of Children Bill providing that girls under the age of 16 could not obtain an abortion without the knowledge of parents or guardian.

The staff of the Association regularly smuggle girls out of school without the

knowledge of parents to take them to have an abortion.

It is outrageous that parents have to sign a school consent form for a child to visit the zoo but can have her unborn child, the grandchild of her parents killed without a consent form. The Association is the major abortion referral agency in New Zealand.

In the year 2008 17,940 abortions were performed in New Zealand, during that year the Association made 4866 abortion referrals throughout the country.

Family Planning now wants to become the major abortion provider in New Zealand.

Last year they made an application to the Abortion Supervisory Committee for a limited licence for its Hamilton clinic to kill unborn babies in their first 9 weeks of life by the use of the murder pill RU 486, which starves the unborn child to death. It is shameful that the Waikato District Health

Communities should rise up and vigorously oppose these killing centres being set up in their communities Board enthusiastically supports this proposed killing centre and is prepared to fund Family Planning for the killing of Waikato’s innocent and defenceless unborn, shame on them. It is the objective of the Association to set up killing centres at all of its 30 clinics.

The killing of unborn children is a lucrative business and will substantially increase the profits of the FPA. Communities should rise up and vigorously oppose these killing centres being set up in their communities.

Family Planning is philosophically totally unsuited to be granted abortion licences, they deny that unborn children have a right to life they reject the current abortion legislation which was intended to provide protection for the unborn child they strongly support the decriminalisation of abortion which would make it no longer a crime to kill an unborn child and would provide abortion for any reason at the request of the mother up to 24 weeks gestation.

It is strongly believed that Family Planning was responsible for instigating the Hon Steve Chadwick’s recently proposed, but now defunct, private member’s bill to decriminalise abortion. Family Planning promote the exploitation and debasement of both men and women and boys and girls. The Association does not accept that human sexuality is a precious gift from God to be used for the procreation of the human race within marriage. The Association degrades our sexuality by promoting promiscuity and sexual perversions such as masturbation, oral sex and anal sex. The Association shamelessly sells sex toys, vibrators and oral dams. Who will protect our children from the dangerous seduction of Family Planning?

New Zealand has the second highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the OECD and also a very high rate of sexually transmitted infections among teenagers. Last year, 79 girls aged from 11 to 14 had abortions, of these, 68 were 14 year olds and 13 aged 11 to 13. This is the result of comprehensive sex education which promotes condoms and so called “ safe sex”. This largely state funded and grotesquely misnamed Family Planning Association loudly claims we need more sex education and “safe sex”. Any objective assessment of Family Planning’s record would quickly conclude that it has been an abject failure. We would be helping our children by promoting chastity before marriage and faithfulness within marriage. When is the government going to stop funding this failed and dangerous organisation?

Ken Orr Spokesperson, Right to Life New Zealand Inc

Find some fossil rabbits

In my letter (January 2010) I stated that “evolution would be falsified if even one authentic out of sequence fossil were ever found in the fossil record, e.g. a fossil ‘human’ in the Carboniferous or, to cite J.B.S. Haldane’s famous example, fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”. I followed with: “No such anachronistic fossils have ever been found.” Jonathan Gray has responded (April 2010) by citing several claimed out of sequence examples.

Your correspondent places much emphasis on ‘human’ fossils allegedly found in Carboniferous strata by Ed Conrad, a journalist who apparently “spent his time puttering around old mine tailings in coal country, collecting Carboniferous rocks that resembled, to his untutored eye, fragments

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 9

of [human] body parts…” (P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota on his Pharyngula website).

To Myers, after examining close-up photos of sectioned Conrad material sent to him by Lin Liangtai (described by Mr Gray as a “Chinese scientist”), it quickly became obvious that anything with a vaguely circular profile was called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint was called blood. “It’s all crude and wrong and very, very silly”, Myers concluded.

Some Conrad material has also been examined by, among others, Andrew MacRae, a geologist, and Kurt Wise, a palaeontologist.

Of significance is the fact that the latter is a young earth creationist.

Both have examined material at first hand and have concluded fossil bone has yet to be demonstrated. Some of the pieces have been designated siderite concretions, apparently prevalent in Carboniferous strata.

Both Conrad and Lin also claim authenticity for what they regard as a human calvarium (skullcap). This piece (discovered

by Conrad some 25 years ago) has not been described in any reputable scientific journal.

Significantly, Mr Gray is silent on this point.

Also worthy of mention is the fact that Lin, although pronouncing it as human and of Carboniferous age, has not examined the ‘calvarium’ in toto – only thin sections (see reference cited by Mr Gray).

A lack of source information means I am unable to follow up most of the other claims of out of sequence fossils listed by Mr Gray.

One claim concerning a human skeleton allegedly found in Silurian rock (Franklin County, Missouri) was reported in Scientific American in 1880. Mr Gray omits the year.

I can assure your correspondent that, far from wishing to suppress such information, if any of the finds listed by Mr Gray had successfully met the strict requirements of scientific description and authentication, they would have made headlines in every major scientific journal and newspaper.

Creationists intent on disproving evolution by means of out of sequence fossils will have do a great deal better than this.

Warwick Don, Dunedin

Robbing migrants

The fact of the matter is that our entitlement (in my case part of a UK pension) will always be stolen from people such as myself. I have heard (Socialist politicians) that “foreigners” must not have more than New Zealanders.

So what? We have earned our “foreign” pen-

sions. Well, Sir, what of the latter who have large private pensions?

To the NZ super-scheme, I pay “x” amount and expect to have “y” amount. I don’t and won’t.

My effective tax-rate is in the order or 85% gross income.

Indeed, it is said that people such as myself did not have to come here. This is a true statement, but let us face facts, in many cases, we are of the higher echelons of IQ, and professional skills.

We are indeed, Sir, USED. To continue, over this pension business, that I consider myself to be a “Second Class” citizen in the country of my adoption.

Not just for me, but I would support any organisation / person that would overcome what is nothing but sheer theft on the grandest of scales.

Incidentally, if my Philippines wife and I were to have had our own children then they would be sent to Manila for their education, where the standards both academic and moral are on higher planes than here. c/f Mrs. Amy Brooke.

Christopher Miles, Waihi

On Colebatch and Kipling

Sometimes there are several items in Investigate that stimulate me to comment.

I really expected a discussion of Rudyard Kipling, by Hal Colebatch, to include a reference to Kipling’s poem, “Recessional” (“Lest We Forget”). There is hardly any poem or song (“Recessional” has been set to music) that more movingly portrays Britain poised between rise and fall, which is of course a subject dear to Hal Colebatch.

God of our fathers, known of old Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies The Captains and the Kings depart Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away On dune and headland sinks the fire Lo, all our pomp of yesterda Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not Thee to guard.

For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Amen.

Miranda Devine says “... A culture which promotes excessive tolerance of family instability is a culture which turns a blind eye to paedophiles...”. British Family Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge is quoted as saying that this problem does finally “...become a matter of public concern when it reaches epidemic proportions...” The always incisive Theodore Dalrymple capped this assessment neatly when he recently said, in “The New Faith, Hope and Charity”, that: “...the anti-paedophile hysteria in Britain...is itself the product of a justifiably guilty conscience about the way many children are brought up...”

The children who suffer so direly from moral breakdown, are mere collateral damage in the anti-Christian “liberal” war against the “patriarchical” family. These “liberals”, the feminists foremost, do not really care at all about children. Conservative values relating to sexual relations with minors are actually endorsed by them solely at their own convenience.

The fact that secular progressives are at the forefront of reform movements to lower the legal age of “consent” does not occasion the slightest shame, nor the faintest censure for hypocrisy, when the behavior they wish to see legalised are made the subject of their loudest condemnations when discovered in, say, Catholic priests. Not to mention that child abuse that occurs in the traditional nuclear family is frequently paraded as evidence of the “oppressiveness” of that structure, while conveniently ignoring that increases in rates of this abuse directly correlate to increases in casual and transient relationships.

Any mention of “The Crusades” gets me going. Apparently they are the reason that Muslims are upset with Christendom. There is hardly a more barefaced anti-Christian lie

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than this one which is routinely parroted by media talking heads and schoolteachers.

The “FIRST Crusade” occurred in the year 1098. A study of the preceding 400 years of history reveals Islam invading, conquering, raiding, and attacking Christendom.

Palestine, North Africa, and Spain were all won for Islam by the sword in the 700’s, and the decisive battle that turned the hordes back, was Tours, France, year 742.

The first crusade was finally mounted after another 350 years of this, including a series of sieges of Constantinople, and one of the worst genocides in history, that of the Armenians following the battle of Manzikert. The crusades were not imperialism, they were a counter-attack.

Constantinople finally fell to Islam in 1453. This city has a rich Christian heritage; so where are the millions of Christians rioting in the streets and committing acts of terror all over the world, because of the wrong and the humiliation we have suffered, and because we want Constantinople back? Or Bethlehem? But it is a fact that the Islamists want SPAIN “back”, not to mention Israel.

Lastly, I continue to be baffled by Richard Prosser’s blind spot. I, too, am a “culturist”, and would like to see a groundswell movement with this label. His idea that foreign interests should only be allowed to leasehold land here, is a very good one. Ironically, all land title in China IS 75 year leasehold, so much for their process of “privatisation”. They can buy OUR land freehold, but not their own.

I can understand the Paleoconservative Pat Buchanan holding views like Richard Prosser’s about the USA with its 300 million people. But Richard Prosser is completely wrong in his belief that NZ could be a wealthy nation after all if only we had continued to assemble our own cars in factories that made 5 per day of some makes and models. Australia long since accepted that 50 per day was unviable. We really do benefit if we just buy the cars off people that do 5,000 per day, and concentrate on efficient manufacture of things like alloy wheels and cylinder heads that WE can sell THEM. I cannot understand Richard Prosser’s nostalgia for NZ assembled “electronics” products like Walkmans and Black and White TV’s. The process by which we bought kits and assembled them here in NZ is the stuff of Kafka and Orwell. Imagine NZ today, with the only computer we were allowed to buy, being a 1986 128K Apple MacIntosh specially assembled in NZ and costing $10,000 each. All to protect around

100 boring jobs on assembly benches – but imagine what happens to all the rest of the NZ “knowledge economy”. Why is serving Big Macs to tourists less sensible than this?

Bangladesh has protected its traditional industries. All weaving is still done by hand, and there is full employment. Marvellous.

As a taxpayer, I protest at being forced to be part “owner” of businesses like airlines and railways that have cost generations of taxpayers billions of dollars total to date, and only ever will cost more billions. I would rather have low travel and transport costs courtesy of taxpayers in Japan and Australia, than pay higher taxes so Japanese and Australian citizens can travel cheap on “our” airline and get produce that has been freighted artificially cheaply on “our” railways.

NZ, Inc, is like a family business that is going broke because of loss-making departments that the owners are emotionally attached to and cannot let go. Taking the cost of transport infrastructure into account, a high proportion of NZ’s use of land for agriculture falls into this category. We would honestly be a lot better off if we had simply left whole regions to nature rather than running railway lines out to them and farming them – and I assure you no-one is more anti the loony Greens than I am.

Our back-blocks are covered in networks of roads that carry half a dozen vehicles per day, yet our cities, which produce exponentially more GDP per square km, are expected to get by with road funding that is proportionally only a tiny fraction of the other, with one-lane roads carrying up to tens of thousands of vehicles per day.

Cities are actually where all the international GDP growth has come from for the last few decades. Low value use of land is a guarantee that a nation will continue to slide down the international rankings. We could even replace all the farms with mining on only one-1000th of the land area, and be better off AND cleaner and greener – not to mention if we replaced some of it with modern, high-tech industry. But that would require an intelligence, especially in our mainstream media, that is entirely absent.

Richard Prosser needs to focus his ire at the things that are strangling NZ-ers opportunity, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. NZ has been in just as big a mess before, following decades of protectionism and subsidies and State crowding out of the private sector; it took us 20 years to pay off the debt.

Perhaps we should have just defaulted on the debt and kept going with the protectionism?

12 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

But we have now had 10 years of a different set of self-induced problems: resource conservation mania; massive expansions of bureaucracy and red tape; punitive laws and costs imposed on employers; industrial, commercial and residential land driven up many times in price; roading congestion deliberately unaddressed; and disincentives in taxation and entitlement structures. No wonder our productive sector has shrunk 12%. Now how do we pull ourselves out of the mess? Certainly not by a return to economic Muldoonism.

I’d like to see NZ getting millions of immigrants and utilising much more of its land for high value purposes ( we are currently around 2% urbanised) over the next few decades, as long as people like Richard Prosser were in charge of the immigrant selection criteria. Ironically, many immigrants appreciate and uphold our cultural values better than born NZ-ers who are selfloathing cultural Marxists. Richard will share my enjoyment of the following short letter that was in the July Quadrant Magazine.

“SIR – I am proud to be – or, rather, to have become – Australian. To those proclaiming that they are ashamed of being Australian I would like to say that I agree; I too am ashamed that they are Australian”!

Philip G Hayward, Naenae

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The City of Lights, dark, No whisper, word or sound The songs finally sung, The dreams run aground.

A hawk circles overhead, A muted lonely cry Falling on the silent city From a once vanilla sky.

Gwyn Ryan

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SIMPLY DEVINE

Miranda Devine Apple’s star falling?

STEVE JOBS HAS SEEMED LIKE A MAN UNDER SIEGE

lately. The co-founder and chief executive of Apple is not just under siege from the cancer that invaded his body six years ago and whose threat always lurks, despite successful treatment, but from an ungrateful world that gobbles up his beautiful inventions and then whinges about details.

You just had to stroll down the Manhattan end of George Street launch night (we won’t mention the NZ launch debacle) to see what a cultural phenomenon Apple has become.

Thousands of Gen Ys, Gen Xs and a few hardy baby boomers queued for up to 22 hours in the cold and wet for the midnight launch of the new iPhone4, some bringing chairs, tents and portable generators with their iPhones and Macbooks and iPads to while away the time.

The wait itself was part of the fun; with all those captive customers, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone competed with a free party, free concert, free booze and free apple-inspired food served by the cast of MasterChef.

Clearly the public loves Apple’s wares but, increasingly, the critics are on the snarl.

Part of Apple’s success came from popular antipathy to Microsoft because it was so successful, and because, as Jobs once said, its computers were ugly and Bill Gates had no taste.

Jobs, on the other hand, was as cool as a computer geek could be. He had been to India! Lived on an ashram! Dropped acid!

Became a Buddhist! Dated Joan Baez! Loved Bob Dylan! And he had taste, with his white curved iMac a beautiful addition to any stylemeister’s decor.

His rags to riches story has a mythic quality – the college dropout building computers with a friend in his parents’ garage to a millionaire at 25, sacked from his own company, and coming back to rescue it, after filling in the wilderness years by founding

an animated film studio – none other than Pixar, creator of Toy Story.

Even his personal story is extraordinary.

He was adopted as a baby by a machinist and his wife, Paul and Clara Jobs. His biological parents were young graduate students from San Francisco who chose adoption over abortion but later married and had a daughter, the novelist Mona Simpson, with whom Jobs has since reunited.

Jobs cleverly made Apple’s journey, like his own, into a countercultural success story, playing off the Goliath that was Microsoft.

But this year Apple’s market value surpassed Microsoft’s, making it the most valuable technology firm in the world and the second-most valuable US stock, after Exxon Mobil, according to Bloomberg. It seems

month only further enraged the pygmy critics savouring their first taste of Apple blood.

All the negative forces came together there.

Jobs, looking appropriately ascetic with his skinny, post liver-transplant body draped loosely in his trademark black skivvy, was visibly annoyed: “This has been blown so out of proportion – it’s incredible,’’ he said.

“I guess it’s just human nature. When you see someone get successful you just want to tear it down.’’

Jobs is under siege, too, because workers started committing suicide at the Chinese factory where components for iPhone and iPad are made. Then came the “blood metals’’ charge, because the tantalum, tin and tungsten Apple uses comes from war-torn places such as the Congo.

There are lots of reasons why Jobs is under siege, but the most potent is the spoiled brat phenomenon of humanity Jobs is finding himself hoist on his own petard. Too successful in a capitalist sense, at a time and to a new generation for whom success is suspect.

And then there was the problem with the iPhone4 antenna, a strip of metal that wraps around the phone but which, if you hold it in a certain way, causes calls to be disconnected.

The flaw was seized on by Apple’s new enemies in the media, on blogs and tech sites, demanding a recall and abject apology from the man himself.

Jobs offered customers a free rubber cover to fix the problem, but his refusal to apologise at a defiant press conference last

16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Add to that the threat from Google, and the war it is at present waging with Apple over its Android smartphone. Apple-haters now wear T-shirts showing the Android urinating on an apple.

There is fury too that Apple is selective about what it allows into its application, or “app’’, store. To the extreme libertarians of the internet, Apple is an enemy of freedom.

The debate came to a head in May in a late-night email exchange between Jobs and Ryan Tate, who writes for the website Gawker.

“If Dylan was 20 today how would he feel about your company? Would he think iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution?

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs presents a strongly renewed version of his iPhone cellphone, the iPhone 4, at the opening of the developer conference ‘’Worldwide Developers Conference’’ (WWDC) in San Francisco, USA, 07 June 2010. / Christoph Dernbach

Revolutions are about freedom,’’ Tate wrote.

Jobs replied: “Yes, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.’’

The “freedom from porn’’ comment opened a new line of attack on Jobs as some sort of born-again social conservative. But he is right. Too much freedom can be a tyranny of its own and Apple’s quality control is central to its success. Jobs is standing his ground against the tide of negativity, but the counterculture guy has come to symbolise capitalist America.

The Wired website has slammed Jobs as “nothing more than a greedy capitalist’’. He is routinely mocked for calling his devices “magical’’ or “revolutionary’’, even though they are.

There are lots of reasons why Jobs is under siege, but the most potent is the spoiled brat phenomenon of humanity.

The more we humans have, the more we want, the more dissatisfied and ungrateful we are.

Even though iPhone and iPad devotees revel in the functionality and design of the devices, at the same time we take them utterly for granted, as a natural extension of ourselves.

Of course I’m going to email on the bus.

Of course I’m going to watch trashy TV shows on my iPad at the gym. Of course I’m going to read the newspaper or a book on my iPad in bed.

These things that were unthinkable 10, five, even one year ago, we now simply expect.

What we need is an app for gratitude, not cynicism, for just taking a moment to appreciate the magnificent achievements of the human mind, which are captured in that slim, sleek device our ancestors scarcely could have dreamed possible.

What we need is an app for gratitude, not cynicism, for just taking a moment to appreciate the magnificent achievements of the human mind, which are captured in that slim, sleek device our ancestors scarcely could have dreamed possible.

devinemiranda@hotmail.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 17

STRAIGHT TALK

Mark Steyn The politics of containment THE OTHER DAY, NOTING BRET STEPHENS’ ANALYSIS

in Commentary as to why Iran cannot be contained, Jonah Goldberg made a very shrewd throwaway aside: “Arguments like this tend to get ignored not because they aren’t persuasive, but because they are,” he said. “The political and psychological costs of accepting the premise are too high. So, denial inevitably triumphs.”

And thus our Iran “policy”: There will be no US military strike. There will be no international sanctions regime. And so the mullahs will go nuclear, because letting them go nuclear requires least of us – and there will always be scholars and experts ready to justify our inertia as farsighted realpolitik. Thus, the rehabilitation of “containment”: That we can do. Iran, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, “may be dangerous, assertive and duplicitous, but there is nothing in their history to suggest they are suicidal.”

Dr Brzezinski is a man who has been reliably wrong about everything that matters for decades and whose decision to route American support for the Afghan resistance through the malign double-act of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki and Pakistan’s ISI has had consequences we live with to this day.

He is the master of unrealpolitik, and so naturally his is now the new conventional wisdom: Iran is not “suicidal”. Therefore, it can be contained.

Even a non-suicidal Iran is presumably intending to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: Controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close US military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have on first use or proliferation, there is no reason to believe any

“containment” strategy would prevent Iran accomplishing its broader strategic goals.

Besides, as Bret Stephens points out, Soviet containment was introduced a couple of years after we’d nuked Japan. Iranian “containment” would follow years of inaction, in which the ayatollahs have been allowed to nuclearize in full view of the world and with the acquiescence of many American allies.

Unlike 60 years ago, there is a basic credibility issue: Despite President Obama’s line that Iran is “isolated”, it’s just been elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and its president in the last year alone has been received in China, Venezuela, Turkey, Denmark, Brazil, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Senegal, The Gambia and various other

and blows them up on the other side of the world; it kidnaps the sailors of permanent members of the UN Security Council in international waters; it seeds terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and backs terrorist attacks all over the world. And it pays no price for any of this. If you can’t rouse yourself to prevent a rogue state with a thirty-year consistent pattern of behavior getting nukes, what else won’t you rouse yourself for?

On September 10th 2001, America was the preeminent nuclear power in the world.

We forget now that the following morning’s attack was aimed not only at the symbols of US military and financial power but also at the heart of government itself. A combination of the vagaries of scheduling and

Iran believes we are a hollow superpower.

It concluded from our behavior that it could go nuclear with impunity places most of which are at least nominally American allies. If he were to be any more “isolated”, Ahmadinejad might get the occasional night at home to wash his hair. So “containment” seems unlikely to impede any non-suicidal moves by Iran.

But let’s flip Dr Brzezinski’s point around: An American might conclude that Iran isn’t suicidal. But can the Iranians make the same confident claim about America? After all, we’ve just let them go nuclear – not under cover of darkness, as Pakistan did, but in slow motion and in open contempt of the US and its European negotiators. Why would you do that? Iran doesn’t observe even the minimal courtesies of mutually hostile states: It seizes foreign embassies at home,

18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

the bravery of Flight 93’s passengers saved us, on a day of horror, from the additional burden of a Robert C Byrd presidency or some such. Osama bin Laden set out to decapitate his enemy – and Mullah Omar, al-Qaeda’s patron in Afghanistan, cheerfully signed off on it. Presumably, he’s not suicidal, either. Yet he made a calculation about the American response that concluded the attack would be worth it.

Remember how quickly the objections to retaliating against Afghanistan began?

Suppose there was a “nuclear transfer” to Sudan or Hamas, and Iran was most likely responsible: Do you think an Obamafied Washington would take action? Or would they express “grave concern” and go to the

UN to get a resolution? I think we know the answer.

Now let’s suppose one of those nuclear transfers detonates somewhere or other and kills tens of thousands of people, but the provenance isn’t 100 per cent clear: Bombing raids on Tehran? Or back to the Security Council? You might not be so sure of the answer, but I’ll bet, after the last few years, Iran is.

How about the big one? The ayatollahs nuke Tel Aviv and puts Israel out of business.

What’s the US going to do? Flatten Iran? Or

hit a couple of cities and leave it at that? Iran believes we are a hollow superpower. It concluded from our behavior that it could go nuclear with impunity. And, whatever the unrealpolitik crowd tells itself, it has now concluded it can be nuclear with impunity.

In a supposedly unipolar world, the planet’s wealthiest states, from Norway to New Zealand, can project no meaningful force, while moribund basket cases nuke up.

That sounds like a transitional phase, don’t you think?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) shakes hands with his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez in Tehran. / ParsPix/Abaca Press/MCT

© 2010 Mark Steyn INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 19

GLOBAL WARNING

Joe Fone

The hot glare of tyranny OPEN WIDE AND SWALLOW! YOU’LL THANK US LATER.

With the introduction of the ETS this year, the Government launched a charm campaign to convince us the emissions trading pill would be good for us, despite the unpalatable cost of living increase that came with it. To aid in the campaign, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman participated in a series of lectures at Victoria University heralding the virtues of the ETS and the dangers of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The lectures had the dual aim of selling the science to an increasingly sceptical public and of dealing with the so-called “climate deniers” who maintain there is no global warming problem in the first place and therefore no need for an emissions tax to solve it.

But the Government had a difficult task because the public have been observing global temperatures trending downward for the past decade despite so much hype to the contrary. NIWA’s release of record low temperature data for July has only emphasized the point. Furthermore, the only evidence for human-induced global warming on offer is politically tainted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Being an entity of the UN, the IPCC is dominated by socialist political agendas which, according to its nemesis the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, predispose it to champion the manmade global warming hypothesis. The IPCC therefore downplays contradictory evidence while promoting alarmist scenarios produced by computer models. These are then used to formulate government policy decades into the future.

Yet every other indicator suggests either declining temperatures or statistically insignificant trends. A fact evinced by thousands of scientists worldwide. However these scientists are Gluckman’s politically incorrect “climate deniers” so they are ignored.

The public are actually witnessing a contest between computer models and empirical evidence that contradicts them. But the computer modellers win because of contagion by political and financial investments that have allowed them to hijack the scientific process and dilute the criticism from Gluckman’s so-called “denier” scientists.

Therefore to purge the scourge of scepticism, the Government appeals to the public’s respect for its authority. Forget what you’re seeing. Trust us instead.

Nevertheless, since Professor Gluckman uses the term “climate change deniers” to describe the sceptical scientists, he is

of science, where it rightly belongs, into the realm of ethics where it rubs shoulders with religious fundamentalism. You are either a believer or a denier. An apostle, or a heretic to be hassled into compliance. It is now considered immoral to “deny” the reality of climate change just as it is considered immoral to deny the Holocaust. Indeed New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman argues that politicians who do not subscribe to the idea of manmade global warming as a “crisis” are guilty of “treason against the planet”. Krugman rebuked the “irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial” as an unforgivable sin because it mocks the so-called “consensus”

You are either a believer or a denier. An apostle, or a heretic to be hassled into compliance. It is now considered immoral to “deny” the reality of climate change just as it is considered immoral to deny the Holocaust obliged to define it so that his target audience can appreciate the moral argument as much as the scientific one. Surely this much is essential if the minister for Climate Change Issues, Nick Smith, expects sympathetic compliance and a willingness to accept his word that global warming is a problem worth fixing through taxation.

So what does it mean then to “deny climate change”? The term is fraught with emotive hostility akin to Holocaust denial as though the two are related by denial of some moral truth. But using such a phrase to describe scepticism of the AGW hypothesis is to drag the climate debate from the realm

20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

that global warming is a manmade catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Not to be outdone, prominent American climate campaigner Joe Romm even suggested that climate deniers should be “strangled in their beds”.

Science of course is not done by “consensus” or a show of hands. It is not done by labeling as “deniers” those who disagree with a fashionable idea. That is the realm of religion. It belongs in the Dark Ages of Europe when heretics were punished for questioning the reigning dogma of the Church.

Ironically if Galileo, Copernicus and many others had not survived such oppression, Professor Gluckman would not have a job as

Chief Science Advisor because science would have withered and died under the hot glare of tyranny. Thus scientific intolerance is no different to religious intolerance. Both retard knowledge. Both retard development. Both would keep us in the dark.

Yet the term “climate change denier” underscores a curious insincerity because it ignores the important distinction between natural climate change and manmade climate change. Only a fool would “deny” climate change as though the Earth’s climate system was forever fixed and unchanging.

But only a mischief-maker would deliberately imply that deniers of manmade climate change were also deniers of natural climate change. AGW apologists like Professor Gluckman however are careful to

avoid clarifying the difference. It is a cheap shot intended to make the sceptics look like the enemies of reason, and help the Government’s emissions tax go down without us gagging on it. Forget the scandals, the contrary evidence and the politics behind the ETS because “the science is settled”.

But the point of the Government’s charm campaign was to encourage the public to buy into the alarmism so that selling the ETS would be that much easier. However NASA astronaut and scientist Walter Cunningham pointed out that the real science doesn’t matter because the alarmists “continue to embrace more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control: the Earth’s temperature”. The science

The real science doesn’t matter because the alarmists “continue to embrace more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control: the Earth’s temperature”

can do what it likes, argues Cunningham, because the aim of the alarmists is to “stampede governments into committing huge amounts of taxpayers’ money before their fraud is completely exposed - before science and truth save the day”.

Joe Fone is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 21

EYES RIGHT

Richard Prosser Mercury rising

THE GOLDEN RULE OF POLITICS – IN WHICH A WEEK can

be a very long time indeed – is to never say never. Never say you’ll never put your hand up for the Leader’s job, never say you’ll never countenance nuclear ship visits, never say there’ll never be mining in National Parks. That sort of thing. In John Key’s place, never say you’ll never work with Winston Peters, because just like the French rugby team, you can never write Winston off. Just when New Zealand First’s knockers thought it was safe to come out in the open, guess what, he’s back.

Your favourite commentator has nailed his colours to the mast over many issues, and this month Winston Peters gets to become the latest. I have never voted for NZ First, though I’ve been very close on a couple of occasions; this election coming, however, I’m giving the man both ticks.

I’ll freely admit that I’m not 100% sure I trust him absolutely, and I most assuredly don’t agree with him on every last issue or matter of policy. But of one thing I am completely certain, and that is that we need that man, or someone very much like him, in Parliament, and preferably as a part of Government. It wouldn’t have to be Winston personally, of course; but in the absence of anyone else even remotely similar to him or his position on many things, the distinction is an academic one. There is a gap in the electoral market, and Peters is the only one offering to fill it. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

I met Winston Peters in person for the first time earlier this month. He was speaking to a full house at the RSA in Rangiora, a Grey Power meeting which had squeezed in around 250 people for the occasion. The old-timers there – which apart from Yours Truly, one bloke from the Christchurch Press, and the charming young reporter from TV3, was everybody – said they’d never seen the

place quite as packed. Given that this is Ron Mark’s old stomping ground, that must count as a respectable result. It was a closed meeting, and I don’t qualify for Grey Power membership on chronological grounds even if I do on those of hair colour, but the President was kind enough to let me in anyway. Peters and his message were well received. No-one heckled or interrupted; they clapped, they murmured approvingly, they laughed at his jokes. Having dipped a toenail in the waters of politics myself twice before, I have stood in front of Grey Power audiences, and I can attest that they can be a fearsomely unforgiving bunch of grumpy

seriously, their rights not being upheld.

And why? Presumably because the Parties one might normally expect to take up the slack when one of their number exits Parliament have other fish to fry. Labour are busy serving their penance and grappling with the terrible issue of whether or not it is possible for the modern Labour Party to actually have a non-Rainbow person in a Leadership role. The Greens are too busy (still) trying to convince us that the world is overheating and that it’s all our fault, promoting a global socialist agenda, and saving whales, to worry about genuinely important matters, like how old people will manage to

Winston Peters has had a rocky relationship with the media, and whether you like him or not, it is undeniable that he was the target of a concerted smear campaign prior to the last election old so-and-so’s. Not so for Winston, however. This was during the week after rumours surfaced that Michael Laws was about to rejoin forces with Peters, of course, which may have provided a new twist to his popularity – but Peters’ speech was vintage stuff and to his vintage audience (no pun intended). Elder care, health care, immigration, foreign ownership; the things which matter to the older generation, conservative folk who don’t regard national pride as a bad thing and who don’t equate state ownership of strategic assets with Communism. Their voice is not being heard in Parliament at the moment, their concerns not being taken

22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

heat their homes and feed themselves when pensions are cut and the age of eligibility is raised. Peter Dunne’s Party is done as a Party, Jim Anderton is off to become Mayor of Christchurch (I thank my lucky stars that I live in the Waimakariri), ACT are languishing at 1.5% where they deserve to be as long as they keep promoting the ravings of that evil traitorous dinosaur Roger Douglas, and the Maoris don’t generally seem too concerned about the plight of the elderly anyway, presumably because very few Maori actually live much past retirement age. And as for the Nats…you know, personally I feel betrayed by National, in spite of the many

fine policies initiated by some of the small number of genuinely intelligent and wise individuals who serve as Ministers. I mean we absolutely had to get rid of Helen Clark, that much goes without saying. But with John Key’s National Government we have been served little more than a rather underdone helping of Labour Lite, with a Prime Minister too ready to heap praise on his predecessor and too slow to recognise her administration’s shortcomings.

I feel betrayed that the National Partyled Government has not addressed the basic failings which were the legacy bequeathed it by Helen Clark’s undemocratic minority regime. I feel betrayed that we still don’t have an Air Force, which 73% of us wanted to retain, and I feel betrayed that we do still have an anti-smacking Bill, which 83% of us never wanted. I feel betrayed that we are being lumbered with an Emissions Trading Scheme which is pointless on two fronts, namely that (a) no-one else in the rest of the world is bothering with such rubbish anymore, and (b) the so-called “science” supporting it has been completely refuted.

The ETS will hit all New Zealanders in the pocket and put our exporters at a massive disadvantage to the rest of the trading world, for no benefit to either us or to the environment. I feel betrayed that thousands of kilometres of foreshore is going to become off limits to white people like me, its title given over to a small privileged racial minority on the basis of an ever-decreasing percentage of Maori blood. But mostly I feel betrayed that we voted for change and never really got it. There is a lesson here for the National Party; ignoring the real concerns of nationalists lost David Cameron’s British Conservatives so many votes to the right-wing UK Independence and British National Parties, that it cost them an outright Parliamentary majority and forced a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Winston Peters has had a rocky relationship with the media, and whether you like him or not, it is undeniable that he was the target of a concerted smear campaign prior to the last election. That itself, even if not the indiscretion upon which it was based, may have been sufficient to nudge New Zealand First below the 5% threshold for MMP, but the fact remains that his Party still collected 10,000 more votes nationwide than did ACT, and only a couple of thousand shy of the total votes cast for the Maori Party, United Future, and Jim Anderton’s Progressives combined. In spite of these

Whether the rumours about Michael Laws prove to have legs in the fullness of time or not, it is already almost certain that Winston will be back in 2011.

figures, the abovementioned Parties were awarded 12 seats between them while NZF missed out completely. The simple injustice of this situation calls for this writer, at least, to seek a remedy.

Certain elements of the blogosphere remind us on a daily basis that Winston still hasn’t repaid $158,000 from the last electoral funding fiasco. I think it rather telling that the same elements do not berate the Finance Minister for lacking the wit to deduce that charging the taxpayer a thousand bucks a week for the privilege of living in one’s own home is fundamentally unacceptable. The cynic in me is somewhat thankful that Chateau English doesn’t have a moat, or we’d probably have been sent a bill for cleaning that, too.

My point is that if Winston Peters is to be vilified for breaking the rules then such criticism should be universal and consistent, not selective, biased, and as often as not meted out by others who are equally culpable. It isn’t, of course, because such is the reality of politics, and the media in this country seldom even pretends to be fair and objective anymore where political loyalties are concerned. Which begs the question; what motivates the man to keep coming back for more? Certainly not the money; even a mediocre lawyer can earn far more than a Cabinet Minister, who in turn can expect a much healthier pay packet than the Leader of a small Opposition Party. The Winebox Affair, which earned Winston Peters lasting credibility in the minds of many New Zealanders, certainly cost him plenty in personal and financial terms; and although I didn’t have much of an audience with the man – scarcely more than long enough to

say hello and who I was – it struck me that Peters is, in fact, quite probably very genuine. Scary as it may seem, I think that here is a politician who does actually want to make a difference. Travelling on your own resources, flying the flag of an unrepresented Party, getting out there amongst the people, and taking flak from a largely hostile press for your trouble, isn’t something many people do just for fun, especially when it comes without the promise of guaranteed reward.

I may have been taken for a sucker, but I really don’t believe so. And there is more to NZ First’s manifesto than Winston’s personal charm. Most importantly, to this writer’s mind, is the fact that alone of the serious contender political Parties, NZF have a commitment to Binding Citizen’s Initiated Referenda. It isn’t a perfect policy because it includes provision for a 75% Parliamentary veto, and it lacks the splendid foresight of Amy Brooke’s 100 Days initiative, but it comes closer to offering real democracy than anyone else is prepared to deliver. This is important because BCIR transcends both personality and Party politics; and if We The People have direct control over Government, it matters a whole lot less about who has control over the backroom dealings which pull its strings at present.

Whether the rumours about Michael Laws prove to have legs in the fullness of time or not, it is already almost certain that Winston will be back in 2011. Lurking in the shadows at 4.5% in the polls he already has tentative coalition offers from both John Key and Phil Goff; proof enough that this Mercurial old rogue will be biting at the heels of the Establishment for a wee while to come. I’d say there’s life in the old dog yet.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 23

LINE ONE

Chris Carter In defence of the Hon’ster WHO AMONGST US WOULD HAVE EVER BELIEVED

that we would end up living in a land where freedom of speech has become such a rare commodity? Hone Harawira, of part Maori heritage and a current MP, recently stated that he personally would not be at all delighted if one of his kids took up with a pale skin partner, or Pakeha as Europeans are more usually if quaintly described.

Well it sure didn’t take long for Hone to cop the usual mindless abuse that now always follows the expression of an honestly held opinion in public. How dare Hone think this way and what right does he have to actually say this in the hearing of others?

He plainly is, horror of horrors, a raging Racist who, according to a stream of talk back callers I heard over the next couple of days, should be gelded and then burnt at the stake.

And so we still rejoice in the myth that we Kiwis believe in the right of free speech and expression eh? What a load of old cobblers.

More like the ultra liberal thought control police call the shots and the rest of the flock bleat in cringing approval! Whatever happened to honesty and truth as we see it? Just about everyone who draws breath has likes and dislikes, things we approve of or actually dislike. But we’re no longer to actually say so? Who says, who’s made these semi fascist rulings that have more or less stripped away our long held rights of freedom of expression and the right to say whatever we personally believe?

For that matter who is it that was responsible for the laundering of the English language to the point where anyone who uses words like right and wrong, good and evil, etc, is more or less considered by the new age spineless inheritors of our once robust and easily understood language as being “controversial” or at least a nutter to be henceforth closely watched.

The Americans, who lend themselves to much well earned criticism about all manner of things that they get up to, at least have something we no longer seem to enjoy – that being total freedom of thought and expression. For instance, while you might end up with not too many friends, you are absolutely free in the States to be a rabid opponent of ethnic inter marriage without threat of job loss being loudly called for by the chattering masses. Perhaps you might not be too keen about a gay night club starting up next door or a traveling gay education group about to visit your kids’ school – does this preclude you from the right to speak out and say so without earning you much per-

the new think and right speak people have no idea about the meaning of simple words that more accurately describe people’s thoughts and actions. Same as we can no longer have problems, being a much too definitive and harsh term to live with. Much better that we adopt a much less threatening term, How about issues, now there’s a nice non-threatening word eh? A world without problems, just have a few issues instead, so much easier to deal with.

Who knows, this emasculation of the English language and particularly of the spoken word may well have a silver lining. Perhaps if we use softer terminology to describe previously unspeakable people we

Just about everyone who draws breath has likes and dislikes, things we approve of or actually dislike. But we’re no longer to actually say so? sonal abuse and perhaps even being tagged as an unrepentant Homophobe? Happens all the time here in New Zealand doesn’t it?

Utter any opinion or idea currently out of line with Nanny’s “right think” rules and you can definitely count on being whacked for it.

Sure enough Hone Harawira tends towards voicing opinions that might well be none too popular with some people, but so what, he has every right in the world to think and say whatever he likes, same as the rest of us, certainly without being labeled a “racist” by his detractors. Mind you, it surprises me that Hone’s comments were not simply labeled by the hand wringing wimps as being “inappropriate”. You’ll note’, not “right’ or “wrong”, as

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may all the better be prepared to love and understand them. That bastard serial killer, perhaps one day, to stalk the town killing and eating children would feel so much better about himself if he was simply being described as having issues that were causing such inappropriate behavior. Of course, naturally we would then have to drop such frequently misused other terms of opprobrium such as being a racist, for a much softer form of description, perhaps such as having issues of an inappropriate nature based on a lack of understanding of colour perception.

Now surely such a wooly headed and meaningless description would be well applauded by those currently dedicated

Mind you, it surprises me that Hone’s comments were not simply labeled by the hand wringing wimps as being “inappropriate”. /Ross Setford/ NZPA

towards concealing plain truth behind a barricade of politically correct B.S, and indeed, perhaps the current affair, whereby a senior opposition MP appeared to have chewed and then spat out in rage his frilly little knickers along with attacking his party leader with his handbag was eventually more “fairly” described as him simply being in need of

a two month paid lie down. Wondrous to behold the combination of political correctness with the black arts of spin doctoring, a little like watching a great magic show – there the truth is...now it’s gone in a puff of smoke. But look, it’s come back again as something completely different – oh, the wonder of it, halleluiah !

Thought about this a fair bit I have, and it seems to me that to solve most of the problems, real or imagined, that most people seem to think we have in New Zealand really comes down to the fact that we no longer seem able to freely communicate our true feelings. Which is not that surprising for, as most of us are well aware, lurking in every corner is some po-faced member of the thought police just waiting to hear you say something that to them at least is “offensive” whereupon they will stick a label on you then phone their mates in the liberal media to socially assassinate ,both you and your character, in the blinking of an eye.

Fortunately, well out of the hearing of the easily and professionally offended, real Kiwis still have straight up and down opinions which they state very clearly, some even having the courage to seek out the pimping little thought spies lurking away out there, to treat them to a good old verbal bashing, preferably to be followed with a couple of healthy thick ears to give them something real to be genuinely offended about.

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

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 25

FADING EMPIRES

Hal G. P. Colebatch Where is America going in space?

IN THE 1960’S PRESIDENT KENNEDY COMMITTED

America to the goal of landing on the moon before that decade was finished. The 40 anniversary of that decade is a convenient milestone for us to pause and survey where we have gone in that time.

As far as space-travel goes, we have the International Space Station, now apparently nearing the end of its life, and with no means of lifting the components of a replacement.

America can no longer get to the moon, although with 40 years of advance in computers this in fact should be much easier than it was. There have also been advances in other branches of science and unmanned space craft have discovered a lot about other planets in the Solar System. The Hubble telescope and other instruments have taught us a lot about cosmology. We have, very importantly, found water on the moon and Mars, making the possibility of bases there a good deal more feasible. Water, after all, is relatively heavy, and quite incompressible, and you can’t save weight by lifting cans of dehydrated water into space.

We ought, in fact, to have a base on the moon by now. The scientific dividends from such a base would be incalculable. Instead we have a frighteningly childish statement

by President Obama that we don’t need to go to the moon because we have been there already, but, perhaps as a sweetener to the space lobbies, he has claimed that we might go to Mars some time in the future. This, of course, translates into “never.” If we can’t make the effort to get to the moon now, how will we ever make the effort to get to Mars?

Stephen Hawking is one who sees Mars as a long-term goal, but also sees a moon-base as a vital preparation. Hawking says “The Moon could also be a base for travel to the rest of the Solar System.” Apart from the fact that the moon’s low gravity means a base there puts you, to use the colourful

expression of one writer “half-way to anywhere,” it will be necessary before a Mars flight is attempted to overcome the effects of prolonged exposure to cosmic rays, and the moon seems the only place to do this.

As for giving up on the moon simply because we’ve been there, the closest analogy I can think of would be Ferdinand and Isabella saying after Columbus’s first voyage that no more trips to the New World were necessary: Spain had been to the New World, bravo for the bravery of Spanish sailors and the seaworthiness of Spanish ships.

It had made its point. But it had found no allies against the Moors as some of those

appears to be a larger infantilism: America did not go to the moon, with the expenditure of vast amounts of treasure and courage, in order simply to say “We’ve done it!”

Even before the potential scientific dividends are considered, and these are great enough in themselves, it was meant to be the start of something much greater, not the finish of the spirit of striving and exploration. It would be interesting to have some surveys carried out under proper sociological discipline to see the place of the idea of space flight in popular culture today compared with the 1960s.

There are also other factors to be consid-

China has put four men into space in three flights, each longer and more ambitious than the one before it, and it is plainly and frankly aiming at a future moon-base. It looks as if India also has ideas in the same direction who had encouraged the expedition had hoped, there did not seem to be a route to China and there was not much obvious gold in Cuba or Hispaniola. No point in going again. Twelve men have landed on the moon at six points for a few hours and scratched its surface. Even this relatively tiny effort has been rewarded by a huge increase in scientific knowledge.

It is really an incredible statement to come from a President with the best scientific advice in the world available. One is forced to wonder if Obama has any idea of the dividends space-flight in general has already produced. Beyond this infantile argument there

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ered. Russia has never given up its space programme, and America and the ISS are now dependent on Russian rockets.

China has put four men into space in three flights, each longer and more ambitious than the one before it, and it is plainly and frankly aiming at a future moon-base.

It looks as if India also has ideas in the same direction.

Behind a fig-leaf of rhetoric about scientific research there is no doubt these preparations are military. To control space is, in military terms, to control the ultimate high ground – it is no coincidence that during and after the Cold War the political left

have always opposed and attacked the idea of space-flight.

As I write this a news item speaks for itself: “Russia will by the year 2013 boost its defence spending by more than 60 percent, the country’s government announced this week.

“The Russian government on Thursday announced that it will increase the country’s defence budget by 60 percent compared with today’s level, newspaper Vedomosti reports.

After the increase, the country will spend an annual 2.025 trillion RUB on its military.

“More military hardware, better equipment for the troops and better training is what lies behind the bigger spending, a defence ana-

lyst told the newspaper. The Navy, the Air Force and the military space programmes are expected to get the lion’s share of the new money.” The history of Russia has been one of sometimes slow but remoresless, long-term expansion and there is no reason to suppose its policy-making thought is any different now. Indeed, while long handicapped by general backwardness and the generally anti-scietific gospel of communism, Russia can be said to have been, historically, more not less, persistant than America in pressing on wioth space-flight.

History, however, has a way of turning unexpected corners. Obama is looking more and more like a one-term president and his

To control space is, in military terms, to control the ultimate high ground – it is no coincidence that during and after the Cold War the political left have always opposed and attacked the idea of space-flight.

successor may feel very differently about things. After all, Carter was succeeded by Reagan. And at long last we are seeing the beginnings of private space-flight. Perhaps something will come from this that no-one anticipates.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 27

CONTRA MUNDUM

Matthew Flannagan Selling atheism

NEW ZEALAND MOTORISTS WILL HAVE NOTICED A new

genre of advertising billboards, those attempting to sell the concept that there is probably no God. These billboards are the collective efforts of the New Zealand Atheist Campaign, The Humanist Society and the New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanists. Like all advertising campaigns, these billboards offer clever-sounding slogans, which are indicative of the philosophy of the seller – in this case three variants of popular ‘new-atheist’ arguments. Like any consumer, I want to read the product labelling a little deeper before I consider buying. So here I intend to unpack the slogans and take a look at the implicit reasoning behind each.

Each billboard has the tagline “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” My first thought on seeing this was that authors must find atheism psychologically liberating. We do not have to worry that there is a God and that means that we can enjoy ourselves but why would the existence of God be something to worry about? Is it the moral accountability that goes with it? If God exists then we might have to worry that He has seen what we have done in secret, and being free from this worry enables us to enjoy our lives. If this is so then prima facie this suggests that guilt is a major motivation behind, at least some peoples, atheism.

The tagline aside, let’s look at the three slogans currently affronting us as we navigate our cities. The billboard on Auckland’s Newton Rd states, “Good without God? Over One Million Kiwis Are. Source:2006 Census.”

Here we are told that one million kiwis are good without God because the census says so. Now a lot could be said about the appeal to the census here, I don’t recall a question on it asking me if I was good and even if it did I am not sure that we should take too

much from self-reported assessments of people’s own integrity. Let’s assume, however, that the billboard makes a fair claim. The inference is still is fallacious. What the census shows is not that one million kiwis are good without God, rather, it shows that one million kiwis are good without believing in the existence of God. But to say that one can be good without believing in God is not the same as saying that one can be good without God. Many people throughout history have been able to live and breath without believing in the existence of hydrogen and oxygen atoms yet it does not follow that they could live without hydrogen and oxygen.

I am still left wondering how the fact

depend on God for their existence. Atheist writers such as Paul Kurtz and Christopher Hitchens retort that this claim is falsified by the existence of morally upright atheists. I suspect something like this is meant by the slogan on the billboard, it repeats Hitchens’ and Kurtz’s retorts as though they said something insightful or clever.

This retort misses the point. Craig, Adams, et al are not claiming that one needs to believe in God to be good – a point made several times in the literature (and particularly made so many times to Kurtz that it beggars belief that he keeps repeating it) rather, their claim is that moral properties, such as right and wrong, depend on God for

What the census shows is not that one million kiwis are good without God, rather, it shows that one million kiwis are good without believing in the existence of God that people do not need to believe in something to do good deeds renders the belief false? For centuries people have done good deeds and lived good lives without believing in heliocentricism or quantum mechanics, should we conclude that these theories are therefore ‘probably false’? Surely we are not being asked to buy that the basis of our beliefs should be what is useful or helpful as opposed to what is true?

Perhaps the sellers mean to convey something else. Some Christian thinkers such as William Lane Craig, Robert Adams, Stephen Layman, Alvin Plantinga, John Hare and Philip Quinn have argued that moral properties such as right and wrong

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their existence. This is not the same thing, we know that water depends for its existence on the existence of hydrogen and oxygen, this does not mean, however, that we need to believe in the existence of hydrogen and oxygen in order to effectively recognise and use water. Ancient and medieval people were drinking, washing in, swimming in and sailing on water centuries before the discovery of contemporary atomic theory.

This is a fairly basic and elementary distinction in the literature. How exactly expressing a common philosophical confusion counts as reason for thinking “there probably is no God” is hard to see.

Parnell Rise’s billboard informs us “In

the Beginning Man Created God.” This one asserts that man created God. Now if one takes this statement in an absurdly literal manner (the way many sceptical organisations approach parables, hyperbole and poetry in the Bible) we find that atheists are telling us that God actually exists. I have no issue with the slogan at this juncture, however, the idea that God was created by human beings is clearly absurd. God is typically defined as an all-powerful, all-knowing, immaterial, necessarily-existent being who created the world and who sustains everything in it. Now if one is going to claim that humans actually created an all-powerful, allknowing, immaterial, necessarily-existent who created and sustains the world, then they are contradicting themselves. Humans are part of the world and therefore cannot have created the being that created the world – otherwise humans would have to exist prior to their own existence.

Of course to interpret this billboard in this way would be uncharitable. The authors of this billboard probably do not mean to say that humans actually created God, they do not think He exists after all. Their claim is that humans created the idea or concept of God and developed it. This is undoubtedly true. Of course, humans also invented the idea or concept of atoms as well – ancient Greek philosophers came up with the basics of this concept millennia ago – but this fact tells us nothing about whether or not the idea or concept humans developed actually corresponds to anything in reality. To assume that it tells us something about whether the idea or concept is true is a fairly obvious case of what logicians call the genetic fallacy.

The last one is my favourite, “We Are All Atheists About Most Gods. Some of Us Just Go One God Further.” To see the problems with this slogan take out the term “God” in the sign and replace it with some other term such as “non-Christian perspective.” When we do this we get: “We all reject most nonChristian perspectives, some of us just reject one more.” This argument has true premises, do we now have, a knock-down argument for Christianity?

Similarly, an analogous argument form with true premises gives us an argument for nihilism, the denial that humans have moral duties, the total denial of the existence of morality. “We are all nihilists about some conceptions of morality, some of us are just nihilistic about one more.”

The same argument for also furnishes a refutation of secularism, “we all reject some

secular perspectives on reality, some of us just reject one more.” I could go on.

Taking a stand on any issue of philosophical substance, whether by affirming, denying or simply being sceptical of it, is to put oneself in opposition to any number of other people and groups who take a contrary stance. That’s life. Such pluralism hardly provides a reason for thinking “there probably is no God” any more than it gives us a reason to doubt any other perspective on the world.

So what do the atheist billboards do? Well the first one tells us that some atheist groups conflate basic philosophical distinctions and

do not really understand the debate they are contributing to. The second shows us that these groups think contradictions and obvious fallacies are some how savvy and smart. The last shows us that they think that invalid argument forms, forms from which you could infer the denial of anything and everything by substituting one true premise with another, are avant-garde. All in all, pretty accurate advertising for these groups.

Dr Matthew Flannagan is an Auckland based philosopher/theologian who researches and publishes in the area of Philosophy of Religion, Theology and Ethics. He blogs at www.mandm.org.nz.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 29

SOAPBOX

Robert Mann Degrees of ideology

SEVEN YEARS AGO, A CANADIAN CON-MAN PUT IT across a human remains consultant specialis-

ing in racial hiring. Thus was hired the CEO for the government’s latest attempt at subsidising Maori TV. No racists noticed that his master’s degree was from a non-existent ‘Denver State University’. None of the directors hiring the Canadian con-man as the full-time chief executive in charge of over $170M tagged for racist TV realised there is no Denver State University.

This may not be too surprising when we remind ourselves that racism, if a prime value, will push education to a lower priority. That’s affirmative action for you; the WimminsLibbers have been doing it for three decades, promoting far above their ceilings of competence a chilling range of females unfit for high office. Now, for a couple decades, affirmative action on racial grounds has achieved similar distortions in major organisations.

The fake-degrees fiasco may be a good prompt for clarifying basic facts about the wider context of academic qualifications.

I will argue that fake degrees are a minor problem compared with some much larger problems in our universities today. After a decade as a university student here & in the USA, and then a couple decades as full-time staff back home, I can point out a few facts which some of those not involved in tertiary education may not have quite clear.

Tertiary education includes polytechnics which have produced many fine, indeed crucial, workers for our industrial way of life.

But universities are different: their lecturers, senior lecturers (the career grade for most), associate professors or readers, and professors, have nearly all earned doctorates by expert-supervised research, and are expected to pursue & publish further research. University academics are scholars not only in passing exams to test their

knowledge but also in contributing to discovery of further knowledge. They are a deliberately elite group who are moreover obliged by Act of Parliament to be the conscience & critic of society. Their institutions teach and examine; students who reach sufficient standards by examination in enough subjects are awarded degrees.

A first or bachelor’s degree, usually 3 or 4 years full-time study, qualifies the holder in a major subject – e.g. French or Chemistry – and a minor, to a standard fit for (say) teaching high-school. The major subject may then be taken further, in a master’s degree which in some cases is entirely exams but

degrees complain about this, the original mail-order degree, the haughty answer from Britain is “we invented master’s degrees, so we’ll define them as we wish”.

Originally, centuries ago, doctors of a university meant literally those entitled to teach there. Very few gained this status. Then continental, USA, and finally British universities took to awarding doctorates for dissertations reporting to a high standard some years of original research supervised by established academics. This highest supervised degree is called in most subjects ‘doctor of philosophy’ – Ph.D (but some such as Oxford affect D.Phil).

Institutions have been permitted to take the label ‘university’ when they have no good prospects of reaching NZ standards.

And even within our older universities, degrees have become easier to get in many versions also includes a thesis – a report on original, supervised research, a little project of discovery. Rutherford qualified at Canterbury to this level, performing such excellent research that he was welcomed at the then best university science lab (Cambridge) to pursue a doctorate by what turned out to be world-shaking discoveries.

There are some quirks in this general pattern. Anyone who has a B.A (Oxford) can send in £15 a few years later to purchase the degree of M.A – not many bother. Some ancient Scottish universities even transmogrify their B.A into M.A automatically, for no fee. When those who have earned master’s

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There is a yet higher doctorate, D.Sc, awarded for a portfolio of published research reports from many years of independent postgraduate research.

The title ‘doctor’ has also been used for some time by those with a first degree in medicine. Others with first degrees in dentistry or in veterinary science are also calling each other ‘doctor’, but not yet in public much.

Nearly all these degrees are sometimes awarded honoris causa, as a decoration to some esteemed citizen for service to the people. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was honoured in this way by several universities,

Former Immigration Service boss Mary Anne Thompson appeared in Wellington District Court on fraud and dishonesty charges over her false CV last year. NZPA / Andrew Labett.

and the Harvard professor S J Gould had over 100 honorary degrees. Our sometime prime minister Nash held an honorary doctorate from an American university (Tufts).

The great naturalist Ronald M. Lockley was given an honorary master’s degree by the University of Wales, and I tried to get the U. of Auckland to give him an honorary doctorate (partly for his far-sighted initiatives at Tahuna Torea).

All these degrees are long-established.

But some disturbing vulgar rackets have lately overlaid this system.

Firstly, some polytechs have been purporting to pull themselves up by their shoelaces – granting doctorates to their own staff for work not supervised by anyone with any higher degree.

Secondly, various institutions have been running more or less brief courses for a novel degree, master of business administration, MBA, which arguably does not connect adequately to traditional academic standards.

More radically, fake degrees have been on sale by mail-order for many years, mainly in the USA. This is the racket which, amazingly, was not detected by Mr Derek Fox or the human remains consultants he’d paid $70,000. Similarly duped was a tertiary outfit which hired a foreigner on the strength of a dubious doctorate; when a Kiwi staff member with a real earned doctorate complained, that con-person was allowed quietly to cease the lie, but no penalty was exacted let alone purging & prosecution. And the penalty for the fake doctorate alleged by a high-rank immigration official was surprisingly small – far less than the excess salary income she had filched from the public purse.

Mr Fox, having sacked the con-man to whom he had advanced $20,000, proceeded to offer on Radio NZ the irrelevant remark that qualifications 25 year old were of unclear value. This is a very misleading assertion; I rise in defence of the senior staff in our

universities and other institutions. I make no apology for wanting the value of their hard-won qualifications to be protected from degradation by this Gresham’s law lately operating for commercial reasons on academic qualifications. I have seen higher degrees awarded within this past decade to babbling airheads for work which would have failed by a wide margin 25 years ago.

The lurid fraud of the con-man gets more attention (and he was sentenced to a few months in gaol), but much more worrying is the slower general slide of academic standards among those who issue thousands of lawful degrees.

Institutions have been permitted to take the label ‘university’ when they have no good prospects of reaching NZ standards. And even within our older universities, degrees have become easier to get – for several reasons. Keeping unemployed youth off the streets is a confusing function which should not be forced on universities, especially when successive governments remorselessly screw down the universities’ budgets. Foreign students are supposed to be the answer to

decreased government grants. Some bring money but some an inadequate command of the language of instruction – and, it must be said, a whole new order of cheating, as well as a few excellent performers.

Isn’t it a puzzle: a much poorer New Zealand could afford to educate my generation, as long as we kept passing the exams to enter and to stay in university, so that (for instance) when I found myself at Berkeley amidst graduates from Harvard, Oxford etc I was able to keep up; but today universities are starved of funding (polytechs haven’t been so badly treated), student loans pile up in billions, and some excruciatingly bad work procures higher degrees, and we have to handicap our native students with some unfit foreigners in their classes while a lot of NZ graduates in Parliament bite the hand that fed them, giving universities less and less, and permit the use of the title ‘university’ where it is not warranted.

Dr L. R. B. Mann was Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry, and then in Environmental Studies, U. of Auckland. In retirement he works mainly for control of gene-tampering

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D eep F orest

THE DANGER OF THE NEW ANTI-TERROR LAWS

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Former top cop and National MP ROSS MEURANT warns that the John Key government may be on the verge of making a massive mistake, by giving police new powers that could ultimately be used against ordinary citizens

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L

ike most recruits, I entered the police as an impressionable young man with a basic education, from a working class environment in provincial NZ. There were hundreds of peers like me, before me and after me. I was nothing special but I was altruistic.

We were all cannon fodder. Easy to manipulate. We looked at the forest before us in awe.

The moment you step into the police, this sub culture within NZ culture hits you. You are immediately part of the thin blue line.

You are part of a team and that team looks after itself. You are special. You are the border between good and evil. The attitudes of the police instructors, armed not with teaching certificates but with ten years exposure to the police sub culture, either consciously or subconsciously invite you into the forest.

To step out of police college is to take the next step into the forest. You are now part of the difference between law and order in the streets where gangs would rule and evil would triumph. But for you, and your fellow coppers, society would be a dangerous place. Your mission is to protect society from this evil. Very soon you learn to decide what is evil and what is not. You are no longer just a collector of human rubbish at the base of the cliff but you have an obligation; yes, even a duty to guide the country to a decent society. That direction is best decided by you and others in your sub culture of police, for what better epitomizes the values of a decent society than those cherished by the men and women in blue? Your task is honourable. What better vocation than to rid the country of evil? Thus, achieving this end can even justify the means!

The further into the forest, the more pervasive becomes this police culture. The heart of the beast is centered in elite CIB squads like Regional Crime, Criminal Intelligence and Drug Squad. These are the destinations to which the most ambitious and zealous aspire. Together with the Armed Offenders Squad and Team Policing units, these entities are the bastion of police culture.

Of course there are those who do not aspire to these objectives but then, the police is also a government department which always harbor a good number of ‘glide timers’: there to collect their pay and do as little as possible, which is the best route to longevity in any government agency. Often these people will suddenly find themselves floating on the top of the pool.

Every new entrant runs the same gauntlet. No recruit is ever formally ‘taught’ to use

violence, to lie and cover up. None of my mentors did that to me and I never did it to those whom I mentored. But the culture sends a very clear message. ‘When you witness transgression by a colleague, keep your mouth shut at worst and at best, provide an account which supports the miscreant and helps him/her out of a sticky situation.’

If you don’t, as a new recruit, you are ostracized. You may as well quit there and then. But once you have provided succor, you have taken your next step into the for-

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est. Later you will witness another indiscretion and you will again ‘cover’. After all, you have been accepted as one of the team.

You are ‘reliable’. To lose that status is not a desirable outcome. But already you are compromised. Then one day you will commit an indiscretion and others will cover for you. Then you are beholden. Then you have entered the forest proper. There is no light to show the way home.

When I speak about a police culture, I speak about the environment I have described. It is

introverted, self protecting and lacking objectivity. It is a culture which looks after itself and has a certain view of how life should proceed. It is reinforced by drinking and bonding sessions. The ‘them and us’ ethos becomes tangible. What is more, the culture is working class conservative in its origins. Bigoted and intolerant. Few of its officer corps are university graduates and even fewer hail from private schools. There is no network which pervades the upper echelons of society. The police are insular.

“When you witness transgression by a colleague, keep your mouth shut at worst and at best, provide an account which supports the miscreant and helps him/her out of a sticky situation”

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If someone has tattoos or hair too long or dresses the ‘wrong’ way or does not have ‘acceptable’ politics, then they are one of ‘them’ and not to be trusted. Conversely liberals are a menace to stability and are even more dangerous than unemployed Maori.

I recall when as a detective in the mid seventies, I applied to go to university and was asked by my commissioned officer: “Meurant. Why do you want to go to university? Are you a communist?” The message was pretty clear. This was at the height of Vietnam. The police sub culture did not approve of its members being associated with undesirable elements who frequented establishments of enlightenment!

W

hen I did finally go to university I found my lecturers to include Michael Basset, Phil Goff and Helen Clark, all of whom where later my peers in parliament but who at the time I entered university, shared decidedly different political beliefs to me. Yet even though I argued, as an example, that US foreign policy in Vietnam was ‘defensive’ (domino theory), these people approved my assignments.

They were prepared to tolerate a philistine within their midst, suppress their natural aversion to me and mark my opinions objectively. This, as I reflect, juxtaposes starkly the attitude or culture of the two institutions.

One institution is prepared to tolerate alternative views. The other is not.

I advanced in the rank structure relatively quickly in the police and soon found myself incarcerated as supervisor in a control room; a job I loathed. So I did go to university and here, the first signs of light began to reappear. Slowly the mist began to abate and I saw things from a different perspective. In all, I did eleven years at either Auckland or Victoria universities. I am immensely grateful for how those institutions unwittingly helped me exorcise the demon of excessive exposure to police culture.

This ‘culture’ manifests in many different forms. Three recent examples will illustrate my point and demonstrate that it is as alive and well as it was in my day: John Dewar. Recently incarcerated for, according to the view of the Court, covering up for the despicable conduct of assistant commissioner Rickards and two other police officers. John Dewar was one of the best sergeants I ever had as an inspector, but the ‘culture’ manifest in his destiny in a most tragic manner for him.

Then there was the police shooting of a

“Meurant. Why do you want to go to university? Are you a communist?”

The police sub culture did not approve of its members being associated with undesirable elements who frequented establishments of enlightenment!

man in Christchurch. The law is clear when a cop or civilian may kill another human being. One must fear on reasonable grounds, death or grievous injury to oneself or a third person which cannot otherwise be prevented. In my view the circumstances of the killing are not as transparent as the police public relations section would have us

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believe. A man shot wielding a hammer on cars! Not dissimilar to a man shot, wielding a golf club against shop windows.

The proper place to test the validity of police action is before a Court. The strength of our police is public confidence and support; without which they are nothing. The best way to retain that public support is for

transparency and that is best achieved by testing police actions in a Court of law. Yet immediately after the killing we have the police association representative, completely out of line in my view, seeking to influence the outcome by claiming the shooting was justifiable and that we should trust the police to judge their own actions. This of course is the manifestation once again of the police culture: look after the police. That is quite different, in my view, to looking after the rule of law.

Finally there is the recent implementation of draconian anti terror legislation to combat routine crimes and offences in the community. Police say they have collated information over a period of 12 months which on analysis leads them to the conclusion that there is a real threat to the stability and security of our country. The problem as I see it is, that information they have has been self assessed by the same people who collate the data or at best, by the supervisor INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COMâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; September 2010â&#x20AC;&#x192; 37

of the ‘intelligence unit’ and his superior; all of whom view society from within the forest and with vested interests in producing an outcome which justifies the retention of their unit. These subjective conclusions are presented to judicial officers as the basis of justification for warrants and implementation of anti terror legislation which abrogate the most basic of our legal rights.

No longer are we protected from arbitrary detention without being charged and the legal requirement to be taken before a Court as soon as possible. This I find unacceptable.

I am also disappointed that too many New Zealanders appear not to comprehend the significance of what it means to our legal structure when on the basis of subjective analysis by the police, these Guardians substantially usurp the role of the judiciary as a check and balance against tyrannical tendencies. There is a fundamental flaw in the pres-

men were legends in their own time, each of them relentless and with a determination of mind few could match. Together with half a dozen other young detectives, we formed a formidable unit; we became a legend in our own time.

Our adversaries were serious villains: Peter Fulcher, Mihaly Bede, Terry Clarke alias Mr Asia, the Saffiti boys and several gangs. This was a particularly violent time in the history of policing in New Zealand. We were right in the middle. It was inevitable that we, who consistently faced angry men in dark alleys, would have allegations made against us. I had my share against me.

There were allegations of excessive force; that I was aware of but did nothing about an offender allegedly being dangled by his ankles from the fourth floor of the police station; perjury and even one of extracting a confession from a drug dealer by playing

was on the activities of Maori activists at Carrington hospital. I took raw police data and used it in my Maiden Speech. At the time I believed in the conclusions we as a police unit had peer reviewed. Some form of revolution or armed insurrection had been threatened. There were threats of ‘Kill white die a hero”. Maori wanted political sovereignty.

Maori activist Sid Jackson was one of several who had been to Libya. But did a contrary political view and aspirations really pose a threat to the security and stability of our country? History has provided the answer.

There has been no revolution and at least one of the Maori activists of those times is now in Parliament working within the system.

I made a mistake when I took the raw police data and used in my Maiden Speech.

It took another 9 years in parliament, another 3 years at university and as I do now, living in East Europe where the legal pro-

“I am also disappointed that too many New Zealanders appear not to comprehend the significance of what it means to our legal structure when on the basis of subjective analysis by the police, these Guardians substantially usurp the role of the judiciary as a check and balance against tyrannical tendencies”

ent legislation where it allows a subjective test of police information by police, to form the basis of reason to catapult us onto a terror alert footing. It is even more disturbing to me when I know the environment where these decision are made, is deep in the forest. What the police are effectively saying is: “In the Ureweras there are weapons of mass destruction. Trust us.”

Sound familiar?

I have been in the forest. In the seventies I was a detective on Regional Crime and Drug Squad. I was also on the AOS. My formal police assessments were high. ‘Excellent’ as a detective. ‘Outstanding’ as a commissioned officer. In my formative years my immediate supervisors included detective sergeant John Hughes, detective inspector Graham Perry and later detective inspector Bruce Hutton (Hutton was my boss on my first homicide: the Crewe murders). These

on him Russian Roulette with a police issue revolver. These allegations were of course outrageous untruths without foundation and never sustained.

In 1981 I was seconded to the police Red Escort Group – Red Squad. I later wrote a book about the exploits of the squad. That initiative catapulted me into the headlines for the first time. On the one hand, I believe it provided the impetus for me to gain selection for National as a Member of Parliament in a conservative seat. On other hand, because I later became a Member of Parliament and had written the book, The Red Squad Story, I became synonymous with Red Squad and alone have endured the odium and contempt heaped upon that police unit, as the tide of public opinion turned.

My last job in the police was inspector in charge of special operations and a criminal intelligence section. At the time the focus

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tections and freedoms we take for granted often do not exist, for me to finally step out of the forest and see it for what it is.

I urge every New Zealander not to allow the State apparatus to take from you by default, legal rights people long before us fought for, died for. I urge every New Zealander to contact their Member of Parliament and express concern that the anti terror legislation currently before parliament, be placed on ‘hold’ until the true nature of the present police raids under the auspicious of terror legislation, is tested before the Courts.

Is a delay of a few months too much to ask before we take the next step toward undermining the most significant legal document ever which has endured since 1215?

The Magna Carta.

Ross Meurant, B.A.M.P.P. www.rossmeurant.co.nz

q

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The Pitch

Up, up, or away? The Battle For Supermayor With local councils throughout the country going to the polls in a postal ballot, six hopefuls are vying for the most tantalising target of all – the political kingdom of Auckland as a new supercity. Only one can don the cape, the rest will be sent away. Rather than give our own spin, we decided to let the candidates speak for themselves in one final pitch and in no particular order: who are they, what do they stand for?

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“Auckland needs an inspirational leader, inclusive in approach and decisive in action. Auckland needs a person who is able to articulate and deliver on a shared vision, and who can speak for the region, and deliver regional priorities decisively.

Overwhelmingly, Auckland is ready now for positive change.”

– Executive Summary Royal Commission on Auckland

SIMON PRAST

Current gig: Thespian Once was: Lawyer Pro’s: Helped build Auckland Theatre Company, Starred in Gloss, Named Metro’s Auckland Man of the Year (joint winner with John Banks) Con’s: Has used meth, now clean, advocates drug liberalisation policies

A new generation of leadership I have no political affiliation and run neither as a candidate of the left or the right. I run as the candidate for Auckland. The only word on the crest of Auckland is ‘advance’. The only direction I propose we move is forward.

Our greatest challenge is not an election, nor a Rugby World Cup but rather, that in twenty years, we shall double in size. How we get from here to there in peace and prosperity without compromising the land or our lifestyle: that is our greatest challenge.

Auckland needs identity, direction and design. To achieve this, we need new leadership and a new style of leadership: inspirational, inclusive, decisive, articulate. That is the job description of the Mayor, as provided by the Royal Commission on Auckland.

That is what I offer.

Pride, prejudice and politics as usual have brought us to the brink. We need remarkable new solutions for pervasive old problems. We must embrace change and emerge united, stronger and smarter. We must approach our problems in a spirit of professionalism not partisanship. We owe it to ourselves, our forebears and all who shall follow us, to work together and make it work.

I run because, as a voter, I believe the other candidates do not represent bold, positive

Press photos/JANE USSHER

change. I believe I have something new to offer: a university education; a national profile, a director’s artistic eye; a producer’s organisational skill. Over 12 years, I built Auckland Theatre Company and Auckland Festival from less-than-zero to regional assets. I have over a decade’s hands-on,

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frontline, practical experience working to make this City a richer, better place to live. I worked successfully with local, regional and central government agencies to secure what I felt was important for my hometown. They know me in Wellington.

I stand for local democracy. We must

get our democratic house in order if we are to achieve our dreams. The new structure must serve Auckland and ALL Aucklanders.

Crucially, local boards must be fully incorporated into the democratic process and decision-making must be informed by constant communication and referral to the people. There will be no sale of public assets. Council-controlled organisations shall remain in the Council’s control.

All elected officials shall remain the loyal servants of the people. Sir Dove MeyerRobinson serves as my role model.

I stand for positive change. We must eliminate piecemeal ‘back-of-a-napkin’ planning.

It has resulted in a vandalised cityscape and an absence of leadership and accountability on the most pressing economic and social issues of our time. As a people, we must have the courage, clarity and commitment to plan with care and act with confidence.

I stand for creative solutions. I have over a decade’s experience translating words into reality. On over 60 productions, I worked in collaboration with New Zealand’s finest theatre professionals to deliver a world-class theatrical experience. In my business, action means action; a budget is a budget; a schedule is a schedule.

The Mayor is Auckland’s advocate, not a mere political lapdog. If Central Government policy on any issue does not work for 1/3 of New Zealand’s population, it is a priority to alert and work in close partnership with Government to resolve the matter.

The Mayor is Auckland’s ambassador: the face and voice of the City and all its citizens in the 21st century. Around the region, the country and the world, the Mayor must represent the city with grace, respect and style.

He must put Auckland on the map. For all the right reasons.

One Vision for Auckland By 2050, Auckland: Tamaki-makau-rau shall be: 1. the First City of Pacific-Asia; 2. a state-of-the-art city, more modern than Singapore, more beautiful than San Francisco; 3. an enlightened society, offering the world’s highest standard of living and best quality of life; 4. a cosmopolitan capital and tourist mecca, blessed by nature and nurtured by mankind: 5. a cultural, commercial and creative hub of the Southern Hemisphere.

For more, go to simonprast.com

“Pride, prejudice and politics as usual have brought us to the brink. We need remarkable new solutions for pervasive old problems”

PENNY BRIGHT

Current gig: “Well known activist” Once was: Welding tutor at MIT Pro’s: Enormous energy, and a commitment to transparency in politics. Even-handed, prepared to criticise left or right Con’s: Repeat offender, holds record for being booted out of council meetings, booted out of Transparency International meeting after discovering Transparency International has something to hide...

Supercity is a plan to raid your wallets Thank God when the Nazis invaded France – the French Resistance didn’t just wring their hands and say “Oh well – it’s too late – we can’t do anything.”

Throughout New Zealand towns and cities are significant marble monuments dedicated to those who left in the khaki uniforms and never

came back home. Is that why 12,500 ANZACs died in Northern France and Belgium? So the income stream from operating and managing our key public infrastructural water services, transport and rubbish collection could be taken over by French multinational company Veolia – without our consent?

Without a shot being fired – this Auckland ‘$UPERCITY is a blatant corporate raid, aimed at seizing control and privatising over $28 billion worth of Auckland regional public assets. This has been another Rogernomic$ blitzkreig, pushed by big business, in order to run the Auckland region, ‘like a business, by business, for business’.

How business will take over is through the ‘Council Controlled Organisation’ (CCO) model, into which 75% of Auckland regional rates will be paid, run by boards of unelected business appointees, over which the public have no direct control.

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Those Mayoral candidates who support – or are not opposed to the CCO model – therefore support this corporate takeover.

The corporate agenda is to ‘commercialise, corporatise – then privatise these public assets through long-term leases via Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). Although the infrastructure may remain in public ownership – the income stream from operating and managing the asset will flow (usually overseas) into the banks of private shareholders.

The aim of the $upercity is to replace thousands of private ‘piggy in the middle’ snouts with fewer but bigger multinational snouts – into a bigger public trough.

This political battle isn’t between ‘left’ and ‘right’. It’s between the corporates and the public, and those who serve their interests.

I’m the only Mayoral candidate with both a ‘vision’ and a ‘plan’ to STOP THE $UPERCITY. My vision is that the people of Auckland will rise up to STOP this corrupt corporate takeover, to defend two fundamental and underpinning principles of democracy: “It is the will of the people that is the basis of the authority of Government.”

“There shall be no taxation without representation” – NO SAY – NO PAY! First: Voting ‘Penny Bright for Mayor’ will give this Government the very clear message, that cannot be ignored – the people do NOT want the Auckland $upercity.

Second: Consider ‘backing up your vote with direct action’ – disputing and withholding rates payments to force the repeal of the underpinning $UPERCITY legislation.

Citizens were denied our lawful right to a binding vote on the $UPERCITY as enshrined in s24 of the Local Government Act 2002 “Reorganisational Proposal’, Schedule 3, s 49 “Polls must be held”: “a poll of electors on the proposal that the reorganisation scheme proceed must be held in each district or region that is directly affected by the scheme”.

Since the last ‘amalgamations’ in the 1980s, when the functioning Auckland Regional Authority (ARA) and local Borough Councils were replaced with our current Councils; since ‘in-house’ Council services were replaced with the ‘contractocracy’ – since the introduction of commercialised ‘more efficient’ CCOs – have your rates gone up or down?

SEE! – YOU WERE ‘CONNED’!

Look at your face in the mirror, and ask yourself – what are you going to say when your grandson or granddaughter asks:

“This political battle isn’t between ‘left’ and ‘right’. It’s between the corporates and the public, and those who serve their interests” ”Why is Auckland is run by multinational companies? Why does everything cost so much money? Why are Mummy and Daddy going to shift us over to Australia? Why didn’t people stop this Grandma? Grandad?”

Or do you just want the public majority

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to be a giant ‘ca$h cow? All pay – no say?

Help make history! Vote Penny Bright for Mayor!

“When injustice becomes law – resistance becomes duty!” http://waterpressure.wordpress.com

JOHN BANKS

Current gig: Mayor of Auckland Once was: Cabinet Minister Pro’s: Learned how to listen, driving force behind infrastructure projects Con’s: Keeps booting Penny Bright out of council meetings, Mayoralty increasingly a figurehead role as more control farmed out to private sector partners

A vision for Auckland Auckland is a very special place to live, with our outstanding harbours, our extensive outdoor recreational spaces and a rich cultural landscape. But a great city is more than physical assets.

A great city has to have heart and a soul, so people are drawn to enjoy its musical, artistic and theatrical offerings.

A great city has to be safe, so people feel free to enjoy our diverse restaurant and night life.

A great city has to have a high quality public transport system that allows people to get to their work places easily and to enjoy themselves at might without having to worry about driving home.

A great city has to encourage participation and diversity within our local communities and promote a sense of responsibility for each other.

A great city has to recognise where there are pockets of deprivation and work together to reduce them.

A great city has to be well led, to bring out the best in all of us. Fortunately, what unites us is much greater than what divides us, and that is why the local body election this year is so important – it gives us a chance for a fresh start, a chance to work together to bring about our shared vision for the Auckland of the future.

For the first time, on the 1st November this year, Auckland will speak with one voice. We have some really big issues to deal with including our transport and infrastructure challenges; what we do with our beautiful waterfront; how we manage our environmental assets, our built architecture and our culture and heritage; how we ensure that local communities retain their identities and their say over what happens within those communities; how we ensure

“I would like to think that the opportunities that this city has given me and my family, can be available to all who choose to call Greater Auckland home” that what we spend delivers value for money and that we reduce financial burden on ratepayers through prudent and careful stewardship of their money; how we encourage a thriving business community to provide jobs, investment and growth for our young people; and how we plan for the future so that our children and grandchildren want to live in Auckland, so there are jobs for them, so they can pursue their ambitions

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right here and we don’t have to visit them in Australia or London.

Auckland has been good to me – I have built successful businesses here. I have served public office at a local, regional and national level. I have raised a wonderful family and I have enjoyed living in the most beautiful city in the world.

I would like to think that the opportunities that this city has given me and my family, can be available to all who choose to call Greater Auckland home.

My vision for the new Auckland is a city that delivers opportunity, prosperity and security for all. Most of my opponents agree with me on the major infrastructure projects that must be completed – the 3rd harbour crossing, an inner city rail loop, rail to the airport from the North Shore, an international Convention and Exhibition Centre, and a modern waterfront. I also want a better ferry service to get people out of their cars and off the roads. Our harbours are never congested. We must provide access for our young to education and employment.

That will take strong decisive leadership, it will take experience and it will take commitment. The job of Mayor will not be easy – but it is a challenge that I have spent my whole working and personal life preparing for – the challenge to lead Auckland towards a brighter future where we get it right and we do the right things. I want an Auckland that we can all be proud of. http://www.johnbanks.co.nz/

COLIN CRAIG

Current gig: Businessman, controlling $1.3billion portfolio Once was: Earning just 75 cents an hour mowing lawns Pro’s: Organised last year’s March for Democracy Con’s: Not on the radar long enough to develop any

Out with the old Hello, my name is Colin Craig and I have decided to stand for mayor of Auckland because Auckland desperately needs a new, non political approach to local government.

Albert Einstein said that: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

He was right. In Auckland we have been doing the same old thing and getting the same old results for years. We now have a 46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

real chance to do things differently and to do them better. There are three existing mayors standing for election and if you vote for one of them you will get what you have always had. But if, like me, you want something different, something better for Auckland, then I am your man.

Who am I exactly? I was born in Auckland and have lived here all my life, I’m 42 years old and I live with my wife and 5 year old daughter in Albany. Originally an accountant by trade, I diversified to become a very successful businessman and entrepreneur.

I also am a campaigner for democracy and better governance.

Specifically, I believe Auckland needs to be lean, local and fair.

Keeping it lean means keeping costs down so that we can afford to live here. The consistent policy of increasing rates and increasing borrowing adopted by the existing mayors has to stop. It is simply not right to pass onto our children a legacy of debt. We should spend only what we have. It’s called “balancing the budget”.

I currently manage hundreds of budgets in a portfolio well in excess of $1 billion. I know how to make a business efficient. Elect me and council services will run like a well run business, delivering best service at best price. It’s your money and it’s time to use it much better.

Keeping it lean also means working cooperatively to fix Auckland’s single biggest financial disaster, the leaky homes crisis. All existing mayors have adopted the 25%:25%:50% deal. This means a victim has to take the council to court to get justice.

In 15 years from now we will regret making thousands of home owners sue us for justice.

Co-operatively we can reduce costs for all parties and fix the homes sooner.

We also need to keep it local. Mr Banks uses the expression “we should all sing from the same song sheet” (his song sheet, I presume). He is wrong, I say we should all sing our own song. One size does not fit all, and local diversity needs to be encouraged, with each local area fully empowered and having the ability to agree their own rates. Aucklanders do not want to lose their local identity and I won’t let that happen.

Finally, we need to keep it fair.

The thought that elected officials are somehow smarter or better than those they serve is nothing but pride. This is your city and you all need to be a part of the decisions that we make. That’s why, if you elect me as your mayor, I will hold referendums

to make sure you have a voice, and I will be bound by the results.

Let’s set an example of democracy in action. With a change of leadership we can turn the Auckland region around; we can be the shining light in the South Pacific.

It is a simple choice: do we have more of the same or is it time to take a different path?

If sincerely hope you will vote for a change. Vote to keep it lean, local and fair.

Vote Colin Craig.

God Bless. www.votecolincraig.co.nz

“In Auckland we have been doing the same old thing and getting the same old results for years. We now have a real chance to do things differently and to do them better”

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ANDREW WILLIAMS

Current gig: Mayor of North Shore City Once was: Trade diplomat Pro’s: Upfront, outspoken Con’s: Will be best remembered for watering council garden after hours

Looking after the communities of Auckland with independent, progressive leadership One of my key objectives if elected would be to ensure that we look after the communities of Auckland so that wherever the citizens of the new city live or work, they feel equally part of the new city. This is not just about an Auckland CBD-centric focused council where the outlying areas take second place in the city’s priorities. And it’s not about political parties controlling Auckland. I am a completely independent mayor who acts on the basis of issues and outcomes, not political ideologies.

When I refer to communities I mean not

just the different physical geographical communities but also communities of interest including community organisations, ethnic communities, our aged and youth communities, disabled and disadvantaged communities, and sport and cultural communities.

I will also be giving high priority with a progressive leadership role towards advancing Auckland’s transport needs, accelerating economic development and job creation, sustainable regional planning with careful environmental safeguards, and will work closely with Police and other agencies for public safety and crime prevention.

I find my trade and negotiations experience is most helpful in mayoral discussions, helping to resolve many situations that need a practical workable outcome, such as my involvement in the Leaky Homes 25/25/50% agreement with the government. I will use my 30 years of business skills and experience to bring Auckland together to advance projects

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such as the downtown waterfront, the next harbour crossing, motorways network, public transport, and making Auckland a more connected and good lifestyle city for the benefit of its residents and commerce. Completion of key infrastructure across the region to help facilitate economic growth and make this an

“It is time for Auckland to come together with a team plan that we can all buy into and see a collective vision that we will all be proud of”

efficient city will be part and parcel to support this overall economic strategy.

It is time for Auckland to come together with a team plan that we can all buy into and see a collective vision that we will all be proud of. I have strong relationships with many of the key people and sectors across the region and nationally that will help us to bring the new Auckland Council into life with positive energy and spirit. I will leverage my many linkages to assist Auckland’s development, including international trade and investment.

As Mayor I will personally Chair regular sessions with key economic development and government agencies such as NZ Trade & Enterprise and Tourism NZ to spearhead commercial initiatives to grow the Auckland economy and move this city forward.

Economic targets will be put in place and buy‐in will be required from all stakeholders to collectively commit to a more prosperous and dynamic Auckland economy.

If you look at my website www.andrewwilliams.co.nz you will see what I have achieved in 9 years of local government. I am known as a “Can Do” Mayor who gets things done, and who delivers. I have done this for the North Shore and will do the same for all of greater Aucklan. Age: 51. Married 30 years to Jane, with 3 children 24, 21 and 17.

Live at Campbells Bay, North Shore.

Mayor of North Shore City 2007 -2010.

Previously 2001 – 2007 a city councillor and Takapuna Community Board member.

Thirty year career from 1977 in international trade including nine years as the Trade Commissioner for Belgium and Luxembourg, and extensive consular and diplomatic activities as the Honorary Vice Consul of Belgium.

Founding President of the NZ-Europe Business Council and former Executive

Member of the Auckland Consular Corps.

My earlier career was in the meat industry, farmed venison exports, airfreight, shipping and trade development. I have an Advanced Marketing Management diploma from the International Marketing Institute of New Zealand. www.andrewwwilliams.co.nz

LEN BROWN

Current gig: Mayor of Manukau City Once was: Legal beagle Pro’s: Generally well-regarded in South Auckland Con’s: TV footage of whacking his own forehead repeatedly

Len Brown – the Mayor for ALL of Auckland It is time to build an Auckland renowned for its economic growth, fantastic lifestyle and strong communities. It’s time for Auckland to be New Zealand’s window to the world, the place we feel proud to live in, a destination not a gateway.

I believe we need strong inclusive leadership to bring our region together, to make sure local communities retain their identity in the supercity and to tackle the big issues.

Effective leadership will be crucial. Without it, the wasteful squabbles that have been a INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 49

part of our local body politics for decades will continue. The new mayor will need to work with people from across the political spectrum and right around the region to get things done – that is my background.

I have worked in commerce as a former partner in an Auckland law firm and in the community as a councillor and now as Mayor of Manukau – I can use that experience to make the supercity work.

I work by putting together a well-understood plan, consulting the community, making a decision and moving forward. In this way, my council has helped to build strong economic growth, develop our transport infrastructure, kept rate increases under control and tackled crime.

For example, when I was elected mayor, business leaders said they wanted safer communities. So with the police, business and the community, we put together anti-graffiti teams that have cut graffiti by 70%, making our main streets safer and more pleasant. I want to bring the same focus to all of Auckland.

Auckland can only be strong if we have strong communities. Many people are worried that their local community will lose out in the new structure when all the money shifts to the CBD. We cannot let that happen and if I am elected mayor it won’t.

I will also deliver: 1. Transport – we need action to unclog our roads by finishing the transport network, delivering a rail link to the airport and an underground CBD rail loop 2. Low rates – as Mayor of Manukau I have delivered rate increases close to the rate of inflation and no increase to water rates, we need to find the same efficiencies in the new Council 3. Economic development – the new Council will set the template for business with a spatial plan, a single set of rules and fees, delivering infrastructure, support for local business districts and mainstreets 4. Public assets – I will not privatise our water company, airport shares, housing for the elderly or the Ports of Auckland. We need to grow our region’s future, not sell it 5. Working with government – I have a strong relationship with the government and will stand up for Auckland’s fair share 6. Crime – Council can work with police and the community to create safer streets through provision of CCTV cameras, tackling graffiti and restricting liquor outlets My wife and I raised our family in

Auckland. I want to build a better city for all our children. The new council will set the values and direction for our city for many years to come – we’ve got to get it right.

We need strong and inclusive leadership from someone with a proven track record who can make the supercity changes work for all. Someone who knows how to run a big city and get things done.

Many are either unhappy or uncertain about the supercity. The region needs a mayor who believes in communities and people, so that together we can make the hard decisions to move our region forward.

Auckland, it’s our time. www.lenbrownformayor.co.nz q

50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

“We need strong and inclusive leadership from someone with a proven track record who can make the supercity changes work for all. Someone who knows how to run a big city and get things done”

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Allison was one of the leading marathon and road runners in the world in the early 1980s. She won both the Boston and New York marathons in 1981 and was recently inducted into the NZ Sports Hall of Fame.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 51

ZIMBABWE’S

Blood Diamonds I s A G i r l ’s B e s t Fr i e n d R o b e r t M u g a b e ?

52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Supermodel Naomi Campbell’s torture on the witness stand in the blood diamonds trial is highlighting a battle to control US$2 billion worth of rocks in Zimbabwe. SAM GREGORY has been on the ground in Harare and filed this report for Investigate

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 53

M

ade famous by the movie Blood Diamond, conflict diamonds have grown in the conscience of the west in recent years. Their association with Africa is due, in no small part, to the efforts of former President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, currently on trial at The Hague for war crimes.

Taylor stands accused of fuelling a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone as well as conscripting child soldiers and murdering civilians.

Now, in a Hollywood twist, British supermodel Naomi Campbell has given evidence against him because of a gift received 13 years ago. During a social dinner at Nelson Mandela’s home in 1997 she and Taylor were seated next to each other when the subject of diamonds came up. Taylor was said to have been flirting with the supermodel when he offered her uncut diamonds which, as it now turns out, were blood diamonds, trophies of the bloody conflict which was raging through Sierra Leone at the time.

Mineral resources, and particularly diamonds, have been a staple of African economies since the 20th century but the threat of violence and corruption has been ever present. Since 2006 Zimbabwe has been mining its own particular breed of conflict diamonds. Now these gems need to be sold.

The Kimberley Process Civic Society’s decision to lift a ban on sales of Zimbabwe’s diamonds was lucky for Robert Mugabe. If the ban had not been lifted he would have had to sell the stones illegally, to China or Iran, and he would have got far less for them.

But the decision is also good news for the people of Zimbabwe. Although they’ve resigned themselves to a certain amount of corruption, they know how much promise the sale of these diamonds holds for their country.

Estimated to be worth as much as US$ 2 billion a year to the Zimbabwean economy, the gems have caused a stir in the international mining industry with a dispute over ownership, claims of corruption and evidence of large scale violence at the mines.

The KP initially decided to uphold a ban on sales of the diamonds, primarily based on evidence of human rights abuses presented to the society at a meeting in Tel Aviv, Israel in June. In echoes of Sierra Leone, NGO’s such as Global Witness and Human Rights Watch have provided reports of murder, torture, rape and beatings at the mines, particularly Chiadzwa, near Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique. They claim that

“The Kimberley Process Civic Society’s decision to lift a ban on sales of Zimbabwe’s diamonds was lucky for Robert Mugabe. If the ban had not been lifted he would have had to sell the stones illegally, to China or Iran, and he would have got far less for them”

54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Halden Krog/ RAPPORT

the abuses are still occurring and accuse the Zimbabwean government of covering up the violence. Hundreds were reported to have been brutally murdered during 2008 by the Zimbabwean army, responsible for overseeing the mining process. There have also been allegations of children being forced to work and smuggling of diamonds by soldiers and police. The red soil of Africa has once again been stained by blood, shed for diamonds.

Farai Maguwu, a Zimbabwean human rights campaigner, was arrested in June for allegedly providing false evidence to the Kimberley Process. He was reportedly subjected to atrocious conditions, intimidation and violence. Speaking out against the government recently, he said “Soldiers have been accused of illegal panning activities and they’re primarily responsible for mining the diamonds”, diamonds, he says, which are

illegally leaving the country through the borders of Mozambique and South Africa. Last year a number of individuals were arrested in neighbouring countries carrying diamonds believed to have come from Zimbabwe. It’s currently estimated that tens of millions of dollars worth of the stones are leaving Zimbabwe illegally every year and government involvement is suspected.

Maguwu also documented instances of

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 55

Ending the trade of ‘blood’ diamonds Humanitarian groups say that so-called “blood diamonds” have been used by rebel groups to fund wars across Africa despite efforts by the industry to stop the practice.

A few of the most prominent hot spots in the illegal diamond trade:

MALI Central African Republic

Guinea

GAMBIA SIERRA LEONE LIBERIA

IVORY COAST

Ghana

Togo

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO ANGOLA

Smuggling countries

Tanzania

ANGOLA

Countries known to be involved in cross-border smuggling of blood diamonds

Namibia

Kimberly Process participant

The Kimberly Process is a U.N.-mandated system that monitors the trade of diamonds to ensure that the sales are not used to fund armed conflict

ZIMBABWE Botswana

Lesotho South Africa

Conflict diamonds

Countries (detailed below) where diamonds were used to fund armed conflict

Civil wars and conflict

500 km 500 miles

Kimberly Process participant

ANGOLA

Several civil wars from 1975 to 2002; diamonds sold to arm insurgency

Yes Country is at peace; exports about 8 percent of the world’s diamonds

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Civil war from 1997 to 1999; diamonds sold to arm insurgency

Yes Country is at peace; elections held in July; exports about 8 percent of the world’s diamonds

IVORY COAST

Military coup overthrew government in 1999; conflict continues today

Yes However, diamond exports are suspended until peace is restored

LIBERIA

Liberia sold arms to Sierra Leone rebels in exchange for diamonds

Yes Country at peace; attempting to construct a legitimate diamond mining industry

ZIMBABWE

Former British colony; independence in 1980

Military killed or tortured hundreds of diamond panners after a diamond rush in 2008

Yes Human rights groups critical of decision to allow Zimbabwe to

SIERRA LEONE

Civil war from 1991 to 2002; diamonds sold to arm insurgency

Yes Country is at peace; exports about 3 percent of the world’s diamonds

REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Unstable condition from Marxist regimes and civil war ending in 2003

No Expelled because of diamond exports of unaccountable origin

Former Portuguese colony; independence in 1975

Former Belgian colony; independence in 1960

Former French colony; independence in 1960

Established in the 1800s by freed American slaves

Former British colony; independence in 1961

Former French colony; independence in 1960

Source: World Diamond Council, The Diamond Registry, Global Witness

the gang rape of local women by soldiers and violent beatings by soldiers. His plight was discussed during the KP meeting and has been suggested as one of the reasons the Civic Society was initially reluctant to lift the ban on the sale of Zimbabwean mined diamonds. Another factor was said to be the lack of transparency in sales of the gems.

Reports have suggested that Zanu PF and associated officials have so far been the only ones to benefit from the mining.

Minister of Mines, Obert Mpofu, a Zanu PF MP, has come under fire from many

Graphic: Minneapolis Star Tribune

© 2010 MCT

here in Zimbabwe for the clandestine way in which he’s dealt with the distribution of mining rights and the sale of diamonds, “Obert Moses Mpofu has openly flouted Zimbabwe’s tender regulations by clandestinely forming companies and giving them licence to mine such a rich public resource that can solve half our economic problems” said Maguwu.

Mpofu recently accused the British government of ‘installing’ 40,000 illegal miners onto the Chiadzwa diamond fields in order to create chaos for the Zimbabwean gov-

56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

ernment. He’s widely regarded as Mugabe’s mouth on the issue of mines.

Before the ban was lifted by the Kimberley Process over 3.5 million carats of diamonds were displayed at Harare international airport, laid out on tables in a private and secure area. They were viewed by international diamond traders (mainly Belgian, South African and Dubai based companies) for consideration of sale, pending the outcome of the meeting.

Immediately after the diamonds were displayed a letter was sent to all potential buyers warning them of possible legal repercussions.

The letter, from the lawyers of London listed company African Consolidated Resources (ACR), said “the potential purchase of the diamonds could embroil your company, servants or agents in ongoing litigation”. ACR is currently locked in a legal dispute with the Zimbabwean government. They claim they were sold the rights to mine in the Marange area of eastern Zimbabwe only to have them stripped and given to Mbada Diamonds and Canadile Miners, both joint venture companies between the Zimbabwean government and South African investors.

Accusations of corruption have also surfaced within the organisations tasked with inspecting the mines. Kimberley Process inspector, Abbey Chickane, has been suspected by many in Zimbabwe and South Africa of corruption. He’s consistently belittled reports of human rights abuses and illegal mining seemingly in the face of over whelming evidence.He’s also believed to have been responsible for the arrest of Farai Maguwu. The KP’s first choice of inspector was rejected by Robert Mugabe himself, raising questions of why Chickane was seen as suitable. His report and subsequent recommendation that all Zimbabwe mined diamonds should be authorised for sale was widely expected by Zanu PF officials to result in an immediate green light from the Kimberley Process. The fact that it was not initially followed leads many to the conclusion that Chickane is not trusted by those within his own organisation.

Diamonds from the disputed mines so far sold by the government and its agencies illegally are said to amount to more than ten million US dollars, but the treasury can only account for US$800,000. The missing money has not yet been explained. A source close to the government said “It’s obvious. It just filters through a corrupt system leaving barely anything for Zimbabweans at the end”.

These illegal sales are only the tip of the

iceberg according to many. Investigations conducted here in Harare have revealed that profits from illegal diamond sales have been deposited into private bank accounts in ABC and CBZ banks, through money transfers from a bank in New York.

M

unya Radzi, a village elder from Chimanimani, spoke to me in Harare recently of the early days of what he calls ‘the diamond rush’, “You couldn’t help but get involved and get excited” he said. In 2007 he was approached by a friend who had been working at a local farm where, it was claimed, diamonds had been discovered. “He handed me a stone the size of a strawberry and said he thought it was a diamond”. This was just the start. Munya became involved in trading the diamonds found by villagers in the early days of the rush. “I made more money than I’ve ever made”. Eventually, how-

ever, the police and army moved in and people were forcefully cleared out of the fields.

He describes one night which he spent with a group of local police from the village who monitored the mines. Around midnight, on a farm not far from Chimanimani, they saw a small light and the police immediately lit up the area with spotlights. “We saw a young man of about 17, I’d never seen him in the village before. He had a sack full of dirt. The police beat him without mercy and made him strip off and run away across the stony ground”. When the police had finished, he says, they explained to him that they were under orders, “They turned to me and said “Munya, we know you don’t like to see us do these things but we have to. If he’d come to us before and said what he wanted to do maybe we could have made a plan” I didn’t see the boy again”.

When asked what he thinks of the accu-

“Attempts to get close to the mines by those without permission are met with a stern refusal. The area around Chiadzwa is locked down by the military and access seems restricted to those involved with the mining and Kimberly Process inspectors”

Dirk-Jan Visser/ RAPPORT

sations of thievery and corruption aimed at the government he says “When the President is greedy, the people are poor”, “Zanu PF is desperate for funds right now and they’ll get that diamond money at any cost”.

Attempts to get close to the mines by those without permission are met with a stern refusal. The area around Chiadzwa is locked down by the military and access seems restricted to those involved with the mining and Kimberly Process inspectors.

Requesting not to be identified, an ex-executive at one of the largest mining companies in the world, originally involved in negotiations with the Zimbabwean government said “We were very interested. We could easily have made a deal but the government insisted on putting up barriers. At the end of the day they have a ten year track record of thievery. They’re just not to be trusted, look what’s happening now”.

Conflict over the sale of diamonds has spilled over into Zimbabwe’s domestic politics in recent weeks. Finance Minister Tendai Biti, an MDC MP, walked out of a cabinet meeting in June, frustrated with Obert Mpofu over the alleged corruption and missing public funds. Biti’s furious walkout left both Morgan Tsvangarai and Robert Mugabe stunned. Parliament seems to be split along party lines, with Zanu PF and MDC struggling against each other on the issue of diamonds, further testing relations within the ‘National Unity’ government.

Many believe the diamonds in Zimbabwe’s soil could be the source of its financial recovery. Certainly, if administered correctly and without excessive corruption, the mines could boost the fortunes of Zimbabwe’s economy which has flattened recently after showing promise. The scrapping of the hyper inflated Zimbabwe dollar and subsequent adoption of the US dollar have bolstered the economy and stabilised the country’s turbulent situation. Many Zimbabweans have been quietly optimistic until now, making the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to corrupt officials and politicians all the more heart breaking.

While entire regions depend on food aid, and electricity is considered a luxury rather than a necessity by many, the political upper class, fostered by Mugabe, line their pockets with the country’s resources.

While it was on its knees Zimbabwe was handed an opportunity by Mother Nature herself. At this point it remains to be seen whether or not that opportunity will be grasped or squandered. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 57

The WAR

ON SUPERBUGS: We’re Losing

Our arsenal of antibiotics is not being restocked through new research and development, and old diseases are now starting to make a horrifying comeback, writes TRINE TSOUDEROS 58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 59

N

obody knows where Simon Sparrow picked up the bug that killed him.

One sunny April morning six years ago, the curly-haired toddler woke up with flulike symptoms; by afternoon he was struggling for breath. He went into septic shock.

Doctors at the hospital gave him intravenous antibiotics, but the drugs failed.

By the next afternoon, Simon was dead at 18 months old, the victim of a highly drugresistant bacterium, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The day before, on the way to the hospital, he had learned the word “flower.”

“I was insane for a year,” said his mother, Everly Macario. “You feel like you are in a dream. You feel like you will wake up sometime.”

We have come to expect that modern medicine can cure just about any infection.

But bacteria are finding ways to evade, one by one, the drugs in our arsenal, and that arsenal is not being replenished with new antibiotics.

Drug companies are abandoning the antibacterial business, citing high development costs, low return on investment and, increasingly, a nearly decade-long stalemate with the US Food and Drug Administration over how to bring new antibiotics to market.

Soon, doctors fear, we could be defenceless against bacteria that can resist all existing antibiotics, which would mean more victims like Simon, dead from a staph infection that drugs used to conquer easily.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, an expert on antibiotic resistance, called the situation “catastrophic.”

At the core of the problem is a regulatory impasse over whether drug companies seeking FDA approval for antibiotics should be required to run much more stringent clinical trials.

The FDA says yes, citing advances in the science of clinical trial design and a series of humiliations involving trials for drugs the agency had approved, including the antibiotic Ketek.

“We don’t want to approve products that don’t work,” Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, told physicians and scientists gathered for a workshop on antibiotics and clinical trials in late July.

But the pharmaceutical industry and some infectious-disease doctors say the proposed rules will make it so difficult and expensive to gain approval for new antibiotics that the

few remaining companies will abandon the field altogether.

The debate over setting new guidelines for antibiotic clinical trials has lasted almost a decade. In two years there have been at least nine meetings among the FDA, pharmaceutical industry scientists and physicians, academics and infectious-disease doctors, but the group has agreed on little besides the dire need for new antibiotics.

At times the debate has been so heated that the acting chairman of an FDA committee opened a 2009 meeting by warning that he didn’t want to read the next day about police “having to arrest scientists for breaking shop windows and turning over cars.”

“I fear the conversation may be beyond all hope,” said infectious-disease specialist Spellberg, who has been involved in the

“Soon, doctors fear, we could be defenceless against bacteria that can resist all existing antibiotics, which would mean more victims dead from a staph infection that drugs used to conquer easily” meetings. “We’ve hashed and re-hashed the same things over and over.”

Dr. Edward Cox, director of the FDA’s Office of Antimicrobial Products, said there has been some progress, pointing to recently issued draft rules for antibiotic trials involving sinus infections, ear infections, a type of bronchitis, skin infections and communityacquired pneumonia.

However, Spellberg said, “The end result is exactly the same: No drugs.”

For years, new antibiotics often were approved based on clinical trials that didn’t have to show the new drug was better than an old one. Instead it had to fall within an acceptable margin of efficacy, which meant it could test somewhat worse and still be considered a success.

60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Just how much worse is OK with the FDA lies at the heart of the debate. The FDA wants the margins for these “non-inferiority trials” to be scientifically justified, and that may result in margins much tighter than before.

This type of trial has pitfalls, the FDA has said. If the definition of success is too loose, you might not be measuring efficacy at all.

A major scandal involving the antibiotic Ketek has fuelled the desire to change the rules. After the drug was approved, the FDA began hearing reports of severe liver problems in patients taking the drug for nonserious illnesses. At least one young man with a sinus infection died. Several FDA employees blew the whistle; congressional hearings followed.

At the centre of the scandal were the noninferiority trials used to test the drug. “The drug Ketek is a symptom of a much larger problem,” Dr. John Powers, the FDA’s former lead medical officer for antimicrobial development and resistance initiatives, testified in 2007 to a congressional subcommittee holding hearings sparked in part by the Ketek scandal.

The FDA is now proposing that antibiotics used to treat non-lethal infections which often resolve on their own, such as sinusitis, ear infections and bronchitis, be tested under different methods: superiority trials or placebo-based trials.

But showing one antibiotic is superior to another is hard because many antibiotics work so well, Spellberg said.

Cox of the FDA said clinical trials that show an experimental drug is significantly better than a current drug would provide clear evidence that the experimental drug works. He also acknowledged it may be difficult to show that an experimental antibacterial drug is better than a current drug.

Placebo trials, in which the drug is tested against a look-alike but useless pill or injection, are also unrealistic, according to some experts. It’s nearly impossible to persuade patients with a painful sinus infection to enrol in a study with a 50 percent chance of getting a sugar pill and not a drug, they said.

Dr. David Shlaes, who worked in pharmaceutical antibiotic development for decades and is now a consultant to the industry, said it is absurd to be, in effect, questioning if antibiotics work.

“This is like asking how do I know parachutes work? ... Those of us in infectious disease, we are all scratching our heads wondering: What the hell they are

mctgraphic, krtnational, national, bacteria, biology, drug, resistant, resistance, environment, public, bacterial, antibiotic, health, krthealth, krtenvironment, pollution, triclocarban, drug, antibacterial, soap, cleaner, farm, food, superbug, sewage, treatment, plant, sludge, fertilizer, krtworld, world, krtscitech, krttechnology, technology, contributed, risk diversity youth, wf, sm, science, matters, mccomas, mct, 2006, krt2006, kanaoka, potter, ml

talking about?” said Shlaes, whose book, “Antibiotics: The Perfect Storm,” will be published in the leadup to Christmas. “It is like proving gravity all over again.”

In the case of life-threatening infections such as community-acquired pneumonia, the FDA is discussing whether to require much stricter non-inferiority trials.

That, several experts said, would create new obstacles in a field where already there are few financial incentives to bring antibiotics to market.

Physicians use new antibiotics only sparingly because they want to keep bacteria from developing resistance. And people take the drugs only for a short time – a week, maybe two or three. By contrast, a blockbuster cholesterol drug does not need to be conserved, doesn’t lose potency and may be prescribed for a person’s entire life.

In 1980, 36 U.S. and European companies were in the antibiotic business, said Dr. Karen Bush, an Indiana University professor who recently left antibacterial development at Johnson & Johnson. “Today there are somewhere between four and seven large companies, depending on how you count,” she said.

Bush, Spellberg and Powers all consult for pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Barry Eisenstein, senior vice president for scientific affairs at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a US-based biotech company that makes the antibiotic CUBICIN, said that without clear FDA guidance, companies and investors will not want to pursue these types of trials.

Some are suggesting that for communityacquired pneumonia, antibiotics trials might require as many as 10,000 patients at a cost of about $50,000 a patient, or $500 million.

“Cubist barely makes that much a year,” he said.

“Nobody can run those trials,” said Shlaes.

“They live in a different world. Their world is numbers and logic. It is not patients and life.”

In an e-mail, Sharfstein wrote: “We are hearing the concerns and are working to make sure the pathway is realistic.”

A few days after an FDA meeting on clinical trials in December 2009, Tom Dukes felt a familiar pain in his abdomen. He thought it was just his diverticulitis again, and that a day or two of antibiotics would have him feeling fine.

He was right about the diagnosis, but this time the inflamed pouch in his colon was infected with drug-resistant E. coli. Oral antibiotics failed and he became deathly ill, requiring emergency surgery. “I still have

Science Matters

How drug-resistant bacteria spread

Bacteria that are immune to antibiotics are often created when ordinary bacteria mix with chemicals in the sewage system; the use of solid waste on farms then sends the bacteria into the food supply.

Bacteria and chemicals mix in sewers

Hospital

3 Sewage treatment plants Encourage growth of bacteria to digest sewage Some bacteria develop resistance to antibacterial drugs or chemicals here

Nursing home

Homes

Food supply

C C

Grocery store

Sewer system

TRICLOCARBAN

C C N

C C C N

Sewage treatment plant

5

Some farm products, contaminated with bacteria, go back to consumers

Antibacterial chemical widely used in hand soaps and disinfectants

O C C

C C

C C

75% of massive amount

Cl

used by consumers is flushed into sewers

Sludge

4 Farms

Antibacterial chemicals are also dumped into waterways

Antibacterial soap, disinfectants Used heavily by hospitals and nursing homes, then washed into sewer

Cl

2 Antibiotics and other medications Human body only absorbs 30% to 70%; rest passes through body and is flushed into sewer system

1

Source: AntibioticPharmacy.com, New Scientist, Frederick A. Senese of Frostburg State University (Maryland), E/The Environmental Magazine, Rolf Halden of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Science News Online

dreams about those last 10 seconds before they were going to knock me out,” said Dukes, of Lomita, Calif. “I remember thinking, ‘I wish I had one more day. I wish I had one more day.’ “ Doctors threaded a thin tube into his heart to deliver the more exotic antibiotic ertapenem. It worked. Dukes lost 8 inches of his colon, wore a colostomy bag for months, was out of work for five months and lost 10kg off his fit, 52-year-old frame, but he lived.

Without effective antibiotics, the whole medical system falls apart, experts say.

Simple problems like diverticulitis turn into life-threatening medical crises. Surgery becomes much riskier without antibiotics that can keep infection at bay.

“People have to understand how much of our medical way of life is completely dependent on antibiotics,” said infectious disease physician and scientist Dr. Lou Rice, vice

Sewage ‘sludge’ Solid part of sewage; contains bacteria and antibacterial chemicals

60% of sludge is dried and used

as fertilizer; contains drug-resistant bacteria, some of them disease-causing “superbugs”

© 2006 MCT Graphic: Steven Potter and Rika Kanaoka, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University Hospitals of Cleveland.

Rice also sits on two pharmaceutical company boards.

“We would have no transplants without antibiotics,” Rice said. “Much of cancer we are able to treat because of antibiotics. ...

This is a big problem that will alter our way of life.”

Macario, who lost her toddler son, Simon, to an MRSA infection, said his death reminded her of tragedies suffered long ago, from a time before antibiotics.

“Before Simon died I thought that infectious diseases were a thing of the past,” said Macario, who helped found the MRSA Research Centre at the University of Chicago. “Losing my son made me appreciate the profound and habitual pain and grief families a half of a century ago experienced.”

q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 61

n THINK LIFE

money

A break in the weather?

Peter Hensley ponders a financial forecast

M

oira said under her breath “I swear Jim pays more attention to that damn weather station than he does to Jim Hickey. He is constantly checking to see if the atmospheric pressure is going up, or down. It could be going around in circles for all I care”. Jim had been thrilled when the kids presented him with the new age electronic barometer for his latest birthday.

It came with a wireless remote outdoor sensor which meant he could keep track of the temperature outside as well as inside.

Jim had tried on several occasions to explain to Moira the difference between hectopascals and kilopascals and why Jim Hickey preferred to defer to the former rather than the latter as a measure of atmospheric air pressure. Moira simply did not

care. She did care about the state of their finances, although she was more concerned about some of their friends as she knew that she and Jim had more than enough to get by. It was almost as if she had an inbuilt “Economic Sensor Weather Station” and she did not like the signals it was giving off.

While Jim was again deferring to his electronic weather station prior to making a decision whether to hang the washing on the line, Moira was concerned about the decline in the interest they were receiving on their investments. She knew many of their friends had funds maturing with the few finance companies which were still operating and they had all informed her they were planning to withdraw their deposits when the security blanket of the

62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Government Guarantee was removed. Their collective voice had resonated that they had lost enough to date and they were not keen to lose any more.

Moira shuddered at the thought. The financial system was based on confidence and she could see that this was slowly being eroded. Investors were now focused on reducing risk. Many were heeding advice from brokers and altering the ownership of their investment so that they would qualify unequivocally should the institution they were invested with have to call upon the Government Guarantee. This in turn reinforced the concept that the non bank finance sector was in danger of being seriously downsized.

Whilst her intuitive sensor was emitting a danger warning, Moira was not keen to contemplate the impact that this erosion of confidence could have on the wider community. She was aware that Corporate New Zealand was itself reducing risk and busy eliminating all but essential debt from their balance sheets.

This combined with the demise of the finance company sector has seen personal investment portfolio cash accounts slowly expand with excess funds awaiting the release of suitable new fixed interest investment products. The immediate forecast suggests that this problem is only going to get larger. Moira bemoaned the fact that there was a decided lack of suitable investment opportunities available.

Moira was aware that the problem was actually bigger than that. In a recent white paper written by her investment adviser he highlighted the lack of suitable investment products that supplied retirees with reliable income streams.

New Zealand does not have an annuity market, nor does it have an allocated pension market, nor does it have suitable products which allow for systematic drawdown of capital. Every other first world country has these types of investments available.

Australia has a mature sophisticated array of such products and all of them have governmental support and are treated preferentially in respect of taxation. This is a direct spin off from compulsory superannuation which was introduced in 1994.

Australians accept that capital draw down (consumption of savings) is not only inevitable but practical. They have a wide range of investment products which provide allocated pensions, which is in effect a systematic payment of their own savings back to them

which goes to supplement the aged pension.

These products attract a tax of only 15% on gains and the regular payments are not considered to be income and as such are tax free.

Equivalent products do not exist in New Zealand.

Moira tried to conjure what the future could bring. She considered the following facts: (a) obvious lack of confidence in the non bank deposit taking sector (b) obvious increase in investor’s portfolio cash accounts (c) obvious lack of suitable income producing investment products and (d) absence of allocated pension market and (e) lack of Government support and direction in the sector as a whole.

Inside a low interest environment Moira came to the conclusion that NZ investors are likely to step up to the mark and devise their own mix of investments that (a) will allow for the maximum interest rate of return and (b) they will be forced to start consuming their own capital.

The Australian Government has already set guidelines specifying the percentage amount of a superannuation fund that must be distributed in a year. The scale is based solely on age and ranges on a sliding scale from 5 % for those aged 65 up to 14% for

those aged 95 plus. The guidelines recognise that the investment vehicles were designed with strong tax incentives with the sole purpose of having the funds paid out in retirement. It won’t take long for us to work it out for ourselves.

Moira looked over to Jim and saw that he was glowing. His weather station was proving to be more reliable than the media forecasters. In a quiet way Moira was happy for him, overall they had had what some people deemed to be a perfect life. Their family was intact, the grandchildren were showing promising academic skills and the youngest grandie was displaying remarkable athletic ability. She knew that they were financially well off because they had worked as a team from the very beginning. They had followed the fundamental law of spending less than they earned and they saved the difference.

Over time they extinguished their debts and in turn grew their investment portfolio.

They learnt from experience that diversification was a sound practice as not all of the securities flourished, indeed many had failed.

Moira made sure she kept up to date with world events and she was firmly of the opinion that the Global Financial Crisis was a train wreck in slow motion, and that we

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were only part way thru. It started with a world-wide tsunami of debt which swamped developed nations and inflated asset prices across the board. Collective Governments saw the outgoing tide threatened the fragile financial system and so they quickly stepped up to the plate, implemented fiscal stimuli and guaranteed individual countries banks.

Their promises worked and confidence has slowly seeped back into the system. In trying to fix the problem the authorities have watched the predicament slowly evolve from a banking crisis to a sovereign debt crisis.

Moira’s concern was that the lack of confidence currently being exposed in the non bank deposit taking sector could just as quickly morph into a lack of confidence in the wider financial system. Her inbuilt economic radar system was encouraging her mind to drift over to the dark side when she suddenly saw Jim beaming with delight as he explained the features of his new weather station to his favourite granddaughter. Moira realised that she should ignore the forecast and they would deal with the future when it arrived, not before.

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

Copyright © Peter J Hensley August 2010

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 September 2010 63

n THINK LIFE

education

The education test If nothing sets people further apart than the limitations of their language, it’s time for the reintroduction of thorough and systematic teaching, writes Amy Brooke

H

ow well were you taught? Test your knowledge of basic grammar and syntax.

Identify any common errors in the following sentences. Answers below.

1. For heaven’s sake, do it like I showed you!

2. Surely it’s not that difficult?

3. Coming home the storm caused a delay.

4. The finest example of her courage was when she refused to answer.

5. Also, you’ve been told before not to do this.

6. Come quick!

7a. He asked whether he may come. 7b. He’s asking whether he might come.

8. Why do you dislike him objecting to the idea?

9. She’s the one who they’ve chosen for the part.

10. We arrived here yesterday, the weather is wonderful.

11. Outside of the building rubbish lay everywhere.

12. My sister and myself are happy to accept your invitation.

64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

What would you expect of a country with a supposed education system which had gradually become managed by a pernicious politburo, the Guardians of which deliberately, and I mean deliberately, had managed to dumb down as far as possible what was taught to that country’s children? Yes, there would always be some very bright children who would elude the Guardians. The former’s high intelligence and thirst for knowledge would save some – aided by those very few élite schools still insisting on traditional quality teaching, vying for the best teachers and supported by determined parents.

And, of course, the smattering countrywide of a small proportion of genuinely enthusiastic, deeply knowledgeable teachers who loved their subjects and their job would save others.

However, the same Guardians would work hard to get rid of the latter. To discourage them and dampen down their hope of achieving better things for their pupils, this politburo would constantly smother them in an ever-increasing pile of bumf – tedious, jargon-ridden, repetitive, unnecessary paperwork, superfluous requirements, internal assessments, compliance requests – using all the hydra-headed ways a damaging bureaucracy can employ. This bureaucracy, after all, would have an agenda. But what would it be, one might wonder.

Do we know such a country? Would there be others as well? Would this deliberate attempt to destroy an education system be a one-off attempt confined to this particular country, or might it be part of an ideology the intent of which was to cause as much damage to this country and other countries as possible? What might they have in common? How could we tell? Would the wisdom of our own forbears be useful – they who themselves faced the same age-old battles? Because the perennial battle never stops, does it – although the intervening skirmishes, even wars, are won?

Any system of attack which focuses on our young, our most vulnerable, as well as the very truth of issues, has to be basically that of the dark versus the light, or in terms that are conveniently currently unfashionable, that of good versus evil. What at any rate could a very old book which dealt with the reality of these perennial attacks have to say that might shed light on what might be at stake?

By their fruits you shall know them. Possibly?

Then let’s check. Would the people of this country be educated in a real sense of the word? Would they speak well, think well,

know and understand their history and that of the civilisation they inherited? Its greatest moments? What happened and when, and why it was crucially important? Its battle for survival against attacks from within and without? Would they understand and value the fact that this is a country of the West and that its values will only prevail as long as they understand their underpinning?

That these are those of Christianity, which, despite the inevitable flaws inherit in any human-inhabited system, has laid down the best and most enduring set of precepts to live by that any civilisation has known? Each individual born helpless into the world is, in a Christian society, regarded as unique and valuable, whether rich or poor, regardless of gender or social status, to be treated as one would wish to be treated oneself. Its golden rule has never been bettered by that of any other creed held by any peoples throughout history, the ultimate wisdom of – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – the essential goal to be aimed for, guided by conscience. Centering on the development of individual conscience and learning would be essential for this society’s well-being, its very stability.

What greater aim could any society have than the important recognition that as this aim, like all worthwhile things, must be constantly striven for, its young should be taught it for the ultimate good and superiority of their society over any other, for its peace and harmony? Should they not be made aware that although democracy is not perfect, it best protects its members from birth to old age, because it is based on the dignity and freedom of the individual to think for him or herself? It allows people the possibility to choose their own paths, based on informed thinking, provided that they do not act against the safety and interests of others.

Such a society, understanding the destructive potential of those who would seek to destroy it from within, would have to be prepared to ultimately fight to preserve its own values, its people. It would not be weak enough to allow or even encourage the destructive teaching that all societies have equally valuable cultural beliefs, even those which basically preach death to outsiders, which subjugate women and tolerate, even promote barbaric customs and traditions rejected centuries ago by far more advanced civilisations. It would not regard some of its own members as more special, deserving of divisive privileges, nor pander to constant

It would not be weak enough to allow or even encourage the destructive teaching that all societies have equally valuable cultural beliefs, even those which promote barbaric customs and traditions rejected centuries ago by far more advanced civilisations INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 65

claims for egoistical attention-seeking, for mana to be satisfied. It would not kowtow to aggressive, bowdlerized, even culpably untrue claims centre-staging such people for their personal benefit and self-aggrandizement. No; the wise society would not be divided against itself. It could not stand.

And for this reason, it would not open its gates to floods of immigrant peoples with disparate, even antagonistic values. First with the head – then with the heart – neither without the other – would be its best judgment.

But what if all was not well? What if some decades had passed since the golden days of that society, and that of the West itself?

What if it had lost so much of the flower of its youth in its defence that its opponents, periodically defeated but wedded still to pernicious ideologies, had wreaked extraordinary damage by stealthily insinuating themselves into its most vital institutions – especially those crucial to the future of that country – those guiding its youth? What if for over half a century they had succeeded in spreading throughout the system, determined to cloud the minds of the young and to substitute for real learning (subjects of genuine and lasting value) superficial playway forms of infotainment – arguing that this was all the young could manage? What if their specious claims had been that knowledge and learning should not be inappropriately “imposed” on the children of this country, that they should be left “to generate their own learning”?

Might you not begin to see that such school leavers, now adults themselves, in turn parents of their own children passing through the school system, would be worryingly ignorant, different in behaviour, knowing far less than previous generations, uncertain of their beliefs, having undergone a well-planned barrage of disinformation and politicization overseen by the Guardians? Would it concern any thinking individual that these adults, as well as their children, were far less capable of actually thinking – and that many of them in turn, having been encouraged to regard themselves with a blinkered self-esteem, were now programmed to be teachers, educationists, lawyers, parliamentarians, consultants, university lecturers, media columnists and commentators – under informed, and essentially, historically and philosophically, very deeply ignorant? Would this concern you?

Would you then really be surprised if the under-educated had finally begun to be the majority? As this society’s level of ignorance

gradually rose, its values subverted or discarded, would you expect changes to occur, manners to decline and a people adrift – separated from their cultural roots and the knowledge and wisdom of their forebears’ generation – to begin to revert to a less stable society? When the old taboos passed on by the wisdom of their fathers’ and mothers’ own fathers and mothers began to be discarded, would not antisocial behaviour

Would you then really be surprised if the undereducated had finally begun to be the majority? As this society’s level of ignorance gradually rose, its values subverted or discarded, would you expect changes to occur, manners to decline and a people adrift – separated from their cultural roots and the knowledge and wisdom of their forebears’ generation – to begin to revert to a less stable society?

and crime begin to increase, at first gradually, then gathering momentum, until antisocial and disruptive happenings, violence, even brutal murders were now commonplace? What if it came to the point that the prisons could no longer hold those ill-served by the Guardians’ targeted attack on that society? What if the people of this country now had a reputation for aggressive yobbish behaviour to such an extent that the

66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

drunken antics of crowds watching their favourite sports appalled visitors? What if the rapidly dwindling older generation of those looking back in disquiet to a time preceding the recent decades of dissolution was consequently pilloried, beginning to be regarded as disposable?

What if the increasingly aggressive, drunk, promiscuous and drug-ridden young were making city areas and suburban streets unsafe? What if this society’s women were now becoming morally adrift, foul-mouthed and aggressive? What if media women, themselves once admired for their achievements, were dressing as if sexually available, habitually using crude language and referring disparagingly to their own bodies (tits, boobs, bums, getting their shit together) severely damaging the respect which women once compelled from men by the standards of behaviour they insisted on? If people’s lives had become so confused that rubbishy, third-rate music ruled the airwaves; that incompetent junk “art” fetched risible prices, bought by those who knew no better; that architecture became pretentious and ugly; that what was once was once the expectation of great literature and poetry had long receded, overwhelmed by a wave of third-rate if not actually pernicious writing promoted by the Guardians – now controlling an entrenched establishment?

Who could any longer regard the future of that society as promising, with its growing trail of broken marriages, disturbed, undisciplined children, babies and toddlers prematurely farmed out to crèches, if not actually destroyed in the barbarism of abortion? – sons or daughters deliberately and cruelly killed before birth – the ultimate act of a society in the process of destroying itself.

Where would the attack on morality itself, on standards of excellence, on deep learning, and sustained thinking first have been directed?

The answer has to be through the language of the people. As language underpins thinking and the quality of our thinking determines our lives, it is crucial for the enemies of society to downgrade and destroy as much as possible the quality and competence of a people’s use of language. It is through language that individuals connect, make themselves understood or misunderstood, remove or inadvertently produce ambiguities in communication. The Guardians well knew that Plato said , “If a man neglects his education he walks lame for the rest of his life.” This has well suited their purposes.

As language underpins thinking and the quality of our thinking determines our lives, it is crucial for the enemies of society to downgrade and destroy as much as possible the quality and competence of a people’s use of language

Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Johnson said, “Wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted, language is. It imitates the public riot.” The fine novelist Storm Jameson acutely observed, “When language is impoverished, all is impoverished…{this} weakens still further the most critical of all links with the past and future of our common culture, and adds to the chaos and unhappiness of our time.”

Was it then an accidental, the result of sheer ignorance, that caused the Guardians of our education politburo to mount their greatest initial attack on literacy, on replacing phonic teaching methods, on downgrading the chances of our children to both read and write well? Removing the requirements to use language well, to require the correct use of grammar and syntax – the tools of accuracy and clarity in thinking – they insisted that any-old-how was fine – as long as everybody could more or less “communicate” – and they trapped successive, themselves under-educated Ministers of Education in the web of their specious arguments.

How well did they do their job? And how many even understand the corrections to these overwhelmingly prevalent grammatical

and syntactical mistakes today found everywhere in this country, even among supposed professionals in language use?

To those who think they are not important, let the reminder be that language is the crucial index of the health of a society, that its disintegration starts with the disintegration of the language – and that nothing sets people further apart than the limitations of their language Where to from there?

How well were you taught?

Answers: 1. This is a very prevalent mistake. However, “like” is not a conjunction, but a prepositional adjective (Anna was like her sister) or a prepositional adverb (He talks like an expert) The sentence should read … “do it as I showed you”. (N.B. “However” is not a conjunction either, although commonly misused as such.)

2. Surely it’s not so difficult? “That” is a demonstrative adjective or pronoun – not an adverb of degree, and cannot modify the adjective “difficult”.

3. “Coming” is a mis-related present participle.

Being a verbal adjective, the present participle must have a noun or noun-equivalent in the principal clause to relate to, as close as possible to the par-

ticiple. It is not the storm which was coming home.

4. The verb “was” should not be followed by an adverbial clause but by a noun or noun equivalent – e.g. The finest example of her courage was “her refusal to answer..” .or…was “that she refused to answer”.

5. The verb “Come” requires an adverb, “quickly” – not the adjective “quick’.

6. Omit “Also”, which is an adverb, not a conjunction.

7a) He asked whether he might come. 7b) He’s asking whether he may come.

If the verb in the principal clause is in a primary tense, i.e. present, true perfect (with “have”) or future perfect, “may” is used in a subordinate clause to express purpose. If the verb in the principal clause is in the past tense, use “might” in a subordinate clause to express purpose.

8. Why do you dislike his objecting to the idea?

“Objecting” is a verbal noun or gerund, and a noun or pronoun used before a gerund must be in the possessive, not the objective case. It’s implied not that you dislike “him” but his action of objecting to the proposal.

9. “She’s the one whom they’ve chosen for the part.” A relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in number and person but takes its case from its position in its own clause. Here, whom is the object of the verb “chosen” in the relative clause – “whom they’ve chosen for the part”.

10. Possibly the most common mistake today in writing English, common even among university graduates, is the use of a comma instead of a full stop to separate complete sentences. Unless such sentences are linked by a conjunction, a comma cannot be used.

11. The use of two prepositions – “outside of” is quite wrong but is now regularly heard from media commentators.

12. Recast as “My sister and I…” An emphatic pronoun such as “myself” should not be used as the subject of a verb. Though seemingly in apposition to a nominative personal pronoun, this emphasizing pronoun is really in the objective case, a pronoun such as “for” being understood.

Results?

Given the longtime malaise in the teaching of English, if you can even understand the definitions and the corrections in these examples you are doing very well. It’s a safe bet that by far the majority of today’s English teachers would fail most of these questions.

Who is checking their standards? © Copyright Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.100days.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 67

n THINK LIFE

science

Once were warriors How did gladiators really fight? Albert Otti follows history students on a journey of discovery

W

earing nothing but a loincloth, history student David Vogelbacher stood in an ancient amphitheatre near Vienna on a recent morning, sparred with a sword and went about learning a new occupation – gladiator.

He and 19 other students have embarked on an experimental archaeology project in the former Roman city of Carnuntum near the Austrian capital, in an effort to find out

how these fighters trained and battled in their bloody spectacles.

The group of young men from Regensburg University in Germany has set up camp at Carnuntum for two weeks in August, living in tents without beds or other comforts.

A team of archaeologists, sports scientists and psychologists want to measure how their training changes their bodies, and whether it has an effect on their aggression levels.

68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

After the sparring exercises in hot sunlight on a recent morning, the students started lifting logs to gain strength. Most of them had little in common with the muscular he-men depicted in films like the 2000 hit Gladiator.

“I haven’t done any sports for the past eight years,” said Vogelbacher, who is slim and wears dark long dreadlocks and a beard.

But gladiators in the ancient Roman empire came in various shapes and sizes, depending on the roles that they played in the games of the ancient Roman empire.

Equipped with a short curved sword and metal helmet, Vogelbacher is training to become a so-called Thracian.

Traditionally his opponent would be a heavily armed Murmillo, a role assigned to the big-bodied students at Carnuntum.

“Some of them were incredibly unfit,” the group’s trainer Christian Eckert said of his disciples. The bronzed, muscular martial arts expert started coaching the group in March.

By the time they came to Austria they were able to bear the more than seven hours of training in Carnuntum, which consists of power exercises, sword fighting techniques and boxing.

Eckert had little to work with besides the historically accurate weapons and armour that allow for certain movements and make others difficult.

As his students started to use the equipment, things started to fall into place naturally.

“More and more we notice that they use certain postures that we also find on historical pictures and reliefs,” Eckert said.

But he also searched beyond Roman history and borrowed traditional techniques that are practised in India by Kushti wrestlers and Kalari Payatti martial arts fighters.

Eckert compared his work to that of an archaeologist: “You can put together the shards, but many holes will remain. So you fill them.”

While details of gladiator fighting remain murky, more is known about Carnuntum.

From the first century, Carnuntum developed into an important military base and town of up to 50,000 people. It lay on the crossroads of two important trade routes.

On of them was the Danube, the Roman empire’s northern border.

Archaeologists have been able to dig up much of the settlement and have fully rebuilt several buildings.

While the historical gladiators lived in barrack-like quarters, the modern trainees

have to sleep in tents, resting on straw and hides.

The young men eat mostly food made from lentils, other pulses and cereals. They shun meat, following a diet that earned their ancient colleagues the nick-name “grain munchers.”

“It makes one feel very well and healthy,” said Latin student Florian Gartner. He said he planned to continue this diet as long as he is in university and has to live off a small budget.

From studying gladiator skeletons, archaeologists believe that this grain diet led to a speedier recovery from bone fractures.

Those fighters stood not only a high chance of injury, but also of death. At least every tenth of them did not survive their armed clashes, according to Eckert.

While these men were fighting for their lives, their modern successors in Carnuntum were just trying not to get hurt.

Vogelbacher already had a cut on his forehead. He said he was glad their metal swords are blunt.

“If the blades were sharp, we would have killed ourselves several times already,” he said. “Compared to the originals, we are just a bunch of kindergartners.”

The young men eat mostly food made from lentils, other pulses and cereals. They shun meat, following a diet that earned their ancient colleagues the nick-name “grain munchers”

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 69

n THINK LIFE

technology

No guarantees Sometimes, big name brands like Toshiba computers aren’t worth the money you pay for them, as Ian Wishart discovered

O

ften, with products you buy, initial reviews might be good or bad, but over a longer time different things emerge that make you re-consider the product in a new light.

So, we’ve decided to provide a semi-regular slot for extra long term, “out of warranty” feedback on products, good and bad, that Investigate has come across. This month, it’s brickbats for the Toshiba Tecra A9 series computers.

It’s galling, because Toshiba charge a premium for their products, over and above comparable or better offerings from less widelyknown manufacturers. For that premium, customers expect reliability.

The model in question is a 2008 version, powered by a Centrino Duo chip and packing 2 gigabytes of RAM. Touted by Toshiba as a business desktop replacement, this notebook carried high expectations with it into the Investigate office. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

On paper it’s a powerful machine and rugged – capable of taking hard knocks and offering fingerprint security access. But after-sales service from both Toshiba and its retailer PB Technologies was appalling.

When the AC power pack expired in mid 2009, one week outside its manufacturer’s warranty, PB Technologies refused to replace the power pack (even under threat of the Consumer Guarantees Act), and Toshiba likewise wiped their hands of the problem.

While one could have forced a fight under the Consumer Guarantees Act, it’s a long drawn out process and serious computer users don’t have the luxury of time to waste.

When the power pack failed again at the start of 2010, PB Technologies tried to avoid providing a new replacement, although we forced them in the end.

But the Toshiba developed worse traits in 2009 – regular unbidden collapses into a blue screen of death which Toshiba insisted were software related, and nothing to do with a probably faulty motherboard.

Regular full recoveries back to the original operating system “out of the box” sta-

Investigate recommendation

NEW: Asus N61JV, getting rave reviews overseas

tus did nothing to improve the Tecra A9’s reliability. An upgrade to Windows 7 has made no difference either – the Toshiba remains buggy, slow and crash-prone. Almost from day one, the Toshiba has been a worse performer than the machine it replaced, a 2006 Asus M6000 Pentium 4.

What to replace it with?

It was back to Asus again, this time the just released N61JV series notebook, featuring ultra-speed USB 3.0 (up to 10x faster than USB 2.0) and an i5 Intel Core processor inside. I’m pleased to say that despite the usual Windows conflicts that arise from time to time, the Asus is like liquid lightning when it comes to performance. The iSeries chips come in i3, i5 or i7. In theory i7 is the most powerful variant, but in fact the i5 turns out to be a better all-round performer for general duties across business requirements and graphic-heavy programmes like video editing or Photoshop.

70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Don’t touch Toshiba’s Tecra series notebooks without first finding long-term users you personally know, who like them. There are much better notebook computers, with more features, at lower prices and with better customer support. In our view the Toshiba brand is no longer the diamond standard it used to be.

Investigate won’t be buying Toshiba again.

And be prepared to raise your voice in a PB Technologies store. The Consumer Guarantees Act seems wasted on them as they try to hide behind the skirts of their suppliers: “You’ll have to take it up with Toshiba, not our problem”.

So if you have an after-sales issue be sure to print a copy of the Act off the internet, and seek some advice from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs so you are armed with knowledge of what they are required by law to do as a retailer, before demanding PB Tech sort it out.

OLD: Toshiba Tecra A9, avoid like the plague

7SPOTL_INSTGE

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 71

n THINK LIFE

online

with Chillisoft

The dangers of casual search Before clicking on that link in Google search, have you taken precautions?

Y

ou use search engines. Everyone does.

So legitimate websites use a technique know as SEO (search engine optimisation) to ensure that their sites are near the top when you search on a particular topic.

But anything that works for honest people has to work even better for scam artists. Hence the growing threat from Black Hat SEO. A particular juicy target are gamers, especially on social networks as ESET blogger David Harley1 reports. “Black-Hat SEO is used by malware authors to position the malicious links in the top results when a potential victim uses certain topical search terms. We’ve mostly seen this technique used to infect users of online games, and more recently, targeting to a much greater extent the many millions of users of social networks that play games.

“Malicious URLs turn up at or near the top of searches to do with gaming tricks, guides, weapons and a number of improvements, depending on the application. In addition, the text of the link promises user instant gratification and increase in gaming

advantage, cultivating the attention of gamers who want to take shortcuts to achieve immediately what might take others days.

“Another technique that is in fashion is the development of what are passed off as hacks for social networking games. However, to achieve the promised advantages, the victim must execute a suspicious application or copy javascript code or a URL into a browser, resulting in the download of malicious software applications targeting millions of users of games such as FarmVille or Mafia Wars.” Ouch!

“ESET advises that users of these types of online applications use caution. Trying to get some gaming advantage through untrustworthy channels and resources may result in infection, and we advise you not to trust dodgy pages or applications if you come across them.”

But these cyber-creeps don’t just target gamers. Any time a major event occurs – earthquake, plane crash, even the world cup – malware writers don’t waste any time and cloak their nasty code inside benign-looking news sites. Bloggers at the Securityblog

(http://www.thesecurityblog.com/2010/02/ malicious-web-site-malicious-code-blackhat-seo-turns-to-pdf-with-chile-and-hawaiidisasters/) explain. “Over 13% of all searches on Google looking for popular and trending topics will lead to malicious links and searching for the latest news on the earthquake in Chile and the tsunami hitting Hawaii are no exception. Both are now used to lure people into downloading fake antivirus products.”

Scareware What? Malware purveyors shilling fake antivirus? One of the most ironic scams going has to be so-called ‘scareware’ or fake antivirus software. You almost have to give these crooks points for sheer audacity. Blogger Anup Ghosh (http://www.invincea.com/ blog/?p=641) reports that “Google researchers recently shed light on the extent of the Fake AV problem with a paper “The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AntiVirus Distribution.” The Google team analysed 240 million web pages over a 13-month period (January 1, 2009 to January 31, 2010) and found 11,000 unique domains involved in Fake AV distribution.

“To give an indication of the rise in this threat, the number of domains harbouring Fake AV rose from 3% to 15% of all Webborne malware domains Google detected over the course of its study. Purveyors of Fake AV utilise BlackHat SEO techniques effectively to ensure users are directed to domains under their control when searching on popular topics. Google found that over 60% of the popular infection domains were Fake AV domains.

These guys move quick. “Another startling finding from the Google paper is the median lifetime for a Fake AV domain dropped dramatically from over 100 hours in early 2009 to under one hour in January 2010. This means that a malware site hosting a Fake AV may only last for less than an hour before it is taken down by its creator.” You’ve got to give them credit!

Just remember it’s a jungle out there so be careful.

Hacked together by Chillisoft NZ from various sources, blogs and ramblings including David Harley (CITP FBCS CISSP), Senior Research Fellow, ESET LLC (developers of ESET NOD32 antivirus software).

REFERENCES 1. http://blog.eset.com/2010/06/19/blackhat-seo-uses-online-games-to-distributemalware

72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 73

FEEL LIFE SPORT

Tour de Dean

The 2010 edition of cycling’s greatest race proved to be an incredible ride for the sprint specialist Julian Dean. A mix of speed, determination and fate transformed his three week trek around France into a one-man highlights reel. Chris Forster has the inside running on a remarkable New Zealander.

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ean served up a champagne finale to the best Tour de France in years. He sprung clear from a bunch of the best sprinters in the world, to catapult into third place on the famed Champs Elysees stage.

It’s the procession every sprinter who’s survived the gut-busting slog around beautiful French real estate, wants to shine in.

He was in elite company, tucked in behind the Isle of Man rocket-ship – Mark Cavendish, and the winner of the Green Jersey in the Points classification, Italy’s Alessandro Petacchi.

Not bad for a 35 year old who was once described by famed teammate Thor Hushovd as the “best lead-out man in the world”. He

was referring to Dean’s usual role as a set-up man rather than a glory boy.

This year it was time for something completely different.

A strange twist of events pushed him into the torrent of coverage that swirls around le Tour.

“Certainly it’s been my best. I’ve had the most opportunities for myself and I’ve been able to convert a couple of those into podium finishes”.

The trio of top three finishes, plus another top ten had transformed Dean into the prime strike weapon for his American team, Garmin Transitions.

“It was a little bit hectic but … everyone

74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

wants to win in Paris and part of the final surge there. A little bit disorganised, a bit of a free-for-all, but I managed to get a good wheel in the finishing straight, but I never had the speed to compete with Cavendish”.

But fate was about to enter Dean’s world.

It wasn’t just going to be a team man stealing some of the glory.

He was one of many riders to come to grief in the crash-strewn start to the Tour, particularly on the infamous cobblestoned sections of the stages in Belgium, before the riders headed over the border to more familiar surfaces.

He needed hospital treatment for facial cuts while Garmin’s number one sprint hope

Tyler Farrar was struggling with a broken wrist.

Two days later the patched-up Dean claimed an improbable and historic second place behind the man who was to prove his nemesis – the unstoppable Mark Cavendish.

Controversy struck for the feisty veteran a week later.

He was trying to help his mate Farrar scoot to victory on a stage after the climbs through the Alps.

In the mad dash to the finish line, Dean was head-butted three times by Australian rival Mark Renshaw, while trying to clear a path for Farrar.

Renshaw became the first man in two years to be banished from the Tour, but this time it was bad behaviour rather than steroid abuse.

It was hardly a trans-Tasman incident to rival the MCG underarm of 30 years ago, but it did deflect some of the global media focus away from the epic battle unfolding between defending champ Alberto Contador and Luxembourg’s pretender to the crown, Andy Schleck.

Dean’s got no ill-feelings towards his Aussie rival.

“The Tour de France is full of drama and full of needle. There are always ups and downs. I got shot last year. So I’m not sure it’s as bad as that was”.

He was referring to the idiot who sprayed an air gun load of pellets towards him and another rider during a descent down one of the Alpine stages, and the pellet which got lodged in one of his fingers.

There was another crazy incident to come this year, although this was more Inspector Clouseau than high speed hi-jinks.

Dean was mistaken for a citizen trying to impersonate a rider, when he was warming on his bike, and crash-tackled by an overzealous policeman.

The Gendarme cut his hand in his desperate bid to stop a would-be intruder, but even had another go at stopping Dean from riding down to join the rest of his teammates.

On the road again and Farrar finally gave into his sore wrist.

Dean had the chance to push for victory on a flat stage he’d targetted after surviving four tortured days in the Pyrenees.

Yet again he was undone by the unstoppable Cavendish, who had similar designs on a fourth victory before the decisive Time Trial the next day.

Two days later it was to Paris, and that crowning podium for Dean.

DEAN’S FAB FIVE

“The last two tours have certainly been something quite bizarre. I’ve crashed. I’ve been in hospital. I’ve been on the podium, I’ve been tackled by a policeman. I’ve been head butted by another rider. And last year I was shot. So it’s been full on that’s for sure”.

That’s a typical understatement for a man who’s been nicknamed “the Kiwi guy” by his American teammates.

Adrenalin gave way to exhaustion as Dean took stock of his efforts with his wife and two young children at his Spanish retreat near Barcelona.

He decided to pull-out of the Commonwealth Games road cycling team in Delhi. It was a case of a bridge to far after his 15th professional season in Europe, although he will still honour his commitment to New Zealand at the UCI Road World Championships in Melbourne in September, before winding down his huge year.

“I’m really tired after the tour. I can only hold onto my form to the World Champs.

It’s an individual decision. There are also a lot of young riders to have a shot at a medal. They’ll be in better condition than I could get to.

“I need readjustment physically and mentally after all the hype that goes with the Tour de France. Every year we have an

ON THE 2010 TOUR

STAGE 4 – Cambres to Reims, 153.5 km.

2nd behind Petacchi

STAGE 2 – Sisteron to Bourg-les-Valence, 184.5 km. Headbutt by Renshaw, who was banished from le Tour.

STAGE 13 – Rodez to Revel, 196 km. 6th place. Alexander Vinikourov wins.

STAGE 18 – Salles-de-Bearns to Bordeaux, 198 km. 2nd behind Cavendish STAGE 20 – Longjumou to Paris, 102.5 km. 3rd behind Cavendish and Pettachi (Finished 14th overall in the Points classification, just behind General classification runner-up, Andy Schleck)

increasing pool of young talent, which made it easier to withdraw”.

Deans has one more year left on his pro contract with Garmin, how much longer than that will be an annual re-evaluation.

Hayden Roulston and Greg Henderson failed to make the cut for their pro-teams this year leaving their teammate as the lone rider from New Zealand.

Julian Dean made a lot of noise for a quiet achiever.

Rotterdam Prologue

START

NETHERLANDS

Wanze

50 miles

FINISH

Spa

GERMANY

LUX.

Paris

50 km

Champs-Elysees

Reims Epernay

Longjumeau

Montargis

Route

F

Transfer Stage start

R

N

C

Time trial

Bordeaux

Mende Rodez

2,263 miles (3,642 km)

Station des Rousses SWITZ.

Morzine-Avoriaz

Tournus

Bourg-de-Peage

Rest day Salies-de-Bearn

E

Chambery

Pauillac

Stage end/start

A

Gueugnon

Bay of Biscay

Stage end

Total route

BELGIUM

Brussels Arenberg Port du Hainaut Cambrai

English Channel

Pau

Revel Pamiers Col du Tourmalet Bagneres-de Ax-3 Domaines SPAIN -Luchon

Bourg les Valence

Saint-Jeande-Maurienne Gap

ITALY

Sisteron

Med. Sea

© 2010 MCT Source: Tour de France organizers

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 75

FEEL LIFE HEALTH

Ovarian issues Claire Francis examines the trauma of a little-known widespread problem

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very now and then, I wonder about the common sense of some health awareness programs, or the allocation of government funding to research and review – at vast expense – some well known issue, especially if, at the end of the day, it turns up nothing much in the way of new research, and restates the obvious, with some fiddling around the edges. But unfortunately, government funding often results in some health issues becoming popular, and getting what might be considered rather a lot of funding, and rather a lot of attention relative to other causes. [You should see what government funding did for the popularity of climate science as a career! – Ed.] Which is not to entirely malign the practice; funding awareness campaigns often leads to aware-

ness in both the private and public sphere, and while hopefully this leads to earlier, better, and less expensive treatment for individuals, it can also lead to increased private and charitable investment in the area. But it does tend to skew public awareness of health

issues towards those that get the most publicity, so that occasionally funding is allocated to some area of research or another which is apparently so neglected that the most publicity it has received was when it finally received some research money.

It’s not a fatal or instantly noticeable problem, it’s a chronic condition rather than an illness and it’s symptoms can be vague or overlooked, or both

76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

As was the case when, last year, the Australian Government announced funding towards the development of evidence based guidelines for the management of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. PCOS affects around 11% of women of childbearing age, although limited research suggests that it is nearly twice as common in some indigenous populations, and perhaps amongst lesbian women, and up to 3 times as common in overweight women.

That’s a greater percentage of women in that age who have diabetes, and while diabetes is associated with serious health complications, so is PCOS: it’s a risk factor for diabetes. But it’s also a health problem with a limited “care factor”. It’s not a fatal or instantly noticeable problem, it’s a chronic condition rather than an illness and it’s symptoms can be vague or overlooked, or both. But more than one in ten women suffer from PCOS, it’s a risk factor for both diabetes and infertility, and it can be treated.

PCOS is diagnosed from a combination of symptoms, history, blood tests, and ultrasound, and requires that the woman have 2 or 3 of the 3 diagnostic symptoms – elevated androgen (male hormone) levels, polycystic ovaries, and/or irregular or absent ovulation ( usually appearing as absent, irregular, or infrequent periods. The problem with these symptoms is that they are all a little vague and, unfortunately, may not lead a woman to the doctor or, if they do, may lead the doctor to ill-informed reassurances. A teenage girl who is worried about not having yet had her period, and perhaps privately concerned about her acne, and the hairs on her chin may put off seeing a doctor, and if she does seek treatment, likely to be reassured, and told to come back in a year. If the acne clears up, and she starts menstruating occasionally, she’s likely to be told how lucky she is that she doesn’t have difficult periods. If she overweight, any menstrual issues may be put down to her weight, and if she isn’t overweight, or doesn’t have obvious menstrual disturbances, she may have a very hard time indeed getting anyone to take her concerns seriously.

PCOS is thought to have both a genetic and an environmental component, and is not always but very often (in around 80% of cases) associated with insulin resistance, a pre-diabetic condition in which the body becomes less efficient at controlling blood sugar levels with insulin. Insulin resistance can be caused by obesity, but it can also be genetic and unfortunately insulin resistance itself leads to weight gain, and can makes

losing weight difficult. Raised androgen levels (caused by insulin resistance or otherwise), often (but not always) interrupt the development of ovarian follicles, thus interfering with ovulation. Not all women with PCOS have trouble conceiving, nor do all women with the condition develop diabetes.

But a significant number do, so it is important to identify these women and treat them.

And for many women, weight loss alone significantly reduces the severity of PCOS. Unfortunately, a woman who finds it very difficult to lose weight no matter what she does is unlikely to persist, especially if she doesn’t know why. What research has been done, suggests that a very low carbohydrate diet combined with a lot of exercise, is most effective. If this fails, or in women without weight gain but with appreciable insulin resistance, medication may treat the condition, reduce the symptoms and prevent the development of diabetes or infertility, both

of which conditions can be difficult and costly to treat, and be devastating for individuals who are affected. The new guidelines for the (medical) management of PCOS may not be published until late next year, but women affected by the condition can be diagnosed and treated, and hopefully reduce the risk of future complications, if more people are aware of the condition now.

PUBLIC ACCESS REFS http://www.managingpcos.org.au http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/ pdf/1743-7075-2-35.pdf http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/ content/abstract/18/9/1928 http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/ short/84/6/1897 http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/07/03/892229.htm?health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Polycystic_ovary_syndrome

HEALTHBRIEFS

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 77

FEEL LIFE ALT.HEALTH

Oral sex causes mouth cancer

Experts now fear orally-transmitted STIs will rival tobacco as a cancer cause within ten years, but a new study suggests at least some treatment hope

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octors have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to help treat patients suffering from mouth, neck and head cancer.

In a trial run by the British Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, 17 patients were given injections of the virus, as well as being treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The cold sore virus, known as Onco VEX, was modified to multiply inside cancer cells but not in healthy ones. It would then burst and kill tumour cells, as well as releasing a human protein that would help stimulate patients’ immune systems.

The virus was injected into cancer affected lymph nodes of the patients, in up to four doses.

Tumour shrinkage could be seen on scans for 14 patients, and over three quarters of the participants showed no trace of residual cancer in their lymph nodes during subsequent surgery to remove them. More than two years later, over three quarters of the patients involved in the study had not succumbed to the disease.

Dr Kevin Harrington, Principle Investigator for the ICR and The Royal Marsden said: “Around 35 to 55 per cent of patients given the standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment typically relapse within two years, so these results compare very favourably.

He added: “This was a small study so the results should be interpreted with caution; however the very high rates of tumour response have led to the decision to take this drug into a large scale Phase III trial.”

The treatment’s side-effects were mild to moderate, and most (except fever and fatigue) were thought to be caused by the chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Chief Executive of the British Dental Health Foundation, Dr Nigel Carter, said:

“This study is very positive news. Mouth cancer is a devastating disease, and an increasing number of people are being affected. While any treatment that can be found to fight the disease is a great step forward, it is also vital that awareness of the illness, the early symptoms and the risk factors is made common knowledge. Early diagnosis improves survival rates from five in ten to nine in ten people. That highlights how important it is that the public know the facts.”

Mouth cancer claims one life every five hours in the UK and more than 5,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.

Tobacco use is the main cause for mouth cancer, with those who drink and smoke to excess being 30 times more likely to develop the disease.

The human papilloma virus has also been

identified as a threat. Transmitted via oral sex, and also a known cause of cervical cancer, experts suggest HPV may rival tobacco as a key risk factor within the next 10 years.

An unhealthy diet can also have an impact, with a third of mouth cancer cases being linked to poor eating habits. Growing evidence suggests an increased intake of fruit, vegetables, fish and eggs can help to lower the risks.

Early warning signs of the disease include a non-healing mouth ulcer, red or white patches and any unusual changes in the mouth. If you are suffering any of these symptoms or have any concerns the Foundation advises you visit your dentist or doctor.

The study was published by The Institute of Cancer Research and can be viewed at http://www.icr.ac.uk/press/press_archive/ press_releases_2010/15460.shtml.

MOUTH CANCER CLAIMS THE LIVES OF 1,850 EVERY YEAR. With over 5,400 new cases each year and a 42 percent increase in incidence in the last 10 years it is one of the fastest growing cancers.

The disease is twice more common in men than in women, though an increasing number of women are being diagnosed. Previously, the disease has been three times more common in men. Age is another factor, with people over the age of 40 more likely to be diagnosed, though more young people are now being affected than previously.

Experts strongly advise people of all ages to check their mouths and have regular dental appointments.

Smoking is the leading cause of mouth cancer – it transforms saliva into a deadly cocktail that damages the cells in the mouth and can turn them cancerous.

The human papilloma virus, passed via oral sex, is an increasing factor particularly among young people. US studies have linked HPV to more than 20,000 cancer cases in the past five years.

Drinking to excess can increase the risk of the disease by four times, and those who smoke and drink to excess are up to 30 times more likely to develop mouth cancer.

Initial signs of the disease include a non-healing mouth ulcer, a red or white patch in the mouth, or unusual lumps or swelling in the mouth.

Poor diet is linked to a third of all cancer cases. Evidence shows an increase in fruit and vegetables lowers the risk, as does fish and eggs.

78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 79

TASTE LIFE TRAVEL

Albania 2010

A Balkan country sheds its secret past, discovers Carol Pucci

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alter Mio, 22, was just a toddler when his family opened a four-table restaurant inside his grandfather’s house in the mountain town of Berati in southern Albania.

What began as one of the first private businesses to open in 1993, after the fall of communism, is now the Hotel Mangalemi, a boutique inn, surrounded by pine forests and whitewashed villas wedged into terraced hillsides.

In a stone house where an Ottoman king once slept, guests sip cocktails on a rooftop deck and eat homemade sausages and desserts of honey and walnuts. In a country where religion was once banned, they

awake to the sounds of church bells and the Muslim call to prayer.

Valter smiled and patted his stomach when I complimented the roast chicken and stuffed peppers his mother had cooked the night before. As satisfying as the meal was the bill, US$17 for two.

If Berati were a town in Greece or Italy, it would be filled with tourists roaming its 13th-century castle, and peering into its ancient mosques and Byzantine churches.

Berati was designated a “museum city” by the government in the 1960s, and its historical architecture was preserved.

But this was Albania, and my husband, Tom, and I were among just a few foreigners.

80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Isolated from the rest of Europe and most of the world for nearly 50 years by its dictator, Enver Hoxha, Albania, Valter reminded us, was a country where 20 years ago, “even the idea of owning a private hotel or restaurant was not allowed.”

The borders were sealed. Private cars and phones were banned. What little learned Albanians knew about the outside, they gleaned from patching into Italian TV or Voice of America.

Like politics, a free press and religion, tourism in Albania, said Valter, is evolving, “slowly, slowly.”

Outside on the Berati streets, sidewalk vendors offered roasted sunflower seeds

If Berati were a town in Greece or Italy, it would be filled with tourists roaming its 13th-century castle, and peering into its ancient mosques and Byzantine churches

in paper cones and sour plums the size of cherry tomatoes as we joined in the ritual evening stroll along the riverfront.

Inside the castle walls, where families still live in stone houses tucked along cobbled streets too narrow for cars, a woman peered out of her doorway and motioned us inside.

Over tiny cups of coffee, we sat in her living room and chatted a while, using a few Albanian words and some Italian. Then she went behind a chair and pulled out a plastic water bottle filled with raki, a clear alcohol Albanians offer as a gesture of hospitality.

As memories of the Bosnian war and ethnic conflicts of the early 1990s fade, the Balkan countries of Croatia and Montenegro

in the former Yugoslavia are drawing travellers looking for less expensive alternatives to Western Europe.

Like its neighbours, Albania, a country slightly smaller than the state of Maryland, has historic towns with architecture evoking 500 years of rule by the Ottoman Turks; archaeological sites with Greek and Roman ruins; mountains and seaside resorts along a long stretch of Mediterranean coastline.

With its leftover communist-style buildings and half-finished construction projects, the capital of Tirana is hardly Paris or London. But no longer is it the city of garbage-strewn streets and beggars that travel writer Paul Theroux described in his 1995

book “The Pillars of Hercules.”

In the Blloku neighbourhood, villas once reserved for the communist-party elite house smart cafes where Tiranians sip cocktails on outdoor patios furnished with sofas and armchairs.

One night we joined a journalist friend at a restaurant called Shakesbeer owned by an Albanian chef who worked in London.

Walking along a wide boulevard built before World War II by Italian invaders for military parades, we passed the former government-owned Hotel Dajti, now closed, and the white marble pyramid built as a mausoleum for Hoxha.

A bronze plaque marks a street named

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 81

Presidenti George W. Bush in honour of his visit in 2007, remembered for the cheering crowds that greeted him (Bush was a supporter of neighbouring Kosovo’s independence) and his watch that was either lost or stolen in the crush.

“Albanians love Americans and America,” our friend explained. As it was in Berati, people were friendly and anxious to talk.

A man sitting across from us at a pizza restaurant our first day in town told us that he spent time working in the U.S. during the war in Kosovo, and earned enough money to pay for his wedding.

When he got up to leave, he offered to buy us an espresso. My husband, Tom, explained he doesn’t drink coffee. “Beer then,” he said, and told the waitress our drinks were on him.

I had a personal reason for wanting to know more about Albania. We found out only recently that my grandfather was born in the southern Italian village of Greci. The town was abandoned by the Greeks, then settled by Albanian soldiers in the 15th century as a reward for the help the Albanian war hero, Skanderbeg, gave Neapolitan kings in fighting insurgents. Many in Greci still speak an Albanian dialect, and everyone from there, including my family, has Albanian roots.

Away from Tirana, rugged mountains form the backdrop for Albania’s rural villages and seaside towns. We travelled on buses and shared vans, called furgons. Twolane roads cut through a countryside strewn with dome-shaped concrete bunkers left over from the Hoxha years.

Locals steer travellers to the Greek and Roman ruins in the ancient city of Butrinti and the nearby beaches in the coastal town of Saranda across from the Greek island of Corfu. More memorable than any sites, though, were the experiences we had and the people we met while travelling in a country where tourists are few.

On one of our long bus rides, we sampled pace, the national breakfast dish made from parts of a sheep’s head. It was early morning on the Llogara Pass, the highest

point on the southern coastline. The driver stopped at a mountain restaurant, and the waiters brought out bowls of what looked like a thick soup. It was pace, and despite our initial inhibitions, the soup was delicious.

In the town of Gjirokastra, we met Haxhi and Vita Kotoni, owners of the Kotoni House, the first private hotel to open after the communist government fell. Using UNESCO funds, they renovated Haxhi’s 300-year-old family home as a B&B decorated with carved wooden ceilings and Vita’s embroidered pillows and woven rugs.

As Hoxha’s birthplace and Albania’s second “museum city,” Gjirokastra, like Berati, received special attention. Built into a steep hillside below a castle and above a modern university town are Ottoman-era stone houses, some restored, others abandoned and awaiting money for repairs.

The port city of Durres on the Adriatic Sea was our last stop before crossing to Italy on an overnight ferry. Within a few blocks walk in the historic center were the remains of a 2nd-century Roman amphitheater, a shop selling 30-cent scoops of Red Bullflavoured ice cream and a bar in the turret of a Venetian watch tower.

I thought about the conversation Theroux had with a man named Fatmir as the writer was preparing to leave on a ferry for Greece.

“I hope you come back in 10 years,” Fatmir told Theroux. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better and I am better.”

He was right. Slowly, slowly, Albania is changing.

IF YOU GO Where: Albania is in southeast Europe’s

Western Balkan Peninsula, bounded by Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece. Italy lies across the Adriatic Sea. The currency is the lek (109 lek equals US$1 at current exchange rates). Most hotels quote prices in euros.

Lodging: Government-run hotels have been replaced by boutique inns, youth hostels and luxury high-rises. Most midrange choices are in the $35-$50 range for doubles including breakfast and private bathrooms.

In Tirana, we stayed at the Stephen Center (Stefan Qendra), a six-room B&B run by a Christian ministry across from a public market. Doubles with breakfast are 40 euros (NZ$80). See www.stephencenter.com.

Rates at the Hotel Mangalemi in Berati start at 30 euros with breakfast. See www.mangalemihotel.com. Rooms at the Kotoni House (www.kotonihouse. com) in Gjirokastra are 25 euros ($NZ50) with breakfast. Another good choice in Gjirokastra is the Hotel Kalemi in a beautifully restored Ottoman house, 35 euros (NZ$70) with breakfast. See http://hotelkalemi.tripod.com.

Getting Around: Rental cars and taxis are available. For long-distance transport, most people get around on buses and vans called furgons. Trips of three or four hours cost no more than $5-$7.

Distances between major towns are short, but travel time can be slow due to road conditions.

82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Traveller’s Tip: About 70 percent of

Albanians are Muslim, but the country was officially atheist under the former communist dictator Enver Hoxha. Those who practice observe a moderate form of Islam. One of the most interesting religions is Bektashism, a liberal Muslim sect whose members worship in elegant temples called tekes. The teke in Berati is especially worth visiting.

More Information: See www.albaniantourism.com. The best guidebooks are the Bradt Guide to Albania and Lonely Planet’s Western Balkans guide. In Your Pocket (www.inyourpocket.com) publishes an online guide to Tirana. Outdoor Albania (www.outdooralbania.com) offers guided eco-tours and day trips.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 83

TASTE LIFE FOOD

/CLASSIC/

Yolking around

Eggs aren’t just for breakfast anymore, says James Morrow. Just make sure they’re fresh

I

had a friend, many years ago, who was terrified of eggs. He wasn’t plagued by dreams that involved giant eggs coming out of the sky, or having to stand up naked and give a speech to the annual convention of the Egg Marketing Board. Instead, it was the mere sight of an egg outside of its shell that absolutely horrified him. One of his more darkly hilarious monologues involved his horror at going out to a pizza restaurant in Paris once with a large group of relatives and an even larger hangover the day after his sister’s wedding, and having a pie with a quivering fried egg cracked into the middle of it placed in front of him by a smirking garçon.

Oddly, though, ‘hidden’ eggs didn’t bother him. Sauces made with eggs, meatloaves

bound by eggs, French toast soaked in eggs – all of that was fine by him, so long as he wasn’t around to see the preparation. Which shows that even if he had a few screws loose in the food department (it would take a Freudian half a decade to work out how his mother gave him this particular phobia), he at least had pretty good taste.

Needless to say, I’ve never known this terror. Poached on toast with a sprinkling of Maldon sea salt; fried in butter and drizzled with hot sauce (Tabasco is great, but my new favourite is a Mexican brand called Tapatío); or gently scrambled with lots of cream, chives, and smoked salmon, I just don’t think it’s possible to go wrong with eggs. Unless, of course, one overcooks them.

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But it is this first preparation, poaching, that seems to cause many home chefs the most grief. Raised to believe that poaching an egg involves some sort of complicated French alchemy involving whirlpools and vinegar, and until recently unable to get anything fresher than supermarket eggs that have spent days or weeks in trucks and on shelves, even many good cooks I know just don’t care enough to bother. Which is a shame, given that it is so easy, and the results potentially fantastic. Nothing showcases a really good egg like poaching. All one needs to do is heat a pan of water – about an inch or so deep – with a slug of good white wine vinegar to the just-bubbling point, slide the eggs in one by one, and wait a few minutes before pulling them out again with a slotted spoon. If need be, you can stop the cooking by plunging the eggs into a bowl of ice water and reheat later, a great technique if you’ve got a crowd coming for brunch.

Which brings us to the first problem with eggs, no matter how they are prepared: most of the eggs found on supermarket shelves are not truly fresh, and are laid by chickens fed in an insipid diet that leaves their product as tasteless as the factory tomatoes over in the produce section. This means they won’t poach properly – instead, they’ll run all over the pan (don’t ask me to explain the science, just trust me on this). Worse, they’ll be tasteless. Although there are many instances where an ‘organic’ label is just a marketing con to separate greenies from their money – more on this in a subsequent column – when it comes to eggs, every input counts. If your farmer is playing music to his hens, make sure it’s calm and relaxing stuff. Remember the study which showed that students who listened to Mozart for half an hour before taking an examination did better than those who listened to heavy metal? The same principle applies here: You can’t get good eggs from chooks whose nerves are being jangled up by a Wagner fetishist.

I get my eggs from my local farmers’ market, where they sell free-range eggs from Chanteclair Farm, and there are plenty of similar producers in New Zealand. These eggs, which can also be found in some supermarkets, are always fresh, and the hens have been fed a special diet that makes their yolks rich, golden and creamy – as well as high in Omega-3, which fights cholesterol and helps mute the chant of ‘remember, thou art mortal’ that tends to play in the back of one’s head when one eats as many of the things as I do.

Best-ever beans and eggs When the mercury is low and the bank balance lower (or even if it’s not), this is a great, cheap plate of comfort food that elevates its humble ingredients to far more than the sum of its parts.

You’ll need: 1 800g tin of Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce 1-2 brown onions 3-4 tablespoons brown sugar 50 grams butter Balsamic, red wine, or sherry vinegar White wine vinegar Dijon mustard 4 slices bread (I like Helga’s Light Rye) Salt & pepper 4 eggs 1. First, caramelize the onions. Slice the onions into thin half-moons, and put them into a wide pan over very low heat with the butter, and just let them sit there, stirring them occasionally.

The more time you can devote to this, the better: you want them to slowly sweeten with just the barest of heat.

About ten minutes in, throw some brown sugar in – this will really up the sweetness factor. After about twenty minutes, turn up the heat to medium and throw in the balsamic (or red wine or sherry) vinegar until it reduces, and then add the beans, stirring in Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper.

2. Meanwhile, get another pan out to poach the eggs. Put in an inch or so of water, add the white wine vinegar (this helps hold the eggs together), and heat to the barely-boiling. One by one, crack the eggs into a cup or small bowl and slide them into the water.

3. Toast the bread, and cut it into quarters. Assemble by putting half the beans on each of two plates, arranging the toast quarters around the beans, and putting two poached eggs on top of each. Season with a bit more salt and pepper, and serve.

Serves two.

‘Special’ eggs, italian style I first saw the great American-Italian chef Mario Battali make a variation of this in the U.S. many years ago; since then, I’ve discovered that poaching eggs in some other sort of sauce is a staple dish in many cultures. The Persians, in fact, do a remarkably similar version of this; they call it gojay farangi; in our house, what my three-year-old calls ‘special eggs’ is an unbreakable Saturday tradition.

You’ll need: Olive oil 1 good-sized brown onion 2-3 (or more) cloves garlic ½ birds eye or bullet chili, chopped (optional) 2 x 400g tins peeled Italian plum tomatoes Dried mint 4 slices of thick, crusty Italian bread 4 eggs 1. Make a simple red sauce. Dice the onions, slice the garlic, and throw it in a hot pan of olive oil with the optional

chili. Feel free to throw in a slug of the previous night’s wine at this point if there is any left over; red sauces are a very personal thing. Add the tomatoes (make sure they’re imported from Italy; if you want to buy local, avoid Aussie tins and make the sauce with fresh tomatoes instead), breaking them up with a wooden spoon.

Add some dried mint, which is my personal touch, and let simmer, uncovered 2. Once the sauce has cooked down a bit, use a spoon or a ladle to make a depression in the sauce, then crack an egg into the well, repeating until all the eggs are in. Cover and let simmer.

3. Meanwhile, toast the bread – I like to rub the slices with olive oil and a smashed clove of garlic, but that’s not 100 per cent necessary – under the grill. By the time the bread is ready, the eggs should be coming pretty close to done as well. Plate them up by putting two pieces of bread on each plate, then topping with an egg and red sauce.

Serves two.

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SEE LIFE / PAGES

Keeping an Appointment Michael Morrissey finds a new Orwellian novel The Appointment

By Herta Muller Portobello Books, $27.00

When confronted by a book of which we know little, most of us will turn it over and read what’s on the back cover. Thus we learn – ‘I’ve been summoned. Thursday at ten sharp.’

By whom? And why? The political authorities wish to interrogate a young seamstress who is trying to escape by the contemporary equivalent of a message in a bottle. Sewn inside the back pockets of export garments is a hidden message that reads “Marry me.” The first Italian who replied would be accepted.

In Western democracies, this would be pathetic but not severely illegal. In totalitarian Romania, it is equivalent to an act of treason. To compound the “crime”, further notes are discovered which read: ‘Best wishes from the dictatorship’ The latter were, however, damning forgeries.

Many reviewers have fastened onto this important plot event as the key to the book.

And so in a sense it is, though as it turns out to be a rather indirect reading. It suggests – at least to my mind previously saturated with books portraying similarly minor infringements in comparably dictatorial (usually Communist) countries – that The

Appointment will be a book similar to 1984 where the traitor is not only interrogated but tortured and brainwashed or sent to a concentration camp. Of course, in many cases, a dictatorial regime will simply dispatch the dissident with a bullet in the back of the head.

However, by focusing on this undoubtedly key event, the dust jacket and numerous reviews give a misleading summary of the book. It’s more of a controlled stream of consciousness narrative driven by family memories, than a straightforward political fable.

Though we are periodically reminded of the sinister but shadowy Major Albu, the central protagonist is perpetually catching trains and reflecting on her husband, father, mother and father-in-law plus her current lover, Paul, rather than fighting the authorities.

Open any page and you will find brilliantly thoughtful writing packed with original imagery and wry observation. But the lack of a coherent plot and indeed, even the lack of a more direct engagement with the authorities, make for a certain flatness where everything is finely filtered and recalled rather than narrative-directed to any climax or confrontation.

Life under totalitarian countries tends to be poor and grim. What The Appointment

88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

delivers in spades is the impression that existence within Ceausescu’s Romania was miserable. The narrative presents a litany of discomfort and woe. The central character’s friend, Lilli, is shot dead trying to cross the Hungarian border and her body torn apart by wild dogs. A driver cuts off his hand so he can be hired as a sexton on the grounds he’s considered a war cripple.

Characters are besieged by flies, fleas, lice, rats. Desperation, brutality (including sexual brutality), poverty and random calls for interrogation are constant presences. In the end, as the text horribly reminds us, “The trick is not to go mad”. But the desperate meandering narrative suggests that mental derangement is never far away.

100 Essential New Zealand Albums

By Nick Bollinger Awa Press, $40.00

Nick Bollinger is a leading authority on New Zealand rock and pop music, and this is his enthusiastic but considered selection.

It begins with the historic Maori group, the Tahiwis, who recorded in 1930 and concludes nearly 80 years later with the Pie Warmer’s The Fearsome Feeling. In my ignorance, I

have not heard of these musical groups. But, naturally, in between, many of my favourites, such as Split Enz, Don McGlashan and Dave Dobbyn are included.

From 1930, we quickly move to the fabled Johnny Devlin in the late 1950s. Younger punters may well be asking, “Johnny who?”

Johnny Devlin was our own latter day Elvis complete with kiss curl and the then compulsory ripping of presumably lightly-sewn shirts from the sweaty male torso of the hipwiggling rock star. Alas, modern day security would prevent such over the top adulation; we’re in a cooler era now. Johnny’s musical entourage included the now world famous jazz patient Mick Nock. (thank you, Nick, for this intriguing gem). Also Johnny wrote many more songs than Elvis. So there! Other noted singers and groups from that golden age, include Dinah Lee, the Keil Isles, the La De Das and that great survivor, Ray Columbus. Plus some who passed me by, like Jay Epae and Peter Cape.

The 70s was when the stages and the recording studios really started jumping – the gorgeously attired Formyula, Max Merritt and the Meteors, the Human Instinct (starring our own Jim Hendrix, Billy TK), Hello Sailor, Split Enz, Th’ Dudes and Dragon among others. Then the 80s saw tough survivors like Dobbyn and McGlashan establish their still shining careers.

After about 1990, my unawareness of more recent pop starts to kick in (or is just that I am no longer frequenting nightspots like

the once wonderful Gluepot?) So names like Upper Hutt Posse, Straitjacket Fits, Bressa Creeting Cake, Stereo Bus and Fur Patrol are newish cultural icons that I should catch up on. I certainly dig the names, though a weird monicker often signals “doomed to be marginalised” with Fat Freddy’s Drop amiably disproving my theory. I have also enjoyed the Headless Chickens, who clearly were never Battery Hens (another great name awaiting musical expression).

Speaking purely from my own perspective, the musicians that appeal to me most are the dogged and talented stayers who keep rebirthing or re-avataring themselves such as Dave Dobbyn (The’ Dudes, DD Smash, and of course, plain Dave Dobbyn); Don McGlashan (Blam Blam, Blam, The Mutton Birds, The Front Lawn, Don McGlashan and The Seven Sisters); The Finn Brothers (Split Enz, Crowded House, The Finn Brothers). In the Bollinger canon, Split Enz are rated most often with six albums being listed – Mental Notes, True Colours, Frenzy, Corroboree, Waiata, and Time and Tide. Plus the Finn Brothers, singly or in combination, with albums like Woodface and Together Alone.

As a sample of Bollinger’s zappy wellinformed style let me quote him on Ray Columbus: “‘I’m Finding Out” is a gritty stop-time blues, the kind the Animals picked up from John Lee Hooker. ‘Orbie Lee’ is a tribute to Roy Orbison, with whom the band had toured, and nods subtly to his

idiosyncratic poperatic style” Sounds good, Nick. I’ll stay tuned.

It is very canny of Bollinger to use the word “essential” rather than “best” or “greatest”. I prefer these bolder epithets because counter claims can then be more easily and vigorously asserted. How could you, Nick, ( for starters) have omitted the rambunctious blues singer Rick Bryant? For this under informed listener, Dave Dobbyn’s voice and his song “Loyal” have left their musical imprint on the national psyche more definitively than any other. And in passing, I thought Alistair Riddell’s Space Waltz, and John Rowles’ Live Back Home might have made the final cut. But then, what do I know?

Leading studios/recording labels such as Stebbing and Flying Nun are included. And on a cheerful note of survival, many of these classics of yesterday have been re-released.

Vive New Zealand pop!

The Maya Codex

By Adrian d’Hage Michael Joseph, $39.00

Despite my sardonic views on The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) and The Atlantis Code (Thomas Brokaw), once again I have been ensorcelled into reading – or should that be devouring? – another blood and thunder thriller involving hidden crypts, lost temples, remote jungles, intrepid linguists, heroic archaeologists, ruthless CIA opera-

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tives, plus an encrypted code (here a Mayan Codex), plus a brainy code breaker.

As in all books of this genre, the stakes are high – we’re talking the fate of planet earth here. It seems not only in this novel, and in the minds of a gathering “cult” (so to speak), we don’t have a lot of time – December 21, 2012 is D-day (where D=Doom), at which time the earth’s axis will shift, the earth will be on the same plane as a Black Hole, the earth’s magnetic field at an all time low, sunspot activity at an all time high, and to top it all, there is a harebrained scheme to zap three billion watts into the earth’s core. Only two and a bit years to go, folks!

Just as well the book is out now so d’Hage can enjoy a few shekels in royalties and we can try to stop the dread fulfillment of the Mayan calendar. The ancient telescopeless Mayan astronomers were by all accounts bright cookies who could calculate over a millennium into the future. No matter how bad it looks, the fact that numerous preceding predictions – whether religious or scientific – have prophesied doom for our globe, yet it continues stubbornly to spin around the sun, bodes well. And I suspect it will continue to do so until the sun expands into a red giant and fries us out of existence ...

The Maya Codex is divided into two books.

The first is set in World War Two and has bad guys Himmler (much juicy description of Himmler’s spooky headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle) and Hitler plotting their nasty Nazi best to find the Codex before archaeologist Levi Weizman gets it.

However, most of the Nazi action is provided by imaginary Hauptsturmfuhrer Von Heiben, who, like other real Nazis, found haven in South America when the war ended. The Nazis, both real and fictional, are all stock villains that are a bit two dimensional. Papal envoy Signor Felici also figures in the skullduggery.

The second book – set in the present – has Signor Felici’s son, Cardinal Felici (another bad guy), and Levi’s daughter Aleta. Thus we have the dramatic device of two generation good and bad characters in conflict. Aleta links up with CIA defector Curtis O’Connor, once he’s gotten past the foolish notion that his job was to assassinate Aleta. In James Bond style, the intrepid pair spend a lot of time outwitting CIA deputy Howard Wiley (“I want them found – and fast!”) with the tough O’Connor dispatching various CIA “assets” with guns or bare hands.

It’s a rollicking ride not quite as actionpacked as Brokaw’s novels but plenty of

action nonetheless. Having visited what has been called the most beautiful lake in the world – Lake Aitlan (and climbed one of its three volcanoes) – I particularly enjoyed the local colour of Guatemala as a vital part of the plot. The Codex is secreted in one of Tikal’s pyramids, Tikal being the former central city of the Mayan kingdom.

But the real climax is in the revelation of the third secret of Sister Lucia, one of the three children visited by Mary, at Fatima.

In the d’Hage version, the secret features a Mayan priest lurking behind Our Lady, the Vatican being destroyed by blue lightning from Archangel’s Raguel’s sword and intermeshing Mayan calendar wheels.

Understandably, the Catholic Church wants these portents of disaster hushed up. But remember, this is fiction, and the third secret or warning of Sister Lucia revealed at last in 2000, though it did prophesy a shooting of the Pope, made no mention of a Mayan priest or calendar wheels.

As for the dreaded time of December 21, 2012, let it be noted that sunspot activity has been particularly fierce of late. You have been warned!

The Male Brain

By Louann Brizendine Bantam Press, $38.99

A couple of years back Brizendine gave us the authoritative The Female Brain and presumably males were well advised to read it.

Now she follows it up with a sequel The Male Brain and perhaps women should read it. But there’s obviously no harm in chaps reading it as well in order to check out if their hormones are working as they should be. Indeed, the hormones are wittily listed as “The Cast of Neurohormone Characters” and given appropriate mythic nicknames – more or less if they were personalities in a novel.

The list includes the gallant Vasopressin (The White Knight) which Brizendine informs us is the hormone of gallantry and monogamy, aggressively protecting and defining turf, mate and children. Then there’s the Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (Hercules) which pushes out female type behaviour and helps build reproductive organs; the soothing Oxytocin (The Lion Tamer) and sympathymaking Prolactin (Mr Mom); the aggressive Cortisol (The Gladiator), the enticing pheromonal Androstenedione (Romeo) together with our more familiar friends Testosterone, Dopamine and Estrogen hovering in the

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wings. I can’t help wondering does a poor chap – does any human being – have any free choice /will after these hormones have propelled their buzz through the nervous system?

I believe so – though clearly hormone expert Brizendine appears to think not.

The actual text is a brief but powerfully packed 134 pages. There follows 40 pages of footnotes then a massive 82-page compendium of articles in medical journals.

Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order beginning from infancy and ending with the Mature Male Brain.

Female readers will be relieved to read it does mature!

One undisputed phenomenon is that boy babies will avert from the human gaze quicker than girl babies. Brizendine observes that whether the boy is simply looking for something or avoiding the human gaze is uncertain. This appears to be the sole uncertainty in a book which oozes certainty. The disinclination of the boy to react to an expression of fear or danger manifests as early as one. By twenty seven months, boys will go behind their parents’ backs to take risks or break rules, more often than the girls. As a male, I am tempted to observe, “So that’s where the urge to explore originates!” From an early age, boys will prefer boyish toys like wheeled trucks and reject girly colours like pink.

In this gender-demarcated world, the worst insult to give a boy is to call him a girl.

Very soon boys are wrestling and trying to overpower or dominate each other – the boys six times more than the girls. Subsequently, this results in an even more startling statistic – men are 20 times more physically aggressive than women. Something not addressed in Brizendine’s book is the recent rise in female aggression which, in my view, indicates the effect of social pressures rather than body chemistry. Likewise for the marked increase of female architects and engineers.

Brizendine notes “that until recently, differences in how men and women feel and express emotion were thought to be due to upbringing alone”. Still more recent research reveals there are two emotional systems in human beings that work simultaneously: the mirror-neuron system or MNS and the temporal-parietal junction system or TPJ The first, used more by women than men, induces a state of emotional empathy whereas the second used more by men, induces cognitive empathy – the search for solutions.

The problem with this hyper-informed book is that it privileges biology over psy-

chology. It leaves the impression human beings are completely controlled by their hormones. Even though the former “blank slate” theory was deeply flawed, the newly emphasised dominance of biology may also be too one-sided. Even so, Brizendine admits that men, though they may at first feel emotions keenly, learn how to mask emotion in order to “strike a pose of self confidence and strength”. Thus, when biology and psychology or social roles are in conflict, it is the outer requirements for behaviour that dominate. The truth, which this book somewhat reluctantly admits, is that the complexity of being human means that a continual dialogue of compromise is at work. The traditional debate of nurture versus nature (with this book leaning towards nature) has been resolved in favour of the two being inextricably intertwined.

Nomad

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali Fourth Estate, $38.99 The odyssey of Somalian born Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s flight from Africa to Holland and onward to the United States in order to make a new life for herself outside the conformist tyranny of Islam continues in this passionately written memoir. Ali is the sort of writer who seems to be continually angry; her righteous rage sharpens her polemical sword, never blunts it.

Initially, Ali turns her mercilessly lucid eye on her own flesh and blood in a sequence entitled “A Problem Family”. She examines the relationship with and the characters of her father, half sister, mother, brother, brother’s son, cousins and concludes writing a letter to her grandmother. My surmise is her searingly honest account will alienate rather than consolidate family ties.

One of the most moving sections is when she phones her father and he breaks his proud silence to speak to her. Shortly after, he falls into a coma, so her call was just in time. As a good Muslim, he tries once more to persuade his recalcitrant daughter to return to Islam but she has made her choice and it is for that freedom of belief that the West allows. At times, I found myself wincing when she tells her relatives of her new pathway. As she poignantly writes, concerning her mother, “Ma wanted forgiveness from God. I want forgiveness from her.”

While the main differences with her parents are over her leaving Islam, her nephew has psychological problems. He is a manic

depressive who swings from moody withdrawal to over excitement making it hard for him get ahead in life. While Ali wants her nephew to take his medicine, her mother thinks Mahad is bewitched.

After examining her relations with her family, Ali moves on to her main topic – her ongoing conflict with the tenets and practice of Islam. Her basic premise is that tolerance to Islam within the borders of western countries is misguided and that the West should exert ideological pressure to insure Muslims achieve fuller integration into a Western way of life. Ideologically speaking, this is an aggressive stance, one which is counter to currently tolerant Western thought. Ali’s attack is three-pronged. First, there is the treatment of women; second, the difficulty of Muslims in dealing with money with savings, credit and interest issues; third, dealing with Islam fundamentalism and violence through socialisation and the spread of ideas from the Enlightenment.

As Ali relentlessly reminds us of the savagery of honor killings (which increasingly the West soft soaps by not identifying these murders by this accurate phrase), of the fact that 130 million Muslim women have been circumcised and of the tremendous pres-

sures put on young Muslim men to achieve impossibly great things, an increasing mood of pessimism settled on this reader. It’s ironic that Ali, who is now an atheist, wants the Catholic Church and Christianity to form a proselytising bulwark against Islam conversion and indoctrinating practices. She even found a Catholic cleric to agree with her.

The issue of money, amusingly illustrated by foolish financial decisions by Ali herself, seems a very minor issue concerned to the larger ideological stakes. In Ali’s view, multiculturalism is a soft option that is counterproductive. As she bluntly put it: “A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance ... It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalise patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.” For some readers, her idealisation of America and the West may seem another form of rose-tinted glasses but one thing is certain – while Ali, because of her criticism of Islam needs bodyguards to stay alive, she wouldn’t need them if she was criticising the West.

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SEE LIFE / MUSIC

Lost in Denver Chris Philpott discovers the musical genius of John Denver, and a dead end offering from Sting Sting

Arcade Fire

John Denver

I’m going to get straight to the point: you would think that the repertoire of Sting and The Police would be easy to convert into a form that could be played live by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, but the whole project suffers from two very distinct problems.

The first is the list of songs selected for the project – or rather, the list of songs that weren’t.

“Next To You” is a solid selection, and “Englishman In New York” is a no-brainer ... but there’s no familiarity to the tracklist. Where are classics like “Walking On The Moon” or “Wrapped Around Your Finger”, both of which would have been interesting additions?

For that matter, what about well known solo tracks “Fragile” and “It’s Probably Me”, both of which would have been slam-dunks on this type of album?

The second problem is the arrangements themselves, which either drift too close to pure classical music, thus alienating fans, or are simply bizarre – like the Latin arrangement of “Roxanne”.

If Symphonicities was intended as a project for a completely different audience, that would make sense. But I imagine fans of Sting will be disappointed by an album that ultimately falls flat on its face.

I’ll be honest. I can think of nothing more frustrating than being trapped as an indie musician forever.

For a start, your music needs to be quirky and truly unique, and you need to embrace and accept small, loyal audiences and low record sales. You also need to somehow be cool without actually trying to be cool in any way, shape or form.

That’s much harder than it sounds. Trust me.

The pursuit of mainstream success is something that is probably frowned upon by the indie scene, which is why we’re always surprised when a well-known yet typically indie band (like Arcade Fire) release a fantastic album (like The Suburbs) that is nearly universally adored by everyone who hears it.

From the opening chords of the title track, it’s clear that singer Win Butler and co. have created an album that is superior to their last effort, 2007’s Neon Bible. This is the sound of a unique group at the peak of their songwriting powers, pushing the envelope musically while still managing to find attractive hooks to suck in listeners.

The Suburbs is intimate and sincere, while at the same time bombastic and over-thetop, never failing to surprise and entertain from go to whoa. Highly recommended.

What can be said about one of the legends of country music?

As a 29 year old male, growing up in the decidedly un-country 1990s, I was born far too late to enjoy the John Denver craze that took over the early 1970s. By the time he died in a 1997 plane crash, he had become so irrelevant to pop culture that I am almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t know who he was.

I had no idea that he had hosted the Grammy awards 5 times, or had 2700 hours flying experience, or had formed an unlikely friendship with ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau that inspired seminal Denver tune “Calypso”.

The thing is, I knew the songs – “Leavin On A Jet Plane”, “Rocky Mountain High” and “Annie’s Song” are modern country standards that everyone has stashed away in their subconscious, always ready to break out for a campfire sing-song.

The words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” might actually be handed down genetically.

These classics and more – including “Sunshine On My Shoulders”, “Sweet Surrender” and even a cover of The Band’s hit “The Weight” – are included on this greatest hits collection from one of the greatest songwriters to ever live.

Symphonicities 2 stars

The Suburbs 4.5 stars

92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

A Song’s Best Friend: The Very Best Of 4 stars

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SEE LIFE / MOVIES

War stories Lebanon excites, but new Julia Roberts? Not so much...

Lebanon

Starring: Reymond Amsalem, Ashraf Barhom, Oshri Cohen, Itay Tiran Directed by: Samuel Maoz Rated: R (for disturbing bloody war violence, language including sexual references, and some nudity) Running time: 94 minutes 4 stars Just as the word “Vietnam” came to mean more than a country for many Americans and came to describe an era and a state of mind, so too the word “Lebanon” is not just the name of an excellent new Israeli film, it signifies a continuing national obsession that shows no signs of going away.

In fact, Lebanon, written and directed

by Samuel Maoz and the winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, is the third Israeli film of the last few years to deal persuasively with the psychological aftermath of Israel’s traumatic 1982 invasion of its neighbour.

After its two first-rate predecessors, Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort and Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, it may seem like there can’t be anything for a new project to say about that war. But Lebanon is a different kind of film and a different kind of audience experience.

More of an experiential film than a care-

fully plotted narrative, Lebanon, based closely on Maoz’s experiences, thrusts you inside an Israeli tank during the first day of the invasion and doesn’t let you out. And that turns out to be a nightmarish place to be, for us as much as for the four young conscripts trapped in the beast.

This notion, this suffocating idea that we are in the tank all the time, that our only connection to the outside world is what can be seen through the tank’s telescopic gun sight, may be reminiscent of the German Das Boot, but the undeniable smallness of the tank makes it an especially claustrophobic place to be.

It is also a scorchingly hot, constantly noisy, continually shaking environment, an indescribably grim hell that takes on a life of its own. As a British critic accurately wrote when the film opened in London, “The tank is a character in itself – it breathes fumes, rattles and leaks oil everywhere like the acid drool slavering from the jaws of Ridley Scott’s alien.”

Into this savage maw are thrust four young men, conscripts barely out of their teens who are in no way prepared for what is about to happen to them.

Assi (Itay Tiran) may be the tank’s commander, but he’s nowhere close to feeling in charge and is always being needled by

94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010

Hertzel (Oshri Cohen), the mouthy ammunition loader. Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the driver, is an only child worried about his parents, while Shmulik (Yoav Donat), the nervous gunner, is the writer-director’s stand-in.

Treated contemptuously by Jamil (Zohar Strauss), a professional soldier and the area commander, the tank crew is ordered into a town said to be already pacified. The reality is that it is nothing of the sort, and slowly, tentatively, the tank enters a devastating horror show that starts dreadfully and gets nothing but worse.

First, Shmulik’s hesitation leads to the death of an Israeli soldier. Then the soldier’s body has to be placed inside the tank for safe-keeping. Then a firefight involving civilian hostages leads to the appalling spectacle of a wounded, half-clothed woman in agony over the death of her child.

Worse is yet to come, as the tank is hit and temporarily disabled. Then a Syrian prisoner of war is brought inside, again for safe-keeping, but a Phalangist, a Lebanese Christian, comes in as well, and in Arabic that the Israelis can’t understand but we see in subtitles, describes to the Syrian in the most graphic terms imaginable the sadistic ways he is going to torture him to death.

While all this and more is taking place, the four young men in the tank are having mental breakdowns, each in his own way, as war proves unimaginably dirtier, harder and uglier than they anticipated. A sign posted inside may say “Man is steel, the tank is only iron,” but Lebanon tells us that the reality is quite different.

Writer-director Maoz graduated from film school in 1987, but it took him 20 years to return to this traumatic experience and turn it into his first feature. His savage film shows us how war destroys everything and everyone it touches, the victorious living no less than the vanquished dead.

– By Kenneth Turan

Eat Pray Love

Starring: Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, Billy Crudup, James Franco Direced by: Ryan Murphy Rated: PG-13 (for sexual content, strong language, brief nudity) Running time: 140 minutes 1 star Eat Pray Love serves up nearly 2 1/2 hours of banal self-help platitudes, accompanied by soothing, picture-postcard images of Italy, India and Bali. The characters all speak in the cliches of spiritual healing, telling one another to seek out “balance” and to forgive themselves for past misdeeds.

The movie is a crock and then some – an exaltation of one upper-class woman’s selfabsorption, and an unwitting celebration of the privilege that allowed her to eventually feel better. You, too, can achieve happiness, it implies, by quitting your job and spending tens of thousands of dollars on a trip around the world.

Yet there’s also no denying that, for certain moviegoers, especially those who feel battered and defeated by a lousy economy and an uncertain future, it’s going to strike a chord – the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir upon which the film is based did not sell more than 7 million copies for nothing.

Eat Pray Love considers what it means to push the pause button on life after years of feeling as if you’re lurching from one bad decision to the next. It’s frequently insufferable – is the therapy travelogue really a genre we want to encourage? – even as it proves occasionally, unexpectedly touching.

Julia Roberts stars as Gilbert, referred to in the film as Liz, a successful journalist and author who feels as if she’s suffocating in her marriage to the well-meaning but rudderless Stephen (Billy Crudup). She walks out on him and almost immediately into the arms of a handsome but flaky actor (James Franco).

Her sense of desperation and guilt mounting, she eventually tells her best friend and editor (Viola Davis) that there appears to be only one solution: She will take off and see the world and attempt to figure out what’s gnawing at her.

At age 42, there’s a measure of maturity and melancholy in Roberts’ face that we’ve never quite seen before. When she isn’t resorting to tics – the burst of laughter, like a chainsaw in an otherwise silent forest, cut through at least five scenes here – she gives a restrained and thoughtful performance,

nicely capturing the way a depressed person can slip from being completely engaged with the world around her to looking out at it like an alien visitor.

But so much of this movie, directed by Glee creator Ryan Murphy, and written by Murphy and Jennifer Salt, consists of cutesy shtick and sentimental bathos. Liz travels to Rome, where she gazes at gorgeous sights and even more gorgeous men, who teach her how to talk and gesticulate like hotblooded Italians.

Next she heads to an ashram in India, praying with yogis and befriending a damaged man from Texas named Richard (Richard Jenkins). In Bali, she listens to fortune cookie-style wisdom from a medicine man (Hadi Subiyanto), spurns the advance of a ripped twentysomething (David Lyons), and eventually falls for a brooding fellow divorcee (Javier Bardem). (For a movie about female self-reliance, Eat Pray Love is perhaps a little too insistent in its belief that nothing cures the blues like a hot guy.)

In a few scenes, particularly one where Richard confesses to Liz the secret that brought him to seek shelter at the ashram, Murphy taps into something genuine: a poignant understanding of how easy it is to become dislocated from one’s own life.

Mostly, though, Eat Pray Love is so sodden and heart-attack serious that you want to slap Liz across the face and remind her that

In the end, Eat Pray Love – like so much output of the self-help field – is simply just full of itself.

there are a lot worse fates in life than being able to spend four months at a stretch in three exotic locales. (The movie conveniently leaves out the fact that Gilbert landed a sixfigure book contract that financed this trip.)

Nor does Murphy ever question Liz’s unmitigated self-pity or find enough distance to gently poke fun at it: The director seems to believe that the fate of the world hangs in the balance of this wealthy woman’s problems. The unexamined life might not be worth living, but this movie reminds us that too much examination is both annoying and more than a little inorganic: If you need to spend a year writing a book about how to live life, are you really living life at all?

In the end, Eat Pray Love – like so much output of the self-help field – is simply just full of itself.

– By Christopher Kelly

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SEE LIFE / THE CUTTING ROOM

Three strikes 3-D and the movies: The future or just a flash, asks Robert W. Butler Is the 3-D movie juggernaut losing momentum?

As recently as six months ago, movies in 3-D were touted as the salvation of the movie business. They offered an experience home theatres couldn’t duplicate, and theatre owners, in turn, charged more for tickets.

But more dissident voices are being heard.

Fans grumble that the $2 to $3 up charge is too expensive, the films are often dimly lit, the 3-D looks phony – or just plain bad. And filmmakers including Star Trek director J.J. Abrams and Inception director Christopher Nolan have groused about the push to convert to 3-D some films shot in 2-D. Some Hollywood insiders speculate that interest in the format may have peaked with the huge success last Christmas of James Cameron’s New Zealand-designed Avatar.

Since then, ticket sales for 3-D films generally have trended downward as the number of 3-D films has increased.

How to Train Your Dragon, for example, received about 68 percent of its March opening from 3-D ticket sales, according to Wall Street research firm RTIG Research. Three months later, only 60 percent of the opening weekend for Toy Story 3 was from 3-D – despite the film’s overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Step Up 3D, the second sequel in a mildly successful franchise and the only one in 3-D, made just US$15million in its first weekend – the worst opening in the franchise’s history.

But does that spell trouble for 3-D versions of this winter’s Harry Potter sequel, Will Ferrell’s animated Megamind or Disney’s next Narnia movie? There’s a new 3-D movie opening nearly every week through the end of the year.

“No matter how it’s spun,” the entertainment website TheWrap.com proclaimed this month, “the data on the expected 3-D explosion just isn’t going in the right direction.”

Richard Greenfield, a film industry analyst with BTIG Research, was quoted saying that “the overall message isn’t that 3-D is a fad or that it’s going away, but I’m not sure we’re moving to a point where 50 percent of the box office is derived by 3-D ticket sales as some of the bulls currently believe.”

The article may have created some blowback in Hollywood’s executive suites. Asked to expand on his statement, Greenfield said “I’m not commenting. On anything.”

And then he hung up.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin sees history repeating itself.

“In 1953 when the first 3-D craze erupted, Jack L. Warner made exactly the statements we’ve been hearing lately, predictions that in the future all films will be in 3-D,” Maltin said.

“He even used that as the rationale to shut down Warner’s famous cartoon department.

Six months later he decided he was wrong.”

By 1954 the 3-D fad was over. Audiences grew tired of the gimmick and the occasional headaches induced by the early 3-D technology. A handful of as-yet-unreleased films shot in the process-including the musical Kiss Me Kate, the Hitchcock thriller Dial M for Murder and the John Wayne Western Hondo – were shown only in standard 2-D. Critics of today’ 3-D say that part of the problem is that some audiences have felt burned by recent releases – such as Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender – that were shot in 2-D but underwent a post-production transformation to 3-D. In the case of Alice the results were nondescript; in Titans and Airbender wretchedly bad.

“Phony faux 3-D films have soured the whole thing,” Beck said. Perhaps, but mediocre 3-D didn’t stop either film from achieving blockbuster status.

A more pressing issue may be one of cost.

Audiences weighing the benefits of 3-D against the higher ticket price will become more selective, says cultural historian Robert Thompson of Syracuse University.

“3-D had its first explosion of euphoria with ‘Avatar,’” he said. “James Cameron is a visionary who lavished time and money on making that the best 3-D film ever. Other filmmakers haven’t yet caught up and audiences have noticed. Now that first act may be coming to a close.”

Nobody is predicting that 3-D will vanish.

But studios probably will need to think twice about what films require the 3-D treatment.

“3-D is a special effect, and it’s one that costs extra money at every step of the process: in the filming, post-production and exhibition,” Hugo Award-winning writer John Scalzi recently wrote on AMCTV.com.

“Producers are unlikely to want to add costs to a movie that won’t result in a commensurate boost to the box office.

“There’s no doubt that in the reasonably near future a major studio will make a very expensive movie in 3-D and that movie will fall flat on its three-dimensional face.”

3-D ... IS IT LOSING THE AUDIENCE? Avatar set box office records, but subsequent 3-D movies have seen erosion in audience support. This year’s releases and their box office to date: Avatar (Dec. 15): James Cameron’s space opus has earned US$750 million in the U.S.-nearly 70 percent of that from 3-D presentations. An extended version returns to theatres Aug. 27.

Alice in Wonderland (March 4): Shot in 2-D, this Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration underwent a post-production conversion to 3-D. It looked OK. Domestic gross: $334 million.

How to Train Your Dragon (March 26): Good animation, great 3-D. U.S. earnings: $217 million.

Clash of the Titans (April 2): Another 2-D converted to “faux” 3-D ... but this time it looked terrible. $163 million.

Shrek Forever After (May 21): $236 million.

Toy Story 3 (June 18): So good many said it didn’t need 3-D. $390 million.

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