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March 12, 2008

ABSOLUTE POWER

COMING SOON>> http://www.helenclarkbook.com

Posted by Ian Wishart at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2008

Deborah Coddington pinged

JUNE 2002 EDITION

Evidence of a political and financial spider's web involving Cabinet Ministers, millionaire businessmen, senior journalists and newspaper editors in a plan to manipulate public opinion has emerged in a pile of explosive documents leaked to Investigate magazine.

The documents, pictured on the following pages, show tentacles of influence spreading out from New Zealand Business Roundtable CEO Roger Kerr across virtually all the main sectors of NZ society.

A source with access to the Roundtable's confidential files dumped a number of them in the hands of this magazine that show:

~A National Cabinet Minister apparently seeking money from Fay Richwhite in 1993 for personal reasons

~A list of policy demands being delivered by David Richwhite, Lion Nathan boss Doug Myers, Air New Zealand chairman Bob Matthew and Roger Kerr to Minister of Labour Bill Birch

~A summoning of National Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Bill Birch to a meeting with Myers, Matthew, Kerr and Telecom boss Rod Deane at Brierley's head office in Wellington

~An apparent close working relationship betweenDominion editor Richard Long and the Business Roundtable

~That the Business Roundtable offered to bribe — in Investigate 's opinion - journalists and columnists in newspapers to write articles showing Roundtable policies in a favourable light

~That a journalist who is now a senior writer for North & South magazine was secretly paid by the Business Roundtable to write a book under her own name that portrayed Roundtable policies in a favourable light

~That speeches and articles allegedly written by top business leaders may not have been written by those business leaders at all, but by the Business Roundtable as part of a cynical attempt to manipulate public, business and political opinion

 

North & South's Editor-at-large, Warwick Roger, who has publicly accused Investigate journalists of wallowing in conspiracy theories, may like to publicly explain the relationship between his magazine's senior writer, Deborah Coddington, and the New Zealand Business Roundtable, in the wake of the publication of these documents.

Not only do the papers obtained by Investigate show Coddington failed to reveal a conflict of interest regarding her authorship of the book Turning Pain Into Gain, but that she looked forward to continuing her close relationship with the Business Roundtable while supplying "business/economy articles" to North & South and other news media as well.

Coddington decided to hide from the public the fact that she was secretly drawing a salary from the Business Roundtable because she worried that readers would doubt her journalistic credibility if they knew.

Other prominent New Zealanders to emerge as mouthpieces of the Business Roundtable include authors Karl Stead and Alan Duff.

A letter from Stead to the Roundtable's Michael Irwin in March 1994 begins:

"I would like to write the piece you suggest for the Dominion, accepting NZBRT's offer to make up payment to one day's work at the agreed rate."

The article was about education.

Another document shows Roger Kerr offering to top up another columnist's usual payment from the Dominion by a further $500 "to make it worth the trouble" to write an article where the "thinking is in line with that in our study".

Investigate has no knowledge whether Dominion editor Richard Long knew that the Business Roundtable was secretly payingDominion columnists extra money to write pro-freemarket articles, and the magazine makes no allegations in this regard. But the documents on the following pages do show a very close relationship between Roger Kerr and Richard Long.

Investigate is also aware that Long ordered alterations to some of the news coverage of the Winebox Inquiry by Dominion correspondents, allegedly because it showed New Zealand First leader Winston Peters in too positive a light.

Ironically, it is in an article published by the Dominion attacking Peters that the Business Roundtable's hypocrisy is best illustrated.

The article, allegedly written by Business Roundtable chairman Doug Myers but apparently penned by Roger Kerr, is headlined "Importance of Being Honest" but could more accurately have been slugged "The Pot Calling The Kettle Black".

"The importance of the judgement of the District Court in the defamation case taken by Selwyn Cushing against New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, from the Business Roundtable's perspective, is that the accusation that it had sought to exercise improper political influence was found to be totally baseless," crowed Myers [Kerr] in the opening paragraph.

"Winston Peters should, as a minimum first step, make a full and unequivocal apology forthwith to all parties wrongfully accused.

"From a national perspective, the sequence of events has highlighted the lack of substance underlying the claims about corruption in New Zealand made in the AustralianFour Corners programme and the earlier TVNZ programme For The Public Good.

"There have been other instances in recent years of false and exaggerated claims by politicians, regulators and journalists about alleged inadequacies in our laws, regulations or codes of behaviour as they affect commerce.

"Contrary to such claims, the general reputation ofbusiness in this country for honesty and integrity is deservedly high. New Zealand has come out in first place in international surveys by Transparency International as the country which is freest from corruption in business and politics.

"The Business Roundtable supports demands for the highest standards of honesty and integrity in politics and business. It is up to individuals and firms to set such standards and to promote them in the wider community.

"As an organisation, the Business Roundtable believes that there is no place for improper influence in any sphere of public life. It operates on the basis of open and transparent research and analysis and on the principle that public policies should be determined on the merits of the relevant arguments.

"When the disreputable television programme For The Public Good was found to have made blatantly untrue allegations about improper business influence on Government decisions, Television New Zealand received the stiffest penalty ever handed down by the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

"Similarly," concludes Myers [Kerr], "Michael Laws resigned from Parliament after accusations of improper conduct. At a time when New Zealand is facing important choices in the coming election, it is vital that public debate should focus on the merits of policies, that high standards of integrity in politics should be upheld, and that those who fall short of them should be held accountable."

Investigate has not sought comment in advance from any of the parties mentioned in the documents on the next few pages because of the high likelihood of an expensive gagging writ. Instead it will be up to other news media to seek reactions to this major story and the leaked documents.

However, Investigate did invite the Justice spokespeople from each main political party, and an expert on journalism ethics, to comment on a hypothetical case we put to them. Their responses follow after the documents: (read the original article, with documents, online here)

a question of journalistic ethics?

The events detailed in these documents happened several years ago. We asked journalism ethics expert Jim Tully, and a group of senior politicians, to answer what they understood to be a series of hypothetical questions. Their answers should not be construed as informed comment on what you have just read, but their answers are indicative of current attitudes to such practices in general terms:

1.Please comment on the ethics/professionalism of the following scenario: If any journalist was to write an article for a newspaper on an important matter and received money from an interested lobby group for doing so...

Journalists must be seen to be independent in their information gathering. They should avoid affiliations and incentives which compromise their independence and create, or indeed appear to create, conflicts of interest.

A journalist employed by a news organisation, or freelancing, who receives money from a source or an individual/organisation which has an interest in the material published or broadcast is compromising their independence and is, arguably, performing the role of a public relations person not an independent journalist if that is what they are purporting to be. If they were commissioned to write the article, the conflict of interest is clear-cut.

It would be appropriate for any financial relationship to be declared to the publisher and to be acknowledged on publication. Readers are entitled to know the an article was written on this basis just as we would expect articles on, say, the travel pages to acknowledge any provision of free travel and accommodation etc and by whom.

2. And a book?

If the book was commissioned by the lobby group, one would expect this to be acknowledged.

3.If a newspaper editor were to run a feature article on a political topic, written by an allegedly independent academic but the person was known to the editor to be working at the behest of influential lobby groups, would that be a breach of ethics?

Affiliations that reflect upon the independence of a writer should be disclosed.

- Jim Tully, Lecturer in Journalism

the questions to politicians

Firstly, if an ordinary MP were found to have substantial direct private business dealings with an influential individual or organisation, should such an interest be required to publicly declared?

Secondly, if a Cabinet Minister or Prime Minister were found to have substantial direct private business dealings with an influential individual or organisation, should such an interest be required to be publicly declared?

Thirdly, if a Cabinet Minister were found to have accepted money from an influential individual or organisation, in return for which such an individual or organisation wanted top level access to the Minister to provide advice on policy matters, should such an incident be disclosed to an authority? If so, which authority?

STEPHEN FRANKS:

Conflict of interest rules for Cabinet Ministers are designed to reduce the risks of corruption. I was
interviewed by Al Morrison in North & South several months ago on the topic of corrupt influence.

Interests registers for Cabinet Ministers are a crude form of prophylactic. They signal to the Minister that any use of executive powers to favour his or her personal or family interests is likely to be evident. Executive power is important, because Ministers have all kinds of discretions to exercise, and our law and constitution assume that they will be exercised in the best interests of New Zealanders generally. As the Parliamentary commencement prayer puts it "Putting aside all private and personal interests".

On the other hand, expecting disclosure to deal with most concerns about undue influence is simply puerile. The influences that affect politicians are largely political, but that covers a broad range. For example lobby groups implicitly threaten the political future of MPs by the influence they have with their members and with other media in affecting the politician's reputation. The best lobby groups achieve the most by providing persuasive argument and information which the political decision maker would otherwise not have.

Your questions identify a particular source or potential source of influence, namely the personal profit that might be derived from or disguised in a private business dealing. It is not the fact that the dealing is with an influential individual or organisation that matters, it is whether the dealing is with people who have some interest in a matter in which the politician also has power. Voting in caucus without disclosure of a conflicting interest should be considered completely unethical. Votes on select committees and in Parliament are open, and debated. This differs from the position for Ministers. Many of their exercises of discretion will never attract public attention. The short answer to your questions is then:

1.Ministers should disclose material private business dealings with bodies where any conflict of interest might reasonably be anticipated. To the extent that is feasible the disclosure should be public and prior, and recorded in a register.

2. The argument is much less powerful in relation to ordinary MPs. There are relatively few occasions in which an ordinary MP can secretly procure advantages for "influential individuals or organisations" who might want to "pay off" the MP. I think the rule should be that MPs must disclosure their connection if and when there is some matter on which they are involved, that concerns the individual or organisation.

I favour strong sanctions for failure to make an informative disclosure of any potential conflict of interest.

But to try to require routine registration of dealings would be likely to have four effects:

(a) Involve a numbing recitation of irrelevant detail by law abiding careful folk.

(b) Catch some "innocents" sooner or later with inadvertent non-disclosure, particularly where a connection or interest arises after the specified filing times.

(c) Non-disclosure by crooks. They will just route the "dealings" through family members or some other disguise.

(d) Inevitably the rules grow in an attempt to block perceived loop holes. If they become a cumbersome set of obligations active business people will be further dissuaded from getting involved in politics. They could not be bothered with the trivia and the prurient and envious use to which the register would be put, when it should really be aimed at corruption.

My approach to most of these corruption matters is to have proper enforcement of real penalties when corruption is uncovered rather than potentially futile procedural fences at the tops of cliffs.

REPLY, Wayne Mapp, Nat.

1. Yes, in fact this is a current requirement where an MP is considering legislation in which it could be said that there is a conflict of interest, or a benefit to the MP as a result of the legislation.

2. Yes, the current rules requires full disclosure of interests given the wide range of issues that Ministers consider.

3.Resignation should be the automatic result of "purchasing access".

REPLY, Phil Goff, Lab.

Very clear and stringent rules about Minister's conduct and conflict of interest exist and are spelled out in the Cabinet Office Manual. The Manual is available at:

www.dpmc.govt.nz/cabinet/ manual/index.html

The Government proposes to introduce disclosure of interest rules for all MPs.

REPLY, Rod Donald, Green

1. Yes, and once the register of interests of members of parliament is established then any such interest will be publicly declared. Such a register already operates for cabinet ministers and all members of parliament are already required under Standing orders (165) to declare any pecuniary interests i.e. direct financial benefit that might accrue as a result of the outcome of parliament's consideration of a particular item of business to either the member personally or any trust, company or other business entity in which the member holds an appreciable interest.

2. Yes. In addition to the requirements under standing Order No. 165, any such interest is already required to be publicly declared under the registration of interests for Cabinet Ministers which requires disclosure of remunerated directorships or employment and substantial minority or controlling interests in a business enterprise or professional practice (with a description of the business activity unless the business concerned is listed as a public company), minority ownership of company shares or beneficial interests in a trust (excluding a registered superannuation scheme), ownership of all real property, holding of mortgage or debt instruments, liabilities indicating the nature of the liability and the identity of the creditor, overseas travel or accommodation (unless paid for personally or by immediate family members or from NZ public funds or by another Government as an adjunct to an official parliament visit), gifts received that have an estimated value of over NZ$500 per gift, payments received from any outside activities and liabilities of the member discharged by a third party.

3. Yes. The rules on non compliance in relation to disclosure of interests are well established. Non compliance is addressed by way of publicity and political sanction, a report by the controller and auditor general and contempt of the House. Failure to declare a pecuniary interest in relation to parliament's consideration of a particular item of business also results in contempt of the House. The Clerk of the House is the authority to which any such incidences should be reported.

Posted by Ian Wishart at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

TRAVEL: May 05, AU Edition

RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT
Gary A. Warner says that if you look beyond the sleaze, Amsterdam is full of treasures

Forget the canals. Forget the coffeehouses. Forget the acres of Rembrandts and Van Goghs. Forget all that wooden shoes and tulips and silly Hans Brinker and his silver skates stuff you ever heard, read or saw.

Before you go to Amsterdam, get your brain around the other Amsterdam. The in-your-face Amsterdam.

The CBD shops that sell postcards of genitals painted to look like Santa Claus. Where delivery boys on pink bicycles deliver marijuana seeds. Where porn and prostitution flourish in the most picturesque red-light district in the world.

Get ready for it, all of it, because it is going to smack you right in the head whether you like it or not.

How you react will determine whether you see Amsterdam as the most liberal, liberating metropolis in Europe or a beautiful old jewel wrapped in an oily envelope of sleaze.

For the better part of two decades, I fell in the latter category. Four times Amsterdam was penciled in on my itinerary, and four times I found reason to get out the eraser.

But when I realized I’d been to nearly every major European city – I had been to Brussels twice – I decided it was time to give Amsterdam a shot.

I’ve always had a long list of reasons not to go. But I came away with more reasons potential visitors shouldn’t repeat my mistake of waiting so long to experience the Dutch metropolis.

Amsterdam has a great airport. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and Amsterdam gets off on the right foot.

With its one terminal that has just two levels, Schiphol is the easiest, most modern airport in Europe, a dream to navigate compared with the creaking facilities of London, Paris and Rome. A high-speed train leaves every 15 minutes for the 20-minute ride from the airport to the city center.

I don’t go to a city for its airport (if I did, I’d never go back to New York City). But Amsterdam’s is nonetheless a big plus.

The morning after I arrived in Amsterdam, I was fighting jet lag. I stepped out of my canal-side hotel and wandered the quays for hours.
The trees had lost their leaves, revealing glimpses through the bare branches of old houses that line the waterways. Homes were hung with Christmas lights and garlands – even many of the 2,500 houseboats along the canals were decked out in yuletide finery.

The heart of the city is the Grachtengordel, the three concentric canals that half-ring the city center. Viewing the mansions of the Herengracht, the bridges over the Keizergracht and the houseboats fronting the artists’ lofts of the Prisengracht is one of the most popular strolls for visitors.

In all, there are 47 miles of canals in Amsterdam, and each mile seemed to offer a postcard image: A woman carrying a cello on her back as she pedaled her bicycle toward the city center. A mother singing “Jingle Bells” to her kindergartner as they skipped by. Pre-teen boys bundled up against the cold playing soccer on a canal-side strip, making moves that would fool most Australian high school teams.

When you get thirsty, watch your language. Ask for a ‘coffee shop’, and you’ll get more than a caffeine buzz – it’s the popular term for places that legally sell marijuana and hashish. If you ask for a ‘café’, you’ll likely be sent to one of the 1,000-plus bars in the city. (Do go. Drinking is a wonderful pastime in Amsterdam. Try a light-tasting Hoegaarden or a dark De Koninck beer. Or better yet, a traditional jenever, a gin-like drink often infused with fruit or herbs.)

There are the grand cafés whose luxurious interiors will seem familiar to anyone who has walked into a fancy café in Paris, Vienna or Budapest.

I prefer the old, small taverns called “brown cafés” for their stained-wood interiors and dark, drapery-blocked doorways. Press past the curtain at Hoppe near the Spui Square, and you’ll go back three centuries in time. It’s a cramped but cozy place that’s especially good in the off-season, when the hordes of summer tourists aren’t trying to elbow in for a seat.

Another good choice is ‘t Doktertje, which means ‘the little doctor’, another timeworn spot where for less than $10 you can get a drink and sit for as long as you like. I brought along my journal and enjoyed wasting a couple of hours in the corner.

My favorite of all was In De Waag, a bistro and bar inside the last remaining gatehouse of the old city. This imposing brick pile was once the weighing house for goods, and later the site of the city’s executions. I had a bowl of spliter wtensoep, the traditional stick-to-your-gut pea soup with duck rillettes, washed down with two haze-reducing cappuccinos. Between bouts of reading the International Herald Tribune, I perused my e-mail and watched a Webcast of the surf at Pipeline in Hawaii from one of the café’s computers. The total of a bill is called a ‘rekening’. I smiled at the apocalyptic-sounding word for a tab so small.

Go ahead and make your pilgrimage to the Rijksmuseum to see Vermeer’s ‘The Kitchen Maid’. Take in ‘The Sunflowers’ and ‘Wheatfield With Crows’ at the Van Gogh Museum. Just save time for some of the smaller museums around town.

I enjoyed my visit to the Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie on a narrow street just off Dam Square. The collections change constantly at the modernist glass-and-steel show space. One day it may be large-format photos juxtaposing cuts of meat or raw animal parts with flowers. Another day it might feature military-installation still lifes from around Europe.

If there is a must-see museum in Amsterdam, it’s Anne Frank Huis, where the young Dutch Jewish girl wrote her famous diary while hiding from the Nazi occupiers during World War II. She and her family were turned in to the police and she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just two months before the war’s end. Her diary describing her hopes while hiding has become one of the most widely translated books in the world.

One of the great charms of Amsterdam – albeit a sometimes dangerous one – is the sea of bicyclists making their way around the city. People wheel wildly around the cobblestone and brick streets as if they are invincible. There’s no headgear, and even at night there are young men and women wearing black on bicycles without lights. Lights and reflectors are just one more thing to get ripped off – Amsterdam logs more than 100,000 stolen bicycles a year.

With bikes parked outside where they are pelted by inclement weather and preyed upon by thieves, there’s little incentive to ride a fancy 10-speed or gizmo-laden mountain bike. Most are your simple one-speed models that you brake by backpedaling – not very different from what most Amsterdamers’ ancestors would have ridden.

It’s possible to rent a bicycle and make your way around the city as locals do. Just be prepared for some kidney-jarring old streets and maniac wheelers – especially during the morning and evening rush hours – who will be more than happy to run you right off the road.

Until World War II, the Dutch ruled Indonesia, and one of the great treats of a trip to Amsterdam is to enjoy a rijsttafel – “rice table” – which is made up of up to two dozen small plates presented at the same time, including fried rice with pork called nasi goreng, and satay – skewers of chicken, pork and beef with peanut dipping sauce.

Beware the spicy sambal chili sauce. Two of the best places to experience the rijsttafel are Tempo Doeloe on Utrechtsestraat and Kantjil & De Tijger on Spuistraat.

For a more domesticated taste, try patat, the local version of what we call chips. The crisp, fresh, fried potato strands are only a distant culinary cousin to the greasy slabs served up in fast-food joints. They’re served from outdoor stands scattered all around town. One of the best is Vleminckx on Voetboogstraat. Locals have it with mayonnaise – so speak up when you order unless you want your order drowned in the white stuff.

There are a number of big baroque barracks on the main plazas and a few design-oriented boutique hotels like Blakes, the local branch of Anouska Hempel’s London-based temple of trendiness. But part of the charm of a stay in Amsterdam is cozying into a canal-side hotel that’s been sewn together from neighboring town houses.

I stayed at the Pulitzer Hotel, with its sparkling gold lights outlining the roofs of the 17th-century homes that form its facade. Though it’s affiliated with the Sheraton chain, there’s none of the artificial feel of a business hotel.

A perennial favorite among travelers is the Ambassade Hotel, a small hotel made from a string of canal houses not far from Spui Square. One that’s not in a lot of the guidebooks, but that I found charming, is Hotel van Onna, a nice canal-side budget hotel. The rooms are small and Spartan, but I loved its pretty Christmas ornamentation inside and out.

Another small hotel enjoying a lot of buzz these days is ‘t Hotel, an eight-room mansion turned hotel built in 1690 that houses its own antique shop. Rooms look out either on a canal or over the pretty gardens.

I’ve already got a list of what to explore next time. Yes, there will be a next time. First, a return in the spring – I’ll put up with the crowds to experience the flowers. I’ll wander the pretty Leidsegracht canal and go see the Poezenboot – a barge filled with cats – that’s moored on the Singel. I’ll drop into the Amsterdams Historisch Museum to see if it offers better insight into how the 17th-century stolid commercial town became the free wheeling place of today.

After so long avoiding Amsterdam, I want to go back. It doesn’t intrigue like Berlin or warm like Rome. It doesn’t have the treats of Paris or the ease of London. But it deserves better than the just-passing-through Brussels treatment.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: July 05, AU Edition

COPY CATS
Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick

It’s just another brown brick building in a suburban American business park. But Suite J at the Waunakee Business Center in Wisconsin is about to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December – is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here.
In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth was announced to the world, research into animal cloning has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago.

Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and endangered species. They’ve created cloned cows from frozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve talked about resurrecting extinct creatures such as woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. And with the news on Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven this research, cloning remains uncomfortable – even freakish – for many people.

Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy animals or deformed monsters? How many animals are sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in the end, what will it lead to?

As ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for animal cloning – improving the food supply, fighting disease, saving endangered animals – the arguments for and against cloning mutate and evolve along with the research advances.

That debate is now moving to the backyard.

In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced the birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold as a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as Julie, paid $50,000 to have her beloved – but dead – kitty cloned. While some say she was swindled, Hawthorne believes she was given an incredible, if expensive, gift.

‘Our product is based on love’, Hawthorne said.

David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone’s product anything but ‘loving’.

Also, he and other critics said consumers are being duped: The animals they think they are getting – their original pets – cannot be reproduced.

And finally, they think Genetic Savings & Clone’s product is grossly frivolous in light of the number of animals in shelters who need homes.

‘Everything about this is objectionable’, Magnus said.
But Autumn Fiester, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said there isn’t evidence to show that animals are suffering – at least any more than commercially bred dogs or cats.

She added that the claim that pet owners are being duped is condescending. As for the frivolous argument, she says, ‘Then you’re arguing against buying any luxury good.’ Among those involved in cloning, she is in the minority.

Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology – a Worcester, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technology – called it ‘troubling.’

Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet cloning ‘ridiculous’ and ‘preposterous.’

Somatic cell nuclear transfer – the shop name for cloning – is conceptually a pretty easy process.

A cell – such as a skin cell – is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell that’s had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail.

‘What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm’, said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.

If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.

While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.

Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones – i.e., those which survive beyond birth – can run as low as one-in-1,000 to as many as 15 percent.

Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues, some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.

The mystery is in the egg. ‘There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram’ and start anew so that it’s read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said.

But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive.
There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg’s nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell in a form known as mitochondrial DNA.

No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo, but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development.

Then there’s the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father. But only one of these copies is active at any one time.

In a clone, ‘the normal battle between mom and dad’ is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and ‘a messed up placenta.’
The hurdles don’t end here.

When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it’s carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion.
Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency.
‘Our losses are well under 50 percent’, he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.

Magnus and others question these claims; scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.

Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.

These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint, but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.

This means that a consumer who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original. That, said Magnus, is ‘a rip-off.’
Finally, critics of pet cloning said there’s the issue of the millions of animals who don’t have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters.

Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne’s business is minimizing the plight of these animals.

They charge that the money Hawthorne’s clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter.
That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say.
Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless.

‘Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated
to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?’ Fiester said.

He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.

In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.

If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with – animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original – the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.

His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets and make them live longer and healthier.

‘Our clones will be better than normal,’ he said. ‘Clones are going to become the preferred pets.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

LINE ONE: Mar 05

CHRIS CARTER
A state-sponsored frontal lobotomy

How do you finally discover that you have crossed the threshold as it were and become, irrevocably, a grizzly old bastard? Could some of the signs, for instance, be somehow linked to the old chestnut theories that the Coppers now seem indecently young, that Americans rejoicing in names like Snoop Dogg, Eminem and the like who wail frequently obscene or incredibly violent doggerel to a sort of ghetto-like primeval beat is now akin to the prophesied effect that Rock and Roll would have on my generation, (a notably accurate prophesy when you come to think of it.) That women and wimps have taken over our world. That we now live in times where the number one objective of every good person must be, at all costs, to avoid ever letting a word or a phrase cross your lips that may give offense to a fellow human being, or for that matter any living thing that could be thought to have an IQ higher than that of a common amoeba.

Having studied at some length our society since the beginnings of the new millennium, the term dinosaur I have now discovered is no longer a strong enough description to accurately portray the likes of such as I.

Indeed so decrepit have become my mental processes and general inability to accept change, that together with my plainly unacceptable desire to hold on to such antediluvian principles regarding such matters as the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, truth versus lies etc, this should, without any doubt at all, make me an instant candidate for a state-sponsored frontal lobotomy. Worst of all, and this is a terrible admission to make I’m sure you will agree, I don’t personally give a big rat’s bottom as to either my supposed mental decay, current thought processes or – worse – frequently rabid utterances.

Since liberal socialism and all of its mind numbing, institutionalised gray-matter-destroying rubbish infiltrated our previously very well balanced and indeed pleasant little country, you may be absolutely assured that anything at all that you may say, do, or even think, will be contrary to this brave new world where euphemism, spin, and downright deception is not only the norm, but where advanced practitioners of these new age black arts are rewarded almost beyond measure.

Of course, should you retain, even after some years now of social re-engineering, some small vestige of morality, a lingering perception of what is genuinely right or wrong, even worse the temerity to voice in a public place an opinion or an idea based on these now officially discredited ageist/sexist/racist/homophobic/ etc thoughts or ideas, (and believe me such is the lexicon of the liberal abuse vocabulary that every time you say anything you will be bound to fall foul of one or perhaps all of these catch-all labels), then very quickly you will see the sense in simply joining the mainstream, saying nothing, and indeed most probably earning social promotion to the ranks of the “Metro sexual”, a term that as I understand it describes fairly accurately, anyone at all who has cast aside such unhealthy notions of being either male or female with a normally operating brain and adopting instead the thought patterns and world view probably best described as being that of an earthworm.

Having achieved, well certainly from our metro sexual politicians’ point of view in any case, this most desirous state of near social nirvana, we may then be almost completely relied upon to vote in the expected fashion, although should a last little nudge be required to maintain the sisterhood’s largely undeserved position of power and influence, then common voter bribery using the peoples’ own tax monies you can absolutely guarantee will retain St Helen’s place in this odd-ball political firmament. All of this, even as a self-confessed grizzly old social dinosaur, scares the hell out of me, not so much on my own behalf, but even casting my mind back just a couple of decades, this quickly accelerating decline in just about everything that we all once held to be an integral part of our national character appears to be all just going down the toilet, right under the very noses of people who, like me have had kids, yet appear to have no conception at all as to how we, as parents, should be guarding, if necessary with our very lives, what little that now remains untouched by a series of politicians, who if there was ever any justice at all, would be behind bars for the common good.

Good God, we voters really do have a lot to answer for do we not? In fact, I really do believe that before anyone is allowed to cast a vote at any upcoming elections that it should be made law that each individual voter should have to prove that they have spent at least several hours watching and listening to the people that collectively we have recently chosen to represent us.

It is fair to say that amongst the Members of Parliament there plainly are some good people, but sadly these folk are working in an environment that more commonly resembles a Victorian mad house. The standard of debate is at best puerile and frequently descends to a level where an onlooker might seriously believe that they had stumbled upon an episode of Animal House, where various wild-eyed actors are competing with one another to amuse the watching audience with feats of studied idiocy that – if not genetically based – at least call into severe question the current state of our mental health service.

Ever watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show? The parallels are “astounding,” from the Speaker playing the part of commentator, to the various MPs braying their own particular interpretations of everyone from Odjob to Frankenfurter. I tell you, rent and watch the movie, then sit down and watch Parliament in action, and I’ll guarantee you that apart from the sycophants in the Press Gallery, no one will ever take our current Parliament seriously, ever again.

Which point, one must observe, is in fact no laughing matter at all, because, quite plainly, it is from this appallingly dysfunctional organisation that the very laws that increasingly control our lives are formulated and then enacted, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why it is that the much better organised Government Departments have increasingly taken over the role of Ministers and the MPs by simply being forced to fill the vacuum that their supposed masters have provided by their collective ineptitude.

Our democracy now appears to have devolved to the point where Parliament simply applies itself to the task of prying enormous amounts of tax monies from the people at large, at which point unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats spend up large, usually in the time-honoured manner of increasing the size of their staff levels and therefore power structure, consolidating their increasing grip on the throats of the citizens that they are meant to serve and be working for.

Certainly we still have elections, indeed we all are looking forward to one at the end of this year, but have little doubt at all that when our votes have been cast, little of any worth will have changed, Justice, Health, Education, the Police and various other Departments and Ministries are now, quite clearly self-sufficient unelected entities and most certainly well beyond either censure or the control of the common herd, which I might add is self evident in the cavalier fashion in which they effectively carry on their own sweet ways regardless of which Government we choose to elect. All of which thoughts and observations I freely admit can only really come from a Grizzly old curmudgeon, the younger more liberal freethinkers amongst us continuing to largely believe that Democracy, like Freedom, is simply a word ... perhaps they are right.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: July 05, AU Edition

IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD
From cough syrups to eyeglasses for cows, Martha McKay takes a peek into a very tiny future

At the nanotechnology show in New York City recently, companies touted the state-of-the-art, from quantum dots to microscopes powerful enough to see atoms.And then there were two guys from Cleveland hawking cough syrup.If you follow the nanotechnology industry closely, this sort of thing isn’t surprising.

But if you don’t, such seemingly humdrum technology on display alongside the advances at the fourth annual NanoBusiness conference might seem unusual.

Spend time with nano-experts and one thing becomes clear: nanotechnology is more commonplace than you might think – from nano-engineered eyeglass coatings used on one in five pairs of eyeglasses, to sunscreens and stain-resistant fabrics.

One of the most hyped areas of technology since the Internet, nanotechno- logy is the study and engineering of really small things – particles and gizmos from 1 to 100 nanometres, or a billionth of a metre, in size to be specific. The paper you are reading this on is about 100,000 nanometres thick.

As you might expect, there are hundreds of ways of using nano-sized particles and devices, with new ideas popping up all the time.
The U.S. government will pour an estimated $1.3 billion into nano-based R&D with a particular emphasis on such areas as cancer research. Here in Australia, governments are putting up $100 million for domestic nanotechnology research this year.

Jeffrey M. Jaffe, president of research and advanced technologies for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, told conferees how telecommunications networks could be transformed by nano-sized devices. Tiny power supplies working together with nano-sized microphones, tiny sensors and video displays could one day give us a communications ‘wallpaper’.
Even the ability to have ‘several microphones inside a phone would be a tremendous (sound quality) improvement’, he said.

Out at the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium, university researchers have 60 to 80 nano-based projects under way.They include building a stress gauge to strap on the back of a fruit fly. The tiny device will enable scientists to tell if the drosophila is asleep (they don’t have eyelids, in case you wondered). Researchers, who
study fruit flies because they are well-suited to genetic studies, want to be able to test whether their modifications to the fruit fly’s sleeping patterns work.

They are also looking into ways to build an electronic nose that can smell, a real-time DNA analyzer, and what they call a ‘rubber mirror’, which would map the imperfections of your eye and allow the creation of perfect corrective lenses.

‘We could fit a cow with glasses’, says David Bishop, vice president of nanotech-nology research at the labs.

But along with purely scientific uses for nano-devices, many companies hope to turn a profit – the motivation behind Cleveland-based Five Star Technologies and its cough formula. Nano-emulsions and dispersions made using a patented technique called controlled-flow cavitation make the cough syrup adhere to the throat better.
Gerry Weimann, Five Star’s CEO, doesn’t think consumers really care about the ‘nano’ aspect of the syrup, which is made by another company called Improvita Health Products.

‘Most people are just looking for a good experience – not a lot of people wonder about the technology behind it’, says Weimann.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Sep 05, AU Edition

SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
After a whirlwind trip through India’s sights, smells and sounds, Robert Cross vows to return

AIPUR, India – ‘I was told that the first thing you’ll notice is the smell,’ said my friend Dave with a faint leer. Just a friendly word of warning to get me going on the wrong foot.

My wife, Juju, and I had been hearing a lot of secondhand and even firsthand tidbits like Dave’s almost every time we told anyone about our travel plans. Visiting India? Get ready for a shock: Pollution. Dirt. Poverty. Stifling heat. Noise. Weird behaviour. Those odors.
I’m here to testify that any negatives were far outweighed by the beauty, culture, architectural grandeur and spirituality we were privileged to sample during a brief visit to a few cities in the north.

After we cleared the jetway in New Delhi at 5:30 a.m. on an autumn Saturday, the only smell came from the universal airport brew of electric-light ozone, air conditioning and passenger scents no different from those at Sydney or Heathrow.

Instead, the first thing we noticed was the wallpaper on immigration officers’ cubicles, a darling blue-and-pink-flowered pattern of the sort that might decorate a little girl’s nursery.

The officers’ faces remained properly stern, of course, and they worked deliberately. We heard a constant thumping of rubber stamps and piped-in native music that sounded like the whining of a thousand mosquitoes, and after about 45 minutes, a man in uniform summoned Juju and me to his posy-splashed quarters, examined our documents and pounded on them with his stamps.

Still no smell when we finally carted our luggage to the parking lot. Obviously, Dave had been misinformed.

Our driver, Remish, helped with the bags, and we set off on the five-hour drive to Jaipur and the beginning of our seven-day India adventure. Dawn greeted New Delhi with a gray haze of pollution, and my chest felt heavy. Our little white van seemed to be the only passenger vehicle on a highway filled with trucks and bicycles. Huge cows, some gray, others black, lolled on the median strip.

Those trucks provided some color in the otherwise drab outskirts of the big city. Each one had been professionally painted with garlands of flowers, soaring birds, cartoonish tigers, lovable bovines and complex geometric patterns. Some bore neatly scripted slogans on their sides, like ‘I Love My India’ or ‘The Great Indian Spirit’. On the rear end of each lorry, the artists had painted a fervent plea: ‘PLEASE HONK YOUR HORN’. Remish hit the horn incessantly, sticking to the right-hand lane and passing the endless parade of freighters – India is a left-hand-drive country – while deftly avoiding wayward bikes and meandering cows.

Two hours later, as we drove into the state of Rajasthan, the roadside scene abruptly changed. Our divided highway became a two-laner, adding to our excitement the real possibility of head-on collisions.

In downtown Jaipur, Juju and I felt as if we had been dropped into the middle of a Bollywood epic. Film buffs use the term to describe Bombay’s prolific movie industry, and here we had subcontinental action in three dimensions. We entered Jaipur during rush hour, so some of the streets leading to our hotel had been temporarily declared one-way in the wrong direction, apparently an effort – largely futile – to prevent gridlock. While Remish circled the city at a crawl, trying to find a route, we suddenly were interacting with the people. A few tapped on the windows to beg for money or sell us things. But most were in cars or riding mopeds – intent on honking their way through thickets of traffic, but still taking a moment to smile and wave at Juju’s video camera.

We found ourselves in the middle of an enchanting old city, alive with markets and the brilliant colors of the dresses and turbans worn by residents going about their business. Pedestrians skittered between vehicles, which slowed down only when a cow or two decided to lounge in the middle of the street.

Remish at last found the hotel entrance, a discrete opening in a wall and a long driveway leading to the magnificent, cream-colored Jai Mahal Palace. The 250-year-old building had once served as a palace for one of Jaipur’s many royals. Rajasthan has had a bewildering lineup of rulers and high-ranking court figures through its long history, and we soon lost track of the lineage, despite the best efforts of our local guides. But the maharajas sure had good taste in housing.

We felt entitled to a few hours of leisure. The lawns, pools and statuary of the Jai Mahal Palace invited meditation and brought a welcome element of tranquility to soften the jet lag. A pantalooned and turbaned house musician entertained two children with an old stringed instrument while they frolicked on the grass near a pavilion where we and a few other guests ate lunch. Juju and I still felt dragged down by travel overload. A visitor to India should schedule a day of retreat every so often to avoid becoming overwhelmed by exotica and to think about the meaning of it all. Our tight schedule denied us that luxury.

The next morning, our guide, who introduced himself as G.S. Arora, joined us and Remish in the van for a tour of Jaipur. His eyes sparkled mischievously behind his glasses. We would have other guides in the days ahead – a scholarly gentleman in Agra and at the Taj Mahal; a religion expert amid the Hindu temple carvings (some quite erotic) in Khajuraho; the harried scout who showed us the sights in Delhi.

Even so, Arora was the first, and this is a story about first impressions, so the task of satisfying our basic curiosity about the Indian way of doing things fell to him.

We headed for the heart of Old Jaipur, the walled and picturesque enclave known as the Pink City. Arora explained that in 1876 the reigning maharaja, Ram Singh, ordered all buildings near the palace painted pink to celebrate a state visit from the Prince of Wales, who later would ascend to the English throne as King Edward VII. ‘Pink is the color of warmth and welcome,’ Arora informed us, and pink the old city has remained. The buildings within the wall are repainted every couple of years. ‘People can use different shades of pink, but the basic color has to be pink,’ Arora said. ‘The authorities take care of the painting.’

We paused at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, for what Arora termed ‘a Japanese stop.’ He said that meant a stop for photographs. Although Juju is Asian, she laughed at the stereotype, one that I thought the world and its technology had obliterated. For a second, the guide’s little joke made India seem even more deliciously anachronistic.

The Palace of the Winds was pink, naturally, a beautiful 204-year-old facade about 5 stories high and dotted with tiny windows. From rooms and balconies on the other side, ladies of the court at the adjoining City Palace could discreetly peek down at the street scene.

On Tripolia Bazaar and other streets of the Pink City, merchants with open-air shops were selling everything imaginable. Although we felt the urge to get out and look at the displays of produce, spices, clothing, tools, toys and all the rest, we had a schedule to meet.
Arora did pause long enough to point out a milk market, where farmers had lined up canisters containing the morning’s output from their goats, cows, sheep and buffaloes.

The guide called our attention to a potential customer dipping his hand into a can. ‘To make the milk more profitable, a lot of water is added to this milk’, Arora said. ‘When the buyer comes in, he will put his hand in the milk, shake it out, rub the milk on his fingertips and see how much fat is in it. So the more hands that go into this can of milk, the better the milk becomes because of this added flavor. Thankfully, this is not the milk supplied to your hotel.’

That led to the subject of cows. ‘Every morning people would milk their cows and then leave them in the street to be fed by people,’ he told us. ‘The cow being a sacred animal, every household would try to feed them. After eating, they stand in the middle of the road or sit in the middle of the road and chew cud. This is good, because it slows and controls the traffic. And the cows like it, because the fumes make them feel high. In India, every animal except the husband is sacred.’

‘How do the cows know how to get home?’ Juju asked.

‘They always know. They are like homing pigeons.’

At the Amber Palace, our next stop, we found it easy to avoid eye contact with the hawkers because the palace itself commanded our full attention. The pinkish-beige structure sprawls across the crest of an imposing, rocky hill about 7 miles north of Jaipur. Begun in 1592 and completed in 1639, it served for more than 100 years as the capital of Rajasthan. In 1727, the reigning maharaja, Jai Singh, moved the capital to Jaipur, but the royal family continues to take up residence in the Amber Palace from time to time, even though the government now owns it.

We decided to ride an elephant up the hill to the palace entrance, a popular if somewhat hokey way to get there. Jeeps were also available, and visitors can hike up the steep ramp if they wish. Juju and I climbed onto a little seat behind our elephant driver. It swayed and tilted, while the driver engaged in a long, loud argument with his supervisor. Evidently, the driver wanted two more passengers for his mount, because the seat can hold four. Juju said, ‘I don’t like this at all. It’s scary. I want to get off.’ But before we could figure out how to do that, the elephant started up the ramp.

Arora, not being a tourist, preferred the Jeep. He met us in the palace courtyard, which was crowded with visitors and the elephants they came in on. He showed us around the wonderfully carved and pearl-inlaid areas where rulers held their audiences. We peeked into the artistically decorated private chambers that housed the maharajas and their concubines. A sandstone garrison stood grimly at a higher level, and both buildings spread their ramparts far along the mountainside like a truncated version of China’s Great Wall. Such a display of power and wealth must have intimidated enemies and subjects alike.

In the days that followed, we moved on to Agra and India’s absolute must-see, the Taj Mahal. After taking in the sights of Agra, we flew to Khajuraho, a relatively tranquil village famous for its beautiful Hindu temples dating back to the Chandela dynasty, which ruled for 500 years until overrun by the Moguls early in the 16th Century. The structures were a pleasant contrast to the palaces, tombs, fortifications and congestion of Rajasthan and Agra. We beheld an array of temple towers surrounded by lawns laced with uncrowded pathways.

Our guide that afternoon introduced himself as Mr. Singh. Immediately, he began to explain at great length the Hindu religion and how the carvings on those temples – built within a 100-year period, starting in AD 950 – illustrated the complexities of Hinduism and honored its divinities in all of their forms. He said the towers had been constructed in this out-of-the-way place to protect the sandstone images from frequent rains and floods that hit the Chandela capitals.
The masterful carvings encircled the towers in rows all the way to the top. They depicted gods and goddesses, of course, but also aspects of everyday life. Animals hauled farm goods, musicians played, soldiers fought, hunters stalked, and beautiful, exaggeratedly proportioned female dancers swayed. Animals both real and figments of artisans’ imaginations cavorted – leopards, elephants, horses, boars and combinations thereof.

Most famously, human couples were shown locked in carnal embrace, striking many of the positions detailed in the Kama Sutra.
‘You know about yoga?’ Mr. Singh asked. ‘There are a hundred kinds of yoga These are the way to reach the ultimate goal of life that is the next incarnation. These poses are a part of it, specific positions. Even sex could be a part of yoga.’

We were still pondering the complexities of the Hindu religion that night, as we dined at the rooftop Blue Sky Restaurant. Below us, merchants sold souvenirs, fabrics, saris, books and miniature copies of temple carvings. Across the street, the actual temples glowed with golden light and a voice boomed in Hindi – a sound and light show. We filled up on helpings of a dish very much like fried rice but punctuated with masala, a mixture of spices that provided a delicious mosaic of flavors.

Up there on the Blue Sky, we met a young couple from France who had been traveling through India for several weeks. They described wonders we would miss, experiences we wouldn’t have. At least not now. They were merchants, buying materials for their shop in Brittany. ‘We did make a short visit one time’, the man said, ‘and it was very difficult and frustrating. Doing it this way can still be difficult and sometimes frustrating, but there is so much to see.’

Intrepid INDIA

Classic Rajasthan
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Pushkar camel safari, Keoladeo Bird Park, Jaipur, castles
Brief: Rajasthan is home to all the colours of India. On our classic Rajasthan adventure we discover hidden forts, majestic palaces, colourful bazaars and of course enjoy a camel safari. This is the essence of Rajasthan.
Departure: Departs every Sunday from September to April and selected dates in July and August.
Price: AU$1020, plus Local Payment of US$200 per
person

Unforgettable India
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Khajuraho’s erotic temples, the River Ganges, Orchha, Chitrakoot, markets, Varanasi, Taj Mahal
Brief: India is vibrant, intoxicating, inspiring, dramatic and above all, unforgettable. From the Mughal splendour of Delhi and Agra, to the reminders of the Hindu epics in Chitrakoot and memories of prehistoric man in Chanderi, this trip offers it all. Join pilgrims as they undertake their daily rituals on the banks of the Great Mother Ganges.
Departure: Departs every Saturday from September
to April.
Price: AU$920, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person

India Unplugged
22 days Delhi to Kolkata
Trip Style: Intrepid Basix
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, desert scenery, towns lost in time, palaces, Kolkata
Brief: Chaotic and inspiring, this is the real India. India Unplugged is a far-flung adventure to one of the planet’s most exotic destinations. See towering fortresses and holy rivers, cosy up with camels, try your hand bargaining in bazaars and still have time to check out the Taj Mahal.
Departure: Departs on a Sunday.
Price: AU$1080, plus Local Payment of US$150 per person

India Family Adventure
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Family
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Bundi, Pushkar, camel safari, Jaipur
Brief: Come and meet India’s people and let them show you their homeland. This itinerary is designed for adults and children alike. Explore some of India’s most famous sights and experience an overnight camel trip into the desert, seek wildlife at Ranthambhore and learn local crafts around Jaipur.
Departure: Departs on a Saturday.
Price: AU$1270, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person
For more information on traveling in India with Intrepid Travel, please visit www.intrepidtravel.com, free call 1300 360 887 or come and see us at 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Best time of year to travel? India’s climate varies enormously from region to region and from season to season. While southern India basks in a reasonably constant tropical climate, the temperatures in the Rajasthan desert can vary from 50 degrees Celsius in July to 0 degrees Celsius at night in January. Monsoons bring torrential rain to most areas between June and August.
Religion: 81% Hindu, 12% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Sikh, 3% other
Language: Hindi (official) plus 12 other official languages and over 1600 dialects
Currency: Rupee (INR)
Visas: India does not offer visas on arrival - they must be applied for prior to travel. Conditions vary with country of origin and they usually take 1-2 weeks to process. In Australia, most travellers will apply for a 6 month multiple entry visa.
Electricity: 220-240V, 50 Hz
Times to avoid: Because climate changes so much within India, times to avoid certain areas will vary according to season. In addition, India is a land of festivals – best to check whether there is a festival going on in the area you want to travel to and book well in advance!

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

DOUBLE SPEAK: Mar 05

IAN WISHART
Killing us softly with their song

Cellphones kill 17 in road crashes”, screamed the newspaper headline, or something like it. I almost choked on the latte (come on, I live in Auckland). Seventeen people a year being killed because drivers are using cellphones, I thought to myself. Almost enough to warrant reconsidering my “yeah, right” attitude to the problem. And then I read on. It was actually 17 deaths over seven years. And on the strength of that, the Nanny-State brigade are calling for a blanket ban on the use of cellphones in vehicles, including a ban on the use of hands-free kits.

“It’s not the cellphone that’s the worst problem,” they wail to sympathetic, liberal, control-freak journalistic lap-puppies, “it’s the conversation. People can’t drive and talk at the same time. It’s not safe!” No. Apparently not. Not with a rampaging death rate of two and a half people per year. What’s next, a lead story in the Herald telling us, shock horror, “100% increase in cellphone-related fatalities prompts call for Government to introduce emergency regulations…”?

Ah, they’re a right little bunch of comedians, these.

It’s almost enough to make me think Darwin might actually have been right. Perhaps a segment of our population, mainly in the left-wing liberal camp, really are the natural descendants of apes and that’s why we’re fast becoming a banana republic. Buried, a week later, in a much smaller story in the paper was Matthew Dearnaley’s brave attempt to provide some much needed balance. He reported that the biggest distractions for drivers in road smashes were passengers talking and/or drivers reaching for or looking for something while they drove.

Add to that the third-largest factor in road smashes – fiddling with those pesky, all-the-bells-and-whistles-you-can-afford car stereos with the really really really small buttons and even tinier writing on the knobs – and you’ve got a whole heap of bigger causes of road fatalities than cellphones.

You are actually more at risk, in Auckland anyway because I’ve seen it happen, of being pinged in a cellphone drive-by where - either as pedestrian or fellow passing motorist – you’re clouted around the head as a result of another enraged driver throwing their malfunctioning phone with the fiddly buttons out the window.

Cellphones are a distraction for drivers, don’t get me wrong. They can, in some cases, lead to road accidents. But how many more accidents are caused by three year old twins Amanda and Timothy in the back screeching like proverbial banshees because one bit the other or you didn’t go the route they wanted or you just passed an icecream shop without stopping – need I go on?

Then there’s autocide – suicide by car. It’s a fair bet that a large chunk of our road fatalities each year are people who’d had enough of the screaming in the back seat, or anywhere else for that matter.

Frankly, I can’t see why the Government is even bothering with this half-baked plan to ban cellphones and headsets when Frau Clark could simply wave her dictatorial finger and get the thought police in Labour’s Cabinet to adopt the full-baked version and simply ban road accidents. Fullstop.

We could have the police officers currently manning speed traps reassigned to ride shotgun in ambulances, where they could sternly admonish and occasionally administer a jolly good kicking to victims of roadcrashes, and slap ‘em with an instant $500 fine before they even reach the hospital.

Because let’s face it: if the logic behind banning cellphones is to ensure drivers don’t get distracted by conversations, then we may as well ban passenger seats in vehicles. Only then could you reduce the likelihood of a conversation breaking out. Governments introduce stupid laws by first creating a climate of fear and then milking those fears for all they’re worth. And the biggest tragedy is that New Zealand’s Fourth Estate is complicit in the crime.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: Dec 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
The year of the monkey…

It was an annus horribilis for an increasingly isolated and beleaguered Republican president under attack from a scathing media and irresolute Democrats in Congress. Each day’s news appeared more dreadful than the last; a constant stream of casualties and poor generalship and setbacks.

Even the president’s attempts to honour the nation’s war dead was sharply condemned. The Chicago Times said he ‘misstated the cause for which they had died’. In other words, he had lied. And, they added, ‘the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States’.

Pretty harsh words. They were to be expected, though, from pundits and cartoonists who frequently questioned the president’s intelligence and who had regularly drawn him as a chimpanzee. Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to give 1863 a miss entirely. But then 1862 hadn’t been a banner year, either. At Antietam, Union forces suffered over twelve thousand casualties, the South nearly fourteen thousand; many more would fall in the year ahead at Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

One of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim political landscape was that Congressional Democrats were severely split. The so-called ‘War Democrats’ were all for it, but squabbled over every battlefield disaster, of which there was no shortage. If that wasn’t enough, the War Dems also accused Lincoln of being a tyrant – packing the Supreme Court with cronies that would do his bidding to destroy civil liberties.

On the other side of the Democratic divide were the ‘Peace Democrats’, who had bitterly attacked Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration on job protection and racist grounds – proof, they wailed, that he had lied all along about the real aims of the war he had foisted upon the nation. They demanded that the war, which was being ‘fought on a lie’, be ended at once, even if the Confederacy was allowed to secede.
Even some Republicans voiced their doubts. Covetous European powers were encouraged.

Simian sophistry
Today, the Democratic and media chorus sings the same tune: ‘Chimpy lied and thousands died’. George Bush, from the beginning of his presidency portrayed as having apelike characteristics, has been accused of lying the nation into war the war in Iraq.

While the Big Lie charge has always focused on WMD, it has morphed through three distinct ‘lies’, each charge itself a lie. The first version of the lie, in the immediate aftermath of the war, went something like this: Bush lied when he claimed that Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the national security of the United States.

Of course, Bush had never argued that Iraq posed an imminent threat. He had clearly argued that in a post-September 11 world, preventative action was justified to prevent gathering threats from metastasizing to the point where it was too late to act.

In a major pre-war speech, Bush said: “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.”

Bush argued, in accordance with international law that threatened nations need not wait for an “armed attack” or even an “imminent” threat before responding with force. Rather, as the distinguished diplomat, presidential adviser, and Yale Law School Dean, the late Eugene Rostow, maintained: ‘the target of an illegal use of force need not wait before defending itself until it is too late to do so. International law, after all, is not a suicide pact’.

It is past ironic that Bush – who was and still is scolded for his doctrine of early preemption (i.e., preventive or anticipatory self-defence) against gathering threats – was attacked for not meeting a standard which he explicitly rejected.

The second Big Lie invention that has been peddled is that Bush argued that the war in Iraq was, in the words of California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, ‘all about WMD, full stop’. Boxer made this outburst during Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice’s confirmation hearing earlier this year. It would be generous to accept that Boxer simply forgot what she had voted for in authorising military force against Iraq:

“Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait...

“The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to:

“(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

“(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq”.

Or as Bush stated in October 2002:

“America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights, to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Shi’a, Sunnis and others will be lifted. The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin”.

The third Big Lie furphy, re-heated lately by Chimpler critics the New York Times and Democratic Chairman Howard (‘Yeeeeeaaaahhhh!’) Dean, is that the Bush Administration twisted and lied about pre-war WMD intelligence. Congress and every other intelligence service in the world, including those of nations which were against enforcing the UN Security Council’s resolutions – chiefly France and Russia –had access to the same intelligence and agreed the threat that Saddam posed was real. The Mesopotamian miscreant’s record spoke well enough for itself: four wars, genocide, WMD use and support for terrorists.
To this Dean et al now claim bizarrely that Bush had a secret stash of heretofore uncovered intelligence that showed Saddam had uncovered all of his WMD. Again, it would be charitable to suggest that such charges are based on an innocent overlooking of extensive bipartisan and independent investigations in the US and Britain that showed intelligence had not been cooked up to stage a war.

If the Bush administration could be criticised for anything, it would be for indulging the doubters in the first place. It was never for the UN or the US to prove that Saddam still had WMD; rather, it was always for him to prove that he did not. This he failed to do, or even attempt in good faith to do, and the message and precedent was made clear by Bush’s response.

Nevertheless, Bush has hit back at his critics:

While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.

Bush was up-front about his war aims. While Lincoln planned the Emancipation Declaration in secret, after the war had begun, Bush at least outlined all of his goals before the first shot was fired. But like the Civil War, the war in Iraq was always about much more than the primary stated aim.

While the Civil War was fought, initially, to save the Union, in the end it was and had to be about freedom. The denial of freedom was, after all, what had led to secession and war. Likewise, the absence of freedom in Iraq, and in the Middle East generally, was the proximate cause for terrorism and the spread and use of WMD. For it is a simple fact of the modern world that democracies not only do not repress and terrorise their own people, they do not terrorise or otherwise attack other democracies. It is why, so long ago, the Great Emancipator’s work remained unfinished.

Lest it descend into the Planet of the Apes.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

FOOD: May 05, AU Edition

HOMEMADE PROZAC
When the weather’s cold and the sun sets mid-afternoon, Eli Jameson finds brightness in the kitchen

It has always amazed me that when T.S. Eliot wrote the line, ‘April is the cruelest month’, he wasn’t talking about the onset of winter. Of course, this is hardly surprising given that he lived in the northern hemisphere. But for myself, April, with all its attendant rituals – the changing of the clocks, the airing of the jumpers – has always been a grim affair.

Somehow, it’s hard to be cheery when the sky turns black at what always feels like four o’clock.

To cope with this seasonal black dog, I’ve tended to take refuge in good food and cooking: after all, much better to stick a roast in the oven than your head in one. Not only does keeping the cooker on full-bore help heat at least one end of my drafty circa-1890s terrace house, but it also provides something in the neighbourhood of an acceptable substitute to that favourite summer pastime – namely, standing in front of the barbeque searing off ribeyes and drinking shiraz at 8:30pm, when it’s still bright and sunny.

Another advantage is that winter comfort food (for lack of a better, and less hackneyed, phrase) can be as simple or as complicated as one likes. For the home chef with a busy work schedule who still likes to muck about in the kitchen a few nights a week, this is a great advantage: if I’ve knocked off a bit early and am home by six or seven, then I might happily bread and fry some eggplants, knock up a red sauce, grate a few cheeses, and boil some spaghetti (perhaps even making the noodles myself, if the mood strikes) to wind up with a ridiculously huge platter of eggplant parmagiana that will keep me in lunches through the week. (Fill a good bread roll with a few rounds of the leftovers, wrap in foil and bake until gooey). Otherwise, tossing a tray of veggies in the oven to roast for an hour or so while pottering around the house tidying or simply watching the 7:30 Report over a quiet drink pays a myriad of dividends. Out of a concession to age and arteries, I don’t do this very often, but lately I’ve taken to tossing the results of this together with some pasta, cream, and good freshly-grated cheese (see recipe).

Another old standby for when people come by the house is a lamb-and-pasta dish I picked up when I lived in New York (and yes, I realize that complaining about a Sydney winter after spending one particularly bleak December-through-February living next to the East River does show a lack of perspective, but bear with me). This involves getting some lamb steaks, flattening them out, rolling and tying and them up into little parcels with mint, rosemary, and cheese.

I then brown the packets, set them aside, and make a rich red sauce in the same pan – deglazing, of course, with some hearty red wine. That done (and here’s the beauty: all this fiddly work can be done in the afternoon), I boil up some orichiette pasta, and serve it in bowls with some of the sauce and a couple of lamb rolls. If you’re out to impress, cut the lamb on a bias and arrange artfully on top of the pasta.

Whether simple or complicated, there is something restorative about the whole cooking process that shuts off the white noise of the previous twelve hours and makes for a welcome distraction from a bout of winter blues. As American novelist Nora Ephron once put it, ‘what I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.’

WINTER-WARMING BEAN SOUP
Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian

This a great winter soup that’s not too complicated for a weeknight and packs a spectacular payoff. Plus, with the exception of the optional truffle oil, it costs virtually pennies a bowl to make. My family eats vats of this over winter.

You’ll need:
• Approx. 250g Great Northern beans, soaked overnight
• 2 litres vegetable stock
• 2-3 peeled garlic cloves
• Dried mint, oregano and/or other dried herbs
• Olive oil
• 3-4 diced onions
• 2 starchy potatoes, peeled and diced
• Leaves of one silverbeet or one head rocket, thinly shredded
• Fresh parsley
• Salt and pepper
• Good extra-virgin olive oil (or, for something really special, truffle oil)

1. In a biggish, heavy-bottomed pot, bring the stock and the beans to the boil. Skim off the froth that comes to the surface, and add the garlic and dried herbs. Give it a good stir and simmer, loosely covered, for up to an hour or until the beans are tender. At this point, crush the garlic cloves against the side of the pan.
2. In a second, bigger pot, bring some olive oil up to a medium-high heat and add the onions and potatoes, stirring so that nothing sticks and everything picks up a bit of colour (about five minutes), with a shot of salt and pepper. Add the silverbeet or rocket, stir until just wilted, and pour the other pot with the beans over the whole affair. Bring it all to a boil, then simmer and stir occasionally for about half an hour.
3. Just before serving, toast some thick slices of good crusty country bread and set aside. Using a wooden spoon, mash some of the potatoes and beans against the side of the pot – this nicely thickens the broth. Check seasoning and ladle into bowls, and drizzle a little good extra-virgin olive or truffle oil over each dish. Serve with toasted bread.
Serves: an army.

ROAST VEGETABLE PASTA

Even though it takes a little while to roast the veggies, the actual work time involved in this pasta is virtually nil. And all the cream and cheese makes the healthy bits of the dish much more palatable.

You’ll need:
• 250g dried pasta, such as fettucini, papardelle, or rigatoni
• An assortment of baby eggplants, fennel bulbs, zucchini, onions, et cetera – whatever looks good at the market that day, roughly chopped
• 200ml whipping cream
• 1 cup (or more) freshly-grated grana padano cheese
• Fresh parsley, for garnish
• Olive oil

1. Place the chopped vegetables in a roasting tray with a good glug of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Toss the lot around to coat, and place in a reasonably hot pre-heated oven. Meanwhile, place a pot of salted water on the stove to boil.
2. After about 45 minutes or so, check the vegetables – when they are good and soft and roasted, throw the pasta in the water.
3. Warm some cream in a wide saucepan, bringing just to the boil. When the pasta is a few minutes away from being al dente, remove the vegetables from the oven and toss with the cream. Add a good handful of the cheese.
4. Drain the pasta, and toss with the cream, vegetables, and cheese. Serve in warmed pasta bowls and sprinkle on some more cheese and fresh parsley.
Serves four

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

BREAK POINT: Mar 05

ANN COULTER
The problem of fruitbat university lecturers…

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that “unquestionably, America has earned” the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of “gallant sacrifices of the combat teams.” That the “combat teams” killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not “unreasonable or vindictive.” He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists “would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.”

To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.

Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and
inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Even liberals don’t try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke “free speech,” like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words “diverse” and “tolerance,” “free speech” means nothing but: “Shut up, we win.” It’s free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).

Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that “free speech” is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That’s why you don’t see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their “free speech” include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.

In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.”

Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states – including the one amendment that clearly refers only to “Congress.” (Liberals love to go around blustering “‘no law’ means ‘no law’!” But apparently “Congress” doesn’t mean “Congress.”)

Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.

So the First Amendment and “free speech” are really red herrings when it comes to whether Ward Churchill can be fired. Even state universities will not run afoul of the Constitution for firing a professor who is incapable of doing his job because he is a lunatic, an incompetent or an idiot – and those determinations would obviously turn on the professor’s “speech.”

If a math professor’s “speech” consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist’s “speech” was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or a history professor’s “speech” consisted of rants about the racial inferiority of the n....s, each one of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of the constitution. Just because we don’t have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn’t mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn’t crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).

In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 “little Eichmanns,” Churchill has said:

1. The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn’t understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn’t be accepted for another hundred years.

2. Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.
I forgot Auschwitz had a casino.

If Ward Churchill can be a college professor, what’s David Duke waiting for?

The whole idea behind free speech is that in a marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. But liberals believe there is no such thing as truth and no idea can ever be false (unless it makes feminists cry, such as the idea that there are innate differences between men and women). Liberals are so enamored with the process of free speech that they have forgotten about the goal.

Faced with a professor who is a screaming lunatic, they retreat to, “Yes, but academic freedom, tenure, free speech, blah, blah,” and their little liberal minds go into autopilot with all the slogans.

Why is it, again, that we are so committed to never, ever firing professors for their speech? Because we can’t trust state officials to draw any lines at all here? Because ... because ... because they might start with crackpots like Ward Churchill — but soon liberals would be endangered? Liberals don’t think there is any conceivable line between them and Churchill? Ipse dixit.
Universal Press Syndicate

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: Dec 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Get ready for a long, hot summer…

Anyone who has ever taken a holiday in a beach community knows that such places can be fairly insular places. When so much time is spent looking out to sea, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there’s a whole land-based world behind you. And with a little bit of paradise on their doorstep, it’s no wonder that locals get possessive and resentful when outsiders roll in and start violating all the little informal and unwritten rules that make a place where everyone enjoys a common piece of property – the beach – function properly. Just ask fish-kisser Rex Hunt, who was accosted with his teenage son by a group of toughs in Byron Bay recently.

But the riots which swept over Sydney’s eastern beaches recently in the wake of the bashing of a lifeguard by young “men of Middle Eastern appearance” (as the popular press so gingerly puts it; it’s amazing that they don’t use the abbreviation MoMA to save column inches, though perhaps a certain museum in New York might not be so happy about it) were something else entirely.

It is no secret, to anyone who has cared to look for it, that there have long been simmering tensions between packs of youthful “MoMAs” and not just beachside locals but about anyone else who is unfortunate enough to cross their path. In places like Cronulla, the only Sydney beach with its own train stop, this simmer has been on the verge of boiling over for months if not years, as locals share stories of disrespect, abuse and attacks by young Lebanese males pouring in from the western suburbs and causing trouble and charging around the place with a disrespectful swagger.

(Apparently one of the favourite lines of these thugs, cited by the Daily Telegraph’s Anita Quigley, to women and girls who reject their advances is to turn to their mates and say, “She’s not worth doing 55 years for” – a reference to the sentence handed down to gang rapist Bilal Skaf. Combine this with the statements of a Pakistani recently convicted of rape to the effect of “my culture made me do it”, and it’s not hard to see why people get nervous).

But the sad thing about the recent riots is that in many ways they were completely preventable. Although the popular press has been quick to cry “racism” and cite the riots as another example of just what an uncouth bunch of bogans we are in Australia, race ultimately had precious little to do with it. (Just ask the infamous Bra Boys gang of Maroubra, which had a starring role in the riots and which over the years has become a fairly multicultural operation, united in defence of former NSW Premier Bob Carr’s postcode). Instead, John Howard had it right when he said that the “behaviour was completely unacceptable but I’m not going to put a general tag (of) racism on the Australian community … I think it’s a term that is flung around sometimes carelessly and I’m simply not going to do so.”

The problem could have been headed off at the pass years ago had police in NSW – ironically enough, largely under the leadership of Bob Carr – not been systematically stripped of their powers to deal with trouble before it gets out of hand. And while in a free society the presumption of innocence lies with the individual, there’s also a noble tradition of what might be called informal “hidden law”, which says that cops know when a group of kids are up to no good, and should have the power to move them on, arrest them, or break them up accordingly.

Instead, Cronulla residents tell hair-raising stories of offensive and threatening conduct by Lebanese youth, and being told by the police that they can only do something if matters get violent – by which point, of course, the damage is already done.

Nature and criminals abhor a vacuum, and if criminals see that police have, by their absence, created a space where bad behaviour is permissible, they will rush in to fill the gap. That’s been happening for years at Cronulla, and locals finally got sick of it – and of trusting the police to deal fairly with their complaints (hence the violence). But unlike Macquarie Fields, where cops hung back after the riot began at the behest of a politically-timid leadership that kept front-line officers from doing their job, in Cronulla and at other beaches, the failing has been going on for ages, leading many to believe that there is one law for the testosterone-charged MoMAs and one for everyone else.

NSW Police could learn a lot from the example of New York, where an aggressive police campaign against the sort of anti-social behaviour committed regularly not just by ethnic gangs but all sorts of people ended years of “long hot summers” of riots and slashed the crime rate to previously-unimaginable levels.

Or, closer to home, they could look at New Zealand, where a few years back Auckland cops employed a change in the unlawful assembly laws to tackle similar problems of race riots and thuggery.

There’s an old cliché in politics that goes something along the lines of, “the first person to call their opponent ‘Hitler’ loses”. There’s something similar when gangs go at each other: the first group to pelt an ambulance with bottles loses, at least in the eyes of the media. And certainly the thugs of Cronulla who went on a rampage against anyone with too dark a tan are no better than the thugs of Bankstown or Lakemba who, fighting massive internal cultural conflicts, treat beachgoing women as objects of both desire and scorn. But it’s amazing to think how much of this could have been prevented if the provocation – community concern at the thuggery on the part of visiting gangs – was dealt with by the cops at a much earlier stage. It’s time to empower cops to crack down on yobbos and crims – no matter what their ethnicity.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

FOOD: Sep 05, AU Edition

NOODLING AROUND
Want a fun challenge in the kitchen? Make your own pasta, says Eli Jameson

Ah, the pasta aisle of the supermarket. Fettucini, cavatelli, oricchiette, rigatoni, penne rigate...just reading off the names on the different boxes and bags is enough to make one feel Italian. And so many of these shapes have names that sound cool even in English: Does a plate of priest’s caps (agnolotti) appeal? No? Well, perhaps a steaming bowl of strozzapretti – or ‘priest stranglers’ – will sate your appetite as well as your anti-clerical urges.

But almost every packet of pasta for sale in the supermarket has one thing in common, regardless of shape: it is dried. Which means that it is made by combining water and hard semolina flour and extruded in factories through various shaped dies. Some of these pastas are very good, and indeed gourmet dried pastas are showing up on the shelves of more and more suburban markets (tip: look for noodles that have a particularly rough sauce-holding surface as a sure tip-off of quality), but they lack a certain something. Now, I keep a five kilogram sack of penne rigate in the cabinet because it’s an incredibly economical and convenient base for a huge number of dinners. But there are times that some occasions, and some recipes, that call for more than just a couple of scoops of Barilla tossed into boiling water.

That alternative is, of course, fresh pasta. Contrary to what one might think, fresh pasta is not simply the pre-dried version of what comes in a rectangular blue box with instructions to ‘cottura 11 minuti’. Instead it is made from eggs and flour – which is why the stuff has a pretty firm use-by date – and unlike dried, only takes a few minutes to cook.

So where to get the stuff? Some fresh pasta is available from gourmet Italian delis and even supermarkets, but it is ridiculously expensive considering what goes in to it. Instead, I say, make your own.

I sometimes think that there is a conspiracy out there in the world of TV chefs and cookbook authors to keep certain ideas and techniques just vague and complicated enough so that the average punter remains mystified and unable to fully recreate certain end-products – or at least not regularly enough to become adept at them. I have a fantastic cookbook by the American chef Charlie Palmer which is almost like a detective hunt: every photograph of a finished dish has some extra touch or flourish not included in the printed recipe, and the reader has to study it closely to discern the hidden item. Call it The DaVinci Cookbook school of food writing. The end result is it convinces ordinary home chefs that fresh pasta can only be made with two kinds of imported artisinal flour and lots of kneading, followed by ample time for both chef and dough to have a good rest.

This is, of course, completely untrue, and there is no reason why fresh homemade pasta can’t become part of any home chef’s regular – i.e., at least weekly – routine. The advantages are numerous: though it takes a little longer to prepare on the front end (and we’re only talking about twenty minutes, with a little practice), it takes only moments to cook. One need only be up from the table for five minutes, tops, to knock up a pasta course before rejoining the rest of the party.

Furthermore, the texture is night-and-day to that of dried pasta. It holds sauce much more effectively – one might even say intimately – and as a result, one needs less to coat it. This is where the old adage that pasta is not about the sauce but the pasta comes from, and it’s impossible to understand unless one has experienced the difference. Fresh pasta absorbs sauce in a way dried simply can’t.

To make fresh pasta, one really only needs to get a hand-cranked pasta machine, costing between $60 and $90, depending on brand, at decent homewares stores. Word to the wise: spend the money on the more expensive Italian model if you can. The cheaper look-alike made in Korea will do the job just as well, but doesn’t stand up to regular use over the years, and will need to be replaced far sooner. Beyond that, the only ingredients are flour (I prefer Italian strong, or ‘00’ flour, but the basic house-brand stuff will do just as well) and eggs (see last month’s column on the virtues of fresh eggs – they make a difference here as well). Ready? Let’s begin.

To make a simple pasta like, say, fettucini for two, just place two cups of flour in a bowl, make a well in the middle, and crack the eggs into it. (Rule of thumb: one plate = one egg = one cup of flour). With a fork, begin to combine the eggs with the flour until you have a mass of dough. On a well-floured work surface, knead this well until it becomes a ball, and it starts to get stretchy when worked with the meat of your hand.

Now comes the fun part. Take about a third of the dough, flatten it, and run it through the machine on its widest setting (1). It may take a few goes at this stage to get it fully formed and looking like a square of pasta, but once that is achieved, keep running it through until you reach the second-thinnest setting (generally number 8). Give this sheet a dusting of flour, and repeat with the remaining dough. And when it’s all done, run it through the wide noodle cutters that come with the machine. Presto! You’ve just made fettucini!

So what now? Well, for one thing, it should be lightly dusted with flour and laid out on a sheet so that it doesn’t stick together, and allowed to dry out a bit. One can also make this at lunchtime for an evening’s dinner party without worrying a bit. When cooking time comes, plunge it into a pot of boiling, well-salted water, and let cook for just 2-3 minutes before tossing it into a pan of sauce. Make an alfredo by frying off some finely-diced onion in a large whack (100 grams) of butter, and adding a good slug of cream, a handful of parma cheese, salt, pepper and nutmeg. (Healthy it up with some greens, asparagus, or mushrooms if you like).

Or make a ravioli – those same sheets can be cut into circles and pressed together around a filling of your own invention, sealed by an egg wash. Use the flat edge of your chefs knife to press them shut so they don’t pop in the water. A favourite stuffing in our house is beetroot, sage, and goat cheese, served in a brown butter sauce jazzed up with beetroot greens.

Whatever you do, don’t be intimidated, and don’t let yourself be constrained by your imagination. Once you’ve got the technique down, you can knock up sheets of the stuff in all of twenty minutes. Your guests – and your palate – will thank you.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

TRAFFICKING IN TEARS
Slavery was supposed to be a thing of the past. But in the dark corners of Australia, it is still flourishing – and as SHAUN DAVIES reports, despite recent efforts the government is losing the fight against the devastating trade in human property

It’s a story that’s guaranteed to break your heart. A 22-year-old law student from Thailand, promised a job in a restaurant where she can legitimately earn millions of baht (the Thai currency), flies into Australia in late November 2002 with high hopes of saving up enough money to buy a car.

But within 24 hours, the student’s situation takes a nightmarish turn. Instead of starting work in a restaurant, she is taken to a house in Surry Hills, handed a g-string and informed that she owes her new employers $200,000.

She has been bought to work as a prostitute – and she can’t leave until she pays the money back.

Shipped from brothel to brothel, she is forced to have sex with up to 20 men each day. If clients refuse to use condoms she can’t turn them down. At night she is locked in a house with fourteen other girls. She begs clients for help – and exchanges phone numbers with some of them – but no-one comes to her aid.

So on the afternoon of January 5, 2003, the student makes a decisive move. She convinces her manager to let her use the brothel’s telephone, telling him she wants to order a pizza. Locking herself in a bathroom, she dials the number she found in the ‘big yellow book’: 000.

‘I want police help me, understand?’ she tells the operator. ‘People come here, lie on me, work in store... Help me, I want to go home, OK?’

The manager bursts into the cubicle and ends the call abruptly, but police raid the brothel later that day and take the student away to a woman’s refuge.

The student’s disturbing allegations, heard recently in open court in Sydney, led to the arrest of two women alleged to own the brothel, and another man alleged to have managed it. All three have pleaded not guilty two charges including exercising ownership over a slave, knowingly conducting a business involving sexual servitude and causing a person to remain in sexual servitude. They are facing jail terms of up to 25 years.

In some ways the case is a landmark – the first of its kind since current legislation against human trafficking was introduced in 1999. It is also the first since the Federal Government allocated $20 million over four years to combat sex slavery in 2003, following public pressure after the death of a trafficked woman named Puontong Simaplee in Villawood detention centre.

This substantial package funded a new federal police task force, as well as education programs for police and immigration officers. The Government also placed an official in Thailand with a brief to combat sex slavery and created new visas that allow trafficked women to stay in Australia. (See sidebar.)

A spokesman for the Minister for Justice and Customs, Senator Chris Ellison, told Investigate that the government has been ‘doing its utmost to fight this crime through concerted domestic, bilateral, regional and international efforts’.
But those who work closely with trafficked women believe much more still needs to be done. And it seems that the crooks are getting smarter – finding methods to avoid detection and legal loopholes to escape prosecution.

So are we winning the fight against sexual servitude and slavery? And if not, what more can we do?

Besides weapons and drugs, international crime syndicates are increasingly trading in a less risky commodity: human beings. International estimates of total trafficking levels (which includes trafficking for the labour market as well as the sex industry) vary wildly, but the US government believes the total figure is somewhere in the vicinity of 600,000 to 800,000 persons ever year. Interpol and the United Nations both rate the issue as a top priority.

Some experts say that the rise in trafficking for sexual servitude to developed nations has been brought about by demand. Women from rich countries don’t want to work in the sex industry, but at the same time more men are using sex workers, so demand is outstripping supply – and organised crime is filling the gap.

Others say the push is coming from the supply side. Sex workers from poor countries want to migrate to developed nations but cannot do so legally. So they look to traffickers to sneak them into a country of choice.

While we know for certain that Australia is a destination market for trafficking, it is impossible to know exactly how many women are brought here each year, says University of New England academic Kerry Carrington.

‘For a start it’s difficult to quantify any form of crime – it’s always going to be hidden. But an added issue here is that it’s not only the criminals. The victims may also hide the crime because of other consequences,’ she says.

A recent Government report claimed there were probably less than 100 trafficked women in Australia. However, Carrington is more inclined to agree with groups who put the figure much higher – around 1000 women every year.

Carrington has one major gripe with the Government’s policy on trafficking - criminal justice visas are only granted to women when there’s a strong chance their evidence will lead to a successful prosecution. Otherwise they are repatriated to their home countries and back into danger when the syndicates that trafficked them seek revenge.

‘I think it’s dubious to say that this meets our obligations under human rights laws,’ she says.

‘As there is no guaranteed migration outcome for assisting a prosecution, there is still little incentive (for the women) to assist prosecutions. Those victims unable to assist the prosecution of traffickers for fear of reprisal, either against themselves or their families abroad, or other reasons, remain unprotected.’

Senator Ellison’s spokesman told Investigate that the visa regulations were fair and ‘provide support to people in genuine need
of protection and who are assisting law enforcement agencies with their investigations’.

But in an interview with the ABC in 2004, the Senator was more direct: ‘We don’t want to make it too attractive for people to come here because they’ll think that they’ll get very good benefits and
so they can come here and then claim to be a victim and enjoy
those benefits.’

But Carrington says that each woman’s case should be critically assessed while she is on a bridging visa. If her case meets a civil level of proof (that is, it seems true on the balance of probability), they should get a longer-term visa.

Shirley Woods, an outreach worker for Australian NGO Project Respect, works with trafficked women on a daily basis. She believes that the approach of police and immigration officers has come a long way since the days of kicking down brothel doors and shipping illegal workers out as soon as possible, though Investigate was supposed to meet with an allegedly trafficked woman from Thailand for this article who was picked up by DIMIA and deported before we could speak with her.
However, Woods says there’s some way to go before officers can handle cases of trafficking with the deft sensitivity that would make trafficked women trust them.

‘I think it’s a matter of more people knowing the right questions: “Do you have your passport?”, “Where do you live?”. A lot of women are shipped from brothel to brothel and don’t know their address,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of questions you can ask.’

In October 2003, the AFP delivered an intensive four-week course in dealing with trafficking to senior investigators from DIMIA, state police agencies, customs and the tax department. Woods believes these education programs will eventually have an impact.

‘It’s very difficult because it’s almost an instinctive thing. So I think that as more immigration and police officers work with trafficked women the situation will get better.’

The jewel in the crown of the Government’s trafficking package is the Transnational Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking Team (TSETT) – a kind of sex-slave commando force which the AFP says is ‘modelled on the successful narcotics strike team approach, with intelligence-driven investigations and the flexibility and capacity to respond quickly to the highest priority cases.’

It’s difficult to quantify how effective this task force has been. We do know that the AFP has conducted 38 investigations into sexual servitude and slavery-related offences since 2003, and that a total of 15 people are currently facing charges for these crimes.

The AFP has not responded to queries about the current level of trafficking in Australia. But Project Respect’s Shirley Woods says she has come across more trafficked women since the taskforce was established (which, she points out, may just be chance). She believes traffickers are getting smarter.

‘There’s been a huge shift away from Thai women and towards Korean women recently because they can get student visas here. The whole payment system and everything has changed,’ she says.
In one recent case, Woods says, trafficked women in a Melbourne brothel were actually given one-third of the money they earned. But of this third, an extra portion went to the brothel owner to service the woman’s debt, and another portion was given to an ‘interpreter’ who couldn’t speak Korean. All up, the women still only kept one-ninth of the money they earned.

‘I think the traffickers have sat down and had a think about what the legislation means and how they can get around it,’ says Woods. ‘I’m interested in how they’re getting around the education issues associated with student visas - maybe they’re paying off [English language] schools.’
Kerry Carrington also believes that the traffickers have changed tactics. ‘I’ve heard anecdotally that the modus operandi of the traffickers is now to circulate the women and move them along, so that they can avoid being detected,’ she says.
Some advocates believe a radical approach is needed to defeat trafficking - issuing temporary visas to sex workers so that they can legally work in Australian brothels.

Fiona Patten, spokeswoman for the Eros Foundation, says giving sex workers temporary visas would completely undercut the trafficking market. She points out that many Thais pay huge amounts of money to legitimate employment agencies to organise a job and a visa in Australia – at least as much as trafficked women pay to brothel owners. The problem, Patten says, is that sex workers can’t go to a legitimate employment agency.

‘From the industry’s point of view, we see sex work as valid work. By enabling women to come out here and work legally in a system where you can ensure that they’re working in safe conditions, where you can ensure that they’re not being exploited, is that not a better thing?’
However, Patten admits that any political party who took up this idea would be committing electoral suicide.

Ranged against Patten and other sex industry groups (such as the Scarlet Alliance and SWOP) are abolitionists who say that cutting demand by outlawing prostitution is the only way to stop trafficking. Project Respect president Kathleen Maltzahn is a careful advocate of this position.

‘We’ve got to go back to asking who prostitution works for – and it’s not the women who do it,’ she said in a 2004 lecture. ‘Prostitution is set up for men. That’s what trafficking tells us so clearly. When there are enough women who agree to do prostitution the industry will use them, but if there aren’t... the industry brings women in, with absolute disregard for their choices, desires, hopes.’

‘We need to stop talking about prostitution as if women’s choices make it happen and start asking about men’s choices. Without this work trafficking will continue unabated.’

In the US, a different group of abolitionists are dominating the trafficking debate – the Christian right. Groups such as the International Justice Mission have the ear of President Bush, who has pledged $150 million to eradicating sex slavery over two years. But sex industry lobbyists are vehemently opposed to the abolitionist approach. It’s supply, they say, not demand, which is driving the trafficking market.

‘I think when you consider (the abolitionist) argument in a global context it doesn’t make sense,’ Scarlet Alliance president Janelle Fawkes says. ‘Many people travel for work, often to another country where the earning potential is greater.’

She gives the example of Burmese women who migrate to Thailand to do sex work, which she says does not make sense in terms of demand.
‘Trafficking happens not because of an unmet demand by clients, but a demand by sex workers who seek to enter Australia to work in the sex industry. It’s a worker’s market, not a client’s market.’

As Investigate goes to print, the trial of Tran, Qi and Xu is still in progress. Another slavery-related trial has just begun in Melbourne and three further matters are ready to go before the courts.

Compare this to 2003, when only one person had ever been convicted of sexual servitude offences in Australia: Melbourne brothel owner Gary Glazner, who made an estimated $1.2 million peddling women to the sex industry. For his crimes, Glazner (who was tried under the Victorian Prostitution Control Act 1994) received a pathetic $30,000
fine and a 30-month suspended sentence.

Although the situation has improved, trafficking will never be completely stamped out unless there is a major shift in our approach to the sex industry as a whole. If there is a market for trafficking (whether supply or demand-driven), criminals will always find ways to exploit this – no matter how well-trained the AFP’s special taskforce is.

While a controversial idea, a legitimate working scheme for foreign prostitutes might cut the market from beneath the trafficker’s feet, and give these women a chance to come to the country for a short time and provide a regulated working environment. But realistically, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Australia will embrace the idea of visas to foreign prostitutes. For now we’ll have to rely on more basic initiatives and the experts agree that the Government is heading down the right track. It just needs to walk a little further and a little faster.

WHAT’S IN THE PACKAGE?
The Government’s $20 million package attempts to deal with attempts deal with trafficking through a number of initiatives, including:

* The establishment of the AFP’s Transnational Sexual
Exploitation and Trafficking Team – there have been AFP 38 investigations into trafficking since 1 January 2004.

* The creation of a new position to combat trafficking - Senior Migration Officer Compliance (SMOC). This position is based in Thailand, which has until now been the source country for most women trafficked into Australia.

* Changes to visa regulations. Women who may have been involved in trafficking are now granted a bridging F visa which allows the AFP to assess their case. If a woman can assist the AFP in a prosecution she is granted a criminal justice visa. Women deemed to be in some kind of danger if they return to their home country may be granted a witness protection visa (trafficking).

* Education of immigration and police officers to ensure that trafficking is recognised and that women are not deported before they can give evidence.

* Proposed amendments to legislation that will bring Australian law more closely into line with UN trafficking protocol. These have been tabled in the senate and are under consideration.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

EYES RIGHT: Mar 05

RICHARD PROSSER
A burning question

A millennium dawns, and a power and environmental crisis beckons. Or does it? The globe is warming, oil is running out, and it’s all our fault, apparently. Mankind’s fondness for fossil fuels spells doom for us all, or so we are told. The earth will warm, the seas will rise, crops will fail, coastal lowlands will be inundated, polar bears will die out, and yada yada yada. This is partly true. The climate is changing. Temperatures worldwide are increasing. It is happening; it just isn’t happening for the reasons that that Greenies tell us it is.

I was raised as an environmentalist. I love the earth. Like most farmers, and most hunters, I’m a true Green, and proud of it. But unlike the ultra-far-red-leftists of the party which bears the same name, Greenies like me prefer to base our opinions on fact, rather than on dogma, ideology, and bad science.

We are in good company. British botanist, Professor David Bellamy, has published a paper outlining how it is that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are increasing because of global warming, and not, as the flat-earth zealots of the Kyoto Cult claim, the other way round. His findings are based on thirteen thousand years’ worth of archaeological data since the last ice age.

Bellamy refers to the Milankovitch cycles, which measure changes in the earth’s climate brought about by variations in the tilt of our planet’s axis and her orbit around the sun. These changes occur gradually over long periods – up to 100,000 years – and their effects, along with those of the known 300-year and 22-year weather cycles generated by sunspot activity, have been inscribed not only in the fossil record, but also in human history. 1000 years ago, the Vikings grazed cattle on the lush green pastures of what are now the frozen icy wastes of Greenland, and Britain had a wine industry. 750 years later, the climate had cooled to such a degree that people could ice-skate on the River Thames in London.

Bellamy also quotes from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, whose petition against the Kyoto Protocol has been signed by some 18,000 scientists worldwide. Its central claim is simple; “Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error, and do not conform to experimental knowledge.”

Kyoto proponents would do well to acquaint themselves with a little of that experimental knowledge. We are told that melting ice caps will cause sea levels to rise. This is patently untrue, and easily demonstrated. Fill a glass to about three-quarters with water. Drop in a few ice cubes. Mark the water level with a felt-tipped pen.

In an hour or so, when the ice has melted, come back and check the level. You will discover that it hasn’t changed.The science behind this is very, very, third-form simple. Ice is less dense than water, which is why it floats. Because it floats, it displaces water, pushing the water level up. As the ice melts, the displacing ice is replaced by water, of increasing density, at lower volume, meaning that the overall level remains the same. Melting ice caps will have no effect at all on sea levels.

For the record, the Northern ice cap has no land mass under it. It is all floating sea ice. Most of the icebergs released by the Antarctic, are also sea ice, from such reservoirs as the Ross Ice Shelf. Such land-based ice as is released, by retreating glaciers and continental ice masses, is utterly insignificant relative to the volume of the oceans. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit down with a map of the world and a pocket calculator to work that one out.

Sea levels will, however, rise with increasing global temperatures. This is because a warming of the oceans causes their waters to expand. Low-lying countries are at risk, unfortunately, and this is a great tragedy of our time; but a greater tragedy still, is the unfettered willingness with which so many otherwise ostensibly intelligent people leap blindly onto a popular bandwagon founded on theory and science which is, plainly and simply, wrong. The burning of fossil fuels by Western nations is not causing the rise in global temperatures, and their cessation in so doing will not halt it, nor will it save those nations which are at risk.

We are also led to believe that methane emissions from New Zealand’s three-odd million cows are irrevocably harming the atmosphere, and that we must purchase “carbon credits” from some other country in order to overcome this.

The authors of this particular chapter of the Kyoto fantasy have obviously not thought far enough outside the box to give consideration to the effects which must, by their logic, have been caused by the up-to-75 million bison which roamed North America until the 1830s, or the huge African wildlife herds that existed up until modern human predation. One would presume, in keeping with their argument, that the globe should now be in credit from that period.

The fantasists also appear to ignore the fact that the atmospheres of the northern and southern hemispheres mix only at the equator, and even then, by only a minute percentage every year. Even if the “carbon credit” theory were anything other than simplistic misinformation, several centuries would have to pass before the effects of carbon emissions “saved” in one hemisphere, had any measurable effect on those “spent” in the other.

And as an aside, forests are not the “carbon sinks” which the Protocolers claim them to be; living plants emit almost as much CO2 as they take in. The only effective way to turn a forest into a carbon sink, is to cut it down for timber, or mill it into paper.

As I write this, on the evening of Wednesday 16th February 2005, the Government of New Zealand is committing the latest in its long litany of ill-informed, incompetent, or deliberate and ideologically-driven blunders. It is ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.

Even as it does, professional activists, from the internationally-franchised business Greenpeace, are occupying the site of this New Zealand Government’s single most intelligent and sensible action – the commissioning of the mothballed Marsden-B power station, as a coal-fired electricity generating plant.

They are doing so because they, and the Greens, and any number of other highly-opinionated yet poorly informed protesters, are opposed to the use of coal as a fuel for electricity generation. It is their claim that the burning of coal, or any other fossil fuel for that matter, in spite of a wealth of informed scientific opinion to the contrary, is a contributing factor to the current cycle of natural climate change. I do beg to differ. Mankind, for all his faults, is just not that significant. We are not affecting our planet’s climate. It is changing all by itself, without our help, as it has done since time immemorial, not just in the couple of hundred years since modern record-keeping began.

A single volcanic eruption on the scale of Taupo, or Krakatoa, or Mount St Helens, or Pinatubo, releases more particulate and oxidative matter into the atmosphere, than has been created by the whole of mankind since the discovery of fire, modern wars included. Sorry, Kyotoers, but once again, this is verifiable fact.

Ice ages come and go. After them, indeed between them, the climate warms again. Greenhouse fanatics choose to ignore this natural phenomenon, because they have no pseudo-scientific way of explaining it.

Though generally short on alternative solutions, in this case, as an alternative to coal, the protestors make some timid noises in favour of natural gas. This is a curious position. The exhaust products from the burning of natural gas (primarily a mix of propane and butane, with some methane, a little ethane, a smattering of pentane, and a dash of carbon monoxide), are mostly water vapour (the single most effective greenhouse gas, which also sustains life on our planet, and staves off ice-ages), and carbon dioxide.

Strangely enough, the exhaust products from a modern coal-fired thermal power station are also, primarily, water vapour and carbon dioxide.

The reality of black gold today, is a long way from the grim memory of its industrial past. Fly ash is caught by filters. Sulphur dioxide is neutralised with lime, and the resultant calcium sulphate is extracted to be used as a fertiliser. After these processes, there is very little left.

Their other preferred alternatives appear to be the continued destruction and flooding of South Island rivers and wilderlands, and the proliferation of ugly, noise-polluting wind farms – which Europe, incidentally, having had much experience of, is now in the process of dismantling.

Nobody wants pollution. There are very good reasons for mankind to pursue an alternative to oil as a source for transport fuels. But just for the record, oil is never going to run out. Contrary to popular myth, it isn’t fermented dinosaur juice. Oil is one of the products which the earth produces all the time, albeit slowly. When we tap into an oil strike, some of the oil comes out under its own pressure, and the next fraction is displaced with water, either sea water or fresh water, depending on whether the find is on land or offshore.

But oil isn’t so much pumped, as collected. Oil companies prefer not to spend unnecessary money on extracting this free and plentiful product; when the easy stuff runs out, the well is capped, declared “dry”, and the company moves on to the next find. At that stage, the reservoir usually still contains around 80% of its original oil.
Oil is handy and versatile stuff, providing us with plastics, artificial fibres, and a host of other products, from cosmetics, to agrichemicals, to road-building materials.

That said, it isn’t the cleanest thing we can put into our fuel tanks; but neither is it, nor coal, the cause of global warming.

Worldwide, a commercially-driven and media supported campaign of mass hysteria over climate change is using fraudulent science and bogus evidence to convince foolish Greenies and ignorant politicians to spend vast amounts of money on solving a problem which doesn’t exist. It is reminiscent of those other great bogeyman stories, about Y2K, SARS, Nuclear War, werewolves, vampires, and Asian Bird Flu.

I end as I began, by quoting Professor Bellamy: “The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world’s leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.”

(With acknowledgement to David Bellamy, and special thanks to Allen Cookson for some additional information.)

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)

FIRST DRAFT: May 05, AU Edition

MATT HAYDEN
Even Kofi Annan’s got his own weblog now…

MARCH 21 2005
Man, this investigation into Kojo and me is a real drag. It’s total pressure, 24-7! I thought having this position meant I wouldn’t have to put up with this kind of thing. Like, dude, where’s my diplomatic
immunity?

But no, they have to investigate everything. Everything, going back aaages. Like, hello! Cotecna? Who are they? I don’t remember.
Cotecna, Coshmecna.

And that Paul Volcker guy. Man, he is such a wingnut.
The worst thing is that I appointed him. Sheesh. What was I thinking?
Hey, Volcker! Investigate this.

posted by GenSec at 12:26 PM
Permalink Comments (124) Trackback

MARCH 24 2005
Man, this Cotecna thing is really ruining my reputation. Like, I just ran a Google ego search. I’m a pariah! Not so long ago I was a superstar on the world stage. I was pretty fly (for a black guy). Not any longer. I’ve gone from hero to zero in, like, days. This is sooo not happening.

Not that I’m in this just for the glory, mind. I just want to do my job. And it’s one helluva tough job. No, really! It’s not all receptions and champers and canapes, you know. There are medals of honor to receive; genocide reports to quash. (Like, words are important, dude. There really is a difference between mass murder and genocide, okay? Trust me.) Still, when all the drudgery is done I can enjoy the best part: I get to be concerned. I just love that ... Being concerned – it’s a buzz, man!

That’s why I hate all this controversy. I want to be concerned about the world. I don’t want the world being so concerned about me. You dig?

posted by GenSec at 4.34 PM
Permalink Comments (67) Trackback

APRIL 1 2005
It’s April Fool’s Day, alright. Now the World Bank is headed by a neo-con.

I had to put up with sniping from that guy and his cronies for, like, years man! “You’re too weak with dictators ... Act on Iraq ... Do something, for God’s sake” ... Etc.

But the UN couldn’t win, could it? When I did nothing, the Yanks had a field day. But if I’d said go in and kick butt, the member states would have gone all medieval on my ass. As I posted at the time: Saddamned if you do. Saddamned if you don’t.

Why won’t they shut up about “oil-for-food” ...
Hey, Wolfie and Co., read my lips: I did not have financial relations with that man Saddam Hussein!

But now I’ve got to have financial relations with Wolfie?
Jeebus, what a drag. I might just quit after all.

posted by GenSec at 9.40 AM
Permalink Comments (57) Trackback

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Dec 05, AU Edition

‘NAM PLUSSED
Patricia Rodriguez discovers the joys (and hassles) of Vietnam, but falls in love with it anyway

LAU CAI, Vietnam – After sleeping fitfully on the night train from Hanoi – note to self: Drink fewer liquids prior to a 10-hour journey on a train where the bathroom is a hole in the floor two cars down – we are herded onto a waiting minibus for the drive to Sa Pa.

The highlands village of Sa Pa, a 90-minute ride from Lau Cai, a trade centre on the Vietnam – China border, has been billed as a bucolic paradise, green, peaceful and mostly unspoiled by modern commerce. But the morning is hazy and foggy and still a bit dark, and as our van struggles through traffic-choked streets, I can’t see much of anything. We drive past long stretches of small, faded buildings with their metal security doors rolled shut, advertising “pho com” (soup/restaurant), “bia hoi” (fresh beer) and “karaoke” (no translation necessary). Kids in Nike warm-up jackets and baseball caps drive scooters loaded with trays of cut-up chickens or boxes bursting with vegetables; other mopeds carry entire families, two adults and two or three kids, so tightly packed together they don’t even have to hang on. It looks like bustling Ho Chi Minh City, except on a smaller, dingier scale.

Then, suddenly, the bus turns a corner and begins to struggle uphill, and the sun burns through, the fog lifting like a film being peeled from a piece of glass. Revealed is the lush landscape we’d been promised. Low, mist-covered mountains, their sides precisely terraced with rice paddies. Rises covered with fir trees and endless beds of lavender-flowering indigo plants. A clear, rocky stream, crossed by a rudimentary wooden bridge. It’s “National Geographic” – beautiful. Worth every second of last night’s discomfort.

And that, for me, is Vietnam: Just when I’m about to give up on this place, something happens that makes me fall just a little bit in love with it.

At times, Vietnam can be an easy place to love: When you’re walking undisturbed through thousand-year-old palace ruins in the imperial city of Hue. When you’re eating a huge bowl of “pho,” beef noodle soup scented with cilantro, mint and lemon grass, that costs less than 50 cents from a sidewalk vendor in Hanoi. When you’re being fussed over in a tailor’s shop in the ancient fishing port of Hoi An, being fitted for custom-made silk clothing that will be delivered to your hotel within 24 hours.

But at other times, it feels like trying to travel with a toddler, one who’s loud, messy, frantic, constantly changing his mind and demanding all your attention, right this minute.

My husband and I had hit bottom in Ho Chi Minh City, only a few hours after arriving in Vietnam and finding our way to a $15-a-night hotel in the area of the city that caters to backpackers. Trying to walk to the nearby public market, we couldn’t take two steps without being asked to buy something. Postcards? Cyclo ride? Taxi? Chewing gum? Spring rolls? Cigarettes? Beer? Hotel room? Guidebook? Guide?
Hot and frustrated, we retreated to a touristy cafe – crowded with dreadlocked and tattooed Western backpackers, smoking and drinking Vietnamese-brewed 333 beer – and wondered whether coming to Vietnam had been a good idea.

We’d planned to spend a few days based here, seeing some of the nearby sights, like the Mekong Delta’s floating markets, huge flotillas of small boats moored together so closely you can step from one to another, buying lychee and bananas from one boat, plasticware from another, conical straw hats from the next. But the smog, the heat and the relentless commercialism got to us. On only our second day, we hopped on a flight to Hanoi, the northern capital. The center of the country’s ruling Communist Party, it also has a reputation as a gracious, reserved city, older and quieter than Ho Chi Minh, retaining a bit more of its French-colonial heritage and architecture. Also, roughly a thousand miles to the north, it would be cooler. We thought we might like it better.

“Mademoiselle”, the cook says, waving my husband and me into her tiny restaurant, just a bare room that opens directly onto the street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. Her daughter smiles and propels us toward a low table in the corner, where we sit on tiny plastic footstools. Around us, several other diners, mostly older men, eat their pho, or soup, and read local newspapers.

We don’t have to order; the proprietress simply starts cooking. Squatting in front of a few pots on portable burners, she takes a couple of large handfuls of very long noodles, cutting them with scissors and eyeballing them until the two portions seem equal. These she places in a bowl, ladling hot broth from a giant kettle over the top. Next, she plucks pieces of meat, hard-cooked eggs and dumplings from other pans and adds these to each bowl, finishing with a handful of fresh herbs. She hands the bowls to a young boy, who delivers them to our table, and then watches attentively as we dig in, giggling as my chopsticks keep dropping the long, slippery noodles. I laugh, too, but I keep trying; the pho is too delicious to leave in the bowl.
The cost for breakfast and entertainment? Less than $1. We head out into the early-morning streets, well-fed and happy. It’s our third day in-country, and Vietnam is growing on us.

Hanoi is jammed with traditional tourist sites, including ancient temples and pagodas, French cathedrals, scenic lakes and parks, and a gaggle of buildings dedicated to the late Vietnamese ruler Ho Chi Minh himself, including a museum, the stilt house where he lived in the ‘60s, and the mausoleum where his remains are on display. We’ll eventually see some of these, but mostly, we spend our time in Hanoi getting a feel for the city – walking, shopping, eating and just sitting.

Hanoi is perfect for this type of touring because it’s compact, walkable and, somewhat surprisingly for such a large urban center, quite beautiful.

Tourists spend much of their time in the Old Quarter, which has been the city’s commercial district for more than 1,000 years. The district begins at the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake, edged by weeping-willow trees and a small park where young and old gather to exercise at dawn, and complete with a small pagoda built in the middle of the lake.
At one time, each of the narrow, twisted streets in the quarter was named for the type of goods you could buy there – silk, bamboo, copper. Today, the old names are still used, but the streets have become less specialized; stores sell merchandise of all sorts, from traditional water puppets, carved wooden boxes and silk clothing to fake designer sunglasses, boomboxes and T-shirts printed with the image of Ho Chi Minh, four for $10.

The exception is the meat and produce market, with sections still dedicated exclusively to astoundingly fresh displays of fish, flowers, live chickens, vegetables, herbs and fruits, and filled with buyers and sellers haggling over prices and quality. It becomes our favorite place for lunch. At one stall, we buy fritters of sliced bananas and sweet potatoes, dipped in a sweet rice-flour batter and fried crispy.

At another, a crusty French baguette filled with pat’ and cucumber slices, garnished with cilantro and fish sauce, the national Vietnamese condiment. At a third, giant prawns, cooked over a tiny charcoal grill, served with French bread and cold Vietnamese beer.
The Old Quarter has also been an area of growth for hotels, restaurants and coffee bars. We linger over sweet iced coffees and spring rolls at a second-story cafe overlooking the traffic circle across from Hoan Kiem Lake, watching the cat-and-mouse game that is city traffic here.

Traffic in Hanoi, like in the other large Vietnamese cities, is dominated by motor scooters, traveling six or eight or more abreast. There seem to be few lanes, few traffic lights and only one rule – if you’re driving, don’t hit anyone. Crossing the street is like playing the old video game of “Frogger.” There’s no such thing as a “walk” sign; to cross a busy street, you simply take a breath, make sure you’re not stepping out directly in front of anyone, and start walking slowly and deliberately, keeping your eyes on the traffic, so they know you see them. Miraculously, they’ll swerve around pedestrians every time. Watching it from above, it’s like a beautiful ballet, except with lots of honking horns and traffic fumes.

Still, after a couple of days, Hanoi’s charms wear a bit thin; it’s still a city of people trying to make up for lost time economically. Some of our fellow tourists have developed strategies for spurning the persistent vendors and cyclo drivers – ignoring them, frowning, pretending not to understand English. (Practically all young Vietnamese speak at least a bit of English, though some older people still speak French.) I, however, must look like an easy mark; I can’t help but speak to every vendor, often with a smile, even when I’m saying no.

Sa Pa is as far from the city as you can get in Vietnam, we’re assured. It’s not a short trip – at least 10 hours overnight on the train both ways – but we figure to see another side of this diverse country, it’s worth it.

Sa Pa was built as a hill station by the French in the early 1920s, a scenic retreat where they could escape the heat and humidity of the lowlands and the coast. When the French withdrew, it fell into a period of decline, hotels and cafes getting shuttered and many people moving to larger cities in search of work.

But over the past decade it has been discovered by tourists who are eager to see the lovely mountain vistas and experience the culture of the hill people. Hotels have been restored or built from scratch, new restaurants have opened, tour guides have multiplied. There’s even an Internet cafe. Now the market in Sa Pa is flooded with tourists every day, and there are frequent organized tours to smaller markets in the surrounding villages.

At arrival, Sa Pa seems like the Vietnamese version of a Colorado ski town; a couple of the new hotels are even built in the style of a mountain chalet, complete with flower-filled window boxes. But it’s still somewhat rustic, with dusty, steeply angled streets and little traffic. Our simple guesthouse has a terrific view of the town and surrounding valley – but requires a hike of six flights of stairs to get to our room.

Yet some complain that the influx of outsiders – still only a tiny proportion of those who visit Vietnam – is having an adverse effect on the culture of the tribal peoples, essentially Westernizing them.
True, the Hmong and Dao women in particular have taken well to capitalism. The women have learned that their craft work – pressed-tin and silver jewelry, and beautifully dyed and embroidered pillows, tablecloths, purses, vests and dresses – were coveted by the Western visitors. Now small groups of women and larger bands of girls, as young as 7 or 8, congregate on the main tourist streets and near the market, wearing gorgeous traditional dress and trolling for customers.

“You’re pretty!” one calls out.

“I like your hat!” says another, emboldened by the first.

“Where are you from?” asks a third, and they all collapse into giggles. But they keep their mind on business. Pause for even a second and risk being engulfed by a sea of smiling, chattering little saleswomen, each begging that “you buy from me, from me.”

The tactics work. I end up with far more tin bracelets and indigo garments than I can possibly use, and many new, small friends, all of whom remember us the next day when we wander through the market.

“Are you ready?” asks a tiny, beautiful girl, dressed in the traditional clothing of the Black Hmong tribe – a skirt, vest and leggings dyed in indigo, a blue-black so deep it’s almost shiny, and embellished with rows of colorful embroidery, and a conical hat, her long black hair pinned within it and the ends spilling from the opening at the top. She also wears huge loop earrings, an armful of bracelets, and in a nod to the changes that have arrived in her world, a pink ribbed turtleneck, a nylon backpack and flat plastic-soled sandals.

Her name is Zei, and she will be our guide for the next two days. She looks about 12, but she says she is 16 and has been leading tours for almost three months. Today we’ll have an easy hike – a couple of hours round-trip to a waterfall that was once harnessed for electrical power by the French, with a leisurely side trip over a wooden footbridge and through fields of indigo.

But the next morning, when Zei comes to collect us after breakfast, is a different story. Today we will visit three ethnic villages – one settled by the Hmong, Zei’s tribe; another by the Tay, known for their wooden stilt houses; and the last by the Dao, recognized by their bright red, puffy turbans, edged with large silver beads.

“We will walk for 14 kilometers (about 8.5 miles) today. Mostly down, though,” says Zei, whose English is very good, from talking with tourists.

(She didn’t study English in school – in fact, she says she hasn’t been to school regularly in years, apparently a sadly common occurrence among the hill-tribe children. Her first language is Hmong, which somewhat resembles Chinese, but she says her English is better than her Vietnamese.)
“You’ll be OK?” she asks, shouldering her backpack, containing lunch and water for all three of us, and assuring us we can catch a ride back to Sa Pa rather than repeat the 14-kilometer route. We promise her we can handle it, and we head out of town.

For a while, we keep to the main road, where the lovely overlooks of forests, rice paddies, indigo fields and the occasional small house must compete with a constant passing stream of minibuses, motorscooters and small trucks. After about a mile, we evidently pass some sort of test, for Zei leads us off the main road and its parade of tourists and onto a barely discernible footpath, descending steeply into the wooded valley.

“This is a better way,” she says.

“Shortcut?” I ask.

“No, just better,” she says.

This, apparently, is a local route. We no longer see tourists, but we pass water buffalo, which make a show of ignoring us, and Hmong women and girls, on their way to market, who smile and offer to sell us yet more indigo clothing. At one point, we’re passed by a group of eight or nine young teen-agers, each carrying a piece or two of corrugated metal on his head and walking about twice as fast as us on the rocky path.

“Someone is getting a new roof,” Zei observes.

Sometimes, we can see a small house or two, tin or thatched roofs nearly obscured by the greenery. Most often, we see an endless expanse of green. Though the villages have been billed as the tour’s highlight, we find ourselves more thrilled by the landscape. It changes from thick forest to a more open valley; we cross rocky streams on rickety-looking wooden footbridges and clamber up staircases rudely fashioned from flat stones. Eventually, the path seems to disappear. We pick our way through rice paddies, carefully balancing on the earthen dikes that are built into the hillsides.
Zei, at first shy, begins talking more the farther we walk. She lives with her mother and little sister; we get the sense she is their main source of income. She used to sell trinkets to the tourists, but when her English was deemed good enough, she was hired as a guide, an occurrence she seems to regard as a striking bit of good luck. She makes better money – a few dollars per trip, plus tips – and the work is steadier. To her, being a tour guide is easy – just walking along paths she’d be using anyway. And usually, she says, the people are nice.

At the last village, little more than a half-dozen huts in a loosely arranged group, we run into another guide, a friend of Zei’s, and her charge for the day, an Australian army officer named Flo whom we’d met on the train. Flo has taken a longer excursion yet, and she’ll be spending the night in one of the villager’s homes. They invite Zei and us into the home to look around; it’s cozy and comfortable, with wooden benches, a small kitchen and several platforms piled with bright blankets for sleeping. The guide offers us cool water and snacks, but we still have a long way to hike; we have to be on our way.

“Isn’t this the greatest?” Flo stage-whispers to me as we leave her to head back to Sa Pa. “Don’t you love that you’re seeing this?”

Flo is talking about the villages and the day’s hike, and I agree with her. But as we make our way back to the main road, where local entrepreneurs will offer us rides on their mo-peds back to Sa Pa, I realize that I’ve come to feel that way about Vietnam. Ten years from now, as the economy continues to explode and ever more Western tourists discover it, it will be a different country. For better and for worse, I love that I am seeing it now.

INTREPID VIETNAM

The Reunification Express
15 days, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City
Brief: Traverse the length of vibrant Vietnam by train. The Reunification Express is a vital lifeline between north and south Vietnam. Along its path we experience the many scenic, historical, cultural and culinary highlights of this marvellous country. All aboard for a ride you’ll never forget!
Departure: Departs every Sunday & Thursday
Price: AU$885 plus a Local Payment of US$200

Vietnam Basix
21 days, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City
Trip Style: Intrepid Basix
Highlights: Hanoi, Halong Bay, Cat Ba Island, Sapa hilltribes, Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City
Brief: There is a lot more to Vietnam than rice paddies and noodle soup! See Vietnam from top to bottom, witness its ancient and modern history and explore the tiny villages and teeming cities. From commercial centres to spiritual havens, this stunningly beautiful country has something exciting to offer around every corner.
Departure: Departs every Monday
Price: AU$895 plus a Local Payment of US$300

Vietnam Family Adventure
15 days, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City
Trip Style: Intrepid Family
Highlights: Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City
Brief: Diverse, beautiful and lots of fun – Vietnam is a great place for a family adventure. Journey together from Hanoi to historical Hue and Hoi An, the beautiful beaches of Nha Trang and the modern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City. On this trip, the whole family is set to be entertained and educated by the people, history, colour and culture of this ancient and amazing country.
Departure: Departs on a Saturday. Dates available online at www.intrepidtravel.com/vfa
Price: AU$1165 plus a Local Payment of US$200

Vietnam Experience
15 days, Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi
Trip Style: Intrepid Comfort
Highlights: Ho Chi Minh City, Cu Chi Tunnels, Mekong Delta homestay, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hue, water puppets, Halong Bay, Hanoi.
Brief: From south to north, Vietnam is a kaleidoscope of wonderful people and picturesque landscapes. Imagine exploring the beautiful lakes and boulevards of Hanoi and shopping to your heart’s content. What better way to get to know the locals than to be their guests in a Mekong Delta homestay! Experience historical temples, spectacular scenery, delicious banquets and lively cities all with a touch of comfort.
Departure: Departs on a Sunday. Dates available online at www.intrepidtravel.com/vkt
Price: AU$1625 plus a Local Payment of US$200

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

When is the best time of year to travel?
Generally, there is no “best” time for travelling in Vietnam. The seasons are a little vague and vary considerably from north to south and within regions. Flooding can sometimes cause minor alterations to our itineraries. THE SOUTH: The dry season is from December to June with March to May being particularly hot and humid. Temperature range from 27°C to 36°C. The wet season with short, heavy rain showers is from July to November. Temperatures average between 22°C and 27°C. THE NORTH: With four seasons, winter is from December to February – it can be extremely cold in Hanoi and the mountainous regions, with overnight temperatures of 4°C and daytime highs between 10°C and 20°C. Thermal clothing is a good idea if trekking in winter. Summer is June to August – expect hot and humid conditions at this time. Temperatures average 27°C to 30°C with high humidity.
Religion: Predominantly Buddhist, with Confucianism, Taoism & other minorities
Language: Vietnamese
Currency: Dong (VND)
Visas: It is necessary to apply for a one month travel visa prior to travel as they cannot be obtained on arrival. This visa takes about 5 days to process and must state the date of arrival and departure in order to be valid.
Electricity: 220V, 50 Hz AC (some 110V, 50 Hz AC)
Times to avoid: Best to avoid the Vietnamese New Year, Tet. Dates are based on the Chinese New Year lunar calendar and therefore vary from year to year. Scheduled TET dates for 2006 are January 29th and for 2007 it is planned for the 18th of February. Vietnam effectively shuts down for at least 3 days over this period and it is virtually impossible to travel anywhere as 60 million Vietnamese are also travelling to see their families.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

LAURA’S WORLD: Mar 05

LAURA WILSON
Identifying and eradicating unwanted pests

New Zealand Customs officers are among the world’s most rigorously protective. We love to keep things out of our remote little country. I quite frequently fly around the world carting some odd items that barely raise an eyebrow until I land here, whereupon I am funnelled toward MAF and Customs scrutineers who treat me as if I am very odd indeed.

“Why would I want to bring such things into the country? Does the country need such things? They have never heard of items like these, so surely I am hiding some ulterior motive?” I have an interest in different healing techniques and pick up the odd foreign implement and herbal remedy. At first the insinuation that this made me a suspicious oddity upset me. How dare they make such judgements? I found it very small-minded indeed.

Often my goods are taken for further testing and I receive them weeks or even months later, purged of every possible evil. This simply does not happen elsewhere, unless you have a firearm. But ask most New Zealanders about Customs and they will back up this mentality of exclusion. We want the right to shape our country the way we want, not have it shaped by outside influences flooding in at the will of foreigners whose alliance lies not with the heart of this nation.

We are quite clear when it comes to excluding undesirable substances, but not so undesirable attitudes. This becomes an issue of human rights, as if we do not have the right as a country to judge an attitude or a behaviour undesirable and keep it out. We will protect our flora and fauna from contamination with the greatest of measures, but not our culture.

A few countries have the shoe on the other foot. Bhutan, for example, allows only tourism, no immigration. Tourists pay US$250 a day to visit, allowed only two weeks in a guided tour of designated areas. While Bhutan is an extreme example, it is by no means unique. Many countries have almost no immigration allowance – it is simply something they do not want. Nepal, for example has a few foreign residents, but all are there on shonky student visas that require constant renewal. Try to even find an Immigration Department, and then try to ask for a residency application form, and you will be laughed back to your country.

I estimate that in approximately two-thirds of the world’s countries, immigration is nigh impossible. The countries that do allow it are predominantly Western. In Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand the attitude to giving foreigners entitlement to dwell and even become nationals, is entirely different. Even countries that are over-full to bursting still take in thousands of immigrants. Why the differences?

Obviously, more people want to get out of a poor country and into a comparatively rich one, than the reverse. But there is another reason, one which Western nations scorned long ago. Protectivism. Even the poorest of countries like Nepal and Bhutan are passionate about their identity and protect it at great cost. They want tourism and they want money, but they do not want outside customs taking root and potentially taking over their sovereign ways.

Try similarly to immigrate to a Muslim nation. Even marrying a national does not afford you residency or citizenship. They are absolutely protective, and unashamedly proud of it. But observe the outcry if any Western country attempts in even the meekest way to protect itself by suggesting for example that it is overcrowded and needs a break from the tide of immigrants. This country will be in the headlines, whichever politician dared to voice this opinion labelled a racist, conservative bigot, or as in the case of Pym Fortuyn, Dutch Opposition Leader, simply shot to death.

I have never been a part of any organisation, be it religious, political or philosophical. I have no criminal history, no world-changing goals, and no particular axe to grind yet immigration to a non-Western country would be no easy task as most simply do not want me. They most certainly feel no kind of moral obligation to take me in simply because I ask nicely! Even if I had fled New Zealand, pursued by the IRD or the Mongrel Mob I would find they have no such thing as ‘claiming refugee status’ because I fear for my livelihood or life.

The very fact that New Zealand is taking its time to consider whether to grant residency to a foreign man with a strongly political-religious-activist past who entered the country illegally under false pretences, is causing moral outrage. Not moral outrage that New Zealand is being taken advantage of, but outrage that it dares to harbour doubts about this man and even greater outrage that it dares to suggest it has the right as a nation to protect itself from individuals, ideas or situations that could harm the way of life here.

What on earth is all this about? How dare Amnesty International lambast the government in full page Herald ads for crimes against humanity? Have we not a right to even consider protecting ourselves?
If New Zealanders don’t want Nukes, they are kept out. We don’t like snakes, even if they are at risk of becoming extinct in their own land we would not consider harbouring them. Customs have every right to treat me, a New Zealander with suspicion, to detain me, test me, question me for as long as they like because their business is protecting the country. Why is it not equally important to protect this country’s culture, as its nature?

When Bhutan wants to protect itself from unwanted influence it is seen as a charming, endearing quality and a bold move by a proud people who have something worth protecting. Bhutanese do not lack compassion, but had some of New Zealand’s high-profile refugee claimants gone to them for refuge, they would have politely declined. The world media would not have berated the Bhutanese government for this. In fact no one would have seen it as other than their personal right to choose. Why on the one hand would people uphold Bhutan’s right to self-determination through protection and exclusion, and not New Zealand’s? Why are we bigots for excluding an Algerian whilst Bhutanese are heroes for excluding an American? Clearly our attitude towards protection and preservation is two-faced, confused and heavily coloured by the unconscious prejudice that Westerners owe something to the rest of the world.

I have spent much of my life travelling, often involved in voluntary schemes to alleviate suffering, to bring health and education to people whose governments either can’t or don’t care to provide for. I do not lack compassion but one thing I have learned about the world is that poverty, disease, and most forms of suffering I have witnessed stem from attitude, culture, belief and behaviour, not by an accident of nature, and not by Western greed.

New Zealand is a safe, healthy and caring place to live because of a culture we have carefully cultivated, argued over and altered over generations. Now we take this culture for granted, as if it is not a creation, a possession of ours. Rather, we see only a land that we possess by dubious rights, that we have little right to restrict others from.

In Bhutan culture is seen as their greatest asset, coming before land, before wealth. Part of treasuring this is in saying the word no.

If it is New Zealand’s choice to become multi-cultural then I support that. This also is our right. But let us not think it is our obligation. Unwise immigration schemes are crippling countries and diminishing cultures that seem to have no right to protect themselves. We must be able to do both; celebrate and protect our way of life as well as invite other cultures and expand our boundaries. To do this we inevitably have to say no along the way, in between the yes’s.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

Simply Devine: Mar 05

MIRANDA DEVINE
Wolfe howls at loose moon units of the Left

After thoroughly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s latest novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, it came as some surprise to read review after review that panned the book. Wolfe has had negative critiques of his earlier work, the smash hit Bonfire Of The Vanities and the more recent A Man In Full; during a celebrated literary bitchfight with a jealous Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, Wolfe wrote an essay titled “My Three Stooges”.

But there was nothing like this near-universal condemnation by the literary establishment, so spiteful and so personal.

Wolfe “has become an old fart, and the worst kind of old fart, too: a right-wing scold, a moralising antique”, wrote Henry Kisor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Wolfe “has grown into an unremitting scold, excoriating perceived depravity”, wrote The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda. The book is, “a (slightly disguised) hellfire tirade, a vision of students who belong in the hands of an angry God”.

Wolfe is “irredeemably, programmatically super-ficial” wrote Theo Tait in the once-great magazine The Spectator.

Many reviewers sneered about Wolfe’s age, 73, as if it somehow disqualified him from writing about young people.

“What can be expected when a novelist in his 70s takes on the subject of undergraduate life? Mainly voyeurism,” wrote Princeton professor Elaine Showalter in the Chronicle Of Higher Education. Wolfe was “titillated by the sexual revolution that has arrived on campus since his own student days”. There must be a reason for such spite which goes beyond the pages of Wolfe’s new book. And, of course, it is politics. The day before the US presidential election last November, Wolfe was quoted in The Guardian as saying he might vote for George Bush. Social death!

What’s more, he poked fun at the Bush-hating New York liberal dinner party set, to which he belonged.

“Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing ...what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina’s reaction is: ‘How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?’ I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled.”

Wolfe’s book is about a high-minded 18-year-old virgin, Charlotte Simmons, from a conservative hillbilly family, the first to go away to a prestigious college. But instead of an intellectual Shangri-la she found a shallow, status-obsessed world of rampant sex, crudity and drunkenness, where her virginity was a joke and being “cool” was everything.

It explores social status and the primal human need to belong to a group. How ironic, then, that the book was the trigger for Wolfe to become a pariah within his own group, the New York liberal elite.
“I cannot stand the lockstep among everyone in my particular world,” he told The Guardian. “They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them.”

Wolfe also accepted an invitation from Laura Bush to the White House last year to speak at a literary function.

But the final affront to his peers was when The New York Times discovered President Bush loved I Am Charlotte Simmons.

“It is unclear exactly what Mr Bush liked so much about the book,” wrote the newspaper’s Elizabeth Bumiller. Shock horror, the President was even, “enthusiastically recommending it to friends”.

“Does Mr Bush like the book because it is a journey back to his keg nights at Deke (his jock fraternity at Yale), or because it offers a glimpse into the world of his daughters’ generation?” Miaow.

Then, to make matters worse, another British paper, The Sunday Times, revealed Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra, 24, had confessed that she, too, was intending to vote for Bush. “If I say it out loud, it’s death,” she whispered to writer Sarah Baxter at a Manhattan black tie arts party. “In a place like this, people look at you like you are a freak.
I believe in abortion and I totally believe Kerry is right on some social issues, but I just don’t trust him on terrorism.”

Maybe this determination to escape intellectual lockstep and think for oneself is hereditary. Or, scary thought, for Wolfe’s detractors, maybe it is contagious.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

Sep 05, AU edition

LOST IN TRANSLATION
She was a Russian dancer. He was a suburban psychopath. IAN WISHART has the story of a paedophile’s manipulation of the law to gain access to children, and a trail of wrecked lives he’s left behind him

Teardrops well, glistening in the soft evening light, but they never fall. ‘I can’t cry anymore,’ she says after a moment, gathering herself again. ‘I don’t cry’, she repeats, softly, more to herself than anyone else. Her name is Elena Reznikova*, and on a cold August night she’s a long way from home, back in the Ukraine. The story of a journey from her life as a Russian ballerina to being surrounded by semi-stacked boxes of files in a tatty suburban law office after hours, is a long and, like many Russian stories, tragic one.

Daughter of a Soviet Air Force pilot, her mother a nurse, Elena Reznikova had a relatively normal childhood in communist Russia. Born in the remote province of Khazakstan – a legacy that would return to haunt her Down Under – Elena’s parents shifted to a home in rural Ukraine, not far from a local nuclear power station named Chernobyl. She draws back the collar of her turtleneck sweater: ‘See, I still have scar from cancer’, she notes, touching her throat. Her voice is hoarse and barely there.

As if sensing the unspoken question, she adds: ‘I have lost my voice, all year. Stress. It will kill me eventually, I think.’
Stress. Now there’s an understatement.

It was back in February 2001 that Elena met Paul Copeland – originally from Australia, now transplanted to New Zealand – courtesy of a Russian bride internet agency.

‘I wanted to get out of Ukraine, out of Russia’, she reflects. ‘I met a person on internet line. He look good. He promised me beautiful life, I would “bloom like a flower”. I fell in love with his photos, I was ready to take care of his children. He said he needs a woman who will look after his children, who will cook, who will clean – and I was the best – and I was ready to be a stepmother, to be friendly with his other partners. Because he was like me, he had three different children from three different relationships. Can you imagine this madness?’

Elena had been married and divorced. Like thousands of Russian women, she was deserted by the men in her life because of appalling economic conditions over there.

‘My friends told me, ‘don’t give up, you can find a good man’. Because it is impossible to find in Ukraine, with children, it is economic, men are unable to provide.’

Copeland, she says, was everything she thought she wanted in a man. ‘All my girlfriends were crazy about him because he was good looking, charming, gentleman, just a little bit drunk, but we just thought he liked his beer, as we do in the Ukraine.’

But Elena had no idea Copeland had a very dark past, despite an incident that ever so slightly foreshadowed what she would later discover.

‘My neighbours came over. We have a tradition in Russia to make a person drunk because we want to know how he acts when he is drunk, because people are different when they are drunk. Paul was drinking and drinking, and he started to try and jump off the second floor balcony, because he said he was trying to escape being locked up.’
In 1989, Paul Copeland hit the headlines throughout New Zealand for trying to murder his first wife with a crossbow in Tauranga. It was a well-publicised court case, with testimony of terror.

A report from his trial in May 1990 recounts the facts: ‘A 32 year old Tauranga man tried to kill his estranged wife by shooting her with a hunting bow and arrow…from only a foot away…the broadhead spear arrow penetrated part of the woman’s liver, stomach and one of her lungs, poking out the other side of her body.

‘She managed to make her way to the kitchen where she tried to use the phone but was prevented by Copeland, who forced her up against a wall in the hallway opposite the kitchen.

‘Feeling dizzy, she had slid down the wall but managed to get up again to make her way downstairs and to her car where her young daughter was waiting for her. She had collapsed beside the car and neighbours who saw her had rushed to her aid,’ the Crown Prosecutor was recorded as telling the High Court at Rotorua.

‘Copeland, from an upstairs window, had asked several times if she was dead yet.’

He was found not guilty by reason of ‘temporary’ insanity. Copeland, you see, had always been troubled. His father was named in investigations as a violent alcoholic paedophile who had allegedly sodomised his young son. In his early teenage years, Paul Copeland allegedly returned the favour by raping one of his younger sisters. There were burglaries, drug use, car thefts and fraud charges. Violence towards animals was also a Copeland trademark – executing cats and other small animals by bludgeoning them, revelling in the gore.

Little surprise that the teenager ended up in the Tokanui mental institution as a result of his behaviour. Family members would later talk of assault incidents in Australia with drink driving and firearms convictions added into the mix.

None of this, however, was contained in the internet dating agency files as Copeland linked up with Reznikova in far off Ukraine. Instead, the New Zealander turned on the charm, promising marriage and more to the former ballerina and mother of two boys.

‘He said he wanted to make me pregnant, that this was beautiful because I need a baby girl, so we need to do it immediately because it would be easier to get visas.’

By August 2001, Elena was pregnant with their child – her third.
‘Paul was very good for about two weeks after I got pregnant, then he started to drink, he said he’d spent all the money for tickets, nearly, and I said, “Listen, we have to have money for tickets to go to your country”.’

In September that year, the couple and Elena’s youngest son, Yuri, landed in Auckland.

‘I couldn’t speak English. None. I couldn’t put sentence together. I couldn’t make myself understood. I left behind my eldest son because the immigration people in Moscow said it would be hard to get him out here, because Paul didn’t have enough money to pay. But he promised me he would bring him out later.

‘I’d always wanted to speak English well, like I do now. I wanted my children to speak English, and I wanted to have a good job and be happy. So New Zealand looked to me like a countryside that I liked, because my family came from the countryside. We had 100 turkeys. My family grows vegetables, we have lots of food, very hard working people.’

Clean and green the countryside in her new home might have been, but behind the four walls of Copeland’s house she began to discover his demons.

‘When I arrived in September I used to clean the house because I was a good cleaner…and I found some photos of other women with children, in Spain, Africa and elsewhere. So I asked him, ‘was this your previous girlfriend?’ He said ‘no, I just used to live with her for a while’. I said ‘why didn’t you bring her to New Zealand?’. He said ‘she wasn’t good, but her children were good’.’

Elena wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

‘When we first arrived, we had sex all weekend, every day, but when his other children arrived he wasn’t interested in me, he doesn’t have sex with me. I’m asking him, ‘Paul, I’m waiting for you upstairs’, but he never came up. I’m four months pregnant but I’m a woman who is still healthy, you know.’

Over the weeks and months of her pregnancy that followed over the summer of 2001, Elena claims Copeland became more and more distant, more focused on the children, including Elena’s six year old Yuri.
‘On the beach I noticed that he was putting his fingers in between the children’s legs every time he picked them up. His children always used to scream in the bath. I said to him, you bath boy, I bath girl. He was always present in the bath when the children were there. I don’t leave babies in the bath alone, but when children are five or older it is a different thing.

‘I often heard the children sobbing, and once [his daughter Amanda, from his second wife] came out crying and I asked “who hurt you”, and she pointed at Paul saying “him”.

‘He used to call me worthless, and good-for-nothing whore. On the few times we had sex after that he became violent, even though I was pregnant. He never kissed me, and turned my face away during the act of intercourse. He was cold and brutal. Then, at the end, he got worse. He had so much sex with me at the end that I had premature baby.’

Their child, Nicholai, was born in March 2002, with complications.
‘When he was born the baby didn’t breathe, and he said “I don’t know why I should have to buy expensive medicine just to keep the baby alive”. He refused to buy medicine, so I used to go to the church, and there was a very good woman there and she gave me $20.’

When the baby had to be rushed to hospital, Paul Copeland allegedly took his time.

‘He wanted the child to die. He told me. He didn’t want to take me to hospital. He went so slow. As a mother, I’m lucky I have medical skills to keep this child healthy and alive, so when he got better – it was four months later – I moved out of the house.

‘There was a neighbour across the road, and everybody knew about his background, nobody told me, it was a huge secret from me. And when I used to speak to people in the church, everywhere, people used to be so nice, they understood my problem and thought they would encourage him to marry me, so I would get residence. But I wanted to go back to Ukraine because I left my son behind and he told me I will never see him. Then he said if I went back he would keep my two other children with him, so I used to carry on in the home, being with him together, and no one could help.’

When she tried to get Copeland to sign their baby’s birth certificate, he spat the dummy.

‘He screamed at me about a former wife who had taken his money. He called her ‘a bitch, a whore and a lesbian’, and swore that no woman would ever get anything from him, although he did eventually sign the certificate.’

During this time, she says, Copeland would often threaten to have her deported back to Ukraine without her children. ‘I’ll keep them, and you won’t be able to go to court because I’ll make you leave the country.’

Copeland also took the unusual step of publishing a photograph of his fiancée onto an internet porn site, along with a story about their sexual exploits when he first met her in Russia: ‘My Elena didn’t like to drink, that was a problem! Still, I had my two beers and the offer of SEX was on, it was the Russian wash down now with no hot water from the tap. So Elena would fill a basin with hot water, and I would sit in the bath. Elena would wet me then with soap wash my body down, then rinse me. Now, guys who haven’t experienced this, it is good, very good to receive this care. So we are clean now, and it’s time to get dirty, so it’s off to the bed again for a lesson in Russian! The sex was good, very good…as will be revealed soon.’

The revelations are too graphic to reprint in a family magazine.
Elena could see no way out. Although her understanding of English was growing, she still found it hard to speak it, and many people simply wrote her off as ‘an over-emotional Russian’. But the woman from the church who’d paid for the medicine to save Nicholai’s life turned out to be a guardian angel.

‘So that woman, she said “I will help you go to a Women’s Refuge”. I said “what is that?” Because we don’t have that in our country. Can you imagine how crazy it seemed for me to leave for Women’s Refuge with four-months-old baby, and leave the man whom I loved, believe me. Later on I realised it was only about that he wants children to abuse.’

Elena fled on a Friday afternoon with baby and older son in tow. She asked the Women’s Refuge to help get her deported back to the Ukraine on the grounds that her immigration status was now void because of the relationship break-up. And she didn’t have the money herself for airfares. But on Monday morning, Paul Copeland had already obtained a court ruling preventing Elena from taking baby Nicholai out of New Zealand.

The Russian mother was trapped. Her own immigration status meant she now had to leave New Zealand; the court order meant her four month old baby son could not go with her. Paul taunted her by threatening to keep Yuri as well.

‘He always told me that he would send me back to Ukraine but he was keeping Yuri with him.’

Even so, Elena Reznikova still had no idea just what her fiancé had done in his past. It wasn’t until Paul’s sister picked her up from the refuge that the missing pieces of the jigsaw began to tumble into place.

‘She told me her brother is a paedophile, and he raped her and two others. And their father was a paedophile. It was like a dream for me because she got my Russian dictionary and she showed me the words. I hadn’t realised then that he had tried to kill his ex-wife. I was more shocked when I found that out.’

It was at this point that Elena was introduced to Copeland’s third wife, a woman named Elizabeth who’s still living in hiding, 11 years after first meeting Copeland. Elena had found a contact number for her and rang her from the Women’s Refuge. Elizabeth says she could barely understand the distressed Russian woman with the thick accent, but she took down bottles so she could feed baby Nicholai. When she heard Elena’s suspicions that the children had been sexually abused, this former Copeland bride heard the penny drop. Elizabeth immediately phoned Copeland’s sister when she got home, who explained that Paul had also sexually abused her when she was a child. ‘You should believe Elena,’ Copeland’s sister told Elizabeth.

It turned out Elizabeth was another foreign woman lured into Copeland’s orbit in 1994, just four years after his trial for trying to murder his first wife. Elizabeth’s own marriage was in difficulty, and she says Copeland was ‘very romantic’ and charming, and convinced her to leave her husband. She says he acted like a father to her two daughters, and ‘got me pregnant two months after we met’.
Sound familiar? Copeland told Elizabeth it would be easier to get residency if she was pregnant.

Once his victim was trapped, Copeland moved from suave suitor to Hannibal Lecter, catching the neighbour’s cat, gassing it, and then burning it in front of his wife despite her pleas to spare the creature.

A recent study suggested people who torture animals are more likely to be sexual abusers. On the Richter scale of deviance, Paul Copeland was already an 11.

After Elizabeth and Paul’s son, Timothy, was born in 1995, he again turned his attention to Elizabeth’s two older daughters, often watching them shower, poking them frequently with a toilet brush while they were naked, assaulting them, verbally abusing them, making one of the girls pick up excrement in the garden using only her bare hands.
Elizabeth worked nights, leaving her husband to babysit six-month-old Timothy and her two daughters. The children’s grandmother would often pop in and find the girls weeping and distressed. He teased one of the older girls about her weight, calling her Moby Dick, and suggested to a family friend the other ‘would be a slut and pregnant’ by the time she was 14.

It was around this time that Elizabeth, wife number three, discovered a box under the stairwell containing files relating to Copeland’s childhood and the fates of wives one and two.

She read of the bow and arrow attack on wife one, the declaration of temporary insanity and the very brief spell in Tokanui Hospital before the psychopathic Copeland had convinced the cuckoo-keepers he was sane enough to fly the nest. She read of how Paul had allegedly been raped by his own father, and the history of sex abuse in his family. She discovered how he’d met wife number two, a German woman (mother of Amanda), and burned her passport and all her papers. How he’d smashed all the windows in his house on one occasion, and psychiatric reports detailing the horrific tortures he’d practiced on animals as a child.
Naturally, after reading all this, Elizabeth became absolutely terrified about what might happen to her and her children.

When she tried to leave, and she did so half a dozen times, Copeland would invariably track her down, stalk her and terrify her until she returned. In the end, however, he booted her out along with her two daughters. Elizabeth says he physically threw them out the door, locked it and stayed inside with Timothy and Amanda. By the time Elizabeth returned with help, Copeland had barricaded both of his biological children in an upstairs bedroom.

Elizabeth staked out the local supermarket and tried to grab Timothy from the shopping trolley while Copeland’s back was turned, but he foiled the rescue by screaming ‘Help, this woman is stealing my son!’ He put Timothy in hiding. Police eventually found the two year old at Copeland’s sister’s house.

The stalking and terror got worse, however, and eventually Copeland managed to convince Elizabeth that he would leave her alone if she’d just give him access on alternative weeks to Timothy.

Mindful of the crossbow attack, Elizabeth signed the custody form.
It was after that, she says, that she noticed her little boy’s behaviour change markedly on his return from access visits; it was, she says unusually aggressive and strange.

This, then, was the story of wife number three.

The woman who would have been number four, Elena, is deeply saddened at the fate of Copeland’s first two children.

‘Last time I saw Timothy and Amanda they put their heads down, they know that I know their problem but I can’t help them. They don’t talk, they’re very embarrassed to tell anybody what’s happening to them because they’re scared that their father will kill them. He told them, “I will kill you if you tell anyone”. He told it to my son but my son is Russian and Russians are very strong. We have a, how do you say, self, self-preservation, as a child when you’re young. You learn to save yourself in a difficult situation, even losing your life.’

In the past year, Elena’s older son Yuri has told of being made to watch naked children on Copeland’s computer during the months that Copeland has had Nicholai in his care, and Elena’s family friends say Nicholai has complained of a “sore bottom”, and “dad touching me in the bottom”.

‘I have three boys,’ says Elena. ‘I have a lot of experience as a mother of boys. When they are small their penises never stand up, they don’t have hormones for sex, but my little boy, his penis is so sensitive. I think it has been massaged. He wakes up at night and says “it hurts”. I am so scared what will happen to him if he goes back to his father. This child has already been damaged.’

Yuri says he and the other children witnessed Paul Copeland interfering with Nicholai’s genitals and bottom – in fact, all the children were made to watch it.

Elena obtained a psychologist’s report on Yuri two years ago, and she says the psychologist was convinced Yuri had also been abused.
She says one of the most frightening things about Copeland is his psychopathic aloofness.

He’s absolutely normal in public, but he’s not normal. His body language is absolutely absent. He doesn’t move, there’s no body language. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a former criminal anymore because I was scared that one day I would have to protect myself and the lives of my children. He told me I would never see my eldest son again, and I haven’t seen him in four years, his threat came true.

‘When I go to bed I feel that I’m already dead or am unable to leave, or help my children to be happy, to be together. The man is killing me psychologically, emotionally. He would like to kill me physically. He has already tried to kill his ex-wife.

‘My second relationship, my partner said “Elena, I can’t pay these bills for lawyers, this is crazy, just give the child away”. I said, “Peter, this is sexual abuse”. He said, “I know”. He said, “sorry Elena, I do love you but with all these problems I don’t want you. I don’t want your children”.’

Nor has the New Zealand Government come to the rescue of the children. The Immigration Service has cancelled Elena’s right to stay in New Zealand, and wants to deport her, if necessary without her children who would be left in the care of Paul Copeland.

‘My application for residence was cancelled because I was born in Khazakstan. It’s another nonsense. Khazakstan is part of Russia and it appears on my birth certificate, but my parents took me out of Khazakstan when I was two months old, so Immigration Service asked me for a police certificate from Khazakstan, and it’s impossible to get! It’s so stupid.’

It wouldn’t be the first time New Zealand’s bureaucrats have been called stupid.

With Copeland continuing to stalk her and harass the men helping her, Elena found herself increasingly isolated. No money to keep up her fight to stay in New Zealand long enough to get the non-removal order lifted, no money to buy groceries. No work permit. She turned, reluctantly, to prostitution to pay the bills.
‘I hated it. I did not want to do. But how else could I survive? How else could I provide?’

Today, she sells other services.

‘My flatmates discover my cooking and cleaning is so good, they pay me to do all of it.’

With the help of a Russian-speaking lawyer, she’s launched a renewed bid to secure New Zealand residency and, as at the time of writing, she has temporarily wrested back control of her children from Paul Copeland and is helping heal their scars.

‘I got Nicholai back two weeks ago,’ she murmurs. ‘He wakes at night, but I think he will get better. I love him. Once I didn’t want to stay in New Zealand. Now I do.’

The most stunning aspect of the whole story, however, is why on earth a man with Paul Copeland’s psychiatric history, a sexual predator who raped his own sister and tried to murder his wife with a bow and arrow, a man who enjoyed killing cats in the cruellest ways he could find – why such a man would be allowed anywhere near a child by New Zealand’s social workers and psychologists.

For Elena, that is the biggest mystery of all.

*All names except those of Elena Reznikova and Paul Copeland have been changed for privacy purposes

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Feb 05

“DOOR” BORES, SEX SELLS
Great acting belies the controversy over “Kinsey”, while Kim Basinger’s latest is just plain creepy.

Door In The Floor
Released: February 3, 2005
Rated: M
2 stars
Sure, Door In The Floor is a sad story. A couple’s two boys are killed in an accident and their parents, children’s writer Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and wife Marion (Kim Basinger), are torn apart with grief. So much so they have another child to make up for the loss (as if that’s going to work). Next they decide to separate and sleep around (okay…). Then they invite a 16-year-old intern who looks like one of their dead sons to work for them.

Can anyone else see trouble brewing here?

One could understand this amount of destructive behavior had the accident occurred a month or a year ago, but we meet the characters a full five years after the fact. Somewhere along the five stages of grief these two got stuck on the step known as, “numbingly vacant yet destructive and willing to leave human carnage in their wake”.Yet for such an un-likeable story the cast is top notch.

As the adulterous artist and grieving father Ted, Jeff Bridges’ is superb – but his acting is wasted on such an obnoxious character. He’s supposed to be free and creative but he’s really just selfish and uncaring.

Kim Basinger plays Marion, the sexy yet emotionally numbed mother. And I have to admit, she can pull off a stone carving impression very well. But things get creepy when she decides to take a page out of
Mrs. Robinson’s playbook and pursue their teenage intern, Eddie (Jon Foster), who looks like one of her dead sons.

The director, Tod Williams, has adapted the movie from John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year. It’s beautifully and artistically filmed – or, to put it another way, pretentious. Without a doubt, Williams wanted to make a “deep” film, and every lingering shot and every line screams not just “look at how deep this is”, but, “but wait this makes it deeper still!”

This film exaggerates the weight of grief without ever bothering to realistically confront the unavoidable process of healing. For me it was as entertaining as watching an open wound. If you want to watch two hours of a marriage falling apart, child neglect and pseudo-incest, be my guest, but Door In The Floor wasn’t my cup of tea.

---

Kinsey
Released: January 27, 2005
Rated: M
4 stars
For all the controversy surrounding it, Kinsey is not much more than a bio-pic of Alfred Kinsey who, in 1948, published the controversial book Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. It sold like gangbusters, and shocked society with its detailed scientific evidence about our rude bits and what we do with them.

Originally a zoologist studying wasps, Kinsey was drawn to exploring sex when one of his biology students asked him, “If a husband gives his wife oral sex will that make her infertile?” and “Does masturbating make you lose a pint of blood? ” Kinsey decided to put a stop to this nonsense by finding out the facts, helped by a team of young researchers to help him carry out in-depth sex surveys. Lo and behold, it turned out Americans in the 1940s were having much more sex and in more ways than anyone ever imagined! Who woulda thunk it?

I’m putting my neck out early here but I think Liam Neeson has an Oscar smell about him. He has a captivating take on the nutty, sex-obsessed professor. Laura Linney plays Kinsey’s free-thinking wife with just the right amount of enthusiasm and fragility. Together they pull off one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes ever filmed as they portray two virgins fumbling on their wedding night with embarrassing realism. I was squirming in my seat. Neeson is well supported by Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard and Timothy Hutton as his research assistants. They quickly become cult followers of their awe-inspiring boss, shaking off Victorian sexual constraints and exploring everything from same-sex relationships to wife-swapping — all, of course, in the name of science. Such forward thinking wasn’t exactly welcomed in the ‘40s and by the time his book on women arrived in 1953, the sexual revolution was getting underway and Kinsey being blamed for the whole kinky mess.John Lithgow is impressive as Kinsey’s conservative father and Lynn Redgrave shows why she’s an Oscar nominee with her show-stealing and thought-provoking cameo as one of Kinsey’s patients.Writer/Director Bill Condon has created another champion script to follow up on his mesmerizing screenplay for Gods & Monsters, a gentle handling of the story of James Whale (most famous for
directing “Frankenstein”), which won him an Academy Award.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

FOOD: Dec 05, AU Edition

SEEING RED
Eli Jameson celebrates summer and separates the ripe tomatoes from the hoary chestnuts

Hear the word ‘tomatoes’, and what do you think of? Spaghetti piled high and swimming in marinara sauce? Garden vines hanging heavy with ripe, red fruit? Or perhaps something less pleasant – childhood memories of supermarket tomatoes as tasteless as their plastic packaging, sliced into a salad of sweaty iceberg lettuce and gloppy dressing the colour of jaundice?

To me, tomatoes always mean one thing: summer. Regular readers of this column are familiar with my fierce dislike of the colder months, and so the arrival of abundant and cheap tomatoes in the markets is always a cause for celebration. For the foreseeable future, there will always be a truss of tomatoes, still on the vine, on the kitchen bench ready to go on sandwiches, be tossed into some dish or other, or simply sliced on a plate and sprinkled with sea salt and a little extra-virgin olive oil – the ultimate simple summer salad – perhaps with basil and a torn-up ball of buffalo mozzarella.

But what’s the story with tomatoes? Are they fruits or vegetables? Were they really once thought to be poisonous, until someone ate a bucket of them on the steps of a small-town U.S. courthouse? There are a lot of strange stories that have grown up around tomatoes, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve fallen for some of them (the courthouse steps one, especially) myself over the years.

Tomatoes, according to the invaluable Wikipedia, are a fruit, at least scientifically speaking: they are the ovary, together with the seeds, of a flowering plant. However, because tomatoes are generally served as a main dish and not as desert, they are legally classified – at least in the United States – as a vegetable. The issue even went so far as the US Supreme Court, which in the 1893 case of Nix v. Hedden declared tomatoes as vegetables because of their popular use (along with cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas), a decision which had huge tariff implications at the time. For a good time, invite a botanist and a lawyer along to your local’s next trivia night, and make sure the emcee asks the fruit-or-vegetable question.

And then there is the tale of the brave Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, who is said to have eaten of a basket of tomatoes on the steps of the Salem, New Jersey, courthouse in 1820 to turn the tide of public opinion and show that the fruit was not the least bit dangerous to anyone who didn’t suffer severe hearburn. Alas, the much-loved Johnson tale is not true: the American television network CBS popularized the story in a 1949 episode of You Are There, in which an actor playing the colonel declared to an assembled throng of two thousand, “What are you afraid of? Being poisoned? Well I’m not, and I’ll show you fools that these things are good to eat!”

As it turns out, tomatoes were grown and eaten in North America since at least 1710; not only were they not thought of as poisonous, but Puritans of the time even eschewed the things, fearing their alleged aphrodisiac properties! That great gourmand and man of the world Thomas Jefferson himself purchased the fruit (not yet classified a veggie by the courts) to serve at state dinners in 1806, and from 1809 onwards planted them at his estate, Monticello. Jefferson’s cousin Mary Randolph, author of the extremely influential 19th century cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, contained some 17 tomato recipes for such exotic dishes including gazpacho and gumbo.

Today, tomatoes are not only not considered dangerous, but downright healthful, especially as they are rich in the cancer-preventing antioxidant lycopene. Bloody Mary, anyone?

Chilled Tomato Soup

This is one of my favourite mid-summer soups, adapted from Charlie Palmer’s excellent cookbook, Great American Food. He suggests serving with toasted croutons with warm goat cheese and basil; I think that can get in the way of the clean tomatoey goodness of the soup. But try it – you may like it. In any case, this is a great dinner party starter course for the height of summer.

You’ll need:

About 8 large, ripe vine-ripened or truss
tomatoes;
Some good extra-virgin olive oil;
1 finely chopped onion
½ cup chopped celery
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Fresh basil leaves
500 ml sparkling mineral water
1 sachet
2 teaspoons Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
Good sea salt, like Maldon
Fresh-ground pepper

1. Peel, seed and chop the tomatoes; set aside. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large, heavy pan and sauté the onion, celery, garlic, and about 8 basil leaves – which should be torn in half as you toss them in. Lower the heat and continue to cook gently for about four minutes (you want the vegetables to soften but not pick up any colour), and add the tomatoes, sparkling water and sachet. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Take off heat and let rest for 30 minutes, then remove and discard the sachet.

2. Puree the mixture in a blender, working in batches if necessary, until the soup is quite smooth. Pour through a fine sieve and strain into a non-reactive bowl – giving the solids a push if need be to extract liquid. Add a couple of teaspoons of Lea & Perrins (just enough to bring out the tomato flavour; not enough to make it obvious) and your salt and pepper to taste. Cover and refrigerate until icy cold – at least four hours.

3. Serve in chilled, flat soup bowls, with a spring of basil for garnish.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

CAN GRANT HACKETT?: Apr 05, AU Edition

CAN GRANT HACKETT?
Fully recovered from the health woes that plagued him during last year’s Olympics, and now breathing down the neck of the world’s fastest man, Grant Hackett speaks to JENI PAYNE about motivation in the pool, the challenges ahead of him and the people this sporting icon most admires

A chronic chest infection would have most of us under the covers, sipping lemony drinks, begging leave of work and looking for sympathy. But Grant Hackett competed with one in the most grueling race of the swimming schedule at the pinnacle of athletic achievement, and won. In fact, last European summer, Hackett defended his Olympic 1500m freestyle title and also won silver medals in the 400m freestyle and the 4x200m freestyle relay.

He has now won the 2000 and 2004 Olympic titles, the 1998, 2001, and 2003 world championships, the 1998 and 2002 Commonwealth Games titles, and the 1997, 1999, and 2002 Pan Pacific Championships.

With the Athens win under his belt, Hackett has joined an elite group of just five Aussies to have defended an Olympic title: Dawn Fraser (1956-60-64), Murray Rose (1956-60), Kieren Perkins (1992-96), and Ian Thorpe (2000-04).

He currently owns the world record, and now sits alongside Perkins and Salnikov as one of the best 1500m swimmers in history.

The two weeks in Athens might have taken a tremendous toll on his health, but the 24-year old doesn’t want to dwell on it.

“I didn’t feel fantastic, but I just pushed myself to the absolute limit. I wanted to win so badly. That’s part of what we do. It’s a test of character. Sometimes you’ve just got to do the job regardless of the situation or how you feel, and I did that.”

Mentally recovered from the hype and heroism of the Games, Hackett says he is “just taking it easy over the next few months”, concentrating on mending his health and spending the time pre-World Championships (Montreal, July 2005) on the promotional circuit, speaking at sponsor events, lunches and charity functions – as well as catching up with friends and family and watching DVDs.

Then there’s the Law degree at Bond University. (Most 20-somethings would find that enough in itself!)

“It has to be flexible, since I miss a lot of weeks with training and travel and I’m probably teaching myself about 50% of the time, but I think it’s important to be educated. The brain has to be as fit as the body. Plus it’s my dose of normality to go to uni.”

When swimming is no longer first on his list of priorities, Hackett says he would be keen to open the other doors afforded him by his high profile and dedication to studies.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer, but I wouldn’t mind getting into business, property development and the media.” But for now, it’s home and family. “My family is everything to me. I tend to travel in small chunks of between one and five weeks, but I miss them a lot. Even if they come with me, I’d be lucky to see them once, since the team is locked off for security. But it helps to know they’re there.”

For a busy man, Hackett is generous with his time. One of the first places this Miami Dolphins Swim Club member visited on his return was the pool. In all likelihood still jet-lagged, and partied-out from the celebrations, he popped in to show the kids his medals.

“It was weird. I swim with these kids every single day of my life, then, suddenly after the Games, I was a different person. It won’t be long though when I’m back in the pool and it’s all back to normal.”
Loving the Gold Coast climate and lifestyle, Hackett says there’s nowhere else he’d rather live and train and surmises that the environment could have something to do with the success of
local athletes.

“We have so much sunshine. It’s sunny and warm for about eight months of the year so mentally and physically it’s a lot easier to train compared to the pool at the AIS in Canberra, where it can be minus-six in the mornings.

“We have great facilities and, logistically, it’s easy to get around.”
To unwind, Hackett likes nothing better than to jet ski with mates, watch movies and just hang out. Does public attention ever get in the way of just hanging out?

“People do come up to me and say ‘congratulations’ or whatever, but that’s part of the package and you accept that.”

What’s harder to accept is the intrusion by the media.

“Being in the public eye, your relationships come under scrutiny as does your behaviour. Your private life is under pressure and magazines are constantly speculating . . . but the positives, enjoying what I do and the rewards of swimming, far outweigh the negatives. Sometimes you’re in a bad mood and the attention gets a bit much, but you just have to be courteous.”

Regular folk, and even the majority of athletes, would be envious of the streamlined Hackett. Not only does he have no worries about losing form over his rest period, he actually has to eat more to make sure he doesn’t lose too much weight.

“Yeah, I have to try and put on some pounds. I guess when you’re training hard you eat a lot. When I stop, I don’t feel as hungry.”
A return to the rigours of training looms and, at his peak, Hackett will put in around five to seven hours per day, six days a week.

Most people would marvel at the fortitude required to “chase the black line” day in, day out but, Hackett says, the motivation never ceases. “I’m always looking for new challenges. There are small stepping stones along the way to major events and milestones and, because I’m passionate about it, every day I can take it to a new level.
“When you’ve finished training, there’s a great sense of achievement. It takes discipline and that gives you a certain pride. Then there’s the fitness, which feels good too.”

Heralded as the second-fastest man in history by commentators at the Telstra World Championships, Hackett mounted the blocks at Sydney Olympic Park two weeks ago without the threat of his rival, team-mate and fastest man, Ian Thorpe, who’s on a one year break in the lead up to Beijing. “Whether Ian is here or not, there is certainly interest in the sport, he said to media at the event. “There’s a lot of talented athletes on the team. The team is respected as a whole, not a one-man band.”

In 100% health, and content with his 11 weeks of preparation after the Athens Games, Hackett swam the 200m, 400m, 800m and 1500m at the titles over the eight days of competition, claiming first-place in Thorpe’s pet event, the 400m, and guaranteeing a berth in the team for the World Championships in Montreal in July. The next three years in the lead up to China’s Olympic Games, Hackett is looking forward to minimal travel: “The Commonwealth Games are in Melbourne in 2006, then the World Championships in 2007 are there too. I’m glad there won’t be so much travel. ”Like most athletes, other than a few precious days off during events, even in the most exotic of locations, Hackett’s time is spent between the hotel and the pool. He describes travel for competition in terms of “being a waiter in a fabulous restaurant”. “One day I’ll be able to eat there and enjoy it, but for now . . .”

Acknowledged as an Australian icon, even at such a young age, Hackett is quick to nominate his own list of those he admires most. “My mum and dad, and coach Dennis Cottrell,” he says without hesitation. “You can look up to other sportspeople and high profile people for their achievements, but I don’t really know them. “We are all products of our environments. My family is where I look to for my strength. Their values and attitudes have contributed most to my success. They’re the people that have influenced me most.”As for Beijing, will he be there? “Definitely!” Will he contest the 400m against Thorpe? “Wait and see. I’m going to take it as it comes. My priority is the 1500m.” It’s likely he’s thinking ahead to 2008 when he has the chance to become the first man in history to win three successive 1500m Olympic titles. No doubt, the entire country will rise before dawn to watch him try.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: Dec 05, AU Edition

PERCHANCE TO WALK
Sleep is still barely understood; sleepwalking, even less so.
A look into the bizarre world of people who go bump in the night

So I sleepwalked the other night. I didn’t go far, just down the hall to the boys’ room and lay down on the floor and continued my snooze in the more traditional, horizontal manner. Obviously, I don’t recall this, nor do I recall my confused husband coming in to fetch me. Why should I? After all, I was asleep. Sleepwalking is a common form of parasomnia, which one sufferer described as “things that go bump in the night.” Sleep, as we all know, can be tricky.

More than 15% of children are thought to suffer from parasomnias of some sort, and this is considered normal childhood behavior. Most young children will occasionally talk or call out in their sleep (“no...I won’t share her…she’s mine!” being my favorite overheard phrase, confirming that a sleeping toddler is, indeed, a toddler).

In adults, parasomnias are less common, affecting something around 6% of the population. They are sometimes a sign that there is something more seriously wrong with the sufferer, and therefore should be investigated. In adults, parasomnias are most commonly linked to drinking, taking drugs, stress and sleep deprivation. I may have been under the influence of at least one of the above when I took my sleepwalk – I’ll leave it to you to guess which.

A parasomnia, according to the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or as it is known in the business, “DSM – IV”), is a “disorder of arousal, partial arousal, or sleep stage transition. It represents an episodic disorder in sleep (such as sleepwalking) rather than a disorder of sleep or wakefulness per se. May be induced or exacerbated by sleep; not a dyssomnia.” The dysomnias, by way of contrast, are a separate category of sleep ddisorder and are difficulties sleeping or waking up: sleep apnoea, narcolepsy, and that old chestnut, insomnia.

Parasomnias are things like teeth grinding, sleep talking, sleep terrors and REM sleep behaviour disorder (RSBD). This lattermost disorder is particularly scary as it is characterized by twitching and other violent movements in the sufferer’s sleep that can cause injury. And researchers have been discovering that parasomnias are in fact more common than previously thought.

As I said, sleep is tricky; it is complex and poorly understood. It’s tough to define sleep, for which reason most definitions of sleep become ridiculous. It’s some kind of important state that all animals go into where we loose consciousness to varying degrees and undergo characteristic changes to our brain waves. Dreaming is undertaken, although not always remembered, and is widely thought to be the brains system for going through junk it has picked up or is sorting through and making sense of it. A good analogy is a computer hard drive, which needs its old junk and temporary files it accumulates with use cleared out from time to time. The interpretation of dreams (paging Dr Freud) is a fun parlour game, but is like any form of insight; you need to have some in order to have more. If you keep dreaming of suitcases and hats and the cigar chompers keep telling you it’s about sex, this means you are spending too much time with the cigar chompers. The exception, obviously, is if while you are awake you believe that a dream of ripe fruit heralds a pregnancy. If everyone in your culture believes this, such a dream is a likely sign you are thinking about this. Even your own private subconscious is sociologically programmed and subject to peer pressure.

Sleepwalking can of course be incredibly dangerous: The person is not awake but they can take in some information. They can see their coffee table and walk around it, even if the sleeping brain “sees” a lake or a dragon or what have you in the place of the real object. For this reason, if you lock a sleepwalker in the house, their sleeping brain can find still find the keys if their awake brain can. Sadly, sleepwalkers have been killed walking on highways, and even behind the wheels of their cars. The latter has occurred on only a few documented occasions, and tended to lead to sleep studies being carried out, largely for medico-legal reasons.

“Sexomnia” has been studied in recent years, and looks set to be officially listed as a disorder. Last year the first and only mass-market book on the phenomena was published (Sleepsex: Uncovered by Dr. Michael Mangan, available from Amazon.com or as an e-book from www.clickbank.net). Unlike sleepwalking, sufferers are unlikely to wake up in a strange place if they have had sex in their sleep, and it occurs at a different stage of sleep to sleep walking. “Sexsomnia” is not necessarily a problem for all people who have it, although it can cause serious relationship problems, and in some cases the person may be violent. Consent therefore becomes an issue if only one party is awake. The awake person may be assaulted by the sleeper, or conversely, may believe the sleeper to be awake, and take advantage of the situation. It’s a medico-legal minefield, and raises difficult situations: if you were raped by someone who was asleep would you want them to be punished? How does one prove that someone with a sleep disorder that can be scientifically established was, nonetheless, asleep at the time?

Sleepwalking was first raised as a defense to murder in the United States in 1846, and the killer, Albert Tirrell, got off, after nearly decapitating a high-class prostitute he was obsessed with and wanted to marry. (She refused; after killing her, he then set fire to the brothel in which she worked). But he had a known history of sleepwalking, and denied all knowledge of the murder and was acquitted. Today, 150 years later, the science would not have been able to help shed much more light on things: while Tirrell could have been sent to a sleep lab to see if he had a parasomnia, there would still be know way of knowing whether he was asleep at the time of the murder and arson.

Sleep is imbued with meaning in our culture – probably in all cultures. It’s a pretty weird thing that we animals do; the only evolutionary advantage sleep is thought to confer is that perhaps there are times that being out cold is safer than running around hunting. Perhaps. It’s not the best theory, really. Just another pitiful dumb human attempt to understand why we need to sleep. We don’t understand much about sleep, except that we do need it; we get very messed up without it, and rats who are prevented from sleeping get sick and die.

For which reason, of course, we need to sleep. Practical advice: Don’t go to bed until you’re tired; face the alarm clock to the wall; if you can’t sleep get up until you are really tired; and if you read before bed don’t do it in bed. Bed is only for activities you can do with the light off. Yawn. I think I’m done.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

THE DEATH OF TAXES: Apr 05, AU Edition

THE DEATH OF TAXES
As pressure builds on the Howard Government to cut taxes, IAN WISHART reports on moves in the United States that go one giant leap further, and which may yet impact on Australians: the possible abolition of income tax

There is nothing as certain, so the old joke goes, as death and taxes. But by the end of this decade, it could be income tax itself lying dead and buried in the graveyard of bright ideas that outlived their use-by dates. If it seems like a bold, even ludicrous, idea, that may be more reflective of the way we’ve been conditioned to think about income tax than the merits of the prediction.

At the heart of it all lies a “rolling thunder”-style tax revolt that’s been quietly sweeping across America since the 1990s. In places as diverse as local community halls, Washington, D.C. thinktanks, and plush resort hotels in offshore tropical tax havens, people have been quietly gathering to discuss ways of removing America’s cumbersome Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from their lives. Many of those meetings were instigated by so-called tax rebels who argued that the US Tax Code was invalid, and that people had a constitutional right, backed up by old Supreme Court judgments, not to pay the federal income tax.

Significantly, these tax rebels also took their arguments to Australians and New Zealanders in the late 1990s with a series of offshore “tax seminars” held in exotic locations like Vanuatu and Fiji. While the legal niceties of the Australasian tax codes were different to those in the US, the principles were the same and a tax revolt briefly flowered here in Australia as a result. But in America it actually took root.

Whether the arguments were right or wrong turns out to be immaterial, because as of 2005 the tax revolt has placed so much pressure on the US tax system that it’s cracking at the seams.

Just a few short weeks ago, President George W. Bush put the abolition of income tax firmly on his domestic agenda this term, with a special advisory panel due to report its recommendations by July 31st. And later in March, US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan added his voice to what is now a cacophony of calls for income tax to go, saying that individuals should be taxed on what they consume rather than what they earn.

You heard it right.

It is an issue that has barely touched the radar of most media in Australia or New Zealand, but the implications for Australasia if the United States abolishes income tax are huge. And the federal government in Canberra knows it.

Investigate understands Treasurer Peter Costello and his officials are keeping a close eye on developments in the US because – just like the old Vietnam War red peril theory – if one domino falls then other Western democracies may have no choice but to follow suit.

Most Australians born here probably cannot remember a time when income tax was not part of their lives, yet income tax is actually a very modern invention. While kings had the power to levy special taxes on ordinary citizens to pay the bills during times of war, income taxes were not permitted – and in fact had been expressly outlawed from the time of the Magna Carta. Contrary to popular belief, taxes on commoners were extremely uncommon throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Britain was the first major nation to impose an income tax, between 1799 and 1816, to fund the Napoleonic Wars with France. The US Government imposed a special income tax in 1864 to fund the Civil War effort, but under the US Constitution the tax had to be repealed in 1872.

Having seen the benefits of a national tax on citizens, however, the governments of both Britain and America realised they could do so much more if they could find a way to permanently collect income taxes. In 1874, just two years after the US tax was repealed after the Civil War, Britain introduced sweeping legislation, including a partial repeal of aspects of the Magna Carta, and gave itself the power to impose a permanent income tax.

New Zealand and Australia followed soon after. News headlines from the time disclose considerable public disquiet about the idea, and warnings it would be “the thin end of the wedge”. But in pioneer lands like Australia and New Zealand where roads and infrastructure needed building, the income tax pill was largely swallowed whole by the public. Still, there were many who felt the tax burden, at one and a half pennies in the pound (a tax rate of about 0.75% in today’s terms), was onerous. Just what those first Australians would make of today’s 50 per cent tax rates is unclear, but history appears to have borne out the warnings that giving a government the power to levy income taxes – even at 0.75% – was indeed the thin end of the wedge.

Not to be outdone by the Mother Country and the Antipodes, US officials reintroduced a federal income tax in 1894, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. So in 1913, amid much lobbying from merchant bankers who saw the chance to make lots of money, the US reintroduced income tax by way of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It is this document that lies at the heart of the US tax revolt after revelations in the past ten years that the Sixteenth appears never to have been properly ratified by the required number of state governments. Therefore, argue the protestors, income tax remains illegal under the US Constitution.

Either way, the protests over the past five years have seen hundreds of thousands – some commentators say it is into the millions – of American individuals and small businesses refusing to file their tax returns, and tying the IRS up in red tape and court challenges every step of the way. Adding insult to injury for the IRS, it has lost some cases in front of unsympathetic juries – fueling the perception that income tax might indeed be “voluntary” in the US.

In August 2001, Investigate was the first media organization in the southern hemisphere to report that the recently-elected President Bush was taking on board the protests and considering abolishing the federal income tax:

“The growing rebellion against income tax that’s sweeping New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada has just taken a major step towards achieving its goal: US President George Bush has confirmed he is considering the complete abolition of income tax in the United States.

“In a front page story in The New York Times on July 16, Bush’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey confirmed that the White House has adopted a Ground Zero approach to tax reform, and that all issues, including the scrapping of income and company tax altogether, are “in the discussion stage.”

“ ‘The facts are that one needs a broad consensus before moving on fundamental tax reform,’ Lindsey said. ‘The process of building that consensus takes time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start the process’.

“If the White House does push ahead with ditching the century-old income tax, the newspaper reports a likely replacement is either a flat sales tax of between 20 and 30 percent, or an Australasian-style GST.

“Pressure’s been building in the United States for nearly a decade for the US Government to come clean on the constitutional status of the income tax. Lawyers, congress researchers and even former Internal Revenue Service agents are now saying the income tax is illegal - that its introduction in 1913 was not properly ratified by the states of the Union, and that ordinary Americans cannot be forced to pay it.
“The White House has also been sandwiched in a pincer movement between competing groups of tax rebels. One of them, the FairTax organisation, has congressional, bipartisan support and its cause is being championed by Congressman John Linder (R-Georgia) and Congressman Collin Peterson, (D-Minnesota).

“The two men, with a number of other politicians behind them, have introduced legislation to Congress clearing the way for the abolition of income tax in favour of the so-called FairTax.”

That was August 2001. A month later, the attacks on the World Trade Center took Bush’s attention away from domestic issues and agendas like the FairTax. But the Linder/Peterson proposal to totally reform America’s, and possibly the West’s, taxation system didn’t disappear.

Over the past four years, largely through an email blitz fired out from their website fairtax.org, the Congressmen have marshaled the support of more than half a million Americans and a large number of current and former politicians and business leaders. And, fresh from introducing democracy to the Middle East, George W. Bush now has the chance for a domestic legacy as well: becoming known to future historians as the President who killed income tax.

Bush can’t stand for re-election in 2008, so this term he’s largely unfettered by political considerations. And Bush has shown he’s a man who likes to pursue big visions.

Which is why the FairTax may return to centrestage this year.
In the form now being proposed in the US Congress, the FairTax would see the federal income tax abolished, the IRS disestablished, and the introduction of a 23% flat-rate sales tax imposed at the final point of sale to end users. Nothing particularly new in the idea of a sales tax, you might say. And critics of sales taxes are usually quick to suggest they are unfair to the low paid, because people on low incomes spend most if not all of their income on the necessities of life and have no way of avoiding a sales tax, while the wealthy can save their money or invest it and not be taxed.

It’s a simplistic argument at the best of times – the low paid haven’t generally been able to avoid income tax either – but in the case of the FairTax the argument fails at an even more basic level.

Recognising the need to ease the burden on the poor, the FairTax provides for regular tax rebates to every single household in America, so that a family of four on the poverty line, with a household income of just US$23,000 a year, will effectively pay zero tax. Under that $23,000 threshold, the tax system actually works in reverse, so that families under the poverty line will not only get all their tax back, they’ll get as much as 23% more of their income back on top of that. In real terms, say the FairTax proponents, for a family of four on a household income of US$45,000, the effective tax rate will be only 11.5%, and at $90,000 it is still only 17.2%, rising to 20% by the time you’re earning $180,000.

Compare that to Australia.

According to the ATO, a family of four in Sydney with a household income of $45,000 will be pinged almost 24% income tax on that sum, more than double the amount of tax an American family will be likely to pay under the FairTax. And over here, Australians still pay consumption taxes on top of the income tax.

President Bush has instructed a nine-member panel of
experts to conduct a series of public hearings on the idea of abolishing income tax, and they’re due to report back to the White House this coming July.

At one of the hearings in March, US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan threw his not-inconsiderable influence behind the idea of scrapping income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax. “As you know, many economists believe that a consumption tax would be best from the perspective of promoting economic growth – particularly if one were designing a tax system from scratch,” argues Greenspan, “because a consumption tax is likely to encourage saving and capital formation.”

A recent OECD report noted Australia’s marginal income tax rates are among the highest in the world. If America does indeed get rid of income tax less than a hundred years after it was introduced, it will undermine the philosophical foundations of income tax in other western democracies like Australia and New Zealand, where it has crept from 0.75 cents in the dollar when it was introduced to 48 cents in the dollar today.

Not only are the US, Australian and New Zealand tax codes huge and unwieldy – running to thousands of pages and requiring teams of Queens Counsel to interpret – the wastage in the collection system is also massive.

Most tax money taken from private citizens gets eaten by the large government bureaucracies set up to administer the system. In the US, the people behind the FairTax are quietly confident their proposal will get the green light from the White House, though it will still have to get through a string of congressional and senate committees and public hearings.

“Can you imagine,” writes one advocate, “what Joe Public will think when he wakes up one morning, five years from now, opens his paycheck and finds the government has taken nothing in tax? Suddenly, Joe is in charge of his own financial destiny.”

For Australians who, like Treasurer Peter Costello, will be watching how this plays out in the next few months, it won’t be too hard to do the math: simply punch your gross annual salary into a calculator, divide it by 52, and that’s how much take home cash you’d get every week. How much tax you’d pay would be determined entirely by how much you bought that week.

Is this kind of tax reform possible in Australia? Maybe. Just ask the people who questioned the possibility of democracy in the Middle East.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

Money: Apr 05, AU Edition

THE CREDIT CARD TRAP
They’ve done it again, says Peter Higgins: banks have figured out a new set of tricks to turn your plastic into their gold

You’ve just finished paying off the overseas holiday and the Christmas presents but the credit card bills don’t quite add up. Why? The answer is simple, but the rationale is complex. The burgeoning credit card debt that we Australians are accumulating is due not just to interest rates but also to fees.

You see, the banks have divided us into two groups of credit card users. If you are the sort that pays off your credit card in stages – possibly even just paying the minimum amount each month – then you have been the bank’s friend for a long time. After all, you’ve been using your credit card as one of the most expensive forms of bank loan allowed by law.

On the other hand, there are those of us who pay off our credit cards in full each month and, until recently, we have evaded the clutches of our “service provider”. Up until recently using a credit card this way has been smart because it effectively used someone else’s money for cash flow while avoiding compound interest rates of 18.5% or more.
It did not take our financial institutions and credit providers long to work all this out, and now there are a number of new fees that are designed to catch we ‘cash flow card’ users. A good way to illustrate this is to recount a real-life story that occurred to someone I know who went on holiday over Christmas.

Mr J’s BIG NEW PURCHASE
Mr J had not purchased a ‘good’ camera for around twenty years and decided that he wanted one to suit his needs for the next twenty. He researched many cameras and eventually decided on a state-of-the-art modern digital camera. Mr J spent three months doing his homework – not just on the technology, but also on prices. On an overseas trip in Japan he haggled, negotiated, and did lots of walking. Indeed, he spent almost a full day figuring out where to buy a camera for the best price. Finally, after all this time and effort he purchased his dream camera. Mr J was pleased with all this effort because, at the end of the day, he calculated that he saved about $500.

But he paid for his purchase using a credit card, and his decision on which card to use was based on loyalty: loyalty to his bank, NAB, which he has been with for many years. Feeling pleased with himself he goes off and takes many memorable photographs with his new toy.

Yet a few weeks later when he receives his statement, he sees that the camera cost him almost $500 more than he expected. There is nothing on the statement to explain this – not even an exchange rate listed. Not even the original amount in local currency is stated, just the Australian dollar equivalent. He quickly emails his bank asking, “Why is this so?” The answer comes in a fashion that is becoming increasingly more common these days, a mixture of bureaucracy and arrogance mingled with a tincture of attitude that says,“This would be a great job if it weren’t for the customers”.

The bank’s response is that Mr J should have read his 52-page booklet of terms and conditions. If he had, he would have known that the bank chooses when to exchange currencies, and therefore what
exchange rate is used. And of course there is that fee of 1.5% (soon to rise to 2.5%) on the full Australian dollar equivalent.

Mr J sends more emails asking what all this means in normal language and could he have a breakdown of the figures that relate to his specific case. At time of writing, these exchanges have been continuing for over three months and he still does not have his answer. He does have more quotes from the corporate complaint manual about ‘escalating this to the next level’, but no real answers.

LESSONS
There are three lessons in Mr J’s story for all of us. The first is: Don’t choose a credit card on loyalty: it is misguided and not reciprocated. Choose a card that has the lowest fees, or no fees, and ask them before you go overseas when they will exchange currencies.
Secondly, force yourself to read the voluminous pages of legal gobbledygook that are sent to you. Whilst they may not make
immediate sense, these documents are what your financial institution uses to make all their decisions, and these decisions are not always in your best interests.

Finally, if you do have a legitimate complaint, do not expect a response that places customer service as the motivating drive of your credit provider. In fact, you will need to be persistent and have a hide as thick as a Credit Card Terms and Conditions Manual.

When I look at Mr J’s story, it seems to me that fees for international transactions come awfully close to double or even triple dipping. There is a fee for the privilege of using their credit card and buying something with it. On top of that, the credit provider chooses the most advantageous rate of exchange for them. Then, finally, they charge interest on everything.

So are financial institutions punishing loyalty? Have the financial institutions that we have stuck with and stood by for years traded customer service for profits? It’s an old chestnut I know, but it seems more relevant to ask the question now than ever before. Let’s look at a list of fees that are being charged by some financial institutions:

* Annual card fee from $25 to $99 per year.
* Late payment fee from $10 to $35 per month, and in some case per fortnight as well as interest repayments.
* International transaction fees – 1.5% (most banks will soon raise this to 2.5%) of the purchase amount.
* Cash advance fees by some banks including Westpac and ANZ 1.5% of amount of cash advance.
* Annual reward scheme fee - $15 up to $69 per year.
* Exceeding your credit limit - $4 to $25.
* Issuing a secondary card - $4 to $40.
* Refusal of periodical payment - $4 to $10.
* Replacing a lost card - $4 to $30.
* Duplicate statements – $4 to $10.

All in all, you could be up for hundreds or even thousands of dollars in fees each year if you don’t manage your credit card correctly.

We are all in the hands of credit providers but credit card usage can still be a smart way to buy goods and services. The playing field has changed dramatically over the past twelve months – and it is still changing – but as long as you know the rules you can still benefit financially. When you finish reading this magazine do an audit on your current credit card situation. How many do you have? What types? What financial institutions are providing you with credit cards? What rates are you being charged? What fees? Do you have an interest-free period? When you have completed your audit do some research on the Web. It should take no longer than thirty minutes. What available cards are better than yours? Which ones have the best rates or no fees? After your audit and research cut up your existing cards and send them back to your credit provider. If nothing else, it will empower you and make you feel great. Apply for no more than three credit cards from the providers that you have researched. Within three months, you will be in a better position than you are now. Remember that you are in control of your finances; our financial institutions are not in control of what we do. You will not only be better off financially if you regain or improve your control, but you will also feel empowered and revitalised. Go for it, you have nothing to lose except your Terms and Conditions Manuals. See you around the traps.

A FEW TIPS:

1. If you want to avoid paying interest on your credit purchases you must pay the full outstanding balance on your statement by the due date. If you don’t, you will be charged interest right back to the date of purchase on each item – this means you will forfeit the interest-free period on those purchases. What’s worse is that you must pay the balance off in full before you will get another interest-free period on any purchases. And if you don’t pay your balance off in full you will be charged interest on your full balance for that month and not what is left after your payment.

2. Say no to cash advances! Why? I am a bit surprised to hear that people still don’t realise that interest-free periods do not apply to cash advances. In fact, with the majority of credit providers you pay interest from the time you withdraw the money regardless of when you pay it off.

3. See if you are entitled to relationship partner discounts. If you have multiple accounts at your financial institution they may discount your credit card fees because of your other
accounts. If you have a mortgage and your bank secures all its accounts against your house, why are you still paying an interest rate as if your credit card is an unsecured high-risk loan for the bank? It is worth the ask.

4. Don’t be conned by marketing tricks. These are developed to appeal to your emotions. Reduced introductory interest rates and reward programs may not suit your financial situation or your spending pattens. Decide on a card based on logic and understand you purchase behaviours.

5. Know what you want.

6. Do you really want a reward program? These may seem attractive, but most institutions charge a hefty fee to be a member of their reward program. Have you also noticed that you now need more points to claim the same reward compared to a few years ago. In many cases you have to spend more to accumulate the same number of points compared to a few years ago. In most circumstances people are better off using a credit card with a low rate and little or no fees rather than joining a ‘loyalty’ program that sometimes costs more than it rewards.

7. Always pay off more than the minimum. Many credit providers are only asking for payments of 1.5% per month, which can be a trap because it is likely that you will take 2 years or more to pay off your purchase and accumulated interest bill.

8. Consolidate debt. If you owe large amounts on many cards it is in your best interest to consolidate debt and put all outstanding monies onto one loan, preferably a personal loan rather than a credit card, because the rates will be almost half that of most credit cards.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: Dec 05, AU Edition

RAIN AND TERROR
What makes a storm a killer? Scientists are searching for the early warning signs, say Jeremy Manier and E.A. Torrier

The two hurricanes that roared into the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year were identical in nearly every way. Born in the same region near Haiti, the storms called Katrina and Rita reached monster status in the warm waters off Florida and swirled toward major cities along the coast.

But before they struck, the two hurricanes underwent subtly different yet fateful changes deep within them that resulted in Katrina reaching land with considerably more destructive power – and a far greater death toll – than Rita would nearly four weeks later.

That divergence is stirring ardent debate among experts eager to build better theories of what separates less intense storms from those that become historic killers. The battle of ideas will help shape how experts study hurricanes and prepare for the next big one.

One explanation in this case may be the movement of deep, warm currents in the Gulf that fed Katrina but slipped to the side of Rita days before that storm reached land. Some researchers believe a Gulf system called the loop current played a major role in the evolution of Katrina and Rita.

During both hurricanes, government scientists deployed a battery of experimental tools to measure deep ocean temperatures and currents where the storms passed through the Gulf. Experts hope the new information will improve forecasters’ ability to predict the intensity of future hurricanes.

“We’re looking at what we did with these storms as a poster child for techniques we might use in the future to get better observations on the interaction between hurricanes and the ocean”, said Peter Black, a meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hurricanes are among the most complex weather systems that bedevil meteorologists, in part because of the peculiar way the storms can change their nearby ocean environment, which in turn can affect the power of the hurricane.

One way to think of a hurricane is as a vast engine that converts ocean heat – its fuel – into high winds. A shortage of fuel or other glitches in the engine can reduce the storm’s strength.

An example of this is when a hurricane’s winds churn up cold water from the ocean depths, robbing the storm of the warm water it needs to sustain high winds. Deep, warm currents such as the loop current in the Gulf can reduce that effect. They provide more fuel for the storm to rage without picking up colder water from below.

Both Katrina and Rita strengthened as they passed over the loop current, experts said. Katrina headed straight from the current to the shore, where it unleashed destruction across a heavily populated region. Rita was just as powerful at its peak, but it took longer to reach shore after it moved off the deep current, losing energy along the way.

“Rita peaked early”, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It was on its way out when it hit the coast.”

Researchers have recognized the importance of that interaction between hurricanes and the ocean only in the last 10 years or so, Emanuel said. In fact, some experts at the National Hurricane Center in Miami still doubt that deep temperatures played a decisive role in building up the two storms.

“That stuff about the loop current – it doesn’t hold water, so to speak”, said Stacy Stewart, a hurricane specialist at the Hurricane Center. “You have to have a lot of other conditions right to allow the storm to extract energy from the water.”

She pointed out that other factors also affected Rita’s decline, including a lack of moisture in the hurricane’s middle levels. As it hit land, the storm also was undergoing eye wall replacement, a poorly understood phenomenon that happens in cycles with the most powerful hurricanes and often saps their strength.

Katrina and Rita were unusual from the start, in that they were “Bahama busters” that took shape in the Caribbean rather than off the coast of Africa, which spawns most of the storms that become hurricanes. Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Florida International University, said the wind shear – a change in wind speed at different altitudes – was too great for large storms to develop near Africa.

That wasn’t the case in the Caribbean, where Katrina and Rita formed within a few hundred miles of each other.

“They were almost like twins,” Willoughby said.

At 11 a.m. on Aug. 24, the National Hurricane Center announced the formation of Tropical Depression 12, the storm that became Katrina, about 200 miles southeast of Miami.

Actually, it was an energizing small squall that started off the coast of Africa but never formed into a storm because of the wind shear. Some of the formation came from a different tropical depression that ran out of gas.

Tropical Depression 14 was spotted on Sept. 17 at 11 p.m., about 500 miles southeast of Miami. This was the birth of Rita.

The storms were nourished by the exceptionally warm waters of the Atlantic, a pattern since 1995. But in both cases, high pressure across much of the United States blocked the storms from turning northward, a trend for much of the last two years. Instead, they headed west over the open ocean.

“Both would have turned otherwise,” said Keith Blackwell, a hurricane researcher at the University of South Alabama, “and we would have heard from them no more.”

In the Gulf of Mexico, both hurricanes moved over the loop current, which moves around the Gulf and exits south of Florida into the Atlantic, becoming part of the Gulf Stream current.

Black of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division said the data his team gathered this year should help improve computer models used to predict hurricane intensity. Forecasting intensity remains a glaring weak spot in hurricane models, experts say, even as the ability to anticipate where a hurricane will go has improved greatly.

The workhorses of Black’s research are small, disposable probes called AXBT devices, which are dropped from planes and measure the temperature of the ocean at depths up to 1,000 feet. Black got his probes as Navy surplus, leftover from Cold War efforts to track enemy submarines using sonar.

He said it would help attempts to gauge hurricane intensity if the US government would buy more temperature probes and make their deployment a routine part of hurricane tracking.

“We’re just about out of these hand-me-downs,” Black said.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: Dec 05, AU Edition

TO HELL AND BACK
Was life on early Earth as bad as all that? And what does
that mean for life on other planets? Robert S. Boyd reports

A scientific quest called “Mission to Really Early Earth” has unearthed evidence that our planet had an ocean, a continent and an atmosphere suitable for life half a billion years earlier than previously thought.

Since the requirements for life – land, water and air – were established so soon on Earth, some scientists say the finding makes it more likely that living creatures could also have arisen on other worlds.

“If it happened so early on Earth, why couldn’t it happen elsewhere in the universe as well?” said Stephen Mojzsis, a geoscientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

According to the traditional view of its infancy, Earth formed between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years ago from a disk of dust, rocks and gas circling the sun.

It then took 700 million years for the young planet to settle down and cool off enough for the first microscopic organisms to appear around 3.8 billion years ago, paleontologists believed.

This early period was named the Hadean (“hellish”) Eon, because it was presumed to be totally hostile to life. During much of that time, the planet was bombarded by giant meteorites like those that blasted the craters on the moon. Any early life would have been wiped out.

Now, however, researchers report evidence that conditions were much more benign when the Earth was only 150 million to 200 million years old – three to four per cent of its present age.

“The stage was set 4.3 billion years ago for life to emerge on Earth”, Mojzsis told a conference on astrobiology – the study of life on other worlds – here last month.

“There was probably already in place an atmosphere, an ocean and a stable crust within about 200 million years of the Earth’s formation”, said Mojzsis, chairman of the conference. “Water was gushing out of the Earth.”

This picture of a comfortably warm, wet young world “contrasts with the hot, violent environment envisioned for our young planet by most researchers”, Bruce Watson, a geochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., declared in a recent online edition of the journal Science. “It opens up the possibility that life got a very early foothold.”

“If there was surface water, then life presumably could exist”, said Don Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“We don’t know when life began on Earth,” cautioned Mark Harrison, an Australian geoscientist who was at the astrobiology conference. “But it could have emerged as early as 4.3 billion years ago. Within 200 million years of the Earth’s formation, all of the conditions for life on Earth appear to have been met.”

Two hundred million years sounds like an awfully long time, but it’s relatively brief on the geologic scale.

For comparison, suppose Earth’s 4.5 billion-year-old lifespan ws shrunk to one year, with 1 January marking the beginning and 31 December representing today. By that yardstick, life could have begun on Earth as early as 12 January. Under the older, traditional view, it would have taken until 26 February to get started.

The evidence for a very young habitable Earth consists of a collection of tiny crystals called zircons dug up in the Jack Hills of Western Australia over the last 20 years. New technology pioneered by Mojzsis and John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has made it possible to determine how and when they formed.

For example, zircons contain uranium, which decays at a known rate. The Jack Hills zircons also enclose bits of shale, a sedimentary rock that must have previously been created by erosion by liquid water. In addition, the zircons contain a rare type of “heavy” oxygen that forms only in the presence of water.

“These zircons tell us that they melted from an earlier rock that had been to the Earth’s surface and interacted with cold water”, Mojzsis said. “There is no other known way to account for that heavy oxygen.”

Sonia Esperanca, an earth scientist at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., called the Jack Hills zircons “time capsules of processes happening in the earliest times in Earth’s history.”

“The estimated ages for the oldest evidence of an early crust have been getting progressively older as geologists seek out and analyze new samples”, said Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who isn’t involved in the Mission to Really Early Earth. Erwin agreed that primitive microorganisms could have existed that long ago. “But I expect it will be very difficult to get any real evidence on the matter”, he said in an e-mail message.

“It’s certainly possible that life arose before the great bombardment, then was extinguished and arose again afterward, but we have no evidence either way”, said University of Washington geochemist Roger Buick in an e-mail message.

Another note of skepticism comes from Samuel Bowring, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It’s a bit of a leap from a few grains of zircon to continents and oceans,” Bowring said, but he acknowledged that “it is consistent with most people’s view of early planetary evolution.”

The Mission to Really Early Earth is supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origin of life on our planet and its possible existence on other heavenly bodies.

“We’re beginning to get the tools to test the Hadean world”, said Mojzsis. “Hell wasn’t as bad as we thought.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : Nov 05, AU Edition

FEMALE TROUBLE
Women, alcohol, and friends who don’t look outfor each other are a potentially tragic mix

The other night an all-too-rare thing happened in the cab: two young women separated from their group of girlfriends near Darling Harbour and climbed in the back, and by the time we reached the Harbour Bridge one passenger received a text message from another of their group.

Nothing unique about that, except that the passenger then called her friend back, quizzing her: ‘Did you get a cab? Are you in it now? Who with? Why? Well, I’m not hanging up until you get home. Why? You’re drunk in a taxi by yourself, stupid – I don’t care if it’s a short trip…’ And so on.

This was a commendable example of drinking companions looking out for each other; all too often cabbies are shanghaied to act as chaperones by default to vulnerable and intoxicated young women. My passenger continued: ‘Are you paying the fare now? Okay, I’ll hang up when you’re inside...No, only when I hear Jeremy’s voice’.

After she had hung up I quizzed the women over the phone call. ‘Do you guys often receive unwanted advances from cabbies?’, I asked.

‘Yes, all the time’, they responded. I wondered if they were exaggerating. ‘Then why don’t we hear more of it in the press or from police reports?’ Without hesitation they said, ‘Probably because the girls are so drunk they don’t recall it next morning’.

‘Where did you learn to use that phone technique – at school or from your parents?’. ‘Neither’, they said, ‘it’s just common sense’. Unfortunately, their ‘common sense’ is all too often uncommon.

Earlier this year, I carried three young women from King Street Wharf to Surry Hills, via Potts Point. It was early morning as the Potts Point resident decided to grab a kebab in Kings Cross, then walk home. As I pulled over by the famous Coke sign, my headlights illuminated a tough looking bloke standing on the kerb, nonchalantly urinating against a barrier.

Yet seeing this, my passengers allowed their drunken friend to alight the cab alone. She staggered off into the strung-out, drunken throng to make her own way home. That she wore what a Sydney Muslim cleric recently deemed ‘rape attire’ only made my alarm bells ring louder.
Before departing I instinctively hesitated, questioning her friends, ‘Are you sure she’s going to be alright? She’s really pissed.’ ‘Yes’, they replied, ‘it’s only a short walk to her apartment – she does it all the time’.

Last Friday, just before midnight, a drunken school-aged girl dressed as a high-class hooker in fishnets, stiletto heels, and miniskirt was poured into the back seat by two thirty-something female companions.
The two older women gave me the girl’s address, then deserted her. She was now effectively my problem. Sure enough, within two blocks she was barfing into a plastic bag, and after stopping to allow her to finish vomiting into the gutter, she recovered enough to direct me to her suburb. Barely.

On arrival, she had me stop in a street lined on one side by a park. She flicked me a $20 note and before I could thank her for the $5 tip, she had disappeared into the dark and deserted park. At this point I could do nothing for her, and I reluctantly pulled away.

I’m almost certain a day will come when on commencing work, I’ll be responding to a common taxi broadcast: ANY DRIVER CARRY FEMALE – 2AM TODAY, OXFORD STREET TO (SUBURB) – CONTACT SGT. JONES, POLICE H.Q.
Some girls just don’t get it.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

FINANCE: Dec 05, AU Edition

OFF THE STREET
New breeds of community banks are getting customers out of queues and into high interest, says Todd Parker

Australians love to hate their banks. It’s a constant staple of talk-back radio; one of the most popular Aussie films of all time was a ludicrous piece of work about a bank that drives small businesses under and (it is implied) kills their children for sport; and who hasn’t seen a battered ute with a kelpie cross in the back and a bumper sticker reading, “Which bank? They’re all bastards!”

Of course, one of the golden rules of capitalism is that when the big guys aren’t able to get it done any more, smaller and more nimble competitors, using new technology, are able to step into the service gap, win over new customers, and make the old establishment institutions take notice. That sort of revolution is quietly taking place in Australia’s banking sector, where a new breed of entrepreneur is taking advantage of the widespread dissatisfaction created when the Australia’s big four banks closed local branches – in some cases leaving whole suburbs and towns without a physical branch office. One new banking network has, in partnership with local communities, set up over a hundred “community banks” across the country, and as part of that has pledged to plow money and profits back into local areas – something that the big banks, with their eyes on maximizing yield for shareholders, pay lip service to in principle but in practice are loathe to do.
But in the Internet age, there is no reason why one even needs to go into a physical branch to do one’s banking. Australia is more advanced than many other countries when it comes to electronic payments, and on-line banks are able to compete on both fees and interest rates by avoiding the expense of brick-and-mortar operations all together. One bank that is making great strides in this area is Community First Credit Union, which is powering a new online financial services operation called Easy Street Financial Services (http://www.easystreet.com.au). Based in Sydney, Easy Street has over $500 million in assets and some 57,000 members – and because it doesn’t need to pay dividends to shareholders, that means that it can offer higher rates of interest and better service.

The company’s EasySavings plan, for example, offers a 5.65% interest rate, 24/7 internet banking, and (unlike the big guys) no fixed terms, minimum deposit, or bank fees. In fact, the EasySavings account has been awarded “Best paying E-account” by Money magazine three years in a row.

Account holders can also take out personal loans up to $35,000 simply by applying online, with no application fee or early repayment penalties and convenient redraw facilities.

And for those looking to invest long term, or just have a little flutter on the share market, their EasyBroking service provides flat-fee $26 trades on the ASX and a full suite of on-line trading tools. So far, Easy Street’s business model seems to be working. Unlike big banks that have to entice customers with “bonus interest” schemes and other incentives to stay with them, Easy Street “feels loyalty is built by providing our customers with consistently good returns on their at call savings.

“What consumers will need to be aware of with a bonus interest offer is that at the conclusion, they could end up with an interest rate that is below what’s on offer in the marketplace”, says spokesperson Kerry McMorrow.

“We have found our funds to be sticky and enjoy a retention rate of approximately 95%”.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)

THE ROUGH LIFE: Nov 05, AU Edition

A DAY ON THE BEACH
At Pacific Dunes, Eli Jameson plays a round – and pulls out his sand wedge

Port Stephens, NSW – Getting a chance to drive up the coast and play a round of golf is always a special treat. And it’s a double treat if it takes place on a weekday. And if the golf is to be played not on a well-worn public course but a top-flight resort facility, well, that’s just the icing on the cake.

Pacific Dunes Golf Club, just outside Newcastle on the New South Wales coast (a two-and-a-half hour drive from the Sydney CBD), is a brand-new course and residential development managed by Troon Golf, the world’s premier golf management company. The centerpiece of the facility, of course, is its 18 championship holes, but there is plenty more on offer, including clubhouse facilities and, for those who don’t want to go home, an eventual 450 homes – many lining the rich, green fairways.

My playing partner and I arrived from Sydney at around lunchtime, and were immediately greeted by helpful attendants who had us sitting in a buggy with our bags strapped on the back in a matter of moments. From there, it was off to the first tee: a confidence-building 329-metre par 4.

Now here’s something you should know: I am not one of those golfers who confidently whips out his driver and hammers a Titleist 280 metres straight down the fairway from every teebox. My drives are a bit more, shall we say, anemic, and I don’t get to play anywhere near as often as I’d like to keep my handicap in fighting trim. So I was pleased to see that the course opens gently, even if there was water snaking through the middle of this fairway (as it does on many, if not most, holes here). Even better, I cleared this water hazard – my balls normally head for the drink faster than Ted Kennedy at last call – with my shot landing comfortably on the happy side of the river, just a short iron into the green.

‘Great’, I thought. ‘Not playing for the past two months obviously hasn’t hurt my game any’.

Oh, there is one more thing to keep in mind. There are dozens and dozens of bunkers scattered around this course, both along fairways and ‘protecting’ the greens. (I’ve always loved that turn of phrase) And even if I never found water once, I think I found the sand on just about every hole, which led my playing partner to give me the new, rather undignified nickname of ‘Sandy’.

That’s the thing about Pacific Dunes: it’s a challenging course that doesn’t reward sheer brute force, but rather clever and careful shotmaking ability and course management. To really play the course well, one should have a really strong idea of how far every iron in his or her bag will fly, and be able to judge distances with precision. Like a game of chess, players have to think not just about the shot they are playing, but their next move or two down the track, with a close eye on what the course is looking to throw up in response.

(This more cerebral sort of game is also more democratic; since it doesn’t need to be overpowered, but rather out-thought, it can be enjoyed by just about anyone with a good knowledge of their own individual game).

Taking an easy bogey on the first hole, we moved on to the second, and the third, which was a particularly sneaky, 297-metre par 4: again, not daunting in terms of length, but with fairway bunkers and a false-fronted green, a serious challenge.

Moving through the front nine, my playing partner and I began to get the sense of the course, and the architects behind it have definitely given it a real personality, like an intellectual friend who one doesn’t always understand, but who is never short of challenging ideas.

Rounding the clubhouse turn we stopped for lunch, and had a pair of hot gourmet sandwiches washed down with a couple of beers, and headed off to attack the rest of the course. Along the back nine, we saw what will be much of the heart of this new facility, the properties that line the course and will form the basis of the Pacific Dunes community, and mused about what fun it would be to get out of our inner-city Victorian shotgun shacks and adopt a live-to-play, play-to-live lifestyle, though we quickly came back to Earth when we realized that our non-golfing wives might take an exception to this.
Having gotten the rhythm of the course over the front nine, the back end of the course is a real challenge – as if the landscaping itself is saying, ‘you think you know me, but you don’t’. The 10th features a creek that runs all the way along the left side of the hole; the 11th has water that cruelly runs around the front of the green, making what would normally be a simple approach shot a fraught and tense gamble.

If one is short, one is wet; otherwise, you’re in the woods.

Again: risk and reward, and the requirement to be disciplined.
Another striking thing about Pacific Dunes, at least for the city-dweller, is the way in which it is designed in such close sympathy with nature. The sheer number and variety of birds on the course had me wishing I had brought my field guide, and by the time we hit the 14th, we had to be careful not of hitting other golfers, but the kangaroo families that suddenly emerged out of no where for their afternoon tea.

As we pulled in from our round, twilight was approaching and about a dozen locals were sitting around a couple of picnic tables, finishing their wines after a long day out on the course. It wasn’t clear whether they were all old friends, or just comrades thrown together by their love of the crazy game of golf. They were having a great time, though, and one thing was for sure: they’ll be back.
As will I.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Nov 05, AU Edition

GET HEP!
An old dog learns new tricks. Plus: deep in the heart of Texas (and England)

Paul Anka
‘Rock Swings’, Verve
3 stars
Paul Anka is another pop cat seeking new life in jazz. Known for such hits as ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’, the 63-year-old creates a curious amalgam, performing rock and pop songs of the 1980s and 1990s with big-band backing.

The effect is kind of cool. Anka shows a decent high range that conjures up Bobby Darin and generates some dramatic heat on Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s a Sin.’ He manages to swing through Michael Jackson’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ with reasonable sass and elan.

But brassy horns get tiring. Also, it’s odd to hear a tune like Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ done as a Vegas revue number. Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’ is interminable, and the dark world of Kurt Cobain’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is better left untouched by the Anka treatment.
Reviewed by Karl Stark

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George Strait
‘Somewhere Down in Texas’, MCA
3 stars
When you think of Texas, you think big, bold and freewheeling. Leave it to George Strait to deliver ‘Texas’, a tribute to his home state, and make it restrained and reflective. But that’s Strait: always tasteful and classy.

Mr. Consistency’s new album is typically solid, but not in the top rank of his considerable ouevre. ‘Somewhere Down in Texas’ has excellent moments, including the ‘Good News, Bad News’ duet with Lee Ann Womack and the on-the-verge-of-a-breakup lament ‘Ready for the End of the World.’ But the ballad-heavy set could use some of the energy Strait usually provides with shuffles and western swing – in other words, some of the feel he rhapsodizes about in the opening cut, ‘If the Whole World Was a Honky Tonk.’
Reviewed by Nick Cristiano

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Eliza Carthy & The Ratcatchers
‘Rough Music’, Topic Records
4 stars
Carthy is a revelation for the verve with which she is reinvigorating traditional English folk music. Fiddles, violas, guitars, melodeons and hurdy-gurdies swirl and rise. The lyrics sing of dashing highwaymen and gallant hussars. But there’s nothing somber or fussy about ‘Rough Music.’

Lovers of Celtic music will savor deft instrumentals such as ‘Upside Down.’ But Carthy’s voice, a combination of Judy Collins and Alison Moyet, continues to improve. Her signal accomplishment is that she manages to make a quaintly old-fashioned style sound so fresh.
Reviewed by David Hiltbrand

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The Greencards
‘Weather and Water’, Dualtone
3 stars
The Greencards are an Austin, Texas, bluegrass trio of immigrants – not from Mexico, but west and east. Singer and bassist Carol Young (who’s got a bit of Alison Krauss in her cool, clear voice) and mandolin/bouzouki player Kym Warner are Aussies; fiddler Eamon McLoughlin is a Brit.

‘Weather and Water’ shows that the trio (which just finished a trek opening for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson) is up to speed on dexterous, quick-picking instrumental breakdowns such as ‘Marty’s Kitchen.’ But it the lovely, soul-searching ballads, including ‘Who You Are,’ and the depressive, Warner-sung ‘Long Way Down’ that mark them as real comers.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Nov 05, AU Edition

MOB RULES
Skip the fairy tales this month – the best flicks on offer this summer are all about nitty-gritty reality

Inside Deep Throat
Released: Nov 10, 2005
Rated: R
5 stars
Deep Throat cost $25,000 to film and grossed over $600 million worldwide, making it the most profitable movie of all time. Inside Deep Throat is an amazing documentary about the impact the original porno film had on society then and now.

I’m not much of a porno girl so I’d never seen Deep Throat, but I must admit I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. And I was pleased I could watch it without having to don a trench coat or furtively avoid eye contact with my local video store employee.

The doco shows a small amount of the original skin flick – including the infamous scene from which the film takes its name. Sure I was shocked (Linda Lovelace obviously had no gag reflex), but what shocked me more was how the film became such a social and political football.
Released in America in 1972, it hit a social nerve. Sex, culture, morality and politics all collided – to explosive effect. This doco uses new and old interviews and newsreel footage to show the protests, arrests and general hoo-ha.

So I was keen to meet the main players and see what they made of all the fuss thirty years on. My favourite scene is when you see footage of the director, Gerard Damiano, as his younger self, a former hairdresser and sleazy swinger. Then it cuts to him now, a shuffling “Harry Highpants” retiree in Florida.

There is a sad side of this doco. Its star Linda Lovelace became an anti-porn crusader and died in a car accident in 2002, broke and bitter. Her co-star Harry Reems, who nearly went to jail on a trumped-up obscenity charge for taking part in the film, is now a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian who sells real estate.

Why weren’t they all rolling in cash? Damiano made the film with mob money, so when it became a hit the mob threatened to break his legs if he didn’t sign over royalty rights. So basically no-one who worked on, or starred in, Deep Throat ever saw the rewards of the most successful movie in box office history.

Now that’s shocking.

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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Released: Nov 17, 2005
Rated: MA
5 stars
She opened the door with nothing on but the radio.’ I love that cool gumshoe detective speak. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang oozes with it. From the opening titles you know this is going to be a sassy, pop-culture romp of a film. And it doesn’t disappoint. It stars Robert Downey Jr (who despite all his drug problems is a very talented actor) as Harry Lockhart, a crook who escapes the cops by pretending he’s an actor auditioning for a role of a detective. Stick with me, it’s worth it.

Needless to say he’s a hit with the film producers, gets the job and is whisked off to Hollywood. There the producers hook him up with private eye ‘Gay’ Perry (played by a fat and hilariously camp Val Kilmer) to tutor Harry in the ways of actual detective work. So Harry becomes a crook-playing-an-actor-impersonating-a-detective. Gay Perry sums it up: ‘This isn’t good cop, bad cop. This is New Yorker and fag.’

Add a sub-plot of an aspiring actress Harmony Faith Lane (played by the vixen-like Michelle Monaghan) who’s obsessed with pulp fiction detective novels and whose sister has been murdered. You know you’re in for a high action, schlocky, fun time.

Downey is suitably jaded as the film’s narrator and often speaks to camera with a snarky aside: ‘Look I’m not going to end this film 17 times… I saw Lord of the Rings.’ And rather than fight for screen time, Downey and Kilmer work perfectly together.

And with lines like this how can you lose? ‘She poured herself into a seamless dress. From the look of it she spilled some.’

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The Brothers Grimm
Released: Nov 24, 2005
Rated: M
1 star
Once upon a time there was a movie about fairytales. It was really, really bad. The end. I wish that was all I had to write about this dog’s breakfast. You see, The Brothers Grimm is not actually about the Grimm fairytales but elements of the fairytales are in it. Confused? Wait it, gets worse.

In The Brothers Grimm, Will and Jake, (played equally appallingly by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) are travelling con artists. They journey from village to village in Germany, staging phony magic and claiming it is real. But then they come across a clichéd village where the woods are indeed magic; the cursed trees move and a sinister tower sits in the middle of it. Inside is the Mirror Queen (the breath-takingly beautiful but under-utilized Monica Bellucci). A hideous witch who needs to sacrifice twelve maidens to restore her beauty during an eclipse (a beauty routine I’m thinking of adopting!)
So even though they don’t believe in magic the brothers have to save the maidens and break the spell. Whatever! And to make things more confusing, there are fairytale references and characters, like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and even the Gingerbread Man. They all seem shoe-horned into an already dodgy script.

It was a mess. Very Grimm indeed.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)

DVDs: Nov 05, AU Edition

WATCH AND LEARN
James Fletcher on all the latest options for the small-screen cinema

Death of a Beatle – Collector’s Edition DVD
4 stars
On December 8 this year it will have been 25 years since former Beatle John Lennon was maliciously shot and killed outside New York’s Dakota apartment block. While Lennon lay bleeding to death on the pavement at the feet of his wife Yoko Ono, his assassin Mark David Chapman simply stood watching, oddly fascinated by what he had done and with no comprehension of the global shockwave his actions had created.

The special edition DVD, Death of a Beatle, chronicles Lennon’s rise to fame from his early days in Liverpool to his time in New York City – and at the same time contrasts this ascent with Chapman’s eventual surrender to the delusional schizophrenia which drove his hatred and jealousy of celebrities.

Drawing heavily on the work of journalist Jack Jones, best known as the author of the Lennon/Chapman biography Take Me Down, the film utilizes audio from an interview between Jones and Chapman recorded in 2000. Much of Chapman’s dialogue, delivered in a reflective monosyllabic monologue is captivating, revealing the simplistic and tragic individual behind a façade of insanity.

However, any sympathy for Chapman is quickly diffused as the producers begin a chain of interviews, ranging from the police officers who attended the crime scene to Lennon’s friends and colleagues – including early Beatles member Pete Best, Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith, and assorted media personalities who effectively reinforce the shock and void that was felt in the wake of Chapman’s crime.
Released as a two-disc set complete with limited edition packaging, the DVD features additional interview footage with police detectives.

Also included is an extensive conversation with Andy Peebles who recalls his time spent with Lennon in his final days and Jack Jones who, having extensively interviewed Chapman over the space of 20 years, offers his own unique insight into the motivations and mentality of Chapman on the night of the shooting. An image gallery comprised of Chapman’s bizarre hotel possessions, biographies and a trailer gallery complete a DVD release that will appeal to both Beatles fans and true crime connoisseurs alike.

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Girl in the Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems
5 stars
Carol Jerrems may not be a common household name, but her extensive portfolio of work on Australian counter-culture throughout the 1970s remains one of this countries most valuable artistic assets. Now, after the recent success of screenings at the Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington and Auckland film festivals, Girl in the Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems has found its way to DVD in record time.

Directed by Kathy Drayton and produced by Helen Bowden of Soft Fruit and Traveling Light fame, ‘Girl’ chronicles the works of Carol Jerrems, who spent much of her time immersed among the 1970’s avant-garde artist movement with the likes of filmmakers Paul Cox, Esben Storm and author Kate Grenville.

Although a celebration of Jerrems raw and effecting photographs, the film is also a fascinating look at how damaged and self-destructive her personality was, something that is reinforced by the numerous compelling interviews from past lovers, colleagues and subjects that grace the film.

This dark presence is further captured as director Kathy Drayton skillfully intercuts numerous striking prints, many created for the film from archives at the National Gallery of Australia, with entries from Jerrems personal journals, written after she was hospitalized by a rare form of blood cancer that eventually claimed her life at the age of 30.

The DVD offers a quality extras package featuring a rare interview with Jerrems done in 1978, with previously unseen interview footage from Paul Cox, Daddy Cool member Ross Hannaford and the two Melbourne youths who feature in Jerrems’ iconic photograph Vale Street. Also included is the short film Hanging About written and directed by Jerrems which deals with rape, a subject which is hinted at more than once in the film concerning Jerrems’ past.

Additionally a collection of 66 photographs not seen in the film offer a retrospective of Jerrems’ professional career while video clips from the music artist J. Walker, who composed the frenetic soundtrack, the films trailer, bios and a weblink gallery complete a remarkable package for a fascinating film which has deservedly caught strong attention for the upcoming awards season.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE: Apr 05, AU Edition

POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE
If Geoff Mackley were a cat, he’d almost surely have used up his quota of lives by now. As the world’s ultimate storm-chaser and subject of the Discovery Channel’s Dangerman series, Mackley is little short of a survival miracle…the kind of guy you’d stand next to in an electrical storm. Our CLARE SWINNEY caught up with the man whose images of natural disaster are spawning a new breed of reality media

He carries a video camera, a digital still camera, a satellite phone and a flame-proof suit. He has been pursued by Army helicopters; almost blasted off a mountaintop; and dangled over gaping chasms.
Little wonder, perhaps, that they call Geoff Mackley ‘Rambocam’. It began as a childhood hobby of taking photos of natural phenomena, and developed into an extraordinary career with a worldwide reputation of going where others fear to tread. Photographer, cameraman and reporter all rolled into one, Geoff Mackley carts his cameras and satellite phone virtually anywhere where a tsunami has struck, where a cyclone is perilously hovering, where a volcano is erupting, and he’ll often be the first one there. His priceless pictures, which appear in science books, newspapers, on TV and in magazines, have come to define how people throughout the world perceive natural disasters.

Not surprisingly, the activities of this intrepid photographer have been the focus of a mass of media attention. The Discovery Channel featured a series about him named Dangerman and he’s appeared in seventeen other TV shows. He has also been interviewed hundreds of times in the past for newspapers and questioned at length for his soon-to-be-released autobiography.

While making it clear he could never even conceive of tiring of his work, which is now all-consuming, he confesses to being pig-sick of being interviewed.

When we first contacted him on the 11th of February, he’d arrived home , half-an-hour earlier from Rarotonga, where he’d been taking photographs of damage to waterfront buildings caused by a 14-metre storm surge driven by Cyclone Meena. He suggests I call back that evening to enable him to have time to update his website, www.geoffmackley.com, amongst other things. Yet when I contact him at 8pm he sayshe is unavailable as he is monitoring emergency channels and intends to maintain this vigil over most of Saturday and Sunday.
“Try Valentine’s Day, 10am,” he offers.

But the 14th, at 10am, proves similarly fruitless; two menacing-looking cyclones, Olaf and Nancy, are brewing in the South Pacific region and Mackley is furiously poring over weather reports, trying to decide if he should go to Samoa, where one of the fierce storms is predicted to hit. Later in the day, I finally hit paydirt, nailing the elusive Mackley to the end of a landline, albeit that the interview becomes punctuated by the crackle of police scanners and emergency vehicle sirens in the background. You can’t, it seems, keep
Mackley down.

Mackley, 41, was born and raised in Christchurch; his mother a high school librarian and his father employed by a customs broker. It was his dad who first kindled Mackley’s interest in photographing
natural phenomena.

“Dad used to take me and my two younger brothers, Richard and Steven, on trips to take pictures of freak conditions, such as snowstorms and flooding. We were brought up with an interest in
nature. I started doing what I’m doing because I’m interested in nature and it evolved to what’s happening now. I never really expected that to happen. I never thought for a moment I’d be doing this,” he ruminates.

In the late 1980’s Mackley attended the University of Canterbury to study psychology, because it was “very interesting,” then dropped out after one-and-a-half years because he didn’t think it was going to be a meal ticket. Mackley had other ideas. Armed with predictions of bad weather, he would pack photographic gear into an old Land Rover and go to where a flood was anticipated, shooting it as it happened.

“Nobody was doing that then, as far as the media goes. It still amazes me that to a large extent the media don’t even do that now. You’d think that if a news event is about to happen, go there before it starts!”

In spite of a lack of formal training in photography and broadcasting (or arguably perhaps because of it), Mackley began working for Channel 10’s New Zealand affiliate news team in 1990, just after the new network’s establishment. He took pictures of natural disasters around the country for the six o’clock news and has been in the game ever since.

In September 1995 he got his first big international break. Majestic Mount Ruapehu was predicted to erupt again and he was waiting patiently nearby with his camera equipment. When the grey ash shot into the troposphere, his career as it is today was launched.

Mackley’s pictures began appearing on TV news shows, in newspapers and in magazines throughout the world. The words “meal ticket” began flashing in his mind, and pretty soon Mackley was taking pictures of volcanos erupting overseas and selling them to a wide range of media. His humble intention in 1995 was to generate sufficient income in order to recover the cost of the trip and be able to go on another trip and then another…

Mackley is coy about how much he makes. He says he doesn’t want to boast.

“Two hundred thousand?” we press.

“It’s a bit more than that,” he defers – which in translation means it’s notably more. Almost as an apology for this bounty, Mackley seems keen to impress that he works very hard for what he earns. He evidently does. He seems completely focused. There’s no room in his life for marriage or children. He allocates much of his time off work to maintaining a high level of fitness. His 178-centimetre tall, 76-kilogram muscular form is probably in far better shape than bodies half his age. “I feel the same I did when I was twenty. I exercise everyday. If I go for a run, it’ll be for about three hours. I spend a lot of time running in the bush, I work out, do weights and martial arts,” he asserts. As his broadcast camera alone weighs seven kilograms and climbing mountainous terrain at any time is a possibility, being unwaveringly fit is an essential part of his life.
“I’m also careful to eat well. I don’t eat crap. If you put bad fuel in a car it doesn’t work properly. Well the body’s the same. It’s common sense,” says Mackley.

Currently about 90 percent of his time at work is spent monitoring what’s going on locally and around the world. He uses the Internet and radio for this. “That’s the key thing - that it’s 90 percent gathering information and 10 percent going out and after something,” he maintains.

Naturally, he’s amassed an extensive knowledge of the world’s weather patterns and now knows what’s likely to happen where and at any given time of the year. He says there’s no busiest time of year. It is invariably busy, as Mother Nature has different seasons around the world. The cyclone season is from November to April. Tornado season is in May and June. August through to November is
typhoon and hurricane season in the US and volcanoes may erupt at any time.

He says the Internet has been an invaluable source for information about weather and volcanic activity, enabling his career to flourish. He asserts: “The Internet is the beginning and end of everything! Because the Internet is completely free of boundaries. It’s instant. I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing now, ten years ago.”
The meteorology services worldwide put data on the Internet for everybody to see instantaneously. In addition, there’s an aviation website that provides updates immediately a volcano begins to erupt which Mackley watches “constantly,” so if a crater blows, he’ll be one of the first people to know about it. One can find links to his sources on his website.

The total cost of his equipment is in the vicinity of $100,000. He says that although it’s expensive, he expects it to last for years. He uses a satellite phone at disaster scenes, which is a necessary requirement in regions lacking a functioning infrastructure. This is used to transmit photos to a few news services, but at $16 a minute, it is uneconomical to send shots around like confetti.

Consequently, he prefers to put high-resolution versions of photographs on his website for newspapers and magazines to download - although this mode of dissemination comes at a cost too. He says that although the majority of media outlets publishing his work remunerate him without having to be prompted, there’s invariably a percentage which don’t. “It’s a pain in the backside really, because when you’re trying to sell still photos, many outfits will avoid paying for them if possible. You’ve always got to track down whether or not they’ve used it or not. Half the time they won’t bother to tell you and it’s not worth chasing up twenty or thirty newspapers just for $100 or whatever,” he complains.

An assortment of his best images can be viewed on his website. He uses a Nikon F90 digital camera for his still photos and says a good photo, as any news editor will tell you, has to tell a story in one shot, ideally with people in it or an object to give it scale.
He believes an image can be a wonderfully powerful tool to help people in need of aid. And one of the best moments of his 20-year career was being able to bring aid to the small island of Tikopia following the strongest cyclone ever in the South Pacific, a cyclone which thrashed villages with 350 kilometre per hour winds, completely destroying everything. His was an extraordinary story.

Cyclone Zoe, as it was named, hit Tikopia in the Solomon Islands in late December 2002, bringing gigantic waves with it.

“I’m not an expert, but I can see from a satellite map when an island is being hammered and it’d be common sense to go and see what’s happened to these people [about 1,200] who no one has heard from for four or five days,” he says. But the airforce and military, in both New Zealand and Australia, did nothing. So he decided to fly to Tikopia in a Cessna and discovered an island completely wrecked. Mackley, who was freelancing, photographed the devastation from the air only because it was impossible to land. This story was on the news that night and broadcast all around the world. He reported that the place looked as if it had been hit by an atomic bomb. He says matter-of-factly: “I suspect if I hadn’t gone there and brought it to everyone’s attention, it’s quite possible nothing would’ve been done. The New Zealand Airforce claimed that it was impossible to get there and then I got there in a Cessna.”

The day after his first report, someone from a French newspaper contacted him and asked him to get on the island anyway he could, at their cost.

Accordingly, he chartered a helicopter from Vanuatu. He filled it with packets of noodles and arrived on Tikopia to be the first outsider there since the cyclone hit and four to five days ahead of any official rescue mission. “I thought it was extraordinary,
because I wasn’t doing anything that I considered to be that out of the ordinary. I just went to the airport and asked ‘Who owns that Cessna? Is it possible to fly to Tikopia?’…‘Yes’…‘So let’s do it.’ And it was the same with the helicopter,” he asserts. Fortunately, there were no casualties, as the Tikopians were accustomed to cyclones and were sheltering in caves in their highlands.

Indeed, the camera is a very powerful tool when used correctly. Bringing images of chaos and destruction to the world is the direct cause of aid arriving – a prime example the aftermath of the tsunami. Mackley believes the amount of aid donated is directly related to the TV coverage – the two being very closely linked. “I don’t feel so bad filming misery and destruction if I know it’s going to bring some good. There are a number of Pacific Islands that are not that well off and they know full well who I am and they welcome me when a cyclone’s coming - because they know that film of the event getting on the news greatly enhances their prospects of getting aid,” he offers, seeming grateful to be of help.

Unfortunately, however, Mackley has found that providing images of destruction can be a two-edged sword. While he regards the camera as a means to elicit donations, sadly, time and time again, he witnesses huge damage being inflicted upon Pacific Island nations by grossly unbalanced news stories. The media, he accuses, ham up the bad part of an event, with little apparent thought of the consequences. He has seen all facets of the media exaggerate the devastation caused by storms; and resultant negative publicity has dissuaded hordes of tourists from journeying there.

“People believe what they see on the news – and they shouldn’t. A cyclone hits a small Pacific Island, [for instance Tonga]. It is highly reliant upon tourism and although the residents clean up the damage in a few days, because a few selective shots of flattened buildings are shown in the news, making it look as if everywhere is decimated and no mention is made that it was all cleaned up in a few days – because that’s a boring story, I’ve seen huge economic damage
being caused for 6 to 8 months,” he says, sounding annoyed. “Sure, there were a few damaged buildings, but that’s not indicative of what the whole country looks like. Often that’s how the media portray it. If there’s widespread destruction, I’m certainly going to say that, but if there isn’t, I don’t,” he says.

In addition, he says that the amount of misreporting about the Tikopian disaster was “incredible.” For the first four to five days, all the information that emanated from the island came only from Mackley. He was guarded about what he said, because he didn’t know if anyone had been killed or not. Thus, he reported that the damage was very bad and it would be amazing if there weren’t many casualties. Then to his shock, he heard stories from outfits such as CNN and the BBC about thousands of people being killed and the island being hit by tornadoes and tsunamis – events that in fact had not occurred. He contends: “It beggars belief where they get those things from in the first place, considering no one else was giving them information except me! So you can see why one would be cynical about the media.”

Although he rarely writes news stories that accompany his images, he’s occasionally a target for caustic reac-tions to them. “I’ve had people from airlines phone me and say: ‘Your story just cost us millions of dollars worth of business because hundreds of people cancelled their airfares minutes after your story went on,’” he offers.
The title ‘Dangerman,’ for the 2004 TV series made for the Discovery Channel about his activities, was a misnomer. His work is perfectly safe, he says. “I’m no closer than anyone else who drives a car to danger. When people drive down any two-lane stretch of rural road, they’re passing within half-a-metre of every other car, going at 80-100 kilometres an hour. I don’t have car-size rocks landing that close to me at volcanoes, ever! Yet people take it for granted that driving is not a risk, when in fact, it is. It’s more of a risk than what I do,” he offers, adding than when he climbs a volcano he’s in complete control of how close he gets “to the action” – unless of course the action gets close to him.

He has had close calls however, one in Mexico during a hurricane. “A building fell. I was underneath the balcony of the building and all the debris – about 50 tonnes of concrete – cascaded down about a metre away from me,” he says. Luckily, he was uninjured.

Another reminder of his mortality occurred in Indonesia. His taxi driver got lost en route to the railway station, so he missed the train he intended to catch, which subsequently collided head on with another train, which was then ploughed into by another train. He’d be dead had it not been for the taxi driver’s incompetence. Indeed, transport he says is his biggest risk, because every time he’s on a train, a bus or in a car, there’s a potential for serious injury, which is out of his control, but so far, injuries have not yet put him hospital: “In this job, you’re either alive or dead!” crows Mackley.

The name Mackley wanted to use for the Dangerman show was his nickname, Rambocam, but as copyright laws protect ‘Rambo’, it was not an option. So how did he acquire the wonderful nickname Rambocam?
This is another interesting story, demonstrating the extraordinary lengths Geoff Mackley will go to “get the shot”. It was in the mid-1990s, down on army land on New Zealand’s central North Island. The Department of Conservation was supposed to round up the region’s wild horses and attempt to sell them before killing the remainder. However, Mackley had become privy to information that a number of horses had already been killed and dumped in a big pit on army land, with no effort having been made to sell them.

“Of course, the army personnel wouldn’t let us in there. Several reporters and newspaper cameramen found out the location of this pit, and we decided we were going to storm in on army land and get pictures of the dead horses, come what may.”

He had a 4-wheel drive vehicle, while the others had cars. The cars became stuck in the mud, by which time the army was chasing them in a helicopter. Consequently, everyone piled into Mackley’s
all-terrain vehicle and he pressed on the accelerator in hot pursuit of the horse pit. Meanwhile, the army landed a helicopter on the road in front of them in an attempt to stall their progress, but ineffectually so.

“It was like a scene from a Die Hard movie.”

Later, Mackley’s vehicle became stuck in the ground, so all the journalists piled out and began running up the hill to the pit.
Because it was a steep hill, the army couldn’t land the helicopter and so hovered above, yelling for the group to stop – but this was falling on deaf ears, as this media mob knew the army didn’t have authority over them. The army then landed the chopper at the base of the hill and some personnel got out and ran up the hill, only to get back in the helicopter again.

“It was really quite comical. And then, in the end, another helicopter appeared with the police in it, and we did listen to them. We knew that while the army didn’t have any authority over us, the police did. So we left, but nothing happened to us. The police thought it was quite amusing that a group of reporters had managed to evade the army for 3 or 4 hours,” says Mackley, chuckling. From this point on, cameramen and reporters from TV3 and TVNZ called him “Rambocam” and the name stuck.

One of the best facets of being Mackley is that everyday is a new day.

“I don’t have the day-to-day pressures that everyone else has – just sitting in a traffic jam and doing the same boring job for years and they are sitting in the same traffic jam and haven’t really moved forward or achieved anything, and know full well what they’re doing tomorrow or the day after,” he says. In contrast, Geoff Mackley doesn’t know what he’s going to be doing from one day to the next. He could be on the other side of the world the next day, facing a volcano that’s erupting or standing in a region devastated by a tsunami. He doesn’t know, and that’s part of why he regards his life as so exceptional. On his website is the phrase: ‘Life is an incredible adventure or it’s nothing at all.’ He really believes it. “I live for each day. I intend to be doing this for as long as I can. I probably won’t be able to climb volcanoes forever, but I can certainly fly to the other side of the world, get in a rental car and drive to a hurricane, until I’m…who knows…there are people running marathons in their 80’s,” he says.

He has a reputation as one of the top photographers of natural disasters in the world – if not the top. Yet as the sirens on the police scanner in the background grow in their intensity, you can almost see Mackley beginning to twitch down the end of the phone. Always, there’s another story just around the corner, another mountain to climb. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Arena: Mar 05, AU edition

THE ARENA

JAMES MORROW
Australians should be proud of the role they played bringing democracy to Iraq

From the moment John Howard committed troops to help the United States enforce the slew of U.N. resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein, Australians were told that they should feel badly about it. By focusing narrowly on the question of Saddam’s WMD programs (and by also conveniently forgetting his history of gassing Iranians and Kurds), anti-war groups were able to conveniently ignore the greater promise of ousting Saddam Hussein: not only would the overthrow of his sick and genocidal cult of personality give a measurably better life to Iraq’s citizens, but it would also have the knock-on effect of bringing political freedom to a region sorely in need of it.

This willful ignorance came to an end on the 30th of January, a day which will be remembered as a defining moment of the first decade of the 21st Century. That was the day when ordinary Iraqis went to the polls to elect their own government — and in the process defied armies of Islamists, insurgents, Ba’ath party holdouts, and much of the Western media, all of whom predicted that the exercise of democracy would cause bloodshed from one end of Mesopotamia to the other.
In fact, the turnout was better than anyone could have expected, with early estimates pegging at somewhere around 72 per cent (much better than, say, an American or British national election). Sure, there was some grumbling, but so what if the Sunnis didn’t vote in huge numbers? The fact that a segment of the population which had for decades happily exercised tyranny of the minority got pouty and decided to pick up their ball and go home should be of no consequence to the legitimacy of the overall election. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out, Afrikaners refusing to vote when blacks were given the franchise in South Africa didn’t cause reporters to heave heavy sighs and complain about the sudden illegitimacy of that country’s democracy.

As Iraqis streamed out of polling places across the country, proudly waving their blue ink-stained index fingers indicating they had voted, it was fascinating to watch the story of their country change in the eyes of the Western media. For months on end, Australians had been subjected to a relentless barrage of stories about how, since the invasion, Iraq had spun wildly out of control and that (for reporters, at least) Baghdad was suddenly a place where leaving one’s hotel room to buy a pack of smokes was about as risky as poking your head above ground level in 1916 Verdun.

Thus the media’s reaction to the election’s overwhelming success was every bit as amusing as the courage of the free Iraqis was touching. Remember that for months every bombing, every setback, and every act of brutality (especially if it was committed by a wayward American soldier) was front-page news, not just in Australia but around the world. And the message was subtle but clear: Iraq and the Iraqis were better off under Saddam, because at least then the state had a monopoly on killing and mayhem. Once the Americans came in, the chaos was privatized – a far worse state of affairs.

But almost as soon as polls opened the story changed. If they didn’t exactly become cheerleaders for Iraqi democracy, the media managed to, if just for a day, agree that the voting was a good thing.
International wire service Reuters, which since 9/11 has been notorious for throwing “scare quotes” around the word “terrorist” – lest anyone think the agency was taking sides – suddenly reported that “millions of Iraqis flocked to vote in a historic election Sunday, defying insurgents who killed 25 people in bloody attacks aimed at wrecking the poll. Iraqis, some ululating with joy, others hiding their faces in fear, voted in much higher-than-expected numbers in their first multi-party election in half a century”.

The New York Times got caught up in the excitement as well, declaring that “if the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned
a corner”.

And closer to home, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough admitted in his first dispatch after the election that “the ballot had prevailed over the bullets and the bombs”, and even conceded that “the provisional figures will be seen as a stunning victory for Washington’s policy of democratising the Middle East and will cause great anxiety among the region’s unelected leaders, who fear such an Iraqi outcome will spur demands for radical reform across the region”.
This was an incredible (if temporary) about-face for McGeough, who has spent the last two years tipping an Iraqi civil war and once went so far as to run a story accusing interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of shooting six terrorist suspects at close range — a bit of unsubstantiated urban myth that allowed the correspondent to think aloud about “a return to the cold-blooded tactics of his predecessor”, i.e., Saddam.

In standing up to the naysayers, and the terrorists, and those who suffer from that peculiar neocolonial racism of the Left which says that some people just aren’t cut out for democracy, ordinary Iraqis took a brave stand for their future. Not only did they send a message to their foes at home and abroad that they were not going to let freedom’s enemies win, but they also told Australians, Americans, and everyone else involved in making 30 January possible that the life and treasure spent in Iraq were not in vain. As Iraqi weblogger Hammorabi put it the night before the election,

Our voting is:
No to the terrorists!
No to the dictatorships!
No to hate and racism!
No to the fascists!
No to the Nazis!
No to the mentally retarded tyrants!
No to the ossified, narrow-minded and intolerant!
The Iraqis are voting in few hours time for the new Iraq.
We are going to create our future by ourselves not by dictators.

We are going to say:
Yes for the freedom and democracy!
Yes for the civilized Iraq!
Yes for peace and prosperity!
Yes for coexistence!
Yes for the New Iraq!
Let them bomb and kill us. It will not deter us!
Let them send their dogs to suck our bones. We care not!
Let them bark. It will not frighten us.
Let them see how civilised to be free and democratic!
Let them die by our vote tomorrow! It is the magic bullet which will
kill them!
Welcome New Iraq.
Welcome freedom and democracy.
Welcome peace and prosperity for all nations with out exception but terrorists!
Amen to that.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Mar 05, AU Edition

OVERDONE EGGERS
But Q & A answers plenty of questions

HOW WE ARE HUNGRY
By Dave Eggers
San Francisco. McSweeney’s Books 2004 ISBN: 1932416137
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, has compiled a list of factors that compel people to write: ‘Free time. Technology. Material. Education. And disgust’.

People are working less and living longer; computers are everywhere, spell-check included; anything goes; we are constantly being told where to put our commas; there is so much bad writing out there and there’s the belief that people are making money from it. Disgust provokes an I can do better than that mentality that has created the hordes of story-telling punks now being published all over the place.

Dave Eggers is one of their leaders, and How We Are Hungry is a collection of fifteen of his short stories. But don’t let that put you off: short stories are changing again, and for the better. Traditional surprise endings à la Roald Dahl are on the rise, while academic experimentation is out. The market for these pieces is still slim with the number of stories being written greatly outweighing the number of people who are willing to read them. With everyone rushing off to writing workshops, this situation worsens daily.

In the New York Review of Books (October), Diane Johnson articulated a hope that the genre is making a come-back: ‘Readers and nonreaders alike are affected by the Internet and television, the byte, the sound bite, and the accelerating pace of life, and have only a short story’s worth of time to give to literature.’ Proof is still to follow. Last year, the publication of John Updike’s Early Stories: 1953-1975 received much positive attention but few sales considering his status. Annie Proulx’s new anthology Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 has not had shining reviews but surely it will sell.

Eggers’ first book, a memoir entitled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, came out four years ago and made him very famous. Since then he has enjoyed an escalating cult following. His magazine The Believer, his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and his publishing house, McSweeney’s, are all very popular. Eggers himself is well-liked, not least of all because he runs free writing labs for children in Brooklyn (Superhero Supply Co.) and San Franscico (Pirate Supply Store) offering one-on-one help
with homework.

So, how are we hungry? Each of the stories in this book answers this question directly. Self-conscious desperation is the key motivation. Mostly, Eggers’ human characters are a miserable lot. They collect cacti and count their lives away. They don’t want to be like they are, but are only momentarily allowed to transcend all that which debases. The urge to find a gigantic pair of tweezers and pluck Dave Eggers from Generation X and put him somewhere more meaningful (and less anxious) overwhelms.

The prognosis is better for dogs and the final story “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned” is enjoyable:

When I run I can turn like I’m magic or something. I can turn like there wasn’t even a turn. I turn and I’m going so fast it’s like I was still going straight. Through the trees like a missile, through the trees I love to run with my claws reaching and grabbing so quickly like I’m taking everything.

This dog’s a Jack Kerouac but his name is Steven.
One of the most topical stories in How We Are Hungry is called “When They Learned to Yelp”. It is also one of the most annoying ones. Though he never makes this explicit, Eggers is at pains to define ‘yelp’ as what happened to young Americans upon witnessing the destruction of the Twin Towers. The word ‘yelp’ appears over thirty times within three pages and Eggers gets his message across just fine. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe a yelp is what happens when you accidentally tread on your puppy’s foot. He’s hijacked the wrong word and the experiment falls as flat as his character in “Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance”, who attempts suicide by jumping from a two-storey building.

It’s all the more annoying when Eggers’ writing falters because we have already looked through the windows of his enormous potential. In “Up The Mountain Coming Down Slowly” the writing is so good you don’t even notice it’s there. First published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it’s about a woman who sets out to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for reasons that elude her. This story is as full as any novel ever could be. And the ending… it’s no wonder Eggers is winning so many awards. A trophy room is in order if he intends to keep this up.

On the eve of her departure, Rita, from “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly”, visits the hotel bar and meets a stranger: ‘They talked about capital punishment, the stenographer comparing the stonings common to some Muslim regions with America’s lethal injections and electric chairs. Somehow the conversation was cheerful and relaxed.’

And yet somehow this book is actually quite funny, a most curious mix. There’s also lot of fooling around here and that’s probably why so many people think he’s pretentious. The posturing in How We Are Hungry is irritating; it distracts from the quality of the writing and the quality of thought. I’d give it an A for achievement and a D for effort and attitude – Eggers might consider this the perfect grade.
It’s unsettling that quite a few of these stories have been revised since their original publication in prestigious places like The Guardian and The New Yorker. One worries that the new ones are going to change too – so wouldn’t it be better to wait and read the final version? Old-fashioned, I would prefer Eggers’ words to stay put.

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Q & A
By Vikas Swarup
London. Transworld Publishers 2005 ISBN: 0385608144. Distributed by Random House Australia. Paperback. $32.95.
“I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.”
This is the eye-popping opening line of Vikas Swarup’s debut novel Q & A - a picaresque tale of an orphan who wins “Who Wants to be a Billionaire?” Unable to pay out the prize money, the organisers of the show conspire to have him arrested for cheating. Our hero is Ram Mohammad Thomas – a name part Hindu, part Muslim, part Christian, designed to please everyone.

Ram’s excellent adventures are presented to us in the form of a quiz show, with a chapter dedicated to each question. It’s a clever set-up and the novel takes full advantage of the quiz-show phenomenon, namely that the audience desperately wants the contestant
to win.

Ram is as smart and brave as his tales are tall. This boy is far from lucky but lucky coincidences are everywhere in Q & A. In an extraordinary act of generosity Ram gives away a huge amount of stolen money to save a dying boy he’s never met. The father of the dying boy gives him his business card which he puts in his top pocket. Moments later the police arrive to frisk him but he no longer has the stolen cash so he walks free. Further down the track, a question on Shakespeare pops up in the quiz and Ram doesn’t know the answer. He elects to use a ‘life boat’ but can’t think of anyone to call. While reaching into his pocket to find his lucky coin, his hand brushes against the business card. He reads it for the first time and miraculously it says, “Utpah Chatterjee, English Teacher, St John’s School, Agra” and then gives a phone number.

Though the story is related entirely from Ram’s point of view, Swarup bends the rules so that the limited perspective is never isolating or dull. Though we are encouraged to doubt Ram’s honesty, this is done in a genial sort of story-telling way: there’s no edgy postmodern uncertainty here. It’s a book that began as a good idea and will probably end up a movie.

Like any great ride at the fair this book succeeds in making you feel a bit sick and it would be irresponsible not to give it an MA rating. Q & A is a fictional story about fortune, both good and bad. Swarup is not remotely concerned with presenting a factual account of a street kid’s life. For example, the only time Ram complains of real hunger he reports, “even something as basic as a boiled egg, which I have never liked, makes me salivate”. I am not sure how basic a boiled egg is to a penniless orphan but to nit-pick is to miss the point. If reading is at all like traveling then Q & A is like riding fast across India on a motorcycle. The view is blurry but the journey is lots of fun.(Trivia: Turkey has just chopped another six zeros off its currency, so that country’s show, “Who Wants to Win Five Billion Turkish Lira” might finally get a catchier name.)

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THE TURNING
By Tim Winton
MacMillan Australia. ISBN: 0-330-42138-7. $46.
I have a confession to make. When I gave The Turning the dreaded flick test and came across a page (say p.294) of skinny unpunctuated dialogue, I thought “not more Hemingway please”, and closed it. A review that lavished it with praise prompted me to give it a second go. I’m very glad I did. When I actually read the first story, I was instantly hooked. Here was a story whose main characters I could easily identify with – dropouts on the run, adolescent losers in quest of the big city or, as it is entitled, “Big World”. It’s a warm but unsentimental account of friendship and doomed destiny that any man who has ever worked a dead end job and one morning got up before dawn, jumped in his rust bucket and muttered to himself, “I’m gettin’ outta here,” can identify with. Or, as Winton puts it ,”Monday morning everyone thinks we’re off to work as usual, but in ten minutes we’re out past the town limits and going like hell.” And somehow you sense hell is where they’re headed, though at that moment, the exhilaration of escape is all they know about.

Accordingly, Winton’s stories have a place of honour in what Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor identified as the central literary short story tradition – people dreaming of escape but not quite achieving it. The short story becomes a kind of mournful but touching parable that shows the trapped protagonists attempting a wild tangent of hopeful escape but essentially returning to where they first started, returning to where they belong. It’s a pessimism about overly quick change in our lives that seems acceptably lifelike in a short story but perhaps unbearable in a novel. In a way, the short story has permission to be more honest about life’s bitter containments than a novel.

The small town world of coastal West Australia is here fictionally embodied in a place called West Point. Gradually and subtly, it
becomes clear that some of the characters’ lives have intersected. After all, West Point isn’t that big a place. Melanie, for instance, who is a central character in “Abbreviation”, is alluded to in “Damaged Goods” as “a farm girl whose ring finger ended at the first joint”. The effect of this and other such intertextualities is to create a sociological mosaic, a village-sized cosmos that is warm and compelling.

As well as Frank O’Connor, Winton’s stories with their drifting losers, drunken wife beaters, abattoir workers, down at heel train catchers, rusting Kombi owners and small town trailer trash put me in mind of what Granta magazine identified twenty years ago as a then new trend in American writing – dirty realism. The principal star of that “group” was Raymond Carver, a modern master of the post-Hemingway story, complete minimalist unpunctuated dialogue, feelings of entrapment and social doom and, unintellectual characters with low social horizons. Like Hemingway, Carver’s work was spare to the point of boniness, and cool to cold in tone. Winton partakes of that heritage but has a warmer tone, a plusher vocabulary with apt colourful similes that sketch in the backdrops effectively. The easy but rich style, the expert characterisation and feeling of small town enclosure make a heady and exciting brew. As of now, Tim Winton is one of my favourite short story writers.

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SHOTGUN CITY: Melbourne’s Gangland Killings
By Paul Anderson
Hardie Grant Egmont. ISBN: 1-74066-210-5. $19.95.
What do Nikolai Radev, Jason Moran, Pasquale Barbaro, Willy Thompson, Mark Mallia, Housam Zayat, Michael Marshall, Graham Kinniburgh have in common? They were all criminals and they were all (save one who was incinerated) shot to death in 2003 during Melbourne’s ongoing gangland wars. By mid - 2004, when this book went to print, six more had been killed. This book is a grim progress report on the “Second War”.

None of these gun battles nor gang warfare are anything new. The opening chapter entitled “The First War” gives an overview of the era from the late 1950s to the early 1980s when an estimated 40 individuals were taken out as a result of warring factions of the notorious Painters and Dockers Union. Veteran of the murderous streets, Billy Longley says sardonically of the Second War, “they’ve got a bit of catching up to do”. Maybe so, but if the present spate continues at its current average, twenty years will see at least 62 well-dressed corpses laid to rest in classy coffins.

Why gangsters murder each other might not be a question that keeps a lot of honest citizens awake at night. However, there is some variation in theories of motivation. A study conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology and the South Australia Police Major Investigation Branch surprisingly fingered “dissolution of an intimate relationship” i.e. bumping off straying partners, as a major factor. It also noted money, drugs, silencing a witness, revenge, or profit from crime as motives. Anderson is adamant that in the case of the recent 1998 – 2004 orgy of assassination by bullet, most were drug – related hits.

As a result of reading this clinical to morbid text, the following advice could be given to those contemplating a career in
violent crime:
* Don’t leave your car unattended
* Don’t leave home without a pistol down your pants
* When dismembering a corpse, use a meat cleaver. Chain saws get clogged with skin and blood.
* Arrange for a minimum $100,000 donation to the police as an information incentive to help track your anticipated killers
* Move out of the Melbourne Central Business District Area
* Stop seeing Quentin Tarantino movies

Regarding the latter, it is fascinating to read that gangsters do watch and like crime movies. Billy Longley’s favourites are Unforgiven and On the Waterfront. Other movies favoured by the older generation are Scarface and Little Caesar. In more recent times, The Godfather, Heat, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs have prominently figured. Plus the cult series, The Sopranos. It must be said that the bad guys have good taste in films as they do in the expensive clobber they buy with drug money.

Cause and effect should not be confused. Crime movies don’t create criminals but if you are walking the street with a Colt .45 in your belt, the mode and code of your crime, not to mention sartorial style, may be film-influenced. It seems the local hoods do follow the general style of their American counterparts as regards dress, code of silence, mode of execution and nicknames - plus a liking for the more authentic crime movie. Overall, the Anderson account is a cool-toned hard-boiled history with traces of American slang - though reading too much at a sitting has a depressive effect.

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PENGUIN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Edited by David Crystal
Penguin Books 2004. ISBN: 0-140-51543-7. $75.
What can you say about an encyclopaedia that gives twelve lines to Alexander the Great and sixteen lines to the Beach Boys? Clearly, the pop present is being privileged over the classical past. However, this 1698-page tome is often factually inaccurate when dealing with the present (20th century). Under Mexican Art, David Alfaro Siqueiros has his last name omitted so he becomes David Alfaro; Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme is credited with the 1992 publication of Bait, a novel that she has yet to publish; Postmodernism only deals with architecture, ignoring the fact it is de rigeur in literature and art. Spelling mistakes include the Mexican president’s first name printed as Vincente instead of Vicente and painter Jose Clemente Orozco’s second name spelt as Clementi.

The omissions are a wonder indeed. Mick Jagger is in, “Keith Richards” is out; Al Capone is in, Lucky Luciano is absent; Keri Hulme is in, Janet Frame is not; Stalingrad is in, Kursk (world’s greatest tank battle) is missing; Michael Jackson is in, Peter Jackson is not; Everest-conqueror Edmund Hillary is necessarily in but Reinhold Messner, the world’s greatest mountaineer is not; Saddam Hussein is in and Osama bin Laden, as always, is invisible. Structuralism is in but astonishingly poststructuralism is not (though it is sneakily mentioned under Deconstruction with which it is mistakenly identified). I was surprised to find Timothy Leary, Peggy Guggenheim, Bryce Courtenay, Pierre Bourdieu (renowned anthropologist), Takla Makan desert and Google absent (though Desktop Publishing is in).

Another anomaly – perhaps common in other encyclopaedias – is contradictory entries. The Aborigines entry has them arriving in Australia 60,000 years ago while the Australian history section has a figure of 40,000. (Some have advanced the figure to 100,000 BC – shouldn’t all three estimates have been discussed?) The entry on Australian literature make no mention of Judith Wright, yet she merits a separate entry under her own name. This inconsistency of analysis is possibly explicable by two different people doing the two entries. But shouldn’t there be a match up? Similarly, William Burroughs is not mentioned under Beat Generation but under his own entry is declared to be a “spokesman of the Beat movement”. Also, stingily, there is no colour in any of the maps and no portraits (though that does allow more text).

Now for some appreciation. There are compendious lists of phobias, popes, highest mountains, deserts and, best of all, Crusades which includes sub-headings under Background, Leaders and Outcomes – though regretfully no Nobel Prize listings. Listings of musicians, artists and scientists are generally good. The quality of the paper and binding is excellent. Some may be wondering – in this Internet age do we still need encyclopaedias? I, for one, would not like to see them become obsolete because they present the opportunity par excellence for browsing by association and the alphabet. Also an encyclopaedia offers greater authority than the crackpot and often wildly inaccurate entries frequently found on the Internet. It cannot be repeated too often that an encyclopaedia, being a book, can never have power failure, a virus, intrusive advertisements or the irritatingly busy format deployed by many website homepages. However, the Penguin Encyclopedia needs a clean up on accuracy, improved expansion and consistency of inclusion and could do with some colour in its bland white pages. Hey, it’s still an encyclopaedia, my favourite kind of book for browsing new arcana and esoterica.

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TOLKIEN’S GOWN & Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books
By Rick Gekoski
Constable and Robinson. ISBN: 1-74066-210-5. $29.99.
In general, I have regarded book collectors and first edition freaks as fetishists who are more interested in the wrapping than the present, brassieres instead of breasts. Having enjoyed Mr Gekoski’s lucid prose and accumulation of delightful anecdotes, my previous value judgment has been white-anted somewhat. Despite his eye for the deal, the multi-talented Gekoski also has an ear for the interesting human story, hence this witty and attractively presented book (which I am hoping will one day prove a valuable first edition).

The book kicks off with a chapter on the controversial Lolita, Nabokov’s sordid tale of a middle-aged lecher’s seduction of a barely pubescent girl. Shocking as this relationship might be, Nabokov’s exquisite prose turns it into a tragic love story.

In his cheerfully lucid style, Gekoski relates how after he sold a first edition of Lolita for $4900, he received a letter from Graham Greene asking how much he (Greene) could get for a copy inscribed to him by the Russian author. Apparently, this in an example of what rare book dealers call an “association copy”, one presented by the author to someone of importance. As Greene eminently qualified, Gekoski insisted on paying him $7200 (Greene wanted less!), and sold it for a profit (mysteriously, or tactfully, not revealed). When Gekoski last heard, the on sold book fetched $264,000 which left him “sick with seller’s remorse”. Since reading this revealing anecdote, I have been urging my friends at launches of my books to hurry up and become “persons of importance” so I can buy the book back off them and resell it for a whacking profit. So far, the scheme has yet to take off. And is unlikely to, for almost none of my books have that piece de la resistance, a dustwrapper, which rockets the price for any rare book into the ionosphere.

If over a quarter of million dollars sounds like big money, it has been topped by Gekoski’s estimate for a first edition Lord of the Flies – $450,000. A first edition inscribed Ulysses actually sold for $460,000 – the highest price thus far. Touchingly, Gekoksi admits that Ulysses is a tough read, even though he considers it the greatest book of the twentieth century. This promisingly profitable spiral was recently put in the shade when the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road sold for $2,430,000 which makes me wish cryonic preservation really works and poor old Jack could return and feast off the posthumous profit.

Packed with colourful stories of famous writers, this book is surely one of the more notable of the 110,000 books published in England last year, most of which, Gekoski reminds us, will soon be forgotten. I am hoping the first edition of his book will soar in value – when Gekoski soon visits the Antipodes I must ask him to inscribe it.

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BOOKS: Nov 05. AU Edition

MONSTERS AND THE DARK
Plus: Looking back at Old Blue Eyes and Australia’s really ancient history

MAO: The Unknown Story
By Jung Chang and Jon Holliday, Jonathan Cape, $59.95
This is how this large and extraordinarily well-researched book begins: ‘Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader.’ Apart from the bogglingly high total of deaths, the other shocking word is ‘peacetime’. Surely only a world war like that started by Adolph Hitler is needed to kill so many? Not so, it seems. And how is it possible – and what is the point – of killing or causing so many to perish?

The answer, which unsurprisingly isn’t at all rational, was given by Mao himself in Moscow in 1957: ‘We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of world revolution’. He repeated much the same statement in 1958. Of course the ‘we’ is Mao himself. ‘Deaths have benefits,’ Mao once callously declared. ‘They can fertilise the ground.’ Hence crops were ordered to be planted over burial grounds which caused ‘intense anguish’. Naturally, Mao suffered from no such qualms.

While his cohorts were Communists with similar aims, some of the minions were slightly more ‘reasonable’. As the authors put it, ‘Whereas Mao had been using terror for personal power, Chou En-lai employed it to bolster Communist rule’. Liu Shao-chi, Mao’s No. 2, was like his master, interested in industrialisation and superpower status but wanted these goals ‘at a more gradual tempo’ by ‘building a stronger economic foundation and raising living standards first’. Mao seemed to take sadistic pleasure in making the populace suffer. His early predilection for public torture and executions to create public terror, as well as his own enjoyment of it, is grimly detailed. Even Stalin and Hitler tended to have their terror performed off stage, as it were (Siberia, Auschwitz).

While the folly of Mao’s Great Leap Forward to make more steel at any cost (burning homes for fuel, melting down farm tools and cooking utensils) is well known, less well known is that all the while China was exporting grain and soybean on a huge scale to east European countries and to Russia either in exchange for arms – or even sometimes as a donation. Indeed, the percentage of foreign aid reached a staggering 6.92 per cent of the GNP, proportionately 70 times that of the United States. The result was in the peak year of famine (1960), 22 million died. In all, 38 million died from hunger in 1958-1961. Yet so tight was Mao’s control, he was able to convince both the CIA and Francois Mitterrand, along with many other gullible western observers, that there was no famine. All in the name of Mao trying to convert China into a world superpower in a few years. The supreme irony is that today China is headed for economic superpower status, but not as a result of following Mao’s policies.

What this monumental biography makes stunningly clear is that though China seemed isolationist at the time, Mao was constantly badgering the Soviets to supply him with nuclear technology and missiles and made a surprising number of aggressive overtures towards other countries – three million troops were sent to Vietnam, for example.

Developing the atomic bomb, which he had earlier hypocritically described as a paper tiger, cost a staggering $4.1 billion – at 1957 prices! In the authors’ view, China’s nuclear bomb cost more than 100 times the deaths caused by the two American bombs used on Japan.
In early pre-communist dominant times he was never keen to fully engage with Japan as Stalin wanted. Mao wanted the Japanese to destroy Chiang Kai-shek so Stalin could then carve up China, leaving Mao as ruler of the remainder. Nor, as is commonly supposed, was Mao even fully engaged with the Nationalists until much later on – when his sleeper-spy generals betrayed them. In fact, it suited Chiang Kai-shek’s strategy to allow the Communists rag-tag army to pass through relatively unopposed. (Furthermore, his son was being held to ransom by Moscow.) Even the notion of Mao’s personal courage during the Long March turns out to be a myth – the authors reveal he was carried in a sedan chair.

Alongside the other mental disorders that have been identified there should be one called Dictator Disorder – the most deadly of all. Those who suffer from it torture kill and murder their enemies (including family and friends), waste economies on vainglorious schemes, try to destroy the past (Mao hated Chinese architecture) and while making sure that the populace suffers, enjoy as much food, luxury and sex as they can. While Hitler is often described as having been ‘mad’ and psychiatrists have tried to diagnose Hitler and Stalin as manic-depressives, no one seems to have done the same exercise with Mao. He was horribly sane and unrelentingly evil. At one point, he even considered the ultimate de-humanising strategy of removing people’s names and giving them numbers. Mao’s perverse code: ‘Do to others precisely what I don’t want done to myself’.

Taken as a whole, I found this book with its long catalogue of crimes against humanity a depressing read. However, the authors have done an astonishingly thorough job. They interviewed people who knew Mao in 38 countries. Corpses and all, this will be the definitive biography of Mao.

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BLINDING LIGHT
By Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, $49.95
One - though not the only – disconcerting thing about Theroux is his prolificity. Seemingly after a few short months, he pops out yet another book. Justly renown as a leading travel writer, he’s a captivating novelist as well and I was surprised (well, not really) to note that this is his 27th novel.

Blinding Light’s central character is a highly successful travel writer (like Theroux) who is suffering from that weird American condition called ‘writer’s block’ (very unlike Theroux). I say weird because if there is such a thing as writer’s block why haven’t we heard of painter’s block, architect’s block or composer’s block? On closer examination, writers who are ‘blocked’ are usually suffering from depression, alcoholism or simply find that their talent has run dry.

Slade Steadman is a one-book wonder with good reason – his first and only book was about a guy (himself) who crossed countries without a passport and without luggage – ever since then he has lived off the lucrative spin offs: leather jackets, sunglasses, pens, knives. It’s such a good idea I’m thinking of trying it myself and hope that the customs officials of the world’s 227 or so countries will cooperate.

As the book opens, Steadman is on his way to South America in quest of a chemical cure – a psychoactive plant that will extend his mental horizons and clear his creative blockage. He tries first ayahuasca and then a more deadly concoction, datura. The insights that the plant’s ingestion brings comes at a high price – Steadman first experiences a kind of ‘darkness visible’, along with insights into his oafish fellow travelers, but eventually the controlled blindness becomes permanent. There is much heavy though successful symbolic play and irony by Theroux on the various meanings and types of blindness – and the punning title resonates throughout the text.

Steadman’s desire to write fiction – in particular, a recapitulation of a richly erotic life – is excuse enough for Theroux to saturate the book’s middle section with much ingenious and at times perverse sexuality. It has to be said Theroux has a gift for this kind of writing though it may seem an excuse for self-indulgence to some readers. By contrast, he is even more gifted in writing about relationships that persist in a savage limbo-like aftermath – yet can still mysteriously rekindle – such is the perversity of human attraction. In the end, Steadman is a tragic and doomed figure. Presumably, it is Theroux’s successful deeper intention to show us that salvation by dark means leads to a dark end.

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SINATRA: The Life
By Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan, Doubleday, $49.95
Sinatra was one of those perennial entertainers who seemed indestructible and ever-present, so it is almost a surprise to be reminded that he is no longer with us in person – though very much so in records and films and from time to time on the radio.

Ambition and achievement are close to alignment in the singer’s life. Sinatra said, ‘I’m going to be the best singer in the world, the best singer that ever was’. The authors more or less concur that Sinatra was indeed ‘... the most celebrated popular singer in history’. Today, the early crooning Sinatra who sounded a bit like Bing Crosby – the singer Sinatra set himself to surpass – has been overtaken by the later Sinatra with that street-wise, nightclubby voice that makes the Sinatra timbre instantly recognizable. For a guy who boozed so heavily, it is astonishing that his singing voice lasted as well as it did – but then Sinatra was often described as a man of astonishing energy and stamina. His lineup of performances would make some younger fry quail – in 1946 he was on stage 45 times a week, singing one hundred songs per day while also doing 36 recording sessions and 160 radio shows.

Sinatra was no angel – he punched out bothersome photographers and in later years was always accompanied by heavies who would beat up people at Sinatra’s signal. On the good side of the ledger, he was a generous man – he gave away 300 gold cigarette lighters and helped pay medical bills for poorer entertainers and hated racial prejudice of any kind. Rumour, apparently supported by fact, has it that Sinatra was buddies with many of the powerful gangsters of the day such as Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancana. The authors inform us that Sinatra’s grandparents came from the same small Sicilian town as Luciano; that Sinatra once acted as courier in taking a satchel with a million dollars from Giancana to Joe Kennedy on behalf of Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign; that Harry Cohn was threatened with death unless he gave Sinatra lead role in the film version From Here to Eternity. All these statements are encyclo- paedically footnoted and so they may well all be true. My only reservation is that Summers was one of the main protagonists for the widely held belief that Marilyn Monroe and Jack Kennedy had an affair – a connection that been seriously challenged by some biographers.

What is indisputably true is that Sinatra had affairs (and marriages) with some of the most beautiful women in America including Ava Gardner (his most lasting but doomed love), Mia Farrow, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Juliet Prowse plus many others less known though some of them – judging by photos – were even more beautiful than the better known names. The much-publicised adoration of bobbysoxers was according to George Evans, Sinatra’s press agent, 98% synthetic.

Faults and all, Sinatra was a guy who is hard to dislike – at least from a distance. His lasting achievement was to turn pop music into an art form. As for the now much vaunted ‘I Did it My Way’ as a biographical theme statement – hotly denied by Sinatra himself – his own son said it summed up his father exactly.

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DIGGING UP DEEP TIME
By Paul Willis and Abbie Thomas, ABC books, $34.95
This book has a resonant title – what could be more romantic than finding the fossilised remains of strange and unknown animals from the distant past? That our earth and the universe is so ancient seems appropriate in the grand scheme of things. Currently, scientists believe the earth is 4.6 billion years old and the universe at least 13 billion years old. A five-decade-plus living fossil such as myself has no business feeling old.

Australia is one of the oldest chunks of terra firma and is particularly fossil-rich. This book visits fifteen of the most well known sites. At Marvel Bar, the hottest place in the country, are the microscopic remains of bacteria known as cyano- bacteria believed to be 3.465 billion years old. Also long in the tooth are stroma- tolites found at Shark Bay, Western Australia, which resemble stone cauliflowers. The Marble Bay fossils are not accepted by all scientists; Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford thinks the ‘fossils’ are just tiny clumps of impurities in the rock.

The theory that life on earth could have originated from Mars - prompted by the finding of an Antarctic meteorite in 1996 – is given an airing but no firm conclusions drawn. Until we find better or indeed some evidence of life on Mars itself, the Martian hypothesis, drawn only from objects found on earth, looks shaky.

In 1979, myoscolex, the world’s oldest fossilised muscle tissue, was discovered on Kangaroo Island. Also located – and boxed in high relief – is the World’s Oldest Poo though tantalisingly, the age of this Methuselah-style dung is not given. At times the prose of the enthusiastic authors waxes poetic – the elegant (!) lungfish (it was news to me that some fish had lungs) is described as ‘graceful and beautiful as an exotic dancer in flowing gowns’. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholders.

Arguably, some of the most colourful finds were found at the Wellington caves which were water-colour sketched by Augustus Earle of the HMS Beagle. This New South Wales site yielded up two of my favourite beasties – Thylacinus Carnifex, better known as the marsupial lion, which could snap off an arm with one bite, and the buffalo-sized Diprotodon, the largest-known marsupial (which was originally mistaken for an elephant.)

Boxed biographies of leading fossil finders and locations indicating where to view the fossils are appended to the end of each chapter in this highly informative book which is a must for school-aged paleontologists or anyone interested in fossils.

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SURVIVING WITH WOLVES
By Misha Defonseca, Portrait, $49.95
At first viewing, it sounds like a fairy tale or extract from a mediaeval bestiary: One snowy morning a Little Girl’s Mother and Father are taken away by Bad Men to a Far-Off Land. The little girl is adopted by a nasty godmother. One day the little girl decides to run away and find her parents. She gets lost in the woods and is adopted by a mother wolf who brings her food ... and the little girl survives to tell her tale, though unlike a fairy story she does not find her missing parents.

Surviving with Wolves is one of those heroic harrowing stories that makes me reflect on what a soft, hardship-free life I’ve been lucky enough to lead. Defonseca survived freezing weather with no shoes, encounters with brutal German soldiers (including one who tried to rape her whom she stabbed to death) wild gypsies, a primitive terrain all but bereft of food. She began her journey with two apples, a loaf of bread, some gingerbread and a compass. She was eight years old.

A prominent role model and undoubtedly one who gave her an example of courage was her grandfather, who said of Hitler, ‘... he’s a madman who wants to repaint the world in his own colour’. It is, of course, Hitler who is behind the disappearance of her parents. From he grandfather she learnt much about nature, how to use a compass, and how to laugh while from Virago, her bullying foster ‘mother’, she learnt how to hate. During her privation when she would eat the pine needles, bark of trees and even dirt, she would lift her morale by talking to her painful feet, telling them that they must go on.

This soul-warming story of heartbreak and perseverance draws the reader in so that when she finds bread and a piece of bacon we too feel as though we are enjoying a banquet. The scenes with wolves are deeply moving and in my view are yet another illustration of how mammals at large often show the unlikely capability to form a bond with other mammals. The key is to be neither aggressive nor afraid.

Her mother had read her stories of wolves which did contain any notion that wolves were dangerous. When she read Little Red Riding Hood she was outraged by its false notions of human cannibalism. In the end, she smelt of wolf which made it easier for other wolves to accept her. Acting submissive around the top wolf and even rolling on her back with her limbs in the air in imitation of a lolling pup also earned her wolverine approbation.

After surviving such a barbaric environment, the sight of a young American soldier handing out chocolates, sweets and tinned beef must have been a surreal experience. Surviving with Wolves is an honest and moving account of how an angelic-looking little girl showed extraordinary physical and moral courage in a quest for love and belonging.

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TRAVEL: Mar 05, AU Edition

PLEASURE ISLAND
Mauritius is a relatively undiscovered jewel in the Indian Ocean – so get there before everyone else does

Forget the South Pacific or Caribbean: it’s the Indian Ocean that home to some of the world’s best island hotspots. And one of the greatest of them all is the Republic of Mauritius, a uniquely multicultural African island east of Madagascar. It is so beautiful that Mark Twain wrote upon arrival: “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”

British, Indian and French influences make this destination a multicultural dream which sets Mauritius apart from other destinations – as does its bargain-basement vacation rates, which are more than fair for a true tropical paradise.

One heads to Mauritius to relax, enjoy the beach and all it has to offer, and direct flights from Perth and Sydney make getting there a relative breeze. Even better, travelers can get by on $10 to $20 a day for food, and $40 to $80 a day for lodging. When you consider what you get (the sun, beach, and aquatic activities) this really is a steal.
There are a wide variety of hotels and resorts to stay at, including those run by Beachcomber Hotels, providing a range of quality resort hotels with locations to match. Featuring superb accommodation, high standards of service, outstanding quality, plus a host of inclusions, spending time in any of these resorts is a pleasure. One can enjoy the thrill of water-skiing or windsurfing, work off some excess energy on the tennis or volleyball court, or marvel at the spectacular underwater world from a glass-bottom boat. And for a nominal fee golfers can enjoy a round on one of the most spectacular resort courses in the world, located at the Paradis resort.

To further tantalize you and provide a taste of all this country has to offer, I’ve prepared a packed three-day itinerary, for which all you need to bring is a bathing suit, suntan lotion and a relaxed attitude.

DAY 1: Grand Baie
At Mauritius’ most popular tourist center, you’ll be visually overloaded by the white sand and blue water. Some quick orientation: Grand Baie is about 18 kilometres north of Port Louis and easily accessible by the regular, albeit slow, Mauritian bus system.

In the late morning, after a breakfast of fresh juice and fruit, cruise the sheltered bay and you’ll feel the relaxed energy that makes a visit here a must. If you’ve done your research or picked up a brochure or two from your hotel’s lobby, you will be itching to do Grand Baie’s most renowned water-related activities.

Everything from yachting and snorkeling to water-skiing and simply swimming is available. The perfect weather (it is so regularly sunny, you can set your watch by it) allows for prime conditions for all these exci-ting opportunities, which come free of charge at
many resorts.

If you want a snapshot of the beautiful reefs without getting wet, take a ride on La Nessee, a semi-submersible boat that gets up close and personal with all forms of aquatic life. Other out-of-the-ordinary activities include an undersea walk, à la a Jules Verne novel. Wearing an astronaut-like helmet and lead boots, you can explore the Mauritian waters without having to swim up to the surface for air. Deep-sea fishing is also highly popular and available in the outlying areas of Grand Baie.

After outdoing yourself for a few hours enjoying one or more of these unique experiences, hit a restaurant to quell your hunger. Just outside of the beach area, you’ll see why Grand Baie is often called the Cote d’Azur of Mauritius – the shops and eateries reflect the trendy areas around them and are not tourist traps in any sense.

Dine at Sakura Restaurant for prime Japanese fare or Lotus of the Garden for original cuisine in an Indonesian setting. For true local Creole food, you’ll have to look at smaller, more intimate places around town.

Walk off the big meal by heading down Sunset Boulevard, a fashion center with unbeatable prices. After picking up new threads, head back to the restaurant area for some crafts and boutique shops which feature native art, Asian handicrafts and cheap jewelry. Drop off the loot back at your hotel (if you’re staying in Grand Baie) and then prepare for a night out on the town.

DAY 2: Ile aux Cerfs
For only 80 Mauritian rupees (just under $4) tourists and locals alike can experience a living, breathing paradise. This is how much the 20-minute ferry ride costs for you to travel from Pointe Maurice to Ile aux Cerfs, an islet on the east coast of Mauritius.

A disclaimer: if you are staying near Port Louis in the west, you’ll have to take a long bus ride to get here. Try and arrive as early in the morning as possible, since you need the whole day to enjoy the island.

Any effort to reach this slice of beauty is worth it. This will become evident once you set foot on the island’s sprawling beaches. From this vantage point, you can see the enticing lagoon waters, prime sunbathing spots and straw-roofed bars, restaurants and shops. Start out the day with what Mauritius is all about: relaxing on the beach. Pick an area (secluded spaces are available if you want to spend time looking) grab a book and just let time slip by.

The sun, sound of the surf and lazy atmosphere will make you forget about all your stress in an instant. Sleep has been known to set in for most of the sunbathers at Ile aux Cerfs.

When you do wake up from your slumber, sit back at Lor Brizan Bar with a traditional afternoon tea, or, if you want something that packs a little more punch, a Pina Colada. There is also a very convenient beach bar service as well.

Follow this up by taking a walk around the accessible section of the island’s coast (the whole walk takes 3 hours if you’re up to it) and the fact that there is heaven on earth will finally sink in – the view of the palm trees, ocean and sand is indescribable.

Grab an exotic sorbet from one of the beachside kiosks – but don’t savor it too long. The island’s last ferry ride out is at 5 p.m. and an overnight stay is prohibited.

DAY 3: Port Louis
Finish off your trip to tropical paradise with something a little different. Mauritius puts its history and many-layered culture out for all to see in the capital of Port Louis. A relatively large city, considering how small Mauritius is, a lot of interesting sight-seeing
opportunities await you here.

A good starting point is Place d’Armes in the oldest region of the city. Check out the interesting buildings here, as well as the St. James and St. Louis Cathedrals. The Port Louis Market is nearby and represents a good place to grab some lunch. It is a prime place to see Mauritians in their comfort zone, haggling for fruits, vegetables, fish, crafts, and spices.

The multiculturalism of the city is most obvious here, where people from all races and walks of life congregate daily. Remember that sellers can spot tourists a mile away and will not hesitate to quadruple prices for the souvenirs you want. To counteract this, make like locals and bargain like mad. You shouldn’t have trouble in English, since it is as widely spoken as Creole and French.

Return to Place d’Armes and find a bench or table to sit and munch at the exotic fruits bought back at the market. When that’s done, get more tastes of the varying cultures by visiting the Muslim quarter, centered around Muammar El Khadafi Square. Funny enough, the main mosque, Jummah, is not situated here. You’ll find it in the city’s bustling Chinatown area, another place worth taking a look at.

As evening comes along, you’ll find that most of the city closes down. The one shining star now is Le Caudan Waterfront, a bustling area with shops, restaurants and bars. If you want to drop more money on souvenirs, try Le Talipot or Macumba. As for dinner, ignore the fact that the area has become somewhat Americanized (there’s a Pizza Hut) and sit down at Grand Ocean City for Chinese or Kela Patta for Indian food. Though it rarely needs to prove itself, Mauritius is so much more than your typical island resort. You can be astounded by its beaches, beautiful people, relaxing opportunities, and diverse cultures all at once. Add to this string of pros the cheap cost of experiencing it all and there leaves little doubt that Mauritius is an ideal vacation spot. Take it all in, you won’t regret it. –AskMen.com

TRAVEL TIPS:
* Petty crime is an issue in Port Louis and the main tourists spots, so watch your wallet and valuables at all times.
* All travelers to Mauritius must already have a return ticket booked – proof of this is needed at the airport. The good news is, Australians don’t need a visa; just showing up with a passport lets you stay for thirty days.
* Don’t be limited only by the beaches mentioned here: Mauritius has many other great ones as well, including Belle Mare and Flic en Flacq.
* Tourism is increasing by 10% each year, so get on board before everyone else does!

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

REVENGE OF THE NERDS: Apr 05, AU Edition

REVENGE OF THE NERDS
Australian families are spending more on education than ever – but what are they getting for their money? A crash course in left-wing political indoctrination, heaps of parties, but not much in the way of real learning, says SAMANTHA HO

Once upon a time when children finished school, their families could wish them well and send them on their way. Their offspring might have decided to pursue a career in surveying, nursing, soldiering, chorus dancing, boiler-making, or home-making. But whatever well-trodden path the children chose, the majority of parents from thirty-odd years ago could look forward to having some privacy again as a couple. This was just as true for more well-to-do parents, whose release from their young came when their young intelligentsia moved out to go
to university.

Happy to escape the suburbs, Australia’s new undergraduates would collect a bunch of milk crates for furnishings and set up a share house with other students. Then they would start a band, have pregnancy scares, and read Marx (Karl, not Groucho) at bus stops while smoking French cigarettes. Quite often, the university students of old would also concentrate on confounding the working public via wacky gags like handing out the Pill to nuns while playing double bass clad only in Marx noses (Groucho this time). Then, of course, they graduated to become barristers, diplomats, doctors, politicians, and academics, building wonderful wine cellars, donating a wing or two to their old high schools, and holidaying in the south of France. Their path through university was aided by the scholarships and living allowances that the Commonwealth used to hand out to a majority of students.

Such taxpayer-funded generosity was quite forthcoming thirty years ago when tertiary institutions were no-fee finishing schools for the well-to-do, and enrolled less than a third of the more than 900,000 students who cram today’s campuses. But like all good parties, that one wasn’t meant to last, and when the Hawke Government expanded a university education into a mass market phenomenon in the late 1980s, fees appeared and started rising, as did heavy restrictions on student assistance schemes. The proportion of students receiving Commonwealth scholarships and other benefits fell from about two thirds thirty years ago to less than thirty per cent now.

The results of this shift might please armchair anthropologists given to admiring the social cohesion of countries where nine or ten generations of a single family customarily live under the one roof. Others weep.

Do you have a university student in your household? Whether you are helping with the fees or simply covering other expenses, tertiary study these days eats money. One way or another you’re probably paying through the nose for the privilege of helping your young know-it-all join the ever-expanding ranks of the university educated.

Even a place subsidised by the government under what was known as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (now it’s called Commonwealth-supported) can cost about $8,000 a year. Full-fee places for students who fall a mark or two short of the entry cut-off can be billed at more than $20,000 per year.

Then there’s all the textbooks, photocopying, stationery, SMS bills, food and fun costs, and compulsory student union fees.
The non-tuition costs of university life quickly drain the wallet with many textbooks small-run, high-price editions and annual compulsory union fees of up to $590. Not to mention another $7,000 or so each year in rent for those lucky or resourceful students who move to a share house in defiance of this age of “adultescence” – the epidemic of children living with their parents into their twenties and even thirties. And for parents whose kids live at home, the situation is even worse.

So is all this worth the thousands you and the students pay, and the billions the government pours in courtesy of your taxes?

When the government recently admitted a drastic shortage of skilled labour and said that Australia might have to admit another 20,000 foreign tradespeople to keep industry and the economy alive, they certainly weren’t talking about any urgent need for more batches of “social researchers”, “advocates”, or “change agents” – all graduate career paths listed in this year’s NSW universities admissions guide.
No, they were talking about graduates with functional and constructive skills – engineers, health professionals, and people who can actually do stuff like build ships, rather than merely interpreting the changing role of seamen in representations of queer identity.

Of course, the trades are not for the squeamish - wielding welders can be a good deal more hazardous to one’s health than waving about a sociology text.

Physically, at least. For surely it can’t be good for the soul to spend years indulging in intellectual tomfoolery – which is the only way to describe an awful lot of what goes on in Australia’s tertiary classrooms.

Some of the more offensive variety are disguised amongst what would seem to be fairly straightforward but growing vocational areas, like communications. That’s journalism, public relations, or marketing right? Wrong.

Have a look at the communications offerings at one of Australia’s more cutting-edge institutions, the University of Technology, Sydney. Here we find the wonderful Bachelor of Communications (social inquiry), which gives whiners the opportunity to feel right at home in what used to be the realm of tough, critical thinking. But then again, why master the hard-won secrets of engineering or physics when you can indulge in the opinion-page pleasing zone “where social theory, research and communication converge. It offers … [students] the skills to participate effectively in social change.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that social change was what pioneering doctors, lawyers or engineers did in bringing their skills to the outback or to the downtrodden, or what urban planners could do by ditching the Macquarie Fields/Redfern-style ghetto model of public housing.

But no, social change is a discrete topic in today’s universities.
The “professional subjects” for budding social changers include “social change, Australian history and politics, belief systems, cultural studies, globalisation, [and] gender and diversity.” (A prize for the reader who can guess which way this all leans in terms of its ideological underpinnings.)

And while we’re at UTS, let’s take a look at some of the traditional courses. How about nursing, an area where the Federal Government just gave UTS a stack more places to make up for the University of Sydney’s decision to phase out of undergraduate nursing.

In between learning to care for people, budding nurses have the opportunity to study Organisational Relationships, where they learn about “critical issues of health care delivery … with particular emphasis on the effects of power, policy and politics”.

Do you have any young kids, or are you planning some? Well, let’s take a look at what our next generation of teachers are learning.
With Australia crying out for more skilled, literate and numerate workers who aren’t snobs about doing hard yakka, what better subject for our teachers could there be than UTS’s Sociology of Education, where topics include “the direction of social change and the nature of globalisation”. No wonder so few people were surprised when Wayne Sawyer, president of the NSW English Teachers Association, announced that he thought his profession wasn’t doing its job if students kept graduating and voting for the wrong guy, i.e., Howard.

In an era crying out for Realpolitik, is it any wonder the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s latest online graduate recruiting drive features a trainee whose background is not in the humanities, but in the logic-heavy disciplines of mathematics and computer science? Plus the trainee, Axel, has actually learnt foreign languages instead of doing vacuous “cultural studies”.

But then again, if DFAT have any questions about how the world works, they only need to pick up the phone to the student unions, who operate on budgets totalling hundreds of millions of dollars nationally, and who use their funding to develop deeply wise policies and positions on everything. With membership of student unions compulsory in every state except Western Australia, chances are the students in your household have been forced to give money to a small clique of delusional ratbags who would die off the moment that unionism becomes voluntary.

First cab off the rank could be the National Union of Students (NUS), an um- brella organisation that collects millions of dollars each year from its affiliate campuses.

The NUS spends up big on get-togethers where it thrashes out wildly entertaining “platforms”, such as a gem from 2001 when the NUS expressed its outrage that the US and its allies attacked the Taliban and al Qa’ida, in a “racist war of terror”. In a dastardly twist, the evil US’s attack on Islam’s theocratic fascists in Afghanistan “perpetuates women’s and queer oppression”.
Cool, huh?

The Taliban executed homosexuals by collapsing walls on them and barred women from attending school, but somehow it all turns into a Western plot, and the NUS called on “the US government and its ally, Australia, to withdraw troops and military operations”. It would be hilarious if this was some nutter’s blog instead of a multimillion dollar organisation funded by hundreds of thousands of university students.

The totalitarian impulse has bled out of much of Western society since the end of the Cold War, but not in student unionism, where the NUS proclaims that “under capitalism the university does not function as a site of critical learning, but rather as a training ground for industry and big business.”

OK, so how do we explain the skills shortage and the preponderance of “social change” courses?

But wait, it gets better: “A fundamental restructuring of the education sector, and of society, is necessary.”

Says who? A pack of undergraduate nitwits who have grown fat off the proceeds of compulsory student unionism.

Luckily for students who would rather make up their own minds whether they want to spend hundreds of dollars each year joining a union, the Federal Government will later this year introduce Voluntary Student Unionism legislation to the Senate. Expect plenty of noise.

And as pointed out in a recent rare moment of the Sydney Morning Herald reporting first and spinning second, the NUS is struggling to come up with a response to the dire threat of consumer choice.

Their main counter attack so far has been an Orwellian assault on language. From the NUS website: “It is very important that we take control of the language being used … Voluntary Student Unionism [VSU] is a positive term in a linguistic sense, and in an ideological sense, for some.”

Can’t let choice be positive: “Instead of VSU … say Anti-Student Organisation.”

In fact, don’t even use the word ‘union’ in this individualist era: “Instead of student union say student organisation or student council.”

And sidestep the ugly truth: “Never refer to compulsory fees or membership. Always use universal membership or universal fees.”
So this will be an interesting year if you have a student at home.
Either they will be happily under the capitalist thumb, learning something useful or intellectually rigorous, or they will somehow combine a zeal for social change with white-hot fury that the Commonwealth wants to give students like them more freedom of choice.

And if you want to get your money’s worth when helping a child through university, encourage them to learn the core disciplines of their area of interest, subjects like mathematics, history, or a language, rather than content-free spin-offs such as social change or cultural studies.
University costs plenty, so focus on the protein – not the frippery.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)

FOOD: Mar 05, AU Edition

THE VAST WASTELAND
Australia’s cable cooking programs give Eli Jameson tummy trouble

Is Foxtel holding Neil Perry’s dog hostage somewhere in the bowels of its Pyrmont broadcasting facility? The question would almost be worth asking, given the amount of time the celebrity chef and Rockpool owner spends schilling for the cable provider and submitting to mock interviews about why he’s so in love with his new digital cable setup.

Of course, that’s a bit over the top. Foxtel doesn’t need to use standover tactics to get Perry to lend a hand any more than Range Rover does to get Perry to drive one of their cars. (As a “Land Rover Ambassador”, that company’s website tells us, “Neil Perry drives a Range Rover which perfectly represents his position as one of the countries leading chefs owning and operating the famous Rockpool and XO restaurants in Sydney.”) Instead, the cable provider simply airs series after series of Perry-themed programming, including his deadly-dull restaurant infomercial known as “Neil Perry’s Rockpool Sessions.”

As a result of all this publicity, Perry has catapulted himself into that upper firmament of brand-name celebrity chefs that includes former Perry employee Kylie Kwong and Sydney café owner Bill Granger – who, in keeping with the small-world nature of the Australian food world, once worked with Kwong as well. (This is in contrast to such great Australian chefs as Tim Pak Poy, who for years ran one of the best restaurants in the country but generally stayed out of the limelight).

Close business histories are not all the three have in common. Perry, Kwong and Granger share an admirable belief that consumers should demand the freshest ingredients possible, a philosophy that has led to better quality and diversity on Australian shelves. And, on their shows at least (when there isn’t an army of prep chefs around to do the scut work), the three also preach a gospel of simplicity which holds that cooking should be easy, not intimidating, and most of all, not time-consuming. Endless chopping, basting, and roasting are out; a quick sear in the grill pan and a drizzle with a just-whisked dressing before rejoining one’s guests for another champers in the backyard is in. One almost never sees a “hero” – the pre-prepared dish that went into the oven ages ago to be pulled out at just the right moment in shooting – on these shows, since everything is quickly tossed together a la minute, as they say in the restaurant business.

This is all very well and good, but those of us who actually like to muck about in the kitchen, get excited when zucchini flowers show up in the shops, and never buy pre-made ravioli because it’s so much more fun to make one’s own, I think. Or rather, back in the heat of the kitchen, while everyone else sits in the lounge room watching Bill Granger’s family scramble over each other to eat breakfast in bed.
At least Ian Hewitson (a pioneer Melbourne restaurateur in his own right), with all his sponsored brand loyalties, spends most of his show, Huey’s Cooking Adventures, actually cooking. Which makes the fact that he once told viewers to make garlic mayonnaise by first glopping a few spoonfuls of store-bought mayo into a bowl almost forgivable.

Sure, that may seem lazy, but it’s nothing compared to Granger, who thinks twenty minutes stirring risotto is a chore and once spent an entire segment of his Lifestyle Channel program explaining that Italian delis are great places to buy ready-to-eat picnic supplies. Now really, in 2005 Australia, do we need to be told that Italian delis are great places to pick up good cheese and olives?
Thus those looking to TV to improve their skills in the kitchen in a serious manner – and not just pick up a new way to combine seared salmon, sesame oil, and Asian greens – have to look abroad, especially to the UK, to do so. (If someone had told me, a decade ago, that today most of my cookbooks would be by British chefs, I would have asked them if they also saw a serious taste bud-injuring accident in my future).

Nigella Lawson, for one, is a great believer in celebrating the techniques of cooking, and is absolutely unapologetic about the fact that time and effort spent in the kitchen is in no way mutually exclusive with having a good time. Fellow Briton Gary Rhodes, meanwhile, manages to combine a passion for fresh ingredients with an instinctual feel for the fine line that separates what is challengingly possible in the home kitchen to that which makes ambitious solo chefs pull their hair out, pour another glass of wine, and order pizza instead. And even Jamie Oliver, behind his luverly-jubberly cockney routine, still manages to cram an awful lot of ideas and “hey-I-didn’t-know-that” tips into his show.

It’s a shame, though, that a country that likes to think of itself as sophisticated about food and where a woman can lose the chance to lead her political party because her kitchen isn’t sleek enough is not producing more chefs who want to share their knowledge and do their part to increase viewers’ skills. Certainly there is a market for it, if the demand for books and programs by the likes of Lawson and Oliver is any indication. Maybe Perry and Co. are worried that if too many secrets get out, Australians will stop going to their restaurants for the really challenging stuff and start doing it themselves.

WONDER FROM DOWN UNDER
Gin is generally thought of as a historically British spirit – think District Commissioners touching it with bitters on the verandah at the end of a hard day administering their particular corner of the Empire, or the very English Col. Henderson berating the help for putting ice in the G&Ts in The Year of Living Dangerously – but it actually has a very international history.

Invented by the Dutch (hence the phrase “Dutch courage”) in the 1600s, the British took to it in droves during the reign of William and Mary, and later discovered mixing it with tonic water was an agreeable way to ward off malaria.

But today some of the best gin in the world isn’t being produced in Northern Europe, but much closer to home in New Zealand. Sold in a tall, sleek bullet of a bottle, South’s makers advise that their customers “leave the tonic in the fridge” – and they’re right. This is a gin that exists on an entirely different plane. Martini drinkers who would never think of sullying their cocktail shaker with anything but Bombay Sapphire will suddenly wonder how they had spent so many years in the wilderness.

Because the thing about South is that it is as smooth as a newborn’s skin, the result of a double-distilling process that creates a grain-neutral spirit that works as incredibly clean canvas for the brewer. From there, traditional ingredients such as juniper berries (of course), lemon, orange, and coriander seeds are added – as well as some very new world ingredients, including manuka berries and kawakawa leaves. The end result is a gin that, despite the high alcohol content, lets drinkers play with it almost like a wine, picking out various flavors that come and go as it passes through the mouth. Just a touch of vermouth and a quick shake-and-strain with some very cold ice is all that’s needed to bring it to life.

South’s parent company also sells fantastic premium vodka called 42 Below – a reference to their distillery’s line of latitude – in a variety of flavours. Their manuka honey vodka, chilled to the point where it starts to get a little syrupy, is particularly delicious.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)

BISHOP TO CHECK MATING: Apr 05, AU Edition

BISHOP TO CHECK MATING
Home care, not day care. A “French” model for pre-schooling. Helping “supermums” do it all. Investigate editor JAMES MORROW recently caught up with controversial federal MP Bronwyn Bishop, who’s just launched a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s flagging birth rate and the work-life balance, to discuss what Canberra can do to persuade more people to have kids, and help those who’ve already taken the parenthood plunge

INVESTIGATE: You’ve just announced that your Standing Committee on Family & Human Services is launching an inquiry into Australia’s birthrate and work-life balance, and perhaps the best way to
begin is to ask, what ways do you see government being able to effect change in this sort of area of Australians’ lives?

BRONWYN BISHOP, MP: Well the first thing is, it’s not peculiar to us, it is a problem affecting the whole of the Western civilized world, that countries are losing population. So there’s already been a lot of discussion about it, and I think that it is timely that we start to bring it together.

My interest grew in this initially from 1999, when I was Minister for Aged Care, and when I had responsibility for the Year of the Older Person, and of course I really wanted to understand and document the impact of an aging population on Australia’s population. So I commissioned Access Economics to do the research, and that
was the first research that was done – from which we subsequently got the Inter-generational Report.

But the problems that we identified – how do you keep mature-age workers in the work force, issues of productivity, all that – we’ve passed that period, and we know where to go. The corollary is: what do we do about people in their twenties and thirties? We know that people stay in education longer, people have children later, we know that one quarter of women will never have any children, and we want to look at the reasons why people are doing that.

INVESTIGATE: Sure, and the reasons a lot of people have cited are that people want to have a career, get themselves situated, have various life experiences, travel, and all that – how can you effect a cultural shift and have people go back to where they want to start a family earlier?

BISHOP: It’s not a question of going back to where we were; it’s a question of what pressures can be relieved through the use of public policy. What can we do to make people feel that they can in fact create an environment and a home where they can feel comfortable keeping a relationship and a family intact, and what are the policies that can help bring that about?

Now under the terms of reference we’re looking at taxation, because taxation is the driver of so many things and so many behaviours. Obviously the question of childcare will arise, and we will be certainly looking at other countries’ models, and we will be looking at countries like France. In terms of childcare they seem to have a system which gives more children care, and their birthrate is now above ours – they’ve pushed it up again.

INVESTIGATE: Of course if you look at a place like France, you’re also talking about a place where you have large groups of immigrant families who are having many more children than the native-born population, to say nothing of all the economic problems they’ve had from the social benefits that make it more expensive to
hire someone…

BISHOP: Well, France has a problem with a lot of the way it organizes itself, such as the fact that they introduced a 35-hour work week. We’re not the slightest bit interested in that, and I think it has been pejorative for the French nation. And from a family point of view, there is a lot of evidence around that it actually makes it harder for women to work and raise a family because it is a lot tougher to have certainty of hours.

But in other policies, such as where they have an effective pre-school system for children three to six, which covers 99% of French children, certainly immigration is part of the question – we have immigration here too and we would cease to grow if were not
for immigration.

INVESTIGATE: On the question of childcare here, there’s a huge problem with the actual number of childcare places. Parents get a benefit for the money they pay, and get some of that back, and that goes with the whole question of tax policy – but an awful lot of parents can’t get their kids into a place. What can be done about this?

BISHOP: Look, why do we put all our resources into childcare places, which at the end of the day is an institution? Why aren’t we looking, as we have with other service deliveries, why aren’t we looking at the home? We made a good start with the 30% rebate which will come in from 2006 for childcare expenses, but again that’s through childcare places. We’ll certainly be looking at options and alternatives.
Going back to my aged care analogy, people don’t really want to be in institutions, they want to be at home. And asMinister I introduced thousands of [funded] places for people to remain in their own homes. So there’s no reason why we shouldn’t look at service delivery in other ways.

INVESTIGATE: When you say “in the home”, you mean making it easier for parents to stay at home with their children, or to have people come in and look after kids, or what?

BISHOP: Well, we actually need young women to return to the workforce. We made a big investment in their education, the country needs a return on that, and they know they’ve got a one-in-two chance of being divorced. They need to get their skills up because they might be heading up their own families. So all these things are all very real issues.

But looking at help in the home – instead of having to go into an institution to do that – there is some evidence of that happening in France. So we’ll be looking at those things as well.

INVESTIGATE: What about leave policies? I know that’s something that Pru Goward has been talking a lot about – questions of how you get people to take advantage of benefits fully. For men, for example, they may not want to take advantage of parental leave in their office if it leaves them vulnerable to getting overtaken by someone else in their office who doesn’t.

BISHOP: To me, maternity leave is no doubt to be discussed. My personal view is that when you’re looking at issues of decisions to have a child and to be in the workforce, it’s not a thirteen week problem, it’s a thirteen year problem. And it could be a thirty year problem! But in reality, we have to look outside the square and look beyond our regular way of doing things.

INVESTIGATE: Speaking of outside the square, you’ve brought up France a couple of times, and you’ve mentioned their polices of services in the home. Help us get our heads across some of these ideas, how this would work.

BISHOP: One of the ideas would be to have a tax deduction for paying people who come and work in your home to come and care for not only children but also do aged care, look after grown parents, and so on, in people’s homes. I took a look at the ABS figures and found that for those sorts of jobs that are in the black economy, they’re worth about six billion dollars in foregone tax. So it’s not all an expenditure question, it’s also one of creating proper jobs – all those things need to be looked at.

INVESTIGATE: I’m sure you saw the Australian this morning, which reported the latest numbers from the OECD on taxation and marginal tax rates and how much money the government takes. There seems to be a lot of talking about giving people benefits for this and that rather than just cutting people’s tax, letting them keep more on the front end, and making up their own minds what to do with it.

BISHOP: Look, my personal views on this are well known. I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of free enterprise and individualism. Individuals will always spend their money more wisely than governments who take it and say we’re going to spend it on your behalf. That is the basic position I come from philosophically, and the principles of free enterprise are really as immutable as the laws of gravity.

INVESTIGATE: So then just as part of thinking outside the square, your inquiry might wind up recommending a real overhaul in the way we do things in this country, and get to keep more money in the first place?

BISHOP: Well I’m certainly not going to predict what the outcomes will be. But there is more than one way to give money back to people. One way is to collect less money in the first place, through tax cuts, another way is through tax deductions, another is through rebates. And we’re going to have a 30% rebate on child care expenses in approved places. We have given the birth of a new child $3,000 – which is giving people more of their own money back.

INVESTIGATE: Well of course the $3,000 is great for new parents, but it’s a one-off, and they’re not getting that money back every year.

BISHOP: There is also the $600 per child, which is better than nothing…

INVESTIGATE: So with the idea of bringing people into the home, you’d have to obviously develop some sort of new accreditation system I presume? How would that work? I could imagine there would be a real danger of creating a whole new bureaucracy around this.

BISHOP: One thing – and these are all things we have to explore – we have to explore withholding tax, and getting these carers a tax file number, and getting them into the system. You know, when I speak to large groups of people and say hands up anyone who knows someone who pays for these sorts of tax in cash, well, forests of hands go up. It’s in the black economy, and it’s money that could be captured. But it’s just one of the things we’re thinking about.

INVESTIGATE: What are some of these other ideas that we might be seeing down the track out of this inquiry? This is, after all, the number one issue these days it seems.

BISHOP: Absolutely, there are some firms that have crèches, and there’s Family Tax Benefit, and we’ll talk about that. So there are just a lot of things to be discussed. And I think the inquiry gives us the opportunity – because so many areas have been discussed in so many unconnected ways – to bring it all together and connect up the dots.

INVESTIGATE: The thing with all these inquiries is getting from connecting all the dots to getting the government to change the way people do things – and as you say there are ways to change opportunities, to change the economic incentive, but how do you change the social attitudes around things such as having children in your twenties, when it’s safer and easier to do so?

BISHOP: Well of course, everything’s moved up, hasn’t it? I mean, forty is the new thirty; thirty is the new twenty. We’re living longer. We’ve got more time. But the biological clock hasn’t moved, of course…

INVESTIGATE: The whole problem of women who say, “oops, I forgot to have a baby” – is your inquiry going to look at ways to change attitudes and remind people that no matter what life expectancies are at 35 your fertility is declining and you need to be seriously thinking about the order in which you do things?

BISHOP: Really our concern is, what are the barriers that make people think “it’s not for me”, or “maybe I would like to but I’ll only have one”? What are the barriers? We want to hear from women. We want to hear from employers, we want to hear about the impact of the return of women to the workforce and of women with tremendous skills being able to be mothers and wives without being a supermum. Some people talk about the myth of the supermum: it’s reality. So that’s what we’re starting out looking at. Then we will look at recommendations from that for public policy.

We’ve seen tremendous changes in the culture in the last thirty years. In the ‘80s we had a government that was encouraging people to leave the workforce at 55 – they simply had not done the forward projections. Anybody who had done the forward work would’ve known that was nuts: that they couldn’t afford to live the good life when they were only halfway through it. We had the situation where legislation was brought in changing the divorce laws in the ‘70s; that was a tremendous change in the culture. So cultural change has been fermenting for the last thirty years. And in the last twenty years there has been quite a tremendous shift. What we’re looking at is, how can we have good public policy?

That means people can have good fulfilling lives, and that involves having a family and having children. What are the impediments that people feel? What are the constraints? What are the things that make people think, “no, it’s not for me”?

What are those things, and what do we need to do in terms of good public policy – tax, providing services people. That is the question.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

FAMILY SECRET: Apr 05, AU Edition

FAMILY SECRET
Untold tens of thousands of women terminate their pregnancies every year in Australia. Thousands of others, desperate for a child of their own, undergo IVF and other painful and expensive fertility treatments. And, just to make things more interesting, somewhere around 20,000 kids are sitting in Australian foster homes right this moment, many of them craving a permanent, loving family to truly call their own.In between these stark realities stands adoption: an issue that, despite recent publicity surrounding it, most Australians leave in the “too hard” basket. Investigate editor JAMES MORROW sorts out the myths from realities and looks at why the adoption option deserves a second look

The first thing many strangers say when they meet Christine* and her five-year-old daughter is, “she looks
just like you”. Indeed, mother and daughter do share the same skin tone and chiseled European features.

The only thing they don’t share is DNA: Christine had ovarian cancer when she was 19, had both ovaries removed, and although grateful to be alive was left unable to have children of her own. And so, like a small number of Australians, Christine and her husband went down the long, sometimes expensive, and often frustrating path of adopting a baby in this country.

As highlighted by the surprise reunion earlier this year between Health Minister Tony Abbott and the son his girlfriend gave up for adoption when he was 19, adoption was once a routine practice in this country. But for a variety of reasons – increased access to abortion, more government assistance for single mothers, political concerns about “stolen generations”, and a loss of stigma around single motherhood among them – adoption has slowly but surely gone out of favour in this country.

In fact, there are now more babies adopted from overseas in Australia than actual Australian-born children placed as adoptive children in local homes. In 2003-04, the latest years for which figures are available, just 73 Australian-born children were adopted, down from 78 in the 2002-03 reporting period – continuing a trend that has been spiraling downwards for nearly three decades.

By way of comparison, in 1980-81, nearly twenty times that many local children (1,388 to be exact) were placed in adoptive homes.

Yet despite the much-discussed Australian fertility crisis – our 1.75 child-per-woman rate is hardly enough to keep the population steady – on the one hand and the vast number of children living in foster or “out-of-home” care on the other (more than 20,000 kids at any given time and growing, according to the latest numbers from the Australian Institute for Family Studies), adoption continues to remain on the sidelines of the family planning agenda.

Part of the reason for this is the time, effort and money involved in adopting a child – though, to be sure, many fertility treatments can also take years and run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Rules, procedures and costs vary from state to state and agency to agency, but $5,000 is a good starting point for any in-country adoption, with overseas adoptions likely to run to $20,000 to $40,000 or more, especially once plane tickets, accommodation, and other travel-related expenses are factored in. And money is no guarantee of getting a child, either: even qualified parents have been known to wait five, six, seven years or more before being allowed to take home a new member of their family, though two to three years seems the norm. “Adoptions are made so very carefully,” says Jane West, a spokesperson for Anglicare Adoption Services in Sydney.

Beyond being able to afford the cost (fees are waived forspecial-needs adoptions, says West), typically couples need to be between the ages of 21 and 45, have been married for three years (though some agencies accept de facto partners and singles) and be Australian citizens. Much of the expense comes from the training, background and reference checks and medical screens which are all performed. Once these steps are completed, the lucky couple is then put in a pool of applicants with no guarantee that they will ever be chosen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, West points out that when a child is placed for adoption, his or her birth mother is given extensive counseling (as is the father, if he can be located) – a far cry from the bad old days when young mothers had to give up their children literally without so much as a second look. Birth mothers are given a selection of profiles of potential adoptive families to choose from, and have final say over with whom their child is placed.

“We had never really had any plans to adopt when we got married,” says Christine, who says that she had been thinking about the idea for a while when, one night, she turned to her husband in bed and said, “what do you think about adopting a child?” To her surprise, he thought that was a great idea, and before they knew it the couple from Sydney’s northern suburbs were taking the first steps into the maze of NSW’s adoption regime.

When they started the process in 1998, they had planned to go to Romania to find a child because they were under the belief, subtly encouraged by social workers, that there were simply no children available to adopt in Australia. And Christine and her husband were fine with that idea; as she says, “we figured that we’d be doing the right thing by giving a baby who needed one a home, the baby would be happy, we’d be happy and, well, everyone would be happy!”

But the more they researched it and found out that it was actually possible, the more they became convinced that they wanted to adopt a child born in this country – though Christine admits that initially she was scared off by the whole process of “open adoption”, which allows for contact between the birth mother and her offspring. (Indeed, the ongoing rights and feelings of the birth mother are one reason why Christine’s family has asked for anonymity).

“At first, I have to admit, it was really difficult from my perspective. It was like the changing of the guard: one family is accepting this new responsibility, and seeing the woman who gave birth to your child is probably the most difficult part of the whole adoption process,” she says.

In fact, when Christine and her husband initially filed their applications, they said that they were not keen on having contact with
the birth family, though they were encouraged when a DoCS social worker told them that, paradoxically, “the families who say they want the least contact often turn out to be the best candidates for open adoption”.

Even though it was initially difficult (her daughter sees her birth mother twice a year: once around her birthday, and once around Christmastime), Christine says it has actually been a blessing in disguise. “For my daughter, I think she’ll benefit from the contact,” she says. “And I know from my circle of friends who adopted from overseas that we are lucky to have this contact. In the beginning, yeah, it was extra stress, but now five years down the track I think it’s fantastic.” One feature Christine is especially keen on is the fact that her daughter has a real sense of where she comes from: “She knows her story, she knows everything, but it doesn’t really come up much. It’s just how it is. For the most part it’s been really positive.”

While Christine’s story has had a happy ending, she and others who have been intimately involved with adoption in Australia are concerned that, with so many children in need, far too many are being shuttled back and forth from foster homes to unsuitable and abusive family situations and back again – hurting their abilities to form trusting bonds with anyone, and creating thousands upon thousands of adults who will, in all likelihood, have repeated run-ins with the law or simply become wards of the state. A recent study by the CREATE Foundation, an advocacy group for children in state care, confirms that that is just what is happening, with those in foster care reporting that they are missing school, are victims of bullying, have trouble making and keeping friends, and are subject to everything from decreased educational aspirations to emotional instability and violence.

The head of the NSW Adoptive Parents Association, who, like Christine, has concerns for her privacy and that of her adoptive child’s birth mother and thus asks that her last name not be used, is a woman called Sonia. She recalls going to an Adelaide conference on adoption in 2004. Sitting in the audience amongst a thousand other delegates, she heard that there were many children in various state foster care systems who had gone through eleven or more placements in the space of just a few years – numbers confirmed by CREATE. According to Sonia, there is a golden opportunity here to connect at least some of these children up with parents wishing to adopt, and she believes the government ought to set some sort of time limit – even just a loose one – stating that after a certain amount of time in foster care, a child should be eligible to go into the adoption pool.

“Surely adopting would be more appropriate than long-term fostering”, she says. “We have learned from the stolen generation, and we’ve learned from the days when we forced adoption on girls when there wasn’t any other option, but since we don’t have that social structure anymore where women are forced into doing something they don’t want to do, why can’t we do something about it?”, she asks. “If a child has to spend, say, a year in foster care while some issues are sorted out, that’s one thing. But if we see that a child is going back and forth from foster home to birth parent and then back out again to some other foster home, there has to be a point at which we say, enough is enough?”

Having children is one of the most emotional and important issues to face Australians, both as individuals and as a nation. Without enough young people who have been raised up to be solid, productive citizens, fifty years from now the country will find itself in the same position as contemporary Western Europe.

There, an aging population which is incapable of replacing itself has been forced to make what now looks like a devil’s bargain with various increasingly hostile immigrant groups in order to keep their leaky welfare state economies afloat. While this sort of situation is unlikely to occur here – for one thing, Australia is generally a lot better at assimilating new migrants – the fact remains, we’re not raising enough kids to keep our economy growing at the sort of clip that has, until recently, been standard operating procedure.

So where does adoption fit in? Certainly, it takes a very special sort of person to decide to go through filling out the forms, sitting through the interviews, and writing the cheques that go along with becoming an adoptive parent. And, on the other hand, it also takes a very special kind of person to recognize that, under their particular circumstances, their child might be better off being placed with another family. All anecdotal indicators suggest that there are large numbers of parents who would consider adopting children if they thought that the process was easier and that there were more Australian-born kids who not only needed permanent homes, but were eligible for them as well. (Christine recalls that in a moment of candour, a DoCS social worker – who was later happily proved wrong – told her “there are no healthy babies out there for adoption”, an attitude which surely causes plenty of prospective parents to chuck in the towel before they even begin).

There are many things that need to happen before adoption is thought of as more than just a pricey and rare special offering on Australians’ menu of reproductive choices. Although Parliament has just undertaken an inquiry into international adoptions chaired by Bronwyn Bishop, MP (see interview, p. 42), something ought to be done on a federal level to streamline the domestic adoption process and streamline the chaotic maze of regulations that go from state to state. Part of this should include a look at allowing private adoptions, a process that has worked successfully for years in the United States to put couples in touch with women who want to adopt out a child.

Furthermore, too, cultural attitudes must shift, and concerns about repeating the mistakes of the past must eventually subside if they get in the way of doing good in the future. The number of terminations and children in foster care on the one hand and, on the other, the number of couples going through difficult infertility treatments shows that there are lots of parents who want children but can’t have them – and vice versa – in Australia.

* Not her real name; due to privacy concerns and Australia’s open adoption regime which keeps birth parents involved in their children’s lives, all the adoptive parents contacted by Investigate and named in this article have asked to remain anonymous.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Nov 05, AU Edition

WHERE TRADITION RULES
Once a closed state, Carol Pucci discovers Laos is an unspoiled treat

LUANG PRABANG, Laos – At first it sounds like thunder. Then I recognize the beat of a drum and the hollow ring of a gong. It’s 4 a.m. and the neighbours across the street, the Buddhist monks of Wat Sene, are starting their day.

Two hours later, I step around the desk clerk asleep on the floor in the lobby of the Senesouk Guest House and walk outside. Lined up next to the red and gold pavilions inside the temple gate are dozens of orange-robed monks about to begin their daily ritual of collecting alms.

Barefoot young novices, some just school-age boys, follow the lead of the older monks as they walk in a single-file procession, tipping their lacquered bowls toward women kneeling along the roadside offering dollops of sticky rice.

One young monk yawns; another smiles when a woman substitutes a candy bar instead of rice. No one speaks.

The scene repeats itself every morning on nearly every street, country road and back alley in Luang Prabang, the ancient former royal capital of Laos. Thirty-two Buddhist temples housing more than 500 monks are part of a cache of historical treasures that led UNESCO to declare this the best-preserved traditional town in Southeast Asia.
Set 2,300 feet above sea level on a peninsula at the junction of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers in northern Laos, the town of Luang Prabang, part of a jungle province surrounded by teak forests and limestone mountains, has always been a special place among the spiritual.

The first kingdom of Laos was established here in the 14th century. The last king to rule the country – Sisavang Vatthana – lived in the Royal Palace, now a museum, until shortly after a communist takeover following the Vietnam War.

Laos became the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in 1975 and reopened in the late 1980s to outsiders after years of isolation. With its temples and collection of French-style mansions and shop houses, Luang Prabang was declared a World Heritage site in 1995, and began attracting Western travelers drawn to the absence of cars and crime and easy, slow pace.

Small enough to walk around in a few hours, this is a town that so far seems to have found its way onto the Southeast Asia tourist route without compromising its culture.

Along Thanon Xieng Thong, the sleepy main street lined with temples glittering with mirrored mosaic tiles, women wearing long, slim silk skirts amble by on bicycles or motorbikes, shading themselves with parasols.

Banana and palm trees shade alleyways leading to the misty Mekong. Pots boil over charcoal and wood fires at open-air breakfast restaurants. At the morning market, women crouch on low stools as they split sugar cane with machetes.

It’s possible to buy a cheeseburger, a latte or get a foot massage at a string of businesses catering to Western travelers. But there are no McDonald’s or Starbucks or high-rise hotels, and the World Heritage status is likely to quash any wholesale moves toward gentrification.
Laws ban construction of modern hotels in the historic center.

Instead, local officials encourage developers to renovate stylish old mansions, built when Laos was a French colony and European architecture thrived.

“The question is, how far do we want to go?” says Tara Gujadhur, an American hired by a Dutch organization to help local officials develop ecotourism.

The number of tourists visiting Luang Prabang grew from 67,000 in 1997 to 170,000 in 2002. “Our goal is not to become another Chiang Mai (a town in Northern Thailand that’s lost much of its charm to an influx of Western tourists) or to follow Thailand’s lead.”

Best advice: Get here soon. Rise early. Chat with a monk. Cruise the Mekong in a longtail boat. Wave at the sweet-potato and peanut farmers working the terraced hillsides.

Sit back. Sip an ice coffee at a riverside cafe at sunset.

For now at least, Luang Prabang is much like what most of Southeast Asia used to be – a slice of the world made for slowing down.

It didn’t take long for me to become a regular at the Sack Restaurant next door to my guesthouse where the bill for a banana pancake with a thin coat of honey, and a coconut shake, came to about $2.

One morning, the young owner split open a coconut for my shake, then while the pancake was cooking, took off on his motorcycle, and returned a few minutes later with his own breakfast.

“This is what Lao people eat,” he laughed, opening a packet of liver steamed in a banana leaf.

Most people speak French as well as Lao and almost everyone is anxious to practice their English.

I wandered into the temple grounds at Wat Sene one afternoon with hopes of putting a name and a face to the sea of orange robes filing by in the morning procession.

A young man standing outside near a giant standing Buddha figure wrapped in a silk sash introduced himself as Monk Chantha, age 20.
He dreams of one day teaching or working in computers. In the meantime, as a novice, he studies, prays and observes the many rules of Theravada Buddhism.

“No driving, no killing animals, no drinking, no eating after noon. And no swimming,” he smiles as we stand talking in the midday heat. “Only showers.”

Lao boys become monks for a day, a week, months or years, often as a way of gaining merit for their parents or a relative. Chantha, like many short-term monks, entered the temple in exchange for an education his family could not otherwise afford.

We exchanged e-mail addresses, but he warned that I might not hear from him often. “For us, it’s very expensive,” he says. I checked later at an Internet cafe. The price was about $1.50 per hour.
Westerners can travel like kings all over Southeast Asia, but Laos offers exceptional value. The currency is the kip, and with a 1,000-kip note worth about 20 cents, change for a $20 adds up to a thick wad of colorful bills.

An air-conditioned room in the eight-room Senesouk Guesthouse, with polished teak floors and modern bathrooms, costs $40; It’s possible to eat well at any of the riverside restaurants for $5-$6 a person including a large bottle of Beer Lao. There’s also a handful of upscale European-style guesthouses and bistros that cater to Western wallets, and a few are worth a splurge.

A bargain at $100 a night is a deluxe room in the Villa Santi, an elegant and graceful hotel in a mansion owned by the family of a former royal princess. Around the corner, at the French-owned L’Elephant bistro, friends and I sampled a menu of Laotian specialties for $15 each that included betel leaf soup, marinated pork and banana flower salad, marinated buffalo, and tropical fruits seasoned with pepper and lemon grass syrup.

Tourism has brightened the economic prospects for many in a country where the per capita income is $500 a year.

Longtail boats once carried only fishermen. Now they ferry tourists along the twisting Mekong. Twenty-five dollars buys a trip to the Pak Ou caves two hours upstream where grottoes carved into limestone cliffs house hundreds of Buddha statues. On the way back, the boats stop at a village where the locals make whiskey from rice and another that specializes in paper making and silk weaving.

Lim Somsy, a villager who sells paper lamps he makes from the bark of mulberry trees, explains that until five years ago, most of the 200 families living in the Mekong village of Xang Khone only farmed rice. Then tourism took off and the “whole village benefited.”

Perhaps it has to do with living under a Soviet-style government, but locals have adopted an entrepreneurial spirit that’s endearing in contrast with high-energy cities like Bangkok or Saigon, where travelers are sometimes hassled by annoying touts and scam artists.
“Lucky, lucky,” a young woman squatting on a straw mat piled with rows of silk scarves calls out as I walked by her stall at the night market. “You buy from me please.”

She was among dozens of women who come in from the villages each night carrying bags filled with hand-sewn and woven textiles. “How much do you want to pay?” she asks, unfolding two or three scarves in colors that caught my eye.

In the village of Ban Aen, about a half-hour’s drive from Luang Prabang, brick and tile have replaced dried palm and thatched bamboo on some of the houses, signs of the new prosperity.

Bouncing around in the back of a tuk-tuk, an open-air truck with bench seats and a canopy, I came here to catch a boat for a 10-minute trip along the Nam Khan to the jungle waterfalls of Taat Sae.

As the driver turned into the village, I noticed two women standing on either side of the road holding a piece of string with plastic bags attached to it. As we approached, they grinned shyly and raised the string.

“The village entrance,” the driver laughs when I ask what was going on. He leaned out the window and handed one of the women two 1000 kip notes, worth 25 cents. Then they lowered the string and thanked us with big smiles and waves as we drove inside.

INTREPID LAOS
The Great Indochina Loop
29 days, ex Bangkok
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Mekong River, Luang Prabang, Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hue, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City, Temples of Angkor
Brief: Journey through the heart, the soul and the many diverse delights of Indochina. The treasures of Thailand, the locals of Laos, the vibrancy of Vietnam and charisma of Cambodia - discover it all on this awesome adventure Asia.
Departure: Departs every Wednesday
Price: AU$2030 plus a Local Payment of US$400 per person.

A Taste of Laos
5 days, Vientiane to Luang Prabang
Trip Style: Intrepid Independent
Highlights: Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Mekong River, Pak Ou Caves
Brief: Experience the essence of Laos on this short but enlightening trip. Colonial mansions, tree-lined boulevards and Buddhist temples impart a unique timelessness to the charming town of Vientiane, situated on the banks of the mighty Mekong River. The former royal capital of Luang Prabang never fails to enchant visitors with its abundance of temples, faded French provincial architecture and friendly people. Visit these sites and get a memorable introduction to a fascinating country, seemingly lost in time.
Departure: Departs daily
Price: AU$625, twin share per person or AU$960, single per person

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
When is the best time of year to travel?
Just about anytime is a great time to visit Laos as most of the year is hot and humid. There are three main seasons – hot, wet and cool. The hot season is from February to May, during which temperatures can get up to 40°C and the land is dry and dusty. The wet season is from June to October and tends to have consistent rain, cloudy days with temperatures averaging around 30°C. The cool season runs between November and January with temperatures dropping as low as 15°C in the evening.
Religion: 60% Buddhist, 40% Animist & other
Language: Lao
Currency: Lao Kip (LAK)
Visas: All nationalities require a visa to enter Laos. We ask all our travellers to obtain their Laos visas in Asia, and NOT in their home country. Generally best to get it in the starting point location or on occasions at the border, depending on the current state of affairs (it varies!). Please ensure that you have 3 passport photos and US$50 cash (this may vary too) to fulfill the requirements.
Electricity: 220V AC

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:17 PM | Comments (0)

FOOD: Nov 05, AU Edition

FOR OUR OWN GOOD?
Eli Jameson looks at our overzealous food regulation – but sees a glimmer of hope

As anyone who has ever flown into Australia knows, the rules for what can and cannot be brought into the country are pretty strict. The official obsession with food and drink and animals and anything that can pass the lips may have valid reasons in science, biology, and economics, but the seemingly-arbitrary nature of what is and isn’t OK sometimes looks more like an application of a secular state religion, always seeking purity and to keep out the unclean.

(Once after returning from an extended holiday in the United States, I found myself at a quarantine desk in an otherwise deserted Sydney Airport arrivals hall waiting for my golf clubs to be cleaned, lest a North American grass seed wedged in my 7-iron throw off the entire Australian ecosystem. I chatted to the young woman manning the station as I waited, and quizzed her about different nationalities and what they’re notorious for smuggling. Japanese? ‘So honest they declare a stick of chewing gum’. Koreans? ‘They try and bring enough food for their entire trip’. Americans? ‘Usually pretty good, but for some reason American girls always try and smuggle a bottle of fat-free salad dressing in their back- packs’, much like Australian backpackers who can be found nursing hangovers from Thailand to Turkey with their own personal jar of Vegemite).

But while some bans make sense – the impending bird flu crisis has customs officers around the world working hard to keep out any potentially-infected poultry products – plenty of others do not. Which is why food lovers down under rejoiced last month when Food Standards Australia New Zealand finally lifted its ban on that marvelously stinky French export, Roquefort cheese. The ban, which represented an unholy alliance between protectionist farmers and the for-your-own-good food police, was an affront to both common sense and good taste. The problem was that Roquefort cheese is made with unpasteurized ewe’s milk (shock, horror), and yet was considered a great delicacy. Thus banning it was an easy call, satisfying both the nanny staters and the competition-shy domestic cheese industry.

Australia’s Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Health Christopher Pyne MP explained the issue recently on ABC Radio: ‘Before 1994, FSANZ had never done an investigation into how the cheese was put together, the circumstances, the production of it. In that intervening time that has gone on, and it’s been determined that the way the French make their cheese, of course, after many hundreds of years of making this cheese, is safe and good for consumers and the Trade Commissioner assures me this morning that there’d be no cases of Roquefort cheese causing illness in France in recorded history...after many years of investigation, FSANZ has decided under the right circumstances and with the right warnings to consumers, that Australians can make their own decisions about what cheeses they eat. They’re grown up enough to determine the risks they like to take and that we don’t believe it is dangerous to Australian consumers.’

Amen to that. Now if only the Australian government – never shy about sticking its nose into the citizenry’s kitchen cupboards, among other places – could take such an enlightened attitude about other food products. For one thing, while unpasteurized Roquefort is now OK, it’s pretty clear that other cheesemakers, both foreign and domestic, will still not be allowed to make or sell similar products on the Australian market.

There are plenty of other bans that make little or no sense and which seem to exist only to give local producers a leg-up. Prosciutto and other fantastic cured meats are generally not permitted; Aussies have to make do with local substitutes. Less-celebrated delicacies – tinned American corned beef hash (trust me on this), for example – are also barred from Australian soil. According to the rules, any product that contains more than 10 per cent dairy or 5 per cent meat requires a special permit, applied for by the manufacturer in the home country. It’s a time-consuming process, and one with which smaller makers overseas simply won’t bother, even if large corporations will. Thus local production is protected, local palates denied.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t some great Australian cheesemakers, ham-curers, and so on – there are. But as Christopher Pyne says, shouldn’t we be adult enough to make our own decisions? The same thing goes for many products that aren’t available to Australian consumers thanks to one or another regulation. While French foie gras – the liver of specially-fattened geese or ducks – is banned due to bird flu and other concerns (fair enough), the production of the stuff locally is also illegal, thanks to the radical animal rights lobby. Which is a shame, since farmers in the United States have proved that the French hardly have a monopoly on this delicacy. The ban also denies chefs the pleasure of magret de canard, the especially-flavourful breasts from these specially fattened ducks.

Instead, we have to make do with the semi-cooked tinned stuff.
Similarly, hanging game for a week or two in the European manner is forbidden, despite the fact that bacteria are killed at 60 degrees C, and no game goes in the oven at under 200 degrees C. Real salami? Also a no-no; authorities require a ‘starter culture’ be used which adversely affects the taste of artisinal salamis.

All this calls for a radical re-think in how we think about freedom and food. What is more personal and intimate than what we put in our bodies to feed ourselves, or give to our families? No wonder dietary regulations are such a big part of so many religions, especially those that emerged from the desert where preservation is such an issue. Warning labels are one thing, but not allowing consumers the freedom to make up their own minds is quite another. As Pyne says, we’re all adults; let’s eat like it.

ROQUEFORT TERRINE
In celebration of the lifting of the Roquefort ban, why not get cooking with it? Make a Roquefort dressing or mayonnaise for salads or burgers on the grill; use it in sauces, or just enjoy it on its own. Or try this Roquefort terrine, adapted from The Palms restaurant in South Carolina.

You’ll need:
250 grams Roquefort, crumbled 125 grams unsalted butter, softened, 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted, 2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper.

To make:
Purée half of cheese with butter in a food processor. Transfer purée to a bowl and fold in remaining cheese, 1/4 cup nuts, and pepper. Spoon into a small crock and smooth top. Chill, covered, at least 2 hours to allow flavors to blend.

Before serving, let terrine soften about 30 minutes, then sprinkle top with remaining tablespoon nuts.
Accompaniment: baguette toasts or crackers

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: Mar 05, Au Edition

DON’T WORRY, DIE HAPPY
Are party drugs really the best way to make a cancer patient’s last days more livable?

Aside from those who die suddenly in accidents, quietly in their sleep, or simply sitting at the dinner table, a good proportion of the population gets not only a fair bit of advance warning that their time is almost up, but also a rough estimate of when that will be. That diva of death, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, counseled coming to terms with and embracing death as a part of life, seeing it as a “transition” to a better place. She was quite a morbid little lady though – and perhaps a little impatient for death to come as well, having spent so much time preparing for it.

On the other side of the coin, there are those of us who would prefer to achieve immortality through not dying. Being firmly in this camp, I plan a last-minute panic, followed by months of denial – but having spent several years working in aged care, my experience is that very few people actually spit the dummy completely when given notice. Still, there is psychological work to do to wrap up a life, and it is painful to watch a patient who is trying to achieve some measure of acceptance and reconciliation but is exhausted by the effort.

Which brings up the question: how much intervention is appropriate to help this process along? Some people these days are answering, “a lot”. Pending a license from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Harvard will this year commence an FDA-approved trial of MDMA, better known as the party drug ecstasy, in end-stage cancer patients suffering from severe anxiety. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre is trialing the use of psilocybin (the active in ingredient magic mushrooms) in terminally ill cancer patients. But these are all very small studies, and are of the “qualitative”, or anecdotal, kind: see what happens, and then know what to look at if it progresses to the level of a drug trial. Essentially, they are pre-trial trials.

(This is not the first time since the heady days of Timothy Leary that U.S. researchers have toyed with illegal drugs to treat various mental conditions: the University of Arizona has lately reported success using psilocybin to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, while in Charleston, South Carolina, MDMA is being studied in victims of violence who are suffering post traumatic stress disorder.)

What some medical researchers have discovered is that ecstasy can make people happy. And expansive. And positive about themselves and at one with the world and like, man, there’s like love, just like, everything is love, you know? Feeling like this, they reckon, is better than being fearful and anxious, as most cancer patients are to some degree. What if we could make them happy? Give them tools to make the work of wrapping up a life and preparing for death a little easier? Or just generally unbridle the unconscious, facilitate communication with family, and defy the poet to go gently into that good night?

In the Harvard and UCLA studies, the patients will be evaluated, given low-to-moderate doses of drugs in the company of a psychiatrist, and then spend a fair few number of consecutive hours talking it all out. And then do it again a few weeks later. The studies aim to see if this helps people to deal with end of life issues. Certainly, most of the unpleasant side effects could be controlled in this very controlled setting. The idea seems to be that these are patients who may not have the time and energy for an in-depth rigorous sorting through of the subconscious issues in guided psychotherapy: if they are uninhibited and happy, it can all get done a lot quicker.

Myself, I’d like anything in my subconscious to stay put, and thus avoid both psychotherapy and hallucinogenic drugs for this reason. But putting aside the issue of how the process could be patented to make money, and determined to be safe, and then approved ten years hence, would anyone really want to find a psychiatrist to sit and talk with them for six hours at a stretch? Furthermore, how much damage might a “bad trip” do to someone in their last days? And if dad has always been a cranky old bugger, will it really help the family to hear him waxing lyrical under the influence? My own feeling is that there wouldn’t be a lot of takers for this kind of treatment, and that they would be a fairly self-selecting group. But what if it took off?

Personally, I don’t like the idea. It rings wrong to me, and I have been trying to find a way to come at it reasonably. Debating the idea of using hallucinogens like this often leads to overwrought fears about a dystopian, mood-managed future á la Huxley’s Brave New World, and brings up a lot of the same issues that came up when it was discovered that Prozac could not just cure depression, but smooth out challenging personality traits. There are, if you tilt your head and squint, some interesting ethical dilemmas here, but the reality is — as for the overwhelming majority of drugs that are tested for any medical use — that cost, profitability, patentability and practicality, as well as safety and the broader concerns of the community may well be immovable obstacles standing in the way of Nana ever getting high.

This small wave of tests involving medical mushrooms and prescription party drugs will probably die out with the patients in the studies, and people will continue to wrap up their lives in much the same ways they always have.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: Nov 05, AU Edition

CRITICAL THINKING
The brain is a marvelous thing – but it can also play tricks on us (for our own good, of course)

Have you ever felt badly blue, critically assessed your life and thought, Of course I’m depressed! Anyone would be under these circumstances!, and then gone to bed, or for a walk, or for coffee, or whatever it is that you do, and felt better?

‘Oh’, you thought, ‘it was the night/the weather/the deadline/the head lice that made me temporarily insane. I love my life. Could use a little bit of tweaking at the edges, maybe, but nothing major.’
Most of us have felt exactly this way at one time or another. And if you don’t feel worse than this, than guess what? You are not depressed. Instead, you’ve just suffered from a mild delusion – but that’s normal.

In fact, your life is always going to be slightly worse than you think. That’s right. You are less moral, less reasonable, less kind, less lucky and less smart than you think. Aren’t we all. If you were depressed you would feel lousy most days, and if this went on for more than two weeks you would be well advised to go and see a doctor.
But if you’re not depressed then you’re not a good judge of how things are going. The depressed – aside from being tedious negative – Nellies – are better judges in some areas of critical thinking than the rest of us. The rest of us are optimists because it gets us through the day.

How smart do you think you are? A bit above average? Isn’t everyone. I have done less-than-perfectly in exams because I was tired, anxious, pregnant, overqualified, didn’t study at all, missed the lecture, or the questions were stupid. I have never done worse than I expected in an exam because more than half the people who took it were smarter than me. Like everyone else, I am smarter than average. I don’t know where the half of people on the wrong side of the intelligence bell curve are hiding, but clearly no one has told them yet.

We – excluding the floridly delusional and the depressed – who are neurologically normal are poor critical thinkers. Some try to think well, and some don’t bother, but the results have been in for years. We are lousy at critical thinking. Our brain wants us to feel good. It tells us lies so that we do. We can’t all be ‘above average’.

People believe weird things. Few of us understand statistics (a subject which should be taught in detail in primary school), and I have seen grown adults confronted with the phrase, ‘show me a double blind study’ look up with big puppy dog eyes and say, ‘I don’t know what that means, but I’ve heard amazing stories so I know it’s true’.
And actually, even if we try not to believe weird things, they still slip through. Imagine you’re a doctor. In all probability you or your work subscribes to a couple of journals about interesting medical stuff. You probably get digests of popular journals sent to your email address. Drug reps bring pens and reports. All together, we are talking about hundreds of studies a week here. To keep up to date, you will only read the interesting ones in detail, and if they ‘seem right’ and confirm what you know to be true, you won’t dig around to be sure the study was done well. This is a self-serving bias. You see what you expect to see. And if a study comes out tomorrow showing irrefutably that smoking is good for you, everyone will look at it, squint at it, and say, ‘well, I just don’t believe that’.

Here’s an example of how this works. Studies have shown, repeatedly, that Echinacea really does nothing for the common cold. Nothing. One study showed it actually made colds worse, but that was an errant finding. I’ve been watching the Echinacea phenomenon for ten years now, and every time it is proven not to work, someone says ‘the dose they used in the study was too low, too high, preserved in alcohol, or brewed under a waning moon so of course it didn’t work…but for just $50 I can hand-bottle the perfect dose for you’.

It still doesn’t work.

Vitamin C also doesn’t work, at least not in the 2,000 mg-an-hour school of cold-fighting. The anti-viral flu injection doesn’t have as much promise as was hoped ten years ago. We all make mistakes, and we like to see things that aren’t there so long as they make us feel good. Conventional medicine is fallible, but it does get the message eventually. Conventional medicine makes errors, isn’t always skeptical enough (of drug companies), is perhaps overly-critical of herbal wisdom, but it tends eventually to get with the program. Show it enough studies and it says, ‘well…OK’.

Unfortunately people with a vested interest in something that can be proved to be false (homeopathy, for example) have, by definition, a vested interest in maintaining their point of view. True believers will never be convinced, or at least the majority won’t. Bad No good Western Medicine comes off a little better, because it is based in science which is true (I mean, specifically that it has a plausible congruent hypothesis which could be – but hasn’t been – disproven. That being a damn fine definition of a scientific fact). That this is, so the beliefs of your local GP are only nominally threatened when they read that they have been prescribing and believing in an antiarthritis drug that provides as much pain relief as panadol, and kills then odd person. They feel foolish at first; then their brain tells them they couldn’t possibly have known , then they feel better about themselves and their profession, and make a note to be cautious with arthritis management in future. If a homeopath sees a study that shows the whole thing is junk science (and doesn’t work, to boot) they have a lot to loose by accepting this. So they don’t. They become a little paranoid and delusional, which is bad, but they get to keep their jobs and their belief in themselves. Which is good. I suppose.

Anecdotes aren’t evidence. They’re stories. We all suffer the placebo effect, and what a blessing that is. The human brain abhors a vacuum. We like to feel useful. ‘Magical thinking’ is the phrase that describes believing in magical things because we don’t like to know how little we know. Magical thinking describes at times a schizophrenic’s reasoning, but it also explains our tendency to attribute cause and effect where there isn’t any. ‘I feel better because I took vitamin C’ really means, ‘the less I know about vitamin C or the cold virus, the more I see the connection’. I don’t know much about computers, but I like to feel smart, so I can gather erroneous information to form a belief about why it won’t do what I want it to. We all do this. But it doesn’t make it right.

The human brain selectively remembers information to support beliefs that support you. This is why there is no point trying to argue someone into or out of religious beliefs. They will accept your arguments only if they are receptive to them, in which case, they are susceptible to believing you and it is in their interest to do so. And yet, the letters page…

You recall the two times in your life that you intuitively thought of a person not thought of for years, only to run into them, or hear they’ve died. Because you like the idea of having spiritual powers and being intuitive. You fail to recall the four million times that you have thought of a person out of the blue, and never saw them, heard from them, or thought of them again. Great dinner party stopper: ‘I had this desire to look up this guy from school – and then a week later I heard he had died!’ Would you believe that the statistical probability that that would occur by chance is really high?

Just another trick of our wonderful, if sometimes deluded, brains.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

VICTORIA’S SECRET: Mar 05, AU Edition

VICTORIA’S SECRET
Why is the Bracks government sticking with a world-first roadside drug test that’s controversial, expensive, and will make Victorian motorists only marginally safer? JAMES MORROW crunches the numbers and finds that there are plenty of good reasons why no other government on Earth has gone near this scheme

When Ballarat truckie John De Jong was publicly humiliated for driving while under the influence of drugs – and then let off the hook (without so much as an apology, incidentally) when it turned out he was innocent – by the Victoria Police last year, it was widely assumed that the much-hyped roadside drug testing program that nabbed him would be allowed to die a quiet death. But instead of learning the potentially expensive lesson of De Jong’s case, Steve Bracks’ state government has pressed ahead with the program. And even though the police say they’ve changed their ways so that fewer innocent people will get caught in their net, a closer look at the program reveals that Victorian taxpayers are still being asked to sacrifice a lot of their own time and money for a program with highly speculative results.

“One in 100 drivers found taking drugs” screamed the headlines when Victoria’s police finally lifted the lid on their controversial roadside drug testing program a few weeks ago. The state’s roads, went the implication, were choc-a-block with stoned ravers and speed-addled truckies: according to the police, around one in every hundred drivers tested by the program were found to have either THC, the active ingredient in marijuana or methamphetamines (or some combination of the two) in their system. Amazingly, this number was proportionally far greater than the number of motorists caught driving while under the influence of alcohol, a legal and readily-available product: As Melbourne’s Age noted in its report on the revived program, “the yearly average strike rate for motorists caught drink-driving is about one in every 250 tested”.

Yet no one asked the question, could these new numbers for drugged drivers really be correct?

The famous American bank robber Willie Sutton was once asked by a reporter why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” came the succinct reply, and it’s hard to fault that logic. To arrive at these incredible 1-in-100 numbers, the sort of headline-grabbing figures that would not only consign John De Jong’s case to ancient history but win an extension of the program from the state parliament when it comes up for review later this year, it’s clear that the cops went the Willie Sutton route.

In fact, despite initial claims that these numbers were arrived at largely by “random” methods, Victoria’s scare-story numbers were almost entirely the product of some very selective targeting. At one operation, targeting the New Year’s Day Summerdayze dance festival, almost one out of every ten drivers tested positive. It’s not clear how many drivers were pulled over on their way out of Summerdayze (the police won’t reveal such operational details about that or any other sting), but it’s easy to see how, in choosing this sort of venue, Victorian cops had an easy opportunity to up the numbers supporting this program.

Do the math: Imagine that, say, fifty drivers were stopped in one night’s operation, and five of them tested positive – an extraordinary result, ten times that of the general population, but not at all unthinkable. If we take these statistical outliers out of the rest of the numbers, things become clearer: Stopping those other 1,450 other drivers would have led to just ten hits, cutting the overall success rate to just .68 of one percent.

Now on one level it makes sense that if you want to catch people who are taking drugs, go to the sort of places where they hang out and party. (Though whether or not the time and effort spent sitting outside a dance festival could not have been more profitably spent patrolling the roads for dangerous driving is another question). But it is also ridiculous on its face for Victoria’s police to suggest that because cops managed to get a one percent strike rate through highly selective targeting, then one out of every hundred cars one sees on Victoria’s roads is being driven by someone under the influence of drugs.

This would be the equivalent of saying that, say, the number of drunks on the road on New Year’s Eve is the same as those out there on any other evening. Furthermore, while it may be tempting to compare testing for stoners and drunks, the procedure for administering these saliva tests are a good deal more invasive than simply asking a driver to blow into a tube. A driver who gets stopped in by one of these sweeps is asked to put a saliva collector in his or her mouth, and then wait five minutes for the results to come back. (And refusal is not an option, but rather carries with it the presumption of on-the-spot guilt). If the sample comes back negative, the driver is free to go; otherwise, they have to produce a second sample, which, if it turns up positive, is then sent to a lab for further analysis by more accurate tests. In the meantime, then, they have to wait for up to three weeks to find out if they will be prosecuted for an offence.

And not only is the test more involved and time-consuming for the (at least) 99 out of 100 drivers who are guilty of nothing but who are still compelled to sit by the side of the road for five minutes waiting to see if they will become the next John De Jong, unlike breathalyzers, with these drug tests there’s far less link between a positive result and actual driving impairment. That’s because these tests can pick up drugs taken long before the driver got behind the wheel – thus a joint smoked on a Friday, while illegal, would likely not impair a driver Saturday. And isn’t the point of this whole program road safety?

So why did the Victorian cops decide to go down this route and become, as they proudly proclaim in all their literature, the first po
lice department in the entire world to set up this sort of roadside drug-testing regime? Beyond the basic motive force that causes any bureaucracy to seek as many good headlines as possible while expending as little effort as possible, much of the justification seems to come from work done by Dr. Olaf H. Drummer of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, and especially a presentation he gave to the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists in 2004.

The presentation was sponsored by BioMediq Pty. Ltd., the Doncaster, Vic.-based agent for the UK company that makes the Cozart Rapiscan – the same test that snared truckie De Jong. In his talk, Drummer talked about the various ways drugged drivers can be a danger on the road (no argument here), but then drew the rather long bow that by spending $1 million to Rapiscan 10,000 Victorian drivers, the state could save a $15 million. As Drummer’s PowerPoint noted, this represents a “Cost benefit ration 15:1 ! [sic]”.

But there are a couple of problems with Drummer’s study. For one thing, the arithmetic behind the purported $15 million savings feels like it was concocted in a trendy outcomes-based grade school maths classroom: it’s not whether the answer is right or wrong that is important, but rather that everyone feels good about the result. Drummer’s presentation states that “If drug testing and wider police enforcement reduces use of drugs and driving by … 5%” (italics added), the “reduction in drug use saves potentially $15 million” (again, italics added). Yet if 10,000 people were tested, and fully 1 percent of them were on drugs as police statistics imply (i.e., the entire program took 100 drivers), it is hard to figure how that handful of drug-takers could wreak $15 million worth of damage.

Who needs a roadside drug test when for some motorists their faces are a dead giveaway? Californian woman Penny Wood traded her privacy for reduced prison time on traffic and petty crime misdemeanours, by agreeing to let police publicise her mugshot as a warning about the ravages of five years’ methamphetamine abuse.

In other words, roadside drug testing could save lives and money; on the other hand, it might not. Since the only sub-stances the current test looks for are pot and speed, then it stands to reason that the smart – well, if not smart, than at least cagey – drug abuser who was looking to get behind the wheel would simply switch to a different poison. Already this seems to be happening, as a quick scan of posts on forums hosted by inthemix.com.au, an Australian dance party website, suggests.

(“We need to send out decoys,” one participant jokingly suggested amidst the debate. “The first car (which has a straight driver of course) that leaves in each convoy from the party puts drops in their eyes to cause their eyes to dilate, then drives in an erratic manner to attract attention, the cops then pull them over, see their huge eyes then perform the test on them. During this time, the remainder of the crew slip past. Once the test is complete and passed, everyone goes on their merry way.”)

Victoria’s drivers are used to getting ripped off when they get behind the wheel. Recall that last year, that the state government had to refund $14 million dollars to some 90,000 motorists incorrectly fined by speed cameras on Melbourne’s Western Ring Road, and spend a further $6 million compensating drivers for hardship when their licenses were incorrectly taken from them by dodgy technology – again, of course, all in the name of safety.

Amazingly (especially considering the embarrassment of John De Jong’s case) Victoria’s police seem more than happy to once again let technology do their work for them, rather than get out on the roads and into the public transport system and look to stop unsafe or criminal behaviour in progress. In the process, Victorians will be forced to give up another little bit of their time and freedom, all in the inarguable name of safety.

And that represents one of the biggest, yet most under-reported, problems with the whole program: while roadside drug testing may pull a few stoners off the road, it also represents yet another small erosion in the personal liberty of all Australians (New South Wales is considering a similar program at the moment, and it is unlikely to stay confined within Victoria’s borders). Part of the tradeoff of living in a free society is that people are willing to take on a bit more risk in return for having a government that, as much as possible leaves people alone to make their own decisions and go about their business.

Australia is not, and should not become, one of those societies where cops and other agents of the state have the power to question and detain people without reasonable cause; that’s the sort of thing many Aussies (or their parents or grandparents) came here to get away from.
While the pain of losing a friend or relative to an auto accident is, of course, incalculable, there is very little indication that an expensive drug-testing regime for motorists will do much more than cause a hassle, heartache, and ultimately further embarrassment for the Victorian government.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: Nov 05, AU Edition

WHAT’S MY ADDRESS?
A new internet numbering system could computerize everything, reports Brian Kladko

The Internet is running out of real estate. Just like a city, the Internet’s virtual space is divvied up into addresses – not e-mail addresses, but Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Each numerical address represents a piece of the Internet, and you can’t connect to the Internet without one.

The current version of the Internet has more than four billion IP addresses. But soon, that might not be enough.

Fortunately, there is a solution: a new system that will not only provide an address for every person on earth, but every animal, every electronic device, every mechanical part. Everything, not just everyone, could be connected.

“Because you have the ability to link everything to everything else, you could conceivably have your cell phone control up to 250 different electronic appliances in your home”, explains Alex Lightman, an inventor, writer, entrepreneur and one of the most ardent boosters of the new system, called Internet Protocol version 6.

IPv6, as it’s known, is a set of international standards, or protocols, that allow computers to understand each other. It will replace IPv4, the standard that has enabled the Internet to function since its creation 35 years ago.

IPv4 worked fine when the Internet was used by a bunch of computer scientists. Now that everyone wants a piece of it, IPv4 is seen as increasingly obsolete.

Most people aren’t even aware of their IP addresses, because most people don’t own one: the addresses belong to government agencies, universities and companies. When someone logs on from home, they borrow an address from a pool of addresses owned by their Internet provider. Although there are still 1.3 billion addresses yet to be assigned, that’s not enough to accommodate two of the most exciting trends of the Internet – high-speed mobile computing and Internet telephony. Both technologies depend on the ability of two computers to communicate directly with each other. Every mobile device, for example, will need its own IP address to tap into the Internet with a broadband connection.

The U.S. Department of Defense has realized the possibilities. It’s converting all of its computerized systems to IPv6 by 2008, so that it can create a “Global Information Grid” – a military network that would provide commanders in the Pentagon and front-line soldiers a wealth of information about battle conditions.

But drumming up interest among private companies, and their customers, is more difficult. So proponents are dangling the prospect of an automated, remote-controlled future: one that will be made possible by giving an address to every device, not just computers.

IPv6, for example, could make it easier to get a taxi when you’re getting drenched. In Japan, sensors with their own IP addresses have been attached to taxis’ windshield wipers.

When the wipers start moving in response to rain, that information is collected through the Internet. Taxi companies use the information to redirect their fleets to rain-soaked locations.

If ordinary household devices can go online, manufacturers could monitor them to make sure they’re working right, or diagnose a problem when they’re not.

If a digital video recorder has its own address, the owner could tap into it from another city and download a show it had previously recorded.

In other words, the Internet won’t just be about sitting in front of a computer, reading Web sites or tapping out messages. It will be about controlling the minutiae of our lives, down to the most mundane details.

“Your refrigerator could call the store when it needed to and order more milk because it would know you were out of it”, explains Doug Barton, general manager of the international organization that distributes addresses. “There are some pretty grandiose ideas behind some of these things.”

When addresses were first doled out, the United States – which invented the Internet – got most of them, even though many are going unused to this day. But when Asian countries finally got on board, they couldn’t get nearly as many, which is another factor that is pushing many to advocate for IPv6. At one point, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had more addresses than China.

“There is a real sense of injustice about how the addresses have been provided over the years”, said Jim Bound, a Hewlett Packard computer engineer who heads a group promoting IPv6 in North America.

Thanks to a reform of the way addresses are assigned, as well as a technological workaround that allows many network users to share one address, the depletion of addresses that some people had predicted just a few years ago has still not come to pass.

But Chinese officials continue to complain about a disparity.
Countries throughout East Asia see IPv6 as a remedy to past wrongs, as well as their best hope of catching up to, or surpassing, the United States.

IPv6 conferences in Japan and China attract thousands, and Japanese prime ministers even mention it in speeches.

Some IPv6 missionaries, such as Lightman, say the United States will pay for its complacency. As the rest of the world moves to a different standard and starts slapping addresses on everything with a circuit, the United States will lose its technological edge.

“We’re a bunch of rubes with respect to the new Internet”, Lightman says.

But even some IPv6 boosters, such as Bound, say it’s only a matter of time before companies realize its potential.

“We are not the overweight, sloppy ex-heavyweight champion”, says Bound, who helped select the IPv6 standard. “What we are is someone who’s ahead. And therefore, for new technology, we have the luxury of operating at a slower pace. We’ll get there when we need to get there.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

Nov 05, AU Edition

FAMILY MAN…WEATHER MAN…HIS OWN MAN

Nicholas Cage is one of Hollywood’s most complex actors and fascinating personalities. The son of a literature professor (and nephew of Francis Ford Coppola), Cage was once expelled from primary school – yet went on to star not only in blockbuster action flicks like Face/Off and Con Air, but in richly complex character-driven films including Leaving Las Vegas, Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation. Today, Cage is on the brink of new milestones: not only does he have a slew of new movies on the horizon, but a soon-to-arrive baby as well. The 41-year-old Cage recently sat down with JORDAN RIEFE at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to discuss his latest ventures, fatherhood (and how his powerful relationship with his own dad affects his work today), and what might be his most controversial project to date: his involvement with Oliver Stone’s film about 9/11.

Q: Is it fair to say you’re not a method actor?

A: The idea that I’m not a method actor implies that I don’t subscribe to any particular method of performance, and I do have my own method. At the time I agreed to do The Weather Man I was going through a divorce and I was trying to figure out how I could take a negative and turn it into a positive. And when I received the script for The Weather Man, I thought, ‘Oh well, here’s a parallel.’ Sometimes I choose movies that help me, like a therapy, help me do something positive with a negative emotion. And The Weather Man was an opportunity to take this well of feeling that I had and just funnel it into Dave Spritz. It was my producing partner who brought it to me and I said, ‘This is really right for me at this time because I have a lot of stuff I want to get out.’ Dave and I were going through similar experiences and so it became an overlay, if you will, of my life and David Spritz’s.

Q: How many times have things been thrown at you?

A: I wish I could be more colourful and say all the time but I’ve never had anything thrown at me; at least not food. There have been times in the past when girls have thrown glasses at me.

Q: How much cash do you normally carry in your wallet?

A: Do you want to come and look? You know, I don’t even have my wallet or any cash on me. But I do go to the supermarket. I just went to the market and bought about 20 packages of Gillette shavers. I buy in bulk. And I used one this morning.

Q: How difficult was it to play someone fumbling through fatherhood?

A: I think no matter what walk of life we’re in or who we are, we all have that connection with our father because we are small in the beginning and they’re big so there’s this awesome regard for dad. And on top of that, my dad is a professor of literature so he’s very, very smart. So I was always thinking how I can aspire to be him? There was this intimidating aura growing up with a university professor, but yes, I did use my own feelings about my own father.

Q: There’s a scene where you’re recognized standing in a queue at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] and you’re not very pleasant to the person who recognizes you. Can you relate to that?

A: I don’t relate to it because I have bad relations with people on the street or at the DMV. I try to make an effort to behave well and I know if it weren’t for my fans I wouldn’t be here. So they’re very important to me. I know what it’s like to meet someone you admire and have them be a complete jerk. But before I was famous someone impounded my car and they weren’t very nice about it. It was an old car once owned by Dean Martin, which is ironic because I now live in Dean Martin’s old house. They were so rough about it. There was no reason to impound it and there were dents all over it. I remember just wanting to go and get my car by any means possible. I think if we’ve all been frustrated by bureaucracy, whether you’re the weather man, you or me.

Q: You’re about to become a father again. Are you excited?

A: Without going into detail, I’ve got 15 years of experience now so I’m very ready.

Q: You talked about your very smart father. Can you talk about what it was like working with Michael Caine and bringing your own experiences to your screen relationship with him?

A: It’s always fascinating to work with the best and Michael Caine is obviously one of the best, so I wanted the opportunity to study him and look into his face. I was ecstatic to work with him, and he’s so friendly. And as for my father, yes, it does relate. He had that aura bout him, but what I will say about my dad is...I’m going to go on the record and I’m not a high school drop-out, but I wasn’t a great match for school. I went to my dad and said, ‘This isn’t for me, I want to act. This is affecting my self-esteem; I’ve got to get out.’ So he said, ‘That’s fine, but just get your High School Equivalency’.
So I did and left and went right to work.

Q: Why does your character have such trouble communicating with women?

A: It’s the battle of the sexes. Do you have trouble communicating with men? We have difficulty from both sides comprehending what exactly is it we’re thinking. Dave is on the receiving end of that because he’s not thinking all the time, he’s forgetting things like the tartar sauce. For her, something as mundane as tartar sauce is enough to tip the apple cart, but we know it’s more than that. I’m very sensitive. I’m even sensitive to the weather.

Q: I’m intrigued by the Dean Martin connection. Have you ever felt his presence?

A: They’re both coincidences. I didn’t know it was his car when I bought it and it wasn’t because it was his house that I bought the house. It was about 3 a.m. one night and I was sleeping and I heard this faint voice singing, ‘That’s Amoré’. And I was like, ‘Please, I’m trying to sleep.’ I’m kidding. And what’s really weird is that was the theme song at the end of Moonstruck.

Q: It looks like you’re going to have six or seven films out next year and it does appear that you work incessantly. Do you feel the need to work constantly and will there be any slow-down with the impending birth of your child?

A: That’s just the way it works out sometimes. I haven’t worked since National Treasure, which was a year ago. I try and make two movies a year. To me, that’s not too much. On top of that, I like to work. It’s part of my spiritual belief. I want to do something with my time that’s productive. I want to serve and I feel I’m serving myself and serving you by working. I don’t want to sit around by the pool luxuriating with a margarita. That’s just not what I want to do. So yeah, work is just part of my principles.

Q: But will you slow down once your child arrives?

A: Probably yes.

Q: Gore Verbinski was the one throwing the fast food at you and he reportedly enjoyed it. What was that like?

A: Yes. There are some good photos of him throwing chicken nuggets at my head. And I think he did enjoy it. He made sure it was him every time.

Q: Dave is often uncomfortable in his own skin. When are you uncomfortable in your own skin?

A: When I have to spend five hours in a room doing one TV interview after another knowing that everything I say will be a matter of public record for the rest of your life, that makes me pretty uncomfortable in my own skin.

Q: What do you do when you’re angry?

A: George Washington once said, ‘When you’re angry count to 10. When you’re really angry count to 100.
So I do that and also I use film, again, to try and steer that anger and turn it into a positive emotion.

Q: Do you still do archery?

A: I don’t but there aren’t too many things I’ll say I’m a natural at. But when I started doing archery it was the first time I’d found something besides acting that I felt I could really do. I did all that archery in the film and I’m happy to say that. I really enjoyed it.

Q: You were talking about the experience of being a father again. What will you do differently this time round?

A: That is a brilliant question and I’m sure anything I say to that will reveal a lot about me, my character and every invention of my mind, but I want to be very careful about respecting his privacy.

Q: What small part of Dave will you carry with you?

A: I’ll carry him with me for the rest of my life and he’ll be around after I’ve gone. He’ll be around because he’s on film. So we’re connected. I don’t know how else to answer that. I’m really happy with the movie.

Q: Can you talk about your character in Ghost Rider?

A: Again he’s a man trying to turn a negative into a positive and, as I said before, I’ve been trying to take movies and do something positive with the negative feelings I’ve had. The character in Ghost Rider had something horrible happen to him and he’s making something positive out of it.

Q: You have a great relationship with your screen daughter. You don’t have a daughter yourself, so did you just particularly like her?

A: I did like her very much but I also like children. I’ve been around children a lot. They’re very close to their hearts. There’s not a lot of filtering that goes on and I like that integrity.

Q: You’ve talked a lot about turning your negativity into positively. Are you over all that now?

A: Yes. I think things go in cycles, they wax and wane. I’m just trying to get better at negotiating the waves. Right now, I’m trying to be more neutral rather than ecstatic or depressed. I’m trying to be right in the middle and to be better in all ways - as an actor, as a father and as a husband. I’m not saying I have any control over my destiny but I’d like to be better at surfing the waves of life.

Q: You’re starting the Oliver Stone 9/11 film next month. What can you tell us about that?

A: I’m still finishing my film The Wicker Man, and then I’m going to go to New York. I know Oliver is going for a cinema verite feel. Oliver and I have been trying to work together for years. And it’s not so much about the buildings falling down as what happened amongst this family of men - which of them survived and how they coped. It’s really about the human condition.

Q: You’ve made a few films about families. Is that a subject that appeals to you?

A: I’ve really wanted to make a family drama. I think it’s a genre that’s just really good for people. I think people can usually learn something. But it’s also the hardest kind of film to make. It can collapse into saccharin or become episodic like a TV show. So my goal was to do something a bit edgy and I think I found a really happy marriage in this film.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

Nov 05, AU Edition

THE MISERY INDEX

It comes like a thief in the night and empties wallets of purchasing power. And it means debtors make off like bandits. What is it? Inflation – and with oil prices high, it’s making a comeback. Can Australians cope? What can you do? And what happens if interest rates and unemployment rise in concert with prices, as they did in 1970s America? SHAUN DAVIES and MATT JOHNSON report.

One hundred thousand dollars a year may sound like a lot, but for Melodie Darmody and her husband, Mick, it’s a struggle to make ends meet on that sort of combined income. They don’t lead a flash lifestyle, carry huge credit card balances for luxury purchases, drive expensive cars, or live in a ‘McMansion’ or what newspapers refer to euphemistically as a ‘leafy suburb’. Instead, they live near Campbelltown in Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs in a house they bought before the property market took off like a rocket, and their driveway is home to a 1983 Ford Fairlane and a 1997 Falcon Futura. Family holidays are spent with relatives in country New South Wales, and they haven’t been to the dentist ‘in years’. She’s a reporter at a community newspaper, he’s a teacher, and with bills to pay and two kids in childcare, they have precious little in their pockets at the end of a fortnight.

‘We do our budget fortnightly’, Melodie says, explaining their situation. ‘We pay $1000 on the home loan, $155 on the car loan and $600 on childcare. Groceries are only about $100 and the fuel bill at the moment is around $100. That’s really it. There’s not much to spare - when insurance and things like that pop up it’s a big stretch. We’ve got to save up for those costs for a few pays. We’ve got a payment now one now for the car insurance and we had one for house insurance a while back, and they’re about $600 each.’

Like millions of other Australians, the Darmodys lives are very price-sensitive. Which is why the prospect of inflation, spurred on by rising petrol prices – which make the costs of transporting raw materials to factories and finished goods to market that much more expensive – is so daunting. Already, the prices of some key staple items such as milk have gone up, with two of Australia’s biggest dairy concerns, Dairy Farmers Group and National Goods, hiking prices in September. And Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens recently indicated that the biggest threat to Australia’s economy, which has over the past decade weathered American recessions and Asian meltdowns with aplomb, is inflation.

‘The issue before us in the next year or two is whether the world and Australian economies can adapt to higher energy and resource prices without a significant bout of inflation’, he said. Commonwealth Treasurer Peter Costello has echoed Stevens’ concern, and – even more worryingly for mortgage-holders like the Darmodys – indicated that increasing inflation could lead to higher interest rates as the government attempts to put on the brakes.

In short, it seems like a sure bet that prices are heading north, and every Australian will, quite literally, be forced to pay the price. As John Edwards, Chief Economist at HSBC says, ‘there’s no doubt that we’ve had a big hit [from fuel prices] recently’, and that there’s also ‘no doubt it’s going to turn up in higher prices for a wide range of goods’.

How bad? Bad.
In terms of how far the average families budget could be forced to stretch, it is crucial to note that oil prices are not yet at all-time highs. Worse price spikes have been seen – especially in the 1970s, when inflation was such a world-wide problem that it arguably brought down two U.S. presidents (Gerald ‘Whip Inflation Now’ Ford and later Jimmy Carter, whose opponent, Ronald Reagan, popularized the idea of the ‘misery index’, or the sum of the then-double digit unemployment, inflation, and interest rates). On 17 October 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, OPEC cut off supplies to Israel, the United States, and its allies. As a result, the price of oil surged by about 135% in the Christmas of 1973. After adjusting for inflation, the price of oil increased by almost 220% between 1973 and 1974.

As a result of this, Australian inflation rate began to accelerate. Higher prices at the pump led to higher prices for just about everything else, and inflation reached a peak of 17.6% per annum in March 1975.

In the 1970s, the Government of the day controlled the interest rate, and as increases were unpopular – as they are today – the Government was slow to act when oil started pushing prices skyward. The wrong decisions were made, and inflation got out of control. Today, the RBA would increase the interest rate as inflation pushed up prices, and thereby limit how far the inflation infection could spread.
Since 1990, the RBA has kept the rate of interest about 3.6% higher than the rate of inflation – so 17.6% inflation might have meant interest rates at 21.2% per annum. At that rate, repayments on the average Australian mortgage of $230,000 would rise to a little over $4125 each and every month for 20 years.

If such astronomical interest rates seem unlikely, they have precedent. After the second oil shock in 1979 – this time the result of the Iranian Revolution – US monetary policy was handed over the modern breed of central banker. As Chairman of America’s Federal Reserve Bank, Paul Volker (Alan Greenspan’s predecessor) oversaw an increase of 6.5% from the time of his appointment to April 1980. The US saw rates peak at around 17.6%, and brought the economy to the brink of recession. Rates were cut to prevent recession, however when it became clear that inflation had not been beaten rates were push up still farther, to a peak of 19.1% in June.

Speaking on oil prices and the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, research director at economic analysis firm 4Cast, Alan Ruskin, commented that ‘it would not be surprising if oil prices had now spiked by so much that they would not be absorbed by the profit margins of firms, but rather would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices’. He added that ‘it is fear of such an inflationary spiral that encourages central banks to increase rates, in the knowledge that the more they respond now, the lower the risk from inflation in the future’.

Future shock
So what is the risk to inflation rates, the Australian economy, and families like the Darmodys? The increase in milk and dairy prices appear to be the thin end of the wedge, with the increase in oil prices and associated costs flushing out the usual suspects.

On September 21 the ACTU called for a four per cent increase to worker’s minimum wages because ‘petrol prices and other rising costs (were) putting working families under pressure’. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) immediately countered this suggestion, calling it ‘Whitlamesque economic mismanagement’.
‘The ACTU somehow seem to have forgotten that one of the most significant economic mistakes of the 1970s was to index wages to changes in prices in the context of the then-oil price shock’, ACCI chief executive Peter Hendy said at a conference in Sydney.
‘This is the type of thinking can kill an economy stone dead, end economic expansion and doom a society to inflation, recession and major job losses.’

Hendy has a point. It’s widely accepted by economists that the problems associated with the oil shocks of 1974 and 1979 were exacerbated when governments around the world gave into public pressure and accommodated unions’ (understandable) attempts to restore the value of the average pay packet. The majority of businesses were doing it just as tough as workers, and were forced to increase prices so they had something with which to fill those (now fatter) pay packages. This led to an inflationary spiral, where workers asked for more money to make up for the increased cost of living, and firms increased prices and laid off workers to make up for the increased cost of labour.

It is widely accepted that the Government erred in leaving rates too low for too long; and by failing to take steps to counter inflationary wage claims. Artificially propping up the wages of average workers ensured that demand for oil and other goods remained reasonably strong, despite skyrocketing prices – the tonic of higher prices was resisted and the market was prevented from correcting itself.
Another bout of such mismanagement would meet with resistance from the RBA. Interest rates would be increased until folks with loans were so broke that firms would not be able to sell much if they kept putting prices up. The threat of bankruptcy would force firms to refuse claims for an increase in wages that could only be funded by increasing prices.

Central banks have already been forced to re-assess their inflation outlooks in the light of Hurricane Katrina. Oil prices were rising before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita severely damaged oil production and refining capacity in the Gulf of Mexico. China’s (and to a lesser extent, India’s) voracious appetite for all kinds of commodities, and particularly energy, has driven the sustained increase in the price of a barrel of oil.

But while the demand the demand for oil is higher than it has ever been, the true bottleneck is in refining capacity. Oil needs to be turned into petrol or gasoline before it becomes useful to your average family in the western suburbs of Sydney. And right now, it’s easier to take extra oil out of the ground than it is to build the extra refining capacity required to transform that oil into something usable. As a result, refiners are able to charge a little more for their services, and the price of fuel has risen by still more than the price of oil. The consequence is that the threat to inflation from more expensive oil is greater than is suggested by the increase in oil prices alone.

Heading for a spiral?
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was among the first central banks to sound the inflation alarm. It warned, in September’s Statement on Monetary Policy, that rates may have to rise as a result of increased fuel prices; it upgraded its inflation forecast to 4% by the end of June 2006 as a result (its upper limit is 3%, like the Reserve Bank of Australia). In anticipation of the RBNZ increasing the rate of interest, financial markets have responded by increasing the rate of interest of Kiwi debt by about 50 basis points (0.5%), suggesting that they expect the RBNZ to increase rate to 7.25% by Christmas.

Other central bankers have lately joined the chorus. The US Federal Reserve’s Richard Fisher said that the Fed is watching for inflation pass-through to prices, and the European Central Bank’s Bini Smaghi signalled that the ECB also has concerns about Oil, commenting that the Bank is ‘closely evaluating how the European economy is reacting to oil prices’.

The latest inflation data suggest that Australian interest rates may also be about to rise. TD Securities supplies the main monthly estimate of Australian inflation; their estimate of inflation for September suggests that inflation has broken above the RBA’s 3% upper target. Stephen Koukoulas, Chief Strategist at TD Securities, highlighted the advance of another inflationary spiral, telling Investigate, ‘it is important to note that the inflation acceleration is spreading beyond the direct and clear effects of higher petrol prices.’

‘Inflation is accelerating to worrisome levels and is above the top end of the RBA target range. With the economy also picking up and wages growth rising, the RBA will be increasingly keen to increase interest rates to guard against an even more dramatic inflation problem in 2006. An interest rate rise before year end is now on the cards.’As a result of this, TD Securities expect that the RBA will increase interest rates to 5.75% before Christmas.

The risk of inflation from higher oil prices has shifted sentiment back toward an increase in Australian interest rates. Over the past few months, the bias of professional opinion has shifted from a cut over the next six months, to expectations of an increase in interest rates.

In the Australian Financial Review’s most recent regular survey, only one economist said they expected rates to fall over the next six months, while eight expected rates to increase, while the remaining 18 expect rates to remain at 5.5%. If the horizon is extended to the end of June 2006, 10 favour an increase, and 16 see no change. More might be expected to tip an increase once data covering the period with the biggest increases in fuel costs are released.

Ray Attrill, research director in 4cast’s Sydney office, agrees that the pressure is on the RBA. He says that ‘the RBA will be under pressure to increase rates, as higher energy prices boost both inflation and growth’, adding that ‘the RBA should be comparatively free from concerns about choking growth, as Australia benefits from higher prices via exports and investment, as it is a net energy exporter’. As a result, 4cast predicts that ‘the RBA will increase rates to 5.75%, by March 2006’, and that there is a 40 per cent chance rates will increase further, to 6% by the end of June of next year.
UBS Senior Economist Scott Haslem is more pessimistic, and tells Investigate that ‘the re-emergence of inflation risks in the September and December quarters [will] lead to rate hikes [at the] end of 2005/early 2006’. He nominates 5.75% by Christmas, and 6% before the end of March – an increase that will see average mortgage rates hop from 6.8% to 7.3%.

A quarter-point increase in the rate of interest adds about $35 per week to the average $230,000, 20-year mortgage. An increase from 6.8% to 7.3% would therefore add about $70 per month to average mortgage repayments. But this is not where the pain of higher oil prices stops. Between June 2004 and June 2005, the average price of petrol was about $1.02. The average household spends about $35 per week, or about $153 per month on fuel, so unless people drive their cars less this year, petrol prices of $1.25 per litre will add about $35 per month to the average fuel bill – the equivalent of another quarter-point increase in the interest rate.

Though many see this worst-case scenario as unlikely, US investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs recently released a research report that predicted that oil prices may rise as high as US$105 per barrel. They believe that ‘oil markets may have entered the early stages of … a “super spike” period’.

Oil at $105 per barrel would result in pump prices of about $2.02 per litre. Assuming that they don’t make major cutbacks to their driving, this will add about $150 per month to an average household’s fuel bill – the equivalent of more than a 1 percent mortgage rise. Central banks would increase interest rates, making mortgages more expensive. And companies would have to pass on increased costs to customers and workforces, which would surely be forced to absorb budget-cutting layoffs. In sum, it’s a recipe for the ‘misery index’, and something that would be devastating to families like the Darmodys.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)

Simply Devine: Feb 05, AU Edition

MIRANDA DEVINE
The new counter-culture groundswell

You know that by the time a new way of thinking makes it into a Hollywood blockbuster it is already deeply embedded in the culture. When it comes to Team America: World Police, how the thought must make lefties cringe.

Made by South Park’s Trey Parker, 35, and Matt Stone, 33, as a Thunderbirds-style puppet movie, it has a team of trigger-happy, flag-waving Americans fighting terrorists, while the peacenik liberals of FAG, the Film Actors Guild, headed by an “Alec Baldwin” puppet, try to stop them.

It features “Michael Moore”, a hot dog in each hand, as a suicide bomber, “a fat socialist weasel”.The movie opened at No. 1 in Australia last month and was still at No. 5 after three weeks. It strikes a chord, despite the lukewarm reception from a lot of reviewers.

They have said the movie attacks left and right with equal vigour. It does not. They liked the beginning because gung-ho Team America blows up the Eiffel Tower while chasing terrorists. “Let’s go police the world,” say the puppets. But those who thought the movie was a satire against American warmongers were shocked to find the opposite.

To her credit, Margaret Pomerantz of ABC’s The Movie Show gave Team America four stars and declared it “hilarious”.

But her co-host David Stratton was “really disgusted”. “It seems to become completely skewed, in the second half of the film, towards attacking liberals in the film industry,” he said. “Sean Penn and Tim Robbins have been very principled in what they’ve said about the Iraqi war and to deliberately destroy them the way this film does is really playing into the hands of George W. Bush.”

All I know is the teenage boys in the theatre I was in laughed heartily at the obscene jokes, puppet sex and savage mockery of Penn and co.

“As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspaper and then repeat what we read on television like it’s our own opinion,” explains

“Janeane Garofalo”.

“Tim Robbins” complains that corporations are “all corporation-y . . . and they make lots of money!”.

“Sean Penn” keeps saying, “I went to Iraq, you know” and says before Team America arrived there were “flowering meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate, where children danced”.

In one scene, evil North Korean dictator puppet “Kim Jong Il” won’t let UN weapons inspector “Hans Blix”, or “Brix” as Kim calls him, inspect his palace.

“We will be very angry with you, and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are,” threatens Brix, just before Kim feeds him to his shark.

After terrorists blow up the Panama Canal, TV newsreader puppet “Peter Jennings” intones: “Team America has once again pissed off the entire world”. Then “Alec Baldwin, FAG” comes on the screen: “Who’s to blame for these attacks? The terrorists? The people who supplied them with WMDs?” No. “Team America, the blood of the victims of Panama is on your hands.”

The final summation of why the world needs Team America, even if they are, “reckless, arrogant, stupid d—ks”, to save them from terrorist “a—holes” is unambiguous, despite reviewers who expected a puppet Fahrenheit 9/11.

“We tried to make the movie optimistic and pro-American,” said Stone in an interview.

Even new movie The Incredibles has an anti-political correctness theme: super hero family forced to blend into society and hide talents. Super-fast runner Dash thinks it’s not fair: “Everybody is special, Dash,” says his mother. “That’s just another way of saying nobody is,” he moans.

The movie also celebrates family: “Mom and dad’s lives could be in jeopardy, or worse - their marriage!” says daughter Violet. These subversive themes are the new counter-culture.

The way it works is that those who build a culture, over 40 years or so, have a vested interest in maintaining it. So the old counter-culturalists become the conservatives, even though they still think they are progressives and deride as “conservative” those who disagree with them, though disagreeing is counter-cultural.

Then along comes a generation which has known nothing but the old “counter-culture” and feels oppressed by it, because there are so many rules now about how you should think, and to a fresh mind many are absurd.

So you get the first signs of rebellion from the most independent-minded, and soon enough it builds into a tsunami that breaks down the old counter-culture and begins the process anew. This is what is happening now, vomit jokes, puppet sex and all.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

Money, Dec 05, AU Edition

PETRONOMICS
Who’s getting rich off high gas prices? Hint: think ballot boxes, not bowsers

Let me take you back in time, to a land that existed long, long, ago. A time when life was vastly different, an era when we were more mobile, a time when petrol was around 85 cents a litre. I am, of course, talking about January 2005. They say that a year is an eternity in politics. Well, the same can be said for petrol prices. I recently heard an explanation from an “industry expert” about how the price of petrol is determined each day, indeed, each hour. It makes subjects like the structure of DNA and thermonuclear physics seem like kindergarten stuff.

Not surprisingly, the only person to lose out in all of this is the motorist. In my honestly held opinion, there are snouts in proverbial troughs everywhere when it comes to making a quid out of petrol. It is also a fact of life that we all depend on our cars for almost everything. Maybe, just maybe, cutting back on petrol, and not using the ol’ chariot as much as we used to, is not such a bad thing. Do we really need to drive to the local shops when they are only a 5 minute walk anyway? Dropping children off at school can be a bit like a demolition derby, but with more emotion… so walking to school is maybe not such a bad thing.

In July 1969, when man landed on the moon, the number one hit was a cheerful little number called, “In the Year 2525”, by Zager and Evans. Some of the lyrics of this song include, “Your arms are hanging limp at your sides. Your legs got nothing to do. Some machine, doing that for you”. Perhaps they were predicting the way we would be going if we didn’t stop using our cars for the most mundane tasks. Call me an eternal optimist but there has to be an upside in this whole price of petrol predicament. Conversely, maybe the more haunting lyrics from Messieurs Zager and Evans are, “I’m kinda wondering if man’s gonna be alive. He’s taken everything this old earth can give. And he ain’t put back nothing...” So let’s have a look how we can drive through to the other side of this petrol pricing tunnel: there is a light but we just need to look for it. And, no, it is not a train heading toward us.

Who gets what?
Let’s look at a litre of standard unleaded petrol – say it costs $1.20 per litre. Where does your hard-earned go? Well, the refiner gets about 60 cents (this is called the “Terminal Gate Price”), and the government gets their bit (in fact its a large bite; around 41 cents goes to consolidated revenue, but only the government could get away with having a tax on top of a tax, because we have to pay GST on top of all these figures, so that makes another 11cents). Are you starting to see a bit of a trend here? We are paying $1.20 and approximately 52 cents of it is going to…drum roll…the government! The wholesaler gets about 5 cents out of all of this and by the time the poor ol’ servo gets a cut they only wind up with about 3 cents a litre.

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see that there is a 100% mark up on the refinery price, so the next time you are muttering under your breath about the petrol station owner, remember that the actual outlet itself is not getting that much from the petrol. (This is why they’re always flogging Mars Bars and chewing gum and groceries and magazines). They make more money on a few chocolate bars than they do on your petrol.

Let’s make these numbers dance a bit so that they are more meaningful: if we assume that the average car has about a 60 litre tank then a full tank would cost $72. The government gets $31, the refinery $36 and the servo gets $2. If you fill up once a week, that means that over the course of a year you are paying around $3,800 in total for petrol – including $1,650 extra in tax. Can you take that off your next income tax return? I don’t think so… and once again the total that the petrol station retailer gets for your patronage is about $100.

Hopefully it is now a bit clearer about where the money goes but we still haven’t looked at how the Terminal Gate Price is determined. Why have we seen such a big increase in the last 12 months and especially the last 3-4 months? This is where it is a real minefield and requires some unravelling of the facts.

How do they decide on a price?
The key point is that Australian refineries compete with Asia for petroleum products. Both oil and finished products (such as petrol and diesel) can be purchased at competitive prices from a number of locations in the region. Prices of fuel types such as diesel or petrol in this regional market are driven by supply and demand of each individual fuel type, resulting in fluctuations of the prices relative to each other. Australian refineries not only compete with imports of finished product in Australia but also export product to the regional market.

The Terminal Gate Price includes the import parity price plus tax (again), and a very small margin which covers some administration and marketing costs. It appears we are getting closer to the crux of all of this. We know what the terminal gate price is but what is the import parity price?

The import parity price is essentially the cost of importing, including freight and wharfage, finished product (as opposed to crude oil) to Australia. The import parity price is not regulated but instead determined by market forces. It now appears that the base price of the petrol we buy is directly linked to the importation of product. But in what way?

An international pricing benchmark is required for efficient operation of the petroleum products market in Australia and Asia. Singapore is a major refining centre and prices there are the best available reflection of prices in our region. For this reason, the Australian market uses Singapore prices as a benchmark, with actual prices negotiated relative to this benchmark. Changes in Singapore petrol prices or exchange rates typically take one to two weeks to flow through into either increases or decreases in pump prices. These changes are often masked by weekly cycles in pump prices in major capital cities.

What a revelation! It appears that the refineries pay for their imported product based on a calculation using the Singapore petrol price. This in turn is directly linked to the fluctuating cost of a barrel of crude. This changes daily and is determined by international supply and demand forces in the Middle East and the USA. This is globalisation in action. The next time you are in a country town like Wheelyabarraback or somewhere near the Black Stump, then realise that the petrol you are putting into your car is costing you what it costs because of what is happening in Singapore and Arabia… and don’t forget the government taxes!

But why do they all go up at once?
A common question is that all petrol stations seem to put up their prices at the same time. This, in fact, is not collusion but rather the result of marketing forces. You see what happens is, as we have just discovered the price that refiners pay for their product is determined by international supply and demand, and what the Singapore price is…but there is still a lot of room to move for thee refineries. There is a time lag between when prices are agreed and when they are paid. There are also corporate marketing strategies that result in temporarily decreasing the margin for the oil company. In other words, instead of a refinery making a 20% margin on their terminal gate price they make a 10% margin but they sell a larger volume.

Now this is why we see petrol cheaper on certain days, usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It is marketing ploy to make us buy then rather than wait. And if one company moves in price the rest will follow to remain competitive. After a couple of days of not maximising profits (remember, they are still making a profit but it is just lower) then there is financial pressure on the oil companies to increase their prices again, hence higher prices toward the weekends. I suppose it is basic commerce really: there are two groups of factors which lead to higher petrol prices – higher costs, and different competitive environments. (And of course, taxes.)

So what do we do?
The aim, of course, is to minimise your petrol bill, and you can do this with push and pull strategies.

1. Firstly, think carefully each time you use the car. Do you really need to fire up the beast to go two blocks to pickup some milk?

2. Do you really need that milk in the first place or can it wait?

3. Can you use public transport? At least on a bus or a train you can relax, maybe read or do some work, and save money.

4. Cadge a ride with someone else. Car pooling works well overseas.

5. Think … and act about your driving style. Drag-track starts might get you away from the lights quicker but you just get to next set of lights before everyone else, and it costs a bundle in petrol. Also there is no need to rev a car’s engine when you first turn on the ignition, unless you have a car built before 1960.

6. Plan when you buy your petrol. If you hear on the news that crude oil prices are going up then that means every part of Australia will be affected. Try and beat the oil companies to a price rise.

7. Watch for pricing cycles. If petrol is usually cheaper on Tuesday, well, buy on Tuesday.

8. Use coupons from supermarkets and other retailers to get a reduction in the pump price. Remember the old truism; look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.

In case all of this fails…buy a horse. This used to work before, they are cheap to buy, and upkeep is more efficient than a car. Unfortunately, the price of cereal and hay is going up. Why? Because of petrol costs. Oh well, maybe it is better to just stay at home: at least we can’t be taxed there…unless we do something.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

Dec 05, AU Edition

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

James Morrow speaks to Zimbabwean actor and filmmaker Chloe Traicos about life in exile, her documentary about the brutality of the Mugabe regime, and the growing community of escapees from that African thugocracy who now call Australia home

In retrospect, perhaps the world should have known Robert Mugabe was going to be trouble. In the 1970s, when he was fighting the war for Rhodesian independence, he was thought of as the most radical, and most Marxist, of all the guerrilla leaders at the time, and did his best to drag out the war and its suffering – especially that of the white population – for his own aims. And his return from exile to lead what would become Zimbabwe was, according to historian Martin Meredith in his book The State of Africa was marked by throngs of supporters displaying “rocket grenades, land mines and guns … and many youths wore T-shirts displaying the Kalashnikov rifle, the election symbol that [Mugabe’s party] wanted but the British had disallowed.” But Mugabe, being a crafty warrior, moderated his tone on the advice of Mozambique’s president, who told him not to scare the white population back into exile.

Now, with Mugabe in the twilight of his life, his true colours have emerged once again as a brutal thug and an anti-white racist. And like another ZImbabwean author and the characters in his book, individuals like Chloe Traicos and her family have paid the price as well.

Tall, blonde and 26 – and with just a touch of the young Audrey Hepburn about her – Chloe Traicos is a Zimbabwean-born actress and filmmaker who has devoted the past five years of her life to documenting and exposing the brutality of Robert Mugabe. The daughter of former Zimbabwean test cricketer John Traicos, Chloe Traicos was born around the time of independence, and had what she describes as an idyllic childhood. The black-versus-white tensions that have been so enflamed didn’t exist at the time, and she recalls going to South Africa when she was a girl and being utterly baffled by apartheid – a system totally alien to the Zimbabwe of the 1980s.

“My father was a cricketer and also the managing director of a big hotel, and everyone there was like my family. That was my home, and I stay in touch with a lot of the people there, but the only way I can go back is if the government changes.” Traicos was forced leave with her family for Perth when it became clear that Mugabe was beginning to show his true colours.

“By the time we left, there were already violent food riots in the country”, recalls Traicos over coffee in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, where she moved two years ago. “I remember doing a three-day computer course in downtown Harare with my sister, and in the middle of one morning the college got a call telling them not to let anyone outside”, she recalls, making her an eye-witness to a situation it would take the rest of the world several more years to wake up to.
“The next thing I knew, our mum was there – she had coming racing in
to get us – there were riots going on around town, and we sped home and everything was shut down in the middle of a weekday and I just thought, ‘well, it can’t get any worse than this’.”

Of course, things were to get a lot worse, with the farm invasions that began in 2000 and the brutality that continues unchecked to this day. “When the farm invasions started happening, a lot of Australians just thought, ‘oh well, they’re finally kicking out the rich whites’, but they didn’t understand that all this was making life even worse for Zimbabwe’s blacks.”

To shed light on the situation in her homeland, Traicos – who studied acting in South Africa – has written and produced A Stranger in my Homeland. What started out as a stage play that ran in 2000 at Perth’s Blue Room has turned into a one-hour documentary of the same name that has screened all over the world, including at the Perth International Arts Festival, the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, and the Las Vegas International Film Festival – and has recently been picked up by Amnesty International as well. Essentially telling the story of both black and white Zimbabweans who have been forced to flee by Mugabe’s reign of terror, the documentary tells the story of “just how bad things are” – including the horrific Matabele massacres of the early 1980s, a “bath of blood” in the words of one witness carried out with the help of North Korean mercenaries.

It’s a constant battle to keep awareness of Mugabe’s crimes on the agenda in the West, says Traicos, who says she finds many who have escaped Zimbabwe just want to keep quiet, “keep their heads down”, and quietly start a new life. “The memories of what has happened is just too raw for many of them”.

But while the silence of Mugabe’s victims is understandable, Traicos is less sanguine about the attitude of Australians and other Westerners, many of whom still choose to turn a blind eye to the situation in Zimbabwe. “No one it seems really wants to know about what’s going on – he even has a following in the US!”, says Traicos, outraged. “Did you see that horrible speech he gave to the UN where people stood up and cheered?”, she says, referring to the address (boycotted by Australia) Mugabe gave recently – ironically enough for a man who has driven his country to starvation – to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“It’s like what happened in Rwanda”, says Traicos, speaking of Western countries’ failure to act in Africa before disaster strikes. “People will say, ‘oh, that’s terrible that that is going on’, but no one is willing to step in and really stop it. Sadly, the only country that’s really in a position to do anything is South Africa, but they won’t.”
Given some of the Mugabe-like rhetoric to come out of South African president Thabo Mbeki, perhaps that’s not surprising. For the people of southern Africa, though, it is very, very worrying.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: Mar 05, AU Edition

MORE THAN JUST A CHILLY PLACE
The moon’s still out there, but what is it good for? Maybe the next century of Asian economic growth, says Pat Sheil

Since Eugene Cernon closed the hatch on the Apollo 17 lunar module and hit the grunt button, the moon has been a very quiet place. We’re used to the idea now, but in the early 70s the notion of a deserted moon in 2005 would hardly have seemed credible. We were meant to have Holiday Inns on Mars by now, right?

The are good reasons why none of this has happened, not the least of which is that once we knew it could actually be done, going to the moon quickly lost the lustre of heroic achievement and became just another budget line item. If there isn’t a quid in it, and all the prestige value has been milked, then it’s time to mothball the idea until there’s a good reason to do it again. A profit angle sure wouldn’t hurt.

But governments are lousy at making money – remember the hype about drug companies whipping up miracle cures in zero G aboard the shuttle and the space station? With no whiz-bang, frontier busting purpose, the shuttle has proved to be the greatest lemon in the history of transportation, largely because it had nowhere to go and nothing to do when it got there.

Since the Columbia disaster the lemon has mutated into a grapefruit. NASA is so terrified of losing another one that they have restricted its use to delivering odds and ends to the space station, a destination in name only. One more prang and the remaining two will go straight into museums.

The shuttle has become, in the minds of NASA, an accident waiting to happen, and if you or I lived by the new NASA definition of “acceptable risk” we’d all wrap ourselves in cotton wool and crawl under a rock for the rest of our lives. (There is a beautiful story on this subject dating back to the early days of the Apollo program. Werner von Braun had assured NASA that he could achieve an impossible “four nine” reliability, by which he meant that 99.99% percent of his launches would succeed. Word around Houston was that he achieved this by asking his sycophantic fellow German scientists “Is there anything wrong with this design?” only to hear “Nein”, “Nein”, “Nein”, “Nein”.)

But things may be about to change. For space to be worthy of investment, it has to generate a return, and at the moment the only money is in communications and imaging satellites, because they actually deliver a saleable product. The moon, on the face of it, is a desert. But then so was Western Australia in the 1880s. The moon may be about to have its first gold rush.

The gold, in this case, is helium 3. Helium 3 is a very rare isotope of helium which accumulates on the moon from the solar wind, but exists in tiny quantities on Earth. The reason it glitters, from an economic viewpoint, is that it looks like the best fuel for the nuclear fusion power plants that we’ve been promised for the last fifty years. If fusion can be made to work, it will change the energy market in ways that haven’t been seen since the discovery of electricity. And the people who control the He3 supply will get very, very rich.

Sure, there are a lot of “ifs” here, but that’s never stopped speculative investors from sniffing around scenarios that promise mountains of money. These things have a habit of snowballing, and recent events have put the moon back on the table, as it were.

For one thing, George W. Bush has made wacky pronouncements about “going back to the moon and on to Mars”. These can largely be ignored, because it ain’t going to happen, not the way he envisages it, anyway. Most of us will be long dead before there’s a Mars base. But he will be throwing money at the idea, if only by gutting other NASA programs. The space caper, from a purely business perspective, is a lot more sophisticated than it was the last time big government moon money was flying around, and there are companies now that will want a bigger slice of the action than sub-contracting work on engines and paint jobs.

Secondly, there are new players. Take the Soviets out of the game, and throw in Europe, Japan, India and China. These last three especially have very serious long-term energy problems. They have serious short term energy problems for that matter, but by 2050 these nations will have found new sources of energy or they will have imploded.

All of these countries are launching moon probes in the next few years. Europe’s Smart-1 arrived in lunar orbit in November. Japan launches one next year. India and China have both announced moon shots by 2007. All of them will be doing mineralogical surveys.

They are not doing this for fun. Sure, there’s an element of flag-waving in it all, especially in China’s case, but there’s also the small matter of possession being nine-tenths of, well, everything.

D.J. Lawrence, planetary scientist at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory was in India in November addressing the International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon being held in the northern city of Udaipur. “Potentially there are large reservoirs of helium 3 on the moon,” he said. “Just doing reconnaissance where the minerals are and to find out where helium 3 likes to hang out is the first step, so when the reactor technology gets to work we are ready and have precise information.

“It really could be used as a future fuel and is safe. It is not all science fiction.”

But what of the 1984 UN Moon Treaty, which forbids nations from making territorial claims on the moon, or anywhere else in the solar system? Australia is a signatory. Significantly, the USA and China are not, and with stakes this high, they’re not likely to ratify any time soon. But even if they did, there’s nothing in the treaty, or the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which forbids corporations claiming territory. And this may be a clue as to how this will eventually pan out. Space agencies like NASA are already looking at the sub-orbital flights of Spaceship One last year that took out the US$10 million X Prize, and coming up with their own prize schemes. NASA has announced the Centennial Challenge prizes, which may soon top US$200 million, for private projects including robotic lunar landings and sample return missions.

It’s not that hard to conceive of a multinational mining corporation teaming up with an aerospace company and taking a punt on something like this, especially when success could reap not only tens of millions of dollars to recoup the initial investment, but also put them in pole position when the gun goes off in the claim-staking race. You can almost hear ‘em now. “Treaty? Don’t apply to us – we’re the Lunar Energy Corporation, not the US Government!”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : Dec 05, AU Edition

NIC FIX
One 21st birthday bash plus two divorced parents minus cigarettes equals a very tense ride

Just after dark recently I was dropping off a passenger in an Eastern Suburbs Housing Commission neighbourhood. As I slowed, a party of three hailed me. It was obvious they were waiting for a booked cab: A young guy around 18 years old in suit pants, white shirt and tie, plus two women likewise dressed up.

The fella ran after the cab then stood on the roadway at my window waiting for the passenger to alight, then asked, ‘Mate, are you free?’ ‘Um, did you book a cab?’, I replied. ‘Yeah but we’ve been waiting half an hour – it’s my sister’s 21st and we’re really late. Please, I know you don’t have to take us but it’s really important’. The kid’s plaintive appeal struck a chord. ‘Yeah righto, jump in’.

My passengers were in good spirits as we headed for a five star restaurant at Circular Quay. The kid earnestly engaged me in banter about cab driving whilst the two women quietly chatted in the back. When one of them requested we stop at a convenience store for cigarettes, the kid tapped me on the leg and said, ‘Mate, this cab doesn’t stop, does it?’. ‘Depends who’s paying’, I replied. ‘I am’, insisted the woman. ‘No, Mum’, the kid replied, ‘we haven’t got time – we’ll be late for the guests’.

Hearing the word ‘Mum’ surprised me. From snippets of their easy chat I’d been under the impression both women were the same age. Now I realised I was carrying a single parent and two children. ‘Mum, you can buy cigarettes when we get there’, the kid told her. ‘No, I don’t think there’s anywhere near the restaurant’, she said, ‘We’ll stop at the nearest hotel’.

At Circular Quay I pulled up at the Paragon Hotel for the mother to buy smokes in the bottle shop. However, as she only had plastic the kids told her she would need cash for the machine. ‘I don’t care, we’ve got to find another shop’, she said tersely, ‘You know not to get between me and cigarettes’. The birthday girl chided her, ‘Mum, you’re being childish’. But the mother’s frustration was obvious – she needed smokes.

‘I’ll take you around to Harrington Street’, I said, ‘there’s a 7-11 there’. ‘No mate...’, said the kid, but his mother interrupted, ‘Yes Steven, we get the cigarettes first!’. Whatever, I thought; it would only take a few minutes. Unbelievably though, the store was lit up but closed! The mother stood outside its doors willing it to open, before storming back to the cab and slamming the door. ‘I told you I needed cigarettes!’, she exploded. The kid leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Mate, please take us to the restaurant now’. ‘Okay’, I said, ‘but there’s a shop back on Pitt Street’. ‘We’ll go back then!’, the mother barked. ‘Mum, let’s just get to the restaurant’, the kid pleaded, ‘then I’ll run up to the store for you’. ‘Yes, you will’, she scowled.

We completed the trip in tense silence, the jovial atmosphere now gone. ‘Thanks Mum’, the daughter quietly said, ‘you’ve managed to spoil the start of my night’. Ignoring her, Mum handed over a debit card then hopped out, slamming the door. ‘I’m really sorry about my Mum’, the kid said as he punched in the PIN. ‘Mate, it’s cool’, I told him. ‘I’m a smoker too.” I handed him a cigarette for her along with the receipt.

What I understood was the situation of divorced parents coming together to celebrate a child’s 21st birthday. There was a good chance relations between the parents were not ideal and the pressure of such a momentous evening could be overwhelming. A child’s formal graduation to adulthood is a tough gig for parents at the best of times, full of powerful mixed emotions. And if a parent insists on cigarettes for such a night, then they must be believed. Believe me.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: Mar 05, AU Edition

INTERNET CAFES
Paul Wright takes a caffeinated tour of Sydney’s suburbs to test go-anywhere broadband

The setup procedure for my new Unwired broadband modem was extremely fast and friendly. Four clicks and I was off to the car to test whether mobile internet access really means mobile as in “while driving from place to place”, or mobile as in dangling in one spot while slowly turning around and around while singing “It’s a Small World After All” as the parents weep quietly in the corner of the baby’s room because all they want is just one night of sleep, is that too much to ask?

First stop: Birdies’ Cafe, Alexandria. Fast call to the Good Lady Wife because I forgot to bring the demo password, and I was off into the wild blue internet. Popular myth has the first telephone call being from Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Watson to help him with an acid burn. In a remarkable coincidence, the first Unwired email I received was an eerie reflection of Bell’s plea; it begins “Mr Watson, I need you...to help get $93 million out of the Bank of Lagos.”

The tests were performed using a Toshiba Pentium 3 600 notebook, test websites chosen for load speed were the Sydney Morning Herald, as a popular local website with medium graphics content, and instapundit.com, a very popular US website with low graphic content. Most tests were performed in business hours.I recommend turning on the “Reception Assistant” whenever going online from a new location. Without this, there is no way to tell why the system is not connecting.

Cafe Bianchi, Summer Hill. Reception: four bars. Download speed: good. Watching: movie trailers from Hoyts.com.au. Coffee: excellent. People: ugly.

The modem has no battery indicator, so user won’t notice when it tanks. Like the reception, this is irritating in extremis, and means one more thing to check when a page won’t refresh. Also, the modem needs to be physically switched off after use. This is an entirely new habit to form, and for the first few days, expect the modem battery to be as flat as a pancake every morning.

Starbucks, Park Street, City. Reception: off the chart. Load speed: excellent. Service: where’s my triple espresso?! These people are moving at the speed of mud.

Make sure the computer you are using has an ethernet port. That’s the one that looks like an overweight telephone socket. Without it, you’ll have to deal with the mutants at Tandy as they gibber incomprehensibly about what sort of cable you need while making insulting comments about your manhood because you actually require assistance with your computer.

Big roundabout, Sydney Park, Alexandria. Reception: poor; connection dropped out. Repeated laps of roundabout failed to regain signal. Other motorists increasingly rude. Decided not to explain reason for driving behavior. Left before police arrived.Since this is a free demo account, I decided to test e-mail load speed by signing up for every possible spam site, porn offer and scam letter I could get my hands on. I want every part of my body enhanced and enlarged with cheap generic medicines supplied to me by the wife of the former Chief of the Army of Nigeria. And Hot College Chicks will then Want To Meet Me Now.

Blackwattle Bay park, walking the dog. Or rather, sitting down while the dog chases the trams on the overhead railway. Computer says it has many, many spyware programs. Decide to download and install Ad-aware software. Reception: hovering between 2-3 bars. Download speed for a 2Mb program file: 8 minutes. I mean, sitting in the middle of a sunny park, no visible means of communication, and it takes 8 minutes to reach out across the other side of the world to get a free program that will prevent marketers from tracking my internet movements? Eight minutes! May as well be living in Russia!

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the software used by Unwired cannot be exported to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya or North Korea. So if you were planning on making a killing re-exporting wireless broadband to countries that still communicate by writing notes on their enemy’s livers, think again.

Note to Unwired: when I’m driving over the Harbour Bridge and need to email ahead to have someone open the wine, I do not want to have to wait to get a connection. A man is not a camel, you know.

A glance through the User Guide produces some interesting examples of Tech-Speak. My favourite came at the top of the document, where they urged me to put in the Quick-Start CD to assist in installing the User Guide. Perhaps this is included to throw those annoying North Koreans off the scent.
When using the Unwired modem in a public space, the signal strength can be enhanced by holding the modem up higher, placing it next to a window, or moving g it about the room. While this may have an effect on connection speed, it will definitely make sure everyone in the restaurant knows you’re an Unwired user and therefore at the bleeding edge of technology. As with every other broadband service provider, reading Unwired’s pricing plans rapidly causes glazed-eye induced bouts of keyboard face. If your boredom threshold is so high you are willing to pay extra for the grass-growing cable channel, I commend you to the pricing plan page. For the rest of us, I recommend choosing blindly, and hope there isn’t a kidney forfeit clause in the fine print.
Interesting thought: will mobile broadband spell an end to fights over bar bets? Who will resort to fisticuffs over the level of influence Seneca had over Pliny the Elder (well it comes up where I drink), when the dashing Unwired user can swiftly settle the matter to the satisfaction of all parties?
One significant problem with the Unwired system is that you can’t tell if it will work in your house or place of business, until you actually purchase the whole deal, get it delivered, install it, and spend a few hours shouting at the screen to get it running. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but in the meantime, you’ve parted with some hundreds of the readies, and signed up for a year-long contract, which you now have to inveigle your way out of. There probably isn’t a way around this, but it’s still annoying. For instance, the on-line mapping of coverage in Sydney tells me I have access from my house. I relayed this slowly and loudly to the Connection Assistant, to little avail. No connection.
All in all, Unwired is a nifty system that portends serious changes to the way we will do business in the future. For home use, it is more cumbersome, and less reliable, than a wireless LAN, but Unwired still offers speed and big-time convenience for road warriors. To say nothing of that increasingly rare commodity, major pose value.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

THE ROUGH LIFE: Dec 05, AU Edition

EARLY START
Eli Jameson hopes his kids don’t wind up inheriting his handicap

Frank Sinatra famously sang that he’d had regrets, but that they were “too few to mention”. (One has to wonder what those regrets would have been: Letting Peter Lawford into the Rat Pack? Cozying up to the Kennedys? The famous “two-dollar whore” remark on his 1974 tour of Australia – if only because it inspired the dreadful The Night We Called it a Day?)

Personally, I try to live much of my life by Sinatra’s credo. Sure, I don’t punch out blackjack dealers (much), can’t stomach Jack Daniel’s, and my wife isn’t named Nancy. But I do believe that it’s good to keep the regrets of one’s life to a minimum. Looking back on my life, however, there is one thing I would have done differently.

I would have learned to play golf when I was much, much younger.
In fact, I grew up overseas, in a city where golf courses were pretty inaccessible except to those who had the money for a pricey membership, the time and fanaticism required to camp out for a tee time at a public course, or both. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and was living in a golf-mad town that I finally picked up a club, when some mates announced they were going to the driving range after Sunday brunch. Having nothing better to do on a hot summer afternoon, I asked if I could tag along.

To make a long story short, I was hooked two minutes after first picking up a club. (I sliced thirty seconds after picking up a club, but that’s another story). My friends put a 9-iron in my hands, gave me a bucket of balls, some basic tips on set-up, stance, and swing, and I was off. The memory is hazy, but I know that only about half of my first dozen swings even came close to connecting with the ball, and those that did saw shots skitter wildly across a 120-degree field of fire that managed to include the course’s first fairway.

Then it happened: the one magic shot that took off high and straight, describing a parabola, before settling down to earth with a satisfying thup and little puff of dust, a la Wile E. Coyote when he has one of his unfortunate run-ins with gravity. Like the caveman at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey who discovers the power of an old bone as a club, I had discovered the power of the 9-iron as, well, a club. The following day I went into the office, ordered up a set of clubs off the Internet, and pestered my friends to take me out on the course the following week. (In a tremendous dose of beginner’s luck, my very first shot on my very first hole – a par-3 – was a 5-iron that landed nicely on the green. Everything about both me and my game has gone downhill since.)

And that’s the problem: I will never get to be really, really good at golf. Breaking 90 is a pipe-dream. Perhaps if I were a natural-born athlete who’d done sporty stuff his entire life, I could have adapted my other skill sets to fit the game, but there’s really no chance of that happening at this point.

That’s why I’m determined that I won’t make the same mistake with my kids. I’m going to do whatever it takes to be the Earl Woods of the Southern Hemisphere. I’m going to turn my offspring into stone-cold golf nuts with negative handicaps by the time they turn 18 and have the world wondering when they will take the US PGA by storm. And as their manager, I’ll never have to worry about how my super is doing again.

OK, maybe that’s a bit much. Still, though, I hope they decide to gather their rosebuds – or work on their mid-irons – while they may. I guess it’s a case of another aphorism that I first came across in a Tiger Woods book about golf strategy: Never make the same mistake twice.

Or something like that.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

Money: Mar 05, AU Edition

CREDIT LIMIT
Owner or renter, boss or wage slave, the coming interest rate hike

Australians are famous for their love their credit and, according to the latest government fig-ures, currently hold a record $28.2 billion debt on their charge and credit cards alone. So it’s no wonder that the mere mention of a rise in interest ratesis about as welcome in many quarters as, say, discoursing on the potential for shark attacks is on Bondi Beach.

Yet all signs point to the Reserve Bank of Australia lifting interest rates sometime this year, and possibly within the next six months, with the economy continuing to grow and the consumer price index edging ever closer to the government’s outer-tolerance limit of three per cent per year. And when the rise comes, it’s not likely to be that temporary a situation, either: economic forecaster BIS Shrapnel’s senior economist, Matthew Hassan, has warned that an increasingly tight job market will push wages up over the next two years, leading to higher prices and, ultimately, interest rates that are “expected to peak at around 8 per cent in late 2006”.

But there’s no need to cue the Jaws theme just yet. Even if the cost of money – which is, in essence, what interest rates represent – is poised to poke skywards like the dorsal fin of a circling great white, there is no need to panic. For when it comes to both hungry sharks and rising rates, experts agree that a lot of panicky shrieking and splashing about will only make things worse.

Homeowners (who represent about seven out of every ten Australians) are obviously going to be the first to feel the pinch, and should make sure their home financing is structured properly: “We suggest that people have one-third of their mortgage on a honeymoon rate, with another third being fixed for five years and the last third being fixed for ten,” advises Christine Davie, a certified financial planner with Melbourne-based Donohue Financial Planning. According to her, this is the best way to hedge one’s bets as interest rates rise and fall over the period of the loan. “The banks have been giving away money as fast as they can for the last several years, and people who are highly-geared should think about this.”

Davie adds that when it comes to interest rates, it’s not smart to go crazy trying to find the lowest rate – “it’s actually very hard to find the bottom of the market,” she says – but that does not mean mortgage holders shouldn’t try and at least do a deal with their individual bank. After all, notes Davie, everything’s negotiable: “It’s often worth asking your bank if that’s the best they can do. But just because the sign in the front window says ‘6 per cent’ doesn’t mean they won’t come down if you ask, or even threaten to take your business elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, for those Australians who don’t own their homes yet, but are looking to join the ranks of first-time homeowners, this is a critical time – one in which careful planning can pay off big.

The first thing to remember is, bide your time. In fact, with interest rates heading north, there is “no rush to get into the housing market right away,” says Damian Cullen, Managing Director of Cullen Financial Planning in Sydney. Instead, put your money someplace smart: “When you’re looking to buy within a twelve to twenty-four month timeframe, really the only place to be is in cash or fixed-interest investments,” cautions Cullen, who adds that when it comes to that crucial down-payment nest egg, “don’t even think of going near the share market”. The second thing to keep in mind (especially for young buyers) is that circumstances change. For example, says Christine Davie, just because a couple consists of two high-earning professionals today does not mean both parties will still be bringing home fat pay packets of five years ago. And the number one reason for this is kids.

“People get married and buy a house and never think about what might happen if they only had one salary coming in, or if one of them decided to take time off to care for a child” she says. Thus couples often wind up either putting off having children, or find themselves in tough circumstances when kids do arrive with a lot of hard choices to make. Davie adds that even if both mum and dad keep working, children are expensive, and childcare can eat up an awful lot of that second income. The old days of buying more home than one could afford may still make economic sense (though it’s an old financial planning chestnut born in the days when one-income families were the norm, not the exception), but it can seriously interfere with one’s work-life balance.

For both owners and renters then, rising interest rates can ultimately mean – either for direct or indirect reasons – less money in the kitty at the end of the week. Smart planning now, says Davie, can avoid a lot of pain later: “If you have personal debt and loans and credit cards, this is the time to consolidate things,” she says. “And maybe, if you find that you keep getting into trouble, you should even think about cutting up the credit cards”.

Meanwhile, companies as well as individuals are poised to feel the effect of an interest rate rise, according to George Etrelezis, Managing Director of Western Australia’s Small Business Development Corporation, and business owners will feel it in a variety of ways.

“First of all, there is the straight bottom-line effect that interest rates have on the cost of borrowing, whether for purchasing equipment or obtaining working capital, and interest rates also factor in to leasing costs and replacement costs,” says Etrelezis, who adds that “there’s certainly an effect that rates have on the dollar coming in the door of a business. And as consumer sentiment dips as they have less money to spend, this means that various industries like the building trades will suffer as people decide to, say, put off building an extension to their home”.But there are other and more pernicious ways in which businesses may feel the pinch as well, and this is where Australian entrepreneurs need to keep a close eye out in coming months. Unless their business is a bank, they need to make sure their customers don’t treat them like one.

“Debtors will quickly start to become an issue for businesses,” says Etrelezis, “and there will be more and more of them who will try and extend their terms of credit. And it makes sense: with the cost of money going up from the banks, they will try and get cash somewhere else,” even if it means stepping on your goodwill.

As a result, the mantra that (especially for small businesses) “cash flow is king” becomes ever more important. Etrelezis says all business owners must start to think like the big boys, who are very strict about their payment terms and are not afraid to enforce them. “Be disciplined, and if someone goes too far beyond their 30 days, don’t be afraid to turn away their business. Remember: you can’t afford to let a regular customer slide for 60 or 90 or 120 days, and if they go down they will take that cash flow down with them”.

Finally, as tempting as it is to focus solely on interest rates at home, smart planning means keeping an eye on what’s happening beyond Australia’s shores as well. According to Geoff O’Neill, Managing Director and CEO of Advantage One, a financial planning and investment counseling firm which caters to high net worth clients in Adelaide, interest rates in the United States are about to make a move as well – something to bear in mind when making investment decisions.
“If you look at the U.S., their rates are at a historic low, while their economy is moving into a period with improved economic fundamentals. And as their economy expands, we’ll start to see American interest rates edge up to keep a lid on growth”, says O’Neill, who adds that this will probably knock some value off the Australian dollar. “Our dollar looks strong right now, but that’s really a reflection of the weakness of the U.S. Dollar,” he points out. “As we see an improving economy in the States leading to an increase in rates, then we can also see the Australian Dollar falling back closer to the .70 mark,” something that will affect our balance of trade and the performance of exporting versus importing companies.

While those two sectors will likely balance themselves out on the equity markets, O’Neill cautions that when it comes to the share market in general, it’s time for investors to get realistic and says that “this current rate of growth is not sustainable, and we must get more focused on achieving the real rate of return out of equity markets, which should be something like 10 percent or less – and certainly not 18 to 25 per cent.”

It can be easy in Australia to get used to living in a place where low interest rates and virtually full employment rule the day, and where the economy regularly weathers storms that lay low the finances of other countries. But while a rise in interest rates might be unpleasant – especially for the unprepared – it’s also the sort of medicine that can keep other more unpleasant numbers (like inflation and unemployment) down as well.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Dec 05, AU Edition

HIT AND MISSY
Elliott’s latest fails to impress. Plus: soul survivors, and a moving tribute to Sublime

Missy Elliott
“The Cookbook”, Goldmind/Atlantic
2 stars
Missy Elliott has a remarkably consistent track record of combining stylistic innovation and commercial success, with a series of freakishly catchy hits that match her outre sensibility with her producer pal Timbaland’s off-kilter beats. All of that came to a creative peak on the brilliantly strange 2002 hit “Work It.”

On “The Cookbook”, though, Timbaland is in the kitchen on only two cuts. As a result, Elliott delivers the first merely mediocre album of her career.

It has its soulful, compelling moments, such as the confessional “My Struggles,” with Grand Puba and Mary J. Blige, and even better, “Irresistible Delicious”, which makes excellent use of the insouciant flow of rap legend Slick Rick. But “The Cookbook” is ultimately not much more than a serviceable party record. From Elliott, we’ve come to expect a more nourishing repast.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

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Patti Labelle
“Classic Moments”, Def Soul
3 stars
Vivian Green
“Vivian”, Sony Urban
3 stars
To hear these Philadelphians tell it, soul never really got too hijacked by hip-hop. For veteran Patti LaBelle and youngster Vivian Green, soul is all about desperation and joy within supple arrangements and vocal twists beneath the rhythms.

Lacking a memorable song, Green’s voice inhabits the colors of each careful arrangement, such as the flying strings of “Under My Skin” and the flickering guitars of “Mad”. From her lyrics to the ache in her high register, Green conveys how some emotions surprise her, from the sadness of “Frustrated” to the carnality of “Damn”.

What Green is just gathering, LaBelle has cultivated during her decades-long career. Without too much sass or gloss, she takes to these slow classics with the sort of simmering and seasoning any great cook would.

Her hefty voice bounces off the Fender Rhodes bump of “I Keep Forgetting” and winnows through the gospelish “Ain’t No Way.” Amen to that.
Reviewed by A.D. Amorosi

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Various Artists
“Look at All the Love We Found: A Tribute to Sublime”, Cornerstone
3 stars
Nothing overshadows the tragedy at the heart of Sublime’s legacy: Singer Brad Nowell’s succumbed to a heroin overdose, leaving behind a wife and baby just before the band’s self-titled breakthrough LP appeared in 1996.

Sad too, in an altogether different way, is the unrealized potential of the trio, which loved punk, reggae, pop and hip-hop. This solid and varied tribute – with contributions as far gone as the Greyboy Allstars’ jazz vamp on “Doin’ Time” and as faithful as Fishbone’s bug-eyed “Date Rape” – underscores that point in a way the perpetual radio play of “What I Got” does not.

Yes, Sublime inspired hokey beach bums such as Jack Johnson, who strums on till the break of yawn here on “Badfish.” But it also dared fellow So-Cal punk-reggae kids No Doubt (who deliver a live version of “D.J.s”) to dream big.

That’s a legacy worthy of a tribute.
Reviewed by Patrick Berkery

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

Skin Deep: Mar 05, AU Edition

How is Karen Matthews turning Ella Baché into a great name in Australian skincare? JAMES MORROW learns the secrets of one of the country’s youngest CEOs

Youth is the name of the game in the cosmetics and beauty business, but very few players in the industry put their money where their mouth is by hiring one of the youngest CEOs in Australian history – she was just 35 when she ascended to the boss’ chair – to turn it around. Not Ella Baché Australia, however, which in 1998 hired Karen Matthews to join the company with an eye towards making her Chief Executive Officer.

It was a big risk for both Matthews and Ella Baché – at the time, the company was losing money – but it paid off big for both of them. Today the firm is flying high and expanding across Australia, and Karen Matthews was recently named Telstra’s NSW Businesswoman of the Year.

Making it big in business was always in the cards for Matthews, who grew up outside Sylvania Waters, NSW, with a corporate executive father and a schoolteacher mother – a combination which goes a long way towards explaining not just her corporate savvy but her desire to teach others the lessons she’s learned along the way.

As a freshly-minted commerce graduate with a major in marketing from the University of New South Wales, it would have been natural for Matthews, like so many with her degree before her, to hop right onto the product and brand management track. Instead, she entered the retail world, joining the Myer chain’s graduate trainee program, where she got to have a go at every section of the business.

“I loved retail – it’s such a buzz. It’s constantly changing, there’s such a great variety of people, and it requires great gut instinct and real creativity”, recalls Matthews, reflecting on her early days at Myer. Plus, she adds mischievously, “it’s great fun when you get to spend other people’s money!”

Her tenure at Myer would eventually see Matthews move to Melbourne when the company consolidated operations there in 1990. Although she missed Sydney, while at Myer she learned valuable lessons that, she says, apply to anyone in their career. First among them: don’t be afraid to speak up.

“One of the most important things I learned at Myer is, if you have a point of view, share it. Even if people don’t agree with you, letting people know what’s on your mind is the only way to develop a profile within an organization,” says Matthews, who further cautions that those who keep quiet “risk fading into the shadows, especially in a big corporation.”

Her time in Melbourne taught her a lot, too, about how to get ahead in a large corporate structure, and also about some of the biggest pitfalls – especially to be careful of people with hidden agendas as well as what she calls “the art of the dysfunctional meeting”.

Eventually, though, it was time to move back to Sydney with her husband Ian, an accountant. “It was great grounding to spend eight years at a corporation like Myer,” she says, but found her role in such a large organization, between meetings, office politics, and only
being responsible for a relatively small part of the business, limiting. When an opportunity came in 1994 to join F.J. Benjamin, the Singapore-based fashion distributorship, she leapt at it. The differences between her new job, where she was responsible for setting up licensees for such major international and American labels as Guess, Ann Taylor, and Brooks Brothers, and her old one, were head-spinning. If Myer was all corporate politics and highly structured decision making, F.J. Benjamin was all about family,
instinct, and what Matthews likes to call “gut”.

“It couldn’t have been more extreme, coming from Myer,” Matthews recalls fondly. “F.J. Benjamin was a family business where the entire family was involved, and everything was done completely on instinct and emotion.” It was a great time in her career, she says, but also one that led to “major burnout.”

“I learned an incredible amount about being flexible, rolling with the punches, and how to change fast,” she says, “but I was on the road all the time. By 1998 I had been at the company for four years, and I realized that over that time, I hadn’t spent more than six weeks in Australia at any one time.”

Suddenly, she realized, it was time to go.

Having told the F.J. Benjamin family she was leaving, Matthews looked forward to spending six months off and doing all the things she hadn’t had a chance to do when she was bopping from Europe to Australia to Asia and back in less time than you can say, “priority boarding.” Matthews had barely cleaned out her desk when the phone rang with what would turn into her chance to make corporate history. It was a headhunter on the line, saying that there was an opportunity for her to join a cosmetics and skincare company as a marketing manager. At first, says Matthews, her reaction was no, no and no: “I didn’t want to go back to work, I certainly didn’t want to go back to work as somebody’s yes-person, and I didn’t want to go work for a polished brand like Estee Lauder.”

Then she heard that the opportunity was with Ella Baché, and that they were not so much looking for a marketing manager as someone to be groomed to take over as chief executive officer. Matthews took the job as much for the opportunity to be CEO as the strength of the name itself: “There was something about the brand: it had a certain attitude to it, a real Australian larrikinism,” she says, noting that the company has sponsored an 18-foot racing skiff and the Sydney Swans.

“I liked that there was a real element of living on the edge and that they embraced the rawer, unpredictable side of things – and one thing I’ve really encouraged here is for people to use their gut and intuition within a structured framework.”

Of course, in taking on the role of CEO – she was elevated a scant six months after joining the firm – Matthews was also taking on a company that she says “lacked focus” and was losing around $1.5 million a year. (Thanks to Matthews’ stewardship, Ella Baché is now quite comfortably in the black). To turn things around, she had to act fast, and that meant that there was not a lot of time for on-the-job training. “It was a major learning period for me,” she says, but despite never having been responsible for so many people or processes before, Matthews was able to quickly find the keys to success.

“One of the biggest challenges when you become CEO is that suddenly, you’re the boss, and everyone watches you and knows what you are doing,” notes Matthews, reflecting on the sudden feelings of isolation she felt when she stepped into the lead role. But in this, she says, there are lessons for others who someday wish to sit in the boss’s chair: “As leader of the company, you have to lead by example and practice what you preach,” she says. “People really do care about when you come and go, and they are very watchful of whether you are in a good mood or not.” Matthews notes that, a few years ago, when she was feeling particularly run down for an extended period of time, people under her constantly monitored her movements in and out of the office, and even paid attention to whether she was looking particularly pale from one day to the next.

This attention, combined with isolation, can make it difficult for any CEO to do their job, says Matthews, who was startled to find that even though her new job put her in charge of the company’s strategic vision, she was less and less able to call on colleagues for long-term thinking. One way she ameliorated this is to join a group called The Executive Connection, or TEC, which gives her a “safe space” to meet with other chief executives – almost all male, a benefit because “sometimes it’s great to get that male, cut-and-dried perspective on things” – and have a forum to bounce ideas off of and share experiences with.

On a day-to-day level, of course, things are different: “As CEO, one is responsible for a whole range of functions, but for me, I had never really had any exposure to areas of the business like finance and operations,” she says. As a firm believer in the principle that strong leaders surround themselves with strong people, Matthews says that a good CEO “learns very quickly where they are weak, and finds good people to help manage them.” In that same vein, she says, one of the best lessons she has learned is that there is no shame in admitting a mistake: in fact, it can often times be an asset. Says Matthews, “to be the first person to put your hand up and admit an error is a very strong thing to do, and people will respect you for it.”

One thing that Karen Matthews has never done is let her being a woman stand in the way of her goals – if anything, she says it’s been a plus in her career. “Sure, I’m not in the building or engineering industries, but I haven’t had any problems with a glass ceiling,” she reports, adding that she believes that being female has in many ways made her a better leader.

“Being a woman and a chief executive, I really see the benefits as a leader,” she says. “Women are more intuitive, and I think that contemporary businesswomen are very comfortable in letting their emotions show and be part of the workplace, so long as that is structured within a framework.”

Ultimately, says Matthews, the key to being a successful person or growing a successful business is not whether someone is male or female, but rather the blend of people that one is surrounded with: “The best companies are those that have a mix of sexes, ages, backgrounds and cultures working together. The more depth you have as a company, the more solid and effective you will be not just in the marketplace but as an employer with a great corporate culture.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, AU Edition

THE GOOD OIL
Are we heading for a world with less petrol, or is there enough black gold in the ground to keep us driving 4WDs for five hundred years? CLARE SWINNEY looks at ‘peak oil’, the latest cry of ecological doomsayers and wonders if this time, the sky really is falling

Sydney, 2019. Centrepoint Tower basks in the glow of the sun’s last rays of the day before it slips below the distant and hazy ranges of the Blue Mountains. The motorways though, are almost empty, as they have been for most of the previous 18 months – ever since petrol hit the latest in an ongoing series of highs – $8 per litre. These days, the traffic is mostly buses and trucks, commuters having long ago given up on runs into the CBD each day in preference for telecommuting from their home computers. The ambitious and expensive network of tunnels built under the city are now largely falling into disuse by everyone except for squatters; it’s too expensive to keep it all roadworthy for the few remaining paying coustomers. And in the CBD, luxury high-rise ghettoes are crammed with people trying to escape now-isolated suburbs.

Such a scenario may sound outlandish, and perhaps it is, but according to a growing number of energy analysts Australians are in danger of living the dream-turned-nightmare. Oil, they say, is running out. The ubiquitous black gold that lubricates our daily lives and makes the economy hum is getting harder and costlier to extract from the ground. On this much virtually everyone, even the skeptics, agrees.
What they don’t agree on is when it’ll happen.

‘In the next three years’, argues author and researcher James Howard Kunstler in a recent interview with Grist magazine in the US, ‘we are going to be feeling the pain. Our lives are going to be noticeably beginning to be disrupted. In the next ten years, you will see the beginning of a major collapse of suburbia’.

Australia is a country heavily reliant on oil. Our strength as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers hinges on not just fuel oil for transport, but oil by-products as fertilizers.

According to Kunstler, rising fuel costs will force city-dwellers to grow their own food literally in household backyards and farms on the back doorstep. Many people, he says, will find their lifestyles change to accommodate a necessary grow-your-own component. Prices for lifestyle blocks and large city sections will soar, while prices of apartments will plummet.

Although Kunstler was speaking to an American audience, there are those in Australia, like the Green Party, who are convinced by his message, and throw the threat of falling oil supplies into an already-confused local debate over environmental policy and where the country – and world is hidden. For while on the one hand, environmentalists worry that the world is running out of oil (though they never mention that such a scenario would also go a long way towards cut greenhouse gas emissions), on the other, scientists such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, disagree. According to Lomborg, there are vast reserves of oil in tar sands and shale, and while it is more expensive to extract, these sources could also keep the well from running dry for many, many years – 5,000, to be exact.

It’s not hard to understand why the skeptics would be, well, skeptical. After all, back in the 1970s environmentalists were predicting that today civilization would be beating back glaciers and that nations would be going to war over food. And there’s currently huge debate over whether rising temperatures are the result of man’s planet-destroying hubris which needs urgently to be put in check, or simply caused by natural long-term fluctuations in the climate. After all, if meteorologists can’t predict whether Saturday’s trip to the beach will be a wash-out, what makes them think they can project the temperature, five, ten, or fifty years down the track?

So is this matter of peak oil really much ado about nothing and another tactic by the Greens to garner inner-city votes and reduce vehicle emissions? Or is it the skeptics who are misinformed?
New Zealand-based geologist Alan Hart, who has worked on the frontline of the oil industry for 30 years, believes the ramifications of this ‘final’ oil crisis will be very serious indeed and our media has fundamentally failed to alert people to the realities of what lies ahead. Born in Texas in 1951, he graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with advanced degrees in petroleum geology in 1974 and 1979, and has worked for several oil companies, including the 7th largest US petroleum company, ARCO. Since 2002, he has been on the board of directors of Canadian company, TAG Oil, which is concentrating on exploration efforts in New Zealand.

‘These journalists and radio hosts are entitled to their opinions and can denigrate spokespersons like myself all they want, but I personally know that peak oil will arrive in two or five or ten years. From that point on, the world as we know it will be changed unless the global community meets it head on and begins its preparations now.’
The act of taking oil from the ground is called producing it. Since the start of oil production in the nineteenth century, the world has produced about half of its ultimately recoverable oil resource. At the halfway point, the world will achieve what is referred to as its production peak – more oil will be produced in a year near the halfway point than ever before – or thereafter. This is what is referred to as peak oil.

There are varied opinions regarding when peak oil will occur. Dr Colin Campbell, a petro-geologist who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on predicting oil trends, calculates that it will occur in 2006. Dr Campbell, who was conferred with a PhD from Oxford University and has worked as a geologist, manager, and consultant for a variety of oil companies, is currently the convener and editor of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre in London. He told the Guardian in late-April 2005 that about 944 billion barrels of oil have thus far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields or reserves, and that a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as ‘yet-to-find’ – that’s the oil geologists expect to be discovered. He said if this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year – with unpredictable and perhaps drastic consequences for the world.

Optimists focus on the figures and assume that just because the production peak has arrived doesn’t mean that oil is under imminent threat. But Campbell and James Howard Kunstler argue the petro-optimists are missing the point.

‘We don’t have to run out of oil or natural gas to have severe problems’, says Kunstler. ‘All you have to do is head down the arc of depletion on the downside of world peak production.’
In other words, as production decreases yet demand continues to increase, oil prices become problematic for the world long before the wells actually dry up.

The peak oil debate has recently heated up especially across the Tasman, where Energy Minister Trevor Mallard told Investigate the Government stands by its view that peak oil will occur sometime between 2021 and 2067, with ‘probability highest around 2037’, statistics that come from the United States Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

‘I stress that other estimates abound’, concedes Mallard, ‘and that I’m not claiming that this is the right one, but it’s in our view the best estimate we have to work to for now’.

But critics say politicians like Mallard have no choice but to play it cool, lest the healthy economic outlook be exposed as a fraud. The man who just purchased a new 4WD on hire purchase would think the bottom had dropped out of his world and the young couple who’d just built their dream home an hour’s drive from their work places, where there was no alternative but to drive, would be gutted. It’s far simpler, say petro-pessimists, for the Minister to use smoke and mirrors to provide an illusion of a rosy future, which allow for the continuance of current trends over the coming years, rather than to tell it like it is. It’s like booking us to go First Class on the Titanic and moving all the furniture towards the end that will sink first.

It is significant that peak oil is getting much more coverage in the international media than it is in Australia’s daily press. But this will change. Ordinary people are learning about the theory, thanks largely to word of mouth and the internet. One who ascribes to this view is Kiwi builder Robert Atack. For six years now, this 47-year-old has been a modern Jeremiah informing people about the impending oil crisis. He, like some experts in world energy studies, believes it will have a catastrophic impact on humanity, an impact which could be lessened if we start our preparations now.

Atack has plunged $9,000 of his own cash into the issue, printing and distributing leaflets, CDs, DVDs, videos and books, which carry information from experts of Dr Colin Campbell’s ilk, to members of the public and parliament.

‘During the last term of government I had 10,000 copies of The Oil Crash And You printed and sent about 5 copies each to every MP. And I’ve sent a lot of e-mails – and I think probably most of the current government have had something sent to them’, offers Atack.

‘Trevor Mallard’s been in denial. Any official reply I’ve seen from his office since he became Minister of Energy is just the regurgitated rubbish Pete Hodgson’s secretary sent out, who became Mallard’s when he took over the job of Minister of Energy.’

Beyond the rhetoric, there is evidence that the oil industry really is in dire straits. According to oil geologist Hart it is an industry virtually working at full capacity now. It’s being pushed to its limits. He can tell by the number of oil tankers traveling around the world, the number of seismic vessels gathering seismic data for oil companies, as well as from the number of oilrigs in use.

At present, the world can produce about 84 million barrels of oil a day at the most.

Over 82 million barrels per day are being used at present and there’s an increasing demand for more. The world economy grew by 5.1% in 2004 – the fastest in nearly three decades. Among the leaders were China, (with around 1.3 billion inhabitants), expanding at 9.5%, Argentina at 9% and India at 7.3%, (around 1.1 billion people). Projections for the fourth quarter of 2005 indicate that 86 to 87 million barrels of oil a day will be required and this won’t be met. Although the biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Texaco, and BP talk about there being ‘plenty of oil’ and being able to produce more, their production figures are actually going down every year, a problem compounded by a lack of refineries that create supply bottlenecks and push the price of petrol north.

While the oil industry can function well at the moment, it won’t in the imminent future. Compounding the oil availability problems is that for the past 20 years the industry has failed to attract enough new personnel. Faced with the choice of studying oil geology or the glamour of IT during the dotcom boom of the nineties, many students chose IT. The grim period of mergers and downsizing in the oil business added to the perception that the oil business was a beast in its death throes. As perhaps it is.

Managing editor of the Oil & Gas International Journal, Dev George, puts it, ‘It seems as though every major petroleum industry conference these days has at least one session devoted to bemoaning the critical shortage of new blood, the lack of young professionals – engineers and geologists and geoscientists as well as business and industry generalists – entering the industry.’

Hart says this spells doom for the oil business, because the ability to successfully locate and drill for oil is highly dependent upon having an employee base with extensive work experience.

‘In 1985, the average age for a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was 38. The average age last year was 53. This shows that at this critical time when the industry really needs experienced employees, they won’t be there. It is really a dreadful situation we face’, offers Hart despondently.

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has been providing videos and encouraging its 31,000 members to speak in public forums about the possibility of future oil shortages for the past 15 years. Hart began making presentations to various civic and business groups down under several years ago in an attempt to alert the public to the coming end to cheap oil, but finds it difficult to disseminate the message because the public is chiefly ‘unbelieving.’

‘Some people think that “peak oil” is nothing but evidence of a greedy oil industry trying to talk up the oil price’, but this is not so, says Hart: ‘Why would the industry manipulate prices so high that they drive away the very customers that are required to keep them in business? The last thing the oil companies want to see is a chaotic global event [peak oil] that destroys their carefully cultivated consumer base. If there was anything the producers – especially OPEC and petroleum companies could do to slow the price juggernaut,
believe me they’d be doing it now, not tomorrow.’

Hart says it’s the plight of his own four children that motivates him to inform the public about peak oil, because while he can educate them on the impending oil crisis, without the cooperative efforts of the rest of the community and nation, their entire livelihood is threatened by the coming dilemma.

Dr Peter Ballance, formerly Associate Professor of Geology at Auckland University, specialised in sedimentary and oil geology and holds a Doctorate of Science from the University of London. He contends that the threat of peak oil should be taken seriously. ‘It’s a physical fact. One which we may reach this year or in 10 year’s time’, he warns.

In regard to whether skeptical cientists such as Bjorn Lomborg are correct in claiming that there is plenty of oil, Dr Ballance admits that ‘people who say there’s plenty of oil are right in one sense, but in the sense of plenty of the ideal oil, they’re wrong. Much of that remaining oil will be in tar sands, oil shales, deep-sea locations and Arctic locations. All of that’s very expensive and environmentally damaging to extract.’

The cost of oil is not the real issue. The availability of oil is. It is currently cheap because we’re extracting fuel from easy fields whose technical infrastructure was put in place and paid for decades ago. When those fields empty, sooner rather than later, prices will rise.

It is commonly suggested that technological advances will play a role in finding meaningful quantities of more oil. Unfortunately, according to Hart, while technology has and will continue to enhance the oil industry’s ability to locate significant new accumulations of petroleum, it cannot compensate for the huge amounts of cheap oil we are chewing our way through.

‘Anyone who believes that technology will “save the day” like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster is not facing up to reality. Technology alone cannot replace the amounts of cheap oil [less than US$10/barrel to produce] we are currently consuming on a global scale. It’s going to take a conservation effort too’, he asserts. Wishful thinking, whilst correct to a point, still ignores the reality that markets rely on plenty of advance warning and new discoveries, not magic wands, and that if another chemical existed that could replace oil as a fuel, or in plastics or any of the other myriad uses for oil, we ought to know about it by now. And we don’t. And on a worst case scenario those ‘markets’ may only have another five years to find the mystery new elixir, test it and produce it.

Yes, solar power can help reduce some of the dependence on oil, but currently we use oil to create solar generation capacity. The power and telephone lines into our homes are manufactured from oil. Computers are dependent on oil. Many pharmaceutical and health products require oil. For the markets to truly ‘take care of it’, planning has to begin immediately, argue petro-pessimists.

Some still refuse to face the possibility of a world with less oil, however, like those who believe Thomas Gold’s theory that oil is abiotic, or non-organic in origin. This theory, which holds a growing number of followers, suggests that oil is being produced within the mantle of the earth, from where it continually moves upward, to provide an unlimited supply. Dr Ballance says that there is no substance to Gold’s theory. ‘It’s one of the many myths on which people build hopes’, he says.

Although the oil industry has repeatedly proven that oil is biotic, meaning that it is derived from the degeneration of organic plant and animal remains from which the carbon molecules have been converted to complex hydrocarbon molecules through pressure and time, the Gold theory has retained many believers for a number of reasons.

There are genuine accounts of oil wells refilling, and drilling at levels deeper than 10,000 metres, which some say is evidence that has supported Gold’s theory. Ballance counters that the reason the wells have been refilling is not because oil is being magically produced deep within the earth, but simply because oil moves through permeable rocks in response to a pressure gradient. It can continue to move after a well has ceased to provide economic quantities of oil. Thus, it’s to be expected that old wells will in some cases refill with oil, but in no where near the quantities that will make any difference to a world that uses over 82 million barrels a day.

Likewise, the drilling beyond 10,000 metres does not lend support for the abiotic theory, either because when hydrocarbons are subjected to the temperatures and pressure that exist below 9,000 metres, they are generally destroyed says Hart.

Former industrial chemist Kevin Moore, who has an Honours degree in chemistry from Auckland University, has studied the abiotic theory and says its proponents are asking us to accept a process that defies the laws of chemistry. ‘Until the proponents of abiotic oil present a plausible theory, and they’ve presented none to my knowledge, it’s just junk science’.

The deepest bore to date was drilled by Russians in the Kola Peninsula to 12,262-metres from 1970 to 1994 and cost more than US$250 million. However, it was not drilled in order to search for oil or natural gas, but to study the nature of the earth’s crust. ‘While there’s no ultra-deep oil except in a couple of unusual fields, there is ultra-deep gas in many places. No matter where people get their information from, they can be assured that petroleum is not generated in the mantle. And if Russia, which passed peak production in the late-1980’s, has all of this deep oil, why isn’t it selling it on the world market?’, questions Hart.

According to peak oil advocates, Australia should be doing a thorough analysis of each sector of the economy to understand how vulnerable it is to oil prices and shortages and what can be done. For example, can our food be grown closer to where it is eaten? How do we maintain soil fertility without nitrogen-based fertilizers – which are made from fossil fuels? Can we invest now in expensive infrastructure that will be hard to afford when oil is expensive – like rail, wind turbines and solar technologies, to say nothing of nuclear power, which is once again on the agenda.

Australia is competing against the world for a limited amount of liquid energy. As long as oil demand outstrips the industry’s ability to supply oil, the prices will continue to rise. When global oil production does peak, and it soon will, the disparity between demand and supply will continue to grow and the situation will so worsen. It’s not a case of if, but when. While one can hope and pray that gigantic new sources of petroleum will be found tomorrow, if the majority of people working in the petroleum industry are correct, this won’t happen and continuing our gas-guzzling ways is only going to add to an already critical situation.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Dec 05, AU Edition

MORE LIKE PURGATORY
Reece Witherspoon’s latest fails to thrill, while Russian Dolls is more than just kid stuff

Russian Dolls
Release: December, 2005
Rated: M
French with English sub-titles
3 stars
Russian Dolls is a sequel to the very popular 2002 French flick, The Spanish Apartment. In The Spanish Apartment a group of 25-year-old students come to discover life isn’t all about meaningless sex and realize that they have to grow up. Set five years later, Russian Dolls has the group on the cusp of thirty discovering they really, really have to grow up.

The storyline is predominantly explained through voiceover from the lead character Xavier (played by a cute but slightly dull Romain Duris). He’s no longer working in finance and is now doing crappy freelance writing for romantic TV movies. So as he writes he fills in plot gaps: “I wrote a book called L’auberge Espanole five years ago, but haven’t been able to find a publisher.” It’s a clever way to bring you up to speed with the lives of his friends over the past five years.

Basically the gang all get back together for the wedding in St Petersburg of English stagehand William (played charmingly by Kevin Bishop) and Russian ballerina Natasha (Evguenya Obraztsova).
Two stand out roles are Xavier’s ex-girlfriend, Martine (played by the captivating Audrey Tautou), who has a young son by a never-seen father, still carries a semi-torch for Xavier and, like all the characters on display, is searching for true love. And current girlfriend Wendy (played by the magnetic Kelly Reilly) a gifted writer getting over an abusive relationship.

Enter Celia (played appropriately woodenly by Lucy Gordon), a top fashion model whose life story is being ghost-written by Xavier. She’s beautiful and dumb – making her the perfect woman in Xavier’s eyes.
My question is why do all these beautiful and smart women fall for a neurotic no-hoper wreck? Sure Xavier is handsome and French – but come on girls, we all know he’s a commitment-phobic disaster.
If you liked The Spanish Apartment you’ll like Russian Dolls. It’s nice to have films that grow up with you.

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Just Like Heaven
Release: December, 2005
Rated: PG
3 stars
Look, I love Reece Witherspoon. And I think Mark Ruffalo is a big spunk. But the new movie they are starring in, Just Like Heaven, leans a bit too heavily on their sweetness to make up for its failings.
Basically Elizabeth is a type-A, work-obsessed woman who has no time for love – not much of a stretch for a Reece Witherspoon character. David is a depressed yet gentle man trying to get over the death of his wife – again, Mark Ruffalo could play this with his eyes shut.

The catch is Elizabeth is a spirit that no-one but David can see. Yup, it’s a pretty dumb plot alright. The scriptwriters obviously hope viewers will make the leap of faith before you run from the room screaming Ghost. Myself, I struggled with it.

Anyway, our two leads have to figure out why Elizabeth is a spirit and only David can see her so they can hopefully fix the problem. There are some funny bits. While Elizabeth is trying to convince David to help her, she seals the deal by arguing, “Look, you have two realities to choose from. The first is a woman has come into your life in a very unconventional way and she needs your assistance. The second is you are a crazy person talking to himself on a park bench.” Fair point.
Of course this is a romantic comedy so they fall in love – even though she’s not real so he can’t touch her and she can walk through walls and furniture. Hmmm.

If you’re looking for a dumb chick flick to distract you this summer Just Like Heaven is for you. But I prefer my spirits mixed with with orange juice.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

Dec 05, AU Edition

LAST FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY
A mystery from inside the Pacific’s Bermuda Triangle

In February 1962, an ageing bi-plane on a scenic flight became the first victim of an area they’re calling the Pacific’s Bermuda Triangle. Six planes have vanished never to be seen again, taking with them 23 men, women and children. Now in this extract from aviation writer RICHARD WAUGH’s new book, Lost Without Trace?, comes the story of the missing Dragonfly, and details of a $4,000 reward for its discovery.

From a gentle idle Brian Chadwick closes down the Dragonfly engines. The ground running warms them up before the flight and is a last check for any obvious faults. Everything is fine and there is plenty of fuel aboard. Stepping away from the Dragonfly, Chadwick looks toward the distant Alps. It’s a habit. There is total cloud cover and he can feel the southerly wind.

With the Flight Plan filed he walks into the imposing terminal building and greets two men already waiting at the Inquiry Desk. “Hello, I’m Brian Chadwick, your pilot for today’s flight,” “Gidday mate, I’m Louis Rowan,” “And I’m Darrell Shiels.”

Elwyn Saville soon joins them and his new wife Valerie emerges from the powder room. ‘A happy young lot; they’ll love the flight,’ thinks Chadwick as they head off chatting, toward the parked Dragonfly. Louis quickly works out his older brother Bill had worked with Darrell at a Sydney brewery.

“Yes, she’s not the newest plane,” says Chadwick, “But you’ll have fantastic views and we’ll be slow enough for you to use all the film in your cameras – I guarantee it!” He soon finds out where they’re from, and puts Elwyn and Valerie together on the rear bench seat, Louis in the front seat next to him, and Darrell in the middle seat. They listen attentively as he gives the safety instructions and points out the First Aid box, barley sugars and four small blankets.

Chadwick eases into the pilot’s seat. He has just over 6,000 flying hours experience. There is friendly banter in the cabin and they all laugh when he says, “On board we have a Pom, three Aussies and a Kiwi – not a joke – but it’s going to be a memorable flight!”

The Dragonfly had been refuelled the evening before by Ken Froggatt who worked as an assistant to Chadwick. Following instructions Froggatt had filled the wing tanks to capacity (30 gallons each) and put 15 gallons in the rear fuselage tank, and the aircraft was all ready for the morning’s flight. After ground running the engines, Chadwick went to meet his passengers. The four tourists were all from New South Wales: Elwyn & Valerie Saville from Wahroonga, Louis Rowan from Granville and Darrell Shiels from Balmain. Valerie was a New Zealander who had married Elwyn in her home town of Gisborne just two months earlier.

The Savilles came to the South Island as part of their extended honeymoon holiday in New Zealand, wanting to see some of the renowned scenery. They were intending to return to Australia in late February. Sidney Elwyn Saville, known as ‘Elwyn’, was born on 8 October 1941 at Casino on the north coast of New South Wales where his father Roy owned and ran a dairy farm. He was the third of five children. The family were Seventh Day Adventist and Elwyn attended Casino High School and then went to work at the Wahroonga Sanitarium and Hospital in Sydney. This is now the Sydney Adventist Hospital.

Valerie Gay Bignell was born on 27 June 1939, the second youngest of twelve children of Fred and Jessie Bignell at Tokomaru Bay, north of Gisborne. Fred was a foreman and slaughterman at the local Freezing Works. Valerie attended Tokomaru Bay School and from the age of 14, the New Zealand Missionary College (later Longburn College) near Palmerston North. She returned to Gisborne and worked in the office at Cook Hospital as a typist. Valerie’s family remember her as “a loving kind person, quiet, who loved children.”

She decided to go to Australia in 1959 as several relatives were there including a sister, Patricia. Valerie soon got a job as a secretary-clerk at the Adventist Sanatorium and this is where she met Elwyn. Engaged in the winter of 1961, they set a wedding date in New Zealand, took extended leave from their jobs and the couple left Sydney by air for New Zealand on 21 November, along with several other friends and were booked to return to Sydney by sea on the Canberra, leaving on 28 February 1962. It was a return trip they would never make.

Born at Junee in New South Wales in 1928, Darrell Stanley Shiels was the youngest of Warrie and Doris Shiels’ three children. His father worked on the railway. He attended Drummoyne Boys High School. Darrell’s older brother, Allan Warren Shiels, aged 19, was killed in wartime England on 19 June 1944 in a plane crash whilst serving with the RAAF.

Darrell was 5’11” tall of medium build and played tennis, but his favourite occupation was playing the piano. He took after his grandmother who was a very good pianist. Darrell worked in a railways office and later as a clerk in the office of Tooth & Co Brewery in Sydney. Darrell was single but had been engaged for a short time a few years earlier. While at Tooths Brewery he lived at home with his mother at Balmain, Sydney.

Louis Rowan had been working in New Guinea before returning home to Australia for Christmas 1961 and then took a trip to New Zealand with the prospect of working for a while.

“Louis was a very outgoing and popular man who had close mates and a wide circle of friends,” remembers his brother John. “He was generous by nature and a willing helper to anyone who needed it. He was popular with the girls and flirting was a trademark. He played tennis regularly and kept himself very fit. Louis was 6’1” tall, lean and about 170lb. He was a member of the Granville RSL and really enjoyed a beer and a smoke. He owned three cars, the first a Vanguard, the second an FJ Holden and the third, his pride and joy, a Dodge Kingsway. He was never short of family and friends to fill these cars for any occasion.”

Rowan’s date with destiny happened by chance: the possibility of a scenic flight to Milford Sound came up while he lingered in Christchurch awaiting a flight back to the North Island and thence home to Australia. When the opportunity came to board the Dragonfly, he seized it, leaving his luggage behind in a bed and breakfast establishment he never returned to.

As the group of five boarded the Dragonfly, Don Eadie, a 24-year-old licensed aircraft engineer with Airwork, was ready to help. In 2004 he remembered: “I was on tarmac duty when Brian Chadwick loaded up AFB with the tourists for the trip to Milford. At that time, the engineering staff at Airwork wore grey overalls, and I always kept a clean pair of white ones for ‘tarmac duty’. My job was to assist the pilot ‘load up’ and having shut the door, stand by with a fire extinguisher while the engines were started. I often wondered what I would do if one caught fire! However, I was never put to the test. The Dominie and Dragonfly engines always started and ran smoothly after a short warm up. A testimony to the care with which they were maintained.

“I seem to recall that it was a warm day at Harewood. I can still see the young couple in the Dragonfly, lightly dressed and quite excited at the prospect of flying to Milford. After a wave from Brian, I pulled away the wooden chocks and he then taxied out to the runway. That was the last I was to see of him.”

Dragonfly ZK-AFB was airborne just over 10 minutes late. George Blackett reported, “Upon Captain Chadwick’s departure from Christchurch the Control Tower sent the Flight Plan to Communications for onward transmission and sent the Control Centre a plaque to inform the Centre of the actual time of departure. The aircraft left at 9.52am and was to set down at Milford at 12.37pm.”

Christchurch Airport received no further radio reports from Chadwick as the Dragonfly began the long climb toward the Southern Alps.
As expected, many other pilots were flying in the lower South Island that day. From Hokitika, Brian Waugh took off mid-morning on the scheduled West Coast Airways service to Haast. He later wrote: “Dominie ZK-AKT lifted off into a light cloudy sky. It was early morning, and Hokitika looked quite sleepy beneath me. Another typical day I thought. Little did I realise that 12 February 1962 would be a day not easily forgotten. Just over an hour later I landed at Haast in sunshine, picked up six passengers and headed home on the return trip. Jim Harper was right: while the coast weather was good, it was pitch black in the ranges. I smiled smugly: ‘Chaddy will not be carrying any scenic passengers to Milford today,’ I thought.”

No radio reports were received from Chadwick after the Dragonfly took off but this was quite normal as his next designated radio reporting point was the Mt. Eliede Beaumont area, assuming his “Usual Route”. While there were no radio messages there were a number of reported hearings and sightings of the blue and white Dragonfly as it droned its way over the Canterbury Plains and headed south-west. In this sense the aircraft did not disappear ‘without trace’ as these observations were made by a range of people at many different places. These reports indicate that the progress of ZK-AFB for part of its intended journey can be confirmed with reasonable certainty.

In 1987 Eric Gillum contacted the author recording his memories of 12 February 1962: “I was digging a drain with a dragline working on Mr Walter Elliot’s Omahau sheep station that day, which is about 6 miles south from Lake Pukaki Village and about half a mile from where Twizel village was later established. I had just stopped work a few minutes before midday when I heard a plane going over, it was far too low and one engine was spluttering and blowing out smoke. I thought then that if it got as far as Lake Ohau it would be as far as it would get.
“Mr Elliot came out that afternoon about 3 o’clock and told me a plane had been reported missing. I asked him if he knew what sort of plane it was and when he said it was a Dragonfly I told him it had gone over with one engine spluttering. I had met Captain Chadwick and found him a very levelheaded person. If the plane had kept on course after it flew over where I was it would have had to gain a lot of height to get over the Ben Ohau Range, but I couldn’t see that being possible with one sick motor, he could have flown around the Ben Ohau Range at the bottom of Lake Ohau and got back on course from there.

“About 11 o’clock that same day my sister, Eileen Harrington, was at Jim O’Neil’s farm on Clayton Road, Fairlie, when that plane passed overhead, therefore he was right on course and the timing would be right too.”

One of the earliest reports received by Search and Rescue on the Monday night was relayed from deercullers at the head of Lake Ohau. This was further investigated on the Tuesday. Evan Blanch in 2004 wrote this detailed account:

As a 20-year-old, I was employed by the New Zealand Forest Service doing deerculling in the Hopkins River watershed. There were eight shooters covering the Hunter, Ahuriri, Hopkins and Dobson Valleys – two to each, plus a Field Officer and under the control of the Otago-Southland office in Queenstown. On the day Chad- wick’s aircraft went missing we were all at the NZFS Waitaki Base Camp on Huxley Gorge Station. This camp is at the base of Ram Hill at the south end of the Hopkins Valley. We would meet up once a month to collect and send out mail, fill in our monthly report cards and have our tallies counted.

“The weather was, to say the least, terrible, with a very strong southerly coming up over Lake Ohau with low cloud and rain showers. I don’t remember now the exact time but it was in the middle of the day. I was at the time repairing the driveshaft on my Chevrolet pick-up truck and was surprised to suddenly hear an aircraft overhead in the cloud. It was clearly twin-engined and working very hard against the wind but at no time did it become visible. I stood and listened until it could no longer be heard. It flew directly up the Hopkins Valley and my impression was that some mountain tops must have been visible to make it possible to fly up the valley. The plane sounded as if it came out of the Dobson Valley and around Mt Glenmary, when the sound of the engines ceased – they stopped very abruptly.

“Everyone at the camp heard the plane but as they were indoors they did not take a lot of notice. It was not until the 6 o’clock news came over the radio saying that a plane was missing that we realised that what we heard was probably it.

“The Hopkins River is almost North to South and has a gentle curve over most of its length. The Huxley River is quite a large valley on the west of the Hopkins with the Elcho Valley a bit smaller. These would be an absolute trap in bad weather for any plane but they do give access to the Landsborough River, via the Brodrick Pass, which in turn gives a route to the West Coast and Haast. So we heard the plane going north away from its intended destination and into an area of high mountains and dense forest. In two years working in the area there was a lot of the area I never visited. A blue fabric covered aircraft could easily still be there!

“The Police were interested in what I heard but I didn’t see any – but officers in charge tend to take over in these situations. I have never been asked for my story and this is the first time I have put it to paper.”

A total of 17 civilian and 17 military aircraft – including both RNZAF and USAF aircraft from Operation Deep Freeze at Christchurch – combed Fiordland for any trace of the aircraft. All up, they logged more than 630 flying hours across more than 250 individual sorties. To this day, it remains the largest air search ever conducted in New Zealand history.

The whereabouts of Dragonfly ZK-AFB, its pilot and passengers, quickly became a persisting mystery spawning wide interest, and this has continued to the present day. Based on what many people reported seeing or hearing, the Dragonfly’s progress south west is reasonably certain but its final resting place is still elusive, despite a number of search initiatives over the years. Adding to this Dragonfly mystery is the subsequent disappearance in the same lower South Island region of five further aircraft which have never been found (see sidebar story).

With the official Dragonfly search being suspended, the families of those on board the missing aircraft were compelled to face the reality that their loved ones had died. It was a traumatic week.

Telegrams had been sent from the New Zealand Police in the late afternoon and early evening of 12 February notifying relatives in Australia that the aircraft was overdue and missing. Darrell Shiels’ mother told newspapers the following day that her husband had been put on sedatives to help cope with the shock.

For the Rowan family it was just as devastating with the family making desperate attempts to obtain more news. Every news bulletin on Sydney radio was listened to and reception of late evening radio broadcasts from New Zealand were sometimes successful. But the distance and lack of news was heartbreaking for all involved. Support for the families from relatives and friends was encouraging with care and prayers being offered all across Australia.

Elwyn Saville’s parents stayed with Valerie’s sister, Patricia King, at Cooranbong, and it was from there that Mrs Saville wrote a letter to the other bereaved families. Her heartfelt letter of 20 February to the Rowan family said:

“We are writing a short note to you in hope that by being parents of the young couple in the same plane as your boy has disappeared, we may be able to offer some comfort in knowing that the one sadness covers both our homes. We do not know each other but may God bless you with his love in our sad time, it is very hard for us to understand but I do feel that God must have a purpose for it all, may we put our trust in him.

“We contacted the New Zealand Commissioner of Police asking if they considered it would be of any gain for us to go over to New Zealand or if my husband and son could be of any assistance in the search, the reply wasn’t just what we’d have liked but they have really made a wonderful effort in the search for them.

“The reply stated that they have searched 17,000 square miles six or seven times. The search has been suspended in the meantime and will be taken up immediately if information comes to hand. No point in coming to New Zealand at present. We cannot expect more of them even though we’d like them to go on searching. We can only have faith in knowing that if we should not see them again in this world we will meet our loved ones when Jesus comes on the Great Resurrection Day. May your faith, courage and health, as well as our own be built so as to face the future whatever God has in store for us.”

In Christchurch the news had filtered out more quickly. The Isles family, where Valerie and Elwyn Saville had been staying, heard about the aircraft being overdue by late afternoon but Valerie’s parents, Mr and Mrs Fred Bignell and their family in Gisborne, weren’t contacted by police until later that evening.

Two weeks later Mrs Bignell and her daughter Joyce went to Christchurch, stayed with the Isles, and collected the luggage, including wedding presents, that the couple had left behind.
For Sylvia Chadwick and her two sons, the news was also unbelievable. At the naval training establishment in Auckland, Tony was convinced that his father would turn up unscathed after a couple of days, and had to be virtually ordered to go home on compassionate leave. Then there was a sense of helplessness, as there was nothing that could be done to assist the search.

Certainly the performance of the Dragonfly in alpine flying conditions, especially at the required altitudes in the lower Southern Alps, was very poor. Not only was there an appreciable difference in the actual single engine performance of ZK-AFB when compared to manufacturer’s claims, but by 1962, in comparison with other newer aircraft available, the veteran Dragonfly was clearly unsuitable for such trips. When the aircraft’s known poor single-engine performance and susceptibility to icing, is combined with the mountainous terrain and deteriorating weather, a whole new meaning is given to the term “margin of error”.

The reality was that the Dragonfly had little or no margin of error to cope with any major weather deterioration or mechanical failure en route to Milford Sound. Chadwick may not have originally envisaged using the Dragonfly for his Milford Sound flights, as his larger Dominie aircraft was more suitable, but in practice the aircraft regularly flew the Glacier and Milford Sound charters. With hindsight it can now be said that flying a Dragonfly aircraft on regular commercial charters over the rugged Southern Alps to Milford Sound, sometimes in deteriorating weather, was risky, if not a tragedy waiting to happen.

In spite of the passage of time, local pilots continued to keep watch for the Dragonfly, looking for anything unusual in the dense bush and trees, especially in more isolated areas. Brian Waugh was prominent, but there were many others.

Nancy Stokes, widow of Mt Cook skiplane pilot John Stokes, who was based at Fox Glacier 1961-1964, recently commented: “John always kept an eye out for Chadwick”. Ray Sweney from Hokitika also deliberately flew over many likely areas. The same was true for Canterbury-based pilot Jim Pavitt, who continued to fly Milford Sound charters, “After Brian Chadwick went missing, every time I flew to Milford I scrutinised the terrain for any signs. I even varied the route to cover as much as possible, but there is such an extensive wilderness it was fruitless. One day I hope a tramper or someone finds something; then we might learn what happened.”

In January 1975 a deerstalker, N.L. Duncan reported seeing what looked like aircraft debris in the headwaters of the Rangitata River. A fully equipped six-man team, led by two police constables, completed a search accompanied by Mr Duncan but nothing was found.

On 8 August 1980 Paul Beauchamp Legg and his wife Frances were flying with Dr Paul and Jean Monro in the Middle District’s Aero Club’s Piper Cherokee 180 ZK-ECR. Paul Monro recounts: “We were on a flight from Franz Josef to Milford Sound with Paul Legg flying. I remember us flying well round Mt. Aspiring to the south of the West Branch of the Matukituki River. We then headed for a point a few miles out to sea from the entrance to Milford Sound and flew over tall bush-covered undulating country which I assume may have been the Dart River. As we descended towards Lake Alabaster, before crossing its southern end, Jean, who was sitting in the left rear seat, saw what looked like the white tail plane of an aircraft semi-hidden in the bush.” Beauchamp Legg was quickly alerted and he recalls: “We were in a severe down-draught at the time and I was more interested in staying with the living than joining the dead and was working hard to get into an updraught. I only had time to make a quick glance in the direction Mrs Monro indicated. I marked it on the map and passed the information to Air Department but as far as I know nothing was done about it. I was told much later, at Queenstown, that one of the helicopters had dropped a fridge in the bush somewhere about there but Mrs Monro was still adamant that it was an aeroplane she saw.”

A further on-going search initiative has been quietly undertaken by Lex Perriam, a ranger with the New Zealand Forest Service based at Omarama since 1975. Perriam remembers the Dragonfly going missing while attending high school at Mosgiel. In 1977 he discussed the mystery with Stafford Weatherall, owner of the Lake Ohau Station.

Weatherall told him that on the day the Dragonfly went missing he had been mustering east of Lake Ohau on Ben Rose Station and heard, above the fog, an aircraft to the west with engines revving loudly. This account, together with a dream Perriam had of the Dragonfly being in the South Huxley area, and Richard Waugh’s article for the 25th anniversary of the disappearance in 1987, renewed his interest and prompted him to be deliberate about ongoing searching for wreckage in the areas for which he has Forest Service responsibility. In 2005 he reported: “I was encouraged to continue looking for the location of the plane by foot and by air.”

Mason Whaitiri of Bluff reported to the author recently: “In early 1962 I was the Skipper of the Miss Geraldine fishing boat and was working directly off the entrance to Milford Sound at the time the aircraft went missing. It was a bright sunny day and the boat was straight out from St Anne Point about a mile from the Sound mouth. The time was about midday or 1pm and the boat was picking up pots.

“I was in the wheelhouse and two crew members were at the winch – Russell Trow, my brother-in-law, and Allan Strange. In spite of the noise from the freezer and engine in the wheelhouse I heard a very loud aircraft noise which all of a sudden cut out.

“I went out on deck and asked the others who were using the winch whether they had heard the close-by aircraft but they hadn’t heard a thing over the noise of the winch and didn’t see anything. While the weather was sunny and clear it was blowing a 25-30 knot wind from south west coming up the coast. A hard wind!

“Later that day we heard that an aircraft was missing. We also saw smoke in the bush behind Big Bay and steamed for about three hours to get closer but we determined it was Davy Gunn mustering cattle. Some weeks later it dawned on me the possible explanation for the very loud aircraft noise and its sudden end.

“I felt the aircraft would have been very near for the noise to have penetrated the wheelhouse so clearly – maybe within 200 yards. I think the missing aircraft may have been running out of fuel and the pilot had nowhere else to land and so decided to get close to the only human civilisation – the Miss Geraldine – and to ditch in the sea alongside. This was the loud noise I heard as the aircraft came up very close. But unfortunately the pilot ditched on the wrong side and was not noticed. The crew and I were not looking that way as we were concentrating on collecting the pots and were watching certain land features to help determine where the pots were. I am a friend of veteran helicopter pilot Bill Black. On occasions Bill came up close to my boat but if I was in the wheelhouse I only heard his helicopter when he was directly overhead. This whole incident has haunted me for all these years.”

Although many years have passed it is quite likely there will be still more reports made about the Dragonfly. All deserve to be considered carefully. The reality is that the Dragonfly did not just vanish without trace. This book documents many key and credible reports, many dating back to 12 February 1962, which provide strong evidence that the Dragonfly was flying on a southwest route down the eastern side of the Main Divide. The sighting/hearing reports of an aircraft in the Lake Ohau/Hopkins area and the Mt. Aspiring area provide important clues as to its possible final resting place.

REWARD
Investigate magazine is supporting Richard Waugh’s quest to solve New Zealand’s most perplexing aviation mystery by offering a $4,000 cash reward to anyone who discovers the wreckage and reports it exclusively to Investigate in the first instance. No reward will be payable if news of any discovery is first publicized intentionally or unintentionally in any other media than Investigate. For full details of the likely route of the Dragonfly, purchase a copy of Waugh’s new book, Lost Without Trace? Available at all good booksellers.

THE PACIFIC’S ‘BERMUDA TRIANGLE’?
Since the disappearance of Dragonfly ZK-AFB on 12 February 1962, there have been five other aircraft lost without trace in the same southern region of the South Island; four fixed wing aircraft and one helicopter. In total, including those aboard ZK-AFB, 23 persons – 6 pilots and 17 passengers – have vanished!

The large area in which these aircraft and people have been lost is among the most rugged in New Zealand, with much of it having World Heritage status. Since the Dragonfly, other aircraft to disappear have been:

• 16 August 1978: Cessna 180 ZK-BMP owned by Central Western Air. The pilot was Rev Cyril Francis Crosbie (aged 37) of Riversdale and the passengers were: Trevor George Collins (aged 50) of Waimea, Gordon Grant (aged 28) of Waipounamu and Peter Alexander Robertson (aged about 40) of Wendonside. The aircraft was on a flight from Big Bay, South Westland, to Riversdale, Southland. It was probably last heard at Jamestown at the northern end of Lake McKerrow and appeared to be heading towards the Jamestown Saddle.

• 29 December 1978: Piper Cherokee Six ZK-EBU owned by the Otago Aero Club. The pilot was Edward James Sinclair Morrison (aged 28) and the passengers were: Earl Blomfield Stewart (aged 40), his wife Elizabeth McGregor Stewart (aged 37), their son David John Stewart (aged 18), Alec Davidson Stewart (aged 38), his wife Rosie Stewart (aged 37) and David Hogg (aged 20). The elder Stewart men were brothers and all the Stewarts were from Dunedin. The aircraft was on a scenic flight from Taieri, Dunedin, to Queenstown, Milford Sound, Preservation Inlet and then back to Dunedin. It was last seen flying down Milford Sound toward the coast.

• 30 July 1983: Cessna 172K ZK-CSS owned by Arthur Roy Turner. The pilot was Arthur Roy Turner (aged 55) of Mt Ruapehu, National Park, and the passengers were: his wife Anne Zelda (aged 33) and children Kim Dorothy (aged 6) and Guy (aged 4). Anne was also a pilot. The aircraft was on a flight from Tekapo to Fox Glacier.




• 8 November 1997: Cessna 180 ZK-FMQ owned by Cascade Whitebait Ltd. The pilot was Ryan Michael Moynihan (aged 23) and he was the sole occupant. The aircraft was on a flight from West Melton Aerodrome, Canterbury to Waiatoto, South Westland.




• 3 January 2004: Hughes 369HS ZK-HNW owned by Featherstone Contracting Ltd, Hamilton. The pilot was Campbell Montgomerie (aged 27) from Hamilton and his passenger, girlfriend Hannah Rose Timings (aged 28) from Cheltenham, England. The helicopter was on a flight from the Howden Hut, on the Routeburn Track, to Milford Sound. A total of 204 flying hours and 2300 man hours were reported as being spent searching the mountainous area for the missing helicopter, without success.

Following the Dragonfly’s disappearance, Civil Aviation officials investigated some overseas developments regarding aircraft radio beacons. A 1962 memo entitled ‘Recommendations Arising from the Dragonfly Accident’ says in part: “Radio in the past has been out of the question, but recently appears to be becoming a distinct possibility. We are currently obtaining data on several emergency transmitters which have recently become available.”

In New Zealand, the Emergency Locator Transmitter device (ELT), to assist in locating missing aircraft, was not finally made mandatory for the general aviation fleet until 1986. The beacon commences transmitting if a certain ‘G’ threshold is exceeded, as in a crash. It radiates on 121.5 MHz for civil or 243 MHz for military, but in the near future the standard will be 406.5 MHz. The signal can be detected aurally if a receiver is set to the appropriate frequency, so overflying aircraft are often the first to report a beacon.
Orbiting SARSAT/COSPAS satellites operated by the United States and Russia are designed to receive the signals and within 90 minutes they can typically determine the location with amazing accuracy and so greatly assist Search and Rescue personnel.

In the case of Hughes helicopter ZK-HNW, the ELT did not function correctly with no signal being transmitted; a rare failure. Phil Timings, father of Hannah Timings, was reported in the New Zealand media in March 2004 calling on the British Government to pay for high tech “Synthetic Aperture Radar” (SAR) equipment that could possibly locate the missing helicopter. He said: “It is like a giant metal detector and the Americans use them for search and rescue. If they can find downed pilots, they can find Hannah.”

Over coming years it will be interesting to see whether the six missing aircraft, Dragonfly ZK-AFB included, can be located by advancing technology.

Note: The author acknowledges published information regarding four of these missing aircraft from the book ‘Missing! Aircraft Missing in New Zealand 1928-2000’ by Chris Rudge (Christchurch, Adventure Air, 2001)

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

Nov 05, AU Edition

David J. Ford has spent a lifetime working in the region’s hotspots – including over a half-dozen years active service with the British Army’s Royal Military Police during the Malayan Emergency and the Borneo Rebellion in counterterrorism and anti-insurgency roles. He’s worked with corporations such as Hilton and Woolworth’s when their operations have been bombed or threatened, and upgraded Fiji’s aircraft safety program when the world’s airlines considered avoiding fly-overs due to perceived security risk. Now, in the wake of the latest Bali bombings, this international counterterrorism expert sees a chilling trend in Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombings

UNWITTING ACCOMPLICES

The terrible loss of 22 innocent lives in Bali on 1 October is a sharp reminder that Indonesia’s terror groups, be they Jemaah Islaamiyah, various splinter groups or other, independent radicals, have not lost their explosive bite – regardless of the arrest of 200 or so JI activists since the first Bali bombing in October 2002. The cruel, despicable use of suicide bombers has again confirmed it as the preferred weapon of Islamic extremists.

But as if the idea of a fanatic wandering into a crowded restaurant full of civilian tourists and workers, the latest bombings point to a potentially more sinister trend – one which adds a dangerous new wrinkle to our efforts to identify suicide attackers and keep them from bringing innocent people to grief. While very little information is known (or at least is being released) about the identities of the bombers themselves, police are known to be investigating the tantalizing possibility that the explosives were detonated by remote control via mobile phone, due to records of calls made at the time of the blasts. The question then becomes: Were these calls made to the individual bomber or – just as likely – were they used to actually trigger the explosive device?

This is a vital piece of information: if the explosives were detonated remotely, each of the bombers may well have been duped into carrying the bomb into the target location, on some pretext or other, without knowing the contents of their respective backpack. That could mean that they had no intention of dying, that they too were murdered. This would be a very worrying revelation indeed. If true, it could mean that in future, otherwise innocent, duped couriers could be of any race, colour or religious persuasion and from all walks of life.

Indeed, there is already precedent, albeit unsuccessful, for this sort of attack. In 1986, shortly before Anne Marie Murphy, a young pregnant Irishwoman, boarded an El Al flight in London bound for Tel Aviv to meet the parents of her Palestinian fiancé, the airline’s world-famous pre-flight interrogators got suspicious. They searched her baggage thoroughly and discovered that her so-called lover had duped her into carrying a load of plastic explosives and a detonator in one of her suitcases. Had she been allowed to board the flight, she may very well have unwittingly sent herself, her unborn child, and hundreds of others to an early grave.

Today, true followers of the teachings of the prophet Muhammad and of the Koran would testify that suicide by whatever means, and for whatever purpose, is strictly forbidden. Muhammad himself said, ‘Whoever purposely throws himself from a mountain and kills himself will be in the [hell] fire falling down into it and abiding therein forever; and whoever drinks poison and kills himself with it, he will be carrying his poison in his hand and drinking it in the [hell] fire wherein he will abide eternally forever; and whoever kills himself with an iron weapon will be carrying that weapon in his hand and stabbing his abdomen with it in the [hell] fire wherein he shall abide eternally forever.’

Let there be no doubt then that for a Muslim, suicide is strictly forbidden as a major sin. So why do they do it?

Desiring to be martyrs, these killers produce their own purely selfish justification for their intended actions. They argue that they are fighting a jihad, or struggle, which they interpret as against all non-believers of Islam, infidels, and that to die in such a war makes the warrior an instant martyr with all that entails – eternity in paradise, 72 virgins, the lot. And while suicide is forbidden within Islam, martyrdom is sought after as the ultimate achievement in this life and performed as a duty.

(Theologically, of course, this promise of paradise cannot stand on a number of points. Among other things, in Islam, the only wars that are permitted are between armies, which ‘should be engaged on battlefields and engaged nobly’. And as for indiscriminate killings, this too is prohibited. Muhammad said, ‘Do not kill women or children or non-combatants and do not kill old people or religious people’. By their very actions many of these religious zealots illustrate a propensity for mass murder without any plausible, religious justification but for some obscure political purpose. They are but pawns in a global game of politics and religious mayhem, and have chosen to ignore their own scriptures and the teachings of more moderate religious leaders to make their own interpretation of the Koranic scriptures.)

The incidence of suicide bombings has increased alarmingly over the past five years globally and will continue to do so at an ever-increasing rate as more young candidates graduate from Muslim religious schools, many financed by Saudi Arabia which promotes a strict so-called Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, that promote this unholy doctrine.

Others will be recruited as disenchanted fringe-dwellers who get roped in and indoctrinated by local radical religious leaders, as was the case with some of the recent London bombers.

And one cannot ignore the role played by the world media as al Qa’ida and other Islamic extremists continue to take heart from perceived successes (even if they are strategic or tactical failures) in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

That said, we must also be mindful that for some clerics and extremists there is also another apocalyptic agenda. The central tenet of Islam is that there is only one true religion, and that is Islam. It goes even further, instructing followers to work towards world domination by converting, or eliminating, all non-believers: to a strict Muslim, the world is divided into the dar al-Harb, or House of War (representing non-Muslim lands) and the dar al-Islam (the Muslim world). A quick glance at a map shows that all along the border of these two areas, conflict is the norm rather than the exception, and the existence of a Hindu outpost such as Bali in the midst of the world’s largest Islamic country is, to a fundamentalist Muslim, like a red flag to a bull.

A religious war, with Islam pitted against the West, suits the goals and aspirations of the likes of al Qa’ida and JI and keeps with the most important commandment of the Koran: to spread Islam throughout the entire world, by force where necessary.

It is possible that this aspect of the Koran and its scriptures could help explain why many Islamic scholars and clerics worldwide have shown reticence to openly condemn or to identify and expose Islamic terrorists in their midst. Though in Australia, Islamic clerics and leaders now appear to be trying to resolve these issues, even attempting to find consensus amongst their disparate groups with a view to accepting the broad application of Australia’s new anti-terrorism laws.

An explosive device, whether carried upon the person or in a vehicle by a suicidal extremist is seen as a very successful and effective weapon. And there appears to be plenty of misguided, well-indoctrinated volunteers seeking martyrdom. Thwarting a person bent on committing suicide using a bomb is nigh on impossible. The device can be detonated at will.

So how can we prevent or reduce the incidence of suicide bombings? There are several possibilities.

Firstly, Muslim scholars, together with all Islamic religious and community leaders must be more vocal and decidedly pro-active. They must, at every opportunity, distance themselves and all true believers from terrorist activity and from the minority religious leaders who continue to preach violence and murder. They must be prepared also to ferociously denounce these extremists to the security authorities lest the extremists and their followers grow in strength and develop momentum such as to bring all of Islam into disrepute, with the added risk of incurring the wrath of all free thinking people. And finally, they must promulgate widely at every opportunity that the act of suicide is abhorrent to the dictates of Islamic law and which immediately negates all chance of martyrdom for the offender.

The second and more immediate question is to find a way of further convincing potential candidates for suicide bombing that, from their religious standpoint, suicide would be pointless and self-defeating, as well as to bring shame on himself and his family.

How could this be done and how would we convince them of this?
Well, profoundly distasteful as the answer is it lies in making the suicide bomber’s body, or mortal remains, unclean in the eyes of Islam. Here we must keep in mind that this is a person who has rejected the norms of the civilized world, one who has corrupted the teachings of the Koran and who is prepared to kill and maim innocent, women and children and the elderly, and even his brothers in Islam, in order to achieve martyrdom. And one who by virtue of his actions can no longer consider himself a Muslim.

Surely, such people do not deserve the respect and social norms usually accorded to the dead.

Muslims are strongly forbidden from eating pig meat, and they consider the animal itself unclean. (Indeed, this porcine prohibition took a darkly comic turn in the West Midlands, UK, council of Dudley recently, when council workers were ordered to take any pig-themed novelty items off their desk lest Muslim staffers be offended). The Koran states: ‘He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of God’.

Muslims therefore consider that to eat pork is a very, very unholy act, andan abomination before God. Similarly, to touch a pig is to make one unclean and an unclean person cannot enter paradise. Hence, this person cannot be a martyr.

Is it not axiomatic therefore that in order to take away the prime incentive of the suicide bomber and other mass killers – that of entering paradise with all its promised sensual pleasures – we offer a counter promise? Authorities would guarantee the contamination of his remains with the blood of swine. And importantly, that the remains would not be returned to his family to enable ritual cleansing and purification.

This would have a very salutary affect and might even put an end to this madness. Remove access to martyrdom and you remove the very purpose, or excuse, for dying, and in its place, make people aware of the threat of carrying bags or packages for suspect people – lest they become unwitting bombers themselves. There is precedent for this: American General John Pershing, fighting Muslim militants in the southern Philippines after the Spanish-American War, wrapped the bodies of captured and executed terrorists in pig fat. As one officer reportedly told a militant at the time, ‘You’ll never see Paradise’. More recently, according to some reports, the Russian afforded the same treatment to the bodies of terrorists involved in the Moscow theatre siege of 2002.

Now is not the time for equivocation. The tightening of Federal and States’ counter terrorism legislation is a very good first step, in a pro-active sense, but it will do little to prevent the die-hard martyr working secretly and in concert with just a few cohorts. We must remove the suicide bombers very reason for dying.

It is time for straight talking and timely action however unpleasant and uncivilized that might appear. Unless the West and true followers of Islam face Islamic fundamentalism and revivalism head-on today, the world will experience a future to horrid even to contemplate.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

DVDs: Dec 05, AU Edition

RINGS AND THINGS
James Fletcher has two good reasons to stay home on a hot summer night

Submariners: The Complete Series
4 stars
During the 1980s the Australian government took the dramatic step of constructing a new Collins Class submarine fleet, to be built in Adelaide and homed in Western Australia. But from the outset things did not go well with massive budget blow-outs and numerous flaws surfacing in the design and mechanics of each boat.

After the initial public relations disaster, which played out in both parliament and the media, the negative attention eventually subsided and for the past few years has remained relatively quiet. But now, a new six part made-for-television series takes a look at the Collins Class fleet from a very different perspective.

Submariners, released as a two DVD set, is a unique independent series filmed aboard the Collins Class flag ship HMAS Rankin during its crew shakedown and subsequent voyage around the globe in preparation for RIMPAC, the world’s largest military war games, off the coast of Hawaii. With the cameraman and producer granted unparalleled access over three month at sea, the Rankin is revealed warts and all in an intimate profile of her strategic capabilities and crew dynamics. In fact, director Hugh Piper reveals a military culture which suffers from an 80% divorce rate, continually demonstrates its resistance to change, and sincerely embraces the Australian spirit of camaraderie – to the point of hazing rituals which, shall we say, don’t always benefit the Navy’s reputation.

However, the series does manages to capture the claustrophobic habitat and isolation of life aboard a submarine, and to its credit efficiently strips away the Hollywood glamour to instead reveal a raw and unnerving sense of distress, a feeling which is effectively demonstrated when the Rankin’s air supply becomes toxic after an engine malfunction while submerged as well as during a tense and unrelenting cat-and-mouse game played against a US Naval destroyer.
Set against some breathtaking cinematography, the series is both an intriguing insight into modern high-tech warfare paralleled with the reality of life aboard a military submarine, a theme which is mirrored in the DVD’s two galleries featuring images from renowned photographer Jon Davison. And surprisingly, the series also manages to blow the Collins Class reputation as a dud right out the water.

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Ringers: Lord of the Fans
4 stars
After the recent spate of pop-culture fan-boy documentary DVDs such as Trekkers and Comic Book Confidential comes Ringers: Lord of the Fans – and with it a breath of new life to revitalize a tired and neglected genre.

Without question, Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has carved its way into film history, drawing audiences as diverse as university academics, heavy metal rockers and the palest of Star Wars geeks, but love or hate Jackson’s interpretation, Tolkien’s novels remain a seminal part of modern pop-culture. And it’s from this perspective that Ringers explore the evolution of its global fan base.

Utilising a unique blend of animation, interview techniques, reenactments and a superb soundtrack, Ringers explores the history and inspiration behind Tolkien’s Middle Earth from its initial conception to the critically disastrous release of The Fellowship of the Ring before it found a home within the counter-culture of 1960’s America.
Resonating with comedic moments and fascinating trivia, Ringers also delves into the various incarnations of LOTR’s influence in western culture over the past 50 years, from an hilarious pre-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy gaily singing “Happy Hobbits” to the cryptic, drug-infused lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album and John Lennon’s failed big-screen adaptation.

But it’s the impressive celebrity talent that director Carlene Cordova intercuts with interviews from Tolkien’s enthusiastic fan base that drives home just how wide-spread the series’ influence has become. Featuring many of the film’s cast, including Dominic Monaghan (who also supplies the film its charismatic narration), Ringers also includes interviews with fantasy writers Clive Barker and Terry Pratchet, Motor Head front man Lemmy Kilmister, filmmaker Cameron Crow and actor David Carradine who, along with many others, sing the praises of Tolkien’s visions and themes.

Released as a Special Edition, the DVD includes a number of behind-the-scenes featurettes, along with deleted scenes, an amusing audio commentary from the production team, and some hidden material. Overall the DVD manages to deliver a fun, entertaining and fascinating look at the culture and influence that LOTR’s still maintains in today’s society.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Feb 05

A FONT OF KNOWLEDGE?

PENGUIN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Edited by David Crystal, Penguin, $75
What can you say about an encyclopaedia that gives 12 lines to Alexander the Great and 16 lines to the Beach Boys? Clearly, the pop present is being privileged over the classical past. However, this 1698-page tome is often factually inaccurate when dealing with the present (20th century). Under Mexican Art, David Alfaro Siqueiros has his last name omitted so he becomes David Alfaro; Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme is credited with the 1992 publication of Bait, a novel that she has yet to publish; Postmodernism only deals with architecture, ignoring the fact it is de rigeur in literature and art. Spelling mistakes include the Mexican president’s first name printed as Vincente instead of Vicente and painter Jose Clemente Orozco’s second name spelt as Clementi.

The omissions are a wonder indeed. Mick Jagger is in, Keith Richard is out; Al Capone is in, Lucky Luciano is absent; Keri Hulme is in, Janet Frame is not; Stalingrad is in, Kursk (world’s greatest tank battle) is missing; Michael Jackson is in, Peter Jackson is not; Everest-conqueror Edmund Hillary is necessarily in but Reinhold Messner, the world’s greatest mountaineer is not; Saddam Hussein is in and Osama bin Laden, as always, is invisible. Structuralism is in but astonishingly poststructuralism is not (though it is sneakily mentioned under Deconstruction with which it is mistakenly identified). I was surprised to find Timothy Leary, Peggy Guggenheim, Bryce Courtenay, Pierre Bourdieu (renowned anthropologist) Takla Makan desert and Google absent (though Desktop Publishing is in).

Another anomaly - perhaps common in other encyclopaedias - is contradictory entries. The Aborigines entry has them arriving in Australia 60,000 years ago while the Australian history section has a figure of 40,000. (Some have advanced the figure to 100,000 BC — shouldn’t all three estimates have been discussed?) The entry on Australian literature make no mention of Judith Wright, yet she merits a separate entry under her own name. This inconsistency of analysis is possibly explicable by two different people doing the two entries. But shouldn’t there be a match up? Similarly, William Burroughs is not mentioned under Beat Generation but under his own entry is declared to be a “spokesman of the Beat movement”. Also, stingily, there is no colour in any of the maps and no portraits (though that does allow more text).

Now for some appreciation. There are compendious lists of phobias, popes, highest mountains, deserts and, best of all, Crusades which includes sub headings under Background, Leaders and Outcomes — though
regretfully no Nobel Prize listings. Listings of musicians, artists and scientists are generally good. The quality of the paper and binding is excellent. Some may be wondering - in this Internet age do we still need encyclopaedias? I, for one, would not like to see them become obsolete because they present the opportunity par excellence for browsing by association and the alphabet. Also an encyclopaedia offers greater authority than the crackpot and often wildly inaccurate entries frequently found on the Internet. It cannot be repeated too often that an encyclopaedia, being a book, can never have power failure, a virus, intrusive advertisements or the irritatingly busy format deployed by many website homepages. However, the Penguin Encyclopedia needs a clean up on accuracy, improved expansion and consistency of inclusion and could do with some colour in its bland white pages. Hey, it’s still an encyclopaedia, my favourite kind of book for browsing new arcana and esoterica.

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THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE Volume Three: 1955-1991
By Norman Sherry, Jonathan Cape, $79.95
At 906 pages, this is the largest of the three volumes of an ongoing Greene biography that now totals 2251 pages — possibly the largest biography in history. It is a labour beyond love — 27 years in the making — and, to be honest, it is somewhat of a labour to read it.

Sherry’s ultraviolet style contrasts uneasily with Greene’s always clipped, spare prose. In contrast to the trouble-seeking journalist— novelist Greene, Sherry is an academic obsessive — he had already written five books on Conrad — and he surmises it was his dedication to Conrad (a kind of early Graham Greene) that may have helped in his selection as his biographer. Plus his hands-on willingness to go to exotic countries as part of his research. Following the wide-ranging peripatetic trail of Greene and his work has meant Sherry has been to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Kenya, Panama, Mexico, Barbados, France, Switzerland, Argentina, Paraguay, Ireland and Spain - bravo! (And shouldn’t Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba be added?)

This biography is of the Boswellian type — no detail omitted. No pithy one liners when a paragraph will do the job - Sherry uses large half page (or more) quotes. When he deals with some of Greene’s major novels, such as A Burnt Out Case, he gives us three chapters whereas one would have sufficed. The overall effect is one of sauntering excess and under-editing. While it is arguably in order to refer to Greene as a maverick, loner, provocateur, rebel and anarchist, the description of Green as politically immature, unripe, callow and jejune looks like three adjectives too many.

Sherry works assiduously, and a trifle over-gleefully, in identifying originals for Greene’s characters, marking him as a biographer of the old school and not a text only postmodernist. His actual literary approach to Greene - influence of cinematic techniques or Hemingway (say) — in the light of contemporary trends of biography, is surprisingly limited.

Having detailed — elaborately as always — Greene’s stubborn inability to quite believe in hell, heaven, angels, heaven or Satan (though he does think of God as Christ), Sherry concludes in somewhat exasperated tones, it’s difficult to buttonhole Greene as either Roman Catholic or Christian - yet there is Green’s oxymoronic statement that he is was a “Catholic agnostic”(or worse still “Catholic atheist”) plus the agonised arguing that occurs so powerfully in Greene’s novels about the nature of evil, God, sin etc. For this reviewer (and I suspect for many more than fully admit it), this agonised I-want-to-believe-but-can’t-quite-believe strikes a resonant chord. Certainly, it is clear—and I am at one with Sherry on this — that Greene is pro-victim which can render his ideological stances fluid, rather than consistent.

Two of the most interesting matters dealt with are Greene’s clash with corruption in Nice - his tough dedicated fight on behalf of his daughter-in-law against a local thug and a corrupt mayor which alas, ended in legal failure - and his failure to win the Nobel prize. I am convinced by Sherry’s account that it was a dedicated Greene-opponent on the controversial committee, one Arthur Lundkvist, who vowed never to vote for Greene because his play The Living Room, was Catholic “propaganda of the most vulgar type”. Even if this were so, the large amount of brilliant work that flowed from Greene’s busy pen plus general world literary opinion should have prompted the committee to press for Greene’s strongly merited award. Unsurprisingly, the English literary establishment considered Greene the most deserving of the writers who had never won the world’s most prestigious literary prize.
While it frequently gives off the sanctimonious odour of hagiography, Sherry does reproach Greene from time to time — e.g. for being a supporter of Castro after executions became commonplace. Despite its stylistic infelicities, tortured metaphors, lapses into banality, embarrassing asides to the reader, excessive detail, over extended treatment, and its occasional presumption to read Greene’s mind too dogmatically, this biography is a must read for any Greene fan.

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TOLKIEN’S GOWN & Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books
By Rick Gekoski, Constable, $34.95
In general, I have regarded book collectors and first edition freaks as fetishists who are more interested in the wrapping than the present, brassieres instead of breasts. Having enjoyed Mr Gekoski’s lucid prose and accumulation of delightful anecdotes, my previous value judgment has been white-anted somewhat. Despite his eye for the deal, the multi-talented Gekoski also has an ear for the interesting human story, hence this witty and attractively presented book (which I am hoping will one day prove a valuable first edition).

The book kicks off with a chapter on the controversial Lolita, Nabokov’s sordid tale of a middle-aged lecher’s seduction of a barely pubescent girl. Shocking as this relationship might be, Nabokov’s exquisite prose turns it into a tragic love story. In his cheerfully lucid style, Gekoski relates how after he sold a first edition of Lolita for $4900, he received a letter from Graham Greene asking how much he (Greene) could get for a copy inscribed to him by the Russian author.

Apparently, this in an example of what rare book dealers call an “association copy”, one presented by the author to someone of importance. As Greene eminently qualified, Gekoski insisted on paying him $7200 (Greene wanted less!), and sold it for a profit (mysteriously, or tactfully, not revealed). When Gekoski last heard, the on sold book fetched $264,000 which left him “sick with seller’s remorse”. Since reading this revealing anecdote, I have been urging my friends at launches of my books to hurry up and become “persons of importance” so I can buy the book back off them and resell it for a whacking profit. So far, the scheme has yet to take off. And is unlikely to, for almost none of my books have that piece de la resistance, a dustwrapper, which rockets the price for any rare book into the ionosphere.

If over a quarter of million dollars sounds like big money, it has been topped by Gekoski’s estimate for a first edition Lord of the Flies - $450,000. A first edition inscribed Ulysses actually sold for $460,000 - the highest price thus far. Touchingly, Gekoksi admits that Ulysses is a tough read, even though he considers it the greatest book of the twentieth century. This promisingly profitable spiral was recently put in the shade when the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road sold for $2,430,000 which makes me wish cryonic preservation really works and poor old Jack could return and feast off the posthumous profit.

Packed with colourful stories of famous writers, this book is surely one of the more notable of the 110,000 books published in England last year, most of which, Gekoski reminds us, will soon be forgotten. I am hoping the first edition of his book will soar in value — when Gekoski soon visits the Antipodes I must ask him to inscribe it.

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THE FACTS BEHIND THE HELSINKI ROCCAMATIOS
By Yann Martel, Canongate, $29.95
The Life of Pi was such a delightful book I vowed I’d read anything else that came from the pen of Yann Martel. As is often the case, the massive success of one book prompts an issue (or reissue) of earlier titles. Helsinki consists of two novellas and two short stories published earlier in the author’s career.

The title short novel is by far the most significant work of the quartet. Of the remaining stories, the formally experimental “Manners of Dying” which presents postmortem letters about an execution as variations on a theme of what the condemned man ate and the manner of his death, is the most interesting. The star of the collection is without question the Helsinki novella.

A well-known literary phenomenon is that a grand (as it were) disease eventually prompts the creation of some grand literary masterpieces. Among these are - The Magic Mountain (tuberculosis), Doctor Faustus (syphilis), A Burnt Out Case (leprosy), Awakenings (sleepy sickness). When AIDS played its dread hand in the early 80s, I was (almost) morbidly waiting for the appropriate literary work to do it justice. Several plays and films have so far appeared but none as powerful or skilful as this novella. It could not be validly claimed that this work is a grand masterpiece but it is a minor one, relentless in its grim clinical detail.

However, Helsinki offers more than just pathological footnotes.
Inspired by the story-telling in the face of the Black Plague in Boccaccio, a nameless narrator puts the proposition to his blood transfusion-infected friend Paul that they should mutually invent stories to, as it were, defeat the doom of the encroaching disease. One event chosen from each year the century thus far — 86 stories in all — would form the narrative backdrop. The stories would centre around a Canadian family in a city neither of the two story tellers had ever been to Helsinki. The combination of factual base combined with an imaginative family in an “imagined” though real city, would form a satisfyingly solid tapestry. It may sound a bit contrived but it makes a compelling counterpoint to the deepening and irreversible manifestations of the disease.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone who has not heard of AIDS. Yann Martel’s short powerful novella tells us of the brutal destruction wrought by the disease and of how two friends responded to it with “narrative therapy”.. If art does not work a physical miracle, it can provide the next best thing - a compensatory defeat by the imagination.

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HELL OR HIGH WATER: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River
By Peter Heller, Allen & Unwin, $35
Until the arrival of maturity and arthritis, I used to nourish the fantasy, however remote, that I might one day go kayaking, preferably on some previously unkayaked river. This would prove to myself (and to others) that I had at last acquired the warrior manhood that my prior dismal performances at football, fighting, and free climbing had failed to evidence; that I might at last be redeemed by one all out fluke performance on raging white water. A fantasy I can no longer sustain. Instead, I can now recline on my sofa, sip the “white water “off my beer” and read about how real men do it. Among these intrepid dudes are two New Zealanders - Mike Abbott, said to be the best paddler in the world, and Dave Allardice. When Abbott won a big cash prize he shared it with his broke mates.

Like so many exponents of extreme sports, participants peak early 25-30 (say). It’s not an activity for one’s middle years (though there are exceptions). Just to reach the Tsangpo river is a feat in itself. It’s buried at the bottom of a 15,000 foot gorge at the eastern end of the Himalayas and has defeated earlier explorers for more than a century. Heller vividly revisits Victorian times when fearless Indians (who came to be called Pundits) crossed the border into forbidden Tibet as pilgrims and proceeded to map the terrain for the British by walking 2000 measured steps per mile, using modified prayer beads as pedometers, carrying prismatic compasses inside their prayer wheels and thermometers in hollow walking sticks in order to obtain hypsometric altitude readings. James Bond’s 007 antics were just a feeble continuation of this daring nineteenth century espionage ingenuity. These early measurements ascertained just where Lhasa was situated and established that the Tsangpo met the Brahmaputra.

Heller, who is a kayaker himself, describes the phenomenon of white water with a specialist vocabulary - “wave trains”, “mean comber”, “boulder garden”, “center of the tongue”. The prose, like the river, is wild but also like the paddlers, controlled. Almost beyond imagining, is an exhilarating though arguably insane activity called squirt boating where the kayak becomes submerged and then pops out - squirts back into the air. Another exhibitionist variety is freestyle or rodeo kayaking where the kayak “catapults forward in a series of fast end-over-end cartwheels” — I think I’ll take another sip of my beer, thank you. Though some consider freestylers made the best river runners, Scott Lindgren, one of the best paddlers in the world, asserted that the opposite was the case. His view was that “riding holes” would be worthless on the mighty Tsangpo.

The first Victorian explorers hoped to find a cataract as mighty as the Victorian falls but it turned out to be a “mere “ 150 feet high - now shrunk to 112 feet. For kayakers, the glory of the Tsangpo river is its wild white water, gloriously rendered in the controlled tumult of Heller’s expert prose.

Beside the wonder of the world’s most terrifying foam piles, wave trains and rolling haystacks, there is also the ferocious and lyric beauty of the landscape, rebellious porters who want more money and the ominous possibility of being eaten by a Bengal tiger. An intoxicating broth of a book.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Feb 05

TO THE EDGE OF THE EARTH
Phil Marty charts America’s less-travelled canyons

Escalante, Utah — We were relaxing in the shade at a table outside the Trailhead Cafe and Grill here while smoke from burgers drifted away from the gas grill into a brilliant blue sky. On the road into Escalante, brilliant blue met reddish orange, compliments of otherworldly red-rock formations.

As if on cue, the radio, set to an oldies station somewhere bigger than Escalante (pop. 900), began to pour out Billy Joe Royal’s lament, Down in the Boondocks.

It’s not hard to consider this southern third (or maybe the whole state) of Utah to be the boondocks. After all, there aren’t many people (only 2.3 million for the whole state - a half million less than Chicago alone). Consequently, there aren’t a lot of fine-dining options.

Or high-brow cultural events.

So, yeah, this probably is the boondocks. But, man, what beautiful boondocks they are.

It was the national parks and their close proximity - five of them, each less than 250 kilometres from the next - that lured my wife, Bonnie, and me here last September. The parks - Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion - share some of the same geology. In this area “you’re getting 600 million years of Earth history with very few pages missing,” says Kevin Poe, a park ranger/naturalist at Bryce.

Most of these parks have the same buff-colored Navajo sandstone and salmon-colored Entrada sandstone. But each has its own idiosyncratic delights: Arches’ namesake weathered rock arches. Canyonlands’ aptly named Island in the Sky. Capitol Reef’s 100-mile-long rocky wrinkle called Waterpocket Fold. Bryce’s fantastically shaped and wildly colored hoodoos. Zion’s massive and (hate to be repetitive, but...) aptly named Checkerboard Mesa. Now that should be enough for any lover of sensational scenery. But there’s more. How about Kodachrome Basin State Park? It got its name from the color film, and for good reason. And guess where Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park got its name?
Impossible to ignore is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which, with 1.7 million acres of cliffs, mesas, buttes and canyons, is big enough to swallow the state of Rhode Island and still have a little room left.

Truth be told, after you look at a road atlas and see how many routes here are designated as scenic byways, you begin to wonder why all of southern Utah isn’t one big national park.

And, oh, if that isn’t enough of an enticement, it’s not much of a jog over the border into Arizona to sample the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, then meander back toward Utah through Monument Valley, whose towering buttes and mesas have been the background for many Western movies.

In short, this is one doozy of a road trip that packs a lot into only about 2,100 kilometres.

Fly to Las Vegas and rent a car or SUV. From there, it’s only about 260 km to Zion National Park and the beginning of a circle drive that will leave your jaw dropping. And because it’s a circle drive, you can, after hauling out your road atlas, route it however you like.
This is simplified, to a certain extent, because Utah, like most of the American West, doesn’t have a profusion of paved roads, owing to those pesky mountains and canyons and deserts that we want to see but that can make road-building daunting.

That mammoth Grand Staircase-Escalante, for example, has only two paved roads that skirt just a teeny bit of its edges. So if you want to explore it more in depth, you need to choose from what a brochure describes as “five secondary roads of varying character (that) traverse the monument from north to south.”

What makes the character of those roads vary? Well, the weather for one. All of these roads are dirt and/or gravel. And that means that if they’re wet, you don’t want to be on them - certainly not in a car, but probably not even in a four-wheel-drive SUV, like we were driving. Keep an eye on the weather forecast. One morning after leaving Bryce Canyon, we stopped at the Bureau of Land Management’s new visitor center in Cannonville to inquire about the state of the Cottonwood Canyon Road. It cuts 80 km through the west central part of Grand Staircase from Cannonville to U.S. Highway 89 on the monument’s southern edge, near the Arizona border. July and August are the most likely months for thunderstorms here, but it’s always best to check road conditions with the people in the know. They’re the ones, after all, who put out that aforementioned brochure that also refers to this as “a fierce and dangerous land.”

The beginning and ending sections of Cottonwood Canyon Road might make you glad you’re driving a rental vehicle. Their washboard surface will rattle your fillings whether you drive 10 km/h or 30.

Just before we got on that section of road, though, we made a stop at Kodachrome Basin State Park, which got its name in 1949 when photographers from National Geographic were so impressed by the colors that they named it after the new color slide film they were using. The park, at 4,000 acres, isn’t all that large, but it impresses with a profusion of towering reddish sandstone chimneys that change hue depending on the vagaries of the lighting. A one kilometre nature trail, one of eight in the park, does a good job of explaining the geology of the area and its flora and fauna.

Heading south, we got our fillings rattled before making a turnoff to the towering double arch known as Grosvenor Arch, for the president of the National Geographic Society at the time of that 1949 trip.

Cottonwood Canyon Road smooths out in the middle section and at a couple of locations there are minor fords across streams, but nothing a car couldn’t handle. After one of those fords, at Round Valley Draw, we topped a hill and found a large flock of roadrunners doing what they do best — running across the road.

At other places, dirt tracks meandered off to the left or right for intrepid four-wheelers.

I wish I could say the two-hour drive across Cottonwood Canyon Road was worth it, but the last 10 kms or so seemed to go on forever. I wouldn’t do it again. At least not the whole road. But certainly Kodachrome Basin and Grosvenor Arch are worth the effort.

A few days before, we had some white-knuckle views of another area of Grand Staircase as we drove Utah Highway 12 (another of those roads the atlas marks with dotted lines to show a scenic route) from Torrey, near Capitol Reef National Park, to Bryce. Just south of Boulder, about midway through the 170k drive, we cut through a small piece of Grand Staircase and found ourselves atop what’s called The Hogback. Here, the two-lane paved (thankfully) road perches on a very, very narrow ridge. So narrow, in fact, that there’s just the road ... and then nothingness on either side for at least a hundred metres down. At least that’s what I was able to see as I kept my eyes glued to the road with only a few quick, furtive glances to the side. Exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

It’s the out-of-the-blue surprises like The Hogback that punctuate a drive and make you say, “Whoa, did you see that?” A few others:
The landscape along Utah Highway 24 south of Interstate Highway 70, through the San Rafael Desert, is one of bluffs and mesas, sand and cactus. Then ... bang ... a sea of green, leafy trees crowds into a large area along a dry creekbed, roots reaching deep to tap into the moisture that feeds this unexpected oasis. Then as quickly as they appeared, they’re gone.

A bit farther on, the relative flatness of the scenery is suddenly interrupted by out-of-this-world red-rock formations that reach probably 30m into the air. There are no other geological oddities here. Just these spires that look like they were discarded by some massive toddler at play in this sandbox.

Along Arizona 12, south of Escalante, mile after mile of otherwise tan-colored landscape glows like gold from the yellow flowers of hundreds of rabbitbrush that blanket the ground.At Capitol Reef, as the sun dips toward the horizon, its rays bounce off orange-red cliffs and paint the waters of a gently flowing stream a lovely copper color.
At the Mossy Cave turnout in Bryce, we make the very pleasant acquaintance of Terry and Pat Norman of Surrey, England. Terry (him) and Pat (her) like the U.S. - a bunch. How much? Well, for the past nine years they’ve been coming here twice a year, two months at a time, to wander in the RV they bought and store in Orlando when they’re back in England. This trip they’d planned to tour the East Coast, but worries about hurricanes canceled that, and they ended up in southern Utah after taking the advice of a woman they met in Indiana. “I guess you have to like a place a lot to keep coming back year after year,” Terry said of our country.

And that could be said of these boondocks called southern Utah. Even a trip of nearly two weeks leaves a yearning: Just one more trail to hike...Just one more glowing sunset ...
Just one more ...
(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, AU Edition

How do you take a radical idea and turn it into a market leader? JAMES MORROW talks to Ross Cameron, Managing Director of Dyson Appliances’ South-East Asian operations about how he took a vacuum cleaner developed in a Bath, U.K., coachhouse and turned it into one of the fastest-growing brands in Australia – and in the process

CLEANED UP

For almost eighty years, the first three words most people came up with when asked what they thought of when they thought about vacuum cleaners were ‘big’, ‘loud’, and ‘ugly’. But in the past decade that has changed radically, thanks to the work of British inventor James Dyson and his Australian counterpart Ross Cameron – two men who have not only turned the prosaic market floor cleaners upside down, but in the process introduced a new word to the language – ‘Dyson’ (as in ‘I have to Dyson the carpet’, or, just as common, ‘sucks like a Dyson’).
Today Dyson is the number one vacuum cleaner brand in Australia in terms of both volume and value, the result of a remarkable story that brings together radical thinking, a will to win, and a lot of dirty floors.

The story of how Dyson came to be a brand-leader not just in Australia but in Britain and the United States is a classic tale of an inventor working through prototype after prototype in a lab; of highs and lows with business backers; and lots of old-fashioned door-to-door (or rather, store-to-store) salesmanship. In 1979, British designer James Dyson – who had already invented a series of marine and gardening products – realized the common flaw of all vacuum cleaners, namely, the bag, and like all true revolutionaries, decided to do something about it. He sold his shares in one of his previous inventions for GBP10,000, and spent the next five years making 5,000 prototypes before coming up with his unique Dual Cyclone Technology in 1984.
But despite the genius of the technology, not everyone was interested. For one thing, big multinationals were reluctant to back a product that could, if it succeeded, do to the vacuum cleaner bag market (worth GBP100 million a year in Britain alone at the time) what digital cameras have done to makers of 35mm film.

Fast forward to 1989, and enter James Cameron.

Cameron, who at the time was working for S.C. Johnson Wax as part of their global team trying to develop equipment that would go along with the firm’s already-existing chemicals lines, recalls the first time he heard about Dyson’s product as a real eureka moment in his life. ‘I said to myself, wow, there’s the answer! I have an engineering background myself, and knew we had to do this’. So Cameron set about convincing his company to buy the commercial rights to Dual Cyclone Technology, and sat down with Dyson to make a viable vacuum cleaner for the marketplace.

‘So we had the backing of S.C. Johnson and James had a little coach house in Bath, in the U.K., and we had a couple of engineers. He would be designing, and we would be getting prototypes made, and finally we had the design sorted out’, says Cameron. ‘We were also meeting up regularly with the global marketing people from S.C. Johnson to make sure there were going to be buyers for this thing, and got them to spend $3 million on tooling. We got the machine produced in Italy, launched it in 1990, and did very well with it across Europe.’

Soon, though, the other shoe would drop – in the form of a corporate edict from on high that said vacuums were not part of the company’s core business, and therefore, the Dyson operation was shut down. Of course, it’s pretty hard to keep a good idea from eventually forcing its way to market, and that’s just what happened as Dyson and Cameron teamed up to take on the world. James Dyson started selling vacuums in the U.K. in 1993, and as soon as a barrel vacuum was developed in 1995 – about eighty percent of the floor cleaner market down under is for barrel vacs, as opposed to upright models – Cameron flew down to start breaking in to the local market. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that’s easier said than done – and as Cameron quickly discovered, his first problem was getting into a retail market he didn’t know about with a product no one had ever seen before.

His solution? Hit the streets.

‘I took it out to the stores, and was pretty persistent. A lot of people told me what I could do with my vacuum cleaner!’, laughs Cameron as he remembers some of the less-than-diplomatic receptions he was accorded by store managers. ‘But I wanted to win. I believed in the technology, and I made a decision that this was going to go, and I know it was just a matter of getting in the door and showing retailers the technology’.

This faith in the product – and the fact that the product was so unique (as opposed to other manufacturers who had for years been essentially repackaging old technology in new housings) – is what sustained Cameron, who notes that that sort of passion is necessary for anyone trying to get a business off the ground.

‘I suppose I was a bit naïve, but I’m bloody-minded, and I just wanted it to work.’

Eventually, though, Dyson’s break came, and David Jones placed an order for 120 vacuum cleaners in May of 1996. They sold just 24 through the following month, a number which Cameron still remembers vividly to this day. But better luck came in the form of a deal with Myer’s: ‘They said they’d put it on sale and placed an order for 170, and we’ve never looked back’.

But while this was the break Cameron was looking for, he realised that managing growth was going to be tricky, and that continued success – predicated as it was, at the time, on so much word-of-mouth advertising – depended on more than just being able to get more product to market. So Cameron and his team spent virtually every night of the week going out into the stores and training staff in how the Dyson worked. ‘We would take the thing out, pour fine powder on the ground and let them see how it separated it out, and even let them take them home to try them out’, says Cameron, who never moved the product out to market without also giving this sort of support to retailers. ‘They realized it was different, but it was damn hard doing all that training’.

From there, Dyson’s Australian operation grew at ‘a ridiculous rate’, with giant retailers like Harvey Norman and Retravision quick to sign on. All of which led to another problem that Cameron never imagined: many of his employees at the time did not want to work for such a high-growth company, having joined up thinking that they were going to spend their days at a staid little operation without too many demands being made of them.

‘In one year I lost 70 per cent of my staff – they couldn’t handle the pace. That was the year our sales doubled. They said they wanted to work for a little company and have a little job – and I knew they couldn’t meet our expectations’, says Cameron, adding that he went through a great deal of soul-searching about his hiring processes. And, as Cameron discovered, getting the right team on board was key as the company was tipped for major growth.

‘One of the things I said was that I didn’t need a lot of little Ross Camerons around’, he says, describing his hiring philosophy. ‘The important thing is to find people who have a vision, and who’ve got passion – the most important thing is that they have that.’

Cameron adds that this quest for strong, diverse people leads to a much stronger team, especially when there’s conflict over an issue.
‘I’m a hard taskmaster, but my people push back. If they defend an issue, I’m very likely to accept what they’re trying to say – I want strong people around me’.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

Money, Feb 05

DEBT IS A FOUR LETTER WORD
Had your email inbox fill up with Nigerian scams lately?
Well, now there’s a new scam doing the rounds called ‘watch this stock’…

Jim rang his financial adviser to place an order for some shares. He had just received an amazing tip. He had run into his old friend Neville down at the club and found out that he had been making a lot of money on the stock market. This came as a surprise to Jim as he had known Neville for many years and had come to learn that Neville could not be described as the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was one of nature’s plodders, a real battler who never seemed to attract good luck. Well, it seemed that good fortune recently took a liking
to Neville.

It started about seven months ago. He received a personalised letter marked private and confidential. The letter introduced a fail safe system of selecting individual shares that were due to increase in value. It did not ask for money, only privacy. The letter was unsigned and Neville had no idea who sent it. It suggested that Neville watch the share price of ABC Ltd as it was about to go up. On the first of the following month a similar letter arrived, again unsigned, suggesting that the share price of DEF Ltd was about to decrease in value. Now Neville was not a fan of the share market, however he did note the prices of the shares highlighted and sure enough ABC Ltd went up in price and DEF Ltd went down. At the start of the next month he received another letter suggesting that GHI Ltd was due to increase in value. Well this had gone on for eight months and each time the information was correct. The anonymous share tipster had grabbed Neville’s attention and by the end of the fourth month Neville had opened an account at the local broker.

Neville’s problem was that he could never keep a secret and was happy to share his good fortune with anybody prepared to listen. Jim thought that it would be a crime not act on such a sure fire tip and promptly phoned his investment adviser to place an order. He also shared his enthusiasm and source of the information. If someone could get eight tips in a row correct, surely they must have some insider knowledge or superior skill. Jim was tempted to find out more about this mysterious tipster and was seriously thinking about changing permanently to this new adviser.

Jim thought that it was too good to be true and listened patiently while his adviser explained the scam. The scammer would source large mailing lists of like-minded individuals, preferably greater than 20,000 which was typically an industry trade list. The first letter is simply one of introduction, in the second he splits the list in half.

He tells one half that ABC Ltd’s share price is going to go up, the other that it is going to go down. The next month he would only write to the half which received the correct information. He would select a different share and advise half of the (reduced) data base that the share would increase in price, the other half that it would decrease.

Typically by the eighth letter he offers to sell them a share trading system for a grossly inflated price and then leaves the area before they discover that it is a scam. Neville’s only luck was in being part of the surviving group. A cynical person would suggest that Neville’s bad luck streak was continuing as he was likely to pay the $35,000 asking price for the useless software and become the victim yet again.
Jim’s adviser always says that punters should always be wary of schemes that appear too good to be true and be especially alert if secrecy is actively encouraged. He went on to explain to Jim that although scams were important, he should be aware that larger issues were requiring attention. He suggested that personal debt levels for New Zealanders could be the next warning sign that investors need to take heed of.

A study undertaken by the Ministry of Social Development in 2004 titled “When Debt Becomes a Problem” suggests that one in six New Zealand households have negative net worth. It goes on to suggest that 17% of the population believed they could not obtain $1,500 in an emergency (51% for those on income-tested benefits) and 36% could not obtain $5,000 (76% for beneficiaries). This includes sourcing it from credit cards and extended family. The study indicates that the above figures are about average for the rest of the western world.

If one in six households are experiencing trouble meeting their debt obligations, then punters have to question if the recent increase in house prices is sustainable. The average income for most New Zealanders is still between $40 and $50 thousand per year. Where the average debt level for an Aucklander is in excess of $73,000. In the USA the figures are similar. In Denver, Colorado mortgage foreclosures are up 30% on the previous year. Experts indicate that risky loan strategies such as no-money-down loans and a year of low housing appreciation contributed to the rise.

Parents have an obligation to teach their children that the first step to financial security and independence is to spend less than they earn. It is common for the financially unskilled to cross this line during the festive season at Christmas. Recent reports from the USA show that January is peak season for those registering with financial counsellors. Courses supported by churches have attracted unprecedented demand.

Those in debt have turned to religion for support. In New Zealand, Citizens Advice Bureau is filling that gap. They cover a wide range of legal, personal, housing and vehicle topics, however they are more commonly known for their budgeting skills.

When it came to selecting share market winners, Jim wanted to believe that some one else had an inside edge and was disappointed to hear that Neville’s secret adviser was just another scam artist. For Jim and his faithful companion Moira, the figures about those in financial hardship came as a surprise. They had learnt sound financial practices from their parents and were excellent students. They did everything within their power to pass these skills onto their children. They were unaware that almost 20% of the population were close to, or suffering, financial hardship. People should be in a position of telling their money where to go, rather than spend time wondering where it got to.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Dec 05. AU Edition

FLY ME TO THE MOON
Plus: Guinness’s records are not so stout anymore, and falling in love (again) with Venice

GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS 2006
Edited by Craig Glenday, Guinness World Records, $45.00
Up until recently the Guinness Book of Records was a quiet black and white document with every record imaginable recorded in small sombre print. Not any more. The cover looks like the inside of a pulsing nightclub, complete with hologram-like reflectors that image anything close by with a series of green and silver highlights. The contents page is adorned with the world’s Most Pierced Women and an actual-size cane toad. The razzle-dazzle continues with the Most Hula Hooped Woman, a Dog with Five Tennis Balls in his Mouth and the proud possessor of 137 Traffic Cones. Impressed? But wait – there’s more! – 31,424 Students Cleaned their Teeth for 60 seconds! 937 students and staff wearing Groucho Marx Masks! 1254 Students Danced the Scottish Reel! Leonardo D’Andrea Crushed 22 Watermelons with his Head! And here’s my favourite – Most Valentine Cards Sent to a Guinea Pig – Over 206 cards from as far away as New Zealand!

Old time Guinness Book of Records readers – fact crunchers who took their records and achievements seriously – must be wondering what the hell is going on. No question – Guinness has gone upmarket with flashy collages, in-your-face images and silly records that anyone could help set. The new format declares that you don’t have to be a fact-geek or a horn-rimmed nerd to read this book – a skateboarder or a guy with 258 straws stuck in his gob will be fine. I guess all this new mass participation is nicer than a group of Islamic terrorists squashed into a bus but it seems to eliminate the point of setting records for true human endurance which are mostly an individual matter requiring either guts, ingenuity or perseverance. Brushing your teeth for one minute with 30,000 others hardly qualifies.

OK, I’ve had my beef. The compendium still has plenty to endear the true record lover. Paul Hunn can burp at 104.9 decibels. Rene Alvarenga has eaten 35,000 live scorpions. Michel Lolito, whose teeth can grind at eight tonnes per cm, has eaten 18 bicycles, 15 supermarket trolleys, 3 TV sets, 6 chandeliers, a set of skis, a computer and a Cessna light aircraft. Whether or how long he brushes his teeth is not recorded. I was impressed to learn the largest private library contains 1.5 million books and the record for one finger pushups is 126 (pushups not fingers). I was surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, that the world’s fastest solo circumnavigation record is held by a woman (Ellen MacArthur) and astonished to learn that the world’s most dangerous stinging nettle is in New Zealand – Urtica ferox can kill dogs, horses and even once killed a man.

Bacteria are tough cookies – samples have survived over two years in outer space (they were attached to satellites). I learnt that there is such a critter as a Wolphin, the result of a whale-dolphin cross, and that the fastest humanoid robot can only stomp along at a snail-like 1.8 mph. On the human side, the oldest surviving couple have been married for 78 years and the world’s largest wedding banquet had 150,000 guests – a missed opportunity to set a dishwashing record. It is satisfying, though slightly absurd, to learn the longest prison sentence handed out (fraud, Thailand) was for 141,078 years. Though I’m sure the fraudsters will be out after only 140,000 years for good behaviour.

More criticism – many records that could reasonably be expected are absent - examples (from a list of many) could include world’s largest aircraft, most poisonous snake, world’s loudest band, largest extinct bird. In its present format, the Guinness Book of Records is no longer the exhaustive compendium of yesteryear. Perhaps they should consider a smaller formatted pocket edition which is mainly print?

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THE CITY OF FALLING ANGELS
By John Berendt, Sceptre, $49.95
What is all this fuss about Venice? This question is usually asked only by those who have not visited the famous watery city – the only city in the world without traffic noise. When I spent a weekend there some years back, I knew little about the place but on arrival, I became, as many have done, an instant convert to her decaying charms. There’s something about magnificence in decay that stirs me deeply, just why I don’t know. Perhaps because magnificence at its peak is often accompanied by the expression of tyranny that expects obeisance whereas when the civilisation has passed away and only the buildings remain, we can enjoy them as architecture minus the tedious and oppressive trapping of visible power.

In the long litany of adoration that Venice has enjoyed from art critics, poets and composers (there are of course notable exceptions among the eulogists), most of the travel writers and essayists have looked at the city as a kind of architectural poem – which it very much is – and somehow overlooked the Venetians. As Mary McCarthy, renown American author once pre- sumptiously said, “Nothing that can be said about Venice has not been said before” – and she was echoing another famous American literary visitor to Venice, Henry James. As Berendt triumphantly demonstrates, these statements have about as much objective correlative as the fatuous statements made around the end of the nineteenth century that science had discovered nearly everything about the universe. Berendt, a skilful social observer, has managed to find out and report back on various scandals and upheavals in contemporary Venice - events that would make a wonderfully dramatic film. Events that give the reader a fresh view of an embattled city.
The City of Falling Angels begins - a perfect film prologue – with a destructive fire in 1996 that incinerated the Fenice Theatre, a stately opera house that was a symbol of Venetian cultural grandeur.

Three days later, with the smell of charcoal still in the air, Berendt arrived. His mission – to see Venice sans tourists – was to be fulfilled in a way he could not have anticipated. For the obvious ensuing question was, was the fire an accident or deliberately set? Either way guilty parties had to be fingered. The book has the feeling of a triptych, with the first event and eventual culprits identified enfolding many additional and wild characters, who, of course, are flesh and blood not novelists’ invention – a forwarding note says: “This is a work of non fiction. All the people in it are real and are identified by their real names.”

Presumably, Berendt (or his publisher), insisted on such a note, otherwise non-Venetians night be inclined to imagine that such fellows as Ludovico De Luigi – a latter day Dali – a surreal painter, who arranged for a porn star politician to arrive in a gondola, topless, climb one of the famous horses at St Marks and proclaim herself a living work of art – might not exist. (And in fact, I’m still wondering, if, after all, as Berendt tells us, the Venetian embellish everything and consider truth tellers a bore, whether he hasn’t added a bit of colour.) The intricate drama of intrigue and plotting that Berendt details is a modern soap opera from real life. Naturally, the Mafia come under suspicion and in my innocence, I didn’t know that they had used arson against art institutions as an extreme form of cultural terrorism.

In the middle chapters, Berendt, who seems to have a knack for engaging friend and foe alike, explores other dramas of great poignancy such as a rift in an ancient family of glass blowers from Murano. First, we side with the father, then sneakily, we see the rebel son’s point of view. Either way, the glass creations emerge, whether fire-inspired or technically innovative – some photos would have been nice. Another long chapter is devoted to Olga Rudge’s struggle with other Poundites determined to secure the old poet’s papers for a song and the bitter battles that ensue. If all of the above sounds unrelentingly highbrow in scope, Berendt slips in a rat exterminator who attributes his huge success at his chosen profession by feeding rats the same (but slyly doctored) food that local humans eat. Is Berendt trying on a symbol for the wiliness of Venetians?
Owing to the fortuitous events of history, what was intended to be perhaps just another travel book, an architectural swan song, became an enthralling and immediate social history. This is only Berendt’s second book, so it will be interesting to see which part of the globe he brings his acute gaze to next.

PS: Against difficult odds, the restored opera house re-opened in 2003.

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LUNAR PARK
By Bret Easton Ellis, Picador, $27.00
Lunar Park which is not to be confused with Luna Park, the Sydney amusement park, and indeed there is little chance of that. Luna Park possibly brings a smile to the face of its users but Lunar Park, Ellis’s latest novel, is neither amusing, uplifting nor entertaining. In fact, it is a tiresomely bad book. The reader may well wind up asking “is this a horror or a horrible novel?”, and the answer is yes on both counts.

Initially, Ellis pulls out that tired metafictional trick of an author turning himself into a character in a novel. Witty when Philip Roth does it, alas not here. The opening chapters with their confessions of druggy parties read like a straight autobiography so the casual browser could be tricked. The blurb tell us “that every word is true”, an assertion which even the dimmest reader will slowly realise is fictional puffery. Ellis, the character, keeps complaining that he is not cut out for suburban married life. And it might appear, Ellis, the real author, is forewarning us not to expect this brat pack novelist to turn respectable and suburbanly settled, anytime soon.

Enter Terby, a nasty doll that seems to have stepped out of the B-grade pages of Stephen King. What’s worse or better, depending on how you look at it, is the presence of a young man dressed up as Patrick Bateman, sadistic-psychotic villain of Ellis’s previous notorious novel, American Psycho, who appears to be leaving a trail of corpses. In other words, art is copying life, even though that “life” is also fiction. Stated thus, something shallow sounds metafictionally deep. I can assure you this is not the case.

The gratuitous slaughters in the pages of American Psycho leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth and here the narrator (Ellis) seems to want explain and excuse the author (also Ellis) by maintaining that brutal murderer Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator and that the crimes may well have been fantasies, “fuelled by his rage and fury about life in America was structured and how this had ...trapped him ...”. The book “was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women”. Or is Ellis, the real and actual author, seeking to let himself off the hook of accusations of unrelenting sadism towards women as grimly reported in American Psycho? It certainly looks that way.

Another unconvincing theme in Lunar Park is that Ellis is trying to make peace with his father and the nastinesses of Patrick Bateman were based on anger against his dad. This notion at least leads to the only good piece of writing in the book – the last two magnificently lyrical pages which describe the ashes of the dead father being cast into the sea. Which is possibly what Ellis should have done when this book was still a manuscript. Except, of course, for those last two pages.

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GRANTA 90: Country Life
Edited by Ian Jack, Granta, $27.95
Established some 20 years, the very non-literary (no criticism or poetry) literary book-formatted magazine, Granta continues to publish first class short stories, travel and sociological memoirs. There is a Granta package – meticulous detail, lucid elegant English, sympathy for the underdog, particularly the working class underdog – the old style factory or field worker – which is sometimes presented as the worker speaking or narrating non-stop for several pages. This approach is used for the lead feature – an evocation of a fading rural way of life in England entitled “Return to Akenfield” by Craig Taylor.

Akenfield – first published in 1969 – was “a rich and perceptive portrait of life in an English village, told in the voices of the farmers and villagers themselves”. Akenfield has had a boom – population 298 in 1950, by 2001 it had rocketed to 358. We learn that picking black currants is bloody (actually sticky) hard work and buying a reasonably-sized dairy farm nowadays will set you back a cool five million bucks.

In former days, Granta tended to mainly feature big name writers but the only one featured here – unless you count Studs Terkel interviewing Bob Dylan back in 1963 – is Doris Lessing’s “The Death of A Chair”. I found Lessing’s piece uninspiring. She is surpassed by less known authors like Barry Lopez (noted for his book on wolves) who writes a poignant piece on salmon fishing with his son; “Fantastic Mr Fox” by Tim Adams, a satisfying look at the crazed dedication and frantic antics of the anti-fox hunters, and “Nightwalking” by Robert Macfarlane, a celebration of noctambulism (walking at night especially in search of melancholy) as opposed to somna- mbulism (sleepwalking, possible at high noon).

The intriguing thing about Granta is if you open it at random you will find it difficult to tell fact from fiction. Actually, the fiction is in the minority but when I read “Constitutional” by Helen Simpson (fiction) I took it to be the kind of typical personal memoir piece that Granta writers do so well. Does this mean my reading filter had fallen asleep? Or that fact and fiction have become indistinguishable? Neither, I believe; it’s just the hard bitten exactitude of the Granta style.

The collection is rounded off by the postcard-tinted style photographs of tree blight by Robert Gumpert and the solemn dignity of English folk parading their showtime farm animals by Liz Jobey. The piece de la resistance (almost) is a bunch of gloriously cheerful Englishwomen holding up their prize chooks on a Hertfordshire farm in 1933, exceeded only by four behatted gentlemen clutching their piglets. The inscription on the building behind reads, “Adolph’s Kindergarten, Bombing Verboten.” Great stuff.

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SPACE RACE
By Deborah Cadbury, Fourth Estate, $67.95
As a small boy I informed my parents that one day a man would fly to the moon. My parents, aunties and grandparent (I had only one) laughed with amiable derision. Man fly to the moon! Consistent aerial Luddites, none of my elders so much as set foot in an aeroplane though they lived into the 70s, the era of cheap flight.

Today – setting aside the conspiratorial sceptics – we know men have flown to the moon not once but six times. The notion that flight to the moon was possible was most prominently mooted by Werner Von Braun, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a former member of the SS whose scientific prophecies included space stations, artificial sunlight, rocket planes crossing the Atlantic in 40 minutes – all in 1945! A series of articles published in Colliers in 1952 continued the hype and were read by millions. Certainly, I knew the name von Braun when I was in short pants. As adolescence hit, I became a science fiction fan. The moon trip was a certainty – it was just a matter of time. My parents were alive when the moon was reached, though kindly, I never crowed ‘I told you so’.

Space Race is a very apt title and just how fiercely it was contested is the thrilling tale related in this gripping book. Major Staver was responsible for the Americans gaining an early lead over the Russians by acquiring – just hours before the Brits arrived – 100 V2 rockets, 15 tons of documents, 1000 technicians, plus the inimitable and charismatic Von Braun, ever after to lead the American half of the space race. Later, the Americans secured some 7000 “German experts” from all branches of industry. By any standards, they had a head start. In fact since they had the V2s, they had a flying start.

What of the Russians? Stalin was furious that they had no V2s, no documents and no senior experts. But SMERSH agents managed to get hold of a gyrostabiliser platform used in a V2 rocket, a talented young engineer called Helmut Grottrup and some blueprints for parts of the V2. Later the Russian’s trump card was an outstanding rocket engineer, Sergei Korolev, brought back into favour after a period of incarceration in a gulag on the usual trumped-up charges.

It was the genius of Korolev in pioneering the R-7 rocket that led to the dramatic overtaking of the American space program by the Russians. I am of the generation who reeled under the impact of Russian success – A satellite! A dog! A man! A rocket impacting on the moon! – while the Americans languished in miserable technical failure. In relatively uncensored America, the press had a field day calling the failed American attempt to catch up Flopkin ... Dudnik ... Puffnik ... Oopsnik ...Goofkik ... Kaputnik. Of course, the Russians had their disasters too, though Soviet propaganda meant that a massive explosion in 1960 which killed 150 was hushed up. The Americans had their small successes and further humiliations, but their moment of triumph finally came with the awesome moon rocket Saturn V whose 5 F-1 engines delivered 7.5 million pounds of thrust and were so powerful they could be heard 100 miles away. Meanwhile, in an ironic reversal, the Russian equivalents began blowing up. This is drama on a grand scale and no has told it better than Deborah Cadbury. It’s a blast!

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, AU Edition

NEW RUDD ORDER
Iraq, the United Nations, and the threat of terrorism in our region: What is Howard doing wrong? How would Labor do things differently? Investigate editor JAMES MORROW recently sat down with Shadow Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd to find out

INVESTIGATE: Do you think Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone?
KEVIN RUDD: Well, the fact of the matter is Saddam’s gone, but to state the bleeding obvious we didn’t support the war. The fact of the matter is that that advice was not accepted by the Australian government, the Australian government fought in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, and in fact succeeded in removing him. Therefore we are, as people interested in and committed to universal human rights, happy that he’s gone.

But what one is concerned about is the stability of the country, and the regime which replaces him. What we’re uncertain about is how all this will shake down in the years ahead, particularly once there is an eventual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
INVESTIGATE: On the subject of the US’s eventual withdrawal, where do you stand on the question of keeping Australian troops in Iraq? After all, Mark Latham promised to have the troops home by Christmas, but Howard has committed another 450 troops.
RUDD: We think that [increasing the deployment] was an inappropriate decision for a number of reasons, one of which is the prime minister’s election commitment, to the Australian people in black and white, which was that there would be no substantial increases. Prior to the election from memory we had in country something in the vicinity of 300 troops if you add another 500, it’s basically a breach of undertaking.
INVESTIGATE: So what’s Labor’s plan?
RUDD: When I visited Iraq and spoke with Ambassador Bremmer, one of the things he impressed upon me was the problem of the porousness of Iraq’s borders, and of insurgents and jihadists coming across from Syria and Saudi Arabia and Iran and [the need] to do what was necessary to enhance the systems, procedures and personnel tasked with providing Iraq’s border security. We can provide a very effective training package for that as well as effective packages to assist Iraqis on the humanitarian front.
INVESTIGATE: In that vein, did you see Syria recently nabbed 113 people trying to make it into Iraq from Syria?
RUDD: I have not seen that particular report, but those figures would not surprise me. I stood in Bremer’s office in Saddam’s palace and examined a very large map of Iraq and its contiguous land borders with Iran, Syria and Saudi. These are borders that probably in the best of times were never properly policed. Now that we’re in the worst of times, in terms of Iraq, to paraphrase [CIA Director] Porter Goss, it has become something of a magnet for training jihadists from around the world.

It strikes us that the best thing to do is help the Iraqis build better border control and better border security systems. That’s something we’re not bad at.
INVESTIGATE: To bring the United Nations into the conversation for a moment, you opposed going into Iraq; does Australia always need the UN’s mandate to use force, or is there a danger that that limits our options?
RUDD: We take the UN charter seriously, and the reason we take the UN charter seriously is that, prima facie, it is better to have an international rules-based order than to have no international rules-based order. And to state the bleeding obvious, of course it’s inefficient. The bottom line is it was put together by a committee of nations in 1945. But critics of the UN don’t argue what sort of rules-based order, if any, should replace it. Are they arguing for the pre-‘45 world order, the pre-1919 world order, what sort of world order are they arguing for creating? Back to Westphalia, back to pre-Westphalia?

If you’re going to take the classic neo-conservative critique of the UN multilateral order, then think in the great tradition of Burkean conservatism, you should argue for something to replace that which you would tear apart. I don’t hear a coherent program along those lines other than occasional bursts of unilateralism when you judge it absolutely necessary. A lot of capabilities are divided within the strength of the UN charter: Article 42, which provides for collective action through the Security Council (that’s how we managed to achieve our outcomes in East Timor). You’ve also got Article 51, which provides for an opportunity to defend yourself against attacks, and Kofi Annan has argued for a further examination of that given the advances in weaponry in recent times. Then you’ve got doctrines of humanitarian intervention, which are much more controversial provisions.

INVESTIGATE: How does that all fit in, then, with the crisis in Darfur?
RUDD: The challenge at stake with Darfur is the question of whether it is a failure of the UN or the member states of the UN.
INVESTIGATE: Then isn’t the problem with the UN that it is only as good as it’s member states?
RUDD: Most cooperative endeavours are.
INVESTIGATE: Sure, if you’ve got an organisation with lots of different states that are not democracies and a few that are, don’t you wind up getting pulled down to the lowest common denominator, because those dictatorships keep one from being able to act?
RUDD: If you look back to the Commission on Human Rights, which is the subject of such comprehensive reform proposals by Kofi Annan’s reform panel, that is the inherent problem of having a democracy of states, states which irrespective of their internal political composition all having equal say in the general assembly.
But again, the critics of the UN system fail to argue the alternative. I don’t hear that. I don’t even hear that from the neo-conservative critics. Would it be the death of Westphalia? Would the sovereignty of individual states go out the door? If so, what replaces it? I just think that reforming the current system is the most practical way to go. I put in these stark terms and your readers will be familiar with Churchill’s great critique of democracy, and I think the same is true with the United Nations.

So it’s not about some belief in chanting the UN mantra for the sake of chanting the UN mantra. No, it’s not ideological, it’s practical. And contrast that with the various international systems of the pre-1945 period. And in this country which tends to be pro-American, and I have a career record of being pro-American myself, support for the UN tends to poll over 60 percent.
INVESTIGATE: On the issue of pro- and anti-Americanism, what did you make of that report from the Lowy institute which said that more Australians were more afraid of the United States than Osama bin Laden?
RUDD: I was actually in China when that poll came out so, so I haven’t gotten into it, but in terms of the responses in the poll that supported the US alliance, I think the figure was 38 per cent, and for America itself it was 58 per cent. That I think is an interesting insight into the way Australians think. Australians, since 1941 when [Labor] ran the country, we had an alliance with the United States for the first time, which was under an Australian Labor government, and we took a lot of criticism from those who accused us of departing from the mother country. We have been consistent supporters of a military alliance with America, and that has not changed and that will not change.

However, support of the US military alliance does not mean that you have to subsume every tenet of Australian foreign policy to American foreign policy. There are going to be areas of difference. There have been in the past, and you know what? There will be in the future. This is not the sort of thing where you just go and tick every box.
INVESTIGATE: Back to the whole concept of multilateral alliances and structures, what do you say to the criticism that if we were in the ASEAN treaty a few years back, we wouldn’t have ben able to liberate East Timor because we would have had to respect the sovereignty of Indonesia?
RUDD: I think it’s an intellectually incoherent argument, the reason being that in the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation refers to Article 42 of the UN charter, which in turn provides for collective action by states. It was only when the UN mandated action in East Timor that the Indonesians withdrew and we entered uncontested under the terms of the relevant UN resolultions. To use the ancient Latin phrase, that argument is complete bullshit.
INVESTIGATE: Where do you see China fitting in to geopolitics these days, especially with the Taiwan issue?
RUDD: I think the central foreign policy challenge for Australia in the next quarter-century is China. I don’t think the Howard government necessarily grasps that. If you look at the Prime Minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute recently, he described us Asia as constituting the stadium of international affairs for the century ahead. Well, that’s terrific that the Prime Minister has discovered a pre-existing reality which is staring the nation in the face for the previous quarter-century. Anyway, leaving that to one side, the core component of that is China. Why? China is the dynamic, and it is an unfolding story of rapid economic growth. Back in 1984 it has an economy slightly smaller than Canada and slightly larger than that of Australia. Now, depending on the measure, you’re talking about an economy that’s the fourth-largest in the world and getting larger.
INVESTIGATE: There’s a lot of economic growth there, but not much political freedom…
RUDD: The open question is, is China going in the direction of a democracy? Anyone making bold predictions on that I think has an excess of courage and a possible deficit of wisdom. It is a very difficult question to predict. To answer to the question how China will evolve politically, well, frankly it is impossible to predict.
On the question of China’s foreign policy behaviour, China now in terms of diplomatic and foreign policy activity in the region is much more activist than it has been in the past. China in the 1980s did not have much of a view of what was going on in the region. Now it has an acute view.

On the question of Taiwan, it is one of continuing core sensitivities, not just in terms of peace and prosperity across the Taiwan straits, but peace between China and the United States, peace between China and Japan, peace within the wider region. This is the core question within the core question.
INVESTIGATE: So if China makes a play for Taiwan, and the US ends up on the side of China, where does that leave Australia?
RUDD: The answer I will give is that it is not productive for the government or the alternative government of this country to speculate on how our alliance relationship with the United States will apply given future strategic circumstances.
INVESTIGATE: But how do you feel about Taiwanese independence in the meantime?
RUDD: We’re long term supporters since 1972. Remember, Labor Party history isn’t bad on China is not a bad one. The conservatives pretended China didn’t exist for 23 years, and you know, we thought that was kind of stupid. Our treaty with China remains unchanged, and we don’t budge from that. Now what is involved domestically within Taiwan, in terms of a liberal democratic principle of management, that we of course support, and I have long been on the record supporting that. I studied in Taiwan as a student, and I’ve seen Taiwan change over the years, but that doesn’t alter our view of the One China policy.
INVESTIGATE: Moving elsewhere in the region, regarding the insurgency in the Philippines, we’ve got a story on the al Qaida-linked Islamic problem. Should Australia be doing more?
RUDD: The connections with the wider al Qaida networks in the southern Philippines has been the subject of some study, and I’m of the view that there are connections. Based on advice I’ve seen it’s quite clear to me that there are connections. That leads to Labor’s fundamental premise in its policy on counterterrorism in the region, that is, beyond rhetorical flourish by a government with an eye on opinion polls in this country, as opposed to doing the hard yards of actually tackling terrorism on the ground, we argue that to be effective in the war against terrorism, what you need is a comprehensive, regional counterterrorism strategy which covers each dimension of the problem. That means, for example, effective intelligence coordination across all south-east Asian states, police cooperation across all south-east Asian states, and on top of that it means dealing with some of the underlying social and economic factors which make it easier for terrorist organisations to recruit. That is the sort of strategy we need. At present what we’ve got is a bit of money here, a bit of money there; fund that capability-building unit in Jakarta; who knows what the one in Kuala Lumpur is doing; what about the one in Bangkok?

As a starting premise, what we argue for is a comprehensive region-wide audit of our counterterrorism capabilities if you’re serious the enterprise, that’s where you start. Then the second thing you do is identify capability gaps, and you agree on a strategy across the region in order to clear the gaps. This is not happening. You have a bit here and bit there, usually in response to an event, and that is a classical conservative party misunderstanding of a fundamental national security challenge.
INVESTIGATE: It sounds like you’re talking civilian operations – but what about on the military side. If we had knowledge of someone with a suitcase nuclear weapon somewhere bound for Australia, does Australia have the right to go stop it?
RUDD: That’s a fantastic hypothetical…
INVESTIGATE: Perhaps, but so was 9/11 before it happened.
RUDD: Look: the only way Australia, a country with twenty million people and limited national security resources of our own, both military and non-military, could do so is collaboratively, with the states of the region.

I mean, John Howard by talking about unilateral action is alienating regional states and the diplomatic support necessary to actually engender the cooperative relationships which are necessary to stop terrorists on the ground. This is a mindless piece of politics and hairy-chestedness.

Ask yourself this question: if you’ve got a problem with terrorists in south-east Asia, can you concede that Australia could in any way act other than collaboratively with the local state involved?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

Simply Devine: Mar 05, AU Edition

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE
Kids are alright,but are they a requirement for leading the ALP?

In her brief flirtation with the top Labor job last month, the party’s most ambitious woman, Julia Gillard, discovered that some people think her status as a single, childless 43-year-old woman renders her “unelectable”. She also found that some people think her neat, sunlit kitchen in Melbourne’s western suburbs looks “lonely” and “lifeless”, code for spinsterish.

“Single? Female? Childless? Was this really what Australians wanted in their alternative prime minister?” asked one newspaper.
It’s not something she had considered before, she said in a phone call from Melbourne on Australia Day after announcing she would not run for the leadership. “That’s just my life.”

But far from being an odd fish, Gillard spearheads a new and honourable tradition of powerful, unmarried childless women who are quietly heading for the top in their careers, unencumbered by the very real needs of children and the sometimes unreasonable demands of a spouse.

The 2005 Bureau of Statistics yearbook shows the fastest-growing household type in Australia is a single person living alone. In the next 20 years, single people will comprise a third of all households, and not entirely because of an ageing population.

Like a growing number of women, Gillard never set out to not get married or not have children, but says that is just the way her life turned out. “It’s an accumulation of the little decisions that brings you here.” And, like many single women, she just never met the right man, “if the definition of the right man is a relationship that endures forever ... Obviously I’ve had a series of relationships that mattered”.

Not that she’s intent on remaining single: “I wouldn’t preclude the thought of being in a strongrelationship”.

When she was a little girl people would ask her if she wanted to be a mother one day, and she would reply: “Oh no. I don’t think so”.
“I never had a strong desire to have children”, she says. “But it was not a decision [based on any notion] children would prejudice my career.”

Gillard is single again after splitting last year with her companion of two years, fellow Labor MP Craig Emerson. The new focus on her single status has led to “all sorts of peculiar offers”, she says, laughing about the men who yelled, at an Australia Day function in her western Melbourne electorate, “you look all right to me, love!”
But she was stung by the criticism of her single status, which seems to have emanated from the ALP itself, as part of a campaign to undermine Kim Beazley’s rivals for the party leadership.

“We can’t even blame the media for this; it’s her own colleagues that did it,” former Labor minister Susan Ryan told the ABC. “Now we’re back in the dark ages, where a woman’s marital status and whether she has children or not is being used against her by her own colleagues.”
Gillard denied her colleagues were behind the whispers but she did feel compelled to compare herself with her ideological opposite, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

“Dr Rice is a single, childless black woman and she is the most powerful woman in the world,” Gillard told reporters, as the pressure against her mounted. Flipping sausages on a BBQ, she went further to justify her single status: “No one person can encapsulate everyone’s life experience. A man doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman, a person with children doesn’t know what it’s like to be a person without children, a person from a wealthy background doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up on a housing estate.” Touché.

She also points out she is part of a family, anyway: her “original family”, parents John and Moira, and older sister Alison, who live in Adelaide.

Likeable and engaging, Gillard also has a tribe of close friends in Melbourne including Terry Bracks, wife of the Victorian Premier. When Mark Latham abruptly quit the Labor Leadership, she was on holiday in Cambodia and Vietnam with another friend.

In any case, she says voters in her electorate don’t care about her marital status, as long as she does the job.

On the other side of politics, 36-year-old Liberal Sophie Panopoulos, also ambitious, childless and unmarried(so far), weighed into the Gillard debate with her own tale of marital-status prejudice.

“All of the Labor sisterhood in Canberra remained absolutely silent when the Labor candidate for Indi (in north-east Victoria) in the last election made the same allegations about me,” she told the ABC’s 7.30 Report. “[He said] I really wasn’t fit to be the member because I wasn’t married and didn’t have children.”

But the allegations didn’t damage Panopoulos’s standing with the electorate. In fact, she won the seat by a margin of 21 percent and attracted almost six percent of Labor voters from her ostentatiously married-with-children rival.

Few Australian politicians have made as big a deal of their family as Latham. There was the famous shot of him striding down a hallway with his mother and wife and two sons when he was first elected Labor leader. He invited cameras to his home during the election campaign to snap him on Father’s Day playing backyard cricket with his boys.
Latham read storybooks to schoolchildren and did everything possible to portray himself as the quintessential family man. But did that make the electorate warm to him? Far from it. In the end, when Latham resigned, he cited a desire to devote himself to his family. From Latham’s experience, you might even infer that the demands of being Labor leader with young children are too hard.
Of course, Gillard could have married her handbag, just to conform. But why should she?

Instead she has to contend with snide comments about her “unnaturally spotless” kitchen, in which she was photographed for the Sun-Herald recently.

Sure, it might not be the schmick Calcutta marble kitchen of a yuppie Sydney couple with a subscription to Belle. But it is a practical kitchen, about what you might expect from a busy single professional person who had returned to work a week early from a holiday and hadn’t had time to buy apples for the fruit bowl.

Successful single men rarely face such prejudice; and most don’t stay single for long, there being no shortage of women eager for rich-wife status.

But it is trickier for a successful career woman to find a partner who doesn’t demand babies at an inconvenient time of her career, as movie star Brad Pitt supposedly did with Jennifer Aniston, for instance, or who doesn’t feel neglected by her success.

Instead, increasing numbers of self-respecting women in their 30s and 40s are content to accept they may never marry or have children. They focus instead on their careers, and relationships with friends and “original family”. It’s not a lifestyle they chose, or one they imagined for themselves. But they are not lonely. They don’t feel they are settling for second best. They are just realistic.

The bonus for a society which embraces such women is the extra guilt-free attention they can lavish on their jobs. Julia Gillard’s single, childless status is an electoral asset because it means she can work harder.

Or, as a woman emailed me after a shorter version of this article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald: “Julia and other single gals such as myself are an asset to any organisation because we are not going to p... off early from our responsibilities to collect little Charlotte or Joshua from daycare after another outbreak of conjunctivitis.”

Ouch.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, AU Edition

HOWARD’S WAY
He’s won a fourth term, faced down a revolt from backbenchers, and has historic control of the Senate. So what next for the Prime Minister? ALAN ANDERSON provides an inside account of the power struggles within the Liberal party, the outlook for succession, and Labor’s last best hope.

With the Opposition languishing in the polls, the new Senate under Coalition control and the issue of the Liberal leadership at least tem-porarily quiescent, one would imagine John Howard to be at the peak of his power. Yet the past few weeks have seen him locked in tense negotiations with four of his own backbenchers, culminating in a partial repudiation of the policy with which he is most closely associated in the public mind. As we eagerly anticipate the Government’s legislative agenda, how far will Howard really be able to push things in a fourth term?

The revolt led by backbencher Petro Georgiou against mandatory detention has been an unsettling experience for the Government. With big ticket items like industrial relations and Telstra on the agenda, together with smaller but equally controversial reforms like voluntary student unionism, Howard will not want policies that should form his legacy to be watered down by nervous backbenchers.

Howard’s response has been to portray the revolt as a strength rather than a weakness. His welcoming of fresh ideas from the backbench carried a disturbing touch of Chairman Mao’s exhortation to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’, although one hopes his motivation is less sinister.

Certainly, Liberal MPs identify the party’s capacity to generate ideas as a key advantage over Labor. ‘We are winning because we are about ideas’, one South Australian Liberal MP told Investigate. ‘They are more interested in factional politics.’

This is more than rhetoric. Two new policy journals, The Party Room, edited by former federal director Andrew Robb MP and tax crusader Senator Mitch Fifield, and Looking Forward, edited by South Australian Liberal MP Dr Andrew Southcott, have sprung up in the last few months. Freed of the discipline of staring down the barrel of electoral oblivion, Coalition MPs have greeted Labor’s decline with an eagerness to conduct their own policy debates in public.

The Coalition is providing its own opposition, while an impotent Labor Party is relegated to the role of spectator. There is every reason to believe that this is not a passing phase. Labor was sidelined before Coalition control of the Senate; deprived of its upper house veto it can only become less relevant. Policy is in fashion this season, and there is no doubt that it is making the Liberal Party look like the natural party of government.

Yet while Howard’s portrayal of the Liberals as the ‘party of ideas’ may encompass calls for tax reform or school vouchers, it was a contrived explanation of his surrender to the mandatory detention rebels. Howard’s line has only passed media muster because the press gallery were so keen to see immigration policy watered down.
The days of a meek and compliant backbench are gone. ‘There are two ends of the spectrum’, another Minister explained. ‘On one hand you have people like Georgiou, who know that they’re never going to get a position on the front bench. What has he got to lose? He figures he might as well do what he believes.

‘At the other end of the spectrum you have young, ambitious backbenchers. If you’re in your thirties and on the backbench, you want to make a name for yourself. You see there’s a logjam on the front bench at the moment, and you don’t expect promotion any time soon. So you’re thinking long-term, beyond this Government’.

In other words, the Coalition’s policy debates are partly a symptom of its success. Howard has an abundance of talent in the Parliament, much of it quite experienced, but there are only so many ministries to go around.

The two major themes championed by the party’s backbench this year have been tax reform and softening of mandatory detention. They represent two different models of backbench activism, at least one of which poses a direct challenge to Howard’s authority.

The so-called tax ‘ginger group’, led by Fifield and Victorian Liberal MP Sophie Panopoulos, was careful to give credit to the Government for past tax cuts while lobbying for more. They portrayed their cause as consistent with the direction of government policy, and their form of contribution is doubtless what Howard has in mind when calling for debate. But to be fairto Petro Georgiou and his mandatory
detention rebels, consistency with government policy would not have been a credible claim for their group to make. Asked to comment on where the line is drawn between healthy debate and white-anting, one Liberal Senator saw the policy itself as the main distinction. ‘The difference is about whether you are agitating to advance Liberal values, or to overturn them; whether you’re trying to get us to go forward or to reverse’.

Yet there is a distinction of process as well as substance. Sophie Panopolous invited controversy when labelling Georgiou’s group ‘political terrorists’, yet there is no question that their campaign was conducted using the threat of private member’s Bills and an embarrassing split in Government ranks. If not terrorism, it was at least blackmail, and it worked.

Media commentators, seeking to excuse Howard’s capitulation on a policy they detest, suggest that it sprang from his belief that ‘disunity is death’. But if disunity is death, has Howard not encouraged it?

The Coalition party room was solidly behind Howard on this issue. Had he wanted to stand firm, there is no question that Georgiou and his three colleagues would have been isolated and defeated.
Instead, Howard spent nine hours negotiating with the group, delivering substantial concessions that undermine the mandatory detention regime for any asylum-seeker accompanied by his family. To extend the Panopoulos analogy, Howard broke the rules and negotiated with terrorists.

One Victorian Liberal backbencher sees the rationale for Howard’s move as being specific to the issue. ‘The Palmer Inquiry was going to criticise the [Immigration] Department and recommend reforms. Howard was just moving first, so that when the report came out he would already have fixed the problems’.

Another explanation is that Howard was driven by memories of the dissipation of Malcolm Fraser’s authority in the face of regular defections. Yet the broader precedent has been set. ‘It will certainly encourage others to think they can get away with breaking ranks’, according to the Victorian. The incident has cast doubt over whether Howard be able to rein in the excesses of this phenomenon.

Of course, the one force that could reverse this trend is the federal Labor Party. Were it not for the absence of effective opposition from the benches opposite, Coalition parliamentarians might be more circumspect in airing internal policy debates than they have been in recent months.

What are the chances of a Labor revival bolstering discipline in the Coalition ranks? The prospect of a Labor leadership change, unthinkable before the Budget, is starting to look like a real possibility.

Returning to Beazley seemed a safe option at the time, but the Labor caucus must be wondering whether they have made their third mistake in a row.

Yet Coalition MPs see Beazley more as a symptom than a cause of the Labor disease. For one thing, a change in leadership will not alter the high ‘hack factor’ that is so apparent from a perusal of Labor CVs, or the resultant intellectual vacuum.

‘It’s about personnel’, was the Minister’s explanation of Labor’s woes, but it was not just a reference to the leadership. ‘Labor’s benches are full of trade union reps and former staffers. None of them have had any real world experience, and they’re not representative of the community. Our party room looks more like Australia’.

‘They just don’t have any ideas’, adds the South Australian MP. ‘They seem to be getting all their policy from one or two sources: tax policy from one think-tank conference; health policy from Catholic health groups. It’s because their MPs are basically just union and party hacks. They aren’t coming up with anything themselves’.
Equally damaging is the fact that Labor continues to break the primary rule of politics: look after your base.

This is perhaps Howard’s most important political legacy. Since 1996, ‘Howard’s battlers’ have continued to upset the traditional political balance. Won over by Howard’s rejection of the culturally elitist Keating agenda, a few battlers went home to Labor over the GST in 1998, before being cemented back into the Coalition’s corner by the border protection debate in 2001.

In 2004, the focus returned to domestic issues, with a traditional class warfare campaign under Labor’s pie-eating Aussie bloke, Mark Latham. Yet in spite of scare campaigns on health, a polarising debate over private schooling and a barrage of self-serving stories about Latham’s Green Valley upbringing, the battlers voted Liberal in greater numbers than ever. This, together with the abject failure of Labor’s anti-Costello campaign, suggests that Howard’s battlers have become the Coalition’s battlers, increasingly wedded to its aspirational economic message as well as its culturally conservative one.

Is this reversible? Beazley’s ham-fisted efforts to block Costello’s tax cuts suggest that Labor still believes it can regain its traditional support base. Yet it is questionable whether Labor can ever win back its socially conservative core demographic until it finds the courage to confront its latte set of academics, teachers and lawyers and reconcile the conflict between what Beazley’s father memorably called ‘the cream of the working class’ and ‘the dregs of the middle class’. Increasingly, Labor looks like it is just sitting back and praying for a recession.

This may well be Labor’s only chance. Asked to explain the Coalition’s electoral dominance, three Liberal parliamentarians independently came up with the same phrase: ‘strong economic management’.

It is interesting that Costello’s mantra is now echoed even by MPs more traditionally associated with Howard, given that it relegates Howard’s personal appeal to being a subsidiary cause of success. Yet it is a tribute to the Howard-Costello partnership that the Government has acquired a confident identity beyond the personality of its leader, in stark contrast to the personality cults of state Labor administrations.

This ongoing dominance leaves Howard with great responsibilities, and with the challenge of managing a restless backbench. He is the trustee of years of intellectual and political effort by liberals and conservatives, which have finally delivered the opportunity for serious reform. There are two tasks by which Howard will be judged.
The first task is to maintain the reform momentum. Kevin Andrews’ ambitious industrial relations reforms exceed the meagre expectations created by his ambiguous post-election pronouncements. If implemented in their current form, they will be a fitting capstone to Howard’s career-long struggle to liberate Australia from its antiquated IR system.

Peter Costello’s last budget also exceeded expectations, although purists will continue to call for a more radical flattening of the income tax system. Liberals have good reason to be satisfied with their Government’s fourth term performance thus far.

But Howard has yet to negotiate passage of his industrial relations laws, which have offended federalists and face a possible defection by Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce. The sale of Telstra also faces hurdles, with some Nationals likely to complain so long as one farmer has mobile reception problems when trying to call the sheep in his back paddock.

On a smaller scale, there are also rumblings of dissent over voluntary student unionism, raising the fear that the policy will be watered down into insignificance as it was under Jeff Kennett in Victoria.
Securing passage of these reforms will be a test of Howard’s authority, not to mention his negotiating skills. This once-in-a-generation opportunity must not be squandered. Howard has acquired a large reserve of political capital over the past ten years. This is the time to spend it.

Yet there will be a temptation to do the opposite. Fear of a possible leadership battle in the coming year could cause Howard to question whether he should keep his powder dry; whether a ‘steady as she goes’ approach and the appeasement of dissenters is a more prudent course to maintain poll numbers and party room support in the short term. It can only be hoped that the surrender on mandatory detention was not a sign of such an approach.

This brings us to Howard’s second great task. Even he must appreciate that the end of his career is approaching. If Howard fights the 2007 election, it will be as a 69-year-old. And even if he fights and wins, what about 2010 and 2013? No one believes Howard will be around for those elections.

One senior Liberal told Investigate, ‘Our newer MPs are looking at the long term. They know the best chance they have of a long career is if the leadership transition is timed right and goes smoothly’.

The Liberal Party’s future does not end with Howard’s career; nor does Australia’s. Howard owes it to his supporters to devise a credible succession plan that bequeaths to his successor a legacy that does not die with Howard’s leadership. His aim should not be one more victory, but many, through a long period of conservative dominance of which he is merely the founder. At the recent Liberal Federal Council meeting, blatant promotion of Alexander Downer, a strong contender for the Deputy’s position under Costello, suggested that succession planning is very much on Howard’s mind.

Thus we have arrived at a crossroads in Howard’s career, which will determine whether he is a politician or a statesman. Howard the survivor can spend his final years in office ducking and weaving to dodge the inevitable final blow. But he is enough of a student of history to know that Australian Prime Ministers are remembered more by their leaving of office than by their holding of it.

Accordingly, Howard should use the authority that four election successes have conferred upon him to advance the Liberals’ ideological cause, applying the bold template of his industrial relations reforms to other areas and creating a policy agenda that will extend beyond his reign. If Howard departs office voluntarily, with his Prime Ministership not a finished book but the opening chapters of a work in progress, he will have earned an exalted place beside Menzies in the Liberal pantheon.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

FIRST DRAFT: July 05, AU Edition

MATT HAYDEN
We sneak a peek at the Senate’s new workplace agreements...

Standard Contract (“Senator”)
Terms and Conditions of Employment
Howard Holdings Pty Ltd

1. POSITION:
You are employed as a full-time Management-Staff Liaison Officer (“Senator”). As described in the Company Charter (“Constitution”) of Howard Holdings Pty Ltd, your continued employment is subject to ongoing review by employee-shareholders (“citizens”). These reviews (“elections”) occur at regular three year intervals in all branches (“cities and towns”) of the corporation (“Australia”).

The exact date of the next review will be chosen by the Chief Executive Officer (“Prime Minister”) after consultation between the Management (“House of Representatives”) and Board of Directors (Messrs Murdoch, Packer, Stokes, et al.).

2. TERMS AND CONDITIONS:
It is your duty to faithfully and diligently facilitate the implementation of Management decisions (“policies”) made in the collective pecuniary interest of all 20,342,715 Howard Holdings employee-shareholders.

Pursuant to this, on occasion, you may:

• Make minor adjustments to these decisions in response to employee-shareholder input (“public opinion”).
• Politely express reservations about the nature of these decisions in response to your own personal code of business ethics (“conscience”). Under exceptional circumstances these may take the form of signed petitions (“private member’s bills”) against certain aspects of company practice*.

However:

• Excessively zealous collective expressions of discontent regarding any aspect of the company’s performance in the global marketplace (“rebellions”), and/or surreptitious dissemination of company records (“leaks”) – particularly those aiding and abetting known anti-corporatist forces (“ABC”, “Fairfax”,”Greens”) – may, at Management’s sole discretion, be seen as breaches of these Terms and Conditions. As such they attract severe penalties, up to and including dismissal (“disendorsement”).

Also:

• Extra prudence must be applied while performing any of your duties related to the recruitment of overseas personnel (“immigration”) and the nature of the processing thereof (“border control issues”).

And finally:

• Any and all of the above Terms and Conditions may be subject to change by Management at any time without notice.

* N.B.: While some junior Management staff (Georgiou, Moylan, et al.) have recently invoked this particular clause – and have not been penalised as of this writing – Management-Staff Liaison Officers are still strongly advised not to follow suit.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: July 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
The death of a child

I suspect many people remember this song: ‘Would you know my name, if I saw you in Heaven? Would you be the same, if I saw you in Heaven? I must be strong, and carry on, because I know I don’t belong, here in
Heaven…’ When rocker Eric Clapton wrote those words, he was thinking not of the potential success of a hit record, he was writing from the heart. On March 20, 1991, just a week after my own son was born, Eric Clapton lost his four year old son Conor in a tragic, heart-rending accident. It happened on the 53rd storey of a New York apartment building. Conor, like all boys his age, was full of energy.

Unfortunately a cleaner had just finished wiping a large floor to ceiling window and left it open to dry. Conor was running and, before his mother could grab him, simply fell out the window, plunging 49 stories to the rooftop of an adjacent four storey building.

There are so many ‘if- only’ elements to this sad event, and Clapton took nine months off to grieve. As commentators noted, when he returned to performing his music was much more powerful and more reflective.

The other week, someone I know lost a child in an equally tragic accident in Auckland. Again, the ‘what-ifs’ and pain swirl in an endless cyclone of recriminations wishes by the parents that they could turn back time and do something – anything – differently.

Death comes to all of us, yet it is incredibly hard to deal with. The pain, the trauma and the emotional loss from an event like these is like a jagged blade in the heart, and the wounds take a long time to heal. So if religion is supposed to answer these “meaning of life” questions, if religion is supposed to help us deal with the ultimate question, how do the various religions stack up when it comes to death?

If you don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, I suspect coping with death is hardest for you. And indeed, medical and psychiatric studies have repeatedly found that a spiritual belief makes people cope with life better than those who don’t have one. For a non-believer who loses a child, there is no hope, just an aching hole in the heart where their baby used to be.

For Buddhists, Hindus or follower of New Age doctrines, life is a cycle of reincarnation, and the grieving parent at least is comforted by the idea that their child will return as someone else’s child. The downside to this is the loss of personal identity. In the Eastern faiths, you become one with the universe, recycled and then spat back down to Earth again where past identities and memories of those you loved are lost to you - a meaningless, cosmic Groundhog Day.
It is Christianity, I suggest, that offers the only tangible hope for non-Christians and Christians alike.

The central theme of Christianity is triumph over death. Death entered the world through the fall from Eden. Now imagine that sequence in reverse, where a kind of supernatural Earth (Eden) is poisoned,, in a massive universe-wide dimension shift that kicks humanity and the world it occupies out of the heavenly dimension into a dimension where death and decay exist. This was the first separation of humanity from God.

Jesus Christ came back to Earth to offer an invitation back for those who believed. In regard to children, it is widely believed from Christ’s comments that children who die are accepted into Heaven by God’s grace. For a grieving parent, Christian or not, God’s grace is equally available by invitation. Only Christianity and the example of Jesus’ resurrection, offers the hope of seeing a dead child alive again.

And yes, Eric, little Conor will know your name, if choose to join him, there in Heaven.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: July 05, AU Edition

TIM DUNLOP
Now’s your chance, Mr. Howard: Go, Johnny, go!

Australian politics is entering unfamiliar territory in that, for the first time in a quarter of a century, the government of the day now controls both Houses of Parliament. Having spent the duration of the Howard Government arguing against their agenda, I guess their Senate majority is a cue for me to redouble my efforts and do what I can to critique and resist what already seems to be a bad bunch of policy options.

But I realise that this moment actually offers me a chance to give John Howard a piece of gratuitous, though sincere, advice. Believe me, my inclination is not to do him any favours, but maybe I’m just homesick enough – I’m about to head back to Oz after three years in the United States – to see what maybe we should all see more clearly, namely, that sometimes politics offers us opportunities.

People argue that history is bearing down on Mr. Howard and that he shouldn’t waste the opportunity of his Senate majority in the way he himself believes Malcolm Fraser did after 1975. I’d like to suggest
another historical possibility.

The fact is, like no prime minister in recent history, Mr. Howard is on the verge of greatness.

Indeed, he is in the rare position of being able to implement change that would not only honour the liberalism that underpins his party philosophy but that would end some of the most divisive and intractable debates since the Dismissal. Plus, it would undermine his opponents such that there would be virtually no challenge his government couldn’t undertake.

In short, the prime minister would so reek with political credibility that all would wilt before him.

The first step would be to offer an apology to Aboriginal people for past injustices. Think about it. He would in one stroke provide the basis for the sort of symbolic recognition that he himself admits is needed, without for one second undermining his insistence on ‘practical reconciliation’. His opponents would be blind-sided and could offer nothing but praise.

Second, he could embrace the Georgiou reforms on immigration and asylum seekers and end the utterly illiberal policy of indefinite detention, freeing children and their families, without at all undermining his government’s basically sound stance on border protection. Once again, his opponents would be floored.

Finally – and admittedly, most difficultly – he could ignore the special interest calls for a ‘more flexible’ workforce and publicly recognize that a worker is not just another factor of production, but that work itself is the basis from which people find a sense of personal identity and through which our society builds a stable and prosperous nation. He could level the playing field without at all damaging the economy.

Having thus transformed the political landscape, he could even do what so few political leaders get to do: retire gracefully at the top of his game.

It should be obvious that any one of these options would be personally difficult for the prime minister – though far from politically impossible – and that any attempt to do all of them would require an almost transcendent sense of duty and will power.

But that’s what greatness demands. A willingness to defy expectations. If he chose to grasp the moment, Mr Howard could seal his place in history as the most audacious leader of the modern period. Probably of any period. Johnny B. Great.

Tim Dunlop is a homeward-bound writer and author of Australia’s most widely-read left-leaning blog, www.roadtosurfdom.com

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: July 05, AU Edition

ANN COULTER
Gagging on ‘Deep Throat’

My only regret is that Mark Felt did not rat out Nixon because he was ticked off about rapprochement with China or détente with the Soviets. Rather, Felt leaked details of the Watergate investigation to the Washington Post only because he had lost a job promotion. This will come as small consolation to the Cambodians and Vietnamese slaughtered as a direct result of Nixon’s fall. Oh, well. At least we got a good movie and Jimmy Carter out of it.

Still, it must pain liberals to be praising an FBI man who ordered illegal searches of their old pals in the Weather Underground in the early ’70s. For those searches, Felt was later prosecuted by the Carter administration.

Ironically, only because of Watergate, which Felt helped instigate, could a nitwit like Jimmy Carter ever become president – a perch from which Carter pardoned draft dodgers and prosecuted Mark Felt. No wonder Felt kept denying he was ‘Deep Throat.’

Also ironic is that Felt’s free-love, flower-girl daughter was estranged from her father for decades on account of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage. A single mum, she is now broke – because of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage.

Of course Felt wasn’t Deep Throat. There was no Deep Throat. Now we know.

As most people had generally assumed, the shadowy figure who made his first appearance in a late draft of All the President’s Men was a composite of several sources – among them, apparently, Mark Felt. And now the jig is up.

The fictional Deep Throat knew things Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn’t work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn’t even work at the FBI anymore.

Woodward claimed he signaled Deep Throat by moving a red flag in a flowerpot to the back of his balcony and that Deep Throat signaled him by drawing the hands of a clock in Woodward’s New York Times.

But in his 1993 book, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Adrian Havill did something it had occurred to no one else to do: He looked at Woodward’s old apartment, and found that Woodward had a sixth-floor interior apartment that could not be seen from the street.

In another scene in All the President’s Men, Woodward’s sidekick, Carl Bernstein, goes to a porno theater to avoid a subpoena – and the movie Deep Throat happens to be the featured film! Havill points out that Washington, D.C., had recently cracked down on porno theaters and Deep Throat was not playing in any theater in Washington at the time.

Woodward and Bernstein’s former literary agent, David Obst, has always said Deep Throat was a fictional device added to later drafts of All the President’s Men to spice it up (kind of like everything in a Michael Moore film).

Obst scoffs at the notion that the No. 2 man at the FBI would have time to be skulking around parking lots spying for red flags on a reporter’s balcony. ‘There’s not a chance one person was Deep Throat’, he told The New York Times.

So it’s not really that amazing that the identity of Deep Throat managed to stay secret for so long.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

LAURA’S WORLD: July 05, AU Edition

LAURA WILSON
Big boys should stop crying

Many of my male friends, colleagues and contemporaries are of the opinion that the women’s movement has gone too far. An opinion shared, it seems, by a majority of males.

The gist of it is, men are not free to be men any more. The male spirit has been gradually eroded away by the disapproval of women and replaced with a neutered, domesticated, femme-friendly New Age model of manliness. Real men feel ripped off, as if they have to apologize for simply being blokes.

These frustrating emotions are behind men’s revival movements such as Australia’s Promise Keepers who claim much of society’s problems relate to the displacement of men. Restore the male to his position of leadership and authority and you will reassert his sense of pride and responsibility. Crime will fall as a result, says this theory.
If men’s roles are not restored, crime, violence, war, and a host of other horrors will continue to rise. The responsibility for this horrible scenario rests squarely on the shoulders of those feminists who upset the order of things by breaking out of their traditional role and stealing men’s thunder.

An astonishing piece of blackmail really. Essentially, if women don’t give men what they want, men will wreck the planet and blame women. So what do men want? I have asked this question of my disgruntled friends and I can only describe the response as elusive. Men only know that they feel vaguely threatened and undermined in subtle ways, but they don’t know how to fix it. Some comments I’ve heard cited by challenged men are: women’s wants never end, you give them some ground and they want more. Women have gone way beyond 50/50; they are at about 70/30 now and won’t stop until they have it all. Men are sexual beings; sex is a physical requirement and if women continue to deny men then rapes will logically increase. Divorce courts favour women by giving them automatic rights to children and to half the husband’s assets regardless of whether she helped earn them.

Some of these examples of discrimination, such as the parental-rights issue, do appear real. But there are glaring omissions in this summary of women’s power and territory. I have my own way of assessing gender equality and it is quite a simple formula. Power is associated with voice. Who gets heard, who gets published, written about, who stars in movies, who gets radio airplay, who runs businesses, who leads countries.

Applying this formula shows women at best account for 20% of who gets heard, seen, reported on, and who holds power. All it takes is one day of observing to come to this conclusion. Listen to the radio, read the paper, watch TV news and check out what’s on at the box office. Roughly 80% of all that is newsworthy, all radio singers, all movie top-billers, all movers and shakers are male.

How this equates with women having gone too far in the minds of men is a little scary. Women have a long way to go before they are anywhere near equal to the actual wealth, earning power and overall status of men, and yet men feel robbed.

The hue and cry over boy’s second-rate performance in schools is a fine example. No complaints were heard when girls came second, as it was expected of them. Now that girls have caught up, there is a feverish scramble to overhaul education. Why don’t boys simply do what girls did: try harder?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: July 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
Media Watch pays homage to Phillip Adams

Australian perceptions of the media are incredibly poor. According to a Roy Morgan poll conducted last September for The Reader, only 18 percent of Australians believe the media is doing an unbiased job reporting on controversial issues; nearly 70 percent believe newspapers do not accurately and fairly report the news. No Australian media organisation escaped a mention.

With such consumer discontent evident one might expect a program like ABC Television’s Media Watch to make the most of what appears to be a target-rich environment. Yet the vista – or at least one side of it – from Media Watch’s studio appears sparse. Such is the state of the state-owned broadcaster’s optics.

While Fairfax (with the exception of conservative columnist Miranda Devine) and the ABC itself never get hit with anything firmer than Paul Keating’s famous piece of wet lettuce, the so-called ‘Murdoch press’ and its conservative columnists remain the show’s perennial target. True, The Australian’s most conspicuous lefty, Phillip Adams, has felt the romaine and radicchio lash, but only just. And the attention he once received was only a convenient artifice to launch another attack on Media Watch’s favourite right wing target, columnist and now ABC board member Janet Albrechtsen.

Weblogger ‘Professor Bunyip’ (http://bunyip. blogspot.com), as he is known, imagined former Media Watch Host David Marr stitching the program up with Adams: ‘We’ll pretend that the item is about you, but what we’ll really present is another attack on Janet Jackboots.’ And, on that occasion, when Media Watch bothered to take any notice of the sins committed by a fellow traveler, the case was weakly presented and was indeed used to attack Albrechtsen (who now has a Media Watch hat-trick to her credit).

In a 1997 speech to the International Documentary Conference in Brisbane, Adams said paying homage was merely a posh term for plagiarism.

What animates Adams’ critics so much is not that he has borrowed a phrase or two now and then; it is that he is seen to be habitually ‘paying homage’. And even when Adams is caught out, he re-offends.
If you like to read the fortnightly New York Review of Books (NYROB), at A$6.00 a copy on the street in New York (far more in Oz), in addition to plenty of time, you have an expensive reading habit. So here’s a tip: affluent Adams reads the NYROB, too – though I expect his copy is paid for by the ABC Radio where he hosts Late Night. Fortunately, you can get theReader’s Digest version in his Australian column.

Evidently, the ABC gets just one copy of the NYROB and Adams permanently absconds with it as he leaves his Radio National studio to write his column, and the ABC, with its beggar budget of $750 million, apparently can’t afford a second copy for Media Watch. Just as well for Adams, lest it fall into Media Watch executive producer Peter McEvoy’s deft hands.

But something tells me it’s not lack of resources that keeps Media Watch from focusing on filching Phil; rather, it is the ABC’s institutional bias and lack of regard for journalistic standards and the ABC’s code of practice which is to blame. How else to explain the rubber glove and cavity search treatment reserved for conservative columnists like Albrechsen or Miranda Devine?

When shown the goods on Adams, McEvoy finds reasons to look the other way. On one occasion he defended Adams by lamely claiming he had ‘sufficiently re-written’ the work (a 2003 NYROB piece) he was alleged to have lifted and that he had cited the work with the words ‘history tells us’.

When Adams is not technically committing plagiarism, even those who share his worldview should feel cheated. Adams is not overworked (he puts in four hours a week on air at the ABC in addition to his newspaper column). Yet his work product is either fundamentally dishonest (i.e., pilfered), or it looks as though it has been.
Here’s one example, provided by the aforementioned Bunyip, involving a piece by Michael Massing in the 29 May 2003 edition of the NYROB, followed by Adams, six weeks later in the Australian. In this case, Adams lets on that he has read Massing’s piece, but he then either paraphrases or copies Massing verbatim:

Massing: The Coalition Media Center is managed by Jim Wilkinson, a fresh-faced, thirty-two-year-old Texan and a protégé of Bush’s adviser Karen Hughes. Wilkinson made his mark during the 2000 presidential election when he spoke on behalf of GOP activists protesting the Florida ballot recount. To run the media center in Doha, Wilkinson, a member of the naval reserve, appeared in the same beige fatigues as the career officers working under him.

Adams: The centre was managed by Jim Wilkinson, a 32-year-old Texan and protégé of the brothers Bush. When last seen, Wilkinson had been speaking on behalf of Republican activists protesting against the Florida ballot recount...In Doha, the Bush activist was repackaged as a member of the Naval Reserve, appearing in beige fatigues identical to the career officers working beneath him.

Adams goes on like this for paragraphs, until near then end when he finally puts quotes around a few of Massing’s words – leading readers to believe everything else Adams has written is his own:

Massing: CNN International bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition -– a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and content of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see.

Adams: CNN’s international service was repackaged, bearing more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic – and domesticated – edition. Massing emphasises how market driven was the tone and content of the broadcast. ‘For the most part US news organisations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see,’ he says.
Adams’ column is, at the very least, an abject embarrassment to The Australian. That is, unless you subscribe to the Adams school of conspiracy. In which case, Rupert Murdoch has taken a page out of Karl Rove’s play book and instructed The Australian’s editors to keep Adams right where he is in order to discredit the left.

And what of Media Watch? Professional review is one thing, but there is something odious about a state-owned broadcaster sitting in judgment of private news broadcasters and newspapers. Sure, the ABC is not the same thing as the government swinging the billy club. But the ABC is a state habitat, populated overwhelmingly by leftists and funded by taxpayers, and Media Watch uses its resources to advance elite left-wing biases in a shrill, predictable and boring way which no commercial broadcaster would dare do.

Media Watch’s supporters would say that’s precisely why state-owned broadcasting is necessary. Well, no, actually. The ABC enjoys its budget, free of commercial constraints, not so it can fill the airwaves with ‘soft lefty’ attitudes masquerading as upholding professional standards. It is required to be fair. Entertaining would be okay, too.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST
At the time of this writing, The Australian published another Adams piece, which looks … well, over to you Media Watch. On 4 May, retired U.S. Army Colonel David Hackworth died. Hackworth, who became a trenchant Pentagon critic, lived for a time in Australia, where he apparently befriended Adams. Six weeks after Last Post was played for his buddy ‘Hack’, Adams finally got around to eulogizing him. That was a cinch, because Hackworth’s obit writers at the Toledo (Ohio) Blade had done Adams’ homework for him...

Toledo Blade, 7 May 2005
As a 15-year-old orphan in Southern California, Mr. Hackworth joined the Army at the end of World War II, surviving four battle wounds in Korea. His heroics earned him a Silver Star, a battlefield commission to second lieutenant, and his own commando unit.

Colonel Hackworth, then a major, was promoted out of Vietnam in June, 1966 – 11 months before the unit’s first documented war crime. From May to November, 1967, some soldiers turned their rifles on hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children in what became the longest-known string of war crimes by a battle unit in Vietnam.During his fourth tour of duty in Vietnam, he spoke out against the war in June, 1971, prompting an Army investigation of his background.

He and his supporters portrayed the probe as retaliation against a whistleblower, but investigators uncovered widespread rule-breaking, including operating a gambling house and a brothel for his troops.
He defended both, arguing that it kept his soldiers disease-free, and the profits helped buy supplies for his men and local schoolchildren.
However, investigators concluded that the colonel enlisted his men in a black-market currency scheme that netted him tens of thousands of dollars. He would admit only that the men smuggled $100,000 of his poker winnings out of the country.

The Secretary of the Army allowed the colonel to retire to Australia, where he made millions in a restaurant business and duck farm.

Phillip Adams, The Australian, 18 June 2005
Born and orphaned in 1930, Hack was raised by a grandmother whose bedtime stories were about the family’s military history, going back to the American Revolutionary War. Faking ID papers, Hackworth joined the army in 1946, aged 15. He served in Korea and by Vietnam was regarded as one of the United States’ most brilliant commanding officers.

During his fourth tour of duty he went public with criticisms of the Pentagon. The army tried to discredit him, threatening him with a court martial for operating a gambling house and brothel for his men. Hack’s defence? The brothel had saved his men from disease, while profits from the little casino were used to buy supplies for the troops and local schoolkids.

Nonetheless, there was evidence of smuggling $200,000 out of the country.

To avoid scandal, the Secretary of the Army allowed Hack to retire to Australia where he continued his winning ways, making millions out of a restaurant and, of all things, a duck farm…

With Desert Storm, Hack once more became a Pentagon critic. Describing the war as ‘a raging atrocity’, David fought for ‘the young soldiers that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf’…

It seemed that a unit called Tiger Force, established in 1965, had committed escalating atrocities – including turning their guns on more than 100 unarmed civilians…

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: July 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Sixty million Frenchmen – and even several Age readers – can’t be wrong

A good friend of mine recently acquired an antique Atomic brand coffee maker. You know the ones I’m talking about: they’re curvy, stylish and Italian, and have more class in their steam control nozzle than any modern $1,999 job that grinds the beans automatically and can be picked up at any big homewares store has in its entire plastic housing. He was telling me about the great history of the things (during World War II, for example, workers at the Atomic factory in Italy stamped the filter’s drip-holes in a Star of David pattern, in quiet protest against the Nazis), and we mused on how amazing it was that, back when the machine was invented, the word ‘atomic’ was the advertising copywriter’s ace in the hole. The boundless promise of the future, the power of science to solve problems, the latest and greatest in technology and design – all were summed up by that one word: ‘atomic’.

Indeed, we were all supposed to be commuting back and forth to the moon in our atomic flying space-cars by now.

But in 2005, Holden’s not making any nuclear-powered Commodores, car makers still tout road-holding – rather than gravity-defying – ability as a selling point, and the word ‘atomic’ has long-since been hijacked to represent everything bad that the men (and they’re always men) in the white lab coats can come up with.

It is time for this to end. Australia, and the world, are on the brink of serious energy shortfalls, yet one of the safest, cleanest, and even greenest electricity supplies in the country is still only being talked about by most politicians in sideways whispers. Fortunately, since I broached this topic in this column two months ago, things have started to change. The Chicken Little propaganda that has, with the help of compliant journalists, teachers unions, and politicians, scared normally-unflappable Australians into thinking that nuclear power will see mushroom clouds rising over Sydney Harbour, is beginning to come undone.

Without mixing fairy tale metaphors too much, it is becoming ever more clear that the anti-nuclear emperor has no clothes.

It all started when NSW Premier Bob Carr released a trial balloon suggesting that, just maybe, it was time to build a nuclear power plant to help meet the electricity needs of Australia’s most populous state. Of course, the move was exactly the sort of cynical ploy that has made Bob the Builder the longest-serving premier in New South Wales history: what he really wanted, of course, was more coal-burning power plants, and the nuclear option, he figured, would scare voters into sticking with the lung-blackening devil they know.

And just in case people missed the nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say-no-more nature of Carr’s nuclear option, he underlined it by pointing out that while a swell idea in theory, state law forbade the opening of any nuclear waste dumps in NSW (while at the same time conveniently ignoring his legislative power to change such a rule).

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the furphy: an awful lot of Australians took a look at the idea and said, hey, maybe nuclear power isn’t such a bad idea after all.

The first sign that opinion had changed came from the letters pages of Melbourne’s Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, both left-wing echo chambers where correspondents routinely compete to out-radical each other, and conservative voices are so rare that they deserve endangered species protection. (By way of illustration, the day after Peter Costello delivered his widely-praised budget speech earlier this year, the Herald was unable to find one single correspondent who thought that it was a good idea).

Yet on 15 June, for example, the Herald’s lead letter came from one Richard Paulin of North Ryde, who wrote, ‘Some questions for Professor Stuart White, resident anti-nuclear advocate. If nuclear power is so inefficient, why does France, which is 80 per cent nuclear, export $5 billion of electricity annually? If nuclear power waste is an insurmountable problem, why is that country not a nuclear wasteland? If nuclear power is so expensive, why does [sic] France’s steel manufacturers use electric arc furnaces, powered by electricity, rather than Australia’s coke-fired blast furnaces?

‘We need to be far more energy efficient’, Paulin continued. ‘But [Professor White] has done nothing to disprove the fact that nuclear power remains the single most efficient and sustainable energy source for the future.’

A few days earlier in the Age, columnist Terry Lane wrote that ‘Chernobyl frightens us away from nuclear power, but the Canadian province of Ontario, not unlike the state of Victoria, gets 40 per cent of its power from nuclear plants and, as far as I know, has not had a single nuclear accident…

If the likes of the letters editors at the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are any guide, there is a real shift in sentiment in the community, towards a position that accepts that electricity is needed to run our modern, technological society and that there are trade-offs with any form of electricity generation. Australians recognize that green holy grails of endlessly-renewable power simply don’t exist, that wind farms are ugly and shred kookaburras, solar is impractical, and coal and oil are both dirty and ever-dwindling resources. Under this line of thinking, people recognize that nuclear power might not be perfect either, but that it is well worth discussing.

Indeed, the question of renewability and dependency is one which reverberates through this entire debate. While Australia’s coal resources are abundant, it is hardly a great way to generate power: even clean coal is still pretty dirty, and for all the talk about the potential danger of nuclear power, precious little is said about all those lives lost or shortened due to cancer, in mining accidents, and otherwise as a result of this form of power generation.

Petroleum, meanwhile, is a more complicated question, but there is a growing concern (see Clare Swinney’s feature story, ‘The Good Oil’, on p. 52 of this issue) that mankind may be a few decades away from having seriously depleted the planet’s easily-accessible crude supplies. And while that may seem like a long way away, building infrastructure to cope with a changing energy use profile takes.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)

DVDs: Mar 05

ALISTAIR COOKE’S AMERICA
PG, 663 Minutes
We have had the book of Alistair Cooke’s America sitting in our living room shelf for as long as I can remember. Its dust jacket is faded and torn in places and I’m not sure how much it’s been read. It should have been; Newsweek described it as ‘The first and maybe the finest tribute to the nation’, and, if this DVD is anything to go by I’d agree.

Alistair Cooke was one of Britain’s best loved American correspondents and for over 50 years he reported on all aspects of American life in his BBC radio series Letters from America. In 1973 he wrote and presented this insightful thirteen part documentary (following closely his same-titled book) in which he provides his own personal history of America, telling numerous interesting stories about the people, places and events that shaped the nation. These 50 minute episodes succeed in covering much historical ground: The past 400 years of American history in fact. In the introductory episode ‘The First Impact’ Cooke visits some of his favourite places, including New Orleans, the home of many jazz greats, Vermont and San Francisco. What is made obvious right away is the passion Cooke has for this ‘adopted’ country and also the effect this country has had on his life. In episode two he discusses the Spanish conquistadors who settled in Mexico, Arizona and Texas, right up to looking at 1972 America in episode thirteen where Cooke visits Hoover Dam which helped transform the desert into a gambling paradise.

Special Features: Interview with Alistair Cooke that took place on the television programme Pebble Mill at One, interviewed by Bob Langley. This documentary series also comes with English subtitles.

Final Word: Certainly more accessible than a daunting 3cm thick ‘coffee table book’. These 13 episodes on 4 disks manage to impressively chart a 400 year history of a nation which most outsiders (and insiders) choose to criticize. On this note it was refreshing to watch and listen to a man who delighted in this country despite its differing views. This is quite possibly the reason he took to this nation like he did.

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BLACKBALL
M, 93 Minutes
As sporting movies go it is not often you find ones that involve the game of lawn bowling and as for playing the game, unless you fit into the ‘acceptable’ age category you might be looked at quite strangely. In the seaside town of Torquay this game is taken very seriously, especially by Ray Speight (James Cromwell) – gifted bowler and club champion for 20 years; a man lacking the conviction to take his skills to the national level, content with his 20 year reign at the local bowling club. Beyond the manicured lawns however, in the run down section of town resides Cliff Starkey (Paul Kaye) who plies his skills as a bowls prodigy, ready to take on Speight. Armed with his American agent and sportswear executive Rick (Vince Vaughn), Cliff begins to turn the game of Lawn Bowls into quite a spectator sport receiving much attention for his ‘bad boy’ persona. A person Speight seeks to ensure never gets to play in Britain’s championship. Unfortunately for Speight, one of Starkey’s biggest fans is a local teacher named Kerry, Speight’s daughter.

Special Features: Commentary by Director, Mel Smith, Cast & Crew Interviews, TV and Radio Spots, Theatrical Trailer.

Final Word: A ‘family movie’, one which pertains to the familiar theme of good triumphing over adversity. As I uphold the belief that British comedy is the best comedy I have to be honest and say that despite this being a decidedly British movie it doesn’t quite hit the spot.

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METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER
M, 141 Minutes
Yeah, like you, we never foresaw ourselves reviewing a Metallica DVD. However, this one is different. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky set off to produce a kind of cinematic fanzine about the heavy metal band they loved, but in the process captured on film the disintegration of rock’s bad boys during the recording of their recent album St Anger. The documentary, shot in largely fly-on-the-wall mode throughout, throws up a stark contrast between the carefully manufactured demonic images that music companies use to market their metal bands, and the human fragility of the men in the band itself.Rather than Metallica, the group could arguably rename itself The Lost Boys, because the DVD shows them trying to break free of the marketing machine that grips them.

While playing to concerts of thousands of angry young men thrusting “the horns, man” (a fist with forefinger and pinky raised) into the air, Metallica’s musicians are agonising over how to write lyrics rejecting the anger and violence and drug use of their youth in favour of something more positive. The boys from Metallica, you see, are all grown up. They’re fathers, they’ve kicked the drugs and booze, and they sip Evian water. Heck, the band even hires a motivational shrink to analyse a communication breakdown within the band.

While the language is offensive, the documentary is fascinating.

Special features: 40 additional scenes, intimate interviews with band members about the film, audio commentaries from both the band and the directors.

Final Word: Not a ‘family’ movie, but certainly a deeper insight into the people caught up in the ravenous demands of the heavy metal music biz. - IW

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Mar 05

RICHARD PEARSE DIDN’T FLY
A new Wright Brothers biography tackles Pearse, as Michael Morrissey discovers in this crop of the latest literature offerings

THE PENGUIN NATURAL WORLD OF NEW ZEALAND
By Gerard Hutching, Penguin, $39.95
Some days I think surely we have had enough books about New Zealand flora and fauna and then two counter thoughts come to mind :
a) we can never have enough books about our plants, trees and wonderful birds and insects,
b) if it’s a good book, yes, we can do with it.

The Natural World prompts both of these positive thoughts. And of course new species get discovered and so we need new books to document these discoveries.

This book has two parts – the first part (In the Beginning) is only 26 pages long and the second part (Our Natural Heritage) has 343 pages which at first glance looks a trifle unbalanced but then the second half contains “New Zealand’s Natural World A-Z” which is the central part of the book. This central alphabetised section mixes up fauna and flora which might disquiet some though it makes for easy reference and encourages that free wheeling habit of association and contiguity by alphabet alone which is the hallmark of browsing dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

I’ll start negative and finish positive. There is an entry on snails but none on slugs. (And we have some magnificent slugs.) Naturally, our unique creepy-crawly, the 550 million old peripatus, is well displayed. Alas and alack, no giant centipedes – well, they have become rare. No entry on insects. There is an entry on endangered plants but none on endangered birds though there is a list of rare (ie, endangered) birds on p 380 – but it has only five (why not ten?) Parakeets are listed but not lorikeets. The entries on beetles, mountains and rivers (no mention of braided rivers) are far too short as is, arguably, the entries on dinosaurs. The entry on blue whales states they weigh up to 150 tonnes but it is well known that a specimen weighing 190 tonnes was caught in Antarctic seas in 1947.

Let’s look at the positives. Wetas are well documented – I learnt there are at least four species of giant weta alone. And it was honest of Hutching to note that the giant wetapunga sometimes patriotically claimed to be the heaviest insect in the world is outweighed by the African Goliath beetle. Impressively researched is the note on the huia – often erroneously stated to be the only species where the sexes have different-sized bills (so do the African green woodhoopoe, Hawaiian honeycreeper and the trembler from the lesser Antilles (admit it – you had no idea!). Other choice new titbits of knowledge – the largest extinct gecko (“Two feet long and as thick as a man’s wrist”) used to live in New Zealand; male puriri moths live for only one day; New Zealand has only 10 species of ants while Australia has 5000; New Zealand has 3153 glaciers (I thought it had about 20); Maori called English “cicada language”

because of its harsh sound; Mitre Peak is the highest sea cliff in the world; New Zealand’s wild ferret population is the largest in the world; whales eat an estimated 100 million tonnes of squid a year; and why sleeping fantails don’t fall off branches (you’ll have to buy the book to find out why not).

Photography is excellent – particularly striking shots are those of a wetapunga half covering someone’s face, a trio of spy-hopping orcas, a male kakapo doing a mating dance, the third largest ammonite fossil in the world (as large as a wheelbarrow), and a tuatara snacking on a gecko. Perhaps I have been a mite tough on this book – despite some omissions and overly short treatment of some potentially larger topics, it’s excellent overall.

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THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES: The Lives and Times of Hitler’s Inner Circle
By Anthony Read, Pimlico, $34
Adolf Hitler may well be the twentieth century’s most written about person. Logically, that is because, for better or for worse, he is regarded as the individual who most influenced history during that apocalyptic epoch. Less well known are his gang of offsiders – Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer, Borman, Heydrich, Hess, Rohm etc. This outstanding, well-researched and well-written multi-biography gives detailed psychological, political and historical portraits of these top Nazi officials both in relation to Hitler and to each other.

Prior to reading Devil’s Disciples, these figures were only known to me as two dimensional cartoon-like characters. Now, regrettably, I know them better. Out of the shadows into the light, they appear morally as dark as ever. It must be said they were all highly competent individuals with the exception of the bumbling Ribbentrop (though even Ribbentrop had his times of triumph) – and, of course, totally ruthless. Goring, in particular, was a man I had conceived as a rather foolish fat guy, morphine-riddled, who got things wrong. Fat he certainly was – in later life (though handsome, lean and dashing in his youth) – foolish he was not. (And apparently not morphine-addicted either.) He wasn’t a coward either but a fearless top air ace, renown for his boldness. Militarily, he was more prudent than Hitler for he opposed the invasion of Russia. A collector – or looter – of top class European art, he lived like a medieval monarch complete with forests, fire-lit castles, baronial halls stuffed with hunting trophies – a vulgar but formidable Teutonic lord. He was popular even in Germany’s darkest hour and when captured had his jailors rocking with laughter. Judge Norman Birkett described him as “suave, shrewd, adroit, capable, resourceful”, though by any moral standards, a monster. Yet (almost) I found myself having a sneaking liking for him. It must be remembered that Hitler, Goebbels and Goring all had great charm as well as charisma.

Himmler, by contrast was a more colourless individual whose Machiavellian ruthlessness eventually ousted Goring as Number Two beside Hitler, though when he betrayed Hitler at the end, he himself, like them all, lost everything. All of Hitler’s cohort – particularly Goebbels and Goring – were engaged in an eternal dance of power around the central focus of Hitler. As has been often commented – and here explored in telling detail – Hitler often encouraged the competition.

No Hollywood mogul ever wielded as much power as the club – footed Goebbels. Unlike family man Goring, he had an insatiable sexual appetite and made full use of the casting couch – as dictator of all art forms he controlled casting for films. Like Hitler, he was a failed artist (ie playwright) who, surprisingly, nourished the delusion that Hitler would emerge as a socialist. Ironically, a Hitlerian ban on any art that wasn’t beautiful and true to nature – which led to an exhibition of degenerate abstract art – proved so popular Goebbels had to shut it down.

Excellent as the histories by Richard Overy and Antony Beevor are, none of their books tops this massive, compelling labyrinth, expertly documented and unravelled by Anthony Read – a drama, which however one may dislike it, is the greatest of the twentieth century, a doomed Gotterdammerung-like tragedy that haunts us still. Though the Nuremberg trials may have seemed like the conclusion of these dark performances, the curtain calls of history continue.

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THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
By Ian Mackersey, Timewarner, $29.95
What are the greatest inventions of all time? I’m going to stick my neck out and say the wheel, harnessed and transmittable electricity and the aeroplane. The aeroplane in its transmuted form, the rocket, will one day take us to the stars...

What this book makes powerfully clear is that the first flight on December 17, 1903 was no accident, no fluke, no product of amateur backyard inventors, but a technologically sound construction – the product of many hours of meticulous, planning, research and always-dangerous trials.

True, the Wright brothers had a bicycle shop (often used by less successful rivals as a put down of their efforts), but don’t kid yourself – these boys were astute and patient engineers/technologists. Of the two, tall ascetic Wilbur was the knowledge-retentive, mathematical one, while girl-shy Orville turned out to be the better pilot. They were both non – drinkers, non-smokers, sons of a venerable but ideologically stormy bishop; upright, morally beyond reproach yet courteous and, when not working with their fabled concentration, friendly. In short, they deserved their success. When international recognition and success came – five years after their first flight – it was overwhelming. In France, a crowd went wild, the French pilots, including Louis Bleriot, had never seen such impeccable flight control, such steeply banked turns.

It had started years before with the lads making experimental flights with engineless gliders. Wilbur grasped firmly the notion that it was control and lift that were the key problems not the engine. Mackersey paces his book expertly so that the long build-up of experimentation and partial success climaxes initially about half way through with the brothers’ first successful flight. This is one of the great technological dramas of history and a defining moment of the twentieth century – the American century.

Three key figures – among many – are well outlined in this enthralling account – Samuel Langley who had $50,000 from the American army to develop a glider that was never to achieve true flight; Octave Chanute, an important pioneer of flight who greatly encouraged the Wright brothers before eventually falling out with them; and Augustus Herring, a confidence man of the worst type who kept trying to cotton on to the tails of Wright brothers – thankfully, he did not succeed though not from want of trying.

Though their initial successes were satisfactorily witnessed, the brothers cagily withdrew from the public eye and got into a Mexican standoff with several governments – the brothers wanted money (lots of it) before they would demonstrate. The governments, understandably, wanted performance first, before any money was handed over. The brothers were overly defensive and poor negotiators – yet they triumphed in the end. For some years, (after Wilbur’s death in 1912), the Smithsonian Institution tried to claim that Langley’s craft had attained flight before the Wright brothers but eventually they backed down. It is gratifying to know that Orville at least survived to see their place in history indisputably confirmed. Footnote: Mackersey, cruelly, though I believe accurately, briefly mentions Richard Pearse as becoming airborne but not an achiever of true controlled flight – a failure that Pearse himself admitted in a letter in 1928.

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REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS
By Susan Sontag, Penguin Books, $27
This will probably be Sontag’s last book as this eminent woman of letters recently died of cancer – though, on occasion, posthumous works are quarried from a well known author’s unpublished papers. A New York-based writer, Sontag always seemed more like an essayist who wrote novels than a novelist who composed essays. Despite The Volcano Lover winning the National Book Award, it is her essays which will be remembered and re-read more than her fiction.

Sontag’s early collections of essays – Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will – were dazzling. She was an intellectual of formidable powers who wrote essays which the “average” educated person could understand. Not for her the wilful obscurities of the poststructuralists, though she was a keen admirer of Roland Barthes and edited a reader of his work. Her speciality – in the tradition of the great essayists – was the epigrammatic sentence compressing several notions into a single witty byte.

Sontag’s work also revealed an early obsession with cinematography and photography. In the world of the Sontagian essay, Hollywood did not exist – her preferred choices were European auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Jean – Luc Godard. In this final book length essay, she combines her fixation on photography with her ongoing moral concern with man’s inhumanity to man – plus as noted by Virginia Woolf and Sontag herself – women and children.

War photography is the central theme. Roger Fenton, official photographer at the Crimea, was the world’s first war photographer – the camera having been invented only a few years prior. Fenton’s brief was “not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill”. The result, as Sontag sardonically observes, was “war as a dignified all – male outing”– complete to carefully rearranged cannon balls showing the aftermath of the doomed charge of the Light Brigade. This sterilised view of war couldn’t hold up for long. Sontag alludes to the conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich who in 1924 published close-ups of soldiers with huge facial wounds and, naturally, to Robert Capa, most famous of all war photographers, killed in action like so many of that singularly dangerous occupation.

Ever the true intellectual – ready to retract earlier ideas if time reveals a different perspective – Sontag pulls the carpet from under ideas she espoused in On Photography, written nearly 30 years ago. There are millions, she says, who are not inured to what they see on television – “who do not have the luxury of patronising reality.” In a rebuke directed at intellectuals (including herself), she insists that images of atrocity continue to remind us, do not allow us to forget, what awful things human beings are capable of. The conclusion of this moving essay rises to a fever pitch of humane pleading that is not found in her earlier work. Perhaps it was her own suffering as a cancer patient that informed these passages. If so, it is a pain Sontag has declined to centre on herself but pass onto us, all humanity, at large. Thus Sontag’s final work concludes on a note of high moral uplift expressed as always in her elegant and eloquent prose. Bravo, Susan!

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RATS: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants
By Robert Sullivan, Granta Books, $35
Rats are usually a non-starter as a dinner conversation topic. Femmes and chaps alike don’t care for the disease-carrying rubbish scavengers as gossip. The Black Plague gave them some of the worst press any animal has had to live with. To call someone a rat is about the worst insult you can dish out. And we’ve all heard those suburban horror stories about rats chewing on babies’ faces. The scene in 1984 where Winston Smith has to face his worse fear – rats – is arguably the most horrible in all literature.

If this is your take on rats, you will probably give this book a wide berth; on the other hand, gnaw your way into it and you might find there’s more to the much disliked rodent then you imagined. For a start they are tough little buggers. Their teeth, dedicated rat-watcher Sullivan writes zestfully, are “stronger than aluminium, copper, lead, and iron. They are comparable to steel ... they can exert a biting pressure of up to seven thousand pounds a square inch”. This compares to 1500 pounds for a wolf and a mere 750 pounds for a German shepherd. No wonder they can chew through concrete.

All your fears about rats are more or less true – rats do bite babies; there have been instances of them attacking fully grown adults; they carry bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fungi, mites, fleas lice and ticks; they spread trichinosis, tularaemia, leptospirosis. (I don’t know what the last two are but they sound bad). And for a bonus – typhus, rabies and salmonella.Reader, there have been no surprises so far but here come three :

1. the author finds rats disgusting (surely he loves them just a bit?)
2. he spent a lot of time prowling around in dirty, dangerous dark alleyways watching them
3. he really doesn’t know why he set out on the rat-watching project.

It appeared Sullivan gathered enthusiasm as he went. Or was that when he had enough information to quit alleys and skulk home to write his very well-written book? Rats of course do die themselves and one of New York’s less savoury nineteenth pastimes was getting tough dogs to kill as many rats as they could in as short a time as possible – the record was 100 rats in five minutes 28 seconds.

The tough Irish impresario drew the line (and please don’t try this at home) at men biting rats’ head off. Amazingly, I learnt from Sullivan’s compendious little book that kiwis are global leaders in rat extermination. In 2002, 120 tonnes of rat poison taken to Campbell Island did in 200,000 rats – a world record!

Sullivan gleefully lists some of the dottier causes of plague before it was discovered (only as recently as 1894) that rat fleas were the culprit – restless night birds, huddling frogs, wormy fruit, large spiders, circling ravens, mad dogs and vapours rising from the earth. To which I say – rats. Rats are renown for their versatile eating habits and you want to encourage them leave cooked rather than raw food. They love scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese and cooked corn kernels but tend to dislike raw beans, peaches and raw celery.

Sullivan is adamant that the notion that there is one rat per person in a city is erroneous – that would mean in New York there were about 8 million. A rat expert has estimated the Big Apple’s quota as 250,000 – which sounds a bit on the low side. Why? Rats have sex 20 times a day.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Mar 05

CAMBODIA’S RENAISSANCE
In Cambodia, the grandest temple of all returns from the ruins, as a nation turns its back on the troubles of the past, reports Alan Solomon

SIEM REAP, Cambodia – The first approach, no matter how you approach it, isn’t all that impressive. From the main road, the profile beyond its moat is low, like a very rough pencil sketch of Parliament along the Thames but less grand and imposing. The three visible spires, leaden in color, plump and oddly mottled at this distance, don’t inspire at all. The camera comes out because it must. Through the viewfinder, it all looks even lower and longer and like less of a wonder.

But then ... wow.

“Where are the words,” wrote French naturalist-explorer Henri Mouhot, who famously happened upon nearly forgotten Angkor Wat in 1861, “to praise a work of art that may not have its equal anywhere on the globe?”

Angkor Wat is a temple. More accurately, it was a temple, built by a Khmer king in the 1100s to honor the Hindu god Vishnu and to hold his own ashes, later rededicated to Buddha as the regional religious dynamic changed, still later a ruin, and today essentially an incense-scented museum.

It is massive. It is magnificent. But it takes a closer look to appreciate. Angkor Wat’s greatness sneaks up on you, comes at you in stages.

That it comes at you at all – that you’re welcome to visit – is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Angkor Wat was built between 1113 and 1150 by Khmer King Suryavarman II, then largely abandoned after Thai armies attacked in 1431. For most of the next 400 years, the temple sat there, watched over by the occasional monk and the odd monkey, looted of its more portable riches and, slowly but literally, falling apart.

When Henri Mouhot sent back excited reports of its grandeur – and as the French (supplanting the Siamese) were establishing a colonial presence in Cambodia in the mid-1800s – more Europeans came to see for themselves.Meanwhile, French archeologists launched restoration efforts at Angkor Wat, at the shrines within nearby Angkor Thom and at others in the region.

That went on, with a few interruptions, until the onset of World War II. The Japanese weren’t much interested in public works during their period in residence. When the French tried to reassert control after the Japanese surrender, pockets of indigenous fighters resisted.
While all this internal skirmishing was going on, and even as the situation in neighboring Vietnam was turning into what it turned into, restoration by the French heroically continued until the communist Khmer Rouge finally booted them back to Paris in 1970.

Over the next 20-plus years, more grief followed for Cambodia. The legacy of two decades’ worth of bombings, coups, invasion, occupation and civil war includes memories of unimaginable suffering and killing, and millions of land mines that, even today, continue to tear limbs off children’s bodies.

Through all this, of course, tourism wasn’t exactly a burgeoning enterprise. “From 1970,” said an information officer with the tourist office in Siem Reap, “no one came to see Cambodia.”With some exceptions.

In 1986, according to government figures, a total of 565 tourists came to see Angkor Wat. Most of the visitors were from Russia and Cuba. Cambodia, at the time, was occupied uneasily by the communist Vietnamese army, which was battling the communist Khmer Rouge and other armies representing other factions.

It was not an easy time – nor an easy visit. Tourists came, when they came at all, on day trips from the capital, Phnom Penh, 250km away.
“You couldn’t spend the night,” said an American-based tour operator who has been bringing people here since 1987. “It was too dangerous.”
The only hotel in Siem Reap – the now-luxury Grand Hotel d’Angkor – “was a $10 hotel that was worth $2. You had to haul water to the rooms to flush the toilets.”

Snipers haunted the jungles on the peripheries of the temples. As recently as January 1995, a tourist from Texas and her driver were shot and killed, and the tourist’s husband wounded, by gunmen near Banteay Srei temple, 30km from Angkor Wat. That year, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) had just completed an 18-month stay that the world hoped would bring a stabilizing presence in this political mess of a country. It didn’t quite – more coups and violence followed – but in 1995, the tourist count had reached 44,808.

In 1999 – a year after the death (of natural causes, maybe) of Khmer Rouge strongman Pol Pot – the total was 85,460. “After he died,” said the tourism spokesman, “we’ve seen major investment.”

What was one badly faded hotel in Siem Reap 10 years ago became, as of late last year, 56 hotels in all price ranges, including backpacker lodges but also two five-stars, for a total of 3,000 rooms. As you read this, almost certainly there are more. Hotel construction was and is ongoing and everywhere.

“It’s good to see the reputation is changing,” said Bruno L’Hoste, French-born operator of Le Tigre de Papier, one of Siem Reap’s more sophisticated watering holes. “It’s good to get out of the `war zone.’”

War zone. In a stone pillar just to the right of the West Gate of Angkor Wat: bullet holes. By the standards of today, they are old.
The moat is more than 200 metres wide and 7km around. Visitors walk a stone causeway over the water to the West Gate, the main entrance. Beyond the gate are what look to be three spires of moderate size, two flanking a central tower.

The West Gate leads to another causeway, this one 10m wide and 360m long over a grass field, the walkway bordered by a series of great carved nagas, the multiheaded snakes linked to Vishnu and found at so many sites here. Two stone libraries, in varying states of disrepair and resembling small museums, stand as sentries on either side.
Only now does the sheer size of this complex kick in. Vatican City could fit nearly five times on the 500 acres within the walls protecting the temple.

Walking along and looking ahead, you get a first good view of Angkor Wat itself. From here, the towers are commanding. And seen from an angle, it becomes clear they are five: Four lesser (relatively speaking) spires boxed around a soaring central tower.

There will be another terrace, and then yet another wall surrounding the temple – this one actually a gallery.

Along its corridors are eight bas-reliefs, carvings in that same gray stone – in all, more than kilometre’s worth – each telling epic stories: of the Battle of Kurukshetra, of the Battle of Lanka, of victories and pageantry, elephants and gods and invasions, of heaven and hell ...

The carvings weren’t always gray, just as the friezes around the Parthenon weren’t always bleached white.

“They were painted at that time,” said my guide, Sokun. “You can still see some color.”

Archeologists estimate it took 37 years to complete Angkor Wat. Its sandstone came from a quarry 40km away, hauled here by elephants and horses and humans, but that was the easy part. As much as the temple’s massiveness, it’s the carvings – in number, in detail and in quality – that boggle. Although to get here we have passed nagas, a few stone lions and not a few celestial dancers (apsaras), this is where they really start to kick in: This is the heart of the structure, the temple pyramid – three levels, each with enclosures, terraces, towers, galleries and quirks (including a “hall of echoes” activated by a firm thump of the chest, ideally your own).

It is useless to try to describe all this in words. Even when on the site, with perspective being provided by a quality guide, it’s impossible to grasp what’s here.

That said, we’re going to try.

Every surface is adorned with something carved by ancient hands – dancers, gods and goddesses, demons and kings. Thousands of them.
All that shapeless “mottle” we see from the road is, seen up close, art.The years have done what years do. The elements have softened some edges. Religious conflicts have left Buddhas damaged and Hindu lingas (ritual phalluses) shattered. Rubbings have done some harm and have left unwanted residue. Pillars are gone.

Heads are missing from torsos, most sold for profit and scattered around the world.

Does that matter? Of course.

But looking up at the central tower from the third level ...
It rises 70m above the ground, just 3m shorter than the towers of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, which was begun soon after the completion of Angkor Wat. The Wat looks higher, probably due to the pyramid arrangement. It certainly feels higher.

The climb up narrow steps to the base of the central tower is frightening to all but those with inordinately fine balance or remarkably small feet. There are four stairways up; at just one, the south stairway, has a railing has been installed to assist descent by the nervous.

Only children and fools bypass the railing.

When this was the sanctuary of Khmer kings, only they and high priests could walk on this higher ground. That we can walk here makes it no less humbling. From that highest point, all is visible.

No wonder the Khmer Rouge army held it for years during the civil war. It was its strategic position, and its emotional position. To Cambodians, there is no more powerful national symbol than this.
In 1992, the year U.N. peacekeepers came in, Angkor was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. When UNESCO speaks of Angkor, it is of an archeological park that includes not only Angkor Wat but hundreds of temples and lesser structures – with restorations in progress by the nations of the world – scattered over more than 230 square miles.
Among them: the shrines of Angkor Thom, notably Bayon, with its own bas-reliefs and its prominent heads emerging seemingly from everywhere; Ta Prohm, still in the grip of strangler figs; Banteay Srei, whose pink delicacy gives it its own charm.

Here in Greater Angkor are terraces etched with elephants and platforms guarded by stone lions, and ruins that once were temples but now are little more than piles of stone blocks in a jungle pocked with red signs warning of land mines ... and soon, perhaps, to be packed with tourists.

“Come now,” urged Canadian ex-pat Michelle Vachon, a reporter for the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. “The place is changing so fast. Come now before they Disney-ize the place.”

Is that possible?

“Our tourism is cultural and natural,” said Thy, another guide, with confidence. “We have learned from other places.”

So that is Angkor.

But here, too, are rice fields and water buffalo and fishermen and thatch houses on stilts, villages where men wear sarongs and mothers nurse as they gossip and where children play naked in the rivers – where they laugh as children laugh everywhere when there is peace and there is food.

This is the Cambodia of today along the roads not far beyond Angkor Wat.

Sometimes it is difficult to know which, truly, is the wonder.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)

MONEY: Mar 05

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Can a market keep growing? Peter Hensley reckons commentators aren’t factoring in the looming retirement of the baby-boomers

The past five years has witnessed the US authorities conduct a huge economic experiment. In an effort to avoid an economic calamity they have reduced interest rates to a point where they have virtually been giving money away to institutions. That is, banks could borrow funds at 1% interest (from the Federal Reserve) and lend it out to punters for mortgages at 4 and 5%. President Bush and the US Government instituted massive tax rebates whilst at the same time encouraging punters to borrow against the value of their houses (with home mortgage interest being tax deductible in the US). These factors combined ensured that the buying public had enough liquid cash to keep the economy running at full steam.

The side effect of this massive experiment of providing oceans of liquidity has meant that the country (USA) and its buying public have gone further and deeper into debt than ever before. The US budget deficit (difference between income tax and government spending) is the biggest ever recorded. Consumer spending has also created the largest trade deficit ever seen. In the short term the experiment has worked. The stock market has not crashed, people have felt wealthier and the enthusiasm (fuelled by the debt drug) has spilled over into real estate with people holding the mistaken belief that property never decreases in value.

The US Government and the American consumer have been spending beyond their means. Foreign Governments have been buying US Treasuries (ie loaning the US Government money) in an effort to keep them afloat. The saying goes, if a person owes the bank $10,000 and cannot pay it back, the person has a problem. However if a person owes the bank $10,000,000, and cannot pay it back, the bank has a problem. Foreign Governments and institutional economists are watching the situation closely. Generally, if a country’s deficit stretched over 5% of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product), their currency was devalued and their government debt (bonds) was placed into junk bond status. The US deficit is projected to reach 7% of GDP this year and foreign Governments are still queuing up to lend them money. We live in interesting times.

It is obvious now that the US authorities have another problem. They have successfully avoided a stock market crash, but have created a debt bubble that now presents its own problems.

Too much money in an economy typically translates into inflation. The US now has an excess of money in its system with its money supply (ie dollar bills on issue) effectively more than doubling in the last decade. To compound their problem, the 77 million baby boomers have not started saving for their retirement, expecting to either sell their shares or property (or both) to fund their later years. It does not take the brains of a rocket scientist to imagine what could happen next. The first baby boomers start to retire in less than 5 years.

The man on the street is either blissfully unaware or doesn’t care about his nation’s economic problem. He or she is acutely aware of the size of their mortgage payment and has been watching it increase steadily over the past twelve months. Sooner or later they will either make an effort to pay off their mortgage or choose to walk to away from it altogether. Individually, this decision will not impact the community (or nation) however collectively it might be a different story.

The Great American Consumer accounts for over 70% of GDP. If they stop going to the malls or stop paying their mortgage, then all hell is likely to break loose. With the national saving rate close to zero, it is likely that 77 million baby boomers are likely to reduce their spending in an effort to start saving for their pending retirement. A likely scenario is that the average greying American Consumer will alter their spending habits in order to save some ready cash for their pending retirement. They will possibly combine this with reducing their mortgage or debts in general. This change in consumer spending is likely to affect the wider economic landscape in ways they possibly could not imagine. In the words of Rachel Hunter, It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

March 05

ZULU KILO DOWN

The mystery of Joe Lourie’s last flight
They make the news but fade away. Topdressing aircraft that crash in remote countryside. But behind every crash is a story, and behind the crash of ZK-LTF is a story that could shed light on many other similar tragedies. NEILL HUNTER has this exclusive investigation

The topdresser dipped silently into the gully ahead and the group of teenage surfies craned their heads searching for it, some balancing on fence posts along the ridge. Suddenly the plane burst into view and roared over our heads like a great flying beast, its proximity not just palpable, but so real it felt like we were almost wearing the machine. The scene was a remote Northland beach an hour’s walk from the road because the Volkswagens couldn’t handle the mud; the agricultural aviator had no such restrictions as he performed aerial tricks, some especially for us, displaying mesmerising skills.

That was back in the 1960s, but those first visions of a topdresser in action remain indelibly etched in my memory. And the culture surrounding the industry hasn’t changed much either over the four decades hence. The sky jockeys at the reins of these aerial workhorses pepper their speech with jargon like “strap on the aeroplane and take it for a ride”, “turn the plane inside-out”, “inverted”, “critical speed”, “stall”, “situ-ational awareness”. They’re held in such esteem that some call them “Super Pilots”. But it’s a moniker that’s swiftly passing its use-by date, because everywhere you look, from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to the New Zealand Agricultural Aviation Association (NZAAA) and elsewhere, there is one controversial word buzzing the airfields: “fatigue”. And that’s what this story is about, the tale of a pilot, his loader driver, two grieving families and the plane with no name. The crash of ZK-LTF. Although it happened back in 2003, the rumours surrounding the last flight of ZK-LTF continue to swirl at Toko, the tiny farming community on the highway to what some call “the lost world”, that magnificent New Zealand hinterland between Taranaki’s Stratford and Waikato’s Taumaranui. On a soft summer evening, the appearance of a national magazine asking questions in their midst at the small village pub renews debate and rekindles memories.

ZK-LTF, you see, was a mongrel. Not in quality, in make. Once it was a fixed wing topdresser, resembling a Fletcher. But officially it was an FU24-950 born into civil aviation existence in 1973, lived 5332 flight hours and died peacefully when it was put into storage in 1990. This was ZK-LTF in Fletcher guise.

But the plane was, amazingly, resurrected in 1999, extensively rebuilt, and re-registered in March 2000 as a “Falcon”. Farmers knew ZK-LTF. Says one: “it was a Fletcher plane, Cresco wings and Falcon motor – 650 HP.” To experts, it was a Cresco main plane, Lycoming LTP-101-700A-1A turboprop with characteristics of a Cresco with an FU24 hopper capable of disgorging 979kg of fertiliser. Some readers will want to know these things, others will simply need to know it was a topdresser, fixed wing.

When ZK-LTF crashed in Taranaki killing pilot Joe Lourie and his loader driver passenger Richard McRae there were those in the farming community who thought it was the old plane, the one which had two near misses, “flame-outs” they said, which nearly killed Joe Lourie’s brother, they said. A jinxed aircraft, perhaps.

Then another farmer, who had remained silent at the pub back in 2003, spoke up telling his friends it was the “new” plane. The Falcon. He knew this because he and his son found the wreckage that night, and the bodies, nearly two years ago:

At about 6.15pm, on 4 April 2003, Barry Baldock sat on a motorbike near his woolshed about to put the sheep away for the night on an evening fine and clear, when he heard the sound of the plane he knew so well. “I knew what plane it was. I thought, ‘that’s Joe’”. The engine of the Falcon was distinctive and smooth: “it was humming,” he says of the Wanganui Aero Works’ Stratford operation topdresser piloted by his son’s good friend Joe Lourie. It was a sound he had heard earlier that day as well as on preceding weeks. He looked up as it roared into view, climbed steeply above the high green ridge, banked away from the tanned farmer, reverse-turned – in pilot jargon – and disappeared. The tall lean man in his sixties sat on his bike and watched briefly then thought to himself, “c’mon Joe, time to knock off.”

For a brief moment he watched the plane as it emerged again, lunging back up the wide open valley from whence it had come, towards the razorback ridges of high, green, steep jagged hills in the distance, into a narrow pass. The shattered horizon is cut by peaks and pinnacles, like broken glass, except near the Strathmore saddle where the serrated green line breaks form, becoming one long, high, straight, towering wall of land, and the valley begins to close.

Barry Baldock reckons he was the last to see ZK-LTF and says he might have heard the crash were it not for the sound of his bike starting as the plane disappeared. There were sheep to tend in these twilight moments, and no time to stand around daydreaming.

“I thought, ‘that’s Joe.’ Started the motorbike up. Probably the time of the crash was as the motorbike was turning over.”
Engine noises drowning the sound of a distant impact; no explosion, no fire.

At around 10.45 pm, when the All Blacks were playing on TV that night, the telephone rang in the modest Baldock farm house and the lifetime farmer told the caller, Allan Beck, local helicopter pilot and veteran search and rescue operator, that he knew the location of the plane they were searching for.

“If it’s gone down I know exactly where it is. I thought if it was the last flight before he went home…but he’d obviously gone through, turned around and made another approach. I started the motor bike up as I saw him disappear back down over the hill and rode off to put sheep away. Otherwise I would have heard it.”

Later, Search and Rescue headquarters in Wellington were so impressed they asked Beck: “how did you find it so fast”.

It was simple. He asked the farmers.

Although the plane wasn’t operating on Baldock’s farm – that had been scheduled for the following week – Allan Beck had a gut feeling he should call Barry Baldock. With his son and a son in-law, Baldock drove up to the Strathmore Saddle, five kms north east of Douglas in the Forgotten World, and he told the others to be alert for the smell of fumes. Then it came, wafting through their car like an invisible cloud, even before they stopped at the place where Baldock reckoned would be the nearest point in the road to the crash scene: the stench of aviation fuel permeating the still night air.

In the end it was not only the fuel smell, but a flight of others on the wing, which alerted the pilot’s friend to the wreckage of ZK-LTF. Says Barry Baldock: “A couple of ducks flew out of a little swamp and frightened him (his son). He had a torch on his head, spun around and his torch shone on a white thing on the side of the hill. He said ‘here it is up here Dad’,” and the search was over. All seemed very peaceful.

“Joe was still in the belts, up off the ground, very peaceful, not really a mark on him. Richard was lying about 20 metres away. I was glad there was no fire. Joe especially looked very peaceful.”
Richard, Wayne Baldock said to his father, “just looked like he was asleep.”

That was April 2003. On 13 October 2004, New Plymouth Coroner Roger Mori signed off his “Findings Of Coroner Under The Coroners Act 1988”, the official title given to his inquest into the deaths of a topdressing pilot and his loader driver passenger. It was supposed to be the final act of a three part process, of yet another investigation into yet another topdressing accident: (1) a police investigation (2) an aircraft accident investigation by the CAA and (3) an inquest, based upon those investigations, by the coroner. There were failures in all three, some small others substantial, but essentially the process failed to provide the families of those lost in the crash with that state of mind popularly known as “closure”.

For the mother of one of those lost in the wreckage of ZK-LTF, Ann Macrae (her surname is spelt differently to her son’s), closure would have been achieved if the inquest had included a full assessment of work pressure and fatigue, involving the pilot and loader driver, leading up to the time of the crash.

As she sits in her home at Sanson, calmly and clinically describing the failures of those charged with handling the investigation, it seems ironic that near her plain, neat home, is an Air Force base named Ohakea. The place where fighter jets once flew. Now this mother is taking up a fight for a lost son, once an Air Force mechanic, but she refuses to be drawn into arguments of blame.

“It would have been wrong to blame Joe Lourie for crashing the plane.” She says it goes beyond that. “Richard and Joe were right at the bottom of the chain.” The woman who loves to write, and grow huge healthy pot plants, says the investigations failed to examine the issues of work place health and safety.

So Investigate left Ann Macrae behind, and followed our own flight path to examine her assertions. Everywhere, even two years after the event, we found emotions still raw. But farmers and others opened their doors, offered opinions, shed tears, retrieved memories.

At the end of a blistering Manawatu summer day, where temperatures had soared as high as 42 in the shade, faces listen intently and fingers draw lines and shapes in the condensation on their beer glasses as the discussion of the crash and its aftermath swoops and dives with a life of its own.

A journalist’s mind, meanwhile, settles on a topdressing veteran describing his craft.

As Richmond Harding recalls it, crashing his father’s Tiger Moth in the 50’s while spreading grass seed left no time for fear because he was too busy.

“About 20 seconds” is all you have to find a place to land after running out of fuel, he tells me. At 66 he is still young enough to fly topdressers, so too his elder brother at 68, but it’s difficult to extract from the sun-drenched aviator the thoughts of a pilot about to crash. He walked away unscathed but wrote off his father’s plane, and
remembers the aftermath. “I hitched a ride back to Waiouru. Me father growled at me,” he chuckles.

“Why didn’t you bring back the Tiger Moth,” his father had asked, in an aviation variation of a teenager crashing dad’s car.

“I wrote it off.”

It’s a lighter moment, while interviewing the man who used to own – and remains general manager of – Wanganui Aero Works, the company he started after persuading his father to let him and his brother
go top dressing instead of farming. It was a pleasure interviewing the man who speaks in a measured, calm, sensible manner, who later sold the operation, one of the biggest in New Zealand, to Ravensdown Fertiliser.

So how did he crash the Tiger Moth? Focussing on the pattern of the grass seed he was spreading distracted the young pilot from monitoring his fuel consumption. When the penny dropped that he was going down, it was more of a Toyota ‘bugger’ moment than a wild panic.

“You’ve got a job to do…pretty urgent job to do. The crash investigator Paddy O’Brien once said ‘if you can put an aeroplane on the ground and run it say 20 metres you’ll probably walk away’. Control it to the ground, don’t stall it to the ground. If it’s hill country run it up the side of a hill. Run it into the ground, don’t smash it into the ground.”

So what happened to Wanganui Aero Works’ ill-fated ZK-LTF? Timing is everything and the time of ZK-LTF’s crash is relevant to much of this investigation, central to issues of work pressure, fatigue and the demise of New Zealand topdressing pilots (and their families).

First: there are no flight and duty time (hours of working and flying) limitations either under OSH or CAA rules. In fact OSH has no jurisdiction over pilots/aviation employers; that’s done by CAA who have OSH personnel helping them. Truck drivers have limitations. Airline pilots have limitations. Australian ag’ pilots have limitations. But not NZ ag’ pilots. Once they did, 25 years ago, but it was too hard so it got scrapped. CAA recognised that ag’ flying was too dependent upon weather and seasons – “windows” – to have rules for pilots’ health and safety.

Whether that is a sensible stand or a facetious excuse for inaction is the point now thrown up for debate. The argument from those who believe the industry must be flexible enough to work during weather windows is essentially this: overall down time exceeds overall flying time, therefore there is no problem, no fatigue. The argument is based on total annual flying hours.

But in the real world there are those who point out some blindingly obvious problems with that analysis. The weather’s been bad for a month, and suddenly a week of fine weather arrives. A plane can be in the air from dawn till dusk; diving, swooping, landing, taking off, seven to ten days in a row to get the backlog of work cleared.
Was pilot fatigue a bigger factor in the demise of ZK-LTF than police, CAA and coronial investigations had suggested?

It would be fair to say that interviews with some became more “adversarial” as the logic of the counter-position sunk in. Credit must go to Bill Sommer, CAA media liaison and ex-RNZAF man who, after two long interviews, seemed to swing away from the entrenched employer and CAA positions of “downtime” and individual pilot responsibility for their own health and safety. The veterans with whom we went “adversarial” listened, but were basically immoveable.

There are some level heads in the industry who while maintaining their view that fatigue is not an issue, say they strive to teach their pilots good health and safety. Mike Keen of Hamilton’s Superair insists he is being accurate in his view that fatigue is not a problem in the industry, nor is work pressure.

“Where are the facts and figures?” he asks. In two long interviews we thrashed the subject and while the 10,000-hour veteran admits that there may have been cases in the past, it is not prevalent now. He says there is too much down time, they may work, say, a 14 hour day, but only fly for six hours and spend the remainder “sleeping under a wing or having a cup of tea with the farmer.” He insists that his company regularly reminds their pilots to take breaks and manage their work load and says most operators are the same. He recently sent a memo reminding pilots of summer temperatures and rest. Of a Pacific Wings magazine story about fatigue and stress, he says it’s inaccurate because there is no data to back it up. He rubbishes the reference to an “appalling” accident rate but admits at times, “it’s bad.”

Investigate’s argument: forget about annual flying hours and down time. We asked the question: “what is going to happen when, as exists now with companies three weeks behind in their work due to weather, suddenly the weather comes right, there’s a flood of work, and it’s game on, work ‘til you drop, pilots working / flying 14 hour days and taking one 15 minute meal break (we sighted records proving it)? It’s not the big picture (annual hours, down time etc) – it’s the micro one, of suddenly going for it over three days (or longer).”

“It’s a fair point you make,” says CAA’s Sommer, adding, “Everyone else has got responsibility as well. Not just us. The pilot has that responsibility to say ‘I’m too tired’. Now that’s clearly drummed into the guys who are flying passengers around. The safety of those passengers lies specifically with them. [But] In the case of the ag’ operator, well the feeling of responsibility that the pilot feels may be quite different.”

Is that “feeling” called peer pressure and subtle work pressure? Sommer believes things will change: “I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, I’m sure it will be. I’m sure it’ll be examined but I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy to do.”

So why not take advantage of a crash investigation and coroner’s inquest, go proactive, highlight the awareness? Our answer: You can’t if the crash investigator seems to pull punches, saying there may have been work pressure, might have been fatigue. There’s talk of reviews of working conditions pending, but apparently no real investigation into fatigue and work pressure until after the Coroner’s hearing.
You read correctly. Arguably crucial evidence was not obtained by CAA until after the Coroner’s investigation had wrapped up.

“It’s in writing on your own letterhead” we remind CAA. A clearly concerned official says he can’t comment because the staff involved are away and efforts to date by Investigate to contact them have been unsuccessful due to leave and overseas commitments we are told. More about the CAA bombshell soon.

Cut to the numbers, fatal and injury, what are they?

“Appalling…bad…trending upwards” are the various descriptions from CAA, aircraft magazine writers and the industry. Bill Sommer: “it’s trending up for ag’ ops and trending down for others…you can see it’s really quite something.”

One veteran said he thought about four were killed over about the last three years, perhaps about 15 accidents in total over that period. He knows that 200 have died since the 1940s when the industry began. This man has been flying for 40 years, operated a company for 23 years which had no accidents until 2001 when they suddenly had 3 in one year. (None were fatal and one of them was his first which he attributes to not flying for three weeks, not fatigue.) Veterans say CAA is fudging the numbers. CAA denies this, and says it has the graphs to prove it, that the accident numbers are climbing.
CAA admits that fixed wing topdressers combine with other light aircraft stats which, say some in the industry, is the reason the numbers aren’t accurate.

“That’s not correct, we can separate them out,” says Sommer of criticism that topdressers join hang gliders and balloons. CAA say they can extract the numbers and have done so on “ag’ ops” and besides, everyone in the industry knows the situation is bad.

Arguably though, it’s not the numbers, but the fact that flight and duty limitations do not exist for topdressing, except “civil twilight”: 30 minutes before/after sunrise/set. According to CAA technical examinations, 11 minutes had remained under the civil twilight rule for ZK-LTF to finish and go home. The device giving that data in ZK-LTF was a pseudo-cockpit recorder, a type of global positioning system (GPS), which could have been switched off due to screen glow distracting the pilot. “1826:50”, the last entry, may be early. The crash investigation says sunset was 1811hrs, “end of daylight” was 1838hrs, crash time “1830 approx”.

Says Mark Ford, a helicopter operator flying over ZK-LTF before the crash, “It was starting to get dark in the valleys, shadow-up. Fifteen to twenty minutes and it would’ve been pretty dark.” Ford believes he saw ZK-LTF well before it crashed because it was spreading on another farm, so by the time it finished that run, landed, reloaded, waited for the loader to park and lock up, transited to the farm and crash scene for its last job of the day, we estimate it could have consumed most of the “15 to 20 minutes to dark” that Ford says was remaining. But there is a variable. The CAA report says Ford told them the time was 5.45pm. Ford told Investigate he was only “five to six” minutes from home, which would mean his sighting was well before sundown at 6.11pm. Even considering the diminished light in the valleys, one would expect there to have been ample light, if Ford’s original sighting time was correct. In the final analysis, according to the technical data, the crash happened just on dark.

Mark Ford is a veteran helicopter logging operator but initially nobody knew where we could find him. In the end of course it was easy, his is the only place in NZ with an ex-RAF Wessex military helicopter, in full camo, parked out the back, with another “squadron” of them in storage – plus the world’s supply of spare parts, literally, 100 containers-worth to be precise. His Wessex helicopter logging operation is as huge as the scrap he is embroiled in with CAA, an organisation he accuses of being rife with corruption.

Ford is one of those larger-than-life Kiwi blokes, a bull of a man and in his no-nonsense way and office, he shared his views of a topdresser crash. Unfortunately CAA, according to Ford, only briefly interviewed him on the side of the road near the crash scene and appeared to focus on an issue which Investigate elects to cover, despite its controversial significance, especially to bereaved families. We do so for completeness, and in the end we say it needs to be viewed in context: was it causative, or distraction from the real issues of pressure and fatigue? It concerns the flying style of the pilot.

Friday evening, nearly two years ago and two men in a helicopter are almost home, flying about 500 feet over the mottled greens of the Forgotten World, when they suddenly see ZK-LTF below them.

“You see an aircraft flying, doing its normal stuff, you think nothing of it, you fly across, see it, oh yeah, just another aeroplane, helicopter or whatever, but for something like that to take my specific bloody attention away, and think to myself, struth, look at that thing, that thing’s near inverted, because it’s frickin’ flying almost upside down. The turns were really tight. That’s why I noticed it…it made me look twice. For me to look back twice and say sheesh that guy’s turning it inside out. That’s exactly what I thought.”

And Ford knows all about fatigue after once taking off with running wheels (removable) still attached and on another occasion, nearly taking off with two heavy truck batteries on the ground, still attached to the helicopter. He says they now “run co-pilots and stop for lunch and breaks after about two hours”, and although it’s his own business he doesn’t pressure his pilots to keep working, “not at all.”
When asked his opinion on the difference between his industry and fixed wing topdresser he replies: “I believe there are a lot more getting killed in aeroplanes than helicopters.” (They’re not, but that’s another story.)

Others say it is not work pressure or fatigue. Hallett Griffin is a 40-year veteran who says his only accident came after three weeks of no flying and at an Australian Conference heard a military pilot lecture on BITS – “back in the saddle” – and its dangers. Griffin also acknowledges that things are not good but insists neither are they bad or appalling as alleged by others. Companies watch their pilots to ensure safety; he says he knows of pilots who have been grounded. So what does he do to instil safety and health, if a pilot is over-doing things? “Keep an eye on him. Bit of a cuff over the ear.”

We don’t know why ZK-LTF smashed into the side of a high buttress-like hill, yet there are clues. Experts have offered opinion: “The aircraft had struck the ground in an attitude that suggested it was pulling out of a dive, but with insufficient height for terrain clearance.

Possible reasons for the manoeuvre include a pull-out from a reversal turn…the aeroplane struck the ground very heavily on a heading of 210 degrees M while on a 55 degrees bank to the right and on descent path of at least 30 degrees…after rebounding and crossing an intervening small gully, the wreckage again collided heavily with the ground some 47m further on, coming to rest in several sections… The high ground surrounding the valley where the accident occurred would have increased the effects of the fading light, making height judgement progressively more difficult”, writes Alistair Buckingham, CAA crash investigator.

Ask the farmers and they say ZK-LTF was simply spreading the last of the fertiliser across the face of rising ground, wings at an angle matching the lower slope but in the darkening conditions, struck one of the low ridges of the small gullies near the base of a nameless hill. A farmer standing on the side of the road points to a patch of thistles as evidence: “you see those Kellies Thistles, he shaved them off like a mower, he skipped into the ground.” That from Barry Baldock, the farmer who found the wreckage; who knows his planes, and the land.

So would a diving heavy impact, offered by CAA, be consistent with shaving thistles? Despite that, for now we confirm that the CAA investigation was otherwise reasonably thorough and “exhaustive”, as they remind the reader.

There are other factors which investigators and the coroner say may have caused or contributed to the crash such as illegal carrying of a passenger during spreading; “exuberance of the reversal manoeuvres”; “sense of urgency to complete the job…”; “pilot’s judgement may have been further eroded by fatigue and a degree of carbon monoxide absorption (cma).” Let’s deal with the latter briefly for clarification. It relates more to internal rather than external (e.g. fumes) sources of toxicology, of blood saturation levels where normal
levels are 1% to 2% cma, 5% to 10% may affect the heart, 15% to 20% dizziness and nausea, 50% may kill. The CAA report includes findings relating to the pilot’s forensic results therefore it can be safely assumed that the cma was relevant, by virtue of the statement “…eroded by fatigue and a degree of carbon monoxide absorption”.

Those and other issues had to be considered by the coroner.

It is 9.30am, another fine day in the ‘naki, already signs of a scorcher but Coroner Roger Mori is happy with a simple desk-top fan in his office at the end of a long corridor in the chambers of Nicolsons, Lawyers and Notary Public. The tall lean father of a representative basketballer, calmly and fully expounds on the coroner’s role generally, and the inquest into the deaths of Richard Sinclair McRae and Jonathan Peter Lourie, ages 30 and 29 respectively.

“I’m required to make recommendations or comments in the avoidance of circumstances similar to those in which the death occurred, or in the manner in which any persons should act in such circumstances, that, in the opinion of the coroner, may if drawn to public attention reduce the chances of the occurrence of other deaths in such circumstances. So, there we are and of course it is only the sudden and unexpected deaths that are reported to me and of course obviously air accidents fall very fairly and squarely into that category.” He has dealt with about six air crashes over the 21 years but can not remember clearly if any included topdressing but may have. Sitting relaxed behind a large desk, in a casual shirt, no tie, one cannot help but be impressed with his professional yet open manner. Despite issues, some controversial, arising from this case, one of which he is unaware until informed in this interview, he clearly conveys an empathy of understanding towards families in grief. He has never lost a son or daughter and can not imagine the hurt, he says. He is probably being humble for someone having presided over countless enquiries and currently awaiting reports on the latest aircrash in Taranaki, that of a plane which slammed into such a precarious part of Mt Taranaki’s summit, two helicopters were required. “I try to keep myself as remote as I can from families”, ‘he says,but then explains examples of where that “rule” has been broken.

ZK-LTF’s case has at times been controversial. The families accuse authorities of prejudging “cause and effect” and to a degree, Mori even agrees: “to that extent they’re right because all the evidence is prepared in writing in advance.” While the coroner may direct further investigations after receiving reports, it is the police responsibility to call evidence, liaise with families and prepare the evidence in advance for examination at the inquest.

Mori is well versed in issues of fatigue, both professionally, and personally from a near-tragedy which could have had fatal consequences when a member of his own family, suffering fatigue, crashed a vehicle, escaping uninjured.

An expert from Massey University presenting evidence in Mori’s court about fatigue in another case, testified how physical functions may carry on normally until suddenly the brain literally stops.
“You get tired and the brain will shut off for some seconds… suddenly you’re out of control”, the coroner recounts.

But it is the question of whether the Civil Aviation Authority lost control of its own investigation that now rears its head. You see, at the end of the day a coronial inquest is only as good as the evidence that Coroner gets to see. If one of the investigating agencies gets facts wrong, or doesn’t cover all the bases, a Coroner may end up delivering an unsound report. And that’s what the families of Joe Lourie and Richard McRae are alleging.

The most telling piece of potential evidence in this regard is a letter written by a CAA investigator (the “bombshell”) which confirms crucial documents, the actual “flight records”, were not uplifted by CAA until “the day after the inquest”.

The letter goes on to confirm that CAA had vastly underestimated the actual flight hours of the pilot for the preceding days, and that an amended report would be filed by last December. As of the time of going to press, no such amended report has been filed that we can establish. So how could CAA get it so wrong, why do they appear to have not done the enquires “by the numbers”, checked the pilot’s flying hours, why change a report after an inquest? Because that is what this investigation reveals.

CAA’s Bill Sommer was unaware of the letter until Investigate raised it, but says he’s sure that if their investigator changed his report, they would “tell the coroner”.

Well, the investigator has changed his report; according to the document, he admits virtually (to his credit) that he got it wrong, but hasn’t told the coroner about his failure to properly investigate the issue of work pressure and fatigue, nor his amended report (after the inquest). Another expert witness present at the inquest has told Investigate that the coroner specifically asked the CAA investigator if he was sure the numbers (flying hours) were correct. According to the source, CAA replied they were. But they are not and Investigate has a copy of the CAA document to prove it. What is the significance of that to a re-hearing?

Mori has signalled he is open to a re-hearing and even quoted the rules allowing it but emphasises the application must come from the Solicitor-General. He cannot initiate it himself.

Quotes Mori: “Section 38… if satisfied that since an inquest was completed new facts have been discovered, make it desirable to hold another, the Solicitor-General may order another to be held and in that case another shall be held.”

So sayeth the Act. And the new facts (as well as breaches and failures under the Coroner’s Act) are these:

The CAA crash report states the pilot “had not flown on any of the seven days immediately preceding the accident date.”
False.

New facts, verified by Investigate sighting documents and interviews: The crash was on Friday 4 April. On Wednesday 2 April the loader driver and pilot worked/flew from 0500hrs to 1900 hours with one 15 minute meal break! Thursday 3 April, the day before the crash: 0600 to 0645, then 0830 to 1945hrs and one 15 minute meal break! They were averaging twelve-and-a-half hour days with one quarter-hour break. The loader driver worked 25 out of 28 days, taking one small break per day and if the loader driver was working as the pilot’s loader, so was the pilot.

Investigate’s copy of a CAA document shows the agency admits not examining flight records fully until after their report was completed and after the inquest. That document proves that their statement about no flying by the pilot before the crash was wrong, by at least 17 hours. Why?

Because they didn’t investigate fatigue and work pressure properly.
While the CAA could argue that it doesn’t matter as work pressure and fatigue are mentioned in the report anyway, that would be disingenuous. It does matter, substantially. The CAA report forms the basis of the Coroner’s finding and recommendations. It makes minimal mention of pressure and stress, mixing them with items of blame on the pilot as possibilities only. So the Coroner accordingly agreed. It is like saying a driver may have had a bit to drink, but we didn’t take a blood/alcohol measurement so we’re only mentioning the “possibility” in passing.

The CAA report does at least acknowledge, “the accident occurred at the end of a long working day. The pilot had been on duty over 12 hours…80 take-offs and landings…carbon monoxide…a degree of fatigue…potential to dull the edge of the pilot’s skill and judgement.”

It’s all minimalist jargon; understandable, given the investigator is working on the premise the pilot hadn’t worked before the day of the accident. But, if one day’s long work hours were enough to warrant mention, what does the new evidence of flying almost all week do?
Second new fact: the police statement given in evidence at the inquest is that the passenger was sitting behind the pilot.

False.

The CAA report states they were abreast. Which is it? We don’t know because nobody appears to have asked the question. In fact from enquiries, the passenger was beside the pilot, but it casts more doubt on the thoroughness of the original investigations.

Approximately one week prior to the accident Joe Lourie was so exhausted from working from dawn to dark that he sent his friend, a farmer, to get food and drink for him. On another occasion he called Stratford Aero Club and asked them to turn on the lights of their building as a navigational point for landing at night, illegally.

Self-imposed bad practice? Or signs of a responsible, well trained pilot under pressure? Farmers close to Joe Lourie and Wanganui Aero Works say that prior to him becoming manager of the Stratford operation it was losing business, attributed to the previous pilot nearing retirement and no longer buying into the work/fly-until-you-drop (or die) culture. That is not a reflection on the retiring pilot but rather a sign of pressure.

“The previous pilot was a lot older and probably ready for retirement,” opines a farmer. “The difference was one wanting to work and the other being very cautious. But they did lose a bit of business because they weren’t getting the manure on…Joe’s thing was to get that business back, plus a bit more.”

Topdressing companies are paid when all the fertiliser bought by the farmer has been spread. So if the job becomes disjointed, broken by weather, including wind, mechanical failures and the like, there is no income, no progress payments. Pressure may come from farmers, “standing over” the pilot pressuring him into flying to their farm “right now” because it looks fine and they want their fertiliser on the ground, now. The plane arrives and, as the pilot suspected, so too does the wind. He tries for half an hour, then flies home again, expenses soar, and net profit plummets.

“It happens,” says a farmer. “It’s pressure from farmers, not all…they want it on now…the job has to be finished, no manure on the ground, no money …weather can hold things up for quite a few weeks sometimes,” he explains.

Then a commercial pilot, after much procrastination and on condition of anonymity comes forward through a third party at first, and then speaks to Investigate directly.

Three weeks before ZK-LTF’s crash Joe Lourie was “doing stunts after work”. While that in itself is not bad he says, because most pilots do it, especially at the end of a day, if conditions are safe, but if a pilot is tired, the consequences may be fatal.

“It’s usually ridge-running, not barrel rolls.” It’s like a release from all the pressure which they say “will kill people”. He exclaims, when told of the flying hours, take-offs and landings logged by Lourie:

“I find that incredible”. Then he pauses and says he knows it’s happening. “Some of them are doing huge hours (flying time). I’ve done eight hours and even that’s too much.”

With 1400 hours logged, he rubbishes the veterans who say flying is no more complicated than driving a car. Investigate has been told on several occasions that for an experienced pilot, flying is easier and less tiring than driving. Our informant says that driving can be “automatic” but “in flying you’re constantly thinking and when you land you feel exhausted”.

When Investigate re-interviews a veteran about the informant’s statements, he scoffs and even laughs and we are told again, fatigue is not an issue. But, says our informant, six hours topdressing flying time in a day… “it’s big.” When a pilot gets tired they “get lazy and don’t pay attention.”

Make no mistake, Investigate accepts Lourie broke rules. Carrying a passenger restrained only by a lap belt (both were big men) while spreading was dangerous. Operating just on dark, soaring up into lighter conditions above the hills and back into dark valleys where shadows obscured the smaller ridges, was reckless.

But why, once again, was this experienced, well trained pilot making such mistakes? Was it pressure, squeezing in one more run just on dark, take the pilot home with him and save time, get back on the job early next morning, take him on the last spread instead of returning to the field, collecting him and flying straight home to Stratford, only minutes away by plane, perhaps an hour in an old slow loader on a narrow twisting country road punctuated by more stop signs and railway crossings than a Monopoly board?

We investigated suggestions it was all Lourie’s own fault: a pilot out of control, cavalier in approach. But to the farmers who knew the quiet pilot it was the opposite. “Very quiet,” is their description, “he would say what he had to and that was it kind of thing”. His employers, to be fair, are reluctant to blame Lourie but in interviewing them there is a clear perception that they discount fatigue, and blame pilot error. “He had been warned…” they explain but say no more, out of respect they say for the families.

Joe Lourie had to take responsibility, says a reliable neutral source in Manawatu (not the employers) who once met the young pilot.
He was closely supervised for six months at Hunterville with a veteran, where they say he was groomed for the Stratford position as manager/pilot. The source says he was very impressed after meeting the big, tall pilot whom he described as “the future of the industry.” Which again begs the question: what went wrong with the 1000 hour-plus, groomed pilot?

More enquiries and again the veterans say they know the cause and it wasn’t work pressure because there is nothing wrong with squeezing in one last load before dark. One says that if the conditions are perfect, as they were this day, then evening is the ideal time to fly, and goes on to describe the joy of doing the last loads late in the day, not because of pressure, but the elation of flying.

Farmers experienced in topdressing say Lourie was a good pilot. None say he was reckless, one talks of his so called exuberant flying (as in the CAA report where technical data confirms “exuberant” manoeuvres) adding that “he could fly, he could handle it, he was a bloody good pilot” but admits he was “starting to take a few risks.” A farmer who had watched him weeks before the crash thought to himself “take it carefully, Joe”, even telling his wife, but says it was paying off commercially: “he picked up a lot of work.” But it was reaching the point where it was raising concerns. A farmer says “a lot of people commented that Wanganui Aero Works should have pulled the pin on him and cut back his hours…they must have known how many tonnes he was putting on so they should have known the hours (the pilot would need to do) to put that tonnage on. It was a waste of two good lives, I know that,” he muses.

There is another reason for the Solicitor-General to re-open the Coroner’s inquest into the deaths of Lourie and McRae. The last error in the CAA report, perhaps only small, perhaps not. The crash report says “…both occupants were ejected from the cockpit.”

False.

New fact: Witnesses to the crash scene, those who found the wreckage, say the pilot was in the wreckage, “Joe was still in the belts, up off the ground, very peaceful, not really a mark on him. Richard was lying about 20 metres away…”

Barry Baldock then went on to describe the state of the wreckage, and the pilot’s position in it which, for brevity and sensitivity, we have condensed as above. Investigate received allegations that Lourie was not the pilot. McRae, the loader driver was a trained pilot, with aspirations of becoming an ag’ pilot and it is not unusual for official and unofficial training to take place on the job. After enquiries however with police, crash scene witnesses and anonymous witnesses who have no agenda, we are reasonably satisfied that Lourie was the pilot. But cumulatively, the CAA report errors are such they raise substantial doubts about the integrity of the inquest.
So what does the Coroner think of all this?

Roger Mori hints that he is less than happy with the situation. Investigate contacted the Coroner again about the evidence, including the bombshell CAA admission that they got it wrong over the “the pilot hadn’t flown during the week”, and that CAA was intending to amend its accident report. His reaction? A typical no-nonsense one: “S**t, that’s all been done subsequent to my report!”

He adds, incredulously, “they (CAA) can’t change a report once it becomes an official document in a Coroner’s inquest.” He tells Investigate “it’s something that should be investigated.”

We then discuss apparent breaches in the Coroners Act about the informing of parties, such as families and employers. Neither family or employer were informed of the inquest and although blame for that falls on the police, Mori typically doesn’t duck the issue and talks about it being “extremely rare” and “system failure.”

He evinces clear frustrations over certain parties, such as the pilot’s wife, being inadvertently excluded from the inquest.
“I was bloody annoyed”.

Investigate explained to the Coroner the results of enquiries to date and the evidence that proximate cause could more strongly be fatigue. In legal terms, more commonly associated with the insurance industry, proximate cause means after weighing-up all other possible contributory causes, in the final analysis there is one direct, stronger cause. Mori replies with talk about that being “logical …best explanation…what you’re doing is researching and asking ques- tions…probably the answer is yes…I would say that’s fairly accurate”. If nothing else, let that at least be of some comfort to the families because blaming the pilot, as hinted in the CAA report, and by some industry members, is an easy assumption.

But it’s up to the Solicitor-General’s office to apply to the High Court, as provided for under the Coroners Act, on the grounds that there are sufficient new facts from the formal evidence: changes to CAA report after the inquest; their admission to erring; breaches of the Act due to the exclusion of families’ members; evidence presented but rejected without being heard.

A re-opened coronial investigation could not only put the pilot’s actions in a clearer light, but also bring an end to commercial and peer pressures that many in the agricultural aviation industry say are killing pilots.

“It was a beautiful sight,” says a farmer’s wife, describing ZK-LTF approaching their farm air strip in the low light of predawn. She says the combination of the plane’s lights, the early dawn colours, vapour streaming off the wings of the white Falcon like long white ribbons, was something she will never forget. The interview turns quiet as she recalls the image, describing it again, painting a word picture that stays in the mind. Later she says that I should go to a small airstrip, at night.

A quarter after nine pm on a country airstrip in Taranaki, and the pilot from the big Cresco topdresser, 3714kg fully laden, parked on the grass, walks through the darkness, and looks puzzled to find a journalist. There are no lights and nearby buildings are in darkness; the place is abandoned apart from pilot and scribe.

He says he landed about 8.15pm, is happy to talk about his job, a tall solid man who now leans over the roof of his car, slumping his body in a sign his day is over. He shares things like hours, working conditions and the importance of the industry.

“Seven hundred thousand tonnes of fertiliser per year, we have more turn-over than any other industry, it’s important we don’t fall over.” He says he manages his fatigue, “you’re not always flying…”, then hesitates. Later he says he’s off to the central North Island and as we talk more there’s a distant rumbling growl, rising like rolling thunder in the still night. From the track leading to the airfield, a monster lumbers suddenly into view, headlights blazing like eyes, a creature common to rural New Zealand: a topdressing loader. Truck-cab at the front, loader-cab and bucket at the back, Kiwi ingenuity at its best.

“My loader driver, he’s coming with me,” says the pilot. Then an older man in a black singlet climbs down and wanders over. The pilot and I exchange farewells, the other looks on silently, confused, then both get into the pilot’s car, and drive away, leaving me alone in the dark, imagining a different scene, two years ago, when pilot and loader took another way home, via grassy slopes of a valley, on a night in the Forgotten World.

The distant silhouette of a giant mountain looms, with snow still present where weeks earlier it too became a place of tragedy, scene of a fatal air crash. Time to go. I’ve booked a cabin overlooking the ocean hoping to enjoy the view but it won’t be, because it’ll be 10.10pm, and I’ve had no dinner, only a quick lunch and the first interview was at 9.30pm, later than the others on this long week when a chief reporter said they too “hate the early morning interviews.” Twice during the 45 odd minute drive to New Plymouth street lights from small towns in the distance seem like approaching car lights, illusions, eyes tiring, itching, then the realisation: could be fatigue.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

Nov 05, AU Edition

ISLAM’S MESSAGE TO THE WEST
We’re coming to get you

Earlier this month the terror group Jemaah Islamiyah hit Bali again. Now, in this exclusive interview for Investigate magazine in Australia and New Zealand, given shortly before the latest bombings, alleged terror leader Abu Bakar Ba’asyir tells TAUFIQ ANDRIE and SCOTT ATRAN there’s no place to hide from militant Islam in the Pacific, and no hope of peace. Ever.

This interview was conducted on August 13 and 15, 2005 from Cipinang Prison in Jakarta. Questions were formulated by Dr. Scott Atran and posed for him in Behasa Indonesian by Taufiq Andrie. The
interview took place in a special visitor’s room, where Ba’asyir had seven acolytes acting as his bodyguards, including Taufiq Halim, the perpetrator of the Atrium mall bombing in Jakarta, and Abdul Jabbar, who blew up the Philippines ambassador’s house. The transcript follows the short introduction below.

In this interview, the alleged terrorist leader Abu Bakar Ba’asyir provides his justification for waging jihad against the West. He also explains the calculus of suicide bombers and discusses his interpretation of Islam concerning war and infidels. Despite accusations that he is head of the al-Qa’ida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organization and has planned the most lethal terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia, Ba’asyir has only been convicted on conspiracy charges in the 2002 attack on a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people. His 30-month sentence for his role in that bombing, which included scores of Australian tourists among the casualties, was recently reduced by four months and 15 days.

Just outside the visitor’s cell is Hasyim, who runs Ba’asyir’s daily errands. Hasyim is a member of Majlis Mujahidin Indonesian (MMI), the country’s umbrella organization for militant Islamist groups headed by Ba’asyir. Like many Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members, including Ba’asyir and JI founder Abdullah Sungkar, Hasyim originally came from Darul Islam, a post-independence group banned by the Suharto regime that has operated semi-clandestinely in Indonesian society much as the Muslim Brotherhood has in the Middle East.

In 1993, Sungkar split from DI, bringing with him most of the Indonesian Afghan Alumni that he and Ba’asyir had sent to fight the Soviets. Until Suharto’s downfall in 1998, Sungkar and Ba’asyir
expanded their network of Islamist schools from exile in Malaysia, funnelling students to training camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines, and expanding JI’s influence across Southeast Asia. After Sungkar’s death in 1999, Ba’asyir became “Emir” of JI – a position and organization whose existence he publicly denies but for which there is overwhelming evidence, including from current and former JI members Dr. Atran has interviewed. Although Sungkar himself established direct ties with bin Laden, it is under Ba’asyir’s stewardship that JI has adopted key aspects of al-Qa’ida ideology and methods, targeting the interests of the ‘far enemy’ (the U.S. and its allies) with suicide bombings (Bali, Marriot Jakarta, Australian Embassy, Bali again) in support of global jihad.

Referred to as Ustadz (“teacher”), Ba’asyir is surrounded by visiting family and students who offer him a daily assortment of news magazines and foods, especially dates, his favorites. His disciples tend to be well-educated, often university graduates, and they wash his clothes. Ba’asyir’s wife visits him once a month, and Ustadz offers to share the food she prepared with his prison mates, including Christians. He is a lanky, bespectacled Hadrami (a descendent from the Hadramawt region of Yemen, like bin Laden and Sungkar) who fasts twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. He is 66 and seemingly in good health. Dressed in a white robe, red sarong and white cap, he is sitting on a wooden chair, one foot up perched on the edge. He exudes politeness and is all smiles, with a strong voice and easy laugh he answers questions as if teaching.

Q: You say that it is fardh ‘ain [an individual obligation] for Muslims to wage jihad against Infidels.

A: There are two types of infidels. The infidel who is against Islam and declares war on Islam is called kafir harbi [enemy infidel]. The second type is kafir dhimmi [protected infidel]. These are people who don’t fight against Islam, but don’t embrace it either and basically remain neutral.

Q: When in Cipinang, did Ustadz meet Father Damanik? [1] Is he kafir dhimmi?

A: Yes, I was visited and was respected by him. I have a plan, if Allah allows me, to pay a visit to his house. That’s what I call “muamalah dunia,” daily relations in the secular life. Because al-Qur’an sura 60 verse 8 says that “Allah encourages us to be kind and just to the people who don’t fight us in religion and don’t help people who fight us” so we are encouraged by Allah to be good and just to them. It means that we can help those who aren’t against us. On these matters we can cooperate, but we also have to follow the norms of Shari’ah. If Shari’ah says not to doing something, then we shouldn’t do it. Shari’ah never prohibited business in the secular world except in very minor things. So it is generally allowed to have business with non-Muslims. We can help each other. For example, if we are sick and they help us, then if they become sick, we should help them. When they die we should accompany their dead bodies to the grave though we can’t pray for them.

Q: What is the principle of Hudaybiyah [the covenant between prophet Muhammad and the People of the Book]?

A: Hudaybiyah means different things according to the legal situation. When Islam is strong, we come to the infidel’s country, not to colonize but to watch over it so that the infidel cannot plan to ruin Islam. Everywhere, infidels conspire to ruin Islam. There is no infidel who wouldn’t destroy Islam if they were given even a small chance. Therefore, we have to be vigilant.

Q: What are the conditions for Islam to be strong?

A: If there is a state, the infidel country must be visited and spied upon. My argument is that if we don’t come to them, they will persecute Islam. They will prevent non-Muslims converting to Islam.

Q: Does being a martyr mean being a suicide bomber?

A: As I explained [the day before] yesterday, there are two types of infidel terms for suicide: first, those who commit suicide out of hopelessness, second, those who commit suicide in order to be remembered as a hero. Both are types of suicide and there is no value in it.

In Islam there are also people who commit suicide out of hopelessness and we call this killing oneself. But if a person defends Islam, and according to his calculations must die in doing so, although he works hard in life, he will still go and die for Islam.The consideration is: “if I do this, will Islam benefit or lose? If I must die and without my dying Islam will not win, then my dying is allowed.” Because to die in jihad is noble. According to Islam, to die is a necessity because everyone dies. But to seek the best death is what we call “Husn ul-Khatimah,” and the best way to die is to die as a shaheed [martyr].

Q: Is it acceptable to postpone a martyrdom action in order to make the hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca]?

A: A martyrdom action cannot be postponed in this case because jihad is more important than making the hajj. For example one of most revered ulema, Ibn Taymiyya, was asked by a rich person:

“O Sheikh, I have so much money but I’m confused about donating my money because there are two needy causes. There are poor people who, if I don’t help, will die of starvation. But if I use the money for this purpose, then the Jihad will lack funding. Therefore, I need your fatwah [religious decision] O Sheikh”

Ibn Taymiyya replied: “Give all your money for jihad. If the poor people die, it is because Allah fated it, because if we lose the Jihad, many more people will die.”

There is no better deed than jihad. None. The highest deed in Islam is jihad. If we commit to jihad, we can neglect other deeds. America wants to wipe out the teaching of jihad through Ahmadiyah [an Islamic school of thought that believes that Pakistan’s Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the Prophet Muhammad’s successor]. Through this organization, America works. Why? Because Ahmadiyah prohibits its followers to undertake jihad because [they argue] jihad is the teaching of Christians. This organization originates from India. Its headquarters are in London, funded by America. Ahmadiyah is America’s tool to destroy Islam, including JIL [Jaringan Islam Liberal, Islamic Liberal Network], an NGO in Jakarta that advocates a liberal form of Islam. It is funded by USAID.

Q: So is the idea to postpone is not allowed in any circumstances, even in order to visit sick parents?

A: No, no. If we are in jihad, the jihad must come first. Unless jihad is in [the state of] fardh kifayah [a collective duty, for the nation]. If jihad is in [the state of] fardh ’ain [an individual duty], jihad must be number one. There is no obligation to ask permission from one’s parents. But even if jihad is still in the fardh kifayah state, such as jihad to spy on infidel countries, Muslims don’t require their parent’s permission.

Q: Can a martyrdom action be permanently abandoned if there is a good chance that the martyr’s family would be killed in a retaliation action? similarly if the community where the martyr is from will also experience retaliation and casualties?

A: That is the risk and the consequence of jihad. If the martyr’s family understands Islam deeply, they will obtain many rewards. Their reward will come, if they understand. A martyr must have ikhlas [sincerity]. The parent who understands this concept must be thankful to Allah. This is the spirit of jihad that most scares the infidels. This is a moral force. According to General De Gaulle, moral force is 80% and actual action only 20% [of successful combat]. For infidels the motivation is to be a hero or [to die for] the nation. Some are even encouraged to drink [alcohol] so that they can become brave.

Russia was badly defeated in Afghanistan. [Afghanistan] is different than Eastern Europe which could be conquered in only a month or two. Russians thought [that they could conquer] Afghanistan in two weeks maximum because its people were backward, isn’t that right? That was Russia’s calculation based on their experience in Eastern Europe. But Afghanistan fought Russia back with their aqidah [by following Islamic doctrine] in the way of jihad. I’ll tell you a story so that you’ll understand. There was an Afghan mother who made cakes. She asked her children to distribute the cakes to the mujahideen. One by one her children were hit by shells on their way to deliver the cakes. When the mujahideen informed her they said : “Dear mother, please be strong because your children are martyred.” [The mother replied]: “I’m not crying for my children but I’m crying because I don’t know who’ll bring my cakes to the mujahideen.” Then one of the mujahideen agreed to replace her children. So, this is the spirit of jihad. You find ikhlas and willingness. Prophet Muhammad said: “I want to make jihad then die, then live again, then do jihad again, then live again, then jihad – for ten times.” This is because of the noble status for Muslims who became shaheed.

Q: Do you think the community which believes in martyrdom
actions cares if the martyr only manages to blow up himself/herself and fails to kill any of the enemy?

A: No, [provided that] the ni’at [intention] to be a shaheed must be for Allah. During battle it is different. Istimata is also different. Still, the whole notion revolves around martyrdom. But in places like London and in America there must be other calculations. In battle it is best to cause as many casualties as possible.

Q: Do you think God favors or cares more for the martyr who manages to kill 100 enemies or one enemy?

A: The value [nilai] and reward [pahala] is the same.

Q: In regard to the global condition, what kind of things can the West, especially America, do to make this world more peaceful. What kind of attitudes must be changed?

A: They have to stop fighting Islam, but that’s impossible
because it is “sunnatullah” [destiny, a law of nature], as Allah has said in the Qur’an. They will constantly be enemies. But they’ll lose. I say this not because I am able to predict the future but they will lose and Islam will win. That was what the Prophet Muhammad has said. Islam must win and Westerners will be destroyed. But we don’t have to make them enemies if they allow Islam to continue to grow so that in the end they will probably agree to be under Islam. If they refuse to be under Islam, it will be chaos. Full stop. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam.

Q: What if they persist?

A: We’ll keep fighting them and they’ll lose. The batil [falsehood] will lose sooner or later. I sent a letter to Bush. I said that you’ll lose and there is no point for you [to fight us]. This [concept] is found in the Qur’an. The other day, I asked my lawyer to send that letter to the [U.S.] embassy. I don’t know whether the embassy passed on my letter to Bush [telling him], “You are useless, you’ll lose.” There are verses in the Qur’an that say, “You spend so much money yet you’ll be disappointed.” The verse is clear so I’m not some one who can predict the future but I get the information from Allah, so I’ll never be sad because I believe the time will come. Still, I feel that the Ummah [Muslim community] has a problem now. If the Ummah loses the [current] battle it isn’t because of Islam. A Muslim, as long as he is not “broken” [and remains committed to Allah’s rule] will get help from Allah.

Q: How about using nuclear weapons by Muslims, is it justified?

A: Yes, if necessary. But the Islamic Ummah should seek to minimalize [the intensity of the fighting]. Allah has said in verse 8 chapter 60 that we should equip ourself with weapon power – that is an order – but preferably to scare and not to kill our enemy. The main goal is to scare them. If they are scared they won’t bother us, and then we won’t bother them as well. But if they persist, we have to kill them. In this way, Prophet Muhammad sought to minimalize the fighting.

Q: In your personal view, what do you think of bombings in our homeland, namely the Bali, Marriott and Kuningan bombings?

A: I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had a good intention, that is, Jihad in Allah’s way, the aim of the jihad is to look for blessing from Allah. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also. But their calculations are debatable. My view is that we should do bombings in conflict areas not in peaceful areas. We have to target the place of the enemy, not countries where many Muslims live.

Q: What do you mean by “wrong calculation,” that the victims
included Muslims?

A: That was one them. In my calculation, if there are bombings
in peaceful areas, this will cause fitnah [discord] and other parties will be involved. This is my opinion and I could be wrong. Yet I still consider them mujahid. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their attacks could be considered as self-defense.

Q: Does that mean you think they didn’t attack?

A: No, they didn’t attack because they defended themselves. They shouldn’t be punished. In Bali where 200 people died, it was America’s bomb. That was a major attack and Amrozi [the Bali plotter who bought the explosives] doesn’t have the capability to do that. [2]

Q: Did Amrozi tell you this himself?

A: He himself was surprised to see the explosion. When he said that it was Allah’s help he was right but he didn’t make that bomb. America did. There is much evidence to this effect and so the police dare not continue their investigations. According to England’s expert, that bomb was not Amrozi’s bomb. You should ask Fauzan. He knows this subject. That bomb was a CIA Jewish bomb. The Mossad cooperates with the CIA. [3] I had an exchange of views with the police and they didn’t say anything. I said to them, “You are stupid to punish Amrozi if he really knows how to make such a bomb. You should hire him to be a military consultant, because there is no military or police person [in Indonesia] who can make such a bomb.” However, when I asked Ali Imron [4] in the court he said: “Yes, I did it” I believe him [that he made one of the smaller bombs that went off]. A bomb expert from Australia said that anyone who believes that Amrozi and friends made that [bigger] bomb is an idiot; [this is also the opinion of] a bomb expert from England whose comments I read in a magazine. If Amrozi really did make that bomb, he deserves the Nobel Prize. So, the death penalty is not fair.

Q: I want to ask your opinion of Nasir Abas’s book where he said that you are the Emir of JI? [5]

A: This is a traitor, a betrayer. I was in Malaysia and I had a jama’ah [congregation] the name of which was Jama’ah Sunnah. We just studied Islam.

Q: Were you aware that Nasir Abas was your student?

A: Yes, I was. But he was not the only one there; he also studied with Ustadz Hasyim Gani. I joined his group. He died. I think Nassir Abas’s book is [written] on orders from the police and for money.

Q: According to you, the book is incorrect, especially on Jemaah Islamiyah and you being its Emir?

A: This is not a court and the real court has failed to prove it. [6]

Q: What was Nasir Abas’s motivation in writing that book?

A: I don’t know. But basically he got orders from the police and received some money. I think that was his motivation. He doesn’t have the courage to meet me. If I meet him, I’ll send him to do jihad in Chechnya or to the Southern Philippines so that Allah will accept his remorse [taubah]. He invented his own story.

Q: I heard that Nasir Abas came here. Did he meet you?

A: No, he came here to meet others.

Q: If I may know, when was the first time you heard the name
al-Qa’ida?

A: After the police questioned me; during the time I was filing a law suit against TIME magazine. Do you remember when I did that? They wanted me to take 100 million rupiah to stop the case but I didn’t. But I don’t know anymore about the case. During that time, I was under suspicion but I wasn’t arrested. That was the first time I heard the name al-Qa’ida. [7] A policeman from the intelligence section whose name I forget interrogated me from morning until afternoon. He asked about that name [al-Qa’ida]. That was the first time I heard of it. Before, I never heard of it. I went to Pakistan but I didn’t hear that name. I went there to accompany my son [8] and meet some Arabs but I never heard that name.

Q: How about Shaykh Osama bin Laden?

A: I heard his name a long time ago. I read his writings, saw his tapes and met Arabs in Pakistan who talked about him when I accompanied my son, Abdur Rahim. Who didn’t know Osama? He was a mujahid against the Soviets and he had his own military that he funded by himself. He was a hero who America also praised. He was then also supported by America. America was piggybacking on him because America didn’t have the courage to fight against the Soviets. They were afraid of the Soviets and they relied on the Afghans.

Q: Have you ever met him?

A: No, no. I want to though. After my release, I hope I can meet him. [9]

Q: Where will you find him?

A: If he still exists – but how could I? On Osama, my stand in court was clear. I have sympathy for his struggle. Osama is Allah’s soldier. When I heard his story, I came to the conclusion that he’s mujahid, a soldier of Allah.

Q: So you will always be on his side?

A: Many say this and Osama is right. His tactics and calculations may sometimes be wrong, he’s an ordinary human being after all. I don’t agree with all of his actions. He encouraged people to do bombings. I don’t agree with that. He said that JI followed his fatwah. His fatwah said that all Americans must be killed wherever they can be found, because America deserves it. Therefore [according to bin Laden] if Muslims come across Americans, they have to attack them. Osama believes in total war. This concept I don’t agree with. If this occurs in an Islamic country, the fitnah [discord] will be felt by Muslims. But to attack them in their country [America] is fine.

Q: So it means that the fight against America will never end?

A: Never, and this fight is compulsory. Muslims who don’t hate America sin. What I mean by America is George Bush’s regime. There is no iman [belief] if one doesn’t hate America. There are three ways of attacking: with your hand, your mouth and your heart.

Q: Does this mean America’s government? Its policies?

A: If its citizens are good that’s fine, especially the Muslim citizens. They are our brothers. Non-Muslims are also fine as long as they don’t bother us. A witness at my trial, Frederick Burks, wrote that he’s against Bush. [10]

Q: How can the American regime and its policies change?

A: We’ll see. As long as there is no intention to fight us and Islam continues to grow there can be peace. This is the doctrine of Islam. Islam can’t be ruled by others. Allah’s law can’t be under human law. Allah’s law must stand above human law. All laws must be under Islamic law. This is what the infidels fail to recognize, that’s what America doesn’t like to see. You should read a book, “The Face of Western Civilization” by Adian Husaini. It’s a good book, a thick one. The conclusion of the book is that Western scholars hold an anti-Islamic doctrine. It is true there will be a clash of civilizations. The argumentation is correct that there will be a clash between Islam and the infidels. There is no [example] of Islam and infidels, the right and the wrong, living together in peace.

FOOTNOTES

1. Father Rinaldy Damanik is the leader of the Christian community in Poso District, Sulawesi where violence between Muslims and Christians led to hundreds of deaths on both sides between late 1998 and 2002 (and where intermittent violence continues to this day). I interviewed Father Damanik in his home in Tentena on August 10, 2005. It turns out that Father Damanik shared the same jail cell block successively for some months (September 2002 – January 2003) with Reda Seyam (legendary Al-Qa’ida film-maker), Imam Samudra (the JI computer expert condemned to death for planning the meetings and choosing the targets for the Bali bombings) and Ba’asyir. Damanik befriended all three. There are smiling photos of Reda and Damanik together, and Samudra and Ba’asyir have both confirmed their warm feelings toward Father Damanik. Damanik used to call Ba’asyir “Opa” (grandfather) and Ba’asyir’s wife would bring gifts of food to Damanik. They discussed
injustice, Shari’ah, faith in God, suicide attacks and opposing America. According to Dam- anik, they found much agreement on the sources of injustice but disagreed strongly over the means to overcome it.
2. Amrozi bin Nurahasyim was sentenced to death by an Indonesian court for having plotted the bombing of the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali along with Imam Samudra and Amrozi’s older brother, Mukhlas.
3. The story about the CIA-Mossad conspiracy is widespread among JI leaders and foot soldiers and (usually with a laugh) used to illustrate that that JI is itself a concoction of “Jewish Intelligence.”
4. Ali Imron, the younger brother of Mukhlas and Amrozi, was sentenced to life in prison for the Bali bombings after having
expressed remorse for his role in the attacks.
5. Muhammad Nasir bin Abas, who trained Bali bombers Imam Samudra and Ali Imron, received his religious instruction from Sungkar and Ba’asyir in Malaysia before they sent him in 1991 for three years to Towrkhan military camp in Afghanistan. He became a top JI military trainer but also gave religious instruction. In April 2001 Ba’asyir appointed Abas head of Mantiqi 3, one of JI’s strategic area divisions, which covered the geographical region of the Philippines and Sulawesi and was responsible for military training and arms supply. Abas turned state’s evidence in Ba’asyir’s trial, outlining the structure of JI and Ba’asyir’s position as Emir. But Abas refused to openly condemn Ba’asyir or accuse him of ordering any terrorist operations, always respectfully referring to Ba’asyir as Ustadz. In July 2005 Abas published Membongkar Jamaah Islamiyah (Unveiling Jamaah Islamiyah). The first part of the book details JI’s organization, ideology and strategy. The second part is a rebuttal to Samudra’s own book, Aku Melawan Terroris, and what Abas believes to be a tendentious use of the Quran and Hadith to justify suicide bombing and violence against fellow Muslims and civilians.
In between my interviews with Ba’asyir I interviewed Abas, who says that he quit JI over Ba’asyir’s refusal to condemn or contain the operations and influence of Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali). In January 2000, Hambali hosted a meeting in an apartment owned by JI member Yazid Sufaat in Kuala Lumpur that included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 9/11 highjackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf
al-Hamzi. As Abas tells it, Hambali, who was JI’s main liaison with Al-Qa’ida and a close friend and disciple of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was given control of Mantiqi 1, which covered the geographical region of Malaysia and environs and was strategically responsible for JI finances and economic development. But Hambali was dissatisfied being saddled with the “economic wing” (iqtisod) and wanted to play a more active role in the conflict zones. The then-leader of Mantiqi 3, Mustafa (now in custody) blocked Hambali from muscling in on his area but Hambali was able to send fighters to fight Christians in Ambon (Maluku) in 1999, which was under Mantiqi 2 (covering most of Indonesia and strategically responsible for JI recruitment and organizational development). Encouraged by success in heating up the Maluku crisis, Hambali decided first to extend his (and al-Qa’ida’s) conception of jihad to all of Indonesia
(including the 1999 bombing of the Atrium Mall in Jakarta, the August 2000 bombing of the Philippines Ambassador’s house, and 17 coordinated Church bombings on Christmas eve 2000) and then to “globalize” the jihad by enlisting suicide bombers to hit Western targets and interests (including a failed plot to blow up Singapore’s American, Australian and Israeli embassies in
December 2001, and the successful 2002 Bali bombings and 2003 suicide attack on Jakarta’s Marriott hotel). Although Abas argues that JI shouldn’t be outlawed because many in JI reject Al-Qa’ida’s vision of global jihad, in fact JI’s infrastructure and leadership continue to protect (with safe houses) and condone (as “self-defense”) efforts by the likes of master-bomber Dr. Azhari bin Hussain and his constant sidekick, JI’s top recruiter Nurdin Nur Thop, who some tell me recently established a suicide squad, called Thoifah Muqatilah, for large actions against Western interests.
6. According to Abas, JI’s essential organization and ideology is outlined in a set of general guidelines for the Jemaah Islamiyah Struggle (Pedoman Umum Perjuangan
al-Jamaah al-Islamiyah, PUPJI), a 44-page manual that contains a constitution, outlines the roles of office bearers and gives details of how meetings must be organized (e.g., about what to do if a quorum cannot be obtained in the leadership council). The guidelines declare that anyone who adheres to fundamental Islamic principles that are devoid of corruption, deviation (e.g. Sufism) or innovation, can take the bayat (oath of allegiance) to the Emir of JI and become a JI member. Although JI would be, in principle, open to anyone who meets these conditions, in fact only carefully selected individuals, including the Mantiqi leaders, were allowed to take the bayat and obtain copies of the PUPJI. Such individuals generally (but not always) would have undergone previous training in Afghanistan or graduated at the top of their class in courses that Sungkar and Ba’asyir designed for JI recruitment (though designation of courses as JI was unknown to potential recruitees). Abas fulfilled both conditions. Although many people (including some Afghan Alumni I have interviewed) think of themselves as JI, or are not certain of whether or not they
belong to JI, Abas insists that if they did not formally take the bayat they are considered sympathizers or supporters of JI but not members (just as some prisoners at Guantánamo are sincerely uncertain as to whether or not they belong to al-Qa’ida if they did not formally take the bayat to Bin Laden).
Abas says the PUPJI was drafted by a committee, including Ba’asyir, and then formally approved by Sungkar as the basis for JI. When asked about the PUPJI in an earlier (untaped part of the) interview, Ba’asyir claimed, on the one hand, that the PUPJI manual was planted by police and intelligence services but, on the other hand, that it contains sound principles modeled on the doctrine of the Egyptian Islamic Group (Gama’at Islamiyah). Abas says that the manual also contains elements of Indonesia’s military organization, particularly in regard to the ranking of personnel (binpur) and responsibility for territory (bintur). He adds that although the PUPJI allows the JI to conduct itself as a “secret organization” (tanzim sir) – and conceal its doctrine, membership and operations from public view – it does not allow the practice of taqiyyah (dissimulation) to extend to lying to the (Muslim) public (another reason Abas gives for his leaving JI).
7. Other members of JI who openly
acknowledge sympathy with bin Laden and Qa’ida say much the same thing. For example, I interviewed the JI member who founded the first mujahidin training camp in 2000 for the conflict in Poso, Sulawesi. He had earlier been sent by JI founder Abdullah Sungkar during the Soviet-Afghan War to train in Abu Sayyafs’s Ihtihad camp in Sada, Pakistan and to study with Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden’s mentor and the person who first formulated the notion of “Al-Qa’ida sulbah” (“the strong base”) as a vanguard for jihad. This JI member also acknowledges hosting Khalid Sheikh Muhammad at his home in Jakarta for a month in 1996. Yet, he claims never to have heard of “al-Qa’ida” applied to a specific organization or group headed by Bin Laden until 9/11.
8. Ba’asyir sent his younger son, Abdul Rahim, to the Afghanistan border during the Soviet-Afghan war to spend time under the wing of Aris Sumarsono (aka Zulkarnaen, who became JI’s operations chief) later enrolling Rahim in an Islamic high school in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Seeking a stricter salafist education for his son, Ba’asyir directed Rahim in the mid-nineties to Sana’a, Yemen, to study under Abdul Madjid al-Zindani (like Abdullah Azzam, Zindani was a legend among self-proclaimed “Afghan Alumni” who fought the Soviets). By 1999, Rahim was in Malaysia and soon under Hambali’s stewardship. Abdul Rahim now operates freely in Indonesia (reports in August 2005, place him in Aceh, heading a new charity, Camp Taochi Foundation) but he is suspected of having taken over JI’s contacts with Al-Qa’ida remnants after Hambali’s capture.
9. Ba’asyir’s statement that he never met bin Laden is contradicted by testimony from other JI members, both free and in custody. In the following letter (authenticated by Indonesian intelligence) dated August 3, 1998 and addressed to regional jihadi leaders, Ba’asyir and Sungkar state they are acting on bin Laden’s behalf to advance “the Muslim world’s global jihad” (jabhah Jihadiyah Alam Islamy) against“ the Jews and Christians:” Malaysia, 10 Rabiul Akhir 1419 [August 3, 1998] From: Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir To: Al Mukarrom, respected clerics, teachers (ustadz), sheikhs All praises upon God who has said: “The Jews and Christians will never be satisfied until you follow their way of worship” Al Baqarah: 120 Praise and peace upon Prophet Muhammad who has said: “If I’m still alive, I’ll surely expel the Jews and Christians out of the Arabian peninsula” And may God bless us and any of his followers who want to follow his orders.Respected clerics, teachers and sheikhs. This letter is to convey a message from Sheikh Osama Bin Laden to all of you. We send you this letter because we can’t visit and see you directly. However, we send our envoy, Mr. Ghaus Taufiq [a Darul Islam commander in Sumatra], to bring this letter personally to all of you. We also attach Bin Laden’s written message in this letter and Bin Laden also sends these messages to all of you:
1. Bin Laden conveys his regards (Assalamu’ alaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh)
2. Bin Laden says that right now, after “Iman” (to believe in God), the most important obligation for all Moslems in the world is to work hard to free the Arabian Peninsula from the occupation of Allah’s enemy America (Jews and Christians).
This obligation is mathalabusy syar’i (a consequence of the shari’ah) that every Moslem must not consider this obligation to be a simple matter. Prophet Muhammad, although he was sick, ordered the Muslim Ummah to prioritize their obligation to expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore, as the Prophet has said, the Muslim Ummah must take this obligation seriously. It is very important for the Muslim world to work very hard to free the Arabian Peninsula from colonization by the infidel Americans.
If we can free the Arabian peninsula as masdarul diinul Islam (the source of Islam) and makorrul haromain (Holy Mecca) from occupation by the infidel Americans, Inshallah (God willing) our struggle to uphold Islam everywhere on God’s land will be successful. Stagnation and the difficulty in upholding Islam at present stems from the occupation of the Arabian Peninsula by the infidel America. This great struggle must be put into action by the Ummah (Muslim community) all over the world under the leadership and guidance of clerics in their respective countries. Under such leadership, we will prevail.
The first step of this struggle is issuing fatwah (Islamic edict) from clerics all over the world addressed to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The edict must remind the King what Prophet Muhammad said about the obligation for the Muslim Ummah to expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula. Otherwise, this world will suffer a catastrophe. These edicts will give strong encouragement and influence to the King of Arabia. This is the message from Osama bin Laden conveyed to all of you.
Sheikh Osama bin Laden really wants to visit all clerics and Islamic preachers everywhere in the world to share his views so that there will be a common understanding about this momentous struggle. In the end, we will have similar movements simultaneously across the world. However, Bin Laden realizes that the situation outside his sanctuary is not presently safe. He also awaits your visit with his deep respect so that this great struggle may proceed. These are Bin Laden’s messages that we convey to all of you.
We take this opportunity to explain certain facts about Bin Laden:
• At present, Sheikh Osama stays in Afghanistan, in the Kandahar area, under the protection of Taliban
• He doesn’t oppose either the Taliban or Mujahideen. He’s trying to unify both groups.
From his camp in Kandahar, Bin Laden organizes plans to expel infidel America from the Arabian Peninsula by inviting ulemas and preachers from all over the world. In this camp, Bin Laden is accompanied by a number of Arab mujahideen, especially those who previously fought in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and these mujahideen prepare to form “jabhah Jihadiyah Alam Islamy” (The global jihadi coalition in the Moslem world) to fight against America. The above information is about Sheikh Osama Bin Laden that you should know.
If you have the time and commitment to visit Sheikh Osama, Inshallah, we can help you meet him safely.
We praise God to all of you for your attention and cooperation.
Jazakumullah khoirul jaza (Thanks to God the best thanks) Wassalamu’alaukim, Your brother in Allah
Abdullah Sungkar Abu Bakar Ba’asyir
10. Frederick Burks appeared at Ba’asyir’s trial testifying that he had interpreted at a 2002 meeting about Ba’asyir between an envoy of President George W. Bush and Indonesia’s then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri. Burks said the unidentified envoy accused Ba’asyir of involvement in a series of church bombings in Indonesia in 2000 and asked for the cleric to be secretly arrested and handed over to US authorities. Megawati declined, he said.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 05

DOWNFOR THE COUNT
The heavyweight courtroom title fight of the world

As a journalist, one’s job is to remain impartial. But MARIA SLADE admits she’s never struggled so hard to retain her objectivity as she did covering the High Court hearing into heavyweight professional boxer David Tua’s bitter and expensive dispute with his former manager Kevin Barry, and former business manager Martin Pugh

I came to the Tua story cold. I knew little about the case, and even less about the venality of the professional boxing world. But it was decided in the newsroom that this was a news, as opposed to a sport, story, and I was dispatched to Auckland’s High Court.

“Take what boxing people say with a grain of salt and keep your hand on your wallet,” joked a sports journalist colleague.

But this is New Zealand. The David Tua/Kevin Barry partnership, albeit now soured, was kiwi sporting salt-of-the-earth. The dirty dealings of the boxing ring had surely no more taken hold here than the Mafia had.
One look at the way Barry and his cohort Martin Pugh had dressed to come to court and I realised I didn’t know what I was dealing with.

Bleached and greased hair, gold medallions, winkle-picker brogues with white socks and shirts more suitable for a night out clubbing. If they’d wanted to portray the image of wily, slimy creatures that had crawled out from beneath boxing’s nasty underbelly, they were going the right way about it.

Contrast this with the Tua entourage. David Tua and his cousin-turned-manager, former rugby and league star Inga Tuigamala, turned up each morning like five-year-olds on the first day of school. Neatly pressed in business shirts and ties atop black ie-faitagas (formal skirts worn by Samoan men), they sat through every minute of the proceedings. At their sides were their smartly dressed wives, and constantly surrounding them was a guard of friends, family members and boxing comrades. Supporters came and went as the week wore on. David Tua long ago won the public’s hearts and minds in what it perceived as his greatest fight.

Baby-faced, he told the court he was “just a fighter” and that Kevin Barry attended to every other detail of his professional boxing life. “You rely on your manager so you can just fight. I signed things exactly as they were put in front of me. Kevin was my trusted manager.”

David Tua said Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh had a plan. “They talked about a company, but I didn’t know what that was all about.”

What that was about was the trio’s Exclusive Management Agreement which states the company, Tuaman Inc, is owned 50% by David Tua, and 25% each by Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh. Tua was under the impression Tuaman Inc was his company. So was company accountant Jennie Grant. “I was led to believe that the company was David Tua’s, and only his,” she told the court. “For that reason alone the books I was trying to keep were misconceived.”

The boxer described the day in April 2001 when he went with Martin Pugh to look at the asset at the heart of the dispute – the multi-million-dollar, 51 hectare beach front property at Pakiri, north of Auckland. “I thought it was heaven, it reminded me of home in Samoa. Right away I wanted to buy it. I wanted it for myself and my family. I could see myself retiring there and growing a bit of taro.” Tua said Pugh told him to buy it through Tuaman Inc for tax purposes. “He said he was trying to protect me. But I never knew how that was supposed to work.”

The Pugh and Barry camp argue through their shares in Tuaman Inc they own equivalent slices of Pakiri, and that the trio’s plan had always been to invest Tuaman Inc funds in property.

David Tua maintains there was no talk of Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh buying the property with him. “There was never a ‘me and you’ or a ‘we’ll buy it’. The conversation was about the land being bought for me.”

As he spoke to the court I thought, can a man who earned millions of dollars by knocking people out really be that naïve, or is this beguiling innocence a great act?

Trying to remain objective, I also thought that perhaps there’s a certain style one becomes accustomed to living in Las Vegas, and this could explain the impression of Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh. After all they move in the sorts of circles where people keep tigers as pets. Then Barry and Pugh opened their mouths.

Throughout his lengthy cross-examination by David Tua’s lawyer Tony Molloy QC, Martin Pugh was petulant and argumentative. He sat virtually with his back to the lawyer and refused to look at him. At times he patronisingly repeated his replies syllable by syllable as if Molloy was unable to understand them. Kevin Barry was defiant. Both frequently attempted to hammer home a point by talking on and over their cross-examiner. The irritated Molloy raised his voice on more than one occasion, and at one point shouted at Barry: “Will you answer the questions I ask and be quiet the rest of the time!” To which Barry cheekily replied: “I’ve never seen you so angry.” Tony Molloy later remarked, “You have more soliloquies in you Mr Barry than Shakespeare.”

A lot of what Martin Pugh said was nonsense.

Molloy questioned Pugh closely on what he knew of his responsibilities as sole director and therefore the board of Tuaman Inc. Tony Forlong, the accountant Tua hired in July 2003 as the relationship between boxer and managers dissolved, had earlier given evidence that Martin Pugh was “well out of his depth” in running a company. He needn’t have bothered.

It was a truth Pugh revealed all by himself as Molloy’s cross-examination progressed.

Pugh disputed the court-appointed accountants’ calculation that between 2002 and 2004, he and Kevin Barry respectively took $1.4 million and $1.2 million out of Tuaman Inc. The QC queried him about the absence of signed and audited accounts for Tuaman Inc for those years. Molloy asked him if he’d had alternative accounts prepared by professionals of a comparable stature to the court-appointed ones, to support his argument.

Pugh claimed that he had but that the court would not allow him to produce them.

Martin Pugh: “The figures I put in front of the court I provided to Price Waterhouse Coopers for their validity check which this court has ordered me not to refer to.”

Tony Molloy: “Where are the accounts? I’m not asking you about validity checks, whatever they are”

Later in the exchange he asserted that no professionally prepared and audited accounts were done because “taxation is decided by the shareholders of the company. The court-appointed accountants have taken the view of undoing three years of methodology of accounting the company followed.” Molloy was moved to remark that it was a stance every New Zealand company would love to take.

When Tony Molloy asked him if he’d ever taken expert tax advice he replied yes, from myself. When then asked what qualified him to provide such advice, there followed a long discourse on how there’s a simple principle involved of paying a percentage of the company’s income in tax, and standard tax return forms are available on the internet. Pugh claimed he adopted a “no harm, no foul” policy with the IRD.

Kevin Barry’s knowledge of company law was little better.
Tony Molloy: “You poured scorn in your brief on the idea that David Tua didn’t understand about shares in the company. What I would like to know is whether you understand. The impression I get from your affidavits is that you think a 25% shareholding in a company entitles you to 25% of the company’s income and 25% of its profit. Is that what you think?”

Kevin Barry: “Yes that’s right.”

The proceedings came down to credibility. It was clear Tuaman Inc was owned half by David Tua and a quarter each by Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh, and that Pakiri was owned by Tuaman Inc. The nexus of the Tua case was the legal principle of express trust – that David Tua had conferred trust on Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh to buy the land on his behalf. The heart of the Barry and Pugh argument was that this had never been put in writing – indeed, it had never even been expressed in those terms.

Martin Pugh’s questionable accounting was therefore not directly relevant to the issue of who owns Pakiri, but it served to highlight the kind of person before the court.

As such, his habit of forging signatures and creatively moving Tuaman Inc funds around were central to their case.

Martin Pugh admitted to Tony Molloy that he had forged signatures on at least two occasions. Once was when he forged Tuaman company accountant Jennie Grant’s signature on a Companies Office document. On another occasion he ‘cut and pasted’ middleweight boxer Maselino Masoe’s signature on to a fight promotion agreement.

The admissions came with no apparent shame. “I received no benefit,” Pugh said. “In closing,” he said grandly, and tried to raise the saga of Prime Minister Helen Clark signing an art work she had not created. Presiding judge Justice Williams cut him off.

Another incident raised by Tony Molloy went to the heart of Martin Pugh’s credibility. In December 2001 around $925,000 was transferred from Tuaman Inc to a company in Vanuatu called Sports Tech set up by Richard Gregory, a friend of Pugh’s. Some of that money was used to set up debit cards for Pugh, his partner Sally Cross, Kevin Barry and his wife, and others.

The sum remaining was around $809,000. The next month $809,000 was transferred back to Auckland to the Baron and Lunar Trust, a family trust associated with Sally Cross. Sally Cross then paid off business debts amounting to $809,000. Martin Pugh conceded the matching amounts looked strange, but said there was nothing “sinister” about it. He claimed he had 200 pages of documents to explain the deal, which he would present at a future trial. “Once you see the documents it will make sense to the court. I do not wish to play my hand in regard to that.”

Martin Pugh variously described the steps in the transaction as a loan, a bond, and then a guarantee. Molloy put it to him that this story was a cover-up for the misappropriation of funds from Tuaman. He denied it.

David Tua told the court he had “a funny feeling” about Martin Pugh. He said it was Kevin Barry’s idea to involve him. “He (Kevin) said he was a smart businessman, and could be the ideal guy to manage the
finances and make investments for me. I trusted Kevin. He really wanted Marty on board, so I gave in.”

In his closing address, Tony Molloy said: “Having seen and heard Pugh and his admissions of forgery and lying, and his disdain for the laws of the land that ordinary conscientious citizens regard as an obligation to observe, let alone company directors, it is not at all surprising that Mr Tua didn’t like Mr Pugh.”

Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh fought back hard on the credibility battlefield. They claim it was the Tua camp which was planning to shaft them. The Tuas came to the management duo in January 2001 wanting changes to the EMA, such as the inclusion of a clause allowing David Tua to get a lawyer’s approval before any contract relating to his affairs was concluded. “Unbeknown to Kevin Barry and I, David Tua with his parents and their lawyer were plotting since September 2000 (the Lennox Lewis fight was in November 2000) to terminate the EMA and deprive Tuaman Inc and Kevin and I of our shares and substantial earnings,” Pugh said in his brief of evidence. “No wonder David Tua performed so poorly in losing his World Title Fight against Lennox Lewis,” Barry said. “He must have been feeling guilty as hell.”

They also claimed there were no missing Tua millions, that David Tua had spent it all, and in fact he owes Tuaman Inc. “David told us that he did not want his family, or the family solicitor or his Church, knowing how much money he had as they would have spent it all and that’s a fact (in the end the family and David spent it all anyway),” Kevin Barry states in his brief.

Martin Pugh claims David Tua’s now wife, Robina Sitene, gave the government an old address so she could continue to collect welfare while living with and being well supported by the boxer. “David would get request from Bina or his family all the time, and I mean all the time, to pay bills,” he said.

Jennie Grant sees matters another way. She told the court Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh simply helped themselves to Tuaman funds. In contrast she said David Tua had to come to her for every small amount of money he needed. “How degrading, that man who had earned millions, doesn’t even have his own money.”

Martin Pugh and Kevin Barry allege that matters deteriorated to the point of a High Court hearing because of “women’s scorn”.

“The only conclusion that I can see is that it now seems to be about Jennie Grant, Robina Sitene and their need to “beat him” (Martin) at something, I don’t know what, and trying to justify their belief that David still had millions that he hadn’t spent,” Kevin Barry said.
“I was adamant that this huha had arisen because of Jennie’s sacking and Bina’s finding out that she couldn’t get her hands on David’s money (because he and his family had spent it).”

And so the personal insults flew. The Tuas no doubt had plenty they would have liked to fling back, but they didn’t. Not once.
The court will no doubt decide on sound legal principles who the rightful owner of Pakiri is. Having sat through the week-long hearing, I have a firm view of who morally should win this most colourful of bouts.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: Nov 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
We’re all fundamentalists now

They’re just another raving bunch of fundamentalists! Now there’s a phrase you’ll hear on talk radio if you listen hard enough. Fundamentalist. The very word, in its modern context, sounds kind of hick, kind of backwoods Kentucky. Kind of downtown Mecca. It is used, primarily, as a pejorative – an insult against those deserving of the label ‘fundamentalist’. Heck, I’ve even taken a liking to it myself as a means of describing diehard secular humanists: atheist fundamentalist fruitbats.

But what does ‘fundamentalist’ really mean? It means somebody with a strong worldview. Somebody who is confident that they understand the world and their place in it, and therefore somebody not likely to be swayed from that worldview easily. A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the reality of objective truth.

At a shallow level, every single one of us is actually a religious fundamentalist. That’s because whatever you believe about the universe and your own place in it, your belief is a faith-based one even if you are an atheist scientist. You may fervently believe that life is a product of random evolution and natural selection. But in a billion lifetimes you will never be able to absolutely prove it. You may believe that God created the earth in six days, but this too is ultimately a matter of faith. You may believe in reincarnation, karmic destiny and the alleged wisdom of Shirley Maclaine and whatever she’s channeling this month. This too is a matter of belief.

You may believe that ‘fundamentalism’ should be discouraged by the government, perhaps even banned, because it threatens your own ideals of tolerance and good vibes. But you too would be guilty of fundamentalism, of imposing your own desire not to be exposed to someone else’s beliefs above another person’s right to listen to free speech.

You see, there is no one in your home or office who, deep down, is not a religious fundamentalist of some kind. Once you scrape away the layers and the distractions, you are left with a person’s core beliefs about how the world is or how it should be. You might be a gay fundamentalist, or a green fundamentalist, or a New Age fundamentalist. Every time you stand up and venture an opinion on how things should be, you are vocalizing your fundamentalism.

So is that wrong? No. To deny our inherent rights to our fundamental beliefs is to deny that which makes us human, rather than slaves.
How then, do we tackle fundamentalism that manifests itself in a bad way, like Islamic fundamentalism? Only by recognizing that while everyone is fundamentalist, not all fundamental beliefs are right. Once upon a time, it was an established religious belief to conduct human sacrifice, even cannibalism. Should we shy away from confronting such evils just because we might offend a cannibal? Clearly not. Is the evil of cannibalism any less evil if we’re dealing with an army of 100,000 cannibals instead of 10? Does the fact that something evil is popular make it inherently right all of a sudden?

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, the saying goes. The truth is, though, that if they did nothing then they were not truly good.
We are all fundamentalists. Nothing wrong with that. But not all fundamental beliefs are created equal.

Here’s a cold hard truth: the only hope for disarming Islamic fundamentalism lies in the advance of Christian fundamentalism. The Passion of the Christ was a huge hit in the Arab world, because it was the first time they’d seen forgiveness, instead of eye-for-an-eye. Mel Gibson struck a bigger blow for world peace in one movie, than all the Middle Eastern summits put together.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: May 05, AU Edition

TYPE-A FOR EFFORT
A little hard work never killed anyone, but coping poorly with it can do some real damage

Keep working like this and you’ll give yourself an ulcer!’ The year is 1982, and all they do is work, work, work. Late into the night and early into the morning on this damn fool scheme of theirs. These are driven men, mavericks, pursuing their research until finally one of them gets an ulcer.

And what was the grail these blokes were chasing? Proof that stress and personality are not the major factor in the development of peptic ulcers. The men were Australian doctors J. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, and they intentionally gave Marshall an ulcer to prove their hypothesis, namely, that the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori (and not worry or stress) is what causes ulcers. It took a long while to persuade the medical world of this, so it is little wonder that many amongst us still believe stress causes ulcers, amongst other things.
Science has been hard at work on the stress-and-health connection for some time now, and it’s now very clear that – for rats – being confined in a small cage with lots of other rats, an unpredictable food supply, and the odd electric shock is definitely not a healthy way to live.

Human studies are not nearly so conclusive. For every study that sees a link, another one doesn’t. Time for some hair-splitting.

So-called ‘type-A’ personalities are hostile, impatient and competitive. Picture a red-faced fellow running across the road (can’t wait for the traffic lights), yakking into the mobile phone that is wedged between his shoulder and ear while at the same time shoveling a burger and coffee into his mouth. This type of individual is often described as a workaholic. He (or she) is also probably very good at his or her job, very likely feared and reviled by employees and underlings and, in all probability, proudly describes himself (or herself) as a ‘Type-A personality’. Everyone he or she knows warns them of their health risk. (Then again, when did you last meet someone who described themselves as calm and worry free? I just took an on-line stress test, and apparently my low score indicated that I am in severe denial about my stress. I think they were trying to sell me something.)

But if this hard-charging type-A isn’t destined for a stomach ulcer, then what kind of problems does he or she face? Although it runs contrary to conventional wisdom, having a ‘Type-A’ personality in itself has also repeatedly been shown not to cause heart disease. (In hospitals the joke is that this must be true, because cardiologists do not, as a rule, have particularly sanguine personalities). More often than not, it is how people choose to cope with the stress that brings them to grief.

Aggressive and high-energy workaholics do many of things to deal with their stress, and smoking and drinking (often a lot) is at the top of many a type-A’s list of hobbies. Thus high stress often appears to cause illness, when in fact it doesn’t. The stress causes bad behaviours, and the bad behaviours cause health problems.

Did I mention that there would be hair-splitting?

But this is a useful distinction, because behaviours like smoking can be changed. Of course, if society stopped rewarding angry men who work hard with nice jobs and lots of money that kind of behaviour might also diminish, but that’s another story.

The counter-argument that turns this on its head is one I hear a lot, and basically goes like this: ‘If I don’t deal with my aggressive feelings by yelling at people and slamming my phone down, all those repressed feelings will make me even more sick, even give me cancer’. Nice try, but no. Instead, it’s the same old story: genetics, diet, environment, smoking, booze, plus some other factors for some specific types, all cause cancer. Personality doesn’t.

But, despite the lack of a connection to heart and stomach problems, too much stress is definitely not healthy. Remember learning about the body’s fight or flight response in high school biology? Sense danger; flood body with stress hormones like adrenaline; in crease heart rate; make breathing rapid and shallow; constrict arteries near the skin (to curtail blood loss); increase blood pressure; release energy stores. All very, very good things to do if you happen to be cornered in a dark alley or need to flee a lion on the African veldt. But these physical responses to stress are of very little help in most offices – unless it is a particularly bad day.

One stress hormone that does have an impact on health is cortisol. This stuff raises blood pressure, increasing the work the heart has to do (fine in the short term, bad in the long) and suppresses the immune system, which means that it can lead to more infections and the like. Lots of cortisol, lots of the time, leads to lots of irritating colds and flus. So chill out. Take a deep breath and breathe out slowly. Now try to keep your blood pressure low and brace yourself for one last little nag.

And don’t even bother with ‘I don’t have time to…’ speech. If you’re a busy person, you don’t have time to be sick either, so take the time to look after yourself now.

Here’s the deal: Stress isn’t good or bad. But lots and lots of stress is bad. Go fix it so that disasters don’t happen constantly in your life, or failing that, teach yourself to cope better when they do. Practice saying the words, ‘thank you for telling me,’ instead of ‘what!!!!! How the !@#$...’ This works equally well for ‘Mummy, the dog did a poo on the sofa’ as, ‘Sweetheart, I love you, but I’m moving to Rio with the tennis pro’.

Also, stop doing all the things that really will shorten your life, and maybe even make it unpleasant while it lasts. Sorry. Let’s do that again. The cardiologist is going to say that. I’m going to say this: do one thing to be healthier. Maybe it’ll be enough. Maybe it will lead to other lifestyle changes. If you know you eat terribly, and you don’t want to change, at least take the odd vitamin. Run to the shops for your smokes, instead of driving. Drink with dinner, instead of for breakfast, that kind of thing. For my money, I’d start with exercise.

Even if it feels terrible the first twenty times, it will actually start to make you feel good. You will enjoy it, your mood will brighten, and you’ll sleep better. Maybe you’ll smoke less and eat healthier as well. It’s also easier to start doing something and make a new habit than it is to break an old one. If you think you might be getting a bit overwhelmed with stress or have some niggling physical problem, see the doctor. She’ll probably say what I said, only in a bossier tone, but better safe than sorry.

Look, you know what you’ve gotta do, so do I. I’m just going out for a run. To the shops…

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: Nov 05, AU Edition

ANN COULTER
George W. Bush’s court pick alienated even his friends

Supreme Court nomination may not have been the ideal time for Laura Bush to start acting like ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ Hillary Clinton. Between cooking segments on the American ‘Today’ show recently, Laura rolled out the straw-man – sorry, ‘straw-person’ – argument that the criticism of her husband’s pick for the high court, Harriet Miers, was rooted in ‘sexism’ (which is such a chick thing to say). I’m a gyno-American, and I strenuously object.

The only sexism involved in the Miers nomination is the administration’s claim that once they decided they wanted a woman, Miers was the best they could do. If the the top female lawyer in the US is Harriet Miers, we may as well stop allowing girls to go to law school.

Ah, but perhaps you were unaware of Miers’ many other accomplishments. Apparently she was the first woman in Dallas to have a swimming pool in her back yard! And she was the first woman with a safety deposit box at the Dallas National Bank! And she was the first woman to wear pants at her law firm! It’s simply amazing! And did you know she did all this while being a woman?

I don’t know when Republicans became the party that condescends to women, but I am not at all happy about this development. This isn’t the year 1880. And by the way, even in 1880, Miers would not have been the ‘most qualified’ of all women lawyers in the U.S., of which there were 75.

Women have been graduating at the top of their classes at America’s best law schools for 50 years.

Today, women make up about 45 percent of the students at the nation’s top law schools (and more than 50 percent at all law schools).

Which brings us to the other enraging argument being made by the Bush administration and its few remaining defenders – the claim of ‘elitism.’ I also don’t know when the Republican Party stopped being the party of merit and excellence and became the party of quotas and lying about test scores, but I don’t like that development either.
Contrary to the Bush administration’s disingenuous arguments, it’s not simply that Miers did not attend a top law school that makes her unqualified for the Supreme Court. (But that’s a good start!) It’s that she did not go on to rack up any major accomplishments since then, either. Despite the astonishing fact that Miers was the first woman to head the Texas Bar Association, Miers has not had the sort of legal career that shouts out ‘Supreme Court material’! That is, unless you think any female who passes the bar exam has achieved a feat of unparalleled brilliance for her sex.

There are more important things in life than being Supreme Court material, but – oddly enough – not when we’re talking about an appointment to the Supreme Court. Sen. Arlen Specter defended Miers on the grounds that ‘Miers’ professional qualifications are excellent, but she lacks experience in constitutional law’ – and Specter ought to know. This is like recommending a plumber by saying, ‘He’s a very professional guy, but he lacks experience in plumbing.’

The other straw-man argument being hawked by the Bush administration is that Miers’ critics object that she’s never been a judge. To quote another Bush – read my lips: No one has said that.

I genuinely feel sorry for Miers. I’m sure she’s a lovely woman, and well-qualified for many important jobs. Just not the job Bush has nominated her for. The terrible thing Bush has done to Miers is to force people who care about the court to say that.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: May 05, AU Edition

SMART OF DARKNESS
You’d have to be pretty dim to buy the latest scare story being pushed by the greenies

Nobody knew it at the time, but thirty years ago the environmental movement suffered the greatest blow to its credibility since a grumpy 19th Century Scottish churchman named Malthus made his now-infamous prediction that, due to a lack of ‘moral restraint’, the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. For it was on 28 April 1975 that the American magazine Newsweek ran a story on the new ecological scare that was sure to doom the human race: not overpopulation, but global cooling.

That’s right, cooling.

Here’s how their package, ‘The Cooling World’, began: ‘There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production–with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.’

What a difference a few decades make. Not only is the U.S.S.R. a thing of the past, but global cooling is an all-but-forgotten article of the greenie faith, consigned to the dustbin of embarrassing eco-history – along with predictions that the world would run out of fossil fuels by the year 2000 and that mass famines would trigger global conflagrations and economic catastrophe throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Instead, doom-mongers have spent the last decade focused on global warming, using language surprisingly similar to that of Malthus (‘an angry Gaia will smite us for not having the moral restraint to resist buying 4WDs’). And in a day and age when the Bureau of Meteorology can’t reliably predict on Thursday whether Saturday’s barbeque will be a washout, the Kyoto treaty holds a gun to the heads of Western economies – all based on what are essentially some very long-range weather forecasts.

Which is why the latest nightmare scenario to make headlines around the world is particularly – one might even say darkly – amusing. According to a handful of scientists, life on Earth is actually getting dimmer. Here’s how a BBC report recently aired in Australia put it: ‘Noticed less sunshine lately? Scientists have discovered that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface has been falling over recent decades.

‘If the climatologists are right, their discovery holds the potential for powerful disruption to life on our planet. Already it may have contributed to many thousands of deaths through drought and famine, and that even the direst predictions about the rate of global warming have been seriously underestimated.’

It gets better. According to this handful of experts (cut from the same cloth as the boffins who, thirty years ago, predicted we would all be taking ski holidays in Fiji when not clouting each other over the head for the last handful of maize), global dimming is a double-edged sword. This sudden bout of planetary mood lighting is bad, they say, but without it things would be a whole lot worse: ‘By allowing less sunlight to reach the Earth, global dimming is cushioning us from the full impact of global warming, climatologists say. They fear that as we burn coal and oil more cleanly, and dimming is reduced, the full effects of global warming will be unleashed.’ In other words, when we’re not making the world hotter, we’re making the world … cooler. We’re damned in both the doing and the don’t-ing, but either way, as the narrator of the BBC’s program on dimming put it in the conclusion, ‘we have to take urgent action to tackle the root cause of both global warming and global dimming - the burning of coal, oil and gas.’

We may have to make very difficult choices about how we live and how we generate our electricity. We have been talking about such things for 20 years. But so far very little has been done in practical terms. The discovery of global dimming makes it clear that we are rapidly running out of time.’

This is the same sort of end-is-nigh apocalyptic language that environmentalists (and their philosophical ancestors) have been preaching for centuries. Malthus told us all to practice some “moral restraint” and stop procreating, lest we all die from mass starvation. Today’s greenies frame the debate in the same moral terms even as journalists and scientists vying for headlines and grant monies out-do each other in trying to freak the public out.

Global dimming is the latest attempt to give some scientific ballast to global warming, which has never borne a lot of close scrutiny.
Indeed, many environmentalists now like to call it ‘climate change’ instead – a deft semantic shift that means just about any freak storm can now be blamed on John Howard and George W. Bush. And it is pretty clear that the science behind dimming is overhyped bunk as well; as Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies put it recently after seeing the BBC documentary, ‘The suggested “doubling” of the rate of warming in the future compared to even the most extreme scenario [is] highly exaggerated. Supposed consequences such as the drying up of the Amazon Basin, melting of Greenland, and a North African climate regime coming to the UK, are simply extrapolations built upon these exaggerations … while these extreme notions might make good television, they do a disservice to the science.’

So what is it that is so attractive about global dimming to its supporters? As with Malthus, the answer is not so much scientific as moral, and an underlying discomfort with modern life and all its trappings. Just look at some of the other rhetoric of radical greens these days: people consume too much, waste too much, products come in too much packaging, our food comes from too far away and all this divorces us from one another and the Earth. But this ignores the fact that all this economic activity is actually good for people and, ultimately, the environment: when I got married four years ago in New York City, for example, New Zealand lamb was the main course. This may horrify some as wasteful, but their outrage ignores the fact that those few dozen plates of lamb, multiplied countless times every day, help pay the wages of hundreds of farmers, abbatoir workers, drivers, pilots, fuelers, mechanics, loading dock workers, chefs, and so on – in other words, the sort of ordinary people whom we are supposed to be more in touch with.

The problem with environmentalists is that, after thirty-plus years, it gets awfully hard to take anything they say seriously. Yes, the outdoors is lovely and nature spectacular, and no one wants their kids to grow up breathing thick and smoggy air – which is why economic development is the key to cleaning up pollution, not relying on a bunch of spurious climate models and a distrust of capitalism. When people are allowed to get rich, they can not only desire a cleaner environment, but do something about it as well.

In the meantime, the environment is too important to be left to environmentalists.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE: Apr 05, AU Edition

WALKING WOUNDED
Two different fares prove the point that Sydney’s streets can always be dangerous – especially at night

Around 9pm two young blokes in shorts, singlets and barefeet flagged me down on a residential street in Coogee. One had an old fella propped up against a fence. The other opened the cab door and said, ‘Mate, this gentleman has fallen over and hit his head - would you mind taking him home?’ ‘Yeah, righto’, I replied, thinking he was drunk.

In fact he could barely move due to a deformed leg. He also carried a shortened left arm tucked tightly into the body, with a contorted claw fist. The young fellas helped him to the cab, carefully lifting each foot.

‘He’s got money in his wallet’, the Samaritans said, ‘and his address is __ _____ Street. You got that?’. ‘Yeah’, I told them, ‘I’ll get him home’. From then on it felt like a mercy trip. The man was well over 70 years old, in shock and disorientated.

Slowly he came around, checking his pockets and patting the back of his head. ‘You sure you don’t want to go for a check-up at Saint Vincent’s?’, I asked. ‘I’ll be alright’, he said. ‘Just take me home’.

Within fifteen minutes, he freshened up enough to demand we pull over. ‘But you don’t live here’, I said, but he insisted. What could I do? As he was conscious enough to pay the fare, I hopped out and went around to help him. ‘Mate, this ain’t home! What are you getting out here for?’

Eventually he agreed he was in the wrong street.

Climbing back in the cab I drove to his address a few blocks away. We stopped outside a shabby unlit boarding house opposite the Hard Rock Café. As I helped him out onto his feet, my spotlight bathed the back of his head. It was covered in wispy strands of snowy hair, half covered in dried blood. ‘Jeez, mate’, I said, ‘you’ve given your noggin a real crack. There’s a cut and some blood there’.

Despite his proud assurances, I grabbed him under his good arm and we made our way up the dozen steps of his boarding house, gingerly dragging his gammy leg. After fishing around for his key, he opened the door to a gritty darkened corridor. There was no one there for him. But he point-blank refused any further help beyond the door, and thanked me in a strong dignified voice. Five minutes later I returned and drove past to see a light on in the unit directly opposite the front door.

A good result, I thought, and with luck a community nurse will come around and clean up the wound.

Speaking of wounds, in an amazing coincidence a few hours later, I was hailed in the very same block by a tall, barrel-chested bloke, around 30, wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt. I pinned him for a gym jockey. His left arm was heavily wrapped in bandages from the hand to above the elbow. Climbing in he said, ‘It’s just a short trip up to
Oxford Street. My arm’s throbbing too much to walk’.

‘What happened to you?’, I asked. ‘Mate’, he replied, ‘did you read about an attack early last Saturday morning? Back there on William and Bourke Street?’ This was the Ferrari dealer corner, a notorious night-time haunt of hookers and pimps.

According to my passenger, he and his girlfriend were approached by two Persian males and asked for a cigarette. The request was declined, unambiguously. One of the males then allegedly produced a machete and proceeded to attack my passenger about the head.

In defending himself my passenger raised his left forearm and sustained numerous gashes from contact with the blade. These required some 150 stitches to close. Plus he lost 1½ litres of blood.

After resisting the initial attack, he was able to disarm and ‘subdue’ the assailant, whose mate ran off. Five days later, the assailant remains in hospital, facing a possible 20-year jail term.
And he didn’t even get the cigarette. Dope.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBY: Mar 05, AU Edition

COCAINE BLUES
The truth may set you free, but when your passengers are on drugs, sob stories get the fare paid

I was working a big hotel in the Eastern Suburbs a few Saturdays ago when three young men and a girl, all skippies in their twenties, approached the cab and asked if I wanted to go up to the Northern Beaches.

Although the fellas were firing on all cylinders, I quickly noted the absence of alcohol odor. That meant only one thing: drugs. I wondered if they had enough for the $70 fare, or if they would run. With half the night’s earnings at stake, one can’t be careless, and I braced myself for the psychological warfare to come. It began quickly when I noticed the lead male muttering something to the girl in the back before calling out, ‘Hey cabbie! Do you ever get women offering you favors for the fare?’ In other words, they were debating whether or not to pay.

‘Nah, never’, I lied, thinking he must be pretty gone.
Then the alpha male got on the phone, ‘Steve-o! Whaddya doin’? I’ve got a gram for ya! Meet us in half an hour’. Then he turned his attention my way: ‘Hey cabbie’, he called. ‘Feel like joining us for a few lines?’

‘Nah, not for me thanks mate,’ I laughed, waving away the offer as we whizzed across the Harbour Bridge, but he wasn’t convinced.

‘Ah, he says “no” but you can see he’s itching for a line. Come on mate, spark up!’

‘Mate’, I called over the thumping music, ‘I’m already sparking on caffeine and nicotine!’

‘Yeah’, he shot back, ‘but wait ‘til ya see this - it’s the best coke in Sydney! Put a real edge on your night’. I just laughed and watched my speed as we shot past a tunnel camera.

‘Even if I wanted to,’ I said, pointing at the discreet interior camera, no bigger than a cigarette pack.

My passengers were chastened for all of five seconds, concluding that if not for the camera, I’d be interested. ‘No worries mate’, they assured me, ‘we’ll talk about it later’. My move had backfired – if I didn’t quickly recover the initiative, I’d lose.

‘Listen’, I told them, killing the music, ‘I’ve been there and done all that. I was once like you guys, partying every weekend. Until my girlfriend got cancer and died. That’s when I said enough...’ It was a total line, but they fell for it.

‘Mate, that’s terrible. We’re sorry for pushing you...’.
Having gained the advantage I moved to consolidate: ‘Nah, that’s okay. But let me tell you, cocaine is just as addictive as heroin. Except you don’t know it until you’re using it everyday...’.

‘Yeah, that’s just like Snowy..’, said one of the boys, quietly.
I continued, seeing I’d hit a nerve: ‘...Next thing you know, you’re 40 years old, looking like 50, with no money and driving cabs...if you’re lucky!’.

We pulled up outside a house in Dee Why with the meter showing $62. From the subdued mood in the cab, I was confident my tale had worked. ‘Anyway, you guys are still young, but don’t waste it. That’ll be $62 plus seven more for the tolls’. They all chipped in and handed me $70 – the full fare, plus a dollar tip.

They made one last attempt to entice me: ‘You sure you won’t come in?’
‘No thanks mate’, I answered, ‘you guys party on, but do it safely, OK?’

‘Yeah, it’s under control mate, it’s all good. Nice meeting you’. Breathing a sigh of relief I drove away wondering if they’d intended to run. One can never be certain in this game.

Read more of Adrian the Cabby at www.cablog.com.au.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : June 05, AU Edition

DRIVING AMBITION
Lousy hours, bad tips, the threat of not making a penny – what is it that keeps a cabbie going?

Cab driving is a funny game (to paraphrase a well-worn cliché). Regardless of what mood one starts a shift with, it can instantly change to suit a particular passenger.

On Saturday night I went to work late, tired and dispirited, due to a small personal brush fire. To start some four hours late on a 12-hour shift is largely a pointless exercise. Barely worthwhile. I was resigned to just making my pay-in, gas and dinner money, and little else. Plus the forecast of a quieter-than-average night only served to compound my dejection. I figured I would simply go through the motions.

In keeping with my mood I opted for a dead rank at Ashfield station, rather than head for the City. A young couple approached and immediately I was wary. Why? The girl had given me a friendly wave from some ten metres away. As no one ever does this, my cynicism sprang to the fore. Was I being set up, I wondered, lulled into a false sense of security?

These things ran through my mind as they climbed in the back and started questioning me on my night, my hours, my localities, and so on. ‘No’, I replied, ‘I’ve only just started but I should’ve started at 3 pm. I’m being just lazy tonight’. Jaded as I was, I played the proverbial dead bat to their questions.

It turned out there was no need to worry: she was a local girl and he an Irish/Canadian, and both very much in love. They were happy and drunk on the intoxicating power of new love. It wasn’t long before their friendliness had rubbed off on me and I warmed to their conversation.

So much so, by the time I delivered them to a City hotel, introductions were made and we exchanged handshakes. They were complete strangers when they boarded the cab yet in the space of 20 minutes, we parted company promising to make further contact. This is a big reason I drive cabs. It reminds me that despite my lousy mood, an overwhelming majority of people are innately kind and decent souls. Hence in this game, passenger encounters are frequently positive and sometimes therapeutic.

I explained as much to a woman last night, off to work the graveyard shift at the taxi base. She had inquired why I still drove cabs, when like so many drivers I’d only ever intended it to be a fill-in job. ‘I was seduced’, I replied, ‘as much by the freedom and flexibility of the job as by the positive interaction with passengers’. It certainly wasn’t for the money.

Earlier I had elaborated on the subject with a passenger traveling from the Airport to Kings Cross. He was an Irish comedian on tour of Australia with an international comedy troupe. After traveling all day from rural Victoria he boarded the cab tired and flat. Yet he sparked up when I mentioned my cab stories. ‘Though it’s ironic…’, I laughed. ‘Now I’m making a name for myself, I’m often asked will writing allow me to quit driving. Yet all my content comes from driving!’

Given that both of us worked creatively from social and personal interactions, we swapped stories. Once again, the conversation had commenced in a perfunctory manner only to terminate on a high. He gave me a tip he couldn’t afford and I slipped him a copy of Investigate. After which we both parted with a warm farewell.

There are plenty more stories along these lines from a weekend which threatened to be boring, depressing and a real chore. Sure I’m tired after a long night’s work, but it’s a contented tiredness. Made all the better knowing I have regular readers logging on and keen to read my stories. Without these readers I would simply be talking to a void, working just another job. So it’s g’day to you and goodnight from me.

I thank you all.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: May 05, AU Edition

MUST-SEE TV
Josephine Cooper reports that Pioneer’s latest plasma TVs are finally living up to the technology’s promise

Plasma screens are the trophy wives of the television world. Seductive in their shiny slimness, deep-pocketed men (often in league with their partners) have been damning the cost and throwing over their old, boxy boob tubes for these new, younger, skinnier models from almost the first day they came on the market.

But that doesn’t mean these new relationships have always been happy: along with the initial entry price, flat-panel plasma units generally require expensive accessories such as tuners to get them out of bed in the morning. What’s more, while they start out as bright young things, the dirty little secret of this wall candy is that they are also subject to burnout: leave it on too long, or with the contrast set too high, and the bright, vibrant colours of the unit’s first heady days start to go drab and fade. Furthermore, from their first day out of the box, plasmas have a problem handling dark colours, especially black, properly: because every gas cell in a plasma unit is on all the time, and because there is no black backdrop as in a standard TV, it takes a lot of power to come close to displaying the dark range of the spectrum properly. Even at the best of times, plasma owners have for years had to live with blotchy being the new black.

Plasmas have what might be called a long memory as well; many users report that just a couple of weeks of watching, say, CNN is enough to burn the network’s logo into the screen for good. (Think of how a bank’s logo and welcome message is always faintly visible in an ATM screen, no matter what is being displayed. Now imagine having spent several thousand dollars for the privilege of that burn-in.) Part of this has been avoidable by keeping contrast set low and the channels flipping during the first few weeks of a unit’s life, when such burn-in is most likely to occur, but until recently, it’s also just been a problem that plasma users have had to either learn to live with or figure out tricks to avoid.

And in what may be the ultimate insult, many plasma buyers are discovering that despite all the money they spent on them, their new loves aren’t really up for a long Sunday afternoon watching sports.

Although manufacturers have been struggling with the problem for years, until recently, most plasma units suffered from all sorts of unpleasant (and unpleasant-sounding) syndromes when they tried to handle fast-motion action of sport, such as jitters and smearing.

Unlike a standard TV, the plasma screen simply can’t keep up with the action, which means that on many units, a flying football or cricket ball will appear like a comet, complete with tail. It can also mean problems with lip-syncing: depending on the quality of image
being fed it, sound doesn’t always keep up with motion, and everyone starts to look like they’re in a poorly-dubbed old Japanese movie.

On the flip side, the good news is that this young technology is great with the kids: plasmas are absolutely tailor-made for digital productions such as Pixar movies, which explains why flicks like Finding Nemo and Toy Story get so much play at the electronics retailers.

It’s all almost enough to make a plasma buyer want to go back, tail between his legs, to his old conventional unit: ‘I want you back. I’m sorry I dallied with that new technology. Remember all the great times we had watching the Ashes together?’

Or, as one online commentator put it recently, ‘Plasma TVs cost a hilarious amount of money, and are ridiculously non-durable. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to my still-good-looking, several-years-old rear projection big screen TV.’

Plasma screen manufacturers have started to realize that they have a real problem, both in terms of the real limitations of their product and, just as if not more important in the tough world of the marketplace, reputation. Makers of plasma units at all price and size levels are all waking up to the fact that they need to either lift their game, or get out of it. Sony, for one, has reportedly decided to withdraw its plasma screens from the market, and Fujitsu has sold half its own plasma business – there were just too many problems.

On the other hand, electronics maker Pioneer has decided to take things in the other direction and break through some of the barriers that have become all too apparent in the flat-panel market and create what might be called next-generation plasma TV. And it seems to be working: their latest models, (the PDP505HD and PDP435HD, coming in at 50 and 43 diagonal inches respectively) received top honours from EISA, the largest editorial multimedia organisation in Europe.

Pioneer has so far succeeded by tackling head-on the biggest problems of plasma TVs thus far. For one thing, the whole issue of colours and skin tones and natural-looking reproduction has been solved through what they call their ‘Advanced Super CLEAR Drive System’: basically, this means that their panels can recreate a ridiculously huge number of colours, 2.79 billion to be exact. This is a huge advantage when it comes to faithfully reproducing colours at the dark end of the spectrum, ensuring that blacks are truly black. Unlike previous plasma units, which were great only for certain limited types of programming (especially those demonstrated at the shop), these are screens that really are good for everyday TV watching.

A second advantage of Pioneer’s new product is that they have ditched the traditional glass panel filter that traditionally sits on the front of plasma units. Because the glass filter often had the annoying side effect of creating multiple reflections between the filter itself and the display unit, Pioneer developed ‘direct colour filter’ technology that not only is crisper (and lighter) than old-fashioned glass panels, but also improves contrast, making images clearer in bright locations.

One more thing that Pioneer has done right: They’ve recognized that there are more places for a flat-panel unit to go then just on a wall, and as such have come up with a pretty schmick-looking stand to hold the thing. Free speakers are a nice extra touch, too, even though the recommended retail price of the two units have just dropped by a thousand dollars a piece – the 43-inch model clocks in at $6,999, while the top-end 50-incher will set you back $8,999.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: Nov 05, AU Edition

NOEL HADJIMICHAEL
Schools can play a bigger role promoting democratic values

The last 30 days or so have seen Australians come to grips with a diverse range of challenging images. We have been traumatised by scenes of bomb victims in Bali and intrigued by reports of asylum seekers recanting core claims. University students demand change and industrial relations debates create new coalitions of interest amongst old enemies. Claims that non-compulsory voting is bad for our civil society contrast with champions of choice seeking freedom in social behaviour or consumer purchase.

It is no wonder that most primary school children I talk to, and I have visited an awful lot of schools for my work, are bemused by the idea of democracy. They seem to think it is a ‘good’ but are unsure what it entails.

The Constitution Education Fund – Australia, CEFA for short, has gone to the trouble of researching the ‘five pillars of Australian democracy’ for the purpose of getting primary school aged kids excited about this thing called Australian democracy. The research has come back and the results are clear: neither fashionable words like ‘multiculturalism’ or conflict-orientated ideas like ‘class struggle’ mean anything to today’s youth.

What young Australians aged 10 or 11, from the 350 student sample involved in our pilot programs this year, seem to identify with democratic values are both obvious and simplistically sensational. They talk about ‘rules’ and ‘laws’ in the same breath as they discuss what their parents talk about regarding the evening television news.
Rights and responsibilities are ‘cool’, whereas dopey adults with ideas about changing the world are suspect unless or until they gain young Australians trust. Traditions are a fluid concept: a girl with a Greek surname is just as likely to be into Scottish Highland dancing as the boy with the Chinese surname is to be into surfing.

In 2004 a study commissioned by the government found some interesting things: only about 45 percent of 17-year-olds intend to register to vote, whereas about 85% of 18-year-olds would vote if enrolled. Less than 60 percent of young adults believe that they have the knowledge to understand political issues and only about 41% of female first-time voters say they have the knowledge to make decisions when voting.

The top sources of information that young people declare they trust about voting or elections are parents, the media, and school teachers. Religious groups and the internet fall at the lower end of the scale.
When asked if people in government can be trusted to do the right thing about half of 18 year olds agreed. When asked if the people running government are smart or clever, ‘yes’ answers fell to around 35%.

What these and other sources say to me is that the five pillars of democracy are: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, federal power sharing, rights and responsibilities, traditions and opportunities. They are not foreign to what older Australians understood from their schooling.

If teachers and the school experience are so critical to students, what are we doing as a society to make their transition to adult political life worthwhile, effective and smart? These questions are being examined around the country today. The answers to these challenges may shape the effectiveness of our responses to terror, trauma and tedious global economics.

Noel Hadjimichael is Director of the Governor-General’s Prize Program. More information about CEFA can be found at www.cefa.org.au.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Apr 05, AU Edition

BROTHERS GRIM
Chemical Brothers’ new dance album starts out slow,
plus, it’s a spice world – we’re still living in it

Emma Bunton
“Free Me”, 19
2 stars
Does the world really need a new Spice Girls? Of course! Then thank the “reality” TV gods for Girls Aloud, five saucy femmes brought together in 2002 by the British show Popstars: The Rivals. Their second album, What Will the Neighbours Say? is everything prefab pop should be: fun, cheesy and, of course, maddeningly infectious. Songs such as “The Show” and “Thank Me Daddy” channel the giddiness of teen-age lust and rebellion through sleek, jittery dance beats. The cover of the Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand by You” is pure slow-dance-at-the-prom schlock.

As they yearn for the same bad boys they insult for playing too rough, Girls Aloud exude PG-rated sexiness and grade-school feminism – an irresistible combination, as anyone who ever sang along to “Wannabe” knows.

What the world doesn’t need is the old Spice Girls, if Free Me, the second solo album by ex - “Baby Spice” Emma Bunton, is any indication.
Seemingly aiming for a more “mature” audience, Bunton coos wispy pledges of love over breezy soft pop that’s as pleasant as an afternoon spent sunbathing on the beach, and just as boring. The gently pulsating “Maybe” and “Breathing,” as well as her cover of Marcos Valle’s “Crickets Sing for Anamaria,” indicate that Bunton and her collaborators have been listening to a lot of bossa nova, but her expressionless voice makes you yearn for Astrud Gilberto. It all sounds flat, lifeless, and in desperate need of – dare I say it? – spice.
Reviewed by Amy Phillips

---

The Chemical Brothers
“Push the Button”, Astralwerks
3 stars
It’s hard work to stay at the top of a field as mercilessly mutating as dance music. And “Galvanize,” the first track on the Chemical Brothers’ fifth full-length, suggests that, eight years after their mainstream breakthrough, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons might finally be ready for the cut-out bin.

“A Tribe Called Quest’s Q Tip” delivers a dull, witless rap over a relentlessly repetitive 6-minute big-beat groove that fails to get the party started.

So skip it. And don’t worry: They may not be innovating anymore, but the Brothers still know how to work it out. Because starting with “The Boxer,” a stuttering groove with vocals by Tim Burgess of Charlatans U.K., and the thumping “Believe,” with Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, Rowlands and Simons get back on track.

Stepping into the role usually reserved for Beth Orton, Anna-Lynne Williams does the ethereal female vocal turn on “Hold Tight London,” which starts in the chill-out room, then makes its move to the dance floor.

The Brothers would do well to note that Button’s finest creation, the elegantly paced closer, “Surface to Air,” takes care of its trippy, ecstatic business without the distraction of a guest vocalist.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

Feb 05

MY OLD LAND’S A DUSTBIN
Residents accuse their council of dirt tricks

Four years ago New Plymouth District Council, in a joint venture with private enterprise, closed their six year old, pollution-causing transfer station at the city’s landfill and built a new one, just down the road. Residents nearby called it a cover up, to spread the dump operation either side of them, without consultation. This is the story of the Colson Road Landfill, as NEILL HUNTER reports.

Stories abound about landfills yet here is more to this one than just another ‘dump story’, it is about power-players, manoeuvrings, fairness, and pollution. New Plymouth has had more than its fair share of controversy lately with health scares over dioxin, controversy at nearby Waitara, and recently: a dodgy power company deal. Yet ask anyone living in the region and they will extol the virtues. At New Plymouth journalism school experts lectured students about the area’s uniqueness: the cleanest air in the southern hemisphere, exceptional natural water reservoirs, snow and surf less than an hour apart.
On a nearby snow-caked mountain the multitude of rivers, streams and creeks spread like a never ending cobweb of crystal clear veins, beyond the ring plain. The quality of these waterways, near a landfill on Colson Rd, is Taranaki Regional Council’s (TRC) responsibility. Rate payers next to the landfill, are New Plymouth District Council’s (NPDC) responsibility, which is how this story begins and ends, with neighbours, and water.

Research for the story began in 2001 and ranged from Whangarei to Christchurch. It confirmed that New Plymouth wasn’t alone in ‘bad tip’ history. Councils break rules. A recent investigation for example by Waikato Times journalist Simon O’Rourke exposed multiple compliance breaches by councils in his region.

Originally designated a refuse site in 1974, New Plymouth’s landfill is situated in 8.5 hectares of rural valley, near the suburbs of Fitzroy and Glen Avon, nestled amongst farmland and streams about 4km from the city centre. Access is via the quiet rural lane of Colson Rd, barely one kilometre long and bearing no hint of controversy. Zoned both industrial and rural, Colson Rd has some nine immediate dump neighbours. Among the inhabitants are a small ostrich farm, plant nursery and domestic residences. The notion that there is a landfill here could escape the visitor, were it not for the odd sign. Certainly that was the impression this journalist formed on a first visit, wondering, was this the wrong road to the dump? At the end, before the trees which hide the dump from view, the RSPCA have their sanctuary for the lost, injured and abused. In 2001 the neighbours counted themselves as abused, after a new transfer station got added to their quiet rural sanctuary but, unlike the animals, they could only run to the people both charged with their care, and at the centre of the abuse. And in 2004, abuse of Taranaki’s clean water, got a little bit worse.

But first, a little history. Cut to 1996 and an Environment Court Judge told New Plymouth District Council to be more realistic towards its neighbours and on page eight of the judge’s decision, said “get approval first”. Neighbourly relations, approval, such small things.
The tenacious battler who once led the fight to improve things for the neighbours is small in stature – Kathy Lovell describes herself as ‘five foot nothing,’ then hands over a box. “Here, you can have my whole file. I won’t be needing it.” The teacher was relinquishing everything she had fought for, over a landfill. While ostriches walked nonchalantly about her farm, a warm wintry sun shone on a rustic, timber home built by Kathy and her partner, from timber they milled themselves in this quiet place. No hint of the rumblings of machinery in a landfill next door, or of discontent.

Kathy Lovell is an athlete. The 47 year old winner of countless marathons, national kayaking events, to name a few, when first interviewed was about to leave for Malaysia’s ‘new airport city’ to teach Asians English and sport.

And so began a long investigation, of laborious hours examining documents from a cardboard box, searching mounds of files in council offices, attempts to get more by Official Information Act, and countless interviews, all for the sake of a small story, about the small things, at Colson Rd.

In 1999, the Environment Court moved to protect things small around New Plymouth’s landfill, especially the neighbours, the “sacrificial lambs”. Operations at Colson Rd Landfill, as it is officially titled, should be strictly controlled,the court said. “We accept the landfill is now under the control of the council (previously under control of a contractor) but we are still extremely concerned that after the 1987 hearing the council still appears prepared to operate the tip with financial expenditure considerations to the forefront and the environmental concerns of the neighbours subservient to the economic pressure of ratepayers. We make it clear that if the council wishes to operate a landfill in proximity to neighbours then those neighbours are not to become the sacrificial lamb to the ratepayer population in general.”Records showed the old tip was plagued with problems: “Colson landfill has had a chequered history….operation has from time to time infringed conditions of consent…concern with recent operations of the landfill caused by inexperienced landfill contractors…we record without any hesitation that the City Council cannot expect neighbours to suffer the effects of a learning curve if that results in environmental degradation….affected by slack landfill management…”
To be fair, the council did dispense with a contractor at the tip who was being blamed for problems. But, that did not satisfy the court with its aforementioned warning about putting “financial expenditure considerations to the forefront and the environmental concerns of neighbours subservient to the economic pressure of ratepayers…”

“We are perfectly satisfied from the evidence,” continued the court, “…the number of incidents were greatly in excess of those recorded. …The question of poor historical management and construction practices certainly have put the tribunal on alert …We accept that the council have not been able to control flying rubbish, gases, or dust…
One aspect which appears difficult to control is the question of odour, particularly in the evenings where there may be temperature inversions…”

In March 1999 a frustrated Environment Court stated in key words: “the airing of concerns of the neighbours to the Colson Rd landfill and to ensure that the landfill’s neighbours are kept abreast of the development of the landfill site…” In other words, liaise with your neighbours. Subsequently NPDC took the initiative and established the Landfill Liaison Committee. It was more than a name. It formed an integral part of a much greater process, including a management plan. In 1999 an application by the council to change the landfill operation included conditions relating to community liaison. The committee was required to meet at least every two months.

The management plan emphasised a co-operative approach. Other documents examined on council files also referred to the plan. One said: the ‘Plan forms the bottom line.’ But like the bottom of an old transfer station, best laid plans leak, and the victims here were the little stream called the Puremu, beside the landfill, and the neighbours. But, like the Puremu’s once pristine waters, the council’s track record of keeping its neighbours informed became a little muddy. During an important period when liaison should have worked, the liaison group minutes were not distributed. This at a time of apparent behind the scenes activity over the then secret, proposed new transfer station site. The council blamed the neighbours’ representatives on the committee, who may or may not have heard what council staff were saying, and did not ask the right questions. That was one perspective. To those most affected by the station’s location, not sending out the minutes was like rubbing leachate into the wound. Things became septic. The council apologised and said it was due to staff shortages, the minutes were only sent to those who wanted them. That was contrary to rules. All the neighbours were supposed to receive the minutes.
Then, when no meetings at all were held, or called, like snow on a spring Mt Taranaki, the council’s defence began to melt. During another critical part of the process, there was a huge gap of six months between the normal two-monthly meetings.

Enter the woman unafraid of challenges, or their size, who began to fight. Kathy Lovell fired her first salvo at the frequency of the meetings: “They seem to stretch it out four or five months apart.” She alleged that this was to lay a smoke screen over the issue of the transfer station location. Then in a meeting in February 2001 it “was absolutely glossed over.” She says that by the time the mayor was about to sign the contract for the station it was a done deal and none of the residents knew about it. Colson Road was never discussed or considered as a location. On the last day of February 2001, Lovell wrote to the mayor complaining that the location of the proposed transfer station was never mentioned except as being on the landfill itself. There was no reply. Lovell conceded there was also talk of another site but that was completely remote, at another, remote, industrial zone.

The liaison group’s role was clear. In July 1999 NPDC had circulated the group’s main functions: “Disseminate information concerning the operations and the proposed development of the landfill, to hear concerns of residents and to discuss ways of alleviating those concerns…The subjects discussed by the committee will be those matters that are of interest to local people and interested parties.” Those were good intentions, but when it came to its first real test, the good intentions decomposed under the heat of big business interests and ‘commercial sensitivity,’ over a new transfer station site.

It is one thing keeping your neighbours informed, it is another not to do it on the grounds of “commercial sensitivity”, a one-phrase-fits-all. That was the reason, the council said, they could not tell their neighbours they were going to move a transfer station from inside the landfill, to the other side of the neighbours. Most believed that a new station was going to be built on another part of the landfill. They had good reason. A search of NPDC records showed a consultants plan for a new station well inside the landfill. So when NPDC finalised a deal for a new station beside the neighbours without consulting them, there was pandemonium. Public meetings and protests ensured, with ugly scenes of abuse against council staff. Local media went front page with a lead story and pictures of angry neighbours. But no investigation and when this journalist began enquiring, veiled intimidation followed from council staff, such as: ‘I suggest you get legal opinion before you make any allegations in that area and I’d get a specialist planning lawyer as well…neighbours are complaining about your enquiries…” and this pearl: “he’s a sh** stirrer.”

The council tried to pacify with “commercial sensitivity,” and the successful tenderer’s “need for confidentiality.” The tenderers had selected the site, said the council and if other tenderers had got wind of the strategically important location, next to rail yards and a possible future rubbish transporter (rail), their position could have been compromised.

Tranz Rail owned the land where the site was located.
Lovell: ‘A while back there was talk about railroading the waste to Hamilton. They are in a pretty good position to do that.’ She accused the council of conveniently using ‘commercial sensitivity’. The council said it wasn’t up to them to specify where the station should be built. It was entirely over to the tenderers. Theoretically it could be built anywhere in New Plymouth, the choice was up to the tenderers.

Let’s examine that: For years the old landfill operated without any transfer station. People simply turned up and dumped their rubbish at the tip face. Neil Fagan, New Plymouth District Council’s management services engineer puts it succinctly: “Previously it was dig a hole and put stuff into it and make sure someone shoots the rats.”

Then the council built their first transfer station at the landfill, just inside the gate. As transfer stations went, it was ugly. In fact to those accustomed to places where you pull up and off load into bins, gleefully smash bottles into appropriate receptacles amid self doubts of green or brown glass, throw cardboard onto overfilled containers then move on to other Saturday ventures, it was disappointing. In 2000 this journalist proudly took his first load of rubbish to the New Plymouth dump and had a transfer station experience. Long before any controversy, I broke the dump rules by merrily driving straight past the so called transfer station, followed a dirty dusty road up and over a hill and dumped my refuse at a tip face. Upon returning I noticed a place for recyclables, stopped and off loaded empties. A dump guy approached and said, ‘first time here?’ ‘Yep,’ I replied. Then he politely and patiently explained the rules. I stared blankly, between him, a hole in the ground, and a jumble yard, he called a transfer station.

I watched those who didn’t need polite instruction, deposit their rubbish into the trench in the ground and throw their empties into an assortment of messy cages, bins, and old containers. I was expertly told that at the end of the day, the refuse in the hole would be scooped out and taken to the tip face. All this, for a city’s refuse.

The point however, was not the quality of the six year old transfer station, but the fact that it formed an integral part of the dump operation, as ordered by the environment court, and that it was within the dump boundary. The council’s own plans, as well as Resource Management Act (RMA) application documentation showed the location: inside the landfill. The council defence to this apparent sleight of hand: The documents were like any other permit, anybody applying to build something was not compelled to proceed. If the council decided to build it on railways land, near the neighbours, where no permit was required, that was council’s choice. The suggestion here: the permit issue related not to building standards, but environment issues, including nuisance. Enter Taranaki Regional Council (TRC).

In March 2001 TRC wrote to Kathy Lovell, saying no permit was needed provided there was no dust, noxious or toxic levels of airborne contaminants. Was that the same as saying, ‘you don’t need a permit to build a house unless it might fall over?’ Choice was a privilege the council seemed to enjoy, and the neighbours lacked.

Enter Manawatu Waste. They operated a transfer station in Palmerston North, were experienced players in waste management, and they knew how to tickle the taste buds of the council. As tenderers they selected a proposed site, part of railways land on the other side of the neighbours. When NPDC heard of the idea, they were ecstatic. Neil Fagan said he wished that he had been able to grab the railway site for council’s own purposes. So they did. They bought the site lease.

The deal became one where Manawatu Waste leased the whole operation off the council. The wheels of big business went into top gear, all to the ignorance of the neighbours. Lovell believed the railways deal may have even been signed a lot earlier, “the guy from the railways was overseas,’ she said.

The defence of commercial sensitivity appeared to crumble further when the council entered the arena of literally buying up the whole proposal, lock stock and barrel, leasing the railways land, paying for and owning the station then leasing it all back to private enterprise. Further more it smacked of back room deals at the expense of court imposed neighbourly relations.

Questions also arose over whether or not the council appeared to be calling tenders for the construction of a business (transfer station) then helping the successful tenderer set up that business by becoming the leaseholder. Kathy Lovell claims the council effectively subsidised Manawatu Waste to set up business. Another source, already involved in transfer stations, said the council didn’t pay them to set up their business. “The council paid for it (new transfer station) before it was set up,” The source said of Manawatu Waste’s proposal. “If you want to start a business, is the council going to pay for the land and the buildings and set it all up for you?” NPDC deny any wrong doing. They say they did everything they could to inform the neighbours, once commercial sensitivity was over. A town planner also said New Plymouth District Council did not need permission legally for the transfer station, but chose to include the public anyway. Well, seemed someone forgot to explain the term inclusion, to the neighbours.

Lovell points to the arrogance of the council whom she says tried to claim credit for setting up a public meeting once the location was divulged. “I phoned around all the residents to see if they had heard anything (about the location). I rang up Neil Fagan and he said ‘sounds like I need to do some damage control here, perhaps I should call a meeting.’ ” She says if she hadn’t “called around the residents there would never have been a meeting.”

The council says it was a balancing act between being good neighbours and trying to keep everyone happy. That seemed to ring hollow when one council staffer said: ‘why should the rest of New Plymouth suffer because of a few?’ An environment court had earlier disagreed, referring to the need to prevent the neighbours from becoming scapegoats. “Sacrificial lamb” was another term used. Sacrifice: often a small burnt offering. The ancient Hebrews sometimes did it after a victory. Once, someone small won a battle, a shepherd boy named David. When he felled Goliath with a single stone to the head, the giant stayed down, and out. Then again David had it easy. One fight, done. Kathy Lovell’s giant went down but her battle was far from over, the giant kept getting back up.

She points to the fact the council were heavily criticised by the courts over their handling of previous landfill cases. “They got their hands well and truly smacked over their dealings with us, by the Environment Court the last time. We were not to be made a scapegoat.” She quotes the courts again: “Judge Treadwell says, ‘the question of whether an extension to the destination is contrary to actual assurances given to residents when the landfill was originally established is of concern to this tribunal.’ ”Given this track record of scathing court commentary, small wonder the neighbours cried foul, at the explanation of “commercial sensitivity.”

Allegations of a cover up by council to get their new transfer station with as little fuss as possible seemed to take on substance in the face of a statement from anonymous sources. They saw contract documents early in the process and alleged the contract for the new transfer station was virtually a done deal, before the council were forced to tell its neighbours. “I rang the council and they said no plans had been submitted to anybody, yet that same morning there were plans out for pricing for the transfer station.” They spoke to council staff and asked if any plans had been submitted and were told, “ ‘oh no, no.’ So I said why are their plans at my place of work for pricing?” He said ‘who are they for?’ I said X, and there was silence on the end of the phone. Obviously I had tripped him up.”

They thought it was deception by NPDC “because in the original draft for Colson Rd Landfill the transfer station was going to go up at the landfill. Instead of car traffic we are going to get truck traffic. Just imagine the price of our property, will be worth nothing.” The council denied any intent to deceive.

Time to examine more closely the time line leading to the station’s site selection. The history as far as the liaison group is concerned is this: In June 2000, the contractor for the new station was selected. There was no mention of a site to the liaison group; no further details were given to the group, which begs the question: why was it still commercially sensitive if the contractor had already been
selected? The lease for the new transfer station deal had not been signed. Contractor selected, but no site. In September 2000 the liaison group met and there was mention of difficulties about signing a lease arrangement. The significance of this was lost on the neighbour’s delegates. Three months after selecting the contractor, the location surely was no longer commercially sensitive. Still details were withheld. Why? The people at railways, required to sign the lease, were unavailable. And of course once the lease is signed it is a done deal. The council wanted the site secured before they alerted their neighbours to the location.

At the September 2000 meeting, there was no mention of which lease or where. Nothing to alert the very people that the council is charged to liaise with. Certainly there was nothing to suggest a new transfer station being built ‘next door’ or splitting the dump operation into straddling the neighbours.

NPDC seemed to adopt an inclusion policy only when convenient. For example, April 1999, they wrote to the neighbours: “Dear neighbour, Transfer Station Near Main Gate. …it is possible to vary the resource consent without formal hearings if the written consent given by …” Here they were happy to include the neighbours in an operational matter (for the previous transfer station), but not in 2000.

On 22 February 2001 “commercial sensitivity” ended. The council, at a liaison group meeting, announced that the tenderer for the new transfer station had identified the site, explaining that the tenderer did not want to tell anyone about the location until agreement was reached on the site land. The land, that is, leased by the council.

Were the neighbours lulled into apathy? They seemed to drift into accepting that the dump operation was going to change by virtue of the transfer station possibly being built in another area, outside the landfill, or so some thought. But, it wasn’t until it was ‘next door’ that reality hit. So what? If some had accepted that a new transfer station was going to be built outside the landfill anyway, did it matter where it was going to be built? Therein lies another story about noise, traffic, litter, dust and other nuisances, too much for one story. Perhaps it depended upon definition. Were landfills and transfer stations both dumps? Not so on both counts said NPDC. Dumps once came under Health authorities but now those authorities are only involved in waste if it is collected and disposed. Transfer stations do not need to be licensed under the Health Act because they do not “collect and dispose.” You read correctly. A transfer station is not an offensive trade under the Health Act, because it does not collect and dispose waste. Certainly the station receives waste but that is different from collecting it. Certainly it then transfers it to a landfill, but that is different from disposing of it.

And permits? Well, NPDC are police, judge and jury. The new transfer station was outside the landfill, no permit required. Why? Because it is all a question of town planning zones, two– rural and industrial, and the twain shall meet, at Colson Rd. In planning jargon the place is called: interface. Here, the mystery for the neighbours both deepens, yet sheds light. The new transfer station is in the industrial zone and transfers refuse to the landfill - in the rural zone. Between the two, for a half km, are the neighbours, at the interface. And it is a case of what comes out must not go in. NPDC’s engineer Neil Fagan saw no problem over planning rules. The new station is in the industrial zone, with fewer rules than where it was previously, at the landfill which is rural and falls under the Resource Management Act. For example there was no rule regarding traffic. In rural zone, things like management plans and all manner of rules, including: consultation, abound. A transfer station outside the landfill and beyond the rural zone was not so shackled. Or so it would seem.

When we spoke, Fagan agreed that where something was built on a boundary between two zones, “the rules are slightly changed.” He said that the effect outside the boundary could only be the effect that it was allowed in the zone outside. For example, “the noise in an industrial zone must be reduced by the time it reaches the next zone.”
Ralph Broad, senior planner for NPDC, with 30 years experience, says the issues between the two zones are not simple. But he agrees on one thing, the link between the transfer station and the landfill was like an umbilical cord. And nobody could deny that in its embryo stage, the station would belong to the landfill, owed its birth to the landfill, and the baby could not survive without it, without being breast fed by a mother of a landfill. Unlike the newborn, this baby needed to keep its cord, the only cut would be to an opening ceremony ribbon. To suggest it was not bound to the landfill rules was perhaps suggesting the newborn infant was not linked to its mother, or parental rules. Without the rules, would the other kids on the block (the residents) get hurt?

At the beginning of this story, there was a reference to water and during the investigation, among the vast array of documentation, were found technical reports by TRC. And “technical” they were. Reading them was torture but the pain was nothing compared to the damage done to the small stream, by an old transfer station, called the Puremu,. Many years ago a biologist for the Taranaki Regional Council carrying out a routine examination of the Puremu discovered zinc and ammoniac traces. Mystified he went searching. The source was found: leachate.

Consequently the council essentially were ordered to build a new transfer station on the existing site of the landfill, within 18 months. This was the previous transfer station, completed in 1994. It had to be a full transfer station operation. It wasn’t, it was a pit, dug into the ground, near the landfill gate as described earlier. Only the ground was not what it seemed. The ground was old refuse. And old refuse was where the monster they call leachate lived and every time refuse was dug out of the pit, leachate was disturbed. And leachate has only one way to go: down, into the Puremu again.

TRC hierarchy denied during interviewing that the Puremu was poisoned. A slightly agitated senior TRC engineer emphatically refuted the suggestion. You decide. Here is the exact wording: “…the most notable of which was the continuing contamination of the Puremu Stream by leachate contaminated ground water flow.”

In 1994, an application by the NPDC under the RMA, for changes and discharges at the landfill said the Puremu would not be affected. A 1997-98 report said the stream was fine. A 98-99 report said it wasn’t and in 2000, it was contaminated by leachate.

And near the end of the TRC report “executive summary,” it said: “…source of the contamination is to be removed with the closure of the on site refuse tipping pit” — the old (1994) transfer station. There was no proof that both councils were in collusion. No proof, that the reason for the new transfer station to be built outside the landfill boundary was because, having poisoned the Puremu with the old transfer station, NPDC were breaking the law. Like a child caught raiding the cookie jar, quietly putting the lid back on, they ran out the gate and built a new one, beside the neighbours. Water can be synonymous with peace, which is all one neighbour wanted. Poignant words were found on one of many forms filled in by the neighbours: “The only quiet days of the year,” …they were words written in upper case by a Mr ‘R Philp,’ with a solid writing hand. His words were in reply to NPDC intentions (before the transfer station issue) of extending the landfill operating hours on holidays and weekends. Compared to comments written by other neighbours, Philp wrote in a short, simple style. Others wrote long, with explanations, of facts and reason. But not Russell Philp. His took up one line. Perhaps it was written on one of his only quiet days, taking time to fill in a yet another form. His words somehow resonated. Russell Philp said all he needed to say. Then he died a short time later, casualty of a work accident.

It is no accident that the tip face at Colson Rd keeps growing and expanding. Like lava spewing from a Taranaki mountain in a bygone era, consuming and cutting deeply everything in its path, forging a
new landscape. But like a passing volcanic era where life forms, flora and fauna replacing red rock and hissing sulphur, perhaps the land now enveloped by waste at Colson Rd will become scenic. How much fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth will continue, is anyone’s guess.I called at the brand new transfer station back in 2001, just before leaving town. There was much fanfare over its opening. All was shiny and new, new machines, new staff, people taking an interest. There were even staff showing visitors around and explaining how to use a new transfer station. The staff were vibrant, animated and enthusiastic. Someone almost ran up to me, to help unload my rubbish. This was service, with a smile.

I wandered around and was almost embraced again, by someone who seemed to be in charge this time, who led me around and explained things, eagerly.

Then he moved off, to operate one of the new machines, a natty little digger scampering around, the new dumping bay, a long shallow concrete affair. At the end was a huge concrete pit where a truck waited, below ground level. The natty wee digger was racing around again scooping up refuse and shovelling it off the edge of the bay, into the truck below. Men cheerfully smiled at me again and soon they were all off in the truck to take a load to the landfill.

I looked down into the concrete pit, below ground level, from where the truck had emerged. The clean, new concrete surfaces were already filling with remnants of litter, spilling from the bay above, some dropping between the lip and the top of the truck before it departed. And it was also finding its way into a large drain hole, at the bottom of the truck pit. Through the hole I could see the clear running water, of a stream.

Since leaving New Plymouth I have returned a number of times and usually I highlight it with a trip to the now, not so new, transfer station. Things have changed, since those mad heady, public relations filled days. The staff no longer beam happily at the visitor and nobody helps me unload. Things are looking more untidy with each visit, this is a place getting used, a lot. It is after all, a large city refuse transfer station. And it has been operating now, for more than four years.

The truck pit has become a very dirty, grimy, littered affair. The drain hole at the bottom is cluttered now, with rubbish. It’s hard to see the little stream, at the bottom of the pit with its long angulated, concrete ramp running down from the work area above, like a giant sluice, for the truck to climb out, with each new full load of rubbish.

I wonder if the council will fit a little fish emblem, at the bottom of the pit, at the end of the ramp, beside the drain hole, over the little stream, at a city refuse transfer station.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

DVDs: Sep 05, AU Edition

WAR STORIES
James Fletcher reports on the latest home-viewing offerings

A Loving Father
Rated: M
4 stars
Director Jacob Berger, son of well known English writer John Berger, isn’t a man afraid of presenting himself as a target within the subtext of his own films. A Loving Father, or Aime Ton Pere for the traditionalists, is a prime example centering on the emotional turmoil of a son trying to connect with a father isolated by fame. But what makes this film remarkable are the confronting performances he draws from his two lead actors, Gerard Depardieu and his own real-life son Guillaume Depardieu, who have their own dark history inspiring their on-screen conflict.

Gerard plays Leo, a cruel self-absorbed writer who receives news that he is to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Against the wishes of his daughter Virginia, played with nervous intensity by waif like actress Sylvie Testud, Leo sets out on a motorcycle journey across Europe to claim his prize. However his son Paul (Guillaume), fresh out of rehab and having heard the news, attempts to reconnect with the man he hasn’t spoken to in years. Of course things don’t go as planned and Paul finds himself kidnapping his renowned father after a fatal accident leaves the literary world, including his sister Virginia, believing Leo to be dead.

Part thriller, part black comedy and part biopic, Berger infuses the script with all his insecurities, angst and obsession while manipulating Gerard and Guillaume’s flawed relationship (which culminated with Gerard publicly disowning his son a year after the films release) to achieve a captivating honesty that saves the film from becoming over indulgent or satirical.

Now on DVD with English subtitles, A Loving Father has little in the way of extra material with biographies on the main cast offering some interesting background facts on the Depardieus’ murky past. However, the stunning performances and obvious emotional investment allows Berger to deliver a brave and entertaining film which explores the darker side of family dysfunction.

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Jonny Wilkinson: The Real Story
Rated: Exempt
3 stars
With the Tri Nations and the Bledisloe Cup fueling the 2005 Rugby season at the moment, it’s not surprising that Jonny Wilkinson: The Real Story makes its way to DVD this month. What is surprising is just how well made and enjoyable this profile of the Lions’ & Newcastle Falcon’s fly half actually is.

Since scoring the winning goal in the 2003 World Cup against Australia, Jonny Wilkinson has become synonymous with international Rugby, gaining fame well beyond the usual fraternity of sports fans. But for the most part, Wil- kinson has avoided the public eye, doing only the occasional media interview or product endorsement.

Having followed Wilkin- son around over a twelve week period in the lead up to the 2003 World cup, The Real Story delivers an entertaining, humourous and surprisingly intimate profile of the sporting icon which thankfully transcends the run-of-the-mill films typical of sports documentaries. Complementing archival footage of Jonny playing in the under-8s league with hard hitting action from international competition, director Simon Niblett also uses to great effect interviews with Wilkinson’s parents, girlfriend and peers including former Lions captain Will Carling and rugby fan Ian Botham filmed exclusively for the documentary.

However it’s the interviews with Wilkinson himself that establish the core of the show, filmed in candid and unpredictable locations around the UK and on tour, and all designed to capture honest, unrehearsed responses. The result reveals a surprisingly likable and sincere man deftly balancing a professional, sporting and private life with a determined ease befitting a much more seasoned player.

Running just short of an hour with no bonus material, Jonny Wilkison: The Real Story easily stands on its own merits as a simple and entertaining profile filmed for the love of the game and without any tabloid motives. A rare find and well worth adding to
the collection.

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Truth, Lies & Intelligence
Rated: M
4 stars
Truth, Lies & Intelligence is unique in being the only Australian film to effectively explore Australia’s involvement in the lead up to the Iraq War. Filmed in 2003 by award winning filmmaker Carmel Travers the film recounts the origins of the intelligence fraud surrounding Iraq’s WMDs and its use in achieving the eventual invasion of that country by the US, Britain and Australia.
Featuring insightful interviews from high profile whistle-blowers such as Greg Thielman, the former advisor to the US Secretary of State, Australian ex-intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to key figures in the Middle East including Hamze Mansour, the head of the Islamic National Front and common truck drivers along Iraq’s dangerous highways, highways they point out, which remained safe under Saddam’s rule, Travers delivers a decisive political documentary rich in journalistic integrity and dramatic revelations.
Now on DVD, Truth, Lies & Intelligence boasts an impressive extras package that opens with an introduction by Travers explaining her motivation in making the film. The usual suspects also appear with the film’s trailer, an image gallery and biographies on the key figures included, however it is the two extended interviews that make this package stand out, the first with Greg Thielman, personal advisor to Colin Powell, and the second with Australian Andrew Wilkie who speaks candidly about his role within ONA and the double-edged relationship Australian intelligence agencies have with their American counterparts. He also elaborates on his motivations in exposing the truth, along with details of his resignation and subsequent treatment by the Howard government.
Although threatened by the Attorney General’s Office and forced to surrender her computer hard drives and personal emails during the films production, Travers has managed to produce an undeniably compelling film and a stunning document of Australia’s current political climate.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

He’s been called the greatest batsman in the world. Now, going on 35, he’s about to head off to England to defend the Ashes trophy. He’s Justin Langer, and he sat down with Investigate’s Sport Editor, JAKE RYAN, to share the secrets behind his training, life on tour, and why we’ll shut out England

4-0

INVESTIGATE: How do you rate the new breed of Poms?
LANGER: To be honest, they are a very similar side to the last time we played them. They do however have a few new players that add strength to their squad. Strauss is a good player. I played with him at Middlesex, and he possesses great character and a strong will to succeed. He is also an excellent person, and I think that when you put people with strong character into your side, it only makes it stronger.

Flintoff is also a good player. I don’t know him personally, but he is aggressive and has a go so we will have to watch him.
I think we need to put them under a great deal of pressure early. There are definitely some old scars there, and if we can get on top early and apply the blowtorch, then hopefully we can open them up again.

INVESTIGATE: How’s it feel to get a bit of a break between New Zealand and the Ashes, and what do you get up to?
LANGER: It’s extremely important to get some time off from playing and traveling and get home to refresh. During the season you just work on trying to maintain fitness, but with the break you can really build on it and set yourself up for another big year. It’s a good chance to help the back out by doing some Pilates and yoga, and really test the back out as during the season you can’t do that – you have to tip-toe around it – and make sure you’re not pushing it to hard in case you miss matches. It’s also a good time for development. Doing some strong work in the nets, and trying a few things you don’t get a chance to do during the year.

It’s a great time just to spend with family. I’m away anywhere between six and eight months a year, so I cherish the time to spend with my wife and kids. I like to do the normal things I miss out on, like making the kids brekkie, putting them to bed at night, taking them for a holiday. A lot of people take these things for granted but they are very important to me.

INVESTIGATE: How serious was the back injury that you suffered going into the Boxing Day test?
LANGER: I did it at training three days before the start. I bent down to pick up a footy in the warm up, and I couldn’t get back up. I couldn’t walk, and I thought, jeez, this could be it. I’m very lucky we had a great physio, and from the outset I was absolutely committed to play. It taught me a valuable lesson, that if you have an absolute ruthless attitude and totally commit to something, you can overcome anything. I got worked on for sixteen hours a day for three days, and probably had a five per cent chance of playing. [Pakistan’s] skipper, Inzaman Ul Haq, pulled out with a back injury, and I was determined to
show him up.

I still look at Steve Waugh four years ago when he played his last test in England with a seven-centimetre tear in his calf. It was one of the most phenomenal efforts I have seen, and just shows that if you have the right attitude, you’re desperate, and you have great support, you can overcome the pain and get out there and play.
INVESTIGATE: You have captained a few of the sides you have played in, including the Australia A Side. How big an honour is it?
LANGER: Yeah, it’s a massive honor to captain an Australian side, and I was very privileged to do so, however I hold the West Australian captaincy right there beside it, and am very proud to have been bestowed such an honor. I also captained Middlesex in England and that was fantastic as there is a lot of prestige and tradition surrounding the county clubs.

Another honor that I hold up beside the captaincies is that I now do the team song in the Aussie team. It’s a tradition that has been handed down from Geoff Marsh, to Ian Healy, to Merv Hughes, to Ricky Ponting and when Rick got the captaincy he handed it down to me. A lot of people might think it’s a bit of a wank, but it’s a very special thing amongst the boys involved, and I’m very proud of being able to do it.
INVESTIGATE: You’re turning 35 this year and still playing amazing cricket. Have you had any thoughts about when you’re going to give it away?
LANGER: Of course I’ve thought about it, yeah. I mean, I am 34, but I can honestly say that I’m enjoying my cricket more now than at any other time in my career. I have been around for a long time now and virtually seen it all, so I no longer have any fears or doubts about my batting. I have no fear about different situations, different bowlers, and that’s a great feeling to head out to the middle with a clear mind, and without fear of failure.

I don’t have those insecurities that dog younger and less experienced players and it’s great to be able to play without fear, or the fear of failing, and as long as that remains and I’m still enjoying what I do, than I will be playing for a while yet.
INVESTIGATE: You grew up alongside fellow West Australian Damian Martyn. How close are you guys?
LANGER: Me and Damian have known each other since we were 13 years old, and I probably see more of Marto than I see of my brothers. I’m very proud of Marto and what he has achieved. He virtually had to draw a line in the sand and turn his career around six or seven years ago or he was gone, and he did just that. He made the decision to put his cricket first. He got fitter and works as hard as anyone in the squad. He was the most talented youngster I’ve seen. At 18, 19, 20 he was the best going. I rated him better than Lara, but I’m just wrapped that he got it together, worked his bum off got it right, and now he will end up being one of Australia’s great batsmen.
INVESTIGATE: And what about your relationship with opening partner and that amazing maroon, Queenslander Matty Hayden.
LANGER: Let me guess Jake, you’re a bloody Queenslander.
INVESTIGATE: Was I that obvious?
LANGER: No, couldn’t really tell mate. No, it’s amazing. I describe it to people as it’s like going to work with your best mate everyday. We first opened together against the Poms four years ago and we haven’t looked back since. Our careers are very similar. We both had to work hard for our opportunities, and had our fair share of setbacks early on. We help each other out both on the field and off, and he’d do anything for you. He’s a great fella, and like I said, I’m lucky to go to work with my best mate everyday.
INVESTIGATE: You have hit 21 centuries and a great 250, what would you say however was your favorite or most important innings?
LANGER: There was the 100 I scored against Pakistan in Hobart. I was under the pump and a few people were calling for my head, so I dug a nice one out when I really needed it. It was a big relief and gave me some much-needed confidence and released a whole heap of pressure that id been under.

The 250 against the Poms. Boxing Day Test at the MCG in an Ashes series it doesn’t get much better. You dream of that stuff as a kid, so that was pretty amazing, and then the 190, and 97 I scored against the Pakis just recently. Facing the world’s fastest bowler Shoaib Akhtar on the world’s fastest and bounciest wicket and playing on my home deck at the WACA in front of all my family and friends was pretty special too.

However I think the best stat is that I am one of only four players that played in every test when we set the record of 16 straight test match victories. To know I had contributed to every one of those victories, and that I was lucky enough to play in every one, is very special to me.
INVESTIGATE: Do you think that even though you haven’t played in the Australian One Day side since 1997, you could still be an addition to the side as they head towards the world cup?
LANGER: Look, I’m pretty realistic about that. You know with Gilly opening it takes away that specialist batsmen position, so probably not. It’s very frustrating, and it’s been a disappointment through my career, but I love being a test player, and I’ve really enjoyed my test career, so I just concentrate on the things that I have control over and leave the rest to the selectors.
INVESTIGATE: How hard is it to have to hit the road and leave your family behind?
LANGER: It’s the hardest part of the job, no question. You know I’ve faced Muralitharan, Wasim Akram, been able to see the world and enjoy some amazing experiences, but it’s very tough to leave them behind. I suppose the novelty has worn off a little. I have three girls and my wife is pregnant with another, and they mean everything to me, so it’s getting harder to leave every tour now.
INVESTIGATE: Your still heavily involved in the WA community and are involved in a lot of charities and guest speaking. Is that a career path that you will pursue when you leave cricket?
LANGER: I think so. My public speaking has developed a long way since I did my first speech in 1993. I filled in for Terry Alderman in Esperance in WA and really enjoyed it. Since then I have improved and gone from strength to strength, and now when I’m home I can do up to five talks a week. There’s a lot of financial reward in it as well, and it’s great to be able to pass on some experiences and give some tips about how to be successful and stay on top of your game.
INVESTIGATE: Tell me about Zen Do Kai, and what has it taught you?
LANGER: Zen Do Kai is a form of martial arts that has been a huge influence on me. As a youngster, I was a bit of a loud-mouth, a smart arse, so it was good in putting me in my place so to speak and teaching me a lot of discipline. I used to go to the sunrise dojo at 6am, and that took a lot of discipline, especially as a young bloke. I also learnt a lot about respect. I once headed onto the mat before my master and bowed, and next moment I was face up on the mat. I turned around and asked what that was for, and he replied, ‘You disrespected me, this is my dojo and im the teacher, and you walked in front of me. You show respect and allow me to go in front’. Fair to say I never did that again, and to this day still let people older than me to pass in front of me first!

I also love boxing and enjoy the discipline and the hard work that involves. There is no-one fitter than a boxer and it’s the ultimate sport of power and endurance. The other great thing is that it’s just like batting. It’s very technical and you need to keep a level head when the pressure is on. There’s no where to hide when your boxing, so you need courage as well. It’s like all combat sports.
INVESTIGATE: You’re renowned for your grit and ability to dig in and just keep scoring when the pressure is on. What gives you that mindset and determination?
LANGER: I’ve always lived by the motto, ‘the harder you work, the harder it is to surrender’. Like I said earlier: I now play without fear, and that comes from the fact that I know I have put the work in, and I don’t want to waste it. Concentration is another part. The ability to block out all distractions and just concentrate on what I need to do. You know, watching the way the ball comes out of the bowler’s hand, seeing it off the pitch, my footwork. It’s the ability to be able to do the same things, the right things, over and over again. I find that the fascinating thing about cricket, just trying to master the mind and be in a place of total concentration, because that is a battle in itself. I think you can learn to be resilient and hard-working. I believe that the pain of discipline is nothing like the pain of disappointment. That just makes you want to keep working, as you never want to leave yourself short, and you never want to lie to yourself. At least if you know that you did everything in your power to get your preparation right and didn’t leave a stoned unturned than you can always be happy with your result.

I think constant improvement is another reason. I’m always looking for ways to improve my game, and when I see young guys hit a plateau, I say to them to try something else. What can I change and do differently to improve my results. If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same outcomes. I was born into a family of extremely hardworking people so I suppose you can so it’s in the genes, and I knew that if I wanted to achieve anything, there was only one way to go about it. I think the other thing is that you need to smile into the face of pressure. People get tense and tighten up when they’re under the pump, and that can lead to their downfall. You need to relax and enjoy the competiton if you want to perform. Like Bruce Lee said, ‘Tight mind, loose body’.
INVESTIGATE: Justin, where do you get your inspiration?
LANGER: I get it from a lot of different people. I admire successful people and always surround myself with successful people. It can only make you more positive and want to keep achieving and constantly improving yourself and your performance. These people are leaders and inspire you to keep working. I admire the guys in the Australian cricket team. Not only are they hard workers and talented players, but also they are also all great people.

The kids I meet with cancer and their families. These people are having to deal with some terrible issues, but the way they smile and attack it head on, and the strength and love that their families provide is unbelievable, and I take so much away after seeing those people. And of course my family. They drive me to successes, and are always there for me when I come home.
INVESTIGATE: Who were your idols growing up?
LANGER: Number one was fellow West Australian Kym Hughes. He captained his country and was a fantastic batsman. Dennis Lillie was intense, and Alan Border was a genius. I also loved Graham Wood and Rod Marsh. Rod has been a mentor of mine growing up in WA, and has been a great help to my career. I also love Viv Richards. I remember stories of Viv being this massively strong gladiator, and he was an amazing batsmen.
INVESTIGATE: How do you prepare for a game, and do you have any weird superstitions?
LANGER: I like to pad up in the nude and walk around the hotel practicing my shots! No, I have no weird superstitions. I’m pretty relaxed and try to stick to the same routine all the time. I use a journal and try to stick to the same things in my lead-up that allow me to play well. The day before I watch a DVD of one of my 100’s I’ve hit for reinforcement. It just allows me to relax and be positive, knowing that I’ve done it before. I have cues that I run off, and I make sure that I’m doing them all right. Like hitting the balls in the nets, just making sure everything’s in the right order and being confident and relaxed. I always listen to music and try to stay relaxed the day of a game. I don’t eat much breakfast, just enough to get me through, and just concentrate on staying loose and relaxed and not worrying to much about batting. When I do worry too much, I tense up and get a little agitated and go back into my shell, and then I don’t play well. If I’m happy, relaxed, laughing, and enjoying myself than I will play good cricket.
INVESTIGATE: Who are the funniest teammates?
LANGER: When I first started Merv Hughes was the man. He was an absolute larrikin, and a bloody great bloke. Always great for a laugh. Glen McGrath would have to be the biggest idiot as well, and the most annoying. But he is the best bloke, a great fella. Now I’ve read a bit of the Bible, and it’s full of stories about miracles, but if you want a miracle you don’t have to go far past Glen’s 50 against NZ. I tell you, that’s the next story in the Bible.
INVESTIGATE: Who do you hang out with on tour?
LANGER: I hang out a lot with Matty Hayden and Damian Martyn. We like to get down to a Starbucks and grab a coffee and just talk shit really. Haydo’s a great fisherman too, so if we get a chance we sneak down and throw a line in.

I enjoy golf, but we don’t get a lot of chances to play. If we do I usually have a hit with Punter [Ricky Ponting]. It’s changed a lot though in recent years as a lot of the guys bring their wives on tour and don’t have as much time to spend with the boys.
INVESTIGATE: Any good stories?
LANGER: After we won the first test against the Sri Lankans we sang our song on the Gali lighthouse, which is no longer there after it was destroyed in the tsunami. After the second test in Candy we had to take a bus back to Colombo, which is an eight-hour bus ride. We organized with local police to stop on the bridge at the border and sing the team song. We were given exactly two minutes and there was traffic backed up as we pulled out the eskys and sung the song on the border. That was pretty special.
INVESTIGATE: Who do you see as the next big thing in Australian cricket?
LANGER: I think Shaun Tate from South Australia is very good. He’s very much like Jeff Thompson as he bowls with that slinging action and is very nippy. Dan Cullen, also from S.A., is an off spinner who looks pretty good. West Australian Shaun Marsh is very promising, and Shane Watson, who we have already seen a bit of, has plenty of ability and has the ability to be the next Jacques Callas.
INVESTIGATE: Who do you see as the next
nation to stand up and challenge the Aussies?
LANGER: Tough question. I suppose we will see how the Poms shape up very soon. India is the next- best team at the moment and we just beat them over there, so I don’t really know. I think you will see that the Aussies will probably drop back a little in the next few years as players retire. You know when you haven’t got McGrath and Warne teaming up, and once-in-a-lifetime players like that bowing out of the side, the pressure will be on the players coming in to maintain and build on that standard.
INVESTIGATE: Have you accomplished the goals you set yourself as a youngster, and what are the goals that you still want to achieve?
LANGER: I suppose eight years ago I had played eight tests and got dropped and it looked like I would struggle to get back in. Even my wife thought that was it, so to get back in was great. I played another 40 and got the chop again, before I worked my way back in and now I’m on 88. One of my goals is to get to one hundred test matches, so I need to maintain my workload and my form and get the twelve needed for my hundred and then keep going from there.

I’ve achieved a lot more than what people have expected, but not what I have expected, and I knew that if I did the work and kept believing in myself than I could play great cricket. I’ve learnt, however, not to look to far ahead. Just concentrate on what’s in front of you, do the right things, and the results will take care of themselves. My next goal is to play in the first test of the ashes at Lords. I’ve never played there and it’s 81 days till the first day of play, so I’m very excited about playing there as its always been a dream to play at the Lords. It’s steeped in tradition and prestige and it will be great to make my debut there in the first day of an Ashes series.
INVESTIGATE: What about Brett Lee. How stiff is he, and will he get his chance?
LANGER: Look, he probably is a bit stiff, but it’s all about timing. He is doing everything right, and will be the next to go in if Dizzy (Jason Gillispie) or Kaspa (Michael Kasprowicz) go down. Dizzy and Kaspa have been brilliant and you can’t drop them. I mean, that’s why we are so good. We suffocate the opposition with our attack, and if you were to drop one of those boys they would be even stiffer.
Undying credit has to go to Brett. He has trained that hard, his fitness would be equivalent of an Olympic athlete, he’s done everything right. He is a great role model for persistence and if he gets his chance his going to come in and play some great cricket.
INVESTIGATE: What about the famous ‘Wall of Quotes’ you have at your house?
LANGER: I always read, and have always written things down. My wife was horrified when we moved into the new house and I started writing on the walls. I have my own room out the back were I have a gym and a few bags hanging up. I hang my memorabilia on the walls as well as quotes, and it’s just a great place to go to. Whether it’s to chill out and relax, or do a workout, you can’t help but feel something when you’re in that room.
INVESTIGATE: What about hoolios and nerds? What are you?
LANGER: I think I’m a nerd. I’m married, I have a family, I like to read, but the boys keep roping me into the hoolios. So at the moment I’m a hoolio but I think I should be in the nerds.
INVESTIGATE: Finally, your prediction for the Ashes?
LANGER: Four-zip.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

Money, May 05, AU Edition

DON’T DO IT YOURSELF
Most financial advisors are here to help. Here’s how to pick the right one

Can you remember the days when financial advice came from a trusted accountant or bank manager? Things were simpler then: cars had bench seats in the front; we went to drive-ins; we ate meat pies and not Macca’s; we played sport for fun and not money; sex was safe and rugby was dangerous; and we had a father figure for a Prime Minister.

Well, perhaps not everything has changed.

But it’s a different world today, and there’s a whole new breed of people out there who want to tell us what to do with our money. Along with accountants and bankers, Australians now have to contend with guidance from such people as financial advisors.

I understand where the cynics are coming from when they say that the burgeoning financial advice industry is a self-made one. But in point of fact, I have spoken to many accountants, and their general consensus is that they are pleased that financial advisors exist.

Accountants say advisors take the heat off and allow them to focus on what to do with customers’ profits, rather than trying to make them in the first place. So let’s agree on one thing: love them or hate them, financial advisors are here to stay, and we have to learn how to manage them and assimilate them into our financial strategies. We need to better understand who they are, what they can do for us, what they can’t do, and what we can do if we are not happy with their service.

The first question has to be, just what exactly is a financial advisor? Greg Tanzer from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) explains that ‘financial advisors are qualified, and allowed under the law to give advice on shares, managed investments, superannuation, even insurance: really [any] financial type investments’. ASIC is the federal government authority responsible for the licensing, registration and monitoring of financial advisors. Importantly, ASIC is also responsible for the complaint process and legal ramifications if you, as a customer, believe that you have been inappropriately advised.

What do financial advisors need to do to become licensed? A prospective applicant has to fill in a 58-page licence application form which not only questions his or her qualifications but also delves into their personal financial situation, risk management skills, and knowledge of compliance policies and dispute resolution mechanisms.

ASIC has a register that lists training courses and individual assessment services that have been approved by ASIC authorised assessors as meeting ASIC’s training requirements in relation to their Policy Statement No. 146, which governs this sort of thing.

Once a financial advisor is registered, he or she is listed on the ASIC website (www.asic.gov.au) and it is a simple matter of doing a search to ensure that they are correctly qualified.

A requirement of their licence is that every financial advisor must have a ‘Financial Service Guide’. This is a document which outlines the range of services that they offer, who they work for, and any associations they might have with financial institutions. You should be aware that almost all financial advisors have some sort of association with a large bank or other financial institution such as a managed fund provider. Is that a conflict? Is it a problem? According to Tanzer, ‘It is not providing that you know about it. The issue is that they can still give you advice from these institutions. Many customers actually want advice on the products available from these institutions because they do bank with them.’

Adds Tanzer, ‘They also have to tell you about commission arrangement and how they are being paid. They have to tell you up front’.
Financial advisors also have to be a part of some sort of external dispute resolution scheme. These schemes are put in place to save you time and money so that you don’t have to go to court. They are neutral, objective, non-associated schemes that go through certain procedures to ensure that disputes are managed fairly, openly, and equitably. One of the most common is the Finance Industry Complaint Service (FICS). All financial advisors have to be part of one of these schemes and you should ask them about this before you sign up with them.

Financial advisors also have their own industry group, the Financial Planning Association. This organisation sets ethical industry standards and has its own complaint resolution procedures.

If after all of this preparation you find yourself in a position where you have some major issues with your financial advisor, then your first step is to contact ASIC. ASIC has powers to take disciplinary action against financial advisors, which could include banning them or initiating criminal proceedings.

ASIC’s current acting chairman, Jeremy Cooper, succinctly explains that ‘clients seeking advice about how to invest their money to secure their financial futures, like all people, have a right to feel that the guidance and information they are receiving is genuine’.

This organisation is not a paper tiger, either. Just a couple of months ago, a NSW financial advisor was sentenced to an eight-year jail term with a non-parole period of five years after pleading guilty to fifteen counts of misappropriating client funds and three more counts of dishonest conduct. ASIC also took civil action in this matter in 2002 when they obtained an immediate injunction against the financial advisor in question, and later obtained orders from the Supreme Court of NSW to permanently restrain the person in question from providing financial products and financial advice, or dealing with client funds. In 2003, ASIC also permanently banned this particular financial advisor from acting as a representative of a securities dealer or of an investment advisor, and from providing any financial services.

This particular financial advisor had got himself in this position because he defrauded nine clients over a two-and-a-half year period of over $1.7 million. He advised each of his clients to invest their funds into certain investment products or term deposits. They all assumed their money was being placed into legitimate investments. But contrary to his clients’ directions, the money was used to meet various business and personal expenses. ASIC has made it clear that stealing clients’ money will not be tolerated. Cooper sums it up, stating: ‘The prison term imposed … is a reminder to all financial advisors that ASIC will pursue those who defraud the community and abuse their clients’ trust, and that they will get caught and punished’.

I should make it very clear that these sorts of proceedings are very rare because disputes are settled before court action is required, and of course, the vast majority of financial advisors are doing the right thing. Like any industry, it is the small handful of individuals that give a bad name to the hard-working ethical majority. You should also be aware that in many cases it is actually the client that is at fault for not fully understanding or investigating what is being offered. As in real estate, the financial planning is very much one of caveat emptor.

We are charging through the 21st century with a sort of millennium madness that is producing many changes. Like any change, some is good and some is not necessary. Regardless of your own personal opinion about financial advisors, they are here to stay. In the most part financial industry professionals see this as a good thing, but what about we that require their advice. For mine, as a prospective client, I see their role as a value added service that should help me manage and maximise my financial situation, but like most things in this life I am responsible for what I do and the decisions I make.

I do not want to be a part of a society full of whingers that is always looking for someone else to blame, or something else to fix self created problems. It is up to me to fully understand and investigate what an individual financial advisor is offering and what regulatory requirements they have met. If I research correctly and ask the right questions, I will be in a better financial position. It may sound a paradox, but if I were to be in the middle of a dispute I would prefer it was the result of something that my advisor had done rather than my inability to be proactive.

Tips for you to use before you hand over your hard-earned to a financial advisor:
* Search the ASIC website to ensure that they are licensed.
* Ask to see their Financial Service Guide.
* Ask what areas in which they are qualified to advise you.
* Question their commission and payment arrangements.
* Understand fully their associations with any financial institution.
* Be fully aware of what services they can offer.
* Ask them to explain, and sight, the external dispute resolution scheme that they are a part of, i.e. FICS. This is important in case you do have a dispute with them.
* Ask if they are a member of the Financial Planning Association.
* If in doubt contact ASIC at www.asic.gov.au or call their hotline number: 1300 300 630.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Mar 05, AU Edition

BAD SEEDS, GOOD TUNES
Also: Seven CDs of suave swing, and what happens when career changes go bad

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
"Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus", Anti
3 stars
With his deep, portentous voice and grave manner, Nick Cave demands to be taken seriously. His literate lyrics often rely on biblical and mythological allusions: even the titles of the two-disc set Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus could use footnotes.
But Cave’ s pretensions are a large part of his appeal, and after 20 years with his ever-evolving band, the Bad Seeds, he still pulls off audacious rhymes like “Orpheus”/ “orifice” without sounding ridiculous.

The mainly acoustic, piano-driven Lyre is the more accessible album. The rolling ballad Breathless is the most beautiful song in Cave’s vast catalog, and Babe, You Turn Me On isn’t far behind.

The more visceral “Abattoir raises a holy clatter of apocalyptic noise in songs such as There She Goes, My Beautiful World, an invocation to the Muses to cure writer’s block that links St. John of the Cross to Johnny Thunders and features a gospel choir. Based on the inspired songs in these albums, the Muses must have listened.
Review by Steve Klinge

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Robert Downey Jr.
“The Futurist”, Sony Classical 1
1 star
Robert Downey Jr. found fame as a talented yet troubled actor. He’ll need to leave it at that with this partly laudable, partly laughable transition into music. The downtrodden, introspective vibe of The Futurist – one mid-tempo piano-driven ballad after another – is tiresome, despite the earnestness of the whole affair. To his credit, singer-songwriter-pianist Downey (who sang on Ally McBeal as well as in his Oscar-nominated turn in Chaplin) brings a solid sense of melody to his own compositions, smartly enhanced by subtle flourishes of jazz and folk. But his voice is hardly endearing, even on his understated rendition of Chaplin’s “Smile”. And he’s painfully off the mark on a cringe-worthy version of Yes’ “Your Move” that even Jon Anderson’s backing vocals can’t save. There’s raw talent here, but Downey had best stick with his day job.
Review by Nicole Pensiero

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Art Farmer/Benny Golson
“The Complete Argo/Mercury Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet Sessions”, Mosaic
4 stars
The jazztet created in 1959 by the trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist/composer Benny Golson more than merits this seven-CD extravaganza from Mosaic Records.

The two created a group with a suave sound that showcased great melodies from a swinging core. Farmer, who died in 1999 and helped popularize the flugelhorn in jazz, was among the most sensitive of brass players, while Golson, a heavyweight reed man, remains one of jazz’s top composers.

Included here is his classic tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, I Remember Clifford, which encapsulates the greatness of the partnership: Farmer’s trumpet finding poignant nuances in Golson’s elegiac composition.

The jazztet, which ran through 1962, was a great vehicle for Golson’s tunes, which range from Killer Joe, with its spoken and theatrical introduction, to the goose-stepping Blues March, and from the earthy Blues After Dark to the noir ballad Park Avenue Petite.
Review by Karl Stark

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

ADVENTURES: June 05, AU Edition

WHEELY GOOD TIMES
Looking for a good time? Check out the new breed of pit bikes, advises Jamie Kaye and Ben Wyatt

When I was a teenager the thought of doing anything remotely dangerous filled me with excitement. Every night I would sit in the park with my mates talking about all the insane things we would do if we were old enough and had enough money, free fall, bungy jump, snowboard, scuba dive, you name it and we wanted to do it. As things were back then, the nearest to danger and excitement we could ever get was to ride my friend Paul’s grandfather’s 50cc moped around a field.

As with most people when I was old enough and had enough money to do the things I spent so many evenings talking about, life just kind of got in the way. Time and money never seemed to stretch far enough to accommodate my childhood dreams of extreme adventures while also leaving enough cash in the kitty to buy beer and take perspective wives out for dinner.

Or maybe I just forgot all of my thrill-seeking plans.
That was until just recently while walking my dog one evening I spotted a Thumpstar in the window of a local motorbike store. The minute I got home I jumped online to find out as much as I could about these mean looking little machines. It wasn’t long before I discovered that I wasn’t the only thirty-something bloke to have had his eye caught by these pocket-sized monsters.

In every state in Australia there is now a Thumpstar club of some description, with regular race meets where anyone who owns one can rock up and race. It really amazed me just how big this little sub culture of seemingly normal every day office types had become, it was at this point that the decision was made, I simply had to try one.

My Thumpstar arrived last Wednesday. I immediately threw it on the back of my mates ute and headed for the hills. At this point it is important to note that I had not ridden a motor bike since my teenage years. Once started the noise that came out of this deceptive little toy was so exciting, it was like turning over a Harley, and suddenly this little bike didn’t seem so little!

We hurtled through the forest and fields for the entire afternoon. I hadn’t had that much fun for years. It was very easy to ride, anyone whose ridden a motorbike before can jump straight on it and go and for anyone whose not ridden before it really is a piece of cake to learn, the real beauty of it is, its so small that if you do manage to fall off you dont have far to fall.

The Thumpstar mini bike will sure help you abandon any lingering frustrations you might have. This is a neat little off road mo-torbike; one that you just look at and know it will be a lot of fun!

Tim Hunter, director of the company developed the first model and now deals with one of the largest production lines in Taiwan, which produces 2.2 million motorbikes per year. This 215,000-square metre factory operates six production lines with one solely for the Thumpstar model.

Stoney Creek is the main dealership in Australia distributing to 115 outlets throughout the country. Cameron Newman reports that the first interest came from motorbike events and competitions where organisers and the professionals would need to get around the often large arenas, so small customised bikes were used. The term ‘pit bike’ is Thumpstars true description, and still sales in this particular area hold a strong percentage of the market.

For anyone wanting to relive the careless wildness of their teenage years, this could be the answer: ‘These bikes are kids’ bikes beefed up for adults to race around back yards all over our country, and with mini race tracks popping up all over the place, our sport that was basically unknown now gets the same attention as a national motocross event’, says Andrew Reid, president of the mini bike association.

These bikes are for people who know how to have fun, and for those who don’t want to break their bank balance. With the bike priced at $3,000, this is an affordable piece of equipment. Being small almost gives them a jovial slant on motorbike riding. ‘When you watch an event you come away with aching cheeks’, Cameron tells me, ‘with a lot of close racing, barging and hilarious wipe-outs.’ Being low to the ground and small bikes limits the damage caused by otherwise heavy crashing metal.

Greg ‘The Godfather’ Timmons is one of Thumpstars most experienced team riders. He won the 110cc 10hp Import Class of the Mini Bike Motocross Titles, Gold Coast 2004. He explains that the pressure in competing in this class is far less, ‘because there’s no training involved, whereas if your riding big bikes, rigorous commitment is necessary.’ It’s an open class event and anyone can enter, making the events ever-increasing spectacles. ‘We would put races on, 20 to 30 riders would turn up and we were excited at the turn out. In 2003 we had a race and 80 riders came, it blew a lot of the people away to see that many minis in one place and little did we know it would turn out like this!’, explains Reid.

Now in 2005 a five-round event takes place from Sydney to Brisbane. There are to date 300 entries for the Australian title. The sport has also gained exposure and recognition through the ‘Gold Coast Bike Week’, which is held in September with 250 entries last year racing round a man made mini motocross track. ‘There was an over under bridge, two wooden ski jumps, a 6-metre finish line table top jump, and technical layout to challenge the best of rider and machine. Twenty riders race at a time battling over four to five laps. The racing is promoted in a fun way so we don’t take things too seriously’, Reid says. ‘We try to cater for most people and 90% of riders are there just to do battle with their mates or the get the feel of racing dirt bikes.’

The Gold Coast Bike Week will be held on the 3rd and 4th of September, so any potential enthusiasts should turn up to see what this sport has to offer. Mini biking seems to be set to become a great new hobby that allows everyone to enjoy the exhilaration, excitement even competition of an adrenaline fuelled sport. Watch this space.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: June 05, AU Edition

NOT-SO-FRESH PRINCE
$20 million still can’t buy Will Smith respect, but Tracey Thorn’s remixes more than satisfy

Will Smith
‘Lost and Found’, Interscope
2 stars
On his ninth CD, Will Smith takes on the intersection of Hollywood and Philadelphia as if jovially taking on another amiable movie role. Mostly, it’s business as usual.

The stutter-tronic ‘Switch’ is the party track.In accordance with hip-hop law, Snoop Dogg appears. ‘Here He Comes’ features a patented Smith sample gleaned from our childhood, the SpiderMan TV cartoon theme, with chunky beats by ex-partner Jazzy Jeff.

Big Willie makes merry about getting dissed by Eminem, blabbing happily about getting reamed by rap radio. So what, right? With more than one reference to making ‘20 mil’, you can’t help but think that Smith is giggling all the way to his broker.

But listen harder. Smith ain’t feeling quite so jiggy.

‘Sometimes y’all mistake nice for soft, so before I go off...’ spits Smith on ‘Mr. Niceguy’, taking on haters through bucking rhythms with the sort of veiled threats his Shark Tale co-star Bob De Niro usually proffers. When not busy taking the offensive on being defensive, Smith wails on religious hypocrisy, star-stalkers, and the rap game’s relentless copycatting (from Smith, yet, goes the boast of the title track) with a sneer to match his cheer.
Reviewed by A.D. Amorosi

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Everything But the Girl
‘Adapt or Die (Ten Years of Remixes)’, Atlantic/Blanco y Negro
2 stars
Someday, perhaps, there’ll be a new Everything But the Girl album. Until then, aficionados of Tracey Thorn’s smoky, sensual purr of a voice will have to settle for this delicious set of remixes.

To recap: Vocalist Thorn and guitarist (and now DJ) Ben Watt emerged from Britain as a haircut band in the 1980s, then suavely evolved into masters of chilled-out electronica after Todd Terry’s remix of ‘Missing’ became an international hit in 1995. ‘Adaptor Die’ gathers a decade’s worth of reinterpretations of the duo’s fetching pop songs, with DJ Jazzy Jeff and King Britt among the knob-twiddlers, along with Terry, Adam F, Brad Wood and others.

It works perfectly, with Watt and Thorn’s compositions – plus a seductive version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado” – reinvented but not unrecognizable, and Thorn’s soulful, contemplative vocals leaving you yearning for more.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

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Sean Costello
“Sean Costello”, Artemis
2 stars
Though he started out as a precocious blues-guitar hotshot – releasing his first album at 16 and backing fellow up-and-comer Susan Tedeschi before he was 20 – Sean Costello seems more interested in emulating Eddie Hinton than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Hinton was the great Muscle Shoals session guitarist who was also a superb singer and songwriter. Like the late Hinton, the 25-year-old Costello has a soulfully rough-hewn voice and is mostly content to make his guitar one element of a taut, earthy R&B sound.

Here he covers Al Green and Bob Dylan, among others, but for the first time he focuses on originals. From the punchy soul of ‘No Half Steppin’’ and ‘Hold on This Time’ to the roadhouse urgency of ‘I’ve Got to Ride’ and the anguished balladry of ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, Costello shows that his lyrical are catching up to his formidable musical talents.
Reviewed by Nick Cristiano

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

June 05, AU Edition

FAMILY TIES
What is driving the quest for millions of dollars in compensation for the woman Australia wrongly deported?
JAMES MORROW reports

When it was revealed that the federal government had mistakenly deported 42-year-old Vivian Alvarez, an Australian citizen, back to her native country of the Philippines four years ago, the media had a field day: commentators wasted no time in suggesting that the deportation was based solely on racial grounds, and that non-white Australians had better carry their identity papers with them at all times lest they suffer a similar fate.

Never mind that Vivian was mentally ill and had been using at least three other different last names (including Solon, Young, and Wilson) at the time of her deportation, making her identity tough to establish. Or that, according to diplomatic cables, she had married a man in the Philippines in early 2001 and re-entered Australia on a Filipino passport with a tourist visa six months before being kicked out of the country.

But as the saga of Vivian Alvarez has played itself out in the media, all these facts have become irrelevant. Add to the mix a gang of Australia-based family members that suddenly appeared for tearful reunions in the Philippines, and lawyers talking of millions of dollars in compensation claims, and the waters become even more muddied.

Enter Rina Quistadio. Rina, a 21-year-old divorced single mother, is in a unique position to shed light on the saga of Vivian Alvarez and her family, and the legal struggle that could cost the taxpayer millions of dollars in legal and compensation costs. Rina, you see, is Vivian Alvarez’s half-niece, and it is her parents – whose house she left when she was just sixteen years old, never to look back – who have been at the forefront of the quest for compensation for Vivian.

‘All of us are waiting for an answer, an explanation’, Henry Solon, Rina’s father and Vivian’s half-brother told ABC Radio recently; Solon has also filed a complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, saying that the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs discriminated against Vivian on the basis of her race, and led the charge for legal representation and compensation. (Vivian has not sought compensation herself, and has forgiven the government for what she has termed a mistake).

But Rina is skeptical of the motives behind her father’s and other members of her estranged family’s quest for compensation for Vivian, and alleges that it is more dollars than a desire for justice for a family member that is pushing them.

‘When I first saw my dad on the news, and then hopped on-line to find out more about the story, I thought it was a bit of a joke’, Rina says, recalling when she first found out it was her aunt who was at the centre of a media and political firestorm. (‘First I recognized the set of encylopaedias, and then I recognized the sofa, and then I thought, “Hey, that guy looks a lot like my father!”’, she laughs, remembering the moment a few weeks ago when the story broke).

‘As far as I know my parents had seen Vivian exactly once in my entire life,’ she adds. ‘About nine years ago, I remember she contacted us at our house, and she brought her two kids and a boyfriend, I don’t remember his name. But she seemed a bit mentally sketchy at the time. It was all pretty emotionless, but that’s the kind of family we were. I was excited about having two new cousins whom I’d never met before, and I remember that Vivian asked my mum and dad if they’d look after her kids while she sorted herself out, but my parents said no.’

‘My mother was working as a daycare mum at the time and was already looking after kids. I was just young and didn’t know what the family budget was, but I assumed at the time mum and dad wouldn’t take the kids because Vivian couldn’t pay them’, she adds.

After that brief meeting, which Rina recalls lasting a couple of hours, there was no contact whatsoever between Vivian and her parents. Rina left home two days after Christmas in 2000 – she chafed under the family’s strict traditional structure, which forbade her from doing any of the normal things Australian kids did. Barely six months later, Vivian was detained and deported by the Department of Immigration.

‘I think it is ridiculous that they are all fighting for the rights of a woman they barely knew’, says Rina, who alleges that her family is more concerned about sharing a compensation payout than caring for their relative.

‘She was only there once for a couple of hours nine years ago, and now they are pushing for all this money for her. I don’t think this incident was one bit troubling for my family – it has been for Vivian – but not for them.’

(For the record, Henry Solon has denied that he is trying to ‘cash in’, and when questioned on ABC Radio about why he moved so quickly to retain lawyers when he heard of Vivian’s plight, responded, ‘I had to move quick, you know what I mean? Otherwise, I would…Vivian, not me, Vivian would miss out.’)

Rina also has harsh words for those, including her father, who has tried to turn the deportation into a racial issue. ‘I just don’t know why they care so much now, and why it took four years for them to speak out about it. It doesn’t look like they’d made a massive effort to look for her before this.’

‘I found it a bit rich that it is being insinuated that this is a racially motivated bungle, because we’re living here and Australia has given us everything we needed and wanted’, Rina continues. ‘I hate to see Australia get a bad name and get called a racist country, because it’s not, because it’s one of the most welcoming countries in the world. I think that’s one of the best things about this country. The really ironic thing is that growing up, my family always said that if you marry a white man you’ll look like a mail-order bride!’

‘Every institution is bound to cock up. My thing is that Vivian didn’t make it easy for herself to be found and verified as an Australian citizen, and she seemed pretty scattered when they found her’, says Rina.

‘From what I’ve read, the government did what they were supposed to do as per procedure. They thought she was here illegally and they sent her back – she must have said something to make them think that. Whether she was in the right frame of mind or not, they thought they had good cause.’

One of the biggest problems Rina has with her family’s story is that they seem to have made no effort to find Vivian before she was discovered by the media, though it fits with a pattern of estrangement from the family that has played out in her own life. Says Rina, ‘the whole story was preposterous the first time I read it. Then it hit me that this was really a big thing. Then I asked myself, “why do they care so much?” There’s just no caring in that family, and if they do care so much, how come they don’t get in touch with me? If they cared so much for Vivian when they first met her nine years ago, she would have become part of our lives.’

Although Rina doesn’t care to see her family, or Vivian, she is concerned that she get back to Australia, get the treatment she needs, and be reunited with her children. She says it would be a shame for Vivian’s sons not to get to know their mother, something she can identify with, having been cut off from her own parents for the past five years.

‘When I first left home, I sent them letters until Christmas of 2001, but never got a response’, Rina says. ‘After I had my daughter I went up to Brisbane and put a photo album of pictures of my daughter in their letterbox and I still never heard a thing from them.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Sep 05. AU Edition

MEN BEHAVING BADLY
This month: sickos, school shooters, and English-language abusers – plus a great sea tale

MR MUO’S TRAVELLING COUCH
By Dai Sijie
Chatto & Windus, $39.95, ISBN: 0 7011 7739 X
Dai Sijie’s first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress, was a delightfully written fable which showed how appealing forbidden Western literature (Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens) could be to people living in an oppressive regime. Sijie’s second novel, also exquisitely written, similarly deploys the encounter of a strand of Western thought with Chinese culture, but this time Western psychology – i.e. psychoanalysis – is depicted to satiric and ironic effect. Mr Muo is a French-educated travelling Freudian psychoanalyst but his dream interpretations are considered by his listeners to be either fortune telling or greeted with howls of laughter. Freud and psychoanalysis are easy targets to mock (Nabokov never spared the ‘Viennese witchdoctor’) and at times I found myself chuckling along with the mockers and knockers.

The plot also oozes satiric mockery towards Chinese society and government. For Mr Muo’s real quest in China is not to spread the ideas of Freud but to find a virgin with which to bribe a corrupt judge to free his first love who has been imprisoned for selling articles to the West that describe scenes of Chinese torture. Believe it or not, Muo has trouble finding a virgin – the villages are filled with old women and young girls – the eligible young women having moved into the cities. In other words, the plot is fanciful and Mr Muo is something of a Chinese Quixote tilting at windmills.

Dai Sijie, let me note, writes safely in Paris and in French. I am reasonably confident this book will not be on sale in China, a land of widespread corruption and censorship, anytime soon. The richly elegant style and the multiple layers of irony (Mr Muo is himself a virgin) make this very much a writer’s book. But it also clearly has a political message – albeit one couched in an ironic fable of folly.

Despite its excellence of style, some of the monologues seem inordinately long and discursive though I suspect Chinese readers (hopefully it will find some) may locate more resonance in them than an Occidental one. Also the basic plot engine is left unsatisfiedly unresolved (a Kafkaesque touch, perhaps) or yet another irony? Readers must decide.

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I CHOOSE TO LIVE
By Sabine Dardenne
Virago Press, $29.95, ISBN: 1 84408 2105
In recent times few crimes have been more shocking than those perpetuated by Mark Dutroux, the Belgian paedophile who kidnapped, raped and murdered several girls, two as young as eight.

Sabine Dardenne, a slightly built pre-pubescent twelve-year-old, who by her own description looked about ten, was cycling home from school one day in May 1996 when a van pulled alongside her. She was quickly abducted then chained up naked in a small dirty dungeon-like room where she became prey to Dutroux’s psychopathic lust.

As well as being her physical tormentor, Dutroux played havoc with her fears. He kept referring to a mysterious boss, who, if he was let loose on the hapless Sabine, would torture and murder her. By contrast, Dutroux’s treatment was self portrayed as ‘kind’ – he even tried to portray himself as her saviour and brainwash her that her parents had not paid the ransom asked for her life.

Being young and in fear of her life, Dardenne believed him. His physical power over her was absolute yet he never broke her spirit.
Eventually, desperate with loneliness and thinking she might spend the rest of her life chained up in that dismal room, she asked if she could have a friend. When another girl barely two years older than herself turned up, drugged and chained, she was beside herself with guilt. But this is one contemporary horror that has something of a happy ending for Dutroux was caught and told the police about the two trapped girls. The two eight year olds were not so lucky – they starved to death behind that massive concrete door that secured the makeshift prison.

Dardenne tells her own story in simple direct prose – and it is all the more moving for that simplicity. If there is any reader seeking titillation from these pages they will get absolutely none: there are no descriptions whatsoever of the sexual humiliations Dutroux inflicted on the two girls.

At the time the story broke, speculation was rife about a vast underground network of paedophiles in Belgium. Dardenne always believed that Dutroux was the main protagonist (though he had a couple of accomplices including, incredibly, his wife). Subsequent information indicates that Dutroux did not have a secret boss and his attempt to make out he was a humble cog in a large network, who procured for others, was an attempt to lessen his own guilt.

That the two girls survived was a small miracle; that Dardenne’s resolute strength of character carried her through to a normal adult life and a normal relationship without any help from psychiatrists is perhaps the biggest miracle of all. Her body may been violated, her mind temporarily downtrodden, but her soul stayed pure and strong.

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RAMPAGE: The Social Roots of School Shootings
By Katherine S. Newman, Cybelle Fox, David J. Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth
Basic Books, $32, ISBN: 0 465 05104 9
I recently read a book called We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, a fictional work which made it plain that Kevin, a fifteen-year-old murderer, was basically an evil kid and his mother’s failings as a parent could not be blamed for his horrible deeds – even though she tortured herself psychologically with the possibility. In Kevin, the psychological, let alone the social, causes of youthful carnage were not presented as the explanation for psychopathic behaviour. Rampage examines psychological factors but seeks to place more emphasis on overlooked sociological factors.

School killers, as the name suggests, perform their mass murders at school. They are disturbingly young and getting younger – Andrew Golden was just eleven when he teamed up with 13-year Mitchell Johnson to shoot dead five people and injure a further ten at his school in Arkansas. Although like most mature men I tell myself I am not easily shocked, an eleven-year-old shooting dead or wounding several people does appal. At that tender age, I was doing projects on tea or sugar, and had never been exposed to a gun more powerful than an air pistol.

Quite often, there aren’t many clues to forewarn. Johnson had been rejected by a girlfriend and Golden was cruel to cats. Hardly sufficient reason or motivation to shoot fifteen people. They, like several such killers, came from a small town. The multiple contributors have tried to find a commonality among school killers by a series of graphs that list factors such as age, ethnicity, urbanity and aspects of social marginalisation such as being a loner, being teased or bullied, or indeed even just feeling marginalised. They also looked at mental illness or family problems, disciplinary history, violent writings, trouble with the law, issued threats, mental illness, suicidality, and depression. Finally, they considered access to guns. Summing up their findings, the authors says that there is not enough commonality to compose a reliable or predictable profile. Depressing news, isn’t it?

My gut instinct is that the sociological explanations offered (structural secrecy, institutional memory loss, loosely-coupled systems, counsellors having too many roles to fill) are weaker and more abstract than the psychological ones. Small towns and being loners seem to figure prominently but also, alas, there are plenty of school killers who had friends and even mentioned their intentions to create havoc – which were of course often not taken seriously.

The authors seem to contradict themselves on pages 268-269 when they write ‘... and they weren’t all bullies or teased either’ which is followed three lines later by the statement, ‘And nearly all of them were bullied or teased.’ So which is it? Were they bullied or not? The table on pages 312-313 shows each of the shooters were either bullied or that there was ‘no evidence’. I know it’s not strictly kosher to say so, but if every known case shows bullying, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that a healthy percentage of the remaining teenagers were also bullied? Not that being bullied is sufficient cause for wholesale murder.

The chapter on prevention offers some cautious measures: keeping better records, more school resource officers, challenging notions of masculinity, zero tolerance policy of disciplinary breaches (how is this ever possible?), encouraging kids to report threats. All very well and good. But I am left with the lingering feeling that this is a study from the inside of American society and to an outsider three factors which, though they are in part included in the book, have a peculiarly American flavour – (a) the wide ownership, obsession and ready access to guns; (b) the status anxiety which makes Americans (especially socially marginalised ones) willing to do anything to achieve fame; (c) a society which accepts adolescence as a zone of complete freedom and independence. America, one could say, is paying a high price for its freedoms.

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PASSAGE TO TORRES STRAIT: Four Centuries in the Wake of Great Navigators, Mutineers, Castaways and Beachcombers
By Miles Hordern
John Murray, $39.95, ISBN: 0 7195 6496 4
This is a book to stir the salt in the blood of even the most landbound reader. Isn’t that what shipping clerks and ‘customer sales representatives’ (receptionists, bank clerks, office workers) secretly yearn for – to sail off on a blue ocean and anchor in remote and gorgeous lagoons there to parley with beautiful bronze-skinned inhabitants? In days gone by, your best security measure to obtain a benign reception by the locals was to be alone – a lone survivor is no threat – and not be part of group (certain to be bumped off).

So off we sail with the Waiheke Island-based author and his 28-foot sloop for high adventure and re-exploration of history on the high blue seas. By the way, this is how it starts: ‘At lunchtime I finished a bottle of rum’. That I assume was the dessert – and not the aperitif – following a lengthy journey. Horden’s adventurous sojourn was to take him north of Auckland to the Melanesian islands, west across the Coral Sea to the Great Barrier Reef and into the dangerous maze of Torres Strait, wrecker of ships, killer of men.

In Dillon’s Bay, Eerromango – south of Vanuatu – Hordern outlines the protocol of the Melanesian approach to a lone vessel. ‘They would circle the boat in perfect silence...when ready they made a deliberate noise, slapping the paddle against the surface or clearing their throats. Then they waited for an invitation to come alongside’. After boarding they would make requests, in this case for tobacco.

This happened three times and just as Horden was tiring of the one-way traffic after an exhausting journey, the Erromagans returned with sixty pieces of fruit. Erromango may seem an out of the way place now, but in the nineteenth century these waters saw a brisk trade in sandalwood, used for soap and cosmetics. At first, sandalwood was traded for beads, fish-hooks then saws, tomahawks, carving knives and butchers’ cleavers and still later muskets, powder and tobacco.

Some of the castaways or survivors of shipwreck were treated like kings. For in times of early contact, white sailors were assumed to be spirits or supernatural beings. One character known as Big-Legged Jimmy was plied with feasts, kava and young women and left hundreds of grandchildren. By contrast, others like Leonard Shaw, who survived a massacre in the Kilinailau Islands, New Guinea, was kept as a pet and tortured by children who pulled out his facial hair. Hordern describes the enthralling survival tales of the like of William Lockerby on Fiji, John Young on Hawaii, and Peter Dillon on remote Tikopia, even today without airstrip, wharf, white residents, electricity or telephones. Both Conrad and New Zealand castaways get a look in.

All around the vastness of the South Pacific, Horden narrates, the castaway, mutineer or beachcomber was often the envoy of European culture. First encounters were not as we so often fondly imagine – a high ranking officer (Captain Cook, say) with a formidable well- equipped ship meeting a noble chief on white beach and exchanging gifts, but rather a lone and miserable survivor often seeking advantage and sometimes getting it, sometime not. The somewhat throwaway term beachcomber has been immeasurably enriched for me by reading this book. So we are on double journey with Horden, the still adventurous present – the difficult and complex passage through Torres Strait is thrilling reading – and the even more adventurous past.

I have left the best wine (or swig of rum) to last. Horden, a proven sailor, can also write like the roaring forties. Graham Billing is probably our best naturalist writer but Hordern (English now settled in New Zealand) is running him close. ‘Tepid strings of spray spun into the cockpit as if coughed up from the belly of a waking beast.’ On virtually every page there are descriptions as fine as this. This is an ideal book for either sailor or landlubber.

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HOW MUMBO JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD
By Francis Wheen,
Harper Perennial, $24.95, ISBN: 0 00 714097 5
I’ve always liked books that take a wide overview (it saves me work) and authors that debunk – for there’s lot in this world that needs debunking. Francis Wheen does rather nicely in both categories. Wheen is firm but fair: he’s tough on everyone. Madame Thatcher, Reagan and the George Bushes cop heavy flak. So do Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. As do Ayatollah Khomeini and Milton Friedman. And readers will be pleased to hear that Holocaust denier David Irving gets a roasting.
On the evidence of quotation, Chopra sounds the daffiest: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual’; this must make Bill Gates the holiest man one earth apart from the Pope and the Dalai Lama. How about, ‘Ageing is simply learned behaviour’? Demi Moore agrees, and she hopes to live to 130. Wheen can be unfairly cruel, as when he quips, ‘Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom [Chopra] lunched shortly before her death remains a mystery’. Whether it’s Wess Roberts’ The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun or Mars and Venus’ John Gray or ‘Six Hats’ de Bono, Wheen wraps them all up in a chapter entitled ‘Old Snake Oil, New Bottles’. Wheen summarises them all as writers of ‘lucrative twaddle’ and blames Dale Carnegie for starting the vogue back in 1948. Whereas Carnegie contented himself with phrases like, ‘If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive’, today’s gurus use ‘neologistic jargon’ like ‘re-engineering’, ‘demassing’, ‘downsizing’, and ‘benchmarking’ in an attempt ‘to give their twee clichés an appearance of scientific method and intellectual rigour’. Right on, Francis.

But if the gurus are mouthing clichés and twaddle, how come top management pays them so much to talk to their staff? Good question – and apparently there is an answer. One executive manager explained, ‘What he’s saying is a lot of common sense and not new really. But if I pay him $15,000 to say it, my general mangers and my people listen’. So there you are – it’s not really the message but the messenger – and the high fee.

Moving on from self-improvement, he sideswipes the‘boa-deconstructors’ (Derrida and his ilk) and includes the twitty Luce Irigray who referred to E=mc2 as a ‘sexed equation’ that privileged the speed of light over less masculine speeds. When Allen Sokal, author of the most famous intellectual hoax of our time (and someone of whom Wheen wholeheartedly approves) accused Julia Kristeva of using mathematical terms she did not understand, she conceded she was ‘not a real mathematician’. Derrida cops it for asserting that Paul de Man’s wartime blatant Jew-baiting was somehow an implicit repudiation of anti-Semitism. I’m surprised Wheen didn’t quote American philosopher John Searle whose demolition of Derrida was published in the New York Review of Books, but the field of debunkers – like the producers of bunkum – is richly crowded.

Wheen’s learning is formidable. He cites, usually for purposes of intellectual demolition, dozens of books and authors of which and of whom I am ignorant.

To catch up with his list of targets would mean reading for a couple of years at least. It’s easy at times to have a moment of confusion between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, Thomas Friedman and Milton Friedman and the two John Grays, one American and one English.
As debunkers go, I rate Francis Wheen up with the best – with Martin Gardener, or H.L. Mencken. I look forward to further books from this acid-penned guru who hates gurus.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Apr 05, AU Edition

CHILI PALMER’S COOL
But two other offerings this month prove that heroin and histrionic overacting aren’t

Be Cool
Release: March 10, 2005
Rated: PG
4 stars
I hate sequels.” That’s John Travolta’s first line in this sequel to Get Shorty. So immediately Be Cool lets audiences know it’s not taking itself too seriously. I felt like I was in on the joke, and the joke is so good the sequel is better than the original.Ten years ago in Get Shorty, John Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, was a hip gangster trying to make it in the movie industry. Now, in Be Cool, he’s trying to muscle his way into the music business. There’s a young starlet trying to get her big break, nasty music moguls and the Russian mob. You know – the usual. But in Be Cool the plot isn’t as important as the all-star ensemble cast.

Now I need to come clean about something: when I was a younger I wanted to marry John Travolta. He’s just so, well, cool. Granted, I had to forgive him for Michael and Battlefield Earth, but when he was in Grease and Pulp Fiction he made my knees weak. And he’s back to his coolest as Chili Palmer in Be Cool. He’s suave, he’s sexy, and he’s unflappable. Matter of fact, I still want to marry him.

Then there’s Vince Vaughn’s stand-out role as Raji, a white-bread music rep who wants to be a “playa”. It’s hysterical to see such a honky white character like Raji spouting hip-hop lines like, “that sh*t was tight, gangsta!” It’s so wrong it’s right.

Uma Thurman is the weak link in the movie. She plays Edie, the sexy CEO of a failing indie record label and Chili’s love interest. Uma is beautiful but, alas, she can’t act. She really should be used as a supporting actress rather than a lead.

On the other hand, one of the best castings is WWF’s The Rock as Raji’s gay bodyguard. He’s constantly taking the piss out of himself – even slagging off his signature wrestling glower (one raised
eyebrow). His comedic timing is spot on and my favourite scene involves him reciting a monologue from teen cheerleading movie Bring It On. The Rock rocks.

But wait: there’s more. Cedric the Entertainer plays Sin LaSalle, an upper-middle-class music producer who’s not afraid to use muscle to get his songs played. Andre Benjamin (who most people would know as Andre 3000 of Outkast) makes a fabulous acting debut as Dabu, a dim but trigger-happy gangster. Harvey Keitel is a music company executive with no rhythm. Danny DeVito has a cameo with Anna Nicole Smith that is cringe-worthy but funny. Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler plays himself and is a natural.
Think Pulp Fiction with less violence, more gags and an equally funky soundtrack. Cool.

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Being Julia
Released: March 17, 2005
Rated: M
2 stars
In Being Julia, all the world’s a stage and Annette Benning’s over-acting on it. Now don’t get me wrong: I loved Annette in American Beauty and The Grifters. I know she’s won a swag of awards for this film. But really… she’s trying so hard in Being Julia that she makes Jim Carey look subtle.

The problem is Annette’s character is so damn repellent. Julia Lambert is an ageing diva of the London stage in the 1930s. She’s at the peak of her career yet she’s bored. So she’s prone to histrionics. It’s hard to care for a woman who decides the spark she needs is to have an affair with a younger man but then is devastated when she finds out not only is her husband cheating on her but her lover is too. She’s either melodramatic, egocentric, overbearing or overwrought with nothing in between. Her manic laughter grates even more when hideous wailing follows it as the spotlight travels past her.

The support roles in the film are more refined. Jeremy Irons is restrained as her long-suffering husband and manager Michael Gosselyn. Miriam Margolyes is fabulous and funny as theatre owner Dolly, a frustrated lesbian desperate to bed her lead actress. And I had to side with Juliet Stevenson who plays Julia’s straight talking yet likeable dresser, Evie.

Basically everyone is more likeable than Julia.

I can understand comparisons between Being Julia and All About Eve. Both lead characters are egotistical actresses who blur their public and private lives. But the comparisons should only remind you why All About Eve is a classic and Being Julia will be a $2 weekly DVD in a flash of an eye.

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Maria Full of Grace
Released: March 26, 2005
Rated: M
4 stars
Maria Full of Grace is a spinach film. That is, you know it’s good for you but you don’t really like it. The story revolves around a seventeen-year-old Colombian girl who thinks the only way to escape her miserable life is to become a drug mule. The film is a drama that feels more like a documentary. It’s shot with a sometimes-nauseating handheld camera style making the entire film feel grainy, dirty and real.

The lead role is played by astonishing newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno and, basically, she is Maria. I believed she’s desperate to escape her demeaning job of de-thorning roses at a flower farm where she earns about $2000 a year. I believed she’s feisty and intelligent. I believed her downtrodden family and friends stifle her. And I believed she’d swallow heroin for a round trip to New York and an easy five grand.

But it’s not easy. That’s the point. This film does nothing to glamorize drug smuggling. The drug dealers aren’t sexy, powerful ‘bling bling’ characters; they are slack-jawed mouth-breathers who are as bored with their jobs as Maria was with the roses.

The scene where Maria swallows the heroin pellets will test the strongest gag reflex. They are about the size of a thumb, coated in Vaseline and washed down with some clear soup. When Maria got down her first pellet, I gagged. By the time she had swallowed 62, I nearly passed out.

The film is shot in Spanish with English sub-titles but there is so little dialogue you could watch it with the sound down. The emotions and fears that cross Maria’s face speak volumes. It’s a basic story of survival.

First time director and writer Joshua Marston has captured the ugliness of drug smuggling with grace.

You’ll feel uncomfortable watching Maria Full of Heroin.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

WAYNE’S WAY
Butcher. Cop. And one of the most storied coaches in Rugby League. JENI PAYNE sits down with legendary Brisbane Broncos coach Wayne Bennett – and finds a seemingly quiet man who still has a maxim for every moment and a winning management style all his own

Wayne Bennett is a man of few words. He says he’s been ‘at war’ with the media since his days as a player. He admits he has come a long way from the Blackhall Bacon Factory of his youth. But his achievements and accolades as a coach, footballer and father keep him from ever being described as an ‘unsung hero’.

Recognised as one of the country’s most influential and innovative coaches, Bennett is the longest serving coach of a single club, has one of the best winning percentages in the game, and ranks second in the number of premierships won as a coach at an elite level.

While Bennett is wary of the media and is notorious for the sparsity of his comment, his colleagues, former Broncos players and high-profile commentators are effusive in their praise. He is not just respected, he’s revered.

Allan Langer, former Broncos Captain, told ABC’s Australian Story in May 1999 that Bennett is ‘like a father to all the players and if anyone’s got problems on or off the field, he’ll fix them if he can’.
Steve Waugh, former Test Cricket Captain, writes in the foreword of Bennett’s book, Don’t Die with the Music in You (ABC Books, 2002): ‘Bennett’s greatest strength is the simplicity of his message’. Waugh says he admires the man because ‘he gets the most from his players and what he says actually works’.

Journalists and fans alike respect Bennett for eschewing the fanfare and limelight, in preference for getting the job done with minimal fuss but plenty of gusto.

Bennett began his working career at a bacon plant, biding his time until he gained entrance to the police force. He started as a police cadet in March of 1966 and over the next two decades honed his talent
for recognising strengths and weaknesses in his fellow man.

In 1971, 1972, and 1973 he played Rugby League for Queensland, and in 1971 he was one of only two Queenslanders picked in the Australia side to tour New Zealand.

He began coaching in 1976 at club level, and in 1986 became Queensland Director of Coaching. In 1987 he became a full-time coach with the Canberra Raiders. In his first season with the Raiders, Bennett coached the team to their first-ever Grand Final and was named Coach of the Year.

In 1988 he joined the Brisbane Broncos as their inaugural coach and soon guided the club to five premierships; two World Club Challenge titles; and three pre-season titles: the Panasonic Cup (’89), Lotto Challenge (’91) and Tooheys Challenge (’95).

Bennett was also coach of the successful Queensland State of Origin sides in 1987 and 1988 and was appointed the inaugural Queensland Super League coach for the 1997 Tri-Series against NSW and New Zealand. He made a successful return to State of Origin in 1998, where he guided Queensland to an historic 2-1 series victory over NSW. The Broncos’ success in 1997, winning both the Telstra Cup and the Visa World Club Championship resulted in Bennett winning the title of Super League Coach of the Year.

Then in 1998 he attained the highest accolade, chosen as the Australian coach for the final two Tests of the ANZAC series against New Zealand. Down one-nil, Australia eventually came home victorious thanks to his inspired coaching.

Also in 1998, Bennett made history by becoming the first coach to steer his club, his state and his country to victory in each of their respective series. He was also named Queensland Coach of the Year, Australian Domestic Team Coach of the Year and, on a personal level, Queensland Father of the Year.

Again in 2000 he was named Coach of the Year when the Broncos won both the minor and major premierships.

Success followed in 2001, when Queensland won the State of Origin series thanks in part to Bennett’s remarkable coup of recalling veteran Allan Langer from England. The same year, the Queensland Government added Rugby League to the Queensland Academy of Sport program, with Bennett appointed Director.

His CV might read like that of a champion, but Bennett the man is a complex blend of humility and fortitude. Despite the shy, reclusive image he projects, he is actually an extraordinary communicator who leans on tried and true tenets that hit their mark with his players every time.

‘I collect quotes and clichés,’ the coach tells Investigate. ‘Things like “there’s always room for improvement, it’s the biggest room in the house”. They’re memorable, they motivate you and they’re true.’
Bennett believes the fundamental key to the Broncos record, and his history of coaching success with the club, is its family ethos – even though he doesn’t like the term. ‘It’s overused in this modern society for all kinds of things. I’d say we care about the players and we expect the best out of them. There’s a huge support network at the Broncos. We’ve ridden through a lot of crises, but the difference is the players themselves. We have high standards, and at the end of the day, if a player steps over that line, we let them know.’

As an organisation, the Broncos is strong from the top. Stability of management has been a huge help in getting through rough periods, says Bennett, who makes no secret of his fondness for the game.

‘I love the things that it teaches you. It teaches you to be disciplined. It teaches you not to give in. It teaches you to be taken off, it teaches you to handle disappointment.’
Married with three children, Wayne is first and foremost a family man, but he admits that the choice between family and football can be a tough decision.

‘That’s what happens to players too. Nothing replaces the mates you make. A lot of players go into the game thinking their careers will never end. But they have short career spans – you can’t be in it for 30 years like other professions – and it’s hard to adjust when it all comes to an end.

‘It’s a false world of media, adulation, money, people doing all kinds of things for them. Then when they leave, it takes two or three years to adjust. Family and friends are there for support, but nothing replaces the mates you make in footy.’

The Broncos boasts a form of exit strategy for players, but Bennett acknowledges, ‘it’s not foolproof. No sport has really done it well’.
As for his own exit plans, Bennett is reluctant to think about retirement. ‘As long as I’m enjoying it and getting the results, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. I don’t look forward to the day that I’m not part of the Broncos.’

His own motivation after 18 years in the job comes from what he calls ‘a fear of failure’. He confesses: ‘I just don’t want to let people down. I try and keep myself fresh and keep an even keel, not up and down with the highs and lows. You need to have balance in your
life too.’

As respite from the game he loves, Bennett escapes Brisbane with his family and heads to the farm in Warwick to ‘chase cattle’ at least one day a week. ‘It’s a good change from city life’,
he says.

Above all, he says his formula for maintaining balance is to ‘not take yourself too seriously’.

Known for his innovative approach to coaching, Bennett says he is not into change for its own sake. ‘I’m not faddish, but if there’s a better way of doing things, let’s investigate it. The one thing I learned from my time as a police officer is that experts employ experts.’

Ten years ago he introduced full-time weight training to the Broncos and now clubs all over the country accept that as part of routine training. Rehabilitation and recovery are currently in the spotlight, particularly with the emphasis on remaining a drug-free sport. But perhaps Bennett is best known for getting the best out of people. ‘I only demand what they’re capable of,’ he explains.

He may be fond of persuasion rather than punishment, but Bennett doesn’t pussy-foot around: ‘Young men want challenges. We are doing them a great disservice if we don’t drive them to be their best. But you can’t go over the top.’

Bennett likens his role to a general manager of a company or an army officer, and admits to being a strong-willed coach, a trait that periodically frustrates diehard fans.

‘We love them and appreciate them, but you can’t try and impress them or change your plan to suit them – or the players. If you start listening to fans, it’s not long before you’re over there sitting with them.’

Likewise, shareholders are not his focus either. ‘I don’t give a sh*t about them. They get rewarded.

The team comes first, then the fans. But I have to make myself happy too and that comes from standing by my decisions and being confident I can make the right ones.’

The Broncos have been scandal-free for a number of seasons, compared with their southern counterparts. Bennett bristles at questions about the causes and the culture that breed the headline-making acts and points out that sexism and delinquent behaviour are not unique to League.

‘Sad to say, but it’s society’s problem, not the NRL’s. It’s a heap of rubbish to say players need counselling or a welfare officer. Alcohol is the biggest problem. Drunkeness. Fights, sexist behaviour, brawls – you never see it happen when they’re sober. It’s become such an issue in the community that the Premier is talking about bringing in curfews to address it.’

One suggestion to the problem of lewd behaviour: more women in administrative and management roles in rugby league.

Another is regular courses on treating women with respect. The theory goes that men who are not adequately socialised in a female environment do not acquire the skills for ‘sexual negotiation’.

They’re pumped up, pissed, and partying – and not au fait with the subtleties of dealing with the opposite sex. They use brute force to satisfy their needs, then they revert to the silence of the code, ‘what goes on on tour, stays on tour’.

But Bennett says: ‘That’s nonsense. These men all have mothers, sisters and friends that are women. They’ve all been educated to senior levels in a system that is full of females.’

His actions speak loudly too. On tours with the Kangaroos, journalists have reported that Bennett is frequently seen in the hotel bar calling ‘last drinks’ for team members, insisting on respectable hours and equally respectable behaviour.

‘You have a choice in life,’ he says. ‘You can sit back and criticise or you can try to make a difference.’

The title of Bennett’s book, Don’t Die With the Music in You, refers to a quote from the American intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes, who observed that many people spend their lives getting ready to live and then time runs out for them and they die without reaching their potential. In it, Bennett imparts many of the professional and personal guidelines he lives by. The difference between talented players who consistently achieve their peak and those who fail to perform, according to Bennett is attitude. One of the greatest discoveries of our age, he says, is that a man can change his destiny by changing his attitude. He asks readers to ponder these questions to help put work, life and success into perspective:

• Am I allowing my life to be governed by daily activities, or do I choose to live in accordance with good principles? • Am I allowing my life to be governed by outside forces? • Am I so busy putting out fires that I don’t have time to start any? • Do I have important goals and dreams

I am committed to, or am I creatively avoiding commitments by filling by life with daily activities?

Reading his book, it’s impossible not to embrace his cache of clichés, as sage and as practical as any Dr Phil espouses.

‘People try to make our game complex. But however great, it remains a simple game,’ he says. He then attributes to Maxwell Maitz a pearler that could just as easily have been penned solely for Bennett: ‘Nothing is more simple than greatness. Indeed, to be simple is to be great.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: June 05, AU Edition

JEWEL ON THE NILE
Ellen Creager discovers an Egypt that is both incredibly fascinating and ridiculously well-policed

GIZA PLATEAU, Egypt – Inside the Great Pyramid, Egyptologist Samid Abdalin climbed swiftly toward the king’s tomb. Right behind him, I excitedly followed the low, narrow tunnel up the steep incline, toward the pink granite room where delicious ancient secrets hid.

And right behind me? A panting bodyguard from the tourist police.
Since 1997, when extremists killed 58 Swiss and Japanese tourists in Luxor, Egypt has gone overboard to keep travelers safe. No tourist has been harmed in seven years. Egypt is the most tourist-safety-conscious country in the world.

Although it’s rare for them to follow tourists inside a pyramid, the tourist police do come in handy. They can help you cross the street in Cairo, an exuberant city of nearly 10 million without a single crosswalk or traffic light. They will push to the front of the line at the Egyptian Museum, where their friends wave them – and you – through. My first day in Cairo, one officer in suit and tie hurried after me in front of the Helnan Shepheard Hotel as I strolled toward the sunny Nile.

‘Do you need to come with me?’ I asked. He nodded. So we walked – me with my digital camera, him with his automatic weapon. When I ate, he smoked. When I went to a museum, he waited outside.

The moral of the story: If you desire to see Egypt’s treasures, don’t let fear stop you.

On the other hand, unless you speak Arabic or plan to stay for weeks, Egypt is best seen for the first time on a package tour or with a knowledgeable guide and driver.

Why? In Egypt, it’s all about whom you know. A guide with connections can smooth the way through the melee of traffic, chaotic lines, ticket windows and airport bureaucracy. A good guide who is also an Egyptologist can tell you what the hieroglyphics mean and point out what’s new or amazing among the 235,000 objects in the Egyptian Museum (The Niagara Falls Mummy! Tutankhamen’s underwear!). A guide can point you to restaurants that won’t upset your stomach, find scrupulous drivers, and give tips on haggling in the market.

Most of all, they can help you see highlights in the short time you have.

But the best things are those your guide might show you by accident. A sudden shower in Cairo sent us scurrying into a shop near the famous Khan Al-Khalili bazaar and up the stairs, where guide Wahid Moustafa Gad asked for a dessert called umm ‘ali, ‘Mother of Ali’. It arrived, steaming bread pudding with cream, raisins, coconut, pistachios and butter – hot, delicious. “Shukran – thank you,” I said, then tasted it. Eyes wide, I smiled. “Ah, shukran.”

In Egypt, visitors are jolted by how much the present and past are jumbled together. Cell phones and camels. Satellite television and rug makers.

Just outside metropolitan Cairo are villages of mud huts, rich fields plowed by oxen, and donkeys carting loads of sugar cane and fruit. In Saqqara, carpet schools teach boys such as 13-year-old Samir Ead a trade. In a big, airy room he sat hunched over a silk rug, his fingers flying and tying a pattern of threads. It takes him seven months to make a 5-by-7-foot rug that sells for thousands of dollars at the shop upstairs. How long has he been at the school? ‘Five years’, he said.
Amid the grandeur of the Medinet Habu temples in Luxor, 450 miles south of Cairo, Egyptologist Ahmed Ali Temerik pointed out one thing that wasn’t so ancient: Egyptian TV actor Hamdi, out for a holiday and surrounded by fans. At the Ramsis Coffee Shop nearby, he introduced Rede Jaher, a watercolor painter who is a fixture there.

Back in the modern part of Luxor, the tourist police had curiously disappeared and I walked the street on my own. Women hurried past carrying packages on their heads. Foreign couples from cruise ships strolled arm in arm. On street corners, groups of regular police in green wool uniforms and carrying assault rifles laughed and talked. Along the river, vendors begged tourists to buy their wares, take their carriage rides or sail the Nile in their boats. (When I
ignored one pushy vendor and strode away, he actually shouted, ‘You look like European, but you walk like Egyptian!’)

Here are some more things to know: Upper Egypt, where Luxor is, is south of Lower Egypt, where Cairo is. Nobody queues except tourists. Tipping is expected everywhere for everything, but prices are incredibly low; five Egyptian pounds are worth $1. At the Mercure Hotel in Luxor, I gave a $10 tip to an excellent waiter one night and he ran after me protesting that it was too much.

In addition to having a guide and driver, I had another connection in Egypt. I saw Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt’s department of antiquities speak recently, and invited he me to visit the recently closed Nefertari’s Tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Queens.

I thought I was special until I got to the fragile tomb and found 25 other tourists inside, all exhaling artwork-damaging breath like me.
Who were all these people?

‘Zahi has a lot of friends’, the guide explained.

Egypt has big plans to improve the tourist experience. A new museum is planned near the Giza pyramids to contain the breathtaking Tutankhamen treasures. Also on the drawing board is a new museum in Cairo that will showcase the history of Egypt. The Coptic Museum, detailing the history of Christians in this largely Muslim nation, is scheduled to reopen soon.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian resort town Sharm al-Sheikh on the Sinai Peninsula’s Red Sea has become a hot destination for European vacationers and divers. It’s only a one-hour flight from Luxor.
On my trip, I flew from Cairo to Luxor, Luxor to Sharm
al-Sheikh, then was driven – with the tourist police as escort – up the Sinai Peninsula, past the stark Mt. Sinai, where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments.

At Nuweiba, a small port on the Gulf of Aqaba, men sat watching an American TV movie on a tiny set in an outdoor cafe. They drank strong mint tea while goats wandered the streets. They stared at me; who could blame them, with so few foreign tourists around? I tied a scarf over my head. At a tiny restaurant, a boy grilled shish kebab on open coals and I ate it gladly, sharing morsels with a stray calico cat under the table.

In Egypt, everyone uses the Arabic word ‘inshallah’. It means ‘God willing’, as in ‘Inshallah, I will cross the street safely’, or ‘Inshallah, the sun will shine’. Before I came to the Middle East, my travel agent, Ihab Zaki, said the best way to navigate the region was ‘gracefully and gratefully’.

As I left Nuweiba on the speedy ferry headed for Aqaba, Jordan, I kept thinking that perhaps more tourists, inshallah, would
pluck up their courage and follow their dreams to see Egypt in just that way.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: June 05, AU Edition

SAME OLD SCHTICK
Woody Allen’s routine is growing old, but Samuel L. Jackson’s still got it

Melinda and Melinda
Released: May 26, 2005
Rated: M
2 stars
I just don’t get the fuss over Woody Allen. I think the man’s films all suffer from dialogue diarrhea.

The characters just talk and talk and go on and on (and on). And they are always horribly highbrow Manhattanites discoursing over incredibly important topics and appreciating fine music. I can guarantee none of his characters has ever watched Desperate Housewives! If I was invited to a dinner party with people like that I’d probably end up plucking my eye out with a fork.

So keeping that in mind, here’s what I thought of Melinda and Melinda. The story starts across a restaurant table, as two writers debate whether life is essentially comic or tragic. To prove their respective sides they each take a tale about an uninvited guest and put their own spin on it. So for the rest of the film the audience is flipping between the comic version and the tragic version of Melinda’s life. The trouble is the comedy isn’t funny and the tragedy isn’t tragic so it’s easy to get lost. My hint is to follow Melinda’s hairstyle: straight=funny, curly=sad.

Although the script is weak a couple of the performances are strong. Rhada Mitchell is mesmerising as Melinda. She’s in nearly every scene and carries the film with ease. But no matter hard she works at her character it’s distracting when she’s sprouting lines like, ‘The subject of infidelity is completely out of the question. You were correct in your assumption.’ This sounds like Jane Austen, not present-day New York.

Woody Allen didn’t cast himself in this film (be thankful for small mercies) but he did make a strange decision for who would play his usual neurotic lovelorn character: Will Ferrell. And weirdly, the comic actor pulls the role off fabulously. I have always thought Will is amusing but not romantic lead material, but in this film the romantic lead is wracked with insecurities, guilt and jealousy, so it works.

Others were more disappointing: Chloe Sevigny and Amanda Peet simply play themselves again and again.
Yawn.

If you’re a Woody Allen fan ignore me and check it out. If not, I’ll pass you a fork.

---

Coach Carter
Released: May 26, 2005
Rated: M
4 stars
Coach Carter is a clichéd sports flick. But it’s a great clichéd sports flick that is based on a true story. Coach Carter (Samuel L Jackson) inherits a bunch of trash-talking, selfish high school basketballers who end every sentence with ‘dawg’. He makes them sign contracts to maintain their grades and respect each other, then whips them into shape with a kabillion pushups and enforced teamwork. Soon no-one can beat them and the state championships are well within their grasp.

That is, until the teachers reveal half the team is actually failing. So Coach Carter puts a lock on the gym and benches the entire team. The players, school and parents are furious. But Coach won’t budge; he points out young black men are 80 per cent more likely to go to prison than go to college.

Cue inspirational speech and swell motivational music. I know it’s formulaic but I couldn’t help it, I was sitting there grinning and urging them to study so they could make something of themselves…oh and win basketball scholarships…and sort out their off-court relationships…and still win the championship.

Samuel L. Jackson smolders with intensity. He carries the film on his capable shoulders. He’s commanding, powerful and likeable. A strong cast of young actors portrays the players in sad but believable situations.

It’s a true story that rings true. Hooray for clichés.

---

The Woodsman
Released: May 05, 2005
Rated: M
2 stars
Sometimes I love seeing a movie I’ve heard nothing about. I walk in with no expectations and no idea of plot and let it wash over me. This was not one of those times. The Woodsman is a story of a pedophile. I think with a subject like this I would have liked some warning.

Kevin Bacon plays the lead role of Walter. Even before it’s revealed he’s a child molester Bacon shows his character is uncomfortable in his own skin. He’s withdrawn and living with the stigma of being just released from jail. Imagine how much worse it is when people find out what he did to get twelve years in the slammer. The editing of the movie splices unrelated scenes together making you feel disjointed and uncomfortable. It makes you see things from Walter’s point of view.
The Woodsman follows Walter and watches what happens when he tries to re-enter society. He honestly says he wants to be a “normal” person but at the same time is driven with a deep compulsion.

He gets a job at a timber yard with a bunch of rednecks and as an ex-con the only apartment he can rent is a rundown shoebox that happens to be across the road from a school. Demons follow his every thought.

Although there are other actors in the movie you almost don’t need them. It’s all about Walter and the battle of his will. Bacon is superbly restrained and subtle and acts with all his might in the many silences.

Will he lapse?

Not recommended as a first date movie.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

FIRST DRAFT: June 05, AU Edition

MATT HAYDEN
Our exclusive first look at the Mark Latham diaries...

November 22, 1999:
Bloody hacks. Just read another story about my ties with Gough and how I’m the ‘anointed one’. Bugger that. Sure, Dad is a total legend. But I’m my own man too, you know...

July 13, 2001:
Maaate. I am so piSSeD. YO wouldn’t believe wha jus HAPpennd!!! Cabbie nicked my moolahh.Butt I shOWED himmdintI!!!
OOhsh. Feeelin queesy....thinkI’m gonna CH ...

July 14, 2001:
Ugh. My bonce is as heavy as a bloody bowling ball. And my left knee feels like a croc took a piece out of it.
That cabbie’s probably feeling a good deal worse, though. I did tackle the bastard pretty hard. Hope he’s okay...re that: what if the hacks pick up on it?

Still, they never found out about that flower pot man I decked yonks back in Liverpool, eh! Old bastard was about ninety not out then. He’s probably carked it by now.
So, it should be sweet. Not worth worrying about.

June 30, 2002:
‘Arse-licker.’ It’s just a word. OK, maybe two. Why all the outrage?
Now the Tories are pushing this line I’ve got some kind of bum obsession. How wrong is that?
Anal fixation my arse!

Talk about the potty calling the dunny brown. I mean they can talk; they are totally, scrotally obsessed with the contents of my pants.
That Mad Monk and his “missing manhood” jibes. If he brings that up again I’ll deck ‘im!

And anyway, he’s the one who’s always wussing out and walking away.
Actually, he’s such a wuss I’m amazed he even fathered the sprog. About the only thing he could sire is a fart. (We’ll probably find out the ponce had nothing to do with it. That’ll be a cack, eh!)

Bloody Tories. They’re such a pack of girls. I might be shy a cod, but I’ve still got more balls than the lot of them.

February 5, 2003:
Mate, what is it with this joint? It’s full of bloody blushing violets. Now they’re going spacko over that ‘conga line’ line!
Gawd. You’d think I lobbed it out right in the middle of Question Time and performed genital origami or something.

They’re still spewing over ‘arse-licker’ – not to mention that (very accurate) description of Tony Staley.

Then there’s the ongoing saga over ‘skanky ho’. Hell, I only said it to get the yoof vote. That’s a pick-up line in some quarters, you know.

What’s wrong with a bit of colourful language? I mean, for f..k’s sake!

Anyway, in all those cases I was being quite bloody restrained. Imagine how they’d have reacted if I’d really cut loose...

September 16, 2004:
Mate, sometimes I read what I’ve written here and wonder why I keep doing it.

Then I remember: Yonks from now, long after my epoch-making, ball-tearing stint as PM has transformed the nation forever, these scrawlings will be worth their weight in gold. I’ll be the new Great Man then; kicking major freckle on the speech circuit; holding court like Dad does now. People will give their eye teeth to know what was really going down all those years ago.

It’s timing, see.

Before then? Not a snowflake’s chance in hell.

Why would they be interested?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

Feb 05

DATELINE PHUKET, TSUNAMI +48hrs
Our coverage of the new millennium’s worst disaster begins in the words of volunteer aid worker Hatairat Estrella Montien:

I was in Bangkok when the tsunami struck. An announcement was made on television requesting translators to assist with foreign tsunami victims. I can speak Thai, English and Spanish, so I sent a request to Phuket Air for myself, (I am a 27-year-old Thai woman), and my Dutch friend, Daniel Van Geijlswijk, who speaks several European languages, saying that we would like to help out at the disaster area. Phuket Air gave us free tickets.

We arrived in Phuket last Tuesday evening and were taken by the Tourist Police to work in their local station. We did not want to stay in the accommodations provided at the Tourist Police as it was inconvenient to get to the Town Hall, so we stayed in Phuket Town, paying our own way.

On Wednesday, we went to the Town Hall and were told that they needed help in Khao Lak, Phang Nga, the primary disaster area. We went there in a car with journalists and another two men who volunteered to help in the rescue effort. Anyone who had a car came to transport victims and volunteers. Many people also supplied food and drinking water.

It took us about two hours to arrive in Khao Lak. It was devastated. Almost nothing was left. The tsunami had carried a large military ship from the ocean, one mile inland. It had torn houses apart and overturned cars. Thousands of coconut trees had been uprooted.

At Khao Lak station, I went with the international diving team to look for bodies. There were five scuba divers, and six or seven helpers. They came from Phuket, most working as teachers at Dulwich International School. Two of them had been diving in Ocean Plaza in Phuket the day before to recover bodies from the basement supermarket. I accompanied them to translate English to Thai since they were working with a Thai rescue team to recover bodies.

We arrived at the Sofitel Magic Lagoon Hotel around 2 p.m. This hotel was once the most beautiful I had ever seen in. They had one of the biggest swimming pools in Asia, with a large ship moored in the swimming pool serving as a bar. It was totally destroyed.

Everything on the first floor was damaged, ruined and broken. It was impossible to imagine how a person could have survived if he or she were caught inside.

There were a few underground rooms that divers needed to clear. We started with a small room next to the beach which used to be a storage room where chemical tanks and pumps were operated by technicians.
Our divers Peter Denton and Hugo Jones went in, after we checked with an engineer the exact location of the equipment in that room for safety reasons. They found one foreigner’s body blocking the entrance. We did not have water pumps so we used buckets until the water reached a level that would allow the divers to enter. It took one hour of manual work, bucket by bucket.Some rooms were too unsafe to enter as the chemical tanks had exploded.

The water level in the smaller room was lower, allowing the divers to remove bodies. Since the corpses had been submerged in water for several days, they had doubled in size, making it harder to take
them out.

I did not want to see the bodies, but I had to be there to translate. When I first saw the dead, apart from the smell, I was OK, not having had enough time to think about it.

The first body we removed was a foreign lady who must have been swept in by the tsunami. We finally took the body out but our diver could not go in again to search as the water had risen to the original level. We checked other rooms, and called it quits for the day at 6 p.m.

On the way to the car we had to walk by corpses that the rescue team had retrieved from hotel rooms. Even though they were wrapped in white cloths, the unforgettable smell was mind-numbing. As soon as I got in the car I could no longer speak. I had pretty much handled it when I was working without time to reflect on the circumstances.

We picked up our friends, Dan and Jaroen at the Khao Lak Information station. They had been helping there while I was working with the diving crew. It took a long time to get back to Phuket as the traffic was very bad. There were a lot of rescue cars, tractors and ambulances. Many volunteers had been there to help the victims who by now had virtually nothing left.

We arrived in Phuket around 8 p.m. and I said goodbye to the dive crew. Debbie, a coordinator, gave me a big hug and asked me if I were prepared to help again the next day. At first I did not answer, but smiled, and finally said I would go back.

At that moment I had mixed feelings; I wanted to be there as much as I hated it. Yet I was willing to give my time and energy since I knew that my assistance would make their job much easier. Yet it was so hard to think about returning.

The next day, Peter Hamilton picked us up at 7 a.m. from our hotel. We collected water pumps and other equipment. At first I thought they would give us only equipment, but when we arrived, they had a full team of 12 local workers ready to go with us. They questioned me about the situation. I did not tell them much, only saying that they needed to put on masks and gloves when they arrived.

The previous day’s diving crew was told by doctors not to return to the water because of potential infection and disease. So we used a different strategy. Instead of having divers, we pumped all the water out and used a rescue team to recover the bodies.

We went back to the small, submerged room. A Thai man in his late 40s told me that he had been looking for his missing brother who normally worked in this room as a technician. He told me his brother wore a dark blue t-shirt and pants. That was exactly the same outfit worn by a dead body that was stuck inside.

The Blue Canyon staff got two water pumps running. The rescue team arrived and helped us look for the body in the water. They tried to use their camera to search in the room. After 20 minutes, the water was at a level where we could see clearly. As I served as the intermediary for the diving team, the rescue team showed me the image of another body in the room. Maybe they forgot that, I was, after all was not a professional, just a girl, as they showed me the most terrifying image I have ever seen: the rotten foot of a dead body.
I wanted to cry.

We finally moved the body out. The victim was the Thai technician that his brother had been looking for. It was finally over. They wrapped up the body and took it away.

I had a little accident. While they were pumping the water out, I was trying to help dig the place for water to run in to the sea. I fell down when carrying my equipment and twisted my left ankle. The crew went to get the water out from the sailing boat in the swimming pool (the pool bar); there were no bodies there. There were a few other spots where we pumped out water, but I did not see much as I could not really walk by then. I waited for the crew upstairs. There were a few people from the hotel management team, engineers, military crews from government and the families of missing people.

I talked to a woman named Prapaipan, who was looking for her young daughter, Thanyamath, who worked as the front desk manager at the hotel. She sat and cried constantly. She held a poster bearing her daughter’s photo and told me that she wanted to stay until she found her. She asked me what the crew would do next. She was still hoping to find her daughter somewhere.

I was deeply troubled. My mother would have done the same if she lost me. She would have hoped until the last minute that I would still be alive if she could not find my body.

Later a relative came and tried to persuade Prapaipan to go home since there was nothing much she could do there. First she refused to leave, but when the family member explained to her that she was stressing us out because she was crying all the time, she finally agreed to wait at her house.

I hope that this short account tells more about the situation. If you have not made any donation, please do not hesitate. They all need your help.

As much as I want to tell more about what I have been doing for these five days, I cannot bear to. One thing I have learned is that life is too short and good deeds matter. At the end, we all die.
(With Daniel Van Geijlswijk and Simon Osborne)

DATELINE SRI LANKA, TSUNAMI +SEVEN DAYS
By RAVI R. PRASAD

Nishanthan is barely two years old. He cannot walk because of a deformity in his waist. The child sits on the uneven sand under one of the thousands of makeshift shelters provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

In spite of his handicap, Nishanthan survived. It was a miracle. His able-bodied parents and siblings were swept away by the killer wave that claimed lives of some 38,000 people in the island nation of Sri Lanka.

“All he does throughout the day is cry,” said 60-year-old Jayaratnam, a neighbor who is now taking care of Nishanthan in the welfare camp. “He keeps saying, ‘Amma, Amma,’ crying out for his mother. He doesn’t know that his mother will never come back.”

When the giant ocean wave hit, Nishanthan was seated in a plastic tub and his mother was bathing him. His fisherman father had gone to see his boat tied at the pier. The family lived along the coast at Kucchuvely village in the eastern Trincomalee district.

Jayaratnam’s wife, Sellamma, had gone to fetch some curd from Nishanthan’s mother and had seen the child. A few minutes after Sellamma returned home, the tsunami hit the coast.

Jayaratnam and Sellamma hugged a coconut tree and survived, but their two children were washed away. In the neighborhood, Nishanthan’s family was not so lucky. They perished.

When the water cleared out after half an hour, Jayaratnam heard the child crying. He spotted the basin perched on a coconut tree. The waves had thrown the plastic basin up, and it landed on the tree between the leaves. Jayaratnam climbed the tree and brought Nishanthan down. The boy did not even have a scratch.

When Jayaratnam moved with his wife to the welfare camp, he brought Nishanthan along. There was nobody to look after the disabled child, and the couple thought it was their responsibility to take care of him.

Living under a tent, sleeping on mats with a couple of bed sheets and pillows, the family of three now depends on handouts given by district officials and aid agencies. The only toy that Nishanthan has is a bucket with a lid, provided by Oxfam.

Now couple is finding it difficult to take care of the two-year-old. They are too old to bring up the child. So they have decided to send him to an orphanage. “I don’t have any income, and the needs of a growing child are far too much for me to meet,” said Jayaratnam. “My wife is suffering from arthritis, so she cannot take care of the baby.”

On Saturday Jayaratnam went to an orphanage in Trincomalee town to leave the child there. It was a harrowing experience both for him and the child. The two traveled for hours, half the time Jayaratnam carrying the child and walking because the roads are bad and no public transport is available.

Several aid agency vehicles whizzed past and Jayaratnam tried to hitch a ride, but none of them stopped. Some of them did not even have anyone other than the driver. As Jayaratnam came closer to the town, an aid agency vehicle gave him a ride in a pickup truck.
Almost two hours after he had left the camp, the man and the child reached the orphanage.

“Good that you have brought the child here,” said the matron of the orphanage, as she asked Jayaratnam to wait for a senior official. “I cannot admit the child, it has to be decided by the warden and some procedures have to be followed.”

After an hour-long wait, the warden-cum-manager of the home turned up. He complained about how he had to wait for the local government official to get food stamps for children in the orphanage.

“We cannot take the child,” said the manager, handing over a printed form to Jayaratnam. “Please fill this up, get the signatures of the Gram Sewaka (village officer), Divisional Secretary, officer of the child probation department and a relative.”

The officer told Jayaratnam that unless he got these signatures — and, most important, the death certificate of Nishanthan’s parents — the orphanage cannot accept the child.

“Where will I get the death certificates?” asked Jayaratnam. “Everyone in his family is dead. Who will inform the registrar?”

Determined to get Nishanthan a place in the orphanage, the man walked another mile to the office of registrar of birth, deaths and marriages. The office was closed for the weekend. “To get the death certificates, I need to contact the Gram Sewaka,” he said. “God knows if he survived or was killed.”

The government has banned adoption of tsunami orphans. If someone complains that Jayaratnam has kept the child, the government could take action against him.

With fear of police arresting him for sheltering Nishanthan, the old man returned to the camp walking all the way.

“Ever since the government has banned adoption, we have been flooded with requests to admit more and more orphans,” said Vyasa Kalyansundaram, a trustee of Sivananda Tapovanam children’s home. “How can the government expect an orphan child to run around and get signatures and death certificates of parents?”

Orphanages are willing to expand and take in more children, but the government rules need to be changed. “The government banned adoption without thinking about the plight of orphans. They need to change the rules for admitting children to orphanages. Many of these rules need to be scrapped,” Kalyansundaram said.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International

DATELINE MECCA, TSUNAMI +SEVEN DAYS
By ARNAUD de BORCHGRAVE

The killer wave that swallowed tens of thousands of Muslims was an act of Allah designed to punish the Christians. So went the convoluted logic of some Muslim imams in recent sermons from Saudi Arabia to the Palestinian territories.

If it weren’t for the diligent monitoring of Muslim clerics by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Americans would be in the dark about the outpourings of dangerous drivel fed to devout Muslims gathered in mosques for Friday prayers. Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajiid explained God’s tsunami punishment of Christians stemmed from “the Christian holidays [that] are accompanied by forbidden things, by immorality, abomination, adultery, alcohol, drunken dancing and revelry. A belly dancer costs 2,500 pounds a minute and a singer costs 50,000 pounds an hour, and they hop from one hotel to another from night to dawn.

“Then they spend the entire night defying Allah. ... At the height of immorality, Allah took revenge on these criminals. ... Allah struck them with an earthquake. He finished off the Richter scale. All nine levels gone.”

In the same vein, Sheikh Mudeiris, at a Palestinian Friday sermon in Gaza, said, “When oppression and corruption increase, the law of equilibrium applies. I can see in your eyes you are wondering what is the ‘universal law of equilibrium.’ This law is a divine law. If people are remiss in implementing God’s law and in being zealous and vengeful for His sake, Allah unleashes his soldiers in action to
take revenge.”

In Saudi Arabia, one of last year’s measures to counter mosque-generated violence was a ban on imam’s using the word “jihad,” or holy warrior. But the content hadn’t changed much without the banned word. Saudi cleric ‘Aed Al-Qarni told the worshippers, “Throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered. This is the path to victory.” He was reacting to the death of a brother “killed by the brothers of apes and pigs, the murderers of the prophets.” In case there was any doubt, he was referring to the Jews of Israel.

He then deplored lamented the lack of Muslim backbone: “One billion two hundred million nobodies. We are incapable of taking action, of being useful, of harming the Jews. The most people do today is to verbally protest over the TV channels or to demonstrate. What is the use of this? ... We must sacrifice people like Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi, and Ahmad Yassin, and thousands of others. Houses and young men must be sacrificed. Throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered. This is the path to victory, to shahada and to sacrifice.”

Imam Al-Qani went to explain the “idolatrous” people of Vietnam, Cambodia and South Africa, “nations with no calling or divine law make sacrifices ... in people, blood and souls. All the more reason we should too, the nation of Islam.”

Saudi clerics have also urged Iraqis to resist “the American occupation of Iraq.” They can urge jihad without the proscribed word for holy war. Saudi Sheikh Fawzan Fawzan said God’s unlisted number informed him the tsunami was punishment for homosexual behavior and fornication over Christmas, even if the victims are Muslims. “All that’s left for us to do,” he said, “is to ask for forgiveness. We must atone for our sins, and for the acts of the stupid people among us. ... We must fight fornication, homosexuality, usury, fight the corruption on the face of the Earth, and the disregard of the lives of protected people.”

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

DATELINE WASHINGTON, TSUNAMI +TEN DAYS
By ROLAND FLAMINI, Chief International Correspondent

WASHINGTON, (UPI) — The Asian relief effort for the tsunami disaster mobilized quickly and massively and, led by Japan, generated a major share of the global aid. The Arab world, by contrast, has lagged behind, even though the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, was the hardest hit, suffering some
100,000 deaths.

Middle East media commentators have been scathing in their criticism of Arab lack of generosity and public concern. They point out that the combined pledges from the Middle East and the Gulf of around $100 million amount to a fifth of Japan’s single pledge of $500 million. Asian nations — partly because of their proximity to the disaster zone — were the first to provide logistical and emergency help. Immediate aid on the ground from Arab nations, such as doctors, nurses, and engineers has been largely and conspicuously absent.

South Korea and Taiwan have each committed $50 million in tsunami relief. As the major power in the region China has been criticized for holding back because its aid commitment to date is $64 million. But observers say that pledge probably represents about half its foreign aid budget. On Tuesday, King Fahd of the oil rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia ordered the country’s aid commitment tripled to $30 million, “in light of the size of the tragedy and the losses.” Among the other Gulf States, Kuwait’s pledge stands at $10 million, Bahrain at $2 million, and Qatar — said to be one of the wealthiest country in the world — at $25 million. Libya’s contribution is $2 million. But no other non-Gulf Middle Eastern country has so far made an appearance on published lists of leading contributors.

Saudi Arabia plans to raise money from the public with a telethon. But Arab media have expressed anger at the apparent indifference of their governments to the tragedy. One Saudi television talk show host remarked, “Many Arab viewers have become racist. Unfortunately, the tragedy that befell Asians has no effect on many of them.”

In Kuwait, the newspaper Al Qabas created controversy by calling on Kuwait’s leadership to live up to its obligations. The special link between Kuwait and the stricken area is that Southern Asia supplies the super rich Gulf state with much of its domestic and manual labor force, and this — Al Qabas argued — was a good reason why Kuwait and its Gulf neighbors needed to be doing much more. “We have to give them more; we are rich,” the paper’s editor-in-chief, Waleed al-Nusif was quoted as saying in the New York Times Wednesday. “The price of oil doubled, so we have no excuse...They built Kuwait, and they raised our children.”

Several experts are harshly critical of Arab governments, and particularly of the Gulf states, for not being more forthcoming. “Where’s the brotherly Islamic love?” observes Middle East specialist Judith Kipper at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s the usual story of not being able to separate rich Arabs from their money. They give what Islam says they’re supposed to give, and that’s it.” One problem, Kipper says, is that “there’s no concept of civil society.”

But within the Gulf states some private donors argue that the closure of several major charitable organizations as part of the war on terror has undermined the spirit of giving, or has made it harder to find institutions to accept donations.

It is also true that while other religions have mobilized to collect relief contributions, Islamist preachers have cast the tsunami as a manifestation of divine wrath at the decadence, nudity, and immorality of now devastated tourist resorts as Phuket Island and Sumatra. This approach, preached in the mosques Friday, is said to have introduced a certain ambivalence into helping the victims.

There are also political differences. Many analysts believe tsunami aid could have a deep influence on the pattern of international relationships in Asia. The Bush administration is hoping that lavish U.S. generosity will improve America’s image in the region, and even beyond it. Japan, China, and Australia ($764 million in long term aid) are also using tsunami relief as a political tool to increase regional clout. Arab countries were not as drawn to the influence game in Asia. As a result, Arab sources point out, their pledges are not calculated to have political impact.

DATELINE PARIS, TSUNAMI +14 DAYS
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO,UPI Religious Affairs Editor

How can postmodern man — a doctrinally indifferent species, as Cardinal Paul Poupard defines him — react adequately to the deadliest natural calamity in recorded history? Almost mindlessly, television anchormen in Europe speak of the tsunami disaster’s “apocalyptical proportions,” although they seem to know little of the Book of Revelation or the Old and New Testaments’ “little apocalypses,” such as the one in the Gospel of Luke:

“And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-26),Only Pope John Paul II, so close to the grave himself, seems to have found the appropriate words when he commended the victims — at least 120,000 as we speak — and their next of kin to the love of God.
What else is there to say, unless of course the brightest lights in Protestant theology knocked at the doors of the world’s television studios demanding to be allowed to explain to the perplexed what should be Protestantism’s greatest asset?

Words like these might be fitting: What you have been witnessing in the last days circumscribes the chasm between a grotesque contortion of God’s face and the “Deus revelatus” — the true God revealed in Christ.

The ex-Christian “homo indifferens,” of whom Cardinal Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, spoke recently in Belorussia, is in reality a religious ignoramus. He knows nothing of the faith of his ancestors, a faith that made them build cathedrals and write stirring oratorios.

He is therefore unequipped to dialogue with other faiths at a time when this has become indispensable due to the massive influx of Muslims into Europe. For as Michael Weninger, a senior Austrian diplomat and religious affairs adviser to the European Commission, insists: “Between religious illiterates no dialogue is possible.”
The same applies even more urgently to the task of explaining God’s presence in the light of the tsunami tragedy. Theodicy, the defense of God against the charge that he either wills evil in this world or is powerless against it, has always been one of the most difficult undertakings for people of faith.

But unless theologians return to the very core of Christian doctrine — that precisely by being weak and nailed to a tree God prevails in his cosmic struggle against evil — they will never succeed in this endeavor.

That this cosmic struggle is well underway seems evident to most lay people observing current events, though not to modernist theologians denying the existence of Satan. And of those, there are plenty especially in Germany where batch after batch of new theologians keeps crawling out of the Black Forest, as the saying goes.

Klaus Berger, Heidelberg University’s primary New Testament scholar, estimates that a mere 2 percent of his colleagues consider biblical texts true. Why does Berger belong to that tiny minority? Because, he says, the Gospel writers were willing to be martyred for their stories. “You don’t accept martyrdom for something you yourself have invented.”

The cross — or rather, the crucifix — is the most powerful antidote against evil, natural or otherwise, which supports the position of the defenders of icons in the perennial iconoclast controversies throughout church history.

The Rev. Rolf Sauerzapf, until recently dean of chaplains of Germany’s paramilitary border guards, used to take his troopers in the formerly communist East, to Catholic or Lutheran churches featuring the crucified Christ, in contrast to the starker sanctuaries of other denominations, which only display the empty cross.

“What is this?” the soldiers raised in an atheist environment asked. “This is our God,” Sauerzapf answered. “Instinctively, they understood that this was the Immanuel, the God with us — suffering with us,” he later related.

A special breed of pastors is needed at a time when Europeans have been deprived of any knowledge of God for two or even three generations and when, at the same time, “people are filled with longing (for God),” according to the European Commission’s Weninger.
The destruction of the family, where 90 percent of all education takes place, has led to the prevailing ignorance of and indifference to religious matters, writes Peter Hahne, Germany’s most popular television anchorman.

“This is why faithful clergymen have become so eminently necessary,” says the Rev. Michael Stollwerk, senior Lutheran pastor of the Protestant and Catholic cathedral of Wetzlar near Frankfurt, whose Christmas services were better attended this year than any in his memory: “On Christmas Eve there were 1,800. On Christmas Day there were another 1,800, and on the following day there were still 600. I have never seen this before.”

An astounding number of these worshipers were young. “Many were kids to whom I had become a substitute father or grandfather in confirmation class. Then they joined — or will join — our youth groups,” Stollwerk says. “And then we’ll have them hooked; then they will no longer be indifferent to God. ”Then they will also grasp the Biblical answer to the God question raised by horrific events such as the tsunami catastrophe: “And he (God) will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4).

DATELINE ASIA, TSUNAMI +21 DAYS
By MARTIN SIEFF

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) — The horrendous tsunami catastrophe in South Asia has led to a rallying of human solidarity and compassion at its very best this week. But after the dead are buried and the period of immediate grieving is passed, the fallout from the tragedy is likely to weaken major governments in the region and possibly exacerbate some bitter, long-running conflicts there.

The still young Congress government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in India is likely to reel for months if not years from the tragedy. Singh had only been in power for nine months when the catastrophe occurred and whatever culpability his government faces for the fatal lack of disaster preparedness along Indian’s coastlines should in justice be shared with the previous Hindu nationalist-led government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Nevertheless, the catastrophe struck on Singh’s watch. And already hard questions are being asked in the Indian press about the two and a half fatal hours during which the government knew, or should have known, that huge tidal waves were racing westward across the Indian Ocean following the unprecedented earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter scale early Sunday morning below the ocean.

Almost as bad, there will now be the sense of an ill-starred fate hanging over Singh and his policies that marked a radical break from those of the previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Vajpayee.

A similar sense of ill-starred omens is likely to overshadow strongly pro-American President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono across the ocean in Indonesia, where the death toll from the disaster was highest.
At least 80,000 people are now known to have died on the island of Sumatra alone. The eventual death toll could soar far above 100,000 on it. And the worst hit part of the giant island was the energy rich province of Aceh at its northern tip where guerrilla secessionist forces have been waging a fierce struggle for independence for years.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, all thoughts of human conflict have been swamped by the colossal horrors inflicted by an uncaring Nature. But antennae of the people of Aceh have been honed to alertness by decades of what they regard as shameless exploitation of their riches by the old 32-year military dictatorship of President Suharto from 1966 to 1998. It would not take much to revive suspicions that aid was being given to other, more favored regions first or that the government was simply uncaring and incompetent in dealing with the huge scale of the catastrophe to stir up new resentments.

There is plenty of precedent in South Asia for natural catastrophes being the harbinger of wars and revolutions. The great Bengal famine of 1943 cost the lives of two to four million people. Historians agree the main cause of the huge death toll was a combination of complacency, incompetence and lack of compassion by British wartime officials who were criminally negligent in waking up to the scale of the disaster. But the immediate political result was to destroy Hindu-Muslim community relations in Bengal with many people in each community convinced the other one was hoarding food and deliberately increasing their suffering.

Within four years, Bengal was torn apart by ferocious Hindu-Muslim clashes at independence in 1947 that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The province remains divided between India and the independent Muslim nation of Bangladesh to this day.

Natural disaster triggered war and revolution again in the same area only a quarter of a century later. The inhabitants of the region, then known as East Pakistan, were convinced that the Pakistani government a thousand miles away made no effort to relieve their sufferings after between 300,000 to a million people were killed in a huge tidal surge caused by unprecedented cyclones in the Bay of Bengal in November 1970. Again, mass resentment quickly turned violent and led to a national liberation struggle that cost hundreds of thousands more lives against Pakistan until India intervened the following year and ensured the independence of the nation of Bangladesh.

Sri Lanka, a third nation heavy hit by last Sunday’s tsunamis, has long been rent apart by a bitter ferocious guerrilla-terror war waged by the Tamil Tigers. There too, the wrath of nature has temporarily drowned mere human hatreds. But whether the traumatic experience leads to a new era of moderation, compromise and goodwill or a renewal of old, bitter feuds has yet to be seen.

There is more recent precedent too for a terrible natural disaster catalyzing long festering resentment at an entrenched and incompetent government that was soon after swept out of office.

The great swathe of urban squalor and misery that sweeps crescent-like north of Istanbul and then eastward for 80 miles across the southern shore of the Black Sea is home to 10 million people. This usually forgotten region of Turkey briefly hit the international headlines in 1999 when the terrible Izmit earthquake killed 23,000 people.

The death toll was so horrendous because, as we noted in UPI Analysis at the time, developers had run up hundreds of shoddily built apartment blocks in defiance of building codes.

On Aug. 20, 1999, we warned in these columns, “The disaster may boost the appeal of Turkey’s Islamic fundamentalists at the expense of the government, ultimately threatening Turkey’s strong ties to the West. Turkey is a NATO member — the only Muslim nation.”

And sure enough, the anger and despair fostered by this event funneled a new wave of support to the Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan that propelled it to its landslide election victory in November 2002.

Singh in India and Yudhoyono in Indonesia will soon be made aware of how closely the survivors and relatives of the dead will be scrutinizing the record of their actions both before and after the unprecedented events of last Sunday.

However long they stay in power and whatever achievements they complete or attempt, from now on everything they do will be under the shadow of that judgment.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

FOOD: June 05, AU Edition

FIT TO BE FRIED
Eli Jameson writes that cooking is just like defending a besieged castle: sometimes, it’s done best with boiling oil

Pity the carnivore in love with the vegetarian. All of a sudden one of his most cherished loves – all things meaty and on a plate – is called into question by the new love in his (or occasionally her) life. Can a relationship last when two parties disagree on something as fundamental as whether or not the children’s song ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is cause for hunger pangs? Or if tempeh is actually yummy, or something sent up to torture us from the depths of hell?

Samuel Jackson’s hit man in Pulp Fiction summed up the dilemma perfectly when he chowed down on one of his more hapless victims’ fast food order: ‘That is a tasty burger! Me, I can’t usually eat ‘em ‘cause my girlfriend’s a vegetarian. Which pretty much makes me a vegetarian.’

Now my wife is a vegetarian, but nowhere near as doctrinaire as Jackson’s movie girlfriend – the most flack I ever cop for frying up a load of bacon and slapping it on some toasted bread with good mayonnaise is caused by health concerns, rather than moral ones (‘are you sure one packet is meant to be eaten by just one person?’). Still, though, I know men whose vegetarian partners would leave them if they found out they regularly went to steakhouses for lunch. One friend’s vegetarian girlfriend even uses meat as a weapon: if things are going well, and she’s happy with the way she’s being treated, beef is on the menu. If not, the poor man is sent packing to the salad bar.

Since we set up housekeeping together a few years ago, I’ve had to figure out ways to cook dishes that satisfy both my wife’s moral code (apparently pancetta is not allowed, even if it’s pretty much dissolved in the final product) and my love of rich food. And in truth, cutting out meat has made me a better cook in a lot of ways: I’m much more conscious of the quality of ingredients, and have learned that vegetables have more of a role than as a creative garnish to a really good piece of meat. No longer do I believe a meal is balanced if it has been sprinkled with parsley.

In terms of technique, this newfound emphasis on cooking with things that grow on the ground rather than run around on it has taught me a renewed love for deep-frying. Perhaps it’s an atavistic masculine thing: if I can’t cook manly things like ribeye steaks, at least I can cook in a manly (i.e., dangerous) way that involves high temperatures and the potential for serious injury. Sort of like the way some guys cloak their creativity by expressing it through the medium of power tools. And unlike those wimps, I don’t even wear safety goggles.

Back in the days before I left my butcher for my wife, I still enjoyed the whole frying process – but never to the point where I would put a bench-top Fry-o-lator at the top of my Christmas list. But with a vegetarian to keep happy, deep frying preserves domestic harmony while also horrifying the health police. It’s also a great way to handle leftovers: golf balls of the previous night’s mushroom risotto can be coated in an egg and parmasean mix and fried in olive oil for a particularly decadent take on the Sicilian classic arancini.

But two of my favourite deep-fried treats involve that late-summer treat, the zucchini flower, and that winter delight, the artichoke heart. The former is my go-to, make-ahead starter course whenever the things come up in the local farmers market (good food retailers like the David Jones Food Hall also stock them - keep an eye out when the time is right); the latter, a fun way to bang and clatter around the kitchen and wind up with something that is, almost literally, heart-stoppingly good.

STUFFED, BEER-BATTERED, DEEP-FRIED ZUCCHINI FLOWERS

Three flowers makes for a good first-course serving; my supplier sells in packets of ten, so we generally tend to have five per person at my house. Waste not, want not, right? The goal here is to make the lightly-battered, delicate zucchini flower the perfect vehicle for an incredibly rich packet of warm, melted cheese and herbs.

You’ll need:
• 12 zucchini flowers, preferably with zucchini stems attached
• 150 grams mozzarella cheese
• 150 grams fresh parmagiano reggiano or grana padano
• 1 bunch chives, finely chopped
• 150 grams flour
• 200 ml beer
• Cayenne pepper
• Good sea salt
• Black pepper
• Olive oil
• Butter
• Lemon (optional)

1. First, make the batter: a good flour-based batter needs at least half an hour to rest and come together. In a wide bowl (you’ll be dipping in here later) mix the beer and the flour together, adding a dash of cayenne pepper, salt, and fresh-ground black pepper. What you’re looking for is a lightish consistency, not a heavy, gloppy batter.
2. Then, make the stuffing. Mix up the two cheeses, most of the chives, and some salt and pepper in a bowl (taste to make sure the balance is to your liking). Take the zucchini flowers and, being careful not to tear the leaves, open from the top and with your little finger or a small spoon pop out the stamen from inside the flower. Fill with stuffing, and twist shut, laying aside on a plate. These can sit in the fridge until you are ready to cook.
3. Get a good, heavy-bottomed pan out and fill with a centimetre’s worth of olive oil, and a good whack of butter to boot. Allow this to get quite hot – test it by dripping some batter into it; if it doesn’t immediately set to sizzling, the oil is too cold. Working in batches, dip the flowers into the batter using a turning motion that works with the direction in which you closed them, to help keep them sealed during frying. Place in the oil, and, turning occasionally, fry until golden brown. Set aside on paper towel, sprinkling with salt, until all the flowers are cooked. Place three on each plate, sprinkle with some of the leftover chives, and a squeeze of lemon juice (optional). Serve immediately.
Serves four.

ARTICHOKE HEART FRITTERS

Adapted from Julie Rosso and Sheila Lukins’ New Basics Cookbook, this recipe hails from Chicago’s celebrated Gordon Restaurant. Apparently this was a classic from the day the eatery opened in 1976, and the whole thing does have a bit of a wonderfully haut-1970s feel to it.

You’ll need:
For the béarnaise sauce:
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons dry white wine
• 1 tablespoon chopped eschallots
• 1 teaspoon dried tarragon leaves
• 125g room-temperature unsalted butter (for this sort of sauce, it pays to buy some good-quality butter, like Lurpak)
• 3 egg yolks
• Salt and pepper

For the fritters:
• 1 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 3 cups corn or peanut oil
• 10 artichoke hearts, halved, rinsed, and dried

1. Make a batter by mixing the flour, baking powder, salt and pepper together in a bowl, and then combining with the milk, egg, and olive oil. Let this rest for at least a half-hour.
2. Knock up a quick béarnaise by boiling down the vinegar, wine, eschallots, and tarragon until reduced by half, and then allow to cool. Then, get some water to near-boiling in a double-boiler (or just use a steel bowl over a pot like I do), and in the top part, combine the vinegar mixture with the egg yolks, giving it a good whisk. Bit by bit, add the butter until the sauce thickens, season with salt and pepper, and set aside.
3. Working in batches, dip the artichokes in the batter and then fry in hot oil. Drain on paper towels, and serve on plates with a daub of béarnaise on each fritter.
Serves four.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: June 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
Why God needs a rottweiler

The newspaper front pages said it all when Pope Benedict XVI ascended the throne in the Vatican late last month: “God’s Rottweiler”, “Panzerkardinal”. Here in New Zealand, Newstalk ZB’s Larry Williams tried to suggest to Bishop Pat Dunn that the Catholic Church had “missed its chance to enter the 21st century”. As if, somehow, the church has to reflect modern secular attitudes to stay relevant.

There’s news for many of the media commentators and fringe lobby groups who resent another conservative at the helm of the papacy, and that news is all bad: Christianity doesn’t have to stay relevant to survive in the modern age – instead, citizens of the modern age need to return to Christianity to survive.

That modern liberals seek a religion that reflects their own views and behaviour, rather than core values, is no surprise. That desire explains the massive rise in Eastern and New Age beliefs in the West, where people are soothingly reassured by spiritual snake-oil salesmen that “there are many paths to God, find what works for you”. For a generation that has trouble getting out of their armchairs to change a TV channel, such anything-goes religion is non-threatening, easy to comply with and really cool if you love mung beans.

Pope Benedict himself wasted no time declaring that Western secularism is the biggest threat to Christianity.

“We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires,” the new Pope warned.

The idea that religion should change itself to reflect human trends, rather than God, is almost a given in some sectors of society these days – usually the sectors who would never darken a church doorway even at Easter. No longer having faith, they would prefer the Church join them by abandoning its faith as well, “lightening up a little”, and what’s wrong with abortion as a form of contraception anyway?

But the times they are a changing. Few could have failed to note that many of the mourners for Pope John Paul 2, and many of those who cheered at the news of Joseph Ratzinger’s election as the new pope, were young. Many of the cynics and critics are baby-boomers. There is not just a culture clash underway on religion, there is an intergenerational clash as well. The children of the baby boomers think their parents are immoral, inept and bereft of basic values. While mainstream liberal protestant churches in the West are dying a horrible death, Pentecostal protestant churches are booming, as Gen-Xers return to the faith their parents abandoned.

Pope Benedict knows this too. His choice of the name Benedict is significant for a number of reasons. The Benedictine order of monks were primarily responsible for the Christianisation of Europe during the dark ages. The original evangelists bringing light to the world. Many observers say this Benedictine papacy will be a battle for the hearts and minds of Europe again.

Yet it will be a battle without compromise. Pope Benedict staunchly resists the notion that Christianity should somehow be watered down to appeal to Western liberals. Better, says the Pope, to remain true to your core beliefs than set yourself adrift in the sea of relativism where truth is meaningless.

If that means the Catholic Church continues to shrink in Western Europe (it is exploding in Latin America and Africa), then so be it, as Britain’s Independent noted.

And there is another fascinating twist to Ratzinger’s choice of “Benedict”. Back in the year 1140, a monk known to history as St Malachi is said to have received visions from God of 112 future popes.
According to those visions, the man just elected will be the second to last pope:

“111. The Glory of the Olive. The Order of St. Benedict has said this Pope will come from their order. The Olive branch is a sign of peace and he may be a peacemaker or dark skinned. It is interesting that Jesus gave his apocalyptic prophecy about the end of time from the Mount of Olives. This Pope will reign during the beginning of the tribulation Jesus spoke of. The 111th prophesy is “Gloria Olivae” (The Glory of the Olive). The Order of Saint Benedict has claimed that this pope will come from their ranks. Saint Benedict himself prophesied that before the end of the world his Order, known also as the Olivetans, will triumphantly lead the Catholic Church in its fight against evil.”

According to Malachi’s prophecy, this pope will have a short reign, marking the start of the tribulation leading to Armageddon. At 78 years old, Pope Benedict XVI will not remain in power for long.
The liberal wing of the Catholic Church, which tried to mobilize against Ratzinger in the conclave of cardinals but failed, now has a few years to regroup and be better placed at the next conclave, perhaps within a decade, to give us a Pope of enlightenment and liberation from the shackles of the past.

Which brings us to the last of St Malachi’s prophetic visions.
“112. Peter the Roman – This final Pope will, it is argued now by theologians, likely be Satan, taking the form of a man named Peter who will gain a worldwide allegiance and adoration. He will be the final antiChrist which prophecy students have long foretold. If it were possible, even the very elect would be deceived. The 112th prophesy states: ‘In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Petrus Romanus, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people. The End’.”

Regardless of what one thinks of Malachi’s visions and end-time theology, there’s no doubt the man now at the helm of the Catholic Church will be a defender of the faith from the erosion of postmodernism, in a Europe fast losing its Christianity and returning to paganism.

God needs a “rottweiler” for times such as these.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: June 05, AU Edition

DAN DONAHOO
Australian energy policy is far too crude

President George Bush has asked Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to reduce the pressure on oil prices. It is a short-term, politically expedient solution to the problem and demonstrates a lack of understanding of one of the most serious economic and development issues of our time. Managing the decline of oil must begin now and our leaders need to pull their head out of the sand and start talking about it. The short-term political issue may be the price at the pump, but the medium to long-term issue is the lack of oil into the future.

Keeping prices low is not going to help anyone. Even motorists who demand lower prices will only face more dramatic increases in the future. The oil markets are doing us all a favour.

Australia has very low energy prices, yet we have the audacity to complain about them. A government legacy that future generations would look back on and appreciate would protect the future economy from more dramatic falls would be to encourage less consumption of petrol and conserve it for future generations.

As much as President Bush would like to think increased global production would bring the price of oil down, it may not. Even the current $50-plus dollars for a barrel of crude is based on speculation, not availability. Currently, there is enough oil to go around, but buyers and analysts are not sure for how much longer. Some suggest the price is over-inflated by over $20 dollars. This is a naïve view.

The market is actually protecting us because like it or not, we are running out of oil. We have been running out since we started extracting it from the ground. Oil is a fossil fuel and by its nature there is only a certain amount.

How much?

The British Oil Depletion Analysis Centre predicts the Earth’s original oil holdings were around 2000 to 2400 billion barrels. About only half of this is left. And, it is only in the last 30 years we have really become serious oil users. This is what peak oil is all about and what the markets are waiting for.

Peak oil refers to the point in time when extraction of oil from the earth reaches its highest point and begins to decline. We won’t be able to say when we have reached peak oil until after the fact.
Kenneth Deffeyes is a geologist at Princeton University and an expert in the work of Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert. Hubbert successfully predicted peak oil production in the US almost 15 years before it occurred in 1970. Deffeyes has used Hubbert’s work to analyse global oil supplies and estimates that global peak will occur sometime this year.

This is what is keeping the markets on edge. With more experts coming forward and predicting we are close to peak oil, prices are starting to reflect nervousness about scarcity.

When peak oil kicks in it, the decline will become obvious. We are on an exponential curve where oil consumption is concerned because the oil supply is decreasing and demand shows no sign of slowing.
At a federal level politicians need to start discussing the impact of oil decline on our nation. They need to begin debating what alternatives are required and where investment should go to support those alternatives.

Prices can’t be kept low, but our consumption can be changed and alternatives can be sought. But we need to start acting now.

Daniel Donahoo is a fellow at OzProspect, a non-partisan, public policy think tank

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: Apr 05. AU Edition

DON’T GIVE IT A THOUGHT!
Business guru Malcolm Gladwell’s latest offering says, yes, you can choose a book by its cover

BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
Penguin Australia 2005. Paperback, $32.95. ISBN: 071399844X
Malcolm Gladwell has a gift for taking obscure scientific experiments and tying them in to much broader ideas. Take, for example, Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg’s study which took two groups of equallymatched students playing Trivial Pursuit. Members of the first group were told to take five minutes before the game started and think about what it meant to be a professor. The second group were to think about football hooligans. The first group faired a lot better. They were in a “smart” frame of mind. This is just one of the many investigations Gladwell covers. He analyses the Pepsi challenge, the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York, speed-dating, the “love lab” and the DNA of marriage, height-salary ratios, Morse code, involuntary facial expressions and Pentagon war games. It’s fascinating reading. But do all these disparate parts meld to form a cohesive theory? I’m not so sure.

The problem is that the publishers are pitching Blink as a self-help title. The best-seller list is littered with diet books and money-making manifestos – French Women Don’t Get Fat; He’s Just Not That Into You; Rich Dad, Poor Dad – which explains what the publishers are up to. But business guru Gladwell’s intentions are a bit more fuzzy.

On the surface Blink is about trusting your gut – hardly a new concept, but the author is such a science-based individual that the book reads as if it’s all news to him. Anyone who’s read his internationally acclaimed first book The Tipping Point will have pretty high expectations for this new release – expectations which, as it turns out, have the power to colour our judgement in either good or evil ways.

The sub-title, “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”, is misleading if you read the word power as solely a positive thing. It’s true that much of Blink is taken up with impressive examples of snap decisions that make people heaps of money or save lots of lives. An equal portion is devoted to those subconscious decisions produced without the rational mind even realising a decision has already been made. First impressions are powerful, but not necessarily in a good way. Blink proves how we justify our instinctive judgements with a logic entirely unrelated to them – thereby validating prejudices we didn’t even know we had.

“Thin-slicing” is a key term in Blink and it refers to “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experience”. For example, when we have to make sense of something very quickly – in a crisis, say, or when interviewing candidates for a job.

Gladwell introduces us to psychologist Samuel Gosling, who has shown how effective thin-slicing can be when judging people’s personalities. His experiment involved getting eighty college students to complete a personality questionnaire about themselves. He then had close friends of the eighty students fill out the same questionnaire. Next Golsing repeated the process with complete strangers who had never even met the people they were judging – all they saw were their dorm rooms, and were given 15 minutes to look around with a clipboard. The results of the experiment are quite surprising: While the close friends were better at measuring how agreeable and extroverted the subject was, on the whole, the complete strangers came out on top. Their conclusions were far more accurate in all other regards, like predicting emotional stability, conscientiousness, and openness to new experiences.

Concludes Gladwell, “Forget the endless ‘getting to know you’ meetings and lunches, then. If you want to get a good idea of whether I’d make a good employee, drop by my house one day and take a look around”.
For me, there’s an absurd side to scientists proving the existence of instinct. Gathering reams of data to pinpoint and explain intuitive responses – it borders on the ridiculous. Granted, the human mind is naturally driven to explain the inexplicable, but to take this further and promote the supremacy of snap decisions over logical thinking is like saying that water is more important than food. We live in a technological age obsessed with data, but have we forgotten so much that we need to rediscover it all again?

Over-thinking has always been frowned upon. While the research in Blink is highly original, the concept isn’t:

In the words of the ancients one should make decisions in the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, “If discrimination is long, it will spoil.” Lord Naoshige said, “When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly.” – Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, written in the 1700s.

Conceding that Blink is preaching to the converted in my case, the focus shifts away from the book’s actual subject toward the biographies of the remarkable Americans collected for the project. We meet the owl-like professor and the smart cop; there’s the fireman who thinks he has ESP and the virtuoso car salesman. Gladwell paints beautiful portraits of these people and many more; he really is the Rembrandt of journalism in this regard. Together they form a brave and intelligent representation of American thought and endeavour.

So, is Blink lamb dressed as mutton or mutton dressed as lamb? Enlisting the Blink philosophy of utilising positive reinforcement to override subconscious prejudice, (perversely) I choose to read Blink as an antidote to the anti-American sentiment that currently plagues us. Medicine like this I’d happily take every day.

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THE PATRON SAINT OF EELS
By Gregory Day
Sydney. Picador 2005. $22.00 ISBN: 0330421581
Do not be afraid of the saints of the new millenium. Fra Ionio, Patron Saint of Eels, seeks only to protect the eels and remind us of the magic of nature. The Patron Saint of Eels is set in the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, where the bush meets the sea. Noel Lee, an artist, is as concerned about tourism as the rest of the locals. When heavy rain floods the neighbouring swamp, hundreds of eels overflow into the ditches that surround Noel’s loft. The immortal Fra Ionio materializes – deus ex machina – to set them free.

The Patron Saint of Eels is a contemporary fable. Traditionally, fables carry wisdom through the ages. They are cautionary tales that tell us what we ought to do. Unlike fairy tales that give us hope and promise happy endings, fables are not concerned with wish-fulfilment. They are overtly moralistic and use scare tactics to prevent us from doing the wrong thing. Contemporary fables are losing their dark side, it seems.

The master of this genre, Italo Calvino, himself wrote a fable about eels. “The Cloven Youth” tells the story of a boy who is cut in half by a witch. This half-boy grows up, with half a head, half a body and just one leg. Out fishing one day he catches an eel and the eel says, “Let me go, and whatever you wish will be granted, for the sake of the little eel.” The boy lets the eel go. Then one day, as he is passing the palace, a princess on her balcony laughs at him. To punish her for laughing at his misfortunate appearance, he wishes that she were pregnant with his child. A baby is born and the princess is abused by her parents for the disgrace. When it is discovered that the cloven youth is the baby’s father, all three are trapped in barrel sent to the bottom of the ocean. The youth wishes again and for the sake of the little eel, they are safe on dry land with a banquet
before them and a palace all of their own.

The cloven youth, who is no longer cloven but handsome and whole, uses the little eel’s magic once more to punish the king but the princess pleads mercy for her father and he relents. “The king took them back to his palace where they all lived in harmony from then on. Unless they have died in the meantime, they may well be there to this day.”
Calvino’s fables are deadly – by which I mean phenomenally good. Gregory Day’s new work is more reminiscent of Tim Winton’s fable, Blueback. They are both set in small towns threatened by gentrification where nature is the maiden in need of protection. The characters are the keepers of the land and salvation lies in understanding and enjoying that responsibility. Day’s Nannette is wiry and freckled to Winton’s Dora, tough and sun-streaked. Both women like to keep to themselves. Despite their similarlities, these are very different books. The Patron Saint of Eels is in your face. Blueback is far more subtle.

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NEVER LET ME GO
By Kazuo Ishiguro
London. Faber and Faber 2005. $29.95. ISBN: 0571224121.
The other day I saw a toddler wearing a t-shirt saying “Ruining It For Everybody”. Not wanting to wear a shirt like that myself, I’m in a difficult position reviewing Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It’s been five years since his last book came out, so the new one is eagerly awaited and now I’m afraid I’m going to hold out on you too. It’s lucky that it’s not just about ‘that’ anyway; as with all of Ishiguro’s books (think Stevens, the troubled butler in The Remains of the Day), there is always more going on than meets the eye.

So here I am, talkin’ loud and saying nothing, while Ishiguro does the exact opposite. When discussing his work I feel the same obligation to stay silent that one might feel in a library. His writing is quiet. His themes, on the other hand, are radical and universal – loud, that is. Never Let Me Go deals with love and friendship; it scopes out death. This uncanny mix of softly spoken clout has impressed the critics to the point where every one of his books has either won or been nominated for a major award. Look at how Ishiguro makes an insightful indictment of international defence and security policies, without going anywhere near the subject of current affairs. These are primary school children who think someone is plotting to abduct their beloved teacher.

“When it came down to it, though, I don’t recall our taking many practical steps towards defending Miss Geraldine; our activities always revolved around gathering more and more evidence concerning the plot itself. For some reason, we were satisfied this would keep any immediate danger at bay.”
How elegant and understated is that! Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

There are surprisingly few big-game writers that take it all on. Ishiguro’s style is both contemporary and classic. And he’s not afraid of fiction. Lately there’s been an obsession with keeping it “real”, which often results in books that fail to strike any chord at all. This book strikes so many chords you’ll end up feeling like a banjo in West Virginia.

To be honest, Never Let Me Go is really creepy. I didn’t actually enjoy reading it – though I’d recommend it highly. Ishiguro always opts for the first person narrative and he’s done so again this time. In interviews he will often discuss his somewhat unique method of auditioning characters for the lead role, spending a long time viewing the situation from one perspective then switching to another. Of course this means that by the time the book is published, we are only given access to the inside of one head. This is why I read the first page of Never Let Me Go with a sinking heart. I didn’t want to know this person who was talking to me and I didn’t want to hear her story either. The sense of something being very wrong here is immediately pervasive.

I’ve made this all sound like some big mystery and it’s not. It’s just that some things are better approached fresh, with as little prior knowledge as possible. It’s a shame I don’t want to say what it is about because that’s probably the reason a lot of people will buy it. Never Let Me Go is very topical, very now; let’s just hope it’s not very soon.

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Reviewed by MICHAEL MORRISSEY:

GOING NATIVE: Living in the Australian Environment
By Michael Archer and Bob Beale
Hodder Headline Australia 2004. $35.
ISBN 0733615228.
Awakening of ecological consciousness - and conscience - can occur at any time. A book, documentary, even a photograph can do the trick. However, I know of few books of this type that are as eloquent, well-documented and, in very sense of the word, down to earth, as this one. Its range is wide-sweeping, immense - from geology to palaeontology, from firestorms to educating children about the unique animals of their own country.

When the authors asked forty children to name ten animals that first came to mind - “no prompts, no preludes, no explanations” - all named cats and dogs and 85 per cent mentioned cows, horses, rats, elephants, giraffes, zebras, tigers, rhinoceroses and lions. Only 15 per cent named any Australian animal. Unsurprisingly, kangaroos were among the most mentioned. Koalas got a look in. With children’s animal perceptions firmly focused on African exotics and imported farm animals, what hope is there for full local ecological consciousness, for heart-felt caring for Australia’s numerous unique species?
In a reversal of cat and dog domination - and moggies come under heavy attack for various nasty diseases they can carry - Archer suggests buddying up with a quoll which, by his account, has all the best aspects of canine and feline qualities combined. It is clean like a cat, affectionate like a dog (even when not hungry!). Alas, Archer’s human-loving quoll bit a cane toad and died - legitimate reason for Archer to bring some heavy artillery to bear on this poisonous and ugly import. Mysteriously, the quoll appears to have two penises (penii?), or what Archer calls “a second erectile structure” - function as yet unknown. If their pro-pet theories seem a trifle cute, how about this (alas, too late) practical notion - if thylacines had been kept as pets, they might still be with us. Quolls and thylacines aside, the authors are no animal rights sentimentalists and strongly urge for the culling of kangaroos - “tasty, free-range, low-fat, low-cholesterol, disease-free, high-protein and environmentally superior” - for human consumption. The departure from the nineteenth century love of local animal tucker was of course a product of urbanisation.

This is a serious and sobering (though humour-seasoned) book which pleads for a radical change in the Australian agricultural sphere. Basically, a shift from sheep to trees. One of the main reasons for this suggestion - more than a suggestion - is the emergence of vast amounts of salty groundwater. A strategy to compensate for the resulting desertification is the hardy saltbush which thrives on salinity that will reduce less tough vegetation to bare ground. In the Bultarra region where merino farmer Robin Meares spearheaded the change, some 7.5 million plants have been earthed.

The authors deftly reel off summaries of all major extinctions by asteroid and meteor impact. The text in general is fact-studded with both actual and estimated figures. In contrast to their factual bombardment, the authors also include some vivid imaginary description of homo ergaster meeting kangaroos long before even the most recently extended date of man’s first arrival in Australia - say 100,000 years ago - and a similarly vivid evocation of Miocene forests at Riversleigh where numerous fossilised remains of unknown species of mammals have been found. They also challenge Tim Flannery’s “Blitzkreig Hypothesis” of megafauna extinction and assert that the impact of mining is actually very minimal and controlled whereas agriculture - the major factor in erosion - is not.

While Archer and Beale spare us no gloomy facts they also offer many practical solutions. Unlike the kind of ecological disaster books that only proffer litanies of doom - possibly to scare us into reacting - Going Native offers down to earth hope in the form of kangaroo culling, native grasses, planting saltbush and trees, and so on. This is an inspired and inspiring book that should be “planted” in all schools and libraries.

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WHO’S WHO
Hoaxes, Imposture, and Identity Crises in Australian Literature
Edited by Maggie Nolan and Carrie Dawson
University of Queensland Press, $22.50.
ISBN 0702235237.
Caution: that latest Aborigine-authored novel may have been written by a whitefella; that heart-wrenching tale of racial prejudice, sexist control, arranged marriage, and murder in the name of honour may have been written by a housewife living in the suburbs of a reasonably safe city. Nor is academia safe from hoaxes, trickery, posing, chicanery.
None of this is new. History abounds with literary quackery. Sir John Mandeville’s 14th century Travels are widely considered to have been written by Jean de Bourgogne, a knavish Frenchman with a penchant for a tall tale of lands he had not visited. In Who’s Who, thirteen academics write thirteen essays examining the strategies of literary imposture, of wilful authorial schizophrenia. David Carter writing about Nino Culotta (aka John O’Grady) suggests there are two kinds of hoaxes - the first, which only works as long as it remains undiscovered, and the second which depends on being discovered. Carter observes that most scientific hoaxes belong in the first category. However, “examples of the second kind are `core business’ for the arts and humanities, from the Ern Malley affair to Sokal and Social text”.

The interesting thing about the good-natured (shall we say) mask of O’Grady is that when it was removed a month or so after publication, the truth seemed to boost rather than mar sales.

When the mask cannot be easily lifted, when it sticks too close to the skin, the wearer gets uncomfortable. O’Grady wrote to his son: “I have had Mr Culotta. I am heartily sick of Mr Culotta. There will be no sequel. There will be no `Cop this Lot’” – but of course there was. The moral might be – if the laughing guests like your clown face better than your own plain mug why not enjoy the ride? It can’t have been all bad because They’re a Weird Mob sold more copies than any other Australian novel until Bryce Courtenay came along.

If the case of Nino Culotta/John O’Grady was only an amusing soft shoe ethnic shuffle, the Demidenko-Darville duplicity has justly called forth righteous wrath. Susanna Egan indignantly notes that Darville talked of travelling to the Ukraine when she was 12, where she found her relatives in grinding poverty living in cottages with earth floors. She had been forced to give up her seat on the train to Jewish Communists, her grandfather and other relatives had been murdered by Jewish Communists, et cetera. Clearly, we are in the dark realms of what the intellectuals term imposture – though we could also call it hate-mongering fraud. Whatever one thinks of Darville and her misrepresentations, the scrutiny was prolific – three book studies within a year and countless more articles. In another such case, Binjamin Wilkomirski aka Bruno Dosseker (a Swiss gentile), who claimed to have been a child survivor of Nazi concentration camps, fell under suspicion because he kept shedding tears, whereas genuine survivors like author Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel remained dry-eyed. I keep thinking there is something we should all be learning from these cases but I’m not entirely sure what it is. Perhaps all authors should be subject to a pre-publication gender and ethnicity check (just kidding). From one deception to another, the motives are different. Some want a new and more successful literary career, some (I suspect) want to make their own ordinary life stories more interesting, more exotic than they are. This is an all too human wish to which many of us succumb every time we embellish a story about ourselves.

Being an academic set of texts, this psychological explanation is less fully examined than might have been the case otherwise. We are all wise, though no wiser after all is revealed. When truth wills out, the gaps in the lies seem glaringly obvious.

In the notorious case of Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Messages Down Under it was unearthed there was no “Real People Tribe”, no kidnapping, no voyage in the desert. And of course no one in the relevant area had heard of Morgan. The American term “Down Under” - never used by Antipodeans - should have been a leading clue to its falsity.

Despite this, Cath Ellis notes that the book is required reading in several American universities and an extract appears in a guidebook to Australia. Ms Morgan’s New Age trash fulfils an eternal desire that we all desperately want to be true - the civilised being can be made uncivilised and return to some more idealised primitive state. Lord Greystoke always wants to be Tarzan. It appears, then, that Morgan, by appealing to a mythic-cultural desire, has “succeeded”, while Darville, who told unsavoury ethnic lies, has failed. This collection of essays offers a thoughtful dissection of this intriguing ongoing phenomena, though its scope and analysis could conceivably have gone further: is this imposture peculiar to “developed” countries? Is Australia a world leader in literary deception? Watch this space.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: June 05, AU Edition

ANN COULTER
Ever have one of those millennia?

It’s always important to get liberals to stop complaining long enough to make a hard prediction. This month we will review liberal predictions on the Iraqi elections. When they weren’t claiming the Iraq elections would not take place at all, liberals were telling us that if we let those crazy Arabs vote, the Iraqi people would elect extremist mullahs hostile to the United States.

Well, the Iraq National Assembly has completed filling out the cabinet, and it can now be said that this was liberals’ laughably wrong prediction No. 9,856. (Or No. 9,857 if you count their predictions of ruinous global cooling back in the 1970s, which I don’t because that could still happen.)

Iraq’s first democratically elected government in half a century has a Shi’a prime minister and a Kurdish president and several Sunni cabinet ministers.

Fat Muqtada al-Sadr saw his radical Shi’ite movement humiliated in the January elections. According to a recent poll by the International Republican Institute, two-thirds of Iraqis say Iraq is on the right track.

The minority Sunnis, who once held sway under Saddam Hussein and were told by American liberals to expect major payback from the Shi’ites under a democracy, were chosen by the majority Shi’a government for four cabinet positions – including the not insignificant position of defense minister.

What we’ve learned from this is: Talking to liberals is much more fun now that we have Google.

In a Nov. 9, 2003, news article, The New York Times raised the prospect that ‘democracy in the Middle East might empower the very forces that the United States opposes, like Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.’

Democracy in the U.S. might have put John Kerry in the White House, too, but you’ll notice they didn’t abandon the idea.
One difference is that the Islamists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt were not democratically elected. Still, the Times said that ‘something similar’ happened in Iran when ‘domestic pressures’ installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By ‘domestic pressures’ in Iran, I gather they meant ‘the Carter presidency’.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin claimed to be talking about ‘grim Iraq realities’, explaining to her readers that if elections were held, the new Iraqi government ‘will likely be dominated by religious parties. If the economy stays bad, radical Islamic parties could do well’. So you can see how leaving the tyrannical Hussein dynasty (slogan: ‘We’re the rape room people!’) in place was preferable to that.

Winning the category of Most Wrong Predictions, Lifetime Achievement Award, Katrina vanden Heuvel (Queen of the May at America’s fun-loving Nation magazine) said invading Iraq would lead to ‘more terrorist retaliation, undermine the fight against al-Qaida and make America less secure and possibly unleash those very weapons of mass destruction into the hands of rogue terrorists in Iraq’.

What weapons, Katrina? (Katrina lied, kids died!) Hey! Wait a minute! How can rogue terrorists in Iraq detonate bombs? They’re all too busy flying kites with their children! Hasn’t she seen Fahrenheit 9/11?
After we invaded Iraq, Katrina predicted the U.S. would stay in Iraq as a colonial power – as the only non-imperialist superpower in the history of the world is wont to do. As we paved the way for elections, she said, ‘You know, if there are elections in Iraq, it’s very likely it will not be secular democracy’.

But it’s not fair to quote Katrina. She still thinks the Soviet Union’s planned economy failed because the farmers had 70 years of bad weather.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

Feb 05

DESPERATE FINDS DATELESS
Behind closed doors at a singles convention

You could ask the question, who’d be seen dead at a singles convention? As NEILL HUNTER discovered, nearly 2000 people were willing to pay $20 a head to hear the guru of good one-liners work the crowd…

On picturesque Takapuna Beach on Auckland’s North Shore, the grassy knoll above the sand is dotted with islands of people, from families to teenagers, enjoying Friday afternoon after-work in the sun. Six girls are sitting in a circle, talking. Their ages are early twenties and one of them says they have been playing a game called match-making. “I got a cuddle,” she laughs. That seems too coincidental so I want to ask them if they’re going to the “singles event of the New Year”, but stop. It could be flirting.

He wanted to be a Catholic priest, had a Christian upbringing but doesn’t do that anymore, runs singles conventions called parties in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and sponsors them on six continents too, for all groups - even Jews and Christians - appeared on Oprah Winfrey and ran for California Governor on a platform of lobbying for singles who he says are discriminated against. His favourite recreation is hiking and last month he found his favourite, between Paihia and Haruru Falls, Bay of Islands, New Zealand. His name? Richard Gosse, call him Rich, and Gosse is French, a word he thinks means “little boy” of which there is one, or girl, in each of us, who needs to have fun, so he does conventions for them and to get single adults listening he makes half his routine stand-up comedy. It must work because some 1500 Kiwis came to party with Rich on a fine warm Saturday evening in Takapuna NZ and they say about 200 were turned away, from the biggest show in town.

“You’d better come in, she’s getting close to the Pearly Gates now,” said a night shift nurse calling at 5.45 to say it was nearly over, a 37 year old wife and mother’s pending death from terminal cancer was about to happen and in hindsight they were strange words. More strange, amongst the whirlwind of events later that week, was the brief realisation of being single again after 11 years. Two years later this journalist gained an understanding of the similarities between being made single by death, and by divorce, at a retreat called The Beginning Experience run by Catholics in an old Friary in Auckland where the widowed, divorced and the youth of both, would spend three days understanding how to close the door a little, on a past life, and accept a new one, in my case one of being single.

Such a crude, sympathy-vote-grabbing introduction of Catholic retreats and Friaries has absolutely nothing to do with a singles convention run by the self proclaimed guru of the unattached, Rich Gosse, but understanding and accepting the state of singleness does. Whether the serenity of leafy, expansive Friary gardens or the razzmatazz luxury of the Spencer on Byron Hotel, Takapuna, participants at either retreat or convention would probably leave with the same sense of satisfaction; having stepped out, had a laugh, and done something different. For years, the Gosse singles convention road-show has come down under to NZ and Australia, because being single is, well, huge. A glance in the classifieds will tell you that, so too will a trawl though the “net” and socially it is far more acceptable to be single today than it was say 30 years ago when foot-loose-and-fancy-free was viewed by some as strange, at age oh…23, not hitched by age 24 – outrageous!

Rich Gosse, Chairman of American Singles Education Inc (or ASE for short), looks at his watch, gets the crowd ready for the NZ Flirt Champion contest and they’re off! On a speed mission to “goodbye-single-days”, of getting the most phone numbers in five minutes, from members-of-the-opposite, here in the ball room of the towering Spencer Hotel. Five minutes later: count down, “30, seconds…20 seconds…and stop” shouts Gosse and then its official, New Zealand “has a new FLIRTING CHAMPION!” Steven, with a staggering 16.

Gosse tells him that all his flirting champions become famous so Steven should go down stairs to Mrs Gosse and get interviewed by the Herald. Not likely. As he threads his way through wall-to-wall singleites I grab him first and with chaperoning skills the envy of any sheep dog, usher him down to Debby Gosse, photo-snap them together and elicit a career first, interview of a flirt. Steven McIntyre is 31, previously married, completing a diploma in computer games software, been in the IT industry 10 years, saw the advertisement for the convention and just thought he’d come for the fun of it. “A friend of mine was coming along as well and said ‘heh why don’t you come along’.” And what’s his secret-swooper-weapon? “I just say Hi and touch them lightly on the upper arm.” Huh.

So who are the best? “The Italians are the best flirts because they pinch you,” says Gosse, who calls the British, Australians and New Zealanders “very reserved, very shy,” as flirts go. If there is a flirting crisis in New Zealand as Gosse likes to remind us because so many NZ women have told him, how about America? Not the same, says Gosse, quoting his kiwi female sources: “NZ men are too shy. They (woman) wish the NZ men were more outgoing like American men. That’s what I hear all the time. They’re (kiwi women) hoping I will train the kiwi men to be more outgoing. We’re going to teach all the kiwi men how to be a good flirt.” Well I’ve got news for him and like a gun slinger defending this down-under- last-bastion-of-good-silent-kiwi-blokes, hit him! With research. Afterwards he blinks and makes complimentary remarks about journalistic research, which is: In a Fox News item, 7 October 2004, it is revealed that flirts compete at singles conventions to see who can score the most telephone numbers from members of the “opposite” in five minutes, the prize: …a lot of phone numbers. Says Gosse to Fox, “the most difficult thing at a giant singles event is you have all these people, who want to meet someone but they are scared to death”, it was all about overcoming fear of rejection, taking a chance and meeting people.

Not surprisingly female flirters consistently score highest, research shows. Well, why wouldn’t any single bloke worth his salt give away his number to any pleading woman, but no, says Gosse: “most guys don’t have the strength to ask for a phone number?”

At American conventions most woman are reluctant to give away their number and Gosse, the research continues, tells them to make the men work for it. Even in Wisconsin. According to the Flirting Champion of Wisconsin (true!) getting men to give up their…information, isn’t easy. “Most of the men won’t even look at you,” says Nancy McDermott, 54. “One guy said ‘I don’t give out my number until I know I’m going to date someone.’ ” Staunch doesn’t describe it as a visual flash of an American square-lantern-jawed-teeth-gritter make his own Custer’s Last Stand. Says McDermott seriously: “how do you know if you’re going to date someone if you don’t give your number away,” How true indeed, and she’s no slouch because that’s the sort of razor sharp incisiveness which enabled her to claim the biggest flirt title by scoring a whopping 19 phone numbers under five minutes! (Loud American cheering). However, seems she was only in it for the glory because the big tease didn’t even bother calling any of her adoring beaus afterwards, explaining that although appearing gimmicky, the contest gave her increased confidence in daily life. The big flirter further explains that finding interesting single men doesn’t seem any easier now than it did before she was named champ’; she does however feel more prepared to talk to men and not worry about the outcome. “The real benefit comes when people walk out into the world and give themselves permission to be a little more flirtatious than they were the day before. “The world’s a better place for all the flirting that goes on. (That’s it! I quit!)…I use to be really shy, I’ve been to a number of workshops, you learn to open up, and you’re going to get rejected (darn right with that sort of reputation) but so what.”It seems McDermott’s are a big name in flirting because Trish McDermott (we are not told if any relation to Nancy) vice president (give me break)…of Romance at match.com told Marla Lehner at Fox News (that’s Fox, as in the media group, not some sleazy little break-away militant singles faction) that Americans are flirt deficient (Investigate’s description). Vice president McDermott said there was a flirting crisis (Fox New’s…) in America. “I have concerns that we as a society have become less flirtatious (get those pills ready people!). Men and women say it is harder to make that initial connection in our day-to-day lives.”

There you go. We down under can hold our heads high. Not so says Gosse because if the research is correct then NZ men are even worse…you just can’t keep a good American down.

Is flirting promiscuous? No it’s fun he says because it is in us from infancy to be expert flirts. “Every one falls in love with babies” who are experts at it he says but as we grow older, get hurt, get rejected, “we start putting up walls,” so the educator see his role as restoring the skill. Understanding our inner selves…perhaps that’s what all this is about.

Desperately seeking… we asked Kerry Frances who is not a singles convention junkie, doesn’t flirt and hasn’t co-founded anything but is no slouch when it comes to understanding people, and she has the singleness to prove it. The stunningly attractive brunette was a lawyer before turning to analysing people and as well as having a law degree she has a BA and a Masters in Counselling, knows the stigmatisms surrounding singleness and says she has copped pressure in that area herself, from family, friends and church but gets on with life anyway. So why do people go to these things in such large numbers? Says Frances, “singles are working a lot longer and harder. Think back to when there was glide time. People finished work at four or five, they socialised at tennis clubs, churches and halls.” So an event like a singles convention solves the dilemma. “It’s all about time and opportunity,” she says.

Is that the answer for those agonising over marital status? Just go out and get on with life, get a haircut and a real job? Is it fair to put singles under the magnifying glass? Of course singles don’t self consciously scurry from corner to corner in little swarms of festering self consciousness but social discourses as such, means there are expectations and presumptions. Take Christian singles for example. Far from portraying themselves as a bunch of cheesy, halo-crowned-virgins, that nasty stereo typical image adopted by some in main stream media, your modern Christian single isn’t afraid to join a group, have fun …and work too hard? In America there is the Singles Channel Newsletter an internet site sponsored by Harmony Ministries for singles and in their August 2004 edition Camerin Courtney, makes an ugly little confession: “having an affair with Jean-Luc,” then before we dive for our big-bashy-bibles, the journo explains: “no not some cheese loving, beret-wearing French guy (I wish),” she ’fesses, “No I’m talking about Jean-Luc my lap top…” In a wonderful blend of good column writing and humour the single Christian free lancer ’fesses-up to being too preoccupied with work: “there is nothing new in our overworked, prove-your-worth-by-how-busy-you-are culture but when I recently recognised the relationship between my singleness and my workaholism, I knew something needed to change. I walked out of work at 7 pm and realised the only two cars left in the parking lot belonged to fellow single people.” Then Camerin, who has no affiliation with ACIE, writes about stumbling upon a quote from none other, Mr Gosse: “ ‘workaholism is a frequent problem amongst single people. Work enables you to escape the fear, loneliness and boredom that often plagues singles’. Ouch!” She exclaims.

Painful as it may seem, some fork out their hard earned dollars for singles conventions but author-of-eight-books Gosse puts his money where his mouth is by charging cash strapped kiwis only $20. Cash. For that you get advice on the best place to meet single people and if people at his workshops don’t find love in six months – it’s money back. Sometimes. The, “have-I-got-the-deal-for-you” attitude also means he isn’t afraid to make a buck or two from singles so in case you think it’s all only about flirts, fellas floosies and flowers, or if you’re a little conventioned-out, or just need to find a real summer this summer, take a tour, with Rich. Gosse runs his own travel business for singles, with their promo’: “…those looking for a normal vacation filled with single people (eh…normal?)…this is a large organisation…around the world…really good deal…the owner Rich Gosse…even spoke recently at a packed convention in the lavish ball room of the Spencer on Byron Hotel in Takapuna (heeeee’s back)” The advertisement continues: “ ‘As you know the number one goal for singles in respect of travel, is to avoid paying the singles supplement (yea right) which sometimes can double their costs,’ said Mr Gosse, ‘that’s one of the main reasons that singles go on our trips. We guarantee them a room mate (mate…not a typo, not rate)…so they don’t have to pay double…especially woman like the security of travelling with a group. Plus the social opportunities are obvious (now we’re getting to it) who wants to travel to a romantic spot and not have anyone with whom to share’ ”.

Yes well. Just when you thought it safe to swoon with Gosse, singles should check the season and the location, before catching the love boat to one of his conventions, especially an Alaskan one. He admits he hasn’t always got it right, like the time he thought Alaska a good place for a singles showdown. He humbly told writer Janelle Brown of Salon.com that “unfortunately the convention happened to fall on the first day of the hunting season”. There is a dearth of good women, to men ratio at the best of times in the land of moose and oil but “All those sporty Alaskan hunks whom Gosse had promised to the female attendees” writes Brown “were out with their guns instead” doing what men gotta do, hunt and gather, in the state which Brown says has the largest surplus of single men in the nation. Woo-hoo for the guys who didn’t hunt that weekend when the Gosse show came to town. Gosse told Brown: “there were three women to every man…it was a disaster”. Says who?

On the rebound, he tried to make amends and play the money card, by holding the next convention in Silicon Valley because he figured the odds for a woman to find a rich computer nerdy guy much higher there than a man from Alaska in hunt. He told Brown that Silicon Valley had the highest percentage of unmarried men in America. Of rich single internet millionaires, he said there were “thousands of them.” He knew this from his match-making Webb site which “would balance out the hordes of woman usually in attendance.” Touted Gosse: “these guys are shell shocked. Where ever they go they only see men. Apparently it was all true and a thousand people showed up, …and 30 requested their money back, which was good news, assured Gosse who fiercely defends that he does it out of a passion not lost after 27 years. Besides, he wears a $20 watch and drives a 1996 Toyota Camry in the US because he says he is practicality, not money driven: “The money is in websites. That’s where I made my money”. He sold his website to another giant dating agency.

He did offer a money back guarantee at one of his previous six visits to NZ and nobody took it. There are no dollar signs in the eyes of those here in the Spencer tonight, only Cupid’s reflection and with an average age of around 30 to 40, they are all a mixed bunch.

Investigate interviewed over 10 budding dators and datees ranging in age between 31 and 55 and only one is here just for the fun. His name is Andy. Aren’t coincidences great? Andy, it transpires, is staying with the same friends. “What are you coming to Auckland for?” Enquires Stuart, of a journalist needing North Shore lodgings for the big assignment. “We’ve got a friend, Andy, from Napier going to that too and he’s staying with us.” Excellent.

Andy has never married, has had countless dates, friendships and one engagement and is an electrical design draughtsman by profession, manager for 10 years by occupation, at Napier’s The Hot Chick.
No, sickoes.

A health food takeaway outlet.

Specialising in chicken roasted over volcanic rock, salads and roasted vege’s Andy agreed to be journalistically stalked and insisted he was not really after the elusive knot-to-tie especially as he’d left his friend of 26 years, girlfriend of five, behind, to tour north in his sports car, visit friends and do the convention. “You can quote me on everything and use my name if you like” he obliges. It’s half an hour before convention registration but he doesn’t mind being made late by the “before-interview”. Tanned, medium build and height, fit with a full non- receding (lucky…) head of grey he is dressed in blues and black – shoes to match leather jacket. A Christian, he laughs “it would be one of God’s great miracles if I got married” and lists amongst his many accomplishments, of being “in Hollywood when Marylyn Munro died.” Explaining the left-behind-girlfriend-thing, “you can quote me, I’m a great believer in honesty” before explaining how they talked about it before he left, “Im very independent” and “I have come up for a fun night.”

We will return to Andy later because honesty raises another question. Does Gosse have that attribute?

Investigate has researched Gosse before meeting he-who-runs-flirting-contests and wants to assure you it’s okay to be single, in case that little gem had escaped you of such disposition, and the first question that must be asked: who is Rodney Dangerfield (RD)? This is important because so much research on Gosse refers to RD in a throw away line hauled out by American media commentators on Gosse who likens singles to Dangerfield. RD was an American comedian, did some movies and had a catch-phrase, snapped up by Gosse: “aah caint geet no respect.” Which begs the question then, just “who is Gosse’s favourite comedian?” He hesitates, mentions Rodney Dangerfield again, struggles, so needs help. “I’ve heard of John Cleese but he’s not one of my favourites.” Hah. Tasteless American. Seriously however Gosse became so passionate about singles, he stood for Governor, in 2004, and will do it again he says in 2006 when he will take on again the muscle-bound-one, Arnie the terminating sand-kicker.

Parallel to his singles platform, is economics and crime, “victimless crime” to be precise. He is on record:

“…Decriminalise victimless crimes, (drugs, gambling prostitution). This would cut serious crime in half in California because drug addicts would no longer have to burglarise our homes and mug us on the street in order to pay for their exorbitant habits. It would also save billions of dollars that are currently being wasted arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating victimless criminals. Once we decriminalise these vices we can tax them and raise the $38 billion we need to solve our financial woes.” You want to do it for money? Asks this incredulous interviewer. He does and it’s all to do with tax.

Now, where have we heard that before, somewhere closer to home and there shall be no further comment for fear of “making the stoners mad,” as my 18 year old said of certain letters to the editor recently and maybe if my whole story, with incisive interview of Nandor and a stunningly good street canvass, the stoners might like me. Then again.
So is he a liberal? Possibly, dressed in Republican cloth because conversely he told the Legislative Newsletter of the Federation of Republican Woman (aah the Americans) “I have deep roots in the Republican party and conservatism. At the age of 14 I campaigned for Barry Goldwater…becoming a Republican precinct captain…I co-founded Young Conservatives…I co-founded Citizens Against Crime…I co-founded Kids Today, Parents Tomorrow…”

Gosse got terminated by the Terminator in the nick of time, some might feel; although truth be known Arnie probably didn’t even know he was there because as illustrated in a satirical story by Los Angeles Times writer Steve Lopez, Gosse was only one of the many minnows “never heard of” by voters. That opinion though is not shared by Janet Levaux writing for the Contra Costa Times. She was excited by Gosse because - unable to previously get excited about candidates until she decided to rate all according to their dating potential - Levaux fell for Gosse. Swooping on Gosse she proclaimed him top candidate, one she would love to date, because of his platform on “fairness for singles.” Her love struck eyes soon dimmed alas and heart t’was cruelly pierced, when she found a picture of Gosse in a tux’, arm draped around his wife, so she slammed the door on the politician for deceiving her.

Yes, our crusader for singles is married, married because Debby Gosse passed the ultimate test. “She laughed at my jokes,” chuckles Rich, of the beautiful blond who once sat in the front row of a convention and afterwards he responded with: “the caveman approach. I took her by the hand (not hair) and dragged her onto the dance floor, in silence.”

So, how can someone married, advocating Neanderthal techniques and good economics by taxing honest, victimless, drug dealing, gamblers and prostitutes, know what’s good for singles, for pining out loud? Is his Love Potion No. Nine one of dope, roulette and hookers? Dignifying such journalistically shallow, a-little question with an answer we must do to understand this married champion of singles. For starters the ex teacher didn’t marry until 1998 prior to which he humbly describes himself as being like a” mechanic whose car wouldn’t start”. He says he talked too much and was a “motor mouth” which he still professes to be but he’s learnt to manage it because previously his dates learnt all about him, nothing about them. Learning it seems should be easy for the man from San Rafael and in his own short biography he says he has a Masters Degree in Secondary Education and Batchelor of Science degree from the University of San Francisco and while teaching, attended a singles group at a local church. Then became its chairman, leading all the ASE’s to become, he says, the world’s largest non profit singles organisation. Their website states ASE was established in 1978, runs 100 education and social events for singles around the world, “often in conjunction with 61 universities and colleges and is much, much more than just “talk”.“Stand around and talk!” You single groupies spit. Agreed, that too was way below the chastity belt because idleness and gossiping is not something singles at conventions do. They do more … like…play flirting games. Gosse, like John Gray in his earlier 15 minutes of fame slot for Venus & Mars, reinforces the point that men and women are different: “When a woman talks to a man she’s met, she’s thinking about the future. When a man talks to a woman he’s thinking about tonight.”

That, he says, can lead to some crossed-lines. Like the men who ask a woman they’ve just met how old she is or, horrors, even her weight! “Believe me, there are men stupid enough to make that mistake on a first date. It’s not usually a mistake you make twice.”

Back to the party and someone who looks honest is Heather. The 55 year old was told by her “ex” to go to the convention because “I needed to be a bit more flirtatious.” Her second marriage, of 24 years, she is here at the party because she thought she “needed to learn how to relate better” and had this to say: “Times have changed. Women approach men now. Years ago a woman would wait until a man did it. It’s all sped up. People have different boundaries now.”

Indeed they have and trying to teach boundaries without being religious and holy about it, are “7 for Heaven” who are amongst other dating groups with enquiry tables. Young, smart and relaxed, the group manning Heaven’s table mingle with both crowd and those enquiring in a manner which belies popular misconception. “…a concept born out of a desire to see single Christians celebrating life and friendship…” says the promo’. Wendy is one of their front-people: “Christian singles might find they’re on the outside, they’ve got married couples who go off and do their thing and sometimes they’re at a loose end to do things as far as events and outings. So this fulfils that. There’s no pressure. It’s relaxed and easy… you make friends.” She explains of their non-denominational group’s focus on singles, “they might find there’s only three or four singles Christians in their church and really there’s a huge expanse of single Christians over Auckland.

Where’s the opportunity for them to meet? Some Christian singles have a limited circle and haven’t seen another way to increase that circle.” And of their presence at a secular event: “we’re making sure we get seen.” The name? “We do a table for six for dinner and the seventh place is for the unseen guest, always remembering to bring God into the mix, being reminded they’re not here on their own.”

Spreading like an undivided sea before the Christian group is an expanse of people both in groups and on their own and there’s been a mistake. Not enough chairs. So a huge group stand and mingle behind those seated before Gosse at the podium, where they have unrestricted access to the bar, and conversation, while the Californian battles to subdue them. “I used to be a teacher you know” he shouts for a laugh and several times those seated yell at those standing to “shut-up!” In the end they’re abandoned, to figure out alone, how best to date. The renegades will miss Gosse’s best tips, on making that connection: (We have condensed Gosse’s advice into NZ’ ese, for reader pleasure, because in American, it was long)

* Get over the fear of rejection; put your ego on the line.
* Make eye contact, three seconds is good, anymore and it’s stalking.
* Smile. Like the American Express card you can take it anywhere.
* Pick up lines: hi works just fine.
* Close the deal. Let ’em talk.

It is nearing 11pm and the dance floor is raging, I’m tired of scrounging interviews from starry eyed Romeos and Juliet’s and I’ve lost Andy so it’s off downstairs to grab some final data from the Gosses and, while doing so, Investigate’s photographer arrives. For the first time tonight a young attractive woman calls out my name which is much better than my big ugly journalism photo’ tutor from Taranaki who earlier didn’t even recognise me, which figures; he now works for some outfit called Metro and tries poaching my pics. “You can take over, I’m off,” to young-attractive-Investigate-photographer who laughs at my wedding ring, tosses her head and disappears into a seething mass on the dance floor, camera held aloft.

Then at 1.30am Andy gets home, to be grilled by both waiting hosts and journalist and so it is with these last words, Mr Independent, sums up what it is like, to be single, un-Americanised, on the town, in Auckland, after a giant singles party. “I wasn’t expecting to meet so many people. I met a good dozen or so ladies. It was past my expectations, I’d go again.” Did he like any? “The very first one. I was eyeing her up when I first got there but I told her I was probably too old but she said age didn’t matter. She was 35. Her girlfriend talked her into going. I also met an Iraqi lady who had been married twice and I asked her about Saddam Hussein.” Which probably killed that one stone dead. Andy explains he was interested in quality not quantity by “getting one number only” during the big flirt competition. The 35 year old and Andy talked and “she’s got my number and might call me if she’s down in Napier. Did it look like many got hitched? “Yes it did actually, looked like quite a few hooked up.” Over all impression? “It was worth the six hour trip.” What more can be said.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

Helen Clark has been New Zealand’s PM since 1999, and her Labour Party has had about as firm a lock on power as is possible in a democratic country. But all that could be changing – and fast, especially with a election in the offing. In an interview with IAN WISHART that continues to make headlines on both sides of the Tasman, former NZ cabinet minister John Tamihere spills the beans on the inner workings of the Kiwi government, and what he thinks it is doing to the country. For New Zealand’s left, Tamihere is ...

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

INVESTIGATE: John Tamihere, you’ve been cleared by the Serious Fraud Office of any wrongdoing, you’ve got a fight on your hands for your electorate seat this year, and I see Labour Party President Mike Williams suggesting a mid-to-late September election…
TAMIHERE: I reckon it is going to be earlier. Just in case a number of economic issues start to deteriorate.
INVESTIGATE: Labour has managed, in the past 20-odd years, to capture Liberal economic theory while retaining a socially liberal outlook. How did they do it?
TAMIHERE: We’re lucky in a number of regards. One is that there’s no huge economic debate anymore over socialism, or communism versus capitalism. That’s gone. Capitalism has won, and the argument now is about best practice, best structure, best systems, and it’s nowhere near as exciting for the masses.
There are two other things that must follow. Labour is now business-savvy. We never had that before because you had unionists who begat our party who believed all bosses were bad bosses. That chasm has now gone, because SME’s [small-to-medium enterprises] produced 86% of all new jobs in the past five years, nearly a quarter of a million, and that will increase. Because more people are becoming business-savvy. Not all businessmen are bad. The biggest sweatshops we’ve got are hospitals, run by the government and funded by the government. And so the caterers and the cleaners are actually government funded, and they’re jumping up and down at their own government.
Award rates are a joke because they bear no resemblance to the capacity of the business sector to achieve it, and that’s why those general wage rounds are anathema to reasonable economics. I mean, you get a number of people jumping up and down seeking a five percent general wage order – get a life!
INVESTIGATE: What sort of power do the unions still have with the Labour party?
TAMIHERE: You know, they come in all ‘ra ra ra’, and the next minute, you know, it’s welcome to the real world, when they’re exposed to a whole bunch of competing advice and information that they’ve never had before because it’s always been the union line before. Unions. I can’t stand them. I had a big pow-wow with some of them. You go into town, have a meeting with them. Won’t name any names but they were all sitting there, and I said to them, ‘All of you sitting over there were all on good jobs, and you all sold us out under Rogernomics in the eighties’. Now I actually think a lot of things happened under Rogernomics in retrospect which were extraordinarily good, but when you’re suffering you take a more vested interest. These guys were all running around in their bloody Falcons and they were on $55,000 those years, which was bloody good money. And what did they do? Nothing! Now some of them are politicians.

INVESTIGATE: Looking ahead three to six years, what do you think the unions are aiming for in the Labour Party.
TAMIHERE: Well, obviously greater influence. I think we f...ed up with our 2004 amendments to the Employment Relations Act. I think it’s very silly, a number of things that we did then, merely to give unions greater organizational capabilities. I don’t think it’ll translate to greater union membership, but having said that it’s another impost and imposition on business. It’s really ugly. Because as business downsizes and subcontracts, if it was me I wouldn’t have anyone in the union. The ‘union’ was our company, our whanau. Guys that actually make small businesses work, as you’ve correctly indicated, they’re not bad employers otherwise they screw their own business. The other thing is a lot of small businesses in NZ are familial, either direct family or references from mates.
INVESTIGATE: The union movement is angling for more of its old heyday, but in your opinion that’ll backfire if the activists achieve that?
TAMIHERE: Yes. Mark Gosche never delivered for them, so they’re bringing in Maryann Street, and she’s a very capable person. I’ll tell you this: Burton was actually meant to be the Speaker but as soon as Street came in and got a high place on the northern regional list, that was it.
You see, these people think in timeframes of ten to fifteen years, it’s only bastards like me that struggle through the current term. So when you’re positioning for high places, they’re thinking that far ahead...yeah, they purposely planned to lose. ‘That era’s gone, we’re new, and we’re coming. He’s gone, Helen’s it’.
INVESTIGATE: This goes back to the great conspiracy theory. Most people like you and I can’t get our heads around the idea that someone can sit in a darkened room and figure out where they want to be in fifteen years. Where do they get the time to do that?
TAMIHERE: They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet. They don’t even think about that.
I’ve got a fifteen year old whose testosterone’s jumping and he’s scrapping around at school. Now they don’t have that, and because they don’t have that they’re just totally focused. You’ve also got a fully paid organization called the union movement, who can co-opt fully paid coordinators. These people just never sleep.
INVESTIGATE: How dangerous is it to be in the Labour Party?
TAMIHERE: If you’re a free and independent spirit, very dangerous. Like, if there was a popularity poll for me, I can assure you that there’s more ministerial klingons voting on the old PC against you, and yet I’m on the same team! They sit there, typing away, muttering, ‘come on SFO, let’s nail this bastard!’
In this outfit it’s all ‘rosy’ on the outside, not the inside. When I used to make a contribution in cabinet, on the cabinet papers, I’d go, ‘Hang on’, and she’d go, ‘you want to be difficult again, do you?’
I’d say ‘it’s not about being difficult, it’s just that a number of these amendments are pointless. You’re just scoring brownie points off the other side when you’ve already beaten them. I don’t think you need to do that. I think you can lighten up on some of these points and still achieve what this mob over here want, the Blues Brothers over here, Maharey and his mates.’ Thankfully, my advice was accepted on a number of occasions.
INVESTIGATE: What do you make of the ‘machine’ that
exists on the ninth floor at the moment?
TAMIHERE: Oh yeah, there’s definitely a ‘machine’ all right. It’s formidable. It’s got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA [Post Primary Teachers’ Association] all the way through. It’s actually even built a counterweight to the Roundtable – Businesses for Social Responsibility.
Its intelligence-gathering capabilities are second to none.
INVESTIGATE: How good is the media, or are they totally useless and sycophantic?
TAMIHERE: They’re utterly and totally useless. And sycophantic. You know and I know there’s no investigative journalism done in that bloody gallery. In an information age, we’ve got more ignorant people out there than there’s ever been.
INVESTIGATE: Labour’s enjoying the benefit of that, but surely there’s got to be a day of reckoning..
TAMIHERE: Not when the journalists know they’ve got to deal with this government for another three years, and the same goes for business. Right now there are people writing cheques out in the corporate sector who wouldn’t bloody cross the road to pee on us if we were on fire, for the same reason: at the end of the day it’s business. They’ve got to deal with this party.
And the other mob aren’t helping themselves much. Even if they wanted to, they’ve got no one who can articulate it.
INVESTIGATE: How much longer can the current machine dominate?
TAMIHERE: The current machine wants to become, in all ways, the natural party of government, and just have us vote different coalition partners on the fringes. Has kiwi culture changed that much? I don’t know.
INVESTIGATE: What is the most powerful network in the
Labour executive?
TAMIHERE: The Labour Party Wimmins Division. Whether it’s bagging cops that strangle protestors they should be beating the proverbial out of, or – it’s about an anti-men agenda, that’s what I reckon. It’s about men’s values, men’s communication standards, men’s conduct.
I spoke to the boards and principals association in Wellington, and I showed them a picture of two girls with their fists clenched, standing on top of two young male students. The object of the exercise was to prove that once again the female students had romped home academically against all the boys. If the positions in the photo were reversed, all hell would break loose.
Where else in the world do Amazons rule?
I don’t mind front-bums being promoted, but just because they are women shouldn’t be the issue. They’ve won that war. It’s just like the Maori – the Maori have won, why don’t they just get on with the bloody job. I think it becomes more grasping.
INVESTIGATE: Will Labour win this election?
TAMIHERE: It’ll win it. Who it does business with to maintain it…she’s too savvy, mate. It’s too clever. You’ve got Cullen – we wouldn’t survive without Cullen – he can cut a deal on a piece of legislation, he can change a single word in a piece of legislation without those other bastards [coalition partners] knowing about it, and it melts down everything they wanted but they still think they got their clause in. The pressure, they bring pressure to bear on individuals.
INVESTIGATE: How intense does the pressure get?
TAMIHERE: Close to fisticuffs!
INVESTIGATE: Very un-PC!
TAMIHERE: I always kick the officials out when I know it’s going to get a bit tetchy, because you know they’ll blab all over the place. So I say ‘hang on mate, I want to talk political now, get them out’. And Cullen goes, ‘oh no, no, he’s ok’ or ‘she’s ok’. And I say ‘It might be for you, but not for me. I’m uncomfortable’.
What you do is you always use the wimmins’ language: ‘I’m feeling unsafe!’ And the women, as soon as they hear that, they’re instantly with me. ‘I’m feeling unsafe in here’. [chuckles]
INVESTIGATE: Where do you see yourself being, three years from now?
TAMIHERE: Well, as long as I’m doing the business and championing the right debate. The issue you’ve raised about where we’ve arrived, and whoever identifies that and encapsulates that, but more importantly is able to bring the masses with them, will set a new benchmark for New Zealand nationhood.
Because it is there. The sense of belonging is for everyone and the Maori don’t have a mortgage on that.
INVESTIGATE: You can get trapped, as you’ve made the point, looking back instead of forward, and letting bitterness over the past poison your future. They don’t grow as people or move on.
TAMIHERE: The Weisenthal Institute is the same. I’m sick and tired of hearing how many Jews got gassed, not because I’m not revolted by it – I am – or I’m not violated by it – I am – but because I already know that. How many times do I have to be told and made to feel guilty?
Same with the Maori, I hear them talking about how they were burnt out of the Orakei marae in 1951 and so on. Big deal. What are we doing about it? Well, we’ve fixed it, actually. So what are you going to tell your children? It’s part of their history. It’s not baggage and it’s not an anchor. It’s part of their folklore.
INVESTIGATE: What’s Helen like?
TAMIHERE: A very complex person, a very, very complex person. And she’s been made complex by the range of sector groups she’s been made to engage with and occasionally confront. But she’s no good with emotions. She goes to pieces. She’ll fold on the emotional side and walk away or not turn up. She knows it’s going to get emotional and it upsets her.
We’ve never had a great relationship. I said to her, ‘look, I don’t give a f..k about the unions. You’ve got enough of those. My job is to bloody talk to kiwi males who are feeling out in the cold over the whole thing and also to stand up against some of the PC bulls..t.
And that’s why I said to Chris Carter, ‘I’m standing against that bloody civil union bill mate, because you’ve already had enough! I voted for one piece of social engineering and now you’re f..king coming back for another! Those two queers never got it right. I said you can have one, Civil Unions or Prostitution, make up your mind. And so I gave in on Prostitution. And then he comes up to me
and harangues me, because he wants to be the first get married on April 1, the tosser, and he says to me ‘but you’re a minority John, you understand’.
I’ve got a right to think that sex with another male is unhealthy and violating. I’ve got a right to think that.
INVESTIGATE: Why are these policies so popular on the ninth floor?
TAMIHERE: Because Helen has been brutalized by people who have called her lesbian, no children and all the rest of it. Her key advisor Heather Simpson is a butch, and a lot of her support systems are, Maryann Street and so on, and she’s very comfortable in that world and comfortable with it. I’m not.
And so that’s why it’s got strong legs. And when you go down through that building [the Beehive] it is infiltrated with it, in key policy and decision making processes and the upper echelons of the ministries, and it skews things, it is an unhealthy weighting, because even if you give a policy directive they’ll skew the policy underneath you. You wake up and think, ‘am I wrong thinking this way?’
But that’s when they’ve got you. They’re trying to make men think and act like them, but I’m not one of them. In my view this is a circuit breaker because you can actually rally numbers. That group of women has only one worldview, and men have to organize themselves to deal with that, and start winning the debates. Men can actually reassert a position. It’s about social conduct and performance. It’s about good father role models. It is about societal mores that will achieve that, not the police.
INVESTIGATE: And some of the chickens coming home to roost would be?
TAMIHERE: The number of do-gooders who are paid extremely well in government. We’ve got 180,000 fewer unemployed, but a bigger bureaucracy than when we did! What the hell is going on here?
We’ve got a range of poor incentives. We say to people ‘you stay in a state house at 25% gross’, and we’re teaching them to be crooks. There might be four income earners in there – we’ll never know it.
And instead of trading up and moving on, we’re encouraging them to stay in there. One third of kiwi families don’t have a male in them. That’s not good. But we got a document printed that tells us all the young males need and are desperately craving for is a male role model who’ll acknowledge them, acknowledge where they’re at and be supportive of them, which is what a normal father does. And if the father’s not there we’ve got to find a male role model somewhere else. And we can’t get them in primary schools, because we’re all ‘molestors’, all ‘rapists’, or ‘potentially’ we’re going to do it. So we’ve got to shift that attitude and provide scholarships to encourage men back into the education system.
Men’s problems are traditionally dealt with by the criminal justice system. Women, on the other hand, get a bloody Cartwright Inquiry and get millions of dollars thrown at their breasts and cervixes. Men get nothing. You need a debate that we can tackle unfair and stupid policy with.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

SPIN CITY: June 05, AU Edition

ALAN ANDERSON
The Liberals’ states (and territories) of confusion

Swept up in the excitement of federal issues, one can be forgiven for stifling a yawn at the mention of state politics. Liberals, in particular, might prefer not to reflect on this unprecedented spell of Labor domination. Yet just as the long federal drought is undermining the political viability of Labor, the Liberals face a bleak future if they do not soon regain the initiative at a state level.

The status quo puts the Liberals one defeat away from electoral oblivion. If it suffers a federal defeat in 2007 without first making gains at state level, the party will lose almost all the resources, influence and staffers that are critical to maintaining political and intellectual capital.

While the federal government is important to business generically, as it has prime influence over the nation’s economic climate, state governments are in a better position to assist particular businesses, especially property developers. This makes control of state governments a lucrative proposition for political parties, one which Labor has not been shy to exploit. It is an under-appreciated fact that the Liberals, not Labor, are the party that is playing catch-up in political funding.

What are the prospects of a Liberal resurgence? In New South Wales, Bob Carr’s tough-on-crime rhetoric has been exposed as just that by the repeated humiliations of his police force at the hands of riotous thugs. Sydney’s transport system is reminiscent of pre-Mussolini Italy. Yet for all that, the Brogden Opposition has failed to achieve the sort of ascendancy in the polls that might presage a change of government.

In Victoria, the shine has worn off Steve ‘Good Bloke’ Bracks. His constant refrain of ‘we’ll look into it’ has become a standing joke, while his unscrupulous revenue grabs have alienated many Victorians. But while there have been some promising polls for the Liberals, the sentiment in the party – and on the street – is more consistent with a respectable recovery next election from the total rout of 2002, not a miracle turn-around.

I tried to elicit comment from the party’s Queensland division, but they were both out. Nor are Liberals knocking on the doors of power in South Australia, Tasmania or the Territories.

In Western Australia, Colin Barnett went to the people with the most exciting election promise since Russian fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky pledged to build giant fans to blow radioactive waste across the Baltic states. I preferred Zhirinovsky’s plan; at least it might have worked. Voters consigned the mighty Barnett canal to the ash heap of history, to the relief of all thinking people.

To lose one state may be regarded as misfortune; to lose six plus two Territories looks like carelessness. A trend this strong must have an explanation.

The most thoughtful one was proffered by Laurie Oakes. He suggested that Australians look to Canberra for policies to sustain economic prosperity and defend national security. The states, by contrast, are seen as service providers, responsible for schools and hospitals. Thus the hard-edged issues which favour conservatives are concentrated at a federal level, while the touch-feely issues at the state level are Labor’s strong suit.

Centralism, which has seen Canberra steadily strip the states of responsibility since Federation, is partly to blame. State governments today are little more than service administrators and contract managers. It was not always so. This trend has also exacerbated the problem of finding decent candidates to run at state level.

The GST has also propped up incumbent state governments. Peter Costello is right to be frustrated by the ease with which the states have squandered their GST windfall, despite increasing their dependency on gambling revenue, outrageous traffic fines and obscene levels of property tax.

But politics is about results, not excuses, and the state Liberals produce far too many of the latter and not enough of the former. Why, in an age of growing hospital waiting lists, functionally illiterate school-leavers and widespread dissatisfaction with transport infrastructure in our major cities, have the Liberals failed so conspicuously to capture the public imagination in these areas?

A quick look at the average state campaign yields the answer: the Liberals aren’t trying. While the rampant vote-buying of federal campaigns is tempered with some issues of principle – asylum seekers, war, mutual obligation – state campaigns are wholly non-ideological.

In an age of few fiscal constraints, all that leaves is bribes to the electorate. State campaigns consist of a bidding war between politicians using taxpayer money. Even at its most feckless and patronising, the Liberal Party is never going to win that fight.
If spending like a drunken sailor isn’t the answer, what is?

Continuing the alcoholic analogy, the first step to solving your problem is realising that you have one. The logical corollary is that Liberals need to convince the voters that taxpayer money is being wasted, and that Liberals could do more with less.

I’m not talking about attacking the Premier’s twenty-grand ‘fact-finding’ mission to Hawaii, or the ministerial office furniture bill. The Liberals have already mastered those stunts. In a time of plenty, most voters ignore the politicians’ snouts in the trough, so long as they themselves are kept in gravy.

Liberals must undertake a more fundamental reappraisal of the big ticket items of state spending. They must convince voters that the problems with our health and education systems do not flow from absolute funding levels, but from structural failures.

Education is the most fertile ground for this argument. It is received wisdom in most “Howard battler” households that schools are failing to teach ‘the three R’s’. Educationalists and their unions have provided a treasure trove of quotes and documents displaying an obsession with politicising our children and a contempt for the importance of basic literacy and numeracy.

Attacks on curriculum would be political dynamite. Increasing access to private schools with a voucher system would empower parents and provide a tangible benefit. Similarly, Liberals should explore avenues to introduce greater consumer-focus into the health system.

Right-wing think-tanks, here and abroad, have produced a library of ideas on how to decentralise service provision and increase stakeholder control. While federal Liberals borrow heavily from the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs, their non-ideological state cousins have demonstrated little interest in radical reform.

After years in the wilderness, it is shameful that state Liberal oppositions have done so little to build the intellectual capital needed not just to return them to power, but to make their future governments a success. The Liberal Party cannot afford more insipid, pork-barrelling campaigns, nor a repeat of Barnett’s giant boondoggle in the West. To those cynical state Liberals who claim that a reform agenda cannot win elections, I say simply: GST.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: Nov 05, AU Edition

A CASE OF THE SHAKES
New research says that earthquakes may be contagious, reports Sandi Doughton

Geologists used to answer with an emphatic “No” when asked if mega-earthquakes like the one that hit Southeast Asia last December can trigger temblors on the other side of the globe. Today, some experts are not so sure.

Evidence is mounting that large earthquakes can rattle geologic formations thousands of kilometres away – and perhaps even set off volcanic eruptions days, months or years later.

There’s also an intriguing hint that major earthquakes might occur in clusters: Nearly a third of the biggest quakes of the past century struck during a 20-year span between 1950 and 1970.

After three decades of relative quiet, two massive quakes came in quick succession late last year: the magnitude 9 in Sumatra and a little-noticed magnitude 8.1 off the coast of New Zealand three days earlier.

Do monster earthquakes beget more monster earthquakes? Could the two recent events signal the start of a new destructive cycle? And is it possible the Sumatran quake jolted other geologic plates enough to hasten the day when they let loose, unleashing what geologists predict will be comparable catastrophes? No one knows the answers to the first two questions, which are hot topics of research and scholarly debate.
But scientists are fairly certain people don’t have any more to worry about now than they did six months ago.

“I would venture to say there’s a minimal effect, if any at all, on our region from the Sumatra earthquake”, comments Herb Dragert, a research scientist for the Geological Survey of Canada, surveying the seismic risks on his side of the Pacific.

Dragert and his American counterparts operate a network of GPS sensors throughout the region. The instruments can detect even slight movements of land masses, reflecting changes in the amount of stress at the Cascadia subduction zone – a 900-kilometre-long offshore region where the ocean floor is diving under the continental plate.

The measurements show no troublesome blips as a result of the Sumatran quake, Dragert says.

“If we suddenly had a very large earthquake in Alaska, which is much closer, and I saw displacement in my GPS instruments, then I would begin to worry.”

However, there could be ample cause for concern around Indonesia. When the undersea plates there snapped apart, triggering the earthquake, the dislocation almost certainly increased stress and strain on adjacent geologic faults and plate boundaries. Geologists call the pheno- menon “contagion” because it raises the odds of subsequent earthquakes like an influx of germs raises the risk of infection.
“It’s very expected and quite dangerous”, explains Brian Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher stationed at the University of Washington. “It gives a certain sense of urgency to efforts to get a warning system going around the Indian Ocean.”

Scientists have long known about the contagion effect, which can extend for 100 miles or so from the epicenter of a major quake. It’s the phenomenon that’s responsible for the aftershocks that follow many major quakes.

But most experts were stunned in 1992 when a magnitude-7.2 quake struck the Mojave Desert in Southern California and was almost immediately followed by more than a dozen quakes as far away as Wyoming. A similar thing happened in 2002, when a magnitude-7.9 earthquake in Denali, Alaska, triggered earthquakes and rearranged the plumbing of geyser fields in Yellowstone National Park – 3,000 kilometres away. The same event spawned a couple of small earthquakes under Mount Rainier and set up sloshing waves that swamped houseboats on Lake Union in Seattle and Lake Pontcha- rtrain in Louisiana.

“As people around the world look more carefully, they’re seeing more examples of this kind of (long-distance) effect”, says David Hill, a USGS geophysicist stationed at Menlo Park, California. “At this point there’s really no doubt that it happens.”

Generally, the triggered earthquakes are smaller than the original, though there’s no reason to believe that larger earthquakes couldn’t be kicked off this way as well, says Hiroo Kanamori, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology.

The effect seems to be caused by seismic waves that radiate out from the epicenter of an earthquake, along the surface of the ground. Imperceptible to people, these waves cover a lot of distance.
“The Earth ends up ringing like a bell”, Dragert explains. “You have a surface wave that travels around the globe for hours after the event, and if it passes through an area that is already critically stressed, it can, indeed, trigger an earthquake.”

That is, a fault or plate boundary must already be on the verge of slipping or breaking for the surface waves to push it over the edge.
There’s still no detailed explanation for the way that happens, though, Hill says.

“In a way, it’s frustrating to be doing research on this,” he adds, “because we can’t do it in the lab and repeat the experiment. We’ve got to wait for the Earth to do it, and then have good recording networks in the field.”

There’s even less concrete data to show that distant earthquakes can trigger volcanic eruptions, though the circumstantial evidence is growing, Hill says. One analysis found a high number of volcanic eruptions within a day or two of large earthquakes. Several volcanoes around the world, including Pinatubo in the Philippines, have erupted within weeks or months of major earthquakes.

Indonesia has many volcanoes, none of which has yet erupted in the aftermath of the earthquake – but scientists will be watching closely.
After the Boxing Day tsunami, the Washington Post reported lava was spewing from a volcano on an island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian archipelago off the coasts of Myanmar (formerly called Burma) and Indonesia. Previously, the crater had emitted only gas.

Theories linking distant earthquakes to eruptions and other earthquakes remain controversial. It’s almost impossible to prove what triggered an earthquake or eruption, Kanamori points out.

Researchers look mainly at the timing of events, then do statistical analyses to show that they’re probably linked, not just random coincidences.

Hill does collect some hard data from strain meters buried in 600-foot boreholes in California’s Long Valley Caldera near Mono Lake. The sensitive devices detect changes in the pressures pushing and pulling on the rock, and have clearly shown effects from distant earthquakes, he says.

The statistical jury remains out on the question of whether the apparent cluster of major earthquakes in the middle of the century is significant or simply a phantom.

It certainly looks compelling, Atwater says. Most of the events are clustered around the Pacific Rim, from Alaska to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to Chile.

However, the Cascadia subduction zone off the Northwest coast of the United States was not triggered during that period, he pointed out. The last earthquake there was a magnitude 9 in 1700.

Garry Rogers, a seismologist at the Geological Survey of Canada in British Columbia, says major earthquakes are far too rare and the historical record far too short to be able to draw any conclusion about clusters or large-scale connections.

“In any random process, you will get clusters”, he says.
Hill believes that more data will eventually solve the mystery – and will probably reveal patterns and links no one understands today.

“My own hunch is that there are lots of instances of clusters that are, in fact, related physically. We just don’t know yet what the details might be.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: June 05. AU Edition

KILLERS, GREAT AND SMALL
From September 11 to Alexander the Great to hapless would-be crims, a range of books that looks at murder and its consequences

EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE
By Jonathan Safran Foer
New York. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. ISBN: 0618329706. Available on import and currently stocked by unusually good book shops. To be released by Penguin Australia in July 2005.

To write a second novel after the first has been a bestseller is famously difficult. Many never manage it at all. After To Kill a Mockingbird, nothing. The author was said to have begun writing a new book the very next year but nothing else ever materialised from the pen of Harper Lee.

With a seven-figure advance on his conscience, Jonathan Safran Foer must have been under enormous pressure when he set to work on his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It probably didn’t help that Foer’s debut, Everything is Illuminated, (winner of the Guardian First Book Award in 2002) was hailed as work of genius. It can’t be easy to follow that.

Foer decided to up the stakes and raise them dramatically. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is based on a child’s experience of September 11, possibly the most provocative subject a contemporary author could address. Has Foer stolen the emotional pull of September 11 in a desperate effort to produce another powerful work of fiction?
Salman Rushdie says the book ‘completely earns the right to take on the Trade Center atrocity. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed.’ A good book, or an honest book, creates its own power whereas a bad book tries to claim its power from external sources. And so it goes that a good writer can elicit more feeling from a sneeze than a bad writer could ever hope to glean from a sunset.

Employing big themes to cover up small writing doesn’t work. Readers already have intense feelings about the attack on the World Trade Center so while many books have previously approached the subject, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the first to become a best seller.

Oskar Schell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about the same age as Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Foer chooses a similar method of approaching a grave issue through the eyes of a child. Foer maintains that he writes out of a need to read something rather than a need to write something and has contrived Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a non-political response to the tragedy.

A crazy coffee-drinking kid whose father died in the World Trade Center tragedy, Oskar’s grief sets him off on a journey to find the lock that fits a mysterious key he has found in his father’s room. Obviously traumatised, he invents many things that might help avert catastrophe. There’s a birdseed shirt in case you need to make a quick escape and a big sign for the top of ambulances flashing messages like ‘IT’S NOTHING MAJOR!’ or ‘GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE!’

Oskar speaks a bit like Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye (another one-hit wonder) over-using the phrase ‘heavy boots’ to talk about being depressed:

On Tuesday afternoon I had to go to Dr Fein. I didn’t understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren’t wearing heavy boots then you need help. But I went anyway, because the raise in my allowance depended on it.

The word association test that Dr Fein conducts during this meeting is very funny. Critics in New York have been quick to accuse Foer of ‘getting cute’ about the atrocity, reminding me of one of the characters Oskar meets on his journey. Ruth Black, a tour guide, hasn’t left the Empire State Building for years, not since the death of her husband. In conversation with Oskar, ‘she let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness’. Reactions to Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud become more positive the further one gets from Manhattan.

Foer’s writing falls into the category of magical realism, a mode of literature that commonly surfaces when a government overrules its people. In our culture, magical realism it is often mistaken as an attempt to be amusing, whimsical or surreal. As a form, it seems well-equipped to accommodate the pluralism required to describe a complex and mythic city like New York, now also a site of intolerable pain.

Flipbook style, the novel concludes with a series of images of a man falling from the World Trade Center, but the order is reversed so it appears as if he is bouncing back up again. My feeling is that Foer’s decision to pepper the book with photographs doesn’t quite work. The German writer W.G. Sebald uses photographs in his texts to majestic effect, so by no means is it a technique destined to fail, but these photos seem to dilute the book rather than enhance it.

Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud doesn’t need to bank on the gravitas of September 11. Oskar could have lost his father under any circumstances and given his perculiar leanings need not have lost his father at all before embarking on this strange journey. If you take away the references to September 11, you are still left with a whole book.

Nothing stems ability half so well as weighty praise and the burden of high expectations. Remember Ian Thorpe flopping into the pool at the trials for the Athens Olympics? He went on to take out the gold again, but not before embarrassing himself in front of the nation. Like Thorpe, Foer finds the gold, but not where you might expect.

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THE OPTIMISTS
By Andrew Miller
London. Sceptre, 2005. ISBN: 0340836555.
Structured like a brilliant photograph, The Optimists is Andrew Miller’s best novel to date. Clem Glass, a successful photo-
journalist, is struggling to overcome the trauma of a massacre in Rwanda. Though accustomed to harrowing assignments, Clem returns home to London unable to resume his life. Miller writes as a perceptive photographer might record, knowing that the edges of a scene are often far more interesting than the scene itself.

Genocide is not the theme here for The Optimists is about salvation. His inability to detach from the wickedness he has witnessed obstructs Clem’s quest for redemption. Throughout the novel, he carries three images around with him in his wallet: an early portrait of Sylvestre Ruzindana, the man responsible for the massacre; a picture of a ravaged classroom showing the legs of upturned desks and a whitewashed wall sprayed and smeared with blood; and a girl called Odette Semugeshi, 10 years old, standing in front of her bed at the Red Cross hospital and staring into the camera ‘with a gaze of the quietest imaginable outrage.’

The experience in Rwanda has awakened Clem’s innermost fears – that the soul of mankind is ruthless, heartless, evil. ‘Drawn increasingly to every manner of portent’ Clem searches for proof to the contrary. He visits his father who, after the death of his wife, has withdrawn to a monastery where the monks keep a vigil in the chapel, each taking a two-hour shift:

‘Can I ask what you pray for?’

‘Me? Oh, for understanding.’

‘Always that?’

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling to himself and slipping his hand again under his son’s arm as they came onto the road. ‘Always.’

Although his previous novels demonstrate an ability for sumptuous prose, Miller’s writing draws little attention to itself in The Optimists. Clem chases down Frank Silverman, the journalist with him in Rwanda, but Silverman’s losing it too and instead of offering consolation, he hands Clem a brown envelope full of heavily corrected notes. Both disturbing and beautiful, Silverman’s fractured account provides a vivid contrast to Clem’s paired down, straightforward narrative.

‘Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop’ said Usman Asif, and almost everyone in this book is afraid of the dark. The notes Clem is handed describe Silverman’s terror of the unlit city where all that is unseen threatens.

Still unable to return to work, and thinking about giving up on photography completely, Clem retreats to the country with his sister, Dr Clare Glass. Clare, an esteemed art historian, has sunk deep into depression after suffering from a bout of malign hallucinations. One night during their stay in Somerset, a fuse blows and the cottage is plunged into darkness. Similarly haunted, Clem is almost as frightened by the experience as his demented sister.

Before she grew old, Clem’s mother went blind and Clem becomes increasingly concerned about his vision. As keenly aware the eye’s sensitivity as a photographer would be, Clem is tormented by the fear that witnessing such atrocities could have irredeemably damaged his retinas.

Like the rest of us, Miller’s ‘optimists’ are trying to make sense of a world where so many bad things happen. They are not optimistic fools but characters who strive towards a positive perspective, battling against the painful and the discouraging, never content to blank it out.

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Reviewed by Michael Morrissey

SUNSET
Penguin Australian Summer Stories
Penguin Books, $22.95, ISBN 0143002724
I believe all books should have identified authors/editors, so why then an anonymous compiler? Or did the authors select themselves? If so, who invited them? With no editor, there is no introduction which is, or should be, a necessary part of any compilation; it offers guidelines to the anthology’s intention.

The collection as a whole disappoints – the editor hiding his/her shame, perhaps? The problem is, too many stories here have the same even kind of tone, which is warm but somehow bland. Possibly this is a conscious/unconscious strategy: summer is a time of relaxed warmth (let us say), so let’s have stories with a relaxed warm tone, stories that give a suntan without skin cancer. However, there are some gems.
With the exception of veteran story teller David Malouf’s novella-length contribution, the best stories are in the earlier part of the book. First up is Gabriel Lord’s ‘Surprise Lunch’, a chilling little tale of an intended murder that backfires. This has the kind of sting-in-the-tail punch we might associate with Roald Dahl, modern master of the horror-terror tale derived from the inventor of it, Edgar Allan Poe. This is the kind of story that - apart from the great Luis Jorge Borges – has been unfashionable in literary circles for some time, but damn it, I enjoyed it.

Peter Goldsworthy’s ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ brings a sharper and more contemporary note with its forbidden tape in a possibly stolen camcorder. Marion Halligan’s ‘Irregular Verbs’ defiantly breaches the almost uniform tone with a luxuriantly descriptive stream of consciousness technique.

By and large, these are coastal or suburban rather than outback stories. No billabongs, kangaroos or snakes – though an echidna makes a guest appearance. There tend not to be professionals in crisis, more ordinary folk in a jam, such as the lady in Andrea Mayes’s ‘The Bag’. With possibly an outsider’s perspective, I wondered about the absence of well-known Australian denizens like sharks, snakes, and blue-ringed octopuses. Casting on eye back to (say) Coast to Coast, a collection edited by Frank Moorhouse when summer-oriented hippiedom was at its height, I felt a tinge of nostalgia for some of the authors current at the time – Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Michael Wilding – and wondered about their absence. Frank, I would guess, has thrown away his swimming trunks and became an unabashed winter-loving Europhile. After many a summer, can autumn be far behind?

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INSIDE HITLER’S BUNKER
By Joachim Fest
Pan Books, $25, ISBN 0374135770
It’s interesting to read a biographical study, albeit a short one, focused on the last days of Hitler by a German historian, rather than what is more typical for most English readers, one by a British historian. Fest’s cool, cogent overview of what is most probably the greatest drama of the twentieth century offers a fascinating view of the necessities of military crisis – permission was given to Goebbels to set up a battalion of women soldiers – an unthinkable idea in the earlier triumphal days of the Third Reich. This book contains some of the familiar photos of Hitler’s last days but some touching new ones – including a fifteen-year-old youth alongside a much older man: the last futile strategy – to defend doomed Berlin.

What Fest’s study shows clearly is the extraordinary contradictions in Hitler’s personality. On the one hand, clutching at chances of last-minute victory (hoping that Roosevelt’s death would split the alliance), while on the other, seeming to exult in a dramatic and final destruction – a gotterdammerung of his own making. While he had become a pathetic shambling physical wreck with a ‘pathological craving for cake’, Hitler could still convince generals who knew the situation to be hopeless that it was nevertheless possible to save it at the last hour – Gauleiter Albert Forster in Danzig had but four tanks to face 1100 Russian tanks, yet after a brief time in Hitler’s study he emerged ‘completely transformed’.

Fest argues forcibly that German soldiers felt swept up in a great cause – ‘called on ..to be the participants in the final act of a great tragedy’. Further on, he maintains, ‘An infatuation with hopeless situations has long been one of the characteristics of at least one strand of German thought.’ Hitler is portrayed as a fanatical exemplar of this kind of infatuation. This psychological-Zeitgeist theory makes a lot of sense and would explain what British historian A. J. P. Taylor found inexplicable, namely, why German soldiers and Hitler went on fighting when the cause was hopelessly lost. Fest’s analysis also helps rebut the tiresomely glib explanation of the phenomenon of Hitler – that he was simply mad.

Hitler’s epic rages are vividly described yet Fest doesn’t try to explain them as amphetamine-fuelled - though certainly the drugs he was taking wouldn’t have helped. Ultimately, Hitler’s personality contradictions remain an enigma, but Fest’s acute analysis, more than most, helps us decode it.

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ALEXANDER THE GREAT
By Robin Lane Fox
Penguin Books, $22.95,ISBN 0141030768
The recent justly-panned film about Alexander the Great, history’s greatest general and conqueror of the then-known world, has prompted a re-issue of this magnificent one volume history of the enigmatic Macedonian. According to some critics, it is the finest history so far written and, though I am not a professional historian, I am inclined to agree. A scholarly work, it has 50 pages of microfiche-sized footnotes. In the main text, it’s all here in dazzling detail: the fantastic siege machines that stormed the island fortress of Tyre, the wheeling feints and massive concentration of attack that defeated every military adversary, the brutal methods used to defeat King Porus’ elephants (javelins in the eyes, hamstrings cut with axes, hacking off trunks with razor-sharp scimitars) plus the founding of cities, the grand Hellenic vision, the spontaneous acts of kindness and generosity, the ruthless treatment of enemies, not to forget alcoholic and sexual indulgence.

Historians like Schachermeyer, Tarn and Hammond praise Alexander while others like Badian, O’Brien and Green condemn him. Depending on one’s cultural and historical perspective, Alexander’s life and deeds lend themselves to either favourable or denunciatory interpretation. Among ancient historians Callisthenes, Aristobulus, Arrian, and Plutarch praised Alexander while Curtius Rufus and Cleitarchus were harsher in their assessment. Plutarch saw Alexander as a civilizer of barbarians – an attitude with which we no longer feel comfortable. When Fox writes warmly of the spread of Hellenic or Greek culture, I am tempted to ask, isn’t this Plutarchian praise in a more sophisticated form? On balance, Fox admires Alexander and there are numerous incidents of his nobility of character as well as the darker side. At times, so overwhelming is the mass of Alexander’s achievements, both cultural and military, in such a short life, one feels a kind of admiring historical vertigo. Did the man never sleep? Apparently, very little.
Fox writes with angelic erudition throughout his closely detailed book. He excels in outlining military technicality but is even more outstanding when he offers intensive psychological analysis – the exact motives and circumstance of Cleitus’s murder by Alexander; the acute examination of the controversial proskynesis or homage with prostration paid to social superiors; the intelligent consideration of Alexander’s “godhood” – are all masterly, superb.

Now for some brickbats: the maps are ridiculously poky affairs and printed in such a way that it is hard to read place names. Also the maps show only Alexander’s journeys, not his battles. Why such an important omission? The new issue – save for a changed cover – is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago, surely a missed chance to
improve and extend the maps as well as an opportunity for Fox to update his views.

Fascinatingly, Fox was historical consultant to Oliver Stone’s recent film and made a non-negotiable’ demand that he be included in the front ten of every major cavalry charge on location. Fair enough. By now, of course, Fox is as old as the hardy veterans of Alexander’s concluding campaigns – nearing 60, yet still a champion horseman. But why oh why did he apparently sanction a major rewrite of history in the film? King Porus is shown as wounding Alexander with a spear, whereas in actuality Porus was captured by an unwounded Alexander.
Prior to Jesus Christ, Alexander was probably the most famous and written-about of men. Curiously, no one has ever doubted that Alexander existed even though nearly all the original documents written about him were lost and recast some three to four hundred years after his death. The consequence is that many of his famous (and infamous) deeds exist in variant accounts. Thus he has become partially mythical though indisputably a real figure. In the case of the Gospels, they are all written close together, soon after Christ’s lifetime and are consistent with each other. Yet some nineteenth historians suggested that Christ never existed. The same theory applied to Alexander would never have gained an inch of traction. Such are the paradoxes of history.

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THE FULL CATASTROPHE
By Edna Mazya
Picador, $22, ISBN 033044215549
Thrillers are like fast food – they fulfil a need with suspicious ease but leave you undernourished. On the other hand, there is the deeper psychological thriller more or less invented by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, one of the world’s greatest novels. This wonderful first novel by Israeli playwright Edna Mazya aspires more to the Dostoyevsky ‘genre’ than the usual airport trash. As in the great Russian novel, we know who the murderer is – it’s the main character, Professor Ilan Nathan, who kills his wife’s lover, not with a knife, gun or heavy object but with – you’ll never guess – his pipe. If the unlikely death of Oden Safra is black humour, it’s difficult to mourn the demise of such a callous smug bastard.

What is gripping about this book is the way Nathan keeps drawing attention to himself, his guilt is an inner motor that drives him to perpetrate the most infelicitous of actions. He leaves a trail of self-incriminating evidence that a blind man could follow. The superbly detailed sequence where Nathan keeps trying to dispose of the body is both nail-bitingly suspenseful and blackly funny. This book, along with countless movies – including Unfaithful, which it strangely parallels – makes one thing perfectly clear: never take a stiff to the rubbish tip.

Apart from the expert plotting, black humour and acute psychology, the novel’s outstanding feature is its unusual style. The sentences are disconcertingly long rolling affairs, yet once you get used to their rhythm they carry you along like giant surf. This eminently readable yet in depth novel is a good antidote to the trashy Hannibal Lecter books. I’ve never quite believed in Hannibal but Ilan Nathan is more credibly human – complete with an unemotional mother who loves him and saves him in the end. Just how, you will have to find out by treating yourself to the book.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : July 05, AU Edition

THAT’S MY BOY
When a night out goes horribly wrong, it can leave scars that might never heal

On a recent Friday night I carried a fifty-something fella from the North Shore down to Sutherland. After a day on the grog at a convention junket he was wasted. Yet not so wasted he couldn’t relate a chilling tale involving his son. It was a tale I readily identified with, as his ‘boy’ was around the same age as mine.

My passenger recounted how several years ago his then 18-year-old son was in the City on a night out with some mates. Late in the evening, one of his friends became involved in a scuffle outside a Hungry Jack’s. On moving to help his mate, my passenger’s son was stabbed some ten times around the body. In an instant he was bleeding profusely, his life literally draining down the gutter. News of what happened came at 4:30 am, when the local police knocked on the door after fruitless attempts by the hospital to contact him and his wife.

Despite losing litres of blood, the boy recovered. What a guy. The assailant was apprehended, char- ged, convicted, jailed for a few years, then released – only to knife someone else and return to jail. What a waste.

In relating this tale, my passenger had obliquely voiced his concern over his son’s ongoing fight for justice. The boy was still in court, seven years later, pursuing a matter of principle relating to the attack. After advising the boy to finally put the saga behind him and get on with life, the kid emphatically responded, ‘Dad, the physical scars may have healed, but in my head it feels so raw I’ll never get over it’. My passenger looked across at me and shaking his head said quietly, ‘It’s killing me to imagine what he feels’.

My passenger had been a knockabout bloke most of his life, growing up in the tough inner-west of Sydney. By his own admission he’d made many mistakes over the years. And despite his age he insisted how, much to his embarrassment, he often felt the same hopes and vitality as that of his son. So much so he couldn’t wait for the arrival of the first grandchild. A sentiment we both shared, and had a good laugh at our encroaching dotage. It was a warm exchange on which we parted.

One week later, I came across an item in the Daily Telegraph entitled, ‘Leave people to their peril’:

Citizens are under no obligation to rescue strangers in peril, a court had ruled in dismissing an appeal by a man stabbed after he sought sanctuary in a fast-food restaurant.

Eron Broughton was out in Sydney’s CBD early in 1998 when he and three friends were threatened by a knife-wielding gang...they sought refuge in a Hungry Jack’s restaurant, asking a security guard to call police.
But the guard pushed them back into the street where Mr Broughton was stabbed 10 times. He sought damages in the District Court in 2003, claiming the guard’s negligent or reckless actions led to his injuries...The then 24-year-old lost his claim after Judge James Black found the chain did not owe Mr Broughton a duty of care.

Mr Broughton appealed the verdict but it was dismissed yesterday by the Court of Appeal.

This boy’s personal struggle brought to mind something I heard recently. A terminally ill patient had commented to his mentor, ‘Sometimes it’s best to simply give up’. I interpreted this to mean that in life, you must pick your battles.

This advice seemed especially pertinent to my distraught passenger and his son’s long road to recovery. For them, those grandkids can’t come soon enough.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: June 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
In paranormal news…

On the north Welsh coast there is the little village of Abergele, where locals claim a ghost ship, the Gwennon Gorn, appears from time to time. According to legend, the Welsh Prince Madoc sailed her to America in the 6th Century – nine centuries before Columbus – and ventured inland as far as present day Kentucky. Show me a bottle of Welsh bourbon and I’ll believe it.

Another mythical ship was sighted recently in the UK during the election there – the MV Tampa. British voters probably hadn’t been thinking much about Norwegian container ships, at least not until a raft of Australian Labor Party has-beens and wannabes washed up in the pages of the UK press. Beware, they cautioned, of sinister antipodean political assassins – namely former Liberal campaign director Lynton Crosby and pollster Mark Textor.

In opinion pieces, which coincidentally appeared on the same day, Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan (in the Independent), and Cheryl Kernot (in the Guardian) – remember her? – lashed out at their nemeses. Swan, feeling ‘an overwhelming sense of déjà vu’, claimed the British Conservatives were mimicking the themes of ‘Crosby’s 2001 Australian election campaign [which] was perhaps the most despicable waged in Australian political history’. The Australians, Swan said, were ‘deadly to progressive parties’ by ‘exploiting fear and race’.

If Kernot was to be believed, the presence of the Aussie duo in the UK election posed more of a threat to Her Majesty’s Realm than Guy Fawkes: ‘Crosby’s tactics represent a truly serious threat to… British democracy’, she forewarned. And even worse, the subversive Aussie would go after the media: ‘BBC, take note!’ Crosby would, she warned darkly, ‘conduct a war of attrition’ against the British broadcaster and accuse it of ‘bias and unbalanced coverage’.

Oddly enough, only three days before Kernot’s dire ‘predictions’ the London Telegraph reported that the Beeb had been ‘plunged into a damaging… row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones’ and sending them into a Conservative campaign meeting being addressed by party leader Michael Howard.

In her familiar understated way, Kernot even went so far as to imply that she was herself a refugee, due to the insidious tactics of Messrs Crosby and Textor. ‘[B]ut thanks to [her] Scottish grandparents, [she’s] been fortunate to have lived and worked in the UK for two years now.’ Well, at least we now know where Kernot lives, because it sure looked as though she wasn’t living in her own home-away-from-home Dickson electorate when she lost it in 2001.

After digesting Kernot’s theories, I suspect most Brits agreed with the Crosby-Textor Conservative slogan, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ And I also suspect most – even Guardian reading, tofu-chomping Volvo drivers – were more concerned about another potential British debacle – the forthcoming Ashes series – than the 1000-year edifice of Westminster democracy being swept away by a couple of sinister Aussie political operatives.

Sounding like Looney Tunes’ hapless duck, former prime minister Paul Keating waddled ashore in the last week of the campaign, also warning Guardian readers that, ‘Prime Minister John Howard had run a despicable election campaign against asylum seekers’ and to expect the same. Australia’s ‘moral compass now lacks the equilibrium it had and the underlying compassion has been compromised,’ the failed piggery owner lamented.

This from the former head of a government that in 1992 stated that ‘rejected asylum-seekers have no claim to remain in Australia…’; won a unanimous High Court backing for Labor’s mandatory detention policy (the Migration Reform Act 1992); and, from the Coalition Opposition, enjoyed support for “the right of the Government… to determine who shall and who shall not enter Australia”. (Sound familiar?)

In its last year, the Keating Government cut off immigration intake at 82,500 places. This year the Howard Government will allow into Australia between 110,00 and 120,000 new immigrants, including a doubling of refugees – a 45 per cent increase from when Keating stood on the welcome mat. In 2004, the top countries of origin for resettled refugees our morally diminished country accepted included Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Congo and Somalia. And, on a per capita basis Australia now has one of the most generous refugee programs on the planet. Not exactly a record you’d expect from a government that was accused in 2001 by its detractors in the New York Times of playing the ‘race card’.

If Keating wanted to measure compassion in dollar terms, he need look no further than the $1 billion donated by the Howard government in the days after the Boxing Day Tsunami. And, at one point after the disaster, Australians were donating privately at a rate of $750,000 an hour. Total private giving topped $200 million. Speaking of the generosity of the Australian people, Howard said: ‘Our home is this region and we are saying to the people of our nearest neighbour that we are here to help you in your hour of need.’

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley had every opportunity to insulate himself from the Tampa factor in 2001. But he failed to appreciate that most Australians were offended by the negative fainéant and continuous media reprimands of self-appointed custodians of national morality. Changing chameleon-like as he did on refugees and border security, Beazley’s voice was indiscernible from the white noise of the sniggering intelligentsia – whom have shown about as much responsibility and constructive alternative thinking on these issues as a bunch of garden gnomes.

So why would ALP figures want to dig up all these old ghosts now? It was hardly to lend a hand to their Labour brethren, whom they happily jettisoned over Iraq; rather, perpetuating the Tampa myth serves to reassure the Labor party’s base that they were robbed in 2001. That is, were it not for Howard’s base appeal, the Coalition would have been beaten senseless by Beazley’s ‘noodle nation’. The Tampa is the ALP’s Potempkin legend, which must be repeated, mantra-like, at every opportunity. And foreign media and their less Aussie-savvy readers are an easy mark for a reprint run, which will – and did – get a nice little run back in the Australian media.

This legerdemain, kept alive by ALP, the left’s leadership caste and some segments in the domestic media, may keep the home fires burning for the Labor rusted-on. And it certainly sustains the indulgences of the far left, upon which Labor has prostrated itself over terrorism, border security, the environment and industrial relations, to name but a few. But it has little currency where it counts: among the electorate at large, particularly among swing-voters, who aren’t buying.

It’s a hard sell that insults large swathes of the Australian electorate, with whom the ALP must make its peace if it is ever to regain power. Keating, who referred to Australians as ‘yobs with cans in their hands’ in urgent need of cultural re-education and thinks that Australia, with its current form of government, is the ‘arse end of the earth’, probably doesn’t advance that goal very far, whatever he’s shilling.

Sustaining the myth, with the help of an indulgent media, also prevents the party from tackling internal party reform. Remember the post-2001 ALP reform fight? Does the party look, act or sound any different today than it did in the 2001 election? Spotting the difference is like playing ‘Where’s Wally?’ without Wally. The ghost ship in the piece is the Labor party itself; adrift, without any sense of what it’s about or where it’s going. Until the ALP stops believing its own media stories, every election will, in the immortal words of American baseball legend Yogi Berra, be ‘déjà vu all over again’.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

Dec 05, AU Edition

ALL THOSE BURNING FRIDGES
A former appliance serviceman claims a bad fridge design could burn someone’s house down, another finds a string of safety faults in other brands of appliance. Is there a big problem or just a series of smaller ones? IAN WISHART investigates

John Rogers grimaces in the glow of a 60 watt tungsten bulb doing its best to illuminate a small suburban dining room, and is failing miserably at the task. He pauses at the question, as if tumbling it over in his mind, glancing across at his wife Kerry. In their eyes you can see the thought writ large, as if in the neon light that decorates the home of this former appliance repairman turned neon artist: oh God, here we go again. Moments later, that unspoken thought takes wing.

“I must admit, when I got your call, Kerry and I thought, ‘do we really want to do this again?’ After all the publicity on TV four years ago when we blew the whistle on Fisher and Paykel’s dishdrawers…”

He stops for a moment, then lifts his gaze from a spot on the table to lock with mine.

“It wasn’t dealt with back then, maybe somebody will deal with it now. We don’t want to be responsible for someone losing a life because we kept quiet.”

It’s been four years this month since Rogers folded the tent on his long time company, JK Appliances, and walked away from a lucrative business as an authorized Fisher & Paykel service agent.

“I was an appliance serviceman for about 30 years, and we’ve been in business together for about 15 or 16 in West Auckland and we fixed roughly 42,000 appliances in that time. I put through seven apprentices and we did mainly F&P service work. So we did refrigeration and all types of domestic appliances.”

Rogers vividly remembers the day that changed it all, the one that tipped him off his perch.

“It was early in the morning, a job in Glen Eden. I walked into the kitchen, the family were all there in their pyjamas, the husband was there and there were two buckets of water beside the fridge. The front of the fridge was absolutely black from smoke and flame damage. They’d woken up in the middle of the night and smelt the smoke, turned it off and started throwing buckets of water in there to put the flames out.”

The immediate danger having passed, Rogers regrets not dialing the Fire Service. “I wish I had, now.” In hindsight, it would have been his smoking gun, in a manner of speaking. But instead, he rang F&P who promptly sent a truck with a brand new fridge, and took the near-new burnt one away.

Rogers was mystified, but thought little more about that incident until he was called to another fridge a week or so later, and again, some evidence of fire damage.

“I saw another one which wasn’t so bad, and again they changed it over. Then I saw three in one week and two at another service company, and I thought ‘this is getting out of hand’, because there’s no way of repairing them because the whole cabinet is burnt.”

Stripping the panels away, Rogers found the evaporator and defrost elements were set too close to the internal plastic casing of the freezers and, in the right conditions, they were overheating and melting the appliances. None of which was visible to the homeowner, who’d usually called him in for something else.

“It was usually another fault – cracking noises, or noises from the fan or something like that, but it wasn’t because of the burning. They hadn’t seen it, and not until I took the whole thing apart and they saw the big holes burnt in the base of the freezers. That’s when I explained to the customers very politely that it had a fault and we’d organize a new refrigerator for them.”

Rogers decided to make a habit of checking every freezer he was working on, and reckons 20% to 30% of them showed varying signs of meltdown. In all, some 15 to 20 units in his West Auckland patch alone, over the space of three months.

It wasn’t all fridge/freezers.

“Only the electronic ones. Anything with an electronic panel on the back wall. The majority of the problems come in the ones with a bottom freezer. I have seen one top freezer one with burning but it wasn’t as bad. It was just a one-off. Whether it was going to escalate I don’t know.”

Why was the problem not appearing in fridges over the previous 20 years?

“The freezers and fridges prior to that were made of steel. This model, the interior of the freezer is made of plastic, and they’ve still got an element in there that glows red hot when it goes into defrost and it’s so close to the plastic lining that the heat transfer causes the problem.”

Rogers felt he was on to a major public safety issue, but he also knew as an authorized Fisher & Paykel repair agent that his business depended on F&P’s continued goodwill. And if John Rogers had been a cat, he probably felt he’d already used his quota of lives after months earlier spilling the beans on a major fault with F&P’s flagship range of dishdrawers. The drawers were rusting out after only a few months use.

“They were offering customers who had rusty dishdrawers a normal dish drawer plus they had to pay an extra $500. So once we blew the whistle on it, things changed and they had to replace the dishdrawers.”

But ‘blowing the whistle’ involved calling in TVNZ’s top rating consumer programme Fair Go and bringing considerable public opprobrium to bear on the corporate that employed him. So to say that John Rogers was chuffed that he was the mug to find a problem with the new fridges would also be a serious overstatement of his mood.

He says he tried to deal with it internally, alerting F&P’s technical team about the growing number of burnt or partially burnt fridges he’d discovered.

F&P tried to brush him aside, he claims, telling him to “leave it alone”. But the company’s reaction got more strident when Rogers began contacting other F&P agents to inquire about their experiences with the problem.

“I talked to another service company over the North Shore about it. And he was concerned as well and he contacted F&P, and so at that stage F&P came storming in – there were about three of them – and they got really stuck into me.”

In Rogers’ mind, he was reporting a major safety hazard to one of country’s leading technology companies, and nothing was being done. Wondering whether he was overreacting, he sought a second opinion from registered electrical inspector Bruce Gosling, an independent analyst who’s main investigations are on behalf of large companies and the Electrical Workers Registration Board.

Gosling drafted a one page report to the Energy Safety Service (ESS) in Wellington, the Government agency tasked with regulating electrical appliance safety for the public. His report was headed, “Potential Fire Hazard issue” with the Fisher & Paykel E402B fridge/freezer.

“JK Appliance Services (John Rogers) have located this immediate fire damage in two of the above freezers and four others have had potential fire hazards existing,” he wrote on November 11, 2001. After personally inspecting one of the units, he told EnergySafe:

“This freezer unit has a potential fire hazard due to the incorrect fixing/installation of the evaporator/defrost heating assembly. This fire hazard, created by the manufacturer, breaches NZ Electricity Regulations 1997….the element touches and heats up the plastic lining until eventually catching fire.”

Under “Conclusion” he wrote: “This model of fridge/freezer needs to be modified.”

According to both Rogers and Gosling, EnergySafe never formally replied to their complaint, and no product recall of Fisher & Paykel fridges was ever made.

As part of their contract, authorized F&P agents were required to guarantee their work for 12 months, says Rogers.

“We had to guarantee these appliances once we’d repaired them and I couldn’t. I couldn’t guarantee that this wouldn’t happen two months down the road.”

“What was the newest fridge you found it on?”

“Three months old.”

After a long discussion with his business partner and wife, Kerry, Rogers decided to toss it in.

“It got pretty ugly from then on. They appointed another service company to take over from us, and we said we’d had enough and closed down. We didn’t want to work like that, we couldn’t work like that. It was at this time we got the phone call from Energy Safe in Wellington to say they couldn’t do anything. They needed proof from the Fire Service or the Insurance Council on loss of life or property before they could force F&P to make any modifications.”

As part of the process of investigating this issue, we approached EnergySafe’s senior technical advisor, operations: Bill Lowe.

Lowe admits that to some extent his hands are tied on the issue of public safety.

“We wouldn’t become involved unless there is injury or damage.”

“Isn’t that closing the door after the horse has bolted?”

“That’s the way our powers are, if they’re handling things internally.”

Fisher & Paykel, says Lowe, controls its own repair team and can control the information that gets released to government agencies like his. If the company chooses to keep a problem close to its chest, he says, it takes the commercial risk associated with that – the risk that one day a house might burn down and all hell will break loose.
But having said that, he adds, no house fire has ever been attributed to a Fisher & Paykel ActiveSmart fridge.

“Electrical fires, if they cause damage to the structure of a house, would be reported to this office. The few that we’ve had have been Westinghouse product, a bug problem literally. The defrost relay had some ventilation slots and a cockroach infestation, and the little beasties get up there and eventually get cooked. And in another one the guy poured brake fluid around to kill the roaches and it caught fire.”

Lowe concedes his agency did receive Gosling’s report on the fire hazards in November 2001, and felt it was serious enough to raise with F&P. Unfortunately, however, because the person handling the investigation left ESS soon afterwards, there’s no evidence that Fisher & Paykel ever responded to EnergySafe’s request for more information, or that ESS chased it up.

“We’ve [now] asked F&P to check their records as to what changes if any were made at the time to the design to address that potential fire risk,” Lowe told Investigate.

“So you’ve got no record in your office of anything being advised to you by F&P?”

“Not that I’m aware of, a quick check hasn’t revealed that.”
For their part, Fisher & Paykel have been critical of John Rogers.

“Mate, we’re open to suggestions, but we want it supported with facts,” says general manager of Customer Services Brian Nowell down the phone. “We asked the guy for information and he just did not deliver it. It’s been high on rhetoric, short on fact, all the way through.”

And Fisher & Paykel global CEO John Bongard is equally skeptical:

“We have never had a fire with the model refrigerator that he has supposedly ‘tested’ so we are at a loss as to what we can say about his ‘issue’. Perhaps you can supply some factual information that we can refer to?

“Surely if these claims are true the ESS would have been able to confirm them. Have they done this? Could you tell me what the ‘specific’ problem is?”

Over at the ESS, we threw the curly questions back at Bill Lowe: is it true that there was no incident, no information supplied?

“Well we know of the two initial problems, so the allegation is a littler higher than that. Actually in the case of the F&P fridge we did consult with their engineers, possibly two of them. There will be a record somewhere but we’ve asked F&P for that information.”

Lowe believes his office may even have sent a formal notification to their counterparts in Australia via an electrical product safety incident report while they waited for F&P to report back, a report that apparently never came and which EnergySafe apparently failed to chase.

For their part, F&P insist that a fax from Investigate is the first time they’ve seen Gosling’s technical report to EnergySafe, despite requests in an exchange of lawyers letters in 2001 and 2002 asking Rogers for more data.

For his part, serviceman John Rogers accuses Fisher & Paykel of trying to avoid an embarrassing product recall on its ActiveSmart fridge line by “hushing up” the smouldering fridges and ensuring authorized repair agents towed the company line.

“I think the authorized service agents have been told to keep everything under wraps. I know they have.”

“Who’s told you?”

“Other service companies. They were told to keep quiet about it, and just put all the information back to F&P.”

Fisher & Paykel’s Brian Nowell says suggestions that New Zealand’s leading home appliance brand, with a strong presence in Australia, the US and UK, is anything less than responsible are ridiculous.

“We take a hell of a responsible attitude to these sorts of things. We view all of these sorts of things seriously, but people’s views on potential hazards vary from individual to individual, and we try and work through them as responsibly as we can given that we have authorities involved from time to time.

“And hell, we wouldn’t have been around for 70 years if we’d been as flippant as some people would have us believe.

“It doesn’t matter what the nature is of a problem that we come across, we sit down and we work through what we should be doing about it, whether it necessitates things like recalls, whether it needs modification and if we deem it needs modification how we confront that sort of thing. So if we deemed it to be of a high risk nature, we’ve done things like product recalls in the past.”

He also points out that no house fire has been attributed to this problem in a Fisher & Paykel fridge.

“Yeah, that’s a very valuable point. We from time to time come across appliances that cause smouldering, which might generate a bit of heat. If the Fire Service is called out to an incident of any nature where they think an appliance is involved, whether it’s ours or someone else’s, they get hold of us. We treat things like that pretty seriously. We’ve had clothes dryers for example, and people who use towels with hairspray all over them and they don’t clean lint filters and things like that.”

EnergySafe’s Bill Lowe nonetheless feels the fridge issue needs a closer look.

“I would say they’ve certainly got a design problem there because it’s not failsafe, however modern product is also manufactured to fire safety requirements in terms of materials and self quenching plastic and so forth. They will burn until such time as their source of energy is removed.”

And, says Lowe, the close working relationship between EnergySafe and F&P is a bonus, not a problem.

“I won’t say we treat them any better than other suppliers because we do work with Westinghouse and some of these other suppliers whose product is not made in NZ, but the fact that they’ve been quite open with us providing information – possibly selectively – but we work closely with F&P on the standards committee and we would expect them to be a responsible company.”

Meanwhile, the electrical inspector who kicked off the bunfight claims Fisher & Paykel can’t be left to take the rap for what is increasingly an industry-wide problem as regards appliance safety. Bruce Gosling says he’s made up to twenty reports to EnergySafe about unsafe appliances, and heard diddly-squat back about any of them.

“The Energy Safety Service, as far as I’m concerned, are a law unto themselves. Rarely can I get an answer from them, and one time I recall trying to get an answer, either yes/no or just a simple written reply from the ESS over a very serious safety issue – the only way I finally got an answer from them was threatening to go and see my local MP at the time, and my local MP is Helen Clark!”

An example of safety issues, he says, is an upmarket brand
of rangehood.

“We still have an ongoing problem with Tuscany rangehoods that are brought into the country by Mitre 10, and again we could only go so far and we had to hand the complaint and the hazard over to the ESS. Again, we would have thought the ESS would have taken them off the market until they’ve been improved,” Gosling told Investigate.

“What’s the problem?”

“People getting electric shocks from these new rangehoods that have been installed, due to the design faults within them. They’re Italian manufactured, a very nice looking stainless steel rangehood, but the one we investigated, I was there on behalf of the Electrical Workers Registration Board as an investigating inspector. And we totally disconnected and removed that particular rangehood from service and we wrote a report, again, to Wellington to both the EWRB and we sent a copy to the ESS.

“That saga went on for well over a year for the customer, who was left without a working rangehood – he was contacting the ESS monthly because he wanted to get a new rangehood, obviously, and he was hoping Mitre 10 might supply him with one. I was totally blown away at the length of time they left that customer in limbo, but at the end of the whole thing we finally got – I’m pretty sure I’ve still got the written reply from the ESS – and they were saying again that there’s been 250,000 sold in Australia and they hadn’t had a problem over there, so why should they worry about one problem here in Ellerslie, Auckland.”

“How live were they when you measured the voltage and
the current?”

“It was a hundred volts from the leakage current back to earth potential, because the stove was directly below and the person was touching it. These sort of things are a bit of a freak scenario, but in saying that it could well happen again in NZ.

“Anything above 50 volts AC becomes dangerous to humans. Yes, that was the measurement we took at the time, and the person getting the shocks had been doing cooking on the stove at the time and had wet hands, so it’s a very serious electric shock situation.

“But whether the ESS have contacted the Tuscany manufacturers back in Italy and told them to improve their design, I’ve got no way of knowing. But that’s what I stated in my report: the design needs to be improved, the electrical safety leaves room for improvement. But I bet nothing’s happened.”

According to EnergySafe there has been some movement, but not much. The Tuscany rangehoods were initially approved for sale in Australia and therefore became automatically approved for sale in New Zealand. Despite the 100 volt electric shocks, EnergySafe’s Bill Lowe says he hasn’t ordered the product to be withdrawn from sale here because Mitre 10 is refusing to agree to a recall.

“No, the product recall process is not simple, it’s a complex legal and technical process and we’re working through one at the moment with another product but we have to be very careful with regard to litigation, and that only becomes a problem if it’s not done voluntarily by the supplier. 99% of them are voluntary recalls.”

“Did Mitre 10 voluntarily take it off sale?”

“No.”

So in other words, this Investigate article is the first that most people will have heard about a possible safety fault with an Italian rangehood that’s now been on sale for more than a year in both New Zealand and Australia.

Ironically, the fact that a homeowner has been given 100 volt belts by the rangehood is not enough to force a compulsory product recall. That can’t happen in the main unless someone is first seriously injured or killed.

Bruce Gosling says he’s found serious safety faults in other appliances as well – portable residual current devices that are supposed to protect DIYers and workmen from being electrocuted while using tools outside.

“From memory, about 10 of these brand new devices failed out of 20 that were purchased.”

“How did this come to your attention?”
“From a company in Penrose, and Alstom out at the Otahuhu power station – they purchased 10 and they do ‘test and tag’, the same as this company in Penrose, a Fletcher Challenge company.

“What happens is that as soon as they buy an RCD personal protective portable device we test and tag them before they go into service, so as electrical people we take them out of their brand new packets and put them through the appropriate tests, and 10 of these devices out of 20 failed.

“And I can tell you for a fact that the guys out at Alstom were only buying one at a time, because they only wanted one, and it failed so they sent it back and swapped it with another one. Five times they did that before they got one that could be tagged as safe.

“It was just ironic that about two weeks prior to that we’d had a major problem at this factory in Penrose. They’d purchased at least 10, and five of them failed the performance test that we do. Some of them didn’t even trip at all, brand new out of the packet and wouldn’t even physically trip on the pushbutton – you know, they all have a little pushbutton that every user must test before they use them – and even that pushbutton didn’t work.

“So that was totally unsafe, and yet when we complained to HPM in Sydney they just said ‘nah, it must have happened in freight, in cargo, because we test every one before they leave the factory’. And we know for a fact that that’s B/S, absolute. But they still turn around and make those statements, and no one can prove them wrong, so in the end we dropped that issue. That’s the tactics these manufacturers are using,” says Gosling.

It is, to use a bad pun, absolutely shocking. And Investigate’s discovery of faulty RCD devices has made EnergySafe sit up and take notice.

“RCDS are on the declared article list and they require approval from this office before they go on sale in NZ,” says Bill Lowe of the ESS. “And why we get very nervous with RCDS is we specify them as a safety device and I look at them like a parachute when you jump out of a plane. Where you’ve got a device to protect a person and it doesn’t work because it’s defective we’ve really got some concerns, yeah.”
On the strength of Investigate’s information, he’s contacting HPM in Sydney to ask some hard questions. It’s not the first time the Australian company has supplied faulty RCDS. But the real question is why Australian and NZ authorities are not picking these things up before the products go on sale?

Fisher & Paykel’s Brian Nowell would like an answer to that one too. He says there’s a big problem with imported appliances where regulators make assumptions that the product complies with safety standards, rather than force suppliers to prove it before the product goes on sale.

“Rather than showing that you do comply, the system appears to be that if somebody comes across an incident you have to show that you are capable of complying. It’s more or less left to people to grizzle here. Let’s put the ambulance at the top of the fence, not the bottom.”

As to the safety or otherwise of Fisher & Paykel’s fridges, the arguing continues. Investigate spoke to another appliance serviceman about his experiences.

“I can mainly only comment on the earlier ones I saw, they would catch on fire, basically. The heating systems in the back of the defrost system would not cut out on the defrost timer and so then they’d just melt out the whole inside, they’d literally have a fire in the back of them.”

“How many of those did you see?”

“Mainly when I was with John, probably upwards of eight or ten I suppose. Then when I went back out on my own again I probably saw another three or four. The last one I saw was quite recently, no more than about 12 months ago. It was well melted out inside in the freezer compartment. Just an ActiveSmart, I can’t remember which model exactly.”

“I believe John perhaps ran foul of F&P for being someone who was prepared to stand up and say something, and I really honestly admire him for doing that because all these other guys just pushed it under the rug and didn’t want to jeopardize their authorizations etc. And he got bitten on the backside for that, big time.”

“So you were aware of other people who were aware of it?”

“Absolutely! No question, we all used to go to Service School for latest product ranges and that and we’d be talking about all kinds of stuff.”

“They talked about the fridges?”

“More the servicemen would be talking about while they’re all together at Service School. The F&P people would say ‘yeah, we’ve got a little issue and we’re sorting it out’, but in my opinion they never did.”
To which Brian Nowell’s response is, “rubbish”:

“We’re obligated to provide EnergySafe with information and we certainly do. We’re pretty self conscious about those sorts of things because we’ve got authority guys working in this country that influence the thinking and safety standards not only in NZ but also Australia and around the world. We’re actively involved with those guys all the time. We certainly wouldn’t send guys off to meetings with instructions to be ‘mum’ about an event that jeopardized our reputation. We work very openly with these people.”

Fisher & Paykel’s technical team were unavailable to Investigate, and the appliance company hasn’t got any data immediately to hand on whether it has swapped any burnt out fridges for customers under warranty.

We did approach one customer whose fridge was the subject of a report to EnergySafe, and she told Investigate that after John Rogers had highlighted the problem, F&P sent a new service team out to her who reassured her Rogers and Gosling were “panicking” unnecessarily and that her fridge would be alright. That was four years ago, she still has that fridge, but its freezer she says “doesn’t defrost properly” and is leaking water. “Do you think I got fobbed off?” she half mutters to herself.

Fisher & Paykel, meanwhile, are standing on their record. Yes, they say, there are occasionally defective units – which is why they have service agents. But the company rigorously denies that it would put public safety at risk.

In the meantime, EnergySafe and F&P are now liaising on the fridge issue again, and EnergySafe is preparing to further investigate the faulty RCD devices. And John Rogers? Well, he’s given up appliance repairs and now exhibits and sells neon art at home shows. “It’s much less stressful,” he says.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

Would you want a job where getting vomited on or dodging a falling telephone pole was considered part of the normal 9-to-5 routine? Probably not. But luckily for the rest of us, some men and women do: they fix our homes, rescue us when we’re in trouble, and take care of society’s forgotten. They’re the Australians who really are

DOING IT TOUGH

DAVE EDWARDS,
Sydney, NSW
Roofer, plumber & carpenter

Dave Edwards has been a Sydney-based roofer, plumber and carpenter for the last seven years, specializing in inner-city renovations. ‘My work involves variety of tasks – I’ve been roofing, laying floorboards, pouring concrete, doing formwork, framing, bricklaying, digging foundations, all aspects of building pretty much. A lot of manual labour is involved in the job.’

While Mother Nature does not make any special allowances for those who toil outdoors all day, your typical roof carpenter isn’t going to let discomfort stop him from earning a buck.

‘Oh yeah, you work all year round! You could be digging trenches, digging footings in 42-degree heat eight hours or more a day – and you’ve got a lot of heavy lugging around to do’, he says.

‘Because you have these tasks to do – pouring concrete, putting up the frame-work, and so on, you need to string it all together at the right time. You can’t just postpone everything because of inconvenience.’
Dave’s work over the last few years has demanded a combination of brain and brawn.

‘Say, in the inner city where I work, access to the sites can be pretty bad. You’ve got to take all the material through the front door – all the heavy materials. Throughout all of this, you have to be perfectly organized, and have your mind on the job constantly. It’s extremely labour-intensive, yet you also have to be thinking a couple of weeks ahead all the time and have everything set up in the right order. You can’t store much on site, so when you need things, they have to turn up and get installed right away.’

Combining hard labour with strategic foresight in often uncompromising weather is not everyone’s cup of tea: ‘It can be a logistical nightmare. There are a lot of situations where you might have outdoor work but if it is going to rain, you can’t just stop. The project has to continue somehow - if that means working in the rain, then you have to do it.’

Is he complaining? Of course not - he loves his job. But for Edwards, enjoying work time is balanced by the daily trials and tribulations that come with servicing the Sydney housing boom.
By Steve Edwards

MELISSA YOUNG,
Melbourne, Victoria
Disability Support Worker

I have been knocked unconscious on several occasions, thrown down a cliff, had my thumb bitten off, been saturated in deliberate projectile vomit, punched and kicked,’ says Melissa Young.

Melissa’s not a member of the SAS, part of a new extreme fitness craze, or a contestant on a Japanese game show. For much of her working life Melissa has been a disability support worker.

While it sounds dangerous, Melissa talks about her job with humour and perspective. It is obvious she has a passion for people and for bringing quality to their lives. These incidents were all cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, she says, though she admits that supporting people with a disability is challenging.

Despite the dangers and humiliations, Melissa says the job was a fabulous experience. ‘The variety in the work is incredible. Some people may have mild learning disabilities, but they can be the best friends you’ve ever had. Other people may have much higher support needs due to behavioural issues.’

It is the issue of behaviour that often places disability support workers in threatening situations.

Like anyone, people with a disability get angry and frustrated, and support workers must diffuse those emotions that may cause their clients to become violent and aggressive. Melissa says the answer lies in being able to communicate and treat people with respect.

Melissa recalls one incident where she was concerned that a person she was working with had drowned. It was a scary moment. She went over to the side of the spa at the public pool they were at and as she bent down to try and see through the bubbles the fist of a powerfully-built woman emerged from the foam and left Melissa out cold on the tiles.

Why would anyone return to work after an event like that?
‘I really enjoyed the challenges of working with people who have behavioural issues. This area does have elements which can be “dangerous”, but with the right supports it works out fine.’

Melissa just left disability support to become a training consultant for the Victorian State government, which is role that allows her to continue to manage risk and support the disability workforce.

She is thrilled that support workers are now trained to engage laterally with their work. Melissa adds that by treating people with disabilities with rescect and supporting their needs, a lot of the tougher aspects of the job can be avoided.
By Dan Donahoo

CHRIS WILKINSON,
Sydney, NSW
Paramedic, Westpac Air Ambulance Service

The Westpac Air Ambulance Service team is the ultimate go-anywhere rescue service, and Special Casualty Access Team member Chris Wilkinson is one of the men who make the famous chopper a lifeline to hundreds of Australians every year. Chris is trained in abseiling and caving, and can work in snow and at sea as well. The job is all about teamwork and commitment, and it allows some truly amazing feats – like the team’s specially-developed technique for plucking people from the surf in just three to five seconds.

‘I always wanted to be a paramedic’ Chris says. He started his training almost two decades ago, and now at age 42 he is one of only 64 senior paramedics in all of NSW.

‘This is very difficult training, 55 to 65 per cent fail, with intense physical and mental discipline, and the training is always ongoing and developing. You have to have the right temperament and the will to succeed’.

For Wilkinson, a typical day might involve attending to a motorcycle accident or finding lost bushwalkers, but his proudest achievement is the four bravery medals he received for his work after the infamous 1997 Thredbo avalanche in the Snowy Mountains. Eighteen people were killed; Chris rescued the sole survivor.

‘It was thirty-six hours later when we found him. I tunneled through tons of unstable rubble to find him deep in the darkness, it was minus-twelve degrees, and I stayed with him for eleven hours’, he recalls.

This is human endeavor and instinctual willingness to help at its highest level. When asked if he still gets nervous, he admits, ‘When you’re suspended on a wire three hundred feet above treacherous surf it will always get the heart pumping!’
By Ben Wyatt

MATT BOYLE,
Castlemaine, Victoria
Alternative Builder
Matt Boyle doesn’t build houses like other people. Half-builder and half-artist, his methods could easily be described as unconventional. While the finished product of his work is stunning, his on-site safety issues are more challenging than your run-of-the-mill house site.

A chainsaw is Matt’s tool of choice. ‘If a sharp chainsaw is going right, you can get to spots you can’t get into with any power tool,’ he says. ‘It is probably the first thing you have in your trailer.’
With chainsaws, a 60-year-old army truck, 20-year-old crane and a penchant for mud bricks, Matt works with owner-builders to create unique homes.

Known for his scavenging ability, his building style is highlighted by the use of heavy recycled materials: poles, stone and steel. It gives his houses solidness and the feeling they are connected with the earth. But he notes that in working with these materials, the biggest challenge is getting them all on-site. Many materials are tough to work with – especially telephone poles.

‘We’ve had some hairy moments. We were lifting one heavy beam up, and it started slipping out of the sling. The crane was shaking off its chocks and everyone had to run around and move fast. It was alright, but there was no other machine we could get in to do it.’ Not surprisingly, the safety issue demands constant attention.

Matt and his crew build organically. Once a wall starts to go up, they work with how the space feels.

‘Building like this, you work around yourself all the time. Having versatility is crucial – being able to change things and get stuff right,’ he says.

‘One of the toughest things is scaffolding. When we build a house, we basically build a whole house outside it before we start. I think we’ve built scaffolding one hundred times in different ways for different jobs.’

Over time, carrying mud bricks, manoeuvring 10-metre telephone poles and working with solid timbers and steel has taken its toll.
‘I’m turning 30 this year, and I’ve done a nerve in my lower back. I’ve got to be careful now. I think that’s probably more from stupidity. If you take it a bit slower and have a few guys there, it is smarter.’

For this reason, Matt always makes sure his workers are aware of the risks: ‘You’re never doing the same thing twice. You’re always “winging it”. You have to keep learning stuff all the time. It isn’t stuff you can get out of a book. On all the trailers now, we have little safety messages so you are always thinking about it. You don’t want anyone ending up paraplegic or anything. At the end of the day, it’s just a house.’
By Dan Donahoo

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

Money, Nov 05, AU Edition

DON'T CALL US…
…or we’ll call ADMA. Everything you need
to do to parry the assault of the telemarketers

Quiz time: You’ve just arrived home after a busy day and are starting to prepare dinner. You’ve met the challenges of reading the mail, making sure the food doesn’t burn, winding down from work, making sure that others in the house are organised, and changing into something more comfortable. Your about to finally relax when the phone rings. Who is it?

You rang?!
When you answer the phone you are greeted by a detached, shall we say scripted, voice that asks, ‘May I speak to so-and-so?’, or sometimes simply. ‘the householder’.

Now so far you don’t know who this person is or what they want, but before you know it they have become quite persistent. Intrigued, you play along, and once your name is established, the voice on the other end of the line is using it in as if they are a long lost friend or relative. In fact, it seems that every second word is now your first name. You are now caught up in a web of what are known as ‘presumptive close’ questions. Things like, ‘You would like to spend more time with you family... wouldn’t you?’; ‘Would you like to be debt free?’; ‘We all want to earn more money, you agree with that don’t you?’.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: your dinner is burning, the water has dried up in the pot, the hot food is getting cold, the cold food is getting hot, your partner is feeling dejected and unloved and you are not sure who’s more feral – the kids or the dog. Your attempts to politely get out of the conversation are met by more open-ended questions. Finally you announce, ‘I’m not interested!’, but this has no effect either… except to bring on more open ended questions.

Almost everyone has been rung by a telemarketing call centre of some sort. Whether it is to sell them banking products, investments schemes, mobile phone accounts, time shares, wine club memberships, or anything else, it is a very common form of direct marketing. Despite the jokes, annoyances, and threats of legislation that surround the practice, outbound telemarketing is an industry that is still growing – especially with the advent of cheap call centres in places like India. Think about this for a minute: an organisation is attempting to establish or build a positive relationship with you, yet they not only intrude uninvited into your private life but they are also sending vast sums of money out of the country for the privilege.

What rights do I have?
You might well ask: ‘Can I prevent any of this?’. The answer is, of course you can.

The Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) has developed a Code of Practice in consultation with the Ministerial Council of Consumer Affairs (MCCA), the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and consumer and business groups.

This Code of Practice focuses on five key principles that underlie any direct marketing activity including of course, call centres. All members of ADMA agree and must adhere to these principles. What are they?

The first is Privacy Protection. An integral part of the Code is the National Privacy Principles (NPPs). The NPPs give consumers some control over their personal information by limiting the amount of information that companies can collect about individuals. In addition, marketers are required to tell consumers who is collecting the information, how the company can be contacted, and the intended use of the personal information – including whether it will be disclosed to third parties. Consumers must be given the opportunity opt-out of future direct marketing approaches and block transfer of their contact details to any other marketer.

There is also a compulsory Do Not Mail/Do Not Call service. Under the Code, use of the ADMA Do Not Mail and Do Not Call Consumer Preference Services are mandatory for all ADMA members. This requires members to purge from marketing campaigns the names and contact details of consumers who have registered with the service. This ensures that individuals that have indicated they do not wish to be approached are not contacted.

There has to be a mandatory ‘cooling off’ period. When supplying goods or services at a distance, ADMA members must provide a seven-day ‘cooling off’ period during which a customer is entitled to cancel the contract with the direct marketer. In addition, ADMA members must ensure the customer’s right to cancel the contract is specified in any contractual documents.

Additionally, there is an agreement that compliance requirement extension to suppliers and non-members. Members are responsible for the conduct of their agents, subcontractors, and suppliers. This broadens the scope of the Code beyond the membership of ADMA, thus raising standards throughout the direct marketing industry.
And you might find it hard to believe but there are Telemarketing Standards of Practice. Direct marketers who use the telephone must ensure they identify themselves to the person they are calling and state the purpose of the call, among other things.

What happens if they break the code?
If there is a breach of the Code of Practice by an ADMA member, it is authorised by the ACCC to impose a variety of sanctions. These include requiring a formal apology for the breach, requiring corrective advertising or the withdrawal of offending advertisements or statements, and ecommending a refund or replacement of goods or services where appropriate.

What if they are not a member of ADMA?
The privacy of every Australian is protected by the Privacy Act (1988). This is administered and adjudicated by the Federal Privacy Commissioner. Interestingly, the Privacy Commission released a report in May, 2005, which analysed and made recommendations on the way that the private sector conducted itself when it came to the privacy of you and me. The Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, explains: ‘The Report contains 85 recommendations stemming from a balanced and pragmatic examination of the Privacy Act, within the terms of reference set by the Attorney General. The recommendations in the report relate to improving the operation of the private sector provisions and are written as actions the Australian Government should consider doing, or as measures the Office could undertake.’ All well and good but what about normal individuals having control over our own privacy?

‘Consumer control over personal information, a key feature of the private sector amendments to the Privacy Act, was addressed in the Review. I have recommended that the control that individuals have over their personal information be strengthened, particularly in relation to information collected about them indirectly or used or disclosed for other purposes such as direct marketing. Simple steps that could be taken to make this happen include measures to promote clearer and more easily understood privacy notices and a general opt-out right for all direct marketing approaches.’

What can I do to stop this?
Clearly, in the case of outbound call centres you can let off some steam when they ring you but abuse might make you feel better but it is only a short term fix and you could possibly be charged under the Telecommunications Act. You could do what one of my friends does and simply says: ‘I’ll get the head of the home now’, and promptly leaves the phone off the hook for an hour, but this is also short-term fix that forces him to change his habits. Ultimately you can complain to the Privacy Commissioner or the ACCC. There are also possible breaches of the Trade Practice Act especially section 60 – Harassment and Coercion, which could result in separate civil action. However, I would like to suggest that before you make a formal complaint you should attempt to resolve the matter with the organisation in question. What should you do?
1. Write a letter or email to the organisation, explain the situation and what you would like to see happen.
2. Give the organisation an opportunity to rectify the situation, 30 days is a reasonable time frame in which they should respond to your initial enquiry.
3. If you are not satisfied with the outcome then you can complain to the Privacy Commissioner by phoning the Hotline on 1300 363 992, or write to GPO Box 5218 SYDNEY NSW 2001. You should ALSO complain to the ACCC, especially if you feel the marketing material may be, or is connected to a scam or other breach of the consumer protection laws, by calling ACCC’s Infocentre on 1300 302 502. Note that 1300 calls cost the price of a local call.

Where to now?
And what about the future, or even the present with the new technology that is available to call centres and other direct marketing activities? Karen Curtis outlines that: ‘…privacy and new technologies warrant further debate. The main recommendation on these issues is that they should be considered in the context of a wider review of the Privacy Act. During the review, it became apparent that while the private sector provisions work well, it may be appropriate for the Government to undertake a wider review of privacy for Australians in the 21st century.’

So if you are sick of the antics of call centres, then take control of your life. Don’t be apathetic do something! Let the relevant organisations know and demand your rights. Simply whingeing will only result in less leisure time, more frustration, less control of your life, and more cold dinners. See you around the traps.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: July 05, AU Edition

VAN’S STILL THE MAN
The grumpy Irishman brawls with mediocrity – and wins – while Nash and Stigers show where jazz is headed

Van Morrison
‘Magic Time’, Geffen
3 stars
After four decades of peerless soul music, Van Morrison has nothing left to prove. No wonder he complains that ‘you gotta fight every day to keep mediocrity at bay’ on ‘Magic Time’: Even when he coasts, his deeply embedded mastery of blues, jazz, Celtic and R&B styles ensures a consistently high baseline.

‘Magic Time’ holds few surprises, and Morrison knows this: ‘You can call it nostalgia, I don’t mind’, he sings in the title track. With three covers of jazz standards, two songs (‘Gypsy in My Soul’ and ‘The Lion This Time’) that allude to his 1972 classic ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’, and several doses of Celtic mysticism and misanthropy, he’s revisiting styles and themes that have long preoccupied him.

But it’s hard to complain when Morrison sings gently rolling ballads as beautifully as he does ‘Celtic New Year’ and ‘Stranded’, or swinging blues as locked-in as ‘Evening Train’ and ‘I’m Confessin’’.
Reviewed by Steve Klinge

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Ted Nash and Odeon
‘La Espada de la Noche’, Palmetto
3 stars
Jazz was born in a cradle of many cultures, and the music’s future is likely to be full of cultural excursions to new realms. Ted Nash pulls off such a fusion. He uses a primarily tango vibe to create a kind of film-noir jazz that’s engaging and probably even better live than on disc.

The son of trombonist Dick Nash and nephew of swing saxophonist Ted Nash, this saxophonist has recently made a career swinging with the backward-looking Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the forward-careening Jazz Composers Collective.

His band here is anchored by Clark Gayton on tuba, trombone and baritone horn. Violinist Nathalie Bonin and accordionist Bill Schimmel enhance the tango feeling, while drummer Matt Wilson is a jazz cat with Latin moves.

The session makes for good bullfighting music. The quintet covers two Latin jazz standards, ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and ‘Tico Tico’, with tango high in its consciousness. But elements of klezmer and traditional New Orleans jazz creep in, forming a worldly stew.
Reviewed by Karl Stark

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Curtis Stigers
‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’, Concord
3 stars
How many singers make a rock recording that sells nearly two million copies and walk away to be a jazz vocalist? Curtis Stigers, whose self-titled hit came in 1991, is one.
Stigers is not, surprisingly, a high-voltage artist. He’s an expressive character who looks for some heart in a song and often plumbs it. The Idaho, U.S.A., native shows an independent-cuss view of songs, expanding the usual suspects here to include ditties by Randy Newman, Sting and Tom Waits.
He shows an affinity for country on Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy’ and gets folksy and direct on the title track, a poignant Newman original.
Waits’ ‘In Between Love’ carries the emotional oomph of an old Tin Pan Alley standard, and Willie Dixon’s ‘My Babe’ gives Stigers soulful credentials. Keyboardist Larry Goldings is a big collaborator here, creating the sympathetic backing with a revolving cast that includes bassist Ben Allison and drummer Matt Wilson.
Reviewed by Karl Stark

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: June 05, AU Edition

NOT SO FAT
New numbers from America suggest obesity isn’t as dangerous as previously thought. But don’t reach for that Big Mac just yet

Obesity is the second-leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and it’s only a matter of time before we catch up. Unless, that is, you use their newly-revised statistics, which place obesity way down at number seven in the leading preventable cause of death in the US. In which case Australia’s death rate from obesity is now almost four times higher than that of the Americans! C’mon, that can’t be right. How many fatty-fatty fat-fats are keeling over, here and abroad? I want answers – and a burger, stat!

Well, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. There is no universal formula for working out something as complex as how many people die from diseases caused by obesity. Working out how many people die from guns is relatively straightforward. As far as I know, the leading cause of gun deaths is guns. But what about cancer? It might be related to obesity, but the obesity isn’t required for the cancer. Skinny people die of heart disease, as do the, ahem, big-boned. If someone has a heart attack and dies, and is also overweight, there may be correlation. But since we know that skinny people have heart attacks too, how do we know if their chubbier cousin would have died of a heart attack anyway, irrespective of his weight?
To use the example of the Australian state of Victoria, their “Burden of Disease” statistics show that in 2002, 650 overweight or obese people died from cardiovascular disease, 450 from type-two diabetes and 300 from cancer. Catch the trick? That’s how we get our statistics down under. If a fat person dies from something that can be related to excess weight, it’s an obesity- related death. No statistics are available on how many of those people might have died anyway.

An example: Let’s suppose that one of those people was called Dazza. Dazza had a heart attack at a family barbie and died in rural Victoria died in 2002. At the time of his death he had three charred steaks, mounds of potato salad and eight or nine beers on board. He also snuck off behind the shed and had five or six Winnie Blues with his brother, but his wife didn’t catch him, so they don’t count. Always the clown, when old Daz grabbed his chest and fell down, it was six minutes before “get up, ya retard” turned to panic. The ambulance took fifteen minutes to arrive. Now although Dazza died of a heart attack, his passing also counts as a weight-related death and a tobacco-related death. Of course, the delay in treatment contributed. Having a father and two uncles who died of heart attacks before 50 also contributed. Now if Dazza died at 65, he’s doing well, compared with his ominous family history. The statistics fail to take these nuances into account.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in April 2005 that too much weight accounted for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States, 14 times less than their January estimate of 365,000 deaths. Now the same number of people died, and the same number were overweight or obese. What the CDC did to get the new figures was to improve their statistical analysis. They took into account a range of factors, some of which may seem surprising.

Much of the problem comes from the use of the Body Mass Index, or BMI. You can easily calculate your Body Mass Index, which is your weight in kilograms (kg) divided by their height in meters (m) squared. So if I am 178 cms tall (from memory) and 59 kgs (distant memory), my BMI is 59  1.782, which makes 18.62 and places me at the low end of the healthy weight range (BMI of 18.5 – 25). If you are very fit (muscular), under 18, experiencing the effect of age (losing muscle), or pregnant, the BMI may not be accurate. The World Health Organisation also recommends different cut offs for south-east Asians, so if your genetic heritage is such, the BMI may not be accurate. If you have recently had a baby, you should substitute the lowest weight you’ve ever been for your actual weight, as I did (just for fun).

Generally 25-30 is considered overweight, and over 30 is considered obese. Further confusing the matter, the cut-off may change between countries and over time. For example in 1998 the US National Institute of Health changed their cut-off for “overweight” from BMI 27.8 to BMI 25. 30 million Americans, previously “technically healthy” became overnight “technically overweight”.

With limited variations this is how the statistical bodies know if you’re an obesity or weight-related death. Because of the limitations of the BMI I prefer the LBM assessment (Look in the Bloody Mirror). It should be abundantly clear (unless you have a body image disorder) whether you are healthy, overweight or obese. And I have to say, being obese is defiantly not good for you, there aren’t two ways about it. It will put you at risk for a lot of things (cancer, heart disease) that will shorten your life (you’ll die). More so than if you were trim and terrific. If you are merely overweight, however, it’s not so clear.

How many people do you know (often women, but not always) who go to the gym, swim twice a week and do yoga on Saturdays and are still “big boned”? They probably have good muscle tone from the exercise, but you may not see it for the soft curvaceous coating. I personally spend a good deal of time participating in toddler aerobics and I believe you could bounce a penny off my “abs”. If you could find them under the squishy layer of stored energy, which you can’t. So if people are overweight, are they automatically at risk of overweight related death?

A study in 1996 confirmed earlier research which showed that for adults over 35 attempted weight loss is associated with lower all-cause mortality, regardless of whether or how much weight is lost. So trying to loose weight is beneficial for your health, even if you don’t loose weight. It’s common sense: an overweight person who works out and eats well should be much healthier than a lazy, unfit, skinny person. Fitness generally seems to mean cardiovascular fitness, which is achieved through cardiovascular exercise, which leads to a healthy heart. If you happen to exercise until you can talk, but not easily (a useful rough definition of effective cardiovascular exercise) for 40 minutes at a time 3 times a week, you should know for yourself that you are healthy. You may, however, still be overweight.

Have a look at the people in your family. Scientists have not yet discovered the gene that causes a craving for breakfast at McDonalds, but they have discovered a small number of genes for obesity. And there are probably more. As in all things, some people are better at some things than others, even at a physiological level. Some people don’t get enough iron in their diet, but their body is very good at using what they get, and they just never get anaemic. Some people are just efficient fat burning machines, eat badly and do no exercise yet stay skinny. Not healthy, mind you, just skinny. Some people just have a hard time losing weight, but if they are doing all the right things, they could well be healthy. If a 10-metre sprint for the bus leaves you breathless, I don’t care how you look, your health is in trouble.

You can be fit but overweight if you try because for all the books on weight loss out there, the whole thing is simpler than you’d think. If the energy you take on is more than the energy you expend, you gain weight. You burn calories/ kilojoules/energy (synonyms for popular purposes) all the time, to breath, to sleep – perchance to dream – to walk to the shop. And you intake energy all the time. If it’s not water and it goes in your mouth to your stomach, it counts as energy.
The more energy you expend (all common sense; walking burns more energy than watching TV etc) the more energy you burn. You could get fat eating apples if you ate a lot of them and moved as little as possible. So if you are overweight, you need to eat less or exercise more. Of course, if you exercise more, you will be fit, which is good. If you just eat less, you could be skinnier but no healthier.

Bottom line, fitness counts for more than weight. We don’t really know how many “overweight and obesity related” deaths happen. I’m not sure what it matters. Being overweight may cause (indirectly) death, being unfit is a better target.

We shouldn’t (alas we do) judge this on how you look. It doesn’t matter what the stats are, I tell you this; if you can’t run for the bus, you’re in trouble.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: June 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Forget Supernanny. What Australia needs is Superteacher

If there is one show that is appointment viewing in our house – OK, besides Desperate Housewives – it is Supernanny. While most ‘reality TV’ is pure schlock of the worst kind and about as divorced from most peoples’ lives as Kim Beazley’s pledge to block tax cuts, Jo Frost’s Supernanny speaks to the inner what’s-the-matter-with-kids-these-days crank in all of us, parents or not.

Of course, child psychologists and other self-appointed experts, who have spent decades turning families into dictatorships where the kids are in charge, hate the idea of an uncredentialed glorified babysitter like Frost telling parents to take control again. Sydney University academic Stephen Juan, for one, criticised her as a ‘devil version of Mary Poppins’, adding that the show’s approach represents ‘the outmoded view of the controlling parent … it seems to be so anti-children. It puts the needs of the parent first.’

No matter that in every episode, none of the needs of the parents, whether for sleep or rest or intimacy were being met; according to Juan, to borrow the phrasing (and pronunciation) of Frost, discipline is ‘not esseptible’.

But while parents of pre-schoolers have been singing the praises of Supernanny to the point where adults now regularly joke about sending each other to the ‘naughty corner’, once the kids hit school, there’s no buxom British nanny around to keep order. This isn’t the fault of the kids; rather, it’s the fault of educators.

I’ve been reading the recently-released collection, Education and the Ideal: Leading Educators Explore Contemporary Issues in Australian Schooling (New Frontier Publishing, 2004), over the past few evenings, and one thing has become clear: the people responsible for educating Australia’s children need to be sent to the naughty room to have a good long think about what they’re doing to the country. As the various contributors to the book reveal, the past four decades have seen every half-baked left-wing fad and cause turned into a trendy ‘study’ of some sort or other (i.e., ‘peace studies’ during the Cold War, ‘environmental studies’ today, et cetera).

The book paints a disturbing picture of schools where children are taught a watered-down version of history that extends earlier than the 20th century for no other reason than to teach that Captain Cook’s landing represented an ‘invasion’. Where literature students are taught that an episode of Neighbours is just as valid a ‘text’ as a Shakespeare sonnet. And where Marxist thinking, dead everywhere in the world except academia, informs everything.

As a result, the book notes, students are going on to university and entering the workforce with no comprehension of how to string together a proper English sentence – much less diagram one. Barry Spurr, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney notes that his institution has been forced to initiate a ‘first-year unit of study, “University English”, to attempt to deal with students’ grammatical incompetence. The imposing title is followed by a less-exalted course description where it is indicated that there will be provided “practical writing tasks and work designed to strengthen the students’ knowledge of the basic English grammar” … that the schools are failing to achieve this competence, even amongst their brightest matriculating students, after twelve years at school, remains a national scandal.’
In other disciplines, the problems are the same: while there are plenty of competent and dedicated teachers out there, their ranks have been infested by leftist hacks and has-beens who, unable to otherwise succeed in a competitive market economy, seek to bring it down from the inside. As much as possible, this means cutting students off from the vast traditions they inherit in a Western Anglosphere country such as Australia. Much easier to rubbish the achievements of an explorer like Cook and the people who built modern Australia out of virtually nothing than to teach the great dramatic sweep of civilization that makes us what we are today.

Even science hasn’t been spared: in the 1960s rush to dethrone any expert at all, the teachers unions banded together to get ‘science back from the scientists’.

Not surprisingly, the chickens are starting to come home to roost. According to a study recently released by the Australian Council of Educational Research, Australian kids were less literate and numerate – that is, competent with words and numbers – at the end of the 1990s than there were at the end of the 1970s. This despite a doubling in the amount of school funding per pupil in the same period of time. So what’s going on?

Experts point to a number of factors, from low teacher salaries to a lack of competition in the public school arena. But surely the revolution in the Australian curriculum over the past thirty years must take most of the blame: rather than made to learn facts, students are now taught to adopt attitudes (recycling good, corporations bad, the world will end tomorrow, and America is the great Satan). Combine that with a vast number of extras loaded into students’ days, and it’s no wonder that their critical thinking skills, and their ability to read and write and add and subtract is faltering.

As Naomi Smith writes in the introduction to Education and the Ideal, ‘Educationists who have broken radically from tradition … have presumably done so because they think this will result in a better result for society and the individual, one closer to the conception of the ideal. But there is a real danger in all of this that much that was good about our education system – the product, after all, of an inheritance that dates back 2,500 years to ancient Greece, and which was further enriched by the Judeo-Christian tradition – will be lost.’
And that’s something no amount of time in the naughty corner can get back.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

Feb 05

PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHTS
The mysterious road death of Paul White hits the big screen

Truth, as is often said, can be stranger than fiction. Or as Pontius Pilate remarked, “What is Truth?” The search for truth, or at least a version of it, lies at the heart of all journalism and it is the centre thread of Geoff Murphy’s new local thriller, Spooked. IAN WISHART revisits his own association with the truth of this particular story:

The call came, as they often did, with an appropriate aura of cloak and dagger: “Ian, it’s Simon Mercep here at TVNZ. We’ve just had a call from the film director Geoff Murphy in Los Angeles — he wanted your phone number.”And then, just for good measure, Simon lowered his voice: “Wow, what’s that about, mate?”

The answer came in a long distance call just a few minutes later, and the legendary director of Goodbye Pork Pie, now on location in the US shooting an action thriller with Steven Seagal, was on the line.
“Yeah,” the voice croaked through the receiver, “I’ve been reading this book of yours, Paradise Conspiracy. I think it’d make a good movie.”

That was December 1995, just two short months after The Paradise Conspiracy launched itself onto the NZ top ten bestseller list and where it was to remain for 18 months. The success of the book had taken everyone, not least its author, by surprise. In hindsight, perhaps we should have seen it coming.

For a start, in a kind of cosmic harbinger, Mt Ruapehu awoke from a long slumber and exploded spectacularly the very hour that we pushed the ‘go’ button at the print factory.

And at a more down to earth level, Paradise lifted the lid on the multi-million dollar wheeling and dealing between politicians and big business. It implicated New Zealand in international arms trafficking, and it began by probing the mystery death of a small time computer dealer named Paul White. During the course of the investigation, my own home was broken into, a copy of the yet to be published manuscript stolen and delivered to Sir Michael Fay, and my vehicle sabotaged by a different party again.

Fay used his influence, and knowledge of the impending book, to warn off would be publishers. Suddenly, no matter which way I turned, no-one was willing to publish The Paradise Conspiracy. With $80,000 in private funding secured, 5,000 copies of the book were printed in Australia — we couldn’t take the risk of having it locally printed, both for issues of security and also to avoid having the stock fall within the jurisdiction of a New Zealand court if an injunction application was lodged.

Knowing that major publishing companies had been threatened if they handled the book, we made a decision to bypass bookshops as well. We couldn’t take the risk that we’d get 5,000 copies into the shops only to have them withdrawn from sale or left in back rooms.

And so, the birth of The Paradise Conspiracy was as clandestine an event as those within its pages: we booked radio ads for “an undisclosed product”, we hired an 0800 call centre, and then we let rip at 6am on Friday October 13th 1995 with the ad campaign and news stories on National Radio, the National Business Review and Radio Pacific.

By 9am that day, the call centre had already taken more than 2000 orders at $34.95. By 10am the major book chains, Whitcoulls and Paperplus, had ordered a thousand copies to cope with people walking in off the street demanding to read the dramatic new book they’d heard about on the radio, and by 5pm the entire first print run had sold out and we’d ordered another 5000 books. On Monday morning, the mailbox contained cheques and credit card orders worth more than $150,000 — an incredible payback on the high risk $80,000 I’d borrowed to get the project rolling. Ten years on, the 40,000 copy, nine print-run book has finally become celluloid, but not without its own plot twists and turns along the way.

Although Murphy was the first to officially show interest in the book, he wasn’t alone. The success of John Grisham’s The Firm in the US, and strong similarities in the “tax haven/dirty dealing/was it murder?” plot-lines meant that Paradise came to the attention of American agents fairly soon after Murphy’s first call. One confided that his interest had been piqued at a Hollywood dinner party where the conversation had turned to books and movies, as it inevitably does in America’s entertainment sausage factory. The agent remarked that the college student son of the host was on a break from the University of Wisconsin.

“He said, ‘if you want to know a book they should make a movie out of, you should read The Paradise Conspiracy’.”

It transpired that the student was studying tax law, and his professor had recently returned from Australia where he’d picked up copies of The Paradise Conspiracy to use as a class textbook.

“Mel Gibson’s a neighbour of mine,” the agent name-dropped shamelessly. Nonetheless, he gave up trying to sell the concept of a movie from “Noo Zeelin? Where’s that?” to the Hollywood set. This was, of course, the days before Peter Jackson became a household name.
On the local scene, film and TV producer Don Reynolds also expressed strong initial interest in Paradise, although the meetings in early 1996 ended in a “let’s talk further” that would take several years to be realised.

Murray Newey, who’d produced the Black Beauty TV series, asked for the movie rights but committed suicide the day before our scheduled second meeting.

Geoff Murphy re-entered the picture early in 2001. He’d spent much of his spare time crafting his own screenplay of the Paul White section of the book, and had big plans for it. Originally bracketed as an $8 to $10 million movie featuring Bladerunner’s Rutger Hauer, the deal fell apart at literally the last minute for a number of reasons.
From Geoff Murphy’s point of view, the overseas investors wanted a formulaic thriller that would directly appeal to the US and European markets, but that wasn’t the movie he was wanting to make. Instead, he wanted to tell it as a New Zealand story, in a New Zealand setting, with local actors. Although local producers, including Barry Everard — now the chairman of the Film Commission in New Zealand — tried hard to make the project fly, a deadline imposed by the Europeans was missed, and Paradise, or Spooked as Murphy was now calling it, remained stillborn.

It was June 2001. Enter Don Reynolds again. “Mate, we like the way you write, and we’re wondering if you’d be prepared to write an international TV series for us on the intelligence/CIA themes. We’ve got a co-production deal going with Canada, Australia and Britain, and we’re going to try and sell it to TV3 as well. Can you come up with a treatment [filmspeak for a programme synopsis]?

“Yeah, no problem,” we responded. Reynolds wanted the treatment for the first episode in his hands by the first week of September 2001 to send to network executives in Canada who were driving the project.
Drawing from material in The Paradise Conspiracy, and early Investigate articles, we plot-lined 13 potential episodes of a new drama series with the working title ECHELON. This was a not very veiled reference to the network of electronic eavesdropping stations first referred to on page 61 of the original Paradise and
later developed into a book of its own by Nicky Hager.
Sadly, although we regarded ECHELON as some of the finest screenwriting we’d done, the project came to a crashing end. You’ll see why when you read the following extracts from the first episode, sent to Don Reynolds on 8 September, 2001:

EPISODE 1, TWIN TOWERS (loosely based on true story)
ECHELON’s US bases intercept 45 seconds of a phone call originating from Auckland to a number in Kabul, Afghanistan, they pick up the words “explosive”, “tower” and “Sydney”, and a date — four days hence. Is it a plot to blow up Sydney’s Centrepoint tower, or is Auckland’s Sky tower the intended target? With only four days’ warning, RACHEL Johnson and her team must mount a TransTasman security crackdown without panicking the public or the media: find the terrorists, identify the target, disarm the bomb, or bombs, and find out why the hell information from an earlier intercept wasn’t passed on by the Americans. So in the middle of all this, when someone claiming to be a journalist dials her unlisted mobile number and starts asking questions about an organisation that doesn’t officially exist, she just knows it’s going to be one of those days.

EPISODE 1, TWIN TOWERS. INDICATIVE SCENE BREAKDOWN: TEASER EXT/INT HELICOPTER/SKYTOWER. NIGHT.
The beat of a chopper blade and the shadow of the machine itself carve a hole in the otherwise sparkling nightscape of the city. The dashboard clock shows 1.53am. The routine crackle of crime on the police radio is interrupted…

For those who still doubt that God can give foreknowledge, consider this: The treatment was on Don Reynolds desk on the morning of September 8. The opening paragraph referred to attacks on the “twin towers” four days hence – September 12 NZ time. And in the first scene of the episode, the time on the clock is 1.53am – the exact moment in NZ that the first hijacked plane struck the first of the World Trade Centre towers…on September 12 – or 8:53am New York time, September 11.
Oh, and the culprits in the Twin Towers attacks episode were Osama bin Laden and his al Qa’ida group.

The treatment had been sent on by Don to Canada. It arrived there on September 12.

And that was the last time Don Reynolds ever asked me to write a TV script. The whole ECHELON concept went out the production window, along with dozens of similar action/thrillers out of Hollywood that had to be canned while they were in production out of sensitivity to
the situation.

Negotiations with Murphy resumed in 2003, but I didn’t realise until the launch party for Spooked that Don Reynolds was a co-producer. After all this time, both he and Geoff Murphy had come through.

And so to Spooked itself. Apart from a cameo appearance by the author, and copious amounts of kiwi vernacular, the film stays remarkably close to events in The Paradise Conspiracy. The first time I saw it, I was in shock. You see, I’ve never actually read a finished copy of Paradise. Most authors, after going through draft after draft of their manuscripts, never want to read them again, and I’ve never read one of my own books. And so the surprise at seeing part of your life on screen through someone else’s eyes is eerie.

Cliff Curtis, who plays journalist “Mort Whitman” in the movie, spent several hours over coffee picking my memory of events, trying to get a feel for his character and how he might react in given circumstances. It paid off. Curtis’ performance of anger, frustration and being reluctantly sucked into the swirl of intrigue and paranoia was right on the nail.Chris Hobbs, playing Paul White’s character Kevin Jones, gives a masterful portrayal of White being railroaded into a psychological black hole, and John Leigh and Miriama Smith are respectively irrepressible and suitably cynical in their roles as White’s friends.

Variety magazine in the US calls Spooked “a stylish, conspiratorial nail-biter. Self-confident and jazzy.”

Leaving aside my personal involvement, I’d have to say it is easily the most watchable New Zealand movie I’ve ever seen.Director Geoff Murphy posits the still-burning question: who killed Paul White, and why? His suggested answer is provocative. You’ll have to see the movie to find out.

SPOOKED, Rated M, Contains offensive language, in cinemas from February 3.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

ENDANGERED SPECIES: Apr 05, AU Edition

ENDANGERED SPECIES
Redefining the Australian family
She works hard for the money. She works hard at home. He’s burning the candle at both ends, chasing the dollars they desperately need to get ahead in Australia’s big cities. Are they working to live or living to work? And with a swiftly dropping birth rate, are we poised to become a geriatric nation where children are rarely heard or seen? DANIEL DONAHOO begins team coverage with a report on why men are increasingly shying away from parenthood

My colleague shook his head when he heard the news. “Bloody good decision,” he said. “I should have had kids younger.” At 47, he was the father of a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, and was feeling the strain. He told me on more than one occasion that he’d be 63 when his youngest child turned 21. It wasn’t a prospect he was embracing.

I was 23, full of energy and ready to tackle fatherhood head-on.
For both men and women, there are many benefits in having children at a young age. Women are healthy and more fertile. The likelihood of complications in pregnant women over 35 increases dramatically. Men have more strength and energy, and are not yet set in their childless ways. And both genders carry less of the cynicism that the years seem to pile on.

Despite all this, Australian men are helping stall the baby-making process. The average age for first-time dads is 32.5 years: an all-time high. These days, if you are dad in your early 20s, you are on the fringe.

Recent projections suggest we will continue to put off having children. Consequently, fewer Australian couples will end up with kids. The Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates that in 2016, more Australian couples will be without children than with. The birth rate has definitely boarded the down escalator, and the implications could be pronounced.

While the statistics strike out, men of all ages are discovering that becoming a dad is an ambition that is never too early, or late, to pursue. Young dads might be an endangered species, but they would do well to hear the messages from older men who are finding more in fatherhood than they thought was there.

A friend of mine who became a dad at 42 is disappointed he left his run so late. He and his partner won’t be having another child. He now works part-time and shares the care of his daughter, which he says is “the bloody toughest and most rewarding gig” he has ever had. He can understand now why he grew up around so many large Catholic families. “Creating your own family is a feat greater than anything,” he says.

Men these days are often busy establishing careers and embracing singledom. But, for some, stumbling upon fatherhood has made life more fulfilling and shattered all pre-conceptions that having responsibility for a child is something to fear.

I committed to a relationship and having a baby after only knowing my wife for five months. In a society where many men turn and run I decided to stand my ground. By not shirking the responsibility my libido had thrust upon me I suddenly found myself more employable, more capable and tackling responsibilities that the constant delay of singledom had denied me.

Consequently, my life took on new meaning and much greater emotional and financial responsibility. My partner and I turned our $10,000 combined debt, amassed before children, into an eight-acre asset by the time my first son was six months.

Some regard the popularity of delaying fatherhood as a major factor in the decrease of couples with kids. It is an issue documented by Leslie Cannold in her new book, What, No Baby?, which points the finger at men and asks them to consider whether their lack of commitment to equal relationships and shared responsibility is fair on our society.
Cannold wrote recently, “In particular, my research makes clear that while the vast majority of women want to become mothers, their freedom to choose to have children at any particular point is limited by a range of social circumstances and attitudes.”

One of those circumstances appears to be all those things young men believe they ‘should’ do before having kids.

“I want my son to get an education, travel and enjoy himself before he gets married,” one mother told me.
Here, the implication appears to be that marriage and having a family is not an enjoyable experience. Or at least, not as enjoyable as travelling the world.

The fact is that an increasing number of young Australian men are putting off fatherhood. It isn’t surprising when you measure the images of parenting against pop-culture images of the party-hard, single life. The women who adorn Ralph and FHM don’t ask men to settle down.

But some young men are proving that having children young is not the burden it is made out to be. They are choosing responsibility over partying.

As part of my recent research for a forthcoming book, I have been interviewing young dads about their experience of fatherhood. They unanimously agree that it is hard work. But they are living the cliché that the more work you put in, the more rewards follow. They are building upon their own childhood experiences and finding new ways to make family relationships work in the 21st century.

One of those men, Lifon Henderson, has spent his working life as an entertainer, but as a 26-year-old father of two boys he has returned to study to pursue a new career. His wife Barbara Sparks is also studying part-time. They both balance study, work and raising their children in a juggling act that beats anything Lifon does in his
clown shows.

They told me they are looking to be qualified and established in new careers by the time their boys go to school. Having children for them was a grounding experience that brought direction into their lives.
Our society assumes study is something we should do before children. But many stay-at-home mums and dads are making the most of new developments in distance-education, thanks to the Internet and off-campus learning.

Julian and Anna Hetyey are a young professional couple in their mid-20s who are looking forward to the birth of their first child in just a couple of months. They see this as the first step in a move to reject the hectic work culture that currently dominates their lives.
Julian is adjusting his working arrangements as a lawyer to have a better work-life balance, while Anna will stop practicing podiatry and stay at home for the first few years of their child’s life.

Instead of cementing careers and paying off much of their mortgage before they have children, Julian and Anna have decided that having children will bring their lives a perspective it is currently lacking. They are interested in being part of a community first and foremost, instead of a workplace.

As for me, at 27, a big night out is usually a visit to my mum and dad’s. They take care of the kids and my wife and I can kick back and relax. Having children young has meant that my parents are considered young grandparents. Very few of their friends are grandparents.
It is a joy to watch my sons roll around on the floor with my dad, or play in the park with mum when they take the dog for a walk. Yet men who are delaying fatherhood are also delaying their parents’ grandparenthood. The longer it is delayed, the greater the risk to developing those inter-generational relationships.

Interestingly, the delay of parenthood isn’t for the lack of wanting children. A recent study of over 3,000 fertile Australians is proving that more of us want children than we assume, and we want more than one child. According to a recent Australian Institute of Family Studies report, “It’s Not For Lack of Wanting Kids”, a large majority of us aged 20-39 want two or three children.

In the survey men come out looking like they have great family intentions. Those who we would expect to be holding tightly onto their freedom are interested in parenthood. Over 60 percent of single men aged 20-29 ‘definitely want children’, while only 20 percent rule out ever having children. Almost 90 percent of married-but-childless men between 20-39 years indicate they definitely want kids.
So if we want kids, what’s the hold-up?

Men appear to have so many pre-set goals and objectives. There is little imagination or flexibility about the many ways a life can be lived. Many of us are stuck on a set of mantras promoted by marketers and the media: “I want to be secure in my career”; “I want to provide my children with economic security”; “I want to have at least half of my mortgage paid off”.

I never had a five-year plan. But my younger brother does, and so do many of his drinking buddies. And, despite wanting to have children one day, kids never seem to be factored into these five-year plans. If children are not in the plan, what does happen if one comes along? Many young men may be denying themselves a happiness they haven’t considered by boxing themselves into a life that is a series of dot points where family and kids don’t figure.

There is a modern-world life-checklist young men complete
before they move on to the next goal: finish school, check. Go to uni, check. Experiment with drugs, check. Travel overseas, check. Establish a career, check. Find a partner, check. Buy a house, check. Achieve financial security, check...Have children?

But what if one of those items doesn’t materialise? What if you get stalled for a while in finding the right career, or the right person to love?

The statistics suggest this is what is happening. The result is that while Australian men may aspire to have children, they are less likely to. And if they do, they are unlikely to have as many children as
they want.

Still, many men are out there challenging the checklist, taking the less-travelled path and becoming dads. These fathers may not stop the birth-rate decline, but they are demonstrating that there are
options out there. And that having kids isn’t the end of the world.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: July 05, AU Edition

MOB RULES
Also: DreamWorks’ latest fails to excite, and don’t expect
a rush of copycat oyster farming flicks any time soon

Layer Cake
Released: July 14, 2005
Rated: MA
4 stars
Boy, is the cast of Layer Cake ugly! But that’s the joy of British gangster films – forget Hollywood glamour, in these flicks the mobsters aren’t pretty or even all that smart. Instead they all have bad teeth and wear horrible parachute-cloth tracksuits.
Layer Cake is a great name for the film because the viewer is taken through several character stories in rapid succession. Don’t go to this movie tired or you’ll never keep up.

Daniel Craig plays the lead role as the most attractive gangster (which is not saying much; he is still horribly pock-marked). He’s so successful as a top-level drug dealer that no-one knows his name – and neither does the audience. He’s planning to pull off one last deal before early retirement. No surprise when it all goes terribly pear-shaped.

To offload a shipment of ecstasy, our main man has to deal with crooks further up the drug food chain than he’s used to. Enter Jimmy Price, played by Kenneth Cranham, an unattractive dealer in every sense of the word. Of course, that leads to dealing with an even more unattractive mobster even further up the food chain, Eddie Temple, played by Michael Gambon (it’s hard to believe he played the loveable Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter). Oddly enough, they don’t want one of their best dealers simply retiring. Go figure.

(There is one notable exception on the ugly front, the gorgeous Sienna Miller – who’s more famous for being engaged to Jude Law than for her acting – has a small part as the hero’s love interest. Her role is tiny but then so is her lingerie. One for the fellas.)

Add to that a drug deal gone wrong in Holland and a pissed-off Slavic hitman and the viewer is left with a lot of action that turns out to be smart, funny and ugly.

Just the way it should be.

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Madagascar
Released: June 16, 2005
Rated: PG
3 stars
Whenever I hear DreamWorks has a new animated movie, I hope for a Shrek. I always forget that DreamWorks also made the disappointing A Shark’s Tale. Madagascar falls into the second category. It’s not a multi-leveled family film that adults can get a kick out of too. This one is for the kiddies.

The animation is reliably impressive and the story has a lesson, so as a film for ankle-biters it’s fine. It’s the tale of a group of animals from the New York Zoo. Alex the Lion (voiced by Ben Stiller) is living it large on steak and adoration from his fans. His friends include Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) who wants to break free, Melman the hypochondriac Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the streetwise Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith).

Marty leads a break-out of the zoo in search of adventure and they all get caught and sent to Africa. But on the way they get shipwrecked in Madagascar. They have no idea how to act in the wild. It’s like Survivor for accountants. They stumble across a colony of lemurs ruled by the amusing King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his right-paw-man Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer). Insert musical number here.

Trouble is brewing (or should that be stomachs are grumbling?) because Alex the Lion misses his daily steak fix. He’s a meat-eater. He starts seeing Marty the Zebra as food. Alex even tries to take a bite out of Marty’s butt. I can only assume forcing the kiddies to confront the dynamics of the food chain is the reason for the
PG rating.

There’s a great running-gag involving a pack of plotting penguins that act like elite special forces soldiers and a funny re-enactment of an American Beauty scene. But that’s it for the grown ups. So if you are a non-breeder who has to take someone else’s bin-lids to the movies, Madagascar is non-offensive and slightly amusing. But that’s it.
They can’t all be Shrek.

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Oyster Farmer
Released: June 30, 2005
Rated: M
3 stars
From the very first shot you can tell Oyster Farmer is using the scenery as another character in the film. It shows the Hawkesbury River as a stunning yet isolated place to live. And the people who live and work on her banks have to cope with its ebbs and flows.

Oyster Farmer is a gentle movie about a young guy (played by Alex O’Lachlan) who escapes a pain-filled life by working with an eccentric community of, you guessed it, oyster farmers. His love interest (played by Diana Glenn) is a local who grew up in the area but longs for the trappings of city life – like fabulous shoes.

Both have secrets. And yet both are drawn together. There’s stealing, lying and jumping to conclusions. O’Lachlan is handsome in a typically Aussie way and brings the right amount of depth to his character Jack to show just how uncomfortable he is in his own skin. Glenn captures a naivety you’d expect from someone brought up in those conditions. Both play true Aussies without falling into parody.

The standout role is Brownie (played by David Field). He’s a weather-beaten farmer battling a temperamental crop of oysters. Field is best known for his performance as Bob Hawke in A Night We Called It A Day, but I think this is some of his finest acting yet. His estranged wife (played by Kerry Armstrong) is sexy and strong but ultimately under-utilised.

The trouble with the film is that the story line meanders along like the Hawkesbury River. There isn’t enough drama. Too much is left unsaid; each sub-plot needs more guts. Yes, Oyster Farmer feels like a film about real people, but as we all know, real life can be a tad boring.

I wouldn’t recommend rushing to the cinema to see it, but if you’re looking for a rainy night DVD selection it would be a comfortable choice. Perhaps with a half-dozen Sydney Rocks on the side.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: June 05, AU Edition

ORBIT OR OBIT?
There’s a lot of talk of space tourism after Spaceship One, but not much about the risk, says Pat Sheil

So a privately-funded manned flight has finally made it into space. Some see it as the greatest breakthrough in transportation technology since the Wright Brothers. Others deride it as the ultimate toy for the obscenely rich – the most expensive roller coaster ride of all time.

The reality of Spaceship One and the much-heralded dawn of commercial space flight lies somewhere between these two caricatures. These sub-orbital hybrid rocket planes are technically brilliant machines which serve no real purpose other than to break records and impress the socks off techno-heads. And just possibly make money – not as serious working vehicles, but as the wildest fairground ride ever to make it from the drawing board to the ticket booth.

Spaceship One is the brainchild of radical aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan. Radical? Well, a spaceship powered by burning rubber in compressed laughing gas has to qualify as an extreme machine, but it works. Rutan’s team claimed the US$10 million X Prize in September by being the first re-usable piloted vehicle to reach space twice in a fortnight.

The prize was established in 1995 by a group of space enthusiasts and business groups in St. Louis in an attempt to kick-start commercial space flight, in much the same way that the funding of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis 1927 trans-Atlantic flight encouraged investment in aviation through the 1930s. The twice-in-a-fortnight stipulation was made to guarantee that the winning craft was genuinely re-usable.

Spaceship One’s victory was not exactly a commercial triumph in itself, given that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen poured twice the prize’s value into the project. But ever since, the hype merchants have been letting the world know that the age of affordable private space travel has finally arrived.

The boosters have now gone into overdrive with the announcement by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson of the formation of his new ‘spaceline’, Virgin Galactic, which is already taking expressions of interest from hundreds of well-heeled space cadets for the first commercial flights.

Branson talks of a son-of-Spaceship One, a craft already being designed, which will carry five passengers instead of two, and blast thrill seekers into the void for as little as US$200,000. Incredibly, he says that this could all be up and running as soon as 2007.

That mightn’t sound like a cheap ticket for a four hour journey into space, but by today’s aerospace standards that’s exactly what it is. Branson estimates that there are at least 3,000 people in the world with a lazy 200 grand lying around and a hankering for a few minutes of zero-G, more than enough to make to make the project workable.

However you cut the numbers, space tourism is certainly cheaper than it was – the first billionaire to ride in space as a paying customer, Dennis Tito, paid around $US20 million to the Russians for the experience in 2001. Tito made a fortune with the finance company he founded after leaving NASA in the 1960s, and while he was the 415th person in space, he was, at 60 years of age, the first paying customer.

Hardly a cheap ticket, but Tito spent days in actual orbit, 300 kilometers up, on the International Space Station. Branson’s rocket planes will reach 100 kilometers – the official if somewhat arbitrary boundary of space – and fall back to earth without getting anywhere near earth orbit. (This is what the X-15 rocket planes of the ‘60s managed to achieve before they were abandoned in favour of the moon program’s heavy multi-stage booster rockets and the space shuttle. Still, you do get the zero-G experience, and the view’s pretty good from 100 kilometers…)

The view was also pretty good for another bunch of wealthy thrill seekers on May 6, 1937, as they approached Lakehurst, New Jersey, aboard what was then considered the grooviest, hippest travel experience on earth. Thirty-five seconds after an orange glow was spotted near the tail section, the Hindenburg, and the age of the airship, lay in a twisted pile of flaming wreckage, only two hundred metres from the landing mast.

It’s hard to imagine that the consequences of a fatal accident on a Virgin Galactic jaunt would be much different. Unlike commercial aviation, space joy rides have no utility, and thus a very low level of acceptable risk.

And just because they’re the ones taking the risk, does that make it OK for wealthy adventurers to blast themselves holus-bolus into the ionosphere? Ferris wheels that collapse aren’t acceptable. What’s the difference, apart from the scale of the ride? Part of the problem is that when space shots fail, they can fail spectacularly, and come down just about anywhere.

The nub of the problem was simply expressed by Senator Bart Gordon of the US Senate’s Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee in July last year. Industry representatives had appeared before the Committee to insist that the US Government indemnify the industry against such disasters. ‘Commercial human space flight may be an idea whose time is about to come,’ said Gordon.

‘However, if it is to succeed, industry and government need to enter into a serious dialogue on the issues of appropriate safety standards and the extent to which it is appropriate for the Government to indemnify the companies against the consequences of launch accidents.’
In other words, ‘We’re none to sure about all this - leave it with us for a while.’

One-time exo-tourist Dennis Tito suggested to the committee that once there had been several sub-orbital launches, that would be sufficient to establish a ‘record of safety’. The committee was dubious about this.

Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace is a possible Virgin Galactic competitor, as are a few of the twenty-odd teams who originally registered as X-Prize competitors and are still working on their launch systems. Greason unintentionally revealed the cavalier nature of the industry’s approach to safety when he breezily reassured the senators that ‘it’s safe enough when customers start showing up’.

Branson’s web site is unclear as to the insurance arrangements for Virgin Galactic, though it appears at this stage that he’s hoping to get away with a simple passenger waiver of all rights against Virgin in case of mayhem. Whether such a document would stand up in court, against the well-advised relatives of very rich victims, is another thing entirely.

The Canadian da Vinci team, who had hoped to snare the X-prize with their Wild Fire rocket, came up against this very problem – as well as a few technical hitches – last month when their Government baulked at indemnifying them against launch accidents. It’s not just the passengers and crew, either. They can take their chances, but ploughing a crippled spaceship into a crowded shopping mall is a different thing entirely.

Nonetheless, there is a sense of inevitably about all of this. Spaceship One has proved that it can be done, and when it comes to new technology, nine times out of ten that means it will be done, in one form or another. And if the International Space Station manages to justify its multi-billion dollar price tag on the waffly argument that we must ‘maintain a human presence in space’ (as George W. Bush puts it), taxpayers will probably be happy to see the work contracted out to private operators if they can do it at a fraction of the cost.
In the hope of long-term budget relief, NASA will next year announce its own version of the X-prize, the Centennial Challenges, which will make awards of up to $20 million for private companies who first achieve feats like robotic moon landings and asteroid sample-return missions.

The Centennial Challenge program manager Brant Sponberg said recently that the agency would have to get approval from Congress first.
‘We can only make awards of up to $250,000 at the moment. Starting next year we hope to have legislative authority to award purses above this level.’

There are politicians in the United States who want NASA to make big money available for private projects. One senator on the Science, Technology and Space Committee, Republican Sam Brownback, is proposing that NASA award $200 million for the first private manned orbiting mission – a lot more than the $10 million X Prize for sub-orbital flights, and a good indication of the work private launch operators have to do before they break into the big time.

But whatever the financial incentives, and no matter how careful the players and strict the rules, inevitably, over time, there will be accidents. It’s just a matter of whether they are bad enough to stop one or two spacecraft, or bad enough to kill an industry.

Engineers and legislators received a salutary reminder of this on October 15 this year. The Chinese had announced that an unmanned test shot of the FSW-20 ‘recoverable satellite’ had ended successfully. By this they meant that the capsule had been retrieved. They didn’t - at first - admit that it had crashed into a four storey apartment building in the town of Daying, miraculously without loss of life, as all the residents were off shopping at the local market.

No real harm done to the Chinese space program, either. But Richard Branson, and those who come after him, won’t be running the Chinese space program.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: June 05, AU Edition

CALL BAITING
Mobile phone phishers will always have Paris, writes Chris Cobb. Will they have you too?

Paris Hilton may have unwittingly provided us a glimpse of a new technology menace when telephone numbers from her personal address book appeared on the Internet in February, after her mobile phone was apparently hacked.

It appears as though she may have company in the not-too-distant future, Internet security experts say.

The proliferation of ‘smart’ phones, which are mobile phones with the brains of a personal computer, means users increasingly will confront the same risks as desktop and laptop Web surfers and e-mailers – including spam, worms, viruses and phishing.

Phishing, an e-mail ploy to trick computer users into revealing personal data such as credit-card numbers and passwords, has grown dramatically in the past year to become the scourge of the wired world.

The number of phishing messages jumped dramatically in the second half of last year – 300 percent to 1,000 percent by various counts – and the total continues to grow, says Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering for Symantec Security Response, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of anti-virus software and other security products.

The cost of phishing scams to consumers and corporations – estimated by one expert at several billion dollars – is hard to determine precisely because financial institutions are reluctant to provide such sensitive data, but phishing is on the increase and becoming more sophisticated.

‘The low-hanging fruit has been swept up’, Huger says, ‘but people are having success at it. More people are coming into the game.’
Phishing hasn’t shown itself to be a serious threat yet on mobile phones, but it may be just a matter of time.

‘As more financial applications, like shopping and banking, become accessible on mobile phones, they will be targeted by hackers,‘ says Stephen Cobb, a St. Augustine, Fla., information-security expert and author.

Along with the threat of phishing, mobile phone users likely will have to deal with worms and viruses, which could steal private information, delete files or worse, experts said.

‘It hasn’t happened yet, but when it hits it, it could hit spectacularly’, says Richard Ford, a research professor at the Center for Information Assurance at Florida Institute of Technology.

‘One nasty cell-phone virus could bring down an entire network.’

One bright spot is the diversity of operating systems in the smart-phone arena. Unlike the PC world, where Microsoft Windows is the dominant OS, the mobile sector is home to several distinct OS.

‘That makes it more challenging for hackers’, says Philip Marshall, an analyst for the Yankee Group, a tech research firm. ‘They can’t attack as many systems with a single virus. They have to modify the virus for different phones.’

Wireless-industry officials said steps are being taken to try to head off such problems.

‘We’ve learned from all the worm and virus attacks on PCs, and we’re aware of what can happen,’ said Eric McGee, spokeswoman for Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group.

‘The problem will get worse before it gets better’, says Stephen Cobb.

‘The consumer has been sold the Web as a wonderful place to bank, shop and meet with friends, but without appropriate disclaimers as to the dangers.’

‘Phishers exist off the gullibility of the average user.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

DVDs: Feb 05

BEFORE SUNSET,
M, 77 Minutes
What if you had a second chance with the one that got away? This is the tagline of this film, the sequel to the 1995 cult hit Before Sunrise. In Before Sunrise, two strangers met on a train and end up spending a night and exploring the after-hours of Vienna together. Before parting they swear to meet up six months later.

Nine years have passed since that morning.

Now, in Before Sunset, on the last stop of his book tour, at the tail end of a reading in a Paris book shop, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) finds Celine (Julie Delpy) watching from the back of the room. She lives in Paris now, he in New York. He’s flying out that evening. Will he make the most of the few hours he has with her? Why did they not meet up six-months later like they both promised?

Before Sunrise illustrated the intoxicating promise of youth and romance, meeting strangers on a train and then spending hours talking about love and life under the stars, and Before Sunset carries on exploring these promises. The director, Richard Linklater (School of Rock, Dazed and Confused) has an almost casual disregard for the usual imperatives of screenwriting the result being this film feels so ‘real life’, we feel as if we are the fly-on-the-wall watching two people re-connecting after nine years in such an unexpected, unrehearsed way. Jesse and Celine are perhaps the archetypal male/female making it very easy for their thoughts to resonate deeply with our own. Linklater gives his characters as chance that we rarely get in real life but he does give us the chance to carry on exploring these two characters thus exploring ourselves.

Special Features: Behind the Scenes of Before Sunset, Theatrical Trailer

Final Word: Gorgeous; an absolutely honest and beautiful depiction of the nature of relationships and of love lost and found. If this film slipped by you in 2004, watch Before Sunrise then you’ll just have to see this sequel.

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COFFEE & CIGARETTES,
M, 96 Minutes
Director Jim Jarmusch went out looking for “something different” and he found it. Coffee and Cigarettes, shot over the course of a 17-year period is a collection of eleven short films, vignettes, based around the seemingly insignificant acts of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. In the first short film, Strange to Meet You, Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni discuss the benefits of cigarettes and coffee; Somewhere in California, Iggy Pop timidly tries to befriend Tom Waits, who decides that he can have a cigarette because he just quit. In Cousins Cate Blanchett delivers a brilliant dual-role performance, playing both her Hollywood superstar self as well as her bitter cousin. One of the most comic short films is Delirium, in which Rappers Rza and Gza (Wu-Tang Clan) discover that Bill Murray is a coffee addict, and they use their expertise to preach to him the benefits of alternative medicine. Despite the huge diversity of characters/actors used in these films; from rock ‘n’ rollers Jack and Meg White to familiar faces like Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett, Jarmusch succeeds in building a poetic conclusion to these pieces.

Being shot in black-and-white really does imbue this film with a certain artistic quality – snippets of real life that have become art: A tribute to the art of conversation and the joys and addictions of life.

Special Features: Interview, Featurette, Deleted Scenes, Theatrical Trailer.

Final Word: If you’re looking for a one-of-kind slightly eccentric watch, then this is the DVD for you.

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ANGELS IN AMERICA,
337 Minutes
In this screen adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, director Mike Nichols captures New York City in the 1980’s; a city where Aids is just beginning to surface and its inhabitants trying to navigate their way to somewhere: Some world where everyday life doesn’t seem so impossible. This is certainly the desire for Prior Walter who is abandoned by his tormented lover Louis, or the pill-popping Harper (Mary-Louis Parker) who is on the verge of losing her sanity when she realizes that her husband, Joe (Patrick Wilson), is a closet homosexual.

Other characters include a deluded lawyer Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) who is frequently visited by Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), a woman he helped to condemn, and who now wants revenge.

Although brilliantly acted (Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson lead an all-star cast) and wonderfully poetic dialogue, at six hours of viewing it really does go on and on.

Special Features: None

Final Word: The Themes this mini-series certainly doesn’t shy away from, most notably Aids, Homosexuality and Politics are not ones that everybody would choose to be exposed to for six hours.

Angels in America does however showcase some of the best script writing and screen performances our TV sets have afforded us for a long time.

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DENNIS THE MENACE,
PG, 96 Minutes
It is impossible to forget the 5-year old with his slingshot and dog Ruff: Dennis the Menace. This Special Edition 10th Anniversary release of the much loved, though critically loathed, adaptation of Hank Ketcham’s comic strip and TV Series is back to remind us just how much fun it is to be a kid.

Dennis Mitchell (Mason Gamble) is no menace to society, his intentions are always good it’s just…well… he always ends up wrecking havoc and challenging the sanity of his neighbour Mr Wilson (Walter Matthau). The advent of the shady stranger Switchblade Sam, who is brilliantly played by Christopher Lloyd, unleashes Dennis’s prankish nature and this 5-year old isn’t captive for long.

Special Features: Featurettes: A Menace Named Dennis, Behind the Scenes, Memories of a Menace (Interviews), Theatrical Trailer.

Final Word: For the “kids” (An elusive term that includes those who consider themselves still kids inside). Can’t get enough of Dennis the Menace? Have a watch of Dennis the Menace Strikes Again.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

X IN THE SUBURBS: Apr 05, AU Edition

X IN THE SUBURBS
Ecstasy and other party drugs used to be an import-only business. But now, home-grown gangs have figured out the trick to pill-making and are flooding the market with their goods. JAMES MORROW in Sydney and SHAUN DAVIES in Melbourne report on the growing drug industry in our own backyards

March 9, 2005: Federal agents stop a van traveling down the Hume Highway near the Victoria-New South Wales border. After arresting the two men on board – a 39-year-old Sydneysider and a 31-year-old Melburnian – cops find five 44-gallon drums of chemicals that can be used to make MDMA, or ecstasy. That night, armed with search warrants, police sweep through a number of suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne, including Pyrmont – an increasingly trendy and cashed-up inner-city neigbourhood which is also home to Sydney’s Star City Casino – and make several more arrests and seizures.

Amongst the cops’ haul for the evening: “proceeds of crime”,
including a 4WD Porsche Cayenne and a Lamborghini, as well as five more 44-gallon drums of what are known as “precursor chemicals”. According to the Australian Federal Police, “a conservative estimate of the MDMA pills capable of being produced from this amount of precursor is four million tablets, which has an estimated street value of $160 million”. But while the AFP was quick to trumpet this “largest-ever seizure” of precursor chemicals, the bust only scratched the surface of a growing trade in so-called “party drugs”: MDMA (better known as ecstasy), as well as GHB, methamphetamine, the animal tranquilizer ketamine, and a variety of other chemicals that are increasingly popular with Australian youth. According to figures published in 2001 by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, one in five Australians between ages 20 and 29 had tried ecstasy – numbers that experts agree has only gone up in the four years since.

Fast-forward to Melbourne, the following week. On Sunday night of the Labour Day long weekend in Melbourne, the dance floor at Revolver, one of the city’s best-known clubs, is packed with sweaty bodies. It is well past midnight and you’d expect the pulsing electronic music to be driving the crowd into a frenzy. But the atmosphere is actually quite subdued: most dancers are only swinging their arms in time to the beat, and some of them are barely moving their feet at all.

It may be that the crowd is not enjoying the DJ, but an equally likely explanation is that a batch of “smacky” pills has been doing the rounds. A “smacky” pill generally contains some MDMA, but it’s adulterated with another drug, usually ketamine or heroin, which leaves users in a stupor. Contrary to commonly held ideas, not all pills sold as ecstasy drive users to all-night dancing and potentially fatal dehydration.

Some of the drug users in Revolver are easy to spot. One young clubber, dressed in low-slung jeans and a trucker’s cap, has obviously overindulged. He stumbles about the club with a slack jaw and a faraway look in his eyes, disorientated and seemingly unsure of where to put himself. Eventually he collapses on a couch in the corner of the room with his legs splayed out, rolls his head back and stares at the ceiling.

But most of the people who have taken ecstasy are more in control, and to spot them you have to know what to look for. Furious chewing is one clue: ecstasy makes users grind their teeth incessantly, and users chew gum to prevent aching jaw muscles the next morning. Another sure sign is excited hugging and sloppy smiling – ecstasy’s empathetic qualities give users a seemingly uncontrollable urge to tell anyone within earshot just how amazing it is to be alive.

Ecstasy comes on in a rush. About 40 minutes after swallowing a pill, your body and brain are consumed with overwhelming pleasure: this is the strongest part of the trip and users refer to it as “peaking”. After about an hour the intensity of the trip will decrease slightly, although the effects won’t really start to wear off until a good three or four hours later.

The comedown is difficult and many users will take multiple pills over the course of an evening to prolong the rush and put off the inevitable.

Those who use ecstasy regularly agree that in the past six months the market has been flooded with high-quality ecstasy. The pills are purer now, which means longer and better peaks and easier comedowns. Users have become pickier and local drug manufacturers, it seems, have been rushing to meet this demand.

ONE PILL, TWO PILL, RED PILL, TRUE BLUE PILL
The Hume Highway bust, and several others over the past year (none of which have made a dent in supply on the street, incidentally), lends further credence to the theory that ready-made ecstasy is no longer being imported on the scale it once was, and that instead, domestic gangs are now bringing in just the ingredients and manufacturing it themselves. This was hinted at in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency report last year which noted that, “There also have been several large-scale 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), a.k.a. Ecstasy, laboratory seizures in the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas. The chemicals seized at these MDMA laboratories originated from locations throughout Southeast Asia. Australian law enforcement and customs officials are also seizing increasing amounts of sassafras oil being smuggled through various ports-of-entry, such as Sydney and Melbourne. Sassafras oil produces safrole, which can be used as a precursor chemical in the manufacture of MDMA”.

Or, as an ecstasy user calling himself Zaki put it recently, “I think Australia has stepped up to the mark and shown we are not only good at swimming, cricket [and] rugby. We are now among the best in good, clean and therefore harm-minimising MDMA production”.

The amount of harm MDMA does is another question (see
below), but the fact remains that no matter how many busts the police make, ecstasy prices remain stable at around $30 to $40 a hit, and there is never any shortage of supply in the dance clubs of any of the capital cities.

“The market is so big, and we know that there are lots of different ways that pills are getting here”, says Johnboy Davidson. “We’ll see big busts, you know, three million pills or something like that, and still supply won’t be affected.” Davidson is the spokesman for Bluelight, an Australian website that has grown to be the biggest online drugs forum in the world. A public advocate for the principles of harm minimisation, Davidson is careful not to paint himself as a wild-eyed libertarian of the “legalize it” stripe, but rather calls for a more “realistic approach” to drug use in Australia. According to Davidson, the international ecstasy trade began in earnest in the 1990s but, until recently, Australian drug traffickers haven’t had the means to make their own product. “The Golden Triangle states switched over from heroin to methamphetamine production in the ‘90s, and then they switched over to MDMA as well,” he says. “A lot of the supply routes came through Indonesia. There used to be a triangular trade from Europe, across Indonesia, and into Australia, but then it became more smugglers from China or Thailand bringing drugs into Australia via Indonesia. Oddly enough, the trade in Indonesia is run by a lot of African and even Israeli gangsters.”

Today, however, some of the best ecstasy on the market is thought to be home-grown, and in the past six months to eight months, the Australian market has been flooded with high-quality MDMA and other pills. Ecstasy is given street names according to the colour of the pills and the type of logo that is stamped on them: Red and green Mitsubishis (red or green pills with the Mitsubishi automaker’s logo stamped on them), yellow doves, red Rolexes and red Russians have all been popular on the market lately and, according to those who take them, these drugs are more pure than anything they’ve had for years.

For Australian drug traffickers to make their own ecstasy takes both expertise – about equivalent to that of a third-year university chemistry student – and equipment, including precursor chemicals and a pill-pressing machine. It is this second item that, experts say, is one of the hardest and most dangerous tools of the trade to come up with.

“Pill presses are a monitored thing and you can’t buy one without a very good reason…having one is like printing money, and it’s one of those things that can get ripped off as well”, says Davidson, who makes a gun with his fingers and demonstrates what can happen if a rival crew hears about the existence of a pill machine. “Most of them would be only about the size of a washing machine. There was a bust three or four years ago somewhere in a block of flats in inner-city Melbourne where a neighbour complained about a guy who had his clothes-dryer on all night. So the landlord looked in, realised what it was, and told the cops. Then a full production lab was busted”.

So who was behind the Hume Highway bust? Cops are tight-lipped, not wanting to compromise their investigation. But speculation is that with the bust taking place near Wodonga, a small town that is also home to several motorcycle gangs and a crime rate far higher than similarly-sized Australian communities, one crew may have heard about a rival’s shipment and ratted it out to the police. More telling, though, is that the amounts involved show a far greater ability of Australian drug peddlers to acquire the chemicals needed to make their own MDMA, rather than purchasing pills or powder from overseas. Says Davidson, “a tonne of precursors is…an astonishing amount.

We’d only thought people were making small batches, maybe ten to twenty kilograms at a time, but this really gives you an idea of
the market”.

THE STING IN THE TAIL
With demand so high, it is clear that even with a ten-fold increase in resources, the police would be hard-pressed to make much of a dent in the local market for party. The urgent question thus becomes, are there chickens that will come home to roost from an entire generation’s chemical bender, or is a young person’s going out to a dance club and popping a few pills occasionally no more dangerous than him or her having a really big night at the pub? In the short term, the latter is probably correct: on any given weekend night, far more emergency department admissions will be made as a result of alcohol and the behaviours it inspires than as a result of MDMA or other party drugs.

“Drugs are always going to be a major factor in presentations at emergency departments, both for hyperventilation and dehydration as well as for people who might have had some underlying psychiatric problem”, says Dr. Bob Batey, a clinical advisor at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre. “With that said, it’s probably a minority of users who show up. At the moment, except for the people who show up with acute medical consequences – which are often a one-off – we don’t have much long-term data.”

While this may seem to give ecstasy a reason-ably clean bill of health, or at least place it somewhere in the shouldn’t-have-had-that-last-Bundy area of youthful overindulgence, Batey cautions that it’s still early, so the full effects of the drug are still not yet known. And while he says that ecstasy definitely leads to structural changes in the brain and has problems associated with long-term depression, “we need more information before saying anything dogmatic about
the substance”.

Still, “people who say that pure MDMA is harmless are most probably wrong”, says University of Sydney psychpharmacologist Dr. Iain McGregor, who explains that ecstasy works by flooding the brain with the neurotransmitter serotonin – a chemical that not only regulates mood, but is also thought to help memory and thinking skills. (Prozac and other anti-depressants in its class work specifically by preventing serotonin from being reabsorbed into the brain. This is why it not only works as a treatment for depression, but also explains the so-called “Prozac effect”, in which some healthy patients who take the drug report both improved mood as well as sharper thinking and greater overall brain function). “Ecstasy may cause a surge in serotonin, but there is a sting in the tail: for weeks or months you may have lowered levels, and in the days after a binge, there is a documented depression”, he says – a well-documented phenomenon amongst users, known as “suicide Tuesday”. “Studies we’ve done in our lab here have found that if we give lab rats ecstasy regularly for three months they wind up with anxiety and poorer memory. Additional, if you’ve taken a huge amount of ecstasy and really knock down your serotonin levels, they may never recover to where they were before”. Further weight to the ecstasy-depression link was uncovered recently by researchers at Cambridge University in England, who found that in people with certain genetic make-ups, MDMA could cause an increase in depressive symptoms.
But the bigger danger is mixing drugs, or worse, taking unknown substances such as “smacky” pills – a message Davidson has been preaching for ages. If you have to take something, says McGregor, “you’re better off with pure MDMA if you know that’s what it is. It’s certainly a lot better than methamphetamine [which is often sold as ecstasy], which has a different sort of toxicity. We see a lot of real problems when meth and MDMA are combined, especially by accident, because there is a real exaggerated toxicity”.

Perhaps the most sobering words for ecstasy users come from Dr. Batey, who points out that “like cannabis ten years ago, we didn’t think it was going to be a big problem, but anything that is altering the neurotransmitter system causes real concern
for long-term potential damage”: a lot of people may be able to come through their experiences unscathed, but for users prone to depression or other psychological ailments, there could be a lot of agony after the ecstasy.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

Nov 05, AU Edition

THE KYOTO CONSPIRACY
How Enron hyped global warming for profit

Amidst all the talk about the benefits that Kyoto Protocol is supposed to promote, it is perhaps forgotten especially amongst the greenies how Kyoto was born in the corridors of very big business. The name Enron has all but faded from the newspapers since the company went down in flames in 2001 amidst charges of fraud, bribery, price fixing and graft, and the jailing of founder and chairman Ken Lay. But without Enron there would have been no Kyoto Protocol.

It all started about 20 years ago when Enron was owner-operator of an interstate network of natural gas pipelines that had transformed itself into a billion-dollar-a-day commodity trader, buying and selling contracts and their derivatives to deliver natural gas, electricity, internet bandwidth – whatever. The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments authorized the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency to put a cap on how much pollutant the operator of a fossil-fueled plant was allowed to emit. So, in the early 1990s Enron helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, the EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s proposed carbon credit trading scheme. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.

All this led to the inevitable question, what next? How about a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program? The problem was that CO2 is not a pollutant, and therefore the EPA had no authority to cap its emissions. When Al Gore became Vice President under Bill Clinton in 1993, he quickly became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental regulatory regime. He led a US initiative to review new projects around the world and issue ‘credits’ of so many tons of annual CO2 emission reduction. Under law a ‘tradable’ system was required, which was exactly what Enron also wanted – remember, they were already trading pollutant credits. Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars – $990,000 to be exact – to green group The Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to ‘reduce’ global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem was in place the solution would be trotted out.

Around this time a lawyer named Christopher Horner was hired who had worked in Connecticut Senator Joseph Liebermann’s Environment Committee. Horner, employed by Enron, became director of relations with the Federal Government. That was in 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was drafted. According to Homer, on the second day at the job he was told that the number one objective was to obtain an international treaty that would impose cuts in CO2 emissions, but at the same time allow the trading of emission rights. Enron was the second-biggest natural gas producer in the world, behind Russia’s Gazprom. Enron was making a lot of money trading with coal, but they had already calculated that the profits they would lose with coal would be more than compensated by the profits derived from its privileged position in other areas. With clever positioning and anticipation Enron had bought the world’s biggest wind power company, GE Wind, from General Electric. They now also owned the biggest solar power company in the world, in society with Amoco (now belonging to British Petroleum – BP). Enron then started to finance everything related to the global warming hype, including grants to scientists – but asking for results favorable to their interest – ‘proof’ that humans were responsible for the excessive emissions of CO2 through fossil fuel burning. The fire of malaise, now lit and kindled, only required feeding.

The expressive term ‘Baptist-bootlegger’ derives from the days of prohibition. Under prohibition bootleggers and those who transported and supplied illegal alcohol made fortunes. One such entrepreneur was Joseph P. Kennedy whose second son, John, became US President in 1961. The bootleggers had allies in the Baptists and other teetotalists, who believed that alcohol was a deadly threat to the social order, and had worked for decades to get prohibition onto the statute books. The Baptists provided the political cover and the bootleggers pocketed the proceeds. In public the two groups maintained a great social distance from each other. Now Enron had positioned itself at the centre of an awesome Baptist-bootlegger coalition. The gargantuan rents which Enron energetically sought could be realized only if the Kyoto Protocol became established as part of US and international law. Ken Lay saw that Enron could not only make billions from sales of the natural gas which was to displace coal as the preferred fuel under the Kyoto commitments, but that as the main (if not the only) international and domestic trader in the new barter world of carbon credits, could realise hitherto unimagined wealth. Such credits, of course, would only become bankable pieces of paper if governments, particularly the US Government, established and policed a global policy of decarbonisation under which a global tax on carbon was to be enforced.
As the movement to establish the Kyoto Protocol developed momentum, it was necessary for Ken Lay to build up alliances with the green movement, including Greenpeace. A 1998 letter, signed by Lay and a few other bigwigs asked President Clinton, in essence, to harm the reputations and credibility of scientists who argued that global warming was an overblown issue because these individuals were standing in Enron’s way. The letter, dated 1 September, asked the president to shut off the public scientific debate on global warming, which despite furious attempts by the green lobby continues to this day. In particular, it requested Clinton to moderate the political aspects of this discussion by appointing a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission. The purpose of this commission was clear – high-level trashing of dissident scientists. Setting up a panel to do this was simple; just look at the recent issue of Scientific American where four attack dogs were called out to chew up Bjorn Lomborg. He had the audacity to publish The Skeptic Environmentalist which demonstrated that global warming fears were overblown, and that the Earth is in much better shape than popularly believed. David Bellamy, the world’s foremost environmentalist also stepped out of line with his widely-distributed article, ‘Global Warming? What a load of old Poppycock.’
In the same way Galileo was forced to publicly utter that the moon had no effect on tides, so Bellamy under pressure backtracked on some of his claims.

Enron commissioned its own internal study of global warming science. It turned out to be largely in agreement with the same scientists that Enron was trying to shut up. After considering all of the inconsistencies in climate science, the report concluded: ‘The very real possibility is that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed.’ One of Enron’s major consultants in that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, who started the whole global warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic congressional testimony.

Recently he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicting exactly the same inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50 years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag. They were a decade ahead of NASA. True to its plan, Enron never made its own findings public, self-censoring them while it pleaded with the Bush administration for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions that it could broker. That pleading continues today – the remnant-Enron still views global warming regulation as the straw that will raise it from its corporate oblivion. Some greenie campaigning in America is still directed from this source. On July 7, 2004, Kenneth Lay was indicted by a federal grand jury for his involvement in the scandal.

‘Enron stood to profit millions from global warming energy-trading schemes’, said Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association and American Coal Coalition. The investigation into the collapse of Enron reveals much more about the intricacies of the Baptist-bootlegger coalition which was promoting the Kyoto cause within the Republican Party and US business circles. Coal-burning utilities would have had to pay billions for permits because they emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That would have encouraged closing coal plants in favor of natural gas or other kinds of power plants, driving up prices for those alternatives. Enron, along with other key energy companies in the so-called Clean Power Group: El Paso Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine – would make money both coming and going – from selling permits and then their own energy at higher prices. If the Kyoto Protocol were ratified and in full force, experts estimated that Americans would lose between $100 billion and $400 billion each year. Additionally, between 1 and 3.5 million jobs could be lost. That means that each household could lose an average of up to $6,000 each year. That is a lot to ask of Americans just so large energy companies can pocket millions from a regulatory scheme. Moreover, a cost of $400 billion annually makes Enron’s current one-time loss of $6 billion look like pocket change. Little wonder Americans and the incoming Bush administration did not want a bar of it.

One needs look no further than New Zealand to see what a disaster the Kyoto Protocol would be in practice. In NZ, the Labour government was forced to agree to the Kyoto Protocol because the Alliance Party self-destructed and Labour needed the Greens for support. The cost of that support was agreement to anti-GE legislation and the Kyoto Protocol. Labour could see that the GE debate had no financial return, but the carbon credit trading game looked much more promising.

Positive credit-trading with all our trees acting as CO2 sinks made politicians see dollar signs. But just as Enron came unstuck mired in financial ruin and scandal, so too is the Kyoto Protocol set to ruin economies and bring down governments and any players foolish enough to be taken in – indeed, it almost brought down Helen Clark at the last election. Enron collapsed in a quagmire of bribery, misinformation, energy price manipulation and the use of political connections to exert pressure on energy boards. Anything connected to the Kyoto Protocol will turn out to be good money after bad, because a scheme instigated by half-truths and hype must eventually collapse under the weight of the spin of its own cover-up. The half-billion dollar debt clean and green New Zealand now owes major polluters like Russia could be just the beginning.

In 2002 Helen Clark said ‘Climate change is a global problem...the Kyoto Protocol is the international community’s response to climate change and New Zealand is playing its part’. This contrasted strongly with Enron’s own internal report expressing doubt that global warming was real. It is hard to accept that Clark, and Kyoto’s boosters in Australia and around the world, do not know that the Protocol only became real because of a bunch of corporate crooks. Real problems are the gullibility of satellite western economies, the dangers of being the tail of giant corporate dogs and the perceived need to appease the EU for trade deals. Global warming itself does not even get a look in.
Despite all the handwringing and increasingly desperate hysteria, where global warming is concerned there has been a failure to force this paranoid religion onto the world. Since the Rio Conference in 1992, the greens have tried using the threat of global warming to induce Protestant guilt in us all, to cap growth, to change lifestyles, to attack the car, industry and the Great Satan of America. They have lost. Only schoolchildren remain rich fodder willing to believe it is up to them now to Save The World, which hasn’t needed saving one iota during the last 4,000,000,000 years or it wouldn’t still be here. Now it is surely time to face the facts: there isn’t a snowflake-in-hell’s chance of global warming altering real life. But the failure of the greens is not just with the public. While playing the climate-change card at the G8 Summit, the final Gleneagles’ declaration shows that the leaders of the developed world have no intention of sacrificing growth and economic success for an ascetic global warming religion. To quote Michael McCarthy, the environment editor of the Independent: ‘The failed agenda that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wide Fund for Nature and others were complaining of – that the US has still not agreed to cut its carbon dioxide emissions – was the green groups’ own agenda, not the British government’s. At G8 the idea of capping greenhouse gas emissions was cleverly replaced by an emphasis on technological innovation and imaginative development. The Kyoto Protocol is effectively dead.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

Money, June 05, AU Edition

GOAL SCORING
Playing the market is still a good move – if you have your priorities in order

You would be forgiven for thinking that we are in the middle of a depression if you read the headlines on the newsstands: to hear the papers tell it, the share market is crashing and we all should be hording gold under our beds. Being a glass half-full sort of person, I wanted to investigate this a bit further and see if things are as bad as others are making out. Could the media possibly be talking the market down further? Perish the thought!

Over half of all adult Australians own shares either directly or indirectly through managed funds. This is a staggering figure when you think about it: more Australians own shares than don’t. It is not a secret club anymore and that means that share ownership now seems much more safe and secure given the wide spread of equity within Australian families. More importantly, Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) research reveals that most small investors remain loyal to the shares that they own. So, in racing parlance, it seems that shares, in general, are a safe bet. The question remains, of course, as to how exactly to place one’s bets. I’m no Clarence the Clocker but let’s look at the share market race.

WHERE TO FIRST?
The first step you need to take to take before you even open the finance pages of your newspaper is to be SMART. Get a paper and pen…go on, do it now while you are reading this. Now write down your own personal vision, mission, and goals. I am not trying to sound like some sort of American motivational speaker, but all successful people in all walks of life will tell you they write down their goals – and no, keeping them in you head does not count. So let’s remind ourselves about what I am talking about:

Vision: This is a written statement of your fundamental aspirations, and purpose. Your vision usually appeals to your heart and not just your mind. This is your dream of where, and what, you want to be.

Mission: Your current purpose or reason for existing. Your raison d’etre, so to speak.

Goals: What you are committed to achieving? Your goals should enable the achievement of your mission and vision. More importantly, your goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-constrained (SMART). If your goals are not SMART then they are not goals.

Your written goals will set a framework and give you direction on how to approach your investment decisions. Do you want long term capital growth? How long term is long term? Do you want regular cash flow? Do you want positive or negative gearing? Do you want to be a million dollars richer in three, five or ten years? Remember, goals should be realistic. How speculative do you want to be? Do you want security or to live on the edge? Do you want to access cash in an emergency?

These are only some of the questions you need to answer in order to write down your SMART goals. Now if you think this is all a bit silly, remember: the common link between all successful and professional investors is that they write down their goals. It also requires you to better understand yourself and what your priorities are at the moment. If you already have a vision, mission, and goals written down, remember, it doesn’t stop there. They need to be reviewed and rewritten at least every twelve months.

GOING DOWN?
The share market at the moment is going through a ‘correction’, which is marketese for ‘it went too far in one direction and now it’s coming back a bit’. This is what I call the Pendulum Principle. Another definition of a ‘correction’ is ‘losing money quickly’. Always remember that you do not lose any money at all until you actually sell your shares. Until you sell, it is all just lines on paper.

So if we look at the current state of the All Ordinaries it is fair to say that we are on a downward tend – i.e., we are in a bear market.
So does that mean that times are grim and we head to the door screaming out ‘sell, sell, sell’? Well no, not really. In reality it means that there are bargains to be bought if you are careful and thoughtful in your selection of shares. Indeed, many people have made their fortunes as a result of their buying during a bear run.

Let’s look at things on a wider perspective: if you look at the All Ords going back to 1980 you will see that there have been many corrections, but also that the general trend is upward. Furthermore, after every downward spiral there has been a subsequent upward trend.

The trick with all of this is the selection of shares that you buy, and this is where I must cut out of this particular dance. There are many methods and many ‘experts’ that can advise on selection of specific shares. My own approach is methodical, mathematical, and painfully drawn out, but it has served me well. I will spend weeks or even months researching specific shares before I part with my hard-earned. In my opinion, the only way to select and build a share portfolio is to understand and look at all the performance indices and build a mixed portfolio that represents all sectors.

The one method that I can actively discourage is the ‘My uncle/friend/boss/milkman/second cousin twice-removed knows of a sure thing’.

As with horse racing, there is no such thing as a sure thing in the stock market. And like horse racing, for every hundred tips from people in the know only one usually comes good. Finally, like horse racing, you only hear about people’s winners and never their losses. The sharemarket is partly a gamble but that should not be the main driver in your decision process. The real secret is hard work and research.

My approach to the current climate is, first, don’t panic. And definitely don’t sell shares that you already own, unless there is a good reason to do so. My own opinion is that the harbingers of doom that declare the dream run is over and warn that we must prepare for a bumpy crash are looking exceptionally short term and have not fully evaluated the opportunities.

More importantly, treat a bear market as an opportunity. Do what the big boys do: look for bargains and analyse scientifically. John Mars (owner of the Mars Corporation, which claims to be the largest privately-owned company in the world) once said to me over dinner, ‘Son, if you want to be rich don’t do what everyone else does. When they buy, you sell. When they sell, you buy. And don’t waiver.’

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO...?
A bit of an update. For those that read my column in the April edition on the latest tricks used by credit card providers to turn your plastic into their gold: I gave a real life example of a Mr J who had been corresponding with the National Australia Bank to try and get some answers to some very reasonable questions about a problem with a credit card transaction. At time of writing he had exchanged twelve emails since last January, at a rate of about one a week. Most said that his questions were being escalated to the next level. The last email he received stated, ‘I have no details as to what your enquiry is about. Should you have any further queries do not hesitate to contact us’. Looks like he was escalated right out of the bank.

We will keep following the plight of Mr J because he himself is not going to let bureaucratic chicanery stop him from getting basic customer service. Watch this space. But have you had similar experiences to Mr J? Have you got so fed up with the run-around from your bank that you just gave up? Mr J’s experience with bureaucracies going into their corporate shell was with the National Australia Bank. What institutions have you dealt with that sacrificed basic customer service in favour of an attitude that says, ‘Work would be fulfilling if it weren’t for the customers’? If you do have any experiences that you would like to discuss, aired publicly, or investigated a bit more, send me a letter with your story. Address it to: Peter Higgins, Money Editor, Investigate Magazine. PO Box 602 Bondi Junction NSW 1355, or e-mail australia@investigatemagazine.com.

Remember, you have nothing to lose except your Terms and Conditions Manuals.

See you around the traps.

ALL ORDINARIES (ALL ORDS)
The index is made up of the weighted share prices of about 500 of the largest Australian companies. Established by ASX at 500 points in January 1980, it is the predominant measure of the overall performance of the Australian sharemarket. The companies are weighted according to their size in terms of market capitalisation – i.e., the total market value of a company’s shares. The All Ords, therefore, is a good measure of how capital growth of the overall market is performing.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: July 05. AU Edition

GREAT MAN THEORIES
Curl up this winter with these tales of occupation, exploration, and depredation

ATTILA
By John Man
Bantam Press, $39.95, ISBN: 13579108642
Of all would-be world conquerors, Attila the Hun (406-453 AD), self-declared Scourge of God had the worst reputation. And his ferocious Hungarian hordes – reputed to be descended from the Xiongnu – were the subject of some very bad early PR: ‘They were squat, with thick necks, so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals ... there was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness ... they knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire ... eating their food raw ... once they put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off until it rotted ... their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk ... stunted, foul and puny ... pinholes rather than eyes’.
You get the idea.
If the Huns swept all before them, due to their mobility, horsemanship and rapid-firing archery, the victims were determined to have the last say. Since the Huns had no written language, it is others who have described their culture – and their appearance. John Man, while not exactly an apologist, balances up the evaluation by telling us of the Huns’ metal work, cooking, religion and even, at times, their comely women. Above all, he vividly details the formidable power of their archery: 2000 arrows could hit 200 of the enemy in 10 seconds, a rate equivalent to ten machine guns as they wheeled in whirlwind fashion, even firing back over the shoulder (the parting or Parthian shot.) The trick is to hold a bunch of arrows in your bow hand and fire when the galloping horse – which you control with your knees – is off the ground.
Priscus, Attila’s principal historian, describes him as ‘excellent in council, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those who received his protection’. Not to be outdone, Man adds, ‘I think he had a sudden smile that could melt rocks.’ At least this item of whimsy is prefaced by the words ‘I think’. Man’s book is well written and a good read, but suffers from certain disturbing oddities in its approach. There is, as suggested above, a tendency to novelise history and to add in embellishments or dialogue that are blatantly of Man’s own imagination, not historical fact. Surely this sort of thing is better left to historical novelists – or is the writing of history undergoing a quiet revolution?
Man dismisses or challenges traditional accounts of the time. Pope Leo’s miraculous turn-around of the Hun hordes was the result of a bribe not a miracle; the great defeat of Attila by Aetius was a stalemate followed by a strategic withdrawal; the 11,000 Ursuline virgins were really 11 – an ‘M’ which stood for martyrs was mistakenly interpreted as ‘1,000’. Then he adds one of his own – he muses that had Attila played his cards right, Britain would have fallen to the Hun and Chaucer and Shakespeare would have written in Hunnish!
The book also has an odd structure. Attila is briefly mentioned in the first few pages, then disappears for over 100 pages. This long lead time is used to describe theories of origins of the Huns and the political situation that preceded their dramatic arrival on the stage of history. Fair enough, perhaps, though a trifle imbalanced. There is a detailed account of Lajos Kassai – a contemporary – who has remastered the art of mounted archery. Fascinating stuff to be sure, but why place it before outlining Attila’s military feats? Surely it would have been more appropriate as an appendix instead of as a ‘flash forward’ in the historical backdrop to the saga of the Huns’ brief domination of central Europe? Once you get used to Man’s time machine approach to history this is an enjoyable and informative read – I learnt, for example, that the habit of referring to First World War German soldiers as ‘Huns’ was derived from a 1902 poem by Rudyard Kipling.

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THE FINAL SOLUTION
By Michael Chabon
Fourth Estate, $24.95, ISBN: 0007196024
I throughly enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a romp through the golden age of American comics, but this short novel by Michael Chabon is a much lesser work. A note on the copyright page notes that this book was published in an earlier form in the Paris Review in 2003. So it is a backdated, then updated, work written prior to the rambunctious Kavalier & Clay work. It’s cruel thing to say but The Final Solution would have been better left in the prestigious pages of the Paris Review, otherwise noted for its definitive interviews with world-famous writers.

The basic plot is – depending how one chooses to look at it – either preposterously whimsical or intriguingly colourful. An 89-year-old Sherlock Homes (only ever identified as ‘the old man’) encounters a mute nine-year-old boy with an African grey parrot that spouts numbers in German. The numbers are subsequently speculated to be a top-secret Nazi code.

I have no quarrel with resurrecting the world’s greatest detective and surely one of the most well-known characters in literature. After all, Conan Doyle (though admittedly under publisher and public duress) did the same after he had killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Other crime fighters like Bulldog Drummond and James Bond have been revisited by subsequent admiring author-fans.

Chabon has successfully rendered the high Victorian prose and elegant speech of Doyle, plus the surprise villains and implausible plot but there is something slight and flimsy about the work as whole. Now and then, Chabon writes a dazzling sentence that hints at the stylistic splendours manifest in Kavalier & Clay. Even the fanciful plot fizzles in a way that would have dismayed the plot-conscious Conan Doyle. I look forward to new novels by Chabon that are not rewrites of minor material.

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OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
By Laurence Bergreen
HarperCollins, $24.95, ISBN: 0007118317
Great as was Columbus’s voyage to America, it was exceeded in length, duration and endurance by the globe-encircling expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan 27 years later in 1519. Indeed, as Laurence Bergreen notes in this excellent biography, Magellan’s voyage was fifteen times longer and encompassed far greater hardship and adventure as well as more spectacular feats of navigation. The discovery and navigation of the 300-mile-long straits that now bear his name is regarded as the greatest single feat of navigation of all time. Magellan was also the first to cross the vastness of the Pacific Ocean in a single journey – 7000 miles of uncharted water. The mediaeval map-makers of Europe did not know of its existence – hence their estimate of the circomference of the earth was about 18,000 miles instead of the true figure, 24,900.

It should be made clear that educated people of Magellan’s time did not believe the earth to be flat. The whole expedition was predicated on the globularity of the planet – in particular, the possibility of approaching the Spice Islands from a westerly instead of an easterly direction. The motive behind the expedition was to grab the spice-rich islands off the Portuguese who had a passion for secrecy and had been harvesting them for some time.

Apart from any few remaining doubters of a round planet, the men may have feared that they would boil alive at the equator, meet a variety of monsters (including the wondrous Socolopendra with a face of flames) or sail near a magnetic island that could pull nails out of ships. They did meet sharks, whales and flying fish, but ultimately the greatest dangers they encountered were those of scurvy and mutiny. Bergreen notes that Magellan and his officers did not get scurvy while many of the men succumbed. The explanation, unknown at the time, was because the Captain and his officers were eating preserved quince which had enough vitamin C to keep them healthy. It is humbling to think that without a few regular helpings of preserved fruit the expedition might never have succeeded at all. Magellan and others thought the cause of scurvy was ‘bad air’.

All in all, there were four mutinies. Magellan, a man of his time, didn’t treat the ringleaders lightly – they had to endure strappado, a thoroughly nasty form of torture involving weights tied to the feet and being hoisted and violently dropped. Bergreen doesn’t spare us the details. In reading about Alexander the Great, Captain James Cook and Magellan, a strange similarity becomes evident: all came to be treated as gods, and when they came to half-believe it themselves, they became arrogant and cruel.

Some three years later, one ship out of an original five and 18 battered survivors from an initial crew of 260 arrived back in Spain to tell the tale of the greatest sea voyage of all time. Without Antonio Pigafetta, the ship’s chronicler (also a lucky consumer of preserved quince), we would know almost nothing of these extraordinary events.

This is a grand tale, perhaps the grandest in all sea-faring history, and it is thrillingly told by Bergreen. This will be the definitive biography of Magellan for quite some time.

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THE MERMAID CHAIR
By Sue Monk Kidd
Review, $36.99, ISBN: 0755307623
Many satisfying novels have been written about what is cynically called the eternal triangle – the situation where one partner strays from the marital bond and has an affair with a third party – but regrettably this is not one of them. In today’s up-tempo world, it’s risky to set in motion a plot of this kind – attractive married woman and rookery-minding monk about to take his final vows meet and are overwhelmingly attracted – and not have anything happen between them until more than half through the novel. They ‘make love’ twice at my count and their dialogue is unlikely to set the world on fire: ‘I can’t believe how beautiful you are’; ‘I’ve wanted you from the beginning.’

It’s hard to get interested in the jilted psychiatrist husband who does a good turn in angry jealousy but otherwise is fairly ineffective as a character. Two women sidekicks also fail to rouse interest. Then there’s the dog, Max (yawn). I’ve tried to warn writers about allowing in dogs as characters in serious novels but to no avail.

There is also a saint-demented mother who keeps lopping off digits and apparently is intent on severing all ten – though thankfully the narrative only takes us up to two. (How do you chop all ten anyway? The way I figure it is, it’s got to be damn difficult to finish the job after you’re chopped off eight of them).

It’s a convention with this type of story that the sudden rush of blood to the head (and other parts) isn’t always the strongest foundation for new lasting relationships. Whatever, Graham Greene did this sort of thing infinitely better a generation ago. Ms Kidd also needs to work on her style: ‘He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don’t think he knew what to feel any more than what to say.’ I rest my case.

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MAGICAL THINKING
By Augusten Burroughs
Hodder, $29.95, ISBN: 0733619002
Most of us want to be thought of as nice people but Burroughs has made outrageous capital of the opposite tactic. By his own confession (though can we always believe him?) he is cruel to mice and children, hates babies and is promiscuous as an alley cat. By way of self-deprecation, he tells us he has an undesirably skinny ass, is domestically grossly untidy, and once had sex with an undertaker. And in case you’re wondering, yes, there was a body only 20 feet away.
Depending on the location of your funny bone, there is black humour to be extracted from these real life tales.

Burroughs’ accounts of his frequent meeting of partners through ads, picking them up willy-nilly, affirms the stereotype of the extremely promiscuous homosexual. With paradoxical humour, Burroughs reports there was one fellow with whom he was sleeping but not having sex with – ‘I told him how it’s really difficult for me to have sex with somebody unless I know them very well and am extremely comfortable with them. This sounded better than the truth which is I can’t have sex with somebody unless they’re a stranger and I’m drunk’.

The sexual high jinks (or low jinks) quickly pall and it’s easier to feel more sympathetic to Burroughs at his missing out on being in a TV ad as a child and – after goggling at a sumptuous Vanderbilt mansion – informing his parents that they had kidnapped him and in reality he is a Vanderbilt who wants to go back to where he rightfully belongs.

‘You’re monsters. I hate you I hate I hate you’, he screams at his parents. Confirming the impression he was a difficult child and maybe a worse adult, Burroughs cheerfully lists his flaws as a ‘wide, deep cruel streak’ plus ‘fear of intimacy, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, social anxiety disorder and mania’. (And don’t forget that skinny ass.)

Looked at from the outside, all of Burroughs’ weirdness belong to a tradition of potentially harmful eccentricity and self-endangering lifestyle which we can readily identify as a sub-set of American behaviours most frequently associated with the inhabitants of California or New York (Burroughs is a Manhattanite). Burroughs’ rollicking lucid style make for an easy read though it leaves the reader jaded after several very same-sounding chapters about casual sex. The reader, whether bemused or shocked, must be wondering if Burroughs is a nice guy pretending to be an asshole, an asshole who somehow wants us still to like him, or a guy who just can’t help himself – or a combination of all three?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

FIRST DRAFT: Apr 05, AU Edition

MATT HAYDEN
One of our youngest insiders recorded the following exchange at Kirribilli Kindie…

Master John (waving a jewel-encrusted rattle): I’m da king of da castle! You da dirty rascal!
Master Peter: Not fair! I want da big rattle now. My turn. MY TURN!
Master John: No. It mine. All mine. Wanna hit Big Fat Kimby on da head again. One two three time hit him on da head! Yippee!
Master Peter: But you said. You said you’d give me da rattle. I wanna be king now!
Master John: How you can be king? You we… wepub… wepubwican!
Master Peter: OK fine! I want da big rattle so I can be pwesident! Give me rattle! NOW!
Master John: No! It mine! Forever! You, never! Hahaha! Da people, dey all love me! Dey hate you! You da cold one!
Master Peter: Liar! You said intwest wates stay same! Dey go up! You told fib! Liar liar pants on fire!
Master John: Who side you on? You sound like Big Fat Kimby now! Money your job…You do all da stuff wid da play money.

Master Peter: No fair! I done good job! I done ten budgets! And I’m still only dis many! You try dat! Me do better dan you could do.
Master John (waving rattle further away): No. It mine. I love da rattle. It love me. Mine.
Master Peter (collapsing in corner): You just wanna beat Dada Bob, dat why. Dada Bob had da big rattle longer dan anyone. You just want to beat him.
Master John: Don’t bring Dada Bob into dis. Dada Bob my dada. Dada Bob my hero, My dada better than your dada.
Master Peter: Dada Bob my hero too! Dada Bob my dada too!
Master John: No he not. Your dada…DADA GOUGH!
Master Peter: WAAAH! WAAH! You so mean!
Master John: No! It true! You we… wep… wepubwican! You mess up budget! You make intwest wates go BOOM! And you went on “sorry toddle”. Dada Gough proud of you!

***

Suddenly a little girl in red diapers appears outside
the playpen:
Little Ms. Julia: Dada Gough my dada!
Master John: Ick. It Little Miss Julia.
Little Ms. Julia: Little Ms Julia to you, poohead!
Master Peter: Eeek! Girl germs! Girl germs!
Master John: Commie germs! Commie germs!
Little Ms. Julia (lunging through playpen bars at the rattle): Gimme dat!
Master John: Why you here? What you doing here? Why no Big Fat Kimby?
Little Ms. Julia: He twied. He dwess up like Mandy Vandy. Got caught. Give me rattle! Me want rattle too!
Master John: Commies in da kindy! Commies in
da kindy!
Master Peter: Yeah! Commies in da kindy!

***

Suddenly a nanny appears:
Nanny: Oh dear, I smell a smell…
All three in unison: Wah! Wah! Wah!

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: Apr 05, AU Edition

NORTHERN LIGHT
On a long weekend in Montreal, Carol Pucci discovers that there’s a lot more to Canada than maple syrup, cold weather, and beer

New Yorkers call it “Paris without the jet lag.” That’s the U.S. East Coast perspective. I’d been up since 4 a.m. when my flight from Seattle landed around 5:30 p.m. for the start of a four-day weekend in Montreal.

The “Paris” part seemed right as I walked through the airport noticing posters and signs in French.

The effects of a three-hour time change and eight hours of flying time were open questions.

Here was my challenge: Could I leave Seattle on a Thursday, fly across three time zones, discover the best of a city I knew little about and make it back to Seattle Sunday night?

We like Canadians, and Europe is expensive these days. Montreal feels a lot like Europe, without the Euro.

It wasn’t much past lunchtime in Seattle as my taxi crawled along in Montreal’s rush-hour traffic. The time change was working in my favour in a way I hadn’t expected. My two Delta airlines “beverage only” flights had turned the clock ahead on my appetite, and already it was time for dinner.

I used the long flights (four hours from Seattle to Cincinnati and another two hours from there to Montreal) to rough out a three-night, two-day itinerary.

Rather than frustrate myself by trying to see everything, I decided to concentrate on two areas where I could indulge my passion for eating ethnic and exploring street life: Vieux Montreal (Old Montreal), where the city began as a French colony in 1642, and the newly gentrified Plateau neighbourhood at the base of Mont-Royal, a 300-acre plus nature preserve above downtown. Midway between the two neighbourhoods, on the edge of the student-filled Latin Quarter and cafe and restaurant-packed rue Saint-Denis, was the Château de L’Argoat, a 25-room European-style hotel where I’d booked a room after reading favorable reviews from other travelers on www.tripadvisor.com.

It was a lucky choice. I’m not big on renting cars in strange cities. Everything I wanted to do was within a half-hour’s walk of the hotel or two or three stops from a subway station across the street.

East of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, once a dividing line between the city’s English and French-speaking communities, Saint-Denis, about a 10-minute walk from downtown, is lined on both sides with Thai, Tibetan, African, Italian, Middle Eastern and Asian restaurants, Parisian-style cafes and African boutiques.

A rainstorm forced me into a quick decision on dinner. I ducked into the Resto-Bar Citezen, an Asian-fusion restaurant that advertised lichee and orange blossom martinis, and settled into a leather lounge chair near the window. People darted by wearing parkas and carrying umbrellas. For a minute, I thought I was still in Seattle. Then the Japanese waiter greeted me in French, and I felt as if I’d crossed continents. I ordered a shrimp stir fry from a menu written in French with an English translation. Most Quebecois are bilingual, but French is the language of the majority and, as I learned from my waiter, it’s customary to at least begin a conversation in French.

The skies brightened as I set out Friday morning to explore Vieux Montreal and the port, a historic area of cobblestone alleys and gray-stone houses fronting on the Saint Lawrence River.

Anchored by the art-filled Nôtre Dame Basilica and the waterfront, Old Montreal is a major tourist draw, and I was prepared to regret not having booked a room in one of the boutique hotels along rue Saint-Paul.

I took an hour’s boat cruise on the river for a view of the Biosphere, the giant golf ball-shaped dome designed by Buckminster Fuller that was the United States Pavilion during the 1967 World’s Fair, then settled in for a brie-and-apple crêpe at a café on Saint-Paul. But something was missing. Vieux Montreal lacked a street life. Tourists filled the quaint restaurants and galleries, but where were the locals?

After lunch, I wandered a bit, and followed lower Saint-Laurent through Chinatown and into the heart of downtown where I expected to find a lively business and shopping scene. But panhandlers seemed to outnumber shoppers, and the main drag, rue Sainte-Catherine, was mostly a run-down hodgepodge of sex shops, music stores and souvenir shops. The best stores and most of the people were below the streets and sidewalks. Twenty miles of connecting passageways link subway stations with an underground city filled with theatres, restaurants and shops, some with entrances in unexpected places. Christ Church Cathedral on Sainte-Catherine, for instance, was raised on piles to
lay the foundation for a shopping complex below.

I found the concept more interesting to think about than actually experience. Surely there had to be a real city around here somewhere. On an impulse, I scrapped dinner plans at one of Vieux Montreal’s tony restaurants and took the subway a few stops in the other direction to the Plateau.

Ragtag in parts, gentrified in others, the Plateau is everything Vieux Montreal is not – hectic, disorderly, crowded and multicultural.
Tired from a day of walking, I found M!STO, one of a handful of trendy new restaurants along avenue du Mont-Royal. A pull-down garage door was open to the sidewalk, and I people-watched while eating penne dressed with warm goat cheese and walnuts.

I was panhandled three times as I walked back to the subway station, but I also discovered French flower merchants, Jewish deli owners and Italian produce sellers. The Plateau started out as a 19th-century working-class neighbourhood of Francophones and immigrants, and in the 1960s and ’70s became popular with writers, singers, theatre people and artists.

Shady side streets lead to renovated two and three-story town-house apartments with wrought-iron balconies and metal stairways built on the exterior to save space inside. On rue Marie-Anne, I found Au Tarot, a restaurant that listed 26 types of couscous. Across the street, Francis Torres, an artist born in Boston and raised in Nigeria, was teaching students how to craft theatre masks from recycled bits of cheesecloth, shells and animal skins.

I liked the Plateau more than any neighbourhood I had explored so far, and the next day, I went back for more.

North of avenue du Mont-Royal, the Mediterranean meets the Middle East at the Jean-Talon market in Little Italy. Stalls overflowed with yellow squash the size of bowling pins, bottles of Canadian maple syrup, fresh dates and olive oil. Many of the signs were in Arabic, but much of the chatter I overheard was in Italian.

In the late afternoon, I climbed Mont-Royal on a hiking trail that wound a mile uphill through the woods to an overlook with views of the city and river, then, with a couple of hours to spare, I used my bus and subway pass to double back downtown to the Contemporary Art Museum on rue Sainte-Catherine.

On display was a huge photo called “Naked World” which was shot four years ago by a New York photographer. When I asked about it, an attendant directed me upstairs to the library to watch a four-minute video showing how the artist rounded up hundred of people and convinced them to undress and sprawl nude on the museum’s outdoor plaza.

Saturday evening’s entertainment was a jazz concert at St. James United Church on Sainte-Catherine. As I sat in a pew listening to local blues artist Bob Walsh perform “Amazing Grace,” I thought about the best strategy for trying one of the “Apportez votre vin” (bring your own wine) restaurants I’d seen.

These restaurants don’t charge a corkage fee and seem to exist so owners and customers can avoid the high taxes on alcohol.
“If you’re a restaurant owner, you actually want to operate a place where people can bring their own wine,” one former owner told me. “It attracts a certain kind of clientele.”

After the concert, I grabbed a $6 half-bottle of Chilean Merlot at a subway kiosk and headed back to the Plateau and Au Tarot for couscous. However, I hadn’t made a reservation, all the tables were filled, so I wandered Saint-Denis again and found ChuChai, a vegetarian Thai cafe.
Not sure about the correct local etiquette for transporting wine, I had tucked my bottle in my shoulder bag. Everyone else walked in with a paper sack. A waitress opened my wine and poured a glass. “This is for you,” she said, handing me what I thought was the cork. It turned out to be a screw top. I had bought the wine in such a hurry, I hadn’t noticed.

Next time I’ll go to a liquor store for a proper bottle. I’ll make dinner reservations. I’ll practice my French.

There will be a next time because two days plus travel time wasn’t long enough to do everything. Still, I felt as if I’d been to Paris, certainly, but also Bangkok, London and Rome.
As the French would say, such is la joie de vivre, the joy of life.

IF YOU GO
INFO: Visit Tourisme Montreal at www.tourisme-montreal.org. Ask for a free copy of the Official Tourist Guide 2004-2005.
LODGING: There’s a good choice of chic but expensive boutique hotels in Vieux Montreal, downtown business hotels and moderately priced smaller hotels and bed and breakfasts in the Latin Quarter, Village and Plateau neighbourhoods. For a list, consult Tourisme Montreal or see www.bbmontreal.qc.ca. Rates at the Château de L’Argoat, 524, rue Sherbrooke East, start at $72 for a single and $82 for a double, based on the current exchange rate of $1.03 Australian to the Canadian dollar, plus a 14.5 percent tax. (Fill out a rebate form available at the airport for a refund on the federal portion, about 7 percent.) Rates include breakfast and free Internet service. Call 514-842-2046 or see www.hotel-chateau-argoat.qc.ca
TRANSPORTATION: Having a car isn’t essential. The subway and bus system cover downtown areas and neighbourhoods. A one-day pass is $7.80; a three-day pass is $15.70. Single-trip fares are $2.50.
TRAVELER’S TIP: Most signs, menus, etc. are in French and English, but some are not. Most residents are bilingual, but it’s polite to begin a conversation with a French greeting such as “Bonjour” and end with a “Merci.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

FOOD: Apr 05, AU Edition

THE TAXATION DIET
Eli Jameson says the best way to keep kids slim is to run them around – not tax their snacks

We Australians are a funny lot: we are either fiercely individualist and independent, reflecting the best of our settler virtues, or we curl up in a ball, scream “it’s all too hard!” and demand that the government come in and pass a law to solve our problem-of-the-moment.

This second instinct – which threatens to make Australia have more in common with California than just wine and weather – is kicking in more and more often these days. With an alleged “obesity crisis” in the news seemingly every week, an unholy alliance of journalists and public health professionals have teamed up, demanding that Something. Be. Done.

Now.

Up until recently, the focus has been largely on “junk” food and its advertising, and in a country with no guaranteed right to freedom of speech, there has not been much outcry at the idea of banning companies (specifically sinister American ones) from promoting their products and making them seem as attractive as possible. After all, the reasoning goes, if Australian kids aren’t subjected to all that evil advertising for maccas and other unhealthy foods, they’ll all of a sudden turn into those mythical European kids we hear so much about who skip to school with lunch pails full of roast squab, farmhouse bread, and little flagons of extra virgin olive oil.

Lately, though, the debate has taken a new and potentially expensive turn. The co-director of something called the NSW Centre for Public Health Nutrition, Karen Webb, has recently come out with a proposal that the government step in and regulate the price of food. “There needs to be some pricing regulation for lower energy-dense food versus the unhealthier alternative,” she recently told Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. “In some areas, it is obvious there is a problem – for example, soft drinks are cheaper than milk.” Of course, this is not the sinister conspiracy Webb makes it out to be: mixing cornsyrup and water and getting it to market is a lot easier and cheaper than maintaining and milking a herd of cows and getting their perishable produce into refrigerated shelves.

There was a time when sane people would hear that some academic was trying to tax them into changing their eating habits, and they’d respond in a calm and clear voice that World War II-era rationing was over, and perhaps you’d just like to wait here while the men in white coats come? Yet, amazingly, Webb’s argument seems to have support: the Australian Medical Association, among others, has come out and said it would get behind the idea. After all, fat people have higher medical bills, higher medical bills are paid for by the taxpayer, therefore the taxes are just a way of making sure the large pay their fair share, and so on.

Of course, it’s also just another way to encourage the notion that everything one does as an individual, even what one eats, is the business of everyone else, including the state – and ignores the fact that “the personal is political” is not just a bad bumper sticker, but also a really bad idea in practice. The last thing we need are Cuba’s infamous block captains checking up on the contents of our fridges.
The reasons some kids are fat in this country are easy enough to see, and using taxes and levies to monkey with the prices of various foods will change nothing except the government’s bank balance. It’s hard to imagine the price point at which an over-indulged kid’s parent would stop fattening his or her offspring like a foie gras goose and start buying from the local wholefoods cooperative: would $8 for a Big Mac be too much? How about $12?

No, the problem isn’t that healthy food is too expensive, thus kids are too fat, and therefore a whole new government institution needs to be spawned to fix the problem. In fact, with a minimum of time, knowledge and skill, fresh fruit and vegetables can be found and cooked, often for far less than something pre-prepared.
Webb and other healthy-living advocates ignore the fact that there’s a lot more to an individual’s food choices, be he rich or poor, than sheer economics.

It’s that nobody makes their kids get out and do anything: everything from parental terror over drugs, booze and “stranger danger” to regulations such as bike helmet laws which make healthy activities that much more marginally difficult have turned Australia into a country where parents would rather let their kids sit around and play with their X-box, “so at least I know where they are and can keep an eye on them”.

And there’s a bigger point, too, that is often missed in this sort of discussion. It’s that no matter how much one likes fat-free food or organic food or expensive gourmet food, sometimes a Big Mac just tastes good. And no amount of tax is going to change that.

THIS 389 IS A 10
To hear the marketing boffins tell it, Australia’s vintners haven’t had a bad year for ages (or at least since they came on the job). If you believe the press releases – a.k.a. “tasting notes” – every vintage is a stand-out classic that’s destined for the cellar, and can just as easily be opened with tonight’s steaks as put away for the eighteenth birthday of a child who hasn’t even been conceived yet. So when Theresa at my local bottleshop told me the ’02 Penfold’s “Bin” range was tipped to be as good as those of the 1996 vintage, I was skeptical.

I shouldn’t have been. Especially at the higher end of the range, Penfold’s has come out with some real standouts this year – especially their Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon and their Bin 389 Cabernet-Shiraz blend (famously referred to as “poor man’s Grange”). Unlike some of their offerings of recent years, which I feel have often been over-oaked or over-fruited or otherwise just somehow out of balance, these manage to hit just about every note right, right now. One can only imagine how they’ll be in ten years time.

Although Penfold’s claims, in an admirable moment of honesty, that the 407 is a bit closed and needs a few years to open up, I found that after a really good swirl in the glass, it woke up and filled my nose with multiple layers of cabernet fruit. Even better, though, was the 389: I got started seriously drinking red wine in the early 1990s and, when I could afford it, 389 was my favourite. The 2002 vintage instantly reminded me why this was, as the fruit and oak are so elegant and perfectly matched that if they could enter “Dancing With the Stars”, they’d win hands down.

The rest of the range is good, too, with the Bin 138 being an easy-drinking favorite, full of approachable Grenache grapes that could make even die-hard white drinkers put the chardy back in the fridge.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: Apr 05, AU Edition

SLICE OF LIFE
The circumcision debate has reignited, with a Melbourne doctor calling the controversial cut a lifesaver. But is it really?

What do you call the useless bit of skin at the end of a penis? The man. Sorry, that just popped out. And while it may be funny, it’s also just as inaccurate an answer as any, since the human foreskin is actually not particularly useless; it protects the penis underneath.

It also harbours the Human Papilloma Virus, which causes penile and cervical cancer. Oh yeah, and it is also said to facilitate the transmission of HIV.

On second thought, it’s worse than useless – it’s an absolute death trap! Off with their…anyway.
Somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of Australian boys are, like my own two sons, uncircumcised. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians sees no reason to support routine newborn circumcision, so it is not regularly performed in Australia or New Zealand except for religious or medical reasons.

Ah, but wait. The aptly-named Professor Roger Short of Melbourne University and the Royal Women’s Hospital’s obstetrics department, has recently suggested that we reconsider our attitudes. Short’s research has shown that because the HIV virus enters the body via the foreskin, circumcised men have 7 times less chance of contracting HIV than uncircumcised men.

The Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV (a nasty little bug that causes cervical cancer in women and the much rarer penile cancer in men), also lives under the foreskin, so women with an uncircumcised partner have twice the risk of developing cervical cancer.

This research is actually in line with previous research on the subject, so I’m going to go along with the man and presume he’s correct in his research findings. It’s the conclusions that follow on from these findings that I have trouble with. Let’s walk through this: you live in a western democracy which has soap, running water and condoms widely available. Rates of HIV are low in your community. The spread of both HIV and HPV viruses can be nearly entirely stopped by the use of the aforementioned condoms. So you conclude that to prevent your tiny baby from ever contracting HIV or HPV, you should go messing about with his penis.

I’m not saying the science is faulty: I’m saying that if my boys can’t think of a better way to avoid contracting HIV than surgery, then we have a whole other set of problems on our hands.

The value in Prof. Short’s research mayfc be found in countries with endemic HIV. Encouraging routine circumcision of newborns in countries which already support the practise may have implications for reducing the spread of AIDS in conjunction with public health teaching about safer sex practices. (Less happily, it may also fuel the belief that condoms aren’t necessary). Unfortunately, countries with high HIV rates don’t tend to have large clean modern obstetric units or much in the way of local anaesthetics and sterile equipment, so one would have to assume that the complication rates of circumcision would be higher than in Western countries.

Of course, there are other reasons for circumcision, religion being chief among them. Jewish and Muslim babies are circumcised in the first week or so of life, rapidly (as one would hope), and generally with local anaesthesia.

That’s all very well and good, but my bigger concern is with the pursuit of circumcision for “socio-cultural reasons” (“so that the boy matches his dad” is a surprisingly common justification). Parents wishing their child to be circumcised for these sorts of aesthetic reasons are advised to wait until the child is

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: May 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
Debating the Resurrection – is it important?

So that was Easter. You know, the time of year when we all jump in cars for a long weekend away, enjoying the rain and high winds, before coming back to a week of sunshine. You know, the time of year when the Good Friday movie on television is invariably something like Deep Throat or – as it was this year – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

In the midst of the stormy weather and the Bacchanalian dancing on the cross of Christ by hostile TV programming mavens, hundreds of thousands of people nevertheless turned out to Easter services nationwide where they would have also heard a wide range of opinions on the Resurrection of Christ.

If you’d gone to the liberal New Age Buddhist hang-out centre formerly known as St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican “church” in Auckland, you’d have heard a sermon telling you Easter has nothing to do with whether Jesus Christ was resurrected – because he probably wasn’t – it was all about the circle of life, and rebirth and other symbolic New Age concepts.

In other words, a sermon based entirely around the Easter Egg. Across town, at a genuine Christian church, you’d be more likely to hear a sermon on the real significance of the crucifixion and resurrection. In other words, a sermon based on hot cross buns.

Out of all that, the ordinary punter is expected – once a year, anyway – to try and make some sense out of Christian doctrine when it seems even the churches don’t know what they stand for or what they believe. Is the actual resurrection important? Yes it is, and here’s why.

Without the real death of Christ on the cross, and a real, bodily resurrection out of the tomb, there is no Christianity. Sure, Jesus was a wise man and a great teacher, but if he’s ultimately still in the grave then he cannot have been God and cannot have been telling the truth in that regard. He’s just another wild-eyed wannabe and whether you follow his principles of living or not is entirely up to how you feel.

But, if Christ was indeed resurrected such a feat would prove his claim to be God, to be someone far more powerful than mere mortal humans. In short, if Jesus really was resurrected then everything else he said must be true, because he is the only person in all human history to have not only claimed to be God, but given evidence to prove his claim and done so in front of witnesses.

Buddha, Muhammed, Confucius? They’re all still dead and buried. Of all the great religious leaders, only Jesus Christ actually claimed to be God the Creator and performed miracles to prove it.

Buddha said there were many paths to Nirvana, but offered no evidence of his authority to make the statement. Hinduism bases its religion on ancient legends, not demonstrable historical figures whose existence we can prove. Moreover, Hinduism is like a throwback to the ancient Greek and Roman gods. Hinduism believes in different classes of humans, that some people are scum just because of the social class they’re born into. Does that sound like a religion founded by the Creator of the Universe?

Muhammed claims God can only be attained through his teachings, but he never performed the miracles that Christ did to show his divine authority.

So we’re left with a resurrected Jesus Christ saying “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me”.
So it all hinges on the resurrection. If it happened, then his comment immediately above affects every living human on this planet, regardless of what religion they think they follow. If the resurrection really happened, then Jesus’ call to the disciples to preach that fact to all nations is not just Christianity seeking “equal time” alongside other religious beliefs; it is Christianity saying every other belief system out there is wrong, and if you choose to follow them you’ll be committing spiritual suicide.

Did the resurrection happen?

The evidence clearly suggests it did. Firstly, we are struck with the fact of an empty tomb. It is abundantly clear both from the Gospel accounts and from Jewish writings that Jesus’ body was missing. The Jews accused the Christians of stealing it. So fact one: the tomb
was empty.

Then there’s the role of women. In the Gospel accounts, women were the first to witness the empty tomb, and witness the risen, resurrected Jesus. So what? Well it may not seem a big deal in our modern world where men and women both get to vote, but in Middle Eastern countries of the time, as today, women were second-class citizens whose testimony was so worthless they couldn’t even be witnesses in court.

If the Gospel accounts were fiction, the authors would definitely have made men the first witnesses, to lend credibility to the accounts. They would not in a million years have dreamed of making women the first witnesses unless, of course, that’s what really happened and they regarded the facts as more important than the spin.

Fact two: with women being first to witness the risen Christ, this indicates the story is more likely to be factual because it is counter-cultural – it runs against what people of the day would have expected, yet tells the story straight despite the risk of alienating potential converts.

Which then brings us to the other witnesses. A resurrected Jesus Christ appeared to the women and the 11 surviving disciples and around 500 others during the six weeks after his death on the cross. Search the annals of Sigmund Freud’s cases, or search every library of every psychology department at every university in the world, and you will never find one case of a hallucination appearing to hundreds of people at different times, or 11 people in a room all reporting that a hallucination sat down and ate fish with them, or that they could touch the hallucination. So the only other possible option here is that all the witnesses were simply liars who constructed a fictional story to help sell their message.

Fact three, then: the resurrection appearances to hundreds of people were not hallucinations, and must either be true or the deliberate false creation of the early Christians.

So could the resurrection appearances have been deliberate lies to sell the Christian message? Let’s examine that for a moment. Such deceit stands in direct opposition to everything Jesus Christ stood for, and everything preached in the Gospels. In other words, if you truly believed Jesus was the way and the truth, how was inventing the mother of all fairy stories going to reflect that “truth”?

Secondly, after the crucifixion, the record shows the disciples were crushed men. They’d been expecting to see the man they followed as God be triumphant at the cross, perhaps smiting all the Roman soldiers and proving to all that he was God come to deliver justice and vengeance against those who had dared to harm him. Instead, whipped and scourged to within an inch of his life, they’d watched from the sidelines as the Romans taunted Jesus on the cross before he drifted away suddenly crying out that even God had forsaken him. Maybe, thought the disciples, he really was only a man after all. So their own visions and dreams of the Messiah died on the cross with Christ, and when the women first talked about a risen Jesus they thought the women were insane. It just wasn’t computing in their heads.

Let’s assume, for the sake of this, that Jesus only fainted on the cross and woke up in the tomb, still alive. A Roman crucifixion was not a smack on the hand with a wooden spoon. It was a bloody and brutal affair where death was guaranteed. On the remote offchance that Jesus was only a human who survived the cross, are we to believe that – after rolling away the two-tonne boulder – a half-dead Jesus, blood-encrusted, gaping nail wounds in hands and feet and a spear gash in his heart, crawled into the disciples’ meeting room triumphantly muttering, “see, I’ve beaten death, I’m Lord and master of the Universe”? Would such a spectacle have inspired the disciples, or would they assume, like you and I, that he must simply have survived and not died at all? Hardly a triumph over death.

But the Gospel accounts speak of a radiant resurrected Jesus. An inspiring figure. Could the disciples have invented the resurrection accounts? Obviously they could have, but it is extremely unlikely. First and foremost, virtually all the disciples were later executed by Rome for continuing to claim that Christ really was God and really had been resurrected. Roman documents in British and European museums show the Roman emperors gave instructions that Christians were to be shown mercy if they publicly renounced their faith, and executed if they did not.

It is highly significant that the disciples were fed to lions; dipped in tar and set alight as garden lanterns; and put to death by crucifixion because they refused to renounce their claims. It is one thing to die for something you believe to be true, but we’re not arguing here over whether the disciples “believed” it – critics say the disciples knowingly made the story up.

Question. Would you volunteer to be torn apart by starving lions to defend a story you’d made up, when you could go free just by admitting to the con? Why would the disciples die such horrible deaths for something they knew was fake? It doesn’t make sense. The only rational explanation for it is that the disciples genuinely believed they’d seen the resurrected Christ (which, for reasons covered above, must have been the genuine Jesus), and that fact gave them enough faith to endure a few moments of pain from lions, rather than give up an eternity in heaven.

And that, folks, is the ultimate power of the resurrection. It is Christianity saying to the world, in the words of a recent song: No matter what they tell you / No matter what they do / No matter what they teach you / What you believe is true.

A liberal, symbolic, Easter Egg, counterfeit construction of the resurrection may be non-threatening to followers of other religions, but it will never set them free like the Truth. If I was on a road to Hell, I’d want to be told. Wouldn’t you?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: May 05, AU Edition

JOHN QUIGGIN
How does the right win? By aping the worst habits of the left

One of the problems of war is that you inevitably come to resemble your enemy. Nowhere is this more true than in the battle of the American right, and its Australian derivatives, against the ‘politically correct’ left of the 1980s and 1990s. The PC left, never a group with much in the way of numbers or influence, have long since been routed, but they have been successful in having most of their main ideas adopted by their erstwhile foes.

First, there’s the famous obsession with ‘correct’ language. This was the subject of both justified criticism and innocent amusement when leftists tried to reclassify fat people as ‘gravitationally challenged’, and so on. But now it’s the right who are most keen on this kind of thing.

As an example, I can’t count the number of articles and blog entries I’ve read insisting that unauthorised asylum-seekers must always be called ‘illegals’. The writers, many of whom bewail declining educational standards in their spare time, don’t seem to be worried by the fact that this is an adjective masquerading as a noun. And they appear to be unaware that the same term was used in apartheid South Africa to describe people who broke the various migration and residence laws there.

The victim mentality was another unappealing feature of the postmodern left. No group, it seemed, was immune to oppression of some kind, except perhaps for dead white males. But nothing in the campaigns mounted by the left can be matched by the whininess of right-wingers (led by former whining lefty David Horowitz) complaining that they are under-represented in academic (and media) jobs. By definition, those excluded from academia must be highly educated, and in most cases therefore on above average incomes. Most likely, they have no desire to earn much lower salaries as academics. But, in the classic logic of victimology, explanations of this kind are illegitimate. If a group is under-represented in any field, discrimination is the only possible explanation.

At the same time all the old complaints about ‘hostile climates’ that were once made by lefties are now being resurrected by the right. The Florida legislature is currently debating legislation to stop biology professors hurting the feelings of creationist students by telling them their beliefs are false. And any academic who doesn’t support Ariel Sharon all the way down the line had better keep his or her mouth shut if they don’t want groups like Campus Watch on their back.

Finally, and most revealingly, there’s the postmodern disdain for objective truth. While there was a lot of evasive talk on this point, there’s no doubt that the postmodernist left was eager to cast doubt on the idea of objective truth and to argue that truth, particularly scientific truth, was a socially constructed concept.

Most of this was harmless nonsense, spouted by underemployed literary critics. But to many on the right, it seemed to spell the end of Western civilisation.

Now, however, the right has learned the lessons of postmodernism better than its proponents, who failed to make the obvious point that, if all truths are equal, the truths of those with money and power are the ones that will prevail.

There was a time when rational leftists were embarrassed by their political allies. Now, it is the minority of those on the right who still adhere to old-fashioned notions like scientific truth who have to blush constantly for the absurdities uttered on their side of the debate.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: May 05

ANN COULTER
The purposeless-driven left

It’s been a tough year for the secular crowd. There was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the moral values election in the U.S., the Christian hostage subduing her kidnapper by reading from The Purpose-Driven Life, and the Christian effort to save Terri Schiavo.
And now, for all the hullabaloo in the media, you’d think the Pope had died.

In defense of one of the Catholic Church’s most ‘controversial’ positions, I wanted to return to a story from a few weeks ago that passed from the headlines far too quickly. The ‘controversial’ position is the ban on girl priests.

I’ll leave it to the Catholics to explain the theological details, but we have a beautiful pair of bookmarks to the exact same incident illustrating women’s special skills and deficits. The escape and capture of Brian Nichols shows women playing roles they should not (escorting dangerous criminals) and women playing roles they do best (making men better people).

Nichols’ murderous rampage began when he took the gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother who was his sole guard at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta, Georgia. It ended when an otherwise unremarkable 26-year-old woman appealed to the Christian conscience of this same violent killer holding her hostage.

At 2 a.m. one Saturday night, Ashley Smith went out for cigarettes while unpacking her new apartment. Returning from the store, Smith was grabbed by a man at her front door, who put a gun in her side and told her not to scream.

In Smith’s apartment, Nichols bound Smith’s feet and hands and put her in the bathtub. Later, at Smith’s request, Nichols allowed her to hop into the bedroom, where she began talking to him.

In short order, Smith was reading aloud to Nichols from the Christian book The Purpose-Driven Life – in direct violation of his constitutional right to never hear any reference to God, in public or private, for any reason, ever, ever, ever!

After reading the first paragraph of Chapter 33 aloud, about serving God by serving others, Nichols asked her to read it again.
Smith read to Nichols some more, both from the Purpose book and from another popular book that’s been dropped from all news accounts of this incident: the New Testament. (In the Hollywood version, Smith will be reading from the Koran.)

Nichols told Smith she was ‘an angel sent from God’, calling her ‘his sister’ and himself her ‘brother in Christ’. Nichols said he had come to Smith’s home for a reason, in Smith’s words, that ‘he was lost and God led him right to me’.

This lasted long into the night. They watched Nichols’ shooting people on TV. Nichols said he couldn’t believe he was that man. In the morning, Smith made Nichols eggs and pancakes. Then she left the apartment to call the police. When the cops arrived, Nichols surrendered, utterly transformed.

Heaven help the average liberal if this ever happens to him! What would an urban secularist do? Come, let me read to you from Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.

It’s also another example of how universities are failing students. Today’s university women would be dead: They know nothing about Jesus Christ and can’t cook a good meal.

Smith saved the soul of a man on a killing spree by talking to him about Christianity. But liberals think this won’t work with the Muslims? We ought to fly this Ashley Smith to Saudi Arabia. We could just make her a box lunch every day and send her on her way.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

SPIN CITY: May 05, AU Edition

ALAN ANDERSON
Time for a re-think on Labor’s foreign policy

Since Kim Beazley’s resurrection, Labor’s focus has been largely reactionary and confined to the domestic sphere. It complains about the marginal fluctuation of interest rates and criticises the government for not spending more (God forbid!) on infrastructure and training. The party’s one major foray abroad, an attack on a troop deployment to Iraq, was a flop.

The reluctance to discuss foreign policy is understandable in an era of unprecedented Australian prestige and influence abroad. Yet Beazley’s domestic focus is driven equally by a desire to conceal the yawning gulf between himself and his party.

Beazley has been here before. In the wake of September 11, he successfully muffled the anti-American sentiment in Labor’s ranks for the duration of an election campaign.

But that discipline was never going to hold. Over the past few years, Labor has fashioned an internal foreign policy consensus based on two tenets: regionalism and mulitlateralism. The failing credibility of both concepts threatens to expose the sham of that consensus.

First, some history. The debate over Iraq exacerbated Labor’s anti-American sentiment, while elevating the importance of national security in the public mind. After Mark Latham’s ‘troops home by Christmas’ debacle, Bomber Beazley was summoned to restore Labor’s national security credentials. In the lead-up to last year’s election, while its lightweight leader read to children, policed junk food advertising, and reminisced about Green Valley, Labor left defence and foreign affairs to the grown-ups.

Awed by the magnitude of Latham’s defeat, most commentators failed to appreciate the effectiveness of Kevin Rudd and, in the final months, Kim Beazley. Realising that Labor’s increasingly shrill anti-American ranks would not let them side-step national security, but wishing to conceal the takeover by Labor’s lunatic fringe, they employed a brilliant tactical ruse.

With Howard strategically ascendant in foreign affairs, Rudd and Beazley fought a diversionary battle using the tenets of regionalism and multilateralism. Focusing on procedural criticisms (e.g., the way Iraq was liberated), they papered over Labor’s internal gulf by shifting debate away from the US alliance and onto peripheral issues.
Now the two tenets are reaching their use-by date, and Beazley faces an unravelling of Labor’s sham consensus. Here’s why.

The first tenet is regionalism, and Labor uses it to claim that Howard’s fixation on US operations causes him to neglect regional anti-terrorist efforts and hence Australian security.

This line is completely disingenuous. There is no reason why Australia cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, and it is unclear what our troops could do to enhance regional security if they were withdrawn from Iraq. (Invade Indonesia, perhaps?) Nonetheless, this argument largely neutralised the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in the last election campaign.

The other element of the regionalism argument is a clone of Keating’s failed bid for cultural assimilation into Asia, dressed up in anti-terrorist clothes. Keating claimed that Asia would not trade with us if we did not abandon our Anglo-Saxon heritage. The new argument is that Asian nations would not work with us on security if we were too close to the US.

Most Asian nations run pragmatic foreign policies. Paul Keating’s post-colonial guilt and incessant cultural cringing before Asia aroused puzzlement amongst some, as well as undisguised contempt from Malaysia’s outspoken Dr Mahathir. By contrast, Howard’s embracing of Australia’s Anglo-Celtic cultural background put our neighbours at ease: they no longer had to humour the crazy white man trying to go native. Asian nations never wanted us to forswear our origins; they merely wanted to trade with us. They are.

Similarly, unashamed promotion of our relationship with the United States has not led to friction with Asia. Asian pragmatists have been happy to take security relationships to unprecedented levels in the War on Terror precisely because of our clout with the US, still the principal guarantor of stability in the region. This has discredited claims that Australia is neglecting the region.

In any case, the argument that support for the US in Iraq undermined us in the region always rang hollow, with regional powers like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea taking Bush’s side. In reality, opposing Bush would have devalued our greatest strategic asset, the US alliance, and left us marginalised regionally, apart from the poorer Muslim powers of Indonesia and Malaysia. With last month’s historic visits by the Indonesian President and Malaysian Prime Minister, the final vestiges of credibility were stripped from the regionalist argument.

The second tenet of Labor’s foreign policy approach is an appeal to the traditional Labor preference for multilateralism. It gave the anti-Americans carte blanche to rail against the dangerous cowboy Bush and his Australian poodle. Yet it left foreign policy ‘realists’ like Rudd and Beazley with a clear conscience, as there was no question that the war on Iraq was ripping up the established order in the United Nations as well as the Middle East.

With a compliant Australian media ever eager to portray the UN as a global ‘parliament of man’, not a corrupt club of autocrats trading in grubby commercial interests, the argument was sure to play well.

Today, the media is finding it difficult to ignore the UN Oil-for-Food scandal. An interim report stated that Kofi Annan’s chief-of-staff ordered the shredding of three years’ of documents the day after the investigation was announced. The final report will be far broader, addressing the largest program of embezzlement in history.

Even with biased reporting, the stench of corruption, not to mention sexual abuse and paedophilia, hangs thick over the UN. The Australian public already knew the UN was ineffectual; its claim to moral legitimacy was its only redeeming feature. Soon that claim will be tarnished beyond repair.

Meanwhile, that grand project of multilateralism, the European Union, is unravelling. With polls now foreshadowing a defeat for the proposed European constitution in the upcoming French referendum, and with the debate over Turkish membership starting to expose the lie of a united ‘multicultural’ Europe, the greatest exponent of multilateral consensus politics is in retreat.

The two tenets of Labor’s foreign policy approach, regionalism and multilateralism, are thus increasingly discredited. Without these distractions, the foreign policy debate will return to substantive
issues. The shaky détente between Labor’s leader and his anti-American party on these issues will fracture under pressure.

Beazley hopes that a more stable international environment will allow him to keep the focus domestic and avoid that pressure. One look at George W Bush’s recent appointments should dispel that hope. History is still on the march, and Labor cannot indefinitely avoid the great question of our age: Do we believe Western Civilisation is worth fighting for; or, like post-modern Europe and Australia’s artistic and academic classes, have we ceased to believe in the idea of the West? Labor’s leader, so enamoured of dissembling and equivocation, will have to decide – and convince his party to follow.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: May 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
Of screaming plastic turkeys and fish wrap

Afew weeks back, it was reported that the BBC had tried to book an interview with Bob Marley. I don’t mean Robert Marley, Dean of Engineering at Montana State University. No, the dear old Beeb wanted to chat with the very late ganja-worshiping Rastafarian musician, Bob Marley.

The British broadcaster admitted to being ‘red-faced’ over the attempted séance – a Freudian slip no doubt. And there are apparently no plans afoot at Broadcasting House – home to the BBC – to set up a dead rockers occult interview network, featuring such legends as Hendrix, Joplin and Elvis (oh, wait, he’s still alive).

You couldn’t be faulted for wondering how a network with billions of pounds at its disposal in the form of compulsory licence fees could make such a blunder. But alas, worse mistakes have been made by one of the MSM’s most influential global media establishments.

(‘MSM’, by the by, is not a trendy new 24-hour music video channel, nor is it an unwanted ingredient found in your take-away chow mein that jacks up your blood pressure – though it might do that anyway. MSM stands for mainstream media. Television, radio and newspapers: collectively they are the MSM. News and views on the Internet, though also an MSM medium – as in the singular of media and not as in spirit conduit – is also the domain of what is not mainstream: web diaries and blogs.)

It’s a definition based on scale and means, though not necessarily one based on content or viewpoint. It alludes to the Goliath-like resources network TV and major publishing mastheads bring to newsgathering. That world, with its foreign bureaus, editors, sub-editors and huge circulation numbers, stands in stark contrast to the legions of solitary, keyboard bashing, sleep-impaired Davids inhabiting the so-called blogosphere.

But, despite their comparatively meager resources and typical amateur status, bloggers have made their mark on the MSM. The early retirement in the US of CBS anchor Dan Rather last October, and more recently the resignation of CNN president Eason Jordan, were both attributed to the role played by bloggers.

Those resignations have prompted some mainstreamers to hit back. One former CBS executive complained on Fox News that ‘these bloggers have no checks and balances…. You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pyjamas writing.’

Fair enough. But so far it’s bloggers in pyjamas, 2; television executives in Armani, nil.

To a good many of the pyjama brigade – in both America and Australia – ‘mainstream’ is a glaring misnomer. In the view of these midnight warriors, the mistakes of the MSM demonstrate all too clearly that the traditional media is anything but mainstream and that its values and motivations are at odds with the beats they cover.

As the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr admitted, ‘The natural culture of journalism is kind of vaguely soft-left inquiry skeptical of authority [sic]. I mean, that’s just the world out of which journalists come. If they don’t come out of that world, they really can’t be reporters. I mean, if you’re not skeptical of authority, find another job. You know, just find another job. And that is the kind of soft-leftie kind of culture.’

The irony, apparently lost on Marr, is that the inquiries of bloggers, themselves skeptical of MSM authority, have forced some ‘soft-leftie’ journalists to rethink their own career choices.

Bloggers and their contributors provide a refreshingly democratic, and highly efficient, alternative. They can get to the bottom of an issue at lightning speed. Bloggers exposed CBS’s journalistic malpractice in days, not weeks or months.

Tim Blair agrees that blogs are providing a watchful eye on the media. Blair is uniquely situated to judge. Since 2001, he’s been writing one of Australia’s most-read blogs (http://timblair.net), which also has a big world-wide following. When not in his pyjamas, he’s a standard-bearer for the MSM, as the Bulletin’s deputy editor. ‘The impact [of blogs] on the traditional media is big and getting bigger’, says Blair.

I asked Blair if he thought there was any conflict between his two roles? ‘All the time’, he quips. ‘Seriously, though, I find having a hand in the blog world helps me in my role as editor. It’s another check. It help keep me grounded.’

Was Blair surprised by some of the attacks leveled at bloggers?
‘I’m always amazed by the sheer preciousness of those working in the news media. They’re happy to make fun of everyone else, but have wafer-thin skin – you couldn’t measure it with an electron microscope – when the finger is pointed back at them’, says Blair.

But Blair believes that most Australian journalists see value in blogs, though some, notably Peter McEvoy, executive producer of ABC’s Media Watch, ‘are dismissive or hostile.’
‘His loss’, adds Blair. ‘That show could do with some blog-like scope and attention to detail.’

Until recently, unless you had a lot of information at your fingertips – like a news clipping service and a vast reference archive as well as a staff to search it for you – you could never compete with traditional news outlets. They really had an effective monopoly on information. News consumers were at their mercy.

Reporters could much more easily slither out of their own words from one news cycle to the next. As Blair says, ‘there was a time, basically before Google, when yesterday’s mistakes were today’s fish wrapper’. No longer.

Blair points to the Iyad Allawi ‘executioner’ story as a good example – an unfounded rumour that Iraq’s interim president had personally executed prisoners. Blair says the story had been quickly and thoroughly discredited thanks to bloggers in Iraq and elsewhere.
‘By the time [the Herald’s] Paul McGeough latched onto the Baghdad urban myth, bloggers were ready to pounce’, says Blair.

The ‘Dean scream’ is another excellent case. There was something about former US democratic presidential challenger Howard Dean that said, Maybe having this guy’s finger on the nuclear button isn’t the best idea. But when Dean made his unsettling primal scream, the Washington correspondent for the Age and the Herald, Marian Wilkinson, didn’t file.

It was the scream heard round the world, ending Dean’s presidential hopes, and Wilkinson didn’t think it rated a mention in dispatches. Bloggers everywhere heard it and knew what it meant. Somebody else – who didn’t yelp like a wounded animal – was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

‘Good old-fashioned reporting sense said Dean’s scream was newsworthy. Look, it’s not necessarily a left-right thing. Look at the way the media stuffed it up on [Mark] Latham. It wasn’t only left-leaning journalists that hadn’t cottoned on that Latham was going to crater’, says Blair.

But Blair admits despite blogdom’s best efforts some stories, no matter how wrong, are repeated over and over again as if true. Blair points to the mythical plastic Thanksgiving Day turkey Bush is
alleged to have served to the troops in Iraq. ‘Even though that story has been shown to be bogus, some reporters and columnists won’t – or can’t – let go of it’, Blair laments.

On further reflection, Blair admits that he’d be disappointed if the plastic turkey faded away altogether. ‘It’s been around so long, I think many bloggers, myself included, have become attached to it. That turkey has become part of the lore of the early days of the revolution now sweeping the media’, Blair says somewhat wistfully.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)

SPIN CITY: Nov 05, AU Edition

ALAN ANDERSON
The last thing we need is a politicized judiciary

For politicians and rock stars, publicity is like oxygen. For members of some other professions – central bankers and public servants, for instance – publicity is generally thought of as undesirable. Happily, most Australian judges would place themselves in the latter category. Unhappily, the federal Labor Party has revealed that it would like to alter the method of judicial appointment, with the covert intent of creating a more politicised and activist judiciary.

Most Australians are unaware of how unique our apolitical judiciary is. In the United States for example, the probing public confirmation hearings of new Chief Justice John Roberts before the Senate Judiciary Committee, set to be repeated even more harshly with President Bush’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, are indicative of the politicised process of judicial appointment to which Americans are accustomed.

The US judicial confirmation process comes complete with intervention from lobby groups and even television advertisements attacking nominees. In some states, judges are directly elected by the voters! Unsurprisingly, the judiciary is a polarised and polarising element of US society.

Australia’s model of judicial appointment is rather different. Cabinet appoints judges to the High Court, usually on the recommendation of the Attorney-General. In practice, the Attorney-General consults members of the profession, but he does so in private and has no legal obligation to do so. This mirrors the traditional British approach, where the Lord Chancellor determines judicial appointments.

While there have been a few appalling appointments, such as former Labor Attorney General Lionel Murphy, governments of both persuasions have generally shown restraint and wisdom in their judicial selections. As a result, polls show that Australian judges enjoy a relatively high level of public respect.

The United Kingdom recently created an unelected judicial appointments commission to determine the criteria for appointment, supplanting much of the role of the Lord Chancellor. This model arose out of the politically correct desire to ensure that the judiciary becomes more ‘representative’, meaning that appropriate proportions of female, gay, black and disabled judges sit on the Bench (judicial conservatives need not apply). Accordingly, it is populated by appropriately bien pensant New Labour types.

In the context of the United Kingdom’s adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights into its domestic law, through the Human Rights Act 1998, judges are being called upon to make an increasing number of politicised decisions. Through the judicial appointments commission, the British Left are successfully entrenching a judicial culture which will ensure that the cases fall their way.

Now Nicola Roxon, federal Labor’s Shadow Attorney-General, has suggested in an opinion piece in the Age that Australia should reform its own judicial appointment processes. Unsurprisingly, Roxon is not impressed with the democracy and transparency of the American system, which has seen Republicans win public support for their promises to appoint judicial conservatives. Rather, she prefers the unaccountable British approach – a commission which will no doubt be stacked with members drawn from left-leaning legal professional bodies and academia, and which will be sure to deliver the sort of activist jurists Roxon would like to see.

Roxon portrays this proposal as a half-way house on the spectrum of transparency, somewhere between the executive secrecy of the Australian model and the robust and often unfair scrutiny of the politicised US model. In truth, a judicial appointment commission is not a compromise position, but an extreme one.

Both the US and Australian models retain a measure of democratic accountability: the people may not elect the judges (though they do in some US states), but they do at least elect those who select the judges. Roxon’s system is designed to add an extra layer between the voters and the judges: voters elect the government which
appoints the commission which selects the judges.

The benefit of this system to the Left is obvious. Where a Labor government would be pilloried for selecting activist judges to overrule the popular will on political issues like aboriginal land rights and asylum seekers, a judicial appointments commission would give it political cover to argue that it had merely implemented the recommendations of its expert commissioners.

Roxon’s article attracted little attention, perhaps because of its absurd context. It commenced with congratulation of Attorney General Phillip Ruddock for his appointment of Justice Susan Crennan, partly on the grounds that she is a good jurist, but principally because she has no penis. Then, having stated what an excellent appointment the current system has yielded, Roxon claimed that it is clearly broken and needs radical reform.

Yet rather than dismissing Roxon’s foray as absurd, conservatives should be grateful for this window into her thinking, and frightened by the implications for Australia’s apolitical judiciary should Labor be elected. Accordingly, conservatives must consider pre-empting Roxon’s proposals with changes of their own.

While the current model of executive appointment has served us reasonably well, it is politically difficult to defend due to its lack of transparency. Instead of allowing advocates of judicial activism the luxury of attacking it on this ground, conservatives should consider a move to defuse the issue by including the legislature in the process of deliberating over judicial appointments, while broadly maintaining the principles of the Westminster system.

Such a model might take the form of insisting upon judicial confirmation hearings in front of a joint parliamentary committee, with the Attorney General retaining a discretion to override the committee. Alternatively, or additionally, parliamentarians might be afforded the opportunity to veto objectionable nominations, although one might make this more difficult by requiring a two-thirds majority in both houses.

There are any number of alternative proposals which might be devised to insert a measure of transparency to the judicial appointment process. By adopting such a proposal now, conservatives would deprive a future Labor government of an excuse to introduce an undemocratic model of judicial appointment which would ultimately entrench the political prejudices of a left-leaning profession in the composition of the High Court Bench.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 03:00 AM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: Apr 05, AU Edition

RELATIVITY, SCHMELATIVITY
Sure, Einstein hit it big in 1905. But let’s not forget the really important inventions of a century ago – like the windscreen wiper, says Pat Sheil

The Japanese thumped the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. Sailors mutinied on the battle-ship Potemkin. Norway gained independence from Sweden, Sun Yat-sen founded his secret society to expel the Manchus, and Sinn Fein was founded in Dublin. Oh, and England flogged the Aussies in the Ashes.
But if you ask a group of scientists what happened in 1905, they’ll all say the same thing: Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. Now, there’s no denying that this was a significant event. A 26-year-old patent clerk had the temerity to tear classical physics to confetti and throw it out the conceptual window, and while most people say the 20th century started in 1901, and others contend it really began in 1914, most scientists date our brave new world from Einstein’s theoretical detonation of ’05.
On top of that, in 1905 he used Brownian motion to confirm atomic theory, and explained the photo-electric effect (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921 – he never got a prize for relativity, funnily enough). It was a big year for Albert, though he didn’t really become famous until the effects he predicted in his General Theory of 1915 were confirmed four years later during a total solar eclipse, when the light of a distant star was measurably bent by the sun’s gravity. He was right – relativity actually applied in the real world.

Yet even then, with his peers in awe of his achievement, the rest of the world simply took the scientists’ word for it: this Albert Einstein was one brainy guy. Even today, we have to take this on trust, because relativity and all that it implies is not exactly self-evident as we go about our daily lives.

So counter-intuitive is it that even though most of us can come to grips with the ideas if the basics are properly explained, very few of us are able to explain it to anyone else a week or two later.

Relativity has a short cerebral half-life – an hour is long enough for it to be brain-dumped in most cases. The fact is that humans live in a Newtonian world, where the three laws of motion clearly affect everything from cricket to sex, from driving a car to falling down the stairs. Relativistic insights are momentarily gleaned from
encounters with powerful drugs or inspired physics teachers, not by lifting a beer in the pub or running down an infant with a supermarket trolley.

But in a bizarre coincidence, 1905 saw major breakthroughs in the application of Newtonian physics and old-fashioned 19th century chemistry which set the tone for the new century in ways that are much easier to understand. Ideas, patents and processes that we still use all the time and which changed our everyday world, for good or ill, depending on your point of view.

For instance, 1905 saw the invention of the jukebox, by one John Gabel of Chicago. There had been coin-operated Edison phonographs seen in the preceding decade, but these only played one tune, and were so quiet that they could only be heard by putting a listening tube to your ear. Gabel, who had previously built cigar vending machines, manufactured and marketed the “Automatic Entertainer”, which offered a choice of two dozen different songs played through a massive 102-cm. horn.

In one of those fortuitous coincidences that pepper the history of technology, the rise of the jukebox was given a hefty boost by the invention of thermo-setting plastics, also in 1905. Chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland had just sold his photographic paper process to George Eastman for a million dollars and, by 1905 standards, was cashed up in a very big way. He hit pay dirt again by founding the plastics industry virtually single-handed, and felt that his first breakthrough invention in the field was so significant that it was only fair to name it after himself. Bakelite was born.

Technically, Bakelite is a polymerisation of formaldehyde and phenol. In practical terms, it was the first plastic that didn’t soften when heated, and as well as creating an explosion of consumer electrical goods, kitchenware, telephone housings and a thousand other doo-dads and gizmos, it transformed the recording industry as it was ideal for the pressing of 78 rpm discs.

The world was becoming “new-fangled”. If you tired of the 24 Bakelite 78’s on the Automatic Entertainer, you could catch a
motorised omnibus (the first ones plied the streets in 1905) and make your way to the cinema. Well, you could if you were in Pittsburgh, where the first dedicated nickel cinema, or nickelodeon, was opened by vaudeville promoter Harry Davis. It would be 25 years before the movies and the depression killed off vaudeville for good, but Davis pulled in a lot of nickels without having to pay any flesh-and-blood entertainers, and it didn’t take long before others caught on – within three years there would be 8,000 nickelodeons across the USA.

Given that hi-tech entertainment was on a roll in ’05, it was fortuitous that someone came along with a promotional tool that couldn’t be ignored to keep the show on the road. French chemist and inventor Georges Claude worked out in that year that by pushing electricity through a tube filled with neon gas (which had only been discovered six years earlier), a new form of lighting could be had, and one that could be bent and twisted into letters, shapes, and logos. His invention was to make him a fortune, and to reach its apotheosis in the town of Las Vegas, where it took on ever-more-lurid forms.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that Las Vegas was founded in, yep, 1905.Music, lighting, entertainment, transport, mass-production – in 1905 the 20th century really started to hit its straps. The first signs of what the century had in store came as cracks began to appear in the Victorian/Edwardian edifice of starch and prudery. And not just in the dark, thrilling back rows of the nickelodeons, though preachers were already warning of the moral turpitude to be found in these places. Even talking about sex almost became respectable with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.

Einstein had never seen a neon light or ridden in a motorised omnibus when he wrote his seminal paper. He had never used a Bakelite telephone or put a coin in a jukebox. He may have seen a moving picture show or two – he was a patent clerk after all – and knew a thing or two about the latest inventions. Perhaps the absence of such distractions, and the sheer boredom of working in the Swiss bureaucracy played a crucial part in the extrapolations that led to the Special Theory. Then again, being a freakish genius probably didn’t hurt.

Years later, as he was driven home from the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study in the pouring winter rain (Einstein was sufficiently a man of the 19th century to have never learnt to drive a car), his driver would have been thankful for the inspiration of Mary Anderson. Mary spent many a freezing evening in New York streetcars, as the drivers stopped, got out, and letting in a blast of snow or sleet wiped the window so they could see where they were going. She got sick of it, and realised that the answer was not relativistic, but deeply Newtonian. She understood that the solution was quite straightforward, and after knocking out a few sketches, patented the first windscreen wiper.

In 1905.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:59 AM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: Nov 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
Rudd and the ALP may be having a meltdown – even if glaciers aren’t

National security is too important to tolerate the fundamental misrepresentation of the truth’, shadow foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd solemnly intoned in the Australian a few weeks back. Actually, I always thought it was important not to be too parochial about the truth when your country’s vital national interests are on the line, hence the old aphorism that ‘a diplomat is an honest man sent to abroad to lie for the good of his country’.

Though Rudd is no longer a diplomat, he still gives the profession a bad name. The former China envoy customarily struggles to come to the point, thrashing about in endless pedantry, from arcanum to minutia, from caveat to irresolute, usually petering out somewhere in an elliptical orbit somewhere between meaningless and dull.

Nevertheless, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have some sympathy for Rudd when his former dummy-spitting boss (now dummy-spitting suburban hausfrau) Mark Latham rolled him on Richard Glover’s radio show when he blurted out infamously that he’d have had Australian troops out of Iraq by last Christmas. We have since learned from the so-called Diaries that Latham also thought it would be excellent to ditch Australia’s national security keystone – the US alliance.

When confronted with Latham’s cut-and-run Iraq ‘policy’, Rudd suddenly had some fundamental truths to face. After all, Latham’s ABC radio outburst was not as impulsive as it first may have appeared. Latham had already publicly shown plenty of form on the matter. Moreover, Rudd confessed that he previously had a ‘pretty basic and at times brutal conversation’ about the US alliance with Latham (to little effect; apparently he was not ‘brutal’ enough).

Although Labor opposed Iraq’s liberation – after months of opinion poll-driven shilly-shallying – Rudd consistently pestered the Howard Government over its responsibilities as an occupying power in post-Saddam Iraq. Rudd whipped out the ol’ Fourth Geneva Convention (the one just after the Third and before the Fifth Geneva Conventions) in a Monash University speech:

‘Australia today is conjointly responsible for ensuring the security, health, food, shelter and clothing for 20 million Iraqis. That’s what occupying powers do. Put simply, if you invade a country, you get to run it afterwards until an Iraqi government takes over. And that is a long way off…’

Just in case Prime Minister John Howard wasn’t in the audience, Rudd popped a memo into the PM’s suggestion box in mid-November 2003, urging increased Australian troop strength in Iraq: ‘I understand DOD currently has staff in country assisting with the development of the army. It would be useful’, Rudd helpfully recommended, ‘for the Government to investigate whether this training capacity could be increased’.

Latham was in charge of the show weeks later. Three months later in March 2004, in true populist ‘Goughic’ fashion, without so much as a nod to the trivial – parliamentary convention and shadow cabinet responsibility – Latham yanked the pin out on Australia’s Iraq commitment and with it the rug from under Rudd’s feet. Faced with Latham’s rash move, Rudd had two choices: do the Right Honourable thing and resign on principle or ‘jump in de conga line’.

We didn’t have to wait long for the answer – cue Harry Belafonte.
Rudd’s initial tactic: feign senile dementia, as evidenced by this Lateline interview with Tony Jones:

JONES: So you knew several weeks ago that Mark Latham planned to come out and say ‘troops home by Christmas’, did you?

RUDD: I can’t pinpoint any particular time as far as that’s concerned, all I know is Mark and I had been discussing it for some time.

JONES: The very line we’re talking about ‘troops home by Christmas’ you knew about that?

RUDD: We’d been discussing it for some time.

JONES: Did you know about it when we last spoke to you?

RUDD: I can’t quite recall the chronology.

Rudd and Latham also argued, breathtakingly, that Latham’s
security policy incontinence accorded with Labor’s pre-war no-war position: because Labor decided to side with the French and Chinese at the UN and leave Saddam running his Mesopotamian shop of horrors, Latham’s troops out by Christmas statement had been, well, pre-endorsed, shall we say, by shadow cabinet. That was hooey.

Notwithstanding Rudd’s notably acute memory lapses (all the more remarkable given his amazing ability to remember the Fourth Geneva Convention), it was devastatingly evident that Latham had been caught in flagrante delicto, so to speak, of violating the principle of shadow cabinet solidarity on a matter of vital national interest, i.e., the war on terror and alliance relations with the US. But Rudd, for reasons he has yet to explain, kept up the pretence of unity. And when caught out on one principle, he repeatedly fell back on
another: the confidentiality of shadow cabinet deliberations.

Recently Rudd was given a friendly chance to come clean. Asked by Kerry O’Brien on the ABC’s 7:30 Report if he’d been ‘caught on the hop’ by Latham’s Christmas pullout announcement last year, dissembling, Rudd activated the principle shield again:

RUDD: You know as well as I do, Kerry, when you’re dealing with complex questions of national security and you have a shadow cabinet that is functioning, a range of views are going to be put. There’s an outcome and the leader had a view.

O’BRIEN: And I think you were caught on the hop.

RUDD: I am not about to breach that principle [of confidentiality].

But still, no admission – at least not one according to the ABC transcript. But oddly, Rudd’s complete remarks are missing. What Rudd actually said, grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat, in reply to O’Brien, who was having trouble containing his own amusement, was: ‘And you can draw your own conclusion. I am not about to breach that principle’. Who says the ABC can’t do good comedy?

That’s about as close to an admission by Rudd as you are going to get. But it’ll do. As to why Rudd’s words were dropped from the transcript, well, keeping in mind that the ABC has in the past demonstrated a tendency to be creative with such things, you can draw your own conclusions. Indeed, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why Rudd has been let off so lightly by the media on such an important matter.

It contrasts rather remarkably with the bollocking given to health minister Tony Abbott earlier in the year when cabinet revised its Medicare safety net calculation, despite Abbott’s pre-election ‘ironclad commitment’. Rudd’s kid-glove treatment also contrasts sharply to much of the media’s shrill ‘we wuz lied to’ over children overboard, Bali terror warnings and supposedly ‘sexed-up’ Iraq intelligence briefings.

And why has not a single journalist, to my knowledge, asked Rudd why he didn’t consider resigning? Why wasn’t Rudd asked why, for example, he hadn’t followed Daryl Melham’s example when shadow cabinet rolled him over aboriginal land claims in 2000? As Melham said then: ‘I did so because as a matter of principle for me, I was unable to support the Shadow Cabinet decision on Queensland native title.’ Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, for different reasons, did likewise. But not Rudd. Why not?

Westminster parliamentary tradition holds that should a minister or shadow minister find himself unable in good conscience to abide by the policies adopted by their cabinet, they should find themselves a backbench to warm. It is an obligation that does not arise simply from a sense of honour, though that reason is not to be dismissed. It serves a very important check on cabinet government.

But that check on executive power is only effective so long as each member of cabinet, particularly those holding the key offices of state, has the strength of character to resign when the chips are down. It’s a test of leadership that British Labour politician Hugh Dalton speculated of future Prime Minister James Callaghan: ‘Has he got a resignation in him?’ Callaghan did (in 1967 over the devaluation of the Pound), but it could not be more apparent that Rudd doesn’t have a resignation in him.If Rudd had resigned, he would have alerted the Australian public to the terrible risk Latham posed. But instead, Rudd and his Labor colleagues tried to cover up the dangerous mess that Labor’s shadow cabinet had become under Latham. Fortunately the Australian electorate saw through it.

And now for the weather...

This just in: ‘There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production–with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now…if climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

‘“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale”, warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences…’

Worried? Don’t care? Heard it all before? Actually, you may have – in 1975. The article, appearing in the April 28th edition of Newsweek, went on to warn that unless something was done, we were doomed.

But that was then. This is now, baby. And the media has been in, well, a meltdown when it was reported recently that Nanook’s land values would decline (actually, according to sound economic principles, they would increase because there would be less of it) and the Panama Canal would lose its monopoly cache. Why the hullabaloo? The Arctic ice was reported to be melting. Must be due to the gaseous, hurricane-making ways of President George W. Bush, all agreed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) sent out the alarm with a media release titled: ‘The Summer Arctic sea ice falls far below average for fourth year, winter ice sees sharp decline, spring melt starts earlier.’ Far below average, eh? Over how many years? How long have they been measuring sea ice accurately?

Well, not for very long as it turns out. These days – and I do mean days – they’ve been doing it with satellites. And as even the New York Times noted, ‘before 1979, scientists estimated the size of the ice cap based on reports from ships and airplanes’.

The key word is estimated. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years; the polar ice caps, about 50 million. On that timeline, Kitty Hawk happened in the geologic equivalent of less time than the half-life of gnat flatulence. As for ships keeping an adequate record of arctic ice movements, I can only imagine that the RMS Titanic’s Captain EJ Smith and others wished it had been more science than art or chance.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:52 AM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: Apr 05, AU Edition

OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE
Nokia’s feature-packed 9300 communicator over-delivers on just about every score

Ialmost got arrested because of the Nokia 9300, I liked it so much. I had just gotten the handset to review the day before, and had spent the previous 24 hours eagerly trying out every one of its bells and whistles when, out of sheer exuberance, I turned the thing on in a place I should not have: aboard a QANTAS puddle-jumper that had just landed in Canberra.

Now, we were safely on the ground and the door to the plane was open when I decided to turn it on and check my voicemail, so I just assumed that any danger that a rogue SMS could have sent us hurtling to a fiery death had well and truly passed.

As it turns out, they do things differently in our nation’s capital.
Not only did a stewardess practically yank the thing out of my hand as I stepped out onto the tarmac, but as I walked to the terminal a burly fellow passenger who claimed to be part from the Transport Safety Bureau clapped me on the shoulder saying, “Mate, you cannot have that thing on anywhere airside at this airport! It carries the potential of jail and a very heavy fine!”

Perhaps he thought I had paid retail for the thing – just about anywhere you look, the pricetag tips over into four-figures territory – and needed to have a little more of my wealth redistributed.
By the time he was done, we were through the little building and I was diving out the door into a waiting cab, briefcase in one hand, schmick silvery mobile in the other, one step ahead of the law.

Brushes with authority aside (I doubt I would have been so eager to play with a $49 pre-paid jobby), the Nokia 9300 is a truly life-changing little bit of technology. Yes, it’s a good deal bigger than most phones on the market, but that’s because there’s more to it than just about any other handset available today. For one thing, it flips open to reveal a little QWERTY-layout keyboard which, though too small for even the slenderest fingers to type comfortably on, works great when held in both hands with each thumb working one side.

Above the keyboard is a little colour screen that is small but rich and crisp enough to manage a Windows-style operating system – which is where the thing’s real grunt and growl becomes apparent. One can surf the Web (though for me this was more fun in theory than in practice; I may have just been unlucky but attempts to load even quick, text-heavy sites took forever) and, more usefully, send and receive e-mail from one’s own ISP’s POP3 server as well. And, happily, it’s no more difficult to configure than Outlook Express.

(Another advantage of the screen: there’s a great little built-in golf game that shows up a treat. Not only does it save your round mid-play – allowing one to play a quick hole in a free moment and come back to the round later – but for me at least, it perfectly mimicked my playing style. As in real life, gimme putts just sometimes failed to drop, and even when my electronic setup and swing were completely in order, my drives still sometimes just skittered harmlessly along the ground, coming to rest just past the ladies’ tees).

Some of the other features seem a little less necessary, if only because the idea of working on something so small takes some getting used to – both physically and mentally. Not only does one have to get one’s small-motor skills back up to snuff to work the keys and joystick that serves as a mouse, but I found something unnerving about the fact that I suddenly had a phone with a better display and more available memory than my computer. Although it is possible to do so, I don’t think I ever see myself knocking up a quick Excel-compatible spreadsheet or PowerPoint-compatible presentation on my mobile. If that sort of work is required on the road, I’ll bring along my laptop.
But the Nokia 9300’s real selling point, I think, is to the cashed-up technophile road warrior: with its own suite of PC software and docking station (a.k.a. “Connectivity Desk Stand”), the phone becomes an organiser par excellence. For those who travel a lot for business, especially overseas, one can easily see how the 9300 would be a God-send. Between the phone’s tri-band EGSM capabilities (in other words, it will work on five continents), the ability to grab e-mail on the go and write coherent responses without having to hit the “2” key three times just to type a “c”, and the contact and personal organizing software which syncs everything up with a home or office PC, those who spend anything approaching serious time travelling overseas for business will find this thing indispensable.

Finally, some quibbles: Why doesn’t the 9300 have a camera? With so much in the way of communications capabilities, it seems a waste not to be able to take a happy snap on the thing and then e-mail it around the world.

Also, a speakerphone function would be nice as well; while obviously not polite for, say, shared offices, the one-touch loudspeaker on my own Nokia flip-phone is a lifesaver in loud spaces, and I was surprised by how much I found myself missing it once I started using the 9300.

Ultimately, the best thing I could compare this phone to would be a big super-luxury car – say, a Bentley. Oversized, more powerful than most people need, and many times more pricey than something more utilitarian that will still get you from A to B. Admittedly, the Nokia 9300 is not for everyone, but for those who can and will really take advantage of all its features, it remains a great piece of engineering and a really useful toy.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:52 AM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: Nov 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Iraqis have a sturdy constitution

If it bleeds, it leads’ is the old cliché about how journalists, editors, and producers decide what leads the evening news and makes the front page of the morning paper. After all (to borrow another aphorism), it’s not news when an airplane lands safely; it is news when one misses the runway and scatters steel and bodies across an airfield. But what if things were the other way around, and plane crashes were an every-day occurrence? Wouldn’t it be news if the rate of disasters dropped, and things started getting better in the aviation industry, and getting on a plane stopped being a life-or-death matter? That would certainly be worthy of a story.

That’s the situation we are faced with when it comes to the news media and Iraq. On the one hand, yes, parts of Iraq are deadly dangerous, as the regular litany of death tolls from suicide bombers and ‘improvised explosive devices’ makes clear. British journalist Robert Fisk recently said that Iraq ‘is now hell – a disaster. You cannot imagine how bad it is.’ Now Fisk may be a notorious leftist and anti-Bush radical (he was the man who once, after being accosted by toughs in Afghanistan, wrote that he felt that he deserved to be beaten up for being a white European), but his sentiments are a common one in the press. And as a result, the vast majority of reporting we see in Australia (and in other countries’ news outlets) is bad news.

Yet there is another side of the story that is not being covered with anywhere near as much enthusiasm: the growth of a democratic Iraqi civil society, and the increasing failure of the notoriously-misnamed ‘insurgents’ to achieve their tactical or political goals. Did you know that Iraqis recently went to the polls and approved a new constitution? No? You could be forgiven, considering the precious few column-inches in Australian papers that were devoted to this historic event.

Even if you did hear the news, it is likely that it was tempered with well-spun numbers designed to suggest that the balloting was a bloody failure. As a combined AP/Agence France Press dispatch that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald put it at the time of the voting, ‘Nearly 450 people were killed in the 19 days before the referendum, often by insurgents using suicide car bombs, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings.’
Well, yes, fair enough – though these numbers don’t tell us anything about the 19 days previous to that. (Similarly, reporters trumpet the rising death toll of American troops, without contextualizing it by pointing out that casualties have been decreasing month-on-month). What the Herald’s dispatch, and those in most other major news outlets, ignored is that the voting was a tremendous disaster for the terrorists who doing their best to turn Iraq into a swamp of civil war and sharia law.

Yes, Coalition troops did their level-best to secure the country for the voting, including banning on the day to prevent car bombs, but consider this: There were 347 terrorist attacks on polling places in January when Iraqis went to the polls for the first time since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Ten months later, when Iraqis once again took to the streets in droves to cast their ballots and get their fingers stained purple, terrorists were only able to pull of a grand total of 13 attacks.

Pretty pathetic on the terrorists’ part, really.

Of course, the institutional bias of most news organisations means that this sort of information is rarely presented. Indeed, ABC’s Media Watch went to great pains recently to take a swipe at a regular feature in the Wall Street Journal – an American newspaper – written by an Australian. It’s title? ‘Good News From Iraq’.

The amazing thing is that this bias, which can broadly be called left-wing, winds up doing such a disservice to the cause of bringing freedom, democracy, and self-determination to a country that had spent the past several decades being crushed under the heel of a brutal tyrant. Loathing of George W. Bush specifically, and broader post-modern skepticism about anything American in general, has placed the left in a very uncomfortable position philosophically when it comes to the liberation of Iraq and the broader Global War on Terrorism.

This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I sat on a panel discussing everyone’s favourite cocktail party subject, ‘why hate America?’. The war was pretty high on my opponent’s writ of indictment, and of course all the usual canards were trotted out: George Bush and Dick Cheney orchestrated the whole thing so that their greedy environment-despoiling pals at Halliburton could take control of Iraq’s oil while at the same time making sure plenty of poor, black soldiers get sent to their deaths and are kept overseas where they were unable to help the Kerry-voting residents of New Orleans…and so on.

And of course, they charged the US with fighting a ‘war on Islam’.

While a simplistic misrepresentation, there is something to that last charge; the war is not a war on a religion, but a particularly political manifestation of it that is generally termed ‘Islamo-fascism’. Where Islamo-fascism flourishes, the very freedoms we all cherish, and which the left has an honourable history of fighting for, die. And thus left-wing opponents of the war – who always go to great pains to say, ‘Of course I didn’t support Saddam Hussein’, before adding the critical, ‘but…’ – effectively align themselves with regimes whose leaders ban representational art, music and dancing, think ‘equal pay’ means that a man has to give the same shopping allowance to all his wives, and stay up all night debating whether stoning or hanging is the proper application of gay rights.

Yes, Iraq still has a long way to go before adventure tourists head there by the planeload to see the ruins of Ninevah. And yes, as the saying goes, war is hell. But as Iraq’s constitutional referendum showed, that country is heading in the right direction.

Too bad that those who should be most supportive of the project can’t see it.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:46 AM | Comments (0)

Sep 05, AU edition

RAGING BULL
There’s nothing more red-blooded than a juicy slab of steak, but BARBARA SUMNER-BURSTYN reports that a female sex hormone linked to ‘gay’ behaviour in animals and adverse effects on children is
being pumped into some of our beef cattle – without being disclosed on food packaging labels

Butchers dancing like Hari Krishnas, senior citizens thrashing out hard rock extolling its virtues, meat, especially red meat is hot right now. After years of slow decline prompted by health concerns about cholesterol and ‘lighter eating’ trends, Australia’s meat producers are staging a comeback. By doing everything from rolling back health concerns – pointing out, for example, that lean red meat is less than five per cent fat, and pushing it as a source of iron for potentially anaemic women – to reviving traditional steakhouse dining, meat producers, distributors and sellers are working hard to get back on our plates.

But like ‘fog facts’ – important things known but not known that nobody seems able to focus on anymore – described in Larry Beinhart’s book, ‘Fog Facts’ Politics: What We Don’t Know and Why We Don’t Know It, there’s more going on in the paddocks than just grass munching.
Hormone Growth Promotants for example. Known in the industry as HGPs, the official line is that the sex hormones implanted into the ears of cattle are natural or nature identical substances that simply replicate nature, mimicking the hormones lost through castration and equating to other natural dietary sources of hormones such as eggs or soybeans. And, for the most part, Australians don’t know that these substances are going into their meat – despite HGPs being banned in the EU, a fact which has spawned complex record-keeping and audit trail arrangements to make sure no meat from HGP cattle makes it to Europe.

Question your butcher about HGP’s and he’ll probably look at you blankly – and labels will tell you precious little more. Yet they have been used routinely in Australian beef production since 1979 – and have until recently been thought to be an effective way to improve growth rates and feed efficiency in the stockyards. A $3
implant, for example, can generate up to $25-$30 worth of extra cow at the market.

Across the Tasman, the New Zealand Food Safety Authority recently endorsed food labelling to ensure informed choice, but that call has recently disappeared from the agency’s website. When questioned about the presence of artificial hormones in New Zealand’s meat chain and the lack of labelling Sandra Daly, Director of Communications, said that they are a science-based organisation and based on the scientific evidence, there is no consumer protection basis for banning HGP use for beef production for New Zealand.

Australia endorses that position. In a major report, the Australian Department of Health and Aging found that the human safety and toxicology of HGP’s have been extensively assessed by regulatory authorities in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, in addition to expert scientific committees from the World Health Organisation. The NZFSA says the report forms a part of the information New Zealand considers in developing their views on HGPs. They comment that all international bodies and national regulatory agencies accept the safety data that residues of registered hormones do not pose a threat to consumers.

All that is, except the European Union. The use of HGPs was banned by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, in 1988. The WTO responded that the ban was unscientific. In 2003 the EU completed a full scientific risk assessment, re-evaluating the potential risks to human health from hormone residues. This resulted in the permanent prohibition of estradiol 17ß. Their so-called ‘precautionary’
approach extends to five hormones (testosterone, progesterone, trembolone acetate, zeranol and melengestrol acetate) that have now been provisionally prohibited. In addition to estradiol 17ß there are seven registered HGP’s in Australia including those containing progesterone and trembolone acetate.

In banning HGP’s the EU say they have considered all social, economic and political factors. They concluded that estradiol 17ß was a ‘complete’ carcinogen and that others such as trembolone acetate, the synthetic equivalent of testosterone, should be viewed as having potentially endocrine-disrupting, developmental, immunological, neurobiological, immunotoxic, genotoxic and carcinogenic effects. The EU claims there is a lack of data to support an alternative view. They also contend that despite the WTO rulings there is limited information available on the levels of the various metabolites, or breakdown products, despite this information being relevant.

The EU also suggests that young children may be more sensitive to low levels of the hormones than previously thought. The authors conclude that in light of recent progress in our understanding of estrogen levels in children, possible adverse effects on human health by consumption of meat from estrogen-treated animals cannot be excluded.

The WTO has consistently ruled against the EU. Despite WTO-approved retaliatory economic trade sanctions imposed by the United States, the EU continues to defy orders to lift the ban. EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy stated in November last year that the EU ban on certain HGPs was based on a thorough and independent scientific risk assessment.

The approach exercised by the EU appears to be echoed by a leading comparative cancer research programme at Cornell University in the United States. They say that while there’s no evidence to suggest that eating meat from hormone-treated animals affects breast cancer risks, a conclusion on lack of human health effect can only be made after large-scale studies to compare the health of people who eat HGP meat to people who don’t. These have never been done. Cornell also acknowledges that large epidemiological studies have never been done to assess whether or not early puberty in developing girls is associated with having eaten growth hormone-treated foods.

The Australian report concludes that even with the EU’s latest data supporting the ban they can find no grounds for amending Australia’s regulatory position on HGPs. New Zealand takes the same position.
Derek Moore, New Zealand manager for Elanco, the makers of Compudose, one of the most widely used HGPs in New Zealand, is verbose in his dismissal of any concerns surrounding the products: ‘There is no question that the EU position is a form of trade embargo and market protectionism. It’s a non-tariff trade barrier.’ Moore goes on to describe the precautionary principal (the EU’s better-safe-than-sorry approach to implementing health regulations) as entirely arbitrary. ‘I give it no weight’, he said and added that the science in favour of HGPs was so unequivocal that there was really only one side to this issue, the side of the facts.

Compudose is a controlled-release estradiol. The package insert says Estradiol 17ß is a naturally-occurring substance. In the material safety data sheet published by Elanco, the emergency overview for the product states that estradiol may enter the body through the skin, causes cancer and is highly potent. Fetal changes, reproductive tissue damage, mental disorders are also mentioned, as are increased breast size and other feminizing effects in males occupationally exposed to estrogens. The published warning for the product says that even intermittent absorption of small amounts of estrogen through the skin may result in accumulation of relatively high systemic levels with concomitant negative health effects on children whose parents work with estrogen products. (3) Elanco, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, is at pains to point out that its product does not pose any health risk, either to those handling the product or to consumers who ultimately eat the implanted meat. ‘The data is pointing out the hazards of exposure,’ says Moore, ‘that is entirely different from the risk.’

Compudose is implanted only in the skin immediately beneath the ear of a cattle beast. Disposal of ears of implanted cattle is an issue. NZFSA says they are discarded as waste, rendered or used in gelatin production. Gelatin is made from skin (pigskin and hide split) and bone taken from slaughtered animals that have been approved for human consumption. The resulting gelatin is then used in a plethora of locally produced products. A report by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) said that failure to discard implanted ears could lead to mg amounts of hormone residues to enter the food chain and cause acute toxicity in consumers. The NZFSA responds that Australia allows HGP implantation in other parts of the body. But as Elanco New Zealand points out, the product and all product use guidelines are the same as in New Zealand. Martin Holmes, a spokesperson for the APVMA says that, as in New Zealand, Compudose is implanted only in the ear.

A further issue is the use of antibiotics. Elanco acknowledges that the implant may be dusted with the antibiotic tetracycline. Derek Moore is unsure if the local version contains any antibiotic. He suggests that perhaps the implant is coated in talcum powder.
In the United States the needle used to insert the implant is also often coated with an antibiotic. Vet Services in the Hawkes Bay are adamant they do not use antibiotics to cleanse needles. But either way the trace use of an antibiotic for non-therapeutic purposes is concerning. In the United States a bill currently before the US House of Representatives (The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2005) stated that non-therapeutic overuse of antibiotics in animals was creating severe antibiotic resistance in people. The task force cautioned that if current trends continue, treatments for common infections could become nonexistent. Again the EU is at the forefront of precautionary measures, banning the use of all non-therapeutic veterinary antibiotics identified as similar or identical to those used in humans. Elanco says it has yet to be demonstrated that non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has a detrimental effect on humans.

So why use HGPs at all? The industry calls them ‘quality enhancers’. In one local trial cattle treated with Compudose had an average weight increase of 23.5%. Cattle treated with HGPs grow faster enabling them to be sent to the works in shorter time, lowering the farmer cost of beef raising. It’s estimated that for every dollar spent on an HGP there is a five-dollar return.

Because of the EU ban and restrictions in nine other countries considered minor markets HGPs are strictly controlled in Australia . They include identification prior to or immediately after implantation, double-tagging, strict dose notation, a level of paper work that one vet described as onerous, implantation by trained and certified implanters and a requirement that all lost tags be replaced immediately. Once HGP cattle reach the works they must be separated from other animals and either killed in a separate area or only after all the equipment is completely cleansed. Abattoir workers spoken to described the processes as time-consuming.

Perhaps the most salient point for Australian meat consumers is the fact that all identification procedures and separation effort is designed solely to protect our standing with the EU. ‘There is no emphasis on ensuring the local market can access non-HGP meat,’ admits the NZFSA. They advise that there are three main mechanisms for post-slaughter separation and identification. Organics such as those run by Biogro, the New Zealand Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau’s domestic Quality Mark and Qualmark. (Qualmark reports that they do not certify meat)

Such is the adherence to the ‘science’ of HGPs and the belief that the EU ban is nothing more than market protectionism, the only risk acknowledged by the NZFSA is a trade risk. Implanted animals in Australia and New Zealand are not tested for residues of any of the registered HGPs. Instead up to 450 non-implanted cattle are tested to ensure compliance with the identification regulations to protect the export market.

NZ Food Safety Authority director of animal products Tony Zohrab was reported recently as saying any decision on the use of HGPs is very much a commercial one between farmers and processors. The organisations official position is that while consumer perception obviously plays a role in decision-making, wherever possible, when that perception is at odds with scientific evidence, they prefer consumer education to scientifically unjustified regulation.
Elanco’s Derek Moore says their own consumer research shows people want safe and affordable food. ‘The use of HGPs and antibiotics in animal production is of very low concern.’ And he comments that banning things is unacceptable in our modern marketplace.

He’s right of course. HGPs should not be banned. The tracking and status of HGP cattle in Australia is comprehensive and effective. Labeling for the local market is no more commercially onerous than separation for the European market. Consumer choice is promoted as the ultimate freedom. It is the market that must test the validity of claims in support of HGPs. It is the market that must sort out whether consumers really want to eat meat grown with growth promoting hormones.

THE LESBIAN GULLS
The issue of estrogen in the diet is a controversial one. Scientists have discovered a number of foods – most notably soy – that contain high levels of phytoestrogens, the plant equivalent of the female sex hormone.

Although initially dismissed by some as ‘soy conspiracy theory’, research on the effects of phytoestrogens and other estrogen compounds on human sexual development is now widespread, particularly because of soy’s use as a milk substitute for infants.

New Scientist magazine reported two years ago that girls raised on soy infant formula are more likely to suffer menstrual discomfort, and boys born to vegetarian mothers are five times more likely to suffer genital abnormalities. Other studies have reinforced suspicions about diets high in phytoestrogens, and some scientists now believe there’s evidence that they could be a factor in causing homosexuality.
The first evidence came in from the animal kingdom, as Science News online reported:

‘While the health community has recently begun a host of studies to explore a possible link between estrogenic pollutants and cancers in women, few researchers have focused on the related reproductive risks such environmental hormones may pose for both sexes. That’s unfortunate says Theo Colborn, a zoologist with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., because reproductive effects are likely to be ‘much more widespread.’

‘Indeed, she notes, animal data are beginning to suggest that far smaller exposures are needed to trigger reproductive effects than to induce cancers. And because some of these reproductive changes may be subtle, they could evade detection for decades – even a lifetime – unless hunted for explicitly.

‘Colborn has convened a number of symposia in the past few years for researchers who study reproductively impaired wildlife populations or laboratory animals exposed to environmental hormones. Most of these scientists, she says, describe the links they’re finding between impaired reproduction and ‘hormonal’ pollutants as sobering – if not downright scary.

‘Indeed, she and many other environmental scientists worry that if hormone-like contaminants can feminize male animals, these ubiquitous pollutants may also underlie troubling reproductive-system trends being witnessed in men.’

A University of California, Davis, study by avian toxicologist Michael Fry in the 1980s determined that estrogenic pollution lay behind the ‘lesbian behaviour’ of seagulls. Significantly, to test their theory, they injected normal seagull eggs with estradiol, the additive being pumped into some New Zealand and Australian beef.

‘To connect these effects with estrogenic pollutants, Fry and his colleagues conducted a number of experiments during the 1980s. In one, they injected eggs of contaminant-free gulls with estradiol…When the hatchlings emerged, they exhibited the same array of feminized sex organs as DDT-contaminated Western gulls on Santa Barbara Island, off the coast of California.’

The estradiol, and a range of other estrogenic pollutants like DDT, effectively ‘chemically castrated’ the males, Fry says.
As Science News reported: ‘He suspects the males’ likely lack of interest in mating explains not only why female gulls dominated Santa Barbara Island’s breeding colony in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also why the females cohabited.’

Increasingly, scientists suspect environmental hormone pollutants caused by human agriculture and industrial waste are working into the animal food chain and creating more instances of so-called ‘gay behaviour’ by animals.

Indeed, the debate over whether homosexuality is genetic, or a lifestyle choice, has raged for decades. But increasingly scientists are discovering evidence pointing to a more complex answer, and one which the estrogen controversy could shed some light on.
If homosexuality were truly an inherited genetic condition, it should have disappeared from the human gene pool thousands of years ago, on the basis of Darwin’s evolutionary theory about natural selection of traits most likely to boost procreation.

Another blow to the simplistic ‘gay gene’ theory are studies of identical twins, which show that where one twin is gay, there is only a 50% chance that the other twin will be as well. Because the genes of identical twins are, well, identical, if a gay gene exists both twins should have it. On that basis, scientists have concluded that homosexuality must not be genetic, given the lower strike rate. Instead, they’re increasingly leaning towards environmental factors during pregnancy.

Subsequent studies, for example, have shown that identical twins were sometimes exposed to differing hormone levels in the womb – one twin might receive higher doses of hormones from the mother, either through diet or the pregnancy itself.

That, say researchers, could explain why one identical twin is gay and the other is not.

Which brings us back to estrogen additives like soy, or estradiol and the lesbian seagulls. Could it be that the increased prevalence of gay behaviour in humans has less to do with “who we are” than what we eat or inhale?
The ethical implications are enormous, particularly if ongoing studies confirm that pollutants and estrogen-laden foods are possible causative factors in both homosexuality and reproductive health problems.

The question is, what are the hormones doing to humans?

Ian Wishart

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: Feb 05

UWE SIEMON-NETTO
An act of God? An answer to lightweight theorists

In these first dramatic days of the New Year, theodicy seems to be the favorite topic in salons and around kitchen tables. Theodicy is a term coined by German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716) for assorted attempts to “justify” belief in a good, omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of all the evil around us — natural calamities as well as the demonic acts of man.How can God allow the angry sea to swallow up hundreds of thousands of innocent people after a huge seaquake? Of course radical Islamic sages
fill Web sites with speculation that this was Allah’s punishment of non-believers, perverts among tourists and governments supporting “crusaders” — meaning, Christians — in their conquest of Muslim lands.

Never mind that most of the victims are Muslims and most of the help comes from the so-called crusaders, plus Japan.

Yet this still leaves the question: What about God’s goodness? To the horror of more fervent Christians, no lesser light than Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, opined in London’s Daily Telegraph “the disaster should have all Christians question God’s existence.”

“The question, ‘How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?’ is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t — indeed it would be wrong if it weren’t,” he wrote.

This triggered a spirited retort from C. FitzSimmons Allison, former Episcopal bishop of South Carolina.

“Natural disasters always provoke questions of God’s goodness in the face of excruciating tragedy,” he wrote in VirtueOnline, a feisty orthodox Anglican Web service. “It has always been so, and disasters will always continue. It has not been given to Christians to dispel the mystery of evil.”

Allison continued, “The cynic in us is tempted to resolve the issue by removing God from all consideration and doing what Job refused to do: curse (consign to oblivion) his own hope. Yet this choice saves no one from the terrible waves of water and leaves us with no hope or meaning beyond the devastation.”

“Jesus does not attempt to explain why the tower of Siloam (Luke 13) fell on those 18 people, but he carefully and adamantly denies that it was because they were worse sinners than others in Jerusalem. He acknowledges therefore, that there is innocent suffering, but he goes on to say what seems at first un-pastoral: “... but unless you repent you shall likewise perish.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Munich University’s Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the world’s leading systematic theologians, also referred to the book of Job. In Biblical times, he said, people seemed to have a much sounder approach to what we today call theodicy.
“Even in terrible situations such as Job’s, they have never ceased praising God. For when you stop doing that, you destroy hope. But hope is when despite everything one puts oneself in God’s hands,” Pannenberg told United Press International.

We do not live in paradise - not anymore, and not yet, if you affirm Scripture. Leibnitz’ theodicy stated that while God created a world with evil in it, it is still the best of all possible worlds.
“God has created the laws of nature, and we experience them in one way or another,” added Pannenberg. “God runs this world with as little supernatural interference as possible,” agreed Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, an organization defending Judeo-Christian values.

But whether evil occurs in humans or in nature, ultimately God will ultimately turn the worst evil into good, Christian theology teaches. Hope and an outpouring of love are already visible results of the tsunami catastrophe, as they have been after the war caused by Hitler.
No, for all its beauty this universe is no Paradise. But it is, as Leibnitz argued, the best of all worlds God could have chosen to create.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

LINE ONE: Feb 05

CHRIS CARTER
Engineering road kill

They reckon that the Aussies will gamble on two flies crawling up a wall, which may very well be true, but equally, when it comes to not only the extraordinary amount of money we Kiwis venture on all known forms of gambling, little appears to beat the appalling gamble that each and every one of ustakeswhen we venture forth on this nation’s roads.

Our family, this Christmas past, decided to repair to the Winterless North, where, based at Whangarei and seeing that the weather required more the donning of gummies and a parka rather than Bikinis or Speedos, we decided, instead of lazing on the beach to explore some of the places around the North that we either hadn’t seen before or hadn’t seen for years. This, quite naturally involved travelling several thousand Ks which I am very happy to report were essentially covered, without any drama at all, on roads that by NZ standards are pretty good, and shared by other motorists who appeared to be driving safely and well. All of which, to be frank, I found to be quite surprising, in that despite there being at all times during these trips a large number of vehicles on the road, Plod, apart from the occasional sighting in and around Whangarei itself, appeared to have gone completely AWOL.

No coppers to be seen, at any time, anywhere, well that is to be accurate, apart from a couple of very genial Plods at the Cape Reinga car park, presumably there to make sure tourists’ cars weren’t pinched or broken into, nary a striped Commodore or Falcon was to be seen anywhere or at any time. Indeed, apart from the obligatory Mitsubishi L300 road-side photo/cash register collection device spotted on the way home, naturally on a wide, straight bit of highway just south of Whangarei, that, appeared to be it when it came to our travels being made all the safer by the now uniformed inheritors of the mantle once worn so proudly by the Highwaymen of yore.

Have the Plods already hit Harry’s budget for roadside Taxation for this year I wondered? Is the Far North a no-go zone for those otherwise so very active in the rattling of the LTSA’s collection boxes most other places? Has a major outbreak of rape and pillage in otherwise less civilised parts of this country required urgent reinforcement leading to a denudation of the North’s usual traffic enforcement presence? Well apart from taking note of this odd phenomenon who really cares, suffice it to say that our extensive travels were most definitely enhanced by their absence, in that, as reported, apart from a few people, probably clinically blind, who persist in driving at a snail’s pace on the open highway, it would be very hard to fault the overall behaviour of the folk, who these Christmas holidays drove hither and yon north of Whangarei.

Which brings us, sadly, to other areas not too far from home base here in Auckland, that coppers or no coppers, no sane person should ever frequently travel should they wish eventually to achieve a statistically normal life span. Roads, so badly engineered and therefore inherently dangerous that in my opinion those responsible for their design, construction and indeed continuing use should be charged, tried and very probably convicted for manslaughter. Sections of this nation’s busy highways, that were OSH’s rules to be applicable, would quickly lead to the need of a brand new prison to be built simply to accommodate the people so plainly responsible for the unnecessary deaths on these roads of so many of their fellow citizens. I just cannot believe that this criminal negligence and clear culpability for engineered road kill is so lightly passed over by the people of this country who, years back let alone now, should be demanding heads on a plate of those so clearly responsible for the hundreds of completely unnecessary deaths and injuries caused. That, equally, we passively allow the inference, by these criminally incompetent nitwits, that the main reason these several roads/killing grounds are so deadly is all the fault of the motorists involved, and all that is required is to slow down, and of course to not partake of the demon drink! That is not to say of course that the authorities have not taken some steps, (however useless and ineffectual) to try to reduce this ongoing carnage. Hell yes, warning signs abound as to the dangers ahead, indeed to the point were anyone silly enough to try to read all of the notices erected you could almost guarantee running off the road as you did so. Naturally this has proven to be, whilst completely ineffectual, very cheap to implement, as indeed has also been the stationing of serried rows of speed capturing devices that whilst raising revenue no doubt, has done precisely nothing to reduce the butcher’s bill, nor in any other way has it altered the plain fact that these roads are simply engineered to kill people, ordinary folk who as ordinary people do, occasionally make a small error in their driving, just that if this momentary lapse occurs say at Maramarua, then the odds most definitely are that you will die.

The ever predictable response to the latest bodies being cut out of yet another car wreck? Gosh, we are looking at this section of highway and who knows sometime around the year 2008 we think that we might just have the problem sorted out! In the meantime do try to drive more carefully, and remember to wear your seat belt meantime! Good God, can you imagine what would happen if these Pratts were in charge of our health system should there be a major epidemic break out. Yes, we know what the disease is and yes we promise to start distributing the vaccine in around four years time. Would any of these ‘decision makers’ be able to safely show their faces in public? Of course not, in sheer fear of the consequences of such a criminal neglect of their paid duties they would have the required medications out there and being distributed as a matter of absolute priority. Roads that kill people in bulk numbers? Money, men and machinery in sufficient amounts, with anyone other than complete incompetents in charge, then these roads could all be re-engineered and safe within six months, and dare I say that were a senior Cabinet Minister’s family to be wiped out on one of these death strips this would more than likely happen, but perish the thought, wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Just think about this state of affairs for a moment. We all know, without a shadow of doubt, that over the announced four years that it apparently will take to sort out Maramarua’s death zone, dozens and dozens of completely innocent people are guaranteed to needlessly die. Yet in many respects and in many ways we too are guilty of just sitting back and passively watching these people die. Perhaps it’s an indication of our obsessive gambling instincts, like, shame about that young family that’s just got wiped out, luck of the draw I suppose! Wrong place, wrong time, dangerous bit of road that one wonders if ‘They’ are ever going to fix? Which attitude, in my opinion, and don’t tell me that this attitude is not a common one, is precisely why the authorities are in no hurry at all to earmark the money necessary, after all why should they? Where is the public demand, the need to react to politicians scared out of their wits by an enraged public who sees all of these largely preventable deaths as being directly their fault? No, now as in the past, the Government and its various authoritative minions are quite safe in the knowledge that the money that should immediately be spent to stop all of these deaths, can be saved and gosh, perhaps even be spent on bribing our way back into office at the next election. After all, as previously observed, where is the public clamour for some action here?

Why even the media is now so accustomed to this carnage, that whilst a few Kiwis overseas that might come to grief becomes headline news, people being bumped off in bulk numbers locally, figures not much more than simply becoming a part of the cricket score like figures of this month’s road toll. Even the siren song of the LTSA concentrating as it ever does on the sins of the motorist re the perils of drink and speed carefully ignores the blindingly clear facts that bad roads are killing people, although one could unkindly observe here that they appear to be in the job of collecting money rather than in its spending on real road safety.

And, so finally, the point that I really would like to make. If anyone of us can tear ourselves away from the continual barrage of bulldust that largely provides most of the content of our local media’s news stories, let us stop and consider, just for one moment, the absolute fact that a large number of our fellow citizens right here in this country, are going to die, not might, but in fact you can absolutely guarantee will, and furthermore in clearly identifiable sections of our highway system, and that if we, that’s WE in capital letters, don’t demand, with political menaces if necessary, an immediate solution, then like it or not, then we, each and everyone of us must share the guilt that in a truly caring society should never be allowed to exist.

By all means continue to consider the plight and the woes of the world in general, but please don’t lose sight of what’s happening, which is so easily reversible, right under our very noses. Cheers.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:07 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

HOWHERE TO HIDE
Biometric passports. A worldwide database tracking one billion people. Cameras on every street, tracking every move. Opinions that must be registered to be published – if they are legal at all. Is this a vision of some fictional Orwellian hell, or the world just around the corner? JAMES ROBERTSON and JAMES MORROW look at the growing tension between webloggers, privacy activists, and ordinary citizens and the world’s governments in the post-9/11 era

The story read like it could have come from China, or Iran, or any number of totalitarian states: an individual’s testimony to a government inquiry breaks open a massive scandal involving the ruling party, allegations of corruption, and as much as $100 million dollars in false payments – all tied in to an effort to undermine a separatist group seeking their own state. Thanks to an official order, though, the testimony is secret, even though (or perhaps because) it has the power to bring down the national government. Despite everyone in the highest circles of the capital city knowing the story, the press can only barely allude to it, under pain of prosecution.

But that doesn’t mean the information doesn’t make it out to the wider world. In a neighbouring country, a few individuals with their own weblogs, or blogs, throw the damning information out onto the Internet, allowing anyone with a computer and a web browser to find out the whole story. Anyone, that is, except those in the place where it is happening: in the country where the scandal is taking place, individuals are not allowed to post any of the information on their own sites, or even link to a site in another country that details the charges. ‘Anyone who takes that information and diffuses it is liable to be charged with contempt of court’, warned a government official. ‘Anybody who reproduces it is at risk.’

Amazingly, the scandal – and the subsequent threat to crack down on anyone disseminating crucial information about it – took place in Canada, a country that likes to think of itself as one of the most liberal, tolerant, and enlightened nations on the planet. An interesting story on its own, the tale highlights the growing tension between individual citizens and their governments as technology allows each side to keep ever-closer tabs on one another. Even in free and democratic states like Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, technology is radically changing the way government relates to people and vice versa. What political philosophers call the ‘night watchman state’ – in which the government’s roles, as Harvard’s Robert Nozick once defined it, are ‘limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on’ – is a thing of the past.

Instead, politicians on both the left and right are using technology, the threat of terrorism, and a natural desire to increase their own power to slowly but surely turn liberal democracies into ‘panopticon’, or ‘all-seeing’, states with the sort of surveillance powers the old Soviet Union and her satellites could have only dreamed of.

ARE YOUR PAPERS IN ORDER?
Already, anyone wishing to travel to the United States will soon require a passport embedded with biometric and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags which are not just expensive and intrusive, but also open up a huge Pandora’s box of privacy issues. For one thing, the RFID tags will contain a wealth of unencrypted data and will be readable by anyone within range with the proper scanning equipment, creating a huge new opportunity in the growing identity theft market.

Business and tourism groups in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe are all asking Washington to back off from the new requirement, but so far the response from the U.S. State Department has been, ‘our country, our rules’. Which might be fair enough were there not plans to, by 2015, make the new biometrically-encoded, radio-tagged passports standard around the world and create a global database of one billion travelers, their movements, and their personal details.

Ironically, while these measures are all being enlisted in the fight against the very real threat of international terrorism, the data in the new passports will actually create a boon for identity thieves and their customers, including terrorists, drug smugglers and the like. Furthermore, at a practical level, much of the technology that the US is leading the international push for is actually quite unreliable.

Some 39 international human rights groups from Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America have all signed a letter protesting the technology, noting that ‘even the most reliable uses of this technology - one-to-one verification using recent photographs - have been shown in US government tests to be highly unreliable, returning a false non-match [where technology doesn’t recognise people with a valid photo] rate of five per cent and a false match rate of one per cent’.

More worryingly, they point out that while free countries may use this technology to keep an eye out for bad guys, more repressive regimes could also use it for their own evil purposes, such as cracking down on dissidents. ‘We hope that the choices of biometrics have been driven primarily by logistical and commercial concerns and were not intended to facilitate the conversion of travel systems into a global infrastructure of surveillance’, the letter concludes. ‘But we are deeply concerned that this may become their unintended consequence.’
And indeed an ‘infrastructure of surveillance’ is what is cropping up, slowly but surely, even in free countries. Be it the near-fanatical push by the United Kingdom’s Home Office for national identity cards that may wind up including DNA fingerprints of every citizen or hidden cameras, often with face-recognition technologies linked to police stations everywhere from American suburbs to (as is now being proposed) Sydney’s King’s Cross, government agencies are using everything from the threat of terrorism to the fight against day-to-day street crime to use technology to be everywhere and see everything.

Which is one reason why the current tensions – not just in Canada – between webloggers and their governments represent the thin edge of what could be a very large wedge. Exposing the old canard that ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about’, cases in Canada and elsewhere are showing that when it comes to technology, governments are increasingly worried about the power of technology to keep an eye on them, and would rather keep it in their own hands.

CANADA’S WAR ON WEBLOGS
In a bygone era of print media supremacy Canada’s ban would have gone unchallenged; indeed, the Canadian daily the Vancouver Sun made its reluctance to defy government orders clear in an editorial, writing, ‘It’s a shame [we] can’t publish anything that’s going on in the…inquiry. When the publication ban is taken off we can all talk freely about what’s going on in our country. Until then our collective lips are sealed’.

But weblogs are changing all that. Already a thorn in the side of totalitarian states like Iran, China, and Burma, where dissidents use the internet as a way of challenging the government’s media monopoly, bloggers in the democratic world are about to learn that an unfortunate consequence of their growing influence is greater attention from governments, as regulators worldwide begin to consider the possibility of reigning in a medium that had previously been a forum for unbridled free expression.

The problem for bloggers is the fine line they tread between fulfilling the role of legitimate journalists and, as their detractors term them, pyjama-clad partisans.

This group of supposed dilettantes, many of whom lack any traditional journalistic qualifications, are beginning to challenge the establishment media for its reach of influence. Readers have embraced the openly partisan format of blogs, the most popular of which can boast daily readerships comparable to the national newspapers and lay claim to having broken some of the biggest stories of the past year.

There are no barriers to internet publication, however, and anyone with a computer and the inclination to do so can establish their own blog free of charge within minutes. Blogs are also free from any external editing which allows their author’s to diarise, write political commentary and deliver a mix of observations, criticisms or updates on a limitless array of subjects without paying attention to concerns about political correctness, bias or even readability.

Governments are pointing to this lack of professionalism across the internet as justification for not giving bloggers and online publishers the same freedoms as members of the traditional press. While print journalists and contributors to the mainstream media are protected by legal precedent that enshrines their free political communication, the law has been slow to respond to the explosion of online political content, giving legislators a chance to fill the void and place clear limits on their freedom of expression.

Leading the Australian push is Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, Special Minister of State and newly appointed head of the Australian Government Information Management Office, who says he is giving ‘very active consideration’ to introducing reforms that would make bloggers and online publishers subject to the provisions of the Australian Electoral Act.

The legislation, expected to be introduced after the coalition takes control of the Senate on July 1st, would place bloggers in the same category as political advertisers, requiring them to include the name and address of the person authorising their website content and making publishers of unauthorised political material subject to fines as large as $5,000.

Of particular concern to most bloggers is the broad definition of what constitutes political or ‘electoral’ material as it is defined by Australian Electoral Law. Section 4(1) of the Electoral Act says that electoral material may include ‘any […] reference to, or comment on: the election; the Government; the Opposition; a political party or candidate; or any issue submitted to, or otherwise before, the electors in connection with the election’.

The issues that fall under the definition and be subject regulation include the performance of the government, taxation levels – even gay marriage.

An Australian Electoral Commission official, who declined to be named, told Investigate that the application of such a wide ranging definition to online content would be ‘difficult, broad…and potentially dangerous’.

Also problematic is the interpretation of what constitutes an advertisement under Australian electoral law. Defined as being any form of publication or notice that contains ‘electoral matter’ the act could potentially to any expression of political opinion, regardless of whether the author has any links to a political party.

The traditional media are exempt from the regulations and the law no longer places restrictions on those who write letters to the editor or callers to talkback radio; creating a legal situation where opinion expressed within the pages of a newspaper is considered legitimate free expression but self-published material on the internet is subject to regulation.

Senator Andrew Bartlett, deputy leader of the Australian Democrats, has a rare vantage point on the issue, as both a sitting member of the Senate that is expected to approve the legislation when it is introduced and as a blogger himself.

Bartlett, who uses his blog to communicate with his electorate directly, suggests that bloggers should be afforded the same freedoms and protections as journalists, noting that he often looks to blogs for analysis in preference to the traditional media, ‘The problem with the political coverage in the mainstream media is that it lacks substantial coverage of policy…they’ve tried to turn parliament into a soap opera.’

Bartlett warned that any legislation is likely to have ‘unforseen consequences,’ impacting on ordinary, private citizens while politicians and public figures will have few qualms about making their identities known.

These restrictions will have a significant impact on the way in which people use the internet as a publishing medium; the government will effectively make anonymous political or social commentary illegal.
The announcement has sparked outrage amongst bloggers, many of whom publish their thoughts under pseudonyms and almost all of whom would feel uncomfortable about making their personal details freely available over the internet.

For Ruth Brown, a 19-year-old university student who came to prominence last year by blogging under the name John Howard, a typical entry will include a satirical recount of the day in the life of the Prime Minister: ‘Just got back from APEC. This year it was in this place called Chilly which is in this country called South America, except it’s nothing like Real America, ‘cause it’s full of poor foreign people. Like Centrelink.’

Brown fears that any regulation will stifle political satire, which she describes as being an ‘essential part of any democracy’. Claiming she will refuse to abide by any regulations that force her to reveal personal details, Brown says, ‘I just won’t do it, it’d take the fun out of the entire concept. All this law will do is make more people host their websites overseas’.

But overseas options for bloggers are fast running out, with similar legislation being mooted the world over in an emerging alliance between legislators and the media establishment – all of whom seek to limit the reach of blogging, which is becoming a serious rival for the mainstream media.

In the United States bloggers are facing a challenge from the Federal Election Commission, which is considering a similar set of regulations to those being proposed in Australia. The proposal, supported by traditional media outlets like National Public Radio and the American Prospect, is an extension of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and is billed as a response to ‘the increased use of the internet by federal candidates, political committees, and others to communicate with the general public to influence federal elections’.

Early indications show that lawmakers could treat political speech like campaign contributions by measuring and limiting, in dollar terms, the amount bloggers contribute to campaigns by writing about them: ‘We’re talking about any decision by an individual to link [to a candidate], set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet,’ said Republican FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith.

A 44-page draft released by the FEC early last month indicated that all websites that display political content would be immediately regulated by default upon approval of the legislation. The proposal sparked uproar from civil libertarians who have forced the FEC to reconsider their position, but bloggers are still nervously awaiting the Commission’s final decision on online content regulation in July. The Australian government is said to be keeping a close eye on proceedings.

The problem for citizens in a democracy, wrote the American essayist A.J. Liebling is that, ‘freedom of the press is only guaranteed by those who own one’. Blogging, at least for now, has changed that; acting as a countervailing force against the media’s ability to set the political agenda and placing the power in the hands of citizens again.

Most disconcerting of all, then, is not the immediate impact of the global move to regulate the internet but the fact that governments want to move against a forum that encourages free expression at all. Considering that much of the resistance to the growing influence of the government on individual lives is coming from bloggers, the fact that the charge is being led by the world’s leading democracies is particularly worrisome.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:06 AM | Comments (0)

DOUBLE SPEAK: Feb 05

IAN WISHART
The love of the common people

Like an old Paul Young tune, the National Party has finally twigged to a vital fact – it needs the love of the common people if it is to ever regain the treasury benches from Labour’s Amazons. But how? Leader Don
Brash whistled a few notes of the new theme tune at last month’s Orewa speech, and at first blush it seems he may be on to something. Not in the grab-em-by-the-cojones style of his race relations circuit breaker a year earlier, but more in the style of a slow burner — a navigational change that doesn’t seem so big right now but come election time will offer voters a clear choice.

What Brash, and behind him National’s strategists like Murray McCully, has done is recognise that the Clark Government has massively polarized the country in a way not seen since the last Muldoon years. There is no “middle ground” in Labour support — Prime Minister Helen Clark’s supporters worship her like a heathen goddess, her detractors loathe her administration with a passion that few bother to conceal these days. It is hard to find somebody genuinely on the fence in this election year — while there are many professing to be on the fence, when pushed you’ll find they simply can’t agree on a viable alternative to Labour. It is said that Oppositions don’t win elections, Governments lose them.

This year could be an exception to that rule if the centre right Opposition parties cannot convince the electorate that they have the mana to rule and rule well. More people loathe Labour than love it — that much is clear from National’s ability to surge dramatically into the lead in the polls on key issues. But forging an alliance among the disparate groups who oppose the Government is proving more difficult.
Hence Brash’s appeal to the average kiwi battler.

National knows that little and medium-sized punters on Struggle Street hold the key to this election. These are people who pay taxes, work long hours in honest toil to feed not only their own family but a rapidly burgeoning coterie of Labour Party hangers-on. There’s no truth to the biting rumour in some circles that Government-owned Air New Zealand will be introducing a new “Beneficiary Class” to cater for Labour Party supporters when the public funding trough is widened in this year’s budget.

The average Kiwi has traditionally been fairly tolerant and ready to lend a hand to those further down the rung, but Labour Government moves like The Artist’s Dole and $30,000 grants for Hip-Hop holidays and reunions in Las Vegas for NZ members of the Lesbian Patagonian/NZ Friendship Society and Birdwatching Club, or the mysterious leap in sickness and invalid beneficiary numbers while Labour crows about reduced numbers on the unemployment benefit, all of this adds up to some beneficiaries not only biting the hand that feeds but amputating it at the shoulder.

Increasingly, Labour has been showing signs of a party living it up like there’s no tomorrow, spending vast fortunes buying votes in immigrant and beneficiary communities so it can impose massive social engineering on a reluctant majority population.

If National can convince the bruised and battered battlers on Struggle Street that it’s time to stop rolling over every time the Labourettes in the Beehive hiss, then we could yet see a change in Government.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:03 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: Mar 05

IAN WISHART
A Viennese waltz on whether you can believe the Bible

Hans (“Vox Populi”, p16) takes me to task over my suggestion that the Old Testament has not been found to contain any errors. My response is this: Why do you keep missing the basic points I’m making? The Old Testament is without error. Philosophically, to believe that it has error is to believe that we worship a God who cannot communicate accurately with humankind. I am familiar with the (mostly 19th century Austro Hungarian) argument that the OT was myth and allegory, but their views were based on invalid philosophical presuppositions – such as Hume’s denial of miracles – that have now been shown to be flawed.

So philosophical argument that the OT is faulty doesn’t stack up.
Which leaves us with the alternative – is there any objective evidence that the OT does contain errors – any errors?

None. That is the point I was making, no more, no less. After two thousand years of criticism and discovery, not one actual error has been found in the OT amongst what is still capable of verification four thousand years after the events. However, time and again historians have found that what they assumed to be erroneous references in the OT are in fact true (e.g., the discovery of the Hittite civilisation only last century).

Reason to disbelieve them could come from the natural world around us, but again (and I’m not attempting to be personal here because it applies to many) there is widespread ignorance about what the OT actually says. You, for example, suggest there’s no evidence of a worldwide flood 4000 years ago. Great. Now tell me where in the OT it says there was a worldwide flood “4000 years” ago?

This sort of strawman rubbish would be laughed out of most theological colleges but it survives in the pages of Skeptic Journals as if it is some kind of silver bullet.

Your bottom line premise is that there is no reason to take the OT as a true and accurate record of history. That’s your philosophical position, now provide me with some real instances where the Bible is wrong to support your premise with evidence.

You suggest all life is related. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. There is no direct scientific evidence of this, only speculation based on the circumstantial evidence. And the circumstantial evidence is effectively confined to the structure of cellular organisms and the fact that every living thing contains DNA. But I and others could equally look at the same evidence and speculate that it points to the existence of a common Intelligent Designer who used a blueprint to create life. Just as roads the world over are made of asphalt, because it works as a roading surface, so too does all life contain DNA, because that is the computer programme God designed to run life with. The mere fact that Brick “A” was found in the Victoria Park Market chimney, and Brick “B” forms part of the Sistine Chapel, does not imply that VPM and the Sistine Chapel are related. They are, but only to the extent they were designed by humans using a common design ingredient.

So here are a couple of biological posers for you: if random evolutionary change, driven by the engine of natural selection, is the reason for the wide variety of lifeforms on this planet, perhaps you can explain to me why it was only DNA-based organisms that formed life? Why do we not have a range of unconnected lifeforms if evolution was as simple and common an occurrence as you imply?

More intriguingly why is it, if evolutionists are correct, that all lifeforms would track back to one common ancestor? Why only one? Why not 500 different original species each giving rise to their own lineage?

Either God is powerful enough to raise Christ from the grave and defeat Evil, or he’s not. Either God by definition is a perfect being and the epitome of truth, or he is not. Either God can inspire his disciples to write his truth in the Old Testament, or he can’t. And if he can’t ensure that the OT is correct, why should we believe the NT?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : Sep 05, AU Edition

ALL DUE RESPECT
A chance fare leaves our driver wondering if there will always be an England

A week doesn’t pass when my cab radio doesn’t issue broadcasts warning of youths throwing rocks at passing cabs, usually in the housing commission areas of Redfern and Matraville.

Indeed the nightly bus runs out to La Perouse don’t operate without security aboard anymore. The vicious attack I wrote of last month was not an isolated incident in that part of the City, where similar attacks occur on a regular basis. For many of these youths violence is fun. Where once kids were content to get drunk, these days a night out is not complete without proving oneself by smashing someone who can make the simple mistake of looking at them. And in a disturbing portent of things to come, such public violence in Britain has now graduated to sinister new levels, namely, the targeting of the weak and vulnerable in society, in particular the elderly. Labelled low level urban terrorism it has led to the Government instituting a legal instrument called Ant-Social Behaviour Orders.

Recently I picked up a visiting British Labor MP Frank Field, who has been championing the fight against this urban scourge and was in Sydney to deliver a series of lectures for the Centre for Independent Studies. Field says anti-social behaviour stems from the collapse of functional families, the unions and the church, adding that the issue was once taken up squarely by the Left, which ages ago stressed personal responsibility and self-improvement.

Field had just been interviewed on radio when he hailed me outside the ABC in Ultimo. Having listened to the interview I sought to ascertain the extent of the problem. A talkback caller had confirmed it by likening it to A Clockwork Orange, a film which depicted a society spinning out of control. ‘Is it really that bad in your electorate?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely’, Field replied, ‘Pensioners are constantly coming to my office reporting how young lads run across their bungalow roofs, pee in their letterboxes, bang on their windows or jump out at them in the dark’.

Wondering how youth arrived at this point I asked, ‘Do you think it’s to do with the fact many parents simply don’t know how to parent, or won’t parent?’. ‘Most definitely’, he replied, ‘Those parents are failing to nurture their young, to teach them what constitutes civil behaviour’.

When I commented that some parents aren’t fit to breed he replied, ‘Well, you know what the saddest thing I’m seeing is the amount of grandparents forced to raise their children’s children’. ‘Well mate’, I told him, ‘obviously we don’t have the same problem here, yet. But there are certain areas around town I prefer to pick up young adults, such as the Bible belt in the north-west of Sydney where the kids are better behaved than other areas’.

Field noted his seat of Birkenhead was traditionally a Catholic constituency but had now changed to a secular seat. He noted the decline of religion in society had also coincided with the rise in yobbo behaviour. Just then he spotted St. Mary’s Cathedral and requested I drop him off there.

I pulled into the Domain to write up our conversation whilst it was fresh in my mind. Some 15 minutes later I looked up to see Field briskly striding past, heading for the Art Gallery. He saw me and as we exchanged a wave I noted he carried a pained expression. A man on a mission. It seemed as if he bore the hopes of the civilised world. Or at least Britain. Good luck to him.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:58 AM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: Apr 05, AU Edition

LAURA WILSON
Respect for women will go a long way to preventing AIDS

There are said to be between five and six million AIDS cases in India, which makes it amongst the Asian countries worst hit by the virus. Whilst still far from Zimbabwe’s infection rate of 40%, countries like
Cambodia are getting up around 10% - an alarming figure for a country which only ten years ago had no known AIDS deaths. According to Time magazine, 6,000 people contract AIDS worldwide per day.

We all know that the disease is spread through prostitution and intravenous drug use, which is certainly true. But one could also say it is spread by husbands who visit prostitutes, then carry the virus home to their wives, who then get pregnant and pass it on to their next child.

An unknown, but probably very high, percentage of Asia’s prostitutes are stolen away from their homes and taken to a city or another country and enslaved into prostitution. These disappearances are common in Nepal, where I currently live. Girls frequently disappear from villages. They are seldom traced because villagers know these girls are irretrievable, and even if they are retrieved, they are outcasts in their former home because of their defilement.

Less talked about is the reality that many of these girls are not stolen, but sold by their families into the sex trade for a small amount of cash and to relieve the burden of another mouth to feed.
I have not met any parents who have disposed of their daughter in this way, and while it sounds barbaric, it first has to be understood that there are different forms of morality in operation here. To illustrate, I use the example of Nepalese culture’s response to an incidence of rape. When a rapist is caught he is “punished” by being forced to marry his victim.

I read the Himalayan Times every morning and frequently learn of such marriages, and yet have never seen the question raised of whether the victim is keen to marry her violator.

The moral concept seems to be that a man cannot have his bit of fun with a woman without taking on the responsibility of her whole life by becoming her husband. The moral concept for the woman concerned is a little harder to phrase, but it seems as if the penalty for being a victim is the same as for being a perpetrator.

I have some good Nepali friends who run a trekking agency with whom I discuss these things.

I expressed my wishful idea that Nepal seemed different to other Asian countries, more innocent somehow. They took me across the road to what I thought was a restaurant. In fact the restaurant was a front for a brothel in which girls around 12 to 14 years old sat waiting in ‘booths’, partitioned only by a curtain.

I was then taken for a walk through central Kathmandu and shown numerous such ‘restaurants’. It seemed every second one was a brothel. The girls were so young, I asked what kind of men would seek sex with such children. My friends answered with a sweeping gesture to indicate the entire street scene in front of me.

At about the same time I met a man from South Africa who for twenty years owned an auto parts shop which hired mostly black employees. Several times over the years a woman would show up at his door and plead for employment. Being generous-hearted he would create a job for them, but to his horror every time there was a woman employee on the premises she would be group-raped by his male staff. I immediately wanted to know if he fired all his staff and called the police. He laughed at my stupidity, saying that the men’s replacements would probably be worse, and that you would be hard pressed to find a black female in Africa who hasn’t been raped. These men saw sexual access to a woman as their right. The women didn’t want this to happen, but expected that it would.

So we are told AIDS spreads through prostitutes. Captive,
enslaved, child prostitutes, often hooked on the drugs that are also forced upon them. Various AIDS agencies and international aid organisations are intently targeting the Asian AIDS outbreak, and their primary tactic thus far is to distribute free condoms and syringes.

This is as clever an idea to my mind as is distributing free cigarette filters to children we wish to discourage from smoking. I can see the motive of the handouts is to minimize deaths and stem the spread of the disease, but it is a double-edged sword which also encourages the very activities that generate the epidemic.

At the root of this kind of approach lies the demoralisation of science. Because AIDS is transmitted through the blood, we treat it scientifically by protecting the organs and instruments that infiltrate body tissue. Why do I see this as being almost completely pointless? Because it is modern medicine yet again treating the symptom, as if the whole concept of a ‘cause’ is outside its realm, in the Darwinian realms of randomness, of nature playing its endless game of chance.

When plagues, typhoid and leprosy were our major health threats a few hundred years ago, we learnt the hard way about dealing with our waste products, the incubus for disease. It forced us to clean up our acts, to desist from throwing our toilet waste into the street below. These diseases are now largely erased from developed nations and new foes face us, forcing us to take a look at other disease-causing aspects of our behaviour.

Medical science has spent a century trying to convince us diseases are essentially random when it comes to whom they find as a host. Once, so frustrated at contracting two, three or four bouts of serious influenza every winter, I approached my doctor and asked what I could do to improve my condition so that I was not so susceptible. I was told the ‘flu virus is random, that one cannot protect oneself. A second opinion from another doctor confirmed this professional view.
Ten years later, I have had neither cold nor ‘flu for at least five years, due to spending several years slowly learning about my body, my diet and my immune system.

I could cite countless examples of what we in the West would call depraved sexuality on continents like Asia and Africa. Is calling such things depraved a judgement? Do I have a right to claim that making a woman marry her rapist is depraved, or the selling of a daughter into prostitution? Maybe not, but I certainly have a right to blame the wildfire spread of AIDS on such practices.

People need to change, as we once needed to change our behaviour in the Middle Ages to stop the spread of disease. Giving long-distance truck drivers free condoms is not going to stop the spread of AIDS. These truck drivers are free to use as many roadside women as they wish, but they are also free to die of AIDS. Apparently a commonly held belief in Africa is that males do not contract, carry nor infect with AIDS: it is a woman’s disease. Western medical missionaries call this kind of belief ignorance, easily rectified by education. But myths such as these are not founded in mere ignorance, but societal malice. Education of the mind will not fix something that is a problem of the heart.

Such beliefs and their concomitant behaviours are at the root of the AIDS epidemic. Until women are honoured, loved and respected, and men and women are raised with a healthy approach to sexuality
in great continents like Asia and Africa, AIDS will have its way, and no amount of medical intervention will stem the tide. AIDS is about attitude.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:56 AM | Comments (0)

BREAK POINT: Feb 05

ANN COULTER
Liar, liar, now you’re fired

If CNN doesn’t hire them, Dan Rather and his producers can always get a job teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism. The Columbia Journalism Review recently defended the CBS report on George Bush using forged National Guard documents with the Tawana Brawley excuse: The documents might be “fake but accurate.”

Dan Rather and his crack investigative producer Mary Mapes are still not admitting the documents were fakes. Of course, Dan Rather is still not admitting Kerry lost the election or that a woman named Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of rape.

Responding to Bill O’Reilly’s question in a May 15, 2001, interview on “The O’Reilly Factor” about why CBS News had mentioned crack-pot rumors of George Bush’s drug use on air seven times, but the name “Juanita Broaddrick” had never crossed Dan Rather’s lips (and was only mentioned twice on all of CBS News), Rather replied: “Juanita Broaddrick, to be perfectly honest, I don’t remember all the details of Juanita Broaddrick. But I will say that - and you can castigate me if you like. When the charge has something to do with somebody’s private sex life, I would prefer not to run any of it.”

If only the press had extended that same courtesy to Mike Tyson! Rape has as much to do with “somebody’s private sex life” as Bush’s National Guard service does.

Admittedly, Juanita Broaddrick’s charge against Clinton — that Bill Clinton raped her so brutally that her clothing was torn and her lip was swollen and bleeding, hence his parting words of “you’d better put some ice on that” — was not a story on the order of Augusta National Golf Course’s exclusion of women members. But, unlike the Bush drug-use charge, which remains unsupported to this day, Broaddrick’s allegations had been fully corroborated by NBC News — which then refused to air Lisa Myers’ report until after Clinton’s acquittal in the Senate.

Fortunately for Ms. Mapes, Rather also described Bill Clinton as “honest,” explaining to O’Reilly, “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.” This must have come as great comfort to Mapes, as she based an entire story about Bush’s outrageous behavior in the National Guard on one Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.
Among the issues that might have raised questions about relying on Burkett as your source before accusing a sitting president of having disobeyed direct military orders are:

* Burkett had a long-standing grudge against the National Guard for failing to pay for his medical treatment for a rare tropical disease he claims he contracted during Guard service in Panama.

* He blamed Bush, who was governor at the time, for the Guard’s denial of medical benefits because, as everyone knows, the Texas governor’s main job is processing medical claims from former National Guard members.

* After leaving the Guard, Burkett suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression.

* At the meeting where he was supposed to give Mapes the National Guard documents, Burkett brought “two binders full of depositions and other documents that were apparently from his litigation with the
National Guard over health benefits” — apparently he forgot the two shoeboxes full of UFO photos he’d collected over the years.

* He had compared Bush to Hitler — which admittedly could have been just his way of establishing his bona fides to Democrats.

* He had told a number of stories over the years about Bush’s National Guard service, all of which had collapsed under conflicting evidence and even his own contradictory accounts — which is to say the stories were both made up and inaccurate.

* In exchange for the National Guard documents, Burkett demanded money, “relocation assistance” if the story put him or his family in danger (perhaps ocean-front property for a quick getaway) and direct contact with the Kerry campaign.

Even before the story aired, Burkett’s description of his own source for the documents kept changing. He said he received the documents anonymously in the mail. He said he was given the documents by someone who would “know what to do with (the documents) better than” he would. He said his source was Chief Warrant Officer George Conn — amid copious warnings that CBS “should not call Chief Warrant Officer Conn because he would deny it” and further that “Conn was on active duty and could not be reached at his Dallas home.”

Burkett needn’t have worried about crack investigator Mary Mapes getting in touch with his alleged source. Even though a three-second search on Google would have revealed that (1) Burkett was crazy, and (2) he had tried to use Conn as a source before and Conn had vehemently denied Burkett’s claims, Mapes told the investigating committee “she did not consider Chief Warrant Officer Conn’s denial to
be reliable.”

It seems Burkett had told Mapes that “Conn was still in the military and that his wife threatened to leave him if he spoke out against President Bush.” That was good enough for Mapes. She concluded that Conn — the only person who could have corroborated Burkett’s story — was not to be trusted. Instead, Mapes placed all her faith in the disgruntled, paranoid nut with a vendetta against Bush, an extensive psychiatric history and an ever-growing enemies list. I’m referring to Bill Burkett here, not Dan Rather.

Finally, Burkett claimed a woman named Lucy Ramirez had passed the documents to him at a livestock show in Houston. It is believed that this account marks the exact day that Burkett’s lithium prescription ran out. Despite the fact that no one at CBS was able to locate Ramirez, CBS stuck to the story.This isn’t a lack of “rigor” in fact-checking, as the CBS report suggests. It’s a total absence of fact-checking. CBS found somebody who told the story they wanted told — and they ran with it, wholly disregarding the facts.

Curiously, though Mapes trusted Burkett implicitly, she was very careful not to reveal his name to anyone at CBS, probably because she would have been laughed out of the room.

Instead, Mapes described Burkett in the abstract as: “solid,” “without bias,” “credible,” “a Texas Republican of a different chromosome,” a “John McCain supporter,” “reliable” and “a maverick” — leaving out only “Burkett is convinced he can communicate with caterpillars” and “his best friend is a coffee table.” His name was not important. It’s not as if he was the sole source for a highly damaging story about the president eight weeks before the election or anything. Oh wait ...
At a meeting with CBS lawyers the day the story would air, Mapes “did not reveal the source’s name or anything negative about the source,” but “expressed ‘enormous confidence’ in her source’s reliability and said that he was solid with no bias or credibility issues.” She described Burkett as a “moralistic stickler.” The subject of UFOs simply never came up.

Mapes trusted Burkett on the basis of the following:

* “Mapes told the panel that she spoke to a mainstream media
reporter, who had known Lt. Col. Burkett since 2001, and she stated that he viewed Lt. Col. Burkett as reliable.” At least it wasn’t one of those unreliable bloggers throwing anything up on the Net and ruining reputations!

* “Mapes told the panel that she informed the Burketts that she was worried the documents might be a ‘political dirty trick.’ Mapes said that the Burketts appeared ‘genuinely shocked’ at the suggestion and this reaction gave her comfort.” (You could tell they were really shocked because they had the same look on their faces that Condi Rice had when Richard Clarke first told her about al-Qaida.)

* Mapes really hated George Bush and would do anything to make him lose the election.

Actually, Mapes did not put her last reason in writing, which created a real mystery for the CBS investigating committee. Proving once again how useless “moderate Republicans” are, The CBS Report —
co-authored by moderate Republican Dick Thornburgh — found no evidence of political bias at CBS.

If Fox News had come out with a defamatory story about Kerry based on forged documents, liberals would be demanding we cut power to the place. (Fortunately, the real documents on Kerry were enough to do the trick.) But the outside investigators hired by CBS could find no political agenda at CBS.

By contrast, the report did not hesitate to accuse the bloggers who exposed the truth about the documents of having “a conservative agenda.” As with liberal attacks on Fox’s “fair and balanced” motto, it is now simply taken for granted that “conservative bias” means
“the truth.”

COPYRIGHT 2005 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, Mo. 64111; (816) 932-6600

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:54 AM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: Apr 05, AU Edition

ANN COULTER
Lefties, come back!

Liberals have been completely intellectually vanquished. Actually, they lost the war of ideas long ago. It’s just that now their defeat is so obvious, even they’ve noticed. As new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean might say, it’s all over but the screaming.

In an editorial last month, The New York Times gave President Bush credit for democracy sweeping through the Middle East or, as the Times put it, “a year of heartening surprises”. Yes, the Middle East’s
current democratization would come as quite a surprise to anyone who puts his hands over his ears and hums during the president’s speeches.
Rolling Stone magazine is making fun of “moveon.org” for having no contact with normal Americans.Their Bush-hating cause has become so hopeless that moveon.org is on the verge of actually moving on.

No one is defending the Italian Communist who claims American forces intentionally shot at her in Iraq. She may have lost some credibility when she backed her claim, that Americans were targeting her, by quoting her kidnappers. She said her kidnappers had warned her to stay away from the Americans because they would only hurt her.

Consider that less than twenty years ago, American TV legends Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace announced at an “Ethics in America” panel that they would not intervene to prevent the slaughter of American troops while on duty as journalists – especially during ratings week. As Wallace said: “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!” It almost makes you wonder if U.S. troops have ever targeted American journalists in the field during wartime. Maybe former CNN President Eason Jordan would know something about that.
Now liberal journalists are pretending to support the troops. They hardly ever call them “baby killers” anymore, at least to their faces.
Democrats are even pretending to believe in God – you know, as they understand Her.

So now, all of America is ignoring liberals. I’m the canary in the coal mine. Twenty-six congressmen have signed a letter denouncing me for a column I wrote recently; for the past few weeks, I’ve been attacked on MSNBC and CNN, in the Detroit Free-Press and on every known liberal blog and radio show. (I especially want to thank Pacifica Radio in this regard.) I personally have shouted their complaints from the rooftops.

Liberals had fallen into my trap!

But there was no point in responding because no one had heard about the liberal denunciations in the first place. It was like explaining a joke: OK, and then they said, “Call me a cab,” and then I said, “You’re a cab! Are you following this? ... Sorry, let me start over again.”

It’s not just that we’re a divided nation, with liberals watching only CNN and conservatives watching only Fox News. I’m pretty sure liberals are aware of me, and I haven’t appeared on CNN for months. It’s liberals the country is ignoring. No one knows or cares what they’re carrying on about in their media outlets. Liberals can’t get arrested. They’re even letting Martin Sheen off with a warning now.

I hate to sound selfish at such a great moment for the country, but this is nothing short of calamitous for completely innocent right-wing polemicists. Liberals are too pathetic to write about. I have nothing to do; my life is over.
Where have all the flowers gone?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:52 AM | Comments (0)

EYES RIGHT: Feb 05

RICHARD PROSSER
A Moral Vacuum

It was British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke who coined the immortal and oft-quoted phrase, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”Burke’s now somewhat clichéd observation was intended as a warning, but in many instances, it is apparent that that warning has not been heeded.There is an evil afflicting modern New Zealand society, and we as a nation are doing little if anything about it.

The creeping evil which is spreading through this country is the stealthy corruption of our national moral fibre, brought about by the steady and systemic failure of individuals, and of the institutions of which they are part, to correctly use their free choice to do what is right, in situations where decisions of right and wrong are involved.
Our national institutions and the structures of our society are rotting from the top down, and We, the People, are doing nothing to stop it. Government, Industry, organised religion, the establishments of Education, non-Governmental organisations, international bodies, and even some sporting and cultural structures, are affected by this malaise.

I am not referring to any moral conundrum of the type decried from the pulpit, or railed against by evangelists. I am talking about the simple departure from the unspoken acceptance of the requirement – the duty, even – of every person, to speak the truth, keep their word, and do the right thing, as they know it to be.

From the highest levels of Government we see this spreading darkness. Cabinet Ministers, a Prime Minister even, caught lying, and worse; double dipping, drink-driving, falsifying tax returns, falsifying election expenses, forgery, cheating on housing expenses, and advocating sodomy with beer bottles, amongst other things.

Yet rather than resign immediately from the nation’s Parliament, these individuals attempt to justify their actions, and worse still, they receive a measure of outward support from their parties and superiors in this attempted justification.

These actions do not go unnoticed in society, and they set an example more powerful than a thousand policy speeches could ever hope to achieve. And we allow this evil to prevail, by doing nothing about it.
The same Government uses its Parliamentary majority – which is not a numerical majority of the electorate, and can in no way be regarded as a mandate – to railroad through social engineering policies such as the Civil Unions Bill, the disbandment of the Air Force, and the ban on smoking in pubs; changes for which there is no public desire, and much disquiet and contention. In any previous generation, Government and its individual members would have felt duty-bound to respond, and to acquiesce, to the wishes of the silent majority of the population; today, they do whatever they please, simply because they know they can. When and why did this change come about, and why do we, the people, permit it?

Other shifts are taking place in the corridors of power. Restructuring of the public sector, driven by dogma and ideology, has seen the departure of the cream of a once-proud Civil Service; an institution steeped in tradition, apolitical, dedicated to the nation, and whose members were considered incorruptible, now replaced by a corporate structure driven by the profit motive.

We the People have supported this change, by not preventing it at the ballot box.

The Chief of our Defence Forces, previously chosen by peer review - in line with two hundred years of British tradition - may now be a political appointment. This insidious change removes us from the process followed by the likes of Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States, and into the company of such nations as Chile, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Indonesia. The traditional, apolitical, allegiance of the military – and indeed the Police – to the Sovereign, and thereby the nation, is now within the grasp of the Government of the Day. And We the People have likewise failed to prevent it.
Alongside this degeneration of Governmental standards of behaviour, has been a parallel faltering on the part of Big Business and mainstream religion.

From the scams of Mr Asia, and the speculators of the ’87 crash, to the Winebox and the parasites of privatisation, New Zealand business has fled from the age-old ethics of established industry like rats leaving a sinking ship; and once again, in our united silence, we ordinary New Zealanders have failed to stop it from happening.

And scarcely a day goes by without yet another report of sexual abuse against young people in the care of one religious order or another. With every one of these attacks against the very fabric of the decent society, we are seeing an erosion of the time-honoured and respectful way in which our nation was built, and with it, the loss of more and more of what we once liked to call “Family Values”.

Family Values....we all grew up under them, so did our parents and grandparents. Where are they now? Why is our generation failing those who will come after us, those for whom we are responsible? What’s changed? In part, I would guess, increased communication, via TV, the internet, and so on, has revealed to more and more people the previously hidden truth of the increasingly corrupt nature of national governments and big business. And people do follow examples.

Partly, also, it is the deliberately anti-family activities, of deliberately anti-family organisations such as the United Nations, in corrupting the new generation into thinking that the family is bad, and should be replaced by some international institution.

And just for the record, I do happen to think that there is a Great Conspiracy, and I do happen to think that the UN is pure evil supported only by utter fools, and is an integral part of it.

Partly, also, endemic corruption within the established churches, who are supposed to provide some sort of ethical guy rope to society, is more and more being exposed by the same increased communication as has illuminated Government and business.

In the past, though such corruption has almost always been present, it has also been hidden, and people have had more of a motivation to follow the example held up before them, rather than the unseen truth of the institution promoting it. Partly, the cult of self; the relentless march of self-gratification allowed by advancing technology, and promoted by the profit motive of capitalism. But mostly, I think, it has come about through the abrogation of responsibility. There was a time when a man’s word was his bond, when a deal was set in stone with a handshake. People had honour then.
Now, we have lawyers and contracts and lawsuits and countersuits. Why? Young men will not take responsibility for the children they have fathered. Why not? Because society allows them to abrogate that responsibility, by setting them the example that there is a way out, just as there is a way out of a contract, and a way out of honouring your word. Mankind - western civilisation if you prefer - has become decadent and corrupt, and we are in danger of going to hell in a handcart, just as many societies have done before us. If there is a way to stop this, and it may not be too late, then I believe it will not come from Governments, or any of the “established” Churches, or Corporations, or International Organisations, or any other corrupted institution. It will come from the hearts and minds of individuals; ordinary decent people who want the best for the generations who are to follow us.

The politicisation of education, the march of political correctness, the unrequested and downright dangerous pacification of a nation and its new generation, and the tacit approval of a host of other sins through the complicity of non-action, is the responsibility of every ordinary New Zealander. We must not rest in silence while our nation is stolen from around us. We owe it to our forebears, and to the generations who will follow, to claim responsibility for the nation which has been forged in our name, and to refill the moral vacuum which has been created through our collective inaction in the face of an insidious evil.

Take responsibility for your word, thought, and action, in your own life; if we all do this, it must follow, that the direction of mankind and his societies will do the same.

I believe in capitalism, I support the profit motive, I welcome technology. But I believe also that we have a greater responsibility; that sometimes we must put our personal interests as secondary to those of the people who depend on us, our children and families.
We all know right from wrong; we must all make the personal choice to do the right, and take responsibility for that, even when it involves suffering or going without.

We must regain the lost legacy of our immediate ancestral past, and re-attain the moral fortitude to live with honour. And thus we may see the return of “Family Values”, and of the decent society, which currently appears to be inexplicably lost, in a fog of selfishness, shallowness, and cynical legalese. Perhaps this will not be such
a bad thing.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)

The Rough Life

SWING TIME
Welcome to Investigate’s new and occasional tribute to the greatest game on Earth

If there were an identifiable chemical compound called golf, it would have been scheduled as an illegal drug by now. To the outsider, a golf ‘user’ getting his fix looks about as bizarre as a heroin junkie doing his thing: an assortment of special equipment, the requirement of a special place (though a golf course is generally a lot nicer for non-participants than a bus station toilet), bizarre contortions all cause others to think, ‘Why on Earth…?’

Golf can be like other drugs as well. It can drain a wallet faster than a coke habit, and turn someone into a crashing bore who thinks he has a lot of deep and profound things to say to people who don’t share his enthusiasm faster than three bong hits of the highest-grade hydroponic.

About the only drug it’s hard to parallel golf with is ecstasy: not much chance of seeing players hugging up on one another under flashing lights while listening to trance music. Of course, you can’t spell ‘clubhouse’ without ‘club’, so I could be wrong.

And yet. Like a drug, once someone gets hooked on golf, it can be a lifelong affair: one that breaks up far fewer families (though some, to be sure!) than the hard stuff, but is just as addictive.
The first time I picked up a club I was hooked. I was in my mid-twenties, and I had been living in a small city – more like a big town – surrounded by golf courses, and where the only two social activities for young men were hitting the bars and hitting the links. So when a few friends said they were heading for the driving range after brunch one Sunday, I asked if I could tag along.

To make a long story short, they handed me a nine-iron, a bucket of balls, and gave me about thirty seconds worth of instruction. Which, considering the amount of money I’ve wasted on golf books, tutorials, and sessions with pros over the subsequent years, makes it far and away the most cost-effictive swing coaching I’ve ever had. If I remember right, it was pretty much ‘OK, stand like this, and then swing’, followed by a lot of impromptu Caddyshack routines. (‘Be the ball, Danny. Be the ball.’)

Of course, the first several balls I managed to hit went skittering off in all sorts of embarassing directions, some of them caroming off the wall of my stall on the range. Then came the moment of connection, when everything aligned more-or-less properly and my clubhead hit that range ball with a quiet, distinguished click and the ball took off on an high and graceful arc, hung for a moment at its apex, and then drifted back down to Earth, landing in a ‘Roadrunner and Coyote’-style poof! on the dusty range.

That was something of a fluke, but that didn’t stop me from beating several more buckets (and tearing up my shoulder and palms in the process) and demanding that we all go and play the following week – an experience better left undescribed.

But that’s what this new column, ‘The Rough Life’ is all about. Average golfers who love the game travelling around Australia to hit some balls on some of our best courses.

It won’t be written from the perspective of a jock who hits 300m off the tee; that’s not most of us. Instead, it is devoted to the hackers, the slicers, and the happy hookers who take mulligans, ride in buggies, and are addicted to this great game, no matter how badly they play it.

See you at the 19th.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:48 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, AU Edition

Unhappy with your looks? Forget a nosejob, go get a whole new face. It sounds far-fetched, but face transplants are soon set to leave the realm of fantasy and become reality. Along with human cloning and stem cell research, it’s one of the most ethically tricky medical procedures to come down the pike in decades but, hey, you can’t stop progress. How are Australia’s doctors responding to the ethical challenges? Will face transplants be the new botox? Are embryos the only place to get stem cells? JAMES MORROW sorts through the medical facts and Hollywood hype and looks to see if medical technology is

GOING TOO FAR?

When cricketer David Hookes died last year after being bashed to death outside a Melbourne hotel, it was a tragedy – but one with some degree of a silver lining.

While Hookesy, at 48, died too young, his senseless death was ultimately not for nothing: the former batsman and radio commentator had signed up as an organ donor, and as a result, as many as ten other Australians were given the gift of life. And it didn’t stop there.

According to Australians Donate chairperson Marcia Coleman, the publicity surrounding Hookes’ death and the subsequent formation of the David Hookes Foundation to promote organ donation caused a 21 per cent spike in the number of registered organ donors. In a country where nearly 1,700 people at any given time are on years-long waiting lists for vital organs, Hookes’ death took on a new meaning.

But even if most people feel good about organ donation as it currently stands, new frontiers of medicine are being explored in America and Europe that are pushing the limits of both technology and ethics. Right at the top of the list would have to be the controversial exploration of face transplantation – an idea first introduced to the general public via the 1997 John Woo shoot-‘em-up Face/Off.

While doctors and scientists around the world have been pursuing this holy grail of plastic surgery for years, at the moment the Americans are leading in the race to be the first to perform a full facial transplant. Doctors at both the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Louisville say they are working hard to figure out the nuts and bolts of the procedure and are seeking the right candidates for the procedure. In Cleveland, doctors have been experimenting with face-to-face transplants on rats, while in Louisville, researchers have been perfecting their techniques on dead humans.

‘When plastic surgeons talk about the face and doing a face transplant, what they are talking about is using a freshly-harvested flap of skin and underlying fat from a donor who recently died – usually in an accident, but possibly from a pathological condition, and attaching it to someone else’, explains Dr. Alf Lewis, Vice President of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, when asked to explain the mechanics of the procedure.

‘The procedure itself would involve taking this skin and underlying fat and possibly a little bit of muscle, and then reattaching it under microvascular conditions [similar to the sort of microsurgery that is used to re-attach, say, fingers severed in an accident] through the microscope to the major blood vessels of the recipient joined to the donor.

‘This is all technically possible in the present state of play’, adds Lewis, who notes that ‘there is no doubt that it could all be done any sophisticated medical community, of which Australia is an example, and the microsurgery and plastic surgery involved is already being practiced here every day of the week.’

But who would the recipient of the face look like? Themselves, the donor, or some combination of the two? And, perhaps more importantly, could they handle looking in the mirror every day and seeing…someone else?

While to the casual observer, a rat is a rat is a rat, the Louisville team in the United States which has been practising on rodents believes that a facial recipient would wind up looking like some sort of combination of their old self and their new face. Dr. Lewis agrees, and notes that muscle tone, which is a key component in how any face looks, ‘would be dependent on the muscle being attached to the fat.’
‘The facial muscles are quite unique in that they originate from bone but insert not back into bone, like in limbs, but into skin in the face. That means that if you put this new donor skin and fat over the muscles which would be exposed after you remove the scar or growth or whatever, it will attach by scar-tissue adhesion and produce some element of movement,’ says Lewis.

‘It wouldn’t be as good or strong or subtle as normal, but there would be some return of movement.’

As to how the recipient of a new face, no matter what they looked like before, might cope with their new look, earlier procedures involving transplanting other parts of the body suggest it’s not as (relatively) simple as replacing a heart or liver. In fact, at least one person whom a procedure was supposed to help was eventually been forced to say, ‘thanks but no thanks, this has all gone too far’. The world’s first hand transplant, performed on New Zealander Clint Hallam in Lyons, France, in 1998, was famously a disaster. Hallam had a dodgy criminal background (he lost his hand in a circular saw accident in a Christchurch prison while serving a two-year stretch for fraud) and went on to profit from the surgery by making paid appearances to show off his new hand, often one step ahead of the law. What’s worse, he also had terrible trouble coping with the regime of anti-rejection drugs he was required to take.

Ultimately, Hallam successfully campaigned to have the new hand removed, saying that he felt ‘mentally detached’ from the limb.
If it all sounds sort of ghoulish, well, that’s because it sort of is. Especially because faces are, by definition, incredibly personal things, it is only natural for people to worry about the implications of moving them from person to person – even if the recipient is badly scarred or otherwise deformed.

‘The face is such a powerful identifier of a person that once you start talking about transplanting a face, you are talking about transplanting an identity’, says Dr. Greg Pike, who serves as acting director of the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide.

‘In purely surgical terms, all you’re talking about is a situation where you have a damaged faced here, a new spare face there, and simply swapping them. This is a purely material way of looking at the situation without considering the consequences that might go with the element of the new identity that the individual is receving, which is tied up in the meaning of the life that was. These things can’t be ignored.’

This where what Pike calls ‘the “yuk” factor’ comes in. To go around with some form of the identity of someone else, and to have to think about what that person might have done or been, is potentially very disturbing. Doctors and ethicists agree that if a face transplant is ever performed, the recipient will need to receive extensive in-depth psychological counseling to cope with the mental side of things just as he or she will need anti-rejection drugs to deal with the physical consequences.

‘Whilst sometimes the yuk factor can be problematic if taken alone, it can also act as a sort of primal warning system’ that can set off ethical alarm bells and tell doctors and researchers to tread carefully about a new procedure, he says.

‘The average Joe on the street has a pretty good view of right and wrong, even if they haven’t necessarily thought it out to the point where they know why. Ultimately, an ethicist isn’t that different; all an ethicist does is unpack those views.’

Dr. Lewis agrees, saying that there really are profound ethical and psychological concerns with a procedure like this, for both donor and recipient – factors which all but guarantee such a procedure would only be used in the most extreme cases, and certainly never for run-of-the-mill vanity cosmetic surgery. For one thing, the side effects of anti-rejection drugs used in such a procedure would potentially be very serious; for another, unlike a hand transplant, there’s no undoing a new face.

‘I suppose you could argue the recipient would become accustomed to not looking like their original self, and they would have to have a lot of psychological counseling and education to cope with the fact that they would never look like themselves’, says Lewis.

‘We know from our cosmetic surgery experiences on the face and nose and other parts of the body that patients often have deep psychological concerns about their appearance. And I think that the psychology of this is a profound topic that needs to be discussed very carefully.’

More challenging, adds Lewis, is the problem of finding anyone who would even be willing to donate such a personal part of themselves, noting that ‘it’s a big ask to get someone to sign their face away on their drivers’ license, and a big ask to ask the relatives of an 18-year-old girl who just died in an accident about something like that.’

Concludes Lewis, ‘The face, it really is you. It’s how you’re identified. They don’t put a photo of your backside on your driver’s license, they put your face. That is you to you and the rest of humanity.’

But if face transplants are still the stuff of rats and research labs, research into other controversial therapies such as cloning and stem cells derivatives have both the potential to change many more lives, while at the same time raising even hairier ethical concerns. Researchers in several countries are currently exploring the idea of what is technically known as somatic cell nuclear transfer technology, which involves taking the nucleus from one cell and implanting it in an egg cell that has had its nucleus removed. Currently banned in Australia, this is the technique that was behind Dolly the Sheep – the world’s first cloned mammal.

What is still legal in Australia, however, is stem cell research – a technically complicated and often ethically messy arena where public perception is manipulated not so much by the ‘yuk’ factor as the celebrity factor. If stars like John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, however unwittingly, introduced the notion of face transplants to the wider world, it is the tougher cases of celebrities like Christopher Reeve which are being used – and sometimes abused – to push for more work with stem cells, specifically embryonic ones.

To start off, stem cells are special kinds of cells that exist in very particular circumstances and which have the potential, theoretically, to turn into just about anything – a liver, a kidney, bone tissue. They are often tough to come by, and for some time one of the most popular places has been from frozen embryos that were created by fertility clinics and no longer needed. Their use opens up a minefield of debate not just about when a human life is worth respecting, but also whether these forms of stem cells are all they’re cracked up to be. And until very recently these embryonic stem cells have long been considered superior to adult stem cells, which can be derived from a variety of other sources.

‘Typically when embryos are harvested for stem cells, we’re talking about blastocytes that are five to six days old, and consist of a couple of hundred cells’, explains Greg Pike. Pike opposes embryonic stem cell research and believes that the debate over the size of an embryo or the number of cells that make it up fundamentally misses the moral point.

‘I recall a senator during the debate over stem cells saying, “well, it’s just a few cells and it’s smaller than a full-stop, so what’s all the fuss about?”, and I felt like saying back, “you’re just a clump of cells, too, only you’re trillions of them.” Stephen Hawking’s universe was once that tiny; how do you put a value on that?’

For ethicists like Pike, ‘the significance of the early embryo is that we’re talking about a new member of the human family’ – a stance he readily admits puts him at the opposite end of the spectrum from people like Peter Singer, an ex-pat Australian who is now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University in the United States. Singer, who is as much a professional avant-garde controversialist as he is an ethicist, believes that ‘just because [embryos] are biological members of the species Homo Sapiens doesn’t give them the right to live’, a position he happily takes to its horrifying logical extremes.

(Among other things, Singer believes that each life is valuable in terms of its rationality and consciousness, and argues that for that reason the life of an adult chimp is more valuable than that of a human infant. Of course, Singer also argued in an infamous essay entitled ‘Heavy Petting’ that the taboo against bestiality should be done away with.)

But between these two extremes stands a lot of misinformation, much of it perpetuated by a media that is more interested in anything-is-possible whiz-bang technology on the one hand and compassion (particularly for celebrities) on the other. When people started talking about a paralyzed Christopher Reeve being able to walk again thanks to embryonic stem cell research, the barn door was swung wide open for just about any piece of well-intentioned misinformation to run free.

‘I think part of the problem with embryonic stem cell research is that there has been a lot of publicity around celebrities pushing stem cells for research and suggesting the definite promise of therapeutic outcomes’, says Dr. Adrienne Torda, a senior lecturer in medical ethics at the University of New South Wales.

‘But the nature of research is that it is open-ended. You can’t promise definite outcomes, and there are many hurdles in developing a therapy that often take decades to resolve.’

Pike has similar concerns as Torda, and worries that feel-good celebrity involvement in ethical and scientific issues can stifle
debate. ‘I for one found it very difficult to talk about stem cells when Christopher Reeve and the idea that stem cells can make Superman walk again was being pushed by the media’, he recalls. ‘Anyone who had anything different to say felt like that had to keep their mouths shut.’

There are other ways to get stem cells – for example, from the blood in umbilical cords of newborn babies, which is often donated by parents, as well as from hair, bone, and other body tissues. Research involving these adult stem cells does not have any of the same ethical quandaries surrounding it as that which revolves around embryonic stem cells or human cloning (after all, no new human life is created or destroyed, no matter how small). Even better, after years of being thought of as second-rate, at the moment these cells also are showing the most promise in the lab.

Researchers in Israel, for example, are currently working on a treatment that borrows stem cells from a patient’s own bone marrow to produce a chemical that could restore muscle movement to Parkinson’s Disease patients; human trials are slated to begin next year. In Britain, meanwhile, work is being done that could see the end of dentures as adult stem cells are being used to grow new human teeth.

Closer to home, researchers at Griffith University in Queensland recently discovered that adult stem cells taken from the nose had just as much potential to be grown into any other type of human tissue as the far more controversial embryonic ones. ‘Our experiments have shown that adult stem cells isolated from the olfactory mucosa have the ability to develop into many different cell types if they are given the right chemical or cellular environment’, Prof. Alan Mackay-Sim told The Australian recently, further shaking the conventional wisdom that only embryonic cells are useful for research.

In speaking to Australian doctors and ethicists, one thing that comes through is a desire to break bioethics out of the ivory tower and into the wider community – even if it means letting other countries take the lead in some areas of research – so that the public is comfortable with and informed about where researchers are heading. ‘We don’t say yes to everything we can do, and we are way behind many other nations that are doing these things. We need to engage many more people in the discussion and figure out how people feel’, notes Adrienne Torda. ‘Legislation has to be constantly moving, and the more you educate people, the better you can make decisions about moving those legislative boundaries’.

While this sort of approach may be frustrating for those who see medical technology as just another high-tech space race, it is also the safest route ethically – and when one is dealing with human lives, no matter the size, doctors cannot be too careful in observing Hippocrates’ ancient edict: First do no harm. And, as recent Australian discoveries in adult stem cells have shown, sometimes the safe route is also the more successful one.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:48 AM | Comments (0)

Sep 05, AU Edition

BAD CHOICES
A New South Wales abortionist will stand trial in November for manslaughter after an alleged illegal termination that went terribly wrong – the first such prosecution in New South Wales in over two decades. Investigate’s Claire Morrow has the inside story of Dr. Suman Sood’s many brushes with the law, and sheds light on just what happens when young women in crisis get caught up in Australia’s abortion industry

The mother was a 20-year-old woman who had the support of her parents and boyfriend to continue the pregnancy. She was recently employed after a period of unemployment without benefits. She was concerned about money. Her parents offered to raise the child, but the pregnant young woman thought they might be moving overseas, and didn’t want that for her child. ‘I thought about it (having the baby) and knew I wouldn’t be able to raise a child,’ she said. ‘I was sad about that and then angry, I knew what I had to do.’

Thus begins the tragic story of an unnamed young woman whose decision to terminate her twenty-something week pregnancy in the office of Dr Suman Sood has led to manslaughter charges, revelations of fraud, and shed light on what Australian women get when they think about exercising their ‘right to choose’.

The young woman was not even eligible for an abortion when she turned up at Sood’s clinic: after 20 weeks gestation, terminations are only performed in hospital, and only in cases of rare or compelling circumstances. And one can only begin to imagine the storm of emotions surrounding her decision: while on the one hand she clearly cared about the baby, on the other hand, she felt that she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy – that, somehow, it was her duty to abort.
The young woman claims she received little in the way of counseling and that Sood told her the procedure would cost $1,500 (and that she needed some of that money on the day – she only had $400 on her). The young mother alleges that Dr Sood inserted a pessary into her vagina and gave her two tablets ‘to soften up the baby’ to take by mouth, with instructions to return the next day to complete the procedure.

Rather than returning for the ‘completion’, the young woman went into labour early the next morning and her baby was delivered prematurely at 3:30 in the morning, on the toilet, by the distressed and surprised mother, who rushed to hospital shortly thereafter. Before the birth, she alleges that she had called Dr Sood in alarm. Sood’s response was to tell her to take some Panadol; she advised her patient that she was suffering Braxton-Hicks contractions. It was not until the baby arrived at the hospital that doctors realized he was alive. He died around 8 am the same day.

Dr Sood’s defense is an affidavit she wrote weeks after the event. In it, she states that she had seen the patient on a Saturday, advised her that she could not lawfully terminate a pregnancy beyond 20 weeks, suggested she think it over, and if she still wanted an abortion, she should return on Tuesday for a referral to a Queensland clinic, where abortion could be obtained at her stage in pregnancy.

Sood states that on the Monday in question, she was not working at the clinic (this is the day the mother alleges that Dr Sood started the abortion procedure). That doesn’t mean Sood was not around, however: by sheer coincidence, when the patient went to the clinic for tummy cramps that day, Dr Sood was indeed there to ‘fetch something’, and did examine the woman. At this point Sood says she assessed her young patient as having Braxton-Hicks contractions, gave her two ‘Tri-Profen’ analgesics, and told her to go home and take some Panadol. Imagine her surprise when she heard the poor girl went into premature labour and had the baby. Nothing to do with her, right?
Sood’s defense raises a number of questions. Why did she wait weeks to file an affidavit, given the seriousness of the incident? What was she doing at her clinic, randomly fetching something – knowing that she would be at work the next day? And having shown up, what would induce her to see a patient whilst there if she had been well and was due to return the following day if she needed a letter? Unless she was, as prosecutors allege, halfway through an illegal abortion.

Sood’s patient’s baby, meanwhile, being at 21-24 weeks gestation, would have been approximately 20cm long, kicking, sleeping and hearing in the womb, a fully formed human, his gender clear, in miniature. The baby survived his premature delivery but died a few hours later. Premature babies have been known to be ‘viable’ at this stage, if the mother goes into labour which cannot be stopped. Oddly, if Dr Sood had had the foresight to kill the baby in utero and keep a close eye on her patient, she would never have been caught. One wonders – if she was in principle willing to perform a late-term abortion – how much practice she may have had.

So just who is Dr Sood? To make a long story short, she is the owner of the private Australian Women’s Health Clinic in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield, and has what might politely be called a checkered past. People keep alleging that has made money in less-than-honest ways. And she was in fact found guilty on of Medicare fraud (96 counts) earlier this year but went straight back to work.

On the 8th of February this year, Dr Sood faced 96 charges of dishonestly obtaining Medicare benefits. At trial it was revealed that Dr Sood was bulk-billing patients through Medicare and also charging them an out of pocket fee; around $120 for a 12 week pregnancy, and $1,100 for a 19 week pregnancy. Now a doctor can charge whatever she likes for a medical service in private practice, but Medicare refunds a flat $144.30 for an abortion. If a doctor wants to charge $200, $500 or $3,000 upfront, she is entitled to do so. The mother then takes her receipt to a Medicare office and receives $144.30 back. Unless she has reached the Medicare safety net, in which case she receives $144.30, plus 80% of the difference. If the doctor bulk bills the patient (many doctors in private practice bulk bill poor patients) the patient gives no cash up front, Medicare pays the doctor directly, and the doctor is not entitled to receive any more money.

The charges followed a raid on Sood’s practice on 30 October 2001. Moments before her arrest, Dr Sood was seen by an employee shoving bundles of receipts under medical waste. Perhaps she was hoping the Health Insurance Commission investigators would be too squeamish to look there. A nurse at the clinic, Minna Zoretic, testified that she had seen Dr Sood dumping papers in a bin. Ms Zoretic had also worked on reception, and taken money from patients for abortions. Ms Zoretic had worked as a nurse, receptionist and counselor at the clinic, although she had no qualifications in counseling. Dr Sood was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and fined more than $20,000, but went back to work.

The baby who died after a premature birth, allegedly induced by Dr Sood, had a mother who was ‘counseled’ at the clinic by Minna Zoretic, who again has no counseling qualifications.

Investigate has also learned that Dr Sood was once investigated by the NSW Industrial Relations Commission for a kickback scheme wherein she was alleged to have received $25 for each sample she sent to Westpath Services, a pathology company. Dr Raghubir Singh – another doctor working at the clinic – has alleged that Sood received between $8,000 and $10,000 a month from the scheme. And she has been the subject of a number of complaints to the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC scheme), but has continued to work.

Under NSW law, one doctor’s opinion that a woman’s physical, mental, social or economic health might suffer as a result of pregnancy or birth is sufficient to warrant a legal abortion. The doctor in question can be the abortion doctor who will profit. Apparently their medical scruples are beyond reproach. To detain someone against their will in a mental health institute because they are a danger to themselves or others requires two doctors, and the case must be heard by a magistrate within 48 hours. To kill a baby, the opinion of a doctor with a vested interest meets the letter of the law.

A doctor who provides abortion is a general practitioner who has decided to provide abortion. Abortion is not routinely taught in medical schools; one must profess an interest, and once one has become a GP, approach a clinic and learn on the job. If a doctor knows what to do in a technical sense, there is no theoretical law to prevent them from hanging up their shingle as an abortionist. There are no licensing requirements. There is an Association of abortion providers, which has voluntary membership. The association sees itself as promoting women’s health, using the safest techniques, and keeping up with ‘best practice’. Dr Sood was not a member. One wonders why.

Dr Sood is not the first person in NSW to be charged under the Crimes Act for performing an illegal abortion, just the first to be charged in more than 20 years. In 1981, Dr George Smart was charged with performing an illegal abortion in circumstances similar to this current case. The teenage girl who he aborted had been refused abortion at other services, and was more than 20 weeks pregnant. Like Dr Sood, Dr Smart was not a member of the relevant professional association, and was on the outer edge of that community. He was reportedly not liked or trusted by other abortion doctors, and could not find other abortionists to testify on his behalf. Smart was found guilty, and lodged an appeal. The case law would have been challenged on appeal, but Smart died before the appeal was heard, so the law was not challenged, and has not been clarified since.

The burden on the prosecution is to prove that Dr Sood was trying to cause a miscarriage (or, more accurately, a stillbirth; babies delivered after 20 weeks must be registered with Births Deaths and Marriages) and gave her prostaglandin. This can be proven or disproven by blood tests the hospital may or may not have run at the time they admitted the young woman. Because it is a criminal case, the standard of proof required is high. The young woman would probably win a civil case. In the civil area, the laws could be tested and clarified. And indeed a number of civil charges have been brought against abortion providers across Australia, for assault (if the woman has not given informed consent, than any contact with her body is presumed to be assault) or nervous shock. These cases have always been settled out of court, meaning that the law is not challenged or clarified in court, and that the woman is bound by a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the case.

Law relating to unborn children is terrifically confused, and varies by state. If a 39-week pregnant woman is stabbed, and the baby dies but the mother lives, no one has been murdered. If a 24-week premmie baby is stabbed, then it has been murdered. Abortion is legal in different circumstances in different states. The majority of general practitioners feel that they do not have a clear understanding of abortion law.

In NSW, counseling is not a legal requirement prior to abortion, although most best-practice publications suggest that it should be available. In order to legally consent to any medical procedure, the patient must give informed consent. The interpretation of this in relation to abortion seems to be that the woman should have an understanding of what will be done to her body and consent to anaesthetic risks and so forth. There is no expressed need to give her any information about the baby.

To find out more about the consequences of terminations on Australia’s women, Investigate spoke to Melinda Tankard-Reist, the author of the 2002 book Giving Sorrow Words and the forthcoming Defiant Birth: Women who Resist Medical Eugenics, and an advocate for Australian women suffering from post-abortion grief. In her 2002 book she discusses the case of the Australian woman who was led into a room for abortion ‘counseling’ and told to press ‘play’ to hear the recorded message.
‘The hundreds of women I have spoke to didn’t feel that they had made an informed choice or gave informed consent…abortion is sold as something quick and simple and easy. The providers’ attitude is that any pregnancy in less-than-perfect circumstances should be aborted. It’s the sensible thing to do’, she says, adding that she believes the fact that so many women ‘choose’ abortion is a sign that there is something terribly wrong with society.

‘This is a Band-aid solution where a woman is abandoned to her so-called autonomy, and if she suffers emotionally after the abortion is told to keep her mouth shut, that she is the ano- maly…this is a sacred right…any questioning or discussion is out of order.’

Tankard-Reist reports that of the hundreds of women who answered her advertisement to talk about grief after abortion, a large number asked if they were the only woman who had felt that way, and called.

In Australia pregnancy decision-making counseling is provided primarily by groups that have a combination of church and government funding. As are, in fact, many other social services such as drug rehabilitation programs, and injecting rooms. The staff at these centres are likely to be pro-life themselves, but have chosen to help women by offering free telephone and face to face support during pregnancy. Investigate test-called two of these services, under the guise of Karen, a 19-year-old student who was 14 weeks pregnant and seeking an abortion. In both cases the counselors took neither a pro Nor con position, and I found ‘Karen’s’ discussions with the services to be sympathetic and focused on providing non-judgemental support to discuss the options.

In NSW, non-directive pregnancy counseling that includes referral for termination is provided by the Bessie Smythe Foundation. Margaret Kirkby, Centre Director for Bessie Smyth spoke to Investigate about abortion and the legacy that counseling, or lack thereof, can create. While Ms Kirkby is resolutely pro-choice, she admits that Bessie Smythe ran an abortion clinic until 2002, but found that it was economically impossible to keep providing abortions to all women in need while also offering ethically adequate counseling: ‘At the end of the day, it is a small business. Running a service in a way that all women have access to extensive counseling is not financially viable. We believe that providing counseling for 100% of clients is good practice. But it’s not covered by Medicare. [These services] do the best they can. They are staffed by people who are caring and committed’, Kirkby said.

In many, but not all cases this would seem to be true. One may disagree with their moral reasoning, but in many cases these individual people are doing the best they can to assist women the way that seems right to them.

But while she admits women may feel grief and loss – she calls it ‘hitting a wall’ – after an abortion, Kirkby resolutely refuses to accept the existence of what many call Post Abortion Stress Syndrome; she claims that it is a right-wing anti-abortion myth designed to scare women and blame abortion providers. Also, it is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of mental disorders. (A slightly odd argument coming from someone like Kirkby, in that implies that the patriarchal medical old-boys of the DSM IV are the best judges of womens’ mental health issues.)

Some abortion providers in NSW allow for counseling which is included in the up front fee, if the woman books the counseling ahead. Some providers do this, but if the woman does not have an abortion on the day of the counseling, she is charged an extra $50 fee – and $50 is a lot of money in some circumstances. Other clinics refer women who seem distressed or unsure to a psychologist, who charges his or her own fee. Some clinics, such as the multinational Marie Stopes, provide no counseling at all, under any circumstances. They either send you home or run you through the system. Those are the choices.

In June this year Natasha Stott Despoja tabled a motion in parliament to force pregnancy counseling services to disclose ‘this service does not refer for termination’ in any advertisement. She felt it was misleading women to provide pregnancy advice from a service that didn’t seek to increase the Australian abortion statistics. She did not discuss in the motion any need for abortion providers to advertise that ‘this clinic has a financial interest in your having an abortion.’

Kirkby told Investigate that ‘compulsory counseling would be an insult to women...it could lead to a situation where women were forced by the state to do certain things, such as view pictures of babies, or wait 72 hours after the counseling before the abortion’, as is the case in some American states. ‘Counselling women must be non-directive, and focus on the woman’s needs…It could also create a situation where counseling was about ticking off boxes, not about supporting women’. Tankard Reist agrees that it would be terrible to force women to view pictures or read information against their will but counters that ‘all information should be freely available; it is absurd and shows the poor state things are in that we even need to discuss the need for counseling’.

Regarding the ‘national tragedy’ of abortion rates in Australia, most people would agree that it would be a good thing to lower the rate of abortion. There are tremendously difficult issues involved in thinking about abortion, the least of these being the lack of data. Health Minister Tony Abbott caused an uproar when he suggested that there were 100,000 terminations performed each year, but the fact is that hard numbers are tough to come by. Most Australian states do not keep records of abortions; Medicare data tells us how many women have had procedures for which they claimed a Medicare rebate, but those numbers are fuzzy as well as some of these procedures will have involved women who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth, and many other women will never claim the Medicare rebate. Some trends show the overall abortion rate decreasing, but it is equally plausible that this is a reflection of miscarriage management, which has trended towards a non-interventionist approach over the last decade as women are no longer routinely given D&Cs after miscarriage.

Arbitrary time limits on abortion are also confused. Why 20 weeks, why not 19, or 21? Is a cleft lip enough of a disability to warrant a termination? What about a 90% chance the baby has Down’s Syndrome – versus a 10% chance that the baby is fine? The current government rhetoric on women’s issues is struggles to mash together a jumble of moderate and conservative attitudes into a cohesive policy. So we want less abortions, but we don’t want more women on the single parent’s pension.

The poorest and most disadvantaged women have the hardest time getting access to everything, including abortion and counseling. Yet they have more abortions, and surely would benefit from more counseling.
The abortion debate is too often about choosing sides, and not enough about civilized respectful discussion of the issues by non-like minded people. Fred Nile can’t keep himself from interrupting pro-choice speakers, and pro-choice pollies can’t stop themselves from name-calling in response. The issue is not ‘settled’, and the majority who think they have an opinion haven’t challenged it, and are going on a gut reaction.

We need to think very seriously about how women are treated in our society, and that a NSW abortion clinic advertises ‘Accidental and Unplanned pregnancy is a fact of life. Dealing with it can be emotional and stressful’. The implication would seem to be that abortion is a fact of life, but it’s just one of those crosses we women have to bear. We should accept that obviously we will not be able to finish our degrees, make enough money, achieve what we want and need, if we become pregnant.

I prefer this quote provided by the American organisation Feminists for Life which has as its slogan, ‘Abortion is a sign that we are not meeting the needs of women’: ‘When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society – so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.’

The abortion-breast cancer debate: Is there a link?

Many studies have suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, to the effect that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer. Not all women who have abortions get breast cancer, there are a myriad of risk factors, and more than one form of breast cancer. Nevertheless abortion is a modifiable risk factor – unlike family history, for example, it can be avoided.

The Abortion Providers Federation of Australia acknowledges that a number of reputable studies have shown a link, but calls for more studies, and their website implies that no conclusions can be drawn. It is, however, accepted that early first full-term pregnancy (i.e. before 24 years of age), increased number of pregnancies, and length of time breastfeeding all decrease breast cancer risk. This is not debated.

An independent link is thought to be due to the proliferation of new breast cells in early pregnancy. If the pregnancy is continued, these cells become mature and less vulnerable to cancer. In most cases of miscarriage, there is a gradual decline in the hormones that cause this proliferation. In some miscarriages, and all abortions, the hormone change is rapid.

The first study to examine the abortion-breast cancer link among American women was published in 1981 and reported that abortion ‘appears to cause a substantial increase in risk of subsequent breast cancer.’ A 140% risk elevation was reported. [Pike MC et al., British Journal of Cancer (1981;43:72-6]

The only statistically significant study of American women using medical records (rather than histories) reported a 90% increased risk of breast cancer among women in New York who had chosen abortion. [Howe et al. (1989) Int J Epidemiol 18:300-4]

Critics of the link rely on the problem of reported history. This argument supposes that women who are healthy under-report their history of abortion (which is well established), but also that women who have breast cancer defy this general trend and accurately (or with exaggeration) report their abortion history.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Sep 05, AU Edition

VISIONS OF EMBARGOES
Ed Bark is stuck inside a screening room with the can’t-talk-about-this-movie blues again

BEVERLY HILLS, California – Now you see him, or else you don’t. The secretive society known as Bob Dylan and his ‘people’ called the tune for PBS (think ABC, but with explicit corporate sponsorship) last week. It was something of a protest song, but more a marketing ploy tied to September’s DVD and PBS unveilings of the Martin Scorsese-directed No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Here’s how it went down.

PBS told TV critics in late spring that their only opportunity to see the 3-hour film would be on the night of July 13 at a closely guarded theatre screening in Beverly Hills. No review copies would be sent out between the screening and PBS’ Sept. 26 premiere of the film as part of its acclaimed ‘American Masters’ series. Critics were also strongly encouraged to keep their opinions to themselves for at least the next two months.

This is hardly business as usual. In an increasingly crowded TV universe, PBS and rival networks routinely send shows to critics weeks and often months before their air dates. But No Direction Home would be a glaring exception. Why? Because Dylan and his manager, Jeff Rosen, who interviewed him for the film, are either paranoid or pragmatic about piracy.

‘The Dylan people say that he is the most bootlegged artist in the world’, PBS president Pat Mitchell said in an interview. ‘And they are terrified that if screeners are sent out, the next thing we know it would be all over the Web and everything else. As you might imagine, it’s a challenge working with someone of Bob Dylan’s stature and reputation, and his history of being very much in control of his product.’

There will be plenty of product this spring. An expanded DVD edition of No Direction Home will be in U.S. stores a week before PBS presents its two-part version. A double CD set with ‘key songs’ from the film hits stores around the same time. And ‘The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-66,’ retailing for $45, is due to arrive shortly thereafter. Still, there’s no official Bob Dylan ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ harmonica coming – yet.

Meanwhile, ‘American Masters’ executive producer Susan Lacy tried to make the best of the situation before last week’s screening at the Zanuck Theater on the Fox Studios’ Hollywood lot. For the record it was preceded by an outdoor Mexican food buffet accompanied by beer, wine and piped-in show tunes.

‘I truly think this film is a masterpiece’, Lacy then told 100 or so critics. Dylan ‘has not seen it. We don’t think he ever will.’
No Direction Home is only about the early performance years, 1961-66, of the now 64-year-old legend. There is ample ‘never-seen’ footage provided with Dylan’s blessing. Much of it is extraordinary, capturing both the tenor of the times and a vibrantly young Bob making his way from traditional acoustic folk tunes to electrified versions that initially stunned and angered audiences.

‘I think he’s prostituting himself’, says a miffed Britisher during Dylan’s 1966 tour of Europe.

Joan Baez contributes a new and candid interview while the current-day Dylan’s diction at least is clear. He otherwise reveals little of any real substance about either his music or himself.

Baez says she long since has given up trying to figure him out. About all we really know is that he’s definitely a capitalist.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:43 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: Sep 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
Child abuse and the nature of evil

Surveys show around 90% of Australians and New Zealanders have a spiritual belief. Many people as part of that belief acknowledge the existence of spiritual evil, whether in the new agey “bad karma” sense or in the traditional Christian, Islamic or Jewish view of evil personified in satanic form. In Europe, however, belief in God is dropping away rapidly as Europeans see themselves as enlightened social liberals. In France, in particular, belief in the existence of the Devil is held by only 17% of the population, compared with 65% in the US.

Is it possible that by abandoning belief in God, people can leave themselves wide open to genuine spiritual evil? That is the question ultimately thrown up by last month’s convictions of 62 people in a French village for “raping, prostituting, molesting or failing to protect 45 children as young as six months old,” as the Belfast Telegraph succinctly summed it up.

The accused villagers, aged between 27 and 73, including 26 women. These people were the parents and grandparents of 45 children from 23 families. As the newspaper notes: “They took part in the sexual assaults themselves or accepted small payments, including cigarettes, drink and food, for the use of their children.”

Some people would have us believe that sexual orientation is something we’re born with. What are we to make of the news that the inhabitants of an entire village were born paedophiles? Do we believe this is a random fluke of nature, or is the cause of this infestation more likely to be a direct result of the culture and belief systems our generation is creating in the West? Like the eagerness of Germans to round up “subhuman” Jews for the final solution, or the speed with which otherwise civilised Los Angelenos descended into brutal bloodlust, rape and riot, burning their central city in 1991; I’m far more inclined to believe that evil is not a “natural” genetic flaw, it is a path we choose. Remember those cartoons with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other? What happens when the person in the middle no longer believes in angels – where then does their advice come from?

The answer can be seen in the French town of Angers.
The mastermind of the Village of Paedophilia was a 37 year old with previous convictions, and four children of his own were repeatedly raped and abused by strangers. One 12 year old girl was said to have been raped 45 times.

A mother, Patricia, was found guilty of raping her own daughter, and prostituting 11 neighbourhood children.

The abuse took place in properties owned by the local council, and 21 of the 23 families were under the “supervision” of social workers. In fact, fifteen social workers had been rostered to look after Patricia’s family. Several witnesses testified they saw Patricia’s husband Frank raping his own children, even though one was yelling out, “stop daddy, you’re hurting me”.

One factor that researchers have long known is that people who are sexually abused as children are more likely to become abusers as adults. Patricia and her husband had both been molested as children.
In Christian theology, there is a reason for this: demonic transference. Several times in the New Testament, Christ talks about people possessed by demons, and how unless a person changes their bad habits, the spiritual baggage they cast out will come back: “It goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go and live in there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

In the book of Matthew, 8:31, Jesus comes across a possessed man and casts demonic spirits out of him: “The demons begged Jesus, ‘If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs’.” And
he did.

Christ treated demons, or dark angels, as real creatures, albeit invisible to the eye. If they left a place, they had to go somewhere else. And they had the capacity to invite their mates around for a few cold ones and blue movies.

There have been several Hollywood movies on the premise of demons leaping from victim to victim, and the spiritual sickness in the French village of Angers is stark testimony. Is there a better explanation for why 62 residents of a village should suddenly take up child molestation on masse, passing their own kids around to other villagers and watching six month old babies being sexually violated?
A random fluke of nature or genetics just doesn’t explain it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exculpating these scum by suggesting they’re not really guilty because “the devil made me do it”. The devil planted the idea, but they chose to act on it.

Which brings me to Graham Capill and other men of the cloth, Protestant or Catholic, who have turned out to be child molestors. While it is true that there are infinitely more cases of child abuse outside the church, it is those within the clergy who gain the most media attention.

The reason is simple, in my view. If personal evil exists in the world, and I am convinced it does, then it is entirely logical to expect that Evil to attack those professing to follow the good. Look at the accusations of hypocrisy leveled at Capill by New Zealand’s atheists and secular humanists as a general tarnish against Christianity. Sure – Capill was a personal hypocrite. But what he said publicly about the dangers of pornography and social liberalism is correct. Clearly his message was not hypocritical, unless atheists would now have us believe that child abuse must be alright (some, in fact, do argue this) and Capill was a hypocrite for arguing the contrary. For all I know, Capill’s journey began with pornography or abuse as a child. Maybe in offering the warnings he was in fact speaking from personal knowledge, from what was left of his conscience while he let the darkness consume him.

Whatever, the media frenzy around Capill, whilst justified on one level, was equally hypocritical – given the media’s role in selling sex, liberalism, violence and other nasties to the wider community. There was an element of spiritual cannibalism going on here. Or Pot calling the Kettle black.

If Christ could spend his days on earth being shadowed by Satan, indeed, having the devil offer him every worldly pleasure possible in a bid to tempt him off course, is it any less likely that Satan is doing the same thing to otherwise good people worldwide, every day?
If life, as Omar Khayyam proffered, “is but a chequerboard of nights and days, where Destiny [the final outcome of the battle between good and evil] with Men for pieces plays”, is it really a surprise that some fall by the wayside, taken out of the game because they’ve compromised themselves or their team?

In the West, we’ve been far too quick to abandon belief in not just spirituality, but specifically the Light and the Dark. Even many Christians now believe only in the Light, and don’t think the Dark is real.

Explain that to the 45 abused children in Angers. Tell them that they were mere victims of coincidence, that their parents didn’t really succumb to the darkness. Then click the heels of your nice red shoes and take a trip to Kansas.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)

SPIN CITY: Apr 05, AU Edition

ALAN ANDERSON
Where is John Howard’s opposition? These days, not in the ALP

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of policy ideas – good, bad and stupid – floated by Coalition parliamentarians. Good: the so-called Ginger Group has championed tax reform. Bad: Tony Abbott and others have ignited a debate over abortion. Stupid: Petro Georgiou declared that Australia’s border protection policies have worked so well that they should be abolished.

Various commentators have discussed the threat posed to John Howard by these rumblings from the party room. On another front, the perennial leadership question has returned to the fore. And speaking of the Treasurer, he has drawn fire from state governments over his outrageous proposition that they should use their GST windfalls to eliminate inefficient state taxes, rather than directing it towards crucial projects like the taxpayer-funded refurbishment of Victorian Trades Hall.

In all this excitement, it’s easy to forget the only people we’re not hearing from – the Opposition. Fresh from a fourth successive defeat, federal Labor has settled on a simple strategy: more of the same.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in their choice of leader. The Labor caucus swallowed hook, line and sinker the conventional media wisdom about the reason for Mark Latham’s defeat: he was too “risky”.
It seems not to have occurred to Labor that the real problem with Latham was that, once elevated to the leadership, his much-vaunted courage descended into sheer opportunism as he danced from one populist position to the next. No, Labor thinks that its problem was a leader with new ideas. Their solution?
Appoint a leader with none.

Who could forget cringing before Kim Beazley’s self-debasing advertising campaign to tell the electorate where he stood? The answer, as best we could discern from the ads, was “next to a desk”.
Now we have returned to the purely reactionary and opportunistic style of opposition in which Labor has been mired through most of the Howard era, eschewing alternative policy detail in favour of a shopping list of complaints. At a time in the political cycle when opposition MPs should be flying a thousand policy kites to see which remain aloft, Labor’s benches appear bereft of ideas. As a result, the nation’s only alternative policy agenda is coming from the Government backbench.
This is not just a problem of political cowardice. The Labor malaise runs far deeper.

Here’s an easily-repeatable experiment I recently tried: ask a few grassroots Liberals what policies the Government should introduce. Tax cuts, welfare reforms; you’ll get your answer. For a laugh, try the same with a Green: “Ban cars, free marijuana for all” (I quote from memory).

Now ask a few Labor branch members of the more cosmopolitan variety.
The results are not just reactionary, they are laced with cynicism about both the electorate and the party: Howard’s border protection policy is evil – but we must tread softly or the racist Australian electorate will reject us. We must stop Howard’s IR reforms, welfare reforms, and so on – but we can’t wind back what’s already done. Union power in the ALP is undemocratic – but without it, the lunatics would take charge of the asylum.

It is common to both parties that most parliamentarians are less comfortable with policy and ideology than with political tactics. But when the grassroots membership, after nine years of opposition, cannot identify any unifying cause beyond opposition to the government of the day, it is no surprise that their representatives can’t either.
Unfortunately for Labor, Beazley’s ungainly verbiage does not conceal, but accentuates, his lack of substance, as displayed in a Lateline interview with Tony Jones on 22 February. Having criticised the deployment of additional forces to Iraq, Beazley was pressed for his own prescription:

BEAZLEY: …you will never be able to train sufficient Iraqi security forces to do that job…

JONES: But are you saying we should not be training Iraqi security forces; that shouldn’t be part of the mission of Australian troops?

BEAZLEY: I think we need a different engagement with Iraq. I’ve made that clear before. I think the time has come to say to the Iraqis: well, there is a certain military involvement that we will have - and I don’t want to go through all the issues there; you understand what our position is in that regard - but as far as...
[Here Jones wisely interrupts to change the topic before his remaining listeners nod off].

While it is fun to torment the congenitally-verbose, consider whether Beazley’s style is more a symptom than a cause of his party’s problems. At a fundamental level, federal Labor simply has nothing to say. Beazley merely personifies his party’s irrelevance.

It need not be this way. The Howard Government has overseen a transfer in economic power from those who earn to those who own. Younger generations have every right to feel angered by the baby boomers, who have maintained exorbitant income tax rates to fund unsustainable benefits for their retirement while forcing the rest of us to pay our own way through life. A bold ALP would start by establishing its credentials as the party of inter-generational justice. For instance, Labor could advocate abolishing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount to fund substantial cuts in income tax. It could push for a rise in the retirement age. And it could devise other policies to address the looming imbalance between workers and welfare recipients.
But while opportunities abound for Labor to demonstrate a fresh commitment to good governance, it remains paralysed by fear. Labor’s renewal will require a positive reappraisal of the electorate Labor has learnt to despise.

Australians no longer believe in a free lunch. That is why too-good-to-be-true policies like Medicare Gold have failed. This is an era of conviction politics.

If Labor is prepared to build on the theme of inter-generational justice and securing the interests of future generations, it will win converts even amongst those adversely affected. Contrary to the bleating of demoralised left-wing columnists, Australians do not decide their votes on self-interest alone, or even principally.

The GST election demonstrated that it is possible to win with policies that people believe will affect them adversely, so long as they feel there is a greater national good at stake. A courageous Labor leader could restore Labor’s sense of moral purpose without venturing onto the Greens’ wilder shores. Nothing lasts forever, and sooner or later Labor will find itself in government, however lacklustre that government may be. It is therefore in the interests of all Australians that Labor find a new and worthy vision to advance.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)

RIGHT HOOK: Sep 05, AU Edition

ANN COULTER
It’s ‘let’s roll’, not ‘let’s roll over’

Since the London bombings, there has been a palpable feeling in the air that another terrorist attack is imminent.

Maybe not as bad as 9/11, perhaps a train or subway bombing. Or maybe something worse. As America’s Republicans were saying repeatedly – captured on Lexis-Nexis for a year before it showed up in a Frank Luntz talking points memo in 2004 – the savages have declared war, and it’s far preferable to fight them in the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of New York (where the residents would immediately surrender). That strategy appears to be working.

Two weeks ago, Gen. Jack Keane, a former deputy chief of staff for the U.S. Army, said coalition forces in Iraq have killed or arrested more than 50,000 insurgents in the past six or seven months. It appears the majority of those were captured and released, but that may be good enough.

Consider the intriguing diary entries of British jihadist Zeeshan Siddique, reported in The New York Times this Monday (somewhat less prominently than the 4 billion front-page stories on Abu Ghraib). Siddique was captured last April in Pakistan by that country’s security forces. His diary is a sort of Plan-a-Jihad journal, much like California seventh-graders were required to write in 2002. (There’s also talk of publishing his diary under the title ‘Hello, Allah? It’s Me, Siddique.’)

In addition to heartwarming entries like the one on the pope’s death – ‘Allah will throw him in hell’ – a number of Siddique’s diary entries suggest that it’s not all sunshine and song for the Islamo-fascists these days. For six weeks, it was all bad news for Siddique – except for news of the Pope’s death, Saul Bellow’s death and the Prince of Monaco’s death, all of which cheered him considerably.

A week later, he is informed by someone, probably not the Prince of Monaco, that ‘the situation is really bad’ and he should ‘just sit tight & wait it out until things get a bit better. Before long, Siddique is vowing to make ‘an all out immense effort’ to ‘rejoin my contingent’.

And then he was captured, too, along with his diary and phone numbers for other al-Qaida operatives and his co-religionists in Britain involved in the failed subway bombing. If you made a movie of this bumbling nincompoop’s misadventures, you’d have to call it Dude, Where’s My Car Bomb?

Siddique’s diary entries refer to Iraq Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as ‘the dog of the hell fire’ and Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as ‘Satan’. That’s not the talk of a winner! Siddique’s future as a jihadist may be fading, but he has a good shot at writing speeches for Howard Dean. (He also describes Maya Angelou as ‘America’s national treasure’, so I guess some things are universal.)

Meanwhile, every time Americans get a gander at these lunatics ranting about the ‘Great Satan’ and the ‘Zionist entity,’ we can’t believe we’re at war with such a comical enemy. No wonder they dream of an afterlife with 72 hot teenage girls. These guys are klutzes. Nerds. Dweebs. In the Las Vegas of life they’re at the convention center with the other ‘Star Trek’ fans. Even in Pakistan, Siddique says he is ‘constantly laughed at & ridiculed.’

Ahmed can’t get a date, and now the rest of us have to suffer.
But you will notice, the jihadists are not pouring across the Syrian border to, say, Brooklyn Heights. They are running to Iraq, where they run smack dab into the glorious coalition military forces.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: Apr 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
One last gasp of hope for the ABC

If you happened to be around in 1938 and were tuning into America’s Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) one autumn night you would have heard the following ‘announcement’: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt
our program… to bring you a special bulletin… Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports… explosions of incandescent gas… on the planet Mars… moving towards the Earth with enormous velocity. And later, near the end of the broadcast,I’m speaking from the roof of broadcasting building, New York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as the Martians approach…

By then, some panic-stricken listeners were either hiding in their basements – loaded shotgun at the ready – or had packed up and left town, no doubt wondering why the government hadn’t taken pre-emptive action.

It was all the doing of the brilliant if mischievous Orson Welles and CBS’s Mercury Theatre of the Air radio production of HG Wells’ science fiction thriller, War of the Worlds.

In the broadcast’s aftermath, the US Congress bellowed many pieties about responsible broadcasting and called for better regulation of the airwaves to protect the community’s more credulous souls. The New York Tribune’s Dorothy Thompson wrote that with no more than a few voices on the radio Welles had scared and demoralized thousands. Welles issued an apology and the issue faded into broadcast folklore.

Today, news broadcast audiences, perhaps less gullible, are fed information more plausible but not necessarily more truthful. Across the globe once-venerated news organisations like the ABC, the BBC, and America’s CBS are under fire from better-informed and more skeptical news consumers and, in the latter two cases, from taxpayers and their governments.

While few institutions have escaped criticism in recent times, the media, particularly the news end of it, seems to have been caught by surprise. Working in their cloistered enclaves, protected from critical scrutiny, much of the journalistic profession believed things could continue on as they had in the past, in splendid isolation.
Such is the case with the ABC, which has had a grilling over balance and impartiality, or more precisely, its lack of it in its news broadcasts. At the heart of the matter appears to be a lack of understanding by its senior management, staff and supporters, of the difference between the legislatively mandated role of the ABC and its commercial news counterparts.

“News,” former Australian Broadcasting Authority Chairman (ABA) David Flint says, “must be presented objectively, and opinion be clearly distinguishable from news… the Sydney Morning Herald is absolutely entitled, if it wishes, to take a left of centre position… A public broadcaster is not because of the way in which it is funded and established.”

Ex-ABC “Media Watch” host and Sydney Morning Herald kvetch David Marr contends such standards represent a “kindergarten notion of balance”. Perhaps. But the ABC exists at the sufferance of the grownup Australian taxpayers, and is expected to live up to its charter, prescribed by law.

Childish or not, that code demands, that ABC’s news programs be “balanced and impartial”. Although the code requires that editorial staff present a wide range of views, it does not expect them to view all sides of an issue equally. Adult editorial supervision is required. Saddam Hussein’s views, for example, are not to be accorded equal weight to those of the US government.

ALSTON GOES TO THE CREASE
In the view of former communications minister Richard Alston, both of those prerequisites – balance and impartiality and effective editorial control – were found wanting at the ABC during the Iraq war. According to Alston, the AM program had repeatedly made comments that were highly subjective and not factually based, and suggested a lack of regard for editorial oversight.

To back up his point, Alston provided the ABC’s MD, Richard Balding, with 68 examples where AM had breached the ABC’s code of practice over a three week period, in March and April 2003 (during major hostilities in Iraq). Alston made these charges in the context of remarks made by ABC’s news director Max Uechtritiz that “the military are lying bastards”.

After an 18-month review process by the ABC and then by the ABA, 21 – nearly a third – of Alston’s original examples were upheld as breaches of the ABC’s code of practice. Twelve of them were considered to constitute serious breaches of the code. The ABA’s acting chairman Lyn Maddock said that AM’s use of “tendentious language” in its Iraq war coverage would have given its listeners the clear impression that the program was pre-disposed to a particular view. And this was just one particular program.

Yet the reaction to the breaches from much of the media has ranged from indifference to claims of vindication, in the latter case most notably and worryingly from the ABC’s own MD. A CPA by training, Balding apparently couldn’t count how many breaches have been sustained but nonetheless appears to have mastered the idiom of tendentiousness.

Alluding only to the four additional breaches found by the ABA, Balding said he welcomed the ABA’s finding that “AM was balanced” in its coverage of the war in Iraq, and concluded with a swipe at the authority for its “flawed” review. That should send a strong signal to the ABC journalists found to be in breach of the code and other staff seeking guidance.

Contrary to the more paranoid of the ABC’s ‘friends’, such
criticism is not the result of any right-wing plot; rather, it is the bias exhibited in the ABC’s news programming and lack of adherence to its charter and code of practice by its staff that has invited
the adverse attention. Over time, if unchecked such code and
charter breaches will erode the legitimacy of the ABC, until, one day,
political support for its existence and special status will
become tenuous.

ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN
Tapped by communications minister Helen Coonan to sit on the ABC board, conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen now finds herself front and centre in this debate.

Judging by the response of the ABC collective – variously, the CPSU, which represents ABC staff, the Friends of the ABC and the ALP – you’d think Albrechtsen’s appointment was equivalent to another science fiction classic, Attack of the 50-foot Woman.

The public sector union’s Graeme Thomson claimed “many” were against someone such as Albrechtsen who “consistently displayed antagonism towards the work that ABC staff perform”.

As Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson pointed out in the Herald, “critics of the Government’s appointments fail to appreciate there is no inconsistency between being a thoughtful critic of the contemporary ABC and being a supporter of public broadcasting”. But Henderson is skeptical that much can be done to the ABC at the board level.
So I asked Albrechtsen what she hoped to accomplish as an ABC director. She is realistic but more optimistic than Henderson and believes the board can bring about positive change.

Albrechtsen prefaces her answer by stating that she is a consumer and fan of the ABC, and agrees that the public broadcaster’s legitimacy is on the line. One of her top priorities will be to address news bias.

“A good place to begin is to ensure that, over time, management recruits staff that are able to serve the interests of all of the broadcaster’s shareholders – the Australian community – not just a narrow band of it,” she says.

In the shorter term, Albrechtsen will want to see the broadcaster’s charter and code of practice adhered to. Does she believe the broadcaster’s charter and code of practice are adequate – especially during wartime?

“So long as the board is satisfied that ABC management and staff is seeing that the broadcaster is abiding by its charter and code of practice, then I see no reason why there should be any changes”.
And if the board is unable to ensure that the public broadcaster remains faithful to its mandate? Control of the Senate will pass to the Government in July. That will provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take corrective measures. After the Jonathan Shier debacle, it’s a bet the Government will not let that opportunity pass unexploited if need be.

Balding is a numbers man who, in defence of his management of the ABC, likes to refer to public opinion surveys commissioned with your tax dollars. I would not quibble that the majority of those who watch the ABC think everything is tickety-boo. But most people don’t watch the ABC. And the only choice that counts is the one viewers make each night with their thumb. Balding will also want to keep in mind the Government’s own increased numbers come July.

If Mars did attack Earth someday, how should the ABC report it?
As the death-ray-emitting saucers hurtled toward Earth and – one would hope – are engaged by a coalition of willing nations (while the UN fretted and muttered platitudes about the peaceful uses of space) how would the ABC interpret its code of conduct? Would it give a fair and balanced account of the grievances motivating the little green men?
Will AM’s Linda Mottram proclaim that ‘Coalition commanders are finding the public relations war may have slipped from their grasp, attacks by the height-challenged red planet dwellers are causing confusion and sapping morale’?

Will Kerry O’Brien demand to know why Australia’s immigration minister – ‘fixated on asylum-seekers’ – has dropped the ball?
Presuming an interpreter could be found who spoke the appropriate interstellar dialect, would an aggrieved space invader be permitted to give his side of things to Lateline’s Tony Jones? (e.g., Martian air waves polluted with reality TV, regular invasions and occupation by robot explorers not to mention always the wisecracks about their diminutive stature.)

It would be more interesting than 60 Minutes’ cash-for-questions-not-answered Mamdouh Habib interview. And ABC shareholders would wish to be able to trust the editorial judgment of the news editors in each case. At present, there is little reason why
they should.

However, the ABC has a chance to win that trust and, if it wants to be around to cover the biggest story of all time, it should embrace its critics. Most of them mean it well.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)

First Draft: Mar 05, AU Edition

FIRST DRAFT

MATT HAYDEN
Somehow this draft e-mail from Kim Beazley made it into our in-box…

From: Kimster2008@aol.com
To:
Subject: Proposed new tactical directions - and thanks!

Dear men and women of Labor,

Thank you for re-electing me as Leader. I am both proud and excited - not to mention extremely flushed. Flushed with confidence. Flushed with enthusiasm. Flushed with anticipation! It’s a great feeling; a feeling that I hope to share. Come the next election I hope and pray that we are all flushed together! And I am confident we will be. Certainly, victory is possible, but not until after some significant changes have taken place. The first thing we need to do is re-unite as a party. How can we unify the country if we can’t unify ourselves? You will no doubt recall that I recently told you all to just “put a sock in it”. I reiterate that sentiment in this memo - but this time with a qualification; a qualification that I’d like to delineate:

As distinct from the Liberal Party, which has a very top-down culture, we are the party of debate and consensus. This is a tradition we simply must not discard. So, the figurative sock I am thinking of is not, say, a thick, wooly, footy sock, which, when placed in the oral cavity would completely stifle any attempted vocalizations. It could be more of a lightweight tennis sock - or even one of those elastic shin-huggers - a sock that, although achieving the required effect most of the time, would still allow certain vital phrases to be expressed - and consequently heard - if need be. Speaking of verbal matters: I am well aware that my peripatetic thought processes and meandering syntax have been a problem in the past. But no longer!

From this point on I make this commitment, both to you and the people of Australia: No more prolixity. As we all know, prolixity - or even a general loquaciousness - is a curse for a politician (or any public figure, for that matter) in this age of sound-bites and fleeting images. In the final analysis, what’s the point of taking a hundred words to say something when only five will do?
Just as I must reinvent myself, so must we all. Apropos of this, we must constantly push into new areas. We need to cease going over old ground. We must quit with the endless post-mortems. We simply have to stop repeating ourselves.
(And we must also do away with the negativity. Negativity never, ever works. It ultimately leads to low morale. And the last thing we need is low morale. Particularly not now. Really, just the thought of it fills me with dread...)

But enough of that! We must stop being obsessed with the past. We must become obsessed with the future, and how we can get there. We must act. And the first step in the process of acting is to agree - and agree unanimously - that I am the party Leader; that I make the decisions; that I articulate our direction. (Of course, I’ll contribute to this process by listening to all constructive criticism, and going with any good suggestions you might have.) Needless to say the most important sub-step of this step is to put the bickering behind us. (And on the subject of behinds: We must avoid any such obsession with that part of the anatomy in our rhetoric. These will no doubt remind the electorate of my predecessor’s unfortunate fixation thereupon, and his ultimately disastrous reign. So, no more references to posteriors, or the osculation thereof. It will be the kiss of death.) So, in summary: We must be combative, but not thuggish. We must be unified, but not undemocratic. And we must stop trying to have it both ways.

Thank you. And go get ‘em, fighters!

Yours sincerely,

Kim Beazley

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:30 AM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Sep 05, AU Edition

KUNG FU FIGHTING
There’s nothing frightening about a bizarre new martial arts flick. Plus: professional skaters and other kids with too much money

Kung Fu Hustle
Release: July 2, 2005
Rated: R
5 stars
I had no idea how I was going to review Kung Fu Hustle. I wasn’t sure if it was the best movie I’ve ever seen or the worst. So I tried explaining it to my friends and found each time I talked about it I was smiling and laughing with amazement. So five stars it is.

I have never seen anything like it. Imagine Enter The Dragon, crossed with The Matrix, crossed with Reservoir Dogs, crossed with a Road Runner cartoon. Yeah, it messes with your mind.

I’ll try to explain the plot but I was so wide-eyed during the screening I hardly took any notes. I didn’t want to miss a second of the sub-titles in case it suddenly made sense.

Set in pre-revolutionary China, Kung Fu Hustle tells the tale of a petty crook called Sing, (played humorously by Stephen Chow) who wants to join the notorious Axe Gang. The Axe Gang is running the city and killing people with axes (obviously) while dancing in tails and top hats (betcha didn’t see that coming).

Sing pretends he’s part of the Axe Gang to extort money for the poor folk living in a slum called Pig Sty Alley. But all is not what it seems. Pig Sty Alley is home to some kick-butt Kung Fu masters, including the local gay tailor who uses curtain rings to fend off assailants and swoons after a fight, sighing, “Is it a crime to be good at Kung Fu?”

So along with the screaming landlady and her husband who also happen to be Kung Fu superfreaks this team plans to battle the Axe Gang. Then it all gets a bit Looney Tunes with the use of CGI and an honest-to-God Road Runner homage.

Finally Sing is revealed as a super-SUPER-powered Kung Fu master and he takes on a Kung Fu killer just released from a lunatic asylum who can harness his own powers and turn himself into a fighting bullfrog. The climatic fight scene is an insane building-smashing, CGI-bending, martial arts masterpiece.

Stephen Chow not only plays the lead role, he also wrote, produced, and directed the movie. Whatever he’s on, I’ll have what he’s having.

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Millions
Release: August 11, 2005
Rated: PG
5 stars
Breath taking, magical, delightful! A family film that is inspiring yet not sickly sweet. Disney you ask? DreamWorks perhaps? Nope. Millions is a Danny Boyle film. Yes, the same Danny Boyle who brought us the drug-fest Trainspotting and zombie flick 28 Days Later has produced one of the most enchanting films of the year. And without an animated animal in sight.

Millions is set in Northern England in the week running up to Britain changing from it’s currency from pounds sterling to euros. Two young boys find a sports bag stuffed with more than £250,000 in cash and, with just seven days before it becomes worthless, have some quick decisions to make.

Anthony (the charming Lewis McGibbon), is nine years old and a bourgeoning capitalist. He plans to buy property and wants to avoid paying tax (“Do you know how much 40 per cent is?” he asks, “Nearly all of it”). His seven year old brother Damian (captivating newcomer Alex Etel), is a more troubled soul who has memorised the names and dates of every saint in the Christian calendar and wants to use the money to help the poor. While his unimpressed older brother tells him there aren’t any poor where they live as the house prices keep them out, Damian’s struggle to do the right thing make him the star of this modern day fable.

This imaginative and incredibly funny film follows the trial and tribulations of the two boys as they deal with their windfall while escaping the crooks who want their stolen loot back. They have to rely on each other as their Mum is dead and their Dad (the adorable James Nesbitt) is lonely and unaware of their money dilemma.

This sophisticated family film uses exceptional camerawork and floating music to show you the world through a child’s eyes. The ending is a little sappy but in a morality tale it’s expected the characters have to choose between right and wrong. And so much of this film is very right.

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Lords of Dogtown
Release: August 18, 2005
Rated: M
3 stars
Lords of Dogtown is a movie based on Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary based on the real lives of the Z-Boys, the famous Cali-fornian skateboard legends of the 70s. But as with any copy, it gets weaker with every reproduction.

It’s the story of the Z-Boys, a group of grommets who muck around with skateboards when the surf is flat. One day the local skate/surf shop owner, Skip Engblom (brilliantly played by Heath Ledger – who I think was channelling Val Kilmer), comes up with a key breakthrough, polyurethane wheels. The trick is they grip. So with the additional traction, the Z-Boys try skating the sides of the big, open drainage canal that runs through the area. Then when locals were forced to empty their pools due to water restrictions the Z-Boys saw those curved pools as cement dreams.

Their freestyling techniques cause such a stir they introduce their own sub-culture to skateboarding. With that the big sponsorship bucks (and the groupies) followed. Of course the money corrupts their friendship and they all go their separate ways, reminiscing of those lazy summers.

The Z-Boys are: Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch), Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk) and Stacy Peralta (John Robinson). They all do an OK job but none of them can do the amazing stunts that are in the documentary so it seems like the fuss is all about nothing.

As always, you can’t beat the original.

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Little Fish
Release: September 8, 2005
Rated: MA
4 stars
We have some amazing acting talent in Australia. Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill, Martin Henderson even Noni Hazelhurst all shine in Little Fish. Too bad the story sucks. All right, maybe it doesn’t suck but man is it dark! Cate Blanchett is exceptional as Tracy, an ex-junkie working in a video store in a slum-like working class suburb of Sydney nicknamed ‘Little Saigon’.

She’s trying to stay on the straight and narrow and wants to open a business but naturally no bank will give a reformed drug addict a loan. Her stepfather, breathtakingly played by an almost unrecognizable Hugo Weaving, is a gay ex-footy star and a heroin addict. Her brother, played impressively by Martin Henderson, is disabled and looking to make a quick buck by dealing drugs. Her ex-boyfriend, played by Dustin Nguyen, says he’s not in the drug business anymore but is a liar. And her mum, played by the fabulously craggy Noni Hazelhurst, is desperately trying to keep her family’s head above water.

You know it’s going to end in tears. Little Fish is well acted, well told and, well, bleak.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)

Tough Questions, Mar 05, AU Edition

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART
Been sucked in by The Da Vinci Code yet?

Along time ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I bought a book called The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail. Hundreds of people queued at my city’s biggest bookshop to obtain the first copies of what was billed as the biggest blow to Christianity in 2000 years.

That book made its authors millions. It took off around the world, all because of its highly controversial allegations – that Jesus Christ did not die on the Cross, but slipped away and secretly married Mary Magdalene before escaping to France and having babies. The essence of the story was that the “Holy Grail” of ancient repute was not, in fact, the chalice from which Christ gave the disciples Communion, but that the real “Grail” was in fact “Sang Real”, or Sang Royale – the royal bloodline of Christ as the authors perceived the story.

According to their “exposé”, a vast network of co-conspirators had worked through the ages to protect the descendants of Jesus – still living in France – and that protection included the Knights Templar and a mysterious monastic organisation named the Priory of Zion which allegedly continues to this day.

Except, as all good adventure story readers know, ripping good yarns like this one are generally a crock, and this one in particular was the Mother of all Crocks. Seems poor old Dan Brown, the author of the bestselling Da Vinci Code, fell for it though.

Brown’s book has spent more than a year sucking people’s money from
their own pockets and into his like a Hoovermatic vacuum cleaner. Brown himself has earned somewhere in the region of $30 million from it to date. So what are his central claims?

Well, he draws heavily on The Holy Blood for inspiration, and has one of his central characters, fictional historian Leigh Teabing, fire a supposed bullseye shot at Christianity in this exchange:

Teabing says to an eager young acolyte, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book…

“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.”

“Who chose which gospels to include?” Sophie asked.

“Aha!” Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the Pagan Roman emperor, Constantine the Great!”

First rule of pulp fiction: never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Let’s examine the illustrious Teabing’s assertion.

What he’s really saying is that by way of some grand Roman political conspiracy, the New Testament Gospels we have today are the ones that suited the Roman Empire’s purposes, and that the vast bulk of “gospels” about Jesus were deliberately left out. Ergo, every poor deluded creature who’s ever entered a church and sung a hymn through the ages has been the victim of a Roman hoax, kept alive through the centuries by church and governmental authorities desirous of retaining power over the peasantry by giving them some spiritual opium. Karl Marx had pretty much the same view. If true, then Christians everywhere have good reason to be concerned about the rationality of their faith. But it’s not true.

Firstly, many of the references to so-called ancient records in The Da Vinci Code are false. Author Dan Brown’s direct claim, via the mouth of his character Teabing, about there being “eighty” suppressed gospels is simply a blatant untruth.

You’d be hard pressed to find eighty bits of paper from 2,000 years ago, let alone eighty gospels. Quite simply, as any recognised university professor can confirm, there were never “eighty” alternative gospels in existence. At most, there were perhaps a dozen or two, ranked in a sliding scale of 1 to 10 in terms of authenticity and credibility.

The top four are the Gospels we have today, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The reason they are at the top of the list is that they were written as early as ten years after the death of Christ. Liberal scholar Dr John A. T. Robinson – no friend of fundamentalists – believes the old view that the Gospels were written up to a hundred years after Jesus died is utterly false, and that the earliest of the Gospels was written and circulating as early as 40 AD.

Those four gospels, and Paul’s letters, had already been meticulously copied dozens of times by hand and sent to Christian communities around the Mediterranean by the end of the first century, and by the end of the second century AD there were hundreds of copies of our New Testament in existence and daily use.

Archaeologists and historians have found numerous letters and sermons, dating from as early as 90 AD, quoting the Gospels and other New Testament books. Those same documents also show the rival alternative “gospels”, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Philip, didn’t appear on the scene until around 140 AD and were not accepted by Christians at the time as genuine. Early Christians regarded those “gospels” as frauds, and so should we.

For The Da Vinci Code to claim that the Catholic Church and a Roman Emperor had any power, by the time they met in 325 AD, to suddenly reinvent the Bible without anyone knowing is so ludicrous it makes the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory look
utterly sensible.

The 325 AD meeting with Constantine was no more than a rubber-stamping exercise that formally recognised what hundreds of thousands of Christians already knew – the four Gospels, Acts and the Epistles were the true and inspired New Testament given to Christians by God. The first Christians – those people who had seen Jesus alive, watched his crucifixion and witnessed the Resurrection – welcomed the four Gospels as authentic and truthful. The reason the four Gospels were revered by the first Christians is because they were written either directly by Jesus’ apostles (Matthew and John), or by assistants to the apostles (Mark and Luke).

Unlike the much later alternative “gospels”, the top four read like historical narratives with acute attention to detail. Contrast Luke’s writing with later fictitious gospels featuring such additions as a “talking cross” that walked out of the tomb behind Jesus on the morning of his resurrection before, presumably, both he and the talking cross dashed off for coffee somewhere.

As a point of fact, nearly every one of the alternative “gospels” was created by followers of the religion “Gnosticism” which maintains that real spiritual truth can only be obtained by secret knowledge passed from Master to Initiate. Gnosticism was working frantically to counter the rapidly growing Christian faith, and it tried to do so by hijacking orthodox Christian gospels and re-writing them in accordance with its own beliefs.

Gnosticism is at the heart of the New Age movement today, and both The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail, and The Da Vinci Code are nothing more than extended advertisements for Gnosticism.

Which brings me to Big Claim No. 2 in The Da Vinci Code:

The character Teabing refers to the Council of Nicea, which was that aforementioned gathering of bishops in the year 325, and he claims: “At this gathering…many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of the sacraments, and of course, the divinity of Jesus”
“I don’t follow. His divinity?”
“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
“Not the Son of God?”
“Right,” Teabing said, “Jesus’ establishment as the Son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicea.”
“Hold on. You’re saying that Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”
“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.

While the above passage would certainly find some supporters out there in I-read-Dan-Brown land, you truly would have to be extremely gullible to believe it. It is, again, a blatant fiction.

Did Jesus Christ claim to be God in the Gospels? Repeatedly. Take John 10:25-33:

“Jesus answered... ‘I and my Father are one’,” at which point a Jewish crowd tried to stone him to death for blasphemy.

At John 8:58, “Jesus said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM’.”

Think about that statement for a moment. Worded very strangely, isn’t it? Unless of course you are indeed the immortal God who created Time and exists outside Time in an eternal Now. Under those circumstances, it makes perfect sense for Jesus to refer to himself existing before Abraham two thousand years earlier, and to refer to himself in the eternal present tense as “I AM”.

Makes even more sense when you go back to Exodus 3:14 and discover that God introduced himself to Moses as “I AM”.

And while Exodus records the first commandment as “Thou shalt have no other Gods but me” on pain of death, the New Testament shows Jesus clearly saying he is God, using God’s divine name for himself and, at Matthew 8:2, John 9:35-39 and elsewhere, accepting worship from people – something only God was permitted to do. Now of course anyone can claim to be God. Our psych units are full of delusional people who claim to be God. And Jesus was confronted with skeptics as the Bible records in Mark 2:9-12 when Jesus met a man paralysed from birth. He tells the man his sins are forgiven, prompting a gasp from the crowd who remind him only God has the power to forgive sins. So Jesus then asks the crowd which is the easier – to say “your sins are forgiven” or to say “rise and walk”? According to one biblical scholar commenting on this little dilemma, it is “an unanswerable question. The statements are equally simple to pronounce; but to say either, with accompanying performance, requires divine power.

“An imposter, of course, in seeking to avoid detection, would find the former easier. Jesus proceeded to heal the illness that men might know he had authority to deal with its cause.”

So it is abundantly clear all through the New Testament that Jesus both claimed to be God, and performed miracles to prove his claim. He accepted worship as if he were God. And writings from Roman imperial records around 100 AD show people “singing hymns to Christ, as if to a God”.

For Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code to claim that Jesus was never regarded as God before 325 AD is just an outright crock.

Yes, it’ll sell books. But then again a fool and their money are soon parted.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

DIARY OF A CABBIE : May 05, AU Edition

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE
Devoted wife, house full of kids, money in the bank.
For some passengers, it’s still not enough

Around midnight, a fella in his mid-thirties hurried out of the Bondi Hotel and approached the cab. ‘Where to, mate?’, I asked, hitting the meter and easing away. ‘Where do you suggest?’, he countered. He was looking to bat on yet had no idea where to do so late on a Sunday night.

‘What are you after’, I asked. ‘Just somewhere for a quiet drink or you wanna tear it up?’. He took a deep breath and paused to consider his preferences. Finally he said, ‘I want to go somewhere there are beautiful girls dancing – somewhere dark, but not strippers. Girls I can have a drink with and talk to’.

When I suggested a men’s club, of which there are a few in Sydney, he took offence: ‘What, you mean lap-dancers?’

‘Yeah, in the city’, I said. ‘Those girls are classier than strippers, but do pole dancing and stuff’. By now I was guessing, having never been inside a men’s club.

‘Nah, they’re just sluts who take your money’, he spat with some disgust. ‘I want regular women out for a good time’. I considered suggesting it was a fine distinction, but thought better of it.

‘Well, in that case you’ve got a number of choices’, I told him, ‘depending on how much money you have and the type of conversation you’re after’.

‘Put it this way’, he said, ‘I’m a married man with three kids. It’s not like I’m trying to pick up or anything. I just want to be close to beautiful women dancing. I want to watch them, you know what I mean?’.
No, I thought, but I’ll indulge you for a $20 fare.

‘I’ll take you to the Cross’, I said, ‘there’s a pub up there with a disco on the first floor’. After heading off I asked him, ‘You’re not from Sydney?’.

‘Yeah, I am, but I’ve been married for twelve years and never go out. I’ve got no idea about the night life’.

‘So how come you’re out tonight?’, I asked.

‘I felt like doing something different’, he replied.

After a high-profile career as a sportsman he owned and operated a chain of very successful businesses. The job exposed him to many women who thought he was wonderful, yet complained endlessly about their husbands and boyfriends. Whilst he was a good looking bloke, he had managed to stay faithful to his wife. Until he succumbed to the advances of a woman from work. ‘You slept with her?’, I asked.
‘No, but we had sex – and you know what’, he said, ‘I told my wife!’
‘Jeez, mate, you’re a thrillseeker’, I said. ‘How did she take it?’
‘Not too bad’, he said, ‘once I told her it was just sex and nothing emotional. I mean, sex on its own is simply plumbing. It’s love and affairs which threaten women’.

We approached Kings Cross in silence and I thought about what my passenger had told me. He was clearly thinking, too. A man who’d been with the one partner most of his adult life. It must feel like a betrayal of sorts I figured, no matter how one rationalised it. ‘Oh well’, I finally piped up, ‘at least you’re honest about it’.

What else could I say? It was tempting to suggest that if he was in any way fair, he must now extend the same right to his wife, though he came across as too egotistical to do so. Indeed, he never once mentioned that he loved his wife, or praised their marriage.

Whether he realised it or not, the dynamic in their long-term relationship was now altered, maybe irrevocably. Having tasted illicit sex he was now insisting he just wanted to watch beautiful women dancing. Late on a Sunday night. Yeah, right.

Good luck, mate. You’ll need it.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: Apr 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
New York used to be a hell of a town. Is Sydney becoming one?

On a hot summer night almost fifteen years ago, a car in a Hasidic Jewish funeral procession veered out of control on a street in the Brooklyn suburb of Crown Heights, killing a black child, Gavin Cato, and severely injuring his cousin. What followed were several days of riots during which the police held back and let the criminals vent their anger by destroying property and attacking Jews, including Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting scholar from Melbourne who was stabbed to death.

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago: again, a fatal suburban car crash sparks several days of rioting, and again, the cops hang back and let the bad guys do their thing – after all, their commanders wouldn’t want them to do anything that would “make the situation worse”, i.e. arrest people.

Of course, there are crucial differences in these two scenarios: the first took place in New York; the second in outer Sydney. In the first case, a truly innocent life was snatched (not that that is an excuse for rioting by any means). In the second, the dead were a pair of budding career criminals who were hooning around in a car they knew was stolen and crashed after being chased by police. And unlike today’s Sydney, the New York of the early-1990s in the bad old days before Rudy Giuliani was in fact a pretty lawless place where the cops were ineffectual at best and politicians could only promise to slow the slide into anarchy. This is the environment Tom Wolfe so brilliantly captured in his classic, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
But just because New York’s bad old days seem so far removed does not mean there are not serious lessons that Sydney’s leaders need to learn – not the least of which is that if a place is perceived as being lawless, then it will quickly become so. The Macquarie Fields riots came just a few months after riots in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, where the death of an aboriginal teen – supposedly after a police pursuit – led to several nights of violence that, again, police were reluctant to clamp down upon.

And while the sort of kids who fling petrol bombs at cop cars and laugh when policewomen are knocked over are certainly not the sharpest knives in the drawer, even they are quick enough to pick up the lesson that when confronted with a mob, overwhelmed cops are powerless and under orders to withdraw and negotiate. Which is why just a few nights after the Macquarie Fields riots which took so long to quell, 150 youths started flinging bottles and abuse at cops in Darling Harbour. And, thanks to the principle of “safety in numbers”, only a handful of miscreants were arrested.

By worrying too much about appearances and not enough about law and order, NSW’s leaders are sending a powerful message that will only come back and bite them and the voters who keep electing them. And Premier Bob Carr’s increasingly politically-correct stance on the riots is not helping. (He started out sensibly in the immediate aftermath of the riots by blaming the criminals involved, only to backpeddle and cast responsibility first on poor social factors, then on bad parenting – things which feature in the lives of plenty of people who still manage not to go ape and destroy their street every time they think the authorities have done wrong by the friendly neighbourhood car thief).

What it comes down to is the complicated set of phenomena that happens when, collectively, a society changes because its perceptions of itself change. In New York, for example, the fact that most people believed the streets and subways were unsafe and ungovernable meant people stayed off of them as much as possible – leaving a vacuum for criminals to fill and solidify the impression.

Similarly, in Sydney, happily-underemployed and undereducated youth are getting the message that their lawlessness will be tolerated and sympathetic newspaper articles will be written about them, so long as they make sure to bring plenty of mates and come from a suitably unfashionable suburb.

To counter this, Bob Carr should tell NSW Police that the next time violence of the sort that flared up in early March happens again, they are to do whatever it takes to restore order and make arrests, as quickly as possible.

Not only that, he should indicate that he will back them not just during the inevitable media firestorm, but also through the legal battles that will surely come from community activists and lawyers who think that there’s no reason that friends can’t come together occasionally over a few Molotov cocktails, and who think nothing of tying up a working-class cop’s career for years in the name of “social justice”.

Finally, he should press prosecutors to hold rioters accountable to the full extent of the law, and urge magistrates to set high bails and sentences for those arrested and found guilty. Even if it doesn’t deter other no-hopers, at least it detains those who are arrested on one night long enough that they can’t go out and start another round of mayhem the next.

The lessons of New York’s bad old days are not complicated: give cops the tools and backing they need to do their jobs. Prosecute minor infractions before they become major ones. And make honest people feel that it is they, and not the criminals, who have control over the streets. Unfortunately, these are lessons that cities like London – where burglars operate with such impunity that they actually prefer to target their victims when they are at home – have ignored in recent years. The growing number of riots throughout Sydney’s suburbs suggests that her leaders are going to have to learn these lessons themselves, the hard way.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

Left Hook, Mar 05, AU Edition

LEFT HOOK

LUKE SLATTERY
Freedom of speech? Sure – just don’t mention the war

I am not a racist. In fact, I’m something of a sensitive multi-culturalist: the more complex the cultural stew, the better. But a vile bigot I may turn out to be if, in the eyes of the Hu-man Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, I’m found guilty of “repeated racial vilification” for dissing, of all people, Germans.

The accusations have been levelled by a German-Australian in a document that as hysterical as it is histrionic. Yet the commission regards it as grave enough to have written me demanding a response and threatening sanctions.

And so I find myself in a free-speech trial. The complainant asserts that I’ve maligned the German people by uttering “extremely disturbing and racially offensive remarks” in several articles written for the Weekend Australian magazine.

Now, I’m enough of a sensitive centre-leftie to believe in the notion of racial vilification as embodied in the Racial Discrimination Act. On the other hand, I’m enough of a realist to want the law’s purview restricted to races (not nations) that may be tangibly harmed by acts of repeated vilification and manifest “hatred”.

As I write these words, a copy of the HREOC complaint lies open on my desk. It includes three photocopies of the offending articles, incendiary passages underlined. The first contains the line: “The Germans have always had the gift of killing to music.” I wrote this on May 29, 2004. Or, rather, I cited it. The line is a quotation by the Austrian writer-journalist Joseph Roth in a 1938 essay in which he warned of “the political terror that Hitler contrives to exert over his European colleagues”. The beauty of Roth’s “killing to music” phrase is that it goes to the paradox of National Socialism: how does the Nazi killing machine sit with the culture of Bach and Mozart, heir to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? I’d defend his use of it in this historical context, and my re-use of it in the same context, a thousand times. How have we come to the point where a writer risks drawing down upon himself the weight of the Racial Discrimination Act by quoting a 1938 article about the rise of the Hitler machine? The questions raised by Roth in this taut and elegant phrase will plague mankind for eternity. And yet the Canberra bureaucracy appears sympathetic to the view that they should not be uttered in public.

The other claims in the dispatch from HREOC are based on overheated and neurotic misreadings of my articles, including one in which I refer to “German shame” in the context of a war cemetery.

This is the problem with any discussion of Germany’s behaviour during the war. Hitler was voted into office by 37 per cent of the population and his plans were carried out with alacrity by many ordinary Germans, as illustrated by Daniel Goldhagen in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. A nation, a race, a people were involved both explicitly and tacitly in the Nazi machine. The historical facts lead one to consider a degree of collective German shame: to do otherwise is to not have the discussion.

Recently I had reason to write again about Joseph Roth as I was reviewing a collection of his journalism (1925-39). Roth was a fierce opponent of Hitler and his writing foreshadowed the disaster. I found myself drawn to his reflections on Germany and the Germans of his time (reflections that draw on the memories of World War One and of Prussian militarism). I stalked them warily, and moved on. I had been bullied, finally, into self-censorship.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, AU Edition

She lost a brother to suicide, and a dad to cancer. Tragedy almost knocked her off her game, writes DAN DONAHOO, but for Australian female basketballer Katrina Hibbert, nothing will stand in the way of her

HOOP DREAMS

Diamond Creek is the outer northern suburb of Melbourne where Katrina Hibbert grew up. Back then it was still considered ‘the bush’; there wasn’t a McDonald’s for miles and everyone had a paddock to play in. Life in Diamond Creek was about primary school, sport and the annual town fair – full of first kisses and fairy floss. Katrina’s folks owned the local milk bar and she remembers walking the streets with all her friends when parents worried less about things like that.

It was an idyllic childhood, but everyone grows up and things change. Diamond Creek isn’t a semi-rural backwater anymore. Now, Katrina Hibbert is probably the best Australian female basketballer never to play for her country.

Katrina loves sport. As a kid she didn’t care who was playing or what game it was. She was there – centre court. She still is.

I remember her in the long red sleeves of our footy jumpers. She’d play full forward or forward pocket changing first ruck. She was our secret weapon. The other teams never saw her coming; she was the best player on our primary school team.

All of Katrina’s sporting life she has been under-estimated. But not for much longer.

This year, Katrina was named the Australian Women’s National Basketball League Most Valuable Player.
‘Maybe nobody looked outside the borders’, she says in reference to being completely ignored by national selectors until a couple of months ago.

There was no invitation to the Australian Institute of Sport. So, Katrina went abroad and had a great American College basketball career at Louisiana State. She scored the first two points for American WNBA team Seattle Storm where she was in the starting five.
After one season in the US, life called a few fouls and Katrina didn’t go back to the US.

Small town gossip travels long distances, and even though we’ve both moved far from home, she knows I know about the tragedy in her life. But I don’t ask straight away. Instead we talk about who is married and how the February rain in Melbourne flooded the Diamond Creek. Katrina informs me that ‘the footy ground became
a lake’.

We are in a café near the townhouse that Katrina shares with a team-mate. It is modest and daggy. Katrina digs into a high protein breakfast. I order a coffee.

She is tanned, fit and beautiful, no longer the tomboy who was always picked first for sports teams.

‘Yeah tomboy, I guess so because I love sport.’ She agrees. ‘But I kicked all you guys in the butt at football.’

She is right. She could command the forward line like Wayne Carey or James Hird.

‘My biggest concern was that I didn’t have earrings and I had short hair in a bowl cut. I always feared being mistaken for a boy and that has probably traumatised me my whole life – hence the long hair.’ She wraps her hands around her ponytail.

Katrina recalls the transition from primary school to high school was hard.

She was so good at sport suddenly a lot of boys felt threatened.
‘I got hassled a lot. There was one guy who called me “Balls” because I beat him all the time. And because you are young it is quite hurtful.’

She looks up to the roof and recalls that her brother Adam ‘took care of him’.

I confess that I don’t know that much about Australian women’s basketball. Katrina laughs and says that I’m not alone. She is acutely aware of the lack of attention women’s basketball receives compared to the men’s.

I did watch a game once, on the ABC; I’d heard her name mentioned and wanted to see her play. Familiarity usually draws out the Australian predisposition to sport. It is like the way country towns with a population of less than one hundred claim gold medallists. They put up signs at the town entrance: ‘The birth place of Jo Bloggs – 1972 gold medallist in the Men’s Freestyle Relay’.

Diamond Creek could put up a sign for Katrina. ‘The birthplace of Katrina Hibbert. Scored the first two points for the Seattle Storm.’
Diamond Creek adores its sporting heroes, Katrina included: ‘Everyone comes to the game every now and again’. Katrina says. ‘People who you wouldn’t think to see at one of your basketball games come to support.’

Support is something Katrina and her family are familiar with. It is something they’ve needed a lot of.
I grit my teeth and ask about how it felt when her brother Adam committed suicide.

Katrina’s eyes water, but she insists it is OK. She says she can talk about it now without falling apart. I feel like I should reach out and offer my hand – just to make sure.

‘A complete shock. And because it is suicide you don’t stop thinking. You think back to his behaviour and what you’ve done and what you have said. I don’t remember much of that period of my life. Not long after that dad went into hospital – he was in and out of hospital.’

In the space of a few years Katrina lost her brother, and then her father, to cancer. Events that would cause many to throw their basketball career.

Female basketballers barely get paid in Australia and the struggle of coping emotionally while playing overseas would test anyone. Katrina actually lives off what she earns in the US and Eurpoe.

Despite the aching, the hours visiting her dad in hospital and allowing the grief to flow through her and the family, basketball was her lifeline.

‘It took my mind off it’, she says.

As the conversation shifts slightly away from the topic, the room loses some of its tension.

‘My best friend asked me this, and I don‘t know if you should write it, but I told her that when I was drunk or when I was exercising was the only time I wasn’t thinking about it. So basically she’d be taking me to the court or the pub a lot during that time.’

Amid it all Katrina says she has learnt great things from her mother, who she respects and adores. ‘My mum is a damn strong women. There were no excuses or feeling sorry. It was like life goes on. Somehow you have to keep going.’

Katrina has grown in strength during those years when just surviving was the ultimate priority.

‘You learn a lot about yourself during that time of your life and I was a bit insecure about myself and I learnt to not give a shit about what people thought.’

Since she has stopped caring about other peoples’ opinions, people have started to sit up and take notice, but it isn’t like Katrina isn’t part of the basketball pack.

‘You all grow up playing against or with each other so you are all good friends. Then, when you play overseas and there are only a couple of Australians.’

Stuck for company in foreign countries helps bind many of our international sports stars. Katrina is especially close to on-court rival and Australian women’s basketball superstar Lauren Jackson.

‘It is a weird connection. Her mum played at Louisiana State 20 years before I got there. She was like the first Australian to go over and play college and do all that.

Lauren ended up playing at Seattle and we hung out together. When Adam died, she came back to Australia and really helped me through that time. It is hard to maintain relationships, but when we are in the same country we catch up and hang out.’

The season just gone would have to be Katrina’s best. The Most Valuable Player Award, a call up to the Australia squad and an offer to go and play in the US again – where a female basketballer can make some money. Still, Katrina isn’t completely satisfied. She was gutted when her team, the Bulleen Boomers, missed out on playing in the grand final.

‘We had a wake at Cheryl’s (Bulleen’s coach) on the Sunday after our semi-final. Everyone was just sitting there in disbelief. I went blonde on Monday.’

Some women get dumped by their boyfriends and change their hair colour. Katrina misses the grand final and changed hers, ‘so I couldn’t be recognised.’

Katrina reflects that you are never far from criticism. ‘Everyone keeps saying, “Congratulations on your MVP, but what happened in the second half of the semi?”’

It is obvious, by the way she laughs about it, that it doesn’t really matter what happened in the second half. What matters is what happens outside basketball and how you deal with it.

She is a strong and confident sportswoman. One Australians should keep on eye on when the next Olympics roll around.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:14 AM | Comments (0)

LAURA’S WORLD: Feb 05

LAURA WILSON
When Harry Met Silly…

Prince Harry dons a Swastika armband for a party and the world is in uproar. He is at best, a tasteless fool and at worst, according to many international publications, a supporter of fascism and genocide.
Asking around, I canvassed these opinions of Harry’s dress-sense. From a 17 year old, a party is a party, and it is the one place people can be outrageous with licence, and without risk of offending anybody. From a 25 year old Nepali, the Swastika originates from his territory and is an ancient symbol of good luck, whichever way the four arms point. He is bemused that a young man should be crucified over the humorous use of the symbol.

Predictably, as the age of the individual increased, the opinion elicited became less tolerant of Harry’s actions, but even so the strongest criticism didn’t go beyond calling him ‘stupid’. Myself, I am a bit of a WW2 buff, in the sense that I find it a brilliant slice of history through which to view human behaviour and the
reaction of different nationalities and personalities to the Nazi phenomenon.

I learnt more about the war through talking to participants - including a nurse who lost 18 children in her care during a bombing raid in London, an NZRAF pilot who lied about his age and at 18 was rapidly trained in 3 months to fly bomber planes all over Germany, and a Polish Jew who escaped a Siberian gulag with her mother and walked to Palestine - than I did from any textbook.

I have attended a few dawn ceremonies on ANZAC day and find them incredibly moving. All considered I would describe myself as someone who honours the memory of WW2, even though it predates me by several decades and none of my family participated (except a grandfather who served beer to the troops in Egypt). The Nazis evoke horror in me, and initially seeing a member of the British royal family masquerading as one made me feel ill.

Then I began to probe a little deeper into my and others’ reaction to atrocity. The list of large-scale atrocities is endless, it is hard to find a culture that has not barbarically mistreated some element within it or alongside it. Were the Jews treated worse than the Indians subjugated by the British Raj, the Africans enslaved in America, the Pakistani Christians murdered by Pakistani Muslims? What are the symbols of terror for these victims? The Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, and the Koran.

What the Jews have achieved that other victim-groups have not, is great PR. It is hard to find a single soul in NZ who remembers the fate of Chinese slaves bought to our country 100 years ago to work the goldmines and die there, never granted citizenship, never afforded rights and even worse, never seen as an equal.

The world didn’t stay outraged with Idi Amin or Pol Pot for particularly long, and the Spanish and Portugese have largely escaped vilification for their massive acts of genocide in a continent as large as South America. Any one of thesecompare in scale with the annihilation of Jews in WW2 and yet the world is pressed overtly to recall the suffering of the Jews above all others, as if their treatment represents the pinnacle of human pain, alone deserving commemoration for all time.

I think it is great to remind each new generation what ‘average’ human beings are capable of when they follow the wrong leader, or allow themselves to be convinced that certain people are beneath them and do not deserve to be treated equally or even to live. Prince Harry no doubt has had this drummed into him throughout the course of his education and is probably as egalitarian and humble as his big brother, but he is also a rebel.

It often seems to go that way with siblings, a wild one follows a conservative goody-two-shoes, as if nature is intent on balance. Harry is simply not politically correct and probably never will be. Life is challenging enough for the anonymous rebel, for Harry it is inconceivably fraught. Personally I wish that just one of the many people asked for their opinion on Harry’s costume would have exclaimed that the bigger atrocity is the fact that he was photographed at all whilst at a private party, and atrocious that the world has an appetite for smutty details of another’s life.

We all participate in the ruination of lives with our international voyeurism, seeming to take great glee in dishing out criticism and scorn. I frankly would be too embarrassed to ever walk out
my front door again had I been photographed at a single party bypaparazzi. I would make an absolutely hopeless Royal, I would be a disgrace as is poor Harry whose future seems cast by the weight of our global expectations.

The Jews are determined to never let us forget, which I take my hat off to them for, but I politely remind them of equally important homages to the dead such as Hiroshima Day, and the lack of remembrance for the vast majority of victims such as the 20 million Russians killed during WW2, nearly half the total dead and far in excess of the number of Jews.It could equally have been Russians who expressed outrage at Harry’s attire, but the Jews have maintained an image of the ultimate persecuted, and are not about to let it go, or to share the title. God forbid anyone challenges them on this.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:11 AM | Comments (0)

Right Hook: Mar 05, AU Edition

RIGHT HOOK

ANN COULTER
Abortion is too important an issue to be left to judges

Maybe he really is an idiot. On the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade recently – I was going to say “birthday of Roe v. Wade,” but that
would be too grimly ironic even for me – President Bush told a pro-life rally in Washington that a “culture of life cannot be sustained solely by changing laws. We need, most of all, to change hearts.”

Actually, the “changing hearts” portion of the abortion debate is over. We’re now entering the “minds” portion of the “hearts and minds” journey on abortion. We’ve been talking about abortion for 32 years. All the hearts that can be changed have been changed. By some estimates, 35 million human hearts (and counting) have been “changed” by abortion in America alone.

Judging by her comments calling abortion a “sad, even tragic choice,” we’ve even changed Hillary Clinton’s heart.
Hillary went so far as to say she had “respect” for those who believe that “there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever
be available.”

I’ve never heard of anyone who thinks abortion should not be “available” to save the life of the mother. If Hillary “respects” even this (nonexistent) lunatic fringe of the pro-life movement, she must adore me!

If, right now, pro-lifers had already succeeded in changing the hearts of every last person in America – including Hillary Clinton! – abortion would still be legal in every state of the union. It’s a “constitutional right” – taking its place alongside all those other “sad,” “tragic” rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, such as religious expression, free speech, freedom of assembly and so on. Who was it who said, “Free speech should be safe, legal and rare”?

Abortion was not terribly popular when Roe v. Wade was first concocted in 1973 – by seven male justices and their mostly male law clerks. We know it wasn’t popular with actual Americans back then because 46 states had outlawed it in a once-common procedure known as “representative democracy.” Reflect on the fact that among the things more popular than abortion back thenf were white-guy afros, lime-green leisure suits and earth shoes.

In a Los Angeles Times poll a few years ago, 57 percent of respondents said they believed abortion was “murder.” Seventy-two percent of women and 58 percent of men said they thought abortion should be illegal after the first trimester. (Among men currently listed on NBA rosters, the figure was even lower.)

Note that men in the poll were more supportive of abortion than women, which is perfectly in keeping with the pro-abortion orthodoxy that men should have no say in this matter, unless they’re saying “yes, dear.” Once again, NARAL and I are in agreement! It’s a “woman’s issue”; could you men please just butt out? Feminists try to make people feel guilty about opposing a “woman’s right” to abortion,but in fact men always support abortion more than women – no matter who takes the poll or how the questions are asked.

Until Roe is overturned, telling pro-lifers they need to be “changing hearts” is like telling the New England Patriots they need to practice more – while never, ever letting them play in the Super Bowl. We’ve been changing hearts for 32 years – I think we’re ready for the big match now. I think Americans would support massive restrictions on abortion. And NARAL agrees with me! How about it, liberals? Prove me wrong! Let Americans vote. Universal Press Syndicate

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:11 AM | Comments (0)

Money, July 05, AU Edition

GET UP, STAND UP
Customer service is an ugly joke in Australia.
Here’s what you need to know to not give up the fight

When I was a young lad, there was corner shopkeeper on our street that looked after our family. His name was Mr Cooley. He would see me (or my mother) and provide our family with the groceries, tell us about new products, order in specialised needs for us and simply update us on gossip. He provided exemplary customer service and treated everyone as an individual and as if each person was his only customer. In today’s jargon, that’s called ‘one-to-one marketing’.

Back in the 1990s, ‘one-to-one’ was all the rage. Very few people understood it, but most organisations and associations wanted to do it, somehow. And there are still a number of companies who claim that is happening today, but overall, I do not believe that Australians are currently getting good customer service. What’s worse is the concept of one-to-one marketing is now all but extinct.

Corner stores used to do one-to-one marketing consistently – they had no choice. Understanding the uniqueness of each customer was what kept them in business. They knew the difference between customers who had a large or a small family. Those who worked longer than others. Those that ate more meat than others and so on. Sadly, large companies seem not to want, or perhaps are not equipped, to practice these philosophes of customer service.

Over the past six months I have been keeping a log of bad customer service stories that have come across my desktop; they include everything from run-ins with bureaucratic overseas call centres to companies that require someone be home sometime between 9am and 5pm to take a delivery or let in an installer. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, loyalty seems to count for next to nothing in the corporate customer service stakes. Regular readers of this column will know of the plight of a Mr J who had been corresponding with the National Australia Bank to try and get some answers to some very reasonable questions about a problem with a credit card transaction. After more than three months of e-mailing back and forth, each one sending Mr J’s complaint up to a higher level of management, he finally got a note stating, ‘I have no details as to what your enquiry is about. Should you have any further queries do not hesitate to contact us’. Looks like Mr J, a long-time and loyal customer of the NAB, was escalated right out of the bank.

A similar thing has happened to another gentleman, one Mr P, who has been a long-term, card-carrying ‘preferred customer’ with AVIS Car Rental. On a recent trip to the United Kingdom he hired a car for two weeks, and dutifully filled it with petrol and cleaned out the inside before returning the car. The AVIS employee who received his car at Birmingham Airport even remarked what good condition the car was in, stating, ‘I wish they were all returned like this one’. They jointly went over the outside and inside of the car and gave it a very clean bill of health.

So imagine the surprise that Mr P received when he received his credit card statement and found that the rental was about $500 more than the agreed price – with no explanation why it was so much over the contractual amount. And, you guessed it: the monies had already been deducted automatically.

Mr P quickly rang and wrote to AVIS Australia. His complaint was escalated from Australia to the USA, then to New Zealand, on to the UK, back to NZ, and back to Australia. Three weeks later he found out that there had been some sort of damage to the car. Now this was a real surprise. Mr P knew that the car was in showroom condition and asked what the damage actually was, and could it have possibly happened after he returned the car. Again: Australia to the USA, then to New Zealand, on to the UK, back to NZ, back to Australia, and then off the planet. Six months later and he still doesn’t have an answer. It is still unresolved! Needless to say, he doesn’t like the way AVIS prefer their customers.

Why is this so?

If a customer goes to the effort of making a complaint it is because they care. They are committed and involved with that organisation. They are loyal and they are probably the company’s most valued customers. So why lose them? A customer who is handled correctly will become the biggest advocate instead of the biggest detractor of an organisation, providing the sort of priceless viral marketing no money can buy. We all respond viscously if we believe our loyalty is being abused. I believe that currently our loyalty with many organisations is misplaced – it is not reciprocated and the customer is not rewarded. And, marketers please note: reward points do not automatically buy loyalty.

I am an adjunct lecturer at Sydney University and I teach my students that the gap between reality and expectation equals anger. The bigger the gap the more anger there is. Organisations cannot promise something that they cannot deliver. It sounds simple, but it is rarely practiced. Why?

Richard Batterley is a thirty-year veteran in what is now called relationship marketing. He is the chairman of Relationship Alliance, a Sydney-based firm which helps companies build stronger relationships with their customers. I asked him what should companies be doing to better service their customers?

‘It is important that all big organisations have customer feedback loops’, says Batterley. Instead, he says, ‘most large organisations have procedures in place to block you and your complaint.’

‘Bad customer service affects the brand and reduces integrity, and destroys brand essence. This has serious financial implications. Yet the easiest way for big organisations to behave is to ignore complaints’, explains Batterley.

Interestingly, Batterley had his own recent run in with bureaucracy. When ringing Telstra he asked to be put through to their complaints department. The call centre said they could not do that because the Privacy Act required him to give his full name and the number he was calling from before he could be transferred. He said that he would be more than happy to give his details to the complaints department but not the call centre, but he was still not put through. He researched this and according to him, there is nothing in the Privacy Act that prevents someone from being transferred to a complaints department. It seems that customers of all sorts are being managed out of existence.

What can they do?

Even if it takes more effort – and maybe causes a short-term hit on the bottom line – it is to the benefit of an organisation if they provide stellar customer service. If one organisation does it better than another then they will grow at the expense of their competitors. They will reduce churn, increase retention, and attract new customers.

So what do companies need to do?

1. Practice active listening. Reading from a script and a page of a standard-operating-procedure manual is the worst type of customer service there is, yet most organisations do exactly this to their customers.

2. Say sorry. This means the most to most people. But this is only true if it is a real apology and not a scripted, condescending, patronising way of getting someone off the phone.

3. Understand what is being said and be empathetic.

4. Respond in an understanding manner which treats the
customer as a human being and a loyal person with whom they have a relationship.

5. The simple question a service person needs to ask is: “Would I treat my mother/father/son/daughter/brother/sister/wife/husband like this?”

6. And a radical suggestion: If a small amount of money is in question, say anything up to $200, just give it back to the customer. This will strengthen a loyal relationship beyond belief. It turns a negative into a positive and, really, in the greater scheme of things, for most large companies it is a fraction of a fraction of a decimal point somewhere in an annual report.

What can we customers do?

1. Firstly, you must complain to the organisation. Even if they block you, at least you have started the process. Don’t be apathetic and just take it, you will feel better if you take control.

2. Don’t pay the bill. Yes, this is fraught with danger and could get you on the list of a debt collector or in court. Strangely though, many accounts departments provide better customer service in this instance than front line customer service staff. But I would not recommend this action unless you have an agreement from the organisation that they will not act on you not paying.

3. Write to the ombudsman. In the case of banks and tele-
communications companies, there is a specific ombudsman that investigates these complaints. It is time consuming but is usually
fully investigated.

4. Tell the media. This is becoming increasingly more popular and unfortunately in many instances the only way that customers can get noticed. Be warned though, some companies close up tighter than Scrooge’s wallet if the press is involved.

5. Take your business elsewhere. This will make you feel better but most large organisations don’t really care.

6. Send them a bill and be prepared to follow it through. If you believe you have given an undue amount of your time and your own service to an organisation then send them a formal invoice requesting that you be paid. It may not work, but I have heard of people getting positive responses to this sort of action.

7. The action I have had the most luck with is to write to the CEO or even Chairman. Mark your letter (not email) private and confidential. Be factual, honest, objective, and admit if you have made a mistake yourself, but explain to him how the poor service of his organisation has displaced your loyalty and damaged their good name.

But it’s a big company...

In the 1976 milestone movie “Network”, evening news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in his Oscar-winning performance, felt the same way that many of us are feeling now about how we are being treated by large organisations. His response?

‘You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, Goddammit! My life has value!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’

Have we seen the death of customer service? Being a glass half full kind of person I am hoping that large organisations learn how we want, and need, to be treated. But as Howard Beale said, we have to get out of our chairs. We cannot let good old Australian apathy get in the way of what we deserve. Be as mad as hell and let organisations know that you are not going to take this any more. Perhaps they could learn from the corner shopkeeper. The spirit of Mr Cooley must live on as a benefit to all of us. See you around the traps.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:10 AM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: May 05, AU Edition

MILD SURF(ER)
Also: Thievery Corporation steals the show, and Waylon Jennings’ son is on-target

Jack Johnson
‘In Between Dreams’, Brushfire/Universal
2 stars
Woody Allen once likened being mellow to a process of ripening, then rotting. Listening to terminally chilled surfer/folkie Jack Johnson’s latest album feels like a similar fate, at least initially.

Johnson blissfully faces the music – all of it – with a grin, a sandy voice, and a Catalina-bound sound. His sparsely arranged tunes sometimes lean toward soul-jazz (‘Situation’) or percolating funk (‘Staple It Together’). But there’s scarce variation to Johnson’s doggone-diddly cheery demeanor.

However, Johnson’s deceptive simplicity, subtlety and understatement become shockingly infectious upon (many) repeat listens. ‘Dreams are made of real things’, he sings on ‘Better Together’. That attitude guides his cozy romanticism through shuffles (‘Banana Pancakes’) and sambas (‘Belle’).

Oh, and he’s also releasing this latest CD in environmentally-friendly packaging and converting his fleet of tour buses to run on green bio-diesel fuel, making his band’s movements “carboneutral”.
Doggone it.
Reviewed by A.D. Amorosi

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Thievery Corporation
‘The Cosmic Game’, ESL
3 stars
Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, the Washingtonbased duo known as Thievery Corporation, are master collaborators: The guest vocalists they enlist define the character of each album, whether it’s Bebel Gilberto on 2000’s sultry The Mirror Conspiracy, the Farsi-singing Loulou on 2002’s multi-culti The Richest Man in Babylon, or the elder-statesmen alternative rockers who join the Jamaican, African and Indian singers for the psychedelic Cosmic Game.

Anchored in the dub, trip-hop, and down-tempo club grooves that make Thievery Corporation the American Massive Attack, Cosmic Game pulses with a swirling, trippy tension that’s more pent-up than chilled-out.

‘Well, let’s start by making it clear who is the enemy here’, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne softly croons on ‘Marching the Hate Machine (Into the Sun)’, establishing the political paranoia that courses through ‘Revolution Solution’ (with Perry Farrell), ‘The Heart’s a Lonely Hunter’ (with David Byrne), and other simmering sonic journeys.
Reviewed by Steve Klinge

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Shooter Jennings
‘Put the O Back in Country’, Universal South
3 stars
Shooter Jennings comes out swinging on his debut – and we’re not talking about Western swing. As the band leans into the chip-kicking honky-tonk of the title song, he complains that ‘there ain’t no soul on the radio’ and throws out a challenge: ‘Are you ready for the country? Are you ready for me?’

It’s not hard to figure out where he got the attitude: he’s the son of Waylon Jennings. That’s a giant legacy to live up to, and if the 25-year-old doesn’t quite yet come across as the saviour of country music, or if he doesn’t possess a voice with the deep authority of his father’s, he is certainly off to an impressive start as he stakes out his own territory.

‘Busted in Baylor County’, ‘Steady at the Wheel’, and ‘Daddy’s Farm’ are swaggering blasts of Southern rock, but Jennings shows there’s real heart behind the bravado with more reflective numbers, such as ‘Lonesome Blues’, ‘Sweet Savannah’ and ‘The Letter’.
Reviewed by Nick Cristiano

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:06 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, AU Edition

Bird flu: It’s on the rise in Asia, and experts agree it’s only a matter of time before it – or another killer flu – shows up in Australia. How ready are we? Is any preparation enough? As SHAUN DAVIES discovered, the world is overdue for a flu pandemic, and even the best preparations could leave Australians

FULLY SICK

For post-war generations unused to death on a global scale, it’s not easy to comprehend the enormity of a disaster like the Spanish Flu. The worst health disaster since the Black Plague, in 1918 and 1919 it killed an estimated 40 million worldwide – more than twice as many people as died in World War One – and infected around twenty per cent of the global population. Originating in the US, the virus spread to every corner of the globe. In India alone it killed seventeen million, while in Fiji fourteen per cent of the population was wiped out in two weeks. Australia got off comparatively lightly with 12,000 deaths, but there were still massive disruptions to everyday life. Authorities closed cinemas, schools, public transport and churches.

One town in the US even banned its citizens from shaking hands.
The Spanish Flu was not the only influenza pandemic of the twentieth century. The Asian Flu of 1957, which started in China and spread to every continent, killed at least one million worldwide. Just 11 years later, in 1968, the Hong Kong flu caused a relatively mild pandemic that killed 750,000 people.

In fact, for at least the past 200 years we’ve averaged an influenza pandemic once every 20 to 30 years. Seeing as it’s more than 40 years since the Hong Kong Flu, experts are worried that the world is overdue. The World Health Organisation’s regional director for the South Pacific, Dr Shigeru Omi, warned this year that ‘the world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic’.

The reason for all this alarm is a deadly strain of avian influenza called H5N1. This is the virus that has devastated Asia’s poultry industries. More than 140 million birds have died or been destroyed and the combined losses to GDP in affected nations is estimated at between US$10 billion to US$15 billion so far.

But H5N1 also has a nastily efficient knack of killing humans, and that’s what’s got authorities in a spin. Through unsanitary wet markets, undercooked food and other means, the virus is known to have made the leap from bird to human 89 times since January 2004. In 52 of these cases the infection was fatal – a kill rate of 58 per cent.

At present, H5N1 can’t jump from human to human. But in a process called ‘antigenic shift’, it can exchange genetic information with other influenza viruses, forming completely new strains. If H5N1 came into contact with another virus in a human host it could potentially gain the ability to move easily from one person to another. And if that happens, a new pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu could be imminent.

Dr Ian Gust is the chairman of the WHO Influenza Collaborating Centre in Melbourne. He would play a vital role in co-ordinating the global response to a pandemic, tracking the progress of the virus, advising the director-general of the WHO and providing governments around the world with up-to-date information.

‘The reason many people are concerned about the current situation is that something very unusual has happened in the bird population,’ he says. ‘We’ve seen almost simultaneously in Asia major outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza, killing initially thousands, then millions and now probably tens of millions of birds. It’s become endemic, certainly in ducks, in much of Southeast Asia.’

H5N1 is asymptomatic in ducks - and Professor Gust says this is a big problem. Because people can’t tell which birds are infected and which are healthy, the risk of a viral leap is greatly increased. The more times H5N1 crosses to a human host, the more likely it is to swap proteins with an ordinary influenza virus.

If the virus did gain the ability to jump from human to human, modern transportation would spread it around the world far more quickly than in 1918. ‘Then it essentially went at the speed of individuals, horses, trains and ships. Now infected individuals are likely to be moved around the world quickly by aeroplane ... so one would guess that the spread is likely to be quite brisk.’

But just how likely is this much-feared mutation or recombination in H5N1? Are we a hair’s breadth away from disaster? Or are the scenarios being played out in the media exaggerated?

‘The answer is we don’t know, other than that the probability is low,’ Dr Gust says. ‘Over the last 15 months you’ve had tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of people living closely beside infected birds, which you would think gives a significantly increased risk of this rare event occurring... This tells you that it is a low-risk phenomenon.’

Even if a worst-case outbreak of avian flu is statistically unlikely, Australian authorities are on high alert. Australia’s Health Minister Tony Abbott recently said that an H5N1 pandemic could be a ‘worldwide biological version of the Indian Ocean tsunami’, and the Federal Government has dedicated $133.6 million over five years to preparing for a pandemic.

Over the past year, Australia has amassed the single largest stockpile of antiviral drugs in the world. These ‘neuraminidase- inhibitors’ prevent infection in healthy people and cure infected people if administered during the onset of symptoms. They’d be our frontline defence in the event of an outbreak, administered to essential service workers and groups deemed most at risk from the virus.

The government has also entered into contract with pharmaceutical companies CSL and Sanofi Pasteur to supply 50 million doses of any pandemic flu vaccine that became available – enough to protect every Australian citizen. However, it would take up to six months for a vaccine to be produced and distributed in large numbers, and some experts say that by that stage the virus will have already worked its way through the population.

The director of the communicable diseases branch of NSW Health, Jeremy McAnulty, would help co-ordinating the health response to an influenza pandemic in NSW.

He says that the states have been hard at work creating influenza pandemic action plans that complement the national approach.
‘Early on what you’d do is try to identify each case individually, rapidly if possible, and isolate them and then identify their contacts to try and prevent further spreads’, he says. ‘We’d be looking out for cases as they came into the country, you’d be sending out communications to all doctors, and we’d put people in isolation and we’d have certain powers that allow people to be held for certain diseases.’

There would also be attempts to trace the networks of people the infected individual had been in contact with. Double-checks to ensure correct diagnosis would be mandatory, and infected people would be interviewed and counselled. But the strategy would change if the situation became worse.

As numbers increase further you use other strategies such as looking after people at home and community caring for people. At some stage, depending on the numbers involved, it would involve cancelling routine operations in hospitals.

There could also be closures of football stadiums, cinemas and schools, as well as cancellations of public events. The states would be required to keep essential services running as absenteeism shot through the roof. Hospitals would be overloaded and community centres converted into isolation wards.

‘If it does happen it will be something that our country will not forget in a hurry’, Tony Abbott said at a recent press conference. But he also claimed that Australia is ‘better prepared than probably any other country in the world.’

Professor Peter Curson, director of the Health Studies program at Macquarie University, does not share Mr Abbott’s confidence. He has just completed a paper for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which sharply criticises the government’s pandemic action plan on numerous points.

‘There is no comment anywhere [in the action plan] about how they’d handle fear, panic or public reaction’, Professor Curson says. ‘I’ve spent 25 years looking at public reaction and human behaviour in previous epidemics in Australia and there’s no doubt that people have an underlying fear of contagion, of infection, particularly when there’s no specific cure or specific treatment.’

‘Official measures put in place like increased surveillance, quarantine, limited supplies of antivirals, masks, restricted travel and so on will heighten public fear and panic, and that’s not mentioning the role of the media of course, who undoubtedly would play a major role.’

The government has a basic duty to protect Australians from outbreaks of disease, says Professor Curson, pointing out that in the event of a major pandemic there would be nowhere near enough antivirals to protect all Australian citizens. It would be six months before a vaccine became available – leaving a huge proportion of the population unprotected.

‘The priority plan says antivirals will be delivered to high risk groups, and by that they mean the old, the young and the people suffering from chronic illness’, he says. ‘But if you take out the one million health-cum-service workers, there are about two million people aged over 65, there are one million kids aged under two or three, well that won’t leave anything.’

But a spokeswoman for Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor John Horvath, rejects Professor Curson’s criticisms. She says a revised action plan, which will soon be released by the Federal Government, does contain provisions for the handling of public fear and the other matters that Curson raises.

The Health Department also points out that there are limits on the global production of antivirals, which means the government can’t provide protection for every Australian, even if it wants to. ‘With current technology and manufacturing processes, obtaining enough antivirals to protect 20 million people for six months would be almost impossible at any price’, Tony Abbott said at an infectious diseases conference in May.

There’s another ethical issue at stake in the bird flu debate - what level of support should Australia provide to its neighbours in the event of a pandemic? On one hand we have the world’s largest stockpile of antivirals; on the other there’s not enough to go around. Would we be generous to our neighbours, as we were during the Indian Ocean tsunami? Or do we only give when we have nothing to lose?

‘Should a pandemic occur next year or this year, only those countries that have got either a national manufacturer or have a guaranteed supply agreement with one of the existing manufacturers would be able to access vaccine’, says Dr Gust from the WHO. ‘For most countries in the world, vaccines and antivirals are only something they can dream of and they’d have to rely on conventional public health measures.’

The WHO will soon broker a meeting where countries with large stockpiles of antivirals (including Australia, Japan, the US and the UK) will be asked to make their drugs available to stamp out a small outbreak of a novel virus in small village in Cambodia, for instance.
‘My hope is that (these countries would) make a tremendous effort to put out that spot fire, to prevent it becoming a bush fire that spreads widely, so there would be a major attempt to quench the infection using international stockpiles’, Professor Gust says.

‘Clearly Australia is a key participant in that discussion and has an opportunity to take a lead in that area. I can’t foreshadow what the government’s view would be, but I hope they would be generous.’
Whether H5N1 is the culprit in the next global outbreak of influenza remains to be seen. But experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the world faces a new pandemic. If the outbreak is severe enough, no amount of preparation would be enough to prevent a disaster - and that’s a frightening thought.

SARS killed just 770 people. But it did an estimated $15 billion worth of damage to the economies of Southeast Asia. In a worst-case scenario, H5N1 would cause tens of millions of deaths. What damage would that do to the global economy? Could we ever be ready for the devastating effects of a pandemic?

‘We’ll never be able to sit back and say, “Well, we’ve done it now, let’s bring it on”,’ says NSW Health’s Jeremy McAnulty. ‘Unfortunately it will never go away and our preparation will always be there, and if a pandemic hits then we’ll have to start preparing for the next one. It’s an ongoing process.’

But Professor Gust from the WHO believes that it’s too early to start panicking. He says that to have a doomsday scenario, the virus ‘has to escape and retain its existing virulence’ – a fairly unlikely prospect.

‘In North Vietnam the virus has already become less pathogenic for birds and less pathogenic for humans,’ he says. ‘A mutation or a recombination that enabled the virus to spread could equally, easily, result in a virus which spread rapidly but had relatively low pathogenicity.’

‘The scenarios that you keep seeing painted in the newspaper are absolutely worst case scenarios. And as we know from history, the most probable scenario is rarely the worst case scenario.’

While the world waits for the next flu crisis, JENI PAYNE meets an Australian on the frontlines of another age-old epidemic

On a visit to the US to see her host families and life-long friends she made as a high school exchange student, Jenny heard about the massive worldwide scheme known as PolioPlus. ‘Then when I became a member back in Australia, I decided that’s what I wanted to get involved in.’

India gave Jenny her first taste of work as a volunteer and she returned three times to help immunize its population. Then followed holidays spent working with communities in Ethiopia, Botswana and this year, Pakistan.

‘Two drops on the tongue is all it takes. A child can be protected against polio for as little as sixty cents worth of vaccine.’
In 1985, Rotary International launched the PolioPlus program to protect children worldwide from the cruel and fatal consequences of polio. Since that time, Rotary’s efforts and those of partner agencies, including the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and governments around the world, have achieved a 99% reduction in the number of polio cases worldwide.

From the launch of the global initiative in 1988, to the eradication target of 2005, Rotary’s Centenary Year, five million people, mainly in the developing world, who would otherwise have been paralyzed, will be walking because they have been immunized against polio. More than 500,000 cases of polio are now prevented each year.

But complacency is the enemy. According to the UN, the number of polio cases has been reduced from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just under 700 reported cases at the end of in 2003 – a greater than 99% reduction. At the same time, Indonesia has just suffered its first polio outbreak in ten years, and UN officials suggest that worldwide eradication this year may in fact not be possible.

Poliomyelitis (polio) is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system, and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. The virus enters the body through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine. It spreads rapidly by unsafe water and hand-to-mouth contact, especially in overcrowded conditions where sanitation is poor and faecal contamination prevalent. Houseflies also contribute, by transferring virus from faeces to food. Toddlers not yet toilet-trained transmit polio readily even in hygienic environments. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs.

One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually in the legs). Among those paralysed, 5% to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.

The tragedy is, polio mainly affects children under five years of age and there is no cure, it can only be prevented. Polio vaccine, given multiple times, can protect a child for life.

‘Polio is generally caused by poor sanitation, so kids in underdeveloped countries are most as risk’, says Horton, adding that currently, the coalition against polio is facing a crucial time in the program.

In 2004, there was a cessation in the immunization program in Nigeria, due to political circumstances. It led to a blow-out in numbers locally and threatened to spread to neighbouring Sudan.

‘Polio is passed on so easily. Only 1% will catch it, but the rest are carriers.’

It was this exposure to the poignant plight of third world children that inspired Jenny to save all year for working holidays as part of Polio Plus. ‘It’s lucky I have a supportive boss! I never want to see children suffering. In India I saw children with flaccid legs.

Sometimes it’s too much. It’s an awesome, terrible reminder of the disease. No child deserves to live like that. If we can do something to help, why wouldn’t we?’

As part of a so-called ‘STOP team’, consisting of 36 people from 22 countries, including medical professionals and Rotary volunteers, Jenny makes a difference in countries that are desperately in need, most recently Pakistan.

‘Pakistan has never broken transmission. There were 103 cases in 2003 and now there are 46. There’s a new government now and it’s supporting the initiative, working very hard with immunisation campaigns every six weeks.’

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:54 AM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: May 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Save the Earth. Go nuclear

Afew Saturdays ago I met one of my neighbours for the first time. He’s the father of one of my son’s playmates – we all live around the same little inner-city playground – and though I’d met his wife and child a million times, the two of us had never crossed paths. We stood around making small talk while the kids ambled around the swings, and the conversation turned to commuting and cars. My neighbour mentioned that he had a 90-minute drive to and from work.

When I asked him where he worked that required such a long drive, I caught a brief anxious flicker in his eyes as he answered my question: ‘Lucas Heights’, he said.

For those not familiar with it, Lucas Heights is the outer-Sydney suburb that is also home to Australia’s one and only nuclear reactor. We don’t get any power from it – it’s pretty much used solely for medical research – but it is a huge source of controversy. Thanks to a combination of junk science, environmental journalism that consists largely of checking the fax machine for the latest Greenpeace press release, and naked political opportunism, in many peoples’ minds, Lucas Heights is simply a Chernobyl waiting to happen.

No wonder my neighbour was nervous about telling a stranger where he worked.

This anti-nuclear attitude is bad for Australia on several levels. For one thing, the same environmentalists and commentators who scream bloody murder over John Howard’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty are the same people who want to deny Australia a source of power that produces virtually nothing in the form of so-called greenhouse gasses.

For another, Australia has the planet’s greatest wealth of uranium, and is just about to become the world’s biggest exporter of the stuff. This may be great for our balance of trade, but it is also an indicator of how we are being left behind in the race to develop safe nuclear energy. Today 17 per cent of the world’s electricity comes from nuclear power that flows from 435 reactors in 33 countries – and a further 42 reactors are under construction or on order.

What is behind this refusal to develop nuclear energy, which even Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has famously described as ‘clean’? Part of the problem is that along with uranium, we are also blessed with enormous coal reserves – another great Australian export – which means that there isn’t much imperative to develop some other way to light our houses.

But more than that is the sustained campaign by environmentalists to wreck the future of the nuclear industry here, even as nations like France and Canada stake their future on atomic energy. As Brian Martin, a radical-left professor at the University of Woollongong put it in a paper entitled, ‘Education and the Environmental Movement’, ‘Several factors made nuclear power a prime target for opposition. The rise of the environmental movement meant that the existence of any environmental impacts of a technology made it vulnerable to attack.

Nuclear power was particularly vulnerable because it was not yet entrenched, as was, for example, the automobile. Therefore nuclear power could be opposed outright, as well as regulated to make it safer.’

Meanwhile in the schools, Martin writes that, ‘the anti-nuclear power movement has put some effort into institutions for formal education, by talking to school classes, putting on occasional adult education courses and encouraging academics to study and research the issues.’ While Prof. Martin was writing in support of the campaign against nuclear energy, he also quietly gave the game away: at its core, the environmental movement is about opposing new technologies, no matter what they are, or how much they could improve the lot of humanity. It’s an anti-progress agenda that American television journalist John Stossel, himself a famous campaigner against junk science, calls the BANANA syndrome: ‘Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone’.

And it doesn’t matter if they have to stoop to a little brainwashing to do it. Martin and others are explicit about the need to get to kids early on in life to make sure they are indoctrinated with the anti-nuclear message (if you can’t win a debate with grownups, after all, why not try with children?) One teachers’ guide distributed in South Australia encourages English assignments such as, ‘Students imagine they are living near Chernobyl at the time of the nuclear disaster. They write a diary covering the week before and the week after the disaster’, and, ‘Students write a story describing a typical day in their life – without sunlight’.

Not a word about Chernobyl’s cardboard-and-duct-tape containment systems, just nuclear nightmares. It’s a 21st Century version of how Cold War geopolitics were taught in the 1980s: just scare the pants off the kiddies with a bunch of apocalyptic nuclear war flicks like The Day After and hope enough of them go home and pester mum and dad to vote left.

Of course, not all environmentalists are opposed to nuclear power, though failing to hew to the anti-atomic precepts of the green church is a pretty fast route to excommunication. The aforementioned Patrick Moore, who says that on the nuclear question, ‘activists have abandoned science in favour of sensationalism’, has started his
own group, Greenspirit, which bridges the gap between environmentalism and technology. On his website (www.greenspirit.com), Moore – who has been branded an ‘eco-traitor’ for his efforts – proclaims that responsible forestry is the way to save trees, and that genetic engineering can help poor farmers.

But while Moore may not see a conflict between human progress, saving the planet, and making a buck all at the same time, the environmental movement in Australia is mired in a decades-old fantasy world where giant wind farms or solar arrays will save the day.

In the meantime, with oil prices spiking and much of the rest of the world cleaning up their own backyards by using our uranium, isn’t it about time we re-opened the nuclear discussion – minus
the propaganda?

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:50 AM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: Mar 05, AU Edition

“FAMILY DOCTOR” NO CURE
Taxpayer dollars are wasted on another dud Aussie flick,but Aviator soars and Daggers slices

The Illustrated Family Doctor
Released: March 03, 2005
Rated: MA
1 star
The Australian film industry continues to drown the continent in a pool of unfulfilling, poorly scripted, pointless excuses for movies. The Illustrated Family Doctor doesn’t just continue this trend, it makes The Crop look like Casablanca.

Personally, I refuse to lower my standards simply on the basis of Aussie pride. This film contains nothing to be proud of.
Gary Kelp (Samuel Johnson) works for a company that condenses long books into manageable digests. His father recently died and Gary is stunned to find out his mother signed dad up to be an organ donor. Then, as if to compound his unease, he is assigned to do a cut-and-paste job on The Illustrated Family Doctor – a medical guidebook filled with lurid pictures of skin diseases and tumours. As Gary’s life falls apart, these diseases seem to jump from the screen and invade his body.

Now Samuel Johnson always looks like he needs a good scrub at the best of times. But add to that actual eye infections and skin rashes and I was reaching for the sick-bag. I was just hoping one of the diseases would be fatal.

In the meantime, his boss (the uninspiring and disappointing Colin Friels) has troubles of his own dealing with his daughter’s abusive husband. There’s even a strange and tacked-on gangster sub-plot. It’s all a sticky mess.

One of my favourite actors, Sacha Horler, has a small role as Gary’s sister, but even her talents couldn’t avert this train wreck.
It is painfully obvious that this is director Kriv Stenders’ first film. His cumbersome direction drags out scenes that should have been tight. Whatever laughter there is comes from pity rather than genuine enjoyment.

How on Earth did this film get funding? Film Finance Corporation Australia should hang its head in shame. Prognosis: terminal.

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House of Flying Daggers
Released: February 17, 2005
Rated: MA
4 stars
Every scene in House of Flying Daggers is a work of art. Strongly contrasting landscapes and rich colours make the characters seem like they are living in oil paintings.

Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, this Chinese film easily crosses the East-West divide. It falls in what is known as the wuxia genre, which means the story is all about swordplay and chivalry; viewers can expect plenty of stylised martial arts fights with dramatic camera angles and mind-exploding choreography. Gravity is not a concept director Zhang Yimou chooses to accept.

But it’s not all style and no substance. Set in ninth-century China during the Tang dynasty, House of Flying Daggers is driven by a classic love triangle. The players are two Tang officers –the handsome young Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the older Leo (Andy Lau)
– who try to trick blind dancer Mei (Zhang Ziyi) into leading them to a rebel group known as the Flying Daggers.

Takeshi Kaneshiro – Asia’s answer to Brad Pitt – breathes steamy sex appeal into his role. Andy Lau, who’s more your Harrison Ford type, struggles to escape Takeshi’s shadow. But it’s Zhang Ziyi who steals the show. She looks like a delicate princess, but a flick of her wrist would smash your nose into a million pieces. Imagine a fragile Winona Ryder who could kick Jennifer Garner’s butt.

It’s inspiring to see such strong lead roles for women. Female roles in Western films just can’t compare. In House of Flying Daggers the women are fierce warriors who can fight dozens of men at a time without also having to look like they could arm-wrestle Arnie.
The film does have a couple of flaws. For one thing, the plot wraps up a bit too quickly in the end with its twists, revelations and double-crossings. And the sex scenes are very clumsy – obviously the lead characters are fighters, not lovers.

House of Flying Daggers’ Chinese title is Shi Main Mai Fu, which literally translated means “Ambushed From Ten Directions”. I prefer this title because it better captures the eye-popping special effects and head-spinning action that had me rushing out of the cinema to practice my karate chops on my younger brother.

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The Aviator
Released: February 10, 2005
Rated: MA
5 stars
The Aviator has already garnered more stars than the American flag and I just gave it five more. This Martin Scorcese – directed film is a masterpiece. Viewers are swept along by the excesses of Howard Hughes’ life and wrapped up in the glamour of a seductive, groundbreaking era. Hughes lived an amazing life, and the world is a better place for hitching a ride in his slipstream. The Aviator uses a great story to showcase Hollywood’s finest actors of the moment. Now I don’t know anyone over twelve years old who actually likes Leonardo DiCaprio, but credit where credit is due: he’s captivating in this film. He doesn’t look like Howard Hughes, yet he has captured the essence of his drive, ambition and cuckoo-crazy episodes – to say nothing of the billionaire’s need for perfection, big-picture brain and desire for busty women. DiCaprio shows how a man could burst under all that pressure and wind up naked and locked in a room surrounded by bottles of his own urine.

And as always it’s all about Cate Blanchett. She of the impossible cheekbones personifies Katharine Hepburn and everything we loved about her. Blanchett nails her mannerisms, voice and headstrong behaviour. But it’s not a crass mimicry – it’s an homage. I look forward to the day a movie is made about Cate Blanchett to see who will be brave enough to portray one of Australia’s finest actors.

Kate Beckinsale stacked on ten kilos to play Ava Gardner, and the curves suit her well – as does the sassy and strong role. Alec Baldwin is at his charming and suave best as Hughes’ arch-rival, Juan Trippe. John C. Reilly is downtrodden as always as Hughes’ accountant. Alan Alda should be given more roles as he is horribly accurate as a corrupt senator. The only two who don’t shine are Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow and Jude Law as Errol Flynn. But director Martin Scorsese had the sense to keep those parts brief.

The special effects are astounding (one particular plane crash is so graphic I shielded my eyes from flying debris), the energetic music had me bopping in my seat and the cinematography is rich and luscious.The world needs more eccentric geniuses like Howard Hughes and Martin Scorsese.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)

Spin City: Mar 05, AU Edition

SPIN CITY

ALAN ANDERSON
John Howard has a long way to go to truly remake Australian society

Fresh from his fourth successive elec-tion victory, John Howard is politically ascendant. Learned commentators who only months ago were waxing lyri-cal about the visionary qualities of Mark Latham are now consigning Labor to the dustbin of history. The Coalition eagerly awaits its Senate majority in July. And Howard’s mate George W. Bush has handily won another four years in the White House.
Australian conservatives might be forgiven a little triumphalism as they reflect on the past year.

Yet there is still plenty to give the Right pause. For while Howard has won many battles, it is far from certain that he is winning the war to really transform Australian culture – or even that he will fight it.

Howard has been a champion of two great political causes: a broad-based consumption tax and industrial relations reform. The former is a battle won. The latter has been partially implemented and will advance significantly once the Coalition’s Senate majority takes effect. What next?

The answer is obvious to some. Led by Senator Mitch Fifield and Sophie Panopoulos MP, a vocal group of Liberal parliamentarians is challenging Howard to implement desperately needed reforms to the nation’s confiscatory income tax regime and its counterproductive welfare system.

But Howard’s response has been to hose down expectations of change, cautioning that it’s “a question of striking the right balance”. Unless the PM’s idea of balance is that we go halfsies with government, it is difficult to defend the status quo. After profligate campaign spending, it is frightening to imagine that projected surpluses of $24 billion over the next four years might fund further expansion of Australia’s bloated public sector.

Of course, it’s possible that Howard’s moderate rhetoric conceals radical intentions. After all, Peter Costello’s last budget included a politically risky change to tax thresholds at the top end of the spectrum. But it is not just in economic policy that reform is in jeopardy.

Australian conservatives have been beguiled by vast tracts of left-wing commentary bemoaning the Right’s victory in the “Culture Wars”. In the memorable words of the PM, “Hello? Hello?”

But let’s check the other side of the ledger.

Taxpayers continue to fund the arts and film industries which churn out politicised material like the disingenuous Rabbit Proof Fence and display a tedious conformity of views. The need for subsidy springs from the fact that only a handful of insiders want to view the art or watch the films. And surely the very idea of a panel of government-appointed commissars doling out cash to whomever satisfies their definition of “art” is anathema to alleged Liberal values. So what have nine years of conservative govern-ment achieved?

Barring a handful of outcasts, dissent amongst the so-called intellectuals in our universities is akin to a power struggle between the Maoists and the Marxist-Leninists, with a few post-modern onanists thrown in for good measure. Vindictive personal attacks on the likes of Keith Windschuttle are matched by the less-publicised persecution of students who dare to challenge the established orthodoxy, making a mockery of the Enlightenment values of free inquiry that universities are meant to celebrate.

Judging by voting patterns, the socialist dinosaurs of academia are well to the left of the students they teach. A full-blown voucher system would introduce market forces to the sector and end their oligopoly. Yet the Government merely tinkers at the edges of the HECS system. So what have nine years of conservative government achieved?

Our public broadcasters rival Cuba’s Granma in their anti-Americanism, while proudly declaring their domestic impartiality because they attack both major parties equally – from the left. John Howard’s appointments to the ABC include the entire current board, save for the staff rep.

With the exception of former member Michael Kroger, every one of his appointees were captured by the institution, leading to the coup d’état against reformist managing director Jonathan Shier and his replacement with a lacklustre insider. So what have nine years of conservative government achieved?

The half-hearted debate about values in schools has merely emphasised the continued domination of the teaching profession and education bureaucracy by moral and cultural relativists who see their job as indoctrinating the young with fashionable multi-culti pietie, from which quaint pursuits such as grammar and arithmetic are an unwelcome distraction. Here the government has made a tiny step in the right direction, with the introduction of an experimental voucher system to enable failing students to seek help from the private sector.

But it’s a case of one step forward, two steps back. The Government is introducing a national curriculum which will doubtless be corrupted by the education bureaucrats. Even if, by some miracle, it is not, the centralised system will eliminate competition between states and pave the way for the next Labor government to implement Carmen Lawrence’s dream of an education system that indoctrinates children into communism – sorry, social justice. Again, what have nine years of conservative government achieved?

Conservative electoral success masks an underlying failure to win key battles over the size of government and the politicised nature of key public institutions. If he is to reverse this failure in his fourth term, John Howard will need to embrace measures more radical than he has shown the stomach for thus far. If he does not, his much-vaunted reshaping of Australian society will prove as ephemeral as a sand

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)

MOVIES: May 05, AU Edition

CRASH IS NO TRAINWRECK
Also: Nicole Kidman’s latest is not what you think it’s about, and Australia (finally!) produces a decent movie

Crash
Released: April 28, 2005
Rated: PG
4 ½ stars
I’m not racist, but…’: That’s the sentiment which best sums up this gripping emotional drama about just how horribly people can treat each other. It also shows a side of Los Angeles that’s not in any tourist brochure.

In Crash there are a number of stories that intertwine (think Magnolia), each one more spiteful than the next. First there’s the carjacking: Larenz Tate and rapper Ludacris are totally believable as carjackers who think they are modern-day Robin Hoods because they only steal from rich white folks. Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock are pitch-perfect as the white-bread middle-class carjacking victims. Don Cheadle and Jennifer Esposito are exceptional as the police officers investigating the crime.

Next, you love to hate Matt Dillon as a racist cop who molests a black woman (Thandie Newton), putting rookie cop Ryan Phillippe in an emotional and ethical dilemma.

But for me the most powerful storyline concerns a Persian immigrant (Shaun Toub) who is trying to run a small shop and Michael Pena, who plays an unlucky locksmith who finds himself the target of years of repressed anger, frustration and despair. This pairing leads to one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen on a movie screen in a long time.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis (who adapted Million Dollar Baby), Crash could have been an unwieldy mess. But he’s a maestro who crams tension into each scene and brilliantly juxtaposes and links the stories until they build into the kind of crescendo that leaves you struggling for breath.

Crash is emotional and thought provoking. I left the cinema promising to be a nicer person.

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The Extra
Released: April 14, 2005
Rated: PG
3 ½ stars
Yaaaay! Finally, an Australian film that had me laughing more than cringing! The Extra is a funny romantic romp with the loveable Jimeoin starring as…well, he doesn’t have a name in the film. Extras never do.

The premise is simple. Normal dude wants to be a movie star. Movie stars are rich, get all the chicks and go to great parties.

Unfortunately, because of an outstanding lack of talent, all he can manage is a few roles as an extra. Viewers travel along with Jimeoin in all of his wide-eyed innocence as he meets jaded child stars, pompous lead actors and money sharks in pursuit of his dream.

It’s the same old crew Jimeoin always surrounds himself with, but when you’ve got a great cast, why mess with it? Jimeoin has the simple bloke routine down pat. His sunny optimism makes him a loser one cares about.

But it’s not just about the star: there’s also a great supporting cast to back up The Extra. Rhys Muldoon nearly steals the show as Curtis Thai-Buckworth, a former child star who’s now a ‘writer-slash-director’: his desperation is palpable. Katherine Slattery is luminous as Jimeoin’s love interest. Forget Julia Roberts – Katherine has the best smile in the biz. Bob Franklin is up to his usual standard as the underworld gangster with a brain. Kristy Hinze is beautiful but vacant. And Shaun Micallef is at his arrogant best as Detective Ridley, a cop with his own TV show who wants to be an actor.

Seriously, just to see the flare with which he his flicks open his police badge is almost worth the price of admission alone.

The Extra is fun, it is well made, and it shows there’s still a faint pulse in the Australian film industry yet.

---

Birth
Released: April 28, 2005
Rated: M
3 ½ stars
Forget what you may have heard. Anyone who claims Birth promotes incest or paedophilia has missed the whole point.

Nicole Kidman’s latest film is a powerful story about loss, love and grief. There has been so much hype surrounding Birth that the actual story has been lost in the furor. Nicole Kidman was booed at the Cannes Film Festival because in the film her character has a bath with 10-year-old boy who says he’s a reincarnation of her dead husband. Later she kisses him. And I’m not talking a motherly peck. I know - ewww! But somehow it works.

Let me explain why. Birth is all about reincarnation. Anna (Nicole Kidman) lost her husband, Sean, to a heart attack a decade ago.

Imagine the shock when ten-year-old Sean (Cameron Bright) waltzes into her life and claims to be a reincarnation of her dead love. Anna’s family, headed up by matriarch Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), treats the boy and the idea of reincarnation with the right amount of contempt and jaded realism you’d expect rational folk to display. But here’s the creepy thing: young Sean knows all sorts of facts that only the husband Sean could have known.

There’s a stand-out scene where Anna is at the opera and the camera stays on her face for a full three minutes – a long, long time in movieland. As the music soars, emotions play across her face, and we realise at the same moment she does: she actually believes him.

Now I’m certainly not a card-carrying member of the “Our Nicole” fan club. I think she’s generally over-rated and definitely too skinny. And I certainly don’t think she deserved an Oscar for donning a fake nose in The Hours. That said, this is one of her finest performances yet. In Birth, she isn’t trying to be a movie star, she is doing what she does best – character acting. Kidman throws herself headlong into Anna’s mind, which is one faulty unit. Watching her you yearn for the intense all-consuming love Anna felt for her husband. I think it helped that she lost her signature red locks and, with a nod to Rosemary’s Baby, goes for a dark Mia Farrow-esque pixie cut.

Cameron Bright is actually ten years old. His performance as Sean is measured and wise beyond his years. He plays an adult in a child’s body so well you start thinking…well…maybe…he is a reincarnation.
Lauren Bacall is powerful as always. The music is superb. The cinematography is classy.

Did I like the film? No. It gave me the willies. I rushed home from the cinema to scrub myself under a hot shower. But the story sticks in your head for weeks and not many films do that these days.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)

Dec 05, AU Edition

He’s the “reason for the season” as the saying goes, but there’s still a surprising amount of controversy over the historical Jesus. Was He the Son of God, or just the imaginINg of an obscure Jewish sect 2,000 years ago? It’s time to take another look at

A CHRISTMAS STORY

By IAN WISHART with JAMES MORROW

True story: On a recent afternoon in Sydney, the not-particularly-religious mother of a three-and-a-half year old sat down with her son to try and explain what Christmas was all about. She wanted him to understand that there was more to the season than just Santa and presents and a great big tree in the lounge room, but she wasn’t quite sure how to explain it all.

“Well, you see, a long time ago, there was a little baby, and his name was Jesus…”, the mum began.

“Jesus? That’s a terrible thing to call a baby!”, the horrified child replied, having until that moment only known Christ’s name as something “naughty” that grown-ups sometimes said, but that he wasn’t supposed to utter. “That would hurt the baby’s feelings!”

Needless to say, that particular child’s parents have some work to do if they want to give their son religion (though they are clearly ahead of the game when it comes to “Thou shalt not take His name in vain”).

But the story highlights a bigger question – namely, the growing divorce between Christmas the holiday and Christmas as the birthday of Jesus Christ. Every year – not just in Australia but around the world – sees a series of pitched battles between secularists who would like to see Christmas turn into just another holiday (see sidebar) and those trying to keep at least some tradition and religion in the event.

Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. The annual stoushes over watered-down politically correct “seasonal” displays have begun (Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore wisely backed down from her Grinch-like stance of 2004, meaning that Christmas will once again be bright in that city’s CBD); shopping malls have hung up their lights and baubles – even if they aren’t all that Christmasy; and the business pages are full of speculation about the strength of retail sales.

But lost in the annual furore over the growth of grating phrases like “seasons greetings” and whether celebrating Christmas too publicly could offend in a multicultural society is the theological elephant in the middle of a pretty secular room: Namely, the question of whether Jesus Christ, whose birthday we celebrate on 25 December, really was the Son of God, the Messiah, the Anointed One, or just an itinerant preacher who happened to come up with what even critics regard as an impeccable moral code?

As Piers Paul Read writes in his study of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, better known as the Knights Templar, The Templars, “Even at this distance in time, and if treated as a character in a work of fiction, the person of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels has a powerful effect on the reader. Unlike the books of the Old Testament which demonstrate the majesty of God through ‘the complexity of life, of emotions and desires beyond the range of intellect and language’, the Gospels are spare narratives virtually devoid of characterization that nevertheless persuade us ‘that this and no other way was how it was’.”
Of course, that’s not necessarily good enough for everyone. Last year’s Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ, also enflamed the passions of those looking to denigrate the historical record of the life of Jesus.

“The Bible can be a problematic source,” wrote Newsweek’s Jon Meacham in a cover story on the film last year. “Though countless believers take it as the immutable word of God, Scripture is not always a faithful record of historical events; the Bible is the product of human authors who were writing in particular times and places with particular points to make and visions to advance.”

Meacham’s criticism is similar to those expressed by liberal theologians and sceptics everywhere, and naturally in the Newsweek article it goes unchallenged. But is it really true?

“Scripture is not always a faithful record of historical events,” he wrote in the anchorpoint to both his paragraph and the entire premise of his article. However, Meacham is just plain wrong.

“Archaeology”, writes William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology and regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in his field, has been unable to “disprove the Bible’s assertions of the meanings of events.” Further, he writes in a scathing critique of liberals who recently tried to claim the Old Testament was a complete myth and there really was no “ancient Israel”, the liberals overlook the fact that the Bible writers “got right virtually every detail [of history] that we can now confirm”. And William Dever is an atheist.

In other words, the Bible has not only survived the heaviest onslaught critics could throw at it during the 20th century, it has passed absolutely unscathed in regard to its accuracy.

Nor is Dever the secular humanist alone in making such claims defending the historical accuracy of Scripture. So too does Norman Geisler, widely regarded as one of Christianity’s leading philosophers and historians.

“Not one error that extends to the original text of the Bible has ever been demonstrated,” claims Geisler, who takes the accuracy of the world’s most popular book seriously. So what would Geisler say to the second part of Meacham’s premise, where he wrote: “The Bible is the product of human authors” – automatically implying not just the capacity for error but also deliberate deception in the comments that followed, even though no errors have actually been discovered? Geisler sets out the logic behind the claim like this:

“Some biblical scholars argue that the Bible cannot be inerrant, through some faulty reasoning:
* The Bible is a human book
* Humans err
* Therefore, the Bible errs.
“The error of this reasoning,” says Geisler, “can be seen from equally erroneous reasoning:
* Jesus was a human being
* Human beings sin
* Therefore, Jesus sinned.”

But of course, there is no indication either inside the Bible or outside it that Jesus Christ ever sinned, and Geisler uses this as an example of where the logic goes astray.

“The mistake is to assume that Jesus is simply human. Mere human beings sin. But Jesus was not a mere human being. He was also God. Likewise, the Bible is not merely a human book; it is also the Word of God. There can no more be an error in God’s written Word than there was a sin in God’s living Word.”

Where Geisler does acknowledge that difficulties can arise is in human interpretation of the Bible.

But Meacham’s chief line of attack against The Passion is that Gibson took the New Testament “too literally” and his film is therefore anti-Semitic. Meacham lays the blame for that not just with Gibson but also the Gospel writers themselves.

“So why was the Gospel story – the story Gibson has drawn on - told in a way that makes ‘the Jews’ look worse than the Romans? The Bible did not descend from heaven fully formed and edged in gilt. The writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John shaped their narratives several decades after Jesus’ death to attract converts and make their young religion – understood by many Christians to be a faction of Judaism – attractive to as broad an audience as possible.”

Again, Meacham’s key assumption, that “the Bible did not descend from heaven fully formed and edged in gilt” colours his whole approach, as does his subsequent comment that the Gospels were written “decades” after the events in question. In fact, even liberal scholar John A. T. Robinson has gone on record as being convinced that the whole of the New Testament must have been written and completed before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 – less than 40 years after the death of Christ and well within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses who could have contradicted any errors in the Gospel accounts.

However, Meacham goes on to develop the theme further when he accuses the Gospel writer Matthew of being “partisan” for including the line at Matt 27:25, “Let his blood be upon us and on our children” in reference to taunts from the Jewish crowd when Pilate was deciding whether to crucify Christ.

From the end of a phone line 10,000 kilometres away, leading New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg is saddened by those trying to make capital out of alleged anti-Semitism in the Gospels. “They’ve interpreted that as somehow a condemnation of the entire Jewish race,” comments Blomberg – author of the books The Historical Reliability of The Gospels and Jesus and the Gospels – currently based as a Professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary, Colorado.

“As a historian, the important thing to stress is that Jesus was a Jew, all his first followers were Jewish, this was an internecine Jewish debate. The crowd was simply using the standard Hebrew idiom for saying ‘we accept responsibility for this person’s death’. In no way is it an indictment of the whole race or even the entire Jewish leadership.”

Like many others, Blomberg is well aware of the anti-Passion spin the media have been creating at every opportunity. He’s also aware that attacking the Gospels has become somewhat of a cause celebre for liberals wanting to redefine and limit Jesus Christ.
In the Newsweek article, for example, there are many pointers to the writer’s hidden agenda.

“The Gospels were composed to present Jesus in the best possible light,” writes Meacham, “and to put the Temple leadership in the worst possible light.” He adds that Matthew must have been writing after the fall of Jerusalem because he presumes the “blood be on us” comment to refer to the Jewish rebellion that culminated in the events of AD 70.
And it is here in the Newsweek story that Meacham begins to proffer his own version of who Christ was – not a spiritual leader but a political one who posed a direct threat to Rome, not the Jews and who, presumably, got his comeuppance.

To back up this line of reasoning, Meacham first argues that the two men crucified beside Jesus were not criminals but freedom fighters.
“In the age of Roman domination, only Rome crucified. The crime was sedition, not blasphemy – a civil crime, not a religious one. The two men who were killed along with Jesus are identified in some translations as ‘thieves’, but the word can also mean ‘insurgents’, supporting the idea that crucifixion was a political weapon used to send a message to those still living: beware of revolution or riot, or Rome will do this to you, too.”

Meacham does not reveal the source of his “insurgents” interpretation, but the most authentic ancient texts use the Greek words “kakourgos” – or “worker of evil” – and “lestes” – or “robber, brigand, one who plunders openly and by violence”. The clear context in both cases is of a criminal, “for profit” motive.

In fact, the New Testament provides an ideal contrast in the language it uses to describe Barabbas, a man who was an insurgent and who stood beside Christ as a fellow Roman prisoner when Pontius Pilate asked the Jewish crowd which prisoner they’d prefer to see released on Passover. Luke’s Gospel records Barabbas had been arrested by the Romans for murder and trying to lead a revolution.

“If Jesus had not been a political threat,” writes Meacham, “why bother with the trouble of crucifixion? There is also evidence that Jesus’ arrest was part of a broader pattern of violence or feared violence this Passover. Barabbas, the man who was released instead of Jesus, was, according to Mark, “among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection”– suggesting that Pilate was concerned with “rebels” and had already confronted an “insurrection” some time before he interrogated Jesus.

“Clear evidence of the political nature of the execution – that Pilate and the high priest were ridding themselves of a “messiah” who might disrupt society, not offer salvation – is the sign Pilate ordered affixed to Jesus’ cross. The message is not from the knowing Romans to the evil Jews. It is, rather, a scornful signal to the crowds that this death awaits any man the pilgrims proclaim “the king of the Jews.”

The problem for Meacham and liberal critics is that – based on their argument – Pilate would presumably have sent an even stronger message to “the pilgrims” if he’d nailed the more popular Barabbas to the cross, not Christ. There is no suggestion in the Gospels, or outside the Bible, that Christ led “insurgents” in any political campaign against Rome. In fact, every reference to Christ outside the Bible talks more of Jesus’ alleged “sorcery”, and people worshipping him “as to a god”, rather than a political campaign.

“On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged”, records a Jewish Sanhedrin document from around 90 AD. “He has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy [rejection of orthodox Judaism].”

The Roman governor Pliny, writing to the Emperor Trajan around the same time, records: “[the Christians] were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up…”

Now, if that’s a political rebellion in the making then the Moon is made of green cheese.

Another Roman historian, Suetonius, writing of the period after Nero’s great fire of Rome about thirty years after the crucifixion, says, “After the great fire at Rome…punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief.”

Meacham is right in only one respect, namely, that Rome ultimately had much to fear from the spread of Christianity. But to argue as Newsweek does that Pontius Pilate was fearful back in 33 AD of the impact of a non-violent itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus who might lead an “insurgency” is widely regarded as laughable by many historians.

Meacham writes: “It was as the church’s theology took shape, culminating in the Council of Nicaea in 325, that Jesus became the doctrinal Christ, the Son of God “who for us men and our salvation,” the council’s original creed declared, “descended, was incarnate, and was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and cometh to judge the living and the dead.”

But if Meacham is correct here, how does he reconcile his claim that Christ only became “the Son of God” in 325 AD, when the passages above show Christ being worshipped as God virtually from the moment of his crucifixion almost three hundred years earlier?

Even more troublesome for Meacham is perhaps the oldest passage in the entire New Testament, Paul’s dissertation on the divinity of Christ at 1 Corinthians 15:3, where he says:

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance – that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve.”
Denver Seminary’s Craig Blomberg explains the significance.

“You have somebody like Paul describing Christian traditions and beliefs that were passed on to him from Day 1 of his conversion, which was within two years of the death of Christ! So you have full belief in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus two years, not 325 years, after the death of Jesus.

“Now, can you still dispute the truth of those claims even in that short period of time? Sure, but to say that no one believed in the divinity of Jesus or the exalted view until 325 AD is simply a flat out factual mistake. It simply is a flat-out lie and untrue to history to say that nobody made this claim until 325, when they’d made it long before 50 AD.”

So the liberal claim that Christ only “became God” hundreds of years later because of the Church is a myth with no factual backing, yet it repeatedly goes unchallenged.

“The climax comes when [Jewish High Priest] Caiaphas asks Jesus: ‘Are you the Messiah?’ and Jesus says, ‘I am...’ and alludes to himself as ‘the Son of Man.’ There is a gasp; the high priest rends his garments and declares Jesus a blasphemer… There is much here to give the thinking believer pause. ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man’ were fairly common appellations for religious figures in the first century. And it was not ‘blasphemy’ to think of yourself as the ‘Messiah’, which more than a few Jewish figures had claimed to be without meeting Jesus’ fate, except possibly at the hands of the Romans. The definition of blasphemy was a source of fierce Jewish argument, but it turned on taking God’s name in vain—and nothing in the Gospel trial scenes supports the idea that Jesus crossed that line.”

If it was quite common for people to call themselves the Son of God, why then did Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin react the way they did?
Meacham may attempt to shrug off the context, but Luke’s Gospel tells a different story:

“At daybreak the council of the elders of the people, both the chief priests and the teachers of the law, met together, and Jesus was led before them. ‘If you are the Christ,’ they said, ‘tell us.’

“Jesus answered, ‘If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you, you would not answer. But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God’.

“They all asked, ‘Are you then the Son of God?’

“He replied, ‘You are right in saying I am’.”
And in the Gospel of Matthew, it is recorded this way:

“The high priest said to him, ‘I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.’

“ ‘Yes, it is as you say,’ Jesus replied. ‘But I say to all of you: In the future, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven’.

“Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, ‘He has spoken blasphemy!’ ”

It wasn’t a case, as Newsweek and the Herald imply, of a casual Messianic claim. The exchange between Jesus and the Sanhedrin is electric, loaded and definitive.

Sure, others may have claimed to be Messiahs, but none of them raised people from the dead, exorcised demons or healed the blind at a touch.
Craig Blomberg admits that many of the “Death of God” theologians and leading lights in the Jesus-wasn’t-divine movement are elderly men and women whose own theological training came decades ago when less was known about the New Testament than today. Like tall trees in a forest, their out of date biblical knowledge is overshadowing the real work on biblical scholarship.

“That tide is slowly turning. Certain views are accepted as standard and the time by which a generation of pastors trained under other folks retires and is replaced by new people who are familiar with the new scholarship, that takes time.”

“In many ways they are the ones appealing to an outmoded worldview, going back to [theologian] Rudolf Bultmann nearly 100 years ago when in some of his earliest writings he talked about how modern man in an Age of Science could no longer believe in the supernatural. That’s certainly not what philosophers of science are saying in the 21st century. They’re leaving the question of God very much open.”

In 28 years’ time, it will be exactly two thousand years since the man who claimed to be God incarnate was nailed to a Cross by Roman soldiers, at the instigation of some members of the Jewish high priesthood who wanted rid of “this turbulent priest”. And after 1971 years, Jesus is still managing to do what he predicted all those years ago:

“I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled…Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.”

And as debate rages on, that division has never been more apparent.

Winterval Dispatches
Even if Christmas cheer is coming back to Sydney’s CBD, it’s a different story in other parts of the world. Especially England, where the perpetual British fear of causing offense has mated with political correctness, with unbelievable results. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is now being sung as “God Rest Ye Merry Persons” at churches in Wales; many schools refer to the Christmas holidays as “Winterval” to avoid mentioning the dreaded C-word; and a charity that sends out Christmas gifts to poor children has lost the support of Inland Revenue. And that’s not all:

* In Havant, England, town burghers have decided to scrap their annual Christmas decorations for a generic “festival of lights” – even dropping the word “Christmas” – to avoid offending non-Christians, at the cost of 5,000 British Pounds. Of course, no one bothered to ask the potentially offended; even the Muslim Council of Britain issued a statement saying, “This sounds like a case of a local council taking it upon itself to decide what is offensive, rather than consult the community it serves. If the council took the trouble to ask local people what they thought, they would find that people of all faiths do not have a problem with this.”

* Meanwhile, in Lambeth, South London, council officials have engaged in a bit of Orwellian re-branding of their displays; no longer will the area display Christmas lights. By official edict, they are now to be called “celebrity lights”.

* The UK is not the only place to see such silliness: In the United States, the K-Mart retail chain has started selling Christmas trees under the anodyne names “Mountain Trees” and “Snow Trees”. And in the State of Victoria, in a rare bout of common sense, Premier Steve Bracks gave the order that it was perfectly OK to celebrate Christmas in schools after several schools ordered the cancellation of nativity scenes and pageants for fear of offending non-Christians.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

HEALTH: Sep 05, AU Edition

A HEART-MENDING TALE
Turning the growth of blood vessels on and off could treat not just cardiac problems, but many cancers as well

The great elephant descended and left the indentation of its foot upon my chest….a Frankenstein’s monster of zipper scars and pirated body parts. Two heart attacks and two bypass operations – six grafts in all, loops of hosing jury-rigged around my jalopy of a heart. Two major crashes, but the motor still runs.”

One of the most beautiful writers I know was almost killed by that last heart attack. There is a touching, miserable aside in Heart: A Memoir about going on a farewell tour of good food. The author, my father-in-law, barely recalls it. Defending his memory, he points out that the book is ten years old. And the motor still runs.

So you see, I have a vested interest in keeping hearts running. According to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, cardiovascular disease is New Zealand’s biggest cause of death. Now, I’ll grant you, some of those people have reached an advanced age and are in the “gotta die of something” demographic. Unsurprisingly, when very old people are autopsied, examiners tend to find not just lots of things wrong, not just the heart failure that killed them. Cardiovascular disease, however, also takes a lot of lives prematurely. To die at 50 is not a tragedy in the sense that dying at 5 years old is, but it still has the sense of a life cut short about it that dying at 80, for example, does not.

You all know the risk factors, so I will not trouble to mention that being a chain-smoking, salt-shaking, cholesterol-scarfing, diabetic couch-potato booze-hound is not good for your heart. If this is you, you need to find a sympathetic family doctor and explain that you are not quite ready to change yet, but would they be a love and give you a quick once-over. Knowing your cholesterol levels and blood pressure may encourage you to change, but even if it doesn’t, at least you can get on some nice drugs to try and slow down the damage whilst you try to work up the motivation to change.

The heart is a muscle and it pumps blood, just like the Counting Crows song tells us. Let’s simplify it for a minute, and pretend that there is simply a loop of hose going in a circle from one side of the heart-pump to the other. Of course, it is a tricky hose, it narrows into increasingly tiny vessels to supply every bit of you with blood. But it will do, as a metaphor. Blood pressure is a measure of how hard heart-pump needs to work to push the blood all the way around the hose and back to the heart. Hopefully the pump can do this easily. When blood pressure is high, the pump is knocking itself out trying to push the blood around. Probably because there is some kind of gunk (cholesterol) clogging up the inside of the hose. The clog can be in your foot, your brain, anywhere. If there is so much gunk (cholesterol) built up that the blood can’t get through it will swell up and burst. If this happens in our brain, cerebral aneurysm (stroke) ensues.

(Note to guys not motivated to change: you know how if blood supply isn’t getting to your brain, it will loose function? Now replace the word “brain” with other body parts until you feel alarmed. Some causes of impotence are avoidable. Maybe a jog, perhaps?)

If all the gunk is near the heart, and the hose is narrowed, then the heart-pump doesn’t get blood. Your actual heart, not our hypothetical pump, needs oxygen, and blood carries oxygen. If blood is not getting to your heart, it is not getting oxygen. It will alert you by causing pain. In angina, the pain is an alert that the heart is suffering, but getting some oxygen and will be OK with rest or a nitro tablet. Beyond angina, the heart keeps aching. The elephant standing on the chest is a common symptom, but the chest pain may be in the arm, shoulder, back. If you have the slightest doubt about chest pain, call the ambos. They will not be angry at you for being fine. You will be angry at yourself if your heart has been dying while you sat at home with the martyr’s wait-and-see attitude. Some people, especially women and the elderly, report symptoms other than chest pain as the primary symptom, for example sudden shortness of breath, dizziness or extreme fatigue.

We assume, at this point, that you have heeded none of my advice except the bit about calling the ambulance. You are in the cardiac care unit, having had your first or second heart attack. What are your
options? You can have angioplasty, where they get into the hose going into your heart and squash, laser or chop out the offending cholesterol. They can put a nice little stent in to hold the artery open. If things have gone past that point, you can get a CABG (coronary artery bypass graft, known as “cabbage” in the trade). The trick here is to dig up a nice big artery, probably from your leg, and jury-rig a detour for the blood to get back to your heart. Obviously there will be some chest-cracking here – it is not a low-risk procedure. Ah, but that spot of dead lazy heart is still freeloading on the rest of your heart, so you must take care.

Now imagine if you could just get the heart to grow nice new hoses, or blood vessels. Angiogenesis is the word for this, and it is an exciting idea at the bleeding edge of research. If doctors can control the growth of blood vessels then they can do two things: grow new hoses where they are needed (in cases of peripheral vascular disease and coronary artery disease) and stop cancers from growing their own blood vessels. Solid cancers need blood supplies to get oxygen and nutrients to grow. No blood, cancer dies.

Human trials are currently underway in the US to develop gene therapy for treatment of heart disease. It is a complex procedure, done at the research level. It works like this: first, researchers find a useful gene and then try to get a patent on it so that they have the intellectual property rights to develop it. (Yes, a lot of people are opposed to this, but consider the alternative: A research-and-development company thinks they have a gene that might revolutionise cancer therapy. It may take many years and a lot of money to get it to market, and many promising therapies will be dropped well before the end of the race. So, what, they should apply for an arts council grant instead?) Then the researchers trick a bacteria or mammalian cells into reproducing the gene, and then they strain it out and clean it up at a very high level. Then all they have to do is prove that what they have created – complex very large proteins – is what they have the patent for. The only thing left is to make it work.

An Australian company, Amrad, has the rights to something called vascular endothelial growth factor B (VEGF-B) and is developing potential cancer therapies with it. Specialising in cancer treatment themselves, they would license the rights to the gene to develop cardiac treatments. David Crump, Amrad’s medical director, told me, “It’s an area of a lot of interest and theoretically it should work…when it hasn’t we have to find out why. Eventually we will get it to work…but then you’ve got to prove it”. Several American companies have reached the human trial stage with these types of therapies, and there are a few coming on to the market now.

For obvious reasons, researchers are only allowed to trial new medicines in people for whom readily available treatment isn’t working. Over ten years ago, only one of the angiogenesis patients in his trial showed any particularly amazing response, and it was decided that the treatment needed much more work and wasn’t brought to market then.
Overall, it was not a particularly successful venture. But, hopefully not in the too distant future, more patients will be good responders to the new medicines. Like my father-in-law, the one good patient, very much alive today.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

TRAVEL: July 05, AU Edition

MONKEY BUSINESS
Close encounters with orangutans, birds, and the largest flower in the world all await in Borneo, writes Georgia Tasker

THE DANUM VALLEY CONSERVATION AREA, SABAH, Borneo – Just after daybreak, we climb the 30-metre-high canopy walk in a lowland rain forest, watching for birds. Moving in a bouncy gait along the suspension bridge, we are discussing the orchids on the trees when suddenly a blurred flurry of orange hair in a wild fluttering and bending of leaves and branches is so startling that at first we don’t know what’s going on.

Then we realize we have awakened a mother orangutan and her son in their nest a few feet below us, and they are scrambling for cover.
The youngster is 3-to-5 years old, still without the dark face and cheek pads of an adult. His hair is wispy and thin on his round head, and his eyes are brown and serious, but ever so often he offers the briefest smile. While his mother stays hidden, he perches on a branch to watch us watching him. After a few minutes, he picks up a vine and twirls it like a lasso.

We have traveled halfway around the world to experience this moment, which never can be guaranteed. But here we were, 30 metres up on a tree platform in the largest virgin rain forest on the island, thrilled to be watching an orangutan in the wild.

Asia’s only great ape tops the list of wildlife and plants that brought us here. Male orangutans can reach 140 kilograms, twice the size of females, but this youngster probably weighs around 35. He will stay with his mother until he’s seven, after which he will become what his Malay name means: a man of the forest.

Bornean forests are home to Asian elephants, leopards, sun bears, orangs, even the world’s smallest squirrel (when scampering up a tree, it looks like a windup toy). An impressive bird list includes hornbills, storks and kingfishers. Huge numbers of orchids, palms, ferns and that bizarre parasitic flower, the rafflesia, are waiting to be seen.

Temperatures in places approach 40 degrees, and humidity is 95 percent. We encounter leeches, rats in a ceiling (one dropped onto one of us at 3 a.m.) and a cave tour that leads us on a grimy boardwalk above tons of bat guano alive with uncountable roaches and poisonous centipedes.

Oil palm plantations, land clearing and timber harvesting are destroying forests in Borneo (70 to 85 per cent of the forests had been felled in the last 30 years), and we decided to see this incredible biological richness before it disappears.

Mount Kinabalu, the highest in Southeast Asia at nearly 13,500 feet, is our first stop. For orchid lovers, it is Mecca. Some 1,000 species have been found on and around these slopes, including the imperiled lady-slipper, Paphiopedilum rothschildianum, which was discovered in the 19th century. That orchid’s location was falsified by early collectors to keep the source secret and the price up. Somehow it was lost until 1970, when the slipper was rediscovered in Mount Kinabalu National Park, now a World Heritage Site.

On the way to the park, our guide Adrian Chan leads us to a species of rafflesia, the largest flower in the world. The flower’s 17 species grow only between 500 and 600 metres on Borneo, Sumatra, Java and the Philippines. It is primo sight for plant lovers.

This one is orange, rubbery and decorated with raised spots. It parasitizes a specific vine. Both vine and flower are clinging to a ravine behind a residential house in a village just off the main road. Forty-four of 83 known flowering sites on Borneo are on private property, and landowners protect the habitat while earning money from tourists eager to see flowers that may reach three feet across.

Named for Sir Stamford Raffles, British founder of Singapore, our rafflesia has been open for five days and is disintegrating slightly at the edges. Its notorious rotting-meat smell has dissipated, however, so we can look into the center bowl, where a disc with fingerlike projections glows in an eerie light. Around it on the ground are flower buds ranging in size from golf balls to volleyballs. Each bud takes 10 months to develop and open.

Mount Kinabalu, where the spirits of the Dusun and Kadazan peoples are believed to reside, was sculpted by glaciers, left naked on top and punctured by a gully a mile deep. We set out the next day before sunup for bird-watching on its slopes, then tour the park’s orchid garden after breakfast. Scores of orchids and carnivorous pitcher plants, such as the Nepenthes rajah, with liter-size burgundy traps that digest scores of insects, are displayed in the mountainous setting. We see only one orchid along a hiking trail, however, a jewel orchid, collected more for its velvety, striped leaves than its tall spike of small flowers.

From Kota Kinabalu, known locally as KK, we fly to the city of Sandakan, on the northeast coast, and board an outboard to Selingan (Turtle) Island to overnight and watch sea turtles nest. A turtle hatchery was set up here in 1966. Every night, rangers patrol the beaches, quietly searching for green and hawksbill turtles that come ashore to lay eggs. They collect the eggs, count them, tag the mothers and move eggs to hand-dug sandy holes protected with wire cylinders.
Within swimming distance of the Philippines, Selingan is a desertlike research station so hot at midday that we retreat to our monastic room to catnap and read. Powerful black monitor lizards and rats stalk the dry forests and steal turtle eggs. Some of the rats have taken up residence in the ceiling of our room, which has a closet, small chest, twin beds and a sink. In late afternoon, it’s cool enough to snorkel, so we venture into the Sulu Sea.

After dinner, we sweat and wait for a signal that a turtle has nested. In a warm rain, we watch a three-foot green turtle squeeze out 124 eggs. She is untagged, so this is her first brood. Each of us in a group of a dozen visitors holds a small, leathery egg, then we gently place them in their new sand pit where, in two months’ time, hatchlings will fight their way to the surface.

Finally, we are allowed to hold a hatchling, feel the power of those tiny flippers, enclose it in our cupped palms before releasing it.
It is after the release of the hatchlings that sleep is undone by the falling rat. My friend’s scream jolts me awake, and I see her sitting bolt upright in her bed. The rat had fallen, probably from the window curtains, and landed, plop!, on her face. She lies awake until dawn.
From the island, we boat back to Sandakan, spend a couple of hours at the Sepilok rehabilitation center for orangutans, then board another boat on the Kinabatangan River. We disembark at the Sukau Rainforest Lodge, tucked snugly in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary. The next two days, we go everywhere by longboat, and it seems the height of eco-luxury to be guided (even in rain) up and down the longest river in Sabah looking for wildlife.

We gaze and peer and find purple herons, a Brahminy kite, a serpent eagle, darters, imperial pigeons, swifts, kingfishers, white-crested and black hornbills, sunbirds, and our prize, a rare and seldom-seen Storm’s stork.

From our skiff, we watch a large proboscis monkey with his wives and babies occupy an enormous tree at dawn and dusk along the river.

At the lodge, built on stilts in Malaysian style, ceiling fans and hot water run on solar power. A small library is in the main building, as is the dining room and a lounge with sofas. Over the river is a sun deck for candlelight dining or morning coffee. We wear sarongs to dinner, and leave shoes at the door.

After rain, these lowland forests are full of leeches. They attach to the ends of leaves and perform leechy belly dances trying to sense the heat of a passing mammal or even bird. We leave our little boat and confront them on our single hike in this forest. Thin as matchsticks before finding you, they inject an anesthesia at the sucking spot, and drop off when full. A rule of thumb is this: the lead hiker’s body heat alerts the leech, the second hiker gets the leech, the third hiker is free to pass untouched.

My friend, second in line, gets a leech on her arm, but cavalierly insists I take a picture of it. Didn’t feel a thing, she says, plucking it off. Later, though, she feels a tickle and a short engorged leech on her stomach, and she doesn’t wait for a photograph. She gets the guide to pull it off. Now.

Yet, in this remote and wild place, where friendships over dinner are easily struck and nature is at her fecund best, our lives seem graced indeed.

Our last stop in Borneo is Danum Valley, where we arrive by car. We stay at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, with enormous open-air lounge, dining room and bar on the second floor overlooking the Danum River. It is here that we see the orangutans, watch rhinoceros hornbills play tag in the morning, admire a metre-at-the-shoulder bearded pig, and climb a 1,000-metre-high hill to see red-throated barbets. On the way up, our guide shows us the way his tribe buries its dead: in caskets made of tree trunks that are hoisted by ropes to ledges of limestone cliffs. We scale a tree-limb ladder and find human remains.

We drive back to KK, and spend one day getting to our next stop: Miri, a tiny coastal town. At Miri, we pare down baggage to 40 pounds, and hop into a small plane to Mulu in Sarawak, where a swamp and four caves are waiting.

I’m not overwhelmed with the idea of caves. On our drive from Sukau to Danum Valley, we visited the Gomantong Cave and it had been an unexpected horror. This is the most famous cave in Sabah. Three kinds of swiftlets nest here, but only those in the highest reaches build their nests of pure saliva. These are the delicacies made by the Chinese into bird’s-nest soup. A single nest may sell for $4,000 U.S. The government regulates harvesting now, but four times a year men are strapped to 100-foot ladders and raised up to remove the nests, once babies have fledged.

They’ve been doing that for 400 years. Not once has the floor of swiftlet and bat guano been cleared out, and the smell is ungodly. Little wonder the roaches are more plentiful than stars. The narrow boardwalk and handrail were slippery with guano, the roaches and giant centipedes were on the walls and the floor, and stretching my T-shirt to my nose, I was so appalled, my toes curled. Outside, all I could do was shudder. But at least, I told myself, I had seen it and now understood why those bird’s nests were so dreadfully expensive.

Mulu’s caves, however, are more rewarding. Three of four are lighted to show beautiful formations; the fourth, Deer Cave, is the world’s largest cave passage and home to millions of bats. The caves make up the world’s largest-known cave system, yet only about a third of the passages have been explored in the mountains that now are in a national park.

Perhaps the best part is the nightly emergence of the bats, which come out in waves of hundreds and stay in formation until they reach a certain altitude to disperse for nightly insect-eating. We watch a doughnut-shaped group stay perfectly in formation until it disappears.
Then we head back to the five-star Royal Mulu Resort, where dinner’s a buffet, and the rooms are air-conditioned.

Intrepid Borneo

Throughout the year, Intrepid Travel operates a number of fantastic adventures that will have you exploring Malaysian Borneo, either with a small group of like-minded travellers or independently on an arranged itinerary.

Sabah – Land Beneath the Wind
13 days ex Kota Kinabalu
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Kota Kinabalu, Mt Kinabalu climb, orangutans, Turtle Island, Malay homestay, jungle camp, Sandakan
Brief: Sabah, the land beneath the wind, is simply breathtaking. Join Intrepid as we meet orangutans and sea turtles on a trip that will have you lazing on beaches, soaking in hot springs, exploring tribal villages and climbing the mighty Mt Kinabalu.
Departure: Departs every Sunday
Price: AU$860, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person

A Taste of Sabah
6 days ex Kota Kinabalu
Trip Style: Intrepid Independent
Highlights: Mt Kinabalu climb, orangutans, Turtle Island, Sandakan
Brief: A fantastic introduction to natural Borneo, from the giant turtles to the awesome peak of Mt Kinabalu. Sabah is filled with rare and exotic wildlife and this trip takes in the very best.
Departure: Departs daily
Price: from AU$890 per person (seasonal pricing applies)
For more information on travelling in Borneo with Intrepid Travel, please visit www.intrepidtravel.com, free call 1300 360 887, or come and see us at 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

Know before you go

Best time of year to travel? Borneo has a typical tropical climate - generally hot and humid throughout the year. Temperatures stay in the high 20’s most of the year dropping back to the low 20’s at night. As in most tropical areas the rain falls in short heavy bursts with sunshine following. In theory, the wet season runs from November through to February, but in reality you can expect some rain at any time of the year. Sabah is famed for being below the monsoon belt and is known as the ‘Land Below the Wind’
Religion: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Animist & other spiritual & tribal beliefs
Language: Bahasa Malaysian, Chinese & many other tribal languages and dialects
Currency: Ringgit (MYR)
Visas: A 3-month visa is free on entry into Malaysia. (Please note: If you are planning on sidestepping to Brunei, you may need to obtain a visa prior to arrival.)
Electricity: 220 - 240V, 50hz AC

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, AU Edition

In America, it’s ‘no glove, no love’. Across the Tasman, the rule is, ‘no rubba, no hubba’. In parts of Australia, the message is, ‘safe sex, no regrets’. So with all the money being spent pushing the message that condoms are a cure-all, why are many sexually transmitted diseases on the rise? As JAMES MORROW finds out, the safe sex ad campaigns are only telling half the story – which begs the question,

IS SAFE SEX REALLY SAFE?

Here’s an interesting but little-known fact about condoms that may just win you a meat tray down at the pub Thursday night: the use of condoms dates back at least as far as ancient Rome and Egypt. Not only that, but archaeologists have discovered early cave paintings that seem to suggest (appropriately enough) that pre-historic Frenchmen may have discovered the things thousands of years before the New York Times ran the first-ever print ad for ‘Dr. Power’s French Preventatives’.

Looking for more condom trivia? Before the latex condom was invented, condoms were made by hand-dipping molds into rubber cement (hence the slang term). But in 1919 an inventor in Ohio by the name of Frederick Killian figured out that latex was a much better material for the purpose, and by the mid-1930s, at the height of the Depression, American manufacturers were producing 1.5 million condoms a day.

Oh, and here’s one more interesting thing about condoms: contrary to popular belief, they are not hugely effective in preventing an incredible variety of sexually transmitted diseases – from HPV, or human papilloma virus, which is linked to more than 90 per cent of cases of cervical cancer and also causes infertility, to herpes.

How can this be? Since the mid-1980s and the discovery that AIDS could be prevented by condoms, ‘French letters’, ‘rubbers’, and ‘raincoats’ have stopped being something that people whispered and tittered about and instead become deadly serious business. Around the world public health authorities, looking for a way to keep AIDS from spreading out of control, have been promoting condoms in earnest for nearly two decades now with a variety of advertising campaigns.

And at least in terms of AIDS prevention, it seems to have worked, especially in Australia: since the all-time high of 953 newly-diagnosed AIDS cases in this country in 1994, the number of new patients has been steadily trending downwards. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, there were just 290 diagnoses of new AIDS cases. With an incidence rate of just 1.5 people stricken per 100,000 population – compared to far higher rates in many other Western countries, including the United States, where the rate is ten times higher – Australia could truly seem like the lucky country, sexual-health wise.

But all is not happy and healthy in Australia’s bedrooms. While the number of AIDS cases is admirably low, the rates of many other infections are on the rise – and while none are necessarily the death sentence that an HIV infection represents, they have potentially huge consequences, including cancer and infertility. Public health experts have seen a tremendous increase in cases of diseases like chlamydia and syphilis; in the state of Victoria, the situation is so bad that Chief Health Officer was compelled this past March to issue a formal Health Alert to general practitioners telling them to watch out for the sudden uptick in syphilis cases. That sort of warning is not an everyday occurrence: the last time the Chief Health Officer issued such a bulletin was in 2003, warning doctors to be on the lookout for SARS.

There are many factors behind the rise in various STDs, but one has gone all but unreported in a culture where, officially at least, condom use has taken on an almost sacramental nature: studies conducted over the past few years show that, far from being the be-all and end-all in sexual protection, condoms only offer limited protection.

In other words, when the emperor has no clothes on, a condom is of limited, if any, use in protecting him from a host of diseases.
Back in 2001, the United States’ National Institutes of Health published a series of findings that were shocking, both because they completely overturned long-held conventional wisdom on a very important topic, and also because they received virtually no coverage. Indeed, the Washington Post at the time reported that ‘some health officials considered keeping the report private’, adding that ‘some family planning advocates said they feared that the new report would be used to put pressure on the FDA to change condom labels to reflect the conclusions.’

As one commentator put it, ‘It’s like hearing that Grandma died and immediately asking if Grandma will be making brownies for the funeral. The reality of the loss just hasn’t sunk in yet.’

Among other things, the study found that when one partner is infected with herpes, using condoms cut the risk of transmission by only about forty percent. Meanwhile, with regard to human papilloma virus, by far the number one cause of cervical cancer, ‘the Panel concluded that there was no epidemiological evidence that condom use reduced the risk of … infection’.

And this doesn’t even begin to take into account the misuse, or irregular use, of condoms: according to just one study of high school students in NSW, 68 percent of those surveyed who said they were sexually active admitted that they didn’t use condoms every time they have sex, despite the fact that virtually every kid in the state’s schools is given lessons in how to use the things. And even among adults, condom usage can be irregular, or start too late in an encounter, to prevent the spread of many infections.

‘The term “safe sex” needs to be examined in detail’, says Dr. Caroline Harvey, Medical Director for Family Planning Queensland. ‘We give people many mixed messages depending on whether we are talking about preventing pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections or HIV. In my dealings with clients, I’ve found that when they ask about safe sex, you need to talk to them and pull apart what they’re talking about.’

‘Viral infections like herpes and HPV do spread from skin-to-skin contact’, she adds, something that many people who come into her office are unaware of. According to Harvey, depending on what the client is looking to prevent, the options may be very different – something that doesn’t always come through in media campaigns such as NSW Health’s recent ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ effort.

Still, ‘condoms are useful’, maintains Anna McNulty, Director of the Sydney Sexual Heath Centre, when asked about diseases that spread despite the use of condoms. McNulty adds that the increase in the rates of infection various sexual diseases – chlamydia rates have trebled in NSW alone in the last five years according to one estimate – could come from a variety of factors, including the lack of access to health care among young people.

The problem, says McNulty, is that ‘people use them some of the time but not all of the time’, and admits that while a great way to prevent things like AIDS and unintended pregnancies, in terms of preventing herpes and the genital warts that can lead to cervical cancer, ‘they are not as effective.’

An added challenge is that fact that many diseases such as chlamydia can be asymptomatic, especially in men. ‘It can be silent for a long time, but it can cause significant damage’, says Dr. Harvey.

Despite this, many of Australia’s state governments and other public health bodies are delivering a mixed message. While, for example, South Australia’s Health Department’s web site frankly states that ‘condoms will give you some protection from most sexually transmitted infections, but some, like herpes, crabs and genital warts, can spread through skin-to-skin contact’, it is a message that often gets lost when it is boiled down to a catchy slogan – such as ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’, the message currently being pushed in NSW Health ad campaign.

Featuring a variety of television and print ads, the ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ campaign shows groups of healthy, happy, good-looking young people – straight and gay and of various ethnicities – in different social circumstances. The copy on the print ads says things like, ‘Tonight I’m picking up chlamydia’ or some other disease, with the name of the disease crossed out the word ‘condoms’ printed underneath it – the implication being that condoms are all one needs to have what the tag-line calls, ‘no regrets’. In one ad specifically targeting Aboriginals, readers are told that ‘sexually transmitted infections … can affect anybody who has unsafe sex.’

Which is absolutely true, but again fails to mention that condoms are not foolproof against disease – and that ‘no regrets’ is a pretty broad statement that implies something close to 100 per cent reliability. Yet very little is ever 100 per cent when health and medicine are involved (and in the sense that condoms are used to prevent the spread of disease, they have a medical component). If the maker of any other device with as many caveats as condoms have attached to them ever tried to advertise in a similar way, they would be shut down by the authorities sooner than the casual couples featured in NSW Health’s campaign could wake up the following morning with a splitting headache and serious misgivings.

But while the campaign does not tell the whole truth about condoms, McNulty says that ‘you have to keep the message simple, and the “Safe Sex, No Regrets” campaign did a good job as it targeted both young heterosexuals and gay men.’ She concedes, though, that even with 100% condom usage, people are not fully protected against skin-to-skin infections.

So what to do about all this? A national strategy on sexually transmitted diseases is due to be released in July, and according to McNulty, it will definitely have an emphasis on chlamydia and the sudden spike in infection rates, and will push for increases in screening. Easy tests now exist to detect the infection, and treatment is normally a simple antibiotic treatment. But the campaign will also continue to emphasize ‘safe sex’ – something which is far as it goes, but which is not a be-all and end-all solution. The problem is that sex is a much more complicated thing than people on all sides of the debate care to acknowledge, which is why diluting information about condoms to a happy, easily-digestible slogan that inspires false confidence is an irresponsible position for public health authorities to take.

Yet that is exactly what campaigns such as ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ does by telling young people that using a condom is as simple a way to have a good time while preventing misery down the road as, say, advising them to only drink bottled water when they’re backpacking up some gorgeous Third World coastline.

While it may not be as sexy a message, so to speak, states should instead work to tell people of all ages in the community that despite their best efforts, behaviours – especially risky ones – can have consequences. The campaign wouldn’t have to be prudish or paranoia-inducing, either, but simply give people the facts: condoms are great for certain things, but there are still risks involved with having sex with people you are not sure the history and health status of. No one would dream of running an ad implying that wearing a helmet was all one needed to stay safe when riding a motorbike; there are plenty of other factors involved that keep one safe on the road, and people are well aware of this. The same sort of truth needs to be told about condoms.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

LEFT HOOK: Sep 05, AU Edition

TIM DUNLOP
Why do conservatives hate this Western success story?

Since September 11, the right has been at pains to argue there is no such thing as root causes for the jihadist terrorism that currently plagues us. To even mention things like US foreign policy as a source of grievance for criminals such as al Qa’ida was to invite ridicule. To this day, John Howard and his supporters attack anyone who dares suggest the invasion of Iraq makes us more of a target. The argument was that these terrorists were simply evil, that their actions were a personal failing that needed no reference to any socio-political context to explain.

But it seems times are changing. Conservatives have decided to embrace the notion of root causes, and a recent spate of op-ed pieces inform us that all our problems are down to (wait for it) multi-culturalism.
Yes, folks, mention that blowing up thousands of civilians in cities like Fallujah might tend to get some Muslims off side and you’ll get called a traitor. Put forward the notion that Western acceptance of religious and cultural practices from around the world in a spirit of liberal democratic tolerance is the problem and you’ll be hailed as an intellectual.

I suspect conservatives like Janet Albrechtsen and others are drawing on The West and the Rest, the recent book by British conservative, Roger Scruton. I’m actually a part-time fan of Scruton’s, but the thrust is the same as Albrechtsen: we have been far too tolerant and all our ills can be traced to progressive social innovations that have undermined ‘our way of life’.

The thing that strikes me about these conservative screeds is that although they purport to be defences of Western culture against the corruption of the so-called postmodern left, they actually glow with their own Western hatred and a blasé dismissal of genuine democratic achievement.

Scruton speaks (correctly) of the need for society to ‘renew itself’, but fails to notice that that is precisely what multiculturalism was: a successful exercise in which the West managed to accommodate the post-WW II changes forced upon it. It was a sign of supreme cultural confidence and generosity which we should be proud of, not looking to scapegoat.

But scapegoat it they will. Australian conservatives also manage to combine a sense of colonial cringe with the dispiriting view of Western achievement they share with Scruton.

Pundits like Albrechtsen wish to abandon Australia’s success because of British difficulties, while Mr Howard takes his lead from Tony Blair rather than having the confidence to suggest that maybe the Brits could take a page out of our own book.

The fact is, conservatives have never liked the idea of multiculturalism, and you can draw a straight line from Enoch Powell, through Margaret Thatcher, to John Howard and Pauline Hanson as indicative of the sort of opposition that has been mounted against commonsense, pragmatic measures that have actually worked very well. The truth is that these attacks on multiculturalism and other social policies are opportunistic and have nothing to do with fighting terrorism and everything to do with gaining domestic political advantage. Why else do they blame Western progressives rather than Islamic terrorists?

In amongst all this ranting from conservatives it is interesting to note the case of Matthew Stewart, a Queensland kid who went to a Lutheran school, loved surfing, joined the army, quit and joined al Qa’ida, and who is currently suspected of being the masked jihadist in a video tape promising to destroy Australia.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

SPIN CITY: Sep 05, AU Edition

ALAN ANDERSON
Blackmail is an ugly word for the Nats’ current strategy. But it fits

One of the hallmarks of the Howard Government has been its willingness to buy off sectional interests in order to make its reform agenda more palatable.

From dairy farmers to ‘grandfathered’ disability pension recipients, a host of minority groups have seen the costs of reform lifted from their shoulders and foisted onto taxpayers and consumers.

This is not necessarily bad policy. The whole argument for reform is that the pain of the few is outweighed by the gain of the many; hence some transitionl contribution from the many makes sense. But when the sectional interest being bought off sits on the Government benches, the spectre of Malcolm Fraser haunts the corridors of power – or impotence.

Barnaby Joyce makes no pretence of being concerned with the broader national interest. ‘I think the job in politics is to acknowledge sectional interests and to try to accommodate them as much as you possibly can’, he stated in defence of his shameless pork-barrelling. The Prime Minister’s model for addressing the problem – appeasement – accepts Joyce’s cynical world view. This strategy is a viable if spineless one in a single-front war.

But if disgruntled Liberals open a second front on Howard, deciding that they also constitute the ‘balance of power’, appeasement will cease to be viable. Howard’s continued indulgence of the Nationals, as the agenda moves onto totemic Liberal issues, can only encourage that to happen.

‘The key is that the PM has an irrationally paranoid fear of people crossing the floor, even in the lower house’, lamented one Howard supporter and long-serving Liberal MP. ‘He has been scarred by his past experience, in the Fraser years. So he wants to seem in total control.

‘The emerging pattern is that perfectly good legislation and policy, with strong support in the party room, or even after having gone through the party room, gets compromised and wrecked. It’s not just the Nationals; that’s what happened to our border protection legislation too.’

The result, according to this MP, is a growing disenchantment amongst the most valuable members of the Government. ‘Those who do the process properly – talking to colleagues, lobbying for support in the party room, arguing the case and, if they fail, giving up quietly and moving onto another issue; people making a positive contribution to the Government – those people are ignored. People are starting to get pissed off; they’re starting to joke that the only way to get things done is to blackmail the PM’.

The irony, in other words, is that Howard’s relentless quest for the appearance of control is giving him less real control than ever, with angry colleagues wondering what principles will next be sacrificed for the sake of a quiet life.

Now the anger has a focus. By capitulating to Barnaby Joyce’s antics, Howard has brought hostile anti-National sentiment close to boiling point at all levels of the Liberal Party.

‘The problem with the Nationals is that we keep building them up’, one Minister told me. ‘We should point out the truth. They are a party with no future. They stand for nothing but self-interest. That is not an attractive proposition in 2005. Their only agenda is to prop up uneconomic industries. We shouldn’t be afraid of them; they should be afraid of us.’

This cynical analysis of the Nationals is, sadly, the only one that fits the facts. It is understandable that the Nationals would go into bat for rural telecommunications. But why on earth do they play games on voluntary student unionism or industrial relations, issues on which all thinking conservatives and liberals should be able to agree? The only possible answer is that they want to secure media attention and bribes; extorting further taxpayer money for doing the job they are already paid to do: to cast their votes in good faith.

Critics of the Nationals are not limited to metropolitan MPs. Rural and regional Liberals are equally angered by them, and by Howard’s tolerance ( even encouragement) of their grand-standing.

One rural Liberal MP expressed it thus: ‘Liberals have more than double the rural seats that the Nationals have. We work hard behind the scenes to resolve policy issues in the interests of rural and regional Australians, as opposed to just looking for giant hand-outs. We’re involved in actually solving problems. But we’re not allowed to take credit. The PM gives the Nationals leave to rebel, so they can look like they are David taking on Goliath, because he’d rather have them as a rump than as another party’.

The Prime Minister would doubtless argue that his hands are tied, as the Nats’ support is needed in the Senate. But is he right?
As a Liberal Senator put it to me, ‘we’ve got a lot of wood on the Nats’. One anecdote illustrates the point.

The Nationals hold twelve lower house seats. Yet when one metropolitan MP visited the then-Minister for Family and Community Services, she showed him two piles of documents on her desk, one several times larger than the other. ‘Those are the community grants to Liberal seats’, she told him, gesturing to the smaller pile, ‘and those are the community grants to National seats’, gesturing at the larger.
Pulling out a single page from the smaller pile, she said, ‘here are the grants for your seat’.

Suppose that the question that confronted the Nationals was not whether they would secure further bribes for their votes, but whether they would keep the existing ones. It seems unlikely that a group which has so successfully blackmailed massive hand-outs from the taxpayer would surrender them simply because they are denied more. After all, as Joyce admitted, their game is simply to squeeze the taxpayer for all they can. It’s as if they are standing on principle.
All that is required to restore genuine, as opposed to apparent, control of the parliament, is for the Prime Minister to have the courage to call the Nationals’ bluff. Instead of greasing the noisiest wheel, Howard should stand firm behind the collective will of the party room, daring renegade National Senators to jump ship, and threatening them with termination of the pork-barrelling that is their party’s only remaining raison d’être.

Of course, there is a risk that a more aggressive stance will see an occasional floor-crossing incident. But the alternative policy of endless concessions makes it inevitable Howard should consider whom he wants sitting on his side.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

FOOD: July 05, AU Edition

YOLKING AROUND
Eggs aren’t just for breakfast anymore, says Eli Jameson.
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.

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.

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. 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 Farms, outside Sydney. 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 (using the French and calling them croutons would be too pretentious in this case, even for me) 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.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

TECHNOLOGY: Sep 05, AU Edition

GETTING SMARTER
Have laptop? Get a PDA smartphone to make yourself fully mobile, suggests Ian Wishart

Stuck in traffic, and desperately trying to remember the name of that Turkish café further up the line so I could phone in an order ahead. Could I recall it? Not in a lifetime. I only did a little hooch in my youth, but I swear I can feel the loss of every single one of those brain cells two decades down the track.

My options were limited: try and play ‘guess the name you’re after’ with Directory Assistance, or simply turn up at the café and wait a further 20 minutes for the kebabs to cook. Neither option appealed.
Enter, the PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone. For a magazine that utilises the latest technology and software, the efficiency gains from making staff fully mobile have been tremendous. Even so, the Treo 650 has been a voyage of discovery. Combining all the bells and whistles of the Palm range with a mobile phone, the Treo range offers a versatility lacking in other PDAs. Frankly, I’d been sceptical of the PDA craze largely because I couldn’t see much point in them. Those who have laptops, use them. Those who don’t, use PDAs. Or so I thought. To a large extent, this remains my perspective. I still can’t see the merit in trying to do screeds of real work on a handheld device – texting is great for teenagers but you’re not exactly going to write King Lear on a mobile phone, are you? Sure, any PDA worth its name offers synchronicity with laptops or desktop PCs, but unless the PDA is fully wireless and independent in its own right then it still relies on said PC or laptop for its internet access which – to me – seems a little like putting an eagle on a leash. Great, so your PDA can link through your PC to go online. Yippee! Why not just use the PC to go online in the first place.

Ah, but the PalmOne Treo is an eagle set to wing.

Stuck in traffic, brain ticking over in that aforementioned mental dash for some kind of solution to my Turkish kebab dilemma, when suddenly a third option springs to mind: use the Treo’s mobile internet to Google a Turkish café in the suburb concerned, and see what turns up. Within seconds, not only had the café-whose-name-escaped-me popped up on the Treo’s screen, but the phone’s intuitive web interface gave me the option of dialling the café phone number at the tap of a stylus. And, after making the call, the experience was consummated by Treo offering to add the café to the address book.

Oh so easy, and it all took about 35 seconds – less time than it takes to navigate Telstra’s service menu.

The beauty of the Treo is that its web browser looks and works like a full monty browser: you get pictures, hyperlinks, the works. The PalmOne software supplied with the 650 optimises the internet so that websites download more quickly than you’d expect to your mobile phone.
As outlined above, Investigate magazine staff are equipped with the latest notebook computers and Telecom’s EVDO mobile broadband (for the NZ edition) and Optus mobile broadband in Australia. Thus, for heavy duty mobile journalism/production demands, we’re generally using notebooks. Where the PalmOne range slots in, however, is on those occasions where a notebook is too bulky or overt to be useful. The supplied software, again, provides an interface for Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel or Powerpoint) to be optimised automatically and uploaded to the Treo, where I can either reference them in meetings or edit them on the run before emailing them to a colleague via the Treo’s online email function.

That email function, in the first instance, is a programme called Versamail 3.0, which comes as standard with the Treo. Others, like SnapperMail, can be purchased for a small extra fee. Initially it was the Versamail programme that gave me some grief on the phone. Thanks to interconnectivity issues between Vodafone (suppliers of the 650) and Telecom Xtra, one first has to purchase an extra service from Xtra for $2 a month before you can download email and – as I was to discover – a technical quirk with the Versamail software meant you couldn’t upload email to send via your Xtra account, you had to find another email provider to do this with. Conveniently, Vodafone allow the use of their own SMTP outgoing mail server so that problem was eventually solved. Alternatively, I could have purchased SnapperMail which works perfectly well with Xtra’s SMTP servers. The software integrates with Microsoft Outlook, although not with Business Contact Manager – if you use BCM you’ll need to select all your business contacts and copy them into the Outlook Contact directory in order for the Treo to see them.

The Treo also comes equipped with a digital camera and VGA video camera – again, a useful function both for home and business. Images and documents are either stored on the Treo’s 32mb internal memory or on an SD expansion card of your choice.

Bluetooth is standard on the 650, making for easy wireless synchronisation with the notebook computer or any other Bluetooth-enabled device you wish.

The 650 isn’t cheap – at around $1,150 plus GST it’s the price of a baseline laptop – but its versatility complements an existing IT setup. You wouldn’t purchase a PDA if you didn’t have a computer, and while you can get great PDAs for $400 upwards, without the mobile phone and internet coverage they’re not necessarily the best value for money if you need portability AND mobility. On the other hand, the Treo also comes in a cheaper format, the Treo 600, which is a similar phone designed for Telecom’s CDMA and 1X networks, rather than GSM. The Telecom version is on offer at $499, but differs slightly in that it doesn’t offer Bluetooth and its battery is built in, which means once the battery’s charge cycle is shot it’s a bit of a mission to fix.

Because of Telecom’s mobile internet framework, the 600 is reportedly slightly faster than the 650 online, but there’s not a lot in it. PalmOne’s agents in New Zealand tested their phones against the state of the art Harrier EVDO unit offered by Telecom, and found that on the Apple site, for example, the Palm units were only around 30% slower to download pages, despite the vast differences between the mobile internet and mobile broadband services on paper. That said, if speed is of the essence then you’re likely to be using a full EVDO wireless card on your notebook anyway and sucking webpages out of the ether at 500kbs. EVDO on handhelds is still not as fast as it is for computers.
Significantly, both Telecom and Vodafone will be offering much faster mobile broadband speeds between now and the middle of next year as network improvements are rolled out. Even so, the 650 is plenty fast enough for my purposes, and I’m an internet speed freak.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)

Dec 05, AU Edition

GOD IN THE MACHINE
Is Intelligent Design the answer to the holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution? Or is it a rear-guard action by fundamentalists to mix religion with science? And why are its supporters so scared of speaking up? JAMES MORROW looks at the latest front in Australia’s culture wars

The voice on the other end of the phone is sounding panicked. A researcher and scientist at one of Australia’s sandstone universities, he had just been told that Investigate magazine had dug something up about his past – and wanted to have a chat about it.“Please”, trembled the academic. “You can’t use my name in this.”

What was the terrible secret in this man’s past? Sex, drugs, and rock & roll – or some combination of the three? An illicit relationship with a student? A lurking plagiarism time-bomb somewhere in his doctoral thesis?

No, nothing like that.

The sordid episode which threatened to run a promising young talent off the academic rails involved his public support a few years ago for Intelligent Design, the controversial new rival to Darwin’s teachings on evolution that has made great gains in the United States and has recently become a hot-button topic in Australia’s universities and education ministries. While this lecturer was happy to talk off the record – on what journalists like to call “deep background” – about the topic, the message was clear: Do not identify me, my field of study, or my support for Intelligent Design, or you will wreck my career.

In interviews with both pro- and anti-Intelligent Design (or “ID”, for short) professors, researchers, and lecturers across the country, one theme emerges: There is a new academic orthodoxy afoot in Australia’s universities which says that ID must be uniformly and roundly condemned, and that anyone who even suggests that the theory get a hearing be publicly exposed and denounced like a capitalist roader in Mao’s China. Yet that is not to say that there are not a few big-name scientists who support Intelligent Design in Australia: Dr. Graeme Clarke, inventor of the bionic ear, has publicly pledged his belief that ID demands further research, saying “I want to put a scientific hat on, I want to be fair to the discussion”, adding that there is “a sort of rogue element in me that likes to see if there are other ways of thinking things through”.

Despite Clarke’s endorsement, the subject is still taboo. In the words of one biologist whose research has convinced him of the rightness of Intelligent Design as a way to fill the many still-unfilled holes in Darwin’s theories, “it would be professional suicide for an academic to come out in support of ID, or even advocate that it receive a fair hearing, in a modern science dominated by scientists whose personal philosophy is scientific naturalism”. It’s not hard to believe him, given that on the very public anti-ID side of the debate are an army of academics who march in lock-step on the subject.

“It’s not a theory in any scientific sense – it’s not a scientific idea. It’s not science”, says Prof. Jack DaSilva, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Adelaide says when asked about Intelligent Design, echoing the sentiments of the vast majority of academics who are willing to go on the record publicly on the topic of ID.

“It’s just creationist religion trying to pass itself off as science. Suggesting that there is some magical supernatural behind it all is simply talking about magic”.

While normally one would be tempted to chalk this sort of intellectual in-fighting up to the nature of university life (as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once famously quipped, “academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”), the Intelligent Design debate – and the meta-debate over whether it should even be debated – is actually a vital one. Because beyond of the merits of Intelligent Design versus Darwinism are much bigger questions about the ultimate purpose of education, and whether science should exist in a materialist vacuum or admit larger questions of spirituality and that ultimate barbeque stopper, Why are we here?

You’ll Never Make a Mousetrap Out of Me…
So what exactly is Intelligent Design? The phrase, and its initials, have become freighted with meaning over the past few months, ever since the Orlando, Florida-based Campus Crusade for Christ blitzed the country’s schools with a mass-mailing of 3,000 DVDs entitled, Unlocking the Mystery of Life: Intelligent Design. The issue was given a further shot in the arm when Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson suggested that ID could have a place in the country’s science classrooms. These two events sent the scientific community into an uproar.

And, of course, the fact that ID comes out of the United States and is supported by the likes of George W. Bush plays into the hands of normally open-minded academics who worry that their classrooms and laboratories are about to be busted up by gangs of knuckle-dragging Bible-thumping rednecks – DaSilva’s “creationists” – who believe that the Earth is 4,000 years old and that the carbon dating of dinosaur bones is the greatest hoax since the government’s cover-up of flying saucers and the UN’s plan to take over the world with black helicopters.

In fact, according to its supporters, Intelligent Design is a very calm, sober, and scientific way of looking at the world that simply admits the possibility of a sentient creator into the continually-vexing problem of how life began on this planet and why it developed as it did.

Michael Behe, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, birthplace of the American Revolution. He is also the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, one of the seminal works on ID theory. And because he has tenure, his career and position is secure, allowing him to speak freely and even testify in court on behalf of Intelligent Design.

“When Darwin first proposed his ideas, he said that evolution had to work through numerous successive slight modifications – in other words, tiny steps over periods of time”, Behe told Investigate when asked to explain the basics of ID. “If things happened too quickly, it would look like something other than random mutations were involved. Darwin insisted that evolution came about by gradual improvement, but if you look at a molecular level you see a number of components that have to work together in order to produce the function – I call these things ‘irreducibly complex’, in that if you take away a part the system won’t work.”

“I make an analogy with a mousetrap. It’s made up of several parts, and all of those are necessary. If one of the parts were missing, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to see how that would come together otherwise.”
“So there’s this big problem staring Darwinian evolution in the face and no one has explained how these could have come about. If you look at the sort of things that intelligent agents design, they put together things like that all the time. It’s clearly a signature of some sort of intelligence.”

This “mousetrap analogy” is like a red cape to a bull for Darwinists, who say that all the structures the professor describes are simply the result of random chance – a criticism that Behe is familiar with, and which can be easily dealt with by simply crunching the numbers.
“People try to claim these things could happen randomly all the time – it’s a variation on the idea that if you put a million monkeys on a million typewriters, eventually one of them will hammer out the Complete Works of Shakespeare”, says Behe.

“But if you do the math you see it’s mathematically impossible – the time it would take for the ‘random occurrences’ we’re talking about with molecular structures to occur would require time well beyond the lifetime of the universe”.

Behe’s “irreducible complexity” – and its intellectual cousin, “specified complexity” and the idea that we live in a “fine-tuned” universe – is just one side of the Intelligent Design argument. The other side of the coin is the fact that there are indeed large holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – holes which, depending on which side of the Intelligent Design camp one sits, are either windows into the transcendent or gaps in the knowledge which simply require more research to fill.

As the anonymous professor cited at the beginning of this article explains, “the word ‘evolution’ is pretty misused. Evolution is really a hierarchy of three theories: at the top of the pyramid is microevolution, which involves variations within species. No one disputes this, and agriculturalists have been using this for centuries. Then at the next level is macroevolution, which is the view that life as we know it on this planet arose from simple life forms over the course of some slow, gradual process – it’s a working hypothesis, though there is a lot of evidence that throws doubt on it.

Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid is chemical evolution” – the level at which Behe studies things – “which suggests that life arose by a natural mechanism and that a soup of inorganic chemicals became life somehow. In the1950s everyone thought this stage of evolution had been conclusively proven by the works of Stanley Miller, but now his work has gone into a sad state of decline.”

God in the Machine, or God of the Gaps?
So much of the debate around Intelligent Design is not about the merits of the theory, or the holes in the Darwinist model that it is meant to fill. Instead, with very limited understanding of either side of the scientific argument, the ID controversy has – with the help of journalists sympathetic to the academic community – become a stalking horse for so many other issues, and opened up another front of the culture wars that have been raging for years now. The idea of mentioning God – or some sort of supernatural creator – is anathema for scientists who, even if privately religious, exist in a professionally post-Enlightenment environment that believes the lab is not the proper place to examine larger questions of humanity’s origin or place in the universe. Still smarting from what happened to Galileo, the Western scientific establishment is one of the most anti-clerical pockets of thought this side of the French Revolution. And again, the fact that ID comes from the United States and has the support of George W. Bush (a man as hated in academia as Marx and Che are exalted; a recent poll showed the US president polling with six percent approval figures among scientists and engineers in his home country) does not help it any on Australia’s campuses or among notoriously left-wing educators. As Laurie Fraser of East Kurrajong, NSW, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald recently, “Like many other teachers I know, I have begun to teach a response to the Campus Crusade for Christ’s DVD on intelligent design. I am simply instilling in my students the notion that it is impossible to believe in God, that such a belief is irrational and hence intelligent design doesn’t even get a leg-up. Sounds harsh, I know, but if the loonies want to fight dirty, I’m willing to respond in kind.”

This is not to say, of course, that all teachers and academics are anti-ID, or that all Christians are in favour of it being taught. Tim Hawkes, headmaster of the prestigious King’s School in Sydney, told the Melbourne Age recently that after viewing the Campus Crusade for Christ’s DVD, he thought it was “quite legitimate to challenge students to think through the implications of there being a ‘grand architect’ of the universe…there are undeniable weaknesses within Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and these must be acknowledged openly.” Meanwhile, more than one Christian academic Investigate spoke with said they did not believe Intelligent Design should be taught – not necessarily because it was bad science, but because it could ultimately be damaging to the cause of faith.

“The problem with ID is that it is in danger of turning into a ‘God of the Gaps’-type idea”, explains Dr. Robert J. Stenning, a physicist at the University of New South Wales, who is also a believing Christian.
“What we’re saying is that we can’t understand how something works, so let’s put God in there and say He must have designed this specifically, and that it can’t have come about by natural processes, that He must have stuck his fingers in somewhere”, Stenning continues. “My worry is that ultimately this will be detrimental to faith. If Christian kids learn these ideas in school, and then some scientific explanation comes about to change the thinking, it could be very challenging.”

One educator who is convinced of the merits of Intelligent Design is Stephen O’Doherty, CEO of Christian Schools Australia – an association of about 150 schools across the country. O’Doherty believes that ID should be available as an option to be taught in Christian schools (he makes no claim about what government schools should or should not do) not just because of the flaws in Darwin’s theories, but because it allows students to grapple with larger questions in the science classroom – an intellectual activity with a long and noble history in the Western tradition, dating all the way back to ancient Athens. And he believes that the knee-jerk prejudice against Intelligent Design, or even against questioning Darwin, is just as bad science as teaching that the Earth was literally created in six days.

“I was reading an editorial in New Scientist, which is a magazine I really enjoy, incidentally, and they published this editorial recently that conflated Intelligent Design with neoconservatism, and essentially said that these twin forces were going to bring about a new Dark Ages”, chuckles O’Doherty, musing on the current state of the debate. “But it’s really a different story. In our schools, for example, we have the state curriculum which we teach, but we also have the freedom to explore other dimensions to life within the classroom.”
O’Doherty says that “the science teachers association has already compartmentalized life in a way that keeps kids from thinking bigger than themselves, and says that such questions belong in a separate classroom”, a fact that he claims explains the reason why public school enrollments are flat-lining as parents flock to put their children in low-cost religious schools, be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. “In a religious school, these questions can bleed through and be discussed, which is really the original point of education”.
One of O’Doherty’s biggest quibbles with the anti-ID crowd is the way the Enlightenment tradition that modern science is an heir to has become so actively hostile to spiritual questions – and answers. It’s a useful perspective, because it shows that the roots of the still-unsettled fights over Darwin and his theories pre-date the man who explored the world on the Beagle.

“At some point, the scientific community took on a view of evolutionary humanism that has become almost dogma, and if you follow evolution backwards this way, eventually you just say, ‘there is no God, it had to have been chance’. But a Christian sees that same process and says that the evolutionary process shows us the law of God. His character shows through.”

“But this is also the same problem that people who talk about a ‘God of the Gaps’ get into. You’re still talking about a dichotomous arrangement which arrays science and reason against darkness and hocus-pocus. One’s view of the universe has to be big enough to understand one’s place in it”, says O’Doherty, which is why he thinks Intelligent Design is a good option to have in the classroom.

“You can’t divorce this discussion from kids, whether it happens in a science classroom or not. If you take a dogmatic view that you cut children off from the search for meaning is a violation of the meaning of education, which ultimately has to do with the question of what it is to be a human being”, he adds.

“The empirically-centered educationalist who says it is about downloading a certain set of idealized facts has a very narrow view of education. In the view of Christian schools, education is about the growth of all facets of the individual, including the spiritual dimension. This is an idea that goes back to ancient Greece.”

While Intelligent Design has a long way to go before it is taught in government-run classrooms – Brendan Nelson’s hat-tip aside – it will surely be a touchstone for the culture wars for some time to come, regardless of its scientific merits. But supporters of ID believe that it is only a matter of time before establishment academia opens its doors to the possibility of a creator who has revealed Himself through the laws of the universe and the development of life on Earth.

“When the Big Bang theory was first proposed in the 1930s, an awful lot of scientists thought it smacked of a religious idea, and really hated it as a result”, says Michael Behe. “It might have had religious overtones because it dealt with the origins of the universe, but it was based on observable data. I see Intelligent Design as being in the same ballpark: it may have religious overtones, but it is still based on data.”

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:31 AM | Comments (0)

THE WATCHER: Sep 05, AU Edition

ALAN RM JONES
Recalling Abu Ghraib

The late 19th, early 20th Century French philosopher Henri Bergson contended that there were two types of memory. On the one hand, there is what he termed ‘habit-memory’, which was what we relied upon in daily life. It serves as our auto-pilot, allowing us to fulfill many daily tasks – which bus to take to get to work, where the sugar bowl is kept and so on. Contrasted to habit-memory was true or ‘recall-memory’. Recall-memory, according to Bergson, serves as our archive of experiences. It’s our hard drive of what we are about – the essence of who we are as a civilisation.Another Frenchman – as it happens – former L’Express editor and distinguished essayist, Jean-Francois Revel, argued that Bergson’s memory ‘duality’ was analogous to modern Western liberal civilization. In the bad old days of the Cold War, in the West, communism’s past was located in habit-memory, while capitalism’s was found in recall-memory.

‘As things are now,’ Revel lamented in his survival manual for the Cold War, How Democracies Perish, ‘it seems only the West’s failures, crimes and weaknesses deserve to be recorded by history.’ The Great Depression, domestic anti-communist excesses (even legitimate action against subversion is recalled as McCarthyism) or the overthrow of Salvatore Allende (‘the other September 11’), for example, are each
recalled as an ‘indelible stain’ upon liberal democratic capitalism generally, and the US in particular. No Western enterprise, however just and heroic, escapes this snare. (Only last week, I involuntarily spat my morning coffee all over a story about my local mayor, Peter Macdonald, who took it upon himself to apologise on behalf of Manly residents for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – a brutal and unnecessary act he claimed.)

Meanwhile, the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people at the hands of Soviet Communist dictators barely registered in the West’s hazy historical consciousness. Revel maintained that liberal capitalism’s memory ‘duality’ not only accustomed the West to accept profoundly desperate approaches toward human economic development and political freedom; it cloaked communism’s crimes while maintaining the West under a kind of perpetual indictment.

The West won the Cold War despite Revel’s grave concerns. But have we learned? Two current examples demonstrate that we have not.

I watched a recent CNN report from Iraq highlighting the bravery and increasing effectiveness of US Marines in coping with so-called roadside IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), planted by Saddamite holdouts and their terrorist blow-in allies. The Marine platoon, followed by CNN correspondent Alex Quade, had improvised their own counter-IED tactics to protect themselves and to kill those that planted them. But plenty of guts were still required to get the job done.

Over the previous two weeks, Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Von Daggenheart and his comrades had hit 22 IEDs. ‘I took some shrapnel in the leg, and thank God for gear, because I took a piece here, then in my holster and then I got shrapnel across my leg. It’s healing up now. It’s all good. My helmet, you can see my helmet, my eyes through here’, he said nonchalantly.

On one patrol, Daggenheart’s platoon encountered an abandoned car by the side of the road, which bore all the hallmarks of an IED. Believing the car to possibly contain a bomb, a marine gingerly attempted to push it off the road using his armour plated Humvee, when the car exploded. The Humvee was a write-off, but the Marine emerged a little shaken but unscathed.

The report was a welcome, if uncommon, counter to the daily dirge of coalition and civilian casualty reports, often cued with graphic enemy supplied home movies with the familiar pre-detonation ‘Allah Akbar’ whispered voiceover. For a moment, it seemed, the media were clueing in to the public’s demand for an end to negative, biased reporting.
But my budding optimism was itself detonated at the end of the story when the reporter signed-off from ‘near Abu Ghraib prison’. Near Abu Ghraib prison? I was confused. Where exactly is Abu Ghraib prison?
Call me ignorant if you want because I don’t have a clue where the infamous prison of American sado-sexual depravity and stupidity is. Oh sure, I knew it was in Iraq, and somewhere near Baghdad. Well, if you’re not exactly sure yourself, I’ve since checked. It’s about 30 kilometres west of Baghdad – roughly equivalent to Sydney’s outer west.

If the CNN reporter had merely said ‘near Baghdad’, would you have been less informed? The answer is no, and you wouldn’t have been left wondering. But as it was left, one could have no doubt what purpose the infamous landmark reference was intended to serve.

Still not sure? Peter Cosgrove’s recent news-making interview with Andrew Denton, on ABC Television’s Enough Rope should make it clear. Denton wastes no time cutting to the chase with the retired defence force chief.

DENTON: You became Commander in Chief of the Defence Forces in 2002. And big issues started landing on your desk. We’re talking Iraq, we’re talking Abu Ghraib, the US alliance. You’d trained all your life as a solider, now this was a political game...Were you ready for it?
Cosgrove merely points out that, the mission which made him most famous, East Timor – skipped over in Denton’s rush to the juicier end-of-career highlights – gave him a first class honours education in political soldiering. Not satisfied, Denton circles back again to... Abu Ghraib.

DENTON: Of course with these other issues, like the US alliance and Abu Ghraib, highly politicised issues within Australia. Not the same thing and you had to step through that minefield.

Cosgrove expressed his regret but said the low point for him was the Sea King tragedy, during the Tsunami relief effort, when 9 Australian service men and women lost their lives. In fact, Abu Ghraib didn’t begin making headlines until mid 2004 – the third and last year of Cosgrove’s command, and it had virtually nothing to do with the Australian Defence Force. To say, as Denton did, that it was one of the ‘big issues’ that ‘started landing’ on Cosgrove’s desk is a bit of a stretch.

Denton, for whom I have a lot of time (about an hour or so Monday nights on ABC), might have remembered that not only did the Tsunami relief effort factor huge in Cosgrove’s responsibilities, politically and otherwise – as compared to the sadistic and apparently bored buffoons running the night shift at Abu Ghraib – but there was that other minor event still ongoing when Cosgrove took command: the liberation and democratisation of Afghanistan.

Australian SAS and other troops were still in action (having deployed in December 2001) when SAS Sergeant Andrew Russell was killed in action only three months earlier, in February. And, in March, the SAS was involved in rescuing downed US Special Forces from behind enemy lines, in Operation Anaconda. But hey, the ABC can blame the Howard Government for that oversight. How much research can you expect on a meagre $750 million budget?

Having obtained Cosgrove’s agreement that Abu Ghraib was a ‘low point’ in the war on terror, Denton goes for the ‘T’ word – and no I don’t mean ‘Terror’, banned by public broadcasters the world over.

DENTON: In war, is torture a legitimate...

PETER COSGROVE: No, absolutely not.

ANDREW DENTON: Never?

PETER COSGROVE: No, you don’t descend to that level…

Well, good thing Denton cleared that up. Because, you know, most Australians, no doubt, were probably wondering if Cosgrove and the Australian military brass condoned torture. The sexual
humiliation – much of it not much worse than what passes for ‘entertainment’ on New York public access television – at Abu Ghraib was outrageous, but the drumbeat of the Left and its media champions is irrational and disproportionate.

You won’t hear much in the media about what went on in Saddam’s ‘prisons’ before Iraq was liberated. Abu Ghraib held tens of thousands of Saddam’s political prisoners. They were subject to torture, many were used as guinea pigs in Saddam’s WMD programs and perhaps as many as 4,000 were executed (not including the 300,000 uncovered in mass graves throughout Iraq. But that is ancient history. What does it matter? Who can remember what happened at Abu Ghraib under previous management?)

Abu Ghraib – the ‘Animal House’ version – will be repeated ad nauseam in the media in one form or another long after those responsible have been investigated, prosecuted and punished, to remind us that the West is inherently culpable for all that is bad or in bad taste. It has been hard wired into the West’s recall-memory; what happened there before and the bravery, innovation and tenacity of Sgt.Von

Daggenheart’s Marine platoon, to habit-memory, which sadly is to say, to oblivion. In that sense, no matter what the US and its coalition partners ultimately achieve, the dateline will always be, ‘somewhere near Abu Ghraib’.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)

Sep 05, AU edition

WILL THERE ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND?
British MP Frank Field visited Australia recently on behalf of the Centre for Independent Studies, and took the time to sit down with Investigate editor James Morrow to discuss the growing crisis in English society – from drunken yobs to home-grown Muslim terrorists – and share his ideas on just what can be done to rescue the ‘mother country’.

INVESTIGATE: I’d like to begin by reading the following extract from The Age’s ‘Eye on Britain’ column, and get your reaction to it: ‘Come the weekend, the high streets of Britain are puddled with vomit. It is part of a ritual that begins in the early evening and ends in the wee small hours, when pubs and clubs close. As their patrons pour out, there seems to be a collective loss of control; bellies give up their contents, bladders burst and tempers fray. The action is caught on closed-circuit television and makes grim viewing.

‘As the police try to restore peace, fights break out like forest fires; when one is dowsed, another flares. The night air is putrid with the smell of food you’d think twice about feeding to the Empress of Blandings. Oaths and invitations to engage in fisticuffs ensure that sleep for the unfortunate residents is impossible. Even on the coldest of nights, the population seems to have dressed for the beach. In the morning, you’d think the place had been paid a visit by Vandals and Goths.’ Is this an accurate description of life in 21st Century England?

FRANK FIELD, MP: In my experience of it is, certainly in some areas. It’s not like this every night but certainly towards the weekend and the weekend itself. In my experience the police don’t try and take the licenses away from people who are serving people who are drunk; they say they need more proof than people falling out of pubs at two o’clock in the morning legless to show that people are being served inappropriately. And when the police do do something they then treat it like a military operation, charging up and down the street, some of them on horssback, and then the whole thing cleaned up in the morning and repeated the next night. So yes, for some areas it is an accurate description. And presumably things will become worse when the government gets is new 24-hour licensing scheme approved. That whole approach comes about, to me at least, because a few cabinet ministers have friends who rush to the pub late at night and down a few quick pints before closing, and think that if hours were extended they could drink ina more civilized manner.

INVESTIGATE: Is this happening across all strata of society, or just in poorer areas?

FRANK FIELD: It’s widespread – the aim of many people is not to go and have a drink the aim is to go and get drunk – I know one banker who is on a million pounds a year, and every weekend he goes to the pub with the aim of getting as drunk as possible, and he drinks about 17 pints a session. But this sort of behaviour, when it is in the lower classes, it wreaks much more havoc. And one of the reasons why it makes more of a difference to poorer people is because if they have problems with a neighbourhood, they can’t toddle off and move somewhere else. So maintaining order is more crucial to them than it is to the rest of us.

INVESTIGATE: Can you paint a picture of life in some of these areas and what makes life so intolerable there? It sounds like the social fabric has really been ripped in some places in England in a way we haven’t seen so much in Australia.

FRANK FIELD: Well there are certainly some areas you don’t go into if you don’t want trouble. But what is more important is the sort of low-level terrorism of unacceptable behavior which is making life in poor areas miserable and is now spreading to middle class areas. I thought at first that people were exaggerating about this sort of thing, but I still remember the time ten years ago when a group of very serious working class pensioners came to my offices and described what life is like when there has been a complete breakdown of younger people having any respect for older people. They told me of young lads running over their roofs, peeing in their letterboxes, and smashing on their windows and giving them a heart attack when they were watching TV.

I said, ‘have you been to the police?’ And you can imagine the look of these poor red-strained sleep-deprived eyes looking at me and saying, ‘oh no, we’ve got to go through this again! We went to the police and the police said we have no control of these people.’

I started thinking about what might we do about this and how we could implement government policy to help. At the time I said we needed surrogate parents in society because of the breakdown of the family, and my idea was that we should give the police powers to show warning cards and then be able to show a red card, and the penalty would then be immediate. Now some of that the government did in a convoluted way with the creation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and the like, in which the criminal justice system gets involved and you go off to collect evidence and they set it up in an adversarial way, but the problem is months and months have gone by since the offense.

The problem with this is that I don’t believe we need to get more people criminal records, but this is what happens now. Often, I just don’t think that the behaviour as appalling as it is warrants the criminal justice system. But people get bored doing one thing, so they ratchet it up, and unless you can nip the in the bud, which I wanted to give the police the power to do, the yobbos will be on to the next thing and on to the next thing – they’ll go from breaking windows to stealing cars. And the horrors that they would visit on pensioners would increase.

INVESTIGATE: And what has happened in these families where there is no control – where are the parents to say, ‘this is not acceptable’?

FRANK FIELD: Oh, you can see even with 3-year-olds which ones able to bully their parents. I was walking through a forest recently and I saw father in what must have been his early 20s, and his young lad ran away by this rocky pool which was really quite dangerous. Well, the dad gave him a whack, and his kid cried, and then he gave him a cuddle and mussed his hair, and the son knew that he wasn’t supposed to do that. I didn’t have courage to say it, but I felt like going up to him and saying, ‘would you like to come sort out the youth of Birkenhead?’

Similarly you need in a community other people in the neighbourhood not being frightened of saying, ‘stop doing that’ so that younger people know that in a public space other people have a say in how you behave.

On the parenting side, we assume that parental skills are passed on by osmosis, just as what makes a civilized nation is passed on. But that respectability that we’re talking about as a nation was built up over 150 years, it doesn’t happen overnight.

INVESTIGATE: The columnist Theodore Dalrymple says that many social problems occur when poor people see rich people acting out certain pathologies, but that poor people are unable to handle the consequences and insulate themselves.

FRANK FIELD: Well, some of the rich can’t handle it either, particularly with drugs. But when you’ve got neighbours from hell and you don’t have a bank balance and can leave, that’s terrible for poor people. Similarly, people who are better off can get their life back together in some way if they have a circle of friends and associates to help, and most of those things are not present in a working class community. The carriers of culture in working class communities are not always in the position to see whether in fact that culture is carried on, and indeed behaviour is often so bad that those who purvey culture do wind up moving out.

INVESTIGATE: In a way it is the downside of social mobility.

FRANK FIELD: One of the things the post-war education
reforms in Britain did is break off the cleverest of the working class, and that certainly had a big impact on leadership in working class areas. I’m not in any way making a plea to turn the clock back, it’s certainly been a good thing, but you used to have the people who would run their trade union or friendly society and other local institutions of culture now running corporations. And I see the impact as I go around the world and I see the number of Birkenhead boys and girls who’ve made their fortune somewhere else – that would have been inconceivable fifty years ago.

INVESTIGATE: What role does deindustriali- zation have to do with all of this? Does the fact that there’s not as much unskilled work around for those left behind make a difference?

FRANK FIELD: When I came to Birkenhead there were 16,000 dockworkers. Today, there are 400 dockworking jobs in my electorate. When you lose unskilled jobs that do pay well, you change the social ecology of the area, not just the economic ecology, in that unless an area pays family wages, you put men at a huge disadvantage in whether they ‘re marriageable or not.

INVESTIGATE: How do the 7/7 tube attacks come in to all this? Those guys had been on the dole for years. Are we creating cultural cesspools that immigrants can come into and get sucked into as well?

FRANK FIELD: Well, we had two bomb attacks, and the ones who failed turned out to have also been the ones who were on welfare. What lessons you draw from that I’m not sure, but it does of course make you think about the success of the welfare-to-work program, through which it was virtually assured that no one remainded more than 6 months on the dole. Now some of these guys had been on the dole for 10 years!

I don’t know whether you saw the recent poll that said that 6% of British Muslims thought the attacks were justified – that’s 90,000 people – and that something like a third sympathize with the attackers who say we’re so decadent that the society should be wiped out. And does all of this come back to the behaviour policies we talked about. We need to have a serious conversation about the our society. What is required in a good life? What sort of qualities do we expect from ourselves and our politicians so that life continues and we’re not blown to smithereens?

That, incidentally, is also the question in international politics in that were are now suddenly confronted with how to stop nuclear weapons from going into the hands of terrorists. The chances are that we will have a nuclear terrorist attack somewhere within the next 10 years – if that doesn’t concentrate the mind, I don’t know what will.

INVESTIGATE: So are we too decadent to defend ourselves, as the terrorists say?

FRANK FIELD: Look at that description of life you gave at the beginning of our talk. If you were an immigrant, would you want your son or daughter to be a part of that? Of course not. We need to have a discussion about what we think about citizenship, and find out what people value about the place they’re in, and I think some of the things we hear will be very unpalatable to the elites. And when you’re a Muslim and you’re trying to save your kids from the barbarism, all around you, that creates an internal tension – the kids must feel that their parents have a point.

INVESTIGATE: What do you think Muslims would say in such a conversation?

FRANK FIELD: ‘How dare you instruct us in civilized behaviour when you allow your young to run in the street and run around drunk and abuse drugs!’

INVESTIGATE: Sounds like we need a rebuilding from the ground up…

FRANK FIELD: That is what is so extraordinary in Britain.
Although the elites built civil society they used national policy as framework, and that translated into character, but then character became a dirty word. And that’s created a big divide with Muslims. But I think the biggest tension there isn’t going to come over civilized values like respect, or hard work, it is going to be about tolerance, and instructing them that tolerance is a two way process, and that that is a virture that has to be universally applied.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)

SCIENCE: Sep 05, AU Edition

MANY HAPPY RETURNS
Researchers have finally discovered the secrets behindthe mysteries of female orgasm, writes Pat Sheil

To the male of the species, being involved in a female orgasm is a wonderfully fulfilling experience. It makes you feel all warm and gooey inside. You may suspect that you weren’t entirely responsible for the successful conclusion of your encounter, but you know that you were a part of it in some small way. Reflecting on what transpired afterwards, you feel much the same as an Amish man walking home from a successful barn-raising.

But what exactly is going on here? There aren’t many men alive who haven’t thought how much fun it would be to actually experience a full-blown female orgasm, if only once. Not so much actually live in a woman’s body for a night, but just to somehow download the sensory data into his skull for a few minutes and feel the heat.

The prospect is some way off, but might just be getting closer. If not quite pinpointing what a woman’s climax is, a researcher in the Netherlands has at least found out what it isn’t. The results are deeply counter-intuitive, and somewhat disappointing for men who like to think that they’re the epicentre of the action.

Gert Holstege, of the University Groningen, recruited 13 heterosexual women and their partners. He asked the volunteers to lie on a scanning machine bed, where they were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function. Then they were wheeled headfirst into the PET scanner, stark naked and legs akimbo.

Holstege’s team compared the women’s brain activity in four states: resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm. (This is the kind of research that only gets done in places like the Netherlands – you just can’t imagine it taking place at the University of Kansas, let alone Lahore. Hats must also go off to a group of horny women whose devotion to science was such that they could manage to come in a lab surrounded with researchers and with their heads stuck in a PET scanner.) So what did Holstege find? It turns out that when women approach climax, whole regions of their brains shut down, and the more excited they get, the more functions cease. Speaking at a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Copenhagen last month, Holsteg said that only one part of the brain was more active than normal during orgasm – the cerebellum, which is normally associated with movement. So if you think she’s making lots of noise because she thinks you’re just tops, well, forget it. In women, the parts of the brain involved in emotion shut down the hotter they get. Alertness and anxiety fall to near zero. It seems that when she’s feeling at her very happiest, she’s feeling nothing but the orgasm itself.

Let’s look at the difference between faked and genuine orgasms for a moment. It’s this data that makes Holstege’s conclusions deeply compelling. ‘The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really changing in the brain’, says Holstege. ‘When women faked orgasm, the part of the brain governing conscious action lit up. It was not activated during genuine orgasm.’

The most striking results, however, were seen in the parts of the brain that deactivated. ‘During orgasm, there was a strong, enormous deactivation in the brain’, Holstege said. ‘It looks like to have an
orgasm, you need to not be fearful or full of anxiety.’

Holstege added that he had trouble getting reliable results from another study on men, because the scanner needs cerebral changes lasting at least two minutes in order to record an activity.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)

FIRST DRAFT: Dec 05, AU Edition

MATT HAYDEN
The address we like to imagine Dominique de Villepin almost gave France…

A POET SHALL LEAD US!
Noble citizens of France, I address you as your Prime Minister and as a humble poet ... Many have baulked at our use of emergency powers to quell the riots. Unfortunately, they have been, how you say, necessaire. We are now down to the usual figure of 90 cars torched per day acrossFrance. Normality, she has returned.

However, we must still reflect on what has happened, non? Our great President Chirac has identified – and bemoaned – a ‘deep malaise’. Sadly, that is not all; there is also an epidemic of existential nausea. (And a literal form, too, as anyone who has walked the streets of Aulnay-sous-Bois knows only too well. Merde, quelle pong!)
So, who do we blame for such sickness, both spiritual and gastronomique?

McDonald’s...j’accuse!

The American culture of fast food and Hollywood violence has taken its toll. (We all saw those armies of rioters in their ‘hip hop’ fatigues, did we not?) This imported junk has poisoned our great nation’s soul. The body politic is aching for sustenance. So, at this grave hour, I seek spiritual food from our literary canon. (Unlike the barbarian Bush, who finds fodder for his military cannon!)

Pilgrim-like I plod through the furrowed fields of Gallic knowledge. Presently I encounter the philosopher Rousseau. Gay sparrow perched atop his head, leopard purring contentedly at his feet, he offers his wise counsel: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”
Yonder kneels Voltaire, trowel in hand. “Dominique, let me be Candide,” he says. “Cultivate your garden.”

It is all so clear! We must make our savages noble once again. We, the intelligentsia, must spill from the salons and travel to our cities’ outskirts to nurture nature in those concrete caverns. We must plant trees therein; make the deserts of the destitute bloom – even at the risk of soiling our smocks!

Then I think of those smouldering Citroens and wonder: but why such hate? It is so not Nice.

Pondering this dissonance, I muse: Yet is ze hate not ze love denied? And does a flame not create as well as destroy? ’Tis true, this fiery river of gall flows from the angry liver of Gaul. But we must not douse this flame; we must harness its heat; create a crackling conflagration in the hopeful hearth of the heart! (Is good analogy, non?)

So, what will ignite this bold new night; consign the ire to a purer pyre? What will hatch this matchless match, to make our suburbs superb?

Blaze moi! I have it: poetry itself!

Let us fight poverty with poetry. Poetry lifts the fallen man; inspires him to build an empire only within himself.

And so to my answer to our great predicament: From this day forth every household in the nation will receive a copy of my collected works. Nightly reading is compulsory.

Vive la France!

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)

TOUGH QUESTIONS: Apr 05, AU Edition

IAN WISHART
Going head-to-head with a reader over the Da Vinci Code fraud

Dear Mr Wishart: In reply to your article regarding Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it would seem to me that Mr Brown has hit a nerve with you. I’m not sure I can put my religious beliefs into a box and label them nicely as one particular religion. I do, however, have a deep-seated interest in the Bible and all the people it talks about, especially Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

I say it hit a nerve because you were unable to support your views with scholarly investigative methods. In fact the only points raised in reply were from the very ‘book’ in question (and a few vague references to academics).

I’d like to comment on the two points you have issues with.

1) You have to remember that Mr Brown’s book is fiction with a few facts thrown in. “More than eighty gospels” is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but not for the reasons you stated. How then can you
explain the omission of the Gospel of Mary written by Mary Magdalene? She was there too! How is her Gospel any less credible or authentic than the others? You say in your article, “the first Christians - those who had seen Jesus alive, watched his crucifixion and witnessed the Resurrection...” This includes Mary Magdalene. I think it was because she was a woman and because although she was with Jesus throughout his ministry she has always been portrayed as the fallen woman, the repentant whore. I ask you to show me where in the Bible it says this. It doesn’t.

2) Jesus’ divinity. Perhaps another reason many gospels were not included in the Bible was that they showed Jesus as a real man, with needs and wants like any other man. There is no doubt in my mind that
he really did walk this Earth, as a mortal man, not a God. He ate, slept, and defecated, like we do. He loved and hated and cried and laughed, like we do. He bled when cut, like we do. He had human needs and human desires. How is it so inconceivable that he married too? That maybe he had a family? Funny how Mary Magdalene figures in this too.

The Council of Nicea decided what would be included in the Bible. This is fact. Research it. It was pointed out recently to me that all the gospels in the Bible tell the story while the ones which were omitted tell of the message. Which do you think is the more important? Have you actually read any of the other gospels? Doesn’t sound like it.
Is it fair to comment on something you have not investigated yourself?
Given your strong stance on the Bible and Jesus I was hoping you could explain a few things to me:

One story in the Bible which has always intrigued me is the story of when Jesus, Peter and Mary Magdalene go to the temple. Jesus and Mary go inside while Peter has to wait outside. Why? Why does Mary go inside and Peter stay outside? The only reason a woman would enter a temple is if she was a priestess herself. (Whoa! Another out-there theory to upset Mr Wishart). Think about it: she saw Jesus after his crucifixion. Why her, and how could she see a dead person? The only logical answer is that she was clairvoyant and she saw his spirit. Jesus could have been the most famous clairvoyant and healer we have ever seen. He was definitely an enlightened man. Whyis this such an impossible scenario?

It is never disputed that Jesus was of the House of David. How can he have a lineage from a mortal father (Joseph) and yet be divine with God as his father. How does this work? And if Mary was a virgin how come Jesus had brothers and sisters. He mentions them repeatedly throughout the Bible. Symbolic meanings, maybe? If so, does it not follow that other things may be symbolic also, like Jesus’ divinity, a virgin birth, miracles? No? Too many contradictions for me!
Jane Applegarth

Dear Jane: I’m not sure after that whose nerve was hit hardest. You dismiss with a mere wave of the hand my assertion that the other gospels came from “dubious sources”. I was actually much stronger than that, stating they were frauds written by followers of a rival religion, Gnosticism. Nor were they written within the lifetime of anyone who witnessed the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus: the Gnostic “gospels”, including the Gospel of Mary you refer to, were written from about 140AD onwards. The Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Peter and a range of others could not have been written by the real Thomas, Mary, Peter, etc., because those disciples died at least 60 years before the Gnostics wrote books in their name.

Karen King’s book on the Gospel of Mary is interesting but utterly worthless. It sheds no light on the real Jesus Christ or the real Mary Magdalene, and is no more biblically authentic than a Taiwanese Rolex.
To illustrate the pointlessness of treating the Gnostic “gospels” as authentic, consider this little dilemma. The Gospel of Peter purports to have been written by the Apostle Peter, except of course that he was actually executed by the Romans nearly 100 years earlier, and that his real gospel is the one written by Mark, who was Peter’s assistant in Rome. Mark’s Gospel was published and in circulation as early as only a decade after the crucifixion.

Regarding Mary Magdalene, you are entirely right that nowhere in the Bible does it say she was a “fallen woman”. Nor do I say it. This is a tradition of the Catholic Church, not founded in Scripture.

Regarding your second point on the divinity of Jesus: while Jesus was both human and divine, he was also sinless. Nowhere in either the Bible, or in contemporaneous extrabiblical accounts, is there a suggestion otherwise. You can be absolutely certain that if Jesus had a wife the real Gospels would have recorded it, because they would have regarded it as a relevant witness to the world. They certainly would not have covered it up, because that would indicate that the Gospel writers themselves were ashamed of Jesus, in which case why would they write the Gospels and why would they be willing to be executed in his name? Doesn’t make sense. Just another daft conspiracy theory from people like Dan Brown.

A wife would also have detracted from Jesus’ stated mission: he was not here to found an earthly kingdom or a divine royal lineage, he was here to sacrifice himself for humanity.

You also wrote: “The Council of Nicea decided what would be included in the Bible. This is fact. Research it.”

I’m sorry, but whomever you’re talking to knows nothing of early church history. And I have researched it. Again, the Council of Nicea was a mere rubber-stamp on what Christians since 50AD had already decided were the authentic Gospels and Epistles. It was no more within the power of the bishops at Nicea to suddenly reinvent Christianity in their own image than it is within my power to prevent a tide coming in. Copies of the New Testament pre-dating Nicea contain the same books and words as copies of the New Testament produced afterwards. As a further sign that the early church regarded only the real Gospels as authentic, you’ll find if you study the writings of the first Christians more than 200 years before the Council of Nicea, that between them they quoted almost the entire New Testament in their letters, and it matches what we have today.

In contrast, one of the early “fathers” of Gnosticism, Marcion, wrote a list of what he regarded as the authentic New Testament in 140AD, the so-called Marcionite Canon, which included the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s Epistles. His list contained none of the Gnostic books, indicating they had not yet been crafted.

The Gnostic gospels were, and are, a crock. A religious flat-earth theory. They suffered their final defeat at Nicea along with their main promoter, a wayward bishop named Arius (much like Lloyd Geering or John Shelby Spong today). Their reappearance today says more about the state of denial some people are prepared to live in than anything about their actual worth.

The primary message of Jesus Christ, and attested to by the genuine Gospels, is that God took on human form, walked the earth in Galilee and gave his life that those who believed in that Act and its significance might repent of their sins and be saved to a resurrection life after death. First and foremost, the message of Christ was spiritual, not social. Good works follow faith, they do not precede it or supersede it.

Concerning Mary Magdalene, it may be my eyes, but I’m unable to find a reference to Jesus, Mary and Peter going to the Temple and Peter having to remain outside. However, the main thrust of your point is that Mary was only allowed in because she was a Priestess/Clairvoyant, because other women were not permitted.

With respect, you are mistaken. There are numerous references in the Gospels to ordinary women entering the Temple to pray and worship. There is no suggestion in the authentic Gospels that Magdalene was a clairvoyant, but assuming that she was for the sake of your argument, I can only presume that the 11 surviving male disciples and around 500 others who witnessed the resurrection appearances were all clairvoyants as well? Even Peter, whom you say had to remain outside?

On to your other questions:

How was Jesus directly descended from David when Joseph was only his adoptive father?

Through his mother, Mary. The genealogy in Luke 3 is via Mary’s father, Heli, back to Nathan, a son of King David and his wife Bathsheba. Jesus was doubly blessed however because under Jewish inheritance rules Joseph was “of the House of David” and so too was his adopted son Jesus.

If Mary was a virgin, how did Jesus have brothers and sisters?
The “brothers and sisters” of Jesus followed later as the full biological children of Mary and Joseph. The idea that Mary was an eternal virgin is, again, a tradition of the Catholic Church not supported by the Bible itself.

Divinity, virgin birth, miracles? No!

For a woman who is prepared to accept, with a lot less evidence, clairvoyancy and ghosts, you then grapple with supernatural themes in the Bible and find them too hard to believe? Sorry Jane, you contradict yourself here. Once you accept any possibility of a supernatural realm you are forced to accept all of its potential, just like you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.

If you wish to read a well-researched book on the authenticity and accuracy of the Gospels in order to get a balanced view, I can recommend Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Gary Habermas’ The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence For The Life Of Christ, or Josh McDowell’s New Evidence That Demands A Verdict, which should all be available at your local library.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)

Simply Devine: Feb 05

MIRANDA DEVINE
The new counter-culture groundswell

You know that by the time a new way of thinking makes it into a Hollywood blockbuster it is already deeply embedded in the culture. When it comes to Team America: World Police, how the thought must make lefties cringe.

Made by South Park’s Trey Parker, 35, and Matt Stone, 33, as a Thunderbirds-style puppet movie, it has a team of trigger-happy, flag-waving Americans fighting terrorists, while the peacenik liberals of FAG, the Film Actors Guild, headed by an “Alec Baldwin” puppet, try to stop them.

It features “Michael Moore”, a hot dog in each hand, as a suicide bomber, “a fat socialist weasel”.The movie opened at No. 1 in Australia last month and was still at No. 5 after three weeks. It strikes a chord, despite the lukewarm reception from a lot of reviewers.

They have said the movie attacks left and right with equal vigour. It does not. They liked the beginning because gung-ho Team America blows up the Eiffel Tower while chasing terrorists. “Let’s go police the world,” say the puppets. But those who thought the movie was a satire against American warmongers were shocked to find the opposite.
To her credit, Margaret Pomerantz of ABC’s The Movie Show gave Team America four stars and declared it “hilarious”.

But her co-host David Stratton was “really disgusted”. “It seems to become completely skewed, in the second half of the film, towards attacking liberals in the film industry,” he said. “Sean Penn and Tim Robbins have been very principled in what they’ve said about the Iraqi war and to deliberately destroy them the way this film does is really playing into the hands of George W. Bush.”

All I know is the teenage boys in the theatre I was in laughed heartily at the obscene jokes, puppet sex and savage mockery of Penn and co.

“As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspaper and then repeat what we read on television like it’s our own opinion,” explains

“Janeane Garofalo”.

“Tim Robbins” complains that corporations are “all corporation-y . . . and they make lots of money!”.

“Sean Penn” keeps saying, “I went to Iraq, you know” and says before Team America arrived there were “flowering meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate, where children danced”.

In one scene, evil North Korean dictator puppet “Kim Jong Il” won’t let UN weapons inspector “Hans Blix”, or “Brix” as Kim calls him, inspect his palace.

“We will be very angry with you, and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are,” threatens Brix, just before Kim feeds him to his shark.

After terrorists blow up the Panama Canal, TV newsreader puppet “Peter Jennings” intones: “Team America has once again pissed off the entire world”. Then “Alec Baldwin, FAG” comes on the screen: “Who’s to blame for these attacks? The terrorists? The people who supplied them with WMDs?” No. “Team America, the blood of the victims of Panama is on your hands.”

The final summation of why the world needs Team America, even if they are, “reckless, arrogant, stupid d—ks”, to save them from terrorist “a—holes” is unambiguous, despite reviewers who expected a puppet Fahrenheit 9/11.

“We tried to make the movie optimistic and pro-American,” said Stone in an interview.

Even new movie The Incredibles has an anti-political correctness theme: super hero family forced to blend into society and hide talents. Super-fast runner Dash thinks it’s not fair: “Everybody is special, Dash,” says his mother. “That’s just another way of saying nobody is,” he moans.

The movie also celebrates family: “Mom and dad’s lives could be in jeopardy, or worse - their marriage!” says daughter Violet. These subversive themes are the new counter-culture.

The way it works is that those who build a culture, over 40 years or so, have a vested interest in maintaining it. So the old counter-culturalists become the conservatives, even though they still think they are progressives and deride as “conservative” those who disagree with them, though disagreeing is counter-cultural.
Then along comes a generation which has known nothing but the old “counter-culture” and feels oppressed by it, because there are so many rules now about how you should think, and to a fresh mind many are absurd.

So you get the first signs of rebellion from the most independent-minded, and soon enough it builds into a tsunami that breaks down the old counter-culture and begins the process anew. This is what is happening now, vomit jokes, puppet sex and all.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

THE ARENA: Sep 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Iraq: For some on the left, it’s the defeat America has to have

Years ago, back when Bill Clinton held the lease to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I had one of the least exciting, yet seemingly most glamorous, jobs in Washington journalism: I was a rotating member of the corps of White House journalists who followed the president whenever he left town.

Once the fun of flying on the president’s jet wore off – the press is sequestered in a small cabin in the rear of the plane equipped with old-school first class airline seats (no sleeper suites here) and a couple of TVs for dialing up movies from a central service somewhere in the bowels of the aircraft – the tedium of the gig set in. A three-day, eight-city fundraising jaunt, listening to the same speech over and over and over again, followed by interminable schedule-destroying waits as the then-president shook every hand in the hall would leave us all exhausted. One of my favourite memories of this chapter of my career was the day the irascible television news presenter Sam Donaldson tagged along and bellowed at each meet-and-greet from our holding pen, ‘Oh, would you just finish up already, so we can GO HOME!’

Why do I bring all this up? Because the patience with which I endured Clinton’s routines was eventually rewarded by my employers, who let me go on holiday with the president. Not holiday in the sense of ‘Clinton and Morrow go cruising on Daytona Beach’, but rather, in that I got to join the rest of the motley crew known as the White House Press Corps in a luxury resort in Florida while Clinton hung out with some friends who had a spread down the road for a couple of weeks. It was one of the great boond- oggles of all time; everyone brought their partners and sat by the pool swilling daiquiris, and the only pretense of work one had to do was occasionally check in with the media centre to see that the announcement ‘Full Lid’ – White House-speak for, ‘ain’t nothing going on here, go play some golf or lie by the pool and have some nice tuna steaks for dinner’ – still applied.

But that was presidential vacation, Clinton-style, and may be one small reason why he got such a free pass from the media for so long. These days, ‘presidential vacation’ duty is a lot less fun, and those ‘lucky’ enough to accompany George W. Bush on holiday get to do so camped out in a tiny town in the middle of Texas in the middle of August with precious few of the creature comforts inside-the-Beltway journos take for granted.

All of this is a very round-about way of getting to the sad story of Cindy Sheehan, which played itself out over the past few weeks on a dirt road outside the Bush ranch. Sheehan, for those not familiar with the story, is the mother of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq; some time ago, she had a ten-minute-long meeting with Bush, after which she said, ‘I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’ Lately, she has taken to demanding another one, simply so that she can berate the commander-in-chief.

Speaking of the way her first meeting with Bush brought her family closure, Sheehan added, ‘That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, the gift of being together’.

Somewhere along the line, though, Sheehan decided to change her tune – from grieving mother respectful of her son’s sacrifice to full-bore, hard-left radical opponent not just of the Iraq War, but, seemingly, everything America stands for. And the place she decided to do this? Camped out in a ditch outside the presidential ranch, where she demanded another meeting (until she upped stumps for a family emergency), surrounded by reporters with nothing better to do than sympathetically cover her ravings. Which, combined with the generally anti-Bush and anti-war tenor of the mainstream media, may explain why Sheehan got such a good run of her fifteen minutes of fame.

But in the midst of Sheehan’s elevation to anti-war movement poster-mum and world-wide front-page story, a few facts have been ignored. Like that before her Texas sojourn, Sheehan spoke at a conference with radical lawyer Lynne Stewart (who defended the Islamists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993) and announced, ‘America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for…the biggest terrorist is George W. Bush’.

And that she’s been heard to comment that Bush should ‘send his two little party-animal girls to war’. Never mind that with an all- volunteer armed services, Bush doesn’t have the power to send any civilian to war.

And that some of her newfound mates have, shall we say, ‘issues’ when Israel comes up, and that se has allied herself with outfits like United for Peace and Justice and the Crawford Peace House, which mark the entire State of Israel as ‘Palestine’ on their websites and who believe that the romantically-named Iraqi ‘insurgency’ (the same one that killed Sheehan’s son) is only engaged in ‘legitimate’ resistance.
Sheehan herself has said her son ‘was killed for lies and for a PNAC neo-con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.’

Not that either, in Sheehan’s book, are worth defending at all.
Not surprisingly, all of this has stood Sheehan in good stead with the anti-war left. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd announced that because she lost a son – one who, incidentally, volunteered to go to Iraq, and whose memory is now being used for political purposes he might very well disagree with – Sheehan has absolute moral authority, and that there is to be no arguing with her.

Alas, there has to be. For not only does she not speak for all families who have lost relatives to the Iraq War, but she also seeks to dishonour those who are there by trashing the country, the mission, and the president they signed up to serve. More to the point, she also raises points that need to be argued, and forcefully: anti-war types like Dowd cannot throw the Sheehan card down on the table like an ace-high straight and expect to walk away with the pot – namely, a wounded America that hobbles back home to lick its humbling wounds while leaving another country in chaos and to the depredation of psychopaths and tyrants.

Sorry, but the Baby Boomers aren’t going to get to relive their Vietnam fantasies that easily.

Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:18 AM | Comments (0)

BOOKS: May 05. AU Edition

CRAZY FOR YOU
This month’s crop of books looks at sanity – and the lack thereof – and sees novels by authors new and established

GOING SANE
By Adam Phillips
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Distributed by Penguin Books. ISBN: 0241142091 $29.95

‘If sanity was a game then how would you learn to play it if the authorities could only tell you when you had broken the rules, but not what the rules were?’

In his new book, Going Sane, Adam Phillips highlights a gaping hole in our language.

Madness is lavished with attention from all quarters, but its perceived opposite, sanity, is barely ever mentioned. Famously mad characters abound in literature and the arts while their sane counterparts fade into the background. The word ‘sanity’ appears only once in Shakespeare, whereas ‘madness’ is referred to over two hundred times. Consideration is similarly uneven in dictionary definitions. Whole sciences are devoted to the study of madness, yet until now a study of sanity has been too dull a notion to consider.

Going Sane’s basic premise is that it might be useful to know what true sanity is: ‘It should matter to us, especially now, that sanity is something we can’t get excited about’. (Phillips must be using the royal ‘we’ as he is definitely getting very personally excited.)
Typically, the definition of sane is ‘not mad’. Justifiably unsatisfied with this, Phillips analyses the reasons that sanity is so difficult to define. Traditionally, madness is equated with loss of control, while sanity is law-abiding. To be mad is to be excessive, unpredictable, dangerous; to be sane is to be safe. He contends that the opposition between sanity and madness is not as absolute as has sometimes, rather often, been asserted.

Going Sane begins with the casual attitude that it will all come together in the end (which it does), but the book’s no good to anyone if you can’t get through Part One. Lengthy, muddy notes toward a definition of sanity are enough to send anyone barking. A little bit more of the humour that mitigates his earlier books wouldn’t have gone astray.

Many interesting points are raised but they lose impact in the jungle of information presented. Phillips has a habit of bracketing his insights: the sane, as so often happens, are rarely contemporary. He is clearly brilliant enough to write on these matters, so the unpolished delivery must reflect a conscious decision to keep it loose. Going Sane has no index; it’s not supposed to be that kind of book.

Anthropologists, philosophers, writers and poets are all thrown into the mix. There are quotes from the likes of Freud and Foucault, and many obscure sources too. This amalgam of quotations in Going Sane indicates an obsession with well-written doctrines, regardless of origins. The theories are expansive rather than reductive and to distil them is to deny them their scope.

For almost twenty years, Phillips worked in child psychotherapy. In Going Sane he examines many different schools of thought. There are those that believe children reflect our primitive selves and will thrive with sufficient understanding and those that sanction the taming of this wild side, all the while paradoxically aware that it’s an impossible task. He writes, ‘All modern prescriptive child-rearing literature is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad, and how not to be driven mad (by the child).’ Phillips conducts an open-minded discussion of the contemporary approaches parenting, ever so quietly exploring the folly of our ways. Did I mention he was clever?

The term ‘thought-provoking’ is bandied about like a power tool so perhaps a combination of radical and perceptive is a better way to describe Going Sane. I argued along as I read it, which was not as unpleasant an experience as it might sound. Going Sane crystallised personal beliefs and opinions on subjects that might have otherwise have passed through the censor unchecked.

Often compared to Alain de Botton (author of best-selling Status Anxiety and originally famous for How Proust Can Change your Life), Phillips is also a philosopher of happiness. Both men filter centuries of impenetrable wisdom into a palatable format fit for contemporary taste and have a reputation for laying it straight. Phillips doesn’t match de Botton’s wit and has never been anywhere near as hip. However, it could be argued that de Botton is in the business of rehash while an ambitious Phillips plots out new turf.

Colours magazine recently devoted an issue to the mentally ill featuring vivid portraits of people from all over the world confined in treatment facilities for the ‘mad’. Unnervingly, when interviewed, many of them don’t sound that unhinged. There is a photo of a man living in a small African village who has been chained to a tree stump for roughly seven years. Phillips can expound on the glamourisation of madness all he likes, but there are real people (literally) at stake who might argue otherwise. It is a shame that despite all the best intentions, academic excursions rest somewhat uncomfortably in the context of human suffering.

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THE SINGING
By Stephanie Bishop
NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005. ISBN: 1876040548 $26.95

Stephanie Bishop’s first novel, The Singing, does not have any songs in it. The ‘singing’ in this book is atmospheric - it refers to the essence of the work rather than its substance and was probably a good call given that anything along the lines of ‘Decaying Love’ would not have had quite the same ring. While a broken love story about a relationship that folds under the weight of long-term illness may not immediately have punters reaching for their wallets, the quality of Bishop’s writing certainly will.

Triggered by a chance meeting with an ex many years on, The Singing is the story of one woman’s endeavour to understand and contain the past. The relationship begins as they always do, with the sense that this was the start of the rest of their lives. After a time, the woman develops a serious illness that no one can name and quietly watches the world as her health deteriorates. Her partner assumes the role of caretaker. A natural to the task, he has a history of falling in love with fragile women. He has left his children from a previous relationship and he has also abandoned his painting for work that can support them.

The Singing is prefaced with a quote by Virginia Woolf that begins ‘the Public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot’. No doubt, Bishop is hoping to head them off at the start with this one – however, afraid of Virginia Woolf as I am, I have to say I found the story a little indulgent. Nevertheless, the writing is sublime.

With a poet’s gift for expressing the symbolic in literal terms, Bishop thankfully also has the clarity to avoid any of the funny business that often pairs with this tendency: ‘I saw words fall from him… I did not know what they were but I knew they were there. I heard them hit the ground.’ She apprehends the point in a relationship when there is nothing left to say. The heroine feels ‘like a statue of a woman whose lips are open while her mouth remains filled with stone’.
Like Woolf, Bishop is intrigued by ‘that very ordinary thing of the present depending on the past and the future depending on the present, and visa versa.’ Memory has always been a hot topic. I think both Freud and Aristotle would appreciate Bishop’s take on it: ‘We do not get over anything. It becomes, over time, less acute, but it comes back, it always comes back, hitting me hard in the chest when I least expect it and never quite making it to that tame place that is known to us as memory.’

The Singing is startlingly well-written and there is a lot of hype surrounding Bishop’s debut. Helen Garner is launching the book in Melbourne and has described Bishop as ‘a striking new voice, calm and fresh’. It even has a painting by Tim Storrier on the cover. Bishop, 25, is doing well to have the big guns on side so early in the piece but then again, good novelists almost always start young.

Stephanie Bishop has taken the time it takes to compose something beautiful and the results instil great trust in her abilities as a writer. It’s a promise not quite fulfilled, I feel, but then how many writers hit their stride on the first attempt? Helen Garner pulled it off with Monkey Grip, which was an immediate success. More recently, Gregory David Roberts managed it with Shantaram, but it does not generally work out like this; Charles Dickens is not exactly famous for Sketches by Boz.

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Reviewed by Michael Morrissey:

WORKING WITH MONSTERS
By John Clarke
Random House, ISBN: 1740511549 $22.95

They intimidate. They manipulate. They show no remorse. They are superficially charming. And they may be sitting at the desk next to you. That’s the surprising –or unsurprising – message of this book. From movies like Psycho and a thousand sequels we all feel we know what a psychopath is – someone who kills without feeling – except sadistic enjoyment. Psychologist John Clarke has some grim news: the majority of psychopaths are not homicidal maniacs but are instead all around us, in the workplace.

It is a male-dominated field. Clarke estimates between one and three per cent of the adult male population are psychopaths, while only .5 to one per cent of women qualify. Clearly, women have some catching up to do, unless they’re just more subtle about it. As Clarke sees it, psychopaths are highly intelligent, score well on job applications, and often rise quickly up the corporate ladder. Having no conscience, they feel no guilt, and can therefore fly through a lie detector test.
Apart from the well-known criminal variety, Clarke analyses in detail three ‘civilian’ types of psychopath: organisational, corporate criminal and occupational. The difference between the organisational and occupational psychopath seems a bit subtle; the former is on his way up the ladder, while the latter may stay on the same rung for ages. The corporate criminal psychopath, meanwhile, has his eye on fraud.

The corporate criminal type is very similar to a con artist: the guy who plays on the victim’s weakness, extracts money for some get-rich scheme, and when challenged, as Clarke puts it, states that ‘maybe the victim really does not deserve to have the dreams fulfilled as they do not have the courage or the determination to achieve them’. The victim may at this point be asked to inject even more money into the ‘scheme’ to prove their commitment to the psychopath. The psychopath may pretend the extra money is still not enough to win back his `trust’.

Eventually, the victim, as well being financially drained, is emotionally crushed. When the scam is revealed, the victims lose confidence in their own ability to make decisions because the biggest final decision they made ‘proved to be the biggest mistake of their lives’.

It’s hard to come up with a punishment to fit the crime and Clarke doesn’t even try - that’s not his bag. Chillingly, he warns that treating rather than curing psychopaths may make them worse: in group discussions psychopaths ‘may learn more effective methods for committing crime’. Clarke does, however, make a number of practical suggestions to ‘manage’ the organisational type beginning with talking to employees about bullying.

If the pattern of manipulation and bullying sounds like someone in your office, Clarke warns against a quick amateur diagnosis and recommends a professional be called in. A warning sign of psychopathological presence: well above-average rates of resignation. Consider yourself warned.

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SURRENDER
By Sonya Hartnett
Viking, ISBN: 0670028711 $29.95

Surrender is a passionately wrought tale of adolescent obsession. The narrator, Gabriel, makes a pact with wild-boy Finnigan. To his regret, one might imagine. Or not? Blood oaths, pacts, secret societies, friendships unto death are, it seems, built into the male psyche. At a revolutionary level, let us speculate, it may be the dog-wolf in us – the part of the psyche that says survival depends on close ties with fellow warriors, banded together against the enemy.

There is a fierce poetry to Harnett’s style that sits nicely with the more inward-thinking Gabriel but less well with the near-psychotic Finnigan. Gabriel, who is in hospital reflecting on his short life, says of himself, ‘I weigh perhaps as much as a small suitcase carrying the necessities of a night’ – a lovely encapsulation of self diminishment, an insightful sliver of self doubt. When Finnigan, vicious arsonist, declares, ‘I wanted to break my knuckles on his pathetic rebellion, crack his skull on his poxy immunity’, it comes across as a tad overwritten, not the more urgent demotic voice one might expect. The narrative only allows very short excerpts from Finnigan which to my mind makes the book imbalanced.

A dual first-person narrator has worked well in such noted novels as The Collector, The End of the Affair and A One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding and it works best when the two voices are widely separated in tone and language and each given plenty amounts of space to have their say. Part of the problem I had with Surrender is I don’t relate well to books that have dogs as prominent characters. Then there is Vernon, Gabriel’s idiot brother. So we have two characters who, by necessity, have nothing to say.

The hatchet blows that suddenly strike Gabriel’s mother and father have the same leisurely yet shocking quality of the Southern Gothic novel – of, say, Flannery O’Connor – yet they shock us less. Surrender is full of a dark and vivid poetry that invites us to admire but not quite so successfully to feel.

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THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape, ISBN: 0224074539 $49.95

A new novel by Philip Roth is always an event worthy of notice – will it win the Pulitzer or the National Book Award? My gues