Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Choice | Apr 19, 2005 11:43

Surely, if God actually chose the Pope it would be much simpler. Just put everyone's name in a hat, and have an innocent child draw out the name of the next pontiff. If God wants an African Pope, or a Latin American one - or for that matter a female one - then that's what'll come out. Surely. Or in keeping with John Paul II's fondness for new technology, you could set up a nice little quantum experiment to do the same job. That would be cool.

But no, instead, there are whispering campaigns, pre-emptive leaks and, generally, all manner of politicking. Essentially, liberal clergy are deeply concerned at indications that the ultra-conservative Cardinal Ratzinger (nicknamed the "Darth Vader" of the Vatican) has the inside running.

Ratzinger has taken a hard line on preventing those whose thoughts are at variance with church doctrine from taking Communion (he says it is permissible to disagree with the Holy Father on capital punishment and the waging of war, but not on euthanasia or abortion). He has a fan club, but is not very popular at home in Germany.

New Zealand theologian Mike Riddell considered The Ratzinger Doctrine in 2000, and found "no surprise in the fact that Ratzinger, the Vatican's Schwarzenegger of doctrine, should come out with a statement reasserting Catholic monopoly on divine revelation. But the seal of papal authority on such revisionist diatribe has insiders disturbed."

And this article by Megan Hartman offers a handy timeline of the debate in the church regarding contraception, both before and after the Humanae Vitae in 1968, in which Ratzinger features.

Although John Flanagan predicted a softening of the Vatican's attitude to contraception (which is frequently ignored in the developed world) the Church's line has held fast in some developing countries, including the Philippines, where the Diocese last month told government health workers who promoted contraception not to bother turning up for Communion.

The faithful point to escalating divorce rates (not in New Zealand, actually) and ageing European populations as proof of the church's wisdom on contraception. David Rockefeller put the alternative case in a great essay in 1997, in which he presciently saw the gains of recent decades being eroded under pressure from religious conservatives:

For women, limited options can be deadly. Some 585,000 women die of pregnancy-related causes every year, 1,600 every day. Nearly half of those women would still be alive if they could have prevented unwanted pregnancies; nearly all would be saved if they had access to adequate reproductive health care. The leading cause of maternal death – postpartum hemorrhage – is most common among poor women who have undergone many closely spaced births. For every woman who dies in childbirth, another 30 suffer from serious maternity-related disabilities, which frequently lead to a lifetime of suffering. And every year 50 million women abort unwanted pregnancies, often in circumstances where abortion is illegal and unsafe, and 75,000 die in the attempt.

Where women lack reproductive health services, children die as a result. Every year, seven million infants die because their mothers were not physiologically ready for pregnancy or lacked obstetric care. Poor children born into large families are far more likely to die before their fifth birthday than children in smaller families. This is especially true when births follow one another closely. In poor families, children born less than a year and a half apart are twice as likely to die as those born two or more years apart. When mothers die in childbirth, their children also have dim prospects for survival.

And, where parents are not free to limit the size of their families, they cannot help but invest less in the welfare of each child. Poor children from large families are less well nourished and less likely to attend school than poor children from small families. Sadly, unwanted children fare the worst: they are more likely to be neglected, malnourished and abused than their wanted counterparts.

It's currently very fashionable for political conservatives to blather on about "abstinence" as if it were some magic invocation that fixed everything (Deborah Coddington even managed some hypocritical bitching around the A-word in her honeymoon column from San Francisco). And NZ Pundit and I argued about this column by Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph:

But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's position.

This is classic Steyn: smug, censorious, hectoring - and pretty much fact-free. Uganda's success in slashing HIV infection rates did not come from a rejection of "condom culture" but exactly the reverse. And as this very good (and fact-filled) story from the New York Review of Books demonstrates, that success is now under threat.

Oh, and if you're looking for interesting coverage of the papal vote, Paul Wilkes on BeliefNet seems both intelligent and informed.

I've shamed Deborah Hill Cone into resuming her blog, even if she has just bunged a couple of columns in there. But her Mediawatch appearance on Sunday has won her a fan in blogdom ("Don't know what she looks like, but from her writing, what a babe").

Act's Muriel Newman presumably decided that she didn't already look weird enough on Eating Media Lunch and late last week released a newsletter headed The Government's Gay Agenda. What's got her going is a couple of policy proposals aimed at getting an idea of how many gay folk there really are - not unreasonable when you're making legislation that affects them. She also passes on a constituent's concerns about a camp (no pun intended) for young GLBT people which could amount to "government funded recruiting grounds for those with alternative sexual agendas." Given that the event is being jointly organised by the police, it seems unlikely to function as either a gay shag-fest or a "recruiting ground", but whatever …

No Right Turn has made a start on the election campaign with a candidate survey canvassing issues ranging from marijuana decriminalisation to the use of the law on sedition and the handling of the Zaoui case. They're not trick questions, and it would be nice to see candidates go on the record. He's had one response so far, from Hamish McCracken, the Labour candidate for East Coast Bays.

Anyway: I only noticed yesterday that the web stats package that CactusLab runs for Public Address now has a geolocation plug-in. Cool. The most common destination for the pages we've served so far this month is, unsurprisingly, New Zealand, with just shy of 80,000 pages. But the US puts in a solid showing, with more than 20,000, followed by Britain on about 8000, and Australia with about 4300.

But next is ... Mexico! Persons unknown in that fine country have viewed more than 2000 Public Address pages in April. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with David Slack's gig writing speeches for a prominent politician there. Less surprising is a sound result from Japan, where I know we have some long-term expat readers.

Thereafter, Germany, France and Canada are clustered between 1000 and 1500. Further down the list, we've served more pages to Algeria (54) than to the Czech Republic (51). But that's still more than South Africa, surprisingly low on only 36 pages till yesterday. We had visits from Iran (17 pages), the Ukraine (6), Georgia (5), Syria (2) and Zimbabwe, with a rather mournful one single page served there.

The list reflects population, respective Internet penetration, language spoken - and where the local diaspora reaches. I know that we have expat readers in some very distant places, and I've decided I'd like to hear from you. A bit like The Expat Files, but focusing on where you're at, rather than thinking of home.

So ... how's life? What's a working day like where you are? How are the people? It is heaven or hell? How's the food? What do you like best? What's commanding the news headlines where you are? What are the politics like?

Send anything you've got to say to me via the feedback link at the bottom of this post, with the subject line "Dispatches" and I'll collate and post it. I can maintain your anonymity if need be.

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On Drugs | Apr 14, 2005 10:26

Having kicked off the psychedelic revolution in 1954 with The Doors of Perception, a still-entrancing account of a maiden mescalin trip, Aldous Huxley subsequently fell out with Timothy Leary on the matter of who should really get access to this stuff.

Leary wanted to turn on the world; Huxley believed that the use of LSD, mescalin and psilocybin should be restricted to artists and the elite. (Arthur Koestler, on the other hand, had a few trips and went off the whole business.)

Huxley felt that opening the door to everyone would cause more trouble than it was worth; more to the point, it would get the good stuff banned. And banned it was, of course. This did not prevent its production or use, just criminalised it.

Fast forward then, to 2005, and the government's move to ban the sale of "nos" - nitrous oxide - for recreational use, or, rather, to clarify the existing law to the same effect.

It's not as if nos partying is actually new; bohemian types were taking sly hits from cannisters of cream decades ago. Dental students have been taking lunchtime nos breaks even longer. And I may or may not have had the most spectacular hallucinatory experience of my life about 20 years ago in New Plymouth, after encountering two of Taranaki's finest products: magic mushrooms and a large tank of nos liberated from a Think Big project.

That was all very well. But what if they started serving the stuff in bars? Well, they have, in Christchurch - and now "on weekend nights in the city centre, young people can be seen doubled over on the footpath outside nos bars, sucking on $5 gas-filled balloons and giggling as they enjoy a dizzying high."

This not a particularly appealing look (although it's worth noting that a couple of years ago the story concerned young people falling over drunk and fighting in the same streets of the same city) and local community leaders are further distressed by the proliferation into the suburbs of shops specialising in such legal highs as nos and piperazine-based party pills. Just what is it about Christchurch? Can't they sell party pills at dairies like they do in Auckland?

Nos is an interesting case. In occasional doses, it's near as dammit to harmless. It doesn't make people fight or (assuming they're not using while actually driving) kill others on the road. But, as the Erowid.org entry notes (kids, if in doubt, always check Erowid), chronic abuse of it is quite unhealthy. And although it's nowhere near as unpredictable as GHB, there are risks involved in anything that might make you lose consciousness. Every now and then, an American student is found dead with a nos-filled bag over his head. That's a sad way to go.

So although actual problems might be very few, it's understandable that the good burghers of Christchurch would be uneasy about the advent of dial-a-nos delivery services and the invasion of sleepy suburbs by legal-high chain stores. Trouble is, their kids are mad for it, and visibly so.

(Compare to salvia divinorum, a very short-acting but powerful psychedelic, which, after a brief flap four years ago, remains available as a legal niche drug because the kids largely aren't visibly mad for it.)

As ever, we come back to our bingeing culture. Necking 10 or 15 BZP pills will produce extraordinarily unpleasant results; so will an equivalent alcohol overdose. But people do it. It's a silly misuse of resources to have police chase mushroom-hunters around Woodhill State Forest every year - but there'll always be the clown who loads up on shrooms and tries to drive, or has a panic attack. Generations have had fun with uppers - yet it's ironic that they've lately gone mainstream in their most potentially destructive form: inhaled methamphetamine vapour, or, as it's better known, P.

In the end, it's just dumb for the state to heavily criminalise personal behaviour, or to apply a different standard to one intoxicant over another. But it would be so much easier to respect the personal freedom to alter one's consciousness if you knew you weren't going to have to clean up afterwards. Perhaps, in the long run, less prohibition would mean more moderation. The Dutch have arguably pulled it off: we don't seem to be all that close yet.

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Very Hairy | Apr 13, 2005 10:13

And so, a political solution. Not so much the only solution as the only one that wasn't completely horrifying to contemplate. Really, would you rather be savaged by a dead sheep Don Brash, or face the very real possibility of your renegade MP going completely feral, while he is cheered on by the substantial sector of the public that sees him as a loveable straight-shooter no matter what he says or does?

It was Tamihere's pathological inability to let anything lie that got him embroiled in the brawl with his successors at the Waipararera Trust that eventually led to his woeful Investigate interview; and which led him to revive his blog with that insane attack on 3 News. Revenge for John is not so much a dish best served cold as a greasy takeaway to be scarfed down on the footpath outside the chippie.

This is not to suggest that John Tamihere was not entirely contrite when he gatecrashed caucus yesterday. He actually did look like he'd had the bollocking of his life when he emerged: his emotional charge runs both ways. The impression isn't just that no other MP would have got out of this, but that no one else would have got remotely this far into it.

This just in: It seems to be quite the week for the Prime Minister: news of a genuinely serious air incident and emergency landing just after 9am today. She's just confessed to Linda Clark on National Radio that she was wondering "will I live or will I die?" as her small plane plummeted and the door came off. Crikey!

Meanwhile, I distracted myself from more pressing work yesterday by perusing Justice Neazor's report on the Sunday Star Times' hoax SIS story. My initial impression is that while the paper blew past various warning signs in the course of the investigation, the basic mistake was made right up front: in not picking up the fact that the initial source, the so-called Jack Sanders was a known fabulist who had been exposed by the New Zealand Herald more than a year before the SST began "investigating" his claims. A little Googling along the lines of "Sanders", "Nauru" and "Beijing" would have saved many tears later on.

By the way, a wee Google on the name of the alleged SIS operative, Steve Buttell, suggests that perhaps some diplomatic advisories are due on the issue of the New Zealand China Business Club, which seems to be a construction of Buttell himself. A Chinese website translated roughly here mentions a cocktail speech by its "president" Buttell. This 2004 newsletter from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat describes him as the club's "newly appointed chairman". There are no other relevant results for either Buttell or the New Zealand China Business Club. Hmmm.

But the most astonishing thing now that it all lies in ruins is the fact that Star Times editor Cate Brett allowed her response to be managed by a public relations firm and will say nothing beyond a rather surprising press statement (short version: it's our job to toss allegations out into the public domain, somebody else's to find out if they're true). Isn't this someone who was calling for other people to front up? I might be wrong, but I'm still inclined to feel a little sympathy for the journalists here (more so Nicky Hager, who was contracted in after the story started) on the suspicion that Fairfax management pushed the story for competitive reasons even after the journalists had begun to have their doubts.

NBR's Nevil Gibson says he's taking my description of him as "the old warhorse" as a compliment. Which it was, actually.

And finally, allow me to welcome the award-winning Tze Ming Mok and the award-winning Keith Ng into the Public Address whanau. I'm delighted to have them with us, and as you'll see they've already made themselves at home. But I dunno, you invite these people in and they start talking funny in your lounge and everything …

PS: I did like Eating Media Lunch's coverage of the recent Destiny march in Auckland last night; not least because it fairly demonstrated that the anti-Destiny protestors were, if anything, more annoying than the marchers themselves ...

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News from the front bum front | Apr 11, 2005 09:45

Early Friday evening, I was sitting on the couch wondering how far removed from the reality of a rugby game Murray Mexted could get and still be considered to be actually commentating on it, when a text message arrived on my phone: "You have just been named Business Columnist of the Year at the MPA Awards." Cool.

I write a monthly column called 'Left Field' for Unlimited magazine, which entered the column in the Magazine Publishers Association Awards on my behalf. I edged out Donal Curtin in the same magazine, and Sir Bob Jones. Clearly, there was no tipping off, because no one bothered inviting me, but that was alright. I didn't really feel like dressing up.

Still, I was pleased. It will confuse the people who think I'm an extreme left-winger (many of whom, it must be said, wouldn't know entrepreneurial spirit if it bit them on the ass) and I can ask for a raise when I go in and collect the award. It's also probably the only journalism award I'm going to win this year, having had a Week from Hell and missed the deadline for the Qantases earlier in the year.

After the rugby, a couple of mates arrived round to take me to the King's Arms, where Ghost Club (featuring former 3Ds David Mitchell and Denise Roughan) were playing. It turned out to be more like a social event than a gig, but it was fun to catch up with a lot of people I haven't seen in a while. Various other people partied off into the night afterwards, but I need my sleep these days, so I went home to sip on my last shot of single malt and watch BBC World for a bit.

I am never happier or more in balance with the world than when I am cooking a great big pot of something, so on Saturday I made a huge pasta sauce with some sieved tomatoes and a couple of kilos of Romas that I got cheap on Lincoln Road. I also stopped in at A Taste of Europe and bought some prosciutto to wrap around my free-range chicken drums ($3 a kilo at The Mad Butcher!), on to which I subsequently poured some of the pasta sauce and a cup of wine, chucked in some capsicum and giant Kalamata olives, and did the lot in an open dish in the oven. Served it with couscous and mesculun salad: came up nicely.

Come Sunday, the Tamihere factor was certainly at play in the papers. The Herald on Sunday led with Ian Wishart letting slip some choice interview quotes that hadn't made print in his magazine - apparently in retaliation for Tamihere's unbelievable decision to return to the scene of the crime and try and secretly get some restaurant staff on tape saying that they hadn't seen a tape recorder on the table when he lunched with Wishart.

Clearly, it was felt that there were whole groups of people who had not been alienated by Tamihere: so now you can add Jews and the leader of his small Parliamentary fan club Clayton Cosgrove to the list.

I have made the point before that respecting Jewish cultural sensitivity will not see you reflexively accused of "political correctness" by right-wing windbags the way that respecting the feelings of women, gays or Maori will (and got a rather alarming email from David Zwartz for my trouble; I tried to explain that he'd missed my point). Rodney Hide can cheerfully stand up in Parliament and paraphrase Tamihere to claim a "lesbian cabal" is running the country, because he knows that he has little to lose by doing so. But you would never hear him advance a similar claim as to a "Jewish cabal". (And there has been no fuss at all over the other part of that comment in which he said he was "sick and tired of hearing how many Jews got gassed" - that he was sick of hearing about the historical grievances of Maori.)

In short, the defence of being a good old non-PC bloke is not available here. And for most people Tamihere's comments will constitute the final straw. It certainly has for the Prime Minister, who has shut the door on a Cabinet return and sent her troublesome MP on indefinite "stress leave". She really had no choice: the Jerusalem Post has already reported both his comments and Clark's emphatic rejection of them as "breaking news".

Mercifully, we agreed in our house today that another comment from the Wishart file - Tamihere's reference to women as "front bums" was actually crudely funny rather than offensive. And a cruel person might find some humour in the Cosgrove situation too …

So why did Wishart choose to withhold the most incendiary statement in a published interview full of such statements? Because he chose to use only the material that supported his well-known perception of the Clark government as a bunch of godless lesbian feminists? Quite probably.

It would seem that there is still some doubt as to whether Tamihere knew that Wishart was recording him for an on-the-record interview - or at least that the presence of a recording device on the table was obvious. For TV One's Agenda, Simon Pound also went out to the Soljan restaurant and also found staff saying they had not seen a tape recorder. There's a transcript of his piece on the Agenda website (nice work!).

Anthony Hubbard's backgrounder in the Star Times notes that Tamihere may have become used to speaking frankly to journalists in Wellington, without fear of having every loose word reported. This is doubtless true, and a reality of political journalism. Reporters who rush to print with every word they hear soon find that they're not hearing everything.

But you can't deny his pull on the media: of the four items on the Star Times' op-ed page - one editorial and three columns - all four dealt with Tamihere, as did the column of political editor, and former Tamihere press secretary, Helen Bain.

I thought the girls had the best of it: in the SST, Rosemary McLeod essentially said, well, so what if gay folk have some influence in the government (the kind of influence that bothered no one much when it belonged to industrialists, Catholics, Rotarians, fourth cousins of earls, and returned soldiers")? In the HoS, Kerre Woodham made the point that "the John Tamihere Appreciation Society is claiming, in a sanctimonious fashion, that all Tamihere did was tell the truth and a man shouldn't be punished for being honest. I beg to differ. He wasn't telling the truth. He was offering an opinion." And, of course, everyone's got one of those: not least some of Tamihere's Parliamentary colleagues. But perhaps Bain, who would be in a position to know, had it right in her list of contradictory acts committed by either "Good John" or "Bad John".

Elsewhere, Media Matters looks at how the conservative blogs and media feverishly gathered "evidence" to prove to themselves that the notorious Republican Schiavo memo was a Democratic dirty trick - until it became apparent that it wasn't. Hilarious reading, if a little disturbing. Power Line still won't apologise, of course. I suspect that quite a few other people, I made the mistake of thinking that Time naming Power Line its Blog of the Year meant it might actually be a conservative blog worth reading, in the way that, say Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan are. But, no: as Ezra Klein pointed out in a savagely funny little post:

They get nothing right. Their fact-checking skills are atrocious. They neither report nor call experts, it's just whatever they invented twenty seconds ago. Watching them work is like attending a high school debate match in the impromptu event. Arguments are created on the fly, accuracy is unimportant so long as the product accuses the "MSM" or Democrats of some cardinal sin that'll leave Powerline's sycophantic readers moaning with the exquisite pleasure that comes only from having one's biases expertly stroked. The plausibility of their claims ranges from pathetic to laughable (has Big Trunk debated PZ Myers on the biological uncertainty of evolution yet?) and their traffic and credibility is entirely predicated on the work someone else did, success they've been totally unable to replicate. They have failed.

August J. Pollak has more on what now appears to have been officially named PowerLine-Was-Completely-Fucking-Wrong-Gate.

Oh, and some bad news for fans of Douglas Adams: early reviews indicate that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie sucks as few films of its kind have ever sucked before. There's also a list of things that are missing from the movie (including, unbelievably, the Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster) and a Slashdot discussion.

PS:Just got an email from Jeremy Corbett to let me know that the marvellous Hairy McClairy-Tamihere parody in fact originated at More FM and was the work of breakfast producer and comedian Paul Ego. Due credit, mad props, etc.

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