Public Address - Hard News (Home)

New mysteries | Oct 27, 2003 22:08

One of the tests of major political party leadership - and Prime Ministerial potential - is being able to smoothly run one's own ascension, by dint of coup or otherwise. If you can't do that, how can you run the country?

So what, then, are we to make of Don Brash's curious tilt at Bill English, into which he appears to have had to be pushed by the press and his political allies? Speaking of whom, what price the Act party, which clearly has a hand in this, eventually offering Brash a spot in the run-on team if his bid fails? He'd presumably find more people who wanted to stay up late talking about Hayek there …

I guess I should see what the gossip is, being as how I'm in Wellington for the week. I'm helping judge the Tuanz Interactive Awards, then changing into a suit to MC the awards function on Wednesday night. That will be interesting. Bill Ralston once urged me to sign up with one of those after-dinner speaking agencies and cash in, but I can't think of anything worse than banging out a set speech for some suburban Rotary club on a Tuesday night, not to mention having to eat with the buggers. But where I have an affinity for the subject, as I do with these awards, I don't mind doing a turn. And they are paying me.

Staying with mysteries, what are we to make of the stray GM enzyme that has turned up in Zealand-sourced dough being used by the Subways chain in Japan?

Well, a few basics: the enzyme in the dough is not a genetically modified organism. It's a protein manufactured in a process that uses a genetically modified bacterium to express that protein. (A similar process is also used to make about 30 different medicines approved for use in New Zealand.)

Over the years quite a number of such enzymes have been widely approved for use in food production, including in Europe and New Zealand, which this one is. In fact it's slightly odd that the enzyme hadn't been approved in Japan.

The enzymes have catalytic properties that improve the performance and reliability of the dough. As far as I know, the enzymes used in food production are naturally-occuring, but manufacturing offers a more economical and reliable way of getting them than the old way - typically extracting them from the viscera of animals. (The natural source of rennase, which is necessary for cheese-making, comes from the stomachs of slaughtered calves. More than half Britain's cheese is made with GM-derived rennase - which, for Jews, has the advantage of being kosher - but most New Zealand producers use either animal rennet or a vegetable rennet that is suitable for some cheeses.)

Ironically, some of the enzymes used in industrial baking used to be present in much greater quantities in the natural grain, but have been steadily bred out in pursuit of optimum starch content.

The industry-friendly (and US government-funded) rundown here looks at the history and scope of enzyme use in processing.

This is already being talked up by GM opponents as a traceability issue, but it's hard to tell if that's the case. After all, Subway Japan discovered the enzyme was used in the dough after it asked for documentation from Yarrows, the New Zealand company making the dough. What prompted it to ask, four years after it started importing the dough? Was it, as Marian Hobbs mused, perhaps a well-timed anti-GE sting? Who knows?

It is clear, however, that more scrutiny than ever will go on the chain of traceability, and that the precise origin of even minor ingredients - which four years ago possibly just didn't seem like an issue - will become a commercial, if not a safety, issue.

Black Hawk Down in Iraq. It has a scary ring to it. The Guardian offers an extremely downbeat analysis of the occupying forces' fortunes, claiming two dozen attacks against US soldiers every day, and a precipitate fall in support from ordinary Iraqis.

And a little earlier on, they almost got Wolfowitz. The US deputy defense secretary was only one floor above where missiles hit the supposedly impregnable al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad. Whatever ignomy was represented by Wolfowitz having to flee down the stairs, it could have been a lot worse.

I had wondered whether the resistance forces – whoever the hell they are – had twigged that attacks on Iraqi citizens and aid organizations were counterproductive, and were concentrating on offing Americans again. But no. The Red Cross was next, more dead Iraqis. The Americans are now in a terrible position: fewer and fewer Iraqis support their presence, yet they cannot leave without the risk of a national bloodbath.

Amazingly, it gets worse. In a stinging story Christian Aid has claimed that about $US4 billion in Iraqi funds earmarked for reconstruction "has disappeared into opaque bank accounts administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-controlled body that rules Iraq." This appears to contravene both the UN resolution that released the money in the first place, and British government promises that such funds would always be handled transparently. Perhaps there's an element of cock-up here. That doesn't make it acceptable.

Back home, even his own party is beginning to do the unthinkable: blame Rumsfeld.

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Yesterday's news | Oct 23, 2003 12:17

So NZTabloid is no more - the site's founders have left a message thanking the - ahem - "more than 1,000,000 people" who have visited their website since it launched in August. Well, then …

I actually never thought the idea was all bad - there was a niche begging for an annoying gossip vehicle, and it did serve to draw attention to the seedier practices around the "respectable" celebrity press.

TVNZ, which quite deliberately launched the idea of television announcers as "celebrities" in the late 1980s, got a little of its own back, to the point where Bill Ralston decreed that his stars could no longer go whoring about for their own magazine cover deals (TVNZ itself can still go whoring about, but that's different). NZTabloid certainly played a part in those events, and got the wider media talking about the cult of celebrity. That was no mean feat.

But Herkt and Marshall seemed to sadly lack an ethical compass, as their debut story - an unwarranted and unpleasant intrusion into the Hoskings' relationship with their children - demonstrated. Good tabloid journalism needs some warmth, and to sometimes let the readers feel they're in on the joke. There was humour in NZTabloid, but it was almost inevitably cruel.

Apart from the sector of the public that delights in hating people simply because they are successful (and that's not a great sector to pitch to advertisers, because its inhabitants are invariably unsuccessful), I think people become weary of nastiness quite quickly.

There remains only the very odd story of the dodgy teacher and the souvenired videotape to play out in the courts. I've heard a variety of accounts of what took place and by what means the Sunday Star Times acquired the tape, and I rather look forward to hearing the details in court.

Salon has an extract from Michael Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, and Spinsanity.org says the book tends to confirm Moore's rep as "a slipshod journalist who has trouble getting his facts right". Moore's tendency to spin to suit himself is outlined in a companion piece listing errors in the book. I heartily agree with some of what Moore says, but his willingness to mangle the facts makes him a liability. Even in his response to criticisms of Bowling for Columbine, he spends many words on simple abuse, and actually ignores most of the major criticisms.

So the Sharon government spits in the face of the international community again. This isn't security, it's a land grab - yet another one - and it will reap only more suffering, hate and bitterness.

I'm reading Salam Pax's The Baghdad Blog, and will be reviewing it for The Listener (it'll be in the shops here in a couple of weeks). It's just a cut-and-paste from the blog since it launched in September last year, but it's a splendidly human book - war-quickies don't come any better. We tried to get an interview via bFM, but we missed out. Stern got one, and it even has a photograph - he's not the lardass you'd think from the way he describes himself!

Anyway listen out to Mediawatch on Sunday morning - I've interviewed Louise Chunn, the NZ-born editor of InStyle UK, who's here for New Zealand Fashion Week. She's cool. And another graduate of the Murray Cammick Academy for People Who Go On and Do Interesting Things …

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Beautiful things | Oct 22, 2003 09:36

I knew the stars were aligned when, just as I set foot in the Control Room, the PA began blaring out The Saints' splendidly jaded consumer anthem 'Know Your Product'. That horn riff - DA-DAT-DAT-DAT-DAA - never lets me down.

We were there to see The D4, and it was comforting to know that someone had made the connection a little further up the lineage of antipodean rock 'n' roll. The D4 rocked, but you knew that. It was nice to hear them play both some new tunes and their cover of the Flamin' Groovies' 'Shake Some Action'. There's a seriousness, decency and sense of style about rock 'n' roll like this.

Meanwhile kids, if you like The D4, then you really ought to check out The Saints' Best Of 1976-1978, a Raven Records' double CD that collects everything from the "classic" Saints era. It's a beautiful thing and it illuminates my life.

The Saturday mood was helped of course by the sport: four centuries in an innings by the cricketers, an amazing win over Australia in the rugby league test, and Auckland going through to the NPC final in an absolute thriller. On the other hand, a reshuffled All Black team lacked cohesion and purpose against a quite feisty Canadian team. I'm not overly worried at this point - they don't need to peak until the quarter-finals - but there were some serious underperformers out there.

Tracey Nelson's match stats make it quite clear how shabby the All Blacks' first-half performance against Canada was. It's a wonder there were any rucks and mauls at all, so tardy were the forwards in getting to them.

Lots more discussion on Slashdot of the latest e-voting story - a PR push by Diebold and other companies to assure the US voting public that everything's alright, really …

The Wired story includes this quote from Stanford University computer science professor David Dill:

The voting machine industry doesn't have a PR problem. It has a technology problem. It is impossible to determine whether their machines, in their current form, can be trusted with our elections."

Here's my Unlimited column on the Diebold fiasco and how it relates to earlier technology schemozzles.

Neil Morrison has his own weblog now, The Sock Thief - and quite good it is too. Among other things, he points to a useful roundup of the scientific debate in GM agriculture.

So the bill providing for the end of appeals to the Privy Council and the establishment of a new Supreme Court has been passed, capping a last-minute "debate" so shrill and politicised that it was hard to know exactly what to be worried about. Finlay Macdonald offers a welcome note of sense in this week's Listener editorial.

And, as promised, here's my Listener column on VeriSign's despicable conduct as keeper of the .com and .net domains.

The reliably brave and diligent Seymour Hersch has the most revealing story yet on how US intelligence on Iraq got so bad - the usual suspects in the Pentagon are fingered yet again. He discusses the story and the current state of the Bush Administration here.

In a new report, Human Rights Watch flags its concern over the number of civilians being killed by US troops in Iraq.

Closer to home, Karl du Fresne tried to find out what's wrong in the Wairarapa for the NBR.

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Scary synapses | Oct 17, 2003 11:30

So that's what happens when you drink $10,000 worth of methamphetamine for breakfast: you - allegedly - slice bits off your ladyfriends with a sword, then hit the road to shoot one man in the back and hold another hostage at gunpoint for hours.

Assuming that the police account of events is proven, the Antonie Dixon case demonstrates that the problem is less that New Zealand's criminal fraternity has amphetamines, or even that it manufactures them (that's been going on for decades). It's that they have so goddamn much of the stuff these days, and an apparent absence of any restraining instinct to go with it.

Darren McDonald's exhaustively-reported celebrity drug hell peaked at around a gram of P a week. That's a hell of a lot; a $1000 a week habit at retail rates. Dixon is said to have consumed ten times that much - plus a little cocaine to sweeten the brew - in a minute or two. It's hard to imagine what was going on with his synapses for the next 18 or so hours, but I'm glad he wasn't anywhere near me.

So: a Fart Tax backdown (in the works for a while, it appears) and a more decent form of internment for Ahmed Zaoui. The government appears to be taking the view that it can only be staunch on so many fronts at once: especially when it's more trouble than $8 million is worth (the Fart Tax) or embarrassing and immoral (Zaoui). Must be something to do with Spring being in the air. I suspect that Zaoui has been treated as he has largely because he appears on the US's Big List of Terrorists, courtesy of Algeria's ugly military regime. I wonder whether there'll be a chat with the Americans at Apec.

So it's not only VeriSign messing with the Internet's plumbing, but the wiki-fiddlers who build blogging software. Trackback is screwing Google. This is bad.

I've always thought that successful searching is mostly about coming up with the right search terms, but my friend James Michael Moore directed me to this page of useful tips for deeper Googling. Cool.

After the recent post here on climate change, Aaron Oxley got in touch to tell me about climateprediction.net, a distributed computing project much like Seti@Home, but running a climate change model instead: "By using your computers," say its founders, "we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists." Windows-only, though …

The dodgy Diebold voting machines story has crossed the Atlantic - and this story in The Independent is probably the best one yet in the mainstream media. It actually defies belief that the situation could be as bad as it is, but, well, it is.

A poll of US troops in Iraq. Interesting.

There's a transcript of the BBC's Inside Guantanamo programme.

The Guardian has a more accurate and less hysterical story on the British GM crop trials, now that the report is actually out. The full text of the report is here. One interesting point is that Britain depends on its farmland as a kind of cache for biodiversity, so the trials were quite relevant there. That's rather less the case in places which have real wilderness, like New Zealand, but it's likely that the report will have an impact on regulatory decisions here. There's a little something for everyone in the report, but if you're to grasp only one thing about this study it's that "GE" didn't kill any weeds: weedkillers did.

And thanks very much to Mary from Heron's Flight for dropping around a bottle of the La Volee Unoaked Chardonnay 2002. Until such time as Public Address effects fundamental change in the new media environment and we all get rich, small acts of kindness help a lot.

PS: Did anyone else experience a vague but not unwelcome sense of disbelief watching Lou Vincent and Mark Richardson as they put on an opening stand of 231 against India? Not just that they did it. Not just that Fleming actually won a toss. But also that it was on TV at all. It's there thanks to Sky's need to put up something against TVNZ's Rugby World Cup coverage. I wonder how it's rating?

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