HIS | False Hope | Is God Dead? | Treaty Claims | 12/2013
HERS | Out Of Mind | Totalitaria |12/2013
current affairs and lifestyle for the discerning woman
IS GOD DEAD?
The battle over belief and some fascinating new evidence
OUT OF MIND
WHY ARE OUR MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES FAILING?
TOTALITARIA
THE UN’S LOOMING PLANS FOR GLOBAL GOVERNMENT Dec 2013/Jan2014
PLUS
BEAUTY, CUISINE, TRAVEL, FAMILY, MOVIES, HEALTH & MORE
CONTENTS Issue 141 | Dec 2013/Jan 2014 | www.investigatedaily.com HIS Selling False Hope The backlash against a controversial US cancer doctor who charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments hits a New Zealand family seeking a cure for their young son. LIZ SZABO and IAN WISHART report on the strange case of Dr Stanislaw Burzynski and his battle with medical authorities
features Out Of Mind
Is New Zealand’s mental health system failing our youth? TALETA MCDONALD investigates dissatisfaction with the status quo page 10
Totalitaria Looms
The United Nations has been planning to set up a global government for decades, now they are just a few years away from pulling it off. IAN WISHART explains in this exclusive extract from his new book Totalitaria page 20
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 1
CONTENTS Formalities
04 Miranda Devine 06 Arnaud de Borchgrave 08 Chloe Milne
Health
26 Conversion controversy 28 Remifemin for menopause
32
Cuisine & Travel 34 38 40
34
The Chef on eggs James Morrow on New York Visiting Roma
Books & Movies
42 The Testament of Mary,Almost English 44 The Book Thief, Aftermath
Home & Family
32 Get great lashes 46 Problem solving skills
30 44 40
HERS / DEVINE
No one believes the Chicken-Littles Miranda Devine
W
hat a delicious decision of the Abbott gov ernment not to send a minister to the latest UN climate-change conference. Environment Minister Greg Hunt can’t go to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Poland. He’ll be too busy… repealing the carbon tax! Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the other end of that RSVP. If ever you needed proof Australia is under new management, the prioritisation of parliament over UN climate gabfests is it. Not for Tony Abbott the excruciating spectacle Kevin Rudd made of himself – and by extension the whole nation – when he travelled to Copenhagen in 2009 with a retinue of 114 assistants, including seven media managers. With classic Ruddian hubris, he staked the nation’s entire prestige, and indeed alleged future survival, on the outcome of the global climate talks that he, singlehandedly, was going to guide, thanks to his Mandarin-speaking rapport with the Chinese. Lo and behold, he was treated as an irrelevant joke in Copenhagen, and the talks were the flop every sensible person had predicted. Rudd flew into a narcissistic rage: “Those Chinese f@# !ers are trying to rat-f@#! us,” the great diplomat said. The rest, as they say, is history, on the right side of which Abbott stood, almost alone among the political class. Australia has learned its lesson in more ways than one since then. It took humility for John Howard to come close to a mea culpa this month during a speech to Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation in London. He outlined the “perfect storm” of 2006-2007 that forced him to adopt a policy he didn’t really believe in – and go to the 2007 election promising an Emissions Trading Scheme. “Drought had lingered for several years in many parts of eastern Australia, leading to severe restrictions on the daily use of water; not for the first or last time the bushfire season started early; the report by Sir Nicholas Stern hit the shelves, with the author himself visiting Australia, and lastly the former US vice president Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth,” he said. “To put it bluntly, ‘doing something’ about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia.” 4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
Laws “affecting our daily lives, including sensitive social issues, should never be made other than by politicians. It is their job and their speciality to reflect community attitudes and values on such matters” So Howard took a compromise ETS to the 2007 election, one that protected exports and would not fully be implemented until the rest of the world signed up. Labor won the election, anyway. Howard’s takeaway is that politicians should not allow themselves to be “browbeaten by the alleged views of experts… Laws “affecting our daily lives, including sensitive social issues, should never be made other than by politicians. It is their job and their speciality to reflect community attitudes and values on such matters.” But it’s a rare politician who stands firm against fashionable views at election time. In part that’s because they get no help from Australian business leaders, who are cowardly, effete and blindly wedded to some bleached-out concept of “bipartisanship”, regardless of ideas. There are, of course, honourable exceptions, such as the outgoing Future Fund chairman David Murray who last year described Labor’s carbon tax as “the worst piece of economic reform I have ever seen in my life”. He went further this month to say that the climate problem was overstated and suggesting there had been a “breakdown in the integrity of the science”. Various other business leaders
are coming out of the woodwork now to voice similar sentiments. But where were they when their country needed them? The danger remains that the political climate could turn again, as Howard described in 2006-07. Already climate alarmists are seizing on this year’s early bushfires to rev up another panic in the public mind, and will use a hot summer, or any unusual weather, to prosecute their case for a renewed jihad on cheap coal-fired electricity, which is, of
course, the source of Australia’s competitive advantage. They are not troubled by the appalling illogic of their position, in which, even if Australia retreated to the Stone Age and reduced carbon dioxide emissions to zero, there would be precisely zero effect on bushfire behaviour or summer temperatures or sea levels. devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 5
HERS / TALKING POINT
A perfect storm Arnaud de Borchgrave
J
ordan’s young Queen Rania Abdullah, a Palestin ian, put her finger on the detonator of everything from local to national to regional to global frustrations. The constant contrast between the real world where today’s youth lives and the virtual world of the Internet where they spend most of their time, said Queen Rania, has broadened their horizons and led to the revolutions ... in the Arab world. “Today,” she said, “when our youth sit in front of the computer, they enter the virtual world where they develop a certain personality and identity for themselves. They communicate with others constantly; they express themselves freely and comfortably. They influence the opinion of others; they see how others live their lives and what choices are available to them. “And when they leave their computers, they return to the real world and they see nobody cares about what they have to say, that they enjoy no freedom, have no real choices and that their hands are tied. So they have a sense of sorrow and disappointment.” The queen was being as blunt as a royal is allowed to be. It isn’t sorrow but scorn for elders and leaders they blame for their predicament. Acute frustration inevitably leads to violence. The priority, opined Rania, should be to bridge the gap between the two worlds in order to make an easy transition between the two. If it were easy, it would have been done decades ago as the Western powers did after World War II with American knowhow and dollars. And the 2011 revolutions that swept the Arab world from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Iraq reflect the accelerated pace of change that leaders don’t know how to cope with, let alone channel into constructive endeavours. Youth want change and they want it now but now isn’t available short of bloody revolutions. And revolutionary upheavals, as the world witnessed via the Internet, triggered still more misery. Syria, plunged in a civil war for the past three years, sustained 150,000 killed and probably 300,000 wounded. And the anti-regime revolutionaries in Syria are increasingly influenced, if not dominated, by al-Qaida and its associated movements. Fearful that any aid could fall into the hands of anti-U.S. 6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
How long will the U.S. Congress authorize the several billion dollars a year needed to keep the Afghan army fighting Taliban guerrillas? revolutionaries, the Obama administration is determined to stay out of Syria’s civil war. At this point the Assad regime, notwithstanding its close alliance with Iran and Russia, looks like the lesser of two evils for the Obama White House. The trillion-dollar U.S. geopolitical boondoggle in Iraq, where Iran’s theocracy now wields more influence than Washington, and where al-Qaida’s friends appear to control much of the eastern part on the Syrian border, strengthened a growing majority among both Republicans and Democrats to sit this one out. On top of the Iraq disaster, a similar outcome seems to be hovering over the end of next year, when U.S. troops will be going home, mission unaccomplished. The $6 billion-$10 billion a year the Afghan army will require from U.S. taxpayers after 2014 is reminiscent of what was pledged to the South Vietnamese army following the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat soldier. He was U.S. Army Master Sgt. Max Beilke who left March 29, 1973. The South Vietnamese army – ARVN – fought on bravely with its own army and air force, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. That couldn’t last and the final collapse came after the U.S. Congress shut down the aid spigot and North Vietnamese tanks clattered into Saigon two years later, April 30, 1975. There is now a widening gap in available U.S. financial resources and the imperative need is to cut back on a conventional military establishment in favor of tomorrow’s
smaller, leaner, SEAL-type units that can operate globally coupled with pilotless bombers, drones and cyber warriors. How long will the U.S. Congress authorize the several billion dollars a year needed to keep the Afghan army fighting Taliban guerrillas? Probably as long as Congress votes the funds. And no one believes that will be very long after they get the drift of largely unreported U.S. aid scandals. Between now and then, these will keep growing. SIGAR – the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction – keeps uncovering scandals involving U.S.-funded civilian construction and reconstruction projects that are now cut off from further inspection as U.S. troops withdraw toward safer zones around the capital. In a strongly worded Oct. 10 letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Rajiv Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, SIGAR chief John F. Sopko, expressed alarm over how his oversight mandate could no longer be carried out in Afghanistan’s changing security landscape. This followed growing difficulties in obtaining military escort to travel into contested areas. “U.S. military officials have told us that they will provide civilian access only to areas within a one-hour round trip
of an advanced medical facility ... We have been told that requests to visit a reconstruction site outside of these ‘oversight bubbles’ will probably be denied.” “Similarly, State Department officials have warned us,” Sopko’s letter continued, “that their ability to reach reconstruction sites will be extremely limited due to constraints on providing emergency medical support without assistance from the Defense Department.” Much of what Sopko’s agency is mandated to inspect is shoddy work by unscrupulous civilian contractors who knew their work wouldn’t be checked as U.S. troops were pulling out as part of a general withdrawal. As Sopko’s agents assessed the rate of the U.S. military withdrawal, Sopko’s report added, “it is likely that no more than 21 percent of Afghanistan will be accessible to U.S. civilian oversight personnel by the end of the transition, a 47 percent decrease since 2009. We have also been told by State Department officials that this projection may be optimistic, especially if the security situation does not improve.” Virtually no one expects an improvement between now and Dec. 31, 2014. And the unravelling scenario is eerily reminiscent of Vietnam for those who witnessed the end as this reporter did. Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 7
HERS / GEN-Y
Single and looking Chloe Milne
N
ow that the winter season is nearing New York City and a high of 3 degrees feels like a mild day, it’s more important than ever to have someone to keep you warm during these very cold months. Unfortunately for those of us women living in this part of the world the chances of meeting a nice guy aren’t great. Not only do women greatly outnumber men, by around 10%, but all New York guys are ‘douchebags’ – according to every woman who lives here. Unlike the movies, there are not great numbers of attractive young men hanging out in laundromats, coffee shops or street corners looking for love. Just as well then that American women, and men, have embraced dating websites as an alternative way to start a new relationship. And embrace it they have, happily dating several potential mates in a week in order to meet Mr or Mrs Right. It’s a strange concept for a country of shy Kiwis who generally need a few (dozen) drinks to chat someone up. Internet dating is still something New Zealanders seem wary of, even embarrassed by, and while Tinder, a dating app that connects you with potential matches based on your GPS location, is said to have gained popularity in NZ, generally going online to find a match is seen as a last resort for ‘older’ people. We’re more than happy pursuing job opportunities, buying and selling, finding accommodation and networking with strangers virtually, but when it comes to falling in love, or even in like, online, the whole process seems contrived and desperate. Dating in New Zealand generally consists of getting drunk near someone, a notion I have struggled with. Even so, I never would have dreamt of creating some sort of online personal promotion to attract a potential mate, but in a bid to embrace American culture, and after realizing that meeting people in a city of 8 million is harder than I expected, I tried two dating sites that came recommended to me by my fellow New Yorkers, just to see what all the fuss was about. I met (virtually) plenty of eligible bachelors, numbers were exchanged, I played it cool, unfortunately they did too. Then there were the much more keen, but slightly less eligible bachelors, like Andrew who asked “Your place or mine?,”
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Unlike the movies, there are not great numbers of attractive young men hanging out in laundromats, coffee shops or street corners looking for love Aaron a supposed Masterchef contestant who simply commented “whang and a bang,” or 23 year old, straight, single, Brooklynite, Bowlofcereal6 whose opening line was “Do you like cereal?” What a ridiculous question, everyone likes cereal. After being fortunate enough (as the odds suggest) to meet a nice guy (in a bar) I decided to delete all of my online accounts. But while my brief foray into the internet dating world was more miss than hit, there is something to be said for dating from your living room. Not only can you date while wearing your pajamas watching Homeland and eating ice cream; there are no awkward “no I’d rather you didn’t want to buy me a drink” moments, unless of course you actually decide to go on a real date. www.chloemilne.com
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