Investigate HERS, Feb/March 2015

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Contents www.investigatedaily.com

Issue 148

Feb/Mar 2015

08 Waitangi Daze

The tribunal has ruled Ngapuhi never ceded sovereignty, is it telling the truth? IAN WISHART argues no, and lays out the evidence

16

Baby Einsteins

We’re told we should be educating kids younger and younger, but new research says pushing toddlers academically can stunt their mental development in other areas. SARAH SPARKS has the intriguing story

20 Sugar Me

Just how poisonous is sugar?

24

Reese Goes Wild

Witherspoon draws inspiration from new role

Contents

34

26 30 38

Formalities

04 Miranda Devine 06 Chloe Milne

Health & Beauty 26 28 30 34

Cancer treatment Ignore pandemic warnings Boutique The colour of the year

Cuisine & Travel 36 Kitchen wars 38 Lake Como

Books & Movies 42 Michael Morrissey 44 Avoid Bruce Willis

Family & Music 40 Lana Del Rey 46 Rules for life

42

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HERS

DEVINE

By Miranda Devine

Climate of fear

H

igh-profile climate alarmists such as Wal- burn dung and wood to cook and keep warm. Three laby flanker David Pocock and IPCC author million a year die prematurely from breathing the Professor Colin Butler are the useful idiots polluted air inside their homes. How many people of green hypocrisy. die from climate change?

Along with the other “fly in-fly out” activists at Greenies seem convinced the planet is going to mining sites across the state, they are doing their fry and we are all going to die if we don’t cut the best to destroy the coal industry, which underpins carbon dioxide emissions which come from fossil Australia’s wealth. fuels. Yet they oppose the only viable low-emission “How can we try to prevent catastrophic climate alternatives, coal seam gas and nuclear energy. change while opening coal mines?” Pocock wrote Nuclear is the only option with zero emissions, in a rambling essay on his “tumblr” site. and you only have to look at how the US fracking The pair were arrested last month after bolting boom has slashed its emissions to see the potenthemselves to machinery at Whitehaven Coal’s tial of coal seam gas. But most greenies are just as Maules Creek Mine, near Boggabri, 750km from opposed to these greenhouse-friendly alternatives their Canberra homes. Chances are they didn’t as they are to coal. walk there.

The same professional activists locking themselves Their protests are only possible because of the on equipment at Maules Creek turn up at anti-CSG energy provided by fossil fuels, whether it’s the coal blockades and anti-uranium protests. which provides the electricity to charge the smart Australia has a lot of uranium but, unlike Europe, phones Pocock used to tweet a picture of himself we haven’t resorted to nuclear energy because we “locked on” to a digger, or the fuel that powers the have been spoiled by the easy availability of cheaper cars and planes they use to travel around. fossil fuel.

They are convinced of the evil of Big Coal, our But as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sensibly second biggest export, yet they offer no alternative pointed out, the nuclear option is the “obvious conto keep the lights on. clusion” if we are serious about They want Australia’s abuncutting emissions. With honourdant coal resources kept in the able exceptions like economist ground. They demonise the Ross Garnaut, climate alarmenergy source which has created ists refuse even to consider the They want our prosperity and which allows nuclear option, and instead cynius the luxury of creating a clean Australia’s abundant cally exploit community fears. environment.

They offer no plausible subcoal resources Worse, they want to deny that stitute for the fossil fuels which kept in the ground. provide 81 per cent of the world’s prosperity to millions of poor people across the world. energy needs. Wind and solar is They demonise As Danish statistician and their mantra, and they demand the energy source climate realist Bjorn Lomborg billions of dollars in subsidies keeps pointing out, billions of to prop up renewable industries which has created which just cannot replace coal people around the world are so our prosperity desperately poor they have to for baseload power.

4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

But greenies don’t trouble themselves with details, which Carlton says is “sheer fiction”. Referencing as long as they feel good.

Wikipedia, Carlton says the Americans did not fly Just like the bien pensants who made that silly the Vultee Vengeance in combat. But Colebatch only Live-Aid style video about children in immigration says they were American planes, that is, Americandetention, it’s not really about solving the problem, made. As the same Wikipedia entry records, the but about parading their virtue. The “We’re better planes were used by the RAAF, and as a history of than this Australia” music video featuring celeb- RAAF memoirs, another of Colebatch’s sources, rities from actor Bryan Brown and author Tom confirms.

Keneally to the Human Rights Commission presiColebatch: 2, and Carlton a big fat zero. dent Gillian Triggs should have been made years ago.

No one likes a sore loser.

“We’ve all read a lot (about this issue) over these As one commenter wrote: last few years and been very troubled by it and not really known what to do,” Brown admits.

“As for the Vultee Vengeance dive bomber planes, Lo and behold, now a conservative government I can assure you that my father flew those planes is fixing the problem, they know exactly what to do. for the RAAF in dive bombing operations in New If it were really about the children, activists would Guinea. The details of all this are within the Ausnot have stayed silent during the Labor years. And tralian War Memorial records and silly old Carlton if it were really about the climate, greenies would can access those records which will prove Colesupport coal seam gas and nuclear energy. batch’s history.

Instead their model is North Korea, the world’s Furthermore, my father was ordered/volunteered most successful nation at reducing greenhouse to fly from New Guinea to East Coast Ports in Ausgas emissions – by two-thirds – thanks to famine, tralia at extreme danger to himself and his aircraft disease and general economic collapse. The lights to secure basic supplies of food and ammunition have literally gone out. Pocock and friends should being denied the troops in New Guinea by the move there.

Unions as set out in Colebatch’s important book.

If anyone cannot accept what he has written, 2 then do get off your lazy and ignorant backsides and research at the Australian War Memorial in Great news that Hal Colebatch won a Prime MinCanberra and other places available to you. For his ister’s Literary Award for his best-seller, Australia’s small part in this disgraceful episode, my father’s Secret War, which exposes the shameful secret of how war records are also available in Canberra.”

Australia’s unions sabotaged our troops in WWII. The award will only drive more sales.

But not everyone is delighted, especially not former Fairfax columnist Mike Carlton, who began a tantrum on twitter.

“Naturally I’ll be accused of sour grapes” he wrote, as he railed against Colebatch.

Well, yeah.

Carlton had entered a book in the same category and hadn’t won. So he tried to trash the winner.

Yet the attack piece he wrote in December for Crikey proves only that Carlton is a sloppy researcher.

He cites two incidents from the introduction of Australia’s Secret War: 1. The arrival of HMS Speaker into Sydney in October, 1945, which Colebatch says was delayed by strikes, but which Carlton claims, “simply did not happen”, citing an online history of HMS Speaker’s service written by one of its officers. Yet this is what that history says: “It was unfortunate for us that this period should have coincided with a wave of strikes ashore which put Sydney on a real austerity basis for lighting, cooking, transport and entertainments and made it difficult for many men to get away on leave.” Colebatch: 1; Carlton: 0.

2. The crash of a squadron of Vultee Vengeance dive bombers after they made a raid on Rabaul, Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 5

HERS GEN-Y

By Chloe Milne

The art of impatience

I

t was on a broken down train between Stansted me appreciate things at home. New Zealand may airport and London’s Kings Cross Station that I be a country of only 4.5 million, but we still like decided patience is overrated. Not only had I just to make things happen. We talk fast, we walk fast flown into London’s most inconvenient airport, I and if the recent road tolls are anything to go by, had also just spent the last 5 or so hours trying to we also drive fast. get from Lisbon to London with Ryan Air; possibly If something is broken we fix it, if there’s an issue the worst airline on the planet, (although I’m yet to we solve it and if there’s something to be done – we fly Turkmenistan Airlines) and now, after running do it. We don’t tend to stand around, look at the through immigration to reach the train in time, I issue, talk about the issue and then ponder if we wanted badly to be home. should “call someone.”

The driver informed us that there was something One of the most frustrating phrases I heard wrong with the train and that he would “look into while living in the UK was “Oh, that’s not in my it”. Looking into it obviously didn’t mean what I job description.” It’s no wonder that New Zealanders think it meant, because 15 minutes later he got back with our DIY, “give it a go,” attitudes, are thought onto the intercom and said he was now going to of as hardworking around the world. get off the train and “take a look” at the tracks. I’m Personally I would have rather helped to fix the not exactly sure what he was looking into for the train than endure the 45-minute wait and I’m sure previous 15 minutes, but taking most other Kiwis would have selfies for his Facebook timeline been in the same boat. My fellow does spring to mind. train mates, however, seemingly It was another 40 minutes until unfazed by the delay sat glued to we were told that the issue (details their Apple technology, without Slow-moving of which were lightly skimmed) so much as a sigh or eyebrow Europe makes me raise to the other passengers. could be ignored and that we did have permission to continue to people are the movappreciate things at ersImpatient London. By that time I had writand shakers of this world, home. New Zealand they are the ones who will invent ten half of this article, fantasized about getting a private jet and a better way, push themselves to may be a country living in a city less inconvenient the limit and get things done – of only 4.5 million, at least that’s what I’m telling than London and made a small bed for myself on the seats of the myself. but we still like to half empty carriage.

Slow-moving Europe makes make things happen www.chloemilne.com

6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

www.epson.co.nz/precisioncore Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 7

Waitangi Why is the Tribunal lying to Maori?

As another Waitangi Day rolls past, the Waitangi Tribunal’s latest ruling suggesting Ngapuhi never ceded sovereignty to the Crown has been echoing through the intelligentsia. It marks a fresh push to set up joint rulership of New Zealand with the public – ordinary Maori and Pakeha alike – treated as mere ‘subjects’ of the edicts of a ruling group of elites.

IAN WISHART wades into the debate to show how the modern generation are being conned 8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

DAZE T

here comes a time in any society dominated by ruling classes when someone from the peasantry has to stand up and ask the age-old question: “Why is the Emperor wearing no clothes?”

That time, in New Zealand’s case, is now.

For the past 40 years, New Zealanders both Maori and Pakeha have been backseat spectators as the Treaty of Waitangi has gradually been re-written, re-interpreted and ultimately tortured to become something it never was, and two recent Waitangi Tribunal rulings show it’s time to blow the whistle before players get hurt.

In late November, the Tribunal issued a ruling, praised by some radio commentators, that claimed Maori in the far north had never given up sovereignty to the British Crown.

Then in December, the Tribunal issued a 618 page ruling attempting to enforce that new Maori ‘sovereignty’ by suggesting Parliament has no power to change laws relating to Maori and that such issues must be decided by Maori.

Both of these rulings are demonstrably wrong – not because I say so, but because Maori who ratified the Treaty of Waitangi back in the 1800s say so in their own words.

Both rulings hinge on the same premise: that Maori never ceded sovereignty to the Crown. Clearly that is the view that now dominates the Waitangi Tribunal’s thinking, so the question remains, is it right?

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 9

Some commentators argue that because the Waitangi Tribunal has the sole ‘power’ in New Zealand to interpret the Treaty, that means the claims must be right; the only body in New Zealand with authority to make a ruling has made its ruling, so live with it! The people who follow that logic are however, with respect, displaying intellect as shallow as a birdbath. Although parliament has the power to pass a law ordering the death of all blond, blue-eyed babies at birth, having the power to issue an edict does not by definition make the edict right or even sustainable in logic.

Adolf Hitler issued lots of edicts that were lawful in their time, even if factually and morally wrong.

And so it is with the Waitangi Tribunal. It might have the power to push the government around but it does not have the power to push the people of New Zealand around. If what the Waitangi Tribunal is saying is false, the Tribunal should be disbanded pending an inquiry into philosophical and scholarly corruption of the unit in my view.

I can prove the Waitangi Tribunal is wrong when it says Maori never gave up sovereignty over New Zealand. In fact, not only ‘can’ I prove it, I already have.

Exhibit A, my smoking gun, is my book The Great Divide.

“You are aware there are no laws in New Zealand; there is no king. They feel the want of this, and they cannot make a king from their own chiefs, as every chief would think himself degraded if he should be put under the authority of a chief of their own.”1 Those are the words of missionary Samuel Marsden in 1837, explaining why Maori wanted an outside sovereign to rule the country. His key take home point was that there could be no Maori sovereignty because each tribe considered itself supreme – a position that kept causing tribal wars and bloodshed. They wanted the Brits to take over and establish peace under a sovereign everyone could respect.

A

n argument raged between two factions in Britain. One faction saw Maori society as a basket-case, as indeed Maori saw it themselves, needing a sovereign to step in and bring Western enlightenment. The other faction saw Maori society as a museum piece in need of isolating and protecting so that Maori could continue living without contact with the civilised world. This faction came to dominate in Australian settlement, treating the native Aboriginals as a race to be

sidelined in the outback rather than welcomed into cities. The logic was that primitive cultures should be allowed to maintain their culture unmolested by modernity.

As explained, while some Maori agreed with the latter sentiment, wanting to turn back the clock and send the whites home, most Maori fell into the first camp, wanting all the benefits of Western civilisation under British rule so that decades (in fact hundreds of years) of bitter tribal wars could be ended.

Queen Victoria, through her officials, told Captain William Hobson that the best interests of the Maori people would probably be served by surrendering sovereignty in return for British protection: “Believing, however, that their own welfare would, under the circumstances I have mentioned, be best promoted by the surrender to Her Majesty of a right now so precarious, and little more than nominal, and persuaded that the benefits of British protection and of laws administered by British Judges would far more than compensate for the sacrifice by the natives of a national independence which they are no longer able to maintain, Her Majesty’s Government have resolved to authorise you to treat with the aborigines of New Zealand for the recognition of Her Majesty’s sovereign authority over the whole or any part of those islands which they may be willing to place under Her Majesty’s dominion.” [quoted in The Great Divide, page 149] The Waitangi Tribunal would have the public believe that ancient Maori society was civilised and they all lived in Smurf-like village settlements, at one with nature. This is far from the truth, a typical Maori village in the early 1800s committed more beheadings than ISIS and al Qa’ida ever have in modern times: “Not less than 40 canoes came into the harbour from a war expedition, with prisoners of war, and the heads of a number of chiefs whom they had slain in

QUEEN VICTORIA, THROUGH HER OFFICIALS, TOLD CAPTAIN WILLIAM HOBSON THAT THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE MAORI PEOPLE WOULD PROBABLY BE SERVED BY SURRENDERING SOVEREIGNTY IN RETURN FOR BRITISH PROTECTION 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

battle. I went onshore and saw the prisoners and the heads when they landed. The sight was distressing beyond conception,” wrote Samuel Marsden at one point. [The Great Divide, page 118].

Another missionary, Samuel Leigh, stumbled across the beheading of a child: “One day, as I was walking on the beach, conversing with a chief, my attention was arrested by a great number of people coming from a neighbouring hill.

I inquired the cause of the concourse, and was told that they had killed a lad, were roasting him, and going to eat him.

I immediately proceeded to the place, in order to ascertain the truth of this appalling relation. Being arrived at the village where the people were collected, I asked to see the boy.

“The natives appeared much agitated at my presence, and particularly at my request, as if conscious of their guilt; and it was only after a very urgent solicitation that they directed me towards a large fire at some distance, where, they said, I should find him. As I was going to this place, I passed by the bloody spot on which the head of this unhappy victim had been cut off; and, on approaching the fire, I was not a little startled at the sudden appearance of a savage-looking man, of gigantic stature, entirely naked, and armed with a large axe. I was a good deal intimidated, but mustered up as much courage as I could, and demanded to see the lad. The cook (for such was the occupation of this terrific monster) then held up the boy by his feet. He appeared to be about fourteen years of age, and was half roasted.

“I returned to the village, where I found a great number of natives seated in a circle, with a quantity of coomery (a sort of sweet potatoe) before them, waiting for the roasted body of the youth. In this company were shown to me the mother of the child. The mother and child were both slaves, having been taken in war.

However, she would have been compelled to share in the horrid feast, had I not prevailed on them to give up the body to be interred, and thus prevented them from gratifying their unnatural appetite.”

– [cited at page 115 of The Great Divide] In one battle in Auckland cited by historian Paul Moon in his 2008 book on cannibalism, This Horrid Practice, thousands of Maori were killed and eaten

where Glen Innes and Mt Wellington now stand.

Lest critics accuse me of being racially insensitive, I am married into iwi, my children can trace their whakapapa.

This is not being written to inflame, but to inject some reality about the life that Maori tribes were desperate to leave behind by signing the Treaty.

So how do I prove that Maori knew they were ceding sovereignty?

L

ike it or not, the perception being sold to Maori and Pakeha on a daily basis is that the tribes always kept their own supreme sovereignty, never relinquished it, and deserve to be treated as equals to the New Zealand government for the purposes of setting the laws of this country. This all hangs on the word “kawanatanga” allegedly not meaning sovereignty.

If, as Michael King wrote, Maori at Waitangi truly did not equate kawanatanga with sovereignty, then what are we to make of the comments of Ngapuhi’s Rewa at Waitangi in 1840, quoted here directly from King’s own book: “What do we want of a governor? We are not whites nor foreigners. We are the governor – we the chiefs of this land of our ancestors!”

You couldn’t get a clearer example that Maori knew kawanatanga was interchangeable with sovereignty: “We are the sovereign – we the chiefs of this land of our ancestors”.

King – perhaps because it would have shot his thesis down – did not quote the end of Rewa’s speech, where he stated: “Do not sign the paper. If you do

you will be reduced to the condition of slaves, and be compelled to break stones on the roads. Your land will be taken from you and your dignity as chief will be destroyed.”

It is hard to believe that academics and authors have been able to draw taxpayer funded salaries and study grants to argue that Maori had no awareness they were transferring sovereignty at Waitangi.

There was also Te Kemara’s speech: “Were we to be an equality, then perhaps Te Kemara would say yes. But for the Governor to be up and Te Kemara to be down – Governor high, up, up, up, and Te Kemara down low, small, a worm, a crawler. No, no, no.”

Does that sound like a “partnership” arrangement? Does that sound like Ngapuhi – as is now claimed – did not know they were signing away their sovereignty?

Another Ngapuhi leader, Kawiti, told those gathered at Waitangi: “We Native men do not wish thee to stay. We do not want to be tied up and trodden down. We are free. Let the missionaries remain, but, as for thee, return to thine own country…I, even I, Kawiti, must not paddle this way or paddle that way because the Governor said ‘No’, because of the Governor, his soldiers and his guns.”

How can anyone reconcile these paragraphs with the claim that Maori did not know the Treaty involved a transfer of sovereignty and control?

But a legalistic word-by-word approach to decoding the Treaty is not necessarily the last word, so to speak. There is another way to find out what Maori understood.

When courts have difficulty under-

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 11

standing the context (and therefore precise meaning) of an Act of Parliament, they sometimes go back to the parliamentary debates that accompanied the passing of the law in question, to get a feel for what legislators actually intended. In the same manner, concentrating on the precise wording of the Treaty of Waitangi only gets you so far.

T

o get a proper handle on it, we jump forward now 20 years, to a gathering of ariki – paramount chiefs – and rangatira, at Kohimarama in Auckland in July 1860. The purpose of this “runanga” – or tribal council – was to discuss how Maori had fared in the 20 years since Waitangi had been signed, and seek their views on current issues affecting them.

The proceedings, and thus the speech transcripts below, were published in Te Karere, the main Maori newspaper, that month.

To those who argue that Maori never intended to sign away sovereignty over New Zealand to the Crown, and never understood that to be the case, we produce chief Wikiriwhi Matehenoa of Ngati Porou on the East Cape, who told the up to 200 chiefs gathered (a much higher number than those who had gathered at Waitangi): “We are all under the sovereignty of the Queen, but there are also other authorities over us sanctioned by God and the Queen, namely, our Ministers.”

The Maori translation is illustrative of what he understood. He used the words “te maru o te Kuini”, where the word ‘maru’ means literally “power, authority” translated in 1860 at the conference as sovereignty.2 12 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

Wikiriwhi further backs that up in his phrase “sanctioned by God and the Queen”, rendered in Maori, “mana whakahaere o te Atua raua ko te Kuini”.

The word “raua” in this sense means “combined” and refers back to the “mana” of both God and Queen”.

To flip Michael King’s analysis back on itself, the chief did not use the phrase “te kawanatanga o te Kuini”, if governorship was all they actually understood the Queen’s sovereignty to be.

It is abundantly clear that Ngati Porou fully understood Queen Victoria’s sovereignty over New Zealand. Te maru; the power, the authority.

The Ngati Raukawa chief Horomona Toremi, of Otaki, went so far as to explain that – post Waitangi – “You over there (the Pakehas) are the only Chiefs. The Pakeha took me out of the mire: the Pakeha washed me. This is my word.

Let there be one Law for all this Island.”3 Then there’s Te Ahukaramu’s position: “First, God: secondly, the Queen: thirdly, the Governor. Let there be one Queen for us. Make known to us all the laws, that we may all dwell under one law.”4 The concept that the Queen set the law for all New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha alike, was clearly understood, as was the Queen’s position under God, and the Governor’s ranking underneath the Queen. Beneath the top three, Maori and Pakeha citizens. “Kia kotahi te Kuini mo tatou” – one Queen over all of us.

Te Ahukaramu was even more explicit about the evolution of the Maori king movement, describing it as a usurpation of the Queen’s sovereignty, and noting that the recently deceased first Maori

king had recognised the authority of “the Queen, and the Government”.

“If any of the tribes should set up a Maori King, then let them be separated from the Queen’s ‘mana’.” In Maori, it reads, “me wehe ratou i runga i te mana o te Kuini”.

A few paragraphs back we looked at why Maori had invited the British monarch to become sovereign over New Zealand, because they needed to unite behind someone with higher mana than any individual New Zealand chief.

As chief Wiremu Patene told the Kohimarama gathering, even the Maori King’s mana was next to nothing against Victoria’s: “But remember, Governor, that (the Maori King) is child’s play. The Queen’s mana is with us. Let me repeat it, that work is child’s play.”

With the huge inroads that Christianity made in the 1830s, it’s actually important to realise in this discussion that most of the Maori chiefs at Waitangi probably had a better and deeper understanding of the Bible than many people today. For Maori, the concept of submission to a higher authority was something many of them had now personally done, and that was part of the understanding they brought to Waitangi; they knew they were submitting.

“Let me make use of an illustration from the Scriptures,” chief Hamuera of Ngaiterangi told the runanga. “Jesus Christ said he was above Satan. So the Governor says he is above both Pakeha and Maori – that he alone is Chief. Now, when Satan said, I am the greatest, Christ trampled him under foot. So the Queen says, that she will be chief for all men.

Therefore, I say, let her be the protector of all the people.”

Others were even more strident, well and truly nailing their futures to the Pakeha ways, not the ancient Maori customs: Te Ngahuruhuru (Ngatiwhakaue): “The deceits do not belong to the Pakehas, but to the Maories alone. The Maori is wronging the Pakeha. I am an advocate for peace. Shew kindness to the Pakeha.

Shew good feeling to this Governor. Look here, Maories! My word will not alter. I belong to the mana of the Queen, to the mana of the Governor. As to the setting up o a King – not that. Do not split up, and form a party for the Queen, and another for the Maori King: that would be wrong.”

It is this July 1860 runanga, or tribal council, that provides vital clues about how both Crown and Maori saw their relationship post Waitangi. As a tribal council where chiefs were required to vote in favour or against, and where – like Parliament today – a Hansard was taken of each speech and given to the speaker to double check its accuracy before being published, it was also an important and binding ratification of the terms of the Treaty which were now clearly expressed, both in English and in Maori.

If there was any ambiguity arising out of the 1840 Treaty regarding the cession of sovereignty, there was no ambiguity this time, and any honest debate of the “treaty principles” cannot take place without consideration of the 1860 speeches.

F

or the Waitangi Tribunal to lie to all New Zealanders about the sovereignty issue is a disgrace, and one that risks putting members of the Tribunal first up against the wall when the revolution comes, as it will if they continue down this divisive pathway.

If anyone wants an honest appraisal of the truth about Waitangi, in the actual words of the chiefs themselves, read the historical reports.

Take the modern debate about “taonga”.

Amazing, really, how a word that once simply meant “property procured by spear” is now an esoteric mystical word worthy of a Hindu guru and meaning whatever its 21st century translators want it to mean.

The problem for ordinary New Zealanders, Maori or Pakeha, is that the Waitangi Tribunal has official dibs on interpreting the Treaty, regardless of what ancient dictionaries or documents tell us the words really meant.

Did the Maori expect every last inch of their lives to be controlled by British law? Probably not. Nor did Britain expect to intervene in their customary habits

except to the extent alluded to by Lord Normanby in his instructions to Hobson: “Until they can be brought within the pale of civilised life, and trained to the adoption of its habits, they must be carefully defended in the observance of their own customs, so far as these are compatible with the universal maxims of humanity and morals.” That paragraph, right there, is tino rangatiratanga in action – the governance of daily life retained by Maori until such time as they seek further access to British laws, and subject to exception for matters like cannibalism and human sacrifice.

It is submitted that no one in 1840 was really in the dark about what the Treaty meant. Overall sovereignty would transfer to Britain, day to day life would continue as normal for most Maori. Where there was intertribal conflict, or major crimes, British justice would intercede and adjudicate to the extent they were able. For routine matters, the rangatira – the ‘mayors’ – would sort it out within the hapu.

In practical terms, with no army and next to no police force, the British colonial administration was pretty much powerless for its first few years, so Maori justice continued to exist by default, tempered by missionaries and the appointment of native assessors, or magistrates.

To be fair, there was confusion within colonial ranks. In 1842 after Hobson’s death, upon reports of a tribe – who had not signed the Treaty – killing and eating members of a tribe who had – the Acting Governor Willoughby Shortland decided to impose the long arm of the law on the culprits. Chief Justice William Martin, Bishop Selwyn and Attorney-General Swainson tried to dissuade Shortland from his mission, primarily on the grounds of biting off more than they could chew, and secondly upon the novel legal argument that tribes who had not signed the Treaty were outside its juris-

diction. Historian and politician William Pember-Reeves would later describe this as “an opinion so palpably and daringly wrong that some have thought it a desperate device to save the country.” Certainly, the Colonial Office in London gave the New Zealand administration a swift kicking when it heard about it, “Her Majesty’s rule, said Lord Stanley, having once been proclaimed over all New Zealand, it did not lie with one of her officers to impugn the validity of her government.”

Since 1972, however, the Treaty of Waitangi has taken on a modern spin of its own that appears to bear no resemblance to the way the Maori who signed it saw it.

Lawyer and passionate treaty activist Annette Sykes summed up the views of many within Maoridom today when she wrote: “The … tribes have reached a crossroads in their journey to protect their sovereignty and self-determination.

In recent decades these highly articulate tribal nations have been leaders in a number of political, legal and economic strategies that promote the recognition of individual tribal entities as sovereigns enjoying government-to government relationships with the New Zealand Government. Their cries for self government having being made in forums from the Waitangi Tribunal through to the United Nations, and from the hallowed halls of political power in Wellington through to rank and file protests on the street.”

Yet here is what the 200 chiefs assembled at Kohimarama in 1860 were told by the Governor: “In return for these advantages the Chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi ceded for themselves and their people to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which they collectively or individually possessed or might be supposed to exercise or possess.

This is a key passage, so please note

AMAZING, REALLY, HOW A WORD THAT ONCE SIMPLY MEANT “PROPERTY PROCURED BY SPEAR” IS NOW AN ESOTERIC MYSTICAL WORD WORTHY OF A HINDU GURU AND MEANING WHATEVER ITS 21ST CENTURY TRANSLATORS WANT IT TO MEAN Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 13

the Maori translation read to the chiefs in 1860: “…tino tukua rawatia atu ana e ratou ki Te Kuini o Ingarani nga tikanga me nga mana Kawanatanga katoa i a ratou katoa, i tenei i tenei ranei o ratou, me nga pera katoa e meinga kei a ratou”. The word “tukua” means “cede” or “surrender” and “nga tikanga” the laws and lore, and “mana Kawanatanga katoa” means all sovereign authority.

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overnor Gore Browne went on to read every clause of the English version of the Treaty, translated into Maori, into the record at Kohimarama for the chiefs to vote and comment on.

If you were looking for clarification on what the Treaty of Waitangi meant at the time, you’ve found it. Every main concept in the English version of the Treaty was re-stated in Maori, before a congress of Maori leaders – the biggest gathering of Maori leaders ever held to that point.

If there was ever a time to shout out “liar!”, this was it. If there was ever a time for Maori to say, “that’s not what we agreed to!”, this was it.

So what did the paramount chiefs say?

Sixty percent of those attending spoke in absolute explicit agreement with the way the Governor had described the Treaty and what it meant, and pledged their allegiance to Governor and Queen.

A further 17% expressed similar sentiments, without making an outright declaration about it. Twenty one percent didn’t state an opinion on the matter, but talked of other things. Two percent appeared to be leaning against the Governor.

The tribes, as they would say on Survivor, had spoken, and in doing so had ratified the Treaty of Waitangi as most people understand it: Eruera Kahawai (Ngatiwakaue, Rotorua): “Listen, ye people! There is no one to find fault with the Governor’s words. His words are altogether good.”

Menehira Rakau, (Ngatihe, Maungatapu): “Let us inquire into the character of the Governor’s address. I did not hear one wrong thing in the speech of the Governor.”

Rirituku Te Perehu, (Ngatipikiao, Rotoiti and Maketu): “The Governor’s address is right.”

Henare Pukuatua, (Ngatiwakaue, Rotorua): “Listen my friends, the people of this runanga. I have no thought for 14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

Maori customs. All I think about now is what is good for me. I have been examining the Governor’s address. I have not been able to find one wrong word in all these sayings of the Governor, or rather of the Queen. I have looked in vain for anything to find fault with. Therefore I now say, O Governor, your words are full of light. I shall be a child to the Queen.

Christ shall be the Saviour of my soul, and my temporal guide shall be the Governor or the Law. Now, listen all of you. I shall follow the Governor’s advice. This shall be my path forever and ever.”

Tamihana Rauparaha, (Ngati Toa, Porirua): “The words we have heard this day are good.”

Karaitiana Tuikau, (Ngati Te Matera, Hauraki): “The Governor’s words are good.”

“The words of the Governor are good.

Let the Queen be above all,” exclaimed Tohi, a Ngatiwhakaue chief.

The list could stretch on and on. Suffice to say not one chief accused the Crown of lying when it said it had taken absolute sovereignty over New Zealand when the Treaty was signed.

Constitutionally, their speeches and votes at the Kohimarama runanga amount to a full ratification of the English version of the Treaty, and it seems clear from the quotes above and on the preceding pages that the chiefs fully understood the concept of sovereignty.

However, this is also the reason the so-called Littlewood Treaty document becomes irrelevant – it was superseded

by Kohimarama.

For those who take issue, for example, with the “forests and fisheries” aspect of the Treaty, on the grounds that the words don’t appear in the Maori version, here’s the bad news: Governor Gore Browne read them into the record at Kohimarama, as you can see in his clauses listed earlier. This issue of attention to historical detail applies to goose and gander alike. The conference ratified sovereignty, but it also ratified forests and fisheries.

So let’s pause for a moment and return to contemporary scholarship.

In 1990, Professor Ranginui Walker wrote that rangatiratanga meant sovereignty and kawanatanga was merely a limited form of governorship: “The chiefs are likely to have understood the second clause of the Treaty as

a confirmation of their own sovereign rights in return for a limited concession of power in kawanatanga.

“The Treaty of Waitangi they signed confirmed their own sovereignty while ceding the right to establish a governor in New Zealand to the Crown. A governor is in effect a satrap…a holder of a provincial governorship; he was a subordinate ruler, or a colonial governor. In New Zealand’s case he governed at the behest of the chiefs…in effect the chiefs were his sovereigns.”

In this respect, Walker follows treaty historian Claudia Orange who says rangatiratanga would be a “better approximation to sovereignty than kawanatanga.”

And yet, you’ve seen what Maori – and some of the Kohimarama attendees had actually signed the Treaty personally – understood the Treaty to mean, and sovereignty to mean. Can the academic claims about the Treaty actually be reconciled with historical fact?

It’s an important question. The meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi as it is currently pitched dominates public policy in this country, and it dominates the school curriculum. Our children are learning the academic version of the Treaty. There are many jobs you cannot be appointed to in the public sector unless you can demonstrate an acquaintance and allegiance to the modern interpretations of the Treaty.

None of this is written to belittle the wrongs that were done to Maori in breach of the Treaty. That’s not what this is about. Those grievances in many cases are real and require settlement. But if we are going to be honest about our past, it cuts both ways. We cannot move forward unless we have a clear understanding of the foundations. If our opinions and beliefs about the Treaty in the 21st century are based on a misunderstanding about what 1840 Maori thought, then our opinions and beliefs are founded on a lie.

What actually matters is what Maori at the time really did think they were signing. The only way to find that out is to listen to their voices, rather than engage in endless debates about the meaning of the words as we currently understand them.

Anyone who wants to argue that Maori never ceded sovereignty can only do so by ignoring the Kohimarama runanga transcripts.

For twenty or so years after Waitangi, tribal Maori pretty much had continued to enforce their own laws and customs, because the British colonial apparatus of state in New Zealand was weak and spread too thinly to administer British justice against Maori by force. It was either voluntary compliance, or it was nothing.

What we see at Kohimarama, constitutionally, however, is an evolution of consent. After 20 years of partial integration, the chiefs not only ratified Waitangi in full but expressly called for a complete adoption of Pakeha tikanga.

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et’s hear the chiefs on how they perceived sovereignty operating. Was the Governor a ruler in name only, or one with the power to enforce the law, even to hold these same chiefs to account: Hemi Metene Te Awaitaia: “I shall make the Governor’s address the subject of my speech. I shall speak first of the 4th clause, namely, – ‘In return for these advantages the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi ceded for themselves and their people to Her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely and Without reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignty which they collectively or individually possessed or might be supposed to exercise or possess.’ That was the union of races at Waitangi. I was there at the time, and I listened to the love Of the Queen. I then heard about the advantages of the treaty.

“In my opinion the greatest blessings are Christianity and the Laws. While God spares my life I will give these my first concern. When I commit a wrong, then let me be brought before the Magistrate and punished according to law. Those are the good things.”

Winiata Pekamu Tohiteururangi: “The only thought that has occurred to me, is this – in former times I had but one lord (ariki), and now I shall have but one lord – only one. I shall have but one rule – not two.”

In early December, Gareth Morgan lashed out at the Waitangi Tribunal rewriting history, saying “There is definitely a conversation to be had about Maori aspirations, but the Waitangi Tribunal is not the place to be having it.

In recent weeks the Waitangi Tribunal found that Ngapuhi and other Far North tribes did not intend to cede sovereignty when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi.

If taken to its logical extreme, this means that Maori who signed the Maori version of the Treaty didn’t hand over the reins of sovereignty to the Crown.

“This finding,” railed Morgan, “contradicts not only earlier tribunal findings but also the reality that sovereignty does lie with the Crown – after all it’s the Crown Maori have been negotiating with and which taxes New Zealanders to pay settlements.”

Later in the article Morgan said the idea of an equal governing partnership “seriously undermines democracy in New Zealand.”

He concluded his Herald piece with these words: “Sadly, many non-Maori are uninformed on the Treaty and particularly its modern interpretation. This renders the public vulnerable to some seriously misguided and offensive proposals emanating from the Treaty industry, and gives no lasting solutions to Maori aspirations.

It’s a lose, lose.”

That was December 4, 2014. What a difference four weeks makes on Planet Morgan, because in the first week of January he published a new series of commentaries in the Herald, stating: “The reason the post-1975 Treaty process has been successful is that the Treaty is now taken to mean whatever Maori leaders and the Crown, as the public’s representatives, agree it means. On the face of it this “fluidity” may seem to be a weakness, but actually to date it has served the process well…”

Among Morgan’s solutions…establishing a new Upper House of parliament on race lines: “The Upper House would refer back to Parliament legislative changes it considers require more work. It could be small – say 20 members – and it could have 10 Maori and 10 non-Maori representatives with Maoridom appointing their members and Parliament appointing the others.”

Of one thing Morgan is right: the time is long overdue for New Zealand to have a serious debate about what the treaty really means, rather than what the Treaty industry wants it to mean.

References: 1. Letter, Marsden to Jowett, 11 August 1837, see http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/ tei-McN01Hist-t1-b10-d79.html 2. The 1844 Maori Language Dictionary by William Williams translates ‘maru’ primarily as power, and gave the example, “Na te maru i a ia koia matou i matuku ai,” meaning, “In consequence of his power we were afraid”.

3. In Maori: “Whakarongo mai e nga rangatira Pakeha. Na koutou i tu mai ai ahau inaianei. Ko koutou anake te rangatira. Kia ki atu au kahore kau he rangatira o tenei motu, kahore rawa, kahore rawa. Na te Pakeha ahau i huhuti mai i te paru, nana ahau i horoi. Ko taku kupu tenei, kia kotahi te Ture mo te motu katoa.”

4. In Maori, the words were expressed: “Ko te Atua te tuatahi, ko te Kuini te tuatua, ko te Kawana te tuatoru. Kia kotahi te Kuini mo tatou. Whakamaramatia mai nga ture katoa kia noho ai tatou i roto i te ture kotahi.”

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 15

To teach, or not to teach?

Research finds pushing kids too early might limit all-round development

16窶オNVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM窶ェeb/Mar 2015

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IS NOW ALMOST COMPULSORY, AND PARENTS ARE BOMBARDED WITH REASONS TO EXTEND THE BRAIN DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR CHILDREN. BUT NEW RESEARCH FROM AMERICA FINDS IT IS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD: YES, CHILDREN CAN LEARN MORE THAN WE THINK, BUT IT CAN COME AT A COST. SARAH SPARKS PROFILES THE DEBATE

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he push for earlier and more academically rigorous preschool for 3- to 5-year-olds comes during something of an Enlightenment explosion in the research. Fields such as psychology and neuroscience are showing that young children can understand and benefit from deep learning at the beginning of their lives.

Yet early-childhood researchers caution that the same studies showing what pupils are capable of also suggest that efforts to push down elementary-style instruction to preschool could undermine the exact cognitive development educators hope to build up.

“Over the last 15 years, there’s been a tremendous revolution in the way we see very young children,” says Allison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the 1999 book, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. “They are learning in very sophisticated ways, playing in ways that help them find information. It’s not just that children are defective grown-ups; when you look at children’s brains, they really seem to be designed to learn in this way.”

At the time Craig T. Ramey started working on the now-famous ongoing Carolina Abecedarian Project preschool study in North Carolina in 1972, “there was a real suspicion that the environment really didn’t matter much as long as the kid had been fed regularly and not physically abused.”

Most educators and researchers followed the model put forth by Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist who helped found modern child psychology. Piaget studied children through direct questioning and observation and determined those younger than school age were incapable of reason.

“How children learn hasn’t changed very much” since Piaget’s work gained wide American prominence in the 1960s, says Ramey, a professor and distinguished research scholar at Virginia Tech. “What we know about how they learn has changed a good bit. Children are learning all the time from early infancy; we have just been too ham-handed to see it.”

As researchers move instead to measuring how babies and children pay attention, react, and solve problems – “letting them answer in their own language, rather than ours,” as Allison Gopnik puts it – they have identified extensive, complex thought in infants and young children.

In fact, a new wave of research suggests the very traits educators are desperately trying to cultivate in high school graduates – critical reasoning, lateral thinking, creativity, autonomous learning, and a host of other “college-and career-ready” skills – are not just present but the natural learning mechanism of young children.

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 17

SOME 4-YEAR-OLD PRESCHOOLERS MAY ACT MORE LIKE 7-YEAR-OLDS, WHILE OTHERS MAY APPEAR CLOSER TO 2, DEPENDING ON THEIR BACKGROUND, DEVELOPMENTAL TRAJECTORY, AND HOW MUCH EXPOSURE THEY HAVE HAD TO ACADEMIC SETTINGS In a 2014 study, Gopnik and her colleagues found that 4- and 5-year-olds were better than adults at recognizing when an event depended on multiple, related causes rather than a direct line of causation. Preschoolers were more open to evaluating all evidence, even that with unlikely or unusual connections, while adults tended to fall back on their established modes of reasoning.

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hat’s the kind of insight required to understand how the interplay of high blood pressure and genetics can lead to a heart attack – or how an early strength in critical thinking could combine with access to strong content in middle school to make a student more likely to graduate from high school.

At the same time, researchers and educators are starting to take a morenuanced look at how early-childhood programs should work.

“What we’re seeing is like a tsunami of research on the science of learning at early ages,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a distinguished faculty fellow in psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“Instead of saying, ‘Oh gosh, kids are behind by age 3 or 4,’ we know what curricular pieces are missing and what we need to focus on.”

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Those in the field have more than a half-century of programmatic research to draw on. Federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs improved the health of children in poverty, but results have varied from site to site. Small-scale, but highly intensive, programs like the Abecedarian preschool study and the Perry Preschool Project in Michigan have shown significant improvement in academics and quality of life over decades, but have been harder to replicate in larger populations. And a host of state, local, and private preschool programs have shown varying effects.

Critics have pointed out that many programs, even highly intensive ones, show fading effects as students grow up. In part, that may be because the range of “normal” is wider in earlier grades, Ramey says.

Some 4-year-old preschoolers may act more like 7-year-olds, while others may appear closer to 2, depending on their background, developmental trajectory, and how much exposure they have had to academic settings. But these differences often smooth out as students age.

Moreover, “preschool is not a vaccination,” says Barbara T. Bowman, a professor in child development and a co-founder of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in Chicago specializing in early-childhood-

development studies. “If you don’t have a very good kindergarten program, by 1st grade, you’ve lost your benefit. Unless they are building on that prior learning, why would they be any smarter? Preschool builds a foundation, but you have to keep teaching them.”

Tomoko Wakabayashi, the current director of the center that launched the landmark Perry Preschool Project, a study of an intensive early-child education program, argues that research on preschool and early-childhood education must take the long view – as the Perry Project did – because many of the benefits in executive function and other noncognitive skills don’t start to show up until much later in life.

“Some of the effects that came out, you never would have found them in preschool,” says Ms. Wakabayasi, who directs for Early Education Evaluation at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation. “If Perry hadn’t followed students for so long, a lot of the discussion around preschool would have been different; there would have been just a fade out of IQ [benefits], and that would have been it.”

Yet David J. Armor, a professor emeritus in policy and government affairs at George Mason University, argued in a

recent critique of preschool studies for the Washington-based Cato Institute that researchers and policymakers may be too quick to generalize findings from the prior programs.

“It’s a really complex behavioural model that says you see fade-out in the present but [benefit] shows up in the future,” Armor said. “Before we extend this to universal preschool, we need to find out what is going on.”

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hat’s tough to do, because modern preschool policy is both spurred by and pulled between the twin concerns of anxious middle- and upperclass parents trying to find the “best” academic foundation for their children – often enrolling them in programs designed for highly at-risk children – and disadvantaged parents often unable to access preschools at all.

“The vast majority of our research has occurred in children with extremely low-resource homes; very often, we’re taking information from studying an extremely high-risk, vulnerable group and trying to apply it to all children,” says Sharon Landesman Ramey, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech. “But there’s no evidence that children from uppermiddle-class families and beyond have need of public pre-school.”

In fact, an analysis of Head Start data from October found that about a third of the differences other studies have seen in the effectiveness of different sites is accounted for by differences in the format and audience of the centers. Full-day programs improved children’s cognitive skills most, and programs with home visits were most effective at boosting socialemotional learning. Moreover, children with less-educated mothers got the most benefit from the centers.

A separate study by the National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, published in the journal Early Child Development and Care, found preschool programs universally available had, as one would expect, more middle- and upper-income and white children than did programs that targeted children in poverty. Universal programs tended to run for longer hours and have teachers with more education, but teachers in targeted programs rated higher on teacher-student

interactions and classroom climate.

More recently, a study of Tools of the Mind, a preschool and kindergarten curriculum designed to improve executive functions like attention and reasoning, showed better effects for pupils in highpoverty schools than in wealthier schools.

“The concern is, there will develop a preschool inequality: The middle- and upper-class kids are going to Montessori and Waldorf preschools, ... but for poor kids, we just have to get them reading and writing to get them through school,” Allison Gopnik says. “That would be a terrible waste.”

Moreover, early-education researchers repeatedly voice concern that both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum would end up poorly served by making preschool more “formally” academic.

“I’ve been in some classrooms that make me want to pull my hair out, because the 4-year-old program looks like a bad, dumbed-down 3rd grade program,” Craig Ramey says. “If you walk into any program and don’t see kids laughing and deeply engaged, you are looking at a bad program.”

Neuroscience and cognitive researchers may be partially to blame for encouraging educators and parents to “run after and do the next best thing,” and apply it too broadly, says Nathan A. Fox, a distinguished professor and interim chairman of human development and quantitative methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Take a hot K-12 (school years 1 to 12) focus like inhibitory control, for instance.

The classic Stanford University “Marshmallow Study,” in which young children tried to delay gratification in order to get more treats, showed later benefits for students who were best able to resist temptation. But it also showed that the ability to wait develops naturally with age, and that 5-year-olds are better able to hold off for an extra marshmallow than 4-year-olds.

Trying to push that skill earlier has trade-offs, argued Yuko Munakata, a psychology professor specializing in developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Just because we can improve inhibitory control and executive function doesn’t

mean we always want to,” she said at the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, in November.

Brain-imaging studies by Munakata have found 8-year-olds’ brain activity for impulse control looks “pretty similar to an adult’s,” but “3 1/2 -year-olds’ [brain activity] seems nothing like adults. They show no planning; they react in the moment.”

Pushing 3- and 4-year-olds to think more like adults may “impair statistical bottom-up learning, like that used to learn language and social conventions,” Munakata warned – removing the mental flexibility preschoolers showed in Gopnik’s study on causal effects.

“The problem is, there’s a misinterpretation: When scientists say, ‘Children are learning a lot more than we thought,’ people think that looks like what people do in schools,” Gopnik says. “The message that children are learning and [that] this is a really critical stage has gotten through. But people are misinterpreting it to mean that children should be in scholastic settings earlier and earlier.”

Just as they changed how they viewed young children’s ability to learn, Ms. Hirsh-Pasek says researchers and educators may benefit from changing how they view the goal of early education, from closing potential achievement gaps to building students’ intrinsic skills and motivation to learn.

“What we’ve been doing is teaching kids how to build the tower,” she says, “but we are not giving them the context to explore the ...[other] things they can do with the blocks.”

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 19

I Words by Barbara Sadick

s sugar making us sick?

A team of scientists at the University of California in San Francisco believes so, and they’re doing something about it. They launched an initiative to bring information on food and drink and added sugar to the public by reviewing more than 8,000 scientific papers that show a strong link between the consumption of added sugar and chronic diseases.

The common belief until now was that sugar just makes us fat, but it’s become clear through research that it’s making us sick. For example, there’s the rise in fatty-liver disease, the emergence of Type 2 diabetes as an epidemic in children and the dramatic increase in metabolic disorders.

Laura Schmidt, a UCSF professor at the School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the project, SugarScience, said the idea is to make the findings comprehensible and clear to everyone. The results will be available to all on a website (SugarScience.org) and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Added sugars, Schmidt said, are sugars that don’t occur naturally in foods. They are found in 74 per cent of all packaged foods, have 61 names and often are difficult to decipher on food labels.

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires food companies to list ingredients on packaging, the suggested daily values of natural and added sugars can’t be found.

Sugar,

SOURCE OF DISEASE

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The FDA is considering a proposal to require food manufacturers to list information on sugars in the same way they do for fats, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates and protein. But because so much added sugar is dumped into so many products, one average America breakfast of cereal would likely exceed a reasonable daily limit.

“SugarScience shows that a calorie is not a calorie but rather that the source of a calorie determines how it’s metabolised,” said paediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, a member of the SugarScience team and the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. Lustig said that more than half of the US population is sick with metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors for chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and liver disease that are directly related to the excessive consumption of added sugars in the Western diet.

Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the category of heart attack/stroke as the leading cause of death in the United States. Every day, 2,200 Americans die of cardiovascular disease.

That’s about 800,000 a year, or one in three deaths.

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he latest statistics from the American Diabetes Association show that 29.1 million Americans, or 9.3 per cent, have diabetes. Of that number, 21 million have been diagnosed and 8.1 million have not, and the numbers continue to grow, according to the association.

It doesn’t stop there. The American Liver Foundation says at least 30 million Americans, or 1 in 10, has one of 100 kinds of liver disease.

Clinicians widely believe that obesity is the cause of metabolic disease. Although it is a marker for these diseases, Lustig said, it’s not the cause. “Too much sugar causes chronic metabolic disease in both fat and thin people,” he said, “and instead of focusing on obesity as the problem, we should be focusing on our processed-food supply.”

The average American consumes 19.5 teaspoons (78 grams) of sugar a day, substantially more than the amount recommended by the American Heart Association. The association sets these limits: 6 teaspoons (24 grams) for women, 9 teaspoons (36 grams) for men, and 3-6 teaspoons (12-24 grams) for children, depending on age. Just one 12-ounce soda contains 8 to 9 teaspoons (32-36 grams) of sugar.

Liquid sugar in sodas, energy drinks and sports drinks is the leading source of added sugar in the American diet. That represents 36 per cent of all added sugars consumed, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. And because liquid does not include fibre, the body processes it quickly. That causes more sugar to be sent to the pancreas and liver than either can process properly, and the resulting build-up of sugar leads to heart disease, diabetes and liver disease.

Consuming too much sugar causes the level of glucose sugar in the bloodstream to increase. That, in turn, causes the pancreas to release high levels of insulin that cause the body to store extra calories as fat.

Too much insulin also affects the hormone leptin, a natural appetite suppressant that signals the brain to stop eating when full. But the imbalance of insulin levels caused by the intake of too much sugar causes lipid resistance, and the brain no longer gets that signal.

Another member of the SugarScience team, Dean Schillinger, is a professor of medicine at UCSF and a practicing primary care. He believes the overconsumption of added sugars is a social problem, not a problem of individual choice and freedom.

“People are becoming literate about the toxic effects of sugar,” Schillinger said, “and have more understanding of the idea that high doses are bad for one’s health.” He sees evidence that those in a higher socioeconomic bracket are taking steps to

LIQUID SUGAR IN SODAS, ENERGY DRINKS AND SPORTS DRINKS IS THE LEADING SOURCE OF ADDED SUGAR IN THE AMERICAN DIET. THAT REPRESENTS 36 PER CENT OF ALL ADDED SUGARS CONSUMED

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 21

limit intake of sugar when compared with poorer, less literate people.

Healthy food is expensive and less readily accessible in poorer neighbourhoods, and because corn is so abundant and cheap, it is added to many food products. “Dumping high fructose corn syrup into cheap foods, sodas, sports drinks and energy drinks is toxic to the body, causing epidemic metabolic diseases and a serious health crisis,” Schillinger said.

To underscore the scope of the problem, he pointed out that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 1,500 American soldiers lost a limb in combat. In that same period, 1.5 million people in the US lost limbs to amputations from Type 2 diabetes, a preventable disease. “We have yet to mobilize for a public health war,” he said, “but the time has come to do so.”

Such a war would have to take on the root causes of the problem. We would need to look at our food policies, food pricing, availability of healthy foods, and the marketing being carried out by food and beverage industries to hook the public on unhealthy choices loaded with added sugar.

Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, is not a SugarScience researcher, but he agreed that the amount of sugar consumed by the American public is too high. SugarScience, he said, is being helpful by bringing the information about added sugar to public attention.

“It’s just about impossible,” Hu said, “to know 22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

DUMPING HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP INTO CHEAP FOODS, SODAS, SPORTS DRINKS AND ENERGY DRINKS IS TOXIC TO THE BODY, CAUSING EPIDEMIC METABOLIC DISEASES AND A SERIOUS HEALTH CRISIS from food labels what kinds and amounts of sugars are in a product.” That’s why he thinks the FDA should require food companies to list those amounts on all food labels so people know what they’re eating, in what amounts they’re eating it, and what amounts are safe.

Food labels are important, Schillinger said, and they need to be revised, but the most important change needed is to make the healthier choice the easier choice.

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We believe it has also helped our mental focus and even the texture of our skin; and it helps us keep up with the grand kids. We recommend it to all.”

Jim and Diana Ryan, Tokoroa. *Copies available on request

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 23

Reese goes wild

Words by Rebecca Keegan/ LA Times

Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern find inspiration in their new film

24窶オNVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM窶ェeb/Mar 2015

S

etting aside the perky, cute-girl persona that serves her so well on screen, Reese Witherspoon brings a gritty, stripped bare (literally and figuratively) performance to her role as Cheryl Strayed in the film Wild. An adaptation of Strayed’s bestselling 2012 memoir of her 1,100-mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, the film interweaves her struggles in the wilderness with her recollections of the painful and often reckless life she’s leaving behind. Laced through it all are poignant memories of her mother, Bobbi, played by Laura Dern. We spoke to Witherspoon and Dern at a recent Envelope Screening Series event. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Reese, you bought this story after reading it before it was published with your own money. What was it that motivated you to do that?

Witherspoon: She sent it to me and I read

it in two days, and I was just in awe of her writing. I thought her gritty, emotional truth and the way that she spoke so openly about her past was such a healing thing. I got to the end and I was like, “I don’t know who this woman is, but I just want to hug her.” I feel like I went on that journey with her. And I called her the next day and said I would love to turn it into a movie. And she asked me a lot of questions, and we talked about it. And then she called me a couple days later and said, “I’m going to give you the option.”

What did she ask you? What’d she want to know?

Witherspoon: She had a lot of things that

she didn’t want it to be.

Like what?

Witherspoon: Well, it’s interesting because

I said, “Why did you send it to me?” and

she said, “Because I know you’re from somewhere. I know you’re from Tennessee.” And it was really important that it wasn’t about, like, white-girl problems, you know? I told her that so many people in this world have nothing, and that’s what I really responded to, that you get to the end of this movie and this woman has nothing. She has no man and no money and no parents and no job, and it’s a happy ending. And that’s extraordinary in this life because so many people don’t know where to turn or what resources are going to lift them up out of their grief or their despair, and she did this for herself with nothing. And I felt like it could be inspirational to other people.

Laura, there’s a scene where Cheryl says something like it must be hard for you that I’m so much more sophisticated than you. It’s one of those conversations, I think, anybody who’s been a parent or a kid probably feels some empathy toward.

How much of your own experience as a mother and as a daughter did you bring into the role?

Dern: Oh, you know, everything and so much more. I mean, everything I’ve experienced and certainly my own love and good fortune in my relationship with my mother and all that I’m trying to figure out as a mother. And, you know, something Cheryl said that impacted me so much. In one of these Q&As recently, she talked about that scene specifically and the gift of writing the book at this point in her life because she said, “I lost my mother before I was the age where you look back and apologize for the kid you were, that didn’t know how lucky you were. So, in a way, my book was my opportunity to heal that and say that.”

Reese, the opening scene where you throw the boot is such a beautiful shot and such a dramatic sequence. Can you tell me where you guys were and how you shot that?

Witherspoon: It was actually the hardest

sequence to shoot in the film. We were on top of Mt. Hood in Oregon, and we had to – we’re already staying at an elevated hotel, and then we had to take two ski lifts and then hike for about 30 minutes with all the equipment, including the portable toilet that absolutely nobody used. It was ridiculous. But then we had to rope ourselves in and walk single file on this tiny precipice. It was really scary.

Laura, you had a kind of unusual experience in that the little girl who played young Cheryl is actually Cheryl Strayed’s daughter whose name is Bobbi. What was that like?

Dern: It was incredible. First of all, she’s an amazing person. We were all particularly moved because when Cheryl first saw Bobbi and I work together, and the first shot was Jean-Marc wanting her to run into my arms in the hallway of the school, Cheryl was standing at the monitor and I think she was stunned by a realization. Later she said, “You know, when my mother died, one of my thoughts was she’ll never know her grandchildren if I have children one day. And here I am with this experience watching my daughter meet the grandmother I thought she’d never know, through this storytelling.”

So, it was incredible that every time we were doing a flashback with her, we all couldn’t help but consider that for Cheryl.

When we walked in, Reese, we passed the giant backpack, a sort of display of it, and you said almost affectionately, “Oh, Monster.” Do you actually feel affection for that pack?

Witherspoon: I know it sounds bizarre,

but I do. I miss Monster, I do. The first couple weeks were horrible and I hated Monster, and I’d kick it every time, and I would take it off my back every single time after he’d say cut. And then after five weeks I just got so used to it. It was like an appendage. And you know what’s funny is Cheryl still has Monster in her basement. The reason Monster is an exact replica of her actual backpack is because she still has it. And she still has all of her camping gear and all of her cooking equipment and all of the outfits she wore.

Is there a point at which you will attempt to re-create any part of this trek on your own?

Witherspoon: It’s so funny. I got home

from the movie and it was about to be my birthday, and I said to my husband, I was like, “Jim, you know what we should do is get the kids and then we’re just going to go out there to the trails and we’re just going to do this, you know, just for seven days, us and the kids.” And he’s like, “That sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Next time right before your birthday can you do a movie in the South of France.”

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 25

HERS health

Specialized treatment helps cancer patients to eat Words by Karen Garloch

A

s a paediatric oncologist, Dr Peter Anderson long ago noticed that, when children are diagnosed with cancer, parents often ask what foods or supplements will help during treatment.

That got him thinking. And he realised it’s not so much about what to eat as it is about being able to eat.

It’s often difficult for cancer patients to eat because of mouth sores.

Also called mucositis, this inflammation of the mucous membranes in the mouth and digestive tract is a common and painful side effect of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. And it’s a major reason why cancer patients don’t get all the nutrition they need.

Anderson started working on the problem in the early 90s, and last year the physician announced his solution to the world at an international medical conference in Toronto.

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

It’s not a drug or a food. It’s a special mouthwash called Healios.

Developed by Anderson with multiple collaborators, Healios has been shown to minimize mouth sores and enable patients to eat enough to keep up their strength.

Anderson’s interest in the subject goes back about 20 years, when he worked in a bone marrow transplant unit at the University of Minnesota. One day he noticed that 11 of 12 patients were on morphine drips because “they had really bad mouth sores.”

When he searched the medical literature to find out “what makes healing faster,” he learned that “critically ill patients did better if they had some glutamine.” It’s an amino acid that is “the fuel for your intestines and the lining of your mouth, just like glucose is the fuel for your brain,” Anderson said.

But the answer wasn’t as simple as buying gluta-

mine in a health food store. Sprinkling glutamine on food wouldn’t help if mouth sores made it hard for a child to chew or swallow.

So Anderson consulted a pharmacist who helped him develop a sweetened glutamine liquid that was tested in three randomized, double-blind, placebocontrolled studies. And the results were good.

“There was strong evidence that glutamine in a good-tasting solution works,” Anderson said. “It reduced mouth sores.”

And that enabled patients to eat. “If you can maintain your weight, usually you’ll tolerate the other side effects of chemotherapy better,” Anderson said.

While he was at the Mayo Clinic for 10 years, Anderson continued testing the product. When one pharmacist worried the sweet liquid might cause cavities, they switched from sugar to NutraSweet.

It didn’t work, but it led to an important discovery.

Anderson said they learned that sugar helped get “100- to 1,000-fold more glutamine into cells” than NutraSweet. “It took both the sugar and the glutamine to get the glutamine into the cells,” he said. “I was a paediatrician trying to make it good tasting. It was not science. It was serendipity.”

Later, Anderson collaborated with Labrada, a company that sells nutritional supplements, to improve the product and get it to market.

“We needed a good-tasting powder that could be easily stored and shipped,” Anderson said. Instead of the “messy, sticky solution,” they came up with Healios, a powder of glutamine and sugars that can be mixed with water. It comes in orange or grape flavours.

“It tasted better than I thought it ever would,” said Anderson.

Healios has been on the market since September 2013, according to Alex Rodriguez, a representative with the Healios Oncology Nutrition.

Rodriguez said the “all-natural product” is sold directly to patients as well as pharmacies for $49.99 (USD) for a 30-serving supply. It can be purchased online at www.healiosproducts.com. Anderson, who holds the patent, does not benefit financially.

The company is just getting started, and Rodriguez is preparing paperwork to begin selling Healios in countries other than the States.

Patients who use it are advised to “swish and swallow” Healios twice a day. To prevent mouth sores, they can start using it even before they begin treatment.

Valerie Miniex, a dietician, said she has 20 patients with head and neck cancer who are using Healios, and she’s been “amazed at the results.”

She learned about it three months ago from a patient who had used it at M.D. Anderson. Separately, Miniex said she had been reading about the effects of glutamine to hasten healing. Miniex said

dry mouth and mouth sores are “major issues” for patients with head and neck cancer. “We’re always treating the symptoms. Here was an opportunity to prevent them.”

Only one of her patients has been unable to tolerate Healios, because of acid reflux, Miniex said.

“That’s huge to get that kind of response. ... It’s such a problem that we’re all just excited to have something that is working.”

This fall, Anderson shared the Healios story at the International Society of Paediatric Oncology Congress, before 1,900 doctors from 92 countries. His poster presentation was prepared by Katrina Ashlin, a Davidson College senior who interned with Anderson.

Ashlin, a biology major who plans to become a dentist, developed educational materials about Healios and distributed them to nurses and nutritionists, those most likely to work with patients on treating mouth sores.

Ashlin’s work was paid for by Joedance Film Festival, an event that raises money for research into rare paediatric cancers. The festival was created in memory of Joe Restaino, who was 20 when he died in 2010 of osteosarcoma. Over five years, it has raised more than $55,000 for Levine Children’s, where Restaino received some of his care.

His mother, Diane Restaino, said her family is proud to have sponsored Anderson’s project because mouth sores were a “very painful side effect for Joe.” “He couldn’t eat. It was painful for him to even drink water,” she said. “This would have taken so much pain away from Joe through all of that chemotherapy.”

Because Joe died before Anderson arrived, Restaino hadn’t tried Healios mouthwash when she met with the doctor. He mixed up a dose and offered it to Restaino, who took a swallow and declared: “It’s really good.”

“This is a huge deal to know that you can go right downstairs to get this,” Diane Restaino said. “It seems like a small thing, but it will make a huge difference to a lot of cancer patients.”

Instead of the “messy, sticky solution,” they came up with Healios, a powder of glutamine and sugars that can be mixed with water

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 27

HERS althealth

Ignore predictions of gloom Words by Wendy Orent

P

rophets of doom have been telling us for decades that a deadly new pandemic – of bird flu, of SARS or MERS coronavirus, and now of Ebola – is on its way. Why are we still listening?

If you look back at the furore raised at many distinguished publications – Nature, Science, Scientific American, National Geographic – back in, say, 2005, about a potential bird flu (H5N1) pandemic, you wonder what planet they were on. Nature ran a special section titled – “Avian flu: Are we ready?”

– that began, ominously, with the words “Trouble is brewing in the East” and went on to present a mock aftermath report detailing catastrophic civil breakdown.

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

Robert Webster, a famous influenza virologist, told ABC News in 2006 that “society just can’t accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility.”

Public health expert Michael T. Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, at a meeting in Washington of scientists brought together by the Institute of Medicine, warned in 2005 that a post-pandemic commission, like the post-9/11 commission, could hold “many scientists ... accountable to that commission for what we did or didn’t do to prevent a pandemic.” He also predicted that we could be facing “three years of a given hell” as the world struggled to right itself after the deadly pandemic. And Laurie Garrett, author of what must be the urtext for

pandemic predictions, her 1994 book “The Coming Plague,” intoned in Foreign Affairs that “in short, doom may loom.” Although she followed that with, “But note the may,” the article went on to paint a terrifying picture of the avian flu threat nonetheless.

And such hysteria still goes on: Whether it’s over the MERS coronavirus, a whole alphabet of chicken flu viruses, a real but not very deadly influenza pandemic in 2009, or a kerfuffle like the one in 2012 over a scientist-crafted ferret flu that also was supposed to be a pandemic threat. Along the way, virologist Nathan Wolfe published The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age, and David Quammen warned in his gripping Spillover that some new animal plague could arise from the jungle and sweep across the world.

And now there’s Ebola. Osterholm, in a widely read op-ed in the New York Times in September, wrote about the possibility that scientists were afraid to mention publicly the danger they discuss privately: that Ebola “could mutate to become transmissible through the air.” “The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has the potential to alter history as much as any plague has ever done,” he wrote. And Garrett wrote in Foreign Policy, “Attention, World: You just don’t get it.” She went on to say, “Wake up, fools,” because we should be more frightened of a potential scenario like the one in the movie Contagion, in which a lethal, fictitious pandemic scours the world, nearly destroying civilization.

But there were fewer takers this time. Osterholm’s claims about Ebola going airborne were discounted by serious scientists, and Garrett seemingly retracted her earlier hysteria about Ebola by claiming that, after all, evolution made such spread unlikely.

The scientific world has changed since 2005. Now, most scientists understand that there are significant physical and evolutionary barriers to a blood- and fluid-borne virus developing airborne transmission, as Garrett has acknowledged. Though Ebola virus has been detected in human alveolar cells, as Vincent Racaniello, virologist at Columbia University, explained to me, that doesn’t mean it can replicate in the airways enough to allow transmission. “Maybe... the virus can get in, but can’t get out. Like a roach motel,” wrote Racaniello in an email.

H5N1, we understand now, never went airborne because it attached only to cell receptors located deep in human lungs, and could not, therefore, be coughed or sneezed out. SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused local outbreaks after multiple introductions via air travel but spread only sluggishly and mostly in hospitals. Breaking its chains of transmission ended the outbreak globally.

There probably will always be significant barriers preventing the easy adaptation of an animal disease to the human species. Furthermore, Racaniello insists that there are no recorded instances of

We need to stop listening to the doomsayers, and we need to do it now.

Predictions of lethal pandemics have always been wrong

viruses that have adapted to humans, changing the way they are spread.

So we need to stop listening to the doomsayers, and we need to do it now. Predictions of lethal pandemics have – since the swine flu fiasco of 1976, when President Ford vowed to vaccinate “every man, woman and child in the United States” – always been wrong. Fear-mongering wastes our time and our emotions and diverts resources from where they should be directed – in the case of Ebola, to the ongoing tragedy in West Africa. Americans have all but forgotten about Ebola now, because most people realize it isn’t coming to a school or a shopping mall near you. But Sierra Leoneans and Liberians go on dying.

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 29

HERS boutique Monster created the World’s thinnest, lightest and most versatile headphone for athletes. This was made possible by the integration of an innovative flat battery and folded circuit design. It is joined by the iSPORT Bluetooth Wireless, which also brings the powerful Monster music listening experience to virtually any tough workout routine. www.monsterproducts.com

Come out and play with Lancome’s gorgeously hydrating lipstick, Rouge in Love. Combine vibrant colour with a feather-light texture that lasts up to 6 hours. Choose from 24 colours to achieve a look you love – from natural to sophisticated. Let your lipcolour show your mood. www.lancome.co.uk

This high-precision mascara achieves instant volume and intensely lush colour in a single stroke. Its innovative formula expands, plumping lashes to their fullest. The exclusive new ‘Snowflakes’ brush combines long and short bristles to deliver an extreme, eye-opening effect. www.chanel.com

PartyLite is continuing its exciting collaboration with iconic potter, designer and author Jonathan Adler with an all-new collection. The Safari Chic Collection will encourage candle lovers all over the globe to explore their wild side. Jonathan’s Safari Chic Collection for PartyLite features pieces inspired by his iconic animal sculptures. The Lion Votive Holder, Zebra Tealight Holder, Elephant Tealight Holder and Elephant Candle Holder have shapes that radiate modern style. www.partylite.eu

30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

Galatea gives Momento jewelry its voice by implanting an NFC chip deep inside the pearl. The tiny computer runs without a battery by induction energy. When the Galatea app is downloaded, the user records a message or uploads an audio file. By tapping the pearl against an NFC-enabled mobile device, the audio is played and other digital material displayed. From words of love and encouragement to wedding vows and Biblical passages, the emotional connections the Momento Pearl can make are truly endless. www.galateausa.com

Yes, it’s official. Beach Blonde favorites are back on shelves. The John Frieda Hair Care Experts, the first to bring you innovative products for that “beachy” style years ago, couldn’t ignore your demands. So say hello, once again, to wondrous windswept waves, brighter, beachier texture and ocean-fresh scents – all year round. www.johnfrieda.com

Rogue Love by Rihanna captures that moment when love first hits you with a wild rush that goes through your whole body. Delicious fruits tempt your senses with notes of fresh citrus and succulent peach mingling with the temptation of juicy berries. Just as the facets of love take multiple twists and turns, the core of Rogue Love by Rihanna is built with layers upon layers of lush, rich florals www.rihannanow.com

Its clean and simple design perfectly compliments the elegance of the glass Chemex carafe. The unmistakable quality and effortless functionality are in tune with our enduring philosophy that beauty and science can be one in the same. Includes the Six Cup Classic Series Brewer, small pack of Chemex Bonded Filters and glass coffeemaker cover. www.chemexcoffeemaker.com

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 31

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HERS beauty

Don’t let the psychology of colour psyche you out Words by Debra D. Bass

E

very year Pantone crowns a colour of the year, the inevitable deluge of press releases about suitably hued products is unleashed.

You’d think that factories were hushed and poised at a standstill waiting for the official decree so that they could douse vast amounts of shoes, handbags, denim, lingerie, watches, jewellery and home furnishings with the annual tincture.

The colour is Marsala, in case you haven’t heard.

Not the Indian cooking variety but a richer, cabernet version.

Pantone doesn’t just chart colour, it aims to “study how colour influences human thought processes, emotions and physical reactions.”

And the colour authority makes the argument that Radiant Orchid, 2014’s colour of the year, encouraged creativity and innovation, whereas, “Marsala enriches our mind, body and soul, exuding confidence and stability,” according to a statement by Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Colour Institute.

That seems like a lot to ask of a new skirt, but we are all aware that there is a science to colour, or rather a science devoted to our perception of colour. However, the influence of colour is heavily influenced by culture.

Why is pink girly? A century ago, it was acceptable for both male and female infants, children and adults. It was neutral, not just in a “real men can wear pink” sort of way, but legitimately gender neutral. Not today.

Colour affects all of us differently, and it can depend on our history, our eyesight, our heritage or simply our vantage point 34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

There’s a reason you feel comfort in blue if you’re from a Western culture, but if you’re from an Eastern society, you’d find more solace in yellows and reds.

Colour affects all of us differently, and it can depend on our history, our eyesight, our heritage or simply our vantage point. It is only our perception of the reflection of light after all. That’s why some people find bright colours too stimulating and others prefer them.

A room of boisterous elementary-school children might be perfectly at home in a bright room of primary colours, but a roomful of office workers would probably demand softer bulbs and a subdued wall colour, but those people don’t work at Google.

Colour affects mood in nebulous ways. Is the girl walking toward you in the bright yellow dress happier or does she just appear so? Does seeing her make you happier and maybe you’re projecting that onto her? Would she have selected that dress from her closet today if she was in foul mood? And would someone who isn’t happy by nature buy a bright yellow dress?

The answers are debatable and not so important as the questions. Colour is what you make it, but that doesn’t mean that it is a small matter.

A few people called Mark Zuckerberg a little bit sexist when he said that he paid minimal attention to his clothing because such frivolous decisions only distracted from his plans for world domination ... um ... I mean from how to best serve the community. Meanwhile, Marissa Mayer, the chief executive officer of Yahoo!, is famously a clothes aficionado.

Although there are reports that her job is not as secure as her fashion prowess.

Zuckerberg explained his lacklustre clothing choice at a Q&A session at his Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley. He said he selected the personal uniform of a grey T-shirt and denim to conserve mental energy. And apparently, it’s really working for him.

He also said little decisions like what to eat for breakfast or lunch can all chip away at efficiency.

But some would argue, and I’m going to raise my hand here, that forcing them into a drab rote uniform day in and day out would be the epitome of soul-crushing, energy-deflating monotony.

When I asked Dacy Gillespie, a local wardrobe consultant who writes the Mindful Closet blog, to corroborate that Zuckerberg is wrong, she said instead that he has a point. Many of her clients, who hate the daily anxiety of finding something to wear, breathe a sigh of relief when she gives them permission to adopt a self-selected uniform.

You don’t say.

“I advise people to not be too adventurous with their clothing,” Gillespie said. “I really think it’s a way to reduce the stress of getting dressed when you stick to certain colours. There’s no reason to force yourself into something that isn’t you.”

So my tangerine skirt and yellow sweater ensemble might not be for you.

Wardrobe stylist and consultant Latoya Elnora said people get themselves into trouble trying to emulate others instead of figuring out what style elevates their personal appearance best.

“Even if you are in a lower-level position, that doesn’t mean the naked eye knows that,” she said noting that people look at you as a package to get their first impression. Most won’t notice the brand name of your dress or suit or even the colour if it’s not off-putting, but they’ll get a feeling about you.

Some feelings are magnified by colour and some feelings are magnified by your persona.

Ultimately, the colour you feel most comfortable, confident or happy in is going to be the best colour for you. So if you prefer the Fuchsia Rose of 2001, the Chili Pepper of 2007, the Emerald of 2012 or any shade in between over this year’s Marsala, no colour institute can dictate that.

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 35

HERS cuisine

Of molecules and Marx James Morrow looks at the new arms race in the kitchen

L

ike genetic engineering and climate change, “molecular gastronomy” is little more than a post-modern scientific gloss on a phenomenon that has been occurring for ages. Just have temperatures have swung north and south since long before the Industrial Revolution, man has been tinkering with the genes of the plants and animals he consumes.

36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

That summer corn you enjoy slathered in salt and butter? It was developed thousands of years ago by North American Indians, the product of work and experimentation to modify the genes and domesticate a crop that in its previous form was inedible.

Likewise the estimated 24 billion chickens pecking and scratching their way around their little patches of the planet at any given moment are only the efficient (if noisy) little producers of eggs and meat they are because of ancient husbandry – or as the headline-writers would have it, “genetic modification”.

Molecular gastronomy must be looked at in much the same historical context. While the term was only popularised by a pair of European scientists in the 1980s, and went on to become a household term with foodies everywhere when tales began to emerge of a little restaurant called El Bulli in a hardto-reach corner of Spain whose chef Ferran Adria was the whispered high priest of this dark alchemy, the use of scientific terminology to describe kitchen processes dates back at least to 17th century France.

And indeed there is no reason why scientific principles should not be taken into account in the kitchen. For in many ways, the kitchen is just one big chemistry lab: Heats, acids, pressures are applied, liquids are transformed into solids and vice versa, microscopic particles managed, all in the service of a result.

This has been going on since the beginning of time.

One need not resort to post-modern methods to perform clever chemical tricks. Some of the items on the current menu at London’s Fat Duck restaurant, another temple of molecular gastronomy, include “Hot and Iced Tea”, “Nitro-Scrambled Bacon and Egg Ice Cream”, and “Radish Ravioli of Oysters”.

Now the Fat Duck is thought to be one of the best restaurants in the world, and its chef Heston Blumenthal, is one of the cleverest chefs alive today – complete with an OBE to prove it.

For the home chef, however, such cooking is really taking place in another level of the troposphere. I

prefer a more down to earth approach. Menu items should not sound like Kevin Rudd soundbites, full of clever terminology and non sequiturs, signifying nothing.

Rather, keep things simple. One of my favourite phenomena is the practice of cooking without heat, something that is particularly pleasant in summer.

Instead of fire, acid or some other agent performs the molecular transformations that take place in cooking.

Centuries ago – history does not relate when the practice began – locals of northern Peru stared cooking fish with the juice of citrus fruits, particularly limes, lemons and oranges. This quick cooking method sees the proteins of the fish “denatured”, which is exactly what happens when any flesh is cooked. The resulting dish is known as “ceviche” or “cebiche”, and can be replicated with just about any fish as well as scallops, octopus or squid, though most commonly it is prepared with thin strips of white-fleshed fish.

Meanwhile, on literally the other side of the world, Scandinavians have cooked their own fish by burying it in salt. Here the salt performs the same function as the citrus, denaturing the proteins and essentially cooking it – though what results is a drier preparation known as gravalax.

What’s the point of all this? Simply that the whole notion of molecular gastronomy is creating something of an artificial divide. Over the past two decades home chefs have become increasingly sophisticated in terms of skills, knowledge and equipment, blurring the line between amateur and professional. Molecular gastronomy is a natural reaction to this phenomenon, creating a creeping credentialism that once again affirms the position of elite chefs while forcing the rest of us into an arms race of equipment and knowledge.

Despite this seemingly Marxist analysis, it need not be that way. Every time you cook, you are knowingly or not, employing principles of science, physics and chemistry. Try some gravlax or ceviche at your next dinner party and secure your place in the culinary nomenklatura.

And indeed there is no reason why scientific principles should not be taken into account in the kitchen. For in many ways, the kitchen is just one big chemistry lab

Salad Of Gravalax With Oysters In Tempura Batter (Adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s Passion for Seafood)

You’ll need:

For the oysters:

1 side fresh salmon (whole filet), about 1 kg 75 g rock salt 25 g caster sugar 2 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper 75g fresh dill 3 tbsp olive oil and sherry vinaigrette mixed with 1 tsp honey and 1 tsp coarse-grained mustard 300g mixed salad leaves

18 rock oysters 80 g self-raising flour + 3 tsbp for dusting 1 egg yolk 2 egg whites Olive, groundnut or sunflower oil for frying Sea salt

Method: 1. Skin the salmon and lay in a long, narrow dish (you may need to cut in half to do this.

2. Mix together the rock salt, sugar and pepper. Finely chip the dill stalks and about 1/3 of the leaves and mix with the seasoning, reserving the rest of the dill. Press half the mix firmly on the fish, turn over and repeat. Wrap tightly in cling film, place into the dish and weigh down with a plate – taking care not to crush the fish. Chill in the fridge for 24 hours.

3. Drain off the liquid from the dish. Rinse off the seasoned coating with cold water and pat dry. Sprinkle the reserved dill on the salmon and re-wrap, then chill for at least three more hours.

4. Using a long sharp knife cut wafer-thin slices from the fish, starting at the tail end. Lay slices on a clean tray.

5. To prepare the oysters, sift the flour into a small bowl. Gradually beat in the egg yolk and 150ml cold water until you have a smooth batter. Whish the egg whites in a clean mixing bowl until firm, white and glossy. Using a large metal spoon, fold the whites into the batter, making sure they are evenly incorporated.

6. Mix the 3 tablespoons of flour with ½ teaspoon of salt. Toss the oysters into the coating mixture one by one, shaking off any excess.

7. Mix the vinaigrette and toss with the salad leaves. Make mounds of the dressed salad in the centre of each of six serving plates.

Surround the salad with slices of gravalax.

8. Just before serving, pour 2cm of oil into a deep, heavy pan and heat until a cube of bread browns in about 30 seconds. Dip each oyster into the foamy part of the batter, then gently lay into the oil. Fry for about one minute, turning, until the coating turns just golden brown. As the oysters are finished, drain, then arrange on top of the salad and serve straight away.

Serves 6.

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 37

HERS travel

A walk around Lake Como Words by Doug Oster

S

ilvia Givera is standing on the picturesque bank of Lake Como. She winds up, underhand, to throw a tennis ball to her dog Diego.

The dog stands transfixed until the ball sails far out into the lake, and then he happily swims after it. He brings it back but is reluctant to return it to Givera. Eventually she gets the ball and the two walk back to Bar il Golfo in town. She helps run this place, which serves traditional Italian fare.

The view of the lake is stunning from the restaurant, and it’s hard to fathom spending every day surrounded by such beauty.

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

I had just stepped off a water taxi after visiting the amazing topiary gardens of Villa Balbianello and walked past Bar il Golfo on my way to meet my family, in Italy on a parallel trip. While I took 32 people through the gardens of Venice, Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, my family used Como as its base to explore Switzerland, the towns around the lake and, most important, connect with relatives near the Austrian border.

When we met in Lenno, my family had already walked more than two miles from the Grand Hotel Tremezzo on the Greenway del lago di Como (Lake Como Greenway). It’s a 10-kilometer trail, a little more than six miles, that winds through neighborhoods and small towns from Cadenabbia south to Colonno in this part of northern Italy.

Of all the remarkable things I saw on my 10-day trip in September, this was one of my most treasured memories. People always say to get off the beaten path while visiting Italy, and it paid off for us in every way.

The greenway is well marked with metal emblems embedded into the trail and bright blue and yellow signs above. We had a few missteps and wrong turns but always found our way on the trail.

We started our walk by a couple of small restaurants and behind industrial businesses. Our first surprise was a rocky slope filled with pink begonias cascading down a rock wall. The second was the sight of a beautiful maid working inside a home. Once we tore our son away, we were back on our hike.

Before long, we stumbled onto a little lakeside boat launch several yards off the trail. The lake was calm, and we stood there for a few minutes to soak in another sweet view of the water and surrounding hills.

We continued through narrow cobblestone pathways flanked by stone walls punctuated by open shutters and window boxes filled with geraniums, ferns and other plants.

As we rounded a corner in Ossuccio we were struck by an odd looking home, filled with art and a sign saying “free entrance.” I wasn’t sure about going in, but my son led the way.

As we opened the door, Felippo Salice sat watching television. He rose and greeted us with a great smile. His home was filled with a cornucopia of odd treasures for sale. He didn’t speak English, but my wife, Cindy, is pretty good with Italian, and they were able to communicate. The walls were filled with photos of him as a young man, with other family members and even walking in a church processional.

After we talked for a while, Salice opened another door, which led to even more interesting items. My wife bought an old crucifix from 1950, and I purchased a crazy-looking little bronze face, which might have been at the front of someone’s home. As we bid Salice goodbye; we felt we had experienced something interesting and special.

We crossed a street and eventually came upon the faded frescos of San Giacomo, a church that dates to at least the 11th century. As we looked around the outside we were treated to another spectacular view of the lake. Standing on a narrow, overhanging walkway we could see big fish swimming at the bottom through the crystal clear water.

The trail ascended and as we climbed we passed an abandoned estate, where we briefly had an “Under the Tuscan Sun” moment. We thought better, though, of following in the Frances Mayes character’s footsteps and renovating an old villa. We took a breather at a small, cool waterfall that meandered.

There were warm greenish purple figs hanging from trees for tasty snacks.

As we reached the summit and began to descend, we were greeted with a hard-to-beat view of the bell tower of Chiesa di Sant’Andrea in Sala Comacina.

I always recall George Clooney’s comments about Lake Como and why he chose to live here. One day he watched as workmen headed for home singing, each with a lunch pail and bottle of wine in hand. As we approached two men pouring concrete one whistled a tune as he worked on a modest trailside home.

At the bottom, we were desperate for a bathroom break. Two Australians and their Italian friend pointed us toward the ferry home and also a bathroom.

We had to hike back to Sala Comacina for both, which was about a 20-minute walk. “It’s not safe,” I yelled to the family as I looked at the narrow berm and tiny, speeding Italian cars flying by. “This is how they do it,” my wife screamed and off we went, stopping to peer around curves, running to the next safe spot. We found what we needed at Enoteca Wine Bar. Alessandra Carminati was preparing the bar for patrons and was happy to allow us in for a bathroom break and point my wife in the direction of the ferry stop.

The printed ferry schedule at the dock confounded us. Two women sitting nearby tried to help. They didn’t speak English, but my wife was able to ascertain that there was no ferry going north to Tremezzo where they were staying and only one more going south to my hotel in Moltrasio.

They learned of a bus headed north, and we parted ways. Since I had 1 ½ hours to kill before my ferry, I headed back to the Enoteca bar, where Carminati poured me a large beer and made me a nice plate of meat and cheese.

As we talked, she told me of her love of Italy. How she lived out of the country for a time but longed to return home. She wondered what I thought of Italy, and when I told her of my unending love for the country she flashed a sweet smile and opened up, telling me where all the food on my plate came from.

“The cow cheese is from up there,” she gestured

toward a steep hill. Each bite was better than the last, and as she poured me another beer, one of her friends stuck in traffic yelled and waved to her through the open front door. “Alessandra,” he screamed, which made her smile again. Her grandmother came in to sit for a bit and then her grandfather, who runs the nearby Grand Hotel Victoria. Another friend came in for a small beer and some cheese.

The two of us talked for 45 minutes – about tourists, food and her long journey on a bike to and from work each day. Despite our brief time together, we connected in the way that’s hard to explain. In another life, we’d be friends. It’s one of the beautiful things about traveling, stumbling upon a person and place like this.

“Will I see you again, maybe next year?” she asked. I didn’t have the heart to tell her we’d probably never meet again.

As the ferry slowly crossed the lake, I thought of Carminati and how her kindness had saved us that day. I couldn’t get her sweet smile out of my head.

It embodied what Italy is all about.

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 39

HERS music

Lana Del Rey on ‘Big Eyes’ success Words by Lorraine Ali

S

pooky midcentury paintings of big-eyed children and the equally twisted tale of the artist behind them are at the centre of Tim Burton’s new film, Big Eyes. The true yet surreal story of painter Margaret Keane also resonates throughout the film’s evocative title track by singer Lana Del Rey. The haunting song, “Big Eyes,” now nominated for a Golden Globe, is a natural fit for Del Rey, a chart-topping pop artist who is often noted for her cinematic style.

Case in point: Her last album, “Ultraviolence,” is named after A Clockwork Orange reference and her contributions to other soundtracks, such as Maleficent and The Great Gatsby, feel more like extensions of Del Rey’s own work than side projects. The 29-year-old (real name Elizabeth Woolridge Grant) spoke about working with Burton, her love of the surreal and what it’s like to think in pictures.

In film as with your own records, your aesthetic is so beautifully melancholy. Is making music a sad endeavour for you?

(Laughs.) No, I really enjoy it. Making a record – it’s where all the fun is. When I’m done, it’s like, oh, God. I kind of go into mourning.

Wow. I would have never expected you to use the adjective “fun” when describing the process.

Sad is happy to me. I love it. When I write something bittersweet, I smile. That’s why I like Tim Burton. His world has that kind of foundation too.

So you’re a Burton fan?

I am a huge fan. I love Edward Scissorhands. But it was Harvey Weinstein who wanted me to work on this. He asked six month ago if I would do a

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

title track, then during editing he wanted one more song for the end. That ended up being “I Can Fly.”

is in my imagination, so having a movie like this makes it easy to go there. I can imagine another layer, what happened to Margaret (Keane, the artist Your sound is so noirish and visual. Is the process played by Amy Adams), how excited she was in the similar when making your own music as opposed to beginning, how she thought she found a father for a film track? her daughter. And it turned out to be a nightmare.

Definitely. I can see it and I can hear it. I’m work- It’s a great story to build a song around. ing on a new record now, and I have this one song, “Music to Watch Boys To.” The title lends itself to a Right. A compelling film score should not just be visual of shadows of men passing by, this girl’s eyes, echoing what you see in a film; it should, in fact, add her face. I can definitely see things. another layer.

This film has great imagery thanks to those sau- For me, the melody should also tell its own story. cer-eyed paintings, but it’s also this harrowing story Whether it’s minor or major, whether you choose to of a woman deceived by her husband. He essentially use a violin or a flute. In The Godfather, so many of claims he’s the painter of the portraits, and for years those little cues were just a horn or a violin. Think the world believes him. about the mood of the film ... there was a reason When writing music, my favourite place to travel why the music was so solitary.

Now your title track has a Globe nomination, competing with contemporaries like John Legend and Lorde.

I grew up watch the Oscars and Golden Globes, but I don’t really remember the best song category having a lot of contemporary artists in it. But maybe it’s just me because I’m more about scores.

What are some favourites?

Thomas Newman’s score for American Beauty. I remember the first time I saw the film, the score is the first thing you hear. I loved it. Or the cues that Nino Rota did for The Godfather or Giorgio Moroder for Cat People. I loved writing for movies because I love anything that makes you dream. I still watch movies to dream.

Daniel Heath produced and co-wrote “Big Eyes” with you. He’s been a longtime collaborator.

Yes! (Laughs.) Dan was my first boyfriend’s best friend. Back then he was doing cues for reality television – the shows were terrible, but his work was beautiful. I said, “You’ve got to work with me on real records. The songwriting is simple: intro, verse one, a chorus, which repeats three times. The bridge is separate from everything else.” That was all he needed to hear to start sending me amazing compositions. He did the title track for “Ultraviolence” for me. He adds a lot of cinema to my sound.

I grew up watch the Oscars and Golden Globes, but I don’t really remember the best song category having a lot of contemporary artists in it. But maybe it’s just me because I’m more about scores Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 41

HERS readit

Fatal attack by guinea pigs Words by Michael Morrissey THE FREE RANGE COOK: THROUGH THE SEASONS

By Annabel Langbein Annabel Media Publishing, $60.00

Annabel Langbein? Yes, the name is familiar to me for two reasons: firstly, while I personally hate cooking, I am very interested in relating to the result(s) and my wife tells me my burgeoning tummy is proof that I am telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth; secondly, Annabel is a former student of mine from the Waiheke Summer Writing School of the 1980s. Obviously, since she is now my most successful student by a galactic mile, I am entitled to claim most, if not all, the credit. Without the Waiheke Summer Writing School – founded and run by myself – and now securely lodged in her inner psychic curriculum vitae, Annabel would still be cooking over an open fire, trapping possums in the Ureweras, trawling for eels and jumping out of helicopters to recover live deer. I assume she does this with a parachute but I could well be wrong – it depends how close the helicopter is to the ground.

Well, I am kidding, but not entirely. Annabel Langbein is the Nigella Lawson (blonde version) of New Zealand and is, one has to say, devastatingly successful. What Peter Jackson is to NZ film, Annabel is to New Zealand cuisine: world famous.

Brace yourself for a dazzle of brutal statistics: she has written and published 21 cook books; in 2013, she won three of the six main honours of the New Zealand Guild of Food – Best Book, Best TV Series and Best Website; (one could add best smile and speaking voice).

Her books have been translated into multiple languages and sold two million copies; named by the NZ Beekeepers Association as the official ambassador for New Zealand bees (and I don’t mean buzzy bees but the real winged ones); her programme, the Free 42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

Range Cook, was launched on TV One and now goes to 90 countries – that’s nearly half the countries in the world! And her recipes concentrate on healthy, seasonal, home-grown organic food (with a few luscious sugary exceptions); she and husband Ted Hewetson – he proposed three times before she said yes! – own a nine-hectare property on the shores of Lake Wanaka; Annabel and her husband have transformed the boggy wilderness into a gardener’s paradise. And to cap it all, Annabel remains the nicest person in the universe (let’s not get carried away – the solar system).

Annabel began her cuisine career making croissants in the tiny Brazilian town of Buzios which was part of a two year stint in South America without a possum in sight. I’ll confess I am curious as to her views on roast guinea pig (the South American equivalent of a small but very cute chicken). However, I have the feeling that a dish of roast guinea pig would incurably wreck her ratings. We prefer our guinea pigs as cute pets, not as table fodder. Ask yourself when did you last read of a fatal attack by a guinea pig on crack?

But it’s not all tea and crumpets (not that Annabel would ever offer a recipe for something as unhealthy as a crumpet… though she has compromised with banana cake (more on that later). Though she is an ace (of hearts) in the kitchen, Annabel can play trumps in real life. A fall off a horse resulted in a four month stay in hospital, with a badly crushed spine and seven broken ribs. She was given a five per cent chance of walking again. She took the five per cent bet and is now back walking.

Time for comment on the recipes? The idea of me cooking one is on a par with expecting a giant kauri snail with rheumatoid arthritis to win an Olympian marathon. However, I was lucky enough to have my sister-in-law and her cousin staying at the time I received Annabel’s book – that means that out of the four people in the house, three were glued to the screen every time Annabel’s Saturday night programme screened. And don’t forget they – my wife, sister-in-law and cousin – were all kitchen

capable. So we tried out some of the dishes.

We started with Israeli couscous with currants and mint and I was amazed at the size and the deliciousness of what looked like soft albino ball bearings. Apparently the recipe works well with regular couscous, farro or barley. I forgot to mention I don’t actually know what couscous is (though I am reasonably sure it has nothing to do with kiss-kiss).

As for farro, all I can bring to mind is Farro Faucett Majors. Then we tried one-pot lumberjack cake.

Now I’m not sure what lumberjacks have to do with this splendid concoction though Annabel has more than a touch of the lumberjack (she can jump out of helicopters carrying spiced orange cream caramels) but I enjoyed the cake (being as sweet-toothed as a baby, I like most cakes).

Be patient dear reader, the best is yet to come. Here it is: The Ultimate Banana Cake with Passionfruit Honey Frosting. Oh dear. My taste buds start to saliva like a child in a lolly shop. The picture was so enticing I felt like clipping it out and hanging it up on the kitchen wall. Regrettably, neither my wife, sister-in-law or cousin are the cake-eating type. The quasi food-porn description goes thus: To make Passionfruit Honey Frosting beat (or is it spank? Can’t be – it’s against the law!) together butter, honey, vanilla, passionfruit or lemon and icing sugar until light and fluffy (2-3) minutes. Spread evenly over the cooled cake. (Sounds cool!) Store iced or uniced (why would it be UN-iced?) cake in a sealed container in a cool place for 2-3 days. Or freeze.

Annabel, I don’t think your magic formula is going to work for me. Once the cake comes out of the fridge, sorry oven, I won’t be able to wait for several days. I’ll probably have to go on a short holiday to kill off my greedy appetite for all things sweet but I when I return to consume a slice of your ultimate banana cake, I am sure the wait will be more than worth it. When I said I can’t cook, I was fibbing. I am reasonably adroit at hard boiling an egg – though that humble dish is (alas) not present in Annabel’s handsome lavishly illustrated tome which I am sure will sell like one-pot lumberjack cakes.

WOMEN IN CLOTHES

By Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton & 639 others Particular Books, $50.00

Had enough of women’s magazines with their absurdly gorgeous models, revealing necklines and lusciously long legs? Isn’t it insufferable when they’re famous as well? This book should cure all that. It has clothes and models though not a single even half way suggestive or naughty picture. (Correction: there are 30 pairs of black cotton underwear in sterile little boxes on p446 though they wouldn’t tempt anyone.)

To rub the point in, as it were, it has a pictorial

page of safety pins, some so small that an initial glance suggests most of the boxes in the diagram are safety pinless. Surely, this is fetishising the small. Should one need a magnifying glance to examine an illustration? No – but you will one, because every page is shrunken to Lilliputian size. A nearly blank page must rate rather low on the scale of visual stimulation.

Page 2 has sixteen pictures of over-the knee-socks. How charming! If this turns you on, you are a lost cause.

In others words, this is a pretentious and portentous book designed to appeal to aggressive female intellectuals (and a few male ones as well) who like to disdain the images of glamour that we aspire to despise but are secretly tempted by. I repeat – you will look in vain for temptation here. This book is as dry as mummy dust, though the pictures do have a miniaturised charm like the more soulful and more skilful photographic versions in Granta magazine. This is a serious book about serious matters like women executives not wearing too loud a print when interviewing billionaires – rather obvious, I would have thought. Then there’s the name “Jeans” scrawled out 29 times in three columns with one of them crossed out! Wow! Maybe she wasn’t wearing her jeans.

Nearly all the pictures have that dried out, desiccated intellectually sterile look of installation art.

Shallowness paraded as profundity. Page 218 hits the low point of taste. Composed by editor Leanne Shapton, it is subtitled, “Various Women’s Stains”. I know what you’re thinking. The captions cover such profundities as “tomato soup on shirt” “mascara on pillowcase’ and the crowning glory must be, “ blood on underpants”. Every stain is the same colour – a rather unpleasant excremental brown. I think we should leave it there.

This book is as dry as mummy dust, though the pictures do have a miniaturised charm like the more soulful and more skilful photographic versions in Granta magazine Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 43

HERS seeit

What happened to Bruce?

Words by Roger Moore

B

ruce Willis has aged into a fit, bald menace, a character actor best-suited to chewy supporting parts in ensemble action pictures.

“Has been?” Maybe. He should be looking at cable TV scripts.

Thomas Jane, on the other hand, is a never-was, or never-quite was. The Punisher was something of a high water mark for the grizzled Jane, an actor forevertopped by a long, greasy mop of hair, a player doomed to play an endless procession of unshaven cops.

But he is every bit as good as Willis when it comes to delivering a one-liner with panache. Check out Roy, his cop trying to track down an escaped “artificial,” a flesh-and-blood clone/robot used as fodder for sex and violence fantasies at the pricey new resort “Vice,” which Julian Michaels (Willis) runs.

VICE “You wanna make it to bed Cast: Thomas Jane, Bruce Willis, tonight, do what I ask,” Jane, Ambyr Childers, Jonathan Schaech as Roy, growls.

Directed by: Brian A. Miller “I know, I know, you’re in Running time: 96 mins love with a robot,” he snarls Rating: TBA at another guy with feelings G for an automaton.

And as that robot, a perky 44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

blonde bartender, Kelly (Ambyr Childers, nothing special), who often is raped, beaten and killed on “your last night here” as part of clients’ sick fantasies, finds the guy who designed her, Roy, has a zinger all loaded up and ready to go.

“It’s not every day one gets to meet his maker!”

Vice is a low-budget thriller that borrows heavily from Blade Runner and Westworld, and serves as an answer to the question “How much sci-fi can you get when you shoot your $10 million film in Mobile, Ala.?” The answer is, “Quite a lot” – with modernist buildings, strikingcontrol room sets and the city’s docks serving as a backdrop.

But Vice is a silly B-movie, one with a villainous businessman (Willis) whose henchman (Jonathan Schaech) quotes Maya Angelou to his quarry (Kelly) after she starts having flashbacks to all the times she’s been raped or killed and flees the world of Vice. Henchman figures “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is apt, considering the artificial blonde’s lifespan and life circumstances. And maybe she’ll be touched and surrender to this guy who “gets” her.

Vice is “a place where there are no laws, no rules and no consequences,” Julian says in its TV ads.

But that unfettered giving in to one’s basest desires tends to spill over into the real city, which is sort this script’s commentary on video game, TV show and movie violence. Only it isn’t. It is, however, why Roy hates the place. His boss refuses to let him go into Vice to chase criminals. So naturally, that’s what Roy does, guns and one-liners blazing.

It’s all rather malnourished, but not nearly as sad as one might expect. Jane turns up in films at this level all the time, and always gives fair value. Willis is just now getting used to the Vice budget era in his work. And if he doesn’t give us more than he figures he was paid for, at least he’s adept at hiding any embarrassment at the low rent district his career has parked in.

H

ere it is, Mother Russia, in all its bloated, drunken, allegorical glory. Leviathan is a modern parable of an ancient state and caricatures and stereotypes as old as vodka itself.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film is, like the corrupt politician and hapless proles depicted here, a Soviet era throwback, a tale of people resigned to entropy, resigned to a naive belief in the authority of law and the state until they’re confronted with exactly who those laws and who that state are designed to serve.

Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a drunken blowhard living a modestly successful life in a town along the northern coast. He’s quick to anger, quicker with a dope slap to his rude teenage son. Lilya (Elena Lyadova), his second wife, endures the kid who hasn’t quite accepted her and keeps her mechanic and allaround handyman husband’s vodka glass full.

We meet Kolya picking up an old army buddy at the train station. Dmitri (Elena Lyadova) is now a lawyer in Moscow, a man with faith in the rule of law but savvy enough to know how things really work. Kolya, it turns out, needs a lawyer. The mayor (Roman Madyanov) has decided the city – or somebody – needs Kolya’s hilltop-with-ocean-view house.

He may face re-election every few years, but the pugnacious Vadim is just an old school “apparatchik” – a functionary kept in place by the top-down oligarchy that replaced the communist party. Vadim is used to getting his way, so it’s no shock that the ruling, rendered in court and delivered in a highspeed drone by a “judge,”goes against Kolya.

But Dmitri has an ace up his sleeve, “dirt” on the mayor that could finish him.

Zvyagintsev frames his story with seascapes, images that capture the decaying fishing boats and exposed whale bones of a world where so little changes that all the average Ivan can do is shrug, sit and drink himself into a stupor – nightly.

A “shooting” picnic with some Russian redneck friends adds to the portrait of life here, and to the tension.

Zvyagintsev patiently builds a sense of dread, the fear of what all this thwarted hope, alcohol and firepower can lead to. Volatile people with high velocity ammunition are a deadly combination.

Will the violence come

when a drunken Vadim slurs insults at an equally drunk Kolya? Will there be some other accident or an incident to tip these teetering tightrope walkers into the abyss?

Vdovichenkov’s Dmitri is droll and bored, but still dogged enough about the system that he’s willing to jump through the hoops he figures will render justice. He’s like a Dostoevsky hero, the last one to get a clue. The nervous, edgy Serebryakov keeps us on tenterhooks, never knowing what he might do next, how he could lash out.

But Lyadova creates a sad, lonely soul straight out of Chekhov, a beautiful woman in an ugly place, gutting fish for a living, trapped by circumstance, loyalty and love in a marriage that is its own dead end.

The politics are rarely overt. “Pussy Riot” stories pop up on TV, and the Orthodox Church’s role in the hierarchy (cozying up to power, serving as a calming “opiate” to the masses) is mocked. Zvyagintsev is a bit too willing, in this overlong film, to let the landscape, the remote setting and the insular world of crumbling apartment blocks, sagging houses, collapsing churches grey skies shape the film’s message. The little people, with their little problems that become huge as they’re ground up in the maw of the beast? They drink because they know – “What else can I do?”

LEVIATHAN Cast: Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov Directed by: Andrey Zvyagintsev Running time: 140 mins Rating: R for language and some sexuality/graphic nudity GGG

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 45

HERS family

4 rules for teaching obedience Words by John Rosemond

W

ho are the happier campers in a workplace setting: the employees who (a) obey the rules, follow the procedures and voice any complaints respectfully, such that the entire workplace is not disrupted, or (b) disobey the rules at every possible opportunity, deliberately fail to follow procedures and disrupt the workplace with frequent and often subversive complaints?

You answered (a) of course. And so it is with children. The happiest kids, so finds the best research (if interested, Google Diana Baumrind and Robert Larzelere), are those who obey parents and teachers, do what they are expected to do without lots of management and voice complaints and disagreements respectfully.

Therefore, because happiness is a child’s right (because, for one, a child cannot learn the benefits of pursuing it unless he has first experienced it), teaching obedience and respect is a fundamental parental responsibility – the third, in fact, which comes after securing a child’s physical well-being and demonstrating unconditional love.

The question then becomes: How does a parent go about teaching obedience and respect? The answer is in four parts.

46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/Mar 2015

1

The parent acts like she knows what she is doing and knows that what she is doing is correct. This means, for example, that the parent does not need to consult with a 5-year-old to determine what foods are going to be on the child’s dinner plate. The parent is, in a word, decisive. She knows it is more important, generally, to be decisive than to always make the most perfectly correct decision (if there is even such a thing).

2

The parent acts like she knows why she is doing what she is doing. She is guided by overarching principles, not whim or emotion. Therefore, she is consistent from decision to decision. The parent is, in a word, purposeful. Her purpose is to assist the child toward standing on his own two feet, to raise a compassionate and responsible citizen.

3

The parent acts like she knows what she expects of the child, what she wants the child to do at any given point in time. In giving instructions, for example, she does not bend forward, grab her knees, and speak to the child in a beseeching tone

of voice. She does not offer reward for obedience or threaten punishment for disobedience. She simply tells, using as few words as possible, and never, ever punctuates an instruction with a question mark. She communicates to the child that he will do what she tells him to do not because of reward or threat but simply because she tells. The parent, in five words, comes straight to the point.

4

The parent acts like she knows the child is going to obey. After giving an instruction, she leaves the area (if at all possible). She does not stand there, waiting for obedience, because that is the equivalent of saying, “I don’t think you’re going to do what I just told you to do.” And that is definitely going to provoke push-back. The parent, in three words, communicates positive expectations.

Those four attributes define the effective delivery of authority regardless of setting. They define effective leadership, and effective parenting is a relatively simple matter of providing a child with equal measures of love and leadership. How simple is that?

Feb/Mar 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 47