Investigate, December 2010

INSIDE: FREE CHRISTMAS BOOK OFFER, PAGE 12

INVESTIGATE December 2010:

GOLD RUSH AS PRICES SPIRAL UPWARDS, IS THIS A GOOD TIME TO INVEST, OR A GOOD TIME TO CASH UP?

Gold Rush • Treaty Rorts • 2010 in Review

TREATY RORTS Amy Brooke argues the

Waitangi Tribunal process is corrupt, and costing taxpayers billions

2010 IN REVIEW The big stories of the year in pictures

THE NEW NARNIA FILM

Issue 119

Behind the scenes on Dawn Treader

$8.60 December 2010

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Miranda Devine, Mark Steyn, Hal Colebatch, and more

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C ONTENTS Volume 10, Issue 119, ISSN 1175-1290

F EATURES

26

Gold Rush

With the world economy tanking, pundits are rushing to gold. The only problem is, if the crisis is as serious as the gold price indicates then we have potentially bigger things to worry about and a treasure chest of gold may not be the solution. PETER HENSLEY begins team coverage of the new Gold Rush

Treaty Rorts

When The Lights Go Off

2010: Year In Review

With the Foreshore and Seabed controversy, and more costly treaty settlements in the wings, AMY BROOKE argues that the Waitangi Tribunal process is corrupt and unfair to New Zealand taxpayers

Few people would disagree the world appears to be going to hell in a handcart at the moment.

What might provoke a little more discussion is the question – how did it happen?. HAL G.P. COLEBATCH suggests an answer

From natural disasters here and abroad, to political scandals and murder mysteries, we review the year in pictures

On Board The Dawn Treader

32

With the latest Narnia blockbuster releasing this Christmas. ELAINE LIPWORTH investigates the making of the fantasy ship on the Queensland coast

Cover: iStockphoto

56

42

62

EDITORIAL & OPINION

78

Focal Point Editorial

Vox-Populi The roar of the crowd

Simply Devine When in Rome...

Mark Steyn Controlled by bureaucrats

16

Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on the Defence review

Line 1

Chris Carter on teachers’ unions

L IFESTYLE

Fading Empires

Poetry

Contra Mundum

Education

Just War theory

Matt Flannagan on 666

96

Amy Brooke’s poem of the month Amy Brooke’s education column

Science

Human history overturned

Technology

Facemail coming

20

Online

New ways to bug you

Sport

Pages

Health

Music

Chris Forster on Rowing

22

Michael Morrissey’s summer reads Chris Philpott’s CD reviews

Why babies cry

Alt.Health

Exercise and pregnancy

Travel

Movies Cool it

Cutting Room

The island time forgot

Food

We interview Harrison Ford

BBQ season

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart | Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart | NZ EDITION Advertising 09 373-3676, sales@investigatemagazine.com | Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom | Art Direction Heidi Wishart | Design & Layout Bozidar Jokanovic | Tel: +64 9 373 3676 | Fax: +64 9 373 3667 | Investigate Magazine, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND | AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart | Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com | Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 | SUBSCRIPTIONS – Online: www.investigatemagazine.com By Phone: Australia – 1-800 123 983, NZ – 09 373 3676 By Post: To the PO Box NZ Edition: $85; AU Edition: A$96 EMAIL: editorial@investigatemagazine.com, ian@investigatemagazine.com, australia@investigatemagazine.com, sales@investigatemagazine.com, helpdesk@investigatemagazine.tv All content in this magazine is copyright, and may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions of advertisers or contributors are not necessarily those of the magazine, and no liability is accepted.

We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax.

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FOCAL POINT

Editorial

The idiocy of Police National HQ the boil once and for all and subject the police to long overdue formal scrutiny.

Then again, part of the raison d’etre for Investigate is providing its readers with information and intelligence that puts them ahead of the pack. To that end, there are tens of thousands of people who now have information on the Heidi Paakkonen disappearance that their friends don’t have.

SOMETIMES, THINGS LEAVE ME SPEECHLESS. LAST

Heidi’s family deserve better than the corpulent halfwits who currently keep the seats warm at PNHQ INSIDE: A RESPONSE TO THE HERALD – “YOU GOT IT WRONG”, P6 INVESTIGATE November 2010: Swedish Tourists • Inside Job • Tuhoe’s Tall Stories

ANOTHER COLD CASE RE-OPENS: SWEDISH TOURISTS MYSTERY

IS HEIDI STILL ALIVE? The NIMBY Fight

How a rural community dragged an unpopular quarry to its knees Issue 118

month’s cover story on missing Swedish tourist Heidi Paakkonen should have resulted in police commencing a fresh investigation. It didn’t.

Instead, the public of New Zealand are increasingly left with the image of police bosses here as lazy, corrupt, donut-scoffing do-nothings too busy playing political games to do any real detective work.

I should have expected it, mind you. Ten years ago I handed the NZ Police some winebox prosecutions on a plate, complete with legal opinions on criminality and the findings of our highest courts that the winebox deals contained evidence of prima facie fraud. National Headquarters refused to process the documented formal complaint, and refused to commence an investigation.

I reiterate what we wrote last month.

Heidi Paakkonen was seen alive on Kawau island near Auckland by a couple who knew her personally, whose home she and Urban Hoglin had stayed at. The couple were close enough to touch her. They could see she was terrified of the man she was with.

You can’t, in police work, get a better sighting than that. It’s not a random member of the public sighting measured against someone’s memory of a picture they saw on TV. This was first rate eyewitness testimony that ticks all the boxes.

Do you think we’ve heard one squeak out of the donut-boys down at Coward’s Castle in Wellington, as frontline staff lovingly refer to PNHQ? Not a blinking dickey-bird.

Heidi’s family deserve better than the corpulent half-wits who currently keep the seats warm at PNHQ. All the more reason to support growing calls for an inquiry into the Crewe Murders.

The only way we are going to get the police force in this country cleaned up is to lance

Inside Job

New doco fingers the men who caused world financial crash ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Tuhoe’s Tall Stories, and How China & Russia Are Arming Iran

4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

$8.60 November 2010

Similar logic puts Investigate readers ahead with this latest issue as well, with our lead stories on gold and the world economy. People who purchased gold at $300 an ounce a decade ago will be laughing all the way to the bank as prices top $1,300, but the current price leaves newbies worried that it’s too late to get on the train – that they might be investing at the wrong stage of the bubble.

Then there’s the bigger question: what do soaring gold prices say about underlying confidence in the world economy? If it’s that high, should we be running for the hills and is the only safe form of gold investment actually physical possession of your metal?

Many people have a nagging suspicion that the world economic collapse has an air of “staged” about it, coming as it does at a time when the United Nations and globalists like billionaire George Soros are frantically pushing for a world governance entity to control economies and industry in the name of combating ‘climate change’.

Literally as I write this, the Greeks have just endorse French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s scheme for a compulsory EU-wide carbon tax system and a transaction tax on all financial transactions to fund a politically stronger EU organisation.

These geopolitical issues all play a major role in helping determine where the world economy is heading, and they are part of the mix that investors and homeowners have to contemplate as 2011 nears.

As Confucius said, may you live in interesting times.

Ian Wishart

Y

This Christmas, there’s one book everyone wants

Arthur Allan Thomas

Arthur Allan Thomas:

THE INSIDE STORY

CREWE MURDERS: NEW EVIDENCE

Jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, now for the first time in 40 years, he tells his incredible story as we name a new prime suspect

Ian Wishart HATM Publishing

#1 bestselling author

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Whitcoulls, Paperplus, Borders, The Warehouse, Take Note, Dymocks and all good bookstores INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 5

VOX POPULI

Communiques The roar of the crowd

Confessions from the front line

When Arthur Allan Thomas, found “guilty” by the juries of two separate Supreme Court Trials, was pardoned by the Muldoon Government who then had the Commission of Inquiry, I thought, “Yeah, this Inquiry is just justifying the Government’s decision”, and it should have least been the other way around (with the Inquiry first and then the pardon). Then, when the Inquiry blamed the Police for planting the cartridge in the garden, my reaction was, “Yeah, right! Blame a dead cop who can’t defend himself!”

Now that I have read your excellent book I am forced to agree that the evidence points to Police corruption and poor investigation, at least as far as the two principal characters are concerned.

I have to say that as a retired Police Officer with 36 years’ service, over 20 of those as a forensic photographer, the facts disclosed in your book have left me appalled, ashamed and embarrassed, even though I did not become a Police Photographer until 1975.

On behalf of the other 95% (or more) hardworking and honest cops of that era I would say that an impartial Inquiry is an absolute imperative. Justice must not only be done – it must be seen to be done – even after 40 years, for the sake of Rochelle, the Thomas family and all the others who have suffered from this miscarriage of justice.

After all, as you pointed out, since Arthur was pardoned, then the Crewe Homicide is still unsolved and is therefore still (or should be) an open inquiry, just like any other hitherto unsolved murder, “cold” or hot.

The fact that many of the parties involved in the Crewe Homicide inquiry are no longer with us should not be a barrier to such a fresh and impartial Inquiry. Much of the documentation and evidence is still available, as you have proved with your book.

Congratulations on a well-researched and readable exposé, which will hopefully lead the way to real justice being done.

Bob Knox, via email

Wishart responds:

It’s worth pointing out, because it can often be overlooked in the heat of discussion, that 99% of cops are honest and hardworking. It’s just that a lot of the dodgy ones have ended up running the joint, and by refusing to allow sunlight to disinfect their operations they taint the remainder of the force with their own dirt.

It’s time for an inquiry.

Dirty cops

Am half way through your book The Inside Story and am fascinated. I have followed this tragedy from the beginning and now the plot thickens so much. Have just read the bit about the jurors at the Station Hotel and it bought back a memory that I have never forgotten. One evening I was in the private lounge area at the Station with a group of friends, one of whom was a house guest.

We were very aware that the Arthur Thomas trial jurors were in the same lounge and they were drinking and having a great time with all the cops. Hutton actually joined us at our table to chat up myself and another girl who was there. The booze was really flowing and although I was young and did not have much knowledge of the legal system, I did know that it wasn’t right that the police and jurors were fraternising so closely. I knew it was wrong. The cops in those days were so corrupt. Funny thing was, the house guest we were drinking with was a big time drug dealer and he was happily sharing a laugh with the detectives. Oh those were the days!!!

Just wanted to share that with you.

Great work, pity the police will not reopen the case.

Name supplied, via email

6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

Missing Heidi

18 year old Sarah Spiers disappeared from coastal Cottesloe in Perth in January 1996; at the time I was struck by the similarity of her looks to Heidi Paakkonen, who had disappeared from somewhere in New Zealand in 1989. Exactly two years after Sarah’s disappearance, a 17 year old Sarah Spiers lookalike Olivia Hope disappeared from coastal New Zealand. The thought occurred to me in 1998, when all three faces flashed before my eyes, was that a person on a boat could easily be grabbing these girls from the coastal spots that they had disappeared from.

Your article ‘Heidi Seek’ and the Kawau ‘hide’ it discusses re-ignited my interest 12 years on. I’ve just had a quick Google around missing girls in NZ and Perth, looking for physical similarities and coastal disappearances. Here is what I found in just a few minutes: Julie Cutler, 22 yrs, Jun-88 Perth; Heidi Paakkonen, 21 yrs, Apr/May-89 NZ ; Sarah Spiers, 18yrs, Jan-96 Perth; Olivia Hope, 17 yrs, Jan-98 NZ; Lisa Brown, 19 yrs, Nov-98 Perth; Sarah McMahon, 20 yrs, Nov-00 Perth.

The similarities in dates are interesting: June 88; Apr/May 89; Jan 96; Jan 98; Nov 98; Nov 00.

The similarities in the girls looks, ages, disappearance from coastal areas, and the disappearance dates may indicate a more global than local approach could be useful in solving these mysteries.

Name supplied, Australia

The Swedes case

I’m writing to you in regard of your latest issue of Investigate “Is Heidi Still Alive”.

My father’s birthday is the 8th of April and every year my wife and I try to get to over to Katikati (KK) to pass on the gift and card as it were. April 8th 1989 fell on a Saturday.

We can’t remember exactly whether we went to visit on that day or the following

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Saturday the 15th, but we did stop in the main street of KK outside the hot bread shop to get some cakes etc for mum and dad. When we came out of the shop both of us noticed and made comment to each other when we were back in our car of a young couple sitting on the ground just north of the shop eating their food like they were starving, there was a man standing there over them.

We had our car parked just north of the shop, and there was a beat up station wagon next to our car which I couldn’t help noticing all the camping type gear in the back. The woman sitting there was blonde, and the guy had sandy coloured hair, he was wearing a distinct green singlet with the word “Lacoste” and it had like a crocodile emblem on it.

None of this really took on any significance until news broke of the disappearance of the Swedish tourists and how the Police were searching in the Coromandel for them. We rang the info line about what we had seen but were told that this didn’t fit with the information they had and weren’t really interested and told us they couldn’t have been in the area.

The thing that bothers me the most about this is that Urban’s body was found near

Whangamata which for all intents and purposes is not too far from where we had seen them.

I have read your book on the Crewe case and I am of the same opinion as yourself and I’m afraid there is a culture in the police force that is not good, they are unto a law of their own.

Graeme Russel, via email

They’ll get you, you realise…

Upon hearing the rather scripted sounding announcements delivered in interviews by Peter Jackson bemoaning our certain and imminent abandonment by apparent economic saviour, Time-Warner, I couldn’t help thinking it all smelled a bit Ed Bernays-ish.

Benefit of the doubt and all that, I thought better to wait and see where things led before drawing hasty conclusions of conspiracy and cunning plots ( in spite of draconian search and seizure laws, back room deals sealing multi-million dollar contracts to have Lockheed Martin change the oil in our Unimogs, steps to have off-shore “security contractors” run our prisons etc, etc...) After all, we all love and trust Peter Jackson and we know those Aussies are nothing but trouble.

Sadly within a week of Sir Pete’s dire oracle,

the nation is cheering as the now involved Prime Minister, himself, rescuing us from the brink, has laws urgently enacted diminishing the rights of NZ workers and signing off a 35 million dollar incentive for the privilege of hosting our esteemed corporate guests.

Is it just me? or should Time-Warner be paying us 35 million for the privilege of filming here and benefiting from the many skilled and talented among us? How did that get turned around so that we now, cap in hand, find ourselves licking the corporate boots of Time-Warner?

I guess we are just a banana republic with an installed puppet dictator. Was it Mussolini that said fascism was merely the merging of the Corporation and the State? and yes Pete, the whole country believes in you, but I guess everybody has their price, right?

This is not National bashing. To elect (an odd practice that gives the public the impression they have some influence on the affairs of government)... to elect National is to elect off-shore central banking, corporate special interests and to elect Labour is to install the UN as our government... two control arms of the same globalist power structure.

Mark Wilding, Hastings

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Leading cause of death

On the Heart Foundation website are three statements: “Cardiovascular disease … is still the leading cause of death in New Zealand (accounting for 40% of deaths annually)”; “every 90 minutes a New Zealander dies from coronary heart disease (16 deaths a day)”; and “many of these deaths are premature and preventable”.

The first statement is false. In fact, the leading cause of death in New Zealand is abortion, accounting for 40% of deaths annually – cardiovascular disease causes only 25%. Every 30 minutes a New Zealander dies by way of abortion (49 deaths per day), and virtually all of these deaths are premature and preventable. Abortion terminates the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being: this is not an ideological statement, but a scientific fact acknowledged by biologists and doctors. So there is no qualitative difference between pulling a human being apart in the womb and stabbing one to death in their bedroom.

While Police Minister Judith Collins and Labour’s spokesman Clayton Cosgrove can bandy words about the relatively few murders of post-borns (only 65 in the year to June 2010), they close their eyes to the

over 17,000 murders of pre-borns annually.

While people are free to debate the morality of abortion, the facts of New Zealand’s ongoing slaughter of innocents should not be ignored in official statistics. For another comparison, there is only about one road death per day. When you consider the huge amounts of money spent by government and private agencies to reduce the incidence of both heart disease and road accidents, isn’t it about time a little was spent on reducing the incidence of abortion, which is a far more significant cause of death? Some very simple and economical resources are available immediately. For instance, showing the parents ultrasound movies of their child and DVDs of how abortions are carried out and what will happen to their child if they proceed.

Chris Finlayson former Maori Treaty advocate is not telling the truth in my view when he claims people will have free access under this bill. The clauses he referred to do not say this. This brings into question the integrity of our Attorney General as well as our Prime Minister. The Maori party is backing off – what a strategy – they say they may not back the bill... Yeah right ... the Maori party was formed to gain control of NZs foreshore and seabed. It appears that both Finlayson and Key are equally misleading us – John Key wants to give the Maoris a multi-billiondollar gift of our foreshore and seabed to stay in power. He will surely lose this power. But the biggest losers will be the people of NZ – our local beaches and water no longer freely available to all. Scrap the bill.

Denis Shuker, Stanmore Bay

Tony Broad, North West Bay, Pelorus Sound

Foreshore and seabed

Why can’t National guarantee free public access to the foreshore and seabed and Attorney General, Christopher Finlayson cannot show us where free public access to the Foreshore and Seabed was guaranteed in National’s new Bill. It’s because his Bill purposely does not guarantee free public access.

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INSIDE: FREE CHRISTMAS BOOK OFFER, PAGE 12

INVESTIGATE December 2010:

GOLD RUSH AS PRICES SPIRAL UPWARDS, IS THIS A GOOD TIME TO INVEST, OR A GOOD TIME TO CASH UP?

Gold Rush • Treaty Rorts • 2010 in Review

TREATY RORTS Amy Brooke argues the

Waitangi Tribunal process is corrupt, and costing taxpayers billions

2010 IN REVIEW The big stories of the year in pictures

THE NEW NARNIA FILM Issue 119

Behind the scenes on Dawn Treader

$8.60 December 2010

When you subscribe to Investigate this month for only $110*, we’ll also give you Ian Wishart’s new bestseller, Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story.

Keep it for yourself or use it as an ideal Christmas gift. AND we’ll throw in a copy of Lee Strobel’s The Case For A Creator absolutely free, as well!

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Miranda Devine When in Rome...

PRIME MINISTER JULIA GILLARD AND HER FIRST Bloke,

Tim Mathieson, were slammed on talkback radio this month for his sartorial splendour while visiting South-East Asia.

It seems the poor guy can’t win. His tie was too long, or he should have worn one, or his suit jacket should have been buttoned or he didn’t know where to walk.

Yada yada yada.

The criticism contained a touch of reverse sexism – and not so reverse, with commentators also referring to Gillard as “frumpy”, lacking “gravitas” or “out of her depth”, on her first regional tour.

It would be hard to imagine the same being said about a male prime minister, no matter how pompous (hello Kevin) he might be in his dealings with foreign dignitaries, which, refreshingly, Gillard is not.

Mathieson scrubbed up just fine, his face pleasant, demeanour unruffled, and no obvious faux pas, quite some achievement for a hairdresser turned First Handbag.

No, the real etiquette blunder was our Prime Minister’s.

Why, when visiting conservative Islamic countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, did she decide to bring her de facto partner and flaunt a non-marital domestic situation that is in strict contravention of the mores and laws of her host societies.

In the majority Muslim nation Malaysia, after all, every Valentine’s Day the modesty police go around town raiding budget hotel rooms arresting unmarried couples and charging them with “Khalwat” or “close proximity”, a sexual misconduct offence which carries a maximum two year jail sentence.

The current Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim has even been jailed for sodomy.

We are not talking about a progressive society.

So what were Gillard’s protocol people

thinking? More to the point, what was she thinking?

This isn’t a backpacking tour where you say, “To hell with local customs. I’m a proud Aussie and I’ll do what I want.”

As it happened the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak miraculously came down with chickenpox on the eve of Gillard’s arrival, so was unable to meet her.

This prompted Malaysian newspaper columnists and twitterers to sneer about “sickies” and their “chicken” leader.

“Is it really chicken-pox” asked the Malaysia Chronicle.

“Is his ‘sickie’ just him ‘playing hard to

and Indonesia on official visits, the nature of Gillard and Mathieson’s relationship would have raised “confusion and awkwardness” in these very conservative countries.

“They would have had briefings for their ministers trying to describe the situation.

[Mathieson] probably would have been described as a ‘common law husband’. It would have raised an eyebrow. Certainly I am afraid it would have demeaned [Gillard] from their point of view. It would have caused awkwardness no doubt. Whether anyone took offence who knows.”

Chickenpox does occasionally have serious complications for adults; the Malaysian PM

The fact Gillard dressed so modestly in the hot, humid weather, covered from neck to wrist to ankle, shows she understands the importance of local customs when it comes to clothing get’,” asked the Malaysian Mirror, pointing out Razak was also too unwell to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Hopeful thinking,” said one Malaysian tweet of a news story describing Mathieson as Gillard’s “husband”. “Check google, hehehe,” said another tweet. “Aunt Julia She has a partner, named Tim Mathieson.

They’re just living together.”

And another, translated into English: “Hehehe, the Aussie PM is intelligent but yeah, too feminist, she’s unmarried as well ...”

We find such attitudes offensive in our own country but, according to one diplomatic source who has travelled to Malaysia

14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

may have had pustules on his face, which would make even a brief photo opportunity to save face for Gillard out of the question. Perhaps an element of sexism was even at play.

Whatever the case, Gillard shouldn’t have put Malaysia or Indonesia in an awkward position.

She should have saved the joint visit with Mathieson for Europe or America, for countries with attitudes more aligned with our own. The fact Gillard dressed so modestly in the hot, humid weather, covered from neck to wrist to ankle, shows she understands the importance of local customs when it comes

to clothing. Some countries in our region find it hard enough to accept a female leader, let alone one who has brought along her unmarried partner. At the very least it is a protocol headache.

The headache only further complicated what was already the central problem of Gillard’s six day tour – her fruitless insistence on pressing her East Timor asylum seeker processing centre on her hosts, an idea which is domestic political poison for them.

In Indonesia, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono cancelled a state dinner with Gillard to visit volcano victims in Central Java. You can’t read anything into that, any more than you can into the typo on the official banner in front of the presidential palace where Gillard met Yudhoyono.

“Welcome The Prime Minister of Australia, the Hohourable Julia Gillard MP”. Much embarrassment and “hehehe” style mirth rippled through Indonesia about the unfortunate misspelling, which some said sounded like “horrible”.

Typos aside, SBY, as he is known, is “quite pious,” says the diplomatic source. “He is a great bloke but very conservative. No world leader is as important as he is to Australia The Indonesians would find it strange to have him sit down with a woman in that position [a defacto relationship]. It’s not something they would tolerate in their own families.”

In Australia everyone has been very sanguine about the fact Gillard and Mathieson are shacked up together in the Lodge. When sexologist and author Bettina Arndt raised some mild disapproval of Gillard’s “living in sin” status before the election, she was howled down by a fierce mob, who completely missed the point.

It is not that Gillard is not entitled to live with her partner without being married.

In fact you have to admire her for not

Yonhap News/YNA/NEWSCOM

The problem is that she is no longer an individual politician. She represents the nation. She is our standard bearer trivialising the institution of marriage by tying the knot to win votes.

Most Australians take the view that it’s none of our business what she does privately, and her story, as she recounted it to Bryce Corbett in the Women’s Weekly, of never having met the right man early enough to start a family resonates with many women.

The problem is that she is no longer an individual politician. She represents the nation. She is our standard bearer. At home, she is a role model for younger women, but

you would hope her domestic situation is not widely copied since (inherently less stable) defacto arrangements do no favours for women or their children.

Internationally, in countries less broadminded than our own, her living arrangements are peculiar, and regarded by a good part of the population as immoral.

Unlike Tim Mathieson’s dress sense, this is not a trivial consideration in diplomatic relations. devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 15

STRAIGHT TALK

Mark Steyn

Unelected bureaucrats need to be accountable AS I SAID LAST YEAR, THE SHORT HISTORY OF THE

post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfil the same function in the system as the firstyear boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.

Thus, America in the 21st century – a supposedly “centre-right” nation governed by a left-of-centre political class, a lefter-of-centre judiciary, and a leftest-of-centre bureaucracy.

Liberalism, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi wrote, “is hostile to law”, and has a preference for “policy without law”. The law itself doesn’t really matter so much as the process it sets in motion – or, as Nancy Pelosi famously put it, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”

When Lowi was writing in the Seventies, he noted that both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission were set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and “provided no standards whatsoever” for their conduct. So they made it up as they went along.

Where do you go to vote out the CPSC? Or OSHA? Or the EPA? Or any of the rest of the acronyms uncountable drowning America in alphabet soup.

“We the people” has degenerated into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers”. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society. But today we’re all ignorant of the law,

from the legislators who pass the laws unread to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end. How can you not be? Under the hyper-regulatory state, any one of us is in breach of dozens of laws at any one time without being aware of it. In a New York deli, a bagel with cream cheese is subject to food-preparation tax, but a plain bagel with no filling is not. Except that, if the clerk slices the plain bagel for you, the foodpreparation tax applies. Just for that one knife cut. As a progressive caring society New York has advanced from tax cuts to taxed cuts. Oh, and, if he doesn’t slice the plain bagel, but you opt to eat it in the deli, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was required of the food.

lucky: You may not catch their eye – for a while. But perhaps your neighbour does, or the guy down the street. No trial, no jury, just a dogsbody in some cubicle who pronounces that you’re guilty of an offense a colleague of his invented.

This is soft tyranny – and, actually, not so soft. Indeed, we do an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.

True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant – in theory. But in practice he was in his pal-

Say what you like about the Boston Tea Party, but nobody attempted to prosecute them for unlicensed handling of beverage items in a public place Got that? If you own a deli, you better have, because New York is so broke they need their nine cents per sliced bagel and their bagel inspectors are cracking down.

In such a world, there is no “law” – in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed by (d) your elected representatives. Instead, unknown, unnamed, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats determine transgressions, prosecute infractions and levy fines for behavioural rules they themselves craft and which, thanks to the ever more tangled spaghetti of preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives, apply to different citizens unequally. You may be

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ace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed.

In Tocqueville’s words: Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.

Just so. You were the mean and worthless subject of a cruel and mercurial despot but, even if he wanted to, he lacked the means to micro-regulate your life in every aspect. Yet

Oh, and, if he doesn’t slice the plain bagel, but you opt to eat it in the deli, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was required of the food

what would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

That moment has now arrived. Thanks to computer technology, it’s easier than ever to subject the state’s subjects to “a uniform set of regulations”. Like to mull that thought over a cup o’ joe? Sorry, I’d love to offer you one, but it’s illegal. With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From The Ventura County Star: Ty Brann likes the neighbourly feel of his local hardware store. The fourth-generation Ventura County resident and small business owner has been going to the B & B Do it Centre on Mobile Avenue in Camarillo for many years. His company, Kastle Kare, does pest control, landscaping and plant care, and he’s a B & B regular.

So when he learned the county had told B & B it could no longer put out its usual box of doughnuts and coffee pot for the morning customers, Brann was taken aback.

Dunno why. He lives in California. He surely knows by now everything you enjoy is either illegal or regulated up the wazoo.

The Collins family had been putting a coffee pot on the counter for 15 years, as the previous owners of the store had done, too, and yea, back through all the generations. But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle the doughnuts. “What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” explained Elizabeth Huff, “Manager of Community Services” (yeah, right). “Those establishments have permits and can operate in front of or even inside of the stores.”

Even inside? Gee, that’s big of you. “Those establishments have permits”? In California, what doesn’t? Commissar Huff added that there are a range of permits of varying costs. No doubt a plain instant coffee permit would be relatively simple, but if you wished to offer a decaf caramel macchiato with complimentary biscotti additional licenses may be required.

“We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Mr Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

Why? When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in noncompliance. What the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? George III didn’t care what complimentary liquid refreshments a village blacksmith shared with his clientele. Say what you like about the Boston Tea Party, but nobody attempted

to prosecute them for unlicensed handling of beverage items in a public place.

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favourable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

And eventually you wake up and find, as in California, that your state is all hole and no doughnut. Just as gun control is not about guns but control, so doughnut control is likewise not about doughnuts, but about ever more total control. Big Government won’t make the coffee, or the doughnuts.

It just regulates them. All it makes is small citizens. © 2010 Mark Steyn

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 17

EYES RIGHT

Richard Prosser Gunpowder, treason, and plot

IT IS A DELICIOUS QUIRK OF OUR WESTMINSTER STYLE

western democracy that we have as the cause célèbre for our primary annual fireworks event, the commemoration of one man’s attempt to destroy the English Houses of Parliament, through the blunt, undemocratic, yet potentially effective, mechanism of a basement filled with barrels of gunpowder.

It is a bitter irony of that same system which sees the present National-led Government releasing a White Paper on Defence in the same week that we celebrate Guy Fawkes’ ultimately unsuccessful crack at putting a rocket up the Government of his day. It is ironic because the upshot of the White Paper is that the New Zealand Defence Force will soon find it even harder to put a rocket up anything at all, thanks to the cutbacks which the review foreshadows.

It is thirteen years since the last Defence White Paper, but the findings and recommendations contained in it are all too predictable. Your favourite – yet humble – scribe was invited to contribute to it, presumably because of my reputation as New Zealand’s leading civilian Defence commentator, though possibly because I harass the Minister so often with advice and suggestions that he felt it might shut me up. In the end I didn’t bother. The National Party has long since very clearly flagged its intentions with regards to Defence, and pays little more than lip service to ideas beyond or outside its chosen path. In that regard there is little to distinguish them from the previous Government, which as we all know had an equally naïve and unrealistic approach to the requirements of the Defence of the nation.

Personally this writer believes that the Nats are planning a combined Defence Force with the Australians, which fits in nicely with their not-so-secret desire for a common currency, a single economy, and

with New Zealand becoming a State of our neighbour nation across the ditch.

To that end they have heralded a smaller Defence Force, based around spending less money, and built on some quite remarkable presumptions. They presume that we and our friends and neighbours are safe from attack or invasion for the next twenty-five years. They presume that China will not overtake the US in terms of conventional military capabilities, or challenge it for regional or global supremacy within that timeframe. They presume that Uncle Sam will be happy enough to allow New Zealand to carry on freeloading through this com-

ket, and selling off Defence Force houses, because presumably we will never need to expand our Forces again, and thus housing for service people with families will be quite unnecessary.

The White Paper talks about “Organisational Reform”, “Resource Redistribution”, “reprioritizing and reallocating”, and a raft of other gobbledygook which translates in English to “You will have even less money in the future than you scrape by on now, and you will be expected to do even more with it.”

Fundamentally however the 2010 Defence White Paper is a flawed and useless doc-

We’ll be able to spot Chinese subs before they pop up in Wellington Harbour after all. We won’t be able to do anything about them, of course, but at least we’ll know they’re there ing safe and peaceful period, which to my mind bears a remarkable similarity to Helen Clark’s foolish and famously naïve Benign Strategic Environment. They presume that we can happily bludge off the Aussies, keep tabs on our vast Exclusive Economic Zone via Google Earth, and keep up the pretence of independence in foreign policy whilst being wholly reliant on others for any sharp end capabilities which may be needed from time to time.

The White Paper proposes amalgamating Army and Air Force bases in the North Island to Ohakea, presumably because they believe all our eggs will be safe in one bas-

18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

ument, based on groundless assumptions and an unrealistic worldview, which fails to address New Zealand’s essential defence and security needs, and which does not make any provision for a future outside of its own rose-tinted hopes and fantasies. Helengrad would have been proud of it.

The Paper does mention the need to upgrade Naval combat capability and to replace the P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft “at the end of its life”, though it is light on detail and doesn’t say precisely what these assets will be replaced with, which won’t be decided on for another five years.

It suggests that unmanned aircraft may be

part of the mix. There may be some merit in that, but the Paper does not consider realities such as the other uses to which the Orions are put, such as dropping life rafts to stricken sailors or landing on small remote islands to perform Medevac operations. I’d like to see a robot plane do either of those things, I really would, especially if there happens to be a war going on somewhere else in the world at the time and the US has shut down all or part of the satellite network on which such drones rely for command and control communications. The paper does not, after all, suggest that New Zealand should invest in creating its own network of military satellites. That the Orions are already well past their useby date and are only kept flying through the innovation and dedication of an everdecreasing number of highly professional techies, is not mentioned. But hurrah! The P-3s are finally going to get their submarine detection capability back, which was twice rejected by the Clark Government. We’ll be able to spot Chinese subs before they pop up in Wellington Harbour after all. We won’t be able to do anything about them, of course, but at least we’ll know they’re there.

That the Anzac frigates are going to reach the ends of their serviceable lives in half the time which was originally budgeted for during their acquisition process, because we are asking two ships to do the work of four, is not mentioned either. In the meantime they’ll be getting a self-defence upgrade; I hope that means SeaRAM and a 128-cell Evolved Sea Sparrow launcher, but I suspect not. What is suggested however is that HMNZS Manawanui and HMNZS Resolution be replaced with a littoral (a military euphemism for ‘little’ and confined to shallow water, look it up yourself, I had to!

– Ed.) warfare ship (two ships being replaced with one, see, you know it makes fiscal sense), and that the Endeavour be replaced, with, um, well, maybe something else.

But the real elephant in the room, of course, is Air Combat. The White Paper does not address it; it does not even mention it, and the silence is deafening. This elephant is more like a mammoth, such is the reluctance of National to acknowledge it.

I have to admit to a certain disdain in my opinion of John Key’s Government regarding their attitude towards the Air Combat Force. They were as aghast as everyone else when Clark and Co scrapped the combat wing, they were at the forefront of efforts to have it restored, they held hope alive for nine long years while we waited for sanity

to return, and then as soon as they were in a position to remedy the situation they turned turtle, and all because one currency trader thinks he knows better than the lessons of history and the wisdom of experienced advisors. Now I happen to know for a fact that some of the advice which John Key and Defence Minister Wayne Mapp have received regarding the Air Combat Force has been extremely good advice, because I am personally acquainted with a number of the retired senior officers who have been providing it. That they have chosen to disregard this advice is more than a little troubling.

This is one dead rat which most definitely needs to be swallowed; and here, once again, very briefly, is why.

Firstly, jet combat aircraft are an essential element of any nation’s ability to defend itself. They are more effective and more cost effective at delivering ordnance and at meeting threats than any other mechanism available. Jet aircraft can travel further and faster than any land or sea based vehicle, and can counter threats from either of those quarters as well as from other air assets.

Air cover is essential for ground forces and ships operating in threat environments.

Ground forces and ships are particularly vulnerable to attacks from the air against which they have little in the way of guaranteed means of effective defence. Without air combat we have no way of protecting our forces, either on deployment overseas or in defence of our sovereignty, and in relying on other nations to provide this capability we lose all pretence of independence.

Secondly, combat aircraft, apart from being the only mechanism by which certain objectives can be met, provide a nation with the ability to counter threats in the most economic manner in terms of money and lives. To put it in quite mercenary terms, sending an infantry battalion into combat might cost several hundred million dollars and risk the lives of five hundred men. A frigate going into harm’s way risks the lives of perhaps 250 crew and a replacement bill of up to half a billion dollars. A fighter jet, by comparison, can be bought for less than thirty million dollars and carries one or two aircrew. Nations with small populations, who wish to provide themselves with effective, versatile defence solutions, have little option but to maximise their effectiveness and minimise their human and monetary costs and risks. The net unit cost to New Zealand for the aircraft in the cancelled F-16 lease-to-buy deal would have been around

$3.25 million per airframe – Uncle Sam was virtually paying us to take them.

Thirdly, and this is far more important than anyone in either Government or the left wing media is prepared to admit, without an Air Combat capability, New Zealand’s Defence Force will always struggle to recruit and retain sufficient numbers of quality personnel, because it is not seen as a credible Force and therefore not a credible career choice. And it is not seen as credible because it is not in fact credible. Without a sharp end it is not actually correct to call the Air Force a “Force” at all. Good people didn’t just leave the Air Force when the combat wing was scrapped, they left the Army and the Navy as well. New Zealand today would be unable to sustain a battalion on rotation as we did a decade ago in East Timor, because too many good people have simply left and not been able to be replaced.

I have done the costings, and the ACF could be rebuilt, even today, in about eighteen months and for about $400 million.

Commentators who proclaim otherwise are either ignorant, or lying, or both. The decision to scrap it was treasonous in my opinion, and the refusal to reinstate it begs the question of whether some deeper plot may be involved. 73% of us wanted to keep the ACF, and I hope and trust we will see some fireworks about this issue come the next election campaign. © 2010 Richard Prosser

Kyodo

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 19

LINE ONE

Chris Carter

Education unions wrecking teachers’ reputations IF YOU CAN DO, THEN DO... IF YOU CAN’T, THEN TEACH. It is a very old truism that I picked up some-

where or another but, by the looks of it, probably a very fair critique of an almost viral affliction that has currently re-emerged to scramble the brains of many people purporting to be New Zealand teachers.

There’s been some very hysterical chanting in unison to protest the plan to introduce some standards into the teaching of our children with the Government’s declared aim of more properly keeping parents well informed as to their offspring’s progress.

This new system of educational standards will sadly unmask many of the semi-literate and invariably left wing oafs currently hiding amongst the teaching profession and who – by their now easily detectable levels of incompetence – shall be fired with relative ease.

As one of the last surviving old time unions still highly skilled in the ancient black arts of good worker intimidation, industrial black-mail and stand over tactics, the PPTA is at the moment looking more and more like the now thankfully defunct bully-boy unions of yesteryear such as the now infamous unions that did their best to cripple our wharves, freezing works, trucking and even our inter island ferries. All of those unions had but one thing in mind, “Sell the Proletariat the wages and conditions crap, and we can get on with stuffing up the Nation’s economy and speeding up our Socialist Revolution!”

Like termites, unwatched and therefore largely unnoticed, our school system has been steadily infiltrated by radical left wing zealots who, as we now have had revealed very clearly in recent weeks, not only don’t give a stuff about our kids’ general education, they even hold in complete contempt such vitally important educational milestones in our children’s lives as their final exams.

Consider when these ingrates are striking. Naturally, in keeping with the Leninist playbook, it’s right on exam time or when the innocent can be made to truly suffer.

To me, I must admit, it’s a great shame that tarring and feathering has gone out of fashion. If you wanted to be a little more liberal, you could confine it to weeding out of our schools through full on re-testing of competence, not so much the childrens learning abilities but of some of the highly politicized prats teaching them! I’ve personally met some of these ‘teachers’ for whom remedial reading, writing and mathematical courses would not even be sufficient for them to even re-enter the human race, let

as being little more than wreckers.

The vast majority of teachers are good keen people, they work damn’ hard, not only teaching all kinds of kids but also having to handle the incredible amount of mind numbing bumf in the way of the bureaucratic paperwork emanating from that home for the bewildered, the Education Department that for years now apparently has not given a big rat’s backside about teaching standards, just as long as thousands of forms are filled in each month!

Maybe we should start at the top and have our first big clean up of schools take place there, and then the teachers could go back full time into actually teaching instead of

Just be professional, do a great job, detach yourselves from the leftist rabble, and as I’m sure you already know, you will be way better off alone the honoured profession that is real teaching. Even the suggestion that a rethink as to the qualities of some of our teachers is long overdue simply terrifies those who will inevitably be found out.

Some of these people are so lacking in commonsense and appreciation of how the world has changed in so many ways for the better, that they have yet to realise that the days of left wing ultra militant unionism are over. A perfect example of this disconnect from reality came just a few weeks back over The Hobbit movie, when the CTU through stupid standover tactics not only ended up looking monumentally stupid amongst their peers, but even to the public they were seen

20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

just providing material to allow for one of Wellington’s more successful job creation schemes, with untold Ministerial staff just to file all the nonsense it creates. Indeed teachers most definitely do deserve compensation right now for the hours of agonizing writer’s cramp they must all suffer. Well, that is, the good teachers; many of the others may well not be able to read and write well enough to comply with the ministry’s needs.

Most people reading this who are over the age of 50 will no doubt have memories of school not too different to mine. Class sizes were around the forty mark, our teachers we called Mr, Miss or Mrs, or maybe sir or madam. We tended to behave ourselves

pretty well otherwise we could pretty well be guaranteed the strap, the sand shoe or even the cane, which would be applied vigorously on our hand or backside.

The classroom in session was as quiet as a courtroom used to be when the Judge speaks. From form one, we did homework – failure to do it meant big and usually painful trouble. Only ever met one kid in all the time that I was at school who couldn’t read or write. Nice guy, but today he would have been in a special class.

We also had it pretty good, in that counsellors, psychologists and other new age people had yet to enter into the school system, so we simply carried on and learned things despite being deprived of such luxuries. Being a boy, along with others in the playground we would sometimes fight each other. Usually it was a bit of wrestling, pushing and shoving and the like. Should things ever get a bit serious and fists started to be used, then if someone got flattened you always waited till the other guy picked himself up. Hit him or, worse, kick him while he was still on the deck, and it wasn’t the teacher you had to worry about: just simply what your own mates would do to you for breaking the unspoken, really important rules we had been told made you a bloke.

Funny thing is that to my knowledge I never knew a fellow schoolkid who was into drugs, stole cars, broke into houses to pinch things or stole handbags off little old ladies!

Primary and intermediate schools is where we youngsters were really educated in all

sorts of ways, so from there on in we’d been pretty well molded into reasonably productive people I reckon. Of course, today the followers of the Californian educational model for the last several decades think that the way we were taught was primitive, even barbarian. Funny though how well the system seemed to work so very well for nearly a century untouched.

I’ve always had a lot of time for teachers, for next to the “hand that rocks the cradle” you’re the people that are the very foundation of our whole society. So don’t have your-

selves disgraced and have your profession diminished by the PPTA. Politicised thugs never ever represent anyone other than their own need for power and personal gain. Just be professional, do a great job, detach yourselves from the leftist rabble, and as I’m sure you already know, you will be way better off, even in the short term and definitely much better off as your true worth to our society is again fully recognized by its deeds, rather than just by the noise it makes.

Chris Carter appears in association with www.snitch.co.nz, a must-see site.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 21

FADING EMPIRES

Jonathan Zimmerman You can’t judge a war by the news coverage MOST PEOPLE REGARD WORLD WAR II AS A “JUST

war” because the United States helped stem the vicious tide of global fascism. But during that war, American soldiers dismembered Japanese corpses and collected their body parts as souvenirs. A contradiction? Not really. You can commit war crimes on behalf of a just war just as easily as an unjust one.

But you wouldn’t know that by reading comments about five U.S. soldiers accused of civilian murders this year in Afghanistan.

According to news reports, the soldiers also cut off fingers from corpses and posed in photographs with them. When the Army announced in October that it would courtmartial one of the soldiers, Spc. Jeremy Morlock, reaction from antiwar activists was quick and predictable: The war was a mistake all along, and our military crimes prove it.

Meanwhile, Army officials moved to keep photographs of the atrocities out of the public eye. If the photos go viral, officials say, people around the world will turn against America’s struggle in Afghanistan.

Just like the antiwar crowd, ironically, the Army is assuming that war crimes will become a metaphor for the war itself.

They’re both wrong. The soldiers’ alleged acts are horrible, of course, and the military should prosecute the charges to the fullest. But these crimes don’t speak to the larger purpose and validity of the war in Afghanistan, any more than American atrocities during WW II reflected on the justice of our campaign against the Japanese.

Let’s leave aside the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the U.S. justified as a way to prevent further carnage. On the battlefield, American soldiers routinely killed Japanese civilians and mutilated Japanese bodies. Yes, our enemies committed all kinds of atrocities during the war. But so did we.

Americans collected bones, scalps and skulls from the Japanese dead or near-dead.

None of this was a secret either. In 1944, Life magazine published a full-page photograph of an attractive young woman posing with a Japanese skull. “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her,” the caption declared.

But skulls were difficult to carry and – especially – to prepare: Soldiers first had to remove the flesh from the severed head, either by boiling the head or by leaving it out for ants to eat. So they preferred to collect ears, which were tidy and small.

“The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of ‘souvenirs’ – eleven ears from dead Japs,” read a 1943 article in a Marine newspaper. “It was not disgusting, as it would be from the civilian point of view.”

for them. In a 1981 memoir, American biologist E.B. Sledge recalled watching American soldiers cut off a hand from a dead Japanese, urinate into the mouth of another corpse and shoot an old woman who was “just an old gook,” as one of Sledge’s comrades told him. “The fierce struggle for survival eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all,” Sledge wrote.

Significantly, though, Sledge continued to believe in the larger purpose of the war. The Japanese had attacked the United States and conquered much of East Asia, and they had to be stopped. Some U.S. military men had committed monstrous acts, to be sure, but America’s larger military cause remained just.

Is the cause in Afghanistan also just? I

It’s far too simple – and a bit dishonest – to claim that the crimes of this war make the war itself criminal Actually, most civilians seemed fine with the practice. That same year, a Baltimore newspaper reported that a local mother had asked authorities to allow her son to send her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier.

She wanted to nail it to her door, she said, so everyone could see it.

Most of all, some American servicemen collected gold teeth. One Marine boasted of collecting 17 teeth, the last from a Japanese soldier who was still moving his hands. Another Marine slit a wounded Japanese’s cheeks open and carved out his teeth with a knife while the victim thrashed on the ground.

Although some Americans did object to these atrocities at the time, it would be much later before WW II veterans expressed regret

22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

really don’t know. But here’s what I do know: The alleged crimes committed by Morlock and his platoon don’t speak to the answer.

Atrocities happen in almost every war, just and unjust alike. So it’s far too simple – and a bit dishonest – to claim that the crimes of this war make the war itself criminal.

But it’s also dishonest for military officials to keep hiding the photographs of the atrocities, which should be released as soon as possible. If the war is just, it remains so regardless of what these soldiers did; and if it isn’t, we should pull up stakes and come home.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.

Hossein Fatemi/UPI/NEWSCOM

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 23

CONTRA MUNDUM

Matthew Flannagan The number of the beast RECENTLY TV3 SCREENED THE OMEN. THIS CLASSIC horror

is a about a boy called Damian who is the predicted anti Christ and appropriately has the number 666 on his head. This film epitomises how the book of Revelation is understood in contemporary culture; apparently it predicts a future person, the beast or the anti-Christ will take over the world. Associated with this is the number 666 which is literally inscribed into people’s heads, or hands. I think this pop theology is mistaken.

The relevant section in Revelation 13:13, 4 says: And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea.

He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority… The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?”

The text proceeds: Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast…He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666. (Rev 13:11,16-18) Most English translations mention the

number 666, this is an accurate translation of the number contained in many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament; lesser known, is that some manuscripts contain the number 616 (the significance of this will be explored later). What is noteworthy, is that the passages quoted above contain imagery, no one, to my knowledge, understands them to refer to an actual seven-headed monster.

In this type of genre, the ancient style of writing called Apocalyptic has imagery that is well known and can be fairly easy to interpret. The first beast is said to [1] get its authority from the dragon, [2] resemble a leopard, a bear and a lion, [3] have 7 heads

I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a man, and the heart of a man was given to it.” “And there before me was a second beast, which looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of its sides, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. It was told, ‘Get up and eat your fill of flesh!’ “After that, I looked, and there before me was another beast, one that looked like a leopard. And on its back it had four wings like those of a bird. This beast had four heads, and it was given authority to rule.” After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast–terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had

When a state makes itself into an empire, dominates the world by military power and demands absolute allegiance and devotion from human beings, it has then become satanic and 10 horns; we know also that [4] everyone will worship this beast and no one can defeat it in battle.

Understanding [1] is fairly straightforward. The dragon is identified as “the ancient serpent” an allusion to the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis; there the serpent is a crafty creature that tempts Adam and Eve to try to be like God and encourages them to disobey God’s commands.

The imagery in [2] is drawn from the book of Daniel: Four great beasts, each different from the others, came up out of the sea. “The first was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle.

24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns. (Dan 7:3-7) What this imagery means is explicitly explained in the text; I approached one of those standing there and asked him the true meaning of all this. So he told me and gave me the interpretation of these things: The four great beasts are four kingdoms that will rise from the earth. (Dan 7:16-17) [Emphasis added] The lion, leopard and bear in Daniel symbolise kingdoms and are probably a reference to the Babylonian, Medio-Persian and

Macedonian empires respectively. The first beast in Revelation 13 is a composite of these beasts and is therefore a world empire.

The symbolism in [3] is explained in the text; This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits.

There are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while.

The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction. The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. (Rev 17:9-14) The seven heads have two meanings. First, they “are seven hills on which the woman sits,” the women in context symbolises a city.

An ancient reader would have immediately got the point; in the first century Rome was famous for being a city built on seven hills.

The world empire then is Rome.

Second, the seven heads symbolise “seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while.” If one follows the order of Suetonius and other apocalyptic writings, the first king of Rome was Julius Caesar, the second was Augustus, the third Tiberius, the fourth Caligula, the fifth was Claudius, the sixth who “now is” would then be Nero Caesar, the seventh who “has not yet come” but who will “remain for a little while” would be Galba who reigned for seven months. Nero a brutal maniacal dictator had among other things established the emperor cult in Rome setting up a statute of himself; the emperor and empire was worshipped as a god. [4] Tells us the empire is being worshipped and which no one can defeat in battle.

Now we get to the number 666. In Greek and Latin the letters and numbers are interchangeable; for this reason one can add up the letters of peoples names to get numerical figures that stand for their name. In Hebrew writings a system of Gematria developed (though it is also found in Greek and Roman writings) whereby a person would assign a numerical value to a word or phrase.

Interestingly, when the Greek word Nero Caesar is translated into Hebrew, the system of Gematria yields the number 666. If one transliterates the Latin instead of the Greek one gets 616; Identifying the beast with Nero also explains why some manuscripts have 666 and others 616. In the first century, Greek was the international language of the Roman Empire and was native

to much of the eastern empire. Latin, however, was the language of the Romans. If the beast was Nero, some Christian communities would cite his name in Greek and others would use Latin.

The second beast has “two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon.” The lamb in Revelation refers to Christ; this is an institution that appears Christian but in fact tempts people into doing wrong. It exercises “all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast” suggesting it was in fact acting on behalf of the Roman Empire advocating that people worship the Emperor.

The reference to a mark on one’s hand and forehead is used in the Old Testament frequently as an idiom for devotion and appears to be used in this way in Revelation 14:1, the very next verse. Consequently, the text warns against false prophets who – claiming to speak

on behalf of God – command people to worship the state.

Revelation is about statism; it warns that when a state makes itself into an empire, dominates the world by military power and demands absolute allegiance and devotion from human beings, it has then become satanic. Religious organisations that advocate this sort of statism may appear Christian but are, in fact, a dangerous temptation. Fidelity to God means refusing to give absolute obedience to human rulers. This message may not be popular on TV3 but it is an important message, one that should not be clouded or distorted by fantastical movies about a psycho child with an odd birth mark.

Dr Matthew Flannagan is an Auckland based philosopher/theologian who researches and publishes in the area of Philosophy of Religion, Theology and Ethics. He blogs at www.mandm.org.nz.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 25

Run for the Hills T

PETER HENSLEY WARNS THAT THE LATEST US STIMULUS PACKAGE MAY BE DOOMED TO FAIL

he New Orleans Investment conference has been an annual event since 1973. It is held every October. This year it attracted well over 1,000 participants and over a third of them originated from outside the United States.

The program stretches over three full days from seven in the morning until 8.30 each night. In addition there is another half day allocated for pre-conference workshops. Aside from morning and afternoon coffee breaks, meals are not supplied.

Exhibitors number over 100 and the list of speakers and presenters is world class.

The underlying theme of the conference is gold. The majority of attendees and presenters could best be described as gold bugs on steroids. This is not meant to be demeaning, just truthful. The conference organisers provide a balanced program with a bias towards investment in Junior Resource Companies listed on public stock exchanges. The speakers are limited to a maximum of forty minutes and the number and quality is exceptional.

All acknowledge that the US debt level is unsustainable and it has reached a level that is impossible to repay. Official debt levels suggest that at US$13 trillion it is close to 100% of GDP. Conspiracy theorists argue that unfunded shadow liabilities such as future costs of medi-care and expected pension entitlements potentially place this figure as high as $65 trillion which is beyond comprehension.

Commentators suggest that the US authorities dealing with this issue have two options. They can either default on the debt or inflate it away. When you are responsible for the stability of the world’s reserve currency all agree that default is not considered to be a viable option. That leaves inflation. US authorities have publically announced that this is their preferred course of action.

Market commentators suggest that this action will enable gold to enter the third and most explosive phase of a long term bull (upward) market. Typically 26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 27

“GOLD HAS OFTEN BEEN DESCRIBED AS AN ANCIENT RELIC; HOWEVER IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN RECOGNISED AS MONEY. THE PAST FIVE YEARS HAS WITNESSED IT BECOME RE-ESTABLISHED AND RECOGNISED AS A TRUE CURRENCY” the first stage is categorised by contempt, the second by quiet unassuming accumulation by market aware individuals, the third stage is when the public’s attention is awakened, and trading in gold can expect to build into a mania. This will lead to the fourth stage where the asset achieves an unsustainable and unrealistic value. The largest price gains are experienced in the third stage.

G

old has often been described as an ancient relic; however it has always been recognised as money. The past five years has witnessed it become re-established and recognised as a true currency.

The past two years has seen a seismic shift in geo-political terms. Market analysts are now acknowledging that the United States is no longer the centre of the economic universe. A century ago share market generally took their lead from the UK, specifically London. Following the Second World War monetary power shifted to the USA and market commentators studied and discussed the Dow Jones. The Dow Jones index comprises the largest 30 publicly listed companies in the United States. Share markets

around the world have traditionally taken a lead from the US market. The adage used to go, if the US sneezes, then the rest of the world caught a cold. This is no longer the case. Over the past decade the Economic power has quietly been shifting to the East.

It changed its postal address earlier this year.

The global financial crisis was created by the US selling toxic mortgage backed securities into a global marketplace. The rest of the world learnt its lesson and decided to work its own way out of recession, leaving the US to flounder with out of date solutions that are no longer effective.

The US has lived beyond its means for the past half a century. It has willingly borrowed from the rest of the world to fund its ever expanding lifestyle. The rest of the world has woken up to the fact that the US is now unable to repay its debts and intends to inflate them away.

At the turn of the century investment bankers sold complex financial instruments to an unsuspecting public and they were incredibly successful in doing so. These products supposedly removed investment risk typically connected with mortgage lend-

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

ing. This led to an unprecedented real estate boom, which in turn led to an even larger increase in mortgage lending. The ever creative investment bankers repacked these (toxic) mortgages and sold them along with the (flawed) insurance policies into a global market place.

Then when the monster they created threatened the world’s financial system, authorities around the world banded together and collectively introduced individual country orientated fiscal stimulus packages designed to protect the global banking structure. In most cases the process was effective.

It is now obvious that the stimulus package could not work in the United States because the economy is addicted to debt. It is unable to function without it. The authorities have announced QE II, which officially stands for the second round of quantitative easing. In reality they plan to pump more money into the economic system with the expectation it will help jump start the economy.

They will make the money available to the banks; however the banks cannot make individuals borrow money. Local Joe Citizens are not interested in increasing their indebtedness, with official unemployment figures reaching 9%; they are more interested in reducing their obligations because they are scared of losing their jobs.

The banks on the other hand are able to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at zero percent and then invest it in Government bonds paying 4%. The authorities know that by flooding the market with liquidity they will inflate their own currency, which in turn will reduce their own outstanding obligations. Over time they will bankrupt the United States.

In every crisis there are opportunities and this is no exception. The author intends to expand and outline these in future issues.

Readers should be aware that there have been major recent legislative changes which affect investment advisers. As from 1st December this year all investment advisers will have to be registered (RFA) and most will have to be authorised (AFA) in order to provide financial advice. Advisers are legally obligated to place the Client’s interest first and adhere to a strict code of ethics. Although the start date is 1st December, advisers have until 30th June 2011 before significant penalties will be enforced.

Copyright © Peter J Hensley November 2010.

A copy of Peter Hensley’ Disclosure Statement is available on request and is free of charge.

THE D-I-Y GOLD RUSH

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping America, and you can expect to see it downunder soon: ‘gold parties’ are the new ‘tupperware’. ERIC ADLER has the story

M

elissa Hale could hardly believe how her bad fortune had suddenly turned golden.

“Betsy,” her old van had just died three hours before. It would mean money she didn’t want to spend flying out of her bank account.

“I have three kids to support,” says Hale, 36.

But here she was, on a crisp Friday night, at her friend Debbie Landis’ home – plopping a small, broken, gold chain she hadn’t worn in years onto Landis’ kitchen table, to see if it might bring a few bucks.

Until this night, Hale had never heard of a “gold party.”

Think of it as the new gold rush – a growing home-party industry that, in this still-nasty economy and with gold trading above US$1,300 an ounce, has had working women and stay-athome mums rushing to each other’s homes like fortune-seekers to Central Otago or California a century ago.

Michele Hall, 36, a buyer for a local gold dealer, examined the bracelet with an eyepiece: 10-karat, less than half pure. She weighed it: 21 grams.

“It comes to US$163.52,” Hall said.

Hale’s eyes and mouth flew open.

“Guess I can get Betsy fixed,” she said.

The price of gold has never risen so high, up from about $300 an ounce a decade ago. The result has been a mother lode of companies and individuals looking to tap into people’s caches of old or broken gold jewellery and melt it down for more money than the crafted pieces were once worth.

As the economy has soured, causing the price of gold to rise, the number of gold home-party companies in the US – advertising their operations at websites including premiumgoldparties. com, goldhomeparties.com, goldparty.com and mygoldparty.com – has exploded.

Officials in the US say they haven’t received any complaints about the parties – which, like Tupperware parties, candle parties, pottery parties and others, spread primarily by word of mouth and friend to friend.

“I never heard of it,” says Susan Ruettimann, a 40 year old mother. When a friend told her that she was hosting a gold party in April, Ruettimann says, ‘I told her, ‘Don’t invite me.’”

“I’m not a fan of parties where you have to

buy things,” she says. “Every year I’m invited to a Tupperware party, and I always feel obligated to buy.”

But then it was explained to her that in gold parties, you don’t buy. You sell.

Partygoers bring any gold bauble or piece of bling they might own. It can be broken, unused, unwanted.

They carry bags full of rings given by boyfriends long gone, single earrings, old charms.

“My mum passed away almost two years ago,” Ruettimann says. “She had a lot of gold jewellery, a lot of gold chains. I just don’t wear gold. There might have been some gold earrings.”

A representative of a party company sets up in a home with a scale, an eyepiece, a magnet (if it sticks, it’s plated, not gold) and a special gizmo (in this case a GT-4000 Gold Tester) that will determine whether an unmarked piece of gold is genuine and, if genuine, whether it’s 10k, 14K or 18K. At each level, the price goes up.

In Ruettimann’s case, as with Melissa Hale, the home party company was Got Gold. (gotgoldkc.com), a company started earlier this year

by Lisa Schuster, 40.

Schuster had been researching the companies online for personal reasons. Her first customer was her own mother, laid off from her office job about two years ago. She found another job, but at a significant pay cut.

“She was just trying to make ends meet and, around Christmastime, trying to make extra money.” Schuster explains. “Something popped into my head. She had a lot of gold sitting around and wasn’t using it. She didn’t want to have a party. I was already researching doing a home party. I told her we would buy it and turn around and sell it.”

She did. For about US$3,000.

From there, through word of mouth, Got Gold began to take off. Since the start of the year, Schuster has hired two associates who work on commission. Each attends three or four gold parties each month.

The women get a cut of the total amount of gold bought at each party. Women who gather their friends and volunteer to “host” the parties also get a commission. If Got Gold pays out US$2,000 or less, the host receives a 10 percent commission. For amounts topping $2,000, they get 15 percent.

“You are skeptical,” Ruettimann says. “If I hadn’t talked to someone who had actually done it, I’m not sure I would have done it at all.”

The dollar signs wiped away her skepticism: She plopped her late mother’s gold on the scales.

“I had close to $600 to $700 worth,” she says.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 29

Landis, a child therapist, hosted her party after attending one herself. She brought earrings without their match, a bent ring, a tangled old herringbone necklace and some bracelets.

“I ended up walking away with over $300,” she says. “I was shocked.”

For her party, she invited several relatives and friends.

Michele Hall sat at the table eyeing, separating, testing and weighing the goods with her price charts in front of her: 10K to 12K gold would bring $7.75 per gram; 14K was $11.25; 18K was $13.25. Platinum was $16 a gram and, if anyone bothered to bring it, silver was 21 cents per gram.

Sherri Ramirez’s odds and ends, including three rings, a broken chain and an old necklace, brought $212.

“It’s helping pay a bill. We’re getting by, but just getting by,” says Ramirez, 43, whose husband was laid off close to two years ago.

Hall, who works full-time as a graphic designer and only part-time for Got Gold, says her rule was to never pressure partygoers.

If they want to sell, that’s fine, she says. But she never advises people to give up on the things that are priceless.

At 8 p.m., after two hours, the total payout to a handful of people was $1,076.23, and the event was tapering off. For Landis that would mean a commission of at least $107, making it a golden night for everyone, more or less.

GOLD STANDARDS How much is your gold worth?

Depends on weight and quality.

The $1,300-an-ounce number is based on 24K “pure” gold. 12K is 50 percent pure and worth roughly US$650 an ounce.

One ounce equals 31.1 grams. So (roughly): •10K = 41.7 percent pure = US$542 per ounce = $17.42 per gram •14K = 58.3 percent pure = US$758 per ounce = $24.38 per gram •18K = 75 percent pure = US$975 per ounce = $31.35 per gram But those prices aren’t what you’ll get at a gold party.

Recent investigations have shown that payouts vary greatly – with consumers getting anywhere from 10 percent to 70 percent of the value of their merchandise from gold buyers.

The National Association of Jewellery Appraisers in the US recommends that individuals go to reputable jewellers rather than attend parties or send their gold through the mail. Howard Rubin, national secretary for the organization, says consumers should expect about 80 percent of appraised value.

FEDS PRINT MONEY Quantitative easing explained

As Peter Hensley has noted, the US stimulus package is doomed to fail, based as it is on simply printing more money to pay its bills and stimulate the economy, a process re-named ‘quantitative easing’. Germany did the same in the lead-up to WWII. TOM PETRUNO explains what’s involved

T

he Federal Reserve has announced a new “quantitative easing” plan aimed at bolstering the economy. So what’s quantitative easing? The term is a mouthful, like many phrases popular at the Fed, but is simple in execution: The central bank plans to boost its purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds in the open market, hoping to push longer-term interest rates lower, or at least keep them from rising significantly.

The Fed has already “eased” its monetary policy – tried to get more money into the economy – by slashing short-term interest rates. (Raising rates is known as tightening.)

But short-term rates are already near zero.

So the Fed now is focused on longer-term rates.

The “quantitative” refers to a specific quantity

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of money – in this case, US$600 billion, which is the sum of Treasury debt the Fed said it would buy by next June, on top of about $300 billion of purchases already planned.

Here’s a primer on the program and what it may mean for the economy and financial markets: QUESTION: Where does the money come from?

ANSWER: The Fed literally creates it from thin air, which it’s permitted to do as the nation’s central bank. But instead of printing actual cash, the Fed credits the accounts of banks and brokerages from which it buys Treasury securities.

The net effect is to remove those bonds from the market, hold them on the Fed’s books, and

“Bill Gross, co-head of bond fund giant Pimco in Newport Beach, Calif., has criticized the Fed’s bond-buying program as a “Ponzi scheme” that will ultimately come crashing down” replace them with money that can circulate into the financial system and the real economy.

Q: How does this affect financial markets?

A: By standing ready to buy a large quantity of Treasuries each month, the Fed becomes a major force in determining the market interest rates on the bonds. If it can keep longer-term Treasury yields depressed, the Fed can influence other longer-term interest rates – such as on mortgages and corporate bonds – because those rates tend to follow the direction of Treasury yields.

What’s more, by keeping rates down and channelling cash to investors for their Treasuries, the Fed hopes to encourage lenders and investors to put that money to work in the economy – for example, by lending to businesses or by buying stocks.

Q: How does the Fed know this plan will work as intended?

A: It doesn’t – something Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has acknowledged. The Fed may get fresh cash to banks, but there’s no guarantee that more lending will result.

But in terms of influencing interest rates, the Fed had some success with a previous round of quantitative easing. The central bank bought $1.75 trillion of mortgage-backed bonds and Treasuries from December 2008 to March 2010, a program that was credited with helping to keep mortgage rates subdued.

And in August, the Fed began using income from its mortgage bonds to buy Treasuries, as a prelude to the latest announcement. Those pur-

chases, and anticipation of the new program, helped push longer-term interest rates lower across the board in recent months.

The 10-year Treasury note yield dropped from 2.96 percent on Aug. 2 to a 21-month low of 2.38 percent in mid-October.

Mortgage rates, in turn, have fallen to generational lows, with the average 30-year loan rate sliding to 4.19 percent by mid-October from 4.5 percent in early August.

Q: Might interest rates have fallen as low as they’re going to go, even with new Fed bond purchases?

A: That’s possible. The Fed cannot directly control longer-term rates; the bond market simply is too big.

What’s more, the Fed probably would be happy to see interest rates rise to some degree if the reason is that the economy is improving, boosting business and consumer demand for loans.

In its statement announcing the stimulus package, the Fed said it would “adjust the program as needed” depending on the economy’s performance.

Some analysts believe the Fed’s main message is that it wants to foster stability in longer-term rates, not necessarily sharply lower rates.

“They want to assure that the economic landscape is pro-growth,” said Tom Tucci, head of Treasury bond trading at RBC Capital Markets in New York. “They want people to feel comfortable spending money.”

Q: What are the risks in the Fed’s plan?

A: There are several, and they aren’t minor.

The central bank is supposed to be independent of the government, but Fed purchases of Treasury bonds open the Fed to criticism that it is eagerly financing the government’s massive budget deficits, which totalled $1.3 trillion in the recent fiscal year alone.

Bill Gross, co-head of bond fund giant Pimco in Newport Beach, Calif., has criticized the Fed’s bond-buying program as a “Ponzi scheme” that will ultimately come crashing down.

The Fed also risks driving the dollar’s value sharply lower by flooding the world with more greenbacks. Although a weaker dollar helps make U.S. exports cheaper abroad, the Fed wouldn’t want to encourage massive dumping of dollars by foreign investors who are tired of seeing the currency devalued.

After the Fed’s announcement, an index of the dollar’s value against six other major currencies, including the yen and the euro, fell 0.5 percent to its lowest level since December. The index has tumbled 13.6 percent since early June.

Finally, if the Fed succeeds in pumping more money into the economy, it risks stoking inflation that could get out of control. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 31

NZPA / Malcolm Pullman 32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

Unaccountable The Case For Abolishing The Waitangi Tribunal

Imagine a court effectively controlled entirely by one party to a court case, and which applied the law differently depending on which side you were on. Would you trust such a court to produce a fair verdict? With billions of taxpayers’ dollars at stake, AMY BROOKE argues the Waitangi Tribunal operates like this, has too much power in the treaty settlement process and is too biased and unaccountable to be allowed to continue. This is Part One of her argument INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 33

F

rom its very beginning, the hopes of radical Maori activism were pinned on the form and functioning of the Waitangi Tribunal. However, there is a very good case for maintaining that it is now part of a problem it was meant to ameliorate, that given its unrepresentative composition and questionably selected participants, it should long ago have been disestablished.

That the Lange/Palmer Labour government ever contrived its maverick provisions is regarded as a blot on their party’s chequered legislative history. The majority of New Zealanders, disenfranchised because of its modus operandi, have long viewed the tribunal as operating like a Star Chamber, without standards of democratic accountability.

Looking at the disastrous course both major parties in turn have embarked on in relation to socio-political issues these recent decades, New Zealanders can certainly now agree with former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley’s extraordinary concession as far back as 1997, when she was then State Services Minister, that “there needs to be a substantial improvement in the quality of policy advice available to government”.

Arguably, no policies have been more damaging than what have been, essentially, the venal vote-buying not of majority partMaori, who have long become part of the New Zealand gene pool, but of a highly radicalised minority of what respected Auckland historian Elizabeth Rata classifies as neo-tribal Maori. It is important to bear in mind that of this country’s inhabitants classified for statistical purposes as Maori, all apparently are in fact now only part-Maori, genetically speaking, many with ancestry attenuated to one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second or an even more reduced Maori inheritance.

Neo-tribal part Maori, re-forming into today’s anachronistic quasi-tribes for the sake of political and financial advantage, have become adept at monopolizing the attention not only of the major political parties but of a less than scrupulous mainstream media constantly hungry for controversial headlines.

Regardless of the poor advice afflicting government members which Mrs Shipley commented on, the lack of analysis which too many MPs (including ministers, and by no means excluding prime ministers) have themselves brought to bear on social policy issues is arguably a failure of their responsibility to the country.

One obvious fact emerges. It can be legitimately claimed that New Zealanders have been particularly ill-served by our political party system – what has long been presented to us as a representative democracy, but where, as we have seen in recent decades, a strong leader or minister can dominate the party to determine its policies and directions. As far as the general public is concerned there is nothing genuinely representative about a form of government where individual MPs are over-ruled so that the agenda of the party leader rules the day.

34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

In these recent times, National Party leader John Key’s decisions to simply disregard the very obvious wishes of majority New Zealanders with regard to the infamous anti-smacking legislation – as well as those of members of his own caucus in relation to the high cost Emissions Trading Scheme foisted off on the country – have turned out to be watersheds in the public perception. What New Zealanders thought of as basically a democracy has been increasingly seen to be nothing of the sort. Horse-trading among the political parties has had successive gov-

ernments, ostensibly operating on behalf of the public at large, become essentially an autocracy. A ruling political class now operates on its own behalf, with both major parties behind the scenes prioritising their own interests to maintain their hold on power.

By the time each party is inevitably rejected by the electorate, the damage has already been done through ill-thought legislation during its term in office. No responsibility is taken for this, while those promoting or sponsoring it have comfortable alternatives lined up for themselves in the form of direc-

“A RULING POLITICAL CLASS NOW OPERATES ON ITS OWN BEHALF, WITH BOTH MAJOR PARTIES BEHIND THE SCENES PRIORITISING THEIR OWN INTERESTS TO MAINTAIN THEIR HOLD ON POWER” torships on boards, lucrative consultancies, diplomatic postings for which they lack suitable training, jobs working for the United

Nations if they are sufficiently left-wing or pliable enough to suit this anti-democratic, anti-the West organisation. If not, there is

NZPA / Ross Setford

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 35

NZPA / Malcolm Pullman

always an honours listing or the consolation of a now almost routine knighthood. Backscratching has become a source of scandal.

The lack of quality analysis been particularly apparent in the advice given to, or by, successive Ministers of Treaty Negotiations, and in the way the Waitangi Tribunal has been granted the attention and respect for its findings that it has simply not deserved.

Even if we regard this body as set up in good faith in an attempt to accommodate genuine Maori grievances – which New Zealanders at large, with their renowned sense of fair play, have always wanted to see listened to, respected, and, where possible, compensated for – the tribunal has by no means been free from charges of bias, and even conflicts of interest in relation to some of its members.

These are serious accusations, but apparently are never followed up. Its reliance, when verifying claims, has been on tribal-hired lawyers and well-paid, largely academic-only historians. This has been matched by its exclusion of other well-informed research-

ers and historians well able (on the basis of factual, historical evidence not allowed to be brought forward) to challenge self-serving claims which may seem impeccable – until more closely examined.

R

igorous scrutiny has not been characteristic of the Waitangi Tribunal in operation, and its recommendations have been damaging. A good case can be made that it is well and truly time for it to be disbanded and for any grievances mounted by tribal chief executives to be examined, where they always should have been, in a genuine court of law subject to the kind of professional cross-examination absent from the tribunal’s operation. However, a rise in judicial activism in recent years has reinforced the perception that given unchecked power, most human beings with or without wigs on will abuse that power. Our court system is not without its problems. Even with this acknowledged, the power given to a body like the tribunal was extraordinary.

36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

This was the contrivance of the then Minister of Justice Geoffrey Palmer, fresh from witnessing the activism of the civil rights movement in the US, and regarded by many New Zealanders to have opened a can of worms by an ill-considered undertaking, in a flush of home-grown activism, to reconsider all Maori land claims back over a century and a half to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – although our two countries had embarked on quite different directions in the race-relations area. Maori were not only guaranteed the same rights as all other citizens under the Crown by the Treaty of Waitangi, but had been freely assimilated by intermarriage from the beginning of European settlement.

On the 13th of July 1989, Palmer wrote: “As the Waitangi Tribunal is a tribunal with the powers of a Commission of Inquiry it is not the normal practice in any case to allow cross-examination. Some provision is made for the Waitangi Tribunal to commission claimant research to enable claimants to pre-

“A GOOD CASE CAN BE MADE THAT IT IS WELL AND TRULY TIME FOR IT TO BE DISBANDED AND FOR ANY GRIEVANCES MOUNTED BY TRIBAL CHIEF EXECUTIVES TO BE EXAMINED, WHERE THEY ALWAYS SHOULD HAVE BEEN, IN A GENUINE COURT OF LAW”

pare themselves for a hearing. This provision is not available to third parties because the jurisdiction of the Tribunal is between the Crown and Maori.”

As historian Martin Doutre writes, commenting on the way this Minister of Justice had established the tribunal: “Had application of this definition and understanding of how the Waitangi Tribunal operates been fairly applied in a way that was in keeping with the Treaty of Waitangi, or Articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then the process could have found some level of acceptable legitimacy. However, the Waitangi Tribunal was allowed far too much latitude in its interpretation of what constituted binding history and given far too many powers, which impinged drastically upon the rights of other New Zealanders. It developed into an insular, powerful and unassailable organization, answerable only to itself. It was beyond the effects of criticism or any outside influence, but exercised draconian powers that often reduced other government departments to the subordinate role of acting as henchmen to carry out and implement tribunal edicts and decisions, without respect for the rights of redress for any so-designated, non-Maori New Zealanders. “ Since then, of course, the funding to enable tribes to mount claims against the Crown, i.e. against all other New Zealanders required to pay for these, has run into multimillion dollar handouts from the taxpayer, who has no choice in this matter. Moreover, not all of these claims have been genuine. A number are seen as basically opportunistic, aided by the special effects of Maori oratory and emotionalism. As Author Theodore Dalrymple, a former Birmingham prison doctor and psychiatrist has noted in his new book Spoilt Rotten! The toxic cult of Sentimentality, “a hidden sentimentality is suffocating public life…under the guise of caring for the underprivileged and promoting social inclusiveness we are achieving quite the opposite.” Noting that government representatives, including ministers, visit maraes, and return to say how moved they were by the tears and representations made to them, Dalrymple’s reminder is a timely one.

A recent troubling example of a very possibly opportunistic claim has been substantiated in detail by historians and researchers Ross Baker and Martin Doutre in submissions to the predominantly part-Maori, Maori Affairs Select Committee hearing

on the Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill.

The latter is a worrying outstanding example of how Parliament was apparently not informed by this committee, of which the present Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson was also a member, that this was not a proven, but merely an alleged claim.

Not only was parliament not informed that this claim was not proven, but our House of Representatives was apparently unaware that substantial submissions against the Te Roroa claim had been presented to and heard by the committee, not only by Federated farmers, but also including a well-made case by the One New Zealand Foundation. Yet members of parliament rely on accurate presentations by these committees to make themselves as fully informed as possible before voting on issues.

W

hat are we to make of all this? And what of the tribunal’s positioning in acting as virtual advocate for these claims?

Although one politician’s activism in particular is associated with a decision to extend treaty claims back to over a century and a half ago, this decision was a worrying concern to many at the time, pointing out that inter-tribal rivalry still exists today, albeit in a different form. It was argued that vigorously conflicting claims and the impossibility of a clear ruling on many of these, so many generations later, would make achieving justice an impossibility.

In his book New Zealand’s Constitution in Crisis, Geoffrey Palmer stated that it was his time in the US which shaped his intellectual approach to Maori issues in New Zealand.

However he seems to have largely sidelined from his thinking, although he paid it lip service, the fact that our two political systems and history had been entirely different, with integration so successful in New Zealand that intermarriage quickly became commonplace. Yet, as he states in A Maori Constitutional Revolution* (Chapter 4) it was against the background of what he had witnessed in the States that he drew “and with adaptations used, as the basis for legislation to advance the interests of the Maori minority in New Zealand”. Palmer decided that the initial commitment should be to a process …”what should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had accessed individual cases. First, it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 37

incorporation of the treaty and statutes and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.”

Even granted the good intent of such thinking and Palmer’s personal view that Maori were suffering social deprivation “which the Crown resolutely refused to address” (in itself a puzzling assertion, given the long directing of government funding to Maori health, welfare and many other initiatives) the fact that he “foresaw promising material for constitutional development” and the contribution of the Waitangi Tribunal to “Maori constitutional revolution” was a radical undertakings. Such singular activism might have signalled caution to others – and indeed did so. Yet, deciding to extend tribes’ claims as far back as 1840, Palmer “took the view that they may (sic) take a decade to deal with but it would be worth it in the end.”

It is now two and a half decades later, with accumulatively billions of dollars taken from taxpayers’ pockets and directed towards Maori-only interests. Yet the claims show no signs of lessening. Palmer’s intent was for the Waitangi Tribunal to look into “the old grievances” and allow it to make recommendations about what should be done. With Maori being given an outlet for their griev-

ances “there would be no further need for direct action”. He saw “one touchstone for judging the success of the policy… to ask whether there has been any major political disturbance based on the treaty since the policy was implemented” and stated that he thought “there has been none”.

H

owever, the present Tuhoe claim to self-government and autonomy, and the growing radicalised move to fly the Maori sovereignty flag – let alone the extraordinary and opportunistic claims to this country’s foreshore and seabed, which the Maori Party quite openly envisages as just the first step in further major political activism, suggests that there was a certain amount of naivete in this minister’s thinking. Moreover, in referring to the then Department of Maori Affairs, he noted that “the department did have a treaty unit which was supposed to furnish policy advice on the treaty” but he “was never able to see how a department whose main admission was to assist Maori could proffer objective advice to the Crown on treaty issues.”

Exactly the same criticism can be levelled at the Waitangi Tribunal he established.

It was in March 1989 that as Minister of Justice, Palmer was responsible for putting

NZPA / Ross Setford

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

forward a Cabinet paper “seeking permission for a group of officials to prepare a paper setting out the principles upon which the government proposed to act on treaty issues”.

This was a significant move. However, it is astonishing to read his admission that the treaty – or the version of it that he then referred to – was “vague, and uncertain”.

(The discovery of the Littlewood Treaty has since made it plain how little reliance should now be placed on the faulty translation that was used at the time.) Palmer also reformulated the concept of partnership as “the principle of cooperation” – a far different meaning from the highly radicalised version later advanced too loosely and mistakenly used both by Parliament and by the judiciary, as in Justice Robin Cooke’s “akin to a partnership” phraseology, which led to ongoing confusion.

Section 9 of the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986 was also momentous particularly in that, against what Geoffrey Palmer had thought would be the case, The Court of Appeal held that “ the principles of the treaty of Waitangi overrode everything else in the Act” according to that same Robin Cooke, then President of the Court of Appeal. According to Palmer, “This judgment was a great setback to the government’s policy,” and “there was

loose talk among some cabinet members that we should legislate it away.”

NZPA / Barry Durrant

H

owever, describing the Court of Appeal’s judgment as containing “broad declarations of principle of a type never made before by a New Zealand court” Palmer marvelled that this was “constitutional litigation of a new and exciting type”. He saw the courts of New Zealand now playing ‘something of the role of the American courts” in that there had been a transfer of power from Parliament and its people’s elected representatives, to the courts. The question how much judicial activism then and in future should be a concern, and whether it was appropriate, in a democracy, that so much in the way of momentous change should hinge upon the determination and-self will of one individual, is still due for serious appraisal.

Furthermore, when The Treaty of Waitangi (State Enterprises) Act 1988 was passed, the decisions of the Waitangi Tribunal were to be not merely advisory, but legally binding.

The genie was now out of the bottle.

To some extent Parliament has now been sidelined, no longer representing the wishes of the country at large, in a climate of flourishing racial activism. The most recent Ngai Tahu settlement, the Tuhoe and the Te Roroa claims, for example, are very good examples of how overworked, underinformed and therefore basically ignorant members of Parliament are at the mercy of the Maori Affairs Select Committee, reporting back to Parliament. Considering what the resulting flawed decisions have cost taxpayers, it is almost incredible that they have been insufficiently scrutinized and in some cases are arguably fraudulent. Where evidence challenging radicalised “facts” and elasticising elast the truth of issues – to put it charitably – is simply ignored by a select committee, parliament can too easily endorse claims which are unproven, opportunistic, and historically challengeable – if all the facts are considered.

As it has long been regarded as operating without genuine standards of democratic accountability, critics argue that the Waitangi Tribunal was given too much authority by government, its recommendations too much weight. The debate surrounding its initial establishment, The Treaty of Waitangi (State Enterprises Bill) forced through in 1988, makes interesting reading. The then member for Tauranga, Winston Peters, warned that enactment of

“THE MOST RECENT NGAI TAHU SETTLEMENT, THE TUHOE AND THE TE ROROA CLAIMS, FOR EXAMPLE, ARE VERY GOOD EXAMPLES OF HOW OVERWORKED, UNDERINFORMED AND THEREFORE BASICALLY IGNORANT MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARE AT THE MERCY OF THE MAORI AFFAIRS SELECT COMMITTEE, REPORTING BACK TO PARLIAMENT” the bill would ensure the European majority “has no status before the tribunal, although they will foot the bill as taxpayers.” It was correctly foreseen that they would have no right of appeal against the findings of the tribunal, no matter how negligent some lawyer… in prosecuting the case for taxpayers”.

His conclusion was that such policies are inconsistent with the Treaty of Waitangi.

Although Peters is himself of Maori descent, both the government and the media have found it convenient to ignore his representation of a large sector of the Maori community. Both major parties have bought into the tiny radicalised Maori Party’s anti-European, racially divisive claims – although by far the majority of part-Maori demonstrably did not support the Maori Party in the 2008 election – not when they achieved less than 3% of the overall vote. Statistically between 12 to 15% of the population is considered “Maori’ – although no definition of “Maori” is provided. The Maori Affairs Amendment

Act of 1974 defines a Maori as “a person of the Maori race of New Zealand and including any descendant of such a person”. This extraordinarily broad definition well suits activist tribal overlords claiming larger tribal membership to lend added weight to their claims. However, there are apparently at least six acts previous to this, the first in 1865. As Maori ancestry becomes further and further diverted with other races, the process is ongoing of the continual, opportunistic redefining what is to be Maori.

When it comes to vote-buying by way of the Maori seats, long overdue for abolition in an MMP environment which ensures minor parties’ representation, pragmatism has become the choice of the day.

The National Party, once perceived as supporting principled political decisions is now perceived as putting its bet on the personal charm of its present populist leader, adept at wooing the media, to win the next election – in spite of the way it has let down its

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 39

“NGAI TAHU’S 1997 CLAIM WAS AT THE TIME GREATLY ASSISTED BY WELLINGTON LAWYER CHRIS FINLAYSON, NOW MINISTER OF TREATY NEGOTIATIONS, AND CURRENTLY PLANNING TO BE INVOLVED IN DIRECT DEALING WITH TRIBES TO SETTLE FURTHER CLAIMS”

NZPA / Ross Setford

core constituency with regard to the divisive issue of racial preferment.

What of other comments by National Party members at the time of the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal? In 1997, in his Pontius Pilate role (“there is nothing I can do about it”) the then Treaty Negotiations Minister Doug Graham, long responsible for wrongly promoting a nonexistent “treaty partnership” (a concept he later abandoned), adopted an entirely different stance from his original ,“The tribunal has enormous powers it should not have.”

The member for Remuera originally questioned why parliament “should allow the government... which has the final responsibility for resolving grievances, to delegate that power to someone else.” Responding to his own query why the Waitangi Tribunal was to have “a binding power” when the government should act in the interest of all New Zealanders, he implied that it had been tactically outmanoeuvred by the Maori Council.

Paul East, MP for Rotorua, similarly objected that the bill established “a kangaroo court…although the tribunal was nothing like a court” with its officers political appointees and with no appeal against its findings. The then Attorney-General

described as “dictatorial and totalitarian” the legislation over which he subsequently presided.

T

hese are grave considerations for us today. Furthermore, the resurgence of radical Maori activism with its claims to Maori sovereignty and to fly such a Maori flag; the more than dubious claims to property rights over the foreshore and seabed – as well as the modus operandi of the Maori Affairs Select Committee and its selective reporting back to Parliament – are all issues well overdue for being brought into the light of day.

At the heart, now, of all the current activism, is the Waitangi Tribunal, which makes its final recommendations to government.

Although its hearings are normally open to the public, it has, however, the power to meet in private, and it may limit who may attend parts of a hearing. It may also require changes to be made to the proposed agenda.

Problematically, far from positioning itself in a suitable location distant from a petitioning tribe, the tribunal “endeavours to hear each claimant group on its own marae (or at another place of its choosing) and according to the particular tribe’s protocols where that

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

is desired”, although it retains final discretion to decide where it will sit. Moreover, non-Maori cannot lodge a claim, participate, cross-examine or even appeal at a hearing.

To the disinterested assessor of these proceedings, an obvious concern must be the absence of an objective framework of normal court proceedings. Not only do the proceedings generally follow the protocol of the marae, often in a highly charged emotional atmosphere, but the tribunal “has no objection to Crown or claimant counsel being seated with advisory kaumataua: on the contrary, it encourages that course”. This is an extraordinary provision. Under such circumstances the difficulty for Crown counsel to remain adversarial, as should be the Crown’s role as Devil’s Advocate, representing majority New Zealanders, is very obvious – as is the ability of tribal kaumatua to apply considerable emotional pressure.

How many New Zealanders realise that marae protocol can even exclude the crossexamining of elders’ evidence? Ngai Tahu in their most recent third “full and final settlement settlement”- (they have since received further compensation) – themselves resisted cross-examination by the Crown, claiming that confrontation was not the Maori way – not only a ludicrous claim, given the history of Maori tribal confrontation – but a manifestly inappropriate state of affairs for anything remotely approaching a judicial body set up to establish the truth of issues.

Furthermore, the same tribe insisted on the right to its own cross-examination at a later

tribunal hearing into counterclaims against it by tribes from the top of the South Island.

Ngai Tahu’s 1997 claim was at the time greatly assisted by Wellington lawyer Chris Finlayson, now Minister of Treaty Negotiations, and currently planning to be involved in direct dealing with tribes to settle further claims, having suggested they are able to bypass the courts, and instead, to apply to him.

The tribunal’s procedures with regard to the 1997 Ngai Tahu hearings in relation to the same claims already heard and settled twice previously (including in the unanimously accepted, full and final settlement extension of their 1944 settlement in 1973, previous to the recent third resettlement) provides disturbing insights into the way it operates.

In a 1996 article in the Christchurch Star, respected media commentator Brian Priestley, having attended several sessions, concluded: “it would be hard to imagine any public body less well organised to get at the truth.” Mr. Priestley noted that the there was no cross-examination; that witnesses were treated with sympathetic deference; and that those representing the Crown “seemed equally anxious not to offend’. Stating that in three months he was not asked a single intelligent question, he concluded that he should have resigned, as he was not “a oneeyed supporter of causes”.

The adequacy of those representing the Crown in that particular Ngai Tahu re-settlement and therefore ultimately the taxpayer, is still in question today. Expert witnesses for the Crown reported at the time that they were distinctly told that their evidence was not to be put forward in a manner partial to the Crown, and that they must not act as advocates for the Crown. Moreover, the Office of Treaty Negotiations later admitted that it lacked both the resources and the well-qualified personnel to do justice to a competent appraisal of the historic issues concerned. When we add to these facts that the then Minister of Treaty Negotiations, Doug Graham, subsequently instructed the Maori Affairs Select Committee to virtually ignore the reportedly close to 400 submissions made concerning this proposed settlement (some from well-researched historians with good evidence to robustly dispute Ngai Tahu’s claim) on the grounds that he and Prime Minister Jim Bolger had already signed the bill at Kaikoura, then the disenfranchising of New Zealanders as a whole from any genuine representation concern-

ing the settlement is obvious. The settlement was described at the time as essentially “a swindle”.

If this accusation seems extreme we should note that not only did the Crown’s witnesses complain of having insufficient time to properly prepare their material, as historical researcher Denis Hampton noted in an Evening Post article of April 3, 1998, but another Crown witness – “at the tribunal’s request, involved the claimants in his research and said that without their help he would not have been able to present such a complete picture!” As Hampton illustrates, “Crown witnesses, perhaps under instruction,” appear to have taken particular care to avoid material contradicting Ngai Tahu’s claims and so could not adequately pursue the case.”

M

oreover vital evidence was withheld.

Early reports from reputable historians who knew Ngai Tahu well in the late 19th century described the tribe then as lazy and negligent, “no longer cultivating their food as it required too much care.”

The evidence from the Rev James Stack’s 1872 observations, for example, that was that “kumara, pumpkins, melons, turnips, etc. all favourite articles of diet were no longer cultivated, the reason given that they required too much care….Though very fond of milk and butter, no household provided itself with these – “everyone shirks the trouble’ he said.”

None of this direct reportage regarding the tribe’s practices was ever presented to contradict NgaiTahu’s claims that the tribe had insufficient land. “Stack felt that one reason for the neglect of agriculture ‘was the facility afforded for the idle to live on the industrious’. In 1879 he noted that the prevailing practice of leasing land to Europeans fostered the habit of depending on others. He said ‘Neither the pressure of want, nor the prospect of gain, nor the advice of friends, prevailed to induce the Maoris here to cultivate the lands.’”

As Hampton noted, Crown witnesses not only failed to advance this material, but also ignored an earlier report by Alexander Mackay, friend to the tribe at the time, commenting on its “constitutional indolence.”

Given that these witnesses had been told that their evidence was “not to be put forward in a matter partial to the Crown, and that they must not act as advocates for the Crown”, fair representation of the Crown and therefore of New Zealanders who would

be required to pay for the outcome of this flawed process was doomed from the start.

Moreover, it is almost impossible, when considering the findings of Wellington historian Alan Everton, which were impressively researched and published at the time of the Ngai Tahu claim, not to concur with his assessment. “The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the records is that the tribunal did not get at the truth, and any settlement of Ngai Tahu’s claims based on its report will be nothing short of a fraud.”

That the Waitangi Tribunal’s report when scrutinised gives a strong impression that it went into its hearings predisposed to Ngai Tahu’s case is undeniable, as Hampton also comments, as did others whose findings were also ignored. Given that the present Treaty Negotiations Minister was a strong advocate for the tribe at the time, it is no wonder that his present offer to negotiate directly with tribes claiming foreshore and seabed, based on arguably non-existent treaty rights and spuriously legal “customary rights” is causing considerable concern.

Questions obviously still remain about the validity of the Ngai Tahu claim – and it is arguably time for an impartial commission of enquiry to reconsider it – and whether this now very wealthy tribe should be obliged to return to the taxpayer at least its initial settlement – if this was indeed made on arguably fraudulent grounds. Certainly the same “facts” it had advanced had been previously rejected by a previous Maori Affairs Select Committee – but this time around National was chasing the Maori vote.

Questions are still unanswered about why at the time Ngai Tahu were given sole monopoly rights to whale watching. It was not Maori, but the early Europeans, who first hunted whales. Maori, lacking the technology, were restricted to using beached bones for carving.

There has been no answer to date, too, about why the thinly scattered, numerically small Ngai Tahu tribe were at the same time inexplicably given sole rights to South Island greenstone, which it did not even discover.

The Ngati Wairangi tribe traded greenstone from Westland to the North Island long before Ngai Tahu journeyed to the South Island. Reportedly, as early as 1510, greenstone was conveyed by canoe to the Maoris of Napier and Poverty Bay. NEXT MONTH: Amy Brooke continues her analysis on why the Waitangi Tribunal needs to be abolished, and highlights more skullduggery by tribal claimants q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 41

When the LIGHTS GO OFF THE ADVERSARY AWAKENS: THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

Few people would disagree the world appears to be going to hell in a handcart at the moment. What might provoke a little more discussion is the question – how did it happen? HAL G. P. COLEBATCH suggests an answer

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 43

Before you can despise the machine, the machine must have set you free from brute labour. – George Orwell1

T

he modern attack on reason and on scientific and technological civilization found a major expression in Britain in the work of the poet and mystic William Blake.

Blake’s attacks on materialism, rationalism and science can be seen as part of a “Counter-Enlightenment” – a reaction in European thought against the optimism and universalism earlier in the 18th Century.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!

You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again …

The Atoms of Democritus And Newton’s Particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

In this Blake attacks two very different kinds of Enlightenment. That of Voltaire was, broadly speaking, the Enlightenment of ideology, though Rousseau was also infatuated with the cult of the “noble savage,” a term which he seems to have invented.2 That of Democritus and Newton was the Enlightenment of science. However, there is more to it than this.3 Like all the mystics and shamans who in their way helped prevent humanity rising above the ceiling of slavery and animal-power for thousands of years and almost everywhere, Blake held reason to be not the ally but the Enemy of man’s communion with God. He wrote in Jerusalem: But the Spectre, like hoar-frost and a Mildew, rose over Albion Saying: “I am God, O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!

Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke, who teach Humility to Man, Who teach Doubt and Experiment? And my two Wings, Voltaire and Rousseau?

Where is that Friend of Sinners, that Rebel against my Laws, Who teaches Belief to the Nations, and an unknown Eternal Life?

It is true that Blake’s work contained ambiguities, or perhaps simply confusion.

He did at times praise “science,” though he certainly meant something different to the modern meaning of the word. In Jerusalem he referred to “the labours of Art

and Science, which alone are the labours of the gospel,” and that it was a sin to despise a mental gift. However, it not clear what he meant by this and he was perhaps not clear himself.

The image of the mechanical, “mill” which haunts the 19th Century (memorably including Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus) is neatly anatomised by Coleridge, opposing the “Mechanico-Corpuscular philosophy” in his Aids to Reflection (1825): In order to submit the various phaenomena of moving bodies to geometrical construction, we are under the necessity of abstracting from corporeal substance all its positive properties, and obliged to consider Bodies as differing from equal portions of Space only by figure and mobility. And as a Fiction of Science, it would be difficult to overvalue this invention ... But in contempt of Common Sense ... Des Cartes [sic] propounded it as a truth of fact: and instead of a World created and filled with productive forces by the Almighty Fiat, left a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding: as if death could come from the living Fountain of life; Nothingness and Phantom from the plenitude of Reality. ‘the Absoluteness of Creative Will.’”

This may have helped inspire Blake’s verse about Newton’s particles of light. The best to be said for it is that it can claim to assert Free Will in the face of those who propound “fictions of science” which may have a limited tactical usefulness (such as Behaviourist psychology) as if they were all-embracing “truths of fact,” reducing human beings to automata (Newton was more interested in the Book of Revelation than in “Science,” anyway!) Blake, Nietzsche and the Romantics in general, however silly, incoherent and destructive many of their ideas were, at least asserted Free Will, without a consciousness of which science is probably impossible. But Blake tried to destroy the thing which has created Western civilization: the partnership between Religion and Reason.

Adam Smith had made the point, looking at the example of pin-making, that division of labour, and mass-production, made it possible to produce great numbers of pins

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cheaply. Cheap pins, like other cheap goods, were a huge benefit to the poor. The “loom” which Blake attacked was weaving cheap cloth that the poor could buy and wear.

Blake saw the plight of chimney-sweeps as an epitome of evil. In this he had common ground with many ordinary philanthropists.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every blackening church appalls, And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down palace walls …

Yet while humans lived in London there would be fires for warmth and cooking.

While there were fires there would have be chimneys, and until reason, science and technology provided something better, and Christian ethics pressed the point, these chimneys had to be swept. The only way the use of boy chimney-sweepers could be eliminated was by the technological progress which Blake so abhorred.

Blake was an irrationalist, a title he would have accepted with delight, since hatred of Reason was a dominating passion of his life.

The reference in his hymn Jerusalem to “dark Satanic mills” referred not primarily to the mills of the Industrial Revolution,4 though he did not like them either, but to the universities of the Enlightenment which, he believed, were pumping out that poisonous product, Reason. He believed Reason came between Man and God, in contrast to those who believed Reason was one of the things that enabled Man to find God. He is said to have written: “Good news for Satan’s kingdom” on a book of Francis Bacon’s Essays.

Had Blake limited himself to pointing out that Reason is not completely autonomous, and needs to be in a kind of partnership with ethics and values, his legacy might have been more positive.

There are areas of human existence which Reason does not cover or explain. Most – perhaps nearly all – of the greatest dramas of human history and especially those dramas which deal with heroism against hopeless odds – the 300 Spartans, Britain’s willingness to accept total national destruction rather than to “parlay” with the Nazis when it was alone and without realistic hope in 1940, the doomed men of Scott’s expedition refusing to abandon the geological specimens they had collected, the last voyage of the Ohio – are tributes to the fact that there are things beyond reason and that it is reasonable to recognize this. They are the stories at which, as William Golding said, the soul must reverberate as a wine-glass must reverberate to a certain note of music. The rea-

“BLAKE WAS OF COURSE HIMSELF DEPENDENT ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE APPLICATION OF REASON. INDEED IN HIS OCCUPATION AS AN ENGRAVER HE DEPENDED UPON IT MORE THAN MANY. HE WAS EVEN AN INVENTOR, INVENTING A PROCESS FOR COLOUR PRINTING”

sonable man – even, or especially, the cynic, who suddenly recognises that there is something beyond Reason – is the stuff of legends ancient and modern: Casablanca and Star Wars are two examples (In Casablanca it is a double whammy because the conversion of one cynic to idealism inspires the other).

But this is a very, very, different thing to hating and condemning Reason as such. C. S. Lewis, in the allegorical autobiography The Pilgrim’s Regress, depicted Reason as a valiant armoured woman who, for him, had slain the superstitions of his age. But it was also Lewis who pointed out in The Abolition of Man that the intellect is powerless without trained emotions: I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to

believe “a gentleman does not cheat” than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who has been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will hold the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use.5 Less dramatic, but still heroic and in a sense irrational sacrifices are made by ordinary people in ordinary workaday lives.

Blake was of course himself dependent on technology and the application of Reason.

Indeed in his occupation as an engraver he depended upon it more than many. He was even an inventor, inventing a process for colour printing. Like Gandhi and practically every other opponent of modernity,

denounced science and technology for others while using it himself (Gandhi’s wife died because he denied her the modern Western medicine he used himself ). Blake was opposed to poverty. He was also opposed to the industrial production that was the only realistic means of generally alleviating poverty. He did vale work, unlike many poets, but only work of a certain kind. In Jerusalem he claimed: Scotland pours out his sons to labour at the Furnaces; Wales gives his Daughters to the Loom.

However, these furnaces and looms were making goods the poor needed – indeed, they needed them more than did the rich, who could afford expensive hand-made goods. They were also offering jobs which the poor chose to take. This alleviation of poverty depended on the use of reason – the harnessing of steam-power required thousands of mathematical calculations – and, indeed, on the partnership of reason with religion and ethics to give values, a moral framework and a sense of the numinous (However, Blake, like many of the prophets whose company he aspired to join, has had his words distorted by his followers, and more sympathetic readings of his original intent are possible).

There was, tragically, a time-lag between the increased production machines brought,

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and the increased national wealth and more sophisticated political organisation. Much of the power of the anti-technology, anti-industrialisation, and anti-modernity movements in England came – and continues to come – from the fact that the new factories and industrial estates were often built without proper planning and without taking steps to minimize the environmental and consequent human destruction and degradation which resulted. The result was and is often heart-breaking, the more so because of the beauty of the landscapes, which is often despoiled.

The Industrial Revolution was unprecedented and carried out by men who did not know exactly what they were doing. The successful combination of industrial production and environmental preservation is very complex, and it had to be learnt by experience.

It is quite logical and consistent – indeed probably the only sane and civilized posi-

“THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WAS UNPRECEDENTED AND CARRIED OUT BY MEN WHO DID NOT KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE DOING. THE SUCCESSFUL COMBINATION OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION IS VERY COMPLEX, AND IT HAD TO BE LEARNT BY EXPERIENCE” tion – to both value industrial production economically and seek to curb its excesses and spiritual, social and environmental illeffects. Along with much outright madness, Blake gave some warnings which should not be entirely disregarded.

Blake’s vision of a “New Jerusalem,” apparently to be created by mystical means, con-

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tinued to influence English politics. Attlee quoted Blake on the need for building Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land (“A new two-class state of proletariat and officials,” as Evelyn Waugh put it), and saw the way to do it as being to expand bureaucracies. “Jerusalem” is still sung as a hymn at British Labour Party conferences

in the 21st Century. Blake is also held as a Saint by the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a black magic cult revived (or invented) in the 20th Century by the occultist, Satanist and drug-addict Alistair Crowley. The cult’s other saints include Wagner, Nietzsche, and of course Crowley himself. All were enemies of Reason. Blake, who had been dead for about 100 years at the time Crowley conferred sainthood upon him, was not consulted about this elevation, or at least probably not. Crowley named the building in which he conducted Satanic rituals and orgies Thelema, after the fictional anti-abbey in Rabalais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the motto was “Do As You Will,” where (to possibly over-simplify Rabalais’s ideas) life could be a sort of permanent orgy, and where, as well as ugly and sexually unattractive men and women (always a problem in a certain kind of Utopia) being banned, there should be no bells or clocks. Clocks had been one of the monastic system’s great inventions which had made scientific and technological civilization possible.

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f Blake’s major followers in the attack upon technologically progressive civilization, William Morris and John Ruskin, Morris was an atheist whose aesthetic theories and medievalist fantasy stories barely masked a streak of totalitarianism.

Morris wrote in the prologue to The Earthly Paradise: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town: Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

The intriguing question of how exactly the population was to be fed, housed and clothed in such conditions, or what was to be done to reduce or eliminate the existing population, was not explored. Morris postulated a future in which Britain could be a largely green and rural land again because twothirds of the population had been removed – that is, had perished or “left.” This irrational and ultimately anti-human vision would have many echoes in succeeding times. There was to be an echo of it, transmitted via the French existentialists and others, in the liberation of Indo-China in 1975, when Pol Pot’s followers emptied the cities and drove the liberated city-dwellers, including crawling amputees from the hospitals trailing saline

drips, into the countryside for purification, and liberated South Vietnamese were driven into New Economic Zones in uncleared jungle for the same purpose, to the applause of innumerable Western progressives.

Ruskin was sexually impotent, having been apparently stricken with horror upon discovering on his wedding night that women possessed pubic hair, and he evidently thought capitalism, technology and economic progress virtually as bad as this cutanious irregularity. Nor was this the end of his destructive legacy. He helped implant in artistic fashion and public policy a notion that an elite should have political power to dictate on matters of taste, culture and art to the masses, claiming, for example, that “the truth of nature is not to be discerned by the uneducated senses.”6 The end of this has been the divorce of much art from life and reason. Ruskin like Blake has earned his place among the enemies of civilization.

Carlyle, an ally of Ruskin, attacked economics as “the dismal science” incredible as it may seem today, because economists like John Stuart Mill, following Adam Smith, supported the emancipation of slaves.

Combinations of these notions have metastasized throughout the occultist tradition. They can also be seen to have influenced the proto-Nazi D. H. Lawrence, who like the Nazis believed in mystical “blood” and “race” and also like them believed in the mass-extermination of the unfit by poison gas, writing: If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus.”7

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“MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN MIGHT BE READ AS SUGGESTING THAT IN TECHNOLOGY MAN WAS CREATING A MONSTER THAT HE COULD NOT CONTROL, THE MONSTER IN THIS CASE BEING ANIMATED

BY THE NEW-FANGLED ELECTRICITY”

It was also Lawrence – still revered in certain literary circles, and with a great talent for descriptive writing when able to think about anything other than sex – who wrote in 1913: My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and bridle. What do I care about knowledge [?] All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling interventions of mind, or moral, or what not.8

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nemies of reason stole reason’s clothes.

Many occultist theories, like Lombroso’s ideas of criminology, were claimed to be scientifically based, while Darwin’s theory of evolution was taken out of its realm of biology and applied to sociology, to become a root of Nazi racial theories. One sees the same sort of thing in Marxism and all manner of varieties of political leftism, where faith-based and ideological assertions were put forth as a new science, and where, typically of religious heresies, a single value, good in itself, was inflated so as to displace all other values, and to displace common sense as well. This is also seen in, for example, the works of Ayn Rand, whose notions have a psychological kinship to Marxism a good deal closer than the followers of either would care to admit.9

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might be read as suggesting that in technology Man was creating a monster that he could not control, the monster in this case being animated by the new-fangled electricity.

The 19th Century, and indeed the 20th and so far the 21st, present us with the extraordinary spectacle of vast technological advances while high literary and intellectual movements wander in a miasma of fads and cults divorced from the things actually happening in life, and paving the way for the totalitarianism.

Havelock Ellis, following Ruskin and others, was horrified by the fact that factories might be able to supply people with cheap clothes. He wrote, in a passage which would have made notable reading in much of the Asia-Pacific region circa 1942: The Japanese masses who fix their popular festival for the day when the cherry-tree is in finest blossom ... may possibly not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy goods to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every savage tribe under heaven, but we need not fear to affirm that they have learnt secrets of civilization which are yet hidden from us in England.10 As Professor John Carey has pointed out in The Intellectuals and the Masses, the progressive intelligentsia of whom Ellis was typical also despised things like tinned food and bicycles, not in spite of but because of the fact that they raised living standards for

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the ordinary people. Slighting references to these two enormous benefits to the “masses” occur in progressive literature of the late 19th and early 20th Century many times.

Ellis also wrote: Men will scarely look back to our own century as so good to live in. One may well say that he would have gladly lived in the 13th Century, perhaps the most interesting of all since Christ, or the 16th, probably the most alive of all, or in the 18th, surely the most human. But why have lived in the 19th, the golden age of machinery, and of men used as machines?11 It is actually frightening to look at this passage and reflect that one of the most influential intellectuals of the day could have been so stupid, if not actually evil, and that this sort of sentiment was and is not uncommon. Given that Ellis was a qualified doctor, it perhaps makes the primitivist and barbaric Nazi doctors a little more understandable.12 This treason of the clerks helped pervert reason and scientific and technological progress, with all the benefits these conferred upon humanity, into a grotesque and antihuman scienticism, (with the attempted creation of a planned State, as evidenced in things like tower-block housing, which took no cognizance of real human needs and values), while on the other hand giving rise to an intellectual and artistic culture in which Reason was seen as an enemy, which led to Nihilisitic celebration of the Void, and

which now dominates much modern art like that of a Damien Hirst or a Tracey Emin.

H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and, as mentioned above, D. H. Lawrence were among those who directly or indirectly promoted the idea of paradise through mass extermination of the unfit and inferior. The occultist and Messianic thought of various kinds which flourished in the 19th and 20th Centuries, which can probably be classified as varieties of Gnosticism, generally showed no interest in science and technology. Michael Wharton showed his perception of the incongruous when he imagined a hydro-electric engineer as a member of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. In this mental climate Christianity was regarded as an enemy, denying Man’s ability to attain salvation through his own efforts. There was, in Utopian thinking (if that is the word for it) a vague and perhaps circular assumption that by the very act of obtaining Utopia all material needs would vanish, and with them the

tualism reached the US and within a year New York City alone had a hundred such mediums, and numerous periodicals such as The Spiritualist Telegraph.15 Then there was French socialist Charles Fourier, who anticipated a secular millennium with, literally, friendly lions and oceans turning to lemonade.16 During the 19th Century there were many communities inspired by Fourier in the US and elsewhere, people living in four-storey houses as he prescribed in the usual obsessive utopian detail with the richest at the top. Fourier, who lived on money he had inherited from his businessman father, considered trade, which he associated with Jews, to be the “source of all evil” and advocated that Jews be forced to perform farm work. He also believed the planets had sexual intercourse.

In Britain the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. This tried to investigate psychic phenomena by rational and scientific methods, and to carry out experiments with scientific controls and disciplines. However,

minds without rational rigour, or otherwise to people with psychological, psychiatric or personality problems of various kinds, and it was not surprising that it was filled with inconsistencies.

While most great religious and ethical systems have basic precepts in common, such as the value of charity, benevolence and truth, they also contain much – especially in their respective ideas of “last things” and ultimate ends – that simply cannot be syncretised. There is no way the Christian promise of eternal life can be combined with the Buddhist promise of eventual eternal non-existence. Nor can a Christian, however kindly he or she may feel towards people of other religions, or however ardently he or she may work or pray for their salvation, admit that non-Christian religions are valid. Nonetheless, huge efforts were made to syncretize different and incompatible religions. It is not surprising that irrationality and anti-rationality resulted. Gibbons quotes the poet Edward Carpenter:

“WHERE THE VARIOUS HERALDS OF THE NEW AGE SHOWED ANY INTEREST IN SCIENCES, IT WAS GENERALLY IN AREAS SUCH AS PSYCHOLOGY, NOT IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL AREAS THAT WERE ACTUALLY CHANGING THE WAY HUMAN BEINGS LIVED, AND UNDERSTANDING OF WHICH REQUIRED HARD MENTAL WORK AND DISCIPLINE” need for technology, as would the need for law and institutions of government (which themselves might be seen as technology of a sort).13 Shakespeare, the great poet of common sense, had previously satirized Utopian ideas in 1611 in The Tempest (In which he also satirized the notion of the Noble Savage with the brutish Caliban, whose name was a nearanagram of “Cannibal.”).

Professor Tom Gibbons has written in his study of the intellectual and artistic currents of the period, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: [T]he period 1880-1920 was one of full-scale ideological reaction from the scientific materialism, determinism and pessimism of the mid19th Century. During the last quarter of the 19th Century these gave way on many sides to their opposites: philosophical idealism, religious transcendentalism, vitalism and optimism.14 Spiritualism and Mesmerism had arisen a little earlier. By the mid-19th Century spiri-

in general spiritualism was hailed as a refutation of scientific materialism. There was a fad for pseudo-Indian religious philosophies and notions of transcendence and the syncretisation of all religions. Gibbons quotes the journalist Edmund Garratt on a group of Cambridge undergraduates who: “lived ‘the higher life’ on a course of Turkish baths and a date diet: while three unlucky youths at Trinity nearly poisoned themselves with hasheesh in an attempt to project their astral bodies, and were only recovered at midnight by a relentless tutor armed with the college authority and a stomach-pump.”17 Gibbons’s work has shown compellingly how occultism penetrated English cultural and intellectual life and the avant-garde in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In fact, the whole phenomenon was of poor intellectual quality, appealing to second-rate and/or ill-educated or immature

We seem to be arriving at a time when, with our circling of our knowledge of the globe, a great synthesis of all human thought on the ancient and ever-engrossing problem of Creation is quite naturally and inevitably taking shape. The world-old wisdom of the Upanishads, with their profound and impregnable doctrine of the universal Self, the teachings of Buddha or of Lao-Tse, the poetic insight of Plato, the inspiring sayings of Jesus and Paul, the speculations of Plotinus or of the Gnostics, and the wonderful contributions of European thought from the fourteenth-century mystics down through Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ferrier and others … are preparing a great birth, as it were; and out of this meeting of elements is already arising the dim outline of a philosophy which must surely dominate human thought for a long period.18 If Carpenter is correct in this prediction, that is cause for alarm. Such a confusion of

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incompatible beliefs would be deeply and perhaps permanently damaging to reason, civilization and progress.

It was ironic but perhaps inevitable that the retreat into incoherent mysticism, with a Gnostic cast of mind overarching the whole, was occurring when science and technology were advancing rapidly. Where the various heralds of the New Age showed any interest in sciences, it was generally in areas such as psychology, not in the technological areas that were actually changing the way human beings lived, and understanding of which required hard mental work and discipline. H. G. Wells was an exception as a trained scientist but his scientific knowledge, mainly to do with biology, was really of little relevance except as an aid to writing his science-fiction novels and quickly became out of date.

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eorge Orwell, writing of Wells in 1941, claimed, in an essay that provoked Well’s huge anger (He wrote to Orwell, addressing him as “You Shit!”19), that Wells’s vision was: “On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses.”

This was, however, too simple a description of Wells.20 He zig-zagged between advocacy of science, technology and progress in many of his later political writings and dreadful warnings of the horrors and destruction which they would bring in his much of his fiction, ending in personal despair.

Indeed, despite his advocacy of progress through science and technology, Well’s great science-fiction novels can be seen as attacks on technology: in his first, The Time Machine, technology, by answering all humanity’s wants, in the distant future has allowed one part of the human race, the Eloi, to become soft, stupid and helpless: “We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!” The other part of the human race, the Morlocks, the machinetenders, are equally dehumanized, but in a different way: they have become vile cannibals, living in the dark underground and emerging at night to carry off and eat the Eloi.21 This, and other stories Wells set in the future, show a Marxist notion of the increasing division of labour and capital and, for labour, “increasing misery” – taken, in The Time Machine, to its logical conclusion (in “A Story of the Days to Come” the middle-

“IN THE TIME MACHINE THE ATTAINMENT OF A MATERIAL PARADISE FOR THE ELOI LED TO THEIR WEAKENING, DEGENERATION AND LOSS OF PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STRENGTH SO THEY COULD NO LONGER TAKE ELEMENTARY STEPS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES OR SURVIVE UNAIDED” class was described as “dwindling” and in this story the eventual division into Eloi and Morlocks is plainly in its embryonic stages).

However, as this synopsis of the plot indicates, if also radically departs from Marxism: Where Marx prophesized that, in the postrevolutionary world of communism the State would wither away, leaving everyone in perfect freedom and fulfillment, in The Time Machine the attainment of a material paradise for the Eloi led to their weakening, degeneration and loss of physical and mental strength so they could no longer take elementary steps to defend themselves or sur-

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vive unaided: “This wretched aristocracy in decay” literally became domestic food-animals. Utopia, according to this logic, was impossible, and would be impossible even if there were no Morlocks (if, say, the Eloi’s needs were supplied entirely by machines) – the better things would get, the worse they would get, with increasing cosseting and lack of challenge leading to increasing weakness and degeneration, and to a state in which there was nothing left that made them human – a kind of twisted pre-lapsarian Eden. There was no way out of this.

There was no notion here that increasingly efficient and productive technology would mean greater physical and mental fulfilment for all – rather, it is a weakening drug (compare the weak, effete Eloi with the tough heroine of Wells’s story of the Stone Age who dodges cave-bears and thinks little of going three days without food). His enthusiasm for science notwithstanding, Wells’s early, and very influential, stories contained several portrayals of that later stock figure of popular culture, the dangerous mad scientist. In The Invisible Man, the scientist who discovers how to become invisible simply becomes a criminal; in The Island of Dr Moreau, cruel experiments to turn animals into rational beings by Dr Moreau, who is apparently intended to symbolize God, bring only pain, futility, despair, decay and death. In The First Men in the Moon the scientist Cavor, the inventor of the sphere which goes to the moon, first nearly strips the Earth of its atmosphere, and, when he gets to the moon is killed by the inhabitants because he lacks the elementary sense not to tell them about human war and aggression, or the fact that he alone among men has the secret of space-travel. The rational, scientific civilization of the moon-dwellers is, like so many utopias, a cold, repulsive order which denies Free Will. The Selenites are like the social insects, physically and mentally bred into their occupations even more thoroughly than the inhabitants of Brave New World. There are many strong resemblances between some of these stories by Wells and incidents in Gulliver’s Travels, and Cavor may have been inspired by the ridiculous but sinister scientists and technologists of Gulliver’s Flying Island.

In The War of the Worlds, the invading Martians, though possessed of vastly superior technology, have no moral superiority or goodness. They massacre humans, killing them hideously. Further, their mastery of machines has allowed their bodies to degen-

erate so that they are simply bags of brain plus manipulative tentacles. Furthermore, although almost invulnerable to attacks by human armies and navies, they are actually doomed to die by infection from Earth bacteria. The narrator speculates that Martian sanitary science had eliminated bacteria on Mars long ago, leaving them with no resistance – the Martians, victims of the comfort and convenience which technology has brought, may be seen as similar to the Eloi of The Time Machine. Another theme of The War of The Worlds may be the destruction which would follow a full-scale industrialized war, though in the vividness and excitement of the story this message may be lost.

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n The War in the Air the technology of flying, which in some other stories Wells seemed to look forward to with enthusiasm, leads to a war that ends with the collapse of civilization, leaving the survivors even worse off than primitive man would have been, since they have no toughness or skills for surviving in a reprimitivised world. In Wells’s novel written in his later, “social realist,” phase, after he had abandoned science-fiction, The History of Mr Polly, two shop-keepers, when they get into a fight, are as a result of their upbringing so soft and urbanized that they has no idea what to do (Perhaps Wells should not have worried too much about this particular problem. The first half of the 20th Century would give the Mr Pollys of England and Europe plenty of lessons). On the other hand the heroes and survivalists of many of his early science-fiction and adventure stories, such as “Aepyornis Island,” or “Jimmy Goggles the God,” are tough, resourceful, outdoors men. Wells’s The World Set Free, written in 1913, again sees science as destructive and predicts air-dropped atomic bombs made from uranium, radioactive contamination and radiation-sickness with astounding accuracy – it is so accurate indeed, that it may have played a part in the development of the real atom bomb.

Winston Churchill, a friend of Wells’s despite their sometimes-deep political differences, was talking about it not long after, and Leó Szilárd said the book inspired his theory of the nuclear chain reaction. In Wells’s short story “The Lord of the Dynamos” a “thirdworld” worker in Britain takes a dynamo for a god and sacrifices his employer to it, while in “The Cone” a story which might turn a few stomachs queasy even today, a ruthless steel-master disposes of a rival in love by dropping him not into but onto a blast-furnace.

“SHORTLY BEFORE WELLS DIED HE PAINTED ON THE WALL OF HIS LONDON HOUSE A STRANGE MURAL OF HORNED DEVILS AND AN IMAGE OF MAN, WITH THE SLOGAN “TIME TO GO.” Technology is portrayed positively, though only as a weapon of war, in “The Land Ironclads,” published in 1904, in which a technologically sophisticated army, using tanks, routs a tough, finely-trained army of Boer War-style horsemen. Neither side is portrayed unsympathetically, but it is the scientific young men working the “Land ironclads” with whom the author’s final sympathies lie. An old officer of the cavalry army, taken prisoner after the rout, reluctantly comes to consider the idea that his side will have to get “ironmongery” of its own.

Wells probably wavered, in Nisbett’s terms, between notions of “progress” as greater control over the forces and powers of nature, bringing Mankind greater health, prosperity and freedom from care (though, as the Eloi showed, with a high eventual cost), and “progress” as greater power over other men.

His short summary of Adam Smith’s work on the value of international trade, as distinct from the internationalism of Marx, in A Short History of the World may well have been the

wisest thing he ever wrote. It is probably a mistake to seek a single or simple message in what he wrote: very few men are completely consistant in their ideas.

At the height of his artistic powers, before he turned to didacticism, Wells was a very great creative writer and it may be that great creative writers do not always know exactly what they are saying, nor do they always intend unambiguous messages (As far as The War of the Worlds, for example, has social or political messages those messages may be interpreted in very different ways). For all his many faults, Wells saw the flaws in simplistic positions and continued to search for something better. He was an extreme antiCatholic (being either an atheist or more likely a deist) and could never have countenanced, even if he had understood them, the Catholic Church’s arrangements for faith and reason. His last work, Mind at the End of its Tether, represented a descent into total pessimism. Paul Johnson says that shortly before Wells died he painted on the wall of

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“THE CATHOLIC EVELYN WAUGH, WHO MUCH ADMIRED ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR, WROTE TO HIM SUGGESTING THAT THE OMISSION OF ANY CHRISTIAN RESISTANCE IN THE NIGHTMARE TOTALITARIANISM OF OCEANIA WAS A MISTAKE, AND THAT MEN WHO WORSHIPPED A CRUCIFIED GOD WOULD NOT FEAR THE SECRET-POLICE TORTURE-CHAMBERS"

his London house a strange mural of horned devils and an image of Man, with the slogan “Time to Go.”22 Anyway, as Orwell said in the 1941 essay: “The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

Orwell was another 20th-Century dystopian prophet who was personally strongly anti-religious. The Catholic Evelyn Waugh, who much admired Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, wrote to him suggesting that the omission of any Christian resistance in the nightmare totalitarianism of Oceania was a mistake, and that men who worshipped

a crucified God would not fear the secretpolice torture-chambers. In Nineteen Eighty Four life is bleak and squalid, but what science there is is used for evil and destruction: pilotless missiles hit cities at random (probably fired by the government itself to keep the population in a state of war-fever), and the ubiquitous two-way telescreens make it possible for the secret police, the “thoughtpolice,” to spy on every aspect of life.

Further, Dennis O’Keefe, reviewing Arthur Seldon’s A life for Liberty in 2009, made a point which, as far as I am aware, no other reviewer of Nineteen Eighty Four

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has possessed the perception or political courage to make, and which Orwell himself may well not have realized, but which, once stated, seems obvious: the melancholy longing which pervades Nineteen Eighty Four is for vanished Capitalism23 with its political freedom, democratic institutions, high standard of living and sense in the individual’s worth in the scheme of things.

It is also notable that though Orwell was throughout his life passionately concerned with improving the human condition, he showed very little interest in classical economics, international trade or the innovative qualities of Capitalism – the index to his collected writings contains not a single reference to Adam Smith, and but a single mention of Fredrich von Hayek: a short and critical (though not malicious or dismissive) review of The Road to Serfdom24 (This book may have influenced Orwell more than he indicated ot perhaps realised. Many of its themes and arguments are to be found in Nineteen Eighty Four). He did, however, state at one point late on his life: “Actually the problem for the world as a whole is not how to distribute such wealth as exists but how to increase production.”25 His writings in the

1940s show Orwell regarded international capitalism as doomed. At that time, apart from the work of a few lonely figures such as von Hayek and lonely groups such as the Montpellerin Society, the divorce between intellectual culture and any appreciation of free enterprise or Capitalism was virtually complete. They were two different worlds which had virtually no contact with reach other. This was perhaps partly to do with the widespread disillusionment with technology, closely related to Capitalism, as well as to the disillusionment with Captialism resulting from the Depression and the ceaseless efforts of leftism and the Adversary Culture.

It was a destructive failure for which both intellectuals and Capitalists who did not defend themselves were to blame.26 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World described a future State in which technology was used basically to reduce and destroy Free Will, that destruction which has always been an implicit goal of Utopians: as mentioned above, the intelligence of the Brave New World population was controlled by pre-natal manipulation of their brains and, with their intelligence-levels established, the population was kept quiet and easily-

governed by drugs, sex-orgies and endless spectator-sport and games. Huxley’s dystopia of hedonism was identified by some as the alternative o Orwell’s dystopia of terror.

A

nyway, parallel to the advances of science and technology there has been a vast library of implicitly or explicitly anti-scientific and anti-technological literature, from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and taking in D. H. Lawrence’s ravings about blood and soil, and E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. While, as in all genres, there was a great deal of trash, some of these stories were powerfully-written and probably influential, not least in shaping the Weltenschauung of intellectually active and curious young people (I have mentioned elsewhere the influence of traditional “hard” science-fiction dealing with spaceflight on many leading pioneers of rocketscience). Most pessimistic of all the major works in this anti-science genre was probably Neville Shute’s On the Beach, which told of the last months of life in Melbourne, the only remaining major city, as, following a nuclear war in the 1960s, the population waited to die of gradually-encroaching

radiation poisoning. Unlike many other stories and myths of global catastrophe it offered no hope that some remnant of the human race might survive to build anew.

Only slightly less dire and also a best-seller was John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, in which what the narrator believes was a misfunctioning bio-weapon (but “officially” a cloud of comet-debris) blinds very nearly all the world’s population, which is simultaneously attacked by walking carnivorous plants created in Russia as a source of nutritious oils. The Germans have a very Teutonic term for these stories: Weltuntergangsroman.

While these stories are very diverse, a number of them combine hatred of technnology with what looks like rejoicing and glee at the mass exterminations which follow some kind of failure of technology. In Three Men Make a World, for example, a strain of bacteria destroys all petroleum. There is mass disease and famine, but, according to the author’s complacent and callous credo (no doubt consoling to the parents who watch their children die of starvation and who look forward to spending the remainder of their own lives hitched up to ploughs): [The machine] has added little to knowledge, and the application of the knowledge has been most damnable. It’s given us a new range of brutality but little happiness. We grow more miserable as the machine grows more perfect, for it is supplanting us. It has killed the craftsman, the man who moulded things with his own hand and brain. The individual, the man long tempered by his work, is gone, the man with a shop of his own, the man with a lathe or a plough or a shovel. He’s dead. That is the one thing the machine has done for us.27 Of course, science-fiction also has a strong tradition of stories in which science and technology prove humanity’s salvation, including for example the robust American tradition epitomized in much of the work of Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, and in Britain in works like Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes and Nigel Kneale’s television series Quatermass II and The Quatermass Conclusion. Perhaps more ambiguously, Wyndham’s The Crysalids is set centuries after a nuclear war (“it was the powers of gods in the hands of children”), in one of the surviving pockets of human society which is at about a medieval level of existence, but where a radiation-induced mutation among humans turns out to have highly positive effects. The story is unusual in suggesting ultimately benevolent consequences to nuclear war.

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Meanwhile, various real-world attempts at Utopia, often including attempts to create non-scientific and non-technological societies, were tried. Some failed relatively peacefully apart from the financial ruin and wasted lives of many involved, like the “New Australia” colony set up by idealistic Australian socialists in Paraguay in the 19th Century. Some failed in madness and massmurder, like Jonestown, or the whole great Utopian, pseudo-rationalist experiment of Communism. But all failed.28 It seems beyond dispute that many of the political disasters of the 20th Century arose from the fact that so many of the leading literary and artistic intelligentsia in this time were, whatever their gifts for artistic creation and expression, mired in bad science,

bad religion, and bad economics, as well as the fact that whole areas of human life and experience, such as technology, were simply beyond them. The legacy of those like Blake included the notion that Reason, science and technology are the enemies, rather than, if used properly, the great enablers, of beauty, wonder, romance, art, poetry, religious consciousness and the spiritual life.

The poet Algernon Swinburne, in “Songs Before Sunrise,” lamented the Spanish conquest of central and south America as the despoiling of “sinless” lands, an action which allegedly “made accursed the name of man and thrice accursed the name of God,” despite the fact their societies were based on torture and human sacrifice – the Conquistadors had been able to overhrown

“ANOTHER POLITICAL PROGRESSIVE, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, ATTACKED SCIENCE IN GENERAL, CAMPAIGNED FURIOUSLY AGAINST VACCINATION, AND HATED LISTER AND PASTEUR”

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them so easily with tiny handfuls of men largely because the oppressed people supported the Conquistadors in large numbers. Genocide expert Professor William Rubinstein has said that according to one recent estimate 78,000 victims were sacrificed at the dedication of the great Aztec temple of Tenochitalan in 1487 – just five years before Columbus landed. There were four lines of prisoners stretching two miles and it took four days to kill them all. He continued; “The Aztec royal court included a zoo, where animals were fed on the remains of the sacrificial victims, a special rack displayed 60,000 skulls of victims and, in Stuart J. Friedel’s words, ‘apartments for human freaks’.”29 The rain gods needed children with two cowlicks in their hair. The sun god needed albinos. On certain days, only the sacrifice of a mature woman of Aztec descent from a noble family would do.

Swinburne’s work was among the forerunners of a major industry claiming the European settlement of America was not the foundation of the most successful civilization ever known, but simply genocide.

Swinburn’s fellow atheist/nihilist Thomas Hardy appeared, in the widely-anthologised poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” to celebrate the sinking of the Titanic as a rebuke to “human vanity” and as evidence of Mankind’s helplessness before something called the “Imminent Will.” (There have been fewer poems and, as far as I know, no films, about the Titanic’s near-identical sister-ship, the Olympic, which had a long and perfectly successful career.30) Western civilization also attracted the ire of Herman Melville, who wrote: The Anglo-Saxons – lacking grace To win the love of any race; Hated by myriads dispossessed Of rights – the Indies East and West.

These pirates of the sphere! Grave looters – Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters, Who in the name of Christ and Trade, (Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!)

Deflower the world’s last sylvan glade! ...

Another political progressive, George Bernard Shaw, attacked science in general, campaigned furiously against vaccination, and hated Lister and Pasteur, against who he penned repeated diatribes (Shaw was also an enthusiastic defender of Stalin and the Stalinist penal system, and wrote of Hitler in the first days of World War II: “Our business is to make peace with him31). In 1990, as part of its continuing spasm of cultural selfhatred, the National Council of Churches

in the US denounced the impending quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’ “invasion” of America, which brought only “slavery, genocide, theft and exploitation.”

One of the major developments of the 20th and 21st Centuries has been the movement of leftism away from hailing science and technology both as allies and as its moreor-less exclusive property, indeed as being synonymous with progressivism, to seeing science and terchnology as being aspects of the enemy. However, elements of this move have been present in leftism for a long time.

There was also from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries a literary and intellectual fashion for “decadence,” nihilism and cosmic pessimism. There is no space here to make any detailed examination of this, but it could be seen in America in the works of Poe and possibly of Ambrose Bierce, among many writers and other artists and intellectuals in France, and in Britain in, as well some of the works of Oscar Wilde, in such things as Bertrand Russell’s The Worship of a Free Man and the Nihilistic literary works of Swinburne, Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman (and, a little earlier, in Shelley’s Prometheus). These had enormous popularity, and Hardy is still widely set as a school and university text. It was, perhaps, ironic that when the term “Wessex” had to some people – as in Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse – connotations of Alfred the Great, and the heroic battle for Christian civilization (“But by God’s death the stars still stand ...”), Hardy’s “Wessex” novels became synonymous with self-pity, pessimism and futility. I recently explored an Internet poetry site visited by literally tens of thousands of would-be poets, largely young Americans, and found Poe’s “The Raven” is virtually the only major poem that many of them have heard of, presumably because it is also set as a school-text in America. A typical piece of Housman’s verse runs: Who made the world I cannot tell.

‘Tis made, and here I am in Hell.

My hand, although the knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

Comparing this with Whitman’s work strongly suggests that Whitman was more civilized than this learned professor.

Among the comparatively small number of poems which have celebrated civilization, there is also, in a different key, “Comfort,”

by Walter de la Mare (1873-1958): As I mused by the hearthside Puss said to me: “There burns the fire, man,”

And here sit we.

Four walls around us Against the cold air; And the latch drawn close To the draughty stair.

A roof o’er our heads Star-proof, moon-immune And a wind in the chimney To wail us a tune.

What felictiy!” miaowed he, “Where none may intrude: Just man and beast – met In this solitude!”

“Dear God, what security, Comfort and bliss!

And think too, what ages Have brought us to this!”…

References: [1] Horizon, January, 1941.

[2] Among the many disasters which Rousseau’s thought caused, the myth of the “Noble Savage” may have contributed to the fact that European colonizers in the 18th and 19th Centuries met various indigenous peoples not with necessarily destructive intentions (instructions to and by the first Australian governors have many enlightened injunctions in this regard), but with unrealistic ideas about how complex matters of “culture shock” were to be handled, and inadequate medical knowledge about the transmission of exotic diseases.

[3] I am particularly indebted to Professor Thomas Gibbons for some important points here.

[4] The Industrial Revolution was only just coming on stream in 1804 when it was written.

[5] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1947), p. 20. Lewis’s comments about “the third hour of the bombardment” would have been based on personal experience – he was a front-line officer in the First World War, and was badly wounded by a shell-burst.

[6] Quoted in Paul Johnson, Enemies of Society (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1977), p. 216.

[7] Letter (1908), as quoted John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992); also quoted in “Art for the Masses: The Death of Culture & the Culture of Death” by Ralph McInery in Touchstone magazine (September 2001).

[8] Quoted in Brooke Allen , “D. H.. Lawrence in Decline,” The New Criterion, May, 2006. The parallels between Lawrence’s thought and Hitler’s is strengthened by the existence of anti-Semitic passages in L:awrence.

[9] C. S. Lewis, in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” stated: “These monomaniac systems are then used as a ground to attack traditional morality;

but, absurdly, since it is from traditional morality alone that they derive such semblance of validity as they possess … The trunk to whose root the informer would lay the axe is the only support of the particular branch he wishes to retain.”

(Reprinted in C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Fount, Glasgow, 19812), pp 101-102.

[10] Quoted in Gibbons, Op. Cit., p. 63.

[11] Havelock Ellis, Affirmations, quoted in Gibbons, Op. Cit., pp. 63-64.

[12] And yet I have been told (this is anecdotal but if true must constitute one of the greatest acts of nobility in history), that every one of the 400 German Army doctors at Stalingrad refused air evacuation when it was offered.

[13] See also Molnar, Op. Cit., especially pages 20-21.

[14] Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880--1920 (University of Western Australia, Western Australia, 1973), p. 14.

[15] Gibbons, Op., Cit., p. 14 [16] The American Spectator Online, 15 May, 2008.

[17] Gibbons, Op Cit., pp. 15-16.

[18]Gibbons, Op. Cit., pp. 23-24.

[19] “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Horizon, August, 1941, reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Eds., The Collected Letters, Journalism and Essays of George Orwell, Vol 2, My Country right or Left (Penguin, UK, 1982), p .469.

[20] Ibid, p.. 169.

[21] There have also been revisionist versions of The Time Machine by other writers, suggesting that Wells’s Time-Traveler misinterpreted what he saw. In David J. Lake’s The Man Who Loved Morlocks, for example, the Morlocks are shown as benevolent scientists, actually caring for the Eloi in a reservation.

[22] Paul Johnson, The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London, 1996), p.21.

[23] The Salisbury Review, Winter, 2009 [24] Observer, 9 April, 1945.

[25] Observer, 9 May, 1948.

[26] One reason the simplistic but vigorouslywritten works of Ayn Rand had as much influence and success as they did (and in some circles still do) is that Capitalism has had so few other literary or artistic advocates or defenders.

[27] Quoted in Clarke, Op. Cit., pp 168-169.

[28] The Israeli Kibbutzes do not count, because they had a lot of outside and government support.

[29] Quadrant, March, 2009.

[30] Further, apart from fires and war-action, and the case of the Andrea Doria, lost in collision, almost all great liners were lost at sea after the Titanic.

[31] New Statesman, 7 October, 1939. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 55

2010

A YEAR OF TURMOIL

From earthquakes to political scandals to murder mysteries, we look back at 2010 JANUARY 1. A magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti kills 230,000 people and leaves millions displaced or affected.

FEBRUARY 1. Investigate busts ‘drug lord’ billionaire George Soros over his attempts to fund marijuana legalisation groups in countries all over the world, including New Zealand.

“NZ Drug Foundation director Ross Bell told Investigate last year that it was a requirement of the $35,000 Soros sponsorship that NZDF provide a written report on the conference…The report notes that participants were urged to lobby for a more ‘progressive’ drugs law in New Zealand.”

56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

MARCH 1. With all the hype about windfarms and alternative energy, our report on what happens when windmills fail was timely – large windfarms in the US and Europe are now rusting and abandoned; white elephants built on taxpayerfunded “green” subsidies, with the corporates running for the hills when the handouts stopped coming.

2. The “Where the bloody hell is she?” award goes to Australia’s Lara Bingle, unceremoniously dumped by fiancé Michael Clark after a former boyfriend posted a naked photo of Bingle in the shower on the internet.

APRIL 1. The “Where the bloody hell is he?” award went to German fraudster Kim Schmitz, who Investigate exposed as the shyster allegedly buying the $30 million Chrisco mansion in Albany. Schmitz, who has criminal convictions, is involved with internet porn and piracy sites.

2. Chile was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami.

3. And a new study found great white sharks eat giant squid.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 57

MAY 1. Spy scandal. In one of his last stories, the late journalist Graeme Hunt published an expose in the May Investigate magazine detailing New Zealand’s links to a Soviet spy scandal.

Herbert Norman (1909–1957), Canadian high commissioner to New Zealand from 1953–56. His position gave him the perfect cover to acquire New Zealand documents for the KGB to forge for its operatives in the Portland spy ring. / Newspaper picture and also in Library and Archives Canada, PA-134317

JUNE 1. The ultimate smackdown. A Government ‘review’ of the anti-smacking laws which found everything was peachy and no parents had been unfairly picked on, turned out to be a PR stunt.

The Nigel Latta-headed review had failed to look at key evidence showing Police and CYFS had made glaring mistakes.

2. Crafar farms deal exposed.

Investigate’s revelations of the extent of businessman Jack Chen’s involvement on all sides of the Crafar farms deal became the basis of a New Zealand Herald investigation and may have been one of the factors that led the Overseas Investment Commission to call on the Serious Fraud Office to look more closely at the deal.

58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

Paddy Costello (1912–1964), the New Zealand diplomat who issued the false passports to atomic spies Morris and Lona Cohen. He and Herbert Norman had been members of the underground Trinity cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain when they were at Cambridge University together in the 1930s./NZSIS

JULY 1. President Obama could sense the electoral storm clouds approaching, as his popularity hit all time lows and his climate change policies lay in tatters.

Even key Democrat supporters were deserting him – the latest being White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel who, seeing the writing on the wall, has quit to seek election as Mayor of Chicago.

2. Investigate also reported on its own little miracle: the successful reattachment of Ian and Heidi’s daughter’s finger – severed and squashed flat in a seesaw accident at an early childhood centre last December. Surgeons at Middlemore Hospital initially refused to re-attach the finger on the grounds it was hopeless – not only had the finger been reduced to paste, but it had been frostbitten after the hospital left it on ice for five hours. The parents fought for reattachment regardless, and prayed hard. Finger now fully working again and almost entirely normal to look at. Plastic surgery team stunned at outcome.

AUGUST 1. Maori party MP Hone Harawira suffered foot and mouth disease by saying he didn’t want his kids bringing home white kids to shack up with. While most commentators tore strips off Harawira for racism, Investigate’s Chris Carter acknowledged the offensiveness of the comments, but defended Harawira’s right to express his opinions in what should be a free country.

2. In a further political earthquake, Winston Peters revealed NZ First was making a comeback in the 2011 election campaign.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 59

THE SHOCKING NEW EVIDENCE IN A 40 YEAR OLD COLD CASE

Ian Wishart

WAS THE KILLER OF HARVEY & JEANNETTE CREWE A POLICE INSIDER?

Arthur Allan Thomas

SEPTEMBER 1. Christchurch hit by magnitude 7 earthquake – similar to Haiti’s. Miraculously, no one killed and only a handful of people seriously hurt.

2. Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside AWARD-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST WISHART HUNTS DOWN Story isIANreleased, prompting Rochelle SIGNIFICANT NEW LEADS, AND FOR THE FIRST TIME, ARTHUR ALLAN THOMAS Crewe, the only surviving victim of the DESCRIBES HIS ARREST, HIS YEARS BEHIND BARS AND HIS LIFE SINCE HIS RELEASE – ANattack, to break a Pukekawa farmhouse INCREDIBLE, NEVER-BEFORE-TOLD STORY...

40 year silence and call for the case toHATM Publishing be re-opened.

A NEW WITNESS COMES FORWARD: “Dear Ian, I have had information since 1970 that I have been far too frightened to release. I made an effort to inform the Police in 1970 and spoke to a Sergeant Johnston ... he told me that if I ever rang the Police with that information again or made any attempt to have it made known then I would be the next bastard found in the river”

Arthur Allan Thomas:

THE INSIDE STORY

60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

CREWE MURDERS: NEW EVIDENCE

Jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, now for the first time in 40 years, he tells his incredible story as we name a new prime suspect

Ian Wishart #1 bestselling author

OCTOBER 1. The latest shot in the vaccine wars came with the story of 17 year old Kahlia, a high achieving Rotary Exchange student from the Manawatu whose life was devastated after a reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine.

2. Vitamin C in massive doses may cure swine flu and other nasties. The case of a Waikato man whose family had to fight for Vitamin C treatment, in the face of opposition from health bureaucrats and ‘experts’, caused a public outcry.

NOVEMBER 1. Is Heidi Paakkonen still alive? Probably not now, but she certainly was in late May 1989, a couple of weeks after David Tamihere had already been arrested.

Investigate obtained a confidential briefing paper for former police commissioner John Jamieson which revealed a couple who knew the missing Swedish tourist well had seen her alive on Kawau Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, looking distressed but being ordered around by another man who led her away from them when the couple tried to assist her.

Police have so far refused to re-open their investigation, even though this is the only positive sighting of Heidi Paakkonen made by people who actually knew her personally before she disappeared.

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TREADING CAREFULLY How A Fantasy Tall Ship Came To Float

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In the upcoming big screen adventure, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the Pevensie children and their friends embark on a life-changing voyage of discovery. They set sail on the Dawn Treader, the legendary tall ship that was immortalized in the classic novel by C.S. Lewis. The Dawn Treader is the ultimate fantasy tall ship, combining whimsy with classic maritime history.

ELAINE LIPWORTH looks at what’s gone into building it

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T

here is something evocative, nostalgic, even mystical about a tall ship: the history it carries, the sense of thrilling adventure from a bygone era. The ship at the center of C.S. Lewis’s classic novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is entrenched in literary and cultural history. Now the new movie, directed by veteran filmmaker Michael Apted, translates the magic of the original book onto the big screen.

The story is one of seafaring exploration and wonder. There are old-fashioned feats of chivalry as the heroes venture into uncharted waters on the Dawn Treader.

“Tall ships are traditionally rigged vessels; we tend to think of them as wooden boats, either original or replicas of boats from the past. They resonate on an almost spiritual and very emotional level with people because they hark back to a time when people were looking for new worlds, new industries, new wealth,” explains English tall ship skipper Ben Jones.

“I think the real magic is all about that romantic idea of sailing across the horizon to a better place. It takes us back to the explorers who set off on tall ships and discovered the New World. They were looking for something beyond the horizon with no clear idea of what was there. The modern equivalent is space travel,” says Jones.

Towards the beginning of the new film, Lucy and Edmund Pevensie (played by Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes) are gazing at a beautiful life-like picture of a majestic tall ship out at sea. They are in Cambridge, England, during World War II staying at the home of their unbearably irritating cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb (Will Poulter). Suddenly all three are swallowed into the painting. They find themselves deep in the ocean. They emerge above water to see the majestic dragon ship the Dawn Treader, in front of them. The three children are hauled up on deck, and the Pevensies are reunited with their great friend Caspian (Ben Barnes), who is now king. The siblings, along with their obnoxious cousin, are back in the Narnian world they love, full of danger as well as magical promise. They set off on a mysterious journey to the Lone Islands and other strange lands. Caspian’s mission is to discover the fate of the seven noble Narnian Lords of Telmar who were sent into exile by his evil uncle.

The Dawn Treader is at the heart of this thrilling adventure, based on the classic book

by C.S. Lewis. In the book, Lewis describes

the ship as “a beauty of her kind, a ‘lady’ as sailors say, her lines perfect, her colors pure, and every spar and rope and pin lovingly made.” While Eustace can’t stand the ship, Lucy and Edmund fall in love with it and are, as the author tells us, “delighted with the Dawn Treader.” After their first meal on board, they “saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and felt the quiver of the ship, and tasted the salt on their lips, and thought of unknown lands on the Eastern rim of the world; Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.”

In the film, the legendary dragon ship is also awe-inspiring. It is the creation of production designer Barry Robison and his expert team. On the set of the movie in Queensland, Australia, chatting on the Dawn Treader itself (raised on a gimbal inside a sound stage), Robison explains how he started work on the design and structure many months before filming began. “We

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were inspired by a beautiful example of a tall ship, Captain Cook’s ship the Endeavour which sits in Sydney harbor. I was able to take Michael Apted and our designers and engineers on board to measure it and note the details, to get a feel of the size and length, the shape of the decks, the scale of rooms.

It was most helpful once we started to put pen to paper.”

The team who had previously worked on another nautical film, the drama Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe, began the Dawn Treader project in Rosarito, Mexico.

“With their vast knowledge, it really began to take shape and become a vessel with its own design,” says Robison. “Originally Michael Apted wanted it to float and actually sail in the water. But once we were back in Australia the team decided it would be both more effective and economical to “mimic” the ship sailing on the water …on land. So we never put it in water, but it looks amazing. Michael

wanted the real sky and the real wind and the real sun on his actors, so we found a fantastic location with the help of the Queensland Film Commission and began construction of the 18-ton vessel. It was built in 32 sections at our construction mill and transported to the location by very large trucks. The water you see in the film is computer generated, but you would never know it. We put the ship out at Cleveland Point here in Queensland on the coast. It was raised on a large platform so that you could see the water and the horizon. It was one of the most gratifying experiences of my career to finally see the Dawn Treader completed in all her glory. It really was a wow,” says Robison.

“The design was inspired by the illustrations in the book,” he continues. “Though many think the Dawn Treader was inspired

by Viking sailing ships, I had the idea that it was more like a 19th-century carousel animal and a tall ship combined, something C.S.

Lewis could have related to as a boy. I did the initial carving and painting for a scale model to present to the studio. The carving of the figurehead and the tail are both of my own design.” The interiors are inspired by art nouveau, from the serpentine railings to the elaborate bookshelves and furniture.

“It is 134 feet long from nose to tail,” says Robison, “beautifully painted with 19th century carousel-painting skills: greens and shiny gold leaf. The decks are made of rosewood and walnut. The whole ship is extraordinary. I wanted it to be majestic and accessible to the young audience that will see the film. I also wanted it to be ‘Narnia.’

We have no rules in Narnia; the only rule we have is that it has to float and sail. It is a royal ship, and it has to be magnificent with a richness to it. I also had to make sure it was artificial in its rendering so it would stand out against the organic creatures the ship and crew encounter along their journey.”

“THE WATER YOU SEE IN THE FILM IS COMPUTER GENERATED, BUT YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW IT. WE PUT THE SHIP OUT AT CLEVELAND POINT HERE IN QUEENSLAND ON THE COAST. IT WAS RAISED ON A LARGE PLATFORM SO THAT YOU COULD SEE THE WATER AND THE HORIZON”

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“THE BOAT IS THE BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE AND HAS TO CARRY THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRY. THAT IS WHY IT HAS TO BE AS EXQUISITE AS THE LOCATION WAS IN THE OTHER TWO MOVIES”

The Dawn Treader, says director Michael Apted, is not only integral to the film, but also it represents the magical atmosphere of Narnia itself. “Well, it is Narnia. We don’t go to Narnia, so the boat is Narnia,” says Apted in a break between scenes on Australia’s Gold Coast. “It is the mobile history of Narnia.

So when you look at the detail on the boat, there are all the iconic images from the previous films and references to the mythology of Narnia. You could say, ‘Where are those beautiful landscapes we had in Narnia?’ But the boat is the beautiful landscape and has to carry the history of the country. That is why it has to be as exquisite as the location was in the other two movies.”

E

qually exquisite is the impressive and authentic tall ship that Ben Jones skippered with a group of children and families who set sail on their own Narnian quest, ten thousand miles from Australia’s Gold Coast in the South of England. The children won a competition celebrating the movie and the Dawn Treader itself. They were lucky

enough to get a real ‘Narnian’ experience on the Matthew, a tall ship that was transformed into a replica Dawn Treader, complete with a dragon’s-head bow and a tail at the stern. They set sail recently around the coast of Cornwall.

On their maritime adventure they could imagine what life on the fictional ship might have been like for C.S. Lewis’s characters.

The original Matthew was the vessel on which explorer John Cabot sailed 500 years ago hoping to reach Asia. Cabot and his crew actually arrived not in Asia but on the coast of Newfoundland and were in fact the genuine discoverer of North America (not Christopher Columbus). The replica Matthew – which temporarily became the Dawn Treader – sits in Bristol Harbor in England.

Ben Jones often takes the Matthew on trips and excursions and was delighted to lead the thrilling Narnian expedition.

“The ship is a Portuguese Caravel from the medieval period,” says Jones who is based in Bristol, England. “They are vessels with square sails. It became the Dawn Treader and looked astonishing. There was a huge

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imposing dragon’s head on the bow and a big tail coming out of the stern and wings coming down the bulwarks of the ship,” he says.

The competition winners (accompanied by adults), aged between 10 and 14 and from twelve different countries, met up with Ben Jones and the rest of their crew at Padstow, a beautiful old fishing port in Cornwall with a small locked harbor. “It is very picturesque, and when the children turned up, there were big crowds on the quay of this little Cornish harbor. The children had no idea what they were in for and they were very excited. When they first saw the Dawn Treader they were speechless. ‘Oh my god, this isn’t possible!’ they said.”

The young adventurers were divided into two groups, and each took a voyage lasting a week – both led by Jones. During the trips they had to perform a variety of tasks.

“The winners and their families were literally living with us,” says Jones who helped to oversee the children as they learned a wide range of nautical skills, such as tying knots and fishing as well as snorkeling. Two overall winners were selected from the finalists onboard the ship. The children were judged on speed, efficiency, and ‘Narnian’ mastery.

“They helped to get the sails up and down and helped to steer the ship. On shore they had to accomplish a variety of other tasks like archery. The idea was that the winners would prove themselves worthy of crewing the Dawn Treader.”

Adding to the sense of adventure was the inclement weather: wild storms raged along the rugged English coastline. “We had big depressions and gales, 50 knots of wind coming in. We had significant headlands; we had

to get around Land’s End. The coast is very exposed, and there aren’t many ports, so it really was challenging,” says Jones.

During each week-long trip they traveled to historic points of interest that in many ways resembled the towns that the Pevensies visit on their fictional voyage. They disembarked at Tintagel, legendary home of King Arthur, as well as the ancient and historic Cornish island St. Michael’s Mount, where they saw the beautiful old castle that stands on a massive rock.

They visited Lundy Island, a three-mile-long island off the coast of Devon, which is a protected marine conservation zone because its waters are home to wildlife ranging from gray seals and lobsters to pink sea-fan corals. Its reefs, sea caves and sand banks conjure up the wonder of the Pevensies’ Narnian Voyage. They visited the Scilly Islands too, finally docking in Falmouth.

The second trip began at Falmouth, and the travelers headed into St. Mawes on the Cornish coast. They visited Mylor, another ancient maritime village with Norman remains, and sailed on to St. Michael’s Mount. They stopped at Mullion Cove, a harbor on the Lizard peninsula in South Cornwall, sailed onto Padstow then Lundy Island where the weather was so bad they were unable to land. “We had a lot of atrocious weather even though this was late summer,” says Jones.

D

espite the weather, the enthusiastic voyagers were simply thrilled to be on board. And other than a few spells of seasickness, they were undaunted. “It was a magical trip for me. I loved sailing on the boat and steering it, and the crew was really great. Fortunately we have photos of our trip, because if not, I would have thought it was all just a dream,” says 10-yearold Béatrice Catteau, a French Narnia fan who was one of the children on board with her friend Margaux Brebant. “This trip was beyond my expectations,” says Margaux. “To put it in two words: absolutely brilliant!”

The French girls were accompanied by their great-aunt and uncle Anne-Marie and Phil Luboff who were just as excited as the young adventurers. “The ship was beautiful.

It looked exactly like you would imagine the Dawn Treader to be like,” says Phil Luboff who lives near Paris. “When we boarded that boat it didn’t feel like we were in this century any more. It felt like I was actually in the book. I was hoping to see a mouse run by and I would have said, ‘There’s Reepicheep,’ he says, referring to the fictional warrior

mouse who accompanies the travelers in the C.S. Lewis story and in the film.

“There were six kids on our trip with adult family members and soon we became one family with the crew,” he continues. “The kids loved the treasure hunt on St. Michael’s Mount. It was such fun, and afterwards the lifeboats picked us up and took us back to the boat. We had our dinner on board, and we were fishing till midnight. About 5 o’clock in the morning we turned on the engine and started sailing. It was fantastic.

It was magical for the kids, their eyes were huge from the joy of being on the boat and being part of the crew.”

“Beatrice was the youngest on board,” says her great-uncle Phil with obvious pride.

“They let her take the helm of the boat for about two hours, and she sailed us into the port (Falmouth). My most memorable experience of the trip? One of the tasks involved climbing up the ropes to the crow’s nest on top of the mast. It was about 30 meters high.

When my wife and I saw our grandniece do it successfully, we were in tears, because she had been so frightened and really wanted to overcome her fear. It was a big challenge for her. She felt just like Lucy Pevensie and even looks like her. But we were so proud of all the kids. We would never do anything like that, and every one of them succeeded.

They felt like they were really part of the Narnia experience as well as being part of a wonderful family.”

“It really was like a family,” agrees Ben Jones, “living, eating and sleeping in close quarters. It is an intimate way of living which really harks back to an era long gone. We prepared and cooked fish that was caught

locally on open fires on the deck. We became a cohesive unit of people supporting each other, just as they do in the book. For our voyagers it went from being a cut-throat competition in which everyone was in it for themselves to becoming a supportive team experience. It was really magical. In my sailing career it was a unique experience.”

Patrizia Roletti organized the trip for the two groups of competition winners from 12 countries including Spain, France, Norway, England and Italy. “The ship was fantastic, a genuine ocean galleon,” she says. “We slept in hammock-style bunks just as sailors in the past would have done. When the sails were up and we were out in the open water, it felt like we were inside the movie, there was nothing around us. But the real magic was in the way everyone felt so close, there was such a strong bond and it is an experience no one who came on the adventure will ever forget. One night we had a barbeque on the boat. Everyone prepared their own freshly caught fish – cleaned it and then cooked it.

It was so much fun. We saw dolphins one day which added to the magic.”

Patrizia, the children, and the other crew members aboard the Dawn Treader got a real glimpse of the marvels of tall ships and the sense of wonder that the Pevensies and their friends would have felt, what C.S. Lewis describes as “the light, the silence, the tingling smell of the Silver Sea.” And when The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader opens in theatres around the globe, audiences will be transported along with the Pevensies, Eustace and King Caspian, across the seas to the ends of the world. It is likely to be an unforgettable journey. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 67

n THINK LIFE

education

Sex education – premature and pernicious Amy Brooke takes aim at National’s endorsement of political correctness in education

I

t’s called Inclusive Sexuality Education – or, if you want the shorter version – Nga Ahuatanga o te Tane me te Wahine.

Oh, the nonsense being inflicted on us all.

With every Maori now reportedly partMaori, many have by far a greater dollop of European ancestry. This isn’t a fact the neo-tribal in-groups like aired too much.

Shouldn’t we wonder why..? However, all can speak English. So these tedious subtitles in a newly invented, arguably non-authentic Maori, intrude with their message of Maori children being “special” – of, simultaneously, warranting perpetual priority counterbalanced by their supposed racial disadvantage.

Inappropriate, they are arguably damaging and condescending in an education system directed towards young New Zealanders

from all backgrounds for whom proficiency in English should be the first goal.

The Ministry of Education’s sex education curriculum continues this advocacy of entitlement invoking “the unique place of Maori”, and a politically correct focus on a non-existent country called Aotearoa, invoking the weaving of a korowai gathering its own mauri, etc. Is this pseudomysticism, with its intrusion into areas of parental responsibility (while purporting to embrace all New Zealanders’ varying beliefs and diversity, focused through a child’s class teacher) meant to convey legitimacy? It doesn’t. The only expertise any subject teachers can be expected to have is competence in their own fields. Sex education, directed by the state, deliberately

68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

divorced from any concern regarding moral or ethical values, is more than intrusive: it’s utterly inappropriate.

So, too, the ministry’s resource booklets wrongly describe the Treaty of Waitangi as representing “the partnership between Maori and Pakeha” – the latter a word many EuroNew Zealanders strongly object to being used to describe them. Jargon and confusion in thinking persist throughout, as in repeating this radicalized claim concerning what never was a partnership. It has long been conceded that the word “partnership” was mis-used in the 90s, for political purposes, to inaccurately describe the interaction between Maori and the Crown (not the “Pakeha”), whereby Maori and colonists were simply guaranteed the same rights, in law, under the Crown.

It is important the ministry be challenged on its activism and jargonized terminology in this and other curriculum statements.

These resource books read as if composed by the agenda-laden, assisted by earnest and naive do-gooders who never quite comprehend the consequences of feel-good thinking up against hard-nosed realities. For example, we have the inherent contradiction between “people feel included and valued if the material they receive is in their language and clear of jargon” – ignoring the fact that the phraseology throughout is not only jargonized, but, while ostensibly embracing the diversity of all New Zealand students, unmistakably centre-stages Maori, implying a special cultural superiority over all other ethnic minorities – let alone the European majority. The result is insensitive and tedious.

This supposed Inclusive Sexuality Education should more appropriately be called Intrusive Sexuality Education. It is not so much geared towards the objective, factual content we should expect of important school learning areas, but represents an underlying permissive philosophy which rightly disturbs many parents.

Moreover, although a recent letter from Anne Tolley claims in fine straw-splitting style that this is not a sex education curriculum (seemingly because it also ranges over other politically correct, radicalized topics promoted by those long infiltrating the schools curricula, to preach social change) it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

These resource guides to teachers contain topics, methods of approach, class practice, etc. specifically directed to sex education – and, for curious youngsters, leading to the inevitable experimentation that will follow with its damaging consequences. Instruction on methods of contraception, including the killing of a baby in the womb (“abortion” sounds so much more neutral); minimizing the risk of STDs; targeting, too, that samesex attraction so very normal and typical of adolescent immaturity: we used to call it getting crushes on someone, and outgrew it with adolescence. Nowadays lesbian and homosexual teachers are ready to pounce to indoctrinate vulnerable teenagers via gay support groups at school.

This is not really education at all – it’s manipulation in large doses, not the teaching of subjects of academic or practical value.

The takeover of education in this country has led to squeezing out subjects of lasting value which aimed for excellence in education to be available to all, in favour of pro-

ducing group conformity, of trivialised or politicized topics saturating our young with the leftist views of those who infiltrated our institutions with the intent of undermining them – aided by those who have never really learnt how to think.

How productive is it really for pupils to be expected to reveal and discuss in class their personal knowledge, or lack of knowledge, in relation to their own sexuality; their private interactions with family and friends; concerns such as developing pimples, coping with puberty; being slow to develop physically; for well-meaning teacher to draw naked male and female figures on board, fastening labels to appropriate parts, fitting condoms? What about individual children’s feelings of embarrassment, of privacy?

Where is the respect for their own and their family’s values and religious beliefs? Why are these sidelined in favour of the intrusion of government-controlled agenda? What about inappropriate and graphic sexual imagery, including descriptions of sexual intercourse, encompassing all possibilities? The teacher is obliged to answer pupils’ questions, and precocious adolescents are highly manipulative and often disruptive.

What about premature sexual information in a mixed-sex class room? The embarrassment of girls, given the readiness of adolescent boys’ arousal, together with their teasing and opportunism in the playground? What about the loss of innocence, so that the end of childhood, together with its very real shield of mental and emotional protection, is too soon taken from so many? And no, it’s not good enough to point to sexually saturated media as a convenient excuse to blatantly intrude on our young, removing what should be parents’ rights to assess what is appropriate for their own child to know, and when.

The world is never the same for a child prematurely sexually awakened, embarrassed and confused, distracted from focusing on real learning in areas of considerable intellectual worth. Raging hormones can bring about new avenues of distraction shepherding them into the pop-rock world, that of too early boyfriends and girlfriends, of sexually inviting dressing. How sad now to see enthusiastic media write-ups of school rock concerts with 10-year-olds gyrating on stage; with little eight-year-olds being taught how to play an “air guitar” – the world of childhood being destroyed as the gates open into the trashy world of celebrity idolizing and imitation – regardless of its attack on enduring values, its all too inevitable reliance on

alcohol, drugs, and the endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.

And yes – it’s compulsory. Parents can “request” their child to be excluded from a particular element of “sexuality education” in “a health education” programme (weasel words). However, their right to withdraw a child applies to one particular element of instruction (often with their having no idea of when this will occur). It does not apply to the whole course.

When is middle New Zealand going to claim back its own children, to protect them from what has become a now pernicious state education? © Copyright Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.100days.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

What about the loss of innocence, so that the end of childhood, together with its very real shield of mental and emotional protection, is too soon taken from so many?

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 69

n THINK LIFE

science Scientists had previously believed that the mining, extraction and manipulation of copper began in Asia Minor, spreading from there.

New discovery rocks human history studies Ancients wore mini-skirts, necklaces, and smelted copper, 8,000 years ago, report scientists

A

“sensational” discovery of 75-centuryold copper tools in Serbia is compelling scientists to reconsider existing theories about where and when man began using metal.

Copper tools – axes, hammers, hooks and needles – were found interspersed with other artefacts from a settlement that burned down some 7,000 years ago at Plocnik, near Prokuplje and 200 kilometres south of Belgrade.

The village had been there for some eight centuries before its demise. After the big fire, its unknown inhabitants moved away. But what they left behind points to man’s earliest known extraction and shaping of metal.

“It really is sensational,” said Ernst Pernicka, a renowned archaeology professor at Germany’s Tuebingen University who recently visited the Ploce locality.

Scientists had previously believed that the mining, extraction and manipulation of copper began in Asia Minor, spreading from there.

With the find in Plocnik, parallel and simultaneous developments of those skills in several places now seem more likely, Pernicka said.

Indeed, the tools discovered in southern Serbia were made some 75 centuries ago – up to eight centuries older than what has been found to date.

The site at Plocnik, believed to cover some 120 hectares in all, is buried under several metres of soil. Serbian archaeologists have so far exposed three homes – the largest of them, measuring eight by five metres, discovered this year.

The layer of earth it stood on is still blackened from the scorching heat that destroyed the village. It is unclear what caused the fire, but no damage that would indicate an outside attack has been found.

The huts collapsed on their contents, with mud bricks and ashes burying all that was inside – pottery, statues, tools and a worktable. After dusting the still embedded artifacts off, archaeologists began extracting them,

70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

most of all hoping to find more precious copper tools.

Scientists are debating whether the Plocnik village led the world to the Copper Age in the 6th millennium BC, particularly as remains of primitive copper smelters were recently found not far away, near today’s mines and smelters in Majdanpek and Bor. The find, which stems from “certainly very, very early in the Copper Age,” was a very lucky one, said another expert from Tuebingen, Raiko Kraus.

The Ploce locality was discovered by railroad builders in 1927, but was largely disregarded until 1996, when serious excavations began, eventually yielding the sensational finds.

According to Krause, old settlements may similarly surface in eastern Anatolia when Turkey launches some massive earth-moving project, such as building a dam.

It remains unclear why a comparatively large quantity of copper tools were found at Plocnik. The head archaeologist on site, Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic, said that the village may have been a tool- making or trading centre.

There is also much more to be learned about the ancient inhabitants, apart from the key question of how man developed his tools.

“These people were not wild,” Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic stressed, pointing to fine pieces such as statuettes. “They had finely combed hair and adorned themselves with necklaces.”

One statue of a woman shows her wearing some sort of a mini skirt.

Others wore long and broad scarves.

Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic actually helped a Serbian fashion designer set up a show inspired by the clothes of the people who lived there millennia earlier.

Whatever remains to be found at Ploce and elsewhere, “mankind took a major step toward the modern era” during that time, Pernicka said.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 71

n THINK LIFE

technology

Facemail on the way Facebook plans to integrate e-mail into a unified messaging system, writes Mike Swift

I

n a bid to become the junction box for people’s digital communications, Facebook announced this month it plans to launch a new communication platform intended to unify e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and the social network’s existing message system through a single “social in-box.”

While each of the social network’s more than 500 million users will have the chance to get an @facebook.com e-mail address as the new service gradually rolls out to members in coming months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the goal was not to create the world’s largest e-mail network, but to merge external e-mail, text messaging, instant messages and Facebook’s existing internal messaging service into a new kind of seamless communication system.

News of the new message system, the product of 15 months of intensive work within Facebook dubbed “Project Titan,” has received intensive attention in the tech media in recent days based on the speculation that it would in one fell swoop eclipse the world’s largest e-mail networks – Microsoft Hotmail’s 361 million users, Yahoo Mail’s 273 million users or Google Gmail’s 193 million users.

But Zuckerberg said Facebook’s goal was not to steal e-mail traffic from its rivals, but to dissolve the fragmentation between the various computer and smart-phone communication channels, including e-mail, IMs and phone text messages.

“This is not an e-mail killer,” Zuckerberg told journalists at a heavily attended announcement in San Francisco, where the tech media is massed mid November for the Web 2.0 Summit. “This is a messaging system that includes e-mail as one part of it.

We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I’m going to shut down my Yahoo Mail or Gmail account, and switch to Facebook.’ “ The new system will allow Facebook members to send e-mail from within their Facebook page to any external e-mail address. But it also will allow people to see incoming e-mail from outside Facebook or a text message sent from a friend’s smart phone on their Facebook page, all integrated within a “conversation” assigned to that one single person.

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the website Search Engine Land, said while

72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

the success of the new system will depend on how easy people find it to use, and while it might not trump more functional e-mail platforms like Gmail overnight, for Facebook “it’ll tie people to the service” more closely.

The system will also allow essentially unlimited archiving of the ongoing conversation with a particular person, meaning that a Facebook user could see their entire communication with that person in one place, across a variety of communication methods.

And Zuckerberg said that because Facebook knows its users’ networks of friends, it would be much more efficient at filtering out spam or less important e-mail messages.

Andrew Bosworth, the Facebook engineer who headed “Project Titan,” said Facebook’s main thrust was to allow people to focus on the conversation, rather than whether they were doing it through e-mail, and instant message or a text message, and not to eclipse existing e-mail networks.

“The goal for us is to make it easier for people to connect with the people they care about,” he said. “If they find it easier to do that through Facebook, cool.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 73

n THINK LIFE

online

with Chillisoft

A new way to fleece you Use Facebook, Twitter or Gmail? FireSheep has your number!

T

he blogosphere is abuzz about FireSheep, a new program that has turned web security on its ear. First, some background: All of the Web 2.0 services use ‘cookies’, tiny text files stored on your PC, to keep track of your login state and confirm it is still communicating with the same client. The most common use for cookies is to allow a user to remain logged-in to a website after submitting credentials.

Consider Facebook: navigating Facebook requires your browser to continuously load and re-load hundreds (or even thousands) of resources from facebook.com as you scroll through web pages, play games, view pictures and click on links. When you first login to Facebook, a session cookie is created to uniquely identify your connection and this cookie is re-transmitted with all subsequent requests made from the web browser until it

is closed or the cookie expires. This piece of technology is absolutely vital to modern web usage – otherwise, we’d all have to log-in to Facebook hundreds of times per page view just to get every image to display.

Trouble arises when you use wireless. If the communication is not encrypted, then your session cookie information is available to anyone eavesdropping on your wireless connection. The danger is from ‘session hijacking’ in which someone pulls your session cookie out of the air and then uses it to convince the web server that it is you without going through the authentication process of logging in. Previously an attacker needed knowledge of HTTP, packet capturing and other techniques to hijack a session.

But now we have FireSheep.

FireSheep is essentially a plugin for FireFox that allows anybody to capture anyone else’s

session cookies on an unencrypted wireless network. It creates a simple graphical sidebar in FireFox that displays a list of captured cookies. Clicking on each one automatically loads the site for that the cookie and assumes that user’s identity. It’s simple, blazing fast, and absolutely terrifying to watch, even in a test environment. A partial list of sites vulnerable to FireSheep includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Yahoo/Google (including mail, docs, and all other services).

There is – and always has been – a cure: encryption at every stage of the network connection. Encrypted wireless networks.

SSL on every site with user accounts.

Keeping secure data isolated from unsecure data. Most of the vulnerable sites use SSL encryption – but they use it after you initially log in. Your credentials are encrypted, but once the cookie is set it generally is not.

Without end-to-end encryption, FireSheep could transform the information highway into something out of Mad Max. The antidote, of course, is that every web service will incorporate end-to-end encryption as part of the design specification. This should have happened years ago and hopefully FireSheep will force web designers to eschew unencrypted and unsecure services.

But until then, here’s how you can ensure you stay immune to these attacks: 1. Never connect to an open, unencrypted wireless network for any reason.

2. Strongly avoid WEP-protected wireless networks if possible as this encryption can be trivially bypassed.

3. Ensure your account settings around the web are configured to use HTTPS/SSL if it is supported.

4. Always “sign out” or “log out” of a service as soon as you are finished using it.

Oftentimes this will expire the session cookie, and subsequent attempts to use it will fail.

5. Avoid settings like “keep me logged in” when logging in to services.

Hacked together by Chillisoft NZ from various sources, blogs and ramblings including Aryeh Goretsky, Distinguished Researcher at ESET, LLC (developers of ESET NOD32 antivirus software).

74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 75

FEEL LIFE SPORT

NZPA / Ross Setford

Rowed to success Lake Karapiro and the World Rowing Championships proved to be a cosy fit in November. The spectacle delivered on a number of fronts, and set a tasty precedent for the sterner challenge of hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2011.

Chris Forster tested the waters

G

iven all the pre-regatta hype, it was easy to be underwhelmed on those first few days of competition on the iconic Waikato lake.

It looked pretty as a picture and the facilities were impressive, but the first Sunday was almost completely wiped out by a strong wind and the choppy waters – and there was only a moderate crowd in that flash temporary grandstand, constructed especially for the event.

It all seemed a bit low key – leaving the casual viewer (and hordes of reporters) wondering whether the biggest sporting event to come to our shores since the Commonwealth Games in 1990, was going to live up to the hype.

But momentum is a wonderful thing for a sport where athletes are rewarded for propelling themselves, seated and backwards – at a high rate of knots.

There were some great qualifying moments to savour, from the fledgling men’s

and women’s eights to little known crews like James Lassche and Graham Oberlin-Brown in the men’s lightweight pair and 20 year old Louise Ayling in the lightweight single sculls – who both ended up with silver medals.

Four-time champion Mahe Drysdale added drama and a neat twist on rule interpretations when an official sticker on his boat, started to unfurl – and he successfully raised his arm to get his semi-final restarted, then only just qualified for the medal race.

Well-publicised back problems robbed 31 year old Drysdale of his famed staying power, and he was dethroned by the Czech Republic’s Ondrej Synek, and finished a silver whisker ahead of British rival Alan Campbell.

Juliette Haig and Rebecca Scown were the dominant force in the women’s pairs – and the rest of their pack have a lot of water to make up between now and London 2012.

In fact two turned out to be quite a crowd for New Zealand and gold medal performances.

76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

The race of the regatta was during the rush of finals on Saturday when Hamish Bond and Eric Murray extended their dominance over the English Olympic champions, but only by a fraction of a second. Then on the final Sunday there was a high-octane surge from Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan to nail heavyweight sculling glory in front of the bumper crowd.

Three golds, three silver and four bronze was a mighty decent haul, and competitive payback for Rowing New Zealand, whose main aim was to break even.

Rowing is an olde-fashioned sort of a sport, Olympian in origins, and steeped in iconic moments. In many ways it’s still rather British.

Who could forget the Evers-Swindell twins back-to-back gold medals from Athens and Beijing, and the black (Fred Daggstyle) singlets of those gutsy Kiwi blokes who rowed to gold in the eights in Munich back in 1972.

FISA (or the Federation Internationale des Societies d’Aviron – to give it its full French name) is the world governing body and it was mightily impressed by the events in the central Waikato, labelling the championships as one of the most impressive ever.

More than 67 thousand spectators turned out over the 8 days, and if it wasn’t for a couple of windy days (on the opening Sunday and then the first day of finals on Friday) the numbers would have been ever higher.

The praise from highly-placed visitors ranged from “friendly” to incredible and even faultless – and Rowing New Zealand’s cast of hundreds deservedly earned special praise.

The timing was just right for New Zealand, 32 years after Lake Karapiro first hosted the championships. The team is

chock-full of household names, who command a remarkably high profile (and generous funding from the government agency SPARC) for a sport away from the mainstream of rugby, league, netball and football.

Success and medals were assured.

It was also a decent distance from the next Olympics in London in 2012, where the Kiwis and the Brits will both be formidable and arch-rivals. Next year the champs go to Bled in Slovenia – and the competition will ratchet up another couple of gears in more familiar European waters.

Given the travel, the demands on teams finishing their season later than normal – and the all-important goal of the Olympics – it could be another decade or two before Lake Karapiro gets to show its international colours for the rowing world again.

OLYMPIC ROWING/ S C H E D U L E MEN Single scull (Mahe Drysdale) Double scull (Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan) Lightweight Double scull (Storm Uru and Peter Taylor) Quadruple sculls Pair (Hamish Bond and Eric Murray) Four (NZ team) Lightweight four Eight (likely to include a New Zealand crew) WOMEN Single scull (Emma Twigg) Double scull Lightweight double scull Quadruple scull Pair (Juliette Haig and Rebecca Scown)

grander triumph of World Cup glory two years earlier.

The dude is still only 25 years old, with 130 NRL games and seven years of service with the Wests Tigers in Sydney.

He kicks the goals for club and country. He’s got a cheeky wit and genial, genuine nature that makes him super-popular with fans, sponsors, journalists and commentators.

Yes even Australians love Benji.

Even when he works magic against their national team’s once God-given right to own every rugby league trophy.

Marshall was brought up by an extended whanau in Whakatane, but departed at age 16 for a school scholarship on the Gold Coast and even played for the Australian Schoolboys team in 2001 and the Aussie touch football team too.

But this guy’s a true blue Kiwi .He’s the captain and inspiration for a damned fine New Zealand rugby team, one that’s feeling the love from league fans here and around the world.

EVERYBODY LOVES BENJI

PHOENIX IN DECLINE

2010 will go down as the year the outrageously talented Benji Marshall came of age. His already extensive skill-set was showed off in full when he sparked yet another of those famous Kiwis triumphs over the Kangaroos to lift the Four Nations title at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane.

Captain Marshall was orchestrator of the two late tries which denied the Australians, on the same ground of the even

Ricki Herbert’s got a major problem. The lustre of the ground-breaking campaigns of his All Whites at the World Cup and the Phoenix in theA-League are starting to fade.

This is all about club rather than country.

The Nix are leaking goals, and plenty of them. Their two year unbeaten run at their Wellington fortress came to a shuddering end with heavy back-to-back

Eton Dorney – west London – 2012. (with New Zealand medal chances)

Three golds, three silver and four bronze was a mighty decent haul, and competitive payback for Rowing New Zealand, whose main aim was to break even defeats to the form teams from Brisbane and the Central Coast.

Their new Australian signings Jade North, Nick Ward and Dylan Macalister are struggling to gel with the old guard. Even the temporary signing of unemployed All Whites midfielder Simon Elliott’s failed to spark them out of their lethargy. Crowd favourites Leo Bertos and Paul Ifill are struggling to rediscover the magic and captain Andrew Durante’s defensive patterns have gone all wonky.

Coach Herbert’s got to find some answers and fast. His boss Terry Serepisos will be getting grumpy and wondering if all the money he’s invested and the scrutiny of his business dealings, are paying a decent dividend.

A team low on confidence is hard to motivate at a professional football, when other teams are going for the kill.

Four wins from their first 14 games and the second worst defensive record in the league is a far cry from the surge through to the preliminary final last season Herbert needs to find the formula to turn the corner and start looking like contenders, of their fan base will start to ebb away.

Less than 6 thousand fans turned up for the 3-nil home defeat to the Mariners in mid-November.

Compare that to the 33 thousand which packed out the stadium for the playoff victory over the Newcastle Jets on March the 7th and their bumper inaugural season where they attracted average crowds of 12 thousand to their home matches.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 77

FEEL LIFE HEALTH

Something to cry about

German researchers get closer to a treatment plan for colicky babies, reports DPA

S

ome babies bawl when they are warm, fed and dry. A regulatory disorder is often behind the inexplicable crying, known as colic. Colicky babies react very sensitively to their surroundings and tend to be irritable. Their parents must learn to relax and better understand the child’s signals.

Is the child’s crying normal? “A lot of parents are unsure whether their child has colic,” says Sabine Ulrich, a psychotherapeutic practitioner in Hamburg. Colic is usually diagnosed by the “rule of threes”: The infant is younger than three-months-old and cries more than three hours a day at least three days a week for longer than three weeks.

Babies who cry less frequently can also worry parents, though.

“It’s not the degree of severity but the perception of the problem that counts,” notes Ulrich, who has been counselling affected parents for eight years.

Margret Ziegler, a “colic consultation” physician at the Munich Children’s Centre, also sees subjective strain as crucial. “As soon as parents feel they can’t cope, we help.”

Most parents are at their wit’s end by the time they seek medical health, Ulrich says.

Although “all of them hope to get a grip on the problem themselves somehow,” they often simply aggravate it, she remarks. They carry around the baby, rock it and sing to it for hours, but pass on their inner stress while doing so.

“In rare cases they even shake the baby out of anger or desperation,” Ziegler says.

“Under no circumstances should parents do this, of course, because it can result in serious injury.”

“Almost one child in five cries excessively in the first three months of life,” points out Paula Diederichs, a psychotherapist and director of several colic clinics in Berlin. The cause is often not abdominal pain but sensory and behavioural regulatory difficulties.

“During the first weeks of life, all kinds of sensory impressions impinge unfiltered on the baby, which can lead to overstimulation,” Ziegler says.

There are many possible reasons that some children cry a lot and others less. “Some

78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

women have stressful pregnancies and pass on stress hormones to the foetus,” Diederichs says. A difficult birth or stressful experience – such as a move into a new home or marital separation – can also affect the child.

A further problem, Diederichs says, is that “mothers sometimes put too much pressure on themselves by wanting to do everything perfectly.”

The first thing done at a colic clinic is an examination by a paediatric physician.

“Sometimes the crying has physical causes, for example milk intolerance,” Ulrich says.

A conversation with the parents follows.

“We want to learn as much as possible about life with the baby,” Ziegler says. When does it cry? For how long? How do the parents feel? What do they do to pacify the baby?

Finally, the clinics always provide individual solution strategies.

“First of all, we help parents to be able to relax again,” Ziegler says.

Diederichs explains, “We look for ways to relieve their daily routines, for example timeouts and support for the moth-

ers.” And there are relaxation techniques for the babies. “We try to lower their irritation threshold with massages, special ways of holding them and humming sounds.”

Little by little, the colicky baby and its parents find more peace and quiet.

Ulrich sees salvation in relaxation. “Often a baby with colic is totally exhausted and overtired,” she says. So the first step is two weeks of helping the baby go to sleep. “After that, I use sleep training to help the parents and baby find a regular sleep-wake rhythm.”

Parents frequently have to learn how to interpret their child’s signs of tiredness, such as blinking, rubbing the eyes and arching the back. “If you know the baby’s body language, it’s easier to avoid overstimulation,” Diederichs says.

In Ziegler’s view, it is also very important to consciously underscore positive moments with the baby. “The good times make it easier to endure the strenuous phases.”

Parents should not expect quick fixes, however. “It takes a little time before the vicious circle is broken,” Ziegler warns. The key, she says, is to keep trying and not give up. For families under particularly heavy stress, a family helper could sometimes baby-sit.

HEALTHBRIEFS FERTILITY KITS CAN MISLEAD WOMEN. Home fertility tests may not be reliable predictors of a woman’s ability to get pregnant, researchers at the University of North Carolina have found.

The group, led by Dr. Anne Z. Steiner, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, found that the do-it-yourself kits often indicated women would have difficulties, yet many had no problem conceiving.

“Although the tests are out there, this is the first study that asks, can these tests be used to measure potential fertility?” Steiner said.

Women typically use the tests to gauge their chances of becoming pregnant, particularly if they’ve postponed childbearing into their 30s when fertility diminishes. For years, women in the United States have delayed their first pregnancies, on average now until age 25; in the 1970s, the average age was 21, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About age 30, fertility gradually starts

to wane as the number and quality of eggs declines. The drop-off is steeper in a woman’s late 30s.

Like a pregnancy test, a home fertility detector uses a chemically treated strip that reacts to hormones in the urine and displays a reading. It measures for follicle stimulating hormone, or FSH, a chemical produced in the pituitary gland in the brain that helps stimulate the growth of eggs in the ovaries.

Readings above a certain level are supposed to signal that a woman may be infertile.

But Steiner’s group found that abnormal FSH levels did not correlate to reduced fertility among the women who participated in the study.

“When we have larger numbers of women in the study, we will be able to look at how many women conceived in a year despite an abnormal test value,” Steiner said.

Her findings result from a small trial of about 100 women in North Carolina who were older than 30. The women, who

were all trying to become pregnant and had no history of infertility, supplied both blood and urine samples that were tested for FSH and other hormones.

Although FSH levels were not good predictors of who would have difficulty conceiving, another hormone was more accurate. That chemical, anti-mullerian hormone, or AMH, is produced in the ovaries and also controls the growth of egg follicles.

Steiner said screenings might need to include more than one hormone, although AMH can only be measured in blood.

Heather Boles, 32, of Chapel Hill, N.C., said she volunteered to participate in the study this year when she and her husband began trying for their second child.

She said her role lasted about two months _ when she became pregnant.

“We didn’t have any trouble” conceiving, Boles said. She said she wasn’t concerned about fading fertility but would have pursued additional measures if months had passed without success.

– By Sarah Avery

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 79

FEEL LIFE ALT.HEALTH

Guy Cali/NEWSCOM

Exercising for two

A new Hopkins study looks into fitness guidelines for pregnant women, reports Meredith Cohn

H

er Asics laced up and her water bottle at her side, Meredith Dobrosielski stepped onto the treadmill for a robust half-hour walk.

For the runner, this wasn’t just any trip to the gym. The session took place in a lab, and each step offered information on the impact of exercise on her fetus. Dobrosielski is about 8 months’ pregnant.

Doctors expect the information collected to fill in some gaps in the data on how much pounding is OK for a developing baby.

Eventually, they hope to be able to develop personalized workout schedules for women in different states of fitness.

“We do know that not only can exercise be done, it should be done,” said Dr. Andrew J. Satin, professor and vice chairman of the department of gynecology and obstetrics

for the Hopkins School of Medicine. “But the level of fitness should impact the individual’s prescription.”

Not too long ago doctors used to tell all women not to exercise when they became pregnant, but that advice has changed, said Satin and Dr. Linda Szymanski, a fellow in maternal fetal medicine helping conduct the research. But there still is little data about what’s too much for the elite athlete verses the couch potato and those in between.

Satin said much is based on “opinion and common sense.”

They believe research is limited because doctors fear testing pregnant women. But nine months into the study, there have been no adverse reactions. As a precaution, the hospital’s labour and delivery area is close by.

About 60 women in their third trimester

80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

of pregnancy take turns on the treadmill.

Some are regular runners and others are sedentary. Everyone takes a moderate walk, and the regular runners also run until they hit their peak capacity but don’t linger there.

Several measurements are taken over the sessions from fetal heart rate and blood flow to the womb to fetal movement and amniotic fluid levels. The fetuses are examined by ultrasound before and after treadmill work.

Over time, the doctors plan to measure the impact on fetuses; partner with biomedical engineers to develop new ways to monitor the fetus, perhaps wirelessly during exercise; and collect long-term data on the pregnancy outcomes. The treadmill tests are the first step and some solid data should be available in a couple of months.

Doctors and groups such as the American

Bundin Alexander/NEWSCOM

College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Pregnancy Association now give blanket advice to pregnant women to get 30 minutes of exercise a day.

Potential benefits include improvement in general health and a decreased chance of gestational diabetes and hypertension, among others. Also, these groups say, that labor, delivery and recovery can be easier.

But the advice is based on recommendations from government and groups such as the American College of Sports Medicine that non-pregnant people get such exercise.

And it’s filled with notes of caution for those who are just starting and those with certain conditions. The college suggests seeing a doctor first, starting slow and stopping when there’s pain or bleeding – advice Satin doesn’t dispute.

He added that doctors do know driving up a heart rate and maintaining it there for too long can cut off blood flow to the fetus.

Getting overheated and dehydrated are also problems. Joints also can become lax and balance may be off, so some exercises should be avoided, such as street biking late in pregnancy. Contact sports, horseback riding and downhill skiing also may cause injury from blows or falls.

But he and others say not everyone has gotten the message that exercise is beneficial.

It was a big change in 2008 when physical guidelines were published for Americans, including pregnant women, said James

Outdated information and myths perpetuated by the Internet still mean many women who had been exercising, stop because they fear they will harm their babies

Pivarnik, who works with the sports medicine college and is professor kinesiology and epidemiology and director of the Center for Physical Activity and Health at Michigan State University.

He said the guidelines do indicate “that the elite runner can continue doing what she is doing for a bit, provided her health care provider is in the loop, and that she has no warning signs or other issues.” But he said “boutique” recommendations are hard with so many possible circumstances.

“Pretty much the aerobic recs are the same as for anyone,” he said.

Pivarnik agreed more research is needed, such as Satin’s. He’s now looking at how much weight lifting is good for pregnant women.

Szymanski said the incomplete data has only confused the message. “[Pregnant] women express frustration because a number of doctors give different advice. Some still tell them not to exercise, especially if they haven’t been exercising.”

Outdated information and myths perpetuated by the Internet still mean many women who had been exercising – up to a quarter by some accounts – stop because they fear they will harm their babies, the doctors said.

Satin said it’s actually a really good time to suggest starting an exercise program.

Women are more apt to take care of themselves when they are pregnant. They’ll quit

smoking, eat better and exercise for the sake of the developing baby and then carry over the good habits, he said.

As long as jogging is comfortable, runners can keep at it. Stationary bikes and running in a pool also are good exercises, Satin said.

And walking is safe for nearly everyone. The fetuses are not “flipping and flopping,” he said. In fact, the entire uterus is moving with the exercise motion, buoying the fetus.

Satin said his interest in pregnant athletes grew out of his work with women in the military who wanted to stay physically fit.

He was formerly a professor and chair of the Uniformed Services University F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in the obstetrics and gynecology department. Szymanski also is an exercise physiologist and collegiate athlete.

Dobrosielski, who is about to have her second child, said she decided to participate in the study because she wanted to help other women. She’s been running “forever” and played field hockey in high school and college. An ankle injury stopped her from running after 4 months, but everyday she runs in a pool, or does yoga, lifts weights or rides a stationary bike.

She knows she won’t lose as much of her fitness and will be able to return to running, even racing, quickly. Others should be able to find out what’s good for them, she said.

“It’s a special population and there’s so little time for study,” she said of pregnant women. “I felt comfortable exercising and I knew when I needed to stop. I think it’s important for all women to exercise and maybe this research will convince them to do that.”

EXERCISING WHILE PREGNANT Several medical organizations recommend 30 minutes of exercising a day for pregnant women. ]If ] you’re just beginning or have a condition, consult your doctor.

Start slow and stop if you have pain or bleeding. ]Don’t ] get overheated, stay hydrated and take breaks. ]Your ] joints may be lax and your balance off, particularly in later months, so avoid unstable ground or consider a stationary bike or running in a pool. ]No ] contact sports, but some weight training is OK. Avoid lying on your back after the first trimester.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 81

TASTE LIFE TRAVEL

Off the beaten track

Lauren Viera checks into the Caribbean island that some will never leave

T

he Honduras we think we know is a small Spanish-speaking country wedged somewhere between North and South America, between the First World amenities of its capital and the Third World poverty of its countryside, between an affordable cultural vacation destination and a risky stop in politically unstable terrain.

But there’s a tiny piece of that country, not quite 25 square miles’ worth, that is so rare and different that the few who have been there tend to want to stay forever and many have.

Utila, the name of this remote island and its main town, is counted among the country’s trio of Bay Islands but refuses to fit into

the Honduran stereotype, if there is one.

There are Spanish speakers, but there also are German, French and Norwegian speakers as well as variations of Garifuna and Carib and Creole-accented English that are neither here (New Orleans) nor there (Cayman Islands).

It’s easy to understand why “Utila” is pronounced differently depending on who is saying it. It’s anchored in the Caribbean Sea by an ancient volcano that has since retired to a hill, yet it defies comparison to other Caribbean islands, including its Honduran neighbours, Roatan and Guanaja.

It’s neither First World nor Third World; it’s simply otherworldly, secure and peaceful.

Before a weeklong visit earlier this year, a

82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

friend residing there offered what I took to be a fantasy footnote.

“Utila is an island of pirates and runaways,” she teased by e-mail. “Everyone is from somewhere else.”

By the time my ferry pulled into the island’s modest Municipal Dock on the late afternoon trip from the mainland, I realized she had been quite literal. The small welcome wagon included people of all shapes, sizes and colors.

Dogs barked at throttling motor scooters and whirring golf carts piled with groceries, construction tools and children, all dangerously vying for space on the alley-wide roads.

As on most small islands, the ferry landings

Slow is a way of life on Utila. Despite the aforementioned scooter and golf-cart traffic, which has increased only in the last few years, walking is feasible almost everywhere one would want to wander.

It’s rush hour in Utila, the name of the island of Utila’s main town. /Lauren Viera/Chicago Tribune/MCT

on Utila dictate rush hour, and I was in the thick of it.

Then, after everyone had kissed their hellos and made their way toward one of the three main roads branching out from the dock, traffic cleared and the pace slowed. For good.

Slow is a way of life on Utila. Despite the aforementioned scooter and golf-cart traffic, which has increased only in the last few years, walking is feasible almost everywhere one would want to wander. Pending weather, two daily ferries and endless scuba dives are scheduled, but everything else is relative. There are few clocks, fewer wristwatches. There is the sun, there is the moon.

There are roosters, there are discotheques.

And like clockwork, these elements dictate

the waking and sleeping hours of the island.

One doesn’t go to Utila to make plans anyway. There are no resorts or hotels to speak of, and there was no tourism office that I found.

It’s not paradise, but it’s beautiful, in a decrepit sort of way. Unlike Roatan, whose population of 30,000 seems enormous compared with humble Utila’s 7,000 or so residents, Utila seems to get by on charm alone. There are tourists, but most of them are scuba-obsessed backpackers in search of some of the cheapest Professional Association of Diving Instructors certifications in the world. They rent rooms by the night from dive shops and buy their breakfast at Bush’s Supermarket instead of loitering with the locals at the Munchies restaurant. Most of Utila’s visitors stay for a few days, a week or, if they’re lucky, a month, and then move on.

Unless, of course, they don’t.

Ask residents how they came to live on Utila and always, without fail, “It’s a long story.”

Presuming she or he isn’t a descendant of the Dutch, French or English pirates who came and went for a few hundred years between Columbus’ arrival and Honduras’ land treaty with Britain to take ownership of the island, it starts with a vacation. A few amazing dives later, a decision is made to postpone the return ticket, choosing instead to stick around to see what kind of life might be carved out of the brain coral and the clear green sea in which the whale shark, the largest fish on Earth, calls home.

Most Utilans are known by first name and nationality only: Jen the Canadian, John the Norwegian, Nicole the German, Clara the Czech, Gunter the Austrian.

Gunter is so tan and leathery he could pass as luggage. He free-dives (sans oxygen) every morning to 90 feet. On one occasion when our paths crossed, I asked him how long he can hold his breath. “Long enough to survive,” he said, telling me about the

“half-men” on the southwestern tip of the island, crippled by the bends.

Capt. Morgan’s Dive Shop is run by Kevin from Louisiana, who, like everyone else on the island, wound up here more or less accidentally. One afternoon, I pressed him for details, and after two white lies, he shook off the tourism charm and spoke soberly.

“The real story comes down to two words: What if,” he said, looking out the front door of the shop into the sea in the distance. “I never wanted to ask myself ‘What if’ later in life.”

IF YOU GO Getting there: About 18 miles north of

the mainland, Utila is among Honduras’ Bay Islands. There is a landing strip to receive flights from the Bay Islands, but unpredictable weather makes scheduling uncertain. Your best bet is to arrive via the Utila Princess passenger ferry, with twice-daily service to and from the mainland port of La Ceiba for 400 lempiras (about US$21).

Honduras’ major airports are Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa (TGU) and the less expensive Ramon Villeda Morales International Airport in San Pedro Sula (SAP). Both serve major airlines via Houston and Miami; and affordable luxury bus service is available to and from La Ceiba.

Staying there: On Utila, modest, affordable accommodations and eateries abound, as well as dive shops and opportunities for scuba certification.

Renting a bicycle or motor scooter is feasible, though most of the island’s populated areas are accessible via long, slow walks.

Information: Visit Utila’s official Web site, AboutUtila.com.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 83

TASTE LIFE FOOD

/CLASSIC/

Primal instincts

It’s summer time, and that means BBQ, as Jacques Windell points out

I

’ve always maintained that the secret to a succulent BBQ lies in treating your meat with respect. Nownow, I meant that in the nicest possible way. I’d even go as far as saying that the art of BBQ-ing is just like courting a lady.

However, the key to a great ‘grilling’ is full-on unbridled mania.

I have found that steak, for example requires a very hot plate or grill and very little time or effort, whilst chicken needs to be pampered till the cows come home. In fact, it’s an absolute art to smoke chicken on the barbie, whilst maintaining succulence.

And if you’re really good, you won’t burn the skin either. In fact, if you really know your stuff it will become the pièce de resistence!

I can hear some of you going ‘yuk’, but

don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. A good skin is a beautiful thing.

Now I know the skin is not the best for you, but life is about risks and a good old calculated risk in the culinary scheme of things every now and again simply adds spice to life, especially if the pay-off is a beautiful thing. There’s nothing wrong with indulging oneself every now and again with the finer things in life. So long as it doesn’t become an obsession. Balance is, after all, king.

I received an e-mail the other day and I must say I had to agree with the lady’s take on the good old Kiwi BBQ. She pointed out that men think they’re doing their wives this huge favour by firing up the BBQ. She argues that they actually believe they’re making this huge contribution. But, who mari-

84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

There’s nothing wrong with indulging oneself every now and again with the finer things in life. So long as it doesn’t become an obsession. Balance is, after all, king

nades the meat, who prepares the snacks, dips and salads? Who ensures the men have all the cooking utensils and spices they need?

Who makes the desert and who has to wash all those dishes, or pack and unpack the dishwasher?

So, I thought maybe it’s time we educate these blokes, me included.

Now the greatest sin I think a bloke can commit around the barbie is to burn the meat. Remember the Jonno Gibbs ad? Well, that’s my brother… It’s a sad thing to see a prime piece of meat die such a heinous death! I mean who in their right mind…?

And then they expect you to eat it!

OK, so what is the difference between grilling and BBQ-ing?

Grilling is fast cooking, at a high temperature any cut of meat or poultry, even vegetables. Sometimes thin sauces or marinades are applied to the food before or during the cooking process to keep the meat moist, because without it, grilling fast at a high heat tends to dry out the meat. That has to be the second greatest culinary sin.

Grilling is recommended for food that requires short cooking times, like steak. It’s also a great way to sear and lock in the juices before BBQ-ing.

To BBQ is to slowcook for several hours any cuts of meat or poultry over for example wood coals. Dry rubs made of various herbs and spices are often applied to the meat.

However, some BBQ-ers forgo the rubs and sauces and let the wood-smoke flavor the food. Some, like me, do both. And did I tell you, it’s a beeauutiful thing.

Like glass blowing it’s now a dying art, but one I believe should really be rejuvenated, because it’s fun!

OK, so you sweat a little… ok, a lot and yes you reek afterwards and your lungs inhale copious quantities of carbon dioxide, but it’s such a little price to pay for excellence!

You can also BBQ a really bad cut of meat and it usually results in a tender, delicious treat that practically falls apart as you eat it. This method works well for delicate foods as well as foods that require longer cooking times.

Some believe, you BBQ when you want whoever you’ve invited, to stay for several hours and grill when you want to get rid of them as soon as possible.

Now that PC is becoming less popular, more of us might now be tempted to grill a bit more.

Now from what you’ve read you might think I’m a bit of a BBQ Beau. You’re right,

I rock! But unfortunately there is just too little space to let you in on all my secrets, so you’re going to have to wait for my book – yeah right.

What I can say is that you can’t have a successfully succulent BBQ without my good friend Portabello. Just a little bit, or a lot of garlic butter or garlic and margarine and you’re ready to experience something near devine. But, Meadow Mushrooms have taken the entire mushroom experience to a totally new planet. No seriously, they have some recipes on their website to absolutely die for. They have also just released their newest taste sensations to titillate those guests you actually do want hanging around.

So, make the effort guys, your wives are worth it!

Grilling Tips ( for gas grills ) 1. Preheat the grill for at least 10 minutes on high. This way it will have time to burn off any bugs or creepy crawlers that might be

hiding on the under side. This will also help to kill any lurking germs.

2. By pre-heating the cooking grids, they will sear the meat to give it nice grill marks, but more importantly, it will keep the meat from sticking to the cooking grate.

3. Scrub grill grates with a wire brush or spatula before and after cooking as it also reduces the risk of the dreaded meat-stick.

4. Oil your grids to prevent food from sticking to the cooking grid or warming racks. You can spray or brush on oil before lighting or spray the food with a mist of oil before placing it on the grid.

5. Avoid grill forks because they pierce the meat which robs it of all its flavour. Use long-handled tongs or a spatula to turn the food instead.

6. Don’t douse a flair-up with water. Just move the meat, or if you have a grill cover, close it.

7. Close grill cover for even cooking and keep closed as much as possible.

Bacon wrapped stuffed mushrooms A classic favourite stuffed mushroom is taken to new heights by wrapping it in a slice of bacon. Simple, it will melt like a genius – the girl will love these. Make 20.

You’ll need: 1. 3-4 chopped spring onions 2. 250 g cream cheese, softened 3. 20 White or Swiss Brown button mushrooms 4. 450g sliced bacon Method Preheat the BBQ. In a medium bowl, mix together the spring onions and cream cheese. Remove mushrooms stalks and stuff the mushrooms with the cheese mixture. Wrap each mushroom with a half-slice of bacon, and secure with toothpicks.

BBQ for 20 minutes until the bacon is crisp and cooked through.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 85

TOUCH LIFE TOYBOX

EPSON EH-TW3600 The Epson EH-TW3600 is the latest high performance home theatre projector from Epson. Aimed at the discerning home theatre enthusiast seeking the benefits of Epson’s inorganic D7 LCD panels and exceptional quality, high contrast images. The EH-TW3600 is a high performer with an affordable price tag. ($3,299 inc GST) Key features: 50,000:1 High Contrast Ratio – Bright whites and deep blacks for stunning image quality Inorganic C2Fine D7 LCD Panels – Previously reserved for our top of the range models, the C2Fine D7 panel delivers long life and amazing picture quality.

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With support for 8 languages, images can be viewed easily and printed with a simple press of a button. Dye sublimation technology features in the SELPHY CP800 to give superb depth and gradation of colour, providing lab quality prints without the hassle and wait. A postcardsize print, for example, can be made in approximately 47 seconds. The SELPHY CP800 is capable of producing postcard (148 x 100mm), L (119 x 89mm), and credit card (86 x 54mm) sized prints in super-quick time.

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SEE LIFE / PAGES

Earthshaking books Michael Morrissey ventures into the quake zone, and attends a tiger hunt QUAKE: The Canterbury Earthquake of 2010

By Ian Stuart (text) and David Wethey (photographs) Harper Collins, $29.00

The Big Quake

By The Press Random House, $34.95 Generally – due to the overwhelming dominance of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel – we think of God (that is, God the father) – as a mature-aged, bearded patriarch who, being a spirit, floats, or even flies. The image is so powerful that it haunts us still, even five hundred years after its conception by the fierce, uncouth Florentine genius who was also a sculptor, architect and writer of sonnets. Powerful as this image is, it cannot be accurate, because since God is a spirit, he cannot have a human form.

I would like to daringly suggest, in the light of recent events, that God who lacks human form (save, of course, for Jesus His Son), has something very human about Him – a great sense of humour. Look at

the absurdly diverse varieties of life He has created. I cannot look at an ostrich without smiling, if not outrightly giggling. Or take the platypus – an animal quipped by Mark Twain to be an so improbable as to be a creature put together by a committee – in contemporary terms a bit of cut and paste with seemingly disconnected slices of DNA. Now to the nub of this eccentric segue.

Christchurch City, our third largest burg, a city of unequalled civic pride, was recently shaken by a powerful 7.1 earthquake. That such a jolt should take no lives is surely either a miracle or God metaphorically laughing up his long sleeves. Even allowing for the fact that the Napier quake was somewhat more powerful, I would amateurishly estimate some two or three thousand fatalities might well have been the order of the hour.

There is no rational explanation for such an absence of death except the Act of God that created the quake in the first place. Mind you, when the summary of other quakes in Quake is examined, all quakes (except the Napier jolt) have produced spectacularly low fatalities. In fairness, it must be noted most were in rural locales. One could not imagine Auckland being so lucky. But then, New

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Zealand’s largest city, is, so far as known, quakeless.

The photographs in the first book Quake have an almost surreal quality – they present us with an architectural rather than a human devastation. Wrecked chimneys, gouged roads, devastated churches. And in the midst of thus ruin, priests and prelates are to be bravely observed offering service and of course the Wizard with his witchy-wizard hat – was he behind it all?

Of course not. Meanwhile, we have copious shots of genial Mayor Bob Parker and Bishop Victoria Matthews looking sartorially composed, much as if they were skiffing on the Avon. It is difficult not to view this deathless tumble of local architecture as a gentleman’s quake, a Cantabrian dress rehearsal for the real shaker long overdue in Wellington.

While the photographs in Quake test the envelope for banality, those in the second book The Big Quake are far more imaginative. Hence the emphasis is much more on people with several delightful shots of children leapfrogging or otherwise playfully reacting to the deep gouges in the earth. In addition, the The Big Quake has

more interesting, better composed photos of destruction wrought on buildings, additional geologic and technical information – and as bonus, a video showing the quake in steady cam. Of the two, The Big Quake, wins this shakedown, hands down.

The Godfather Of Kathmandu

By John Burdett Bantam Publishers, $38.99

Burdett’s three earlier thrillers – all set in Bangkok – were exotically violent, exotically sexual, intricately plotted. A thundering good read, they made Bangkok sound like the wickedest yet most exciting city on earth.

This fourth in the series is alas not up to the standard of the earlier trio. On the face of it, Kathmandu sounds gripping enough – a Tibetan Buddhist master has 40 million dollars worth of heroin to sell and, in the manner of a sub-Dostoyevskian villain, has some intriguingly glib reasons why it’s OK to sell heroin. Comparisons are made with thalidomide, alcohol and other more exotic substances. This reader remains unconvinced. There’s also the gutted body of Frank Charles, a Hollywood film maker who like so many of Burdett’s protagonists has an unhealthy habit of loitering around the red light district.

Instead of moving the action along, as a good thriller should, there is much heavy discussion about the hero Sonchai Jitpleecheep having to explore the numer-

ous transgression of earlier lives on his pathway to enlightenment. The action livens up somewhat when the corrupt Police Colonel Vikorn appears and even more so when the female Australian ‘Mule’ – i.e. drug carrier – make her impassioned plea for freedom while rotting in jail. But after some discussion how the stash of heroin is distributed, the climactic interchange between Vikorn and his arch equally corrupt rival General Zinna, occurs over a large meal in silence.

Go between Jitpleecheep provides the necessary ice breaker dialogue. This lost opportunity for a climax reads like a parody of a James Bond confrontation where Bond outeats his villainous rival in glamorous faceoff.

Throughout the book when there should be action or movement there are monologues about Tibetan history and other cultural cu de sacs. Despite occasional frissons about the now familiar down town Bangkok night life, The Godather of Kathmandu. never takes off as a thriller. However, the three preceding rip-roaring Bangkok thrillers are well worth a visit.

ATLANTIC: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

By Simon Winchester Harper Collins , $40

Simon Winchester has become one of the outstanding creative non-fiction writers of our time. Part history, part naturalism, part catastrophic geography – all of

these ingredients go into the fizzing crockpot of his hectic, gloriously fact-studded prose. Among his books are Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World, The Map that Changed the World and most recently, Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China. And now Winchester has tackled the Atlantic. No small subject!

Winchester draws his Atlantic frame up from Shakespeare’s arguably most well known quote from All the World ‘s Stage which begins: At first the Infant Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms And then takes us stage by stage through Schoolboy, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Pantaloon, Second Childishness – hardly a formula to tame the great grey Atlantic I would have thought. But in his artful learned essayist’s way, Winchester convinces you that his mighty somewhat forced metaphor is just what the ship’s captain ordered. And isn’t Shakespeare, the eternal bard, always already to lend a hand to any compelling argument under the sun?

Like all things that seem eternal, the Atlantic also has a limited life and is only ten million years old in its present form. So one day, it will transmogrify into a post-Atlantic. Perhaps it won’t even be grey anymore.

Winchester bombards us with a boat load of Atlantic arcana that, depending on your reading, will be familiar or obscure. I had heard of the wonderfully and mysteriously named Green Sea of Darkness, teaming

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 89

Markov, the first victim, an experienced hunter, wound up as no more than a hand and a head without face. Of the second victim, Vaillant says there was scarcely enough to slip into the pocket of a shirt. Despite the raw ferocity of the attacks, none of the people in the area wanted other tigers shot, just this particular tiger

with sea dragons and so forth, but did not know that it was first skilfully navigated by Gil Eannes in 1432. This opened the way for such later more famous navigators as Columbus and Cabot and the great Amerigo Vespucci, who first revealed the Atlantic in all its extended grandeur.

News to me was the great controversy about Vinland – that sector of North America reputedly reached some five hundred years before Columbus. I was aware of the fact, not the controversy. The first evidence of the claim rested on a fragile map but like like so many maps – like the Shroud of Turin – it become controversy without resolve until some actual Viking ruins were located. A structure proved a lot more solid than a crumbling map. Thus was the matter more or less settled. A Norseman crossed the Atlantic before an Italian. Why then, one wonders, does the cruel Columbus still get the lion’s share of the glory? Perhaps because Columbus had a head start of four hundred years. Perhaps because colourful myth sometimes has more persuasion than plainer truth.

Extended consideration of individuals is scanty in the grand sweep of Winchester’s survey – perhaps too much so. There is mention of Joshua Slocum, first man to single handedly sail round the world (1898) and an extended quote of his clear, honest prose. Cortes, is passed over and Pizarro not even mentioned!

I’d have liked to hear more about sea monsters like the Midgard Serpent or the Old Hag (!) and a 200-foot long Norwegian sea serpent.

In his broad sweep, Winchester often takes time out for the fascinating if not esoteric footnote. Take this little gem: Prince Alfred, Victoria’s second son, tipped

the inaugural truckload of riprap (?) into South Africa’s first Atlantic Docks 1860. As the second Duke Of Edinburgh, he had already given his name to the tiny capital of Tristan da Cunha (the Atlantic’s and the world’s most isolated and inhabited island), had survived an assassination attempt while having a picnic in Sydney (his Irish assailant was hanged for daring to try), and had married the daughter of the Russian Czar, Marie, who still has a popular biscuit named after her.

I can only assume such salty detail is intended (so to speak) to compensate for the omission of Pizarro.

The Tiger

By John Vaillant Sceptre,$40 Not everyone knows that the world’s largest cat is not the lion but the Siberian Tiger, also commonly known as the Amur tiger. It can measure 14 foot from nose to tail and has been known to top 800 pounds. It can withstand temperatures of fifty below and as much above. Neither revolver nor a dum dum bullet nor a BZ bullet – that can penetrate three quarters of an inch of steel – can stop it in mid charge.

In 1997, a large specimen weighing between 500 and 700 pounds, killed two people. Rumour had it – a rumour strongly supported by the author of the book – that the first victim had killed a tiger cub and was therefore the object of the tiger’s vengeance.

When a tiger turns man eater, the title is not given lightly or easily. Markov, the first victim, an experienced hunter, wound up as no more than a hand and a head without face. Of the second victim, Vaillant says

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there was scarcely enough to slip into the pocket of a shirt. Despite the raw ferocity of the attacks, none of the people in the area wanted other tigers shot, just this particular tiger.

The Tiger is the gripping story of the hunt for this ferocious man eater by experienced woodsmen, not just big game trophy hunters. It is an enthralling read from start to finish written in a superb prose style.

Set against this solitary man-eating tiger (which is of course eventually shot after a grippingly prolonged chase) is that the fact that between 1992 and 1994 some one hundred tigers were poached for the animal parts trade based in China.

The central protagonist of this tiger saga is Yuri Trush, squad leader of an Inspection Tiger Unit. As described, he is one tough hombre. Six feet two, he trains by lifting a kettlebell overhead, a large cannonball with a handle. He has studied karate, aikido, knife handling, “His fists are knuckled mallets and he can break bricks with them..” However, in the one photograph of this formidable man, he is shown smiling, amiable. Having described Trush, Vaillant settles into describing the Siberian tiger. Its thickly maned head can be as broad as a man’s chest. The teeth can cut through the heaviest bone. The four claws are needle-sharp and the length comparable to that of the talons on a velociraptor. It can drag a thousand pound carcass through the forest for fifty to one hundred yards.

With such a such a formidable animal, inclusion in local mythology is almost inevitable. The local indigenous peoples – Udeghe, Nania, and Orochi – claim the tiger as a direct ancestor. There are many stories in their legends of tigers taking human wives or husbands.

In the breadth of his story, Vaillaint includes much political background about China and Russia, perhaps a little too much but it makes for a rich tapestry.

Does Vaillant anthropomorphise his tiger too much? Reluctantly, the answer must be yes. At first with Markov, one says yes, the tiger is stalking him, but when Vaillant writes, “the tiger’s theory of mind is not as sophisticated as ours” this reader baulks.

How can a tiger have a theory of mind?

The animal reacts in a complex variety of impulses but cannot be said to have a theory of mind.

Notwithstanding these, as it were, minor reservations, this is a terrific read. The lead up to the climactic killing of the animal is the stuff of cinema. Buy it and be thrilled...

For real Christmas stories for your children or grandchildren

Amy Brooke’s latest tale of the Holly and the Ivy “The Holly and the Ivy when they are both full-grown of all the trees that are in the wood The Holly bears the Crown…”

Christmas has always been a special time for Holly. But when once again she is too unwell to go out with the carol singers on Christmas Eve, she is disappointed. She is puzzled too, by a strange dream that has begun to come to her as she falls asleep.

When her tall, mysterious aunt from the North arrives to stay, the dream begins to take a different shape, as the old stories from far-off times in history and legend times meet the new hope of Christmas, and the wonder of a very special child.

•

New Zealand children’s writer Amy Brooke’s wonderfully imaginative stories have been compared to those of C.S. Lewis Narnia’s stories and Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising). Avoiding the current fad of politically correct storytelling for children, she writes timeless tales for the real child reader which stand the test of time, magical, inimitable, and engaging.

Illustrated by Dean Raybould

The Third Star & Other Stories

Magical stories for younger children where the Little Folk come back again, a grey cat is not what it seems, a hungry little mouse has a wonderful surprise, and a spoilt little girl learns a lesson just in time! And if you loved the Milly Mandy Molly stories of your childhood, don’t miss the happiness of Jasper and Granny May Again, The Golden Firepot or the poignant and moving The Duck Who Went to Heaven.

Don’t miss Amy Brooke’s wonderfully imaginative stories for children and young adults.

“Quite simply, New Zealand’s best children’s writer.”

All Amy Brooke’s books can be ordered from Nationwide Books info@nationwidebooks.co.nz

V i s i t w w w. a m y b r o o k e . c o . n z

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010 91

SEE LIFE / MUSIC

Brooke’s frayed it Chris Philpott finds too much Hillsong, not enough Brooke in new Fraser album Brooke Fraser

Kings of Leon

Taylor Swift

Brooke Fraser is one of those local artists that people either love or hate.

On the one hand you have Fraser fans, who claim that Wellington-born Brooke is a song-writing genius with a beautiful voice and style. On the other hand you have a crowd of detractors who will gladly tell you that she isn’t doing anything really new or unique, and often harp on about her Christian influences ruining the lyrics of her songs.

When it comes to that second crowd, Flags isn’t going to change any minds.

Aside from opener “Something In The Water”, a peculiar country-folk song that sounds more like bluegrass than pop, the opening half-dozen tracks are slow, downbeat tracks that may have started life as rejected suggestions for the latest Hillsong album.

To be fair, Brooke has spent most of the last few years at the Sydney megachurch, so you could almost forgive her for falling into that particular style. However the grandiose, crescendo-laden style that permeates from Hillsong worship albums simply don’t suit a pop album like this, and therein lies Flags’ biggest weakness.

There are a few decent tracks here which will please fans, but Flags is a sub-par album to more objective ears.

For a while it seemed like Kings of Leon – the American rock band made up of three brothers and a cousin – could do no wrong as they released a string of hit singles, and toured the world to play at sold out arenas and stadiums.

Earlier this year they hit a bump in the road, after refusing to play a concert because of pigeon poop, and their reputation slid considerably. Their newest album was released this month with very little promotion and received a poor response from fans.

Though, I get the sense that the group’s reputation wasn’t the only problem. Come Around Sundown mostly relies on a much more mainstream, laidback, Southern rock sound than previous albums, which could be problematic for long-time fans.

It’s not all bad. Gospel-tinged first single “Radioactive” is catchy, and opener “The End” is a hard rocker. But aside from a few highlights, the majority of the album is a contrived attempt to recreate the success of hit singles like “Sex On Fire” and “Use Somebody”.

Maybe Come Around Sundown is a mediocre record. Maybe fans and casual listeners have just had enough of Kings Of Leon.

Either way, make sure you approach this new album cautiously.

You might know of Taylor Swift as the country-pop diva who has sold over 15 million albums, won a swag of Country Music, MTV and Grammy awards, and became the centre of a controversy after Kanye West stormed the stage during one of her acceptance speeches to announce that another nominee deserved to win.

Alternatively, you might know her through her appearances with the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus on the Disney Channel.

That was the case for me – my 9 year old daughter plays her 2008 album Fearless on loop after finding her through her Disney appearances, which made me apprehensive about reviewing her latest album Speak Now. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was actually a decent piece of work.

Sure, it sways towards mainstream pop – Swift’s vocal is the centre-piece of an array of typical pop arrangements, based around her trademark acoustic country sound – but somewhere between opener “Mine” and the title track (right around catchy second track “Sparks Fly”, in fact), I noticed that I was actually enjoying the album.

It’s a little corny at times and can seem a little generic, but song-for-song Speak Now is far better than the average pop album, and definitely worth checking out.

Flags 2 stars

Come Around Sundown 3 stars

92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM December 2010

Speak Now 4 stars

OUT NOW

Exclusively from tgifedition.com

SEE LIFE / MOVIES

The inconvenient environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s new documentary takes the heat out of Al Gore’s scare stories Cool It

Directed by: Ondi Timoner Rated: PG (for thematic elements) Running time: 87 minutes 4 stars If Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth left you feeling as if we’ve already lost the battle against global warming, Cool It is a tantalizing counterpoint that will make you wonder if maybe we’ve just been going about it the wrong way.

Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial Danish economist/political scientist at the center of filmmaker Ondi Timoner’s energetic new documentary, doesn’t find Gore’s truth inconvenient so much as distorted, a position that has made him about as popular as a toxic spill in many circles both left and right.

The film hits that head on, throwing up a lot of footage early to suggest how radical, and how widely attacked, some of Lomborg’s theories have been – the most serious levelled (and later overturned) by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty against his 2001 bestseller, The Skeptical Environmentalist. The committee’s name says it all. Then Timoner proceeds to knock

down each critique so she can get back to the business at hand, which is twofold: dismantling conventional wisdom about global warming as preached by Gore, and providing a range of alternative solutions to the energy alternatives we’re currently betting the environmental bank on.

Just how inculcated the precepts of filmmaker Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth have become is laid out in the artwork and answers of a classroom of articulate elementary school kids in Britain that Timoner uses to open the film.

Their hand-drawn paintings of an Earth mostly covered by water, dying penguins and massive deserts pretty much sum up the current consensus on the toll of unchecked global warming. Their solutions will sound just as familiar: recycling, carbon offsetting, hybrid cars, a lot of light bulb replacement and, as one puts it, “I pray a lot.”

Lomborg isn’t suggesting we shouldn’t worry, but he does resist what he contends are the fear tactics and overstatements being used to get our attention. He is, after all, a numbers guy, so when he convened a think tank to look at how the $250 billion a year the European Union plans to spend on car-

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bon offsets might be better spent, the group was packed with top economists drawn from around the world. Basically, he argues there are ways to divert some of those funds to address poverty, disease and education without slowing things on the global warming front if we look for ways to spend more wisely. Needless to say, he has a few ideas.

With its follow-the-money mind-set, the documentary works its way through problem and solution many times over, always in a brisk, no-nonsense way. By bringing in a diverse group of big thinkers to take part in a very animated, sometimes agitated, discussion, the filmmaker has succeeded in bringing what could have been a dry mountain of data, theories and experimental research to vibrant life.

Timoner came to the project a skeptic herself, and that serves the film well. Though the charismatic Lomborg is very much the center of the storm, she lines up an impressive number of experts from the environmental and scientific research community to stand on either side of the divide. Nearly every assertion Lomborg makes is met by a devil’s advocate – though the late Stephen Schneider, Nobel winner, MacArthur fel-

low and long a professor of environmental biology at Stanford University, carries much of that load. Still, there is little doubt from the beginning who will win the final round.

Controversial subjects seem to suit the filmmaker. Whether her subject here sharpened her or we would have seen it regardless, Cool It is her most sophisticated and satisfying work yet. The narrative, which she wrote with Terry Botwick, keeps surprising, the pacing rarely lags (though we could have done with fewer shots of Lomborg biking to work) and cinematographer Nasar Abich Jr. makes the most of the people and landscapes he captures.

As the story shifts from Lomborg to the scientists experimenting with ways to offset global warming, we get a look at the possibilities. The range of ideas is eclectic, from the practical simplicity of cooling cities by changing the color of the streets to highly complex systems designed to alter atmospheric conditions. By suggesting there is light at the end of the global warming tunnel, Timoner has made Cool It a hopeful film. We just have to know where to look for the switch.

– By Betsy Sharkey

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Mikael Nykvist Directed by: Daniel Alfredson Rated: R (for strong violence, sexual material and brief language) Running time: 147 minutes 3 stars Sullen, seething, sexy Lisbeth Salander is back for a poignant farewell in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. For those who haven’t met the heroine of Swedish thriller novelist Stieg Larsson’s smash Millennium trilogy yet, Lisbeth is the thinking man’s (and woman’s) Lara Croft. She’s a computer hacker extraordinaire, an indestructible martial artist and a vengeful moralist, with enough emotional scar tissue and awful secrets to make her odd and fascinating. She lashes out brutally, but the bad guys deserve retribution. They are evil with a capital “E” and six exclamation points.

The concluding chapter in her adventures finds her recovering from near-fatal wounds inflicted by her monstrous father, a sadistic Soviet defector living under government protection in Sweden. If Lisbeth survives, she’ll be put on trial for three murders that were truly acts of self-defense. Unless she’s

whacked by a secret government outfit murderously safeguarding their Russian accomplice. And then there’s all that unfinished business with her crime-fighting partner and erstwhile lover, journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

The film huffs and wheezes under the strain of this much narrative baggage. Niels Arden Oplev directed the crackerjack first installment, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, hustling the story along with athletic grace.

All the Larsson adaptations suffer from overstuffed screenplays and XXL running times.

You cut scenes from bestsellers at peril of the fans’ ire. But director Daniel Alfredson, who helmed The Girl Who Played with Fire and this chapter, lacks Oplev’s knack for giving static stories an illusion of breakneck momentum.

This film suffers from a strain of George Lucas Disease, wherein sequels to a great yarn suffer a spectacular drop in quality.

Symptoms include disoriented plotlines, wooden characters, loss of mood, pace and tone, declining dramatic tension and listless dialog.

Blomkvist talks to his colleagues at Millennium magazine about printers’ deadlines. Spies conspire over which strategy will most effectively silence Salander. Lawyers drone on in protracted courtroom scenes.

Everyone filibusters except Lisbeth, who spends the first quarter of the movie silent and immobile in her hospital bed, recuperating from the bullet her father put in her head.

Noomi Rapace, with her severe beauty and stony glare, dominates her scenes even when she’s lying on her back. You can’t help but admire her presence; she acts her heart out. But you wish she’d get back into fighting form and bust some heads.

Instead, it’s Blomkvist, the sedentary middle-aged writer, who has a life-or-death wrestling match with a machine-gunning killer.

Mikael Nykvist plays the muckraking journalist with the solemn melancholy of an Ingmar Bergman depressive. His throwdown with the assassin is absurd, but it gives him something to do.

Throughout this film and the one before his relationship with Lisbeth has been sidelined as he has risked his life to defend her against trumped-up murder charges. That’s a dramatic mistake, like separating Holmes from Watson or Starsky from Hutch. The weird dynamic of their bond – Blomkvist imagining that he can touch Lisbeth’s wounded heart and save her, she attracted to a good man who echoes the father figures who abused her since childhood – was an irresistibly unstable psychological time bomb.

Blomkvist talks his sister Annika, a feminist attorney, into defending Salander. The hugely pregnant lawyer is another of Larsson’s woman warriors, smart, resourceful, empathetic and fiercely moral. The too-convenient resolution of the court case wouldn’t pass muster on Law and Order, but it puts across an important character point. Annika’s fierce advocacy shows Lisbeth that she can lower her guard occasionally and trust another human.

Exactly how prepared she is to open herself up to threatening feelings of vulnerability is played out in the finale.

After spending most of the last two films apart, Rapace and Nykvist exchange meaningful glances before a climactic sound effect tells the tale. You may not like the resolution the film offers, but you have to respect its emotional truthfulness.

– By Colin Covert

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SEE LIFE / THE CUTTING ROOM

NEWSCOM

Ford perfect Colin Covert talks to Harrison Ford about life as a film icon When you’ve carried three worldwide-hit franchises by outgunning spaceships, outrunning giant boulders and outwitting international terrorists, you’re entitled to kick back and have a little fun. Which explains what action-hero extraordinaire Harrison Ford is doing in Morning Glory, an ensemble comedy set behind the scenes of a floundering network morning show.

Morning Glory finds a comic angle on Ford’s cantankerous-maverick persona. He plays Mike Pomeroy, a high-profile TV anchor irate at his demotion to a news-lite program. In a recent phone interview, Ford conceded that there may be aspects of his personality in the Pomeroy character. Like the obstinate newsman he plays, Ford has his standards. And he fights for them.

He first appeared in the mid-1960s on TV’s The Mod Squad and Ironside, but learned carpentry so that his choices wouldn’t be dictated by financial concerns. Even early in his career he was dismissive of material he considered substandard. Ford repeated for me his blunt reaction to the awkward dia-

logue in George Lucas’ Star Wars script. “I told him quite simply, ‘George, you can type this (expletive), but you sure can’t say it.’ “ No mere naysayer, Ford can be a superb collaborator. He ad-libbed some of his most memorable (and hilarious) moments as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. During production of The Empire Strikes Back, Ford objected to Han uncharacteristically echoing Princess Leia’s declaration of love before he was frozen alive.

Director Irvin Kershner allowed Ford to improvise a take, in which he responded to Leia’s “I love you” with “I know.” Lucas reportedly was furious, but that was the take he ultimately used.

On Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford was stricken with food poisoning on the day he was slated to battle a swordsman in an elaborate fight scene. Ford had a better idea: Indy unholsters his gun and blows the bad guy away, creating one of the movie’s most memorable moments.

Morning Glory, written by The Devil Wears Prada’s Aline Brosh McKenna, had no need

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of script repairs. The story gave Ford a rich, multifaceted character slinging sharp dialogue. He glowers as his lighter-than-air cohost, played by Diane Keaton, banters her way through mundane cooking segments and inane celebrity gossip. He pulls rank on his chipper, inexperienced producer (Rachel McAdams) by rattling off his death-defying exploits in war zones, then drops the big one: “I had lunch with Dick Cheney.” Pomeroy’s egocentric tantrums simultaneously embarrass and endear him to us.

Morning Glory requires Ford to explore the hidden anxieties of a public person. The actor himself is famously protective of his privacy. Ask him about his love of flying – he earned his private pilot certificate in 1996 at 54 – and he’ll tell you that he enjoys the freedom, the responsibility of doing things for himself and the convenience of commuting to his film locations by helicopter.

While it’s a heck of an entrance, “I try to be discreet about it,” he said drolly.

What he doesn’t mention are the “angel flights” he pilots. Ford was the honorary chairman of Cessna’s 2010 Special Olympics Airlift, transporting athletes to Lincoln, Neb., for the games in July. He has shared his passion for flying as chairman of the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Young Eagles program, and has given hundreds of kids their first ride in a general-aviation plane.

Though he doesn’t carry a soapbox, Ford is strongly committed to fighting hunger and environmental concerns. In typically self-deprecating fashion, he starred in a public-service announcement for conservation. org that dramatized the effects of deforestation by having his chest hair waxed. “Every bit of rain forest that gets ripped out over there hurts over here,” he says as a technician applies a cloth spread with hot wax and tears off a bald swath.

Ford is the third-highest-grossing actor in film history, after Tom Hanks and Eddie Murphy. His explanation for his enduring popularity? “I’m like old shoes. I was never enough in fashion that I had to be replaced by something new.”

Ford’s next role is a return to large-scale action with a twist. He plays an Arizona landowner who joins forces with Apaches to fight extraterrestrials in Cowboys & Aliens. Also in his posse are Daniel Craig, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Adam Beach.

After that there’s talk of a fifth Indiana Jones film and possibly a Cowboys & Aliens sequel.

“We’ll have to see how this one is received,” he said. “But I have very high hopes.”