Investigate magazine March 2010

NO ONE GETS CLOSER

INVESTIGATE March 2010:

Green Police

The Green Police • Larry Ellison • Melting Credibility

The Nanny State control freaks who’re getting paid to raid your trash, monitor your mileage and soften you up for tough new climate laws

Helen Mirren As Tolstoy’s Wife

Team Ellison

What drives the new America’s Cup magnate?

Melting Credibility Issue 110

Everything you wanted to ask about climate changebut were too afraid to ask

Identity Crisis

How hackers stole one man’s life, job and fortune

$8.30 March 2010

You’ve already been swimming with the dolphins...

Our one-stop connection will have you in Phuket same day.

Fly THAI to the world, smooth as silk.

For more information and details of our latest special deals, ask your travel agent.

www.thaiairways.com

publiceye_2290_INVEST

INVESTIGATEdigital This is the Adobe Flash edition of Investigate magazine. To zoom in, simply click the mouse on the page, then use the mouse to move the page.

Whilst back issues will appear publicly online after they’ve gone off sale at the newsstands, you can purchase a premium digital subscription and get a link to the latest editions as they’re published.

If you prefer, you can also purchase a fully functional PDF of the magazine to save to your disk – putting the text of the entire issue at your fingertips.

For all these options and more, visit our webstore: http://www.tgifedition.com For access to our news feeds, story archives and blogs, visit our main site: http://www.investigatemagazine.com In the meantime, enjoy, and feel free to share this edition with friends and colleagues.

速 速

Ver y R are 11ct Diamond Pa le Yellow Vs 2 $236,0 0 0

5.04ct Idea l cut F/SI 2 Handmade in platinum

333 333 REM REM UER UER A A ROAD, ROAD, AUCK AUCK L LA AN N D. D. PHON PHON E E 09 09 520 520 1092 1092 Available tax free Available tax free W W W. A N T W W W. A N T HEASJEW HEASJEW ELLERS.CO.NZ ELLERS.CO.NZ

CONTENTS Volume 10, Issue 110, ISSN 1175-1290

F EATURES

28

The Green Police

You might think we’re kidding, but as governments bring in carbon controls they’re also setting up new laws and restrictions on the public, and some countries already have “Green Police”. IAN WISHART examines the rise of “Nanny World”

The Ellison Cup

Melting Credibility

Teaching Abstinence?

He’s worked for years to get his hands on the Auld Mug, now Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison gets to finally play host. BRANDON BAILEY profiles the man behind the mug

Everything you ever wanted to know about global warming but were too afraid to ask.

Retired science educator DR BILL PEDDIE pulls together the story behind climate change

A new study stuns sex educators – abstinence programmes are more effective than ordinary sex education classes. JENNIFER MARSHALL argues the case for spreading a little abstinence around

The Catcher’s Wry Author

Identity Crisis

36

38

When controversial writer J D Salinger passed away at the end of January, he left behind an enigma. ELAINE WOO has the story

60

The case for a decent firewall and antivirus system couldn’t be made any plainer, after drive by hackers managed to steal one man’s identity, his life-savings and his job prospects.

JENNIFER WATERS reports

Cover: Dreamstime

54

EDITORIAL & OPINION

16

68

Focal Point Editorial

Vox-Populi The roar of the crowd

Simply Devine

Miranda Devine on National Standards

Mark Steyn

America’s next money meltdown

Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on John Minto

18

Line 1

Chris Carter on TV sleaze

L IFESTYLE

Fading Empires Hal G P Colebatch on an English sunset

Contra Mundum

Matt Flannagan on the origin of morality

Money

80

Peter Hensley on the next Crash

Education

Amy Brooke on Teacher standards

Science Whalesong

Technology The Prius recall

Sport

Chris Forster on the Super 14

Health

22

Claire Francis on iodine

Alt.Health

The antioxidants

Pages

Michael Morrissey’s summer reads

Music

Chris Philpott’s CD reviews

Travel

Movies

Food

Cutting Room

Italy’s five lands James Morrow on fried chieken

Films to avoid

Helen Mirren is Tolstoy’s wife

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart | Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart | NZ EDITION Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com | Contributing Writers: Melody Towns, Selwyn Parker, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Francis, 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. Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd

For more information contact H.E. Perry Ltd. phone: 0800 10 33 88 | email: sales@heperry.co.nz | www.olympus.com

Often clicked...never eaten trust Olympus

The new E-620 from Olympus Plenty of time to point and scoot

FOCAL POINT

Editorial Windfarm madness

AS THIS MAGAZINE GOES TO PRESS, VARIOUS COMMU nities around New Zealand are fighting rear-

guard actions to prevent massive windfarms from being installed on rural or conservation department land in their communities.

One such is in a double World Heritage site south of Mt Tongariro.

Sadly, with National’s Nick Smith as Environment Minister, but also Climate Change Minister, there’s a bit of a conflict of interest as he has to choose between the Good Ol’ Nick or the Bad Ol’ Nick on his shoulders.

Let’s make his decision easier. Ditch the windfarms. Despite being the centrepiece of a Green party investment scheme for a while, wind technology is a novelty destined to die a horrible death. For a start, it’s unreliable.

The wind does not always blow, particularly at night, and during the downtime other power stations have to take up the slack. In New Zealand, as has already been the experience overseas, it would most likely be coalfired plants switched on and off as back-up, particularly in hot, dry spells.

The greater the portion of electricity generated by wind, the greater the risk of grid collapse in a sudden calm spell.

Some would argue that as a maritime nation New Zealand is well placed to capture offshore winds. Well, yes. But look at what happened in Hawaii: “But even in a place where wind-shaped trees grow sideways, maintenance issues were overwhelming,” reports American Thinker of one Hawaiian windfarm. “By 2004 Kamaoa accounts began to show up on a Hawaii State Department of Finance list of unclaimed properties. In 2006, transmission was finally cut off by Hawaii Electric Company.

“California’s wind farms – then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity – ceased to generate much 6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, postindustrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”

Abandoned? Yes, it appears so. An industry of unreliable technology that essentially owes its existence to massive taxpayer subsidies under the guise of climate change simply ups-stakes and runs away when taxpayers decide the corporate should be paying a bigger share.

“European wind developers are fleeing the EU’s expiring wind subsidies, shutter-

ing for 25% of power to be generated by wind. However, Danish engineers said this: “The incentives for wind power have been analysed and are found inadequate in all scenarios except the low wind Reference scenario. This means that the development of wind power to a level of more than 10% of the electricity in 2025 will be dependent on a subsidy scheme. This however has no influence on the socioeconomic analysis but the cost of the scheme would have to be paid by the consumers.”

The Danes further identify that government plans to incentivise electric vehicles

ing factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake.

But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.”

A Danish academic study done for Transpower in 2008 on New Zealand’s plans for windfarms and electric vehicles reveal some interesting factoids, at odds with official government statements. The government, for example, has said that NZ windfarms won’t need subsidies and is aim-

will of course lead owners to plug in their cars to charge at night and therefore “will raise the minimum price in the system and thereby contribute significantly to the incentives for wind power”. Watch your power bill go up because your neighbour buys an electric car.

Classic.

Never re-type aNother documeNt agaiN! OmniPage is the most accurate document conversion software ever – guaranteed!

neW VersiOn!

With 99%+ character accuracy, one-click conversion to Microsoft Office and universal compatibility with any scanner, OmniPage 17 is the one tool to do it all — no other OCR software does as much, does it as accurately or does it as easily.

The combination of superior accuracy and functionality means OmniPage 17 saves organisations significant time and money by radically improving the ways in which paper and digital documents are processed, archived and shared.

What’s neW? New in both OmniPage 17 and OmniPage Professional 17

• Increased word accuracy • Improved layout and formatting accuracy • Faster launch times • Improved multi-core parallel processing • Easy loader • One-click toolbar in Microsoft Office • Asian language recognition • Automatic Asian language detection • Improved digital camera 3DC technology • Flexible interface • Improved “Quick convert” view • Improved PDF-MRC optimisation The Professional version of OmniPage 17 also includes the award-winning* desktop document management software, PaperPort and PDF Create software that allows you to create a 100% industry-standard PDF file from any application.

With OmniPage Professional 17 you can automatically batch convert files; use multi-function printers to automatically scan and convert high-volumes of documents; monitor, recognise and convert files from incoming emails directly to your network; access scanned files from anywhere in your organisation; archive documents directly into Microsoft SharePoint; highlight and redact document data to improve collaboration; and maintain confidentiality. * PC Magazine Editor’s choice award

New features exclusive to OmniPage Professional 17

• Native ECM connectivity • Improved SharePoint 2007 integration dd

aVailable frOm yOur Preferred sOftWare suPPlier, Or Via Our retail Partners:

www.mistralsoftware.co.nz © 2009 Nuance Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Nuance, the Nuance logo, OmniPage, PaperPort, and RealSpeak are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 7

VOX POPULI

Communiques The roar of the crowd

In support of Dak

George Soros is a Civil Libertarian [really?

Ed.] as I am myself. He has made lots of money and doesn’t need to make any more [really? Ed.], so he has been looking for some worthy causes to spend his money on. It is completely false for Investigate to allege that his motive has been to make more money.

Soros has decided that ending the war on drugs, which is really a war on people, would be one such worthy cause.

Ian Wishart’s diatribe against marijuana is misleading and shows that he has little real knowledge about this remarkable herb.

There are several points to consider in getting the true picture.

One important right is the right for people to take risks so long as uninvolved people are not affected. Thus we have the right to ride motorbikes even though they are a potent cause of severe injuries and deaths.

Marijuana is much safer than motorbikes and no confirmed deaths have resulted from use of this benevolent herb. There is no good reason for it to be prohibited and people should have the right to use it.

While there is an association of marijuana use with mental illness this can be explained by the fact that people with mental illness, or those who are predisposed to it, are attracted into using mind-altering drugs.

Various studies have showed no detectable increase in mental illness after a big increase in the prevalence of marijuana.

There are other risky pastimes such as mountaineering or sailing in small boats, and water sports in general. But none of these are prohibited despite a large number of deaths and injuries caused by them.

Using marijuana is much safer than any of the above activities and marijuana has been shown to be one of the least toxic drugs known to modern medicine.

It cannot be denied that there is a resi8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

due of marijuana metabolites retained in the body after its ingestion. But the metabolites are not psychoactive and have no adverse effects on attention demanding tasks.

No official Government appointed Commission of Inquiry into marijuana has ever issued an adverse report on the drug. For instance the 1998 report of the New Zealand Government Health Select Committee ‘Inquiry into the Mental Health Effects of Cannabis’ recommended that: based on the evidence received, the Government review the appropriateness of existing policy on cannabis and its use and reconsider the legal status of cannabis.’

Drug prohibitions do not work and have a tremendous cost to society. Marijuana is simply not going to go away just because it is prohibited. Use of marijuana does not produce victims but prohibition certainly does. For instance the American alcohol prohibition led to an explosion of real victim crime committed by gangsters like Al Capone. Here in N.Z. there has been an enormous rise in the rate of real victim crime coincident with the rigorous prosecution of victimless drug crime. The associated costs are enormous. One should consider that in historic times when all drugs were legal, New Zealand was not destroyed by drugs.

The low casualty rate then from actual drug use was about the same as it is now under prohibition. But in those days there was no high costs of enforcing drug prohibitions and hence a zero rate of imprisonment associated with drug production and use. Surely the most sensible course of action would be to end the futile prohibition of marijuana.

David R Currie M.Sc. Auckland 1958 (Author of ‘Marijuana – facts and the case for legalisation’)

Editor responds

David, with respect, what are you smoking??

Marijuana can be found in the blood of virtu-

ally every serious criminal in this country. The article you’ve evaded in this letter was chock full of hard data on the upsurge in violent and other crimes in the Netherlands in the wake of its liberal dope experiment.

Secondly, you are perpetuating the myth that police are routinely busting poor old marijuana users to weed out use of the drug. No they’re not.

I was a crime reporter for nearly a decade with extensive police contacts. Police go after growers and distribution networks, but sometimes all they can ping someone on is possession, rather than possession for supply, because the supply quantity has already been stashed somewhere else or moved on.

Thousands of New Zealanders, if you bothered to ask, would tell you how they have tried to report tinnie houses in their areas and been met with a shrug and “we’re too busy” from their local police.

This concept of the poor persecuted middle class dope smoker is a myth that gets pushed to the media, but it doesn’t reflect the cannabis industry.

As I indicated in an editorial for TGIF Edition on this, I’m quite happy to take a libertarian approach to cannabis use – let adults decide – but only on the basis that I don’t have to fund one cent in welfare, health or other similar payments to a person who’s become unemployable/mentally ill etc from marijuana exposure. You want the right? Great, take the responsibility.

Then there’s the issue of childcare. Most of the celebrated child abuse/child murder cases in New Zealand happen in homes with significant drug use, including marijuana. You claim marijuana is a victimless crime. Really? What price do the tamariki pay for stoned parents?

Now, yes, we can build alcohol into that mix and indeed we should, but pretending as you try to do that marijuana is mostly harmless is a load of old cobblers. The overseas studies I quoted suggest otherwise.

LARGE VENUE Powerful Easy Install Dual Lamp High Definition

EDUCATION Teacher Friendly

HOME THEATRE

Reliability Long Lamp Life

Stunning Picture Quality 1080p Resolution 200,000:1 Contrast Ratio

Ultra Short Throw

MEETING ROOMS Bright Wide Screen Wide Connectivity

BUSINESS TRAVELER Light Weight Portable Wireless PC Free

RELIABILITY, QUALITY AND RANGE. Whatever your application, Epson provides the perfect solution - a range that IT ALL STACKS UP TOWith MAKE EPSON Whatever your application, provides perfect solution - a of range that soldNUMBER 1. delivers on price,Epson performance andthe reliability. millions projectors delivers on worldwide, price, performance reliability. millions the of projectors sold Epson is and a clear numberWith 1; leading way in technological worldwide, development Epson is aand clear number 1;such leading theshort waythrow, in technological offering features as ultra wireless connectivity, Whatever your application, Epson provides the perfect solution - a range that delivers on price,

superb picture quality and much It all stacks up to is make Epson Number 1. development and offering features such as more. ultrasold short throw,Epson wireless connectivity, performance and reliability.

With millions of projectors worldwide, a clear number 1; leading the wayquality in technological development offering features such as ultra short throw, wireless superb picture and much more. and It all stacks up to make Epson Number 1. connectivity, superb picture quality and much more. It all stacks up to make Epson Number 1.

For information on our range of projectors call 0800 EPSON 4 (0800 377 664) or visit epson.co.nz

For information on our range of projectors call 0800 EPSON 4 (0800 377 664) or visit epson.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  March 2010  9

A cannabi supporter writes

I agree with your editorial in the latest GIF magazine. I would much rather see the endless violence, destruction of property, family sufferings etc that go with a few legal drinks and the stink, filth and cost to health that go with a few harmless and also legal fags than allow adult persons to make up there own minds about what is a Drug and what isn’t and what’s good for them and what isn’t.

(Let’s not ban Beer drinkers and Smokers from the health system as well) Just last week I had a beer bottle courtesy of Mr Myers throw 30 meters up my driveway at my Car but I only laughed as we all can do this with a few beers because mate we are just Bloody Hard Cases A Bro, William Stronach, via email

The right to debate

I write a response to Judith Hill’s letter, entitled ‘The right to debate’, in your February 2010 issue. I have read Ken Orr’s letter ‘Down syndrome, search and destroy’, in the December 2009 issue, and find few objections in it.

However, we need to remove the term ‘rights’ from our vocabulary when it comes to these debates. I believe it is an unhelpful term because it presupposes that others have a duty to me. That is true, but only because I also have a duty towards them.

So, in classical Christian, and, I might add, most non-Christian societies, it has been a duty of those who ‘had’ to help those who did ‘not’. Probably a good example of this is the patron-client relationship of ancient Rome. I have a ‘right’ to private property because in the course of my life I have earned money and so purchased whatever I may own. It is others’ responsibility to leave me in possession of that without attempting to defraud me of it or otherwise steal it.

I have a ‘right’ to life only because it is others’ duty not to kill me or otherwise injure me deliberately or by negligence. That does not mean to say that I do not have a responsibility as an adult to look after myself. So it is with the unborn. (Let us not forget at this point that it is the parents of the child who conceived it and that reason alone should be enough to require them to care for it; they did have a choice whether or not to engage in sexual intercourse, the purpose for which is not only pleasure but the continuation of the human race.)

The term ‘foetus’ is another which needs to be abandoned in general conversation;

there may still be some use for it in the medical field. As it is commonly used it is merely a ploy to distract us from the fact that abortion is the killing of a child. In a very small proportion of cases this is justified, but as the law stands, and it is a reasonable law, well over 90% of abortions are simply murder. That is to say, they are not to ensure the mother’s physical or mental safety and many studies and anecdotal evidence has shown that great emotional harm is done to the mother by abortion.

As for imposing upon the poor financially-strained and incompetent parents of an intellectually lacking baby a lifetime sentence of supporting it, that is a nonsense. It is parents’ duty to provide for their children, whether of complete or lacking intellectual capacity. One ‘deletes’ or sends to the scrapheap dysfunctional items like broken TV sets or cars, not children. If I in the future father a child (and yes, it is a child) with Downs syndrome, I cannot simply return it to the manufacturer and request a replacement or the upgraded later model, thank you very much.

Apart from the obvious distinction here that children are not lifeless, impersonal machines this kind of reasoning is utterly wrong. As Mr. Orr mentions, where will this logic stop? It must continue on to ‘delete’ dysfunctional items like people whose limbs have been lost and the infirm as well as the intellectually incapacitated. If we would only look at history, it has; in Nazi Germany it was not just Jews that were sent to the gas chambers but the intellectually handicapped, homosexuals, and gypsies also.

As for the ‘right to life’ including freedom from physical compulsion, I don’t think too many think about what that statement entails. I am continually bound by physical compulsion. I am compelled to work because I need to eat to live. I must drive according to the road rules or the police will catch up with me sooner or later. In addition, a certain amount of coercion and even fear of the consequences of that coercion is necessary for the civil law to work. If I know that it is illegal to commit murder but that there is no way that the government can punish me for doing so, why should I not commit murder if it suited my purposes?

‘Rights’ do NOT have as their standard a fully functioning human being. In the first place, what is the definition of a fully functioning human being? Five hundred years ago the ideal was the Renaissance man, a standard which only half a dozen individ-

10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March February 2010 2010

uals attained to. I freely admit that I am not a fully functioning human being. I do not use all my abilities to their limits.

Does this make me one of a line of stock to be ‘deleted’? What of those who have lost a single finger? They are no longer fully functioning.

Ms. Hill states that a foetus (read child) in the womb is totally dependent upon another entity to sustain it and as such does not have the rights pertaining to independent persons. This logic too has its limits. As she acknowledges most children are dependent upon their parents for several years after their birth; I would say more like fifteen years at least after their birth. But that is the case whether intellectually handicapped or not. My father would not have expected me, then at the age of fifteen, to leave home and support myself. This definition of dependence also needs clarification but I would argue that it is irrelevant.

Human life has its own inherent value; as Mr. Orr says, ‘they should be loved, valued, and respected’. Frequently, the intellectually handicapped have their own insightful if not brilliant contributions to make to the world of science, once we learn how to communicate with them.

There seems to be a contradiction of logic somewhere here. Why is it that an adult has the ‘right’ to choose whether to allow the unborn child to live, yet that child somehow does not automatically, as does the woman who conceived him, have the right to life?

Ms. Hill’s logic boils down to a might makes right mentality.

Mr. Orr states that life begins at conception. There is still no good scientific or philosophical reason to doubt this and it is a modern aberration to deny it. It has otherwise been held for thousands of years and ideas are not held for so long without good reason.

It is not true to say that the values and beliefs of someone else are no-one else’s business. Leaving aside any arguments as to the legitimacy of abortion as commonly practised, that I pay taxes to the New Zealand government, which in turn pays doctors to conduct abortions, is my business. Someone else’s belief that he owns the road and doesn’t care about whether I am on it or not becomes my business when I am anywhere near him on the road. The government enacts laws because, to a certain limited extent, the values of its citizens are its business.

I lack the space to refute every presupposition which Ms. Hill raises and will conclude

Indulge in the Exceptional Now you can enjoy eight deliciously different

Together the EXCEPTIONAL teas and infusions

handpicked teas. The EXCEPTIONAL range from

from Dilmah are an exploration of the finest teas on

Dilmah are each chosen for quality, taste and

earth, a quality selection that marries the 5000 year

natural goodness. Some are black teas, some are

old history of tea with 21st century taste and style.

real fruits and herbs to titillate your taste buds.

www.dilmahexceptional.com www.mjffoundation.org www.dilmahconservation.org

Are you ready for an EXCEPTIONAL cup of tea?

c&s5560

green and some are mischieviously composed with

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 11

with the statement that it is a little difficult for a ‘pro-choice’ activist to claim the moral high-ground.

I would advise anyone, whether ‘prochoice’ or pro-life, to read Matthew Flannagan’s article on abortion in the November 2009 issue of Investigate.

Josh Rogers, Auckland

Another climbs into hill

Judith Hill (Investigate February 2010) bases her argument on the philosophy of Objectivism of Ayn Rand. For Rand, objectivist epistemology maintains that all knowledge is ultimately based on perceptions, ethics on rational self-interest, and politics on individual rights and capitalism.

According to Rand, “the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s happiness or rational self-interest, and so the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights”.

Governments should therefore guard this right. For Rand, morality is “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions – the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life”. Since life is only to serve oneself, there being no ethical doctrine of altruism involved, Rand has redefined our normal understanding of these concepts and terms.

Therefore, according to Ms Hill, rights to life “belong to human beings, and have as the standard a fully functioning adult equipped to act independently and self-sufficiently”.

This standard confuses between an entity’s ontological [being] and its functional aspects. For example, if we follow her argument, from conception until it can chase birds and mice and be independent and selfsufficient, a cat is not a cat. Once it can carry out these functions, it is (becomes?) a cat. However, once it loses its ability to thus function independently and self-sufficiently, for example because of old age or as the result of an accident, it is not a cat.

Translate that scenario to a human being.

Ms Hill then says that a Down’s-syndrome baby has no right to impact on the lives of adults who have some happiness and rational self-interest to pursue and “to dictate a financial and societal burden on every taxpaying adult”.

Rand’s philosophy has been criticised.

Robert Nozick is sceptical of her argument.

Rand’s belief is that one’s own life is the ultimate value because it makes all other values possible. But if someone rationally prefers dying, then why should that person have no

value? Nozick, therefore, considers Rand’s attempt to defend the morality of selfishness to be essentially an instance of begging the question.

Ethics is the philosophical study of morality, studying what is goodness and right action. Right actions concern the principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and pursuits. They constitute a moral code that defines the duties of man and woman who live together in community. This conception of moral principles is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity in the West. Jesus Christ’s command to love your neighbour as yourself extends your love not only to yourself but also to those around you.

Ms Hill’s approach is multi-faceted. First, Thrasymachus supposedly held that “justice is the interest of the stronger party” – in other words, “might is right”. But there is a difference between power and goodness.

Also power corrupts.

Secondly, is man the measure of all things (Protagoras)? Taken in its individual sense, right is measured by an individual’s will.

Of course, this would lead to chaos. There would be no community, no unity in society.

Thirdly, whatever brings pleasure is right, and whatever brings pain is wrong (hedonism). However, not all pleasure is good and not all pain is bad.

Right, then, has to be defined by some standard or test outside of itself. Otherwise it is self-serving and merely begs the question. In other words, regarding Ms Hill’s standard, we can ask, “Who says?”

Ray Galvin, in his book “Coping with Moral Issues” points out that the sanctity of human life is a central theme of the Bible.

Justice and its close relative righteousness are related to values such as mercy, kindness, and compassion. Righteousness deals with relationships. The righteous person is one who is in right relationship with other people. An unborn child is entitled to care, protection, respect, nurture, and we should be thankful to God for the presence of human life. The unborn child is in a relationship of dependence on her or his mother and also with society as a whole as a future member.

Is an unborn child, whether with or without Down’s syndrome, a “human being”?

When a life is conceived, she/he is human and not an animal or vegetation. She/he is separate and distinct from her/his mother.

Although she/he may be a unicellular zygote, she/he is a separate entity and only needs to grow and develop. There is no morally rele-

12 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March February 2010 2010

vant break in the biological process of development. She/he is human life or human in nature. In other words, her/his essence is human. Ms Hill’s ontological reductionism leads only to a situation of absurdity.

Ms Hill points to the fact that adults are given rights over a Down’s-syndrome child.

However, that adult’s right is a responsibility to do whatever is right for that child.

Ms Hill’s system of life will only bring chaos. No society can survive where adults only look and act to further their own selfinterests. She claims that the values and beliefs of the couple (ie, in fact, parents) are nobody’s business but theirs. But in reality, acts based on such values and beliefs cannot impinge upon other people’s rights to their life or to their property. Just laws are enacted to protect those rights and thus make such acts crimes of murder and robbery.

Ayn Rand’s views have been described as “stillborn” (William Buckley Jr); that adherence to Objectivism can result in hazardous psychological effects (psychologist Albert Ellis); that there is a lack of rigour and limited understanding of philosophical subject matter (Chandran Kukathas); that many in the Continental tradition think her celebration of self-interest relies on sophistic logic, and as a result her work is not worth any serious consideration (Edward W Younkins).

Nathaniel Brandon accused Rand and her followers of “destructive moralism” which “subtly encourages repression, self-alienation, and guilt”.

In effect, Rand’s views are destructive and dangerous.

John Fong, Voice for Life Inc. Central Waikato Branch

The Govt always wins on tax

The recent tax changes seem like deja vu.

Let me see if I have it right, reduce income tax and increase GST? Last time this happened the trade off was slowly cancelled over a succession of tax tinkering moves by various governments to income tax rates.

Can I suggest the pre GST days had a similar income tax level to what we have today. Over all, now, we are taxed at a far higher rate.

This next increase will be balanced by a decrease in income tax but how long before it devolves back?

GST is a real winner for the government, because I think, in the long run, we end up with increased taxes.

Joshua Norris, Wellington

Bad Miranda!

Miranda Devine’s article on the movie Avatar ruins itself with her ‘red-neck’ sensibility. It is impossible to read Devine’s article without being banged over the head with her ideological hammer.

Devine has a simple formula: Humans good.

Planet (Gaia) – Pandora actually – bad, as in expendable.

Savages bad; when they get in humans’ way, kill them.

‘Flaky’ pagan worship bad.

America always good.

American military always very good.

Capitalism always good.

Mining always good.

The only bad human is the ‘traitor’ Jake Sully.

If Cameron’s intent was to make an antiAmerican movie then he failed miserably. Only a hyper-sensitive right-wing American looking for rejection would have interpreted it this way.

As for the rest of the world, all we saw was an amazingly powerful retelling of the age-old story of the abuse of power by the greedy and militarily powerful, seeking to impose their will on those who get in the way of their greed.

I saw the movie twice and not once did it occur to me that I was watching anything ‘anti-American’. I have asked everyone I know who has seen the movie if they thought it was ‘anti-American’ and all have answered to the effect, ‘What are you talking about – it wasn’t even about Americans!’

The soldiers were in fact mercenaries who worked for a mining company; they were not ‘American soldiers’. Miranda you can relax, the vast majority of viewers in the world would not have seen Avatar as in any way ‘anti-American’.

The fact that ‘Canadian’ Cameron was trying to open the eyes of some Americans (how dare a non-American assume he can teach the Americans anything) would have applied only to that ever decreasing minority of Americans who still support the Bush/ Chaney presidency, arguably the most incompetent and deeply corrupt in American history. The majority of Americans have shown their remarkable humanity and intelligence by giving America a President that they and the world can at last be proud of.

The truly scary thing about the undertone and implications of Devine’s article is that awful feeling that just maybe (I hope I have misjudged her) if she had directed this movie the story line would have looked something like this.

American military is sent to Pandora to

defend American mining company against ‘savages’ who are ‘anti-capitalist’ and are threatening profitability by objecting to their homes being destroyed.

American military and mining company decide to teach these savages a lesson so they send in the gun-ships. After all, this is justified by the savages’ refusal to obey the mining company and, even more serious, their refusal to salute the American flag and to abandon their ‘flaky pagan worship’ for true religion, namely right wing American ‘Christianity’.

The movie ends with a heroic American victory. The military stand tall among the bodies and blood of the Na’vi with their hands on their hearts and tears in their eyes singing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ while a tight formation of gun-ships scream overhead and the American flag flies high and proud in the breeze.

Devine’s article is also written from the view point of a white girl born to privilege. She seems not to be aware that indigenous peoples of colonized lands will still, even hundreds of years on, have been able to identify at a very powerful level with the profound story-line of this movie. Their ancestors were at times subject to the same horrific sneering and superior attitudes

as those exhibited by the ‘Sky people’, by invaders who imposed their own version of ‘shock and awe’ in subjugating these ‘savages’ and their ‘flaky’ pagan cultures.

Avatar was deeply moral and at many levels committed to the ethics of Jesus Christ. True, there was a fair dollop of Old Testament ‘eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ and yes, as Devine points out, there is a certain glee that the ‘sky people’ get what they so richly deserve. But that is only after their pre-emptive strike on the Na’vi, a fact she conveniently forgets to mention.

Yes Avatar is rather simplistic, but it is this that has helped create and carry its amazing power.

Devine hopes that the ongoing effect of the message of Avatar will soon be lost. Fat chance of that as the message of Avatar is, despite its imperfections, God’s message to his world. Avatar has succeed brilliantly in laying down another layer of the on-going work of God establishing his Kingdom in the hearts and souls of humankind, more nails in the coffin of the sort of attitudes displayed by all right wing ‘sky people’, whatever their ethnicity, nationality or religious persuasion.

Bruce Puddle, Tauranga INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 13

SUBSCRIBE Get a FREE copy of Absolute Power with this offer

A GREAT GIFT IDEA SPECIAL OFFER

NO ONE GETS CLOSER

INVESTIGATE March 2010:

When you subscribe to Investigate this month and purchase either Ian Plimer’s new bestseller, Heaven+Earth, or Ian Wishart’s Air Con as well, we’ll also give you a copy of Ian Wishart’s Absolute Power, absolutely free! (while stocks last)

Green Police

The Green Police • Larry Ellison • Melting Credibility

The Nanny State control freaks who’re getting paid to raid your trash, monitor your mileage and soften you up for tough new climate laws

Helen Mirren As Tolstoy’s Wife

Team Ellison

What drives the new America’s Cup magnate?

Melting Credibility Issue 110

Everything you wanted to ask about climate changebut were too afraid to ask

$8.30 March 2010

Identity Crisis

How hackers stole one man’s life, job and fortune

SELLERS, THAT’S TWO BEST , FOR JUST & THE MAGAZINE E UP TO $60 $118 ALL UP, SAV

Check out our book offers ONLINE at ianwishart.com OPTIONS:

NAME ADDRESS

Yes, send me the special offer of Investigate and Heaven+Earth or Air Con (circle one) for just $118, plus my free Absolute Power

POST CODE

Yes, just send me 12 issues of Investigate for $78

PHONE

FAX

Yes, send me a two year subscription to Investigate, plus

E-MAIL

Heaven+Earth, for just $195, plus my free Absolute Power

CREDIT CARD NUMBER

Yes, just send me 24 issues of Investigate for $156

NAME ON CARD AMEX

DINERS

MASTERCARD

EXPIRES VISA

Start my subscription with this issue (choose month):

BANKCARD

CHEQUE IS ENCLOSED

Extra shipping charges apply to overseas orders of Investigate. Please note that TGIF is a PDF document, and we recommend that you are on broadband if you wish to subscribe

Photocopy or clip out this coupon and post to Investigate, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843 or order online at www.ianwishart.com, or fax 09 3733 667; offer for a limited time

SIMPLY DEVINE

Miranda Devine National standards, Oz-style BEHIND THE FURORE OVER SCHOOL LEAGUE TABLES,

the criticism of standardised testing, the selfinterested screaming of neanderthal teachers’ unions and the remarkable steel in Julia Gillard’s spine, is a very important fact.

More than anything else in education, it is teachers who make a difference.

Research by Professor Bill Louden, of the University of Western Australia, and from overseas, increasingly points to the instinctively obvious: regardless of how many school halls or archery fields, regardless even of a child’s socio-economic background, teacher quality is the key to success.

The most valuable information standardised testing can provide is the difference good teaching makes, allowing the lucky child with a good teacher to improve at a greater rate than her contemporaries stuck with duds or mediocrities.

This kind of information is, of course, anathema to a union culture hell-bent on preserving a false “see-no-evil” egalitarianism among its membership, where longevity of service is rewarded over excellence, ingenuity is crushed, and children, especially those without involved, competent parents, suffer.

To her great credit, Gillard, the federal Education Minister, is determined to empower parents and policy makers with as much information as possible about the performance of schools and teachers. Her MySchool website, launched this month, includes the results of national numeracy and literacy tests for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in each of the nation’s almost 10,000 schools.

“We would expect parents to have robust conversations with teachers and principals,’’ she said. “This should put pressure on people.”

The extent of the pent-up demand from parents for such information was revealed in the fact the site crashed under the weight of 9 million hits in its first day. People started using it at 1am.

16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

The Australian Education Union, purportedly representing 180,000 teachers, under its militant federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, has been fighting the website on every front, and threatens to boycott supervision of this year’s tests. Gillard, admirably, is standing her ground. “If they don’t reconsider, we will get it done by whatever means it takes.’’

While some parents have reportedly been pulling their children out of schools that rated poorly on the website, the school is in fact less important than the individual teacher.

As an article this month in The Atlantic titled “What makes a great teacher?’’ puts it:

with such sponsors as Boston Consulting Group and Stockland, operates outside the education establishment, but is now championed by Gillard.

It recruits non-teachers – high achieving university graduates – to parachute into a disadvantaged school for two years, bringing enthusiasm and a fresh approach.

They are given six weeks’ intensive training, 70 hours a week over the Christmas holidays, and will receive a postgraduate diploma in teaching.

Early February the first crop of 46 TFA associates, as they are called, began teaching in Victorian schools. The program has been popular, with 750 applications for 50 places.

Early February the first crop of 46 TFA associates, as they are called, began teaching in Victorian schools. The program has been popular, with 750 applications for 50 places “Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools – even supposedly good schools – than among schools.’’

The problem is how to identify the qualities of great teachers. This is where Macquarie University’s joint project with the Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, “Teach for Australia’’, comes in.

Based on an American program, “Teach For America’’, the non-profit organisation,

The average UAI score of the applicants was 97. TFA cites an American study that found Teach For America teachers are “more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers”.

Of course, teachers’ unions have been hostile, with claims TFA “demeans” the profession. But they are increasingly irrelevant, and in a speech to the new TFA teachers when school commenced, Gillard said she expected they would be welcomed by established teachers “because I believe the best people aren’t afraid to be surrounded by the best people”.

The idea for TFA came from a seminal paper by Pearson for the then Cape York Institute in 2007: Teach for Australia.

A practical plan to get great teachers into remote schools. The idea was championed

by Professor Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, whose Professor Kevin Wheldall already had been working with Pearson on successful phonics-based reading programs in Cape York.

In the US this year 7300 Teach for America teachers will teach almost half a million children, almost all of whom are poor and African American or Latino, reports The Atlantic.

The American TFA found a pattern among exceptional teachers – those whose students achieved at least 1½ years’ growth in a year.

They “set big goals [and] constantly re-evaluate what they are doing . . . frequently check for understanding; [established a] well-executed routine; avidly recruited students and their families into the process; planned exhaustively and purposefully; refused to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls [and they had] a relentless mindset”.

The heartening discovery is that great teaching is not rocket science, and, as Steven Farr of Teach for America says, is “neither mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance.’’

Importantly, great teaching techniques can be taught.

In her TFA speech Gillard laid down the philosophy behind the project: “That children from the poorest and most difficult backgrounds can learn and achieve and if they fail to do so, we the adults have let them down.”

The war against teachers’ unions is on – only this time it is not from their traditional conservative enemies, who have proved spec-

tacularly unsuccessful over the past decade in breaking union control of education.

A new resolve from the unions’ old allies and enablers, the Australian Labor Party, and in the US the Democrats, unable any longer to ignore the disastrous effect of progressive policies of the past 40 years, looks like finally breaking their destructive dominance.

At last we can prove that demography is not destiny.

Gillard, admirably, is standing her ground. “If they don’t reconsider, we will get it done by whatever means it takes.’’

devinemiranda@hotmail.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 17

STRAIGHT TALK

Mark Steyn

Welcome to financial Armageddon AT THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST, BARACK

Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander-in-chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest.

And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine.

Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of The West Wing they can only conceive of the publicand, indeed, the worldas crowdscene extras in The Barack Obama Show: They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor-manager tells you to, but the notion that in return he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s 18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.”

Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.”

So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008,

growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,

Did you get your pay raise this year? What’s that, you don’t work for the government?

Yes, you do, one way or another and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Coloured-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent.

Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained?

A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP

Barney Frank, a handful of reach-acrossthe-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense.

That leaves Director Elmendorf ’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah: “Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began, the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year?

What’s that, you don’t work for the gov-

President Barack Obama, right, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, left, making a statement on the budget he submitted to Congress /Robert Trippett/ PSG/ Newscom

ernment? Yes, you do, one way or another.

Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank, and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that. In the last month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be a hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is

choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”: “WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”?

And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho.

Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors.

It seems a comfortable life . . .

If unsustainable is the new normal, it

should also be the new national anthem.

Take it away, Natalie Cole: “Unsustainable That’s what you are Unsustainable Though near or far Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us How the thought of you has flopped on us Never before Has someone spent more . . . ” It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

Mark Steyn, an Investigate columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 19

EYES RIGHT

Richard Prosser Quiet in the cheap seats ONE OF THE BEST THINGS ABOUT BEING A CONSER vative,

no-nonsense, right wing nationalist social and political commentator, is never having to say you’re sorry. It doesn’t matter if you upset anyone, because the only people who are likely to be offended by your unabashed dissertations of truth and common sense, are pinkos and liberals and other whingeing minorities whose opinions don’t count anyway. And get offended they certainly do!

Veteran hate campaigner John Minto has been at it again these past few weeks. He gets around, does Johnny Boy; one week he’s in Auckland hurling abuse at an Israeli tennis player, the next he’s at Waihopai in Marlborough, protesting the fact that the Americans continue to cover New Zealand’s posterior despite the abuse and disrespect we shower them with.

What motivates people like Minto, I wonder, and why does the media give them coverage in such a massively disproportionate measure relative to the support and sympathy which their opinions actually carry within the wider population?

I first saw John Minto during some protest or another in Auckland in the mid-eighties when I was about 18. He was hiding in a car being driven slowly up Queen St, expounding anti-rugby, anti-white South African, anti-New Zealand Government views, through a loudhailer mounted on the roof. Following him were several hundred scruffy, unwashed, long-haired retards from Rent-a-Mob, carrying what were, even back then, very professionally made and expensive looking signs, and wearing T-shirts with professionally printed slogans.

I was with a few mates from down home on the Hauraki Plains, and our section of the crowd included a number of Australian league supporters who were in town at the same time.

Being country boys, charged with patriotic 20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

fervour (and the libations of the Queen City’s hospitality) we felt it our duty to offer the protesters the benefit of our wisdom; I believe I advised Minto to go back to Moscow, whereupon a particularly ill-nourished, trench-coat wearing, Bohemian albino popped out from the mob, to inform me that John was “from Hastings, actually”, as if I cared.

The point about this is that despite the nationwide TV coverage which the protest attracted, and the credence afforded it by the broadcast media, those few hundred ragged marchers were alone in their outrage about the South Africans, their rugby, and New Zealand’s association with both. No-one in the crowd was cheering them. Most, had it

get their own way, apartheid crumbled – along with, predictably, the economic and social stability of the Republic, and the South Africa we have today is the result.

Black South Africans no longer struggle under the yoke of the white oppressor; instead, they struggle under the yoke of a black oppressor, where tribalism and nepotism have replaced racism as the dominant force. Even Minto himself, I am told, now accepts that Joe Average Black Man in South Africa is worse off today than he was under the old regime. We, the majority of New Zealand, can only watch in despair as the South Africa which we knew fades inexorably into the twilight of civilisation. The best

These people make a great deal more noise than their numbers actually warrant, and demand a great deal more say in the nation’s direction and policy than the popularity of their opinions can justify not been for the not inconsiderable Police presence, would have been throwing bottles along with their derisory comments.

So why do we put up with them? Surely one of the fundamentals of democracy is that the will of the majority shall prevail – with regard to the rights of the minority – but this itself presupposes and demands that the minority must accept the will of the majority. The right to protest does not and cannot include the right to be given your own way, when your views do not represent the prevailing mood or feelings of most of the nation.

As things turned out, Minto and Co. did

we can offer is a new home to her refugees, the people who were and are our familial and colonial kin, and our nearest relatives. South Africans and Rhodesians were always New Zealand’s closest cousins, nearer to us in thinking even than our trans-Tasman neighbours; this is a truth which the silent mass of us have always known.

I say the anti-apartheid mob should stop speaking and go away quickly, because they’ve done enough damage already. No-one who was taken in by their lies twenty-five years ago, still believes them today.

That hasn’t stopped Minto, however, from

continuing to attempt to destroy other bastions of the light of Western Civilisation as they stand against the forces of Darkness, nor has it detracted from the passion with which the media ply the man with frontpage slots and prime-time sound bites.

Minto and a motley collection of leftists and anti-Semites calling themselves “Global Peace and Justice” (why is it that Communists, bent on world domination and the oppression of freedom, always put ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ in their titles?) descended on the New Zealand Tennis Open in Auckland a couple of weeks back, having apparently decided that the way to solve the problems of the Middle East was to harangue a tennis player by megaphone.

Yeah, that’ll do it, won’t it. They were protesting about Israel’s continued, and in their view unreasonable, insistence on defending itself against terrorist attacks from the Palestinian territories. They’d quite like Israel to just shrivel up and die, and hand over the only productive bit of that entire wretched region, to people who would take no time at all to turn it back into a desert, like it was before the Yids made it bloom, with running water and agriculture and electricity and a phone system, and sealed roads and drains and sewerage and hospitals and a functioning democracy, like what the rest of the Arab Middle East doesn’t have.

Why does this irritating little man keep making ridiculous protests like this, and why, I ask seriously, does the media keep feeding the troll?

Frankly I couldn’t give a wet slap about the Palestinians, and neither can anybody else I’ve spoken to. If they could be bothered to get off their backsides and actually do something to help themselves, they might engender a little more respect from the likes of Yours Truly; but no, the Palestinian approach is to blame everyone else, deny responsibility, re-write history, whinge, sulk, and bite the hand that feeds them. (Boy, do we know about people like that in New Zealand.) So some of them live in refugee camps; yeah, well, for the record, that’s their own fault. When Israel was created, its leaders offered every Arab living within the newly demarcated borders the chance of a new life as an Israeli citizen, with a clean slate and no strings attached. Some took the opportunity, but others didn’t. They headed for Jordan, or Transjordan as it was called back then. The Palestinians are, after all, a Jordanian people. The Government of Transjordan, however, didn’t want a bar of

My advice to the pro-Palestinian lobby? You’re a small upstart minority and no-one cares what you think, so stop trying to influence policy

them, because the Palestinians, even then, had a long-established reputation in the Arab world for being trouble makers. It was the Jordanian Government, not the Israelis, who built the refugee camps, and therein the Palestinians have resided ever since.

My advice to the pro-Palestinian lobby?

You’re a small upstart minority and no-one cares what you think, so stop trying to influence policy.

Minto’s dalliances with the idiot fringe this past month included a day out with that other vehemently anti-American activist of dubious New Zealand allegiance, Keith Locke, decrying New Zealand’s contribution to world peace and security in the form of the Waihopai listening station near Blenheim.

Unbearably for these people and their ilk, despite their best efforts, Uncle Sam is still managing to keep the wolves of war from the door of the world, and New Zealand still has the temerity to keep helping him!

But I’m not about sounding off at John Minto. He’s a sad, angry, and ultimately irrelevant little man. Quite why anyone has a problem with Waihopai escapes this writer. Why anyone has a problem with ECHELON, the UKUSA agreement, or the Western Alliance generally, also has me puzzled. In fact I don’t believe the great majority of New Zealanders have any issue with it at all, just as most of the population never

had a problem with ANZUS, or nuclear ship visits, or the fact that we once had an Air Force and weren’t afraid to use it.

The problem, such as it is, is ‘had’ almost solely by a small and close-knit clique of narcissistic left-wing ideologues and egomaniacs, who occupy the broadcast media and exercise a disproportionate degree of influence over it. They are aided and abetted by a similarly miniscule number of loud-mouthed control freaks sprinkled throughout the Parties of the political Left, the environmental movement, and the Trade Unions.

These people make a great deal more noise than their numbers actually warrant, and demand a great deal more say in the nation’s direction and policy than the popularity of their opinions can justify.

I say they should sit down and shut up.

The Greens are a perfect example; the Green Party (putting the ‘mental’ back into ‘Environmental’ since 1990) are positively peremptory in their insistence that we acquiesce to their proclamations and dictates, seemingly oblivious to the reality that 19 out of every 20 citizens regularly don’t vote for them.

The Republicans and the Flag-changers are another. I confess a degree of sympathy for both causes, and I will support them in the future when they are done properly and for the right reasons. But now is not the time for either, and the small minorities making the most noise in favour of each are most decidedly the very worst people to be making decisions about them for the rest of us. The great majority of New Zealanders are proud of our British heritage and traditions, proud of our history, and proud of our flag. When we’re ready to change, it will be the silver fern on black which we run up the flagpole, not any of the other Godawful abominations put forward by idiots, trendy-lefties, Maori activists or the New Zealand Herald.

Likewise, when we decide that the Monarchy has run its course, we will institute a genuine Republic where all citizens are equal, where no-one has privilege just because some of their ancestors arrived by canoe, and where democracy means rule by the will of the majority, not by the bullying of a few malcontent leftist control freaks.

Till then, if the whiners in the cheap seats could hold the cacophony, that would be great, thanks very much. The squeaky wheel may get the oil for a while, but there comes a point when it risks being lopped off with a gas axe, and replaced by something that does its job – quietly – and nothing else.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 21

LINE ONE

Chris Carter

Sleaze TV: an insidious brain-drainer FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS OVER THE LAST COUPLE

of weeks, I’ve found myself spending altogether too much time watching television (torn calf muscle).

This relatively short exposure could have, were I not blessed with a well-armoured psyche, completely shattered any of the few remaining concepts of decency, the truth, etc. that’s still struggling to survive in my battered old brain.

What a disgusting, puerile and civilization destroying diet of rubbish NZ television is now beaming into our homes. The worst examples shelter behind the so called ability of viewers to complain to the Broadcast Standards Authority who, apart from having an almost pathological hatred of politically incorrect utterances, seem completely OK with programming that just 10 years ago would have earned a broadcaster some considerable time in prison.

As parents, I’m sure many of us have wondered how our kids have become so knowledgeable about various forms of depraved behaviour or of language that is ultra violent and frequently grossly obscene. We’ve probably noted too how common debate or argument is frequently now settled not by rational thought expressed with a good working vocabulary, but more likely with a highly offensive and obscene personal attack even to the point where even a Member of Parliament aped a now infamous form of obscene abuse, straight out of a recently televised Bruce Willis movie, to describe Pakeha New Zealanders.

All this publicly reinforces the old belief that those deprived of a good education tend to revert to the use of more easily learned obscenities to cover up an otherwise sad inability to communicate. Worst of all perhaps is that our previously well educated and non violent society has little or no way at all to protect itself from the continual 22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

stream of extremely harmful and morally destructive rubbish being transmitted each day by a television service now completely out of control.

Sure, some parents have banned TV’s from their homes to protect their kids, only problem being that at school their kids are surrounded by hundreds of other kids whose parents let them sit up half the night watching stuff that would make your hair curl.

Think about it, children and impressionable teenagers being fed a steady diet, by adults, of material that if a friend of the family tried on with your youngsters at your home you most likely would throw him or her straight out the window. Or perhaps in

ences in life it’s all a bit insidious isn’t it? We start out for instance with someone in broadcasting saying “bloody” – the great Australian adjective. After a bit of controversy it’s more or less decided that after all the world hasn’t ended has it, so after a while an ad agency decides to try on “Bugger” in a very funny Toyota Ad that passes real easy, to be superseded with a couple of cattle apparently having it off in the back of a Toyota 4 wheel drive.

All pretty innocuous stuff to be sure, but to be followed up by Mitsubishi recently plagiarising the sex theme with a little boy asking his dad, peering at the back seat of the Mitsi ,” is this where I came from?”, somewhat crudely and unnecessarily implying

Who could have imagined for instance in days gone by of say Phillip Sherry doing a promo for an upcoming show on One featuring a guy with an enormous willy? a similar scenario, some dear old uncle came to visit and began to regale your children with stories of a sexual nature complete with four letter words to describe the action, perhaps pausing to suggest a few joints to warm the family up for a wee game of strip poker.

The chances of dear old uncle leaving your place other than with the help of St John’s Ambulance would, I think, be most unlikely.

Yet come around early evening there we all are watching stuff that not a couple of decades back would have had the Coppers around accusing us of watching blue movies or engaging in activities leading to the corruption of minors.

But not unlike many of the corrupting influ-

that mum and dad had been having it off in the Mitsi. How this implied sexual reference would ever lead a normal person to rush off and pay a fortune to buy the car on offer escapes me entirely, even being as I am a “Westie” through and through.

Each of the aforementioned ads, on their own, are pretty innocuous. But nevertheless they perhaps do illustrate how the ball got rolling. Who could have imagined for instance in days gone by of say Phillip Sherry doing a promo for an upcoming show on One featuring a guy with an enormous willy?

Or for that matter a “comedy” show on Two, Jackass, that mostly seems to delight in various semi deranged people endeavoring to

rupture their private parts or defecate on camera with monotonous regularity.

All very uplifting stuff to be sure, and on Cable subscription TV no real worries, but on free to air public TV surely we have to be kidding?

A lot of you my well remember Janet Jackson having a “Clothing Malfunction” on American TV a while back, like she exposed the better part of her left breast. Being on free to air TV the Yanks went absolutely ape, Congress was even involved, the broadcaster was heavily fined and poor old Janet was nearly run out of town on a rail. If this had happened on Cable TV no problem.

In New Zealand, however, had she stripped right off and had it away with her partner Justin Timberlake whilst singing obscene songs in a beery voice, providing it was put to air after around 8.30... 9.00PM all would have been seen to be pretty normal fare it would seem.

Going back to Hollywood, let’s look at movies that eventually end up being screened on television here in NZ. Once again movies in the theater are subject to censorship, but on NZ TV anyone at all can watch them uncut in all their glory after mid evening. In the USA on public TV you will only see specially re-jigged movies with all the really rough stuff either having been re-shot or the soundtracks being heavily modified. Why not here, or do we prefer our young people to be exposed to stuff we would never in a million years take them to the movies to go and see?

We all wonder why it is that kids today

swear like troopers, or sex-wise go at it like rabbits from damn near primary school; Queensbury rules cast well aside they beat up on each other like young barbarians, drink like fish, try every kind of drug that’s going, drive cars like lunatics, etc etc. When

we stop for a moment and consider what they have been watching every day of their short lives, is it really any wonder at all that they are so badly affected?

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

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 23

FADING EMPIRES

Hal G.P. Colebatch Barbarians well inside the gates now IN 313 THE EDICT OF MILAN GRANTED GENERAL

freedom of religion and made Christianity tolerated throughout the Roman Empire.

Christianity henceforth grained ground over other religions and was in a dominant position when the Romans withdrew from Britain about 409 AD. Following this Britain was attacked by various heathen and pagan forces but managed to preserve at least part of its Christian culture by the efforts of the likes of King Arthur. The Book of Kells is one example of the heights this Dark Ages Christian culture reached. The attacking heathen were not a State but the absence of a State.

They either enslaved the monks and other religious people or sacrificed them as Servants of Krishni, with Warlock. At length brave missionaries such as Saint Augustine of Canterbury and Saint Patrick were able to re-Christianise it. (Kipling’s tale “The Conversion of Saint Wilfrid” gives what seems an accurate picture of those times.)

Now, for the first time since 313, it has become obvious that Britain or a large part of it is again coming under the control of open and professed anti-Christians, using the new so-called equality legislation to destroy not only the churches as such but Christian institutions such as marriage.

Under the new legislation, churches could be forced to hire people whose life styles and beliefs are contrary to the tenets of their faith when employing staff under planned Labour equality laws.

The new Equality Bill could require them to take on candidates who do not conform to their religious doctrine when recruiting key staff such as faith school head-teachers or youth workers. The only exceptions will be if those concerned are able to prove they spend more than 51% of their time in religious work.

At the moment, organised religions have 24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

a special status that lets them turn down applicants whose lifestyles conflict with the churches’ beliefs.

But religious leaders are concerned the proposed law will restrict their ability to employ lay people who share their values.

The Bill – introduced by Equality Minister Harriet Harman in the Commons last year – is being debated in the House of Lords now.

It is a serious matter to accuse a government of deliberately setting out to destroy the churches, but one may ask: if the real object of the bill is to promote equality, why

ernment has found it necessary to impose these savage measures on Christianity as such, measures plainly intended to stop these schools fulfilling their religious and teaching functions. In tandem with this, the present tax laws not only fail to reward marriage but actively militate against it.

The Minister responsible, Harriet Harman, has been accused by Erin Pizzey of making a “staggering attack on men and their role in modern life” as a result of her stating “it cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence

It is a serious matter to accuse a government of deliberately setting out to destroy the churches, but one may ask: if the real object of the bill is to promote equality, why is it so apparently drafted that exemptions in such sensitive areas are not permitted? is it so apparently drafted that exemptions in such sensitive areas are not permitted? There is not even a pretence of fair treatment or religious freedom such as has been taken for granted and established by civic convention for generations (Other religions as well as Catholic are of course also affected).

Legislation may also make it an offence for Catholic schools to display holy pictures if non-Catholic dinner ladies or cleaners are offended by them.

In well over 1,000 years, whatever sectarian differences have arisen, no previous gov-

of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion”.

Leo McKinstry, writing in the Daily Mail, accused her of “hating marriage”.

In May 2008 Harman stated that marriage was irrelevant to government policy and that there was “no ideal type of household in which to bring up children”.

Where is our Arthur?

Mollies Invites You to a Distinctive Dining Experience Nestled in St Mary's Bay, the “Dining Room” at Mollies is now open to the public for a relaxed, gourmet dining experience. With elegant cuisine and a selection of the finest wines, the a la carte and degustation menus feature the best of local produce, prepared by Mollies talented and creative young team of Kiwi chefs.

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner are available and reservations are recommended.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 25 6 Tweed St, St Mary’s Bay, Auckland Phone: (09) 376 3489 Email: reservations@mollies.co.nz www.mollies.co.nz

CONTRA MUNDUM

Matthew Flannagan Secular smoke screens and Plato’s Euthyphro IN “RELIGION: A BARRIER TO CLEAR THINKING,” THE

final article in the award winning series of lay philosophy articles published in the Christchurch Press, Canterbury based Philosopher Simon Clarke addressed the question, “what is the biggest obstacle to thinking clearly about social and political issues?” Predictably he answered “Several answers suggested themselves but time and again I came back to the same thing: religion.” Clarke explained that “the fallacy of grounding morality upon religion was pointed out by Plato over two thousand years ago.”1 Clarke was appealing to a famous argument that purports to show that ethics (what is right and wrong) is independent of religion. This argument is known by professional ethicists as “The Euthyphro Dilemma” or “Plato’s Euthyphro” and is named after a dialogue Plato wrote. The current version used against mono-theistic religions, such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism, is an adaptation (the original applied to poly-theistic religions, those religions that believe in many gods).

The argument is usually framed in terms of a rhetorical question ‘are actions wrong because God prohibits them or does God prohibit them because they are wrong?’ As the question is framed, there are only two possible answers a person can offer.

The first is to contend that actions are wrong because God prohibits them. This answer is said to suffer a debilitating problem, it makes morality arbitrary – anything at all could be deemed ‘right’ as long as God commanded it. Philosopher Michael Tooley has suggested this, “if God had commanded mankind to torture one another 1. Clarke’s series “Clear Thinking” was awarded the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media prize in 2006.

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

as much as possible, then it would follow that that action was obligatory … many people, including many religious thinkers, are very unhappy with that consequence.”

Therefore, the critics conclude, actions are not wrong just because God issues commands against them.

The failure of the first answer means that the only possible way out is to claim that God prohibits actions because they are wrong; they are not wrong just because he prohibits them. This answer does not have the problems of the former. However, as Clarke points out, it entails that “there are independent standards for what we should

mistaken/confused/ muddle-headed/whatever and from there went on with the serious business of offering secular perspectives on topics such as abortion, affirmative action, euthanasia, homosexual rights and so on.

Philosopher Peter Geach noted “In modern ethical treatises we find hardly any mention of God; and the idea that if there really is a God, his commandments might be morally relevant is wont to be dismissed by a short and simple argument that is generally regarded as irrefutable.” The short, simple argument he mentioned was, of course, Plato’s Euthyphro.

Given this backdrop it is perhaps not so

The argument is usually framed in terms of a rhetorical question ‘are actions wrong because God prohibits them or does God prohibit them because they are wrong?’ do, independent that is of the dictates of religion.” Actions are wrong before God prohibits them. His commands simply tell us what is already wrong, quite independently of what he prohibits.

This argument is something of a cliché in contemporary secular ethics and is found in almost every secular text book I have read (and will undoubtedly make its way into the Ethics section of the new NCEA Philosophy course). Typically “religious ethics” is mentioned and then dismissed with a short rendition of Plato’s Euthyphro. When I studied Philosophy Plato’s Euthyphro was one of the first things I was taught in first year Ethics.

The lecturer spelled out the argument, contended that it showed “religious ethics” was

surprising that Clarke, after mentioning Plato’s argument, stated “… Plato’s pretty convincing demonstration has been ignored by the vast majority of people in the intervening millennia. Why are appeals to religion so common?”

Despite the popularity of making claims like this, I still find them somewhat puzzling. Perhaps secular ethicists assume that theological ethicists have never read Plato or that, if they have, they have ignored him. In fact, the opposite is true. The last 40 years, in fact, has seen sustained defences of theological ethics including thorough refutations of Plato’s Euthyphro. These have been published in the philosophical literature at the highest levels – off the top of my head I can

rattle off over 22 different articles and monographs which have offered rebuttals to Plato’s Euthyphro – yet secular ethicists and many textbooks blithely continue as though these answers had never been offered.

I maintain that there is an answer to the Euthyphro dilemma, one that many have pointed out; it is to adopt the first of the answers I mentioned above, to contend that an action is wrong because God prohibits it.

Contrary to popular claims, this option can succeed. The objections raised against it are not as debilitating as they are made out to be.

The primary objection is that morality is made arbitrary; anything at all could be deemed ‘right’ as long as God commanded it – even atrocious commands. What is important to note here is that the objector assumes that it is possible that God could command atrocious things like ‘torturing people as much as possible.’ This assumption, however, seems very dubious. We need to remember that we are not taking about right or wrong as being based on the commands of just anyone, we are talking about these things being based on the commands of God. In the mono-theistic tradition that this line of argument seeks to criticise, God is typically defined as a being who is all knowing, all powerful, and is morally perfect.

So, as the terms are defined, the claim that it is possible for God to command people to “torture one another as much as possible” is true only if it is possible for a morally perfect person to command such an atrocious thing. But this is unlikely. The very reason

The last 40 years, in fact, has seen sustained defences of theological ethics including thorough refutations of Plato’s Euthyphro

critics cite examples such as “torturing others as much as possible,” is because these actions are paradigms of conduct that no morally good person could ever entertain or endorse. The situation the critic envisages then is a situation which is impossible.

Of course the critic could contend that he or she does not accept the existence of a being who is all knowing, all powerful, and is morally perfect. However, because those the critic is criticising do believe in such a being and also if the dismissal of theological ethics is to be based on an accurate understanding of what the various theological traditions actually believe and teach, and is not based on a caricature, then the sceptic must address what these traditions actually affirm.

This answer typically generates a rejoinder. If some action is right or wrong because God permits or prohibits it then God cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense. This answer renders the claim ‘God is good’ into no more than the claim that God obeys his own commands, if this is so, can God be said to have any duties at all?

Philosopher William Lane Craig argues that “[duties] are not independent of God nor, plausibly, is God bound by moral duties, since

He does not issue commands to Himself.”

William Alston drew the same conclusion, “we can hardly suppose that God is obliged to love his creatures because he commands himself to do so!” William Wainwright suggests “the notion of commanding oneself to do something … is incoherent.”

The rejoinder that, if God has no duties then he cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense, has a grain of truth to it. If we are going to understand God’s goodness in terms of God having duties or obligations that he consistently fulfils then theological ethics, of the sort envisaged, has problems.

However, it is not clear to me why the phrase ‘God is good’ should be explicated in terms of God having duties that He follows.

Many theologians have suggested that one should not understand God’s goodness in this way. When God’s goodness is explicated in sacred texts like the Psalms or in official creedal statements such as the Westminster Confession of Faith it is often explicated in terms of God having certain character traits.

To claim God is good is to claim that He is truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful, that He is opposed to certain actions such as adultery, murder and rape and so on. Now, even if God does not have duties, it does not follow that he cannot have character traits such as these. It is true that God may not be under any obligation to love others or to tell the truth or what have you, but that does not mean that He cannot love others or tell the truth. God does not have to have a duty to do something in order to do it.

So there seems, on the face of it, nothing incoherent about contending that God is good, that he has certain attributes like being truthful, benevolent, loving and so on. It is not that theological ethicists have never read Plato or that they have ignored him – they have read him, found his arguments wanting and published responses explaining why – it is that some sceptics have never read the responses or they have chosen to ignore them.

Perhaps these rebuttals do not work (though I think that they do) but even if I am wrong the onus is surely on the sceptic to demonstrate why. Simply ignoring them, misrepresenting the situation and then dismissing religion “as a barrier to clear thinking” is simply not good enough.

Dr Matthew Flannagan researches and publishes in the area of Philosophy of Religion, Theology and Ethics. He is an adjunct lecturer in Philosophy for Laidlaw College and Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He blogs with his wife at www.mandm.org.nz.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 27

The Green

POLICE They’re Coming To Arrest You...

Environmental regulations are flying thick and fast as governments around the world sign up to carbon control despite the collapse of global warming science. IAN WISHART looks at what could be around the corner, even here

W

hen more than a hundred million Americans couched themselves in front of the box this month to see the Superbowl final, it was more than the football that caught their eye. Amongst the myriad of big-name TV commercials that dotted the game, one from German car-maker Audi collectively gave viewers cause to sit bolt-upright in their seats.

That commercial, “The Green Police” tells the tale of an America just a year or two from now, where climate change has required not just new green regulations but a means of ensuring compliance. The ad opens with a customer at a supermarket choosing plastic bags instead of recycled paper, only to find his head slammed down on the counter as he’s cuffed and removed by a Green Police officer.

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

“You picked the wrong day to mess with the eco-system, Plastic-Boy!” The next scene features the Green Police (who drive electric golf carts and Segways) rummaging through roadside suburban rubbish bins before they raid a householder who threw out a (bad for the environment) torch battery instead of taking it to a toxic waste depot.

An overhead police helicopter trains its searchlight on the kitchen window of a man as he throws orange peel into the garbage.

“Put the rind down, sir, that is a compost infraction,” a Green Police officer yells through a loud hailer, while a ground team storms the man’s home to force an arrest.

“Tragedy strikes tonight,” intones a TV crime reporter in front of an Al Gorestyle mansion , “where a man has just been arrested for possession of an incandescent light bulb”.

The punchline of the ad is a queue of traf-

fic at a Green Police roadblock where officers, upon discovering an Audi TDI driver, wave him through the checkpoint no questions asked because, “TDI clean diesel?

You’re good to go, Sir”.

It was a cunning commercial from Audi, playing to the Green crowd by showing the hero driving a Green car, but playing to the growing number of climate sceptics by portraying the Green Police as an officious, Nazi-style hit squad prepared to haul people out of spa pools in the middle of the night for having their water temperature set higher than 39C. Ironically, Hitler did indeed have a hit squad targeting Jews prior to World War II that were named “the Green Police” because of their uniform colour, but Audi countered this association by pointing out Israel now has its own dedicated Green Police units performing environmental crackdowns on citizens.

So how far off beam was Audi’s dystopian view of the near future? Surprisingly, it’s a near bullseye.

San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom tweeted soon after the Superbowl ad screened, “That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home.’’ It must have been a personal ‘ouch’ moment, under Newsom San Francisco has recently introduced some of the toughest green laws in the USA. “Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported late last year.

“The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal for the most comprehensive mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. It’s an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Audi’s provocative commercial was produced by a San Francisco ad agency.

Under the new laws, city dwellers must sort their trash into different bins, and some items deemed toxic – like mercury-filled CFL lightbulbs – must be driven by homeowners to approved disposal sites and not thrown in the trash at all.

A newspaper online poll asked readers their views on the city’s tough green stance: • Good way to reduce solid waste (599 votes) 24% • Too much big brother (1048) 42% • One more law that won’t be enforced (828) 33%

Nearly half of respondents felt the city was being too intrusive telling residents they could no longer throw out pizza cartons and orange peel, but interestingly a third of respondents took refuge in a belief the city wouldn’t enforce the laws.

Enter the Green Police. Are we entering an era where seemingly “symbolic” laws will indeed start to be enforced once politicians feel they can get away with it? Let’s take a look.

HOME FIREPLACES In Canterbury, New Zealand, the Green Police already have an unofficial branch office at Environment Canterbury where, this winter, homeowners will be forbidden from using their fireplaces to keep warm.

“From 1 April 2010 residents in Christchurch’s Clean Air zone will not be able to use their open fires, or solid fuel burners older than 15 years during the winter months,” reports ECan. “The ban extends from 1 April until 30 September each year and people who use their fires during this time may face enforcement action from Environment Canterbury. Outside these months people are able to use their fires.”

You can see how lighting a fire in the middle of summer might appeal to some people, but probably not many.

While you can make the argument that Christchurch has a particular smog problem, it hasn’t stopped the fireplace ban from spreading elsewhere around New Zealand.

Homeowners are finding it increasingly difficult to get approval for installation of fireplaces, which leaves them in a difficult position in a cold winter when the power supply crashes.

In the recent British blizzards tens of thousands, mainly elderly and infirm pensioners, died of bitter cold, and some who didn’t found themselves fined by politically-correct police simply enforcing the regulations: “Two pensioners were fined £60 by police because they picked up a seven-month pregnant mum and her two children trudging through a blizzard. The driver’s crime?

His car wasn’t fitted with a child-seat,” wrote Welsh newspaper columnist Denise Robertson for Wales Online in January.

In good old San Francisco, meanwhile, a fireplace ban has been in force over the blizzard-ridden northern winter as well.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 29

“Enforcement actions taken during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were particularly galling to Bay Area residents subjected to such actions – based upon snitch reports from neighbours – for innocent holiday fireplace no-nos,” wrote columnist Wendy Lack for the Contra Costa Times over Valentines Weekend.

“Accordingly, it is fitting and proper for Bay Area residents to pause to celebrate Fireplace Freedom Day on March 1. This is the day that the Bay Area’s seasonal fireplace restrictions are lifted, making it safe for residents to use fireplaces free from fear of monetary fines (that is, until Nov. 1 when the winter restrictions again kick in).

“In this absurdly over-regulated, tyrannical madhouse known as the Bay Area – home of zealous legislators, profligate government 30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

spending, endless red tape, junk scientists and well-intended Greenies – it’s good to know that a man’s home can once again be his castle, at least a little bit for a little while.

After the air quality Green Police are called off fireplace patrol duty, it will be an ideal time to enjoy the soothing warmth of your fireplace – guilt free!”

GENERAL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby also laments the rise of the super nanny state, staging his own Valentines Day massacre of political correctness: “There was a time when Americans were thought capable of deciding for themselves what to do with their coffee grounds or whether to carry groceries home in paper or plastic bags. It isn’t only in San Francisco,

“TDI clean diesel?

You’re good to go, Sir”

and it isn’t only when it comes to “green’’ issues, that such mundane or personal choices are being supplanted by government coercion. One thin slice at a time, liberties we used to take for granted are replaced with mandates from above. Rather than leave us free to choose, Big Brother increasingly makes the choice for us: On trans fats. On gambling. On smoking. On bicycle helmets.

On health insurance.

“In Massachusetts, the Globe reported last week, new regulations will soon require thousands of restaurant workers to undergo state-designed training on handling food

allergies, and every restaurant menu will have to be revised to include a new message: ‘Before placing your order, please inform your server if a person in your party has a food allergy.’’ In Pennsylvania, the Reading Eagle notes that it is illegal for volunteers to sell pies or cookies at a charity bake sale unless the treats were ‘prepared in kitchens inspected and licensed by the state Agriculture Department’. In Oregon, an eight-year-old boy was suspended from his public school on Monday because he came to class with a tiny plastic toy gun from his G.I. Joe action figure,” reports Jacoby.

In Britain, a pensioner was again the target, falling foul of environmental transport bylaws this month, as the UK Press Association reports: “A pensioner was left 10 miles from home

after being refused a bus ride because he was carrying a can of paint, it was claimed.

“Brian Wakley said he was stopped from taking the 1B Bournemouth to Poole Transdev Yellow bus as the non-toxic green fence paint breached regulations.

“The retired officer worker was told to leave the bus by the driver because the £3.75 tin was a ‘banned substance’, he said. Rather than pay more than £20 for a taxi after the episode on Thursday, Mr Wakley called a friend to take him home to Sandford, near Wareham.

“Afterwards he called the company and it confirmed its policy.

“Mr Wakley, who is over 65, said: ‘It’s absolutely diabolical. Millions of people rely on public transport to take home things like paint and DIY equipment. It was a five-litre sealed plastic pot. I know it was innocuous, because I took the liberty of contacting the manufacturer. “ ‘The driver said to me, ‘I’m sorry you can’t come aboard because you are carrying a banned substance’. I said, ‘It’s a can of paint’. He said it was against regulations’.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg writes: “David Harsanyi, author of Nanny State, reports that there are “No Running” signs in Florida playgrounds, perhaps to make it easier for the authorities to catch toddlers and outfit them with mandatory helmets, chin guards and corrective shoes.

“Nor is this a purely American phenomenon. Paris – where smoking a Gauloise while tucking into some runny cheese has long been the national pastime – recently banned smoking in bars, restaurants and cafes. Britain has gone just plain bonkers, updating its omnipresent anti-crime and anti-terror security cameras to catch people eating in their cars while on the road, now a major offense.”

BANNING LIGHT BULBS The New Zealand Labour Government of Helen Clark once famously tried to ban incandescent light bulbs in favour of mercury-filled toxic CFLs. The CFLs have been proven hazardous in domestic use, particularly when situated over carpeted areas as it is near impossible to clean the mercury out of carpets and restore to safe levels.

As reported two years ago by Investigate, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection conducted a major scientific test of CFLs and came out with recommendations the lights should not be used in children’s bedrooms, playrooms, over carpet or

in areas frequented by pregnant women.

Apart from that, they’re great.

New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment and National Poisons Centre (both government agencies), are still well behind the eight-ball on CFL safety. Their latest clean-up recommendations make the startling claim that the mercury in one broken bulb is far less than the mercury in a broken thermometer, and therefore unlikely to harm you. The reality, as a number of scientific studies have shown, is that the mercury in the lamps releases as a misty vapour when the lamp breaks, not a solid liquid metal, and it’s therefore much more hazardous than a thermometer because it is easily inhaled, particularly by children and infants whose noses are closer to floor level.

The Maine study and others found that even one broken lamp over carpet could expose a child’s bedroom to ongoing chronically toxic mercury levels over many months, because of the mercury vapour that got kicked up each time the kids played on the floor.

Thankfully, the New Zealand authorities appear to have taken on some of the latest studies and are at least beginning to recommend CFLs are not used in some rooms of New Zealand houses: “Don’t use CFLs where they are likely to get swiped by enthusiastic children and their sports gear. Only use an exposed CFL in a place where you know it is unlikely to get accidentally broken,” says a warning on the Government’s Rightlight.govt.nz website this month.

But leaving aside the health hazards of the Green Police bulb of choice, people are waking up to the realisation that eco bulbs don’t actually last – one of the supposed key benefits. Far from having lifespans of up to seven years, these relatively expensive bulbs from a range of manufacturers are failing as rapidly as a few weeks, according to readers of Consumer magazine.

Consumer seriously dented its credibility and claims of independence when it came out in favour of CFL bulbs and ignored much of the science surrounding their toxicity. The backlash on Consumer’s website from people who think the organisation sold out to the Green Police makes interesting reading: “We have used a variety of brands over the last three years (Philips, Ecobulbs, Elite) and all have had frequent bulb failures – some bulbs of the same brand last well and are the originals, others have failed within the first year and within a month in some cases. 50% have failed within the first year.

We have started keeping receipts and taking INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 31

So how far off beam was Audi’s dystopian view of the near future? Surprisingly, it’s a near bullseye 32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

them back for replacements. The advertised long life and the reality do not match up,” wrote Martin Newton last October.

“We’ve used a variety of brands and had very mixed results. Some are still going after years; the worst only lasted 3 days. We haven’t noticed any brand difference,” agreed Rebecca Officer.

Consumer reader R M Scaife was already disappointed on August 14: “We changed 80% of our bulbs to eco bulbs about 3 years ago, another failed yesterday, making 50% have failed in 3 years, these are a waste of money. And what to do with the old bulbs, local council provide no collection so in the rubbish they go.”

Only to write in a month later: “Another one failed today, they will not be replaced by any more eco types, if lighting only amounts to 7.5% of household energy costs, then the return just isn’t there if they don’t last.”

Even the best brand in Consumer’s socalled “test” of CFL bulbs was seen as a dog by some readers: “We have been using the same brand of eco bulbs that came at the top of your test for some time, and have found that they have failed at an unacceptably high rate and have had quite a short life span, months rather than the 7 years claimed on the packaging. This makes them a very expensive option, and we are wondering if the same thing is happening to other people. If so, the longevity of these bulbs has been grossly exaggerated, as have the cost savings. These facts in combination with the mercury content makes me wonder if they are an expensive hazard rather than good alternative to incandescent bulbs.”

In New Zealand, the National Government killed off the compulsory switch to CFLs, but in the United States they’re destined for a ban on incandescent lights by 2012.

In the US, it’s not just the safety or the lifespan that are issues, but also disposal at the end of their useful life, anywhere between three days after purchase and (allegedly) seven years. What to do with energy saving household toxic waste? Apparently, you have to load the dead bulb into your big 4 litre V8 SUV, and drive your energy saving bulb to its final resting place: “The bulbs are considered hazardous waste though, which cannot be picked up at the curb and have to be taken to the disposal site by the individual,” reported one US local paper this month.

“Inside a bookstore along Middletown’s Main Street, resident Barrie Robbins-Pianka says her burnt-out CFLs are gathering dust in her house. ‘I didn’t know what to do with them or where to take them. I think I put them in a box, in a box with other things that didn’t work.’

“Connecticut, like New Hampshire and

New York require businesses to recycle the bulbs, but residents are only encouraged to recycle them at their town’s waste facility or to drop them off at stores with free recycling programs, like Home Depot.

“Standing inside a hardware store in Brattleboro, Vermont resident, Carrie Walker says she has a lot of questions about the CFLs that she’s bought through the years. ‘I wonder about the mercury level and is it safe?’ ” To get around these nagging inconvenient truths about CFLs, local authorities all over the world are trying to figure out how to deal with the mercury from 600 million CFL bulbs being thrown in landfills.

“In California, for example,” writes Triple Pundit’s Cory Vanderpool, “citizens who throw batteries or CFL lights in the trash are creating a major headache for the waste management authority. Local governments frustrated with the burden, and the financial repercussions that result from it, are finally taking a stand and pushing back.

“During the past year lawmakers in Maine, California, Minnesota and Oregon have proposed ways to start shifting the burden of waste disposal from the public to the private sector. The idea centers around “product stewardship” which means that manufacturers themselves would be required to pay for collecting, recycling and disposing of designated products after their consumers are through with them.”

As with all good Green Police ideas, costs will ultimately be paid by consumers and be built into product prices or rates and taxes.

The good news for homeowners in New Zealand, and the US, is that alternative, safe, energy efficient lights in both halogen and LED formats are coming on the market. A word to the wise, avoid putting mercuryfilled CFL lights in your house like you’d avoid allowing tenants to set up a P-lab in your living room.

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE There’s no need for a Green Police unit to rummage through your rubbish if, in fact, your neighbours are prepared to do the job for them. That’s one of the added benefits that authorities in North America are finding they’ve created by turning the fate of the planet into a religious experience. Even Google, with Al Gore as an advisor, is on board doing its bit.

“Forget about all of those ubiquitous police surveillance cameras in your city: the new sheriff in town is that shifty Google Maps camera wheeling through your neighbourhood,” reported Wired News.

“Recently, a property owner in Canada was charged with illegal removal of trees after a Google camera helped capture the evidence, according to CanWest News Service.

“Last May in Vancouver, Margaret Burnyeat allegedly hired a company to remove 23 cedar, cypress and evergreen trees from two adjacent lots she owned.

Neighbours alerted the police, who found some stumps that hadn’t yet been removed.

“Luckily for the city, one of Google’s Street View cameras – strapped to cars and driven

through neighbourhoods to photograph high-resolution, 360-degree images that are then linked to Google’s online mapping tool – caught some of the culprits in action.”

Tapping into that same streak as those reporting winter fireplace violations, the image of a surveillance state towering over a resentfully submissive population is a misnomer; a more accurate portrait would be a surveillance state that’s managed to take a large chunk of the population with it.

This, of course, was a technique perfected

by Hitler, but not by the Soviet Union. The Nazis knew they had to build enough public support for their cause to effectively divide and rule. Propaganda was a key weapon in achieving that.

That’s one of the reasons the climate issue has become so heated (no pun intended): it’s about far more than climate, it’s about control and a clash of ideologies between those who believe the state is supreme and those who believe individuals have basic rights beyond the reach of the state.

In an opinion piece for Reason.com this month, author and commentator David Harsanyi painted that picture: “This week, prepping for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change talks, Dr. Steven Chu, our erstwhile energy secretary, crystallized the administration’s underlining thinking by claiming that the ‘American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is’.

“Did you know that Cabinet positions INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 33

come equipped with a handbook detailing how Americans ‘should act’? If teenagers – irresponsible bunch of weasels that they usually are – are in need of moral supervision, an environmental train wreck like me needs an intervention.

“After all, President Barack Obama warned me this week that a failure to address the problem of ‘carbon pollution’ could create an ‘irreversible catastrophe’. (Yeah, Oxygen, you’re next.) Chu recently referred to Earth as ‘the great ship Titanic’.

“Chu will deploy bureaucrats to more than 6,000 public schools to, um, teach children about ‘climate change’ and efficiency.

“Chu, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner – and, unlike me, a deadly serious person – believes that ‘all the world’s roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming’. Guess what? Not one white roof in my community. What’s the holdup? Do we have to pass a law?

“We do. Because you are hopeless, petulant, immoral, and clueless. Your nightmare starts with banning a plastic bag at the grocery and ends with a job-killing cap-andtrade scheme. It starts with a public service announcement from a third-tier celebrity and ends with you scouring the earth to find a light bulb that lights something.”

Keen-eyed observers will have seen a similar pathway open up in New Zealand.

Interestingly, here, as in the US, technology is steadily being introduced that could, under a future government, be used to seriously restrict freedom of movement under a nanny state approach to climate change. In fact, exactly that is now underway in Britain: “The UK Sustainable Development Commission yesterday released a report recommending the use of average speed cameras for round-the-clock tracking of motorist journeys nationwide. The government advisory body said that widespread deployment of average speed cameras was required to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide by automobiles, a factor that some believe is linked to global changes in temperature. The report made a number of recommendations affecting the driving public. “ ‘The business models associated with private motoring are not aligned with sustainability’, the report explained.

“The commission suggested that the government take immediate action to encourage the use of mass transit and discourage automobile use in general. Speed cameras were seen as an easy method of accomplishing this goal.

34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

“ ‘Enforcing the speed limit has also been shown to be a very cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions from road transport with estimates of a reduction of 1.4 million tons of carbon dioxide simply by enforcing the 70 MPH speed limit’, the report claimed. “ ‘In 2009 the Home Office approved average speed cameras to enforce speed limits in urban areas. Cameras are networked together and can be placed at entry and exit points to an area with a fixed speed limit, for example 20 or 30 MPH’.”

So far, that’s a network of national cameras tracking your every move on the roads, and perfect for authorities to see whether you are making more car trips than your carbon allowance entitles you to. But Big Brother wants to go further in Britain, installing remote control of all cars by the state: “The report also called for a ‘clear timetable’ for the introduction of Intelligent Speed Adaptation technology that would use global positioning satellites to take away control of vehicle speed from the driver, making it impossible for a car to exceed the limit on a given road.

“The same information communications technology (ICT) infrastructure could be used for congestion pricing, tolling of every journey and charging for insurance by the number of miles driven. The commission explained that such systems would require a substantial and ongoing financial investment.”

As Association of British Drivers spokesman Paul Biggs notes, it’s a draconian attack on basic freedom of movement.

“This is an exercise in global warming alarmism aimed at underpinning ‘green’ taxes and restrictions on the general public.”

IN THE HOME The reach of Nanny State and the Green Police is already extending into homes. In Australia, all homes will shortly have to undergo a climate change warrant of fitness before they can be sold, at a cost of at least $1,500 per household.

From there, of course, it opens up the likelihood of a Government inspector ordering homeowners to make expensive “energy efficiency” upgrades before you are allowed to sell. Whatever ancient rights two parties once had to sell or buy their own property are fast disappearing, as governments decree that they can decide where you live, how you live, where you can travel and what you can sell.

In Australia, however, Labour’s climate statism has cost lives, with the deaths of several people caused by faulty installations of ceiling insulation. Journalists discovered many of the “green” installers who climbed on board for the Government initiative were untrained, and had created a number of hazards including accidentally electrifying the ceilings of thousands of homes by stapling insulation foil through power cables.

A media investigation in New Zealand has turned up safety concerns about a New Zealand government home insulation programme as well, and Investigate has been informed of hazardous installations of new electric company “smart meters” by gungho installers bypassing safety standards. All in the name of green efficiency.

THEY’RE COMING TO ARREST ME So are the Green Police a logical endpoint of the current obsession with control?

Bestselling author Jonah Goldberg suspects so: “ We are seeing a return to the idea – first championed by social planners in the progressive era – that government can and should play the role of parent. For instance, Michael Gerson, once a speechwriter for President Bush, advocates a new “heroic conservatism” – an updating of his former boss’ compassionate conservatism – that would unleash a new era of statist regulations.

“On the stump, Hillary Clinton refers to her book, It Takes a Village, in which she argued that we all must surrender ourselves to the near-constant prodding, monitoring, cajoling and scolding of the “helping professions.”

“Clinton argues that children are born in “crisis” and government must respond with all the tools in its arsenal from the word go.

She advocates putting television sets in all public gathering places so citizens can be treated to an endless loop of good parenting tutorials.

“Mike Huckabee, who represents compassionate conservatism on steroids, favors a nationwide ban on public smoking.

Everywhere, from Barack Obama to John McCain, we are told that our politics must be about causes “larger than ourselves.” What we used to think of as individual freedom is now being recast as greedy and selfish.

“We’ve seen this before. The original progressives – activist intellectuals, social reformers, social gospel ministers and other would-be planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – touted “social control” as

the watchword of their movement. One reason the progressives supported World War I so passionately was not because they supported the aims of the conflict but because they loved domestic mobilization. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator who sang the praises of the “social benefits of war,” was giddy that the conflict might force Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom. ... We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.”

The progressives believed that people needed to be saved from themselves.

Journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann dubbed average citizens “mentally [like] children and barbarians.” “Organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the only means to create meaningful freedom, argued Lippman, Dewey and others. And by free, the progressives meant free to live the “right” way.

“A similar dynamic defined much of Nazi Germany. Nazi Youth manuals proclaimed

that “nutrition is not a private matter!”

“Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz” – essentially, all for one, one for all – was the rallying slogan of the Nazi crackdown on smoking, the first serious anti-tobacco campaign of the 20th century. The first systematized mass murder in Nazi Germany wasn’t of the Jews but of the “useless bread-gobblers” and other lebensunwertes leben (“life unworthy of life”). The argument was that the mentally ill, the aged, the infirm were too much of a drain on the socialist economy.

“Now, nobody thinks anything like that is in store for us these days. But we can come far short of that and still overshoot the mark of what is desirable by a wide margin,” concludes Goldberg in a recent commentary for the Los Angeles Times.

But perhaps the last word belongs to green commentator Phil Valentine, who says in a column for The Marshall Tribune this month that he saw all this coming: “Remember, these people have already banned your light bulbs. The incandescent

The Lords constitution committee has released a report stating that the Proliferation of CCTV cameras and the growth of the DNA database are two examples of threats to privacy / NEWSCOM

light bulb is being forced off the market by government decree starting in 2012. That used to sound like a long time into the future but it’s just two years from now.

“San Francisco already has mandatory composting and they’ve banned plastic bags at supermarkets. The man behind those changes, Jared Blumenfeld, is now a regional administrator for Obama’s newly-radicalized EPA. Could the Green Police be far behind?

“The Audi ad should be a wake-up call to us all. With all of these new regulations being foisted upon us it only makes sense that they’ll need an enforcement arm at some point to keep us all in line.” q INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 35

B

illionaire software mogul Larry Ellison won the America’s Cup this month by following the same aggressive rules he has perfected in business: Push the envelope on technology. Don’t be afraid to spend money. And make the competition personal.

The pugnacious Oracle CEO and the crew of his 114-foot, high-tech trimaran led by kiwi Sir Russell Coutts, became the first U.S.-sponsored team in 18 years to win the world’s oldest sailing trophy, after trouncing the Swiss Team Alinghi in successive races making a third event unnecessary in the best-of-three competition off the coast of Spain.

“It’s an absolutely awesome feeling. I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of this team,” Ellison, who was on board for the race, told a TV crew on the scene moments after the BMW Oracle boat, dubbed USA17, finished the second race 5 minutes and 26 seconds ahead of its rival.

But the quick victory came after a yearslong quest, into which Ellison, the world’s fourth-richest man, poured hundreds of millions of dollars from a personal fortune estimated at $27 billion. In addition, he waged an extended legal battle against his bitter rival, billionaire Swiss yachtsman Ernesto Bertarelli, to make sure the race was staged on what Ellison considered fair terms.

During those years, Ellison also was spending billions of shareholder dollars to gobble up smaller companies and major competitors, including PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and, most recently, Sun Microsystems.

Ellison, who cofounded Oracle as an upstart database vendor in 1977, has built the Redwood City business into one of the biggest commercial software companies on Earth – with $23 billion in annual sales and $117 billion in total stock value.

“He is perhaps the most aggressive CEO in the tech industry today,” said Jon Fisher, a former Oracle vice president who now teaches business at the University of San Francisco. Fisher added that Oracle, a company that vies with such giants as Microsoft and IBM, is both highly competitive and 36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

OLD MUG The man behind the America’s Cup

For billionaire Larry Ellison, competition, whether in software or sailing, is personal, discovers BRANDON BAILEY

ruthlessly “engineering-centric,” even compared with other tech firms.

The 65-year-old Ellison has long cultivated a swashbuckling reputation – driving fast cars, piloting jet planes and even breaking a few bones while body surfing in Hawaii. In 1998, he won a 700-mile yacht race off the coast of Australia after sailing through a storm that killed six crewmen on other boats.

And he has not been shy about exploiting that image. In recent years, Ellison’s keynote speeches at Oracle’s Open World – a convention that draws 40,000 programmers, customers and industry executives to San Francisco each year – have been introduced with thundering music and dramatic video of Ellison and the BMW Oracle boat racing on the high seas.

Ellison also is known for publicly deriding

his rivals, both in the tech industry and the sailing world. Last fall, he assured a dinner audience in San Jose: “We have the fastest boat, we have the best crew, and if it’s a fair race, we’ll win.”

USA-17 was built with bleeding-edge technical features that helped it skim the ocean at speeds up to 40 knots. It has an unusual three-hulled design, made from carbon fibre and topped with a towering 223-

foot “wing sail,” a rigid structure like an oversized airplane wing that is controlled by nine adjustable flaps.

Winning the America’s Cup also took money. Ellison and Bertarelli each spent millions on boat design, construction and wages for a small navy of crew members and onshore support staff. While the exact numbers are undisclosed, Ellison has said he spent $200 million to enter the last America’s

Cup in 2007, when he failed to reach the finals.

And in keeping with Ellison’s approach to competition, he told those attending a Silicon Valley Churchill Club dinner in September that his feud with Bertarelli had become “very personal.”

To an interviewer in Spain last week, Ellison, a college dropout raised by adoptive parents, said of Bertarelli, the heir to a Swiss pharmaceutical fortune: “I don’t like him.”

During their two-year legal battle, Ellison frequently complained that Bertarelli, as the winner of the last America’s Cup, was trying to dictate terms for this year’s race that would make it impossible for anyone else to win. But their rivalry dates back to 2003, when Bertarelli’s Team Alinghi defeated Ellison in that year’s finals.

Ellison later retaliated by hiring away Bertarelli’s skipper, Russell Coutts, a wellforged America’s Cup winner.

Making things personal is how Ellison achieves his goals, according to Mike Wilson, author of a 1997 biography whose title, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison,” plays off a joke that made the rounds in Silicon Valley. The punch line: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

Ellison made business personal in Oracle’s early days by declaring war on rival database company Ingres, Wilson said. Later in the 1990s, Ellison took on Microsoft’s Bill Gates by publicly calling PCs of that era “ridiculous” and arguing that they should be replaced with less expensive devices that would access software over the Internet. The concept is similar to cloud computing, a leading industry trend today, but Ellison was early in talking about the technology.

Wilson said Ellison believes “if he creates an enemy, he can vanquish it.”

Now, with the recent $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is expanding into the hardware business. Ellison has loudly proclaimed his intention to beat industry leader IBM in the market for highend corporate computer systems.

“I enjoy competition. I think life is a series of acts of discovery,” Ellison told his Churchill Club audience.

But when asked if he would rather win the America’s Cup or lure a customer away from SAP, a German software company that has been one of Oracle’s major rivals, Ellison said he’d much rather beat the Swiss sailing team.

Explained Ellison: “We beat SAP all the time.” q INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 37

Global WARMING

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL

As public debate over global warming grows, retired science educator Dr BILL PEDDIE provides an informal overview of the evidence

G

lobal warming is not the first issue which has attracted a great deal of ill-informed debate and nor should we be surprised, given the difficulty in mastering the scientific background of what in fact is a very complex field. There is a problem for the general public to work out who to believe, since even the scientists are usually specialist in relatively narrow fields and both the politicians and the media commentators are often forced to make judgements without the luxury of knowing the relevant scientific literature and the appropriate questions to ask.

Having read some of the claims on global warming and noting that some of those making the claims are forgetting to mention substantial contrary observations from competing areas of expertise, I am submitting the following in the somewhat optimistic hope that it might stimulate some debate and gain some support for relevant research. As one with training and experience in science education, I hope to be able to draw attention to some issues which seem to me to have escaped mainstream media commentary, yet which seem important in gaining some degree of perspective. I stress I am not a climate expert. What I can offer is a relatively broad general science knowledge and considerable experience in interpreting the scientific literature for a lay audience.

Given the grave prognostications, the current media fascination with global warming is understandable, but despite the millions of words now published on the topic it is of some concern that naïve over-simplification and misrepresentation of fact remains the order of the day. But first I should lay my cards on the table. I am not a global warming sceptic, in that I accept there is evidence for some global warming over the last few decades. Furthermore I can accept a human generated component (albeit tiny) to recent warming trends. It is just I shudder when I know an important issue is being misrepresented and dumbed-down in order to support both the case for and against global warming..

We start with a current mainstream political view.

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Another winter storm has come to the Washington metropolitan area, February 10, 2010, just days after one of the biggest storms in history dropped more than 20 inches of snow over the weekend. / Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 39

The Maori myth of the god Maui using a flax net to lasso the Sun in order to slow its progress across the sky is a great story which now has an equally improbable modern counterpart in the form of Chancellor Angela Merkel. At a recent G8 summit Chancellor Merkel has explained how carbon dioxide emission control can limit the global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. This two degrees has now assumed the status of a universal mantra and became

the focus target for such international conferences as the Copenhagen Summit conference on climate change. My only problem with this is that since, as will be shown, the global warming and cooling history show far greater shifts than 2 degrees Celsius partly in response to well documented changes in radiation from the Sun, should we now presume that once again we have in Merkel some god-like being who can control our local Star?

Since detailed geology and geophysics is not part of the layperson’s general education the key questions are rarely part of the debate. For example if more people were aware of the research into carbon dioxide levels in the Paleozoic era which began 600 million years ago where for instance carbon dioxide levels are now generally accepted as several orders of magnitude higher than they are today with no corresponding evidence of exceptionally high global temperatures, then more questions of the please explain nature would be directed at the IPCC who for a variety of reasons seem to be content with insisting that the current levels are at an all time high.

For those wishing to look at the data for themselves a relatively non technical introduction to the overview can be found at http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ Carboniferous_climate.html

At a recent G8 summit Chancellor Merkel has explained how carbon dioxide emission control can limit the global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. This two degrees has now assumed the status of a universal mantra 40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Another point at which probing questions should be asked relates to the IPCC temperature record showing an abrupt leap in global temperatures at the beginning of the 1990s. Here the issue is that something of the order of two thirds of the world’s temperature data gathering stations were expunged from the record from 1990 onwards on the grounds that for various technical reasons they were considered unreliable. What is not clear is how it was then established that the abrupt shift in temperatures was not at least partly due to this change to the sources of data gathering. This is of particular significance since the leap in global averages did not appear to be reflected in a host of biological and geological annual data which is normally thought to accompany temperature change.

It is true that a majority of science commentators currently accept a view that global warming has happened and many of these support the claim that this is related to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately associations of this sort are not necessarily causal and, more to the point, it is distinctly unscientific to ignore and denigrate those who challenge mainstream beliefs by highlighting the current uncertainties.

It is also inescapable that some of the protesting experts are poor public communicators. Clive James in a BBC address in December 2009 described one of these, Fred Singer, while a man with undoubted high intelligence, as someone whose spoken deliberation is not only too slow for radio, but too slow for smoke signals! Nevertheless

Singer’s careful paper some years ago criticising IPCC presentations of data trends couldn’t be clearer. For those interested it is suggested they might Google the story “The Road from Rio to Kyoto: How Climatic Science was Distorted to Support Ideological Objectives.” There among other points they would find Singer saying that in choosing the last six hundred years as the frame of reference for the present phase of global warming, the IPCC accidentally – or even deliberately if you are a conspiracy theorist – avoided any focus on the Little Ice Age of the medieval ages from which the current trend might be thought of as a recovery. He also pointed us to the data typically showing that temperature rises before the carbon dioxide rises – not the other way around which would be more expected if carbon dioxide was the causal agent.

F

or those believing that global warming is accepted by most scientists as inevitably leading towards what Clive James mischievously referred to as the bodies of fried polar bears floating past your penthouse windows, they could do worse than read James Hogan’s book, “Kicking the Sacred Cow” and see just how many scientists wish to question the mainstream view and why.

It is probably still true that if you were to poll scientists, in all likelihood you would find a majority prepared to go along with the mainstream view that global warming is a serious problem and further that there is a strong component contribution from greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

Yet if you look closer there are some awkward problems with polling.

In 1997 President Clinton produced a list of 2,500 scientists who had approved the 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change preparing for Kyoto. If Singer is to be believed, most of those who had signed were not climate scientists but rather international governmental representatives, with a preponderance of those with social science qualifications, whose actual contributions were merely restricted to offering support.

To make matters worse, the executive summary for their views was purged of all traces of doubt, qualified opinion and scepticism – after it had been signed: which not unexpectedly drew a howl of protest from those who felt they had been thereby misrepresented.

From the other side of the debate, when Britain’s Daily Telegraph of the 30 May 2008 reported that a petition of 31,000 scientists denying global warming had been presented,

In choosing the last six hundred years as the frame of reference for the present phase of global warming, the IPCC accidentally – or even deliberately if you are a conspiracy theorist – avoided any focus on the Little Ice Age of the medieval ages from which the current trend might be thought of as a recovery the IPCC in their turn denounced the petition as including a good number without even the qualification of PhD. Perhaps the best we can say about this shonky way of proving the case by popularity of view is that in the eyes of a good number, there are still many unconvinced.

There are certainly some issues which are

unlikely to go away without more definitive research. Even using the IPCC figures, only 3.4% of the current carbon dioxide level is considered to be caused by human activity.

Of that again according to IPCC figures, only 1.8% gets into the atmosphere with the rest being absorbed by various sink activity eg photosynthesis of plants, absorption by INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 41

the sea, rock weathering etc. Whether that 1.8% contribution from a gas typically present in very low concentration is sufficient to force the overall temperature to change more than the myriad of contributing natural processes may be more uncertain than some would have us believe.

O

f course there are some recent and spectacular weather disasters.

Droughts, hurricanes, floods, areas of tropical coral reef dead or dying, and salt water contamination of ground water supplies are just some of the regular items in the news. Yet there is a note of caution. Those who keep watch on the hurricanes do not note a present trend towards fiercer hurricanes and many scientists claim that while some areas are currently devastated in some form or other this is not new, even if population increase and redistribution finds more people currently affected than was the case in the past.

The prognostications of lurid doom are

ates some sample articles, some of which follow. In the eighteen nineties through to about 1925, geologists and scientists were regularly warning of an impending ice age.

For example The New York Times February 24 1895 had the headline “Geologists think the World might be frozen up again”, Los Angeles Times Oct 7, 1912 “Fifth Ice Age is on the Way”, on that same day The New York Times, “Prof Schmidt “Warns us of an Encroaching Ice Age” and Chicago Tribune August 9 1923: “Scientist says Arctic Ice will wipe out Canada.”. In the 1930s, through the 1950s on balance the scientists were identifying global warming with a series of headlines pointing to glacier recession, a trend of warmer global temperatures, loss of Arctic Ice, permafrost in Russia melting etc.

Through the 1970s we were back to global cooling, with science journals and major newspapers alike printing the reports of scientists queuing up to warn us of the frozen disasters that awaited. Something of their flavour is encountered with Nigel Calder

increased rainfall. If this continues, according to Cameron, these rains could revitalize traditional drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

According to the article, this desertshrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a verdant savannah some 12,000 years ago.

Satellite images of regions affected by the greening include the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).

Further evidence from satellite images since 1982 reveals extensive re-greening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences. The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.

The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute

I also distinctly remember when the notion of global warming then re-emerged in the 80s as a relatively mainstream idea and recall apparently respectable scientists predicting ten metre rises in sea level by the year 2010, and what is more, gaining widespread acceptance for their apparently timely warnings almost as old as written history, and world wide floods are talked of in the Bible. Those who have visited the city of York in England, might have come across the windows of All Saints Church in North St which provide an ancient stained glass comic book version of the 600 year old Pricke of Conscience.

This work of art depicts some of the predictions from the 10.000 word poem of the same name in which among other things, 60 foot high floods are prophesied. In this immensely popular work which incidentally outsold the Canterbury Tales in its day we would for instance read: The sea shall ryse, as the bukes say.

Abouten the height of ilka mountayne, Full forty cubits certayne...

Yet popularity of an idea has never necessarily equated with scientific accuracy.

The headlines about climate change in the late 19th century through to the present day reflect some remarkable swings of opinion. Ian Wishart’s book Air Con enumer42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

(retired editor of New Scientist), telling us solemnly in International Wildlife JulyAugust 1975 that “The threat of a new ice age must stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of death and misery for mankind.”

My problem with the swinging positions issue as a recently retired science educator is that not only am I old enough to remember the 70s as a time when I was taking these warnings of an impending ice age from the mainstream scientists on trust but that I also distinctly remember when the notion of global warming then re-emerged in the 80s as a relatively mainstream idea and recall apparently respectable scientists predicting ten metre rises in sea level by the year 2010, and what is more, gaining widespread acceptance for their apparently timely warnings.

The vagaries of the present situation are illustrated by the July 2009 National Geographic article by James Cameron summarising the dramatic greening of parts of the Sahara Desert in response to the

for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study reported National Geographic.

If you take a continent like North America some of the complexities become apparent.

Areas currently adversely affected by cold are improved by the increase in frost free days as global warming kicks in generally extending growing seasons while elevated carbon dioxide levels act as a fertiliser for most forms of plant growth. Conversely, areas where too much warmth damages crops are adversely affected by increased temperature. That does not excuse us from worrying about the plight of East Africans currently experiencing drought conditions, but it is at least a reminder that world weather patterns are complex and difficult to dismiss with simplified soundbites. Please note that none of that need suggest there is dispute with the observation that the Earth has been warming. It may however begin to suggest that this alone might give rise to mixed fortunes.

Certainly a number of findings appear largely beyond dispute. For example the scientific consensus is that for the last few centuries there has been widespread evidence of some climate warming and it is also clear that some molecular forms like the well publicised greenhouse gases of carbon dioxide and methane may well help the atmosphere trap heat. The anthropogenic (human produced) contribution is much more uncertain since other gases like water, ozone, nitrogen oxides, methane, CFCs and various sulfur compound aerosols also impact on the atmosphere’s ability to hold heat, and depending on what stage the Sun has reached in terms of its longer term cycles, the atmosphere itself plays a variable role.

It is admittedly blindingly obvious that humans have been able to have some effect on this climate change particularly on a local scale where humans engage in large scale removal of trees, burn fossil fuels with little regard for the consequences and add pollutants to the air in vast quantities. The

orange shimmering sun seen dimly though the brown acrid haze is a feature of some of the world’s bigger cities, particularly in some third world countries which cannot be good for anyone. Urbanisation and industrialisation can radically affect the local environment.

In one example, a cold year in 1952 in London saw a corresponding increase in smog which was trapped by a layer of cold air and produced record air pollution. This particular smog is thought to have killed 4000 people. Visibility reduced to one or two metres, (causing the closing of a number of theatres since only those in the front rows could see the screen) An airliner got lost while taxiing at Heathrow after an instrument landing and those who went out to rescue it also lost their way.

Nitrogen and oxygen (the main components of air) do not normally combine at room temperature but within furnaces or the ignition chamber of car engines it is common for nitrogen oxygen compounds

to form. Modern smogs in large cities are often toxic with nitrogen dioxide from cars reacting with the other chemicals from produced by various processes to produce a particularly nasty soup called PAN (peroxyacyl nitrate for the chemically literate). Small soot particles are also nasty because the some of the complex hydrocarbons in them are carcinogens.

This does not excuse us from oversimplification when we are thinking of climate change, since some of these activities, eg the industrial production of sulfur compounds in the form of aerosols and even the natural production of water clouds at appropriate heights, actually increase reflectivity of solar radiation which makes it hard to be certain what is happening.

Even the standard argument that planting trees fights global warming by removing carbon dioxide needs some qualification. For example removing trees in areas towards the poles is thought to have a cooling effect since it exposes white snow which then reflects sunA patch of recently deforested Amazon rain forest is cut out of the jungle near Tailandia, Brazil. Brazil is the world’s fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Jack Chang/MCT

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 43

Because natural cycles of cooling and warming are dimly understood we cannot extrapolate from the figures in to date to say with confidence that therefore we know enough to know how to fix the current trends light back into space. Planting trees in temperate or tropical regions has more potential but even there, there are complications. Oil palms, often the trees of choice in subtropical regions are not nearly as good as the hardwoods they replace at removing carbon dioxide, while other trees photosynthesise effectively but also pump large quantities of water into the air from the ground by transpiration. Since the water molecule is also a greenhouse gas this does not necessarily lower the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Complications abound. For example 44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

there is a serious contention in the current scientific literature that having green house gases like carbon dioxide in the air may even be lowering global temperature since air warmed by the greenhouse effect at ground level rises during the day to a height where the heat can be dissipated into space at night. At present far too little is known about this aspect of the climate to be certain that this is indeed true. What is far more certain is that fossil fuel burning, deforestation and wide scale pollution remain serious issues and there is no question that they require urgent attention. By all means we can justify cleaning up our air and water and are certainly not obliged follow the previous White House regime in using scientific uncertainty to divert action away from conservation of nature and fossil fuels, but this is not quite the same as accepting we are ready or even have the means to restore the Earth to its hypothetical steady state temperature range. Indeed it is my contention that the assumption that all is understood and potentially controllable when it comes to climate change is wildly exaggerated.

Because natural cycles of cooling and warming are dimly understood we cannot extrapolate from the figures in to date to say with confidence that therefore we know enough to know how to fix the current trends. It might seem to follow that if humans can help mess up the atmosphere, if they were to desist from their climate interfering behaviour, all would be better. There is unlikely to be argument with the proposition that we should be prepared to clean up the mess we make in our environment.

The difficulty comes when the issues are presented as if that is all there is to global warming. There is also the ethical question as to why anyone pointing out these complications should be dismissed as a global warming denier or presumed to be in the pay of the oil companies.

For those of us brought up with familiarity with graphs from simplistic school laboratory experiments, those comforting and precise looking lines plotting temperature change over millions of years, or even plots of recent temperatures or carbon dioxide levels with time convey an implied accuracy of measurement which is quite unwarranted.

Measuring temperature in a beaker is hardly the same problem as measuring temperature of the whole world when local temperatures as little as five km apart can show more than a 5 degree centigrade difference, or for that matter showing that carbon dioxide is caus-

ing a temperature rise when a host of other equally plausible causal factors are continually changing at the same time.

This is particularly worth noting with the recent history of the famous hockey stick graph, a leading global warming icon of a few years ago. That famous graph which became the key rallying picture for the Kyoto summit, was based on very limited sampling and not only purported to plot unprecedented recent global temperature rises – but was extrapolated in a variant of an exponential curve to predict what was said by its author Michael Mann to represent runaway global warming. This graph was initially hailed as a most important indicator of the doom that lay ahead. When it was discovered that much of the data on the graph had been generated from looking at the tree rings from a single ancient bristlecone tree and it was pointed out that such tree rings being affected by soil nutrients, wet and dry growing seasons and a host of other factors are notoriously unreliable as a single measure of temperature variation, support for the graph subsided to a somewhat embarrassed silence.

From a personal point of view the graph incidentally caused me some embarrassment at a public meeting where I had gone along to listen to a public lecture in late 2006, well after Mann’s graph had been roundly rubbished by the scientific establishment, and witnessed the lecturer showing Mann’s now suspect graph and heard him assuring the audience that the IPCC were confirming that not only the statistics supported the graph but that he could confirm that 2006 would be the hottest yet. Because I had seen the data put out by the East Anglia Hadley group showing that the temperature was no longer rising, and admittedly only skim read the rubbishing of Mann’s graph, I challenged the speaker on both points. I was accused by the speaker of talking without facts and publicly berated for not having references with me to “proper science publications” to substantiate my “global warming denier” stance!

To be fair to the lecturer, he may well have missed hearing about the problems with the graph. Having pinned faith and reputation on earlier statements about the graph being essentially correct the IPCC and US National Academy of Science (the NAS) had been understandably reticent and muted in their eventual inevitable rejection of Mann’s work, so much so that the graph itself continued to feature in global warming literature and Mann was almost able to

MICHAEL MANN’S GRAPH: The committee went on to summarise their findings on Mann’s work as “bad mathematics”.

get away with his claim that his study had been vindicated by the NAS report on his work. The Mann graph continued to find its way into countless texts and educational publications.

Eventually Mann’s insistence that one of his frequent critics Lawrence Solomon was a liar, needled Solomon so much that he followed it up and discovered, then publicised, that both Dr Gerald North (chairman of the NAS panel on his work) and panel member Peter Bloomfield had admitted under oath to the Senate House Committee on Energy and Commerce Committee, that they had agreed with the criticisms of Mann’s work. The committee went on to summarise their findings on Mann’s work as “bad mathematics”.

In 2009 a surprise paper by Professor Eric Steig in collaboration with the same Michael Mann presented a radical new collection of “evidence” to show that whereas prior measurements to date had shown that it was only West Antarctica that was cooling, now Steig and Mann could now show that East Antarctica was also cooling. This time, perhaps remembering being burned once by accepting Mann’s work as gospel, both the IPCC and NAS were cautious and examined the data carefully. Their caution was justified. They discovered with the assistance of Mann’s earlier critic McIntyre, that the researchers had mixed up data from two

sites and simply guessed at other data at intervening points to compensate for the fact that there were insufficient observation stations in the area. This produced an entirely artificial trend that may have suited the global warming camp but did nothing to support their case or the reputations of the two researchers. It did not however prevent Greenpeace and a host of other Copenhagen Summit attendees from seizing on the paper to justify their prognostications To update the old dictum, there are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and global warming science.

S

ophisticated methods can be used to measure the concentration of gases in the atmosphere, but the atmosphere is subject to many changes at a local level producing serious sampling problems. Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere from burning, from respiration (from all living cells), from decay particularly of plant material, from all life in the sea, warming sea or land, from volcanoes and so on. It is removed by photosynthesis of plants, held in store by a host of methods like carbonate formation, sequestered by plant material which is either still living eg growing trees or being preserved in fossil form (eg fossil fuel such as coal or peat). The annual change of 18% in the carbon dioxide level in the Northern hemisphere during the growing plant sea-

son shows just how easily this level can be affected by natural and relatively predictable processes but when a large volcano occurs, or large patch of sea warms this can radically alter the local and even global concentration of CO2. Since activities like burning fossil fuels only represents a relatively tiny contribution to the total carbon dioxide present it is difficult to be certain how much effect changing this form of human behaviour might have on global temperature. On a number of occasions in recorded history a single large volcano has been known to alter the entire temperature for the world for several years.

The simplified version of green philosophy whereby we reduce emissions by replacing fuel powered cars with electric cars, insist on after burners for petrol driven cars, change to bio-fuels or hydrogen powered vehicles where possible and replace fossil fuel power generation with nuclear, and other forms of power generation (eg wind, tide, solar etc) may all help in some way with the task of cleaning up the atmosphere but there are still questions to ask.

Several studies have pointed out that since in most countries, surplus electricity must be produced by burning fossil fuels, and since no energy process is 100% efficient, burning fossil fuels to make the electricity to charge the cars to run on electricity finishes up by burning more fossil fuel, than would be the INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 45

case if the fossil fuel is burned directly in the vehicles. Bio-fuels are also something of a problem. Palm oil trees grow well in tropical and subtropical climates, but are not as good as the rain forests they replace for converting carbon dioxide back to oxygen. Where the land for producing bio-fuels is currently used for producing food and animal feedstocks – converting it to fuel production produces spikes in food prices and shortages which particularly hit third world countries.

Since science now provides some improving ways of following temperature trends of the past we should acknowledge that we can be relatively certain that of the last 6 million years there was a three million year period when the average temperature was warmer than it is today followed by a three million year, predominantly cooling period during which there were a number of relatively frequent cold and warm climate cycles. Although some of the climate changes appear to follow changes in the Sun’s output others are far from predicable. We can be grateful that much of the relatively recent human development has occurred at a time when we have had a relatively warm and benign 10,000 years of interglacial climate. But what should be stressed is that for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

The most recent few years’ record is a little embarrassing right now in view of the apparent recent agreement about warming in the scientific community, and that is that the steep increase in global temperatures through the 1980s and 1990s has now effectively flat-lined despite the steady increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the last ten years. The temperature figures from 2001 through to the end of December 2007 are summarised in the following graph, the red line summarising the grouped annual data, the white representing the movement in annual temperature, and the blue dotted line the monthly averages. The scale cur-

0.0 0.5 0.4 0.0 0.2

Since activities like burning fossil fuels only represents a relatively tiny contribution to the total carbon dioxide present it is difficult to be certain how much effect changing this form of human behaviour might have on global temperature rently up to 0.6 Celsius represents the rise above the temperature set at zero degrees Celsius near the beginning of last century.

There is no question that in the few decades prior to 1981 on balance there was evidence that global temperature was trending upward but the initial notion that this was somehow largely due to rising human

JAN 2001

influenced carbon dioxide levels must now be brought into some question.

It even turns out that the sea level rise in the highly publicised case of the tiny coral atoll of Tuvalu is a non starter in that the sea level monitoring equipment installed in 1993 has detected no overall rise in the vicinity of Tuvalu and it turns out the inundaDEC 2007

Latest TREND is NEGATIVE 0.012

46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

tion problems had more to do with erosion brought on by sand mining, construction and local industry depleting the water table and drawing in salt water.

Although the main media focus has been on the state of our surrounding atmosphere, this should not cause us to overlook that most of our atmospheric heat comes from the Sun and a smaller proportion from beneath us in the Earth. Since our main source of heat is solar, it matters that through the centuries the Sun has not been a completely stable heat source. There are several reasons why this should be.

T

he Earth does not stay a fixed distance from the Sun. The Earth’s orbit is partly elliptical and within this there is a pronounced wobble. There is also a gravitational related physical reaction of the Sun as it counterbalances the rest of the Solar system resulting in up to a one million Km change in the position of the Sun relative to Earth.

Since summer in a hemisphere occurs when that hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, whether or not it is a particularly hot summer partly depends on whether or not the summer comes when the Earth is approaching a near point to the Sun in the orbit. The fact that the Earth itself wobbles slowly like a slightly off- balanced top as it spins and orbits, provides a further complication. The Earth’s wavering distance from the Sun, and the fact that the solar system itself is continuing to move through our home galaxy, causes us to encounter varying concentrations of cosmic rays which in turn appear to affect the formation of high clouds in our atmosphere which are generally thought to moderate the degree of cooling or warming.

The Sun itself is undergoing a complex series of nuclear reactions, one of which involves hydrogen atoms being fused together to make helium and subsequently a range of nuclear reactions leading to other elements. Since the heat from these nuclear reactions sets up convection currents with variations in magnetic flux compounded by a rotating sun in which the core rotates at a different speed to the perimeter, the Sun is always changing.

Some of these changes are cyclical. At varying intervals, magnetic storms on the outside of the Sun occur (usually in linked pairs of sun spots). These typically have a diameter of an average of about 37,000 km and since the temperature within the spots is a few hundred Kelvin above the rest of the outside photosphere, an excess of sun

spots increases heat radiation and consequently results in an increase in temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. These peak on average every 11.1 years (part of the so-called Schwabe cycle) so we get imposed cycles of heating and cooling. Other cyclic changes like the larger 75-90 year (Gleissberg cycle) can affect the length and intensity of the sun spot cycle. These larger cycles including the 200-500 year Seuss cycle and the 1,100-1500 year Bond cycle which can have substantial effects that swamp the effects of the 11.1 year cycle and a number of initial studies suggest these correlate with much larger changes in surface Earth temperature.

Since sun spots increase the effective

The bubbles of CO2 trapped in layers of ice of varying thickness (depending on ambient temperature of ice formation) suggest that raised temperature is actually followed by elevated carbon dioxide levels rather than the other way around solar radiation, they are associated with an increase in the so called solar wind whereby charged particles stream out from the sun through the solar system. Among other things this wind appears to interact with the Earth’s magnetic field to produce an effective shield in the Earth’s atmosphere from deep space cosmic rays which are currently thought to increase high cloud formation. While not all climatologists accept that enough is known to be certain about this mechanism, there appears to be some cautious support for the following. With fewer high clouds the temperature rises still higher in the atmosphere. When the sun is less bright the opposite occurs. When more cosmic rays can get through to Earth’s

atmosphere in the absence of the solar wind shield, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case if we thought in terms of direct solar effects alone. This may help explain then what happened from the middle of the 17th century to the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots recorded, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. Because the details of different level cloud effect on atmospheric temperature is only partially understood, apart from some agreement that this is likely to modify temperature, those who produce the computer climate models are far from sure about the relative weighting that should be given to this effect.

The changes in solar radiance are now claimed by the Union of Concerned Scientists to play a relatively minor role in overall global temperatures, but on 3 June 2009, writing in the journal Nature, Lockwood et al. published a study entitled “A Doubling of the Sun’s Coronal Magnetic Field during the last 100 years” in which they suggest an important role for the Sun as did a series of papers by Scafetta and West showing that the total Solar Irradiance was increasing between 1980 and 2000 . To a number of these scientists this pointed to the Sun being a main factor in the increasing global temperature over that time.

Nevertheless, in plain English, changes in the output of the sun modified by a range of other factors including cosmic ray exposure, may well have caused some or even most of the most recent extremes of climate change. The weighting given to any specific component has been attempted but not to every scientist’s satisfaction. Dr Veizer and others writing in Nature in 2000 questioned the direct link between high carbon dioxide levels and high temperatures when the ice ages 440 million and 150 million years ago both showed evidence for very high carbon dioxide levels. According to Veizer there was for example a time when the soils show a level of approximately 16 times the present carbon dioxide level, and evidence for glaciation occurring at the same time.

While CO2 variations show periods of some correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales, the previously mentioned inconvenient exceptions in the record such as Veizer’s observation of two ice ages where there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide than the levels at present, and numerous periods where INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 47

there is an apparent complete lack of correlation suggest there is still much to learn.

Another question which is by no means settled is whether or not CO2 levels are a cause or effect factor in global temperature changes. Since more carbon dioxide is produced by a variety of oxidation processes at higher temperatures and since more carbon dioxide can be trapped by the sea at lower temperatures, temperature effects should be reflected in changing carbon dioxide levels without necessarily being a prime causal factor. The bubbles of CO2 trapped in layers of ice of varying thickness (depending on ambient temperature of ice formation) suggest that raised temperature is actually followed by elevated carbon dioxide levels rather than the other way around.

I

n 2002, Daniel H. Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also raised objections to the current popular view after studying carbon dioxide clues present in marine rocks. Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he said that with one exception – the recent cool period of the last 50 million years – he could find “no systematic correspondence” between carbon dioxide and climate shifts.

It is understandable that initially scientists should have thought carbon dioxide to be the key factor for increasing global temperature. Carbon dioxide is clearly currently increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere.

For the last few decades since the levels have been monitored it has averaged virtually a steady slope upward. This coincided with a period of global warming. Pre-industrial levels for carbon dioxide were about 285 parts per million (ppm). It is currently closer to 390 ppm. But the devil is in the detail.

Since 1960 when accurate annual measurements became more reliable it appears to have increased steadily from about 315 ppm.

The period 1980-98 was also one of clear temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340 parts per million (ppm) to 370ppm) which told the scientists they appeared to have found a causal relationship. Certainly from the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met. Office (from the Hadley Centre at East Anglia) and the IPCC (as confirmed by Al Gore) roughly identical rises were noted from 1980 until 1998.

Unfortunately for the supporters of the carbon dioxide causal argument since then, 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

the global temperature has been effectively unchanged (albeit wobbling up and down) despite the CO2 rising from 370ppm (parts per million)to an average of 380ppm and even getting up to almost 390 at its peak ).

This flat-lining means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued in step with the carbon dioxide increase. This would not surprise the paleogeologists who insist that there are strong indicators of carbon dioxide levels at 6000 ppm coinciding with temperatures very similar to those today.

There is always a problem in explaining physics to the non scientist, but nevertheless since so much of the current policy debate focuses on the carbon dioxide heat energy absorption effect some really basic physics must be at least acknowledged. Molecules

like nitrogen and oxygen are pairs of atoms and do not absorb and trap the Sun’s energy in the same way that molecules with three or more atoms can do. Carbon dioxide is an energy trapping greenhouse gas because it has three atoms but they are so arranged and bonded that the carbon dioxide can only substantially absorb at two narrow bands in the Sun’s energy spectrum. Water on the other hand, also has three atoms, but its bent arrangement and different electron arrangement enables it to absorb over a much wider range of the Sun’s energy. In other words water vapour is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Since processes like respiration and burning carbon based fuels produce water as well as carbon dioxide and since current estimates for the two molecules (water and carbon dioxide) give at least twice as much contributory

The global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued in step with the carbon dioxide increase

effect to the water in the atmosphere, it is not surprising some papers suggested up to 95% of the effect is caused by the presence of water. The global warming supporters claim that although water is potentially a much greater contributer to global warming since water stays for a shorter time in the atmosphere and that because carbon dioxide has a much longer retention time, the water has a corresponding smaller effect.

This however suggests a serious misunderstanding of how gases behave. Although it is the gases like water, methane and carbon dioxide which are the energy trappers, when we measure temperature it is predominantly the gas molecules which have collided with these energised molecules that are the ones being measured.

With beginning chemistry students I would first tell them that gas particles have

a variety of speeds (some easily as fast as a jet plane) then show them that when we set up a 30 cm tube with hydrogen chloride gas diffusing from one end and ammonia gas from the other – it is several minutes before the white rings of the ammonium chloride are seen. In other words rather than progressing in a straight line there are constant collisions and consequent energy transfers taking place in the giant game of billiards in the tube. If the atmosphere behaves the same way, since the energised molecules should be expected to lose energy in collision, surely the concentration at any one time is more important for the ability of the air mix to take up energy from the Sun than how long a particular molecule stays in the mix. If this is the case water, with its superior energy trapping ability should have a much greater effect than carbon dioxide with a lower concentration and more limited ability to trap the Sun’s energy. Whether or not a water tax would have the same emotional appeal as a carbon tax is a moot point.

At the very least, if the greenhouse effect is what it is thought to be in the mainstream media, the Earth’s temperature should have continued to rise as the carbon dioxide levels increased. It hasn’t over the last decade.

Whether or not those now committed to the recent global industry of carbon trading are prepared to look at this complication objectively remains to be seen.

Although the recent temperatures have fluctuated, the hard fact is that the world has not warmed in the last five years. Putting it bluntly, as indicated above, global warming has apparently stopped for now. This is not an opinion or a sceptic’s convenient inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. It must be stressed however that there is no excuse for ignoring the general warming trend of the last few decades. Certainly on average the

past 30 years have been warmer than the previous few decades and we also have to admit there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world weather patterns have been responding to those elevated temperatures. But, like it or not, the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased if only for the brief time-being.

What is more, we have no way of knowing for certain that this is a respite or the beginning of a new trend. To go with mainstream environmentalists we would probably claim this to be a temporary aberration but since a number of the solar physicists are predicting the beginning of a cooling period based on variations in the sunspot cycles we need more data before we can be sure what is happening and why.

There is plenty of incidental evidence to follow both the changes on number of sun spots and indications of changing temperature. It has been relatively common scientific knowledge for some years that the sun spot variation has a parallel in changes of global temperature. Sunspots have been known and counted for several hundred years but the correlation with other phenomena makes it possible to trace the record further back.

Since sunspots subsequently affect the concentration of Carbon 14 in our atmosphere, the record of sunspots can be reflected in various geological records like the layered varves in the bottom of lakes and fjords and annual changes in layers of ice in Arctic and Antarctic regions. The other indicators scientists use for monitoring the geological record for Earth temperature (which they call “proxies”) include fossil and living tree rings, signs of shifting ocean level, pollen studies to show shifts in tropical and temperate vegetation and the general fossil record of plant and animal life.

And yes, we have to admit clear evidence for a regular 11.1 year cycle of Sun spot intensity approximately correlating with global temperatures…and what is more, in the sediment, and in diatom and fish-scale records for example, there appear longer period cycles, all apparently correlating to some extent with those other well-known regular solar variations. Hence we note marine productivity cycles that are claimed to match well with the sun’s 75 year + “Gleissberg Cycle,” the 200+ year “Suess Cycle” and the more than thousand-year “Bond Cycle.” It is complex in that the strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun’s brightness over these longer cycles appears INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 49

to have had an effect many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle.

This has implications for the current mainstream acceptance of the carbon dioxide effect since we are currently on just beginning to shift from the 11.1 year cycle where carbon dioxide appears to have had a measurable effect and we are now moving to the verge of a more extreme cycle where the carbon dioxide effect is relatively poorly known.

I

t should be stressed the things we still don’t know about climatic factors, far exceed the areas of relatively secure knowledge. For example our accurate temperature readings and precise mapping of sun spots are relatively recent products of advances in technology. Past ice ages and periods of extreme warming are beyond our ability to monitor with any degree of precision. While it is true that other gases like methane appear to be on the rise it is actually hard to establish whether they come from human interference or are simple artefacts from natural phenomena. For example bubbles of methane are coming out of the ground in vast areas as the Siberian tundra goes through its current warming phase. It is hard to establish if a molecule of methane detected came from such a source or from a cow chewing its cud, and even harder to know whether it is a cause or an effect of the warming phase.

A warmer sea also releases more carbon dioxide. Since warm temperature also accelerates the breakdown of plant material and since an end product of this breakdown is carbon dioxide it is again hard to distinguish cause from effect in the rising levels.

For those sensing doom in the recent global warming trends, take heart. 6,000 years ago proxy evidence strongly suggests it was about 3C warmer than now. Even the rate of warming is not at an historical high.

Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade – 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

In those pre-industrial times it seems highly unlikely these large changes can be blamed on human intervention. From this combined record we note at times in the relatively recent past, temperatures have been considerably higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were far colder.

Presumably this is why there is fossil evi50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

dence to show that as well as the famed frozen mammoths there were once crocodiles in Hudson Bay, lemurs in Spitzbergen and subtropical forests in Antarctica. A clearer understanding of these extremes might even be a little comforting. A currently melting ice sheet in the far north might be less worrying if we remember that within recorded history there have been several times when the North West passage has been open to shipping.

When it comes to predicting regional climate changes, there are massive complications. The giant conveyer belt of ocean currents that variously bathe coastal regions in temperate, cool or warm water and hence affect their local temperature as heat is redistributed, can shift to the side, stop or even reverse in response to local changes in salin-

A currently melting ice sheet in the far north might be less worrying if we remember that within recorded history there have been several times when the North West passage has been open to shipping ity and land or water temperature. For example although Arctic Ice on one point of this conveyor has been going through a warming cycle (although I note that in the last annual bulletin there was 9.8% more ice at the summer minimum this year than for the previous year) there is heaps more ice in the Antarctic where one of the more recent big projects announced is drilling down through 4 km of ice to the rock beneath. It is also relatively well established that a one degree change in surface sea temperature can have a substantial effect on the frequency, intensity and duration of hurricane systems.

The melting of ice sheets at the two poles is not a simple correlate with the local temperatures at those latitudes. The global conveyer belt of warm water occasionally brings warmer water to the poles but for the last few

years this has had a much greater effect on the North Pole than the South. Whereas the North Pole ice sheet shrank relatively dramatically at the turn of the century, in the South it was largely only in West Antarctica and then mainly on the Peninsula which comes out beyond the Antarctic circle that the effect was most easily noticed. Earlier this year it was noticed that the point at which the West Antarctic shelf was broken had a local warmer current meeting the ice.

It also should be of comfort to remember that while icebergs have broken off in recent years, over the last three hundred years there have been much more dramatic ice shelf fractures and on several occasions icebergs one hundred mile square in size or more have been observed in the Southern oceans.

For example The American Navigator (an authoritative annual text) reported in 1854 a crescent shaped iceberg in the South Atlantic with horns at either end being described as 40 and 60 miles long, 40 miles between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long by 100 miles wide was reported and in 1956 a US icebreaker reported one 208 miles long by 60 miles wide. No long term effects of this dramatic ice loss as a harbinger of impending doom were noted.

Measurement problems confound those trying to find out what is happening. Measuring sea level sounds easy but not when some parts of the coast are rising and others sinking, quite apart from the fact that changes in air pressure also cause fluctuations. For example the IPCC reset its ocean rise models based on results from a tidal gauge off Hong Kong, yet at the same time satellite measurements showed a much smaller increase. Another form of measurement based on the spin rate of the earth, using the same physics as an ice skater uses to change the speed of their spin depending on how far they extend their arms shows the average increase of sea level to be less than 1.1mm per year. A very slow amble would be enough to keep ahead of that rate of inundation. For those seriously worried about sea level rise, but are unwilling to face the complexities of a scientific report, they could do worse than go onto the internet and seek out the record of an interview with a world sea level expert Dr Nils Axel Morner (entitled) “Claim that Sea Level is Rising is a Total Fraud” Any single way of measuring temperature back through the ages is at best approximate. Tree rings might well reflect temperature but a host of other factors also affect

Nort West passage

tree growth and the sampling of tree rings is still relatively sparse and unequally distributed. Even the temperature today is hard to measure. The grid method of temperature sampling now employed for global figures glosses over the awkward truth that some places get much more attention and are measured more accurately than others in the sampling Temperature measurement in the atmosphere is also hard to interpret since above average temperatures higher in the atmosphere might correspond with lower than average temperatures nearer ground level and vice versa. In any case if you wanted to measure the temperature at the top of the atmosphere there is a problem since the top of the atmosphere can raise or lower through 50 Km height variation. Even deciding where best to base the thermometers on land is by no means certain. The industrial phase of the human contribution to atmospheric temperatures appears unequally distributed. For example temperatures taken in industrial or urban city situations where most thermometers are situated are typically

reading up to 2 degrees above those in the nearby countryside and can be as much as 20 degrees C different. Apart from greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels we would expect some temperature changes from urbanisation in that large areas of concrete and asphalt have very different heat absorption and reflectivity when compared with green bush or forest. This then raises the question whether a temperature rise in a populated area is due more to increased greenhouse gases or the use of inappropriate building and construction material.

Although the three main centres collating global temperature information have similar figures, the variation between the centres is sufficient to be uncertain of the nature and size of some of the trends.

Some cynics in the denier camp have also pointed out that the claimed overall temperature rise of 0.5 degrees Celsius for last century actually falls within the demonstrated error of measurement and may in fact not even be real. Although I personally would not accept that and come down on the side of those who accept the IPCC reported mea-

surements as the best indications we can have of what we appear to know, I would have thought the new improvements in the measurement system as a whole are simply too recent to be talking with certainty about the significance of much of the data as indications of a long term trend.

Which brings us back to Chancellor Merkel. In the very short term she may well be hard to refute. But given the fact that there are numerous difficulties in finding out what is going on and an overwhelming body of evidence to show substantial changes in global temperature are not new phenomena, should we share in her certainty that if we follow her advice stability will return? Whatever else has remained stable, long term stable climate has never been a feature of this planet’s geological record. The only constant relating to climate is change and given the little we do know there is every reason to think that not even a politician will be able to prevent future hot and cold spells.

Dr Bill Peddie is a recently retired science educator. This is his first contribution to Investigate.

q INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 51

•Empower women

TEACH ABSTINENCE A major new study has found abstinence sex education is more effective than contraceptive education in delaying teen sexual activity. Now JENNIFER A. MARSHALL argues for a new look at the controversial idea

52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Members of the “Pure Love Alliance” hold a protest for abstinence before marriage in Bryant Park, New York/ NEWSCOM

A

group that thinks a Super Bowl ad, celebrating star footballer Tim Tebow’s life after his mother chose not to abort, is bad news for women might be a little out of touch with what women really want.

That helps explain why the US National Organization for Women and other feminist groups have vehemently opposed abstinence education while failing to notice that a culture of casual sex hasn’t been so liberating for women.

Just ask the 29-year-old Briton living in America whose anonymous account appeared

in her country’s left-wing Guardian newspaper. “(M)y sexual liberation was perversely trapping me in destructive relationships, while intimacy had become something elusive, insubstantial, disappointing, surreal,” she writes.

Weary of a “burlesque comedy where we all pretended we were emotionless and cool,” she decided to stop having sex because “I wanted sex to be, quite simply, special again.”

Similar world-weary statements have been recorded by researchers such as Dr. Miriam Grossman, author of “Unprotected,” and Laura Sessions Stepp, author of “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.”

Only a third of young women say they truly wanted to have sex the first time they did, Stepp reports. Young women, she writes, “are trying to make sense of what is arguably the most confusing sexual landscape any generation has ever faced.”

Most sex education pushes young women into this jungle and tells them contraception will provide adequate protection. This puts incredible pressure on those who have the most at risk in the casual-sex scene. And it jeopardizes their dreams of long-term security and love.

The vast majority of young women say marriage and motherhood are important to future happiness. Why wouldn’t we equip young women to achieve those dreams while avoiding such consequences as sexual assault and serious disease – to say nothing of bewildering heartache? Why not teach young women the real facts about the risks of early sexual activity?

Teen girls who engage in sex are more vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease and depression. Girls who are sexually active in high school are half as likely to go on to college as abstaining peers from the same social setting. Later, they often have more difficulty in forging the kind of lasting relationships that lead to marriage.

Why not help young women make social choices that advance their long-term educational, vocational and marriage prospects?

What about teaching tactics for resisting unwanted sexual advances? How about helping girls build relational and communication skills that will allow them to get what they really want – lasting love?

This common-sense approach is exactly what abstinence education seeks to do.

Contrary to its detractors’ caricature, abstinence education aims to empower young

people – especially young women – with the information, skills and long-term perspective they need to successfully navigate what Stepp calls today’s “confusing sexual landscape.”

New evidence says this approach is helping girls do exactly that.

A study by University of Pennsylvania researchers released Feb. 2 found abstinence education is effective in delaying the onset of teen sexual activity. After eight hours of instruction on abstinence, middle school students were one-third less likely to engage in sexual activity compared to their peers.

This effect persisted two years after they attended the class.

By contrast, the study found both “safe sex” and “comprehensive sex-ed” programs ineffective. The former promote only use of contraceptives; the latter teach abstinence and contraception.

Published in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, the Penn study used a randomized controlled experiment. The approach, designed to produce unbiased results, is considered the gold standard in program evaluation.

This is the most sophisticated evaluation showing abstinence education’s positive results, but it’s not the first. A 2008 research paper from The Heritage Foundation catalogued 15 scientific studies of abstinence education, 11 of which found positive effects.

On the same day the Penn researchers’ study came out, President Obama released his 2011 budget proposal. It zeroes out funding for abstinence education while creating a $179 million comprehensive sex-ed program – the very kind the Penn study shows to be ineffective. Add that to more than $600 million a year already spent by the Department of Health and Human Services on pregnancy and STD prevention programs and “family planning” services for teens.

The Obama administration’s plans not only fly in the face of the research, they ignore the real needs of young women. Teen girls say they want to hear the abstinence message. More and more young women who have braved the casual-sex culture say they still haven’t found what they’re looking for.

If we want to empower these women, let’s teach abstinence.

Jennifer A. Marshall is director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation and author of Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life in the Twenty-First Century. q INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 53

OBITUARY

The

Catcher’s Wry Author

ELAINE WOO revisits the life and times of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic writers, J.D. Salinger, who died at 91 at the end of January

P

erhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as the author of 1951’s Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that only appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965, when his last story – “Hapworth 26, 1924” – was published by The New Yorker.

Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.

His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his mythic status in Western culture. Still others interpreted his withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man who, shying from the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.

His stories – heavily autobiographical, humourous and cynical – focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking mean54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

ing in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which Salinger was a direct participant.

His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of The Catcher in the Rye, who was, like Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.

A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the criminally disturbed, including Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan. But Caulfield also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting moral outrage and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

When renowned psychiatrist Robert Coles lived among civil rights activists in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “scarcely a day went by that Salinger’s name wasn’t mentioned,” he recalled in an article for The New Republic almost two decades later.

Tom Hayden, the former ‘60s radical and California legislator who read Catcher as a teenager, called Caulfield one of several “alternative cultural models,” along with

novelists Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean, whose life crises “spawned not only political activism, but also the cultural revolution of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Catcher began to appear on college reading lists in the 1960s along with Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” but critic John Seelye, among other analysts, would later conclude that in “acting as a transcendental Special Prosecutor of Adult Values and making straight the way for the protest movements of the ‘60s,” Salinger led the way.

In the ensuing decades Catcher became one of the most-banned and most-taught books in the country. Salinger also created the neurotic Glass family, who first appeared in stories published in the 1940s and ‘50s. Among the best-known are two long pieces published in The New Yorker in the 1950s and later combined in the book Franny and Zooey by Little, Brown in 1961. The Glasses also were featured in the collections Nine Stories (1953) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

An unauthorized collection, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, was mysteriously published in 1974 and went out of print after some 25,000 copies were sold. It contained 21 pieces that originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s but that Salinger never wanted reprinted. The bootlegged edition so outraged the author that he broke two decades of silence when he sued to stop its sale.

In a rare interview, Salinger not only condemned the pirating but tried to explain his extraordinary reluctance to share his writing with readers.

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he told The New York Times in 1974.

“It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

In 1997, the announcement by a small literary press that it would reprint his last work – the novella-length “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which was originally published in 1965 – caused excitement among a legion of hungry Salinger devotees. But the book never materialized, its cancellation as mysterious as the author who had led a hermitic life on a 99-acre estate in New Hampshire since 1953.

Fans regularly travelled to the remote New England hamlet to find Salinger but rarely made contact. He lived on a hill behind high walls, where a sign warned trespassers to keep out. He steadfastly ignored almost all interview requests and aggressively dis-

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 55

couraged biographers’ efforts to examine his life. He would not allow his photograph or personal information to appear on his book jackets. He even refused fan mail. “He just doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of us,” Lillian Ross, the longtime New Yorker writer and Salinger friend, once noted.

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year’s Day, 1919. His Scotch-Irish mother, Marie Jillich, changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger, a well-to-do importer of meats and cheeses. Jerome, known as Sonny, and his sister, Doris, who was eight years older, grew up on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan.

Sonny attended several public schools and the private McBurney School, racking up poor grades at all of them. According to biographer Paul Alexander, McBurney officials offered this withering appraisal when they kicked him out: “Character: Rather hard-hit by (adolescence) his last year with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word.”

In desperation, his father sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. It was there, holding a flashlight under the covers of his dormitory bed, Salinger first began 56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

to write. His grades improved, and in 1936 Valley Forge awarded him what was to be his only diploma.

He attended New York University for a year, interrupting his studies to work as an entertainer on a cruise liner, then spending several months in Europe to learn about the family import business. Meanwhile, he was writing stories, sending them off to magazines and collecting rejection letters.

In 1939, he entered Pennsylvania’s Ursinus College, where he wrote drama reviews and a humourous column called “The Skipped Diploma” for the campus newspaper. He pulled average grades but dropped out after nine weeks.

Back home in New York, he enrolled in a class at Columbia University that would launch his career as a writer. It was taught by Whit Burnett, editor of the influential Story magazine, where such writers as William Saroyan, Norman Mailer and Carson McCullers had made their debuts. Burnett agreed to publish “The Young Folks,” one of the stories Salinger, then 21, had written for the class. A year later, a Salinger story appeared in Collier’s magazine and then one in Esquire.

Shot by a Catcher reader, Jim Brady was wounded in the head during John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan / CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY PHOTO/Scott J. Ferrell

In April 1942, five months after Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Salinger joined the Army but did not stop writing. He carried his typewriter all over Europe, reportedly even taking it with him into foxholes, and had several stories published in the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1944, Salinger, who was serving in counterintelligence, landed with the 4th Infantry Division at Normandy on D-Day and stayed on through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge. According to unauthorized biographer Ian Hamilton, the young writer may have experienced a nervous breakdown in July 1945, after fighting for nearly a year during the advance on Berlin. He was hospitalized in Nuremberg, where he wrote to his new friend, Ernest Hemingway, that he

faced the possibility of a psychiatric discharge; he was presumed to have earned a regular discharge before returning to civilian life in November of that year.

Stories Salinger published around this time concerned soldiers on the verge of emotional collapse, including the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield. Published in Colliers in December 1945, it was titled “I’m Crazy.”

J

ust before he left the Army, Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. She was thought to be a doctor with Nazi ties who, according to the author’s daughter, Margaret Salinger, “hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis.” The eight-month marriage ended in mid-1946 during a vacation in Florida, in a hotel much like the one Salinger would describe two years later in A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

Considered one of his finest stories, it features the sage but mentally fragile Seymour Glass, who is just released from an Army hospital and on holiday in Florida with his bride, and ends in an inexplicable tragedy. The same year that his marriage ended, Salinger received welcome news: The New Yorker had finally decided to publish a story of his that it had been holding for five years.

The main character of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison Avenue” was Caulfield, again in the middle of a nervous breakdown. “Slight Rebellion” later became the basis for a chapter in The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger soon began to write exclusively for the New Yorker. Among the pieces that appeared there during the period leading up to 1951 was “For Esme – With Love and Squalor,” narrated by a man very much like Salinger. The main character is a counterintelligence officer who seeks temporary refuge from World War II by taking tea in an English establishment. There he meets and is deeply affected by a precocious teenage girl named Esme and promises to write a story for her. The rest of the story seals his promise and brings a gift of redemption. It is one of Salinger’s most beloved works, reportedly eliciting more reader response than any other story he had written.

Then, in 1951, came The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger spent 10 years writing the novel, which opens with 17-year-old Caulfield in a California mental hospital describing three days he had spent in New York after flunking out of school for the third time. The rest of the book shows Caulfield as he heads for collapse in a series of adventures and misad-

John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono. Lennon was later shot dead by a Catcher in the Rye reader/ NEWSCOM

ventures that veer between the screamingly funny and the desperately sad.

The novel is written entirely in the vernacular of an upper-middle-class, adolescent Manhattanite of the era. Caulfield litters his sentences with a lazy “and all” (as in how his parents “were occupied and all before they had me” or how they were “nice and all”) and is generous with obscenities. He is kind to children but distrusts most everyone else, calling anyone or anything he dislikes “crumby” or “phony.”

The book quickly earned a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 30 weeks. The Book-of-the-Month Club made it a main selection, an unusual honor for a first-time novelist. “Read five pages,” club editor Clifton Fadiman wrote, and “you are inside Holden’s mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden is himself.”

Time magazine also praised it, noting that it offered “some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner.” Similarly, S.N. Behrman, writing in The New Yorker, said Salinger’s humor made the book “one of the funniest, expeditious (novels) in the history of juvenilia.”

But T. Morris Longstreth in the Christian Science Monitor condemned it as “not fit for children to read” and said Caulfield was “preposterous, profane, and pathetic beyond belief.” James Stern in The New York Times adopted a voice similar to Salinger’s protagonist when he wrote that the book “gets kind of monotonous. And (Salinger) should’ve cut out a lot about those jerks and all at that crumby school.” A memorable barb came from Norman Mailer, who wrote, “I seem to be alone in finding (Salinger) no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

Instead of basking in the glow of celebrity, Salinger went to England to avoid publicity. After the novel went into its second printing, he ordered Little, Brown to remove his photograph from the book jacket. Future editions would rank among the plainest in publishing history. In 1953, he left Manhattan for New Hampshire, holing up in a remote rural spot of the sort that Holden Caulfield longed to escape to.

Salinger’s interest in Zen Buddhism deepened, and there were indications that he considered becoming a monk. The first litINVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 57

erary manifestations of Salinger’s Buddhist influences appeared in the collection Nine Stories. Each story is a puzzle, like the Zen koan that Salinger chose to open the volume. It reads, “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Eudora Welty, writing in The New York Times, said that in Nine Stories Salinger displayed “the equipment of a born writer – his sensitive eye, his incredibly good ear, and something I think of no other word for but grace.” Charles Poore in The New York Times was less charitable, calling the stories “disjointed, uneasy little dreams,” while Sidney Monas in the Hudson Review took exception to Salinger’s “peculiar conceptual separation of the child from the adult, as though they were of different species, not merely different ages.”

Despite the mixed reviews, the collection spent three months on The New York Times bestseller list.

In this later period, Salinger focused on the various members of the eccentric Glass family, which consisted of Irish-Jewish 58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

vaudevillians Bessie and Les and their seven brilliant children: the tragic Seymour; his brothers Buddy (whom Salinger called his “alter-ego and collaborator”), twins Walt and Wake, and Zooey; and his sisters Boo Boo and Franny, the youngest of the brood. Fans lined up at newsstands whenever a new Glass story was published in The New Yorker. “I love working on these Glass stories,” Salinger wrote in an author’s note when the book Franny and Zooey came out in 1961. “I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and allavailable skill.”

Franny and Zooey spent six months on The New York Times bestseller list despite some of the harshest reviews of Salinger’s career.

Some critics found his obsession with the Glasses unhealthy. “To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool,” Mary McCarthy wrote, while John Updike said the author’s adoration of his characters “robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

Novels and short stories, including the iconic The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger are seen on a bookstore shelf in New York.

More than 60 million copies of Catcher have been sold worldwide since it was published in 1951./ Richard B. Levine) NEWSCOM

Critic Alfred Kazin pronounced the Glasses too “cute,” but he acknowledged that their creator had a gift. “No American fiction writer in recent memory has given so much value, by way of his hypnotized attention, to the little things that light up character in every social exchange,” Kazin wrote in 1973. “Salinger has been the great pantomimist in our contemporary fiction.”

Even Updike allowed that when “all reservations have been entered in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction (Salinger) has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and the

refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

Salinger’s last published word on the Glasses came in the long and rambling “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Consisting largely of a letter from camp written by an unbelievably precocious, 7-year-old Seymour, the story met with much critical disdain.

Nonetheless, the announcement more than three decades later that the story would be republished as a book made headlines across the country. It prompted New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani to reassess the Glass saga, including “Hapworth,” which she concluded was “a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”

Shortly after her essay appeared, Orchises Press, the tiny Alexandria, Va., publishing company that had planned to reissue “Hapworth,” announced that publication had been indefinitely postponed. The author, as usual, had no comment.

Salinger was tall (over 6 feet) and darkly handsome. He married his second wife, Claire Douglas, in 1955, when she was a 19-year-old Radcliffe student and he was a 34-year-old rising literary star. The marriage produced two children: Margaret Ann, born in 1955, and Matthew, born in 1960.

Margaret Salinger, who became a lay minister, penned a stinging memoir called Dream Catcher, published in 2000. In it she describes an extremely lonely childhood.

“My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation.” To fill the hours, her mother read stories to her, she said, while her father “spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who accompanied us throughout our day.”

Douglas, who became a Jungian psychologist, sued for divorce in 1967, and Salinger did not contest.

In addition to his son, daughter and three grandchildren, Salinger is survived by his third wife, Colleen O’Neill, whom he was believed to have married in the late 1980s.

Little is known about her except that she had worked as a nurse and was about 50 years younger than Salinger.

The most infamous of his liaisons came in 1972, when the then-53-year-old author began corresponding with Yale University undergraduate Joyce Maynard, who was being touted in the press as her generation’s

Holden Caulfield after the publication of her celebrated New York Times Magazine cover story, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.”

When Salinger invited Maynard to live with him in New Hampshire, she dropped out of school and moved in for 10 months.

Although rumours of the affair had been widely circulated, Maynard, who eventually became a columnist and novelist, did not go public with it until two decades later.

She devoted several chapters of her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, to their relationship, writing of their inability to have

The most infamous of his liaisons came in 1972, when the then53-year-old author began corresponding with Yale University undergraduate Joyce Maynard, who was being touted in the press as her generation’s Holden Caulfield after the publication of her celebrated New York Times Magazine cover story, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” sexual intercourse due to a medical condition of hers, his absorption in homeopathy and his devotion to Reichian therapy.

According to Maynard, Salinger also regularly induced himself to vomit after eating pizza or other foods he deemed unhealthy, and he taught her to do the same.

Their relationship ended after a Time magazine reporter obtained Salinger’s unlisted phone number and asked him to comment on a story about Maynard, who had a book coming out.

Salinger, apparently incensed by this intrusion, kicked her out of the house a short time later.

In 1999 Maynard put 14 of his letters to her on the auction block, explaining that she needed the money to pay her children’s college tuitions. The correspondence was purchased for $156,000 by California philanthropist Peter Norton, who announced that he would return the letters to their author.

A decade earlier, Salinger had successfully barred biographer Ian Hamilton from using other letters in his 1988 book, In Search of J.D. Salinger. But Salinger’s lawsuit ironically resulted in broad public access to the very correspondence he was trying to suppress: In order to protect his letters, Salinger had to place them on file in the copyright office in New York, where anyone could read them for a modest fee.

In a deposition for the Hamilton case, Salinger stated that he was still writing fiction. According to Maynard, Salinger had completed at least two books by the early 1970s but kept the manuscripts in a safe, far from prying eyes and publishers. He told Maynard that publishing was an “embarrassment.” “The poor boob who lets himself in for it might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.”

What critic George Steiner once called “The Salinger Industry” – the curiosity and speculation surrounding the enigmatic author and his works – continued to thrive into the early 2000s, when some critics felt compelled to pronounce that Salinger was no longer relevant, that Catcher was a “minor classic” at best, or that Franny and Zooey was the more skillful work. Zooey, writer Janet Malcolm declared in The New York Review of Books in 2001, “is arguably Salinger’s masterpiece.”

Other writers were inspired by him, such as W.P. Kinsella, who made Salinger a character in his 1999 novel Shoeless Joe, and John Guare, who paid homage to him in his 1990 hit play Six Degrees of Separation. Bestselling author Don DeLillo told Esquire magazine that Mao II, his 1991 novel about a reclusive novelist, was born in the instant that he noticed a tabloid photograph of Salinger with a haunted look on his face.

Novelist Herbert Gold once asked Salinger for permission to reprint one of his stories in an anthology. Salinger actually wrote back, Gold recounted in the 2002 book Letters to J.D. Salinger, edited by Chris Kubica and Will Hochman. His answer, however, was no.

Gold lost the letter but 40 years later still remembered Salinger’s enigmatic last words on refusing a place in the anthology: “I have my reasons.” q INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 59

INTERNET

60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

One man’s story

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 61

Identity theft and fraud have ruined Dave Crouse’s life. In fewer than six months, $900,000 in merchandise, gambling and telephone-services charges were siphoned out of his debit card. His attempts to salvage his finances have cost him nearly $100,000 and have bled dry his savings and retirement accounts. JENNIFER WATERS backgrounds what could happen to anyone

D

ave Crouse’s credit score, once a strong 780, has been decimated. And his identity – Social Security number, address, phone numbers, even historical information – is still being used in attempts to open credit cards and bank accounts.

“I have no identity,” says Crouse, 56. “I have no legacy. My identity is public knowledge and even though it’s ruined, they’re still using it.

“It really ruined me. It ruined me financially and emotionally.”

Crouse is among the 11.1 million adults – one in every 20 U.S. adults – last year who have the dubious distinction of breaking the record of the number of identityfraud victims in the United States, according to a recent study by Javelin Strategy and Research. That figure is up 12 percent over 2008 and is 37 percent ahead of 2007. The cost to the victims: a collective $54 billion.

“The odds have never been higher for becoming a fraud victim,” says James Van Dyke, Javelin president and founder. “It’s an easy crime to perpetrate, a crime that’s almost impossible to catch when done in a sophisticated manner and a crime in which enforcement is very limited.”

62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Crouse can attest to that. Once an avid fan of online shopping and banking, he would auction on eBay.com, download songs from iMesh.com and use his ATM card like a credit card.

He first noticed suspicious activity in his account in February 2009 for small charges of $37 or $17.98. He had a full-time job then and was spending out of an account that generally held $30,000.

“All of a sudden it really got bad. In August the charges hit big time – $600, $500, $100, $200 – all adding up from $2,800 to $3,200 in one day.”

He called his bank immediately and started what began a tiresome process of filling out what he said finally amounted to about 20 affidavits swearing that he was not responsible for the charges. He said one day he filled out an affidavit about a charge and the next day the bank had accepted similar charges approaching $4,000.

“At that point I was going to the bank every day and looking at everything,” he says. He had the time then. Five months before that he had been laid off his $180,000 a year construction-industry job.

Now he was in a double bind: His $2,300 a week net income had dwindled to $780 in unemployment benefit every two weeks and

his accounts were getting drained daily – even after he closed his debit account.

He opened a new account at a new bank and the next day both accounts got hit with a $1,100 charge. The new bank told him it was keystroke malware that had likely done him in. Someone had hacked into one of the sites he visited regularly, his computer got infected and picked up all his personal information by tracking every key he struck.

While much of the fraud came from online purchases and at gambling sites, there were new accounts opened in different names but linked to his bank account.

There was one purchase of a plasma TV from a Best Buy in Florida that was shipped to a Brooklyn, N.Y., address. In another case a woman in North Carolina was writing out cheques tied to his account.

“It was nasty,” he says, admitting that he even contemplated suicide. “I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t feel like a man anymore. I was violated and I didn’t know what to do.”

High-Value Targets

Identity thieves steal mostly through two means, according to Michael Stanfield, chief executive of Intersections Inc., a riskmanagement firm. They take an established address and phone number of an identity that “has some value,” he says, like a doctor or a lawyer. In many instances, they can go to the Internet and acquire enough information to get an address changed with your bank account or a credit card account. They apply for new accounts as you.

Others take over existing accounts, Stanfield says, through keystroke malware that you – and probably hundreds or even thousands simultaneously – have picked up through the Internet.

Listening software then sits on your computer, perking up when you go to a bank site. It copies all your key strokes – your user name, password, challenge question, account numbers, everything.

“You leave and the bad guy goes right back in behind you,” Stanfield said. “We’ve seen examples where that has occurred and its gets fixed and a month later the computer gets cleaned out again and he becomes a new victim, even with a new account.

“It’s a horrible event and it’s happening every minute of the day to someone,” Stanfield says.

According to Javelin, the number of fraudulent new credit-card accounts shot up to 39 percent of all identity-fraud victims in 2009 from 33 percent the year before. Fraud

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 63

significant pay cut because he lost his clearance. He figures he’ll be 61 by the time he crawls out of the debt the fraud caused and is able to rebuild any kind of nest egg. He’s sold many of his prize possessions, including a 1993 Corvette and assorted pieces of gold and silver. He uses coupons now, shops food sales, even eating things he doesn’t like such as macaroni and cheese because they’re cheaper.

“It’s just like I’m back in college.”

His advice to others: Don’t touch Web sites that offer free things or 30-day trials; never give out personal information; and always keep your receipts.

Don’t Become A Victim

from existing credit-card accounts rose to 75 percent. New online accounts opened falsely more than doubled from 2008. The study also found that 29 percent of victims said new cell-phone accounts were opened deceptively.

No One Is Immune

Identity theft is indiscriminate, cutting across all age and income levels and affecting countries right around the world. But those most at risk are those who spend the most and that tends to be middle-income families. Those most likely to miss detecting fraud are usually 18 years old to 24 years old, simply because they don’t pay enough attention to their accounts and – though most are technologically savvy – they’re not protecting themselves against the worst of technology through malware, viruses and Trojan horses.

“The more you transact, the more you’re at risk because you leave a trail behind,” Van Dyke says.

Criminals turn to in-store and online purchases to steal most often, accounting for four in 10 cases of fraud, according to Javelin. Some 20 percent of victims have had their information used to make phone or mail-order catalogue purchases.

“A lot of these crimes are really a battle of who can get their hands on the most information,” Van Dyke says. Remember, too, that not all identity fraud is committed by 64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Keep close watch over activity in existing accounts. Monitor bank and credit-card accounts weekly, even daily

strangers. Last year at least 13 percent of all ID crimes were committed by someone the victim knew, like a family member or friend.

As for Crouse, the trouble extended into other areas of his life. He fell behind on paying bills – though the mortgage on the house his ex-wife and two sons live in was kept current – and racked up myriad late fees, higher interest costs and penalties. One son dropped out of college and another is reconsidering where he’ll go because of costs.

In the meantime, he was having trouble finding work. With a doctorate degree in organizational psychology and a longtime veteran of contracting work at federal facilities like the FBI and the Secret Service, Crouse was getting high acclaim in interviews but no calls back. Finally one recruiter told him that companies were turning him away because his credit reports were so poor and his debt was mounting. As a result, his security clearance to work on government buildings was yanked.

“It affected me. It affected my livelihood.

It affected my whole family.”

He finally found a job, though he took a

Javelin has recommendations for what it calls “prevention, detection and resolution” of identity fraud: Keep sensitive information from prying eyes. Request electronic statements, use direct deposit, don’t put checks in unlocked mailboxes. Don’t give out your Social Security number and secure all personal and financial records in locked storage devices or behind a password. Shred all sensitive documents.

Prevent high-tech criminal access. Install good antivirus and firewall software like ESET’s NOD32 on your computer and keep it updated. Never respond to requests for personal or account information online or over the phone. Watch out for convincing imitations of banks, card companies, charities and government agencies. Don’t divulge birth date, mother’s maiden name, pet’s name or other identifying and personal information on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Be creative with passwords and don’t access secure Web sites using public Wi-Fi. Keep close watch over activity in existing accounts. Monitor bank and creditcard accounts weekly, even daily. Sign up for alerts to your phone or e-mail accounts.

Javelin found that 43 percent of reported identity-fraud cases are spotted through self-monitoring.

Keep close watch on new accounts.

Monitor your credit and public information to spot unauthorized activity. Get those free credit reports and consider fee-based services that monitor those things for you.

Resolve identity fraud quickly. Report problems to you bank, credit union, protection services and the police immediately.

Make sure your financial provider offers zero-liability protection for debit and credit cards. q

we protect your digital worlds

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 65

n THINK LIFE

money

Financial alarm bells Peter Hensley picks up Mark Steyn’s warning and runs with it

T

ony and Pam had admired Jim and Moira for many years. Moira’s commitment to her community was well known and Jim’s dedication to their extended family was legendary. Jim had a story for every occasion and was both an excellent dinner guest and host. He was old enough now to use a lot more poetic licence than he used to. Moira regularly accused him of making up stories because he had forgotten the true facts.

Moira’s mind was sharp and she kept it active with puzzles. She especially liked the daily crosswords on the internet because the letters changed from yellow to blue when the correct word was entered. Doing Sudoku on the computer was much easier as well as the

colour changed when the numbers lined up.

Whilst Moira enjoyed the puzzles they were of secondary importance. She most enjoyed keeping up with the business news from around the world.

Tony and Pam were about 20 years junior to Jim and Moira and fitted firmly into the title of baby boomers. They had always enjoyed life. In the good old days university was free and jobs were plenty. Not like now, when their own children were expected to take on a student loan to gain a tertiary education. Moira thought this idea was scandalous. Why should the managers and business owners of tomorrow start their working life with a huge millstone of debt. Not like the old days when some of the fortunate actually

History has shown that when individuals and corporations start spending more than they earn, they can get away with it for short periods of time. Creative accounting, flash talking and smoke and mirrors can often postpone the inevitable for longer than most people comprehend.

66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

received a government scholarship which went a long way to pay for living expenses.

Tony admired Moira’s ability to manage the family’s finances. He understood that they had started with virtually nothing and unlike many of their generation they had applied several basic principles very well which saw them accumulate wealth over time.

Tony also knew that Jim and Moira did not consider their wealth accumulation tactics to be secret. In fact they were considered to be amongst the friendliest couple in town, being generous with their time, money and advice. Jim often said that their house was a mecca for those seeking financial knowledge and a decent feed. Moira’s cooking skills were legendary. None of this pre-prepared supermarket fast food for her.

Every meal was made from scratch with basic ingredients.

In order to ensure that Moira had fresh ingredients, Jim had always tended a vegetable garden. In the early days it was out of necessity, nowadays it was out of habit.

Crop sizes had diminished over the years and with the availability and range of cultivated plants at the local supermarket he admitted to losing some of his enthusiasm. Jim and Moira had not lost the desire to help others though. Sometimes it was by sending an anonymous cash donation through the post, other times it was by sharing their abundant vegetable crops and sometimes by just providing a gentle word of encouragement to a couple who had lost their way financially.

Over the years, Jim and Moira had come to understand that there was a real truth in the saying that ten percent of the population controlled ninety percent of the money.

At times they struggled to comprehend why this was the case, but they had seen enough examples to know that the rule applied in their community. Moira had shared countless cups of tea and a biscuit with youngsters explaining two simple rules. Firstly, they had to spend less than they earned and secondly that they had to have a plan to both get out of debt and stay out.

Debt was the issue that troubled Moira the most. She knew the effect that debt had on individuals and understood that it was

the same for corporations and countries.

A company, whether it was the local service station or the supermarket down at the mall could not keep spending more than they took in income or sales. Spending more on expenses than they took in income was always going to be a short term plan.

Yet the list of countries attempting to do the same thing was growing by the day.

Iceland tried it recently and found out it didn’t work.

Moira recalled that in 1989, Japanese share market Nikkei index almost reached 40,000 and the value of the land surrounding the Emperor’s Palace was rumoured to be worth more than the entire state of California.

Japan’s debt ratio to GDP has now reached 200%. Over the past 20 plus years they have built roads and bridges going anywhere and nowhere. Nominal interest rates are virtually zero. Those citizens with spare cash are forced to seek investment opportunities off shore as their local share market struggles to get into double figures.

It is common knowledge that Greece is having troubles balancing its books. It is obvious to many commentators that the Government is likely to default on its debt.

This is not new to Greece, the record sug-

gests that over the past 200 years they have defaulted 105 times. Not a big issue some would say, except they are now part of the Eurozone and member countries are expected to play by the rules. Prudent fiscal management is one of them.

Over the years of helping families with their budgets Moira is more than aware of the implications that wanton and excess spending can and ultimately will have. She marvelled to Jim that the new President Obama thinks nothing of openly forecasting government deficits for the foreseeable future.

Official figures show that USA’s government debt to GDP is approaching 100% and the President is saying that will only grow larger.

Over the past three years they have implemented policies which have been called fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing. Technical words meaning they are printing money. They are trying to borrow their way out of debt.

Moira explained to Tony and Pam that the politicians are attempting to baffle their people with science. History has shown that when individuals and corporations start spending more than they earn, they can get away with it for short periods of time. Creative accounting, flash talking and smoke and mirrors can often postpone

SUBSCRIBE

the inevitable for longer than most people comprehend.

History shows that when countries start spending more than they take in with taxes they can get away it for a lot longer than individuals and corporations. The US has been running a deficit program for decades.

Moira had studied enough to understand that confidence was the underlying ingredient that provides the market with stability. Once countries start defaulting on their debt, confidence has a habit of disappearing.

If that happens the global economy could be off to hell in a handcart.

A copy of Peter Hensley’s disclosure statement is available on request and is free of charge. © Peter J Hensley March 2010

EVE’S BITE

THE DIVINITY CODE

“…the most politically incorrect book” in New Zealand. He is absolutely right…Prepare to be surprised and shocked.

Wishart may ruffle a few feathers but his arguments are fair as his evidence proves. If you are looking for a stimulating mental challenge, or a cause to fight for, Eve’s Bite will definitely satisfy. – Wairarapa Times-Age

Wishart takes up the gauntlet laid down by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and in fact, uses Dawkins own logic and methodology to launch a counter-attack against unbelief.

Challenging…thought provoking…compelling – keepingstock.blogspot.com

Discover the truth for yourself. Get these two books today from Whitcoulls, Borders, PaperPlus, Dymocks, Take Note, and all good independent booksellers, or online at

I’m having a cracking good read of another cracking good read – The Divinity Code by Ian Wishart, his follow-up book to Eve’s Bite which was also a cracking good read – comment on “Being Frank”

www.evesbite.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 67

n THINK LIFE

education

Teachers’ examined Why aren’t we nationally assessing the teachers’ own standards, asks Amy Brooke

L

et me see if I’ve got it right. The teachers don’t want their pupils to be assessed to see if they’re doing all right. No, it’s not for any self-serving reason – perish the thought. We all know that these are thoroughly professional, extremely learned individuals (well, yes...some of them look pretty scruffy, and when they open their mouths, well-educated isn’t the adjective that springs to mind). But hey, everyone mangles grammar and syntax these days – at least most New Zealanders do – hardly their fault, when they’ve been through the substitution for an education system our politburo foists off on them.

But, at least the teachers – in our now tough, highly competitive world environment? I mean...they have to be different, a cut or two above the rest of the population... dedicated, hardworking, literate, knowledgeable...or they wouldn’t be teachers. In fact, they’re probably pretty well all excellent. The issue of performance pay – as if some are better than others, so an incentive would help to retain these and lift the performance of those others – is pretty insulting.

Well, that’s the unions’ version. And yet it is not too strong a statement to say that a long-mounted, deeply destructive attack against this and other English-speaking countries has now come to fruition – with worse to come. The 20th Century wars-to68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

end-all-wars saw the regrouping of unarguably malevolent forces bent on the downfall of the West, so much so that its cultural institutions, education in particular, were gradually infiltrated and taken over as mouthpieces of the far Left. Hence the aggressive belligerence of the teacher unions.

In 1986 the US Secretary of State, Bill Bennett, was shocked to learn American children were the worst performing of those in any English-speaking country. In the UK, left-wing educationists fought a bitter campaign against the well-performing grammar schools offering scholarships to bright, disadvantaged children, barracking for the “egalitarian” and largely trashy comprehensive schools. Australian Education Union President Angelo Gavrielatos emotes about schools whose pupils don’t achieve reasonable standards being branded as “failing”. So

they should be. Any school which fails its pupils and does not manage to engage parents to assist in achieving better educational outcomes for their children should close down. What genuine objection could there be? In business, sport, every other endeavour, the emphasis is on setting the bar high.

I recall when present as a relieving teacher in a secondary school staffroom some years back listening incredulously as a PPTA representative harangued staff. I marvelled that these grown men and women, university graduates, put up with his bullying, hectoring manner. No doubt his sarcastic responses to the few questions indicated why.

Many fine teachers of course have gone, disheartened by what has happened to a once respected profession. Enthusiastic teachers still hang in there. But the dead wood of both indifferent and lazy – or medi-

What inadequate teachers are concerned about is being recognised as just that, as poorly-performing

ocre, if well-meaning but gullible, and not infrequently quite stupid individuals – litters the profession. Hence the acquiescence of so many, and the lack of challenge from within to both primary and secondary teacher union management with their spokespersons making manipulative, often quite fatuous claims to rebut the obvious fact that many teachers need to shape up – or ship out.

Listen to today’s spokespersons talk. So teachers don’t want to see children “labelled”?

What specious nonsense. Children know very well when they’re failing – as do their peers. What inadequate teachers are concerned about is being recognised as just that, as poorly-performing. We should be shocked that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars are going to have to be spent teaching these teachers the things they should have

known before they were let loose in the classrooms.

But let’s listen to their leaders. From Kate Gainsford, PPTA president: “Plain English and informative reporting is a good thing.

You don’t need expensive national standards to do this”. Well, actually you do, Kate, when the schools aren’t doing their job; when children are subliterate and can’t even read well, add, multiply or subtract.

And, in one of his less bizarre assertions from the Principals’ Federation Ernie Buutveld, claiming the working party was hamstrung...

“It’s a bit like gravity. You might (sic – do any educationists actually now know how to use the subjunctive? Italics mine) be able to have a cunning plan to work around it, but ultimately gravity is still going to determine how things fall.” A chocolate fish for anyone who can work out the meaning of that “plain English”.

I recall a decade ago remarking in passing to an economist that the teacher unions were the most dangerous in the country. Being an economist with a mandarin perspective he predictably dismissed the notion – only to less arrogantly review it some time later after beginning to access the history of the domination of education directions by our neo-Marxist-controlled education ministry and by the activity of the unions.

Deluged by propaganda from principals

downward, they themselves often grossly under-informed or fellow travellers, we cannot revisit too often the then Dr Margaret Dalziel’s sober warning (both as a former teacher, headmistress and university lecturer) that by the1960s, most English teachers knew no more about the language they were supposed to be teaching than their pupils. I again recall a senior lecturer in English at Canterbury University confiding in a surreptitious letter nearly two decades ago that the very worst of their graduates were going back into the schools as teachers.

A few years ago I discussed this with a well-spoken young Greek lawyer whose father was Principal of a South Island secondary school, himself a well-educated individual, more than can be said for many principals today. He was so shocked at the sub-literacy of the individual class teachers’ reports to be sent out with poor spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax that he rewrote them all himself, lest it reflect badly on the school. He shouldn’t have. Parents needed to see what they were up against.

I spoke, too, with the principal of a local secondary school who expressed concern about how many third-formers in his school were failing because, after long years in primary school, they still hadn’t been properly taught to read and write well. I asked what he and his colleagues were doing about getting back to the primary schools to ask what why their children were coming though so very shortchanged. His admission was... “Nothing... we wouldn’t want to offend our colleagues.”

The problems in this country are not those of the material standards of New Zealanders, but of our low intellectual, ethical and moral standards – all very much part for what a genuine education system should impart.

Unfortunately, too many self-serving teachers, principals and union representatives are making the usual self-serving excuses for our system’s inevitable failure rate (one in five, in my view, under-estimates the problem – especially in the ill-conceived and poor-performing Maori schools which are now – inappropriately – being excused from actually implementing the standards! Poor children.)

What we are basically talking about are culture and civilization – both markedly on the decline. The politicised education bureaucracy is doing its work only too well. © Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/ INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 69

n THINK LIFE

science

Whalesong Blue whales have begun singing in a lower key, reports Jill Leovy

B

lue whales have changed their songs. It’s the same old tune, but the pitch of the blues is mysteriously lower – especially off the coast of California where, local researchers say, the whales’ voices have dropped by more than half an octave since the 1960s.

No one knows why. But one conjecture is that more baritone whales indicate healthier populations: The whales may be less shrill because they’re less scarce and don’t have to pipe up to be heard by neighbours.

The discovery was accidental. Whale acoustics researcher Mark McDonald was trying to track blue whales’ movements using data from Navy submarine detectors.

He had created a program to filter out the blues’ songs from a din of ocean noise captured by these instruments.

But he kept having to rewrite the code.

70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Each year, it seemed, the whales sang at a lower pitch.

At first, the researchers thought it was a quirk. But after a couple of years of adjusting for lower frequencies, “we knew there was something strange going on,” says John Hildebrand, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and co-author of the study published recently in Endangered Species Research.

So the researchers scoured military data and seismograph readings for clues about what blue whales used to sound like.

A retired Navy scientist directed Hildebrand to a trove of tapes stored at Sea World. The delicate old reels were the size of dinner plates.

It turned out they contained snippets of blue whale songs from 40 years ago.

The tapes eliminated all doubt: In the

Beach Boys’ era, blue whales’ voices, while nowhere near falsetto, had been distinctly higher pitched.

With more work, the researchers were able show that blue whales worldwide are using deeper voices lately. Some have dropped their calls by only a few tones, but all showed a steady decline. “It was baffling,” Hildebrand says.

Blue whales are shrouded in mystery as it is. Sleek, mottled and silvery, they are rare and don’t reveal much. They don’t leap on the surface as much as humpback whales do.

They might, if really flustered, slap their tails on the water. More often, they quietly sink, Hildebrand says.

Their song is barely audible to the human ear – a deep bass growl with very long wavelengths befitting very long whales.

Making an appearance

Gulf of Alaska Blue whale sightings

Earth’s largest animal, the blue whale, has been spotted in Alaskan waters, meaning they may be re-establishing old migration patterns.

Larger than life

Lifespan 80-90 years Size 82-105 ft. (25-32 m); 200 tons (180,000 kg) Diet Can eat up to 4 tons of krill a day Swimmers Travel up to 30 mph (48 kph)

Migration pattern

Coming back • An estimated 350,000 blue whales before hunted to near extinction; hunting banned in 1965 • Current population estimated at 8,000-14,000

Spotting a whale Small dorsal fin, 1 ft. (30 cm) high

Size compared to an African elephant, the largest land animal

Surface characteristics of the blue whale Flipper 12 percent of body length

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The tone is so deep that if played in a small room, it’s hard to hear: The long-period sound waves extend beyond the walls. But play a recording very loudly, in a large auditorium, and “you feel it in your chest as much as you hear it,” McDonald says. “It’s awesome.”

The researchers pondered possible causes.

Warmer temperatures? More acidic seas?

Such factors affect the way sound moves through water, but not enough to explain the change, Hildebrand says.

The rumble of shipping traffic is thought to affect marine mammals. But the researchers argue that if whales were just trying to be heard above the fray, they would adopt higher, not lower, voices.

It’s also possible that the low voice is just a fad. Biologists talk about whale “culture,” and blue whales tend to be conformists. But

researchers have says they doubt that a random, learned behaviour could spread all over the globe.

So they put themselves in the whales’ shoes. McDonald surmised that whales would rather not sing in higher voices if they didn’t have to. They prefer deep and manly – “a lower, sexier frequency,” he says.

Among whales, he says, depth of voice may bespeak more desirable mates with larger bodies. It’s useful shorthand, since it’s hard to get a good look at one’s suitor if he is 80 feet long and swimming in murky water.

After the whales were hunted nearly to extinction, they may have been spread so thin that they could no longer find one another easily, prompting them to raise their pitch.

Efforts to restrict whaling beginning in the late ‘60s helped populations rebound. With increased numbers, the whales may not have needed to shout and may have gradually returned to their deep tones.

“This hints that some of these great whales are recovering; it’s not all doom,” says co-author Sarah Mesnick, ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Spout shoots up to 30 ft. (9 m) when it surfaces for air © 2009 MCT Graphic: Melina Yingling

Administration Fisheries Service.

If whale songs are related to population density, they might aid efforts to count blue whales, Hildebrand says. They once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today, their population is thought to be 10,000 or so.

Oceanographer Jay Barlow, program leader at NOAA fisheries, cautioned that changes in the whales’ pitch don’t track closely with population changes. California blues, for example, recovered most strongly in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and their numbers may not have grown much since, he says.

But Barlow had no alternate theory for the deeper songs, which he sometimes plays on his home stereo. The sound makes his floor shake and upsets his cats.

David Mellinger, a marine mammal bioacoustician at Oregon State University, says that, whatever the reason, the finding “is astonishing.” It recalled to him the first time he heard a blue whale sing.

He was on a boat, using headphones, and one passed. “It was a defining moment in my life,” he says. “It made a visceral impression on me. Just this huge animal. I could hear the hugeness of it.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 71

n THINK LIFE

technology

For Toyota, the crucial question is the electronics The recall nightmare continues, write Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian

I

n the nearly five months since it launched a string of recalls to stop its cars from accelerating out of control, Toyota Motor Corp. has been adamant about one thing: It’s not the electronics.

Company officials put the blame first on floor mats that could entrap the accelerator, later amending that to include gas pedals themselves that could stick.

But they have vigorously asserted that there is no evidence of a glitch in the electronics or software that could cause cars to malfunction, a “ghost in the machine.” Some independent safety experts, congressional investigators and others are just as certain that the risk of an electronic flaw is being dismissed by Toyota without an adequate examination.

The causes of unintended acceleration remains under investigation, but an admission by Toyota that sudden acceleration was caused by an electronic defect could be a devastating blow to the company’s already dented reputation for quality, say engineers, attorneys and experts in crisis management.

Compared with mechanical problems such as floor mats and sticky gas pedals, an electronic hardware or software glitch can be difficult to find, costly to fix and would open Toyota to a new onslaught of lawsuits, these people say.

“Every car accident that took place for years will suddenly be blamed on electronics,” said Ted Frank, an attorney and founder of the Center for Class Action Fairness.

And considering the fact that every Toyota vehicle sold in the U.S. since the 2007 model year has an electronic throttle, with some models using the system dating back to the 2002 model year, the number of potentially affected vehicles could reach into eight figures. “It’s a big potential problem for Toyota,” Frank said.

Indeed, less than 24 hours after Toyota announced its recall of the Prius and Lexus HS250h last week, at least two suits alleging economic damages to owners of the hybrids had been filed against the automaker, adding 72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

to a pile of suits related to the recalls now numbering in the dozens.

Beyond its legal liability, Toyota’s relationships with its customers could be further damaged by any finding that sudden acceleration is being caused by electronics, instead of floor mats or gas pedals, some say.

“Cars are moving computers, and the electronics are the very heart of the car,” said Ian Mitroff, emeritus professor of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a consultant on crisis management. Unlike a mechanical problem, like a sticking pedal, the fix is not easily understood, he said.

“It’s the most scary component of all,” said George Hoffer, an economist at Virginia Commonwealth University who moonlights as a consultant on recalls for automakers.

Toyota, for its part, says it has repeatedly and thoroughly tested its vehicles, including their electronic throttle systems that replace traditional mechanical accelerator controls with sensors, wires and computers, with no finding.

In a letter to Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., that was released Friday, attorneys for the automaker said it had hired an engineering and testing company to test its electronic throttle system. The company,

Photo shows Toyota Motor Co.’s Prius, for which the automaker announced a recall on Feb. 9, 2010 due to brake problems/ NEWSCOM

Exponent, found that the system “did not exhibit any acceleration or precursor to acceleration, despite concerted efforts to induce unwanted acceleration,” the letter said.

“There is simply nothing there to say electronic controls are causing the problems,” said Bob Carter, general manager of Toyota’s U.S. sales division, at the Chicago Auto Show last week. “We have exhaustively tested every scenario.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, meanwhile, has opened a new investigation at the behest of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to determine if electromagnetic interference

could cause sudden acceleration, but has said it found no evidence to support that theory in the past.

But experts in electronics say that even the most thorough testing can fail to turn up computer problems given the increasing complexity of automobile technology.

“It can be a tremendously difficult thing to spot,” said Ronald Jurgen, an electrical engineer who edits the Automotive Electronics Reliability guidebook for the Society of Automotive Engineers. He said that code errors in programs, electromagnetic interference or design problems in circuit boards could create issues that appear only in extremely rare instances.

“And when you can’t spot it, it’s just as dangerous and deadly as a major mechanical problem,” Jurgen added.

So far, Toyota has proposed relatively lowcost fixes to the problems that cause sudden acceleration, such as a small shim for gas pedals that outside experts say probably costs a few pennies to produce. But if an electronics problem is found, new microprocessors or new engine control modules could be a lot more expensive, apart from labor costs.

“Rather than a few pennies it may amount to more than $100 per vehicle,” said Michael Pecht, director of an electronics reliability lab at the University of Maryland. “My gut tells me that there is still more to come from Toyota.”

Many consumers are also not convinced

by Toyota’s assurances.

Harold Watkins, a Studio City owner of a 2007 Avalon, said he finds Toyota’s explanations “ludicrous.”

“My Avalon’s sudden acceleration problem... had absolutely nothing to do with a sticky accelerator pedal nor a floor mat,” said Watkins. Like many Toyota owners, he suspects the computer-controlled throttle system.

And though Toyota maintains that there are no bugs hiding in its wiring, the complexity of today’s onboard computer systems, which now run everything from emergency braking to windshield wipers, has proved thorny for Toyota and other automakers when it comes to recalls and other safety issues, a review of government records shows.

Only last week, Toyota admitted that a software problem on its showcase Prius model and other hybrids could cause a momentary loss of braking. It recalled 437,000 vehicles to reprogram computers.

In past years, it issued bulletins to dealers

to reprogram Prius computers to prevent engine stalling.

The top-selling Camry has been subject to two technical service bulletins – advisories of repair procedures to dealerships – to deal with engine surging in the 2002 and 2003 models.

Electronics problems in the Camry go back at least to 1990, when the company recalled 120,000 of the sedans to replace a faulty cruisecontrol computer that could cause “engine racing” leading to “loss of control and an accident,” according to NHTSA records.

It also recalled the popular Lexus RX in 1999 for an electronic control unit that caused headlights and taillights to turn off without warning. This past December, NHTSA opened an investigation into whether the electronic control module in some Corolla and Matrix models could cause them to stall without warning, and the agency is also investigating the computerized vehicle stability control system on the 2003 Sequoia SUV. Along with potential mechanical and electronic issues, Toyota vehicles have been investigated by NHTSA 13 times in the last 25 years for allegations of unintended acceleration, resulting directly in four recalls.

Toyota is not alone: Other automakers, including General Motors and Chrysler, have in recent years conducted recalls for hardware and software failures that cause engine surging and possible loss of control.

According to James Muccioli, an automotive electronics consultant who spent his career in the industry, the increasing complexity of auto electronics has come in tandem with sharply compressed timelines to design, development and test such systems. “Automakers used to take five years to develop a new model, and then it became 15 months,” he said.

And because those time constraints are even more pronounced in the pressure cooker of a high-profile recall, there’s a significant risk that a new error could be put into the system. “Sometimes you fix a problem and you accidentally incorporate new ones,” Jurgen said.

Now, with three congressional committees and NHTSA focused on the electronics issue, the topic will only get more attention.

“No matter what Toyota’s position has been on this issue, we’re going to be seeing a lot more focus on the electronics going forward,” said Itay Michaeli, auto industry analyst at Citi Investment Research. “If it proves to be an electronics issue, that would be strike three for the company.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 73

FEEL LIFE SPORT

Super urgent

D

an Carter is a guaranteed drawcard.

In a blessing to the Canterbury rugby union and the NZRU, the 28 year old maestro’s been back steering the Crusaders around the paddock since round one of the competition in mid-February.

This is the revamped AMI Stadium – with its flash new Robbie Deans stand – that struggled to muster 12 thousand fans for the finale of a fiery provincial competition back in November.

Carter turns 28 this month. Injury-free he’s in his prime and a multi-faceted asset for “summer rugby”. The term “mass appeal” could’ve been invented for the gifted and genial playmaker.

He’s the poster boy for New Zealand Rugby Union Chief Executive Steve Tew too – along with the likes of established All Blacks like Richie McCaw, Sitiveni Sivivatu and Jimmy Cowan. Then there’s a fresh crop of talent including gifted first Aaron Cruden and stylish winger Zac Guildford, both on deck for the Hurricanes this year.

74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

NEWSCOM

Rugby’s Southern Hemisphere showpiece is in full swing – trying to entice the great unwashed away from their summer activities to stadiums and to boost the pay-per-view TV ratings. A few timely rule tweaks are aimed at restoring the Super 14 glory days of tries galore and mass appeal. Chris Forster has the inside running on a super challenge Tew was the fall guy for the whole failed attempt to axe four provincial teams from the Air New Zealand Cup for sensible financial reasons – which unintentionally sparked a fierce populist backlash, particularly in the Manawatu and Tasman.

He was centre-stage at the Super 14 preseason launch in Auckland, which carried a tentative moniker of – “it’s part of who we are”. It was almost a case of damage control rather than “you ready for action”.

Terms of not-so-endearment like “reignite”, “draw back the fans” and “drift away” peppered an almost apologetic release for the gnarly rugby scribes to dissect and plunder.

Tackled one-on-one, Tew’s a past master at retaining a heavy dose of realism to pack down with alongside the promotional theme.

“We (rugby) have lost some interest from the fans, particularly in the Rebel Sport Super 14. We’ve been getting a lot of information.

“I think (the rule changes) will be good – rewarding players who are going for it 100 % unlike last year where there was way too much slow ball”

The length of the season is the length of the season. But the fans’ expectations at the stadia … having our top players playing … all these things we are conscious of.”

This genuine communicator probably has one of the toughest jobs in New Zealand sport. He has to fend-off the opinionated attacks from unions and the media while trying to placate the sponsors, board members and SANZAR partners in Australia and South Africa.

He’s become an expert at facing the music since New Zealand’s untimely World Cup exit in Wales in 2007.

Sabbaticals for players like Carter, whose stint at Perpignan was ruined by a serious injury, robbed the Super competition of a big dollop of its wow factor.

Starting in mid-summer and maintaining momentum for 15 weeks is no easy task, particularly if the product isn’t up to scratch.

And the kick and tackle mentality adopted by most sides in 2009 bored the pants of commentators and punters alike.

A fussy sporting public is spoilt for choice these days. The national game of rugby is head-to-head with the NRL and its emphasis on attack, and overlaps with the first full tour by the world champion Australian cricketers in years. Not to mention the Phoenix in the A League playoffs and the All Whites’ path to the FIFA World Cup finals in June.

What’s on show this year is a possible solution to the tedious tactics which have evolved under the Experimental Law Variations, or ELVs as they’re colloquially known as.

It’s all about the breakdown. It’s where the tackled player and the tackler(s) collapse with the ball in a heap on attack or defence, and a whole heap of their teammates pile into the rucks and mauls trying to secure possession. To the rugby novice it’s like an unco-ordinated octopus and the referee rulings are often like a lottery the players don’t have tickets for.

Rather murky rules about the attacking player having all the rights led to a string of penalties against the brilliant ball snatching ability of Richie McCaw and his fellow foragers.

Tew and his South African and Australian counterparts need to hope the whistle blowers “get” the switch to re-invent the crowdpleasing rugby from the early 2000s.

“The work we’ve done around scrum engagement and the breakdown hopefully that’ll make a difference. We’ve lost a lot of fans and we can’t afford to take their commitment for granted”.

McCaw is another proven performer on all stages. He’s the IRB player-of-the-year after his brilliance in a muddling All Blacks 2009 season.

It helps he’s part of the Crusaders juggernaut and a central figure in the vexed breakdown area. Like a true champion the open side flanker’s as keen as anyone to clear up the confusion and get the ball whizzing through the backline.

“I think (the rule changes) will be good – rewarding players who are going for it 100 % unlike last year where there was way too much slow ball”, he says.

Slow delivery equals kicking for goal or territory, more referee interpretations and a defence-orientated strategy.

“You’ve seen in the last couple of years rugby’s sort of gone in cycles. Where teams work out the defence and find ways of getting around it. There’ll be a lot of emphasis on getting the breakdown right this year.

It’ll be interesting to see which teams actually play and to see which make the best of

it. And perhaps those that do … they’ll do the best. Hopefully we can turn around the negativity of 2009”.

Anyone who dares to remember the turgid affairs of last year, typified by the Hurricanes dreary early season form and the Highlanders 6-nil grind past the Crusaders, will echo the McCaw sentiment.

In fact the game seems to have deteriorated since the addition of two new franchises in 2006 to bump up the competition from a Super 12, appeasing the number games from RSA and in Western Australia.

Next year it’s Melbourne’s turn to hit the ground running.

The Victorian capital is an Aussie Rules stronghold – attempting to support Super rugby’s 15th franchise.

You get the feeling the 2010 season, without the baggage of the last World Cup and the expectation of the 2011 Cup in New Zealand – might just regain its lustre.

The early signs have been positive, with big crowds on deck for week one at North Harbour Stadium and the remodelled Stadium in Christchurch.

The bottom line is entertainment, reigniting lost passions and ensuring rugby regains its slot as the number one sporting choice from February to May. If commitment to the cause means anything, it’ll be a roaring success.

SUPER RUGBY

HIGH POINTS 6095 TRIES in 13 years An average of 6 tries per game in the Super 12 era 5 per game since 2005 12 All Blacks in the Hurricanes’ starting side for Round One v the Blues 7-time CHAMPIONS The Crusaders FINALISTS but yet to win The Highlanders, the Hurricanes and Chiefs.

94 Super matches per season Most points in a season 541 from the Crusaders in 2005 Most individual points in a season 226 from Dan Carter in 2006 5 years between Super rugby appearances for Carlos Spencer Playing for the Lions in 2010.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 75

FEEL LIFE HEALTH

Iodine, a cure for cretins Claire Francis finds a good use for iodised salt

H

ave you seen a doctor?” Not an unreasonable enquiry, I suppose, but a bit rough on the person who is just feeling “a bit under the weather”. Everyone understands this infuriating symptom, the frustrating state of feeling not-entirely-well, but not exactly sick. Well enough to go to work, probably a bit tired, needing a holiday, going to get an early night, hope you’re not coming down with anything. A vague feeling that might mean you’re getting the flu, or need a holiday, or at least an early night, or which might indicate a bigger problem. If it persists for days or weeks, in spite of sleep, in spite of that multivitamin you remembered to take, you should probably see a doctor.

Sometimes this vague subjective symptom goes along with serious illness, sometimes an iron deficiency, sometimes it’s a case of “the blues”, or an unhealthy lifestyle, or you really do just need a long weekend away.

And commonly, also, the vague, tired, notquite-yourself feeling is the first and most noticeable symptom of thyroid dysfunction, a malady common enough that most people will have heard of it, but all the same, not the kind of thing that keeps you up nights.

The thyroid is a “butterfly” shaped gland in the front of the neck (under the Adam’s Apple in men) and is part of the endocrine system, the body system which produces hormones, which in turn affect most of our physiological processes. This small gland holds most of the body’s Iodine stores, and produces the hormones thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3). These hormones acts globally in the body, affecting growth and development, metabolism, fertility, immunity, and the use of nutrients within the body. So while minor malfunction of the thyroid may pass unnoticed, severe thyroid disorders cause significant illness.

Hyperthyroidism, the excessive production of thyroid hormones, can be caused by a number of conditions, many of which are rare, with the most common being Grave’s Disease, an autoimmune disorder. Initial signs of hyperthyroidism include tiredness, weight loss and irritability, and many other vague signs, when thyroid hormone levels are mildly elevated. When thyroid levels are 76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

very high, the symptoms resemble nothing so much as stimulant drug overdose, with a very rapid heart rate, tremor and psychosis.

Insufficient production of thyroid hormones, known as hypothyroidism , is more common, affects around 3% of the world’s population, although this figure varies significantly by region. Early symptoms of the condition tend to be vague and generalised; tiredness, muscles aches, constipation, sensitivity to cold, slow pulse and weight gain, for example, may pass unnoticed, or be attributed to depression, PMT, or overwork, and symptoms can persist for some time and become quite severe before the condition is identified. Hypothyroidism can result from congenital absence of the thyroid gland, disease, radiation therapy (to the thyroid), and as a side effect of a small number of medications. Secondary and tertiary hypothyroidism result from damage to or disorders of the pituitary gland and hypothalamus, respectively. About 5% of women given birth in any year will experience postpartum thyroiditis, a short-lived disturbance in thyroid function that progresses to permanent hypothyroidism in a small number of those affected.

Most of these forms of hypothyroidism are treated with oral thyroid hormones, which ideally returns hormone levels to normal, and alleviates the symptoms, although some individuals will continue to suffer from fluctuating hormone levels (and their attendant symptoms) from time to time, requiring more frequent blood tests and medication changes to keep their symptoms at bay.

Many individuals with hypothyroidism continue to struggle with a degree of weight gain and tiredness on a long term basis. However, the most common cause of hypothyroidism, is Iodine deficiency. If the deficiency occurs during pregnancy and childhood, it causes cretinism, a specific developmental disorder which features mental and physical retardation, deafness, mutism, and lameness. Mild deficiency can cause a mild loss (relatively) of around 10 IQ points, while some of the most severely effected are profoundly disabled by severe retardation, unable to care for themselves or communicate at all. The World Health Organization calculated that in 2007, nearly 2 billion individuals worldwide had insufficient iodine intake, a third being of school age. Iodine deficiency, therefore, is the single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.

Iodine, a trace element found in small amounts in the earth’s soil, and larger

HEALTHBRIEFS SELF-CANNIBALIZING CANCER CELLS STUDIED. U.S. cancer researchers say they have started a major study to determine the role of self-cannibalizing cancer cells found in tumors.

The scientists from Princeton University and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey said such cells become dormant and self-cannibalize to apparently survive periods of stress. The researchers said their work might help produce new cancer therapies to stem changes that render cancer cells dangerous and resistant to treatment.

We want to know: What role is this self-cannibalization playing in the middle of a tumor? said Princeton Assistant Professor Hilary Coller. To treat cancer, it may be that you want to get rid of this ability in tumor cells, so we’re searching for inducers and inhibitors of this process.

The project involving Coller, Princeton Associate Professor Joshua Rabinowitz and Professor Eileen White of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Rutgers University, is funded by a $1 million National Institutes of Health Challenge Grant through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. WEB SITE HEALTH INFO PERCEPTIONS. A U.S. study suggests health information written by a doctor is rated as more credible when it appears on a Web site than in a blog or on an Internet homepage.

The findings of the Pennsylvania State University-College of New Jersey study of college students’ perceptions are said to highlight the relative importance of different online sources to people who seek health information on the Internet.

Most people look for health information online by keying disease symptoms into various search engines, said Penn State Professor Shyam Sundar. But the results of that search could range from experts at the Mayo Clinic to somebody’s personal blog.

Sundar and Assistant Professor Yifeng Hu of the College of New Jersey, Ewing, N.J., said they wanted to see how people act on the health information they receive, and whether they recommend it to others or forward it to friends online.

The researchers said they found study participants were more likely to believe – and make use of – information on a Web site from a source identified as an expert than from a layperson. Health information on the Web sites of TV, radio, and newspapers was not included in the study The findings appear in the journal Communication Research.

amounts in seawater, is necessary – in small amounts – for normal human thyroid function. In the human diet, much of the naturally occurring iodine in diets comes from seafood and seaweed, and from food grown in iron-rich soils. In the past, when iodine was commonly used as a disinfectant in dairy manufacturing, some of our intake may have come from milk, but much of our (national) iodine intake has come from iodised salt, since the product was introduced in the early twentieth century as a public health measure. But nutritional studies have found a steady fall in Iodine levels amongst Australians and New Zealanders.

Changes to our diet have led to a decrease in the consumption of Iodized salt, since we use less salt in our cooking (which is otherwise a good thing), and are more liable to use gourmet salts, which are not iodised.

Increasing levels of Iodine deficiency have recently led to the mandatory supplement of all non organic bread in October 2009.

In the same year, the University of Otago published a study showing that even children with mild iodine deficiency benefit from iodine supplementation, improving their test scores when their iodine status improved. But while the mandatory fortification provides a small increase in Iodine, it may be insufficient to meet the requirements of pregnant women, and people with iodine deficiency, who may need further supplementation. But at the other extreme, Iodine causes temporary hyperthyroidism in excessive amounts, as when Bonsoy soy milk was subject to a product recall in December, after ten people became ill from very high levels of Iodine in the product. All things in moderation.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 77

FEEL LIFE ALT.HEALTH

The AO question Antioxidant benefits can be distorted by scale, writes Julie Deardorff

L

ike every other diet program out there, Keri Glassman’s antioxidantbased “O2 Diet” promises to make you thin and beautiful. And it’s easy: Just eat foods that have high antioxidant levels.

But the scale used in the book to determine antioxidant levels is not perfect, the author admits, and antioxidant research is, relatively speaking, still in its infancy.

We asked the experts to explain antioxidants and how we should approach measuring their health effects.

What are antioxidants?

Antioxidants are compounds that prevent free radicals from damaging the cells of your body. The damage, called oxidative stress, can accumulate and lead to several chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as age-related conditions, such as macular degeneration, says researcher Diane McKay. RANKING THEM

To rank foods, Glassman used something called the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) scale, which was developed in the early 1990s and refined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The ORAC scale is one of several methods used 78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

to measure how well a food protects against disease-causing free radicals.

Phytochemicals, which are found in all plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, cocoa, teas and wine, all have antioxidant activity. Artichokes, for example, score 7,900 ORAC points. A sweet potato provides 2,400 ORAC points, while broccoli adds 600.

One reason might be that other compounds in the food can affect how your body absorbs the phytochemicals or other antioxidant micronutrients, McKay adds.

Another point to remember: More of a single nutrient is not necessarily better.

Some studies have showed negative effects when antioxidants are administered in high amounts, particularly in the presence of certain minerals, says McKay.

THE CATCH

THE BOTTOM LINE

Though berries, nuts and teas often top lists that measure antioxidant activity, “it’s very misleading for food/beverage manufacturers to state the ORAC value of their product on the label and in advertisements, as this information has little relevance to the health effects of these products,” says McKay, a researcher at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.

The problem, McKay says, is that even if a food or beverage ranks higher than others, it doesn’t necessarily mean, for example, that it will increase the antioxidant capacity of your cells.

“Some antioxidant-rich foods will increase the body’s antioxidant capacity after you eat them, but others do not.”

“Just because a food or beverage scores well with the ORAC test doesn’t guarantee that it can cure, treat or even prevent disease.

However, most of the foods or beverages that have been studied for their health effects are those that have high antioxidant activity – teas, wine, cocoa, etc. The data certainly suggest that incorporating these antioxidant-rich foods and beverages into our regular diet, in moderate amounts, may help improve some biomarkers of disease risk.”

Facing a cancer diagnosis?

Now there’s an entire community of people waiting to help you.

Share your story and gain support from other survivors.

(And you can help them too.)

Find clinical trials that might be right for you.

Share your insights as a caregiver.

Learn about the latest treatment advances from medical experts.

Ask questions.

caring

community

compassion

A Property of OMNI Health Media, LLC

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 79

TASTE LIFE TRAVEL

A Mediterranean summer Tourist hot spot? Sure, but Italy’s Cinque Terre still worth a visit, writes Patrick Cant

T

he days of having the Cinque Terre to yourself are long gone.

The string of villages along the Ligurian coast in Italy is far too exposed.

Rick Steves wanders the lovely streets and waxes poetic about the charm and the food, and the masses come. Even in the offseason, the streets are jammed with visitors gawking at the colourful little harbours. You should not let that deter you from visiting, however.

I’ve been wanting to go since I heard about it a few years ago and my dad wanted to see it in person, too.

The towns, from north to south, are Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore, all surrounded by and built within rugged hillsides.

The name Cinque Terre means five lands, or in this case, five towns that were individual fiefdoms during pre-Roman times.

Because rough terrain made access difficult, these towns developed wine and food cultures that were mostly unhindered by outside influences. Even today, they remain largely car-free. The only invaders are tourists.

Other than Corniglia, which is on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean, the towns all sit along the water. They are linked by a train running from La Spezia in the south to Genova in the north. We started our journey in La Spezia.

First step: train tickets. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

This turned into an exercise in patience, as we ended up being sent to four different places in the same station, eventually getting them from the tabacchi (tobacco shop).

Apparently, “A pack of smokes and a train ticket” is how it’s done. Train travel in Italy tends to be a little haphazard but ultimately a great deal. To explore the Cinque Terre by train, you buy two tickets, each about $3.

One allows you to travel north, making as many stops as you like, for six hours. The second gets you back to La Spezia, making as many stops as you like along the way.

A walking path also links the five picturesque towns. As Cinque Terre is a World Heritage site, you can’t just traipse about 80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

willy-nilly. You must pay to walk on the trails; an all-encompassing Cinque Terre Card gives you unlimited train travel between all five towns, access to the hiking trails and an afternoon on a rental bicycle.

When you are traveling by train, the stations come very quickly, sometimes no more than a couple minutes apart.

We flashed through the first four towns on our journey north. Much of the trip is in tunnels, then you burst out into the sun, stop at the next station and then duck back into darkness.

When we finally arrived at Monterosso al Mare, we stepped off the train into a scene straight out of St. Tropez. Beautiful pastel-colored hotels and restaurants front the lovely beach, where you can rent a chaise lounge and an umbrella to relax for the afternoon. The bright blue of the Mediterranean and the rows of beach umbrellas looked like something that would have stopped Monet in his tracks.

Monterosso is the largest (and flattest) of the five towns. All five have restaurants and lodging, and each would make a fine

Monterosso is the largest (and flattest) of the five towns.

All five have restaurants and lodging, and each would make a fine base from which to explore the region, but Monterosso has the most options.

base from which to explore the region, but Monterosso has the most options.

Hotel rooms here can be had from 110 euros a night for a double. And, once the light starts to fade and the last trains depart (loaded with tourists, one hopes), you’ve got the place to yourself.

In Monterosso, we arrived to find a festive street market near the waterfront. Local art, food and crafts were there for the browsing and buying, enough to fill a carry-on bag.

The region is known for its crisp, clean white wine, which can be found easily at street

markets or local stores, as can good local olive oil. Ceramic art – much of it bas-relief objects in blue and yellow – and paintings of local scenes were on display at several stalls.

After fortifying ourselves with espresso and pastry at a cafe near the market, we were ready for lunch. We walked back to the station and headed south to Vernazza.

Vernazza has a proper harbor, with a breakwater and a smaller patch of sand. The piazza is right on the water, and we splurged on a delicious lunch of grilled octopus, veal and pasta with pesto, washed down with a

local wine and all within 20 feet of the sea.

The wine we sampled had a label with four simple icons on it, translating to “eat fish, watch ocean.” I couldn’t agree more.

Vernazza is possibly the most picturesque town of the five. Tiny streets wander down from the train station to the harbor, lined with charming shops and tasty-smelling restaurants. This is tourist country, so there are few great deals, but the view really is worth it. From the waterfront in almost every town, you can look up or down the coast and see the other towns. The train winks in INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 81

Veggies for sale at outdoor grocery stand, Riomaggiore / NEWSCOM

and out of view as it passes between tunnels.

After lunch, my cousin and I decided to walk the Cinque Terre trail. We hopped the train to Corniglia, bought our Cinque Terre trail cards at the tourist information office and headed for the trail. We were asked at a few points along our walk to show our trail cards, so keep them handy.

We didn’t visit Corniglia, I’m sorry to say.

It’s a beast of a climb up a staircase with about 20 switchbacks, or a long wait for a shuttle bus, so we headed south along the trail instead. It is considered the quietest of the five villages and features a communal olive press where the locals like to sit and pass the time.

The trail between Corniglia and Manarola is pretty rough, so hiking shoes are recommended, but I saw people in flip-flops, as well. After about a 45-minute walk to Manarola, it was time for a cold bottle of water and some gelato.

Cinque Terre Gelateria e Creperia is widely recognized as serving the finest gelato in the region. Considering the number of gelato shops I saw, that’s an impressive feat. The chocolate gelato they serve is like heaven in a small cup.

Next, it was off to Riomaggiore, the southernmost town. The trail, known as the 82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Via dell’Amore, or the Way of Love, takes about 15 to 20 minutes and is well-paved and easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that along the route you can stop for an espresso or grappa (a regional specialty) at Bar dell’Amore, which perches on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean.

Riomaggiore is the final town on the trail.

Watching over it is a castle, dating to the mid-12th century, that yields a stunning view of the area – if you’re brave enough to climb the steep road behind the train station. Like the other towns in the Cinque Terre, it has a wonderful assortment of small hotels, restaurants and waterfront views. The Via dell’Amore ends right on the train station platform, so if you’re tired from all that walking and gelato, you can clamber aboard the train and be whisked away.

I recommend you to save a little energy, however, and explore the town.

Those who aren’t fans of rail also can explore the region by boat. Water buses serve all five towns, but at some of them, be prepared to disembark by walking across a plank between the boat and the shore.

In the end, the train and my feet were all I needed for this trip – and to under-

stand why it is such a tourist hot spot. A day spent eating, drinking, riding trains and walking along the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean is one to remember.

IF YOU GO Cinque Terre Card: This allows use

of trails, plus electric buses in certain towns, three free hours of bike rental on the higher paths, and a discount at the park Information Services shops.

Cost is 5.40 euro for one day, 13 euro for three days and 20.60 euro for seven days. Children under 12 are half-price.

Cinque Terre Ferry Card: This provides trail and bus access, plus boat service. Cost is 13 euro for one day.

Cinque Terre Train card: This is good for unlimited rail travel and trail access, plus all other benefits from the basic trail card. Cost is 8.50 euro/one day, 19.50 euro/three days and 36.50 euros/ seven days.

More information: A good Web site for planning a trip to Cinque Terra is www.parconazionale5terre.it.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 83

TASTE LIFE FOOD

Finger licking good

James Morrow gets deep ... deep frying, that is

O

f all the bigotries and prejudices that afflict the human condition, those based on food are the most irrational.

When some ignorant fool points at someone they don’t like and throws out an epithet like “curry-muncher”, “bagel-eater” or “cheeseeating surrender monkey”, I am left scratching my head: I love curries and bagels and would be proud if my ancestors invented such delights.

Likewise I love France’s fromage, even if I’ve had quarrels with their foreign policy since, oh, about 1815.

So why – with the possible exception of those lutefisk-eating Scandinavians – does someone’s traditional food make for so easy a cause for offense?

This thought occurred to me during a recent food and race-based controversy 84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

which cropped up in Australia during the country’s recent test series with Pakistan.

KFC, a major sponsor of the test, was running a series of television ads in which the hero, a young cricket fan, uses buckets of fried chicken to win friends, influence people, and basically allow him to watch the match in peace. All well and good until one ad, in which he finds himself in the stand surrounded by a bunch of West Indian rowdies and shares his chicken around to quieten them, made its way to the US through the magic of YouTube.

Predictably it was promptly picked up by the professionally angry and aggrieved who claimed that the ad was racist against African-Americans.

Why? Because, according to an old stereotype,

American blacks like to eat fried chicken.

Nevermind that the people in KFC’s ad were West Indian, not American, and that outside of a few Caribbean communities in places like New York, there are precious few American blacks (or whites for that matter) who would have the first clue about cricket, never mind be in the stands for a match. According to a few lowest common denominator loudmouths, the ad was ipso facto racist.

And once again, the sorry old script of our politically correct age was dusted off. KFC was forced into damage control mode, apologies were issued, and an otherwise witty ad campaign (albeit for a cretinously awful product) was pulled off the air.

This is insanity, of course. w is one of the great culinary delights to emerge from

the American south, and the whole white supremacist trope that paints it, negatively, as the exclusive domain of African Americans just goes to prove that those who go on about the “master race” can lay no claim to membership. Is Kris Kristofferson’s wonderful ode to the hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” now verboten on the grounds that as he walks along he catches “the Sunday smell of someone’s frying chicken”?

More broadly, no one can claim a monopoly on what we think of as “fried chicken”.

Like stuffed parcels of dough, it’s one of those great ideas that every culture seems to hit upon sooner or later. Deep frying is an ancient technique, and archaeologists have found evidence of it from Medieval Europe to Russia to Japan to Mexico. What the Italians called pollo frito, the Vietnamese called ga xao and the Japanese call kara’age.

And it is easy to see why it has historically been so popular. For one thing, fat is flavour, and before anyone came up with the idea of putting the words “obesity” and “epidemic” next to each other and using them as an excuse to peer into our kids’ lunchboxes, our bodies instinctively craved the stuff.

For another, fried chicken kept and travelled well – all important in the days before refrigeration, and still pretty useful for packing picnics or excursions to moonlight cinemas and winery concerts.

Great fried chicken is a pretty simple matter to achieve at home, if you follow a few simple rules.

First, source a good bird, and a small one at that. Go to a good butcher and source smaller, free-range birds – not overgrown supermarket beasts.

Second, brine your chicken. This may seem like an extraneous step, but it is crucial to tender, flavourful meat. Boil a pot of water with a couple of cups of salt, some cut-up lemons, a small hand full of peppercorns, and some herbs. Let it cool and soak your chicken pieces in this for about eight to twelve hours in the fridge.

Finally, heat control. Invest in a little thermometer so you can see exactly what your fat is doing. The temperature will drop considerably when you add the meat to the pan, so make sure to not overcrowd it, and be cooking on enough BTUs to get the temperature back up quickly.

What results should have a crispy skin, tender flesh, and a good salty flavour – and is as good hot out of the pan (after having rested a bit, of course) as it is the next day.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken You’ll need: 2 small (1-1.5kg) free range chickens, cut into ten pieces and brined Canola or peanut oil 300 ml buttermilk 6 cups flour 1/4 cup garlic powder 1 heaping tablespoon each paprika, cayenne pepper, and salt 1 teaspoon fresh black pepper Sea salt To make: 1. Remove your chicken from the brine; rinse and pat dry, and let rest at room temperature for one hour. Fill a pot with three-four centimetres of oil, and heat to 160 degrees C. Set a cooling rack to one side, and arrange a dipping station: all coating ingredients divided between two bowls, buttermilk in the other. Add some salt and pepper to the buttermilk.

2. Working in batches, dip chicken piece by piece into the dry ingredients, then into the buttermilk, then into the second bowl of dry ingredients.

3. Carefully lower the chicken pieces into the hot fat, and fry for 11 to 12 minutes until golden for thighs and drumsticks, 6 to 7 minutes for wings and breasts.

Remove from the oil, place on cooling rack, and add salt. Enjoy

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 85

TOUCH LIFE TOYBOX EPSON STYLUS PRO 3880 The innovative Pro 3880 will print gallery quality photos for professional and amateur photographers, colour accurate proofs for design studios, media agencies and printing companies, and ready to frame enlargements for photo studios and photographic stores. BorderFree prints can be made on both photographic and fine art paper from 6 x 4 inch up to A2 size, and striking black and white prints are produced with the three black UltraChromeK3 inkset.The nine individual high capacity 80ml cartridges of UltraChromeK3 with Vivid Magenta pigment inks, including matte black and photo black, and the ability to print on Epson’s full range of photographic and fine art media, make the Pro 3880 is economical to run and extremely versatile. The Epson Stylus Pro 3880 is $2,400 RRP including GST. The high capacity 80ml cartridges are RRP $123.75 each including GST. www.epson.co.nz

COOLPIX P100 Made for those who demand the most from their compact camera, this bridge camera provides high performance to allow the photographer to capture a range of subjects and scenes and consistently get the best result. The wide angle 26x zoom NIKKOR lens with ED glass gives more freedom for choosing a subject and ensures crisp images every time. The revolutionary back illumination CMOS image sensor improves sensitivity and reduces noise to get great pictures even in low-light conditions and at 10.3 megapixels you can capture the most intricate details or produce high-quality enlargements. And whether it’s day or night, you’ll get great video clips with the Full 1080p HD movie recording with stereo sound, optical zoom and autofocus, all captured at 30 frames a second.

Just because this camera packs in technology it doesn’t compromise on ease of use with a dedicated video record button and 7.5 cm (3.0 inch) vari-angle LCD display. It also boasts five anti-blur settings so you can focus on the image in front of you. www.nikon.com

CANON LEGRIA HF M SERIES The LEGRIA HF M series features a 3.3 Megapixel Full HD CMOS sensor, 18x Advanced Zoom, Canon HD Video Lens and DIGIC DV III processing technology. Advanced Face Detection Technology identifies up to 35 faces at once – ensuring that friends and family remain in focus and well-exposed at all times – whilst Canon’s Instant AF technology provides the high-speed, pin-point auto-focus required for HD. Steady pictures are delivered by Canon’s Dynamic Optical Image Stabilizer technology, which minimises camera shake throughout the zoom range. At maximum zoom, users can utilise the new Powered Optical Image Stabilizer mode, which greatly improves image stability when focusing on distant subjects. ww.canon.co.uk

LAPTOP COOLING PAD The new Belkin Cooling Pad is the best way to keep your laptop cool. In order to achieve the best cooling performance, Belkin redesigned the Cooling Pad to include a patent-pending AirFlow Wing, repositioned fan, and wave shape. This combination of features optimizes circulation to let hot air flow up and away from your laptop. The USB-powered Cooling Pad can be used comfortably on a desk or in your lap. www.belkin.com

BENQ V2220 With its cutting-edge LED-backlight technology, BenQ has created the world’s slimmest 21.5”W LED monitor. Sleekly styled and delivering extraordinary picture quality, the V2220 offer 16:9 Full HD, and world’s high dynamic contrast ration of 10,000,000:1. With the BenQ V2220, things are certainly lookin’ great! Winner of an iF Product Design Award for 2010, the V2220 achieve a rare balance between the cutting edge and the classic. The smooth contours and clean lines of the housing are complemented by a subtle sheen inspired by the finish on lacquer ware. LED backlighting offers significant advantages over the CCFL technology used in older LCD monitors. These advantages encompass not only performance metrics such as higher dynamic contrast, no light leakage and flickerfree, but also environmental factors, like a manufacturing process and disposal that produces fewer pollutants. The V2220 reduce power consumption by 28.6 compared to CCFL models and with Eco mode saves up to 52%. As such, the V2220 is not only the most environment-friendly choice, but offers significant savings on electricity costs as well. www.benq.com

SEE LIFE / PAGES

The Book of Roth Michael Morrissey wonders how many more books Philip Roth has left in him The Humbling

By Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, $42.99 Every year now, as regular as a flowering cherry, Philip Roth, America’s senior literary novelist, delivers a new novel. Roth now aged 77 (much the same age as the equally vigorous though less gifted C. K. Stead), has an almost desperate vitality – no doubt activated by lively defiance of the impending mortality that his recent novels have touched upon. And on each of the recent books, Roth’s photograph reveals a stern frowning man bereft of human warmth or humour. Whence the rambunctious jocularity of the novels? Does it only exist in narration – in the act of creation -. which once released, leaves the creator filled with cadaverous gloom?

Joseph Heller always smirked like a wiseguy who knew more than most of us. Not so Roth who looks as austere as a concentration camp victim. Is the photo calculated to remind us that a humorous novelist may be very serious, perhaps morbidly so? If so, the image has succeeded in ample measure. I feel like I want to fly over to the US of A and cheer poor sad 88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

aging Philip up with a six pack of Tui and a slap on the back. Yeah, right.

So we have The Humbling. Critics have been gleefully – perhaps too gleefully – rubbing their critical hands together as they scribble about how the old maestro has lost form. Being of a contrary nature, whenever I hear a massed opinion of negativity, I feel reasonably sure I will discover something to be positive about and vice versa. Hence, prior to reading Roth’s thirtieth book, I told myself The Humbling would prove to be a great but misunderstood work.

Alas, this time, the critics are right. The Humbling begins with grim theatricality with veteran actor Simon Axler who has lost everything that makes an actor – talent, self confidence, acting ability. He only thinks of failure, suicide and death. In other words, the boy (who is actually in his sixties) needs a stiff course of Prozac. Axler’s breakdown reminded me vividly of the actor in James Baldwin’s How Long the Train’s Been Gone who has a comparable disabling in the form of a heart attack. Baldwin’s writing is more vivid and compelling than Roth’s which seems a little inclined to trip over its own switch back self analytic complexity.

Of course from any writer less than Roth, this would be good writing but by his high standards, it is not quite his best. But is it fair to expect a writer approaching eighty to be on tip top form with each and every book? Can’t we cut the maestro some slack?

On the other hand, shouldn’t he try to top American Pastoral, arguably his finest book?

Because fine, witty and humorous though Roth maybe, he is not a great writer as, say, D.H Lawrence, or Franz Kafka or Juan Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez undoubtedly are. He remains one step down from the top rung. No shame in that but I would have preferred a grand slam – a Rothian Brothers Karamazov before the grim-faced one shuffles off his mortal coil. Will he perhaps be still producing at 87 or will he hang up his pen? Be sure with each book whether witty or serious, whether excellent or slightly below excellent, the aging maestro (and he is a maestro) will continue to stare out at us with a species of stripped down to the bone lugubrious fierceness. On the back of The Humbling, Roth looks as though he has one foot in the grave. And yet, there’s probably a few books in the old boy yet. I for one am confident that reading them will be a pleasure.

In Our Time

Edited by Melvyn Bragg: A Companion to the Radio 4 Series Hodder & Stoughton, $39.99 I have an attraction to question and answer interview series and as often as not, prefer them to the more standard feature article type of profile where all too often perceptions intentionally shift away from the author-subject to the focus of the interviewer’s impressions, and in some cases, ego.

The cult of “personality” interviewer, while intriguing and even compelling at times, can also be downright tedious. In his television appearances, Bragg has a smooth inoffensive style and while at times, he seems half in love with his own good looks, he does what any good interviewer should do – allow us to enter and interact with the psyche of the interviewee. However, in the case of this particular series, the emphasis is on historical subject matter rather than personalities. And Bragg calls in an impressive range of experts to discuss the juicy topics covered. Bragg’s style, even in cold print, reveals a gentle inquiring yet vigorous mind, a style of interviewing that doesn’t exist in this country, though hopefully, one day it will. Our TV interviewers should read this book and learn from Bragg’s example.

His range is impressive. We have the great Arab thinker Avicenna (not personally interviewed as he died in 1037 AD) alongside Black Holes and Plate Tectonics; Socrates and Witchcraft rub shoulders; alchemy and angels hold hands. Clearly, Bragg is

embarked on a neo-Wellsian task of educating the masses. And why not? We all need educating nowadays. Specialisation means the range of any one person’s knowledge is constricting rather than expending. (In passing, may I heap praise on Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopaedia ever, “alive”in the sense, it grows by the minute.)

Bragg’s compilation is oxygen-rich with information. I mean we’ve all heard of angels – some believe in them, some don’t – but how many know the first mention of them was in the Book of Judges roughly dated around 1000 BC? And don’t forget (as Bragg reminds us) that the famed theological question of how many angels could sit on a pin is apocryphal.

Under witchcraft, I learnt that there was (supposedly) a female type person called a miaow woman who had a diabolical cat who fed off a secret teat. I have to report thus far in life, I haven’t encountered many miaow women though quite a few who owned cats but who feed them milk from saucers rather than from additional and hidden teats. Also, I gleaned the grim news that in Germany, 20,000 witches were burnt at the stake, while in England it was a paltry 500. Clearly, the Germans were more witchcrazed than most. But then several hundred years later, they did an encore on the poor Jews. And they say the neo-Nazis are on the rise. Maybe the Germans need to have a few more beers and chill out on persecution of minorities. Under alchemy, I discovered Rutherford considered himself an alchemist but this is not elaborated on.

It may be that like a good interviewer, Bragg prepares and pre-reads his subject.

On the other hand, it may be that he really is a learned fellow at home in many zones of esoteric knowledge. Either way, this collection provides a feast of ideas.

Warrior Princess

By Princess Kasune Zulu with Belinda Collins IVP Books, $50

“Mrs Zulu, you are HIV positive.” This is the opening line and you might say it’s a killer.

In the early days of AIDS, its victims simply died within a year or two. By 1996, a cocktail of drugs could prolong life. Of course in New Zealand, such medicines are both available and affordable. In the vastness of poverty-stricken African countries, often they are not. Ignorance of AIDS remains even now, widespread. For a time, South Africa had an official policy of denial, reversed in 2006.

Currently, 33 million are HIV positive and 22 million of these live in sub-Saharan Africa; 14 million children in Africa are AIDS orphans.

So the facts are despairingly grim.

Yet here is Zulu’s shattering second paragraph, her post-HIV reaction: “The most wondrous sense of peace and calm fills my body. I am floating on a cloud and my heart wants to shout, ‘Praise God!’” In all my imagining, I could never have conjured up such a positive reaction. Now thoroughly hooked, I am frantically reading onward to discover why news of her impending death fills INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 89

Princess Zulu’s heart with such joyous elan.

The answer arrives with brave simplicity on the next page “... this virus is my reason for being. That is why God put me on the earth..HIV is my cause, my mountain to climb.” :In other words, Princess Zulu has resolutely spiritualised her illness. It is perhaps the only way to find peace with one self under the circumstances. It’s important to once again consider the enormous difference between someone with AIDS in Africa and someone with AIDs in a more developed country. In Zambia, she will have but six months to live and the treatment costs $10,000. In the west, it costs s fraction of that sum and the infected person might live 20 years or more on the available cocktail drugs concocted by Dr Ho, the wold’s foremost authority of AIDS, in 1996.

The ensuing chapters which cover her family background, her handsome father, the death of her baby sister are somehow less intense and curiously less moving than her spiritualising resolve. Nonetheless, the condition of her dying baby sister is poignantly described.

Poignant too, are the passages that outline why the infected couple should not make love without a condom and when Princess Zulu asks about eating pumpkin leaves, cassava leaves, bean leaves and foods high in iron.

When the doctor says yes these things may help, you feel the assurance is hollow.

The widespread contagion of AIDS in Africa has given rise to an awful social phenomenon, the serial orphan – a child passed from relative to relative as each successively dies of AIDS. In the midst of this malaise, the soul of Princess Zulu glows like a warm helpful beacon. She is surely that possibly rare? – hopefully not – thing we call a good person.

Relief

By Anna Taylor Victoria University Press, $30 There’s a good-looking chick on the back of this elegantly designed book who closely resembles a distraught supermodel brooding over her clumsiness on the catwalk. In other words, she is too burdened with beauty to be taken seriously as a writer, but then Kapka Kassobova, surely the prettiest writer to come from East Europe or ... anywhere, drips talent like a leaky faucet in one of the East European ie Bulgarian communist concrete blocks she used to call home.

Then there is (or was) the Unbearably Handsome – the quote is accurate – Mario Vargas Llosa whose profile I was able to 90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

check at close range in the lobby of one of New York’s leading hotels in the winter of 1986. Yep, the guy had rock-solid film star good looks, and after Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was probably the second most gifted writer of the Latin American Boom, despite the disadvantage (actually, an advantage in America) of looking like the Tyrone Power of Peru. Then there is (or was) the reviewer ....but modesty forbids.

STOP PRESS: I’ve just discovered (probably the last to know) that Anna Taylor really was a model so my cheap (or moderately priced) crack at her ridiculously good looks was accidentally accurate.

OK – so the gorgeous blonde who declined to beam the world a rictus which would confirm her beauty so irrevocably we could only reject it as an aggressive superfluity, even a masterly piece of morphing (contra: I accept Anna’s beauty to be the real deal), but .. . can she actually write?

Well yes ... and no. The second sentence of the first story is nice enough to be good second rate John Cheever: “It was hot that summer, hotter than usual, and everyone in the street kept their sprinklers going, day after day, the long wisps of water moving lazily back and forth across the lawns.” It’s obviously the “long wisps” that prove Taylor can write. But does she sustain it?

Unfortunately not.

On page12. there’s this clunker: “Ellie’s Mum smiled brightly. ‘”Of course!’ she said. “God excuse the mess!”

She invited him in for tea.”

There’s really no excuse at this late date for such tired banality (unless of course you are a barely ex-model who has done Bill Manhire’s course) but you will find it everywhere in New Zealand writing. What this means is a rather frightening truth – neither writers like Taylor nor her editors can tell the difference between banality and excellence. No wonder we have so few good writers!

Much as I hate to point out an unpleasant truth, but feel morally obliged to do so, there is more of this style in women’s writing not only because standards for women are lower (political correctness and an over eagerness to cure the injustices of history being the root causes), but also because men know at a deeper level that writing drives into the very heart of the perplexity of human existence.

The most extraordinarily ambitious writers – the ones who carry it to grandiose levels – are usually male. One could say it’s part of the malaise of being male. Such ambition prompts men to yearn for the stars and if

they can’t achieve it in hyperspace, they will try to do it by their writing. The top male writers (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce) seek to emulate God and that’s an arrogance that produces the best kind of work.

So what is Ms Taylor up to apart from looking ravishingly frail? Alas the remainder whether complexly plotted like “Working Girl” or leaner of narrative “Electricity” are rendered in a flat lifeless prose that for this reader simply proved unreadable. But I am sure Ms Taylor’s work will improve. She looks resolute.

The Temple Goers

By Aatish Taser Viking, $39

One take on Taser is that he is trying to do for Delhi what Vikram Chandler did for Mumbai – put it on the fictional map. No matter which way you look at it, Mumbai makes for the juicier mix. However, as in Chandler, we have bribery and corruption and a sense of the city’s seedy underbelly.

But the novel lacks Chandler’s grand fictional architecture, his lush organ-like style and his heroic characterisation.

Compared to other Indian writers like David Davidar, Hari Kunzru, and Salman Rushdie – writers whose musically complex prose peppers the mind with baroque imagery – The Temple Goers has a very plain style indeed. Set along the tropical warmth of the magic realist Indian, the prose is spare and bare.

The novel uses one of the great familiar plots, the return of the native. In this case, a return to upper class Delhi – an indolent world, filled with media bigshots, fashion makers on the make. And our hapless hero is trying to finish a novel. In truth, I tire of novels where the main character is a novelist. The strategy almost invariably leads to an overly mannered inward looking stance.

There are some unresolved threads – who, for instance, is the murderer described in the opening pages? We never find out.

Aatish gets involved with his trainer, Aakash. By way of contrast, the trainer is poor but has the vitality of the live-now-dietomorrow colourful criminal. Evil almost invariably makes more exciting copy than good. And arguably, there is a touch of the homoerotic in their relationship. But overall, the style tends towards the chilly – we are in the icebox, not the living room. Despite these drawbacks, Taser is a writer to watch.

Perhaps one day he will surprise us and himself, by pulling out a masterpiece.

Start talking and watch your productivity soar with Dragon® NaturallySpeaking®

More Speed. More Accuracy. More Features.

The experience speaks for itself™ Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is here, and the world’s best-selling speech recognition system just keeps getting better.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is faster and more accurate than ever, delivering up to 15% more accurate results than version 9. Your transcribed words now appear on the screen in half the time it took in the past. With new Dragon Voice Shortcuts, you can search the Web for information, products, news and more with a single voice command.

Updated graphical icons for the DragonBar are intuitive and easy to see. New Quick Voice Formatting makes it easier to format, delete, and copy words and passages with a single command.

New VersioN! • Up to 15% more accurate • Up to 50% faster • Quick voice formatting • New look and feel • Improved help system and tutorials • Improved natural commands for Firefox • More flexible enrollment for younger speakers and users with certain speech challenges • Regional accent support • One-click option to disable conflicting services • Better control of commands vs dictation on the web • Auto configuration for optimal performance based on system profile • Formatting and word properties interface enhancements • Embedded data collection tool

The Nuance suite of Dragon NaturallySpeaking products is available through your usual computer software reseller.

Please contact sales@mistralsoftware.co.nz or your usual computer reseller for further information.

www.mistralsoftware.co.nz

Copyright © 2008 Nuance Communications. All rights reserved. Nuance, Dragon, and NaturallySpeaking are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the properties of their respective owners.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 91

SEE LIFE / MUSIC

Back from exile Chris Philpott is pleasantly surprised after suffering a Massive Attack Massive Attack

Thrice

Corinne Bailey Rae

So how exactly do you follow up the least popular album of your career?

Apparently wait 7 years and name the followup after a German archipelago. At least, that was the tack taken by trip-hop duo Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall, better known as Massive Attack.

Since 2003’s 100th Window, the duo have been a mite busy, putting together the soundtracks for doco Trouble the Water and action flick Unleashed, before focusing fully on their fifth full length album.

While the album is about what you’d expect – lengthy tracks grounded in the hip-hop/ dance style, drawing on more expansive synth soundscapes, string arrangements and guitar riffs – it’s the variety of guests that set it apart.

As well as guest spots from regular guest vocalist Horace Andy, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (on highlight “Pray for Rain”) and British soloist Martina Topley-Bird, there is additional instrumentation and production from members of Portishead and Blur’s Damon Albarn.

The result is a laid-back record that entertains from start to finish, without really demanding too much from the listener, while proving that the oft-dismissed Massive Attack are still a force to be reckoned with on the electronic scene.

Opener “All The World Is Mad” kicks off with a quick drum-roll leading into a grinding, distorted bassline, and almost immediately you’re hooked. Californian quartet Thrice, led by singer-songwriter Dustin Kensrue, have proven themselves a creative force to be reckoned with, maturing more and more with every new release.

After spending 2007/2008 touring in support of a series of concept discs, collectively titled The Alchemy Indexes, the group settled back into the studio in January 2009, to begin work on Beggars, a more stripped back affair, showing the groups raw talent for writing catchy rock songs.

But while the twisted, dark melodies of guitarist Teppei Teranishi are interesting to listen to, Beggars best kept secret is the poetic, often spiritual lyricism of singer Kensrue, who surprises again and again with well written, thoughtful lines that stick with you long after the song has ended.

“We are saints made of plaster / Our laughter is canned / We are demons that hide in the mirror” is one of many lines Kensrue sings out, painting wonderful images thick and fast.

Packed with highlights like “The Weight”, “Circles” and “Doublespeak”, this is one album that I don’t just recommend, but implore you to take a chance on.

It’s been a long 4 years for English soul songstress Corinne Bailey Rae, since the 2006 release of her self-titled debut album – only the fourth British debut ever to hit #1 in its first week of release in the UK. After touring heavily in the wake of her debut, Bailey Rae was forced to deal with tragedy after her husband, Jason Rae, was found dead in a flat in Leeds in March 2008.

Following a lengthy hiatus, Bailey Rae headed back into the studio to write more songs for The Sea, with the album eventually comprising tracks written both before and after her husband’s death.

The result is an album that deals with happiness and sadness, the influence of both hope and loss evident through the lightness of tracks like “I’d Do It All Again” and “Closer”, with the darkness of loss reflected in album highlight “Feels Like The First Time”.

Bailey Rae even addresses the tragedy in opener “Are You Here”, making the album something of a cathartic experience for the timid-sounding singer, and by the time the gorgeous title track closes things out you began to feel that maybe, just by listening for a while, you’ve helped out a little.

Heligoland 4 stars

92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Beggars 4.5 stars

The Sea 3.5 stars

Makes Sense

All-in-one Home THeATre SySTem MORE THAN JUST A TV DISPLAY STAND

TV display stand with piano black finish Built-in 1080P upscalling DVD player Built-in iPod/iPhone dock for charging and playing iPod Built-in Am/Fm radio Built-in amplifier, speakers and sub woofers Distributed by Digitalblue - www.digitalblue.com - P. 6494 766 381 - F. 6494 766 384 TV/iPod not included

SEE LIFE / MOVIES

THE WOLFMAN

Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt Directed by: Joe Johnston Rated: R for violence and gore Running time: 125 minutes 3 stars A lavish coffee table book of a horror film, The Wolfman features visuals so beautifully planned and executed that each frame begs to be lingered over and savored. The film is set in rural Victorian England in a fall where the skies are the color of lead, the woods exude a primal spookiness and the harvest moon blazes like the lantern of an onrushing train. The editing moves at a stately pace, evoking an agonizing sense of dread.

Joe Johnston, best known for light crowdpleasers like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji, aims for grim gravitas here, as in Francis Ford Copolla’s Dracula and Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein. When the blood begins to flow – fly, actually – the gruesome tableaux are worthy of an art gallery slide show. Impaling on an iron fence, a white swanlike neck bisected by a straight razor, steaming viscera torn out by fangs; it’s a splatter film with a genius art director.

In this era of reboots and reimaginings, The Wolfman sticks close to the classic story, adding psychological notes and, oddly, political references, to the legend. Benicio Del Toro, his heavy face echoing Lon Chaney Jr., plays the doomed Lawrence Talbot, here a Shakespearean actor specializing in the tragedies. Labeled mad and “fragile” as a child, he was shipped off to an aunt in America by his domineering father. His brother’s death at the claws of something brutal and violent brings both Del Toro and his brother’s fiancee Emily Blunt to Blackmoor, the isolated family estate.

They are welcomed with ambiguous hospitality by Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins). He’s a portly, bearded big game hunter with the manner of a sinister Santa Claus and a flair for pronouncements like, “Never look back; the past is a wilderness of horrors.” If he looks to his guests like he’s chuckling over some nasty, private joke, it’s because he is. There are twisted roots to the Talbot family tree that justify Del Toro’s 94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

Give them a miss Splatter movies try a comeback

expression of inner torment. The screenplay repeatedly notes that the line between man and beast is not always clear, and as computer-generated effects turn human hands into gnarled claws and mouths into foamflecked muzzles, the film wallows in the horror of deformity and disfigurement.

Most locals scapegoat the Gypsies and their dancing bear for master Talbot’s mutilation but some mutter about a werewolf, and soon the blacksmith has a busy sideline melting heirloom silverware into bullets.

Hugo Weaving glowers as the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case. Monstrous mysteries are his specialty; he last led the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

After a scarring encounter with the lycanthrope, Del Toro inherits the curse. In the film’s best passage he is confined to a dungeon-like asylum where a smarmy psychologist prescribes submersion in ice baths and electroshock to cure his “delusions.” Del

Toro’s explosive reaction proves that the textbook approach to an absurd claim isn’t always the correct one.

While the production design is a sumptuous swirl of eerie and disturbing Victoriana, there’s a 21st century subtext to the legend.

The characters’ backstory hinges on a bloody encounter in “the Hindu Kush,” the British imperialists’ name for eastern Afghanistan, and Del Toro’s sessions of medical torture look a lot like the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” for al Qaeda suspects.

There’s also a ripe strain of Oedipal conflict simmering between Hopkins and Del Toro and morbid sexual repression in his yearning for his late brother’s betrothed.

There’s plenty of bloodletting, but Johnston and his collaborators know that the real moments of fear come in those long, nerve-wracking moments when the finger hovers over the panic button.

– By Colin Covert

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak Directed by: Pierre Morel Rated: R (for strong bloody violence throughout, drug content, pervasive language and brief sexuality Running time: 94 minutes 2 stars John Travolta shaved his head, dyed his goatee and gave himself and his stunt double a helluva workout in From Paris With Love, a gonzo spy shoot-em-up from the folks who gave us Taken.

But even though the action is every bit as explosive and the jokey tone is an amusing departure from Taken’s serious man “with very particular skills,” Paris is basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

Travolta is Charlie Wax, a loose cannon shipped to Paris for a mission. Jonathan Rhys

Meyers is Reece, his in-country American embassy handler and driver, a functionary who longs to move up the espionage ranks. When he hooks up with Charlie Wax, his wish becomes his nightmare. Charlie is chaos and carnage incarnate – a triggerhappy killer who’s a bit too old for his hiphop wardrobe and his slang.

“If you want to BE a ‘secret agent man,’ you’ve got to roll like a secret agent man!”

Charlie declares. He bullies French customs officers so he can smuggle his gun into the country, then sings to his gun, “Mrs. Jones,” as he assembles it – “Me a-aand Missus, MRS. JONES.” And he blows through Paris like a bald bull in a drug-smuggling China shop, riddling nefarious characters of various ethnicities like so much Swiss fromage.

Travolta seems to be having a blast as this guy, going all Swordfish over-the-top, referencing the Hong Kong action films of The

Shaw Brothers and goofing on his Pulp Fiction past in his choice of French cuisine (a “Royale with cheese”).

Rhys Meyers has the tougher role, mastering an American accent but struggling mightily to give this chase-and-shoot-andchase-some-more actioner some heart and conscience. Reece is reluctant to pull a trigger, anxious to avoid confrontations and bloodshed. And Charlie ain’t having it. He tries to make his partner man up, but learning the kid was into Star Trek doesn’t help.

“Kirk or Spock?”

“Uhura!”

Director Pierre Morel, a Luc Besson protege, gives this Paris with Pistols a little pace and a smidgen of flair. One shootout, in a mannequin factory, is straight out of the Stanley Kubrick filmography. But there’s no escaping the grinding gears of an American buddy picture that loses something in the translation.

– By Roger Moore INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010 95

SEE LIFE / THE CUTTING ROOM

“You don’t need a husband, you need a Greek chorus!” thunders the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy at his emotional wife in the movie The Last Station.

“Oh my God, absolutely!” said a laughing Helen Mirren, asked in a telephone interview last month if that line was part of what made her take on the role of Sofya Tolstoy.

“I mean, I love very subtle pieces,” she went on, “and nothing could have been more subtle than what was required of me to do (as Queen Elizabeth II) in The Queen – that utter repression and sublimation of everything. But I think because of that, it was great to find a role that would show the extreme opposite – you can’t get much further from the queen than Sofya Tolstoy.”

This month, Mirren received the fourth Academy Award nomination of her career (she’s won once, for The Queen), for best actress in The Last Station. Her statement to the press was charmingly appropriate for the character: “I’m very happy and honoured for Christopher (Plummer, nominated for playing Tolstoy), myself and our film. I think Tolstoy himself would have been perplexed by all this, but Sofya, his wife, would have been over the moon. So in that spirit, I am, too.”

Playing an aristocratic Russian was no stretch for Mirren, whose original surname was Mironov. “My father was born in Russia, onto an estate very similar to the world that the Tolstoys came from,” she said.

“His grandmother, my great-grandmother, was a Russian countess.”

Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy, the daughter of a Moscow physician, married Leo Tolstoy in 1862. She bore him 13 children, assisted in his career (she copied out his vast novels in longhand, including War and Peace six times), and watched in horror as, after nearly 50 years together, he announced his intention to give away all of his worldly goods and flee his marriage at the age of 82.

The Last Station, based on a novel by Jay 96 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM March 2010

The Russian inside Helen Mirren plays Tolstoy’s tempestuous wife in The Last Station, and talks to Moira Macdonald

Parini (itself inspired by diaries kept by Leo, Sofya and other members of their circle) focuses on those late tumultuous days in the Tolstoy marriage, as two people who have spent a lifetime together try to understand each other and make peace at the end.

“Can you imagine? Six times? War and Peace?” said Mirren, her eyes audibly widening. She said she had known “absolutely nothing” about Sofya before taking on the project, and little about Tolstoy himself.

After her husband’s death, Sofya worked tirelessly to preserve his reputation: preserving the family’s estate (now a museum), cataloguing his library and writings.

“You know, the Tolstoyan academics give Sofya rather a hard time,” said Mirren. “The family – she has a huge family now, it’s massive – they are very happy to see Sofya rehabilitated. What she was doing, they have benefited from. (... ) There’s a sense of the academics dissing her and insulting her,

when actually she was very much a part of the creation of his masterpieces.”

Mirren said she relished playing Sofya’s emotional scenes, particularly one in which the countess becomes so infuriated she throws dishes across the room. “It comes from such a point of calm,” she said. “One minute, it’s ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ and seconds later she’s smashing all the china. This volcanic thing that she’s only just kept under control in her erupts again.”

Due to the vagaries of filmmaking, that particular scene had to be reshot much later – the film, sent to the lab for processing, was inadvertently destroyed. Mirren said she was “devastated” by the loss, but ultimately happy with the re-shoot. “It actually was better the second time,” she said, noting that it’s difficult to re-create something anew.

“You never move on with a scene unless you feel you’ve got it, you feel inspired. Film acting is lightning in a bottle.”