Buzzfeed reports:

John Cisna, a science teacher in Ankeny, Iowa, enlisted his students help him with an experiment: He wanted to see what happened if he only ate McDonald’s for three months.

Inspired by Super Size Me, Cisna planned to put together an amateur documentary about the process, KCCI reports.

Following a strict 2,000-calorie diet, Cisna’s students constructed meals for him using McDonald’s online nutritional information.

 They also tried to stay close to the recommended dietary allowances for carbohydrates, fat, proteins, and cholesterol.

Cisna didn’t heavily restrict himself; a typical breakfast would be two egg white McMuffins and a bowl of maple oatmeal, lunch would be salad, and dinner would be a value meal — like a cheeseburger and fries.

“So this isn’t something where you say ‘well he went to McDonald’s and he only had the salads’,” he said. “No, I had the Big Macs, the quarter pounders with cheese. I had sundaes, I had ice cream cones.”

In addition to watching his caloric intake, Cisna also began walking 45 minutes a day. …

When the experiment was over, Cisna had lost 37 pounds and brought his cholesterol down to 170 from 249.

His low-density lipoprotein, known as ‘bad cholesterol’, also dropped from 173 to 113. …

He added: “We all have choices. It’s our choices that make us fat, not McDonald’s.”

A useful experiment that dispels some of the hysteria over fast food. As Cisan said, it is your choices that make you fat, not McDonalds.

The walking he did every day would have accounted for only five pounds of the 37 pounds he lost. The reality is you can eat pretty much any food you want, so long as you keep portion sizes appropriate and you keep under the recommended daily intakes for calories, sugars, fats, carbs etc.

The well known super size me documentary had someone eating 5,000 calories a day of McDonalds food. If you ate 5,000 calories a day of any food, you’d gain weight.

Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah, USA

A very happy 2014 to you all. I hope like me you have got out and about in the last few weeks either locally or overseas. I have hit some beaches in Northland and have some new photographs to look forward to seeing. I always get my motivation by planning my  next photographic trip, so for me I am just putting some final touches to a South Island trip which I think is going to be really special.

Being that today is the first day back to work for many a little motivation may be in order – I selected this photo simply because it is an awe inspiring location.

Click on the image for a larger view of this photograph.

We are doing some maintenance on the website this week so this photograph will be available as a wallpaper download next week.

Cheers

Richard [richardhume.com]

The Heritage Foundation highlights some of the more outrageous Government waste in the US. They include:

• A $100,000 outhouse
• A $1 million bus stop with heated pavement
• $350,000 for a study that found out couples are happier if the woman calms down after an argument
• $5.4 million of crystal glassware for the State Department
• $1 million for a granite sculpture at an embassy

Today’s Dom Post editorial is very weird. It links the Obama-Key round of golf to the US-NZ thaw in military exercises and that the US is trying to limit China’s influence in the Pacific. It goes on to warn about getting too chummy with the US.

It is one of the more bizarre editorials of recent times. First of all it ignores the fact that Obama is well known for not using golf as a diplomatic tool. Only 5% or so of his games have been with elected officials, half of them with Joe Biden. He played a round of golf with Key, because they get on well and were both in Hawaii. To try and make this all about China is frankly weird and off the planet.

Even worse, they seem to be suggesting that the game of golf was a bad thing, because it might offend China. Jesus Christ. Seriously? I can only presume the normal editorial writer is on holiday, and this one was written by a 17 year old intern.

The Dominion Post reports:

The man who helped bring the Absolutely Positively Wellington and the Wellington Phoenix to life, has died.

Ian Wells, head of New Zealand Tennis, chairman of Cricket Wellington and a former general manager of The Dominion Post, was 76 when he died peacefully on Saturday.

His son Jason said his father was one of the smartest people you could ever meet.

“Dad was very generous, very passionate about sport and about Wellington,” he said. “He loved the newspapers and he loved life.”

Mr Wells and fellow bid head John Dow conceived the idea for a Wellington team to take over the failed Auckland Knights A-League licence in 2007.

The pair did most of the work on the bid, but almost failed to secure the money needed to start the team. Entrepreneur Terry Serepisos stepped in at the eleventh hour to bankroll the team and the rest is history.

His great football love was Wellington club side Miramar Rangers, of which he was chairman and a life member.

Mr Wells began his career as a sports reporter with The Dominion in 1965.

He later became advertising manager and business manager for Wellington Newspapers before spending 17 years as general manager from 1985.

I didn’t know Ian well, but did meet him a couple of times when I had a holiday job working for Wellington Newspapers in their credit control section. A hugely respected figure.

Under his watch, the company developed the Absolutely Positively Wellington slogan and gifted it to Wellington City Council.

His involvement with New Zealand Tennis started in the 1970s and he served as chairman of the national body for 20 years.

In 2004, he became chairman of Cricket Wellington. Former New Zealand cricketer Gavin Larsen, who was chief executive during Mr Wells’ tenure, said yesterday: “It’s a really sad loss. Ian’s contribution to sports admin has been immense . . . we have lost an absolute champion. He was very insightful and I really valued his wise counsel when it came to some of the tougher decisions that have to be made . . . I feel I have lost a friend.”

Few people have given as much to Wellington and to NZ sport than Ian.

Nina Rees at USA Today writes:

New York¹s public charter schools are upending old assumptions about urban education. And they can help even more students if New York¹s incoming mayor lets them.

Earlier this year, Stanford¹s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) revealed that in just one school year, the typical New York City charter school student gained about five additional months of learning in math and one additional month of learning in reading compared with students in traditional public schools.

These gains, repeated year after year, are helping to erase achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. A rigorous 2009 study from Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who attend New York City¹s charter schools from Kindergarten through 8th grade will make up 86% of the suburban-urban achievement gap in math and 66% of the gap in English.

Closing the gap in educational achievement. We can’t have that. This is so evil, that we must boycott anyone involved in such a school.

New York has roughly 70,000 students enrolled in public charter schools, and the numbers are on the rise. This school year alone, 14,000 new students in the city enrolled in charter schools ­ with the vast majority in low-income neighborhoods.

Even worse, low income students are being helped by them, and they are growing in popularity.

Remarkably, several charter schools in low-income neighborhoods are showing some of the most impressive achievement gains. For instance, while just 30% of students citywide passed New York¹s new Common Core math exam, 97% of students passed the exam at Bronx Success Academy 2. The passage rate was 80% at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill in Brownsville, a community that has suffered academic failure for generations.

But, but, but they are stealing resources from other schools. It is better for everyone to equally fail than some students do well.

Mayor Bloomberg introduced “co-location” as a way to turn unused classrooms into productive learning environments. Sharing space also tests the hypothesis that environmental factors make it difficult for children in certain neighborhoods to succeed in school. Charters quickly proved that theory wrong. For example, 88% of third and fourth graders at Success Academy Harlem 5 passed the state math exam. The traditional public school located in the same building only managed to attain a pass rate of 6%.

Same buildings, same neighbourhood, but what a variance in pass rates.

Across the country, charter schools have produced particular academic gains among students in poverty, minority students and students still learning English. The sameCREDO study that revealed impressive learning gains among New York City¹s charter school students also showed that, nationwide, black students in poverty who attend charter schools gained the equivalent of 29 extra days of learning in reading each year, and 36 extra days in math, compared to their traditional public schools peers.

That’s awful. That may lead to them breaking out of poverty. Why should kids whose parents decide to send them to a charter school be allowed to do better than those who do not?

Nina Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

We should invite Nina to New Zealand!

Time has an interesting infographic showing who Obama’s normal golfing partners are.

The Herald reports:

The Wolf of Wall Street, a controversial tale of financial greed, orgies and drug-taking starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has set a record for profanity in a major Hollywood movie.

It uses the F-word 506 times during its 180-minute running time – that’s once every 21 seconds.

The Martin Scorsese-directed film, a blockbuster hit in Kiwi cinemas this summer, eclipsed the previous record held by Spike Lee’s 1999 movie Summer of Sam, which notched up 435 mentions, according to Variety, the entertainment industry trade publication.

I saw The Wolf of Wall Street on Friday night in Hamilton, and loved it. A three hour movie is either going to be great or unendurable. It was the former. Just cracked up laughing so often. The highlight or lowlight was when the future wife of the Jordan Belfort walks into a party.

Funnily enough I didn’t even notice the profanity. Maybe it is partly because the F work hardly registers as a shocking word anymore (unless used directly at someone) but partly because it just fitted the environment the film depicted.

Some people will hate this film, but most people will love it.

3 News reports:

Australia’s foreign minister may ask Greenpeace to help foot the bill for consular support to the Arctic 30, but the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) has ruled out a similar move.

Thirty Greenpeace activists – including two New Zealanders – were released just after Christmas after being detained for four months in Russia.

The group had been protesting against Arctic oil drilling.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Australian taxpayers were entitled to ask why they should be covering the cost of assisting Australian activist Colin Russell to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

“It took a huge effort and a lot of money to get this guy out and the Australian taxpayer paid for it,” Ms Bishop said yesterday.

“If it is a deliberate strategy designed to provoke a response and potentially to risk breaking the laws of another country, the question of cost recovery does arise.”

Citizens of a country who accidentally end up on the wrong side of the law in another country, should get consular assistance. But it is a fair point Julie Bishop makes, that when they travel to a country to deliberately break the law, then shouldn’t the organisation that put them up to it, pay the costs of their assistance?

The Herald reports:

Parliament’s Speaker, David Carter, has sought a review of Maori protocols at Parliament after two senior women MPs were asked to move from the front row for a welcome ceremony to visitors.

He said he wanted to “modernise” the protocols. “Parliament needs a protocol that is modern and acceptable to a diversified Parliament.”

Parliament’s longest serving woman MP Annette King and her Labour colleague Maryan Street were asked to move from the front bench during a powhiri at the start of the Youth Parliament several months ago.

That prompted the Speaker to begin a process to review protocols that were put in place 15 years ago with the oversight of the Wellington iwi, Te Atiawa.

On a marae, the protocol is set by the host Iwi. They can set whatever rules they want (and of course bear any criticism of those rules). But in Parliament, the rules should be set by Parliament, and they should and must embrace equality. It is offensive to women MPs to be told during Youth Parliament they can not sit on the front bench during the powhiri.

Ms King and Ms Street came in late and when they sat on the front row alongside the Speaker, they were asked to shift by Kura Moeahu, who assists Parliament’s kaumatua, Rose White-Tahuparae.

“They were asked to move and I thought that was embarrassing to them,” Mr Carter told the Herald.

He had had feedback from other MPs.

“I have initiated the discussions with Te Atiawa and I haven’t had feedback from those discussions. But the matter won’t rest. I intend to follow it up in the New Year. I want Te Atiawa to talk to other iwi so that we can modernise protocol but do it in a way that respects Maori tradition,” Mr Carter said.

It sounds like the Speaker is determined to get change, which is excellent.

The Herald editorial:

Predictably, there is outrage over a scheme in South Auckland that offers women smokers a voucher for up to $300 if they stop smoking while pregnant, to avoid the harm that tobacco can do to an unborn baby. But all the talk about the mother’s personal responsibility and the like disregards a couple of salient facts.

The most important of these is the price an unborn child might pay for a mother’s failure to act in its interests. Society also gains when the benefit of preventing smoking-related birth complications far outweighs the cost of the vouchers, which can be spent only on groceries, baby products, cinema tickets or petrol.

I don’t have a problem with the scheme if the benefits outweigh the costs, which looks likely. But what I do have an issue with, is that it is restricted to Maori and Pacific mothers only, rather than all pregnant mothers who smoke.

The Herald reports:

Politicians in Colorado have reported that “the sky didn’t fall in” when cannabis went on sale to the public for the first time, leading to calls for the drug to be legalised in other US states.

In Denver and at ski resorts around Colorado, dozens of shops licensed to sell cannabis to anyone aged over 21 reported few problems.

Barbara Brohl, the director of Colorado’s Revenue Department – which hopes to raise millions of dollars in taxes on the drug – said: “Is the sky falling? No, I don’t think the sky is falling today. Everything’s gone pretty smoothly.”

Andy Williams, the owner of Medicine Man, one of the first legal shops to open in Denver, said: “A lot of people around the country were looking for something bad to happen here and it didn’t. A lot of state legislators are going to take note and say ‘We can do that too and help our citizens out’.”

Williams served 650 customers and sold about 6.8kg of cannabis.

The data from this law change will be fascinating. Will the number of people who use cannabis increase, decrease or stay the same? Will it lower the price of the drug on the black market and reduce profits for criminals? Will drug related harms increase, decrease or stay the same? How much money will the state make from legal sales from it?

Other states and countries will be in a good position to decide, based on the data, if legalising cannabis is beneficial or not. The fact 48 other states have not legalised, will also allow for comparisons.

The Dom Post editorial:

Now Jetstar faces another bad news story. It refused to let 12-year-old Ashleigh Harvey fly from Christchurch to Wellington to see her father because only secondary school students are allowed to fly unaccompanied. Ashleigh starts high school in Christchurch later this month.

So let’s take Jetstar at its word and ask: is this a case of treating customers “as if they were friends and family”? Not really. A friend or a family member might reasonably suppose that Ashleigh fails the secondary student test only by a few weeks, and it is therefore daft to be so pedantic about the rule’s application.

A spokeswoman for the airline said the policy was clear. “There has to be some kind of cut-off.” But this is exactly what customers dislike about Jetstar – its mule-headed insistence on the letter of its laws. This is not “bringing a human element” or “empathy” to the customer.

This isn’t the first time Jetstar has bungled its public relations. There was the shocking case of Jeanette Strange, mother of Adam Strange, who was killed by a great white shark at Muriwai. She was told she would have to pay $321 to change a booking to get to Auckland.

It’s the culture, and they simply have it wrong. When Ansett NZ started in New Zealand, they had a great culture as the underdog seeking to win market share. They came across as grateful, every time you flew with them. By contrast, Jetstar seem to think you should be grateful to them for allowing you to fly with them.

Stuff reports:

Millions of taxpayers’ dollars could be saved by setting up an independent body to investigate miscarriages of justice currently dealt with by a “clumsy and blunt” court process, Canterbury University’s dean of law says.

Chris Gallavin and Labour justice spokesperson Andrew Little have renewed a decade-old debate, calling for the establishment of a Criminal Cases Review Commission.

I’m actually a supporter of such a Commission. It was the Peter Ellis case that convinced me it was necessary.

Little said the current process for dealing with alleged miscarriages of justice was “very ad hoc and there’s no dedicated resources to it”.

He quoted research which showed there were about 12 cases of injustice in New Zealand each year, but only one or two were picked up in through the prerogative of mercy process.

As I said, I support such a Commission. But what isn’t clear is whether Labour is promising to establish one, or is just calling for this Government to introduce one. There is a significant difference. If it is the former, then what are the proposed details of it, what will it cost, and what will its scope and powers be? Much harder to do the detailed work, than to just say I think this is a good idea.

Have been up in Hamilton since the 31st. As Wellington is battered with storms, fairly good timing.

Has been great weather up here.

Becoming quite a fan of Hamilton. The trails by the Waikato River are great for cycling, running and walking (have done all three). Also the Hamilton Gardens are exceptional, and much better than others in NZ. Plus did a cycle trail along the Karapiro River which was great scenery.

Sadly back to Wellington tomorrow (if airport is open).

A fascinating and hilarious AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit with a guy who has two penises.

Most of it not safe for work. Had over 12,000 comments. Some extracts over the break so no one will see them who doesn’t want to.

Continue reading »

Stuff reports:

United States President Barack Obama has rounded up a new golf partner: Prime Minister John Key.

The two leaders teed off on a sunny and breezy morning at a course at a military base on Oahu, the Hawaiian island where Obama is renting a vacation home. Key owns a home in Hawaii.

The golf outing put Key in rarified company. Obama is an avid golfer, but prefers to limit his playing partners to a close circle of friends and advisers. Among those who have also scored invitations to play with Obama in the past are former President Bill Clinton and House Speaker John Boehner.

Rounding out the foursome on Thursday (Friday NZ time) were Max Key, the prime minister’s teenage son, and Marvin Nicholson, Obama’s personal aide.

According to one site, Obama has only played golf with another politician nine times of of 145 games (and five of those were Joe Biden). The fact he has asked John Key to join him for golf, is a sign of a significant personal friendship, rather than it being a political act. You host other leaders at the White House when they visit, you don’t play golf with them on holiday.

Credit: The Obama Diary site

A nice photo of Max Key with President Obama. He has got tall! Most of the time it sucks having your Dad as the Prime Minister, but I guess sometimes it is pretty cool 🙂

It is worth reflecting that Key is exceptionally good at establishing personal relationships with other leaders.He has done it with Harper and Cameron who are also from the centre-right but also with Gillard and Obama, who are not. I also understand he has an excellent rapport with the Queen, as evidenced by the rare invite to Balmoral.

My theory is that Key isn’t fazed by anyone, and so when he meets people like the US President, or the Queen, he treats them much the same way as he treats everyone else – with some humour and as a person, not a position.

Some people got really excited that a junior sub-editor at the New York Daily News didn’t know who John Key was, when captioning a photo from the Mandela funeral. Well I guess if you have to choose between being known by a junior sub-editor, or the US President, I know which one I’d want 🙂

Anyway, we’re all waiting for the real news – what were the scores, and who won? 🙂

UPDATE: I understand that Obama and Key Sr played on the same team, and beat Key Jr and Nicholson.

A guest post by Camryn Brown:

Given that multiple political parties have policies with which I agree, how do I decide which one to vote for?

Or “How do I prioritize by political opinions?”

Generally, I prefer very small government in both the social and economic spheres. Put another way, I believe in government that plays only a limited and judicious role in both your personal and financial lives. Faced with a hypothetical (yet all too common) choice between a socially liberal and economically big government party and a socially conservative and economically small government party, which would I choose?

I would choose the economically small government party every time. There are three reasons.

1. Politicians have more impact on the economy than they do on society. So it’s more important that they get the economics right.
2. When the economy is going well, society tends to the liberal. So my social objectives are more easily advanced when my economic ones are.
3. Economic big governments naturally become social interventionists, one way or another. So, they should be avoided.

Let’s discuss each reason in turn after a pause for definitions. For the purposes of this essay, I define social policy as policy concerning interaction between members of society e.g. policies on gender, sexual orientation, marriage and family structure, discrimination, and so on. Social welfare policy falls into economic policy because it’s about the economic well being of people not interactions between people. Social and economic policy certainly interact, but it is necessary to draw a line somewhere for the sake of argument.

First, the limited social impact of politicians.

• Humans are consciously social creatures. We spend our lives pondering morality and fairness and applying our social mores in our interactions with others. We are highly confident in what we think is right and wrong and we love talking about it. Thus, as new ideas are raised and debated, society tends to change its views quickly. In New Zealand, homosexual conduct was illegal until 1987 and yet we now have marriage equality. These changes are consolidated and codified by the laws that politicians pass, but they are not created by those laws. Indeed, the laws are a reaction to a society that has already changed. That change happened through social interaction, not political action.
• In contrast, humans are not consciously economic creatures. We don’t tend to think or talk about economics as much as we do social issues (e.g. most reality TV is about social interaction, very little is about economic interaction). We respond strongly to incentives, but often in a subconscious manner. Many of those incentives spring from “the people” (aka. the market, which is just a name for the economic interaction of people) but many are politically created for various ends (some good, some bad). Thus, the economic laws that politicians set do have an immediate, ongoing effect on us all and we tend to habituate to them and barely ever consciously revisit them.
• Thus, it makes sense to vote for the party that agrees with me in the area that has the most potential to positively or negatively impact well being. That’s the economy. I acknowledge that this view must be frustrating for some, especially those personally impacted – as homosexuals wishing to marry recently were – but this brings me to my next point.

Second, a good economy leads to a liberal society.

• Prosperous societies tend to the liberal.
• When people are economically comfortable as a result of their own skill and effort, they feel good about that. It builds self esteem. Therefore, people have less motivation to seek self esteem elsewhere, which too often involves considering others to be inferior on the basis of their gender, race, sexuality and so on. Discrimination is a cheap and artificial boost to self esteem, but one that people tend to turn to when they can’t get themselves ahead on their own merits.
• On the opposite side of this same coin, typically we’re only as liberal as we can afford to be. At a macro level, an example of this would be in the industrialization of the UK. The greater use of capital provided an alternative route to prosperity that quickly led to an acknowledgement of the immorality of slavery. The northern US followed suit as it industrialized whereas the south, remaining agricultural, tried to hang on. 

Third, economically big governments tend to have to intervene socially.

• Economic help tends to come with strings attached, or at least it should if it is not to eventually fail. For example, it’s not possible to provide welfare without social strings attached unless you’re willing for the cost to spiral out of control as people make increasing poor personal choices or even actively victimise themselves. Any brief reading of Theodore Dalrymple illustrates this better than I could. 
• Therefore, when government is seen as the solution, it tends to be applied to *every* problem.
• Thus, economic interventionists tend to disbelieve my first point and act as if they can control social behaviour instead of simply react to it.

In short, it makes most sense to vote for politicians with which you agree in the economic sphere irrespective of whether you agree with them socially. The social policies they promote won’t impact society much and will probably fall into line with society in one or two elections anyway. The economic policies they promote will have impact and this can speed up the social change anyhow.

Do you agree, disagree or partially agree?

The SMH reports:

Michael R. Bloomberg loves tropical fish. So when he was elected mayor of New York, he installed two giant aquariums inside City Hall.

The cost to him for having the tanks cleaned out every week for the past 12 years: about $US62,400 ($70,100).

The mayor likes to nosh, too. So he paid to feed his staff daily a light breakfast (coffee, bagels, yogurt) and a modest lunch (tuna salad, peanut butter and jam, sliced fruit).

The bill for his entire mayoralty: about $US890,000.

An analysis by The New York Times shows that Bloomberg has doled out at least $US650 million ($730 million) on a wide variety of perks and bonuses, political campaigns and advocacy work, charitable giving and social causes, not to mention travel and lodging, connected to his time and role as mayor. (His estimated tab for a multiday trip to China, with aides and security in tow: $US500,000.)

In the process, he has entirely upended the financial dynamics surrounding New York’s top job.

In the past, the city paid its mayor; Bloomberg paid to be the city’s mayor.

In moves that would make a financial planner’s head spin, he rejected the $US2.7 million worth of salary to which he was entitled (accepting just $US1 a year) and, starting in 2001, turned on a spigot of cash that has never stopped gushing.

I wonder if he would like to be Mayor of Auckland?

The Herald reported:

A woman arrested for drink-driving with two small children in the car had one of the highest breath-alcohol levels recorded in New Zealand – and might have consumed the equivalent of 25 drinks or more.

The 29-year-old was described by police as an “incredibly dangerous driver”. She blew 1568 micrograms per litre of breath – nearly four times the 400mcg legal limit for adults.

It is a miracle she did not crash. A blood alcohol level of that level, while in charge of kids, is almost rounds for proven neglect – even if she wasn’t driving. But to drive with your kids in the car, while plastered like that, is appalling. She should lose access to the kids before they get killed.