Went to a launch of Mevo the other day.

It’s New Zealand’s first electric car sharing service. Looks pretty nifty.

You use the app to request a vehicle 30 minutes before you need it. It will be waiting in its home space, fully charged. You can then use your smartphone as a key to unlock the car. You then have the car for up to three days.

They have a number of plans, including:

• Pay as you go – $23/hr up to $138 a day
• Weekly – $19/week and then $16/hr up to $96/day
• Lux – $49/week and then $11/hr up to $66/day

Prices aren’t the cheapest at the moment, but as with any new business model, as more people use them, the prices tend to drop.

Stuff reports:

So I urge at least 61 of our MPs to send this bill to a select committee for further investigation and consideration. That’s the majority it needs.

Seymour is confident he has the numbers. And certainly recent polls on the issue suggest 70 per cent of Kiwis support voluntary euthanasia.

Let’s call in the experts and lobby groups and genuinely hear from them in front of a select committee.

MPs must vote this through in the first instance. We have time to make good law and have a mature debate.

I think it would be disrespectful to not even send it to a select committee. That is where people can have their say and also debate the specifics of the proposed law and whether the safeguards are adequate.

I would quite understand that some MPs would vote against after it comes out of select committee if they feel the safeguards are not adequate. But to not even have the select committee process and debate would be wrong.

• Race 1 – NZ wins by 47 seconds
• Race 2 – Sweden wins by 15 seconds
• Race 3 – NZ wins as Sweden retired after the skipper fell overboard

Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal writes:

Imprisoned serial killers of women are often the object of marriage proposals from women who know nothing of them except their criminal record. This curious phenomenon indicates the depths to which self-deception can sink in determining human action. The women making such offers presumably believe that an essential core of goodness subsists in the killers and that they are uniquely the ones to bring it to the surface. They thereby also distinguish themselves from other women, whose attitude to serial killers is more conventional and unthinkingly condemnatory. They thus see further and deeper, and feel more strongly, than their conventional sisters. By contrast, they show no particular interest in petty, or pettier, criminals.

Something similar can be noted in the attitude of at least some intellectuals toward dictators, especially if those dictators claim to be in pursuit of a utopian vision.

An interesting argument.

Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has long had an interest in political deception and self-deception—not surprising in someone with first-hand experience of both the Nazis and the Communists in his native Hungary. In 1981, he published his classic study of Western intellectuals who traveled, mainly on severely guided tours, to Communist countries, principally Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, and returned with glowing accounts of the new (and better) worlds under construction there. The contrast between their accounts and reality would have been funny had reality itself not been so terrible.

Sounds like someone who returned from North Korea signing its praises.

First, there is the nature of the dictator to consider. Obviously not all dictators are equal, any more than are intellectuals. It was harder for non-German intellectuals to admire Hitler than Stalin because of the nature of Hitler’s ideas: claiming the inherent and ineradicable superiority of one’s own race and nation in everything from time immemorial is not the best way to attract foreign adherents. Nevertheless, many German intellectuals, notoriously Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, rallied to Hitler, and few actively opposed him. How far their support was motivated by fear or opportunism is impossible to say; but years of study and intellection did not protect them from gross misjudgement, and even before Hitler attained power, support for him was greater among university students and the professoriat than in the nation as a whole (here, quantitative information is important). In other words, the penetrating clear-sightedness and benevolence toward humanity that intellectuals often claim for themselves by comparison with the benightedness of the rest of the population is at least sometimes—and maybe often or always—self-serving and mythical.

I did not know that.

The fact that the most educated part of a modern society supports such-and-such a policy is no evidence that it is right. It would be a logical error, however, to conclude from this that the uneducated are always right. The contrary of error need not be truth: it is often merely a different error. Likewise, ad hoc dictators—those whose main purpose is to maintain themselves and their cronies in power, such as Basher al-Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq—may have their apologists, but seldom their enthusiasts. To excite intellectuals, dictators must embody, or claim to embody, some utopian ideal.

Claim to embody a socialist ideal and you’ll be forgiven any number of massacres.

The special ability to see beyond appearances that intellectuals like to congratulate themselves for possessing is, indeed, their raison d’être: for if they cannot perceive what others cannot perceive, what is their role? Whereas the simple-minded see in a massacre of priests only a massacre of priests, for example, intellectuals discern in it the operation of the dialectic of history, the imagined future denouement of which is more real to them than the actual deaths themselves, merely eggshells on the way to the omelette.

The Marxist omelette must be wonderful, considering how many eggshells have gone in to make it.

Though Hollander does not claim that there is a single explanation for intellectuals’ attraction to dictatorships such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (or Khomeini, in the case of Foucault), let alone to have found it, he nevertheless believes, in my view plausibly, that the longing for quasi-religious belief in an age when actual religion has largely been rejected is a significant part of the explanation. …

Rather, those dictators were religious leaders who claimed the power to answer all human questions at once and to lead humanity into a land of perpetual milk, honey, and peace. They were omniscient, omnicompetent, loving, and kind, infinitely concerned for the welfare of their people; yet at the same time they were modest, humble, and supposedly embarrassed by the adulation they received. The intellectuals, then, sought in them not men but messiahs.

An astute analysis.

A great read about how a bogus article was accepted and published in a peer reviewed journal. It is a reminder that merely peer reviewed is no guarantee of quality, when the reviewers are looking for research they agree with.

“The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.”

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.”

Sounds persuasive eh.

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions.

They could get tenure as some universities on the basis of their article.

We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

And they did.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

This shows what you can do when you push to the limits of stupidity.

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

I love it – they also blamed climate change on penises.

Most of our references are quotations from papers and figures in the field that barely make sense in the context of the text. Others were obtained by searching keywords and grabbing papers that sounded plausibly connected to words we cited. We read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by intention, as part of the hoax. And it gets still worse…

Some references cite the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmodern Generator liberally; this includes nonsense quotations incorporated in the body of the paper and citing five different “papers” generated in the course of a few minutes.

Five references to fake papers in journals that don’t exist is astonishing on its own, but it’s incredible given that the original paper we submitted had only sixteen references total (it has twenty now, after a reviewer asked for more examples). Nearly a third of our references in the original paper go to fake sources from a website mocking the fact that this kind of thing is brainlessly possible, particularly in “academic” fields corrupted by postmodernism. (More on that later.)

So the peer reviewers did not even check the references.

” The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.

It should be sad, but really this is just hilarious.

Without the partial collapse of the Scottish National Party and the big increase in the number of Conservative MPs from Scotland, Jeremy Corbyn might be trying to cobble together a governing coalition of Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. That is how close Conservative Prime Minister Teresa May came to what would’ve been one of the most stunning defeats in British political history. As it is, she has limped back into No. 10 Downing St with the backing of the right wing Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland. How did May managed to blow what was in some polls a 22% lead over Labour in the space of a 6-week campaign?

Voters don’t like snap elections
Especially when they were promised by the newly sworn in PM May that she’d see out her predecessors’ 5-year term. One of David Cameron’s more popular policies (which was enshrined in the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011) attempted to create election certainty by having a government last out its 5-year term. Cameron honoured that commitment by holding the first election as the sitting PM 5 years from when he first became PM in 2010. If there are valid reasons for a snap election, voters understand but sticking it to a weak and divided Labour Party to get a bigger majority was the real reason that people saw rather than the official reason given; to strengthen May’s hand in the Brexit negotiations.

Don’t attack your base
Perhaps the single most damaging act of the May/Conservative campaign was the so-called dementia tax and the subsequent backtrack. The Tories banked on the fact that its wealthier base would be resentful if some of them were forced to use their own assets to pay for institutional care for the aged and infirmed but that most would hold their noses and still vote for them. In a country weaned on free medical care courtesy of the NHS, it went against the national consensus to make even the rich pay for such care and it came across as niggardly and mean. It was a spectacular own goal and the hasty reversal did great damage to May’s mantra of her being ‘strong and stable’. On the back of a coupe of prior fiscal related U – turns, it showed May to be fickle, indecisive and possessing poor political instincts.

UKIP voters returned home
The Conservatives had previously been the major electoral beneficiaries of the UKIP vote because a majority of UKIP voters had been Labour voters and with the FPP voting system, UKIP often split the left’s vote allowing a Conservative candidate through to win a formally Labour seat. With Farage’s work done with the successful Brexit vote, the raison d’etre for UKIP was gone and those voters returned home. Because Corbyn said he would honour Brexit, it meant a traditional Labour UKIP voter could safely return to the fold. The other non-Brexit bread and butter issues that working-class former Labour voters are concerned about were better catered for in Labour’s manifesto than the poorly executed Conservative manifesto and so in a ratio of 2:1, the collapsed UKIP vote favoured Labour. This helped Labour defend its at-risk marginal seats.

Young voters usually don’t turn out … but this time they did
Youth and millennial voters across all the major 1^st world democracies are notorious for their activism but not backing it up by actually voting. The overall turnout in the 2017 election was 3% up on 2015 but turnout was up over 5% in many of the key Labour seats that the Tories were targeting plus in some marginal Conservative constituencies. This was the key to Labour’s massive upset. Young voters were not swayed by the Conservative scare tactics about the massive downside of a state controlled economy (that Corbyn promised) nor Corbyn’s long history of pro IRA sympathies. The economic turmoil of the Callahan years in the ‘70’s and the terror of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s IRA bombings are but chapters in textbooks to Millennials. Corbyn promised free tertiary education and a nirvana of state run trains and cheaper state-run power; no-brainer electoral choices to under 25s and they turned out in droves for Labour.

Wooden, safe, robotic campaigns are easily overshadowed by grassroots passion
Teresa May was the Hillary Clinton of the UK. Her lack of warmth and spontaneity was palpable and she and her inner circle foolishly built a presidential style campaign of personality around her when she was devoid of warm personality. Corbyn was able to shake off his torpor and was energised by a Bernie Sanders style grassroots campaign that had more seeming vigour and passion. This help juice the 18 to 25 year old turnout.

To win you have to be seen on TV and attend debates
One of May’s most bizarre decisions was to refuse to debate Jeremy Corbyn. And to refuse to front up to many of the TV talking head interviewers. Corbyn did both and his performance in interviews and in the free-for-all leaders debate helped Corbyn to portray himself as less threatening in the flesh than his frightening ideology. All leaders in the free world’s democracies show up to debate the rival or rivals to their crown – it’s part of the job of being the head of a government during an election campaign. May couldn’t even do that basic part of the job of being Prime Minister.

The terrorist attacks ended up hurting May
Depending on how such attacks are handled, normally a capable incumbent Prime Minister or President can dominate the media space with grave messages of support for victims and outrage over the terrorists and thus see a poll bump after such attacks. The trouble was that in each of the three major terror incidents (two of which occurred during the campaign), almost every single one of the identified terrorists were found to have already been known to MI5 and/or the police. In a few cases, concerned family and citizens had called the authorities to warn of what they had seen or heard and nothing was done. Teresa May was Cameron’s Home Secretary all through the period when these terrorists were being radicalized unperturbed inside Britain and so some of the blame for the inaction of the security forces rubbed off on her. Labour skillfully tied the attacks to cuts in police numbers again something that was started by May as Home Secretary and carried on as PM. Finally, instead of attacking the real cause of the Islamic terror problem with a suite of radical measures such as the French have implemented, she talked tough but acted weak and then intimated that the internet would have to be regulated to stop the terror. In times of fear, May was not seen as someone who would do what it takes to protect the British people.

The huge poll leads helped Corbyn
With the Conservatives so far ahead and Corbyn written off and attacked as a left-wing terrorist-sympathising, corduroy-jacket-wearing socialist, voters wanting to object to the hubris of May in calling the election or protest her manifesto, thought they could safely vote for Labour as a protest secure in the knowledge that Corbyn would never make it to No 10.

May was seen as inauthentic regarding Brexit
She was a vocal and public Remain campaigner and clashed with her Brexit supporting colleagues like Boris Johnson, David Davis and Michael Gove (whom she dispatched to the wilderness). May made strengthening her hand in the Brexit negotiations the primary reason for the snap election. Voters judged that she was not really as up to that job as she should’ve been and turned away from her.

FPP throws up unpredictable results
The collapse of UKIP and the partial collapse of the SNP has seen a return to the dominance of the two major parties in a way not seen in British politics since the 1970s’. The Liberal Democrats were caught up in this shift with a continuing decline in their influence but even the Lib Dems managed to pick up SNP seats in Scotland and the odd Tory seat. In some safe Labour seats in the north, there were swings to the Conservatives (on the backs of Brexit), whilst in the strongly Remain electorates of London and the south east, the swings to Labour were pronounced. This trend, coupled with the larger than predicted youth turnout, played havoc with the pollsters where, once again, most were off. Almost all polls used 2015 youth turnout models that ended up over sampling Conservatives and showing a larger Tory lead than was the case. The exit poll was however, unlike 2015, reasonably accurate this time.

Conclusion
It is highly unlikely that May will survive such a debacle and the odds are that Boris Johnson will be the new Conservative Prime Minister. With such a slim majority (with the DUP), the government will be weak and subject more to the vagaries of querulous back-benchers and adverse by-election results so a fresh election is highly likely given the track record of previous minority governments in the UK.

There is however one last crucial point that is worth bearing in mind and that is that the UK constituency boundaries have not been revised in well over a decade and a raft of distorting anomalies have arisen that will be corrected when the Boundary Commissions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland complete their boundary re-drawing work in 2018. The number of Labour seats that have fallen well beneath the average population threshold is significant and it has been estimated by prominent Labour peer Lord Hayward that 30 Labour seats may be drafted out of existence. In other words, Corbyn was fighting on an electoral battlefield that was skewered in Labour’s favour and he may not get to fight with such a tail wind ever again. Also, Boris Johnson will be a far more formidable election foe than May if and when the next election occurs. As dramatic as Labour’s revival has been in this election, it was an election that Teresa May almost single handedly lost. Don’t bank on the Tories making the same mistakes again as May made this northern hemisphere summer.

Frank Bruni in the NYT writes:

With just one seat to declare the UK results are:

• Conservatives 318 (-12)
• Labour 261 (+29)
• SNP 35 (-21)
• Lib Dems 12 (+4)
• DUP 10 (+2)
• Sinn Fein 7 (+3)
• Plaid Cymru 4 (+1)
• Greens 1 (nc)
• Independent 1 (nc)
• Speaker 1 (nc)

The SDLP and UUP lost all five of their seats between them and UKIP its one seat.

Take away Sinn Fein’s 7 seats (as they don’t take them up_ and you have 643 which means 322 to govern. Conservatives are four short so they will rely on the votes of the DUP. This will make things difficult in Northern Ireland as the UK Giovernment will no longer be able to be the honest broker there between DUP and Sinn Fein when things get tense, as they will be dependent on DUP.

It is a disaster for Theresa May who will be gone soon rather than later and a triump for Jeremy Corbyn who is safe as Leader. It is not that Corbyn was at all a good campaigner – but that he exceeded such low expectations and Theresa May had an awful campaign. They gained votes from UKIP but also lost them to Labour.

For the UK it is a terrible result as a minority Government will make it near impossible to have a sensible position for Brexit negotiations, so expect to see a hard Brexit and/or another election next year.

It would have been better for the UK to have even had a majority Labour Government, than a minority one. And the rest of us could have been amused watching Venezuela style polices implemented in the UK.

In terms of the vote share, the results are:

• Conseratives 42.4% (+5.5%)
• Labour 40.0% (+9.5%)
• Lib Dems 7.4% (-0.5%)
• SNP 3.0% (-1.7%)
• UKIP 1.8% (-10.8%)
• Greens 1.6% (-2.1%)

If we look at Scotland, it was the one bright light for the Tories:

• SNP 35 seats (-21)
• Conservatives 13 (+12)
• Labour 7 (+6)
• Lib Dems 4 (+3)

The Scottish Conservative Leader Ruth Davidson is a real rockstar and could even become First Minister of Scotland in the future.

So if Theresa May goes, who could be the next Tory leader:

• Boris Johnson – has the genuine quality – what you see is what you get – popular but divisive
• Philip Hammond – Chancellor and former Foreign Minister. Safe but boring. Had fallen out with May.
• Amber Rudd – Home Secretary, high profile but almost lost her seat
• David Davis – Brexit Secretary. Hated by Cameronites

Stuff reports:

Dean Barker and Team Japan have blown a 3-1 lead to lose their America’s Cup challenger semifinal series 5-3 to Artemis Racing.

The Swedish outfit will now face Team New Zealand in the challenger finals after finishing off Barker’s team on Saturday morning (NZT) on the Great Sound in Bermuda.

Artemis won three successive races on Friday to storm to a 4-3 lead in the race to five. They completed the comeback by winning the eighth race of the series when they overtook Japan, who had easily won the start, on the third leg and then kept ahead to win by 13 seconds.

The Swedish boat with an Australian skipper beat the Japanese boat with a Kiwi skipper!

Artemis look very good and unlike Team NZ, have beaten Oracle twice. I hope we become the challenger but it will be a tough fight.

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley writes:

The president of Venezuela, whose government shoots protesters in the street, recently thanked the international community for its “universal vote of confidence” in that country’s commitment to human rights.

The Cuban deputy foreign minister, whose government imprisons thousands of political opponents, once said Cuba has historic prestige “in the promotion and protection of all human rights.”

How can these people get away with saying such things? Because they have been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members are — on paper — charged with “upholding the highest standards” of human rights.

Last month, a U.S. Senate subcommittee met to consider whether the United States should remain a part of the council. Expert witnesses shared their viewpoints, not on the question of whether America supports human rights — of course we do, and very strongly. The question was whether the Human Rights Council actually supports human rights or is merely a showcase for dictatorships that use their membership to whitewash brutality.

Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela.

The exit poll projects the following:

• Conservatives 314
• Labour 266
• SNP 34
• Lib Dems 14
• Others 22

The 2015 exit poll was very reasonably accurate (unlike the pre-election polls). If this is correct then May’s gamble has backfired and Corbyn will stay on as Labour Leader.

But let’s wait and see what the actual results are.

The 2015 exit poll projected:

• Conservatives 316 (got 330)
• Labour 239 (got 232)
• SNP 58 (got 56)
• Lib Dems 10 (got 8)
• Others 27 (got 24)

UPDATE: It is looking to be a terrible night for Theresa May. They almost certainly have a reduced majority or even a minority Government.

Of the 375 seats declared, here is what has changed with the vote %:

• Labour +9.4%
• Conservative +6.2%
• Lib Dems -0.6%
• Greens -2.1%
• SNP -2.2%
• UKIP -10.9%

Scotland is very interesting. So far the SNP has lost 13 seats and Labour and Conservatives picked up six each.

Today

• NZ beat UK twice and lost once
• UK lost to NZ twice and won once
• Japan lost to Sweden three times
• Sweden beat Japan three times

Points

• NZ 5
• Sweden 4
• Japan 3
• UK 2

NZ has qualified for the Louis Vuitton challenger final. Sweden and Japan have two more matches. I’m backing Sweden as they don’t co-operate with Oracle.

The Herald reports:

A law change aiming to protect teenagers from forced marriages has passed its first hurdle – and a National MP says it will stop girls being “exported” to New Zealand.

A private member’s bill in the name of National MP Joanne Hayes passed its first reading in Parliament last night with backing from all parties.

It will require 16- and 17-year-olds who wish to marry to apply to the court and get the consent of a Family Court judge. Currently parental consent is needed in such cases.

A very useful safeguard. I suspect most people marrying at that age are do so through family pressure.

Hayes told Parliament child marriage and forced marriage “are the most horrific culture practices that could happen”.

“There are horrific stories that I have heard to do with forced marriage and child marriage that just absolutely sicken me, and we must ensure that they must stop here in New Zealand before they get legs and carry on,” said Hayes, who paid tribute to former National MP and now Human Rights Commissioner Jackie Blue, who introduced the bill to the member’s ballot in 2012.

Hayes said that between 2002 and 2011 there were 798 young brides in New Zealand, 388 of whom married overseas. About 80 16- and 17-year-olds marry a year.

“We know that some girls also are exported to New Zealand for the purposes of forced marriage. All this has to do with a fee to parents, a bit of a story given to the young woman who is told, ‘you come over here, you’ll get free education, we’ll look after you’.

“And they end up as slaves in an unwanted marriage and one that ends in violence, to the point that we hear stories of where young women lose their lives, and there is no justice for them.”

Terrible that this occurs.

The Herald reports:

New Zealand has signed a deal with the United States which will allow it to find out whether multinationals are paying enough tax in this country.

Revenue Minister Judith Collins, who is at an OECD conference in Paris, said New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to sign such a bilateral agreement. She hailed it as “great news” in the fight to get large corporates to pay their fair share of tax.

Beginning in 2018, Inland Revenue will receive more information about US companies operating in New Zealand, and will reciprocate with information about NZ companies.

“This will further enhance Inland Revenue’s risk assessment processes to make sure that the right amount of tax is being paid,” Collins said.

That’s a very useful agreement. Being able to see how much tax the companies are paying in the US will help assessments as to how much they should pay in NZ.

Stuff reports:

MPs will be forced to vote on whether or not euthanasia should be legal, after the End of Life Choice bill was drawn from Parliament’s ballot. 

A bill to legalise the use of medicinal cannabis if prescribed by a medical practitioner, was also pulled for debate. 

The euthanasia bill, by ACT leader David Seymour, has laid dormant in the House’s infamous biscuit tin since 2015. …

While euthanasia would be a conscience vote – meaning MPs would vote individually, rather than along part lines – it was a political landmine both Key and Opposition leader Andrew Little had gone to lengths in the past to avoid. 

Now the bill has been drawn from ballot box, it was out of the Government’s hands. 

I’m glad the bill was drawn. I think most people want to see Parliament vote on this issue. It is not an abstract issue, but something that is very real and painful and poignant for many families.

I have an archive of public polls on euthanasia at Curia.

My personal view is that so long as you have strong safeguards, people of sound mind should be able to seek assistance to end their lives if they are in terrible pain and suffering.

Brian Edwards writes:

I have been a vocal opponent of capital punishment all my adult life. I have given speeches, written articles, debated the rights and wrongs of it. And my position has never changed: the state has no more right to take a life than the individual. Life is sacred.

I now find myself, quite inconsistently, making an exception.

Terrorism, the random slaughter of innocent people without just cause, to make a point, can never be defended, or forgiven.

I now believe that the terrorist is entitled to fair trial.

But if the verdict is ‘guilty’ then that individual, who placed no value on the lives of innocent men, women and children, should have the same value placed on his/her own life. None!

Mad dogs just have to be put down.

Life is sacred, but not to the mad dogs who slaughter eight year olds at concerts and slit the throats of people at cafes.

Former FBI Director Comey’s testimony is on the Senate website. A fascinating insight into how Trump’s mind works, and his total ignorance of concepts such as independence.

Some extracts:

I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

Imagine in the NZ context if the Prime Minister had nine private meetings or conversations with the Commissioner of Police in four months. It would be seen as very unusual.

The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away. My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship

And then:

I added that I was not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but he could always count on me to tell him the truth. I added that I was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the President. A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner. …

Near the end of our dinner, the President returned to the subject of my job, saying he was very glad I wanted to stay, adding that he had heard great things 4 about me from Jim Mattis, Jeff Sessions, and many others. He then said, “I need loyalty.” I replied, “You will always get honesty from me.” He paused and then said, “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.” I paused, and then said, “You will get that from me.” As I wrote in the memo I created immediately after the dinner, it is possible we understood the phrase “honest loyalty” differently, but I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further

You want the FBI DIrector to be loyal to the Constitution and to the law, not to a particular politician.

Shortly afterwards, I spoke with Attorney General Sessions in person to pass along the President’s concerns about leaks. I took the opportunity to implore the Attorney General to prevent any future direct communication between the President and me. I told the AG that what had just happened – him being asked to leave while the FBI Director, who reports to the AG, remained behind – was inappropriate and should never happen.

I don’t think Trump was acting with malice in what he did, more ignorance. But it is a dangerous ignorance as he sees the model for the US presidency being more authoritarian than constrained.

The latest poll, a One News Colmar Brunton is out. Details are at Curia.

National is at 49% which is incredibly high for a party in their 9th year of Government. By contrast Labour at the same stage in their last Government was at 29% in the May 2008 poll.

Stuff reports:

The Crown decided last year it no longer needed the former ministerial residence. When the Commissioner of Crown Lands offered it to Wellington SPCA and the Vogel Charitable Trust – who were beneficiaries of Jocelyn’s will – a legal battle ensued.

Jocelyn’s grandsons requested a rehearing, and an investigation by an independent lawyer. In an unexpected twist, the independent lawyer advised that neither the Vogels nor the two charities should be given the property.

The parties were this week told Vogel House would instead be sold on the open market, with the proceeds going to the Crown.

Wellington SPCA boss Steve Glassey said it was a “sad outcome” for the two amazing Wellington charities who desperately needed the money to care for animals and the needy people of Lower Hutt. 

It is sad, and if the Vogel grandsons had not contested the original decision, the SPCA would have benefited hugely.

The case comes amid calls for changes to succession laws to better honour will-makers’ last wishes.

Glassey said the case was just one of many in which charities, and the community, lost out. He estimated three-quarters of SPCA bequests were challenged by family members, costing $500,000 to $1 million a year.

“People should be warned that, despite family members saying they won’t contest, soon after the casket is lowered they are clawing at the money,” Glassey said. “Sadly, your word is no longer law.”

He advocated removing the right for independent, adult children to dispute their parents’ wills – a change Law Commission recommended in 1997.

I’d support that, so long as the person was clearly of sounds mind when making the will. If someone wants to leave their estate to the SPCA they should be able to without challenge.

Stuff reports:

A $30 million housing project at Wellington’s Erskine College has been given the go-ahead after legal issues with heritage groups that threatened to stall the project were ironed out.

The Save Erskine College Trust (SECT) and Heritage New Zealand have given approval to most of the development of the former Catholic girls’ school in the seaside suburb of Island Bay.

Under the agreement, developer Ian Cassels’ Wellington Company can start work on the development while further engineering, design and feasibility work is done on the main convent building and chapel.

I have very fond memories of Erskine, having fled there chased by nuns on a couple of occasions they became aware my secondary school self was on the premises in the evening.

If the main convent building can be saved the development may lose a proposed early childcare facility and cafe.

But the project will still include a $7m restoration of Erskine’s historic chapel and a refurbishment of its wedding/function centre and restoration of the Reverend Mother’s Garden, Cassels said.

A cafe up there would be great.