apologies for the late posting….

The Herald reports:

The High Court has allowed an appeal against a judge’s decision to discharge rugby player Losi Filipo without conviction for assaulting four people, including two women. …

Justice Collins found the sentencing judge “did appear to harbour a degree of uncertainty about the genesis of the assault”.

“The source of Judge Davidson’s uncertainty appears to have been the statements in Losi Filipo’s affidavit . . . In particular, Losi Filipo portrayed his role as being one of assisting his brother after the fighting had started and that he was hit before he delivered any blows. Losi Filipo’s explanation about the genesis of the assault conflicted with the agreed summary of facts.”

However, Judge Davidson was “obliged” to base his sentence indication only upon the agreed summary of facts and victim impact statements , which named Filipo as the aggressor.

Justice Collins also noted the sentencing judge did not refer to the fact Filipo stomped on the head of one victim.

“Those stomps were particularly serious and occurred when Gregory Morgan was already unconscious. This is the most disturbing aspect of Losi Filipo’s behaviour. it was potentially lethal conduct and required specific consideration,” Justice Collins said in his notes.

“Judge Davidson appears to have understated the seriousness of Losi Filipo’s conduct by not specifically referring to the fact he stomped on Gregory Morgan’s head on about four occasions.”

This is the aspect for me that made it extremely serious. A bar fight in one thing, but head stomping is another – especially when the person is unconscious.

Good to see the system has worked and the discharge has been overturned.

The Herald reports:

Auckland Mayor Phil Goff supports a blogger joining the Auckland Transport board after leaving two councillors off the board.

Last week, Goff announced two council appointments on the board would remain vacant for now to look at the best form of accountability for Auckland Transport and other council-controlled organisations.

He was not convinced having councillors on the board – Mike Lee and Chris Fletcher have been board members for six years – and subject to secrecy provisions was the best form of accountability.

I agree that having Councillors on the board didn’t actually help accountability. It conflicted them in their roles.

Patrick Reynolds, of the Transport Blog, has applied for an observer role on the board, despite the blog stating it “is not associated in any way with Auckland Transport”.

Reynolds is seeking a customer focus committee board observer role – a non-voting and unpaid position.

In a letter to the board, Reynolds said he was a highly engaged customer and commentator on Auckland Transport issues who believed his “other side of the counter” perspective would be extremely valuable.

“There is now significant commonality between our aims and official AT policy. We are highly aligned with AT,” Reynolds said.

Today, Reynolds said he applied for a board position earlier in the year and received no formal notification of any position being decided.

Reynolds said if he got a board role “I would likely cease posting on the blog, or only do so with full disclosure and approval of the board. Like all boards there is a confidentiality agreement to adhere to.”

Patrick is a very smart guy on transport issues, and could be a strong contender for a place on the board. The Auckland Transport blog has had a strong impact on transport debate in Auckland.

But I don’t think you can or should create a special new role of non-voting unpaid observer on the board who has access to all the information, but none of the responsibility of decision making.

If Patrick is seen as having the skills and knowledge to be a productive and constructive director, then Goff should appoint him to the Board as a full director.

sStuff reports:

Police have admitted they used a breath-testing checkpoint to target people who had attended an Exit International euthanasia meeting.

The move has been criticised as an “unlawful checkpoint to interrogate pensioners” by one lawyer, while another said it was probably a breach of police powers. 

A complaint has already been laid with the Independent Police Conduct Authority about the officers’ actions in Lower Hutt earlier this month, and at least one other is likely to be laid in coming days.

Police said on Wednesday evening that they had also notified the IPCA themselves.

It is significant that the Police have dobbed themselves into the IPCA. This suggests they may well now realise they overstepped the mark.

The Police are given powers for various reasons. Some powers can be used in any situation, while some can only be sued for the reason granted in statute.

The Police were given the power to require vehicles to stop and drivers identify themselves for the purposes of road safety. Not for the purposes of finding out if they were attending a legal meeting down the road.

“Information gathered through the checkpoint has enabled police to provide support and information to those people who we had reason to believe may be contemplating suicide.”

Again the power to pull over cars randomly is for road safety purposes. And it is not illegal to contemplate or commit suicide in New Zealand. It is only illegal to assist.

ACT leader David Seymour said people had the right to meet and discuss issues without “fear of police harassment”.

“The admission that the police used a drink-driving checkpoint to obtain the identities of people attending a meeting is deeply un-Kiwi,” he said.

“The police minister needs to explain why peaceful New Zealanders are being interrogated under false pretences.”

Now it has been referred to the IPCA, the Police Minister probably can’t comment. But once the IPCA reports, then the Police Minister should strongly advise the Police that this is a bad look.

The Herald reports:

The New Zealand Defence Force is mourning the loss of one of its most popular and respected leaders, and a veteran stalwart of its support operation in Antarctica.

Major Mac McColl, or “Mac” as he was affectionately known at Scott Base and in the defence community, died on Saturday morning after a short battle with cancer.

This is devastating news to anyone connected to Antarctica. Mac basically ran Scott Base, and was one of the vital kegs in our long-term operations there. He was basically our host when I stayed down there in January.

He had a total commitment to Antarctica, to Antarctica NZ and to keeping the people down there safe. Also very well regarded by the Americans at McMurdo.

Mac as well as hosting us, gave us tours of places like the heritage hut built by Sir Edmund Hillary and the observatory. A great ambassador for Antarctica has been lost.

McColl, who joined the New Zealand Defence Force in 1977 as a Territorial Force field engineer, saw operational service in Sierra Leone and Timor Leste, along with several stints in Antarctica.

A recipient of seven medals, including the New Zealand Operational Service Medal and the United Nations Medal Sierra Leone Medal, McColl held a range of development and training appointments as a soldier before being promoted to major in 2004.

“Apart from his professional achievements and the respect in which he was so widely held, Mac was also notable for his sense of humour, camaraderie and willingness to assist others,” Weston said.

His association with Antarctica lasted three decades, in a range of roles with the US Antarctic Program’s Operation Deep Freeze, the NZDF’s Operation Antarctica and Antarctica New Zealand.

Most recently, he was seconded to Antarctica New Zealand as the New Zealand defence senior national officer and key member of the planning and logistics team.

Antarctica New Zealand’s Antarctic operation general manager, Simon Trotter, said McColl’s passions were logistics, aviation, planning and people, so it was no surprise that his role satisfied his appetite for challenges.

“Mac was a respected leader bringing a range of proven skills, knowledge and experience to the Antarctic environment.”

McColl was also a great believer in the value of a cup of tea and a good conversation with other people, Trotter said.

“He valued relationships with his colleagues and National Antarctic Program associates greatly.”

Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Peter Beggs said McColl’s strong leadership presence, mentoring skills and humour were “consistent features” of his character.

“The measure of a person is often reflected in the positive impacts and quality of relationships had with others,” Beggs said.

“Mac will certainly be remembered for his great qualities, the friendships formed and teaching as the value of the simple things in life such as a good cup of tea and conversation with others.

“His enduring smile and sense of humour will live on in our memories.”

My thoughts are with his family, and the wider NZ Antarctic family who will be mourning.

Pattrick Smellie writes:

In Europe, a French-speaking parliament in Belgium has all but killed a long-sought free trade deal between Canada and the European Union.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) may yet somehow be signed in Brussels this Thursday, but as of Wednesday in New Zealand, there was no clear pathway for that to happen.

The European Union risks effectively shutting up shop for trade deals with anyone until a way through the impasse can be found.

Yep, no point in negotiating when not even a state parliament but a regional parliament can veto a deal.

You feel sorry for the rest of the EU who want this deal but under EU law are fobidden to negotiate trade deals outside the EU. So the Wallonia Assembly gets to veto everyone else.

Former trade negotiator Charles Finny has just returned from Washington DC, where he found a far higher hurdles than he expected to TPP’s progress. The prospect of a protracted renegotiation now looms.

Yeah TPP looks dead because the NZ and Australian negotiators got too good a deal it seems. But if US won’t ratify I say leave them to their tariffs and lets focus on countries in Asia who do want to reduce barriers.

Thirdly, there’s always the UK. Brexit looks almost attractive if the EU loses its ability to write Europe-wide trade deals with other parts of the world.

While the UK can’t formally negotiate a free trade agreement with anyone until it’s left the EU – and that could take four years or more – that doesn’t stop informal negotiations starting in preparation for swift ratification once the way is clear.

Already, there’s informal chatter about linking together a Commonwealth initiative, involving New Zealand, Australia and Canada, to push for an FTA with the UK. If TPP fails and an NZ-EU FTA proves too hard, the UK may well emerge as an unlikely candidate for focus. On that note, a more united ANZAC trade strategy may start to make more sense in both Wellington and Canberra.

All in favour of an FTA with the UK.

And fourthly, New Zealand might consider whether its support for the inclusion of investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in FTAs with developed economies is past its use-by date.

ISDS has been a primary lever used by opponents of trade liberalisation to create the rising tide of opposition to FTAs in general. While there may be a case for clauses aggressively protecting investors’ rights in countries where the rule of law is uncertain, they have no clear place in agreements between developed economies.

I tend to agree. There is a case for them where property rights are less certain and governments have a propensity to confiscate assets without compensation. But we shouldn’t need them in agreements with other OECD members.

Stuff reports:

Negotiations to end junior doctors’ long hours have been labelled “an absolute farce” as a standoff with health boards continues.

About 3200 resident junior doctors across the country, including more than 100 in Palmerston North, walked off the job for 48 hours last week.

The New Zealand Resident Doctors’ Association (NZRDA) sat down with health board representatives on Wednesday this week in their first official discussions since the strike.

That was in protest against their long shifts, which can run up to 14 days in a row with a 30-hour weekend, or night shifts – working from about 11pm to 8am for seven days in a row.

The RDA say it is about hours while the DHBs say it is about pay. Sadly the media reporting of the dispute fails to provide impartial information such as what would be the cost to DHBs (and taxpayers) of the RDA claim.

The RDA say it is all about safety but this can’t be true as they are the union that agreed to these hours in the last pay negotiation. Why would they agree to hours that are unsafe?

The DHBs say that the RDA are asking for reduced hours, but no reduction in pay. If this is correct, then of course they won’t agree.

What I would like to see is independent analysis of the claims of each side, including what the cost of each side’s proposal is.

Stuff reports:

A Christchurch man lost eight kilograms in a month living on pies and beer.

Julian Lee, a reporter for Newshub, became slimmer after four weeks pioneering the pie and pint diet.

Lee ate three to four pies (depending on meat content) every day. Once a week he was allowed to swap one pie for three beers.

When he stepped on the scales live on Wednesday’s Story, he found that he’d lost 8kg. On top of that, his blood pressure had dropped from an unhealthy to a normal level.

Lee modelled his diet on US nutrition professor Mark Haub, whose “convenience store diet” – Doritos, cereal and sugary snacks – made headlines back in 2010.

Like Haub, Lee was aiming to prove that it didn’t matter what you ate when trying to lose weight – what’s important is limiting your calorie intake.

This blows apart all the claims of the activists that some foods are “bad” and must be banned from tuck shops and the like.

It is your overall calorie intake that will determine if you gain or lose weight.

“It used to be that fat was the bad guy, then carbs were the bad guy, now sugar’s the bad guy. Some people, including myself, don’t have any idea about what’s what. I just wanted to prove that all it is is energy in, energy out when it comes to weight management.”

Yes, which is why sugar taxes are a nonsense when it comes to weight and obesity. They are just one source of calories.

At 1.83 metres tall, it is estimated Lee needs 2500 calories per day to maintain his body weight. On the pie and pint diet, his daily intake was 1600 calories.

Although Lee’s low calorie count seemed to be helping his body, he said the lack of nutrients wasn’t doing his mind any favours.

“Mentally I’m slowing down quite a bit. My body’s loving it but my mind’s really not loving it at all,” he said.

“I’m definitely getting scratchy, like grumpy, scratchy. I’ve taken a multi-vitamin every day, but it’s not enough.”

An all pie and beer diet is not a great idea in terms of overall vitamin intake. But purely for weight loss it shows that it is all about portion sizes.

The University of Auckland released:

Nicotine reduction, such as very low nicotine cigarettes, has huge benefits and few potential harms, according to a new study from the University of Auckland.

“Cigarette smoking continues to devastate the health and lives of smokers resulting in an urgent need to reduce smoking rates in New Zealand and many other regions of the world,”
says study co-author, Professor Chris Bullen who is director of the University’s National Institute for Health Innovation.

“One way to reduce smoking is to make it less addictive by greatly reducing how much nicotine is in the tobacco people smoke,” says Professor Bullen

Researchers from the University of Auckland and Universities of Pittsburgh and Minnesota in the USA, showed that reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes has the potential to produce huge benefits with minimal harm.

“The public health impact could be enormous and help New Zealand attain its Smokefree 2025 goal,” according to the study in the leading journal Tobacco Control.

It is the nicotine that is the addictive element of smoking, but not the nicotine that does the most harm.

Research into the potential of low nicotine cigarettes is a good thing. But if people are already smoking, they would be less likely to be satisfied I suspect with low nicotine cigarettes. Could be useful for those starting off smoking, but can you stop them getting higher nicotine cigarettes without a big rise in the black market?

The abstract of the article is:

Large reductions in nicotine content could dramatically reduce reinforcement from and dependence on cigarettes. In this article, we summarise the potential benefits of reducing nicotine in combusted tobacco and address some of the common concerns. We focus specifically on New Zealand because it may be ideally situated to implement such a policy.

The available data suggest that, in current smokers, very low nicotine content (VLNC) cigarettes decrease nicotine exposure, decrease cigarette dependence, reduce the number of cigarettes smoked per day and increase the likelihood of contemplating, making and succeeding at a quit attempt. New smokers would almost certainly be exposed to far less nicotine as a result of smoking VLNC cigarettes and, consequently, would probably be less likely to become chronic, dependent, smokers.

Many of the concerns about reducing nicotine including compensatory smoking, an exacerbation of psychiatric symptoms, the perception that VLNC cigarettes are less harmful, and the potential for a black market are either not supported by the available data, likely mitigated by other factors including the availability of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, or unlikely to offset the potential benefit to public health.

Although not all concerns have been addressed or can be a priori, the magnitude of the potential benefits and the growing evidence of relatively few potential harms should make nicotine reduction one of the centrepieces for discussion of how to rapidly advance tobacco control. Policies that aim to render the most toxic tobacco products less addictive could help New Zealand attain their goal of becoming smokefree by 2025.

I tend to think reduced harm products are part of the solution, rather than trying to ban smoking. Low nicotine products may well be part of that.

Newshub reports:

The World Bank has done its 2017 Doing Business report. It compares business regulation for domestic firms in 190 economies.

The top 10 are:

1. New Zealand 87.01
2. Singapore 85.05
3. Denmark 84.87
4. Hong Kong 84.21
5. Korea 84.07
6. Norway 82.82
7. UK 82.74
8. US 82.45
9. Sweden 82.13
10. Macedonia 81.74

The bottom five are:

1. Somalia
2. Eritrea
3. Libya
4. Venezuela
5. South Sudan

NZ’s ranks on individual measures was:

• Starting a business 1st
• Dealing with construction permits 1st
• Registering property 1st
• Getting credit 1st
• Protecting minority investors 1st
• Paying taxes 11th
• Enforcing contracts 13th
• Getting electricity 34th
• Resolving insolvency 34th
• Trading across borders 55th

Some of this is down to specific laws, but a lot comes down to having made it easier to do more and more Government interaction online.

Stuff reports:

Former MPs and their spouses claimed over $700,000 in taxpayer-funded travel in the last year, with couples among the big spenders.

The Parliamentary Service’s 2015/16 annual report has revealed the latest figures for claims on international and domestic travel as part of a discontinued perk.

Former Speaker and Labour MP Sir Kerry Burke was the biggest spender among MPs, totting up $16,147 courtesy of the taxpayer.

He retired 26 years ago but still getting the benefit.

The perk was cut off around 15 years ago it only applies to MPs who were elected before 1999. This means eventually it will disappear. But it is aggravating to taxpayers to see former MPs get it.

However I agree that you don’t retrospectively cancel something that was part of the terms and conditions of becoming an MP back then, and was in lieu of salary.

But why don’t we just buy the perk back and have it done with once and for all.

If it costs $700,000 a year and there are say 140 former MPs getting it, then that is an average $5,000 a year. So write them a cheque to compensate and then close the perk.

Nicky Hager writes:

This brings us back to the subject of privacy. It is awful if people wonder needlessly whether someone is reading their private email, or decides they’d better not be involved in politics, or generally shrinks down and limits who they are because of an unnecessary fear of surveillance. 

I have had my private e-mails read. They have twice appeared in books published by Nicky Hager.

I have considered quitting politics because of the fear of surveillance.

I’ve had spies put into my business to steal documents.

So pardon me if I have trouble reading the above without getting a bit angry.

Danyl McL blogs:

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, that we don’t have volunteer police or teachers or doctors or nurses or prison wardens: these are all well paid professional roles. But if the state wants someone to raise a child from another dysfunctional family, something quite a lot more demanding than any of the jobs we pay people in the public service to do, and the success or failure of which has massive benefits and costs to society, then their labour is unpaid. Which means not many people want to do it. Which means we had CYFS, and now a ‘Vulnerable Children’s Ministry’ which is going to cost more than CYFS, which cost over a billion dollars a year to manage the foster system, which is a train wreck.

What would happen if you made foster parenting a profession and paid them 50,000/year? The cost would be $175 million/annum, a pretty small fraction of the cost of the current system, quite a lot of which could be scrapped. It would breach the convention that child raising has to be unpaid work though, which seems to be an important taboo in our society.

This is a debate worth happening. Foster parents at present basically get costs only which are:

• Weekly care $204.46/week
• Presents allowance $102.23/year
• Clothing allowance $132.06/4 weeks

That comes to just under $12,500 a year.

I’d be more than happy to pay foster parents if it means we get more of them. I guess we need to worry about unexpected consequences such as people offering just for the money – but that should be manageable.

For those who can’t wait (like me), a normally reliable source has posted major plot threads for Season 7.

Do not read over the break, if you do not want to read the spoilers.

I’ve grouped them together by character for easy reading.

Can’t wait for the season to air next year! Very very excited.

Continue reading »

Middle East Eye reports:

This week, Saudi Arabia will be re-elected to the UN Human Right Council (HRC) for the fourth time, after another non-competitive election at the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

While serving its third term on the council, Saudi Arabia blocked international inquiries into its human rights abuses, punished Saudi citizens who worked in collaboration with the HRC, and threatened to cut critical UN funding after being called out for violating children’s rights.

Worse, instead of incentivising the kingdom to institute reforms to curtail abuses and foster greater accountability, Saudi Arabia’s membership on the council appears to be having the opposite effect.

The number of executions in the kingdom has spiked dramatically since Saudi Arabia was last elected to the council – with 2015 marking the most brutal year in two decades with 157 executions and 2016 closing in with 124 executions as of the end of September.

Meanwhile, the country ignores visit requests from the HRC’s “special procedures” – independent human rights experts who undertake country visits and report back to the council. Currently, Saudi Arabia has seven outstanding visit requests, including requests from special rapporteurs appointed to conduct fact-finding inquiries related to torture, freedom of expression and opinion, and executions.

This is the same UN where they tut tut over the name of one of our ministries.

Here’s a summary of human rights in Saudi Arabia:

• Torture by the state
• rape victims lashed for adultery
• Sentences of flogging up to 2,500 times
• Imprisonment for changing religion
• Women need permission of a man to travel abroad
• Women not allowed to drive
• Shia muslims ineligible for many government jobs
• Illegal to practice any non Muslim religion in public
• Trade unions banned, and political parties
• Demonstrations are illegal
• Capital punishment for homosexuality

A wonderful member of the UN Human Rights Council

The Dom Post editorial:

Police raids on elderly people associated with the voluntary euthanasia movement are surprising and disturbing.

So are suggestions that police officers are staking out meetings, taking down number plates, and paying such people a visit to probe them on their intentions.

It’s true that the police are charged with upholding the law, and that the law bans assisted suicide, as well as the importation of drugs commonly used to achieve it. But the police also make decisions all the time about how to divide their time and resources.

They have only recently committed to attending all burglaries, for instance, even though they solve only a fraction of them. Community police stations have been phased back. In 2014/2015, there were nearly half a million fewer drink-drive tests than the year before.

In that straitened environment, it is especially odd that the police are running an operation, codenamed “Painter”, that targets elderly people concerned about the end of their lives.

Even if the police had endless resources, it would still be a troubling investigation. The thought of officers interrogating octogenarians seeking to make decisions about their own lives is an unwelcome one.

Fears of intimidation are rightly at the heart of objections to legalising euthanasia. But here the situation might be reversed – it is not hard to imagine elderly people feeling harassed by officers.

I agree. Setting up a fake checkpoint to gather information on who attended a meeting is inappropriate.

Campaigners such as the late Wellington lawyer Lecretia Seales have eloquently argued for a change, and, equally, the courts have rightly cautioned that any such reform must be made by Parliament.

Whatever comes of this debate, there is a right way to police the laws around euthanasia: with discretion and humanity. Not all crimes are the same. A terminally-ill person in great pain who wishes to shorten their life is wishing for something that is leagues away from most of what we classify as criminal: acts of theft and violence and the like.

Most people understand this. There is considerable public support for allowing euthanasia in certain circumstances, and even more sympathy for those who find themselves wanting it.

The police are at the sharp end of the law, and they will always face tricky cases. Some really ought to provoke an urgent response – those with any hint of pressure or intimidation, of course, but also those involving people who are actively distributing the tools used for euthanasia. Such people mock the law and can reasonably be penalised.

Extending such scrutiny, however, to every person who considers their options for the end of their life is an illiberal and heavy-handed act.

The police should pause and reconsider their approach.

I hope they do.

Stuff reports:

The Joseph Parker world heavyweight boxing bout is borderline for government funding, Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce says.

Good to see the Government sceptical.

Labour spokesman Trevor Mallard has questioned its worth to New Zealand and Joyce on Tuesday highlighted the hurdles it would have to meet.

“It’s probably on the border for a number of reasons, but we’ll have a look at it – they’ve put an application in and we treat every application fairly,” Joyce said.

“Some of the questions would be, what’s the opportunity to promote New Zealand, and the sort of leverage of New Zealand, and it’s just a short time fame in that respect? It could be tricky.”

There would also need to be a clear understanding whether it was going to happen anyway, with or without the funding support, and whether it was planned to be a profit-making event.

“We don’t generally support events that are already profitable.”

He said the promoters had submitted a budget which officials would look at.

There was no express upper limit for how much the fund would pay out, although there was a budgeted amount each year and it was well allocated for the next year or two, “so there isn’t a huge amount sitting there at the moment”. 

Dean Lonergan of Duco Events told Radio Live they needed a “significant seven-figure amount” to make the fight happen.

I’d be appalled if the Government gave over a million dollars to the promoters. This is a massively commercial sport.

Joyce said the idea of the fund was to develop and encourage the development of things that would not otherwise happen in New Zealand.

“So for example we have supported bids to bring the Rugby League World Cup here and … the Fifa under-20 (football) as well as domestic events” including the Winter Games, golf and large regional events.

But it did not fund All Blacks tests because there was a clear understanding they would happen regardless.

I can see the case for funding certain events, being:

• Having them in NZ will bring a huge influx of tourists coming for the event. I don’t see this happening for a boxing match.
• Having them in NZ will result in a huge amount of publicity for NZ as a destination, increasing tourism. This might apply if occurring somewhere scenic, but this is an indoor match.
• Having them in NZ will be a huge boost to that sport in NZ, such as FIFA Under 20s.

I see pretty much no case at all for funding the event except it would allow NZers to attend a heavyweight boxing match in person, rather than on television. I don’t see that as a case for taxpayer funding.

Lonergan said earlier on Tuesday that he felt the major events fund was set up “purposely to help an event like this”.

“This is a major event, it’s a historic event for New Zealand, and it might not otherwise happen here.

“It is going to happen, but it mightn’t happen in New Zealand now because of the situation. As I’ve said, there’s a 70 to 80 per cent chance it will go to the United States now unless we can sort something out very quickly.

Beware when people say you need to decide quickly.

Stuff reports:

Vaping is being touted as the latest weapon in the battle of the bulge, with researchers claiming it could stave off food cravings.

Massey University research suggests that former smokers gain an average of 4.7 kilograms in the 12 months after quitting.

“Vaping’s use of e-liquids with food flavours, along with the mouth-feel and aroma of the vapour, could play a role in helping people to eat less,” Professor Bernhard Breier, Massey’s chair in human nutrition, said.

“If there is a chance that flavoured vaping could help even a small proportion of people reduce the diabetes, cardiovascular and cancer risks associated with excess weight, the population health gains would be significant.”

Breir co-authored a paper published in the international journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research on Wednesday, which reviewed existing studies on vaping and weight control.

Would be interesting to see more research in this area, but I’d be cautious about promoting vaping as a weight loss tool.

Vaping or e-cigarettes are a great substitute for tobacco, and there are massive health benefits for smokers to switch to vaping.

But you get even more health benefits by not smoking at all. Of course many smokers are addicted to nicotine and can’t easily stop smoking – hence why e-cigarettes are a good way to feed the nicotine addiction but cut the health impact by 95%.

An Otago University health expert agreed, saying effective advertising restrictions, calorie reductions and junk food controls would be more effective tools in weight management. 

“If you have got a fat person that says, if I get rid of smoking I’m going to be even fatter … well maybe e-cigarettes can help them,” Jim Mann, professor in human nutrition and medicine at Otago said.

“But to use e-cigarettes as a method of weight control – I would be very dubious about that, because we don’t know much about e-cigarettes.”

“Smoking is worse than obesity. If you have to get rid of one, you get rid of the smoking.”

I agree that if it is a choice between obesity and smoking, you get rid of the smoking.

The best option is not to smoke at all. If that isn’t possible then e-cigarettes are way way better than smoking.

Stuff reports:

A fatal accident at Dreamworld on Australia’s Gold Coast, which is believed to have claimed the life of a New Zealander and three other people, comes after a series of incidents at the park over the past two decades.

Since 1995, Dreamworld has had at least five incidents where rides malfunctioned or had to be temporarily closed down. Some of these incidents left visitors injured or stranded.

The most recent incident unfolded six months ago, when a man almost drowned when he fell from the Rocky Hollow Log Ride.

I went to Dreamworld in the 1980s. We were queued up for one of the rides. The surfboard one that swivels everywhere when suddenly there was a huge cracking noise and a piece of gear of the ride went flying off it, halting the ride in mid flight. It took 15 minutes or so to restart and as we were young and foolish we stayed in queue for the ride and went on it once they had reattached the part.

With hindsight it is not a good sign the parts of the ride come flying off in mid flight.

I’m not sure what is an acceptable incident rate for theme parks, but Dreamworld seems to be too high. And the four deaths this week will have been preventable. No one should die in a theme park unless from a heart attack.

News.com.au reports:

The latest Newspoll, taken for The Australian, shows voter satisfaction with the prime minister has dropped to 29 per cent — lower than Tony Abbott’s measure of 30 per cent when he was toppled as leader last year.

I doubt Turnbull will see out the end of 2017. Starting to feel unsure if he will even make the beginning of it!

Danyl McL writes:

Thirdly, it turns out that if you have a capitalist economy – even a very basic one like Tsarist Russia – and you take away the market and put the workers in charge of the means of production (and execute anyone trading on the black market) then instead of transforming itself into a utopia because of the scientific laws of history and the malleability of human nature, the entire economy collapses, and people in cities end up eating their own children to stay alive, and everyone who can still walk rises up and joins the capitalist counter-revolutionaries trying to overthrow you.

We are now seeing this occur in Venezuela – as it has in pretty much every other country that has tried this.

The revolution endured, through a combination of extreme ruthlessness, dumb luck and the ineptitude of their enemies and also, humiliatingly, by bringing back an attenuated form of capitalism. It took them a long time to work out an alternative economic system that didn’t involve either capitalism or keeping the population in a state of abject terror by just randomly murdering people or imprisoning and enslaving them for life, en-masse. They got there though, by the 1950s. And the form of communism they wound up with was very materialistic: very consumerist, focused on high economic growth at the cost of extraordinary environmental destruction. Actual communism was all the things the left dislikes about late capitalism, in other words, except it didn’t work as well as capitalism.

Marxist intellectuals in the west didn’t put that much effort into trying to figure out how to make Communism work. For most the assumption was that it did work, because science, and that reports of famine in the Ukraine were obviously western propaganda. So they carried on critiquing capitalism, applying a Marxist analysis to whatever was intellectually fashionable in the west.

Spot on.

When psychoanalysis was in vogue, the theory was capitalism caused alienation and schizophrenia: the traditional family became the agent through which capitalist production repressed the revolutionary desires of the child. When people became interested in colonialism, then Marxists decided that colonialism was caused by capitalism. Now racism, patriarchy and climate change are caused by capitalism. (It’s an endlessly repeated trope on the left that capitalism, with its assumption of infinite growth is the driver of climate change, without discussing why non capitalist economies won’t also seek growth and drive it with greenhouse gas pollution. And why won’t the powerful head of the People’s Coal Miners Union have all the climate change scientists imprisoned or executed as traitors?). Whatever people are upset about is caused by capitalism, and the solution to all our problems is to get rid of capitalism.

The Jeremy Corbyns of this world always see capitalism and especially Western capitalism as to blame.

When the failure of actual Communism became horribly apparent Marxist intellectuals comforted themselves that the revolution wasn’t supposed to happen in places like Russia and China. It was supposed to happen in developed capitalist economies, like their own, so they went on critiquing capitalism. There have been recent socialist revolutions in proper capitalist countries like Venezuela. That would have been a good time for Marxist theorists to go prove their theories correct. Did Venezuelans become less racist? Did patriarchy disappear? Did Venezuela’s policy of paying for their socialist state by selling lakes of oil to capitalist countries address the issue of climate change? But with the exception of hand-waving about droughts and capitalist sabotage, there is near total silence on the left about Venezuela. We don’t talk about Venezuela.

An inconvenient truth.

Instead of envisioning capitalism as a totalising system responsible for everything that annoys you, the removal of which will instantly solve all our problems, I think it’s more useful to see it as a series of kludges that allow complex, high population technological nation-states to function and interact with each other. A kludge is a term-of-art in engineering, especially software engineering: it describes an improvised, inelegant and inefficient solution to a problem. Over time, complex engineered systems tend to accumulate kludges, all creating unforeseen consequences that then proliferate more kludges, which all become interdependent on each other. They create lots of problems, but if you get rid of them then the entire system collapses – just like capitalist countries do when you get rid of capitalism.

Fixing kludges can be really hard. You need to have a deep understanding of the system you’re working with, and come up with realistic improvements, and make them work, and then move on to the next one.

This is basically the day to day work of Government policy making – fixing kludges.

I recently read a book about the history of cancer. For much of the 20th century, the most brilliant physicians and doctors in the world struggled to find cures for cancer. They didn’t really understand what was causing the disease – they thought it radiated out from the centre of the body in a spiral pattern – but they knew that sometimes surgery cured tumours, and sometimes chemotherapy cured tumours, or at least caused them to remiss. The culture of the profession drove them towards more and more radical solutions. Radical surgery, radical chemotherapy. They stopped paying attention to statisticians and molecular biologists, who were telling them that they’re weren’t actually curing anyone, and that cancer didn’t function the way they thought it did. Weren’t they the most brilliant physicians in the world? How could they all be wrong?

But they were.   The big lesson there is that a large groups of brilliant people all trying to do the right thing can all be completely wrong, for many decades, and cause incredible suffering and harm, while basically wasting their lives. It seems to me that something similar has happened to left-wing intellectual theory, especially the radical left. That it’s taken a very wrong turn somewhere, and a lot of very brilliant people have been studying, teaching and writing nonsense, for a long time now and that they’re in a deep state of epistemic closure about this, because no one likes to think they’ve been wrong about almost everything. Especially people who fetishise intelligence, like surgeons, or left-wing intellectuals.

This reminds me of a post I did some years ago asking what were the things that the left and the right got disastrously wrong post WWII?

For the right I would say tolerance of apartheid South Africa and opposing welfare states.

For the left I would say socialism/communism and unilateral disarmament