Friday, June 10, 2005
I apologise for the paucity of posts this week, but computer technical issues prevented me from accessing the blog. Solved now. So here's a recap of the missed items.
A ban on smacking children has been thrust onto the election agenda, with MPs already debating whether a proposed law change would make criminals of parents. Green MP Sue Bradford last night insisted that her private member's bill unveiled yesterday would protect children and would not see police invading people's homes to arrest a parent who lightly smacked a child. But opponents said her attempt to change the law would not save any child from brutality. Ms Bradford's bill will be debated in Parliament for the first time late next month and would repeal the controversial Section 59 of the Crimes Act, which allows a parent to defend an assault charge by arguing that he or she was using "reasonable force" in physically punishing a child.
Influential UK public policy thinker, Baroness Warnock, is about to publish a report which calls for a fundamental re-thinking of the policy of inclusion, under which children with physical or emotional difficulties are taught in mainstream schools alongside everyone else. She describes the implementation of this policy and the consequent removal of such pupils from special schools as a ‘disastrous legacy’. "So it is," writes Melanie Phillips. "The problem, however, is that it is her own disastrous legacy. For it was Mary Warnock who, in the early 1980s, laid down the principle that all children, however disabled or emotionally damaged they might be, should be taught in mainstream schools. It was a policy which created a classroom revolution — one which has caused chaos and misery for countless thousands of children and their teachers and made many schools all but ungovernable. Children with special problems require specialised teaching and attention. Yet the specialist help they once received has been all but destroyed, leaving these most vulnerable children all but abandoned and schools in general unable to cope. It's not the first time Lady Warnock has made U-turns with huge significance.
Throw away your Eftpos and Visa cards. Retailers in the US are starting to move towards a fingerprint scanner, which does what the credit card used to do (deducts the price from your bank account). [Aren't you happy that your fingerprints will be yet another part of your identity that can be hacked by any passing kid, or co-opted by any government agency?]
A cash crisis in the Church of England is forcing bishops to consider radical moves including cutting clergy numbers by up to a third and making worshippers meet in each other’s homes, The Times has learnt.
Ever wonder what happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? The former dissident Russian author has emerged from three years in obscurity with a warning that Russia could face a Ukrainian-style revolution.
One of every seven people in the United States is now Hispanic, a record number that probably will keep rising because of immigration and a birth rate outstripping non-Hispanic blacks and whites. The country's largest minority group accounted for one-half of the overall population growth of 2.9 million between July 2003 and July 2004, according to a Census Bureau report being released today. [Spanish is also now the second language of the US. There are many parts of the major cities where people will look at you blankly if you try to speak English.]
A surprising number of scientists engage in troubling degrees of fact-bending or deceit, according to the first large-scale survey of scientific misbehavior. More than 5 percent of scientists answering a confidential questionnaire admitted to having tossed out data because the information contradicted their previous research or said they had circumvented some human research protections. And more than 15 percent admitted they had changed a study's design or results to satisfy a sponsor, or ignored observations because they had a "gut feeling" they were inaccurate.
Last year, the research company Datamonitor found that British men now spend £1.3 billion a year on grooming products. The overwhelming majority of those purchases are being made by men under 40 who spend £111 a year each on personal beauty products - only £27 a year less than women in the same age bracket.
ACT Health spokesperson Heather Roy says newly dumped Treasury budget papers confirm health spending is unsustainable and out of control. "Treasury says ... there could be a possible blow-out in Vote Health from 6% in 1999 to nearly 14% of GDP in 15 years time.” The increase of $1.08 billion for 2008/09 is so huge, it is as big as the average size of the Government’s entire budgets for Budgets 2000, 2001 and 2002. Despite population growth of 4.3% between 2000 and 2004,and 7% increase in budget, there has only been 1.3% increase in operations, and there are 61,314 people waiting for surgery and 119,696 waiting for a First Specialist Assessment.
If you were wondering just how bloated our civil service is becoming, there are some helpful numbers in this article.
Queen's Birthday came at an apposite time as the Prime Minister ponders when to call the election, writes Colin James - "as if it were her election and not yours. Her pondering presumes a regal power, a lingering vestige of an era when sovereignty resided not in the people but in the monarch. When Helen Clark announces the election day she will be acting as if the sovereign, exercising the royal prerogative. Is this right in 2005?"
TV channel C4 says it won't reconsider its decision to show the highly irreverent cartoon "Popetown", despite requests by the Catholic Church. (The programme was rejected by the BBC.) As the Catholic church points out: "We are certain that if this cartoon was called “Maori-town”or “Islam-town”, and it disrespected those cultures in the same fashion, it would not have even been considered for screening in New Zealand, and rightly so." [A website opposing the cartoon has been launched, where you can record your protest.]
Hospital managers at the University of Leicester NHS Trust in England have proposed to ban Bibles from hospital bedside lockers. The Trust said it was "committed to religious diversity and equality" and claimed "there is a possibility that Bible could give offence". They also feared that Bibles could potentially spread the MRSA superbug.
Gay and lesbian Church of England clergy who register their relationships under the UK's new "civil partnerships" law will be able to keep their positions, The Times reports. However, clergy will have to assure their local bishop that the relationship will be celibate. Some bishops, however, are uncomfortable about requiring their priests to make such undertakings in face-to-face interviews, The Times says.
A bill that would have set the stage to create gay marriage in California has died in the liberal California Legislature. The bill fell at least four votes short of the number it needed for passage, with a dozen Democratic members either voting against it or abstaining. AB 19 would have deleted the phrase "a man and a woman" from the California marriage law, so it would have redefined marriage to make homosexual marriage
licenses legal in every single California county.
A year after Hamilton city councillors voted to outlaw sex in the suburbs, just one complaint has been received about a suburban brothel. [There is some strange editorial comment in this article. The reporter says: "The act sparked howls of outrage from residents, who claimed the city would be flooded by suburban brothels, but a council spokesman said only one complaint had been received over alleged breaches since the bylaw was passed." Seems to me that means the by-law is working]
Pre-natal screening is becoming almost obligatory these days for parents-to-be. But it has a chilling downside - it is leading to almost compulsory abortion of babies that might have a disability. In other words, we have adopted eugenics as a necessary way of life. George Neymayr writes: "Imperfect children aren't wanted children -- this is the logical terminus of a society obsessed with choice and control, and the culture is hurtling towards it. If you doubt this, note the growing impatience with imperfection in children, both unborn and born, that increasingly dominates the culture of reproductive choice and control."
The anti-abortion group Right to Life has filed legal action in the High Court at Wellington against the Abortion Supervisory Committee, saying it has misinterpreted the law and allowed too many abortions.
You thought technology had changed at blinding speed over the last decade? Technology forecaster Daniel Burrus says there will be more technological change in the next five years than in the previous 15.
The continuing housing boom means households are still increasing their net worth at a strong rate, but they're also spending more than they gain. This is leading to a "fool's paradise" perception of wealth, says Spicers Wealth Management, publisher of a quarterly survey on household net worth. The report for the March quarter showed wealth increased 3.2 percent to an average of $243,000 a household, driven largely by a 4.6 percent increase in the value of houses. However, household debt increased 3.9 percent in the quarter (and nearly 15 percent in the past 12 months). Households have been spending more than they earn every year for a decade.
Doesn't this sound chillingly familiar? "Society has a moral obligation to use genetic technologies to create 'better people'," says Professor Julian Savulescu, chair in practical ethics at Oxford University. Research was likely to provide information about genes involved in aggression,ddiction, criminal behaviour, personality disorders, neuroticism, even sexual behaviour. He said there was nothing wrong with choosing who had the best opportunity for a better life, rather than accepting "nature's lottery". [Does the word "eugenics" spring to mind?]
The international media organisation Reporters Without Borders has voiced alarm at the Chinese government's announced intention to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered. The plan is all the more worrying, the group said, as the Chinese government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply.
A new survey has found that the average G-rated movie made at least 11 times the profit of R-rated flicks, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The survey, commissioned by the Dove Foundation, examined the revenue and production costs for more than 3,000 films over more than a decade.
Parliament strongly supported the first reading of Matt Robson's bill that wants to raise the drinking age from 18 to 20. It went through its first reading 78-41 on a conscience vote and has now been sent to the law and order select committee for public submissions. Robson believes Parliament made a mistake in 1999 when it voted, by a narrow majority, to lower the drinking age from 20 to 18.
Fashion-watch: Hip-hugging jeans and tight-fitting tiny tops are out. Less skin is back in for the young American. US fashion experts say a trend toward modesty is evident in new fall styles for clothing aimed at girls in their early teens, and will become more common with spring 2006 designs. "We're seeing skirt hemlines that are at the knee and are very demure, very proper pants, prim tops and large pearl necklaces," said Gloria Baume, fashion market director for Teen Vogue. [Ah, but is it just fashion swinging its fashion pendulum - nice if it reflected something going on inside.]
A ban on smacking children has been thrust onto the election agenda, with MPs already debating whether a proposed law change would make criminals of parents. Green MP Sue Bradford last night insisted that her private member's bill unveiled yesterday would protect children and would not see police invading people's homes to arrest a parent who lightly smacked a child. But opponents said her attempt to change the law would not save any child from brutality. Ms Bradford's bill will be debated in Parliament for the first time late next month and would repeal the controversial Section 59 of the Crimes Act, which allows a parent to defend an assault charge by arguing that he or she was using "reasonable force" in physically punishing a child.
Influential UK public policy thinker, Baroness Warnock, is about to publish a report which calls for a fundamental re-thinking of the policy of inclusion, under which children with physical or emotional difficulties are taught in mainstream schools alongside everyone else. She describes the implementation of this policy and the consequent removal of such pupils from special schools as a ‘disastrous legacy’. "So it is," writes Melanie Phillips. "The problem, however, is that it is her own disastrous legacy. For it was Mary Warnock who, in the early 1980s, laid down the principle that all children, however disabled or emotionally damaged they might be, should be taught in mainstream schools. It was a policy which created a classroom revolution — one which has caused chaos and misery for countless thousands of children and their teachers and made many schools all but ungovernable. Children with special problems require specialised teaching and attention. Yet the specialist help they once received has been all but destroyed, leaving these most vulnerable children all but abandoned and schools in general unable to cope. It's not the first time Lady Warnock has made U-turns with huge significance.
Throw away your Eftpos and Visa cards. Retailers in the US are starting to move towards a fingerprint scanner, which does what the credit card used to do (deducts the price from your bank account). [Aren't you happy that your fingerprints will be yet another part of your identity that can be hacked by any passing kid, or co-opted by any government agency?]
A cash crisis in the Church of England is forcing bishops to consider radical moves including cutting clergy numbers by up to a third and making worshippers meet in each other’s homes, The Times has learnt.
Ever wonder what happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? The former dissident Russian author has emerged from three years in obscurity with a warning that Russia could face a Ukrainian-style revolution.
One of every seven people in the United States is now Hispanic, a record number that probably will keep rising because of immigration and a birth rate outstripping non-Hispanic blacks and whites. The country's largest minority group accounted for one-half of the overall population growth of 2.9 million between July 2003 and July 2004, according to a Census Bureau report being released today. [Spanish is also now the second language of the US. There are many parts of the major cities where people will look at you blankly if you try to speak English.]
A surprising number of scientists engage in troubling degrees of fact-bending or deceit, according to the first large-scale survey of scientific misbehavior. More than 5 percent of scientists answering a confidential questionnaire admitted to having tossed out data because the information contradicted their previous research or said they had circumvented some human research protections. And more than 15 percent admitted they had changed a study's design or results to satisfy a sponsor, or ignored observations because they had a "gut feeling" they were inaccurate.
Last year, the research company Datamonitor found that British men now spend £1.3 billion a year on grooming products. The overwhelming majority of those purchases are being made by men under 40 who spend £111 a year each on personal beauty products - only £27 a year less than women in the same age bracket.
ACT Health spokesperson Heather Roy says newly dumped Treasury budget papers confirm health spending is unsustainable and out of control. "Treasury says ... there could be a possible blow-out in Vote Health from 6% in 1999 to nearly 14% of GDP in 15 years time.” The increase of $1.08 billion for 2008/09 is so huge, it is as big as the average size of the Government’s entire budgets for Budgets 2000, 2001 and 2002. Despite population growth of 4.3% between 2000 and 2004,and 7% increase in budget, there has only been 1.3% increase in operations, and there are 61,314 people waiting for surgery and 119,696 waiting for a First Specialist Assessment.
If you were wondering just how bloated our civil service is becoming, there are some helpful numbers in this article.
Queen's Birthday came at an apposite time as the Prime Minister ponders when to call the election, writes Colin James - "as if it were her election and not yours. Her pondering presumes a regal power, a lingering vestige of an era when sovereignty resided not in the people but in the monarch. When Helen Clark announces the election day she will be acting as if the sovereign, exercising the royal prerogative. Is this right in 2005?"
TV channel C4 says it won't reconsider its decision to show the highly irreverent cartoon "Popetown", despite requests by the Catholic Church. (The programme was rejected by the BBC.) As the Catholic church points out: "We are certain that if this cartoon was called “Maori-town”or “Islam-town”, and it disrespected those cultures in the same fashion, it would not have even been considered for screening in New Zealand, and rightly so." [A website opposing the cartoon has been launched, where you can record your protest.]
Hospital managers at the University of Leicester NHS Trust in England have proposed to ban Bibles from hospital bedside lockers. The Trust said it was "committed to religious diversity and equality" and claimed "there is a possibility that Bible could give offence". They also feared that Bibles could potentially spread the MRSA superbug.
Gay and lesbian Church of England clergy who register their relationships under the UK's new "civil partnerships" law will be able to keep their positions, The Times reports. However, clergy will have to assure their local bishop that the relationship will be celibate. Some bishops, however, are uncomfortable about requiring their priests to make such undertakings in face-to-face interviews, The Times says.
A bill that would have set the stage to create gay marriage in California has died in the liberal California Legislature. The bill fell at least four votes short of the number it needed for passage, with a dozen Democratic members either voting against it or abstaining. AB 19 would have deleted the phrase "a man and a woman" from the California marriage law, so it would have redefined marriage to make homosexual marriage
licenses legal in every single California county.
A year after Hamilton city councillors voted to outlaw sex in the suburbs, just one complaint has been received about a suburban brothel. [There is some strange editorial comment in this article. The reporter says: "The act sparked howls of outrage from residents, who claimed the city would be flooded by suburban brothels, but a council spokesman said only one complaint had been received over alleged breaches since the bylaw was passed." Seems to me that means the by-law is working]
Pre-natal screening is becoming almost obligatory these days for parents-to-be. But it has a chilling downside - it is leading to almost compulsory abortion of babies that might have a disability. In other words, we have adopted eugenics as a necessary way of life. George Neymayr writes: "Imperfect children aren't wanted children -- this is the logical terminus of a society obsessed with choice and control, and the culture is hurtling towards it. If you doubt this, note the growing impatience with imperfection in children, both unborn and born, that increasingly dominates the culture of reproductive choice and control."
The anti-abortion group Right to Life has filed legal action in the High Court at Wellington against the Abortion Supervisory Committee, saying it has misinterpreted the law and allowed too many abortions.
You thought technology had changed at blinding speed over the last decade? Technology forecaster Daniel Burrus says there will be more technological change in the next five years than in the previous 15.
The continuing housing boom means households are still increasing their net worth at a strong rate, but they're also spending more than they gain. This is leading to a "fool's paradise" perception of wealth, says Spicers Wealth Management, publisher of a quarterly survey on household net worth. The report for the March quarter showed wealth increased 3.2 percent to an average of $243,000 a household, driven largely by a 4.6 percent increase in the value of houses. However, household debt increased 3.9 percent in the quarter (and nearly 15 percent in the past 12 months). Households have been spending more than they earn every year for a decade.
Doesn't this sound chillingly familiar? "Society has a moral obligation to use genetic technologies to create 'better people'," says Professor Julian Savulescu, chair in practical ethics at Oxford University. Research was likely to provide information about genes involved in aggression,ddiction, criminal behaviour, personality disorders, neuroticism, even sexual behaviour. He said there was nothing wrong with choosing who had the best opportunity for a better life, rather than accepting "nature's lottery". [Does the word "eugenics" spring to mind?]
The international media organisation Reporters Without Borders has voiced alarm at the Chinese government's announced intention to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered. The plan is all the more worrying, the group said, as the Chinese government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply.
A new survey has found that the average G-rated movie made at least 11 times the profit of R-rated flicks, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The survey, commissioned by the Dove Foundation, examined the revenue and production costs for more than 3,000 films over more than a decade.
Parliament strongly supported the first reading of Matt Robson's bill that wants to raise the drinking age from 18 to 20. It went through its first reading 78-41 on a conscience vote and has now been sent to the law and order select committee for public submissions. Robson believes Parliament made a mistake in 1999 when it voted, by a narrow majority, to lower the drinking age from 20 to 18.
Fashion-watch: Hip-hugging jeans and tight-fitting tiny tops are out. Less skin is back in for the young American. US fashion experts say a trend toward modesty is evident in new fall styles for clothing aimed at girls in their early teens, and will become more common with spring 2006 designs. "We're seeing skirt hemlines that are at the knee and are very demure, very proper pants, prim tops and large pearl necklaces," said Gloria Baume, fashion market director for Teen Vogue. [Ah, but is it just fashion swinging its fashion pendulum - nice if it reflected something going on inside.]
