26 Oct:  New dairy nutrition innovator, manufacturer and exporter Winston Nutritional formally enters the New Zealand market today with its sponsorship of the Infant Nutrition Council’s Feeding the Future Conference in Auckland. Winston Nutritional will present to potential suppliers, partners, local and national government agencies and market participants about its product suite, its state-of-the-art technology, its vision for the New Zealand nutrition market and the company’s role in advancing the industry’s innovative capability. Winston Nutritional General Manager Leon Fung, who was previously Deputy General Manager at Yashili NZ Dairy Company and directed the development of their Pokeno plant, said the…

26 Oct:  The German industrial giant Siemens plans to merge its rail business with the French train equipment maker Alstom, the companies said Tuesday, creating a behemoth that can compete with the Chinese-state backed China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation. The combined company, Siemens Alstom, would make systems and equipment for two of Europe’s high-speed rail lines, Germany’s ICE and France’s TGV, which can zip between cities at about 185 m.p.h. “We are creating a new European champion in the rail industry for the long term,” said Joe Kaeser, the chief executive of Siemens. “This will give our customers around the…

#6 - The millennialist panic was that all the world’s computer programming would freeze up as 1999 turned into 2000. This it was said would cause aeroplanes to fall out of the sky, and utilities such as electricity to switch off thus crippling transactions everywhere. This was based on a short-cut in the then tiresome business of writing programmes which had caused programmers simply to cut everything off at the end of the last century.The position nowNobody bothered to investigate non standard but widely used computer systems such as the Pick one which had actually expired by this time, yet…

#5 - James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis made powerful arguments in favour of the Earth as a self-regulating system, and as the last century drew to a close the theory arrived massively in New Zealand academic and media life. It’s central contention is that the planet is self-regulating organism and that the heavy output of “carbon” actually carbon dioxide from industrial processes along with its associated “greenhouse” gas methane from living creatures is interfering with this natural order The position nowThe flap remains still largely confined to the intelligentsia and has failed to break into the electoral realm as a whole. Proponents, supporters and…

#4 - The privacy hysteria floated into political life in the 1970s with the widespread introduction of computerisation in the public sector notably in two quite divergent areas – crime and health. The fervour was largely whipped up from Australia and as each waved peaked public sector administrators would ask “who has been over?” The position nowFacebook and all the other “social media” have reversed this position as whole sectors of the community cannot tell people they have never actually met enough about themselves. What was considered highly personal and thus confidential as recently as the 1990s is now willingly,…

#3 - This scare was the harbinger of all the other panics on ingestibles that continues today. The background was that New Zealanders short, but fast flowing waterways failed to collect the minerals required for healthy teeth. The result was that New Zealand teeth were among the worst in the developed world requiring among other things mass adult extractions and huge purpose built dental clinics for children The position nowThe unselfish insistence by the dental profession that fluoride had to be introduced to the public water supply brought this situation under control. Unselfish because it did the dentists out of…

#2 - The notion of a world capsized by the weight of its uncontrolled population growth overlapped with the nuclear war fear. It began to dissipate during the 1960s with the advent of readily-available contraceptive science. Yet later in the last century is began to pick up renewed momentum through reports of population expansion in Africa and Asia. The position now Recognition of this and action in Asia, most famously in China, has allayed these fears. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation report, the most recent comprehensive one on the topic indicates that world population is now stabilising. The population…

#1 - This was the first of the post World War 2 panics. It held that as a staunch Western ally, New Zealand would become a casualty of any nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. The position now According to USSR deep penetration agent Kim Philby, by now a KGB colonel in Moscow, New Zealand’s anti nuclear stance meant that it was removed from the USSR’s list of targets. Thus confirming that New Zealand, until its anti-nuclear era , a staunch United States ally, had been on it in the first place.  This threat, the most realistic…

Big Frights of Our Times MSC Newswire Series Starts Tomorrow Tuesday 10 October 2017 “Don’t’ worry,” the saying went “it may never happen!” None of them have. So far. In this series we look at the panics of our time. We assess them in the light of today. Were/are they justified? Who started them? What is the situation now?