NZ Herald takes up eccentric infectious diseases scientist’s trolling retribution
Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles publicly advocated the required national response to Covid-19 and at the same time estimated the effect of this response.
Having nudged the nation toward sidestepping the worst of the virus the clinician has taken on the power of making uncomfortable the very people who should be grateful to her.
Phillida Perry’s documentary Siouxsie and the Virus www.loadingdocs.net/Siouxsie intriguingly taken up by the New Zealand Herald has taken the scab off this undercurrent and will ensure that the bizarre outcome will remain a suitable case for study.
In the event Dr Wiles entered the Covid-19 debate when casualties were being forecast in tens of thousands.
Her widely publicised forecasts turned out to be correct and having successfully in advance calibrated the deadliness of the virus and how the nation could sidestep all but its fringe effects Siouxsie (say it “Suzy”) Wiles could have expected to have been elevated into the pantheon of respect and admiration reserved for New Zealand’s over achievers in a few other fields of endeavour…..sport and the accumulation of wealth, for example.
Instead she has become the epicentre of another type of viral attack, the electronic variety, in which she is pilloried for having spoken out in the first place.
Had she been a political scientist then few doubt that Miss Wiles would now be accorded adulation of the type accorded to women who stick their necks out and that she would be receiving much institutional covering fire and protection.
How different attitudes might be had Miss Wiles’ science doctorate from Oxford had been let us conjecture a sociology doctorate from Waikato?
Miss Wiles who is married with children has trade mark flowing pink hair of the variety often associated with fair grounds.
The infectious diseases transmission specialist is of a fuller figure with a round youthful cherubic countenance and dismisses her own startling appearance seized upon so avidly by her trollers as evidence of sorcery and witch craft and self-deprecatingly says she is merely “fat and middle-aged.”
There the matter might have rested had not the New Zealand Herald taken up the documentary which illuminates the darker underside of human nature and the smouldering envy and corresponding resentment detonated in so many breasts by the achievements of someone such as Miss Wiles with her dumpy figure and candy-floss hair-do.
A salient point is that Dr Wiles cannot dispense with social media and thus the trollers just because her brief is in communicating public health imperatives in the causes and the effects of an insurgency such as the Covid plague.
This expertise was why she was recruited in the first place via Edinburgh and Oxford Universities and Imperial College.
The trolling connected with Miss Wiles has about it characteristics often associated with quite a different moral stereotype to the ever-present generalised social injustice one.
This is not the routine drumbeat of the social justice signallers with their ready access to mainstream mass communication.
This is a new claque that has found a common voice and a common target. It is composed of those who find it hard to reconcile the purple-haired clinician’s eminence in relation to her otherwise ordinariness.
Their message to the clinician? If you are so smart, why don’t you go home?
She has shifted and diversified the paradigm of the outrage industry by showing how quickly it can reframe itself from signalling generalised injustice to a contemporary fixation on someone who rises above the noise level and also what is seen as their station.
The lesson of the niche Siouxsie as Sorceress unease boils down to the perils of being different.
In this new and still less obvious sullen electronic chorus there lies a much deeper and more personal signalling bubbling up of resentment and envy.
This devolves onto the “issues” many have here with internationally qualified scientists who break their stereotype by becoming public figures.
As an expert in transmission Dr Wiles must be contemplating her own transit from that of laboratory scientist to high profile public cultural touchstone, icon for some, witch for others.
Political Class Activism Eclipsed Quarantine priorities
Identity politics submerged climate change as the overriding moral issue in New Zealand, often considered a global weather vane of moral causes.
Mass marches switched from the extinction-rebellion climatic catastrophe ones to those vilifying the colonial era and those seen as benefiting from it, then and now.
The political-class rendition of this mild-mannered, fair-minded, and considerate nation as being in fact the repository of a bigoted, tyrannical majority, the kindest categorisation being racist, often delivered in the local dialect as “rashe-ist,” writes National Press Club president Peter Isaac.
This followed on the heels of the extinction-rebellion marches which saw city councils actively encouraging demonstrations seeking to portray a nation dedicated to hygiene, method and order as one of feckless polluting and contaminating.
This U-turn in causes was theatrically-defined by the mea culpa proclamation of the governing coalition’s cabinet who, in one instance, saw one of its members in front of an audience flagellating himself for having enjoyed what he saw as the advantages of being from a white middle class and thus pitifully unfair background.
This hair shirt exhibition was only one of many bizarre such displays as the political establishment turned itself inside out to signal its support of the freshly supercharged identity campaign in which for example senior police representatives were encouraged to attend in mufti solemn ceremonies of atonement.
Greens, by now suffering from acute publicity deprivation, seek to wrestle climate back on the agenda: notably by encouraging the mainstream media to make connections between Covid-19 and man made climate change.
Identity politics in washing man-made climate change out of the popular forum has given agribusiness an opportunity to regain a front foot at a time when its productivity is crucial.
Identity’s subsuming of the political class’s backbone cause of causes, the climate one, in another opposing interpretation has left this particular wing of the media political class, the climate one, pretty much free to implement its agenda, and do so unseen.
The centrepiece of this agenda is to hobble with international-grade show boating political correctness the nation’s underpinning primary and extractive industries.
In the shorter term, few doubt that the media and political class take-up of identity causes and the vitriolic righteousness inherent in this accelerated mass guilt transfer diverted official attention from the myriad details involved in the administration of the nation’s Covid 19 quarantine management.
The viciousness with which this same class, sensing blood, now turned upon elements of public health administration and on the prime minister Jacinda Ardern was itself a lesson on how virtue in its eyes becomes transformed overnight into villainy.
The prime minister and her officials who had successfully implemented a campaign that thrust the nation into the top rank of the Covid-free must have felt a bit like the primary producers who delivering year after year a successful economy, find themselves denounced as threats to human survival.
To what extent did the United Nations’ preoccupation with the Greta Thunberg campaign divert it and, so fatally, its agency WHO from the true threat: the looming one in the form of Coronavirus?
To what extent did the aftermath of this United Nations-sponsored extinction campaign, the one which so hypnotised this same media political class, devalue the meaning of “emergency?”
There followed the regional climatic emergencies, the ones which otherwise responsible local governments, egged on by the equally gulled mainstream media, fell over themselves to endorse and support.
This particular round of institutional mass hysteria has been eclipsed by the real thing, a true emergency in the form of the pandemic.
Moral movements exert a strange force, one of extreme excitability, on otherwise sober sectors of New Zealand society.
Authority figures such as politicians once sought public gatherings to promote themselves. Now, however, in these new-era collective guilt gatherings, these same politicians still do this, but do so in reverse.
They heap guilt upon themselves, about their skin colour, the advantages bestowed upon them by the accident of birth….the word “privilege” recurs…..
They pepper this with selective statistics designed to underline this undeserved head start.
The personal outpouring is a litany starting at the apology which is for being a thoughtless contributor to the destruction of civilisation (climate). It is for being a man (feminism). It is for being white (identitarian). It is for being middle class (poverty).
It is subtle self-praise of the type in which this class excels.
The impression is conveyed that the apologists in their penitence are, or have been, in a position to influence all these. That they have striven to alter the drift of mankind but, having been caught in the tide and that they have been unable to turn it back. That their lives certainly mattered, still matter. Will matter even more.
More such movements will wash up on these shores to be swiftly taken up by the political class whose representatives will turn themselves inside out in self-abasement with finely turned apologia which as we have seen is simply a reverse form of big noting.
Mass guilt transfer movements with their nurtured hysteria will continue to be imported here, and they will continue to arrive at times when nerves are under strain as they are now, by a pandemic and the economic consequences of it.
United States remains first and only nation founded to do good in the world
President Trump’s brandishing of a King James Bible in front of a church was a unifying signal which the mainstream media perversely chose to interpret as a divisive gesture, a stab at the soul of the union, even idolatry.
In fact the King James Bible ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as an underpinning United States document.
It was carried by the original Mayflower pilgrims and became the founding moral handbook of the United States, writes National Press Club president and sometime White House visitor Peter Isaac.
The mainstream is determined to portray President Trump’s symbolic and silent display of the bible as representing the heart of darkness, as being un-American.
In the event and with the King James Version as its centrepiece the United States was the first and still the only nation to be founded in the belief that it was created to do good in the world and enlighten it
President Trump’s waving of the bible was an only lightly encoded message reaffirming this moral authority of the United States and its founding purpose of doing good.
Inflamed itself by its own contemporary interpretations of righteousness the media now sought to engineer the backfiring of the Trump gesture.
This is in spite of the mainstream being overwhelmingly controlled by those who claim adherence to two of the Abrahamist religions – Christianity and Judaism. These are also known as “the book” religions. (The third Abrahamist/book religion curiously enough is Islam.)
The bible incident served to underline how in the popular culture elite urban context contemporary techniques of seeking to be seen to display righteousness have modified and usually replaced those based on the bible.
Trump understood this and the way in which this stylised personal street level moral concoction borrowing only from orthodoxy in terms of fire and brimstone is seen by his own base as posing a long and short term threat to their own security, and to that of the nation as a whole.
This replacement new and ersatz street belief draws its power from a welter of modern and technology fuelled bespoke and free style cravings in the field of segmented virtue display imperatives.
The double symbolism of the Trump gesture was similarly missed. This was that for his bible-waving he had strolled across the lawn to St John’s church, demonstrably scorched by roving rioters.
Trump is no stranger to the religious backbone of the United States, an immersion emphasised by the teachings of his Gaelic-speaking mother Mary Macleod raised in Scotland’s Western Isles and which the mainstream throughout the English speaking sphere cannot bring itself to acknowledge.
While the fashionable urban politico-media class exults in the formula of targeted mass hysteria wallowing in its reflected virtue, president Trump knows that in the productive United States hinterland there remains a sense of revulsion centred on the short and long term effects of the orchestrated over-excitement, and the applied havoc in its wake.
Trump stepped into this beliefs vacuum with his bible moment.
This is the vacuum amplified as it is by the established church through its conviction that it must accommodate and ultimately absorb competing doctrines, ones with a persuasive following. It is the reason for example that it allowed things like the days and months of the year to be classified with the heathen names we all use today.
It is the reason now why the established church backs down from acknowledging the gratuitous mayhem detonated by these single-point ignition to multipoint and now globally viral civic violence eruptions.
It is a mayhem actually visited on working and god-fearing people, such as the proprietors of small businesses and those who cannot afford to move to the suburbs along with those others who are singularly unblessed by being poor.
The established church anxious to appease the well-placed agitators sidesteps the whole problem with incantations centred on mantras of revolving words such as peace, equality, justice, divisiveness…
It is the reason why petrified pastors fearful of losing the support of such influencers simply identified the bible incident as being “blasphemous.”
Meanwhile the arrival of the consignment of King James Bibles on the original Mayflower is one of history’s great coincidences.
The accelerating application of moveable type meant that the King James Version now quite suddenly became available and a consignment was rushed to the Mayflower only hours before it sailed from Plymouth.
The mainstream media in its quest for hip modernity has long dispensed with its once standard god-spot broadcasting segments and published homilies from clerics.
In the looking glass world of the media the bible has gone the way of the Whole Earth Catalogue.
And yet…and yet presidents are still sworn in on them.
President Trump was sworn in with two King James Versions
His own and President Lincoln’s.
President Trump knew as he sauntered to the by now boarded up St John’s church that in today’s era of orchestrated opinion journalism that his bible semaphoring would be reduced to showboating.
Or at best statements posing as questions such as, Was he holding it upside down, and whose bible was it anyway?
His signal though was tuned to a longer distance destination the one beyond the confected rage of the self-regarding mood makers of the coastal enclaves and beamed at the heartlands where once a week Americans still clutch the King James Version.
This hinterland tends also to be comprised of people who do not applaud, condone, concur and generally excuse the setting alight of parish churches such as St John’s.
Family Cluster Lockdowns were Bleaker and Longer
In 1956 schoolboy Brian Bourke found himself in an Ashburton hospital ward, a victim of New Zealand’s annual and brutal polio wave.
He was one of 897 victims in New Zealand that year of the polio virus.
It cost him his left leg, writes National Press Club president Peter Isaac.
Nationwide that same year 50 other victims were not so lucky. They lost their lives.
Mr Bourke a chartered accountant recalls now that his nurses were completely shrouded in sterile material and he was not to identify any one of his carers until many years later when one of them Monica McCormack recognised him at a church service and introduced herself.
When after 192 days in hospital he eventually returned to school Mr Bourke recalls that fellow pupils were wary of him, fearful that they might catch the polio virus from him.
In the event Mr Bourke (pictured) went on to establish himself in New Zealand’s North Island with an accountancy practice and a number of directorships.
Challenging the disadvantages presented by his withered leg he embarked upon distance swimming and represented New Zealand at a Masters’ tournament in Brazil.
More than 800 New Zealanders died from polio also known as infantile paralysis between 1916 and 1961 when the annual epidemic waves finally succumbed to the vaccine developed by Dr Jonas Salk.
The most deaths in one year in New Zealand was in 1925, when 173 people died.
The virus was associated with respiratory ailments and those most severely afflicted often required artificial breathing support.
Conversely and curiously in the light of the current Covid-19 plague taking its biggest toll on the unfit and the elderly the polio virus in contrast attacked the young and the vigorous such as Mr Bourke.
Equally conversely, the polio virus thrived in summer rather than in winter said to be the favoured transmission season for Covid 19.
The introduction of the Salk vaccine intercepted the polo virus prior to the era of mass travel which has proved such a contagion thoroughfare for Covid 19.
Pivoting agilely on the stick which compensates for his prosthetic left leg Mr Bourke who is now 78 knows that he is among the last who can testify through experience to the annual summer polio waves which left in their wake the paralysis of which he is a living victim.
The annual summer intervention of the polio virus which put him in the isolation ward of Ashburton hospital is fading over the institutional memory horizon he notes. Social distancing in the polio era for example centred on shuttering schools, swimming pools, theatres and amusement arcades.
Mr Bourke with his wife Margaret went on to have seven children and he remains a signal figure in community activity.
A lean, tallish fellow with the engaging smile of those sensing their own gift of life redeemed, Mr Bourke a carpentry buff by day and who at night dabbles in poetry believes that the fear and trembling evoked by Covid-19 should be put into human perspective………
“In 1956 we all feared polio because it had a preference for children. There is nothing like it around now. The symptoms were like a very bad dose of the flu with a severe fever. The effects were very different. The paralyses were swift. We were utterly defenceless against it. Doctors had no answer. ….
“When I arrived at hospital they were not sure if I had polio and they put me in a small room with green walls and no window to the outside. They gave me a lumber puncture in the late afternoon and then left me alone. That’s when the paralyses started. I could feel it coming on. I had a strange feeling in my left arm and my left leg. The nurses did not come to check on me. I got out of bed and walked up and down that small room until I could not walk anymore and I collapsed on the floor…
“The others in my family were not allowed to go to work or attend school. Nobody came to visit them and they only went out to buy food. They sat around in the dreary nor-west heat of early 1956 and wondered if they could drink from the same cup or if they should wash all the dishes again……”
In the meantime and declining to succumb to the ravages of age any more than he did to those of polio Mr Bourke nowadays in a self-imposed act of defiance hosts an annual swimming gala in which he personally swims an extra pool length for each additional passing year of his life.
Instinct is up close, personal and infectious
Antipodeans instinctively keep their distance from each other. Right or wrong?
Wrong. The inhabitants of the thinly populated South Pacific outpost of British reserve and stand-offish-ness cannot in fact keep their hands off each other
Touching and feeling is the raw material of social codes of behaviour new and old.
These range from modern introduced sporting activities through the run of hugs, kisses, and handshakes to greetings ancient characterised by the Polynesian hongi or rubbing of noses.
The myth is that of the man-alone. The reality is that of the direct opposite. Males of all provenance embrace a tribal lifestyle often described as mateship in which they adore congregating and will commingle together as closely as they can. Whenever they can.
Mandated distances between non familial or non-bubbled humans in New Zealand as elsewhere is two metres and when proclaimed the distance was promulgated in a vein of this being a natural state of separation, removal, anyway.
Yet as we have seen the fervently-followed collection of ancient and modern social customs and practices runs counter to the notion of New Zealand males naturally keeping their distance from each other.
A more recent example of a socially–licensed custom which by definition encourages males to commingle are the officially sanctioned and even encouraged gay parades characterised by males intertwining with each other in order to demonstrate quite literally their solidarity.
Society issues its licence for such parades in what as seen as the public interest of “diversity.”
Rugby football in the event is a reprise of mating rites dating back to the dawn of time.
In its modified and current form it bestows social license on males to achieve a physical proximity otherwise denied to them and confers simultaneously license for a wider spectrum to observe them in this process, and to shape a conversational philosophy around it.
Opponents of this above conclusion when they feel free to discuss the issue, which is rare, say that the other Anglo Saxon-origin sport of cricket in contrast is designed by its nature to keep men apart, at a distance from each other.
A similar pattern of attraction however is now emerging and is in plain sight. It is now observed that an underpinning mating-cum-fertility ritual has begun to assert itself in the form of onlooker spectators seeking every opportunity for physical proximity to the team players.
For example, spectators deliberately position themselves close to team entrance and exit tunnels in order to grasp and then cradle and cuddle the heads of certain players, otherwise total strangers, as the players pass to-and-fro.
The head-hugging now so familiar in cricket and its derived sports such as softball is a conundrum bearing in mind that in so many countries the human head is a true taboo.
In short, far from being keep-your-distance types, the average Antipodean cannot wait to deliver a man-hug.
An approved contact sport (note the word “contact” as the sanctioned generic description) delivers the proximity permission.
For further evidence to support this conclusion we can examine the behaviour of people during the height of the recent Coronavirus lock down which permitted supermarkets to open as essential service providers.
But this came with the caveat that shoppers do so singly, one family member at a time, rather than on a familial group basis.
In the event otherwise responsible members of the community were observed as couples determinedly doing their shopping together, regardless.
In other words, the social license conferred by their pair bonding arrangements of these couples, ones such as marriage, superseded external commands centred on viral contagion.
In the military distance between individuals is rigidly codified and enforced. Elsewhere in the public service attempts to promulgate and enforce a distance cordon sanitaire between the genders has had only varying success.
In life as a whole we can see that contrary to the established myth, universally believed, individuals will trash artificially imposed distance taboos and huddle as close as they can providing they believe that they have social license to do so.
Far from being stand-offish Antipodeans given the social licence instinctively want to be up close and personal and the closer the better.
International artistes marvel at the gigantic audiences they get in sparsely populated Australasia failing to realise that a large part of this is the compound mass proximity attraction – the more, the closer, the merrier.
Nobody doubts that mandated social distancing has been central to Australasia containing the contagion.
Its continuing success will rely on an understanding that this degree of separation is not a natural state of affairs and that people will still have to be levered apart to keep their distance.
Lethally Dangerous Policeman-turned-Preacher Prepares to take tithe
United Nations at one and the same time has enthralled and betrayed New Zealand and now it fully intends to collect from the beleaguered nation a sum considered to be in the region of 1.5 billion dollars as a climate contribution.
This is after its wholly controlled subsidiary World Health Organisation utterly failed to warn New Zealand about the imminence of the Covid 19 virus and continues to actively block from WHO membership Taiwan the one nation capable of giving early warning of this and other such pathogens.
Unapologetic about its shocking failures such as failing to sound the alarm about Covid 19, United Nations considers New Zealand an easy mark for the billion plus contribution for a climate alarm which has failed to materialise.
United Nations is similarly unapologetic about other false campaigns most notably its globalisation one in which it encouraged smaller nations to outsource production thus rendering them vulnerable when a true crisis happened.
United Nations and its apparatus has enjoyed one signal success and it was and remains to present itself to the activist political class of nations such as New Zealand as a semi mystical moral inspiration and authority.
Now though the worry everywhere in governmental and commercial circles in New Zealand is that United Nations will be successful in extracting its climate money from the very politicians it has so consistently and successfully mislead.
The only supra national organisation that can compare with the power of United Nations in terms of keeping countries such as New Zealand in its thrall is the Roman Catholic church in its heyday.
While New Zealand politicians sling off at governments such as those of Australia or the United States, these same politicians become piously reverent in any reference to United Nations, and to anyone bearing one of its high titles.
This state of demonstrable awe was manageable while United Nations carried out its original peace-keeping role, the one for which it was formed.
United Nations transition from policeman to preacher ran parallel with its own conversion from law-and-order keeper to a gigantic self-serving bureaucracy trying to please its growing membership in order to stay in business.
An early diversification was into identity issues and it was now that it began to play to the activist gallery by blending the fashionable with its functional purpose of peace-keeper.
It knew it needed an over-arching cause in order to reinforce its evolving central doctrine of globalisation, binding all nations together in the synergy of a common purpose.
This suited China which was now tooling up as the world’s workshop.
United Nations by now accommodating more and more freshly-created nation-states now tilted toward placating China.
It found common cause with China in excluding from United Nations-controlled world forums, notably the World Health Organisation, the island state of Taiwan.
Taiwan was founded by the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek (pictured with fellow UN founders Roosevelt and Churchill).
General Chiang Kai-shek had actually fought the Axis powers, thus entitling China to become a founding pillar of United Nations in the first place.
All this was overlooked by the international political class especially in the English-speaking zone, as the United Nations now carried the most virtuous collective banner of the era which was the climate one.
United Nations now subtly conveyed the message that until it took up the climate cause, nothing had been done at all to save what had hitherto been described as the “environment.”
Among the most avid of the adherents to the United Nations climate doctrine, an omnibus one packaging in the globalisation theme among others, was and is the New Zealand political class.
This class remains so enraptured that it is still prepared to wreck its main industry, agriculture, in order to please the gigantic policeman-turned-preacher behemoth.
The United Nations-sowed cult of imminent climate catastrophe was the central distraction from the true threat, the virus one. This in turn was braced by the UN’s refusal to do anything construed as displeasing mainland China.
Even so, it remains very likely that sometime in the quite near future a dismaying starry-eyed New Zealand government will meekly hand United Nations for its non-performance a staggering sum of money allowing it to still further propagate its lethally dangerous prophesies.
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things?”
Constant repetition by climate campaigners of words signifying conceptual disasters of great magnitude debased these words and diluted their meaning and their impact to the point at which when taken up by Fleet Street they failed to deliver the required message in the event of a true calamity, the Coronavirus one.
Peter Isaac the president of the National Press Club conjectures that initial warnings about the damaging effects of Coronavirus were blunted and lost impact just because so many of the words used were associated with moral cause propaganda rather than with an actual disaster such as the present rampant viral contagion.
Isaac rated as the “three horsemen” of the climate movement word bending apocalypse as being these words: crisis, emergency, and extinction.
The outrider of this trio was the word dying.
This word routinely applied by the climate change movement and then taken up by the media remains an encoded way of describing the failure of western society to do anything about the alleged changing climate with the result that people were perishing, “dying.”.
The confected alarmism structured around these re-purposed words had its Commonwealth genesis in what Isaac described as only several members of what was once known as the Fleet Street “quality” newspaper category.
The word-bending constructions now assumed what Isaac described as a “royal charter” of approval though usage in one of the qualities, a kind of Stamp of Good Housekeeping.
They were now taken up by public broadcasting, embellished with a gravitas of delivery, and then after gathering additional credence with every mile they travelled from London were reiterated in Australasia.
The result on the audience side of the camera and microphone was confusion
This centred on the crisis/emergency/extinction that under the agenda of a moral movement and one with ready access to the media could theoretically happen with the crisis/emergency/extinction that was actually happening at that moment and was heading toward the population at large.
Isaac originally drew attention to this problem in www.nationapressclub.org.nz and did so with particular reference to what he saw as the proneness of several Australasian newspaper chains to re-iterate the London-sown propagandised vocabulary and terminology.
The latest report from Britain’s Social Mobility Commission demonstrated that in spite of industry sector vaunted and much proclaimed “diversity” that in fact journalists are increasingly drawn from a privileged and university educated background that added up to a sameness of outlook.
The university common room bias was more insidious in public broadcasting because of a much stated impartiality and also because audiences were less aware of the socio-economic human forces behind the constant weaving-in of the theoretical climate “crisis, emergency etc.”
Curiously, noted Isaac before the climate syndrome mutated into one of “change,” it had been labelled as one of global “warming.”
In the event the Coronavirus threat was said to be reduced in a warm climate, while flourishing in the cold weather. A reversal of a popular notion that germs multiply in the heat and get killed off in the cold.
Isaac said that journalists now describe their vocation as a professional one and as such should be expected by the public to use words correctly.
The calling, he said, having robed itself in the mantle of professionalism must be seen to treat moral movements for what they were and do so by putting their propaganda and slogans into context rather than re-iterating and transcribing them as matters of fact.
Journalism whether trade, craft, vocation, or profession was now made up of graduates who had a duty to clearly define for their audiences the difference between a theoretical environmental global alarm and an actual, real-time one, the real thing.
Journalism had not attained its homogenous graduate-grade professionalism without “growing pains.”
The main one was that the elevated journalistic practitioners, seasoned as they were in academic theory, sought as a counterweight to position themselves as contemporary tribunes of the plebeians, as representatives of everyday folk.
They did so by shouldering and arming themselves with what they saw as a noble cause notably the climatist one, and blending their own lofty inculcated values with what they saw as the welfare of the common people.
It was now in this tangled skein of confused values that flourished the agenda masquerading as reporting and requiring the bending of words to accommodate this duality.
Isaac is the author The New Gobbledygook, and The Bureaucrat’s Survival Guide to Workplace Jargon.
The progressive political class’ unquestioning adherence to the United Nations fixation on man-made global warming as the existential threat of the era can be viewed now as being at the expense of considering an actual global scourge such as the present Coronavirus one.
Why was it that the United Nations agency World Health Organisation started talking about the insurgent virus at the same time as everyone else?
Why is it that western governments even now are so frightened to support Taiwan’s membership of the World Health Organisation?
Taiwan, otherwise known as the Republic of China, has long warned of the vulnerability of mainland southern China to exactly the type of contemporary plague as the Corona virus.
Taiwan has long run a campaign for admission to WHO just because it is in such a favourable position to give early warning of these outbreaks.
Its membership of WHO is consistently vetoed by China.
OECD governments meanwhile are loath to admit the way in which United Nations spun them into a near-total preoccupation with global warming, currently encoded as climate change.
Global warming/climate change with its refrain of being caused by developed nations in a few short years became the catch-all cause of western political thought and it also doubled as the central mechanism for the United Nations purpose of transferring wealth from the developed nations to the undeveloped ones.
The extent to which the United Nations focus on the theoretical catastrophe posed by “climate change” to the exclusion of the actual threat gathering in China in the form of the Coronavirus contributed to the present plague will never be known.
Now that the actual threat has made itself manifest the governmental sectors and their accompanying media which became drawn into the United Nations-encouraged climate hysteria, are naturally reluctant to admit their cupidity.
This school room climate exciteability peaked at United Nations in New York last year and a channel for amends exists in the form of UN member nations to insist that Taiwan becomes a member of the World Health Organisation.
These governments lulled into compliant complicity by the feel-good climate panic must recognise that they comprehend the current existential, as they would describe it, threat and they must do this by replacing their climate clamour with one to admit Taiwan to the World Health Organisation.
Curiously China will not be the only obstacle to this.
0pposition will come from the Western progressive political class that became so invested in climate change and the United Nations version of it that any renunciation of it, however, partial is seen as threatening their very existence.
United Nations meanwhile will similarly stonewall about its failure to give early warning of the mystery illness and its contagion capability just because this very contagion exposes the flaws in its bedrock globalisation doctrine.
Neither will the English-language media, notably the public broadcasting systems, question for example how the World Health Organisation, based as it is in Switzerland, ground zero for international pharmacy, failed to at least identify the inherent danger of a concentration of pharmaceutical production in vulnerable countries.
The Coronavirus outbreak and the failure of United Nations and its agencies to give adequate early warning of it now illuminates the perils of unquestioning devotion by the political class to a monolithic transnational body such as United Nations.
This type of unquestioning faith has been particularly evident in the anglosphere in Australasia where in the past decade entire general elections have been pivoted on a perceived climate threat and where the oldest-established media chain, Fairfax, has outlawed any material running contrary to United Nations doctrines on climate.
Arts in New Zealand scream conformity, acquiescence, patronage-induced passivity
Anglo-New Zealand artist Derek Cowie has categorised the nation’s art scene as one in which practitioners without even realising it bend their output to the demands of a top-down patronage system.
The reliance on patronage led to a passivity in which the artistic purpose of igniting discussion and debate was now submerged in an obedient quest to conform.
Art, he insisted, should invite controversy, and not by-pass it.
Mr Cowie’s art is renowned for its depiction of the tribulations encountered by everyday individuals and especially the damage inflicted on tem by what he describes as “neo-liberalism.”
This refers to globalisation and the way in which it has undercut the earning power of all but a few New Zealanders.
Mr Cowie was engaged in Britain as an applied artist during the 2008 great financial crash and then stood by as those he describes as “criminals” were then bailed out by the very working people whose trust they had abused.
Worse than this Mr Cowie explained was the way in which these same malefactors after some “token contrition” went about restoring their lavish way of life complete with their bonuses.
On top of all this points out Mr Cowie was the way in which this was conducted openly and without condemnation from the very parties that exist to illuminate such behaviour such as artists.
It was then that he realised that instead of revealing and exposing “elitism in all its facets,” artists were walking hand-in-hand with it.
In his exhibition which opens on March 12 at Wellington’s Page Galleries Mr Cowie (pictured) will quite literally illustrate all this in the vernacular and with a broad brush that will feature too his distrust of contemporary agricultural practices.
These include the overworking of the land and some swipes at the seemingly unchallengeable state-sponsored procedure of planting billions of non-indigenous trees notably the quick-growing pinus radiata variety.
These he claims exhausts the land while handing it over to giant corporations which alone recent experience shows can handle the fluctuations in demand.
Mr Cowie was for many years associated with the late Peter McLeavey often considered the signature New Zealand gallerist and art dealer of his era.
During his years in London he was behind the scenery of Little Dorrit a joint BBC-PBS series. He was similarly engaged on another BBC drama Desperate Romantics, centred on the pre-Raphaelite movement.
He rubbed shoulders with such Hollywood types as Johnny Depp and Dustin Hoffman while responsible for the backdrops on Finding Neverland, the Peter Pan extrapolation.
On Revelation 2001, an archaeological drama, he found himself working alongside such British figures as Terence Stamp.
He is also known for his murals, notably in the Gielgud Room of the National Theatre.
.Meanwhile Mr Cowie observed that the conformity he perceived now in the arts in New Zealand was often encouraged by a pervasive fashionable and institutionalised collective sharing and exhibiting of the same opinion about the same things – mass tree planting was just one example.
The move to follow fashion had coincided with the growth and the reliance on artistic patronage.
This in turn meshes with the same artistic conventional drift and with the common purpose of ensuring that what was not upset was the apple cart of conventionally acceptable attitudes.
Art, by definition, must tread dangerously, where the conventional fear to tread, he proclaimed.
Napier-based industrial authority reminds sector that machinery is UK’s biggest import category
Ken Evans of Tekam NZ Ltd urges trade officials to “open their eyes,” to the enhanced export prospects in Great Britain for industrial food processing machinery.
Tekam of Napier is the predominant engineering specialist in meat and fish processing heavy duty machinery.
New Zealand as an internationally ranked food process machinery design and development nation is in a position to reclaim this market he said, noting that machinery already ranked as New Zealand’s eighth most significant export.
Supplying the UK with heavy food processing technology was now much easier with the evaporation of much what is still known as the “tyranny of distance,” he said.
The freight cost of shipping to the UK from Napier was now comparable to shipping to the South Island, Mr Evans (pictured) declared.
Machinery remains the United Kingdom’ s No 1. Import category he added, 12 percent of its total imports.
In regard to the UK market New Zealand was “in so many ways in an improved position” now than in the pre-EU era of Imperial and Commonwealth Preference.
Mr Evans has been responsible for some of New Zealand’s major meat processing systems and he has been a leading exponent of the refurbishment of many installations during the sector’s re-configuration in recent years.
“Meat processing machinery is upwardly and downwardly compatible and equipment can be re-purposed and transferred from one district to anothe, or even from one country to another --it is never scrapped.”
Mr Evans cautioned trade administrators to face up the “reality” as he described the situation of the sought-after markets in Asia and the Middle East, a market for meat processing systems that had become a “mirage.”
The Middle East North Africa market he said was tied into the export of live sheep.
“Well intentioned and lavishly taxpayer-funded model meat process installations have failed to dissolve the linkage between live shipments and specialist technology processing hardware of the type that is paid for,” said Mr Evans, adding, “we must now be realistic and accept this linkage, and the way in which it blocks our technology exports, however great the benefit of this technology and its cost-effectiveness to the region.”
Mr Evans, a participant in meat processing equipment trade missions to the Middle East, noted that the reality of the consequences of the live sheep export ban now had to be recognised, however “painfully.”
Similarly he urged trade administrators to accept other problems in exporting industrial equipment to the Asia region.
In Asia engineering food technology exports from New Zealand had been characterised by the need to supply test equipment which was promptly copied.
Mr Evans has previously drawn attention to another problem in these regions which is the little talked-about practice of prospective buyers imposing bidding and tender fees that turn out to be non-refundable.
Membership of the EU had led to Great Britain’s own meat processing equipment industry fading away as Britain became a service economy and continental European manufacturers took over.
Mr Evans has consistently warned of New Zealand “drifting” into becoming a service economy itself.
Instead the requirement was to grasp the new opportunities presented by Brexit, and indirectly by the United States which had promised substantial trade opportunities to a post-Brexit United Kingdom.
He cited a string of New Zealand agri engineering innovations including soil-heave freezer insulation, through to electric fences and halal-compatible process chains to reinforce his message.
There has been in industrial machinery terms an exclusive focus on emerging markets, a fixation which in the event has failed to emerge through eco-politics, and investment recovery – “getting paid,” as he put it.
“We are now faced by a re-emerging market, a recurring one, in the form of the UK,” he said.
He cited New Zealand’s reorganisation of its meat processing, notably in rendering, as an obvious attraction for densely populated countries as Great Britain.
“The industry’s transformation in recent times has meant that most people do not even know where the meat processing works are located, they are so unobtrusive.”