Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Ready to Fly | Jun 12, 2007 10:05

Couldn't Alan Bollard have waited till I went to the bank? In truth, the unusual overnight intervention in our currency still leaves the dollar as strong against the greenback as at any time I've travelled, and I think it's likely I'll still find the odd $US-friendly bargain in Ho Ch Minh City.

After, all the Vietnamese apparel industry is facing the prospect of a fairly major stock surplus, with the US Department of Commerce having spooked American importers into placing no orders at all for the third quarter, because it might declare the Vietnamese to be dumping.

The US market accounts for 55% of Vietnamese apparel exports. Can you imagine a major New Zealand exporting sector having its most important market closed down while a foreign regulator keeps its counsel? Yikes.

OTOH, it seems President Nguyen Minh Triet will sign a free-trade deal when he visits the White House next week. What manner of dead rat the Vietnamese will be obliged to swallow to get a deal? Given the way the US has behaved since Vietnam joined the WTO, it's not hard to imagine the sort of take-it-or-leave-it deal the Americans will be offering.

Still, the Vietnamese have other things to think about anyway: inbound floods of investment capital, 9% economic growth, product adulteration scandals, old-fashioned oppression of critics of the government, and fishermen facing the death penalty for scavenging the wrong cable. Everything seems to be going on at once.

It's a shame I'm only there for a few days before heading to Singapore for CommunicAsia, but I do have quite a busy itinerary, which includes, if I'm up to it, meeting some local bloggers at a coffee shop that holds swing dance classes on Wednesday nights.

Anyway, get Stephen Franks on The Panel yesterday - the podcast is here, and the money part starts about a quarter of the way through. Franks was weighing in on the Press Council's ruling on Deborah Coddington's 'Asian Angst' story for North & South.

Franks approached the key fact at the base of the complaint against the story - the "supposed drop in the rate of offending pro rata" in the Asian community - by claiming, without benefit of supporting evidence, that such a drop had only happened because people no longer bothered to report crime.

He didn't venture to explain why the Asian community should apparently have stopped reporting crime at twice the rate of the general population.

The not-just-making-stuff-up reading of the facts, of course, is that the statistics misleadingly quoted to depict a "gathering tide of Asian crime" actually show that Asians have gone from being twice as unlikely as the general population to nearly four times as unlikely. And yet Franks repeatedly implied that the story that made this claim was "the truth".

Franks raged on: "That shouldn't be a process for authorities … These agencies which should be standing up for free speech rights are becoming the engines of oppression."

For fuck's sake. The Press Council is a self-regulating body, constituted and selected by the print media industry - it has no statutory authority and is nothing to do with government - and North & South voluntarily makes itself subject to its standards.

And the appalling penalty suffered by North & South and its writer? North & South is obliged to print part of the Press Council's decision. That's it. It doesn't even have to acknowledge fault.

Surely Franks knows this? Well, it's hard to say what's going on in the head of a man who famously declared the gay community to be "so riddled with pathologies" as to be beyond redemption. You don't have to be barking mad to be a former Act MP, but it clearly helps.

And, pray tell, what part of Deborah Coddington's speech has been curbed? She has wilfully breached the embargo on the decision - applied in the first place to allow North & South to be the first to print it - with a self-serving Herald on Sunday column in which she not only denies any fault in her story but attacks the Press Council members as individuals.

She might have a particularly bad case of ill grace, but it's hard to see where she's "oppressed" - not without completely cheapening the word.

On the other hand, there was Damian Christie's really fine story on the issue for Close Up last night, which didn't seek to re-litigate, but, instead, looked at the impact of what the Press Council described as "dehumanising" stereotypes - New Zealand Asians' experience of brutality and prejudice from the rest of us. The page for last night's programme is here, but someone's bollocksed things up, and the video link for Damian's story plays the P story that ran before it. Fix, plz? [Fixed now. But does anybody else get the ad audio playing again over tghe first 30 seconds of every clip?]

And one more bit of video I'd hoped to point you to today will have to wait: Attitude TV's excellent story on our family, which aired on Sunday morning. It took a degree of trust to put the kids in front of the camera, but that trust was absolutely rewarded. I sort of wish I hadn't been so rampantly unshaven throughout, but apart from that, I am happy and grateful for the story - which I'll get someone to post to OurTube when it's ready.

I also promise in the story to get the humans.org.nz website up and running. Well, I am, now that we've got Leo's schooling on a more even keel. I've emailed a basic brief to my web guys, and when I get back in two weeks' time, I'll fire up the mailing list - so, to those people who offered to help, you will, finally hear from me.

And the next time you lot hear from me I'll be a long way away.

PS: My old mate Scott Young, having had interesting adventures in the dozen or so years since I last saw him - including playing a KGB double agent in a Ridley Scott produced mini-series - is living in Budapest and making quirky short films, several of which he has loaded into OurTube if you'd care to look. (Also: OurTube's System home page presence is to expand soon to a Top 10, at the expense of Monitor, which has - despite the welcome efforts of several contributors - not really taken off. And given that Fiona's going to TV-blog every week, telly talk can take place in the main Café forum forums.)

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Actually, I've always been really into yacht racing | Jun 08, 2007 11:51

Why did it have to be Moet? Couldn't Dean Barker and his crew have squirted each other with a good New Zealand bubbly? The Pelorus, perhaps? Or even the Deutz. There's loads of that to go around, and I'm sure it would have got them every bit as wet and sticky as that French muck.

Still, it's all on now - by which I mean we can all now set about pretending to (a) understand, and (b) give a crap about yachting. At least until they lose the final, at which time the talkback radio hordes will doubtless find several angles for bitter recrimination.

If they (sorry, "we") win, we can look forward to endless media storms involving whoever happens to be the relevant minister, the Auckland City Council and everyone who doesn't live in Auckland. The problem, of course, is that most of the space that was devoted to team facilities at the two Auckland regattas has now been built over with apartment buildings for rich wankers.

It does rather bemuse me that everyone was all in fits about the proposed waterfront stadium, when at the other end of the waterfront, the public has been shut out from its harbour by what amounts to a six-storey wall, and no one's made a peep. Ditto, in fact, most of the way down Quay Street, and of, course, amid the nouveau canyons that sit where the vegetable markets used to be.

The next public-spirited architect who proposes a "residential mix" for Auckland's waterfront can piss off. Building swanky apartments for your mates kills public space. Bah.

---

Anyway, the lovely folk at WFMU
are reminding the people about Look Blue Go Purple. They have a couple of clips and a link to a live version of their Buffy St Marie cover 'Codeine', which I've put in OurTube.

Also in OurTube, the (literally) steamy clip for Sharon O'Neill's 'Asian Paradise', and, seeing as we had the Anika cover, the Mint Chicks' 'Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!'.

The tireless Simon Grigg has published a singles catalogue for the Pagan and Antenna labels, with track notes by Trevor Reekie himself. Nice.

Matt Cooney at Idealog has a quirky selection of YouTube clips to accompany his story on the new reality of television.

Greg Taylor directed me to this interesting report on something I looked at last year with Steven Price: the distinct philosophical differences in the way the internet is regulated and legislated in Australia and New Zealand respectively. Guess where you'd rather be.

And there are some new podcast posts from Public Address Radio, including Ryan Hutchings' report from Goa, chats with Toa Fraser and Don McGlashan about their new collaboration, and Craig Ranapia on gods and monsters.

Okay, seeing as the productive work isn't going very well, I might have to see if I can think of something witty for NZBC's most excellent discussion of proverbs for the new century. Stephen Straford is currently setting the pace:

A friend in need is to be avoided.

Marry in Hastings, repent at leisure.

A man is known by how many friends he has on MySpace.

After a storm comes the insurance claim.

It never rains in Australia but it pours in Auckland.

The grass is always greener in Coromandel.

There's no fool like Garth George.

Heh. Have a nice weekend.

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An unexpectedly long post about supplements and stuff | Jun 07, 2007 08:43

I called The Listener with a message for Mr Matt Nippert yesterday. The gist of the message - nay, its entirety - was "Hahahahaha - you're on The Panel with Christine Rankin today". In the event, Matt kept his composure admirably, even when she enthused about how there must be something in astrology because it had, y'know, mathematics in it.

I wonder if Mrs Rankin is still engaged with her chant-for-a-new-BMW middle-class Buddhist cult? (More extensive profile here.)

She's on another mission now though: a crusade against the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill, which is at select committee. It enables a joint agreement with Australia on regulation of supplements, natural and alternative medicines.

She shared with us the remarkable factoid that there was only one recorded death from natural remedies - and that was when someone got a pill stuck in their throat and choked! Who knew!?

Rankin declared that she was teaming up with Allison Roe to fight the bill with all her might. As Allison had told her, she said, if our athletes couldn't get their supplements, how would they win gold medals any more?

Allison Roe is an amazing athlete, but I don't think that's why she's taken up arms against the bill. That would more likely be something to do with her involvement with a vedic medicine business for which she supplies a tailored fitness programme that draws on her own expertise plus "timeless knowledge from Maharishi Vedic Medicine." And the products for sale are not cheap. She has an obvious interest.

Indeed, when I sat down yesterday to try and work out what I thought about all this, I discovered that it was quite hard to find an advocate who wasn't either directly commercially interested, or insane.

(They're there, of course. This non-conflicted, non-insane submission on the bill from the New Zealand Organisation for Rare Disorders is one good example.)

Oddly these are some of the same people who scream bloody murder about big-business influence on regulation and want food origins certified all the way back to whatever foreign field from which it hailed. But they want traditional remedies from some other foreign field waved through on trust. Go figure.

Often that's because they're traditional and have been "used for thousands of years".

That's such a shitty argument.

Look at black cohosh, a time-honoured remedy for menopause symptoms - except there's no good evidence that it works, and growing evidence that it can cause liver damage (but lots of people will happily sell it to you in New Zealand.)

Or take sassafras, a revered tonic whose active ingredient, safrole -- once commonly used as an additive in sassafras tea, root beers and the like -- is now known to be somewhat carcinogenic. You can't even use it in soap these days. (Although it is still just the ticket for making Ecstasy.)

Beta-Carotene: a dietary essential, therefore it must be good for you, right? Actually, it turns out that if you're a smoker, taking beta-carotene supplements increases your risk of lung cancer.

This now rather old FDA article has many more zingers, including:

- Germanium: Use of this nonessential element for a long time may cause serious, irreversible kidney damage and has resulted in death. Germanium products are promoted as so-called "health promoting" elixirs or as an "electronutrient" for uses such as neutralizing heavy metal toxicity. There is no evidence of effectiveness.

- Jin Bu Huan: Unapproved labeling claims this Chinese herbal product is useful for relieving pain. After accidentally taking Jin Bu Huan, three preschool children were hospitalized this year in Colorado with life-threatening, very slow heart rates, depressed central nervous systems, and breathing difficulties. After intensive medical care, the children recovered.

In many such cases, the problem is over- or inconsistent dosage. Yet one of the complaints of the bill's opponents is that the potency of some vitamin and mineral supplements will be reduced.

What I find odd is the through-the-looking-glass approach to consumer rights the pro-supplement lobby seems to hold. As a consumer, I might regard it as my right to be protected from poor products and shonky manufacturers. It seems to make sense that someone selling me something I'm going to put into my body should have to demonstrate that it, within reasonable bounds, safe.

The "health freedom" people work it the other way. The authorities should have to prove something isn't safe before you're not allowed to buy it. Check this guy treating the US Food and Drug Administration's recently-won right to assess supplements using a risk/benefit principle like that applied to conventional medicine as if it's the final assault on liberty. Take this part:

The recent Supreme Court case involves the herb Ephedra, wherein a high dose may have adverse cardiovascular side effects. However, there is no evidence that lower doses cause any harm at all. The herb has been in traditional use for several thousand years. The FDA has no proof that it poses any harm whatsoever in smaller amounts. By using drug-related risk/benefit analysis the FDA stated it had the authority to remove Ephedra at any dose – thus overturning basic fundamentals of food and drug law. As long as this case stands the FDA has the legal precedent to do this with any herb or vitamin it chooses.

Actually, several people died as a result of taking products containing ephedra (active ingredient: ephedrine! Party on!) and there were more than 800 "adverse events" reported in the US, until the death of a famous baseballer brought the matter to a head.

So how about here? Annette King refers to three deaths as a consequence of taking complementary medicines. Two of those will be men with prostate cancer taking a Chinese herbal brew called K4, and there is some doubt over exactly what killed them. There is much less doubt, however, about the fact that these men, and 11 others who took the herbal nostrum, suffered liver damage. From a WHO bulletin:

In several cases, patients felt well but liver function tests were consistent with acute hepatitis. In most cases, the hepatitis resolved gradually on withdrawal of K4. Both patients who died presented with acute hepatitis which progressed to massive hepatic necrosis confirmed by liver biopsy. Screening for possible infectious causes, such as infectious hepatitis, was negative.

What I find quite unsettling is that some of the people behind the local "health freedom" lobby have persistently defended both ephedra and K4. I have trouble believing they hold my interests as a citizen and consumer uppermost.

On the other hand, I' more inclined to credit goodwill to the people at Public Citizen, which has some interesting stuff, such is this article that explains why it took so long for US regulators to act on ephedra, even though people who were following the instructions were getting sick: big money, political influence, biddable Republican legislators. More here, and some more reviews of supplement safety. The same people are equally unflinching on big pharma drugs.

Some of the most dramatic rhetoric here has poured forth from the gob of the Greens' Sue Kedgley, who argues that this "highly controversial and, indeed, sinister legislation" will "undermine our sovereignty and national identity". This weird jingoism - it'll be run by Australians! Ewwww! -- is a keynote of the argument.

Kedgley talks a lot about how products that are "FDA approved" won't be for sale here in five years time. Because of the way the FDA works, it's a spectacularly meaningless statement. As this current McClatchy news story serves to demonstrate:

WASHINGTON - The $22 billion dietary supplement industry operates with minimal oversight from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, despite a history of suspect quality and safety -- and independent lab tests that have found one in four products to be substandard.

About one in four dietary supplements tested don't meet quality or safety standards, according to former FDA research scientist William Obermeyer, a co-founder of the independent testing firm, ConsumerLab.com, which tests thousands of supplement products.

Some are tainted with pesticides, salmonella, glass, bacteria or heavy metals such as lead and cadmium. Others fail for a variety of reasons, including a lack of ingredients, improper ingredients, failure to disintegrate properly and mislabeling.

Because manufacturers seek low-cost ingredients, Obermeyer said it's likely some of the tainted products contain ingredients from China, which typically are cheaper.

Under a 1994 federal law, most dietary supplements -- vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids and other substances such as enzymes and metabolites, which are taken orally and intended to augment the diet -- don't need to be registered or approved by the FDA

Read the whole thing - it's terrifying. Obermeyer's website has a lot more on shoddy products and unscrupulous practices.

Further, from the US National Institute of Health:

Dietary supplements are not required to be standardized in the United States. In fact, no legal or regulatory definition exists in the United States for standardization as it applies to dietary supplements ..."

Another view:

How safe are they? In many cases, no one really knows. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which normally checks out the safety of foods and medicines before they come on the market, does not check on the safety of dietary supplements before they're sold. The FDA has to wait until it receives reports of problems caused by supplements before it can investigate and ban a dietary supplement.

So it relies on self-reporting from people who (especially in the case of overdosers or users of more unorthodox therapies) may not have an entirely rational attitude to what they're doing in the first place.

Anyone who thinks we should regulate the way the FDA does is nuts.

Much of the above is not directly related to the bill under consideration, but more a reaction to the character of the argument, which as David Lange put it, I find regrettable.

We certainly need a new regulatory regime, but I've yet to be completely convinced of the merits of that enabled under the bill. If it does impose genuinely onerous regulatory costs, then I don't think that's a good thing. I'd like the benefits of operating a joint regime more clearly explained to me.

But it now looks like New Zealand producers won't even have to follow the joint regime if they don't want to. Traditional Maori healers will also still be able to practice, and make preparations for those in their care; they'd only come under the scope of the system if and when they commercialised.

I can also see the merit of a libertarian argument that people should be free to neck what they like, much as I can in the case of recreational drugs.

And some supplements and therapeutic remedies, taken sensibly, are clearly beneficial. There's even a little evidence for some vedic treatments (although it's hard to say without knowing the real status of some of the journals, and the whole business is far too cultish for my taste). I'd hate to go without cherry fruit extract, whose efficacy in alleviating acute gout symptoms is a matter of more than anecdotal experience.

I'd be delighted to hear any considered opinion about the bill in the discussion thread here (assuming you still have the will to live after reading this far). I feel like there's stuff I don't know.

But the public fever over this bill isn't really over what can be known.

PS: No Right Turn skewers the journalists who ran with a meaningless Sensible Sentencing Trust poll without bothering to check their source.

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Googlin' on Hobson Street | Jun 06, 2007 09:29

TVNZ is in the final stages of negotiation with Google on what would seem to be an alliance involving YouTube. A Star Times story (no longer available, or at least searchable) hinted that TVNZ was looking to support a regional version of YouTube, but I guess we'll have to wait and see about that.

TVNZ has also, of course, spoken to Apple about the iTunes Video Store, but New Zealand isn't going to be a high rollout priority for Apple - look how long it took it took us to get music downloads. A deal with Joost will likely happen first.

In the meantime, TVNZ has bumped out TV3 as the news video provider for Fairfax's Stuff websites. Or not. Actually, it seems that TV3's supply to Stuff was only ever a trial and it hasn't supplied clips for seven months.

But TVNZ is definitely supplying news and other video, from July 1. So how will that work on the revenue side? Flash files with embedded ads?

The broadcaster also talked to APN about the same sort of deal for the Herald site - assuming that's no longer operative, it would be interesting to know how the decision was made.

Assuming APN still wants to deliver video, it's far from clear that it would come from TV3. At the moment, TV3, is enjoying its presence on the gloriously content-free msn.co.nz, which is driving plenty of traffic to its own site. But as John Drinnan noted recently in the Herald, TV3's new owner, the private equity company Ironbridge Capital, is exploring a deal with MSN for a joint venture in an MSN-branded site that would carry TV3 content.

I'm rather enjoying The Wee Man. Undecipherable Scots grime rapping is presumably the next big thing. Actually, an interview suggests a comedy dimension.

And, by the way, I'm going to Vietnam next Tuesday, with the assistance of the Asia New Zealand Foundation. I'll be accompanying Mitchell Pham, who came here as a child refugee and has since built up Augen, the IT company he founded with his university mates, to the point where it is now back in Vietnam doing business.

From there, we'll move onto Singapore for CommunicAsia 2007, which this year has some really interesting broadcast technology components, which will tie in nicely with a paper I'm writing. I'll also catch up with Greg Wood, formerly of the Friday Night Allen.

I'll be writing a number of print stories around the trip, but the foundation is keen that I should also blog progress. And y'all know that I need no urging to blog …

And yes, I shall seek out the weasel coffee.

PS: Note tasty new (ie: old) clips of Split Enz and the Suburban Reptiles in OurTube.

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