The NY Times is really on a roll having forced the Bush administration to seek legal authority from Congress for a number of its more dubious security programs. The paper's reporting has now forced the EU to take a close look at data transfers of banking information to the US from a system called Swift. And guess what? They're illegal too.

Another Pulitzer or two on the way no doubt. Even better, it marks a recovery from a low period when the paper let Bush's case for war in Iraq pass without proper scrutiny.

Che Tibby signs off from Public Address today. He's got a real job. So long and good luck, state house boy.

Meanwhile, Jack Yan has a funny post on NZ employment law. Instead of saying "you're fired!" the star of a local version of The Apprentice would have to say:

‘I would like to propose that you leave this organization and would like to enter into a consultation process with you, with full legal representation for you. I hope you will accept this proposal.’

Comments are worth a read too.

Think maybe you should be on statins because of your high cholesterol level?

They're wonder drugs, aren't they, lessening by, say, 31% the likelihood you'll keel over and the next thing you know somebody will be brandishing two shiny disks over your chest and yelling "Clear!"

Well, no. As this Slate piece, written by a real heart doctor, notes, you have to know the difference between a relative reduction, an absolute risk, and a far more useful measure of drug effectiveness called NNT, or number needed to treat. That 31% figure translates into only a drop of only 2.2 percentage points, from 7.5% to 5.3%, in terms of absolute heart attack risk.

Out of 100 people taking a statin drug, perhaps two would have avoided having a heart attack because of it. So the NNT is 50. Aspirin, that wonder drug, has an NNT of 208. Higher is less useful.

The NNT is intuitive: To a savvy, healthy person with high cholesterol that didn't decrease with diet and exercise, a doctor could say, "A statin might help you, or it might not. Out of every 50 people who take them, one avoids getting a heart attack. On the other hand, that means 49 out of 50 people don't get much benefit."

This is not to say that smoking drinkers with family histories of heart attacks and blood as thick as glue should throw away the pills; they should not. But it is to observe that drug companies would rather quote the relative risks than the absolute risks or the NNT. It's a bigger, scarier number.

And to note that people who write about fantastic new drugs for this and that do readers a disservice by first not addressing their "innumeracy and scientific illiteracy", as the writer of a famous book on the subject terms it.

Local vodka merchant 42 Below has sold itself to Bacardi.

"The name is 42 Below, which relates to its origin," says boss Geoff Ross. "There is a map of New Zealand on the bottle and that is such a vital part of the brand.

"It will always be New Zealand in a bottle," he said.

Whatever.

Of course, many other proudly NZ companies have sold out for the big bucks. Ghost, Navman ...

I don't blame them for a minute for grabbing huge wads of Lord Rutherfords for a good idea and hard work, but heavily playing the patriotic card with your clever-clever web ads and your TV appearances when you're clearly aching to sell seems just a little unsavoury.

Does no one want to build a big NZ brand any more? What do you mean, Feltex?

I prefer Smirnoff.

On first glimpse I was disturbed at Labour's apparent retaliation against the Exclusive Brethren, threatening to remove their exemption from union visiting rights to Brethren-owned businesses. It looked over the top.

But news like this out of Australia has made me think again:

Several teachers have told The Australian they left Brethren schools in disgust at "excessive control" over what children were allowed to read and study.

And they said they were paid $10,000 a year less than teachers at comparable non-government schools because the sect did not allow enterprise bargaining.

David Farrar doesn't like faith-based exemptions to the law but is uneasy about the whiff of revenge here. No Right Turn is uneasy as well. Fair enough, but I feel uneasy about how little we actually know about what goes on behind those closed doors.

The Brethren are coming under increased scrutiny in Australia as well as here, and it isn't just their labour practices, there are also allegations of illegal payments and abuse.

The first six months of 2006 hit me especially hard; all work and no play had made this bell’s clangour even duller than usual. It was time for a holiday. But this would be no desert island idyll, no snowboard sojourn down a mountain for après ski jollies. Auckland has always felt like a home from home, so I chose a short hop from Mount Eden to the Viaduct for an indulgent weekend of luxury. And it was almost perfect — although for reasons other than those I paid for. More…

It's good to see, according to the polls anyway, that amid all the innuendo Kiwis are not forgetting the small matter of Labour's election spending rort.

Stephen gives big ups to Leader of the Opposition, David Farrar, in this and other threads. He also notes comments by people using their real names tend to be a bit more thoughtful and constructive than those from the anonymous legions. He also likes the Milton Friedman choir video on Teenage Pundit's site here.

Kicker Chris recommends artist David Hockney on "Why I paint instead of just picking up a camera". Also Tim Haillay of The Kraken reminding us how funny Graham Rawle's Lost Consonants series is ('the collected woks of William Shakespeare', indeed). Check out the wickedly illustrated series here.

And, via Arts & Letters Daily, Susan J. Douglas warns drones who may be "slogging away in archives, tracking down people to interview, checking their facts and struggling to develop fresh ideas about how to see the world and new arguments about history, culture and society" that their work is fair game for plagiarists.

Mark likes this profile of Killers frontman Brandon Flowers and this on David Sharp, the man who died on Mt Everest in May as 40 others passed him by. He also note the news for drinkers just keeps getting better.

From me, this interview with writer Richard Ford, more insights into Jack Profumo's affair, this time from his son, one to watch in Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost ( more here) and an unflattering portrait of Dick Cheney, serial screwup.

Ciao.

You may remember Jack "Jihad Jack" Thomas was acquitted recently because the evidence collected against him under duress was not admissable in a civilised court. Now Jack is no lilly-white, he went to Afghanistan, trained for something and met Osama, but there is no evidence he was actually planning anything.

Anyway, get a load of the prosecutor's case for retaining the control order and think Catch 22:

"In our submission, something can substantially assist in preventing a terrorist act or something else without the need to show that the terrorist act or the particular conduct is likely to happen or not," he said.

If I could give your Honour an example," he said. "If one is out in the country, and there's a quiet country road, clearly looking right and left will substantially assist in preventing being hit by a car, but there might be a reasonably small chance that this would occur."

Meanwhile, Popbitch leads with this:

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion asintolerant encourages violence" - Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.

And No Right Turn has some good stuff on the US secret prisons, torture, desperate search for legal authority gig.

News just in: even eating healthy may be bad.

Our food is contaminated by industrial filth.

Keep an eye out for organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, brominated flame retardants, perfluorinated chemicals, phthalates, organotins, alkylphenols and artificial musks. (Natural ones presumably ok.)

The good news? We will soon be able to eat a kind of sugary substance from the plant that gave us tequila, which helps to burn rather than store fat. Dos gusanos, por favor!

Investigate Publishing Australia is facing a liquidation order (search under "Investigate Publishing"), according to ASIC. I've tried calling Investigate Australia only to be advised by Optus that the number has been disconnected.

Trouble at mill? The Liquidator is allowing an extension of time for a report on affairs. Awaiting comment from Ian Wishart. Will keep you posted.

Update: Just spoken to the mag's former sales director who says Investigate Australia was never owned by the New Zealand operation but had private shareholders. He left some time ago. The launch announcement talks about the mags being part of a publishing group and mentions Ian Wishart as Group Managing Editor. Investigate's web site, however, says there's a new Australian edition coming soon.

Update 2: Ian Wishart says the consortium that published Investigate Australia ceased publishing earlier this year. In the meantime the NZ edition has been distributed there and a new Oz edition is in planning.

It's been a good week for conspiracies, what with Peter Davis joining the Exclusive Brethren and Don Brash finally coming out as a socialist.

The week started with the SST, my future employer, spending about 12 seconds to find out what Investigate didn't.

The same day, I walked into a shop and the guy had a copy of the 9/11 conspiracy DVD Loose Change ready to watch as soon as the doors closed.

Loose Change is a compelling little video - available for free from its makers - that doubts that planes hit the towers and the Pentagon etc. But that would involve fooling the President ... Ah, hey, if it's good enough for former MI5 agent David Shayler, it's good enough for just about any old ex-spook.

The day before, I finally got off my arse and went to see the really quite good Saint of 9/11 at DOCNZ, a, yes, hagiography of a gay "recovering alcoholic" priest; he was the chaplain of the NY Fire Department who died on 9/11, so the film wrapped the Ground Zero hero around his other "issues". Nice bloke, really.

Then later in the week, George Monbiot reckoned there's a Big Tobacco link to climate change denial. My head was spinning.

What's a sceptic to believe?

That just in from Stephen, and Lyndon Hood on Scoop raises the lid on Investigate's next cover.

I almost feel obliged to say something about Don Brash and Peter Davis. Sorry, not Brash and Peter Davis, I don't want to be starting any more rumours. Brash, and Peter Davis. That's better. Keep 'em apart with a comma. Anyway, as I say, I almost feel obliged. What kind of blogger wouldn't chime in on issues like those?

Moving right along, it's lollies light this week. First Mark offers a profile of Karl Pilkington, who some say is the real genius behind the Ricky Gervais podcasts. And, while we're in profile mode, he also recommends this one of Maggie Gyllenhaal.

George W is desperately trying to get Congress to pass laws to make his military tribunals, the NSA eavesdropping program and his interrogation techniques legal. But he's finding a few people with military experience and a conscience getting in the way. Now, hold on, aren't these the programs wingers insisted were already legal? Didn't they want The New York Times prosecuted for treason for even mentioning them? In the cause of freedom of course.

Anyway the midterm Congressional elections are looming. Many expect the Democrats to retake the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994. But the Senate seems tougher. They need a net gain of six seats to gain control there with 33 seats up for grabs. The analysts reckon there are five in play. But there are interesting developments in Virginia that might, just might ... Slate is monitoring the momentum here.

Not interested in politics? Then try Will Self on Louis-Ferdinand Celine. We have a Booker prize shortlist, including Aussie Kate Grenville's The Secret River.

Chris says it may be long, but everyone who visits NZBC owes it to themselves to at least read ‘The age of horrorism’, an exclusive three-part essay by Martin Amis at the Observer. And a Homeland Security detective, in justifying another senseless bust ("If you remember, a lot of people were killed on 9/11") is shamed by Boing Boing:

“Yes, I remember ‘a lot’ of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, Detective — and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go and find the people who killed them.”

Is Wikipedia ‘knowledge’ merely third party hearsay, asks ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin who reckons the quality of the product that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales touts “does not match the quality of his orations”. Meanwhile Guantánamo Bay is a “shocking affront to the principles of democracy” and a violation of the rule of law, says Lord Falconer, the highest-ranking official in the British legal system.

And Richard Cooper of Thoughtcat likes this “very principled article” by UK MP Clare Short, who says she’s standing down so she can speak the truth: “I am profoundly ashamed of the Government. The Labour Party has lost its way.”

Adios muchachos.

This time our Friday quiz won't even let you claim that you're smarter than everyone else. Just that you have one of those weird memories that can retain movie quotes perfectly and roll them out at will when the barbecue's firing and the wine's kicking in. They don't have to be particularly clever, just be ones that stuck with you for some crazy reason. Here's a few I like, for some unapparent reason.

Russian cop Schwarzenegger asking criminal element in car if he knows his rights. “Do you know Miranda?”
“Never heard of the bitch.” Punches him out cold.
Red Heat, 1988

"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"
AND
"You maniacs! You blew it up! Ahhh, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
Planet of the Apes, 1968

“What's in the box?! WHAT'S in the BOX?!”
Seven, 1995

Rob offers a line from a fifties B-grade job. Our hero says something particularly banal to which the evil Chinese mastermind replies inscrutably: "Ahhhh. You are a phirosopher ..."

Rating: ***

My taste in movies tends to be either arthouse or shithouse. I don't like the in-between stuff. So, yeah, I rate Dumb and Dumber very highly. And Napoleon Dynamite.

While watching Nacho Libre, which opens in New Zealand today, I was thinking it strongly reminded me of the latter - despite a completely different setting and storyline. Now I discover it's from the same director, Jared Hess. However, Nacho doesn't quite live up to its predecessor.

Nacho, the eponymous hero played by Jack Black, is a monk in a Mexican orphanage. His job is to cook, but the orphanage has no money to buy decent ingredients. Nacho does something about it - on the sly he becomes a luchador, a wrestler.

He and his tag team partner are perennial losers in search of "skills" as Napoleon would say. Black is very good, with his musical efforts a highlight. There are a lot of funny moments and the film is certainly worth a look. But it lacks the strangeness that made Napoleon Dynamite so appealing.

Or, the four-word reviews here.

The Skeptics are a very good thing. They come out fighting against mumbo-jumbo, stupidity and those who take advantage of the credulous. Their magazine, NZ Skeptic, is highly entertaining and apparently their conferences are good fun, especially when the media are the target. The next one is in Auckland at the end of the month. Here's the press release:

Twenty years of aliens, the paranormal and the fascinating foibles of human psychology are being celebrated in Auckland at the end of the month with the 20th Annual Skeptics Conference, running Sept 29-Oct 1 at Kings College Auckland.

"We´re covering all sorts of areas -- how to think, how to laugh and how to save your health, your mind and your money," says Chair-entity Vicki Hyde.

The speakers and presentations are diverse, from philosopher Dr Jonathan McKeown-Green taking an interactive, multi-media chat session on how and why we make mistakes to comedian, satirist and documentary maker Te Radar discussing why he fears horoscopes. Aliens are welcome to attend astronomer Dr Grant Christie´s look at when astronomy goes bad, and teenage texters and their parents are encouraged to hear about telephone chain letters in the session "Send 2 10 or bad luck 4lyf" presented by Year 8 student Judith Goodyear.

Journalists will be scrutinised at the 2006 Bent Spoon and Bravo Awards, when the New Zealand Skeptics announce their annual prize for the most gullible piece of reporting in the past year as well as lauding excellence.

There's more information on the conference programme and registration form
here.

It’s a matter of personal shame to me, but now the facts are beginning to emerge all over this unforgiving thing we call the internet, it’s time for me to fess up: I’m a fake. A complete fraud. Not only did I embellish many details about my past experiences and altered others in order to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of NZBC, I wanted my blog posts to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, the tension all truly great blog posts require. All I could come up with, though, was stuff like this. Yes, I altered events and details all the way through. There’s no Chris Bell and never has been, so now it’s time for me to reveal my true identity.

Another week has arrived and you'll be hoping it's not like poet Roger McGough's A Critic's Review (in The State of Poetry, one of those brilliant $5 Penguins) Of A Curate's Egg: “It's all bad. Especially in parts.”

For your excitement and delectation, Chris offers Barbie going bestial.

The dumb blonde has a new accessory: a dog called Tanner whose droppings are made of plastic. This version of Barbie comes with a pooper scooper, and the "dog biscuits" that are fed into one end of Tanner are exactly the same as what comes out the other end. Which, as this blog post in The Age points out, means that kids will be “feeding Tanner's own excrement back to him”.

And from Barbie's mutt to Mickey Mouse's: everyone from standup comedians to NZ Herald columnists has been ranting about the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf-planet, but here's a slightly better informed and more readable piece from Boston.com, via Arts & Letters.

CB also like Ben Schott's (author of Schott’s Original Miscellany and the forthcoming Schott’s Almanac 2007, a yearbook of American society) "Five Years of Consequence"; an attempt to survey graphically the last five years, "a world that is certainly new, though not always brave", says Schott, who also concedes his effort is selective and incomplete.

I offered Ben my latest idea for a reference book but, oddly, he hasn't got back yet.

Stephen is greatly impressed by the weight and average smartness of comments to David Farrar's post on Labour's cynical attacks on the Nats to deflect from their own electoral spending badness - 265 comments and counting.

He accepts that the signal to noise ratio might be low, but reckons quite a few are sensible, “and once you filter the rabids out, nice to see dialogue developing”. Almost a conversation, he says. Blogversation, maybe.

I offer you a few of my predictable profiles, including brainbox New Yorker editor David Remnick.

No focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. 'So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.

Well, some of us do, anyway.

There's another attempt to unravel Ali G's creator, Sacha Baron Cohen.

And kitsch icon David Hasselhoff.

If you didn't catch it, the fearsome Lynn Barber interviews (wrong byline photo) tireless self-promoter (and quite good writer) Toby Young. First question: “Is it true you google yourself every day?”

Young preempted the interview with his own (behind paywall) strike in the Spectator. It's worth checking out on the mags shelf. Flecks of his angry spit landing on her tape recorder, etc.

For the record, Barber is slightly charmed.

Speaking of serve and parry, here's a lyrical explanation of the sublimity of Roger Federer's game by author David Foster Wallace.

And since we haven't had any foreign politics, here's a piece on China getting its swagger on around the UN Security Council.

Ciaoarama.

In Sydney, nursing hangover. I was wandering the backstreets aimlessly and came across this exhibition of Mambo shop art. A lot of fun packed into one small room, including the famous farting dog - the musical note comes out of the dog's arse on a little metal rod. The upholstered surfboard is great too.

Being a man has its challenges, perhaps not least in our keenness to get involved in dangerous pursuits.

Sadly, and almost inevitably, another famous man following such a career has come to grief - mostly for his family and friends and fans.

Testerosterone helps get us killed, into fights, go bald. We have 300 to 1000 ng/dL (nanograms per deciliter of blood) coursing through our veins, compared to a woman's 40 to 60 ng/dL, says one site. We also have to cope with numerous embarrassments, such as the ads aimed at making us feel totally inadequate.

Have you noticed how the men on impotence adverts have got younger over the years? Some barely have grey hair these days.

Imagine, then, how young the models might be for dapoxetine, which appears to aid those who are not backward enough in coming forward. The market for Premature Petes is, apparently, depressingly huge, even huger than the can't-get-it-ups. Big Pharma has hit the fatherlode.

The new drug is showing promise is an SSRI, a type of antidepressant whose frequent side effect is loss of libido. Meaning it messes with your mind. This new SSRI, however, makes men last longer if they used more (over 3 mins; you poor things). Moreover, it appears to clear from the body quickly and can be used just a few hours before the act.

The Australian headlined its story, in that tasteful ocker style, "Hope for 60-second men".

It’s Friday, so it’s time for another NZBC competition. As always, there is no prize for the best entry other than the smug feeling of being cleverer than the rest of us.

This time it’s for explanations of magazine titles: it occurred to me that North and South is a form of bipolar disorder. Mark suggested these:

Bulletin – Blood and guts out
Time – Not on your side
Metro – Going underground
Atlantic – Mostly pacific
Next – To last

Okay, now it’s your turn.

Photograph of Michael Silverblatt by Marc Goldstein at pbase.com

The DG is quite right; shame on us all for our sloth! In order to deflect the otherwise inevitable disciplinary action, here’s a belated homage to that unlikeliest of literary heroes, Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm. Heaven alone knows how he finds time to interview so many authors, let alone read so many of their books. More…

Che Tibby has a bit of a rant about e-government (and stuff) this morning. Coincidentally our State Services Commission yesterday delivered some much needed push back against the digital rights management and trusted computing technologies being rolled out by IT vendors and media organisations. I wrote about it for ZDNet here and you can read the policy here.

They are asking for new functionality to be included in the technologies and for full disclosure and increased control of their application.

Reading between the lines I get the impression the SSC thinks its position on these technologies, which are effectively being foisted upon a wide range of IT users, is pretty advanced and they are inviting other governments and interested parties to participate in developing the policies further. Nice work.

Update: Cory Doctorow of boingboing and (correction: formerly) of Electronic Frontiers has linked to my article and gives his own evaluation here.

Update 2: The SSC reponds here and Cory has another say on the potential impact of DRM on open source, among other issues here.

The guys on Aussie Channel Nine's Today show are up in arms over Germaine Greer's take on Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin. You can almost hear Greer yawning as she starts off by mumbling the usual common platitudes and then the tone changes:

The only creatures he couldn't dominate were parrots. A parrot once did its best to rip his nose off his face. Parrots are a lot smarter than crocodiles.

And then

What seems to have happened on Batt Reef is that Irwin and a cameraman went off in a little dinghy to see what they could find. What they found were stingrays. You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's sake.).

And it gets worse - or better depending on your perspective. Personally I've always switched channels whenever Irwin appeared on screen. Where Durrell was a pioneer and Attenborough thoughtful and seemingly in wonder at the most insignificant form of life, Irwin was strictly for the kids.

Steve Irwin is dead, doing what he loved. Etc.

The Crocodile Hunter got a stingray barb to the heart off Cairns.

The news shocked everyone in my office and led at least one local TV news bulletin, so I guess they got something right.

Noted the lovingly old-fashioned NY Times:

Stingrays have flat bodies and tails with serrated spines, which contain venom and can cause cuts and puncture wounds. The creatures are not aggressive and injury usually occurs when a swimmer or diver accidentally steps on one.

Well, it has been quiet around the ol' NZBC of late. Just two posts between our weekly lollies. It could be time for this DG to deliver some boot up the bum.

Mark, who has been known to compare me to the David Hasselhoff from time to time, points to this interview from The Guardian where the Hoff confesses he tried to save the world but forgot to save himself. Awww.

He also likes how Biblical literalists, also known as Christian fundamentalists, use remarkably postmodern methods in their reading (from ALDaily), and this on China's view of the international order.

He also points to NewAssignment, a site that intends to experiment with open source journalism.

From Chris we have Martin Amis's short story, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, which was inspired, in part, by a paragraph in the September 11 Commission’s Report.

Every few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the sump of his throat. His breath smelled like a blighted river.

There are some startlingly negative comments in the blog post (why do so many people hate Amis so fervently?). Make up your own mind — Amis’s story is here in its entirety.

Chris also points to the newsreader who took a toilet break without realising her microphone was on and Airfix, the modelling maestros, has gone bust. We grew up making these models! Very sad.

Stephen likes Chase Me Ladies because “the comments are good — more literary than we get”. Try a gynaecologist's view of Germaine Greer for starters. He also points to some unfortunate 9/11 constructions spotted by Tim Blair.

Ciao.