On John Roughan's Curious Distaste For Journalistic Privilege

Colonel Nasser of Egypt once pithily observed that "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something."

Now, I hesitate in the extreme to term The Herald's John Roughan a "genius". Yet every time I read one of his more "ideological" columns, that sort of sentiment seems to spring to mind. A sort of more-cynical/paranoid version of the famed 'Hanlon's Razor' - "never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".

Because so frequently, when I cast my eyes over his output, I see all these wild blurrings and obfuscations of facts - and I am never quite sure how much of this is *deliberate* propagandizing, versus Roughan simply lacking due diligence or apt memory of the events and details and occurrences in question.

The most recent offender is his recent piece basically opposing the legal protection of journalistic privilege being upheld in the case of Nicky Hager in relation to an illegal search-warrant executed upon him by the NZ Police.

It's phrased also in general terms as Roughan rallying against this occurrence - due to its being some sort of mid-step marching-stride towards an "unfree press". This is because, in Roughan's view, the inexorable result of *all* journalists having the protection enshrined in statute which Hager has benefited from ... is all of our 'official' news media turning into Pravda, apparently.

Which is downright peculiar by itself. I mean, surely the legal protection of the journalist-source relationship ought to *increase* the relative freedom of our press, by increasing the facility with which they are able to garner information to report?

'Not so', says Roughan; and he invokes the spuriously slippery slope specter of Aotearoa marching towards an era of Journalism being a fully-licensed and accredited profession a la Doctors, Lawyers, and Clinical Psychologists. The implicit idea being that the State shall get to decide who is able to effectively call themselves a Journalist, and benefit from the resultant protection - thus limiting the freedom of the press to speak truth to power, in consequence.

Except ... that hasn't exactly happened, has it. The law which Roughan has taken issue, has been in force now for some thirteen years. It's true that the Press Council is a thing, and that in order to gain institutional access through the Parliamentary Press Gallery, one must be properly accredited .... but these are not recent innovations here. They've been in place for decades. Something Roughan presumably knows, given his stint on the latter from the early 1980s onwards, for a start.

In fact, taking a look at the relevant section of the Evidence Act, I'm not sure at all what Roughan thinks he's getting at.

Here it is:

"journalist means a person who in the normal course of that person’s work may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium" [s68 (5) Evidence Act 2006]

No requirement for state licensing mandated there, and I further note that it's not an absolute privilege, either - with s68 (2) allowing a High Court Judge to overrule the privilege anyway in situations of significant public interest.

As a further point of interest, s58 of the same legislation enables a Minister of Religion to claim a not entirely dissimilar legal privilege to that of a journalist, in the course of his or her duties. Now, Roughan is clearly aware of this - he makes brief mention of the protection in his piece. Except when it comes to his scaremongering about the "slippery slope" we are apparently setting up by enabling Nicky Hager to have the proper privilege protection due to him as a journalist ... Roughan curiously stops mentioning "Minister of Religion" - we go from "Only lawyers, doctors, priests and clinical psychologists have the same rights of confidentiality in legislation" through to "properly qualified and licensed like lawyers, doctors and the rest." Spot the difference.

The reason why he's suddenly started getting 'blurry' here, is because the State of New Zealand *does not* actually license nor assess the qualification or otherwise of "Ministers of Religion". It *especially* does not, when we are dealing with s58 of the Evidence Act, which defines a Minister of Religion as follows:

"A person is a minister of religion for the purposes of this section if the person has a status within a church or other religious or spiritual community that requires or calls for that person—
(a) to receive confidential communications of the kind described in subsection (1); and
(b) to respond with religious or spiritual advice, benefit, or comfort."

Now, personally I think that's a rather broad legal standard, and it would no doubt be both interesting and well beyond the scope of this piece to take a look at how the Courts have interpreted the law in these matters, when it comes to establishing just how widely the principle of recognition extends here.

But the point is - whether we are dealing with Ministers of Religion, or with Journalists, what Roughan is claiming is the likely-inevitable result of having state-mandated (conditional) protection for these occupations ... is simply not a thing under current legislation.

Which is not to say that, in some Reductio-Ad-Orwellium hypothetical future, Parliament might not, for some otherwise inexplicable reason, vote to grant *enhanced* protections and privileges to journalists ... although that perhaps makes about as much sense as the proverbial Turkeys voting for an ever-larger set of test-knives afore Christmas. And besides, with deference to the only *other* instance cited by Roughan of a man having his legal status as a "journalist" subjected to judicial scrutiny - that of Cameron Slater - the Government of the day demonstrated that it was perfectly capable of providing him with *all manner* of assistance and empowerment without creating a more broad and legally above board 'protected class' of offically Parliamentary-sanctioned PR-chaperoned propagandtastic mouthpieces.

And while we are speaking of Slater, it seems most curious to me that Roughan takes such issue with the people who had sought to have Slater's "journalistic" status revoked. He does so at least partially on the basis of WhaleOil's exposure of Len Brown's extramarital affair - claiming that this was "one of the strongest pieces of journalism I have seen in this country."

And certainly, I am not going to disagree that it was one of the most "spectacular". Not least when the fireworks started going off prematurely and *inside the tent* of the political would-be operatives attempting to besmirch the just-elected Mayor by cajoling a story out of an arguable victim in false pretenses. We shall leave aside the fact that WhaleOil did what he did there for a political purpose, and that Slater's most prominent role in the drama was as publisher rather than gumshoe. I do understand and accept that you could feasibly term what happened there as "Journalism".

But, you see, Roughan is rather ribaldly misrepresenting reality here. Slater did not lose his "journalist" status in the course of the Blomfield defamation case due to anything he might have 'reported on' with regard to then-Mayor Brown. Rather, he lost it *for that specific case*, because the High Court Judge in question quite sensibly ruled that carrying out a "private feud", and attempting "extreme and vindictive" weaponized disclosures of patently unsupported or even potentially outright falsified information with the purpose of prosecuting "extended character assassination" against an otherwise private citizen ... wasn't "news", nor was it "responsible" conduct.

Roughan omits to mention, as well, that Slater nevertheless *did* find himself acknowledged *as* a "news medium" more generally by the same Court that was stripping him of the protection of journalistic privilege, in the course of the very same case ... because I presume that that doesn't fit the narrative which he wants to portray.

Which appears to be of Hager as some sort of semi-illegitimate interloper into the journalistic sphere; as Roughan puts it: "Nor would I blame them if "journalist" wasn't a designation of Hager that sprang automatically to their minds. Many see him as primarily a political activist, especially when he pumps out polemics such as Seeds of Distrust and Dirty Politics during election campaigns." Although, to his credit, Roughan does then briefly add "But he is a journalist."

So, on the one hand, we have Slater, and his "2013 exposure of Auckland mayor Len Brown's office affair [as] one of the strongest pieces of journalism I have seen in this country" ... and on the other, we have Hager, and his books taking on both Labour- and National- led Governments, being regarded "primarily as a political activist". What's the difference? Well, I suppose, for a start, Slater tended to only far more rarely attack the figure (and administration) that Roughan wrote a biography of a few years back.

But I digress.

Roughan writes in his piece, that he'd "been a journalist for 45 years and I didn't know we had [journalistic privileges]" under law. And you know what? I somewhat potentially believe him. For you see, Roughan writes these days mostly in the "Opinion" pages of the Herald. And most of his actual output, that I'm aware of, has been a sort of comfortable-accommodation-with-the-ruling-classes-and-accepted/acceptable-lines style stuff that would be singularly unlikely to land him in court or subject to police officers bashing down his door in possession of a search warrant.

To be fair and sure, he does occasionally write good and useful stuff; and I highlighted his recent piece on Ihumatao in part because it was exactly that. At least, in terms of whom it was presumably reaching out to, and what it was seeking to say.

But all-up and overall, I suspect that the reason why Roughan had no knowledge of the legal protections available to a journalist in the course of his or her duties, is because he had never had much, if any, cause to avail himself of them.

Unlike Hager.

So when it comes to Roughan attempting to luridly sketch out the Road to State-Sanctioned Serfdom which the NZ Journalistic fraternity and profession are presumably diving headlong down upon for *daring* to make use of their legally extended protections, in cases of controversial crusading activities ... part of it's probably because he's considering the whole thing as an abstract.

He does, after all, talk up his view that "News media have long claimed a right to protect anonymous informants in court" [which .. somewhat contradicts the assertions made elsewhere in the piece, but anyway], and that in consequence, "Judges have been well aware reporters and editors would go to jail rather than betray a source."

And yes, there is something pretty nobly romantic in the idea of a reporter who so adamantly believes in the truth of what they are doing, the truth that they are *reporting*, that they're prepared to put themselves in the potentially serious harm's way of a prison term (with all its accompanying fecundities) for this.

But underneath this, is something else. Namely, the reflexive role which Roughan plays as a sort of telepathic mouthpiece for the older and more right-wing/conservative type of New Zealander that has hitherto had such a monopoly on power [c.f his eulogistic remarks a few weeks ago around the era of benevolent "Remuera Patricians" running Auckland].

Which is what it is. And in this instance, it's a semi-conscious feeling that somehow Hager has "gamed the system". That instead of the onus being upon the NZ Police to know the law if they are going to choose to enforce it, especially in incredibly high-profile and high-stakes politically-resonant cases ... that the onus is upon journalists not to "upend the applecart", or at least, not rock the boat *too* much or in too potentially insalubrious company ["the trouble with being on the side of right...", as other Winston used to say, being "all the insalubrious company"].

That, to quote the old adage, "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".

That "the law" is a single, unified and level playing field, which is unutterably undermined when we start creating 'special' differences within it for persons and clades of people whose intersection with the law is, by their very nature, going to be different and have different requirements of it.

And, in this particular case, that a legal protection rolled out for *all* journalists, incredibly broadly defined with reference only to their regularly being "given information" which is then "published in a news medium" in the course of their "work" ... that the fact that one single journalist *actually successfully making use of this* protection in a court of law, somehow creates both an 'exceptional situation', and irrevocably undermines the freedom of our nation's press.

Because what kind of "free press" has freedom from undue scrutiny of its informational sources, right?

This is not the "banality of evil" that we are witnessing before us. This is the "freedom of banality" that Roughan apparently seeks to defend.

The freedom to do as you like, write and publish as you wish ... but only provided that it isn't incendiary, isn't explosive enough to actually be viewed as a "problem" by the Powers-That-Be, and their blue-uniformed enforcement arm [whom, it should be clear, I generally am rather positive about - the latter, I mean, not so much the former]. Unless you, yourself, are prepared to put yourself in the firing-line to be criminalized for it.

For all his bluster about how we are apparently "on the slippery slope towards an authorised press" [and how nice when he namechecks the fallacy he is using, even as he invokes it] "which is not a free press", Roughan appears not to have thought seriously about the local implications of running the removal of journalistic privilege, to similar extremes as he has hyperventilated about its maintenance. 

There is an old Soviet joke:

"First, do not to think.
If you think - do not speak;
If you speak - do not write;
If you write - then don't publish,
If you publish ... don't be surprised."

We might adapt this to Roughan's take on Hager's situation:

"First, do not receive potentially inflammatory information.
If you receive it, do not read it.
If you read it, do not write about it.
If you write about it, do not publish it - especially during an Election Year!
If you write about it (especially during an Election Year, thus implicitly attacking the Government when it is most at risk) ... then do not be surprised, when the constabulary execute a search warrant upon you."

Now how's *that* for a slippery slope away from the concept of a "free press".

On The Recent Death Of Jeffrey Epstein

On the one hand, attempting to blame every little thing on "The Clintons" and/or some other, further elite conspiracy efforts ... as hilarious as it can be, is often overtly ridiculous.

On the *other* hand ... Jeffrey Epstein somehow managing to kill himself *while on suicide watch* following his previous attempt, allegedly via hanging, suggests that *at minimum* there's been some almost unbelievable incompetence by his jailers.

I'm not saying that he was, necessarily, murdered. Although there is little doubt that a not-insignificant quotient of people out there, whether rich and powerful or victimized and powerless, will be quietly or overtly jubilant at what has occurred.

But it is difficult to avoid the temptation to speculate that oversight on Epstein may have been *deliberately* lax, so as to actively 'facilitate' an outcome just such as this.

That is to say - why have a man murdered, with all the subterfuge and potential discovery that this may very well entail, when you can just prod him into making an attempt on his own life, and then not stand in his way when he eventually gets close enough to the precipice .. all of his own accord.

And, once again, it may not even have been a 'conspiratorial' effort to facilitate nor ensure that this'd happen. It could have been prison staff with a lackadasical attitude towards the prisoner or the whole situation, for a start.

The only thing that *can* be said at this stage, I suspect, is that in some important ways, justice has been denied. For while we can debate and defer as to whether a self-imposed death sentence is a more or less "just" ultimate outcome, than his spending potentially up to the rest of his natural life in prison ...

i) the actual *processes* and *performative* parts of the judicial process *do* matter. The right, not simply of an accused to have their day in court, but of the accusers, the victims, and society at large to definitively establish guilt and have a perpetrator actually *stand trial* as part of that process - this has now been, in some ways, forever abrogated.

ii) any potential value which Epstein may have had for further ongoing investigations into those other wealthy and powerful figures he may or may not have consorted with ... will now *also* be severely abrogated. Not entirely disintegrated, as Epstein's notebooks and other subsidiary evidence are now coming to judicial light. But still.

It's hard to view what has transpired here - allegedly or otherwise - as being any real kind of "win".

It Is Possible To Be Both Pro Ihumatao AND Not Anti Police

Watching the course of developments around Ihumatao over the past few months, it is hard to escape the sensation that something extraordinary has happened. What would, some decades ago, perhaps have been written off as a "Maori" issue by much of New Zealand - and consequentially, disparaged, denied, and turned into a pit of talkback-radio excoriation - has in fact managed to attain broad support from across the community.

The fact that John Roughan was prepared to pen a piece in the Herald a few days ago speaking about his own evolving perspective upon the situation - and attempting to cast it as a more justified cause to support than Bastion Point - would seem to confirm that there's been some critical shift out there in the tumulous [not to mention tumescent] body politik. John Key's literal biographer, and a man who not a month beforehand was speaking wistfully about the rulership of Auckland by "Remuera Patricians", being on-side for Ihumatao being protected is a most interesting barometer, indeed.

But if the necessity of the protection of Ihumatao has now managed to draw in support from 'unexpected' quarters like Roughan and his ilk, it has also succeeded in conjuring self-appointed championship from much less surprising specimines. And, I would argue, not necessarily to the Cause's overarching favour.

The video which has been doing the rounds, of a protester at Ihumatao verbally castigating a police officer and demanding that he decamp from his lawful duty to the state "back to your own country", is merely the tip of the iceberg. At the risk of regurgitating NZ Police press statements upon the subject, it really does seem like the Police deployed on that watch-line have displayed stoic professionalism in the face of being spat at, insulted, taunted, and - especially in the case of Maori police officers on site, as well as others - racially abused.

Once upon a time, particularly some four decades or more ago at the height of the 1980s' epoch of 'robust encounters' between Police and Protesters, the happenings and their outcomes would no doubt have been severely different. And it is not at all to seek to excuse the Police from some of their previous (or, indeed, present) areas of misconduct, to say that the restraint they have exercised in recent times at Ihumatao as well as elsewhere has been to their credit. [Indeed, due to the significant quotient of new cops about the place these days, it's absolutely no exception to state that much of what's egregious even in the relatively recent record of the NZ Police, may have occurred well beyond they joined the force, were anywhere near it, or in some cases, had even actually been born.]

Yet in every war, there is an inveterate temptation when going into it to attempt to simply re-fight the last one rather than engaging with the actual fact-situation that unfurls con-current, infront of one.

This perhaps explains why some either at or around Ihumatao are seemingly focused upon re-litigating any number of previous skirmishes or outright conflagrations with the Police in particular, the Crown in general, or even overseas instances over which the Government of New Zealand has little, if any, connection let alone control.

And you know what? Leaving aside the 'optics' of the situation, that's not entirely un-understandable. When you feel that you are bearing the weight of decades, centuries worth of marginalization, oppression, and the exact, axiomatic opposite of fair treatment by colonial authorities or post-colonial or settler states, there is not just a temptation to view everything through a kind of overarching-writ-large metanarrative of 'us versus them' taking place upon every corner of our nation's history, and thence from there through much of the globe. There is an actual factual basis to it, as applies the fact that it's often the debris of globe-spanning empires and significant coterminities of experience [and, for that matter, sodality, solidarity] that we are dealing with here.

But at the same time, it does need to be said that those who would hijack this particular cause in pursuit of a far broader agenda (especially that which can be basically summed up as F*#& the Police), run the significant risk of harming the otherwise enviably positive rapport which the Ihumatao preservation motive has built up within the wider NZ public.

It becomes a distraction; it becomes a degradation; it becomes even a vector - as we can see here with that video - of perpetuating *further* iniquities against those not exactly morally blameful for the actually-objectionable circumstances being protested against. Such as the verbal attack against that nondescriptively brown police officer on Monday night, who may have been born here or elsewhere - or may even have been of Maori descent himself. Who knows. I doubt anybody thought to check before shooting mouth off and into foot with reckless abandon.

In any case, my point is a simple one.

The Government is yet to remove digit and do something productive over the whole issue; and perhaps there are solutions which do *not* require the Prime Minister personally wading in, or remarks to that effect eventuating.

But, not just because the matter is 'in train' and public opinion appears to be swinging over to the pro-Ihumatao side .. but also because it's the morally correct thing to do - it is *certainly* possible to keep pushing for the protection of the site in question *without* attempting to turn the whole thing into an anti-police conflagration.

Let us hope that cooler heads on the protest side prevail.

Tulsi Gabbard Blazes Impressive Trail At First Democratic Primary Debate

It has been said by political minds far more astute than my own [read: pretty much every candidate going into today's 1st Democratic Primary debate] that a 'win' here is securing 'cut-through'. Standing out from amidst the crowded, twenty-candidate field and managing to reach out through the television-camera's silvery lense to make that all-important connection with the ordinary American voter on the other side of the screen.

Now, before this debate had even begun, there were several clear 'favourites' amidst the DNC's 2019 stable; figures who were supposed to make that all-important salience. And, due to a microphone-gaffe part-way through, it now seems like the DNC is once more prepared to help 'guide' attention towards their 'designated winners'. Nothing new there, then.

But here's the thing. Even though the questions, the moderation, and the overarching tactical terrain were arrayed against her from well before the start ... Tulsi Gabbard looks like she's managed to make a positive impact, a splash. Below, we've got search analytics data for the Congresswoman both during and after the debate. I've also seen immediate post-match polling which has Gabbard a clear 'winner' - in fact, the clear Winner - edging out even predicted 'people's-choice-but-establishment-bete-noir' Elizabeth Warren.



What's even more interesting - to me, anyway - is the seeming dysjunction between some of the immediate reception which Gabbard and her points received in the room itself versus out there in broader America. I mean, apart from a few loud positive responses from some in the physical audience, her military background and her opposition to continued American imperialist adventurism ... did not find fecund soil with those in attendance. At one point, the moderators deliberately attempted to stop Gabbard from speaking about Saudi Arabia and its role in financing terrorism.

Yet out there in 'broader America' beyond the room, which is not so easily impressed by a field of candidates falling over each other to push forward a 'united front' of 'Democratic National Consensus' on various policy positions, or compete over who can gesticulate the loudest about this or that minority demographic, Gabbard's views and background appear to have found considerable purchase. Turning her, in the span of a few hours, from somebody who's been almost deliberately ignored in just about any mainstream media reporting of the Democratic Primary - through to a figure of emerging prominence.

She may not - not yet, anyway - be quite a "household name"; but it seems like a lot of households are, indeed, googling her.



The importance of this also lies in Gabbard's ability to 'reach across the aisle', out beyond the Democrats' preferred 'safe' voter-base, to those who are leery of the party and may even have voted for Trump at the last Election. Not by engaging in some sort of social-media slanging-match race to the bottom in the manner that Trump successfully trounced the 2016 Republican Primary field .. but by resonating with the strong regard that many middle-of-the-road American voters have for authenticity, military service, and anti-interventionist foreign policy (particularly when said 'Adventurism' just means more body-bags and far less federal spending turning up in their local community, in service of some fundamentally nasty foreign regimes who don't seem to wish America anything but ill).

As a brief aside, I am genuinely of the opinion that it was Trump's perceived anti-interventionist stance which won him the 2016 Presidential Election - flipping key counties in Ohio, and winning over thousands of voters in the communities that have borne the [domestic] human cost of the previous decade and a half worth of Neocon-ism-in-overdrive via being major military recruitment hotspots etc.

Hence the significant importance of Gabbard's stances - but also personal record of service, which gives her vitally needed credibility when speaking against ongoing military quagmire-ism - in these areas; especially when held up against a Democratic 'establishment plus' field which looks increasingly interested in navel-gazing and 'turning inward' to focus on shoring up its own base against any potential 'contagion' of 'further-left' sentiment a la Sanders 2015-16, or AoC et co last year.

Now, it's true that this debate was not an ideal performance from Gabbard. She displayed hints of anxiety, and more worryingly, in the first half of proceedings was far too 'polite' I suppose you might say - not creating the opportunities for herself by shouldering aside others, and instead waiting to be called upon to speak. That's courteous, and it's no doubt borne out of an underlying attitude towards others, even adversaries, which is built upon the principle of respect ... but this is politics, and up against a potentially rigged system with pre-picked 'favourites' who're designated to get more of the air-time and less-trappy questions, such considerations must by necessity fall by the wayside.

Fortunately, Gabbard improved on these scores over the course of proceedings; and I have every confidence that she'll continue to grow and shine more with further experience, practice, and exposure.

As applies the 'anxiety' dimension ... this is actually not nearly as hazardous as it might first appear. Various politico-psychological analyses have demonstrated time and time again that ordinary American voters like seeing something of themselves in their presumptive representatives. Hence, when George W. Bush botched his lines and came across as less sophisticated, less intelligent ... less know-it-all and slickly "polished", you might say ... than Al Gore in 2000, a lot of Americans actually decided they liked him more as a consequent result!

Coming across as more 'human', as displaying shades of some authentically real traits which we can empathize with, makes us more likely to both subconsciously and intentionally choose to support a leader.

So in other words, especially considering her continued blossoming through the course of this debate, even one of her more noticeable 'weaknesses' is actually a reasonable potential strength.

Going into this debate, myself, I had relatively low expectations for Gabbard's positive outcomes. I figured she might manage to get in a few good hits on her core campaign theme, maybe boost her polling up to the high-end of the single figures, and breath some much-needed 'life' into her ongoing prospects for the next phases of the race.

'Breathe life', she has indeed managed to do! In point of fact, I'm pretty blown away by the actual immediate outcomes of this debate. Fighting in decidedly unfriendly terrain, she's managed to get a sweeping salient of that absolutely vital 'momentum' going. People excitedly talking about her, looking into her, and then going back to talk about her some more armed with fresh insight and information into who she is and how she measures up as compared to the rest of the Democratic field.

The Media and no doubt the DNC shall continue to try to find ways to do so, no doubt - but for the American voter [although this is not necessarily the same species in all particulars as the [Democratic] Primary voter], it shall be increasingly hard to overlook, much less outright ignore Tulsi Gabbard from here on in!

In conclusion, gentlemen:

HAVE WE STARTED THE HAVAN?

JA! KAAL-AGNI RISES!

Why America Might Have Wanted Iran To Down Its Drone - A Warning From History's Rhyme

Now, here is an interesting thought pertaining to the recent Iranian downing of an American drone.

Way back in the late 1990s, it is alleged by then-serving US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Hugh Shelton, that he was approached by a high-ranking member of the Clinton Administration's Cabinet with a request that he allow an American U-2 spy-plane to be shot-down over Iraq as an effective pretext for starting a war to ouster Saddam Hussein.

General Shelton did not name the Cabinet member in question when detailing the encounter in his 2010 memoir; however, it is speculated based on various elements in the text and elsewhere that the requestor may have been then-Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.

Anyway, that is beside the point.

What is directly relevant here, is that a surveillance drone operating in Iranian airspace is the modern-day equivalent of the last century's U-2 spy-flight missions. And, fortuitously, one that can be shot down by the country whom it is surveilling, without some poor American pilot having to make the ultimate sacrifice as a dangled lure-bait.

Much has been made of the rather curious pattern of the United States often seeming to start its wars via fishy incidents involving boats - the USS Maine at the outset of the Spanish-American War, for instance, or the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin which preceded the significant upscaling of US entanglement in Vietnam.

Yet little attention has been directed towards another comparable instance to this week's shoot-down - namely, the downing of an American U2 spy-plane over Cuba towards the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

While it is seriously doubtful as to whether this was an intentional occurrence on the part of the Americans the immediate reaction of then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, is rather telling. “They’ve fired the first shot,” he said.

So, if you are outright trying to start a war - having the country you wish to shortly be at war with, carry out an act of armed "aggression" against a border-penetrating reconnaissance effort, can be adequately sold as your bete-noire "firing the first shot", and thus rendering rather more rhetorically 'legitimate' all the ensuing 'return' shots from cruise-missile range that may perhaps thusly ensue.

Marx famously opined that history seemed to repeat itself as tragedy, then as farce. The Americans appear to go the other way, from time to time - with the trumped-up attempts at sparking a war with Iraq under Clinton, that seem downright farcical with retrospect, being succeeded with actually-successful and thencely tragic whipping up of a 'Coalition of the Willing' to actually invade Iraq for real this time, less than a decade later under George W. Bush.

And, because the 'rhyme-scheme' of History is evidently a rather regular one, we have recently seen a bit of a shift in focus from straining to have Iran declared a Weapons of Mass Destruction seeking international pariah to be tarnished and toppled as Saddam's Iraq was by Bush and Blair ... through to what looks suspiciously like an attempted actual going ahead of the late-90s sacrificial-spy-flying-lamb gambit mooted for war-starting use against Iraq, except against modern-day Iran this time.

Given their previous predilections in these areas, I am almost surprised that the Americans did not haul a Catalina flying-boat out of a museum so as to attain the maximum faux-'freedom' synergy for this stunt.

A Newspaper Is A Dangerous Mind-Altering Substance

You ever get the feeling that your news media's attempting to push a particular narrative that's ... not really all that concerned with the truth?

I mean, seriously. Take a look at this story, from the front-page of yesterday's NZ Herald. Now, going off that headline ... and pretty much everything else in the article ... you'd be forgiven for thinking that cannabis was the *only* factor [or, indeed *a* substantive, salient factor] in the accident that occurred. Because it's repeated - over and over and over again, for two pages.

Yet you look a little closer, and there - nestled in a small sentence that would be altogether too easy to just gloss over if you're reading swiftly - is the actual reality of the situation.

Cocktail of prescription drugs.

Now, it doesn't specify just which "prescription drugs" are being talked about. Wouldn't go very well with the 'corporate line'! Especially if it turned out the guy was legitimately prescribed them!

But I would hazard a guess - and let me be clear about this, this is my uninformed, speculative opinion - that if they were being recreationally used, they were likely the sort of anti-anxiety or other meds which would stereotypically come with a "DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY WHILST UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF" disclaimer.

Or, in other words, the sort of meds you *really* shouldn't be driving upon ... and which would, odds on, be far more - even *exponentially* more - likely to have *actually* had a salient, significant role in the causation of this regrettable accident.

I'm not even going to get into the actual science around the impact of cannabis upon driving, here; although I *will* note that the addition of multiple drugs to an individual, in simultaneous use, can have 'quadratic' rather than mere 'additional' effects.

The fact is, that somebody, somewhere, doesn't want cannabis legalized via referendum.

And in order to deliberately frustrate this particular democratic outcome, they're going to pull out all the stops in order to do so.

No tragedy is going to be too great, no detail too small, for them to distort out of all proportion. They'll find the dirt to throw and the mud to sling - whether it exists there or not.

Now, we can tell from various developments over the past few years, that they've narrowed in on an 'attack angle' around 'drug driving'.

This has partially been driven by the previous National-led Government presiding over some popularization of the concept via some rather odd televised ads; and various attempts to look into bringing Australian-style roadside testing here.

It's also a tangential development to the legitimate expression of horror at our ever-high and lamentably lingering road toll. People want it to come down, so in desperation, will look in all manner of directions in order to try and do something about an escalating human tragedy. That's understandable. And when you're trying to make sense of a tragedy, it's only human nature to go for what seem like the 'easily preventable' "BUT WHY" factors in its (narrative) causation.

So going off the steadily increasing saliency of these "but why would we want to legalize cannabis, when our road toll is already so high??" talking-points all across talkback, social media, and letters to the editor ... it seems pretty clear that whomever, whatever's directing this agenda, has identified a strategy that works.

This kind of broad-based anti-PR snowjob offensive is rather like playing a game of Battleship. You fire out your volleys, and when you see the plume of smoke from having scored a hit on something .... you zero in and bombard that particular point with everything you've got, in the hopes of taking the whole thing down once having hit the magazine via repeated fusillades.

The National Party, as well, has chosen to capitalize directly upon this avenue of attack - bringing in several strikes at the present Government (including the Speaker of the House) as allegedly being "soft on drugs"; inviting victims and family of victims of crashes caused by, inter alia, *synthetic cannabinoids* [and let's remember - the comparison between consuming cannabis and consuming synthetic cannabinoids ... is perhaps akin to that between drinking alcohol, and drinking methylated spirits, while on meth] to come along to Parliament to add to the human pathos of the whole thing; introducing a private member's bill; and both getting themselves kicked out of the Debating Chamber and riddling the Minister for Police with questions upon the apparently epidemic crisis of "drug driving" here in New Zealand.

The goal of such things is quite clear, and - as always - at least as two-fold as it is reprehensibly two-faced. First and foremost, to make the Government of the day look bad, duplicitous, morally and otherwise. Like it's too limp-wristed to care about ordinary Kiwis' voices and vehicular safety.

And second, to keep trying to drive public opinion *away* from what's previously been pretty full-throated support for cannabis law reform, in any meaningful variety. [Which also helps to hammer the government - because apparently, giving ordinary New Zealanders their fair say on cannabis legalization makes everybody even tangentially proximate to the Cabinet of the day a raging pot-head]

You keep saying something often enough, repeatedly enough, and with sufficient permutations upon the same basic theme ... people start to believe it's this absolutely huge, overweening issue that's at crisis-epidemic-insurgency levels. And therefore, that Something, anything, Must Be Done to stop it. Somehow.

So over the next twelve to fourteen months, expect more of these stories, once again blown out of *any* semblance of reality, to be broadcast and shouted from the rooftops in superliminal propagandtastic efforts, with increasing frequency, right up until Polling Day for our cannabis legalization referendum.

Because the only "mind altering substances" THEY want you to have access to - are alcohol, newspapers, and National Party electoral leaflet material. Perhaps that's in ascending order of social destructiveness.

The Teen Euthanasia That Wasn't

Here's something potentially rather interesting. You know that 17 year old Dutch teenager whom an appreciably large proportion of just about everybody's newsfeed and/or Letters To The Editor section is jumping up and down about? The one apparently legally euthanized, and therefore how terrible a thing legal euthanasia is we can't have it here?

Well, apparently ... that's not actually what happened at all. Instead, it appears that what actually transpired was the kid applied for euthanasia, was refused, repeatedly attempted suicide anyway, and then eventually, just straight-up stopped eating/drinking - at which point, her family and medical team finally acquiesced to her wishes, and agreed not to force-feed her, moving her to palliative care.

Now, your mileage may vary as to ... well, pretty much this whole thing.

It could certainly be argued that actually having let the child go 'on her own terms' prior to all of this, would have been an awful lot less traumatic than having several months worth of repeated suicide attempts, endeavours to have her subjected to electro-shock therapy, before finally conceding that in the absence of ye olde feeding tube down nose, she was going to get her way eventually anyway.

But it seems like, at this point, an array of both news media organizations - and, for that matter, jump-up-and-down-hand-wringing social conservative pseudo-political groups, have deliberately bait-and-switched a story up, in order to try and oppose any meaningful progress on euthanasia law reform in their own countries, riding high off the back of one obviously tortured girl's personal misery.

I can understand why the idea of the state allowing 17 year olds to put themselves to death would be scary. Because it is. [I personally find the idea of forcing teenagers to carry pregnancies to term to also be rather scary, but then I am over here in the #ProDeath camp, apparently, so once again, YMMV]

But I'm not of the opinion that there's a very sensible comparison to be made between "we allowed a teenager to access a state-supported facility for getting us to kill them" - which is what everybody seems to think happened;

and "after many months of effort, we stopped attempting to force-feed or otherwise forcibly keep alive against her own wishes, a person".

It could be argued that the overall outcome is the same. And yeah, sure, one less person on the planet.

But I don't think that it is. Not really. And not least because only one of these things apparently happened.