Referendum on Smacking

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

This question is being put to nearly three million New Zealand voters. But what has become known simply as the smacking referendum reaches much deeper into the way children are raised and treated here. Here is one man’s response. I agree with his point of view.

YES – Noel Hendery, Regional Ministry Convener, Anglican Diocese of Waiapu:

Yesterday morning I popped into the supermarket, bought a couple of things and walked back to my car. As I opened the door my mobile phone rang. It was quite a long conversation.

Normally I would have started up the vehicle and driven home, talking as I went. I didn’t, not because there is any law about that, but because there is a lot of discussion about cellphones and safety and this has made me think about the issue a lot more, and pushed me to clarify the rights and wrongs concerning cellphones and driving.

For this reason, I think the referendum on smacking is a good thing if it gets more people thinking about the issues surrounding physical punishment of children.

The first point I make is to do with language. The real issue at stake is not banning smacking: it is opposing violence against children.

I am very clear where I stand on this issue. I can remember the moment that I decided that a smack cannot be “good parental correction”.

It was over 35 years ago, when I was the proud and loving father of two lovely little boys. I had smacked them only a few times in their whole lives. But one day they were being a bit of a pain, I was under stress, and I hit them both with an electrical cord.

It was not serious, but it was quite disproportionate to their misbehaviour. It was all about my frustrations and nothing to do with good parental correction.

I have never hit a child since that day.

There is evidence from at least one survey of New Zealand parents that my experience is probably overwhelmingly the norm for most incidents of smacking in our homes.

And I believe that the law change in 2007 helps good and decent parents in New Zealand to see smacking for what it is. I also believe that the law, and the police’s administration of that law, acknowledges the reality of what happens in normal family life.

What I have written is very personal. I am, however, proud to say that my church in this region has taken a clear stance on this issue. At its synod (annual conference) last year, the Anglican church from Bay of Plenty to Hawke’s Bay, passed the following motion, almost unopposed:

“The Anglican Diocese of Waiapu applauds efforts to reduce the level of violence against children in our country and encourages both Government and non-Government agencies to provide adequate resources for this work and explore further ways of enacting it.

”In particular this diocese supports the Crimes (substituted Section 59) Amendment Act of 2007, strongly urges its retention, and wishes to make clear that not all Christians or churches wish to return to a state which provides less legal protection against assault for children than for adults.”

The basic question to ponder is: should children have less protection against violence under the law than adults?

If you think children should be legally protected against violent assault, then forget about the annoying and confusing language of the wording of the referendum.

Draw a line in the sand by voting “Yes” to the question.

New Republican Memo

Deepak Chopra on the American Sickness System

This article contains embedded links. I’ve italicized them -they can be found in the original article here.

The health care crisis in this country is a monster, like one of those mythical giant squids that could grab a sailing vessel, wrap its tentacles around it, and pull it to the bottom of the sea. President Obama’s message is that the U.S. economy is that ship. Without reform, health care costs will sink us in the near future. Yet it’s no surprise that Congress can’t find a solution or that the public is deeply worried about the cost of reform. Each arm of this monster thinks it has a right to hold on. Doctors don’t want lower salaries. Pharmaceutical companies don’t want a flood of generic drugs from across the border. Lawyers and insurance companies fight for their share of premiums and court settlements. Patients don’t want reduced care.

In a televised town meeting aimed at selling his program, Obama rightly pointed out that Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world but don’t necessarily get more. One example is the estimated $700 billion dollars in unnecessary tests that doctors routinely run each year. As soon as he made the point, however, a doctor in the audience raised a familiar specter. If your wife or daughter had cancer, he said, would you tell them they can’t get the best care possible, no matter what the cost? It’s a fearful question, and frankly, the ace in the hole that mainstream medicine has been pulling for decades.

So which is worse, cancer or the huge cost of health care?

If we can set our fears aside, certain facts need to be faced. A recent European study on prostate cancer poked a hole in the need for early detection, a need that’s drummed into us constantly for every type of cancer and which costs billions every year in expensive tests. The new study “indicated that saving one man’s life from the disease would require screening about 1,400 men. But among those 1,400, 48 others would undergo treatments like surgery or radiation procedures that would not improve their health because the cancer was not life-threatening to begin with or because it was too far along,” to quote the New York Times. The same story covered an early-detection campaign known as “Check Your Neck” aimed at thyroid cancer. Yet this rare cancer kills only 1,400 people a year, and there’s no evidence that regular checkups for it save lives. The same holds true for ovarian, lung, and skin cancer. Considering all the factors, including side effects and risks of treatment, one expert in early detection gloomily declared, “There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad.”

The one good outcome, finding a fatal cancer that responds well to treatment, is what Americans pay billions and billions of dollars in the hope of achieving.

So, will doctors back off on the standard PSA tests to detect prostate cancer, much less the protocols of radiation and surgery to treat it? Not unless a new system of health care emerges that reduces fear as well as costs. Thirty years ago I first entered alternative medicine with an emphasis on wellness, believing that it represented a new system. I still believe it does. Cancer, and the anxiety it induces, is a red herring. The mean adjusted age of death from all types of cancer — meaning how long the average patient survives before succumbing to the disease — has barely changed since the 1930’s for both men and women With all the early detection and advanced treatments, a cancer patient today is by no means guaranteed to live longer than a cancer patient in our grandparents’ generation. That’s another fact we need to face.

The final fact is that American health care needs prevention more than anything else. The majority of medical costs go to treating three conditions: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. As this society grows fatter, older, and less likely to exercise regularly, all three will rise, and yet sensible prevention would go a long way to halt or reverse that trend. A major type of diabetes, Type 2, is directly linked to obesity, so even though type 1 is incurable, maintenance and prevention would effectively fight the scourge of diabetes, not to mention the myriad secondary problems it causes.

The thing about a giant squid is that you can’t peel it off one tentacle at a time. You need to find a way to pull off every arm at once. In our current crisis, doctors and Congress cannot do the job. Vested interests will be fighting over health care for years to come. The public is right to worry that Obama’s promised reforms cannot be paid for without extra taxes, and even then the overall costs may not go down. But it’s the public that is best equipped to kill the monster, not by focusing on the war on cancer, gene therapy, heart bypass surgery, and the next miracle drug — these all cost a king’s ransom and are controlled by powerful interest groups — but by finally waking up and taking charge of our own health. The cry for preventive medicine and inexpensive natural treatments isn’t new or glamorous, yet we need to heed it now more than ever.

Man On Wire

This is a very good documentary. I saw it on DVD the other night. Highly recommended.

On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit, a French wire walker, juggler, and street performer days shy of his 25th birthday, spent 45 minutes walking, dancing, kneeling, and lying on a wire he and friends strung between the rooftops of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

This documentary uses contemporary interviews, archival footage, and recreations to tell the story of his previous walks between towers of Notre Dame and of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, his passions and friendships, and the details of the night before the walk: getting cable into the towers, hiding from guards, and mounting the wire.

It ends with observations of the profound changes the walk’s success brought to Philippe and those closest to him.

Obama Family in Russia

Trunk Monkey

This is really funny and well worth watching.

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

This is a fascinating article about Goldman Sachs’ role in the current American financial meltdown.

From Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

Four more pages online. Continued here.

I was no al-Qaeda ally, Saddam told FBI

SADDAM HUSSEIN told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews just released. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.

The then US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

How India Helped Me Find My Purpose in Life

by Sharell, an Australian who married an Indian, at WhiteIndianHousewife.com.

I was reading a feature in the Mumbai Mirror yesterday, about six people who left their high paying professional jobs to follow their passion and pursue a career in cinema.

It made me start thinking of myself and the giant leap of faith I took. However, the big difference between me and those people was that I had no idea of the direction I wanted my life to go in when I left my job. And I was hardly enthusiastic about creating my new reality.

I had to be pushed by a crisis of mass proportion.

2005 wasn’t a very good year for me. In fact, it was the toughest year of my life. I’d been working in the same government office for 10 years. I was unfulfilled and unmotivated by my choice of career as an accountant, but I tolerated it because it paid very well. The only thing I enjoyed about my job was writing reports. In order to break the monotony of my life, I spent too much time partying, shopping, and taking long lunches. Life had fallen into a very predictable and unproductive pattern.

Then, my long term relationship came to a traumatic end. Along with it went all my plans for the future.

I was completely lost. Nothing of what remained of my life inspired me. I had no choice but reinvent myself. How though? My situation was made even more difficult by the fact that I hated change.

I decided that the only solution was to completely throw myself out of my comfort zone, open myself up to new possibilities, and accept every opportunity that came my way — no matter how much it scared me. And the best way to do it would be to go to India. Having travelled there twice already, I knew of no place that could challenge me more. To take my mind off my woes, I resolved to do community work for five weeks. I chose Kolkata simply because it was a place in India that I hadn’t been to.

I took six months long service leave from my job, left a friend in charge of my home, packed my bag, and boarded a flight.

Then, fate stepped in. Along with it started the long chain of events that led to me to be where I am today — living in Mumbai, married to an Indian guy, and writing about India travel for a living.

I met my husband-to-be within a week of arriving in Kolkata.

Story continues here.