Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Perception and reality in the…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And isn’t it ironic the private prison system has brought us ’Mt Eden Club Med’? The Two Minutes Hate brigade will never be happy.
From that story:
The 10-year contract, which the company says is valued at about $300 million, includes a clause that says the contractor must "ensure meals conform to each prisoner's religious, ethnic, cultural and medical requirements".
A fuming McVicar said last night: "That is disgraceful. A prison is a prison – you have broken the law and I don't think we have to tie the contractor in knots about having to conform with cultural requirements.
"Prison has to be humane, but I don't think we should be bending over to cater for every cultural or religious belief."
Good grief. Is he proposing force-feeding beef to Hindus and pork to Muslims and Jews?
-
Hard News: Perception and reality in the…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Illustrates how stupid the drug laws are. He’s no criminal. Just a gentle 62 year old who been entertaining with his music for four decades. What possible purpose does this conviction serve for anyone?
I actually know a couple of people who used to buy pot from Rick, both of them about my age. They appreciated having somewhere safe, discreet and friendly to go.
Rick being busted has not, of course, stopped them being pot smokers. And all this guff about whether Rick has, in the judge's view, "rehabilitated" or not is absurd. He's a 62 year-old musician who smokes pot. What exactly is he rehabilitating from?
-
Hard News: Perception and reality in the…, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
Just in: Contains crime policy, public perception, online poll, McVicar
Awesome self-selected poll amongst the readers of New Zealand's angriest online forums. Still, excellent timing for us. Thanks for the heads-up.
-
Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I was asking because when I was a kid in the seventies I was well aware of the dangers of smoking, unlike my parents before me, and in spite of the lack of any antismoking campaigns. And so when the age came when I would have taken up smoking otherwise, ie the mid eighties, I didn’t, like many of my peers.
Smoking prevalence had been slowly trending down in Italy (it was still 30%+ in 1990), but the rate of cessation doubled 2004-2006, after Italy’s own smokefree legislation was introduced:
Conclusion. The drop in smoking prevalence and consumption is due, at least in part and particularly for younger generations, to the comprehensive smoke-free legislation adopted in Italy.
-
Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I’m inclined to agree with Chris’ China comparison re availability, although I think he downplays the smoking issue. Certainly, there is plenty of booze and cigarettes available, and so long as you’re in at least a village, you’re never more than a five minute walk from a drink or smoke. I’ve seen very young kids buying a bottle of booze and some cigarettes for Daddy from their neighbourhood store, and nobody bats an eyelid. The young people stumbling drunk down the street late at night are generally expats
OTOH, ethnic Chinese in New Zealand generally drink far less than European New Zealanders. New Zealand has a bingeing culture right back to colonial times, and I think it’s a factor in consumption of other drugs too – BZP, for example, which was often heavily tied in to binge drinking.
But here comes the socialisation thing: China and New Zealand are both binge drinking cultures, but Chinese do their binge drinking in a very different way. Traditionally Chinese drink over a meal, and the men will often drink to get hammered, but when the meal ends, the drinking ends.
There's a superb documentary called The World's Biggest Chinese Restaurant, which captures the Chinese bingeing style basically as you describe it. The owner -- a middle-aged woman -- goes from table to table greeting guests and, because it seems to be expected, knocking back large glasses of wine with each group. She ends up absolutely slaughtered.
-
Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Do you include greater knowledge about the dangers of smoking under “smokefree policy”?
I think so. An education campaign was in the first set of measures in 1985. Public awareness advertising campaign in 1986. Prominent health warnings on cigarette packaging arrived in 1987. Amazingly, domestic airlines didn’t go smokefree until 1988.
Between 1985 and 1990, New Zealand had the most rapid rate of reduction in smoking consumption of any OECD country.
And this was before the Smokefree Environments Act 1990 (which sharply curtailed visual advertising for tobacco products) and the halving in cigarette consumption per capita between 1991 (when prices went up 17% and consumption decreased 15%) and 2001.
I do think the data are such that anyone who proposes a mere correlation needs to suggest some alternative causes.
Timeline here.
-
Hard News: Perception and reality in the…, in reply to vangam,
Two years jail for a personal stash of coke and some bud is waaaaay over the top – especially for a 60yr old guy!
For puzzled readers, that's a reference to Rick Bryant's sentencing today. It seems harsh in isolation -- Bryant dealt pot to grown-ups he knew -- but I expect his history of marijuana convictions was a factor.
He'd have been much safer opening a bar, basically.
-
Hard News: Perception and reality in the…, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
Yet the minsiter insists, to the point of personally abusing Kim Workman, that a slight drop in prison numbers can only be due to a decreased reoffending rate (though she declines to offer any direct evidence).
The comments the minister directed at Workman bordered on actionable.
-
Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to nzlemming,
Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Just saying.
I think it's pushing it to suppose that the raft of public measures to curb the smoking rate has had no role in the halving of the number of cigarettes smoked per adult since 1991. Can you propose a cause that bears no relation to any smokefree policy?
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
You got to watch this 1996 BBC doco about Gil Scott Heron, in four parts on YouTube -- it really nails how much he brought when he turned up in the late 60s.. Part 1: