Articles in ‘Current Affairs’

It’s been estimated that dogs smell up to 10,000 times better than us. That’s in part because they have about 220 million scent receptors, whereas humans have a mere 5 million. But dogs also inhale in short breaths up to 300 times a minute, meaning that their olfactory cells are constantly picking up new scents. It’s these factors that make them effective – and adorable – real-time disease detectors. When we’re sick, we produce compounds that…

Natural immunity generally refers to our ability to defend against infectious disease. This is in contrast to vaccine-induced immunity where the immune system is artificially primed in an attempt to “fore-arm” the body against a specific infection. Natural Immunity is a complex, interactive phenomenon between multiple systems within the human body and the elements we are exposed to, including microbes. Our natural immunity can be divided into…

When the cry of “fake news!” is so frequently thrown from both sides of the aisle, do we really want to give political leaders the power to prosecute alleged lies? As we consider history through the lens of free speech, a common theme emerges for the type of speech which censors build as their great “bogeymen”. These are the ideas which are so dangerous that just verbalising them is a threat to social order. From the charge of “blasphemy” in…

This is the claim made by Kate Hannah in the podcast released last week by Radio New Zealand (RNZ), Undercurrent. It is a 7-part series on Misinformation in New Zealand, hosted by Susie Ferguson and there is one word for it: · Propaganda. · “It’s genocidal because it’s about the eradication of a particular group of people,” adds Ferguson after Kate Hannah’s claim. The inference is clear. To disagree with someone’s identity or ideology, to…

Let’s face it. Three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’ has and still is changing our nation’s social landscape. Up until March 2020 most of us were doing our thing, living what we considered to be pretty good lives. We thought we were in control - albeit grumbling about fluctuating prices of fuel, and taxes, ohh those pesky taxes. But we were mostly compliant, law-abiding, and left our elected politicians to do their jobs, hoping they were making…

The Government is currently in the process of scraping the 30-year-old Resource Management Act (RMA) and replacing it with three new pieces of legislation. The three new replacement Acts are: · • The Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA), whereby local government and mana whenua will be required to form joint, regional planning committees to develop one NBA plan for each region, 16 in total. · • The Strategic Planning Act. This will provide…

exclusivley on Voice Media Alistair Harding, The filmmaker behind We Came Here for Freedom is Alistair Harding. A New Zealander by birth, Alistair spent much of his working career in Asia, where he began making short documentaries in Singapore, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia as well as longer films for National Geographic, History Channel and corporate clients. His first feature film, ‘The Sea Decides’, was featured at the 2021 DocEdge Film…

exclusively on Voice Media Richard Pykett, · Richard Pykett, an insurance broker with 35 years of experience, discussed the changes he has witnessed in the insurance industry during a conversation with Mykeljon Winckel on the Free Speech Space podcast. Pykett accidentally stumbled into insurance in 1986 and eventually found success by developing software that helped analyze client data. He later established himself as an independent broker,…

Adam Young - is a free speech advocate who works as a legal researcher for the Free Speech Union. When I imagine the exercise of free speech, speaking truth to power and “sticking it to the man”, I don’t think of back-room discussions or big-money lobbying. No, one simply needs to run a google image search of “free speech” to see the symbols of protest: the crowds holding up their placards, the fist raised in dissent. Free speech is not the…

New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) This seems to be an increasingly common phenomenon – doctors bemused or unable to diagnose or explain odd conditions. · The article refers to a baby girl who has developed a cataract. It states that the parents noticed an odd eye and went to get it checked. It is reassuring to know that, despite the current state of our health system, they got prompt investigations once the problem was…