Antitrust action on information technology sector blamed for opening door to China

In the 1970s and 1980s the United States federal government applied antitrust actions against its two dominant computer and telecommunications companies IBM and AT&T.

The federal government threats and moves to break up these two companies is considered now to have preoccupied the companies to the point at which foreign competition now started to slip through under the cover of the government diversion.

The belief now is that IBM for example became more focussed on coping with the extended anti-trust proceedings than with expanding or holding its 70 percent share of the computer market.

China’s seizing of such a commanding position in this same market is thus regarded as a direct result of the United States federal government’s intervention in the dominance of these two companies.

In short order prior to this trust-busting drive the United States telecommunications and computing sector had come up with three technology breakthroughs: the transistor, the integrated circuit (silicon chip) and the microprocessor.

Only rather later came an understanding that the federal anti monopoly disruption of the information sector had consequences that had not emerged during the much earlier break ups of steel production, oil, and the railways.

Huawei’s appearance as a core telecommunications network supplier in North America is the wakeup call of nightmarish proportions that alerted the United States to the reality that its dominance of this sector was not so much slipping away, as disappearing in a cascade.

Google and Facebook with their subsidiaries such as YouTube and WhatsApp are today’s IBM and AT&T with its Bell System.

They allow the United States to control the narrows of personal point-to-multipoint electronic communication, otherwise known as social media.

Similarly, Apple in its sector and in its turn has been in the shadow of United States federal government trust-busting.

Apple then lost its position in the smart phone market to Huawei.

The reason that the Google and Facebook nexus will remain substantially unfettered is that the United States views itself as a corporate entity whose competition is similarly monolithic in the form of China.

China has what the United States has which is scale.

Experience has shown that smaller countries lacking this and however innovative are unable to lever off this narrower base to present the United States with an enduring threat in this social media category.

France is such a country.

France which is Europe’s most ardent watchdog on the dangers of Google and Facebook was once in technology terms light-years ahead of the United States due to its national effort with its Minitel technology.

The United Kingdom was similarly ahead of this particular game with its Videotex system.

In the event both these technologies languished and are now forgotten because neither country had the population and thus the development base to develop and take to market these early breakthroughs.

Washington will make sympathetic murmurs about the dangers of the untrammelled Google and Facebook duo.

But it has no intention of re-enacting an IBM/ AT&T trust-busting regime for as long as China is breathing down its electronics neck.

Google and Facebook know it.

The knock-down-drag-out story of social media and its favouring of the mega-scale countries is a poignant one and especially so for the Franco-New Zealand campaign to rein in the United States operators.

New Zealand, and this is not generally known, was among the first to refine the programme generation heavy lifting behind the automated coding so important in the development of things such as social networks and their algorithms, the ones which according to the Paris meet, so urgently require “transparency.”

In the event, and justifying current United States suspicions, this programme generation system, led co-incidentally by a Frenchman, was filched by the Chinese under the pretence of buying it.

The only consolation is that these countries are in good company.

Finland’s Nokia, so recently the David in the David and Goliath of smart phones, was acquired by Microsoft another revolving door antitrust candidate.

The same thing happened to Canada, not a particularly small country.

Canada saw its standard-bearing Research in Motion brand Blackberry, once a by-word in the industry and the standard appliance used by politicians everywhere, quickly become motionless, submerged through its absence of hinterland scale.

The United States social media majors cover themselves in feel-good slogans and their representatives when in public have about them the Aw Shucks candour of an Idaho small town family dry goods store proprietor.

Presentation is everything in the world of big-league electronics, especially in the personal communications variety in which the more iron in the fist, the greater the need for the velvet veneer.

Flagship Pike River Re-Entry Policy Threatened by Undetectable Gas

Methane gas has become so politicised that officials are terrified to talk about outside a rigid and approved context and frame of reference.

Nothing underlined the perils attendant on the Labour coalition government’s Pike River mine re-entry fiasco in that a cause of its being aborted was that a “wee” creature had chewed the lead of a gas sensor.

Nothing emphasised the presence and name of this gas as the determination by everyone concerned to avoid mentioning it.

The gas was and is methane gas and it was the culprit in the Pike River mine disaster.

Methane hovers. It is lighter than air.

In its ghostly fashion it cannot be detected by human senses.

Officially we were told that readings on “oxygen” led to the abandonment of the re-entry.

We were told that the “atmosphere” imperilled the re-entry.

The word methane has become so politically-charged that in a contrary way in the Pike River disaster and its aftermath it became conspicuous by its absence.

The re-entry scheme and the reasons for it being aborted encapsulated the basic-science comprehension problem of New Zealand governments since the advent of the professional politician i.e. those who have no background in anything productive beyond word-creation, and posturing.

The notion of the mine being “sealed” was chief among these.

Other than the elaborate and mediagenic barrier at the entrance no other part of the mine is sealed it all.

The mine has been soaking up methane ever since the last explosion there.

Methane gas has been filtering through into the mine from the surrounding geology ever since.

This aggregation will have been accelerated since the official and token sealing of the mine entrance by internal collapses which in turn will have been aggravated by things such as seismic activity, and also by water.

A disused mine is much more dangerous than a working one.

Another threat barely mentioned in the re-entry turn back reasons was the presence of coal dust.

This volatile substance, as with methane, will have collected in the mine over the intervening years.

In this re-entry scheme there would have been no electrics in the mine of the type that powered the ventilation equipment which as the Royal Commission so studiously observed was positioned inside the mine, rather than outside it, the practice everywhere else.

Nobody doubts that methane gas caused the mine to explode.

But the cause of the ignition of the mine methane remains undetermined.

The Pike River mine re-entry has about it the aura of political showboating allied to a victim-culture determination to identify individuals or groups of them responsible for the explosions.

The hunt for SCADA type monitoring recordings centred on the initial explosion and which might prove who exactly did what and when in the lead up to the disaster is only one indicator of this.

Promises to the effect that the re-entry will face a cut-off of one kind or another “by Christmas” only serves to underline the gulf between the productive economy, with all its physical threats as opposed to the politico-bureaucratic one in which threats are reputational.

On one side of this divide is a now long abandoned mine with its deteriorating structure and its accumulated methane.

On the other side, the political ambition to showcase not only a mineral villain, but ideally one or two human ones as well.

Gauche handling of France’s Gauche contrasts with New Zealand premier’s adroit Coup Politique

When Jacinda Ardern shut in the support of her Labour-led coalition government’s ideological left wing support she did so quickly, effortlessly, decisively and effectively.

When Francis’ president Emmanuel Macron tried to the same thing with his eco-ideologues he ignited a carboniferous subterranean smouldering fire akin to those that plague the sites of abandoned mine workings.

The New Zealand Labour government swiftly bonded in its liberal political and media class wing at the outset of its administration with the proclamation of its ban on oil and gas prospecting.

It knew that this bold appeal to high-minded university campus grade purity of thought was going to weld into the Labour-led coalition the climatist movement.

The bold decisiveness of the Labour’s handling of this lock-in contrasts with that of French president Emmanuel Macron.

He was presented at the outset of his presidency with much the same problem in handling the liberal political class base which was responsible for putting him into the Elysees Palace.

In contrast he mishandled the same problem.

The result of this fumbling is there for all to see in, for example, the Gilets Jaunes displays.

These routine and scheduled riots are the result of president Macron’s gauche handling of his own gauche in seeking to apply his own dithering solution to the same problem, that of disarming the fashionable, activist left.

The problem of locking in its media and political class ideological support base was solved by New Zealand’s Labour – led coalition in a military manner that incorporated stealth, deception and surprise to achieve a fait accompli.

The stealth was that discussion about it was limited and restricted and thus there were no leaks.

The surprise was that the oil industry believed that an exploration cloture would be the subject of a fairly prolonged “conversation.”

The deception was that instead of being announced at some environmental summit the scheme was announced to a student gathering.

The decisive delivery was to deliver the anti prospecting proclamation without any warning so early in its term and before the lobbies had the time to do anything about it.

Confronted by this same problem and the same opportunity president Macron in contrast allowed his strategy to become attenuated, drift out of his own hands and thus missed the decisive symbolic moment so deftly exploited by his New Zealand counterpart.

His poor delegation of the problem allowed it fester which had the effect of the accelerating agitation of this noisy ideological base which in France hits in addition to the television studios, the streets for additional theatre value.

President Macron belatedly sought to please this base with its shared and unifying belief in man made global warming and did so with a series of appeasing and symbolic taxation reshuffles.

These were viewed by France’s always restive blue collar, productive, classes as an attempt by president Macron to appease his elitist class support base and do so at the expense of the working classes, this in a nation ultra sensitive to its elites profiting at the expense of the non-privileged.

President Macron‘s decision to increase fuel taxes was viewed as placating the privileged at the expense of the workers

Another move to cater for this elite class was to symbolically reduce France’s speed limit for the benefit of the climatists.

The Gilets Jaunes followed, seemingly unstoppable.

The New Zealand Labour-led coalition’s blunt proclamation sans any trade-offs serves as a standard in the management of the political class and its expectations.

Mr Macron remains mired in his environmental morass in spite of concession after concession.

Current conversations pointedly focus on eliminating the select few universities, notably ENA, that nurture the political class elites that president Macron had so ardently tried to court.

Should France’s Ecole National d’Administration survive the current purge, then a suitable case for study in one of its new classless classes might be the virtuous self-flagellating groupthink in two nations that led the way in renewable energy.

New Zealand did so in hydro electric power, and France with nuclear energy.

New rendition of definite article debuts in television dialect, describes “thuh” Anzac……

A panel on public and official pronunciation convened by MSC Newswire uncovered what it describes as six categories of routine spoken language abuse by professional broadcasters. They are:-

- Handling of the vowel sound “e” in a generalised context in which the word air so often emerged from broadcasters as “ear.”

- Emergence of the definite article now pronounced as “thuh” before words beginning with a vowel

- Latin-language tendency to emphasise second syllable of certain words

- “Ts” rendered as Ds

- Missing syllables

- Protest used without being followed by “against.”

In its second sitting a variety of words and phrases used by broadcasters that employed a non-standard delivery falling far-wide of received and even common usage.

Other examples were bed rendered to sound like “beard” and bear, as in bearing up, sounding like “beering up.”

“Fear” was routinely substituted for “fair” or “fare” and often rendered vice versa. Hair emerged as hear.

Bed rendered as “beard” was also singled out.

Similarly the name of the fruit pear emerged to sound like pier or peer (of the realm)

It was routine to hear about the damage inflicted on society by “six” abuse.

These were the most frequent half-dozen vowel abuses inflicted by broadcasters on their listeners.

The panel claimed however that it had unearthed a new and startlingly systemic departure from accepted usage that had swept through broadcasting in just the past few months.

The panel observed that the definite article was increasingly being delivered as “ther” or “thuh” in front of words starting with a vowel.

The most routine example was a morning independent television magazine programme described by the show itself as “ther” AM Show.

Other renditions in the thuh or ther category before a vowel included “ther” EU; “ther” average and “ther” emphasis, and ther Easter holidays, and most recently still, thuh Anzac day……………

This was an abrupt and still unacknowledged change in spoken English, and deserved to be analysed by academia, according to the panel which confessed to being flummoxed how the common use of “thee” prior to a vowel sound had so abruptly shifted to the non-elided ther/thuh.

“Thuh” only reason for this the panel could discern at this stage was a still unidentified but influential avatar.

The panel also identified as prevalent in the New Zealand broadcasting argot the romance or Latin-based language formula of emphasising the second vowel as dominant, notably in the delivery of the word health to sound like “halth.”

The squished or swallowed “i” sound substituting for the extended “e” sound was again noted by the panel in a word such as wreckage delivered as “rickige.”

Alternately the word wreckage emerged as wreakage,

Another curious and routine romance language rendering was that of the word prayer as “prier.”

The panel claimed that government, public sector, broadcasters were there to show an example and especially so as New Zealand’s tertiary education was increasingly funded by foreign students paying substantial fees to learn English as a second language.

For example the elision of the words “try to” do this or that emerging as “tryder” was instantly understood by native speakers, said the panel, but was unintelligible to second language students who required substantial context to understand it.

The panel was mildly tolerant of various mangled sayings such as “hone in,” for home-in and in something “playing” (preying) on someone’s mind.

It was similarly inclined to be tolerant in the misuse of more complex words such as “expousing” for espousing.

The panel singled out for urgent attention by state broadcasting administrators the correct usage of the verb to protest which was routinely applied in a way that delivered the opposite of the intended meaning.

By itself protest means support.

Broadcasters routinely used it to mean the opposite i.e. condemn.

Protest requires the addition of the word “against” to deliver the desired negative, condemnatory meaning.

Otherwise it proclaimed positivity as in protesting the innocence of someone.

The panel however dismissed the “lazy lips” omission of the first syllable of the rendering of the word police (pleece) as irritating but trivial in that non native speakers still picked up the meaning through context.

In its first report the panel identified what is described as the near-standard, even de facto received, use of the word “woman” to describe in New Zealand a collection of them.

Survivors will seek redress from those who are dead, or, who soon will be

New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care poses unlimited financial liability to public funds.

This is because the historic claims unit which handles compensation claims has been instructed to “cooperate” with, and “support” the Commission.

The historic claims unit is under the umbrella of the Ministry of Social Development.

It is in the business of making what it describes as “payment offers” meaning compensation.

An initial budget of $160 million was initially associated with the Royal Commission.

Now, a year and a half after its inauguration, and at which time its proceedings remain stalled, this is said to have shrunk to half this amount.

It is unclear if this sum is net of estimated compensation payments, or includes them.

When New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition took office it quickly delivered electoral obligations due to certain select constituencies, supporting groups

One of these was to the victim culture swirling around juvenile care and those responsible for administering it, and above all to allow the “survivors” their retributive public voice.

The fact that the Royal Commission scheme was implemented so soon after the arrival of the Labour-led coalition government does indicate though that the previous National government, similarly besieged by the highly organised “survivors,” was doubtful about its unforeseen consequences.

This unlimited liability inherent in the Royal Commission’s procedures has been shrouded in a variety of distractions, notably the sectarian one.

Similarly shrouded is the extent to which the coalition government’s departmental officials, those responsible for estimating things like risk and gross liability, were stampeded by the rush to implement the inquiry.

The Royal Commission’s area of investigation is from 1950 to 2000.

This means it will be reviewing events of 70 years ago.

This in turn means that the “network” as it is often described, of the “survivors” will be seeking redress from those who are dead, or, who soon will be.

Should the accused in loco parentis carers have themselves survived the timescale, many are likely to be of such infirmity as to be unable to defend themselves.

There are many reasons why the watchdogs both within the government, and outside it, notably the press, are silent on this Royal Commission and the unlimited taxpayer liabilities it is likely to set in motion.

The increasing delicacy of it is only one reason.

Continuing Social licence to motorbike gangs imperils control legislation

New Zealand’s numerous motor bike gangs represent the remaining stronghold of an accepted and even encouraged male dominated hierarchy, and one that is known to be singularly brutish.

These gangs are actively encouraged by progressive society for their adherence to tribalism.

These same gangs will now seek to spike the nation’s drastic new gun laws in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosques shooting catastrophe.

Successive governments have stepped as cautiously around the motorbike gangs as they have stepped with hitherto extreme trepidation around dealing with the nation’s gun proliferation.

Attempts to strengthen New Zealand’s gun-control laws have failed in parliament four times over the past 20 years.

Similarly, these same parliaments have shied away from imposing common law on the gangs since they began flexing their outlaw sinews in the early 1970s and prompted a placatory instead of an enforcement response.

Between then and now these gangs generated a service industry dedicated to divining their deeper purpose in a parallel growth sector in the social sciences.

New Zealand has more gang members than it has members of the professional military.

In the international gang context they share a similarity to their Mediterranean counterparts in being as rooted in rural areas as they are in cities.

This dispersal gives them another shared characteristic with that of the cosa nostra in that they abide by their own laws with the common law intruding only in extreme instances in which the public demands that steps be taken.

The artillery of the academia-based socio-political support base is at some variance with the horror that the gangs in full echelon inspire in the rest of the population.

With their full head and sleeve tattoos and gunning the unmuffled engines of their big capacity motorbikes the road gangs are the antithesis of the nation’s underpinning method and order.

Neither is the gang involvement in quasi-militia roles reassuring, notably their recent one in ringing Christchurch’s besieged mosques in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe.

When the gangs began to hit their straps in the 1970s, the official view was that the outbreak was transient, that participants would tire of it, and that the television lights would dim.

In the event much that officialdom did instead fuelled the gangs including the highway law enforcement transition from British to Japanese motorbikes which flooded the market with well- maintained second hand Nortons.

It is now said that the gangs are sidelining their standover ways in favour of migrating their activities into business enterprises of various descriptions.

This prospect reinforces another tacit exculpatory reason for the official social licence extended to the gangs which adds up to the notion that “at least they are visible.”

The government knows that its time frame of atonement, its bringing-together moment, is a diminishing asset in legislative terms.

An indicator was that within the same month as the Christchurch catastrophe a gun importer buying group saw it timely for a mass mail drop promoting repeating firearms.

The government knows that it treads on a common law minefield in extending any more slack to the gangs, or even upholding the present degree of social licence to them.

New faction will challenge ideologues, political class elites, on behalf of ratepayers

Wellington City Council is accused of using the “perilously unrealistic“ promise of extensive cycling lanes and cycle access routes as a “symbolic” appeal in order to attract at the local body elections later this year what a new electoral lobby describes as “ideologically- inclined” voters.

According to the newly formed Wellington First electoral lobby the council fixation on cycling will see swept away 600 CBD carparks in order to establish cycling only lanes.

This loss is in addition to the “at least” 900 CBD car parking building slots already lost due to earthquakes or the threat of them.

Wellington First also insists that the Wellington City Council intends to drive an already sanctioned official cycleway in the city’s relatively flat southern suburbs all the way through to the central city.

As a result of this the lobby claims that inner city peak time traffic already routinely stalled for “30 minutes” will be held up for even longer.

The lobby claims that activists have already “sabotaged” any prospect of speeding up access between the CBD and the southern suburbs by causing to be abandoned various major works at the Basin Reserve/Mt Victoria tunnel bottleneck.

The lobby says it intends to field a council slate at the local body elections in October

Contrary to what it describes as the climatist vote-courting “propaganda” put out by the council, cycling as commuter transport, is in fact only used by what it described as a “determined minority,” simply because of the capital’s hostile hilly layout, and trademark strong winds.

Wellington First reserved its harshest criticism for what it describes as the Wellington City Council’s blatant “cultural misappropriation.”

In hi-jacking this virtue-signalling code term, Wellington First explains that the council has “deliberately and misleadingly” sought to put Wellington in the same cycling framework as Copenhagen (pictured top).

In contrast to flat Copenhagen, New Zealand’s capital Wellington (pictured at bottom) adheres to a hill-girt bay and features narrow, twisting two-way streets that present extreme danger to cyclists.

Additionally, Wellington's average wind speed is 22 kph, while Copenhagen, is only half that at 12.9kph

Wellington First describes itself as a party and its mainstays are Bryan Weyburne and Digby Paape, both long term civic commercial figures.

Mr Paape is described as chairman of the action group.

Mr Weyburne is a former two term Wellington City Councillor who was responsible for founding the Rates Reform electorate faction which came to power in Wellington and its neighbouring territorial local authority, Lower Hutt City.

Wellington First appears to be a single issue group dedicated to countering what it describes as the move led by the City Council’s governing bloc to “covertly” pander to “ elitist ideological” voters and at the expense of ratepayers.

Messrs Weyburne and Paape of Wellington First, say that they will name their full council ticket soon.

They declined to divulge names at this stage.

Their immediate purpose they claim is to intercept and expose Wellington City Council’s underpinning and unstated electoral strategy.

They say that the council’s scheme is a subtle one.

It is to take advantage of a pervasive fear among citizens of being viewed as being unsympathetic to Green-leaning assertions, however “impractical or even dangerous” these claims might in the event be.

Wellington First has no connection with the New Zealand First Party which is in a Parliamentary governing coalition with the Green Party and the Labour Party.

New Zealand a pioneer in Big Data surveillance technology

A Royal Commission of Inquiry will be convened in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosques atrocity.

In the short term also there will be departmental inquiries to evaluate who knew what and when?

Among the issues, the questions, in the longer term inquiry, the Royal Commission and also in the more immediate departmental inquiries are:-

- Was the suspect identified as a consistent user of extremist social media sites, and if so, when?

- Was the suspect’s application for gun license approval and his subsequent acquisition of the approved weaponry at any time matched with any extremist site visits?

- Was the suspect’s visit to North Korea, a nation with which New Zealand is still technically at war, and attested by the photo posting, registered by surveillance agencies in connection with the granting of the gun license approval?

- Was the suspect’s peripatetic lifestyle and absence of visible means of support and over a long period of time in terms of not having a job, permanent or otherwise, registered prior to the granting of the gun approval?

- Were the suspect’s finances investigated at any time and in relation to the weaponry acquisitions in terms of money transfers and deposits and especially the source of these?

In the background of all this is the question of the security agencies and the degree to which they were, and are, confined and hobbled in their operations by legislated privacy restrictions – and in the more abstract sense, human rights ideals.

Information technology and its application naturally follows on the heels of this.

Big data refers to the method in which information from every conceivable electronic source including social media is run through an analytic sieve in order to pin point departures, exceptions, from a pre-defined norm.

Under this approach the suspect’s gun licence application procedure might have exposed:-

- Visitations to certain social media sites

- Absence of visible means of support i.e. a job

- That he was in fact a loner i.e. absence of postings showing the suspect with other people in the conventional context of a male in their late 20s.

Using this example and if the above had rung bells this same approach might have run the suspect’s financial transactions though this same sieve in order to discover where his money was coming from?

Similarly, the issue will be raised at some stage during all these deliberations to the effect: was it known if the suspect sought treatment at any stage from medical clinicians, and if so why?

These last two points will be intensively relevant to the various ensuing inquiries.

New Zealand was a pioneer in what is now described as big data and data mining.

The National Law Enforcement Database in Wanganui was opened in 1976.

It featured a modus operandi routine which allowed investigators to sort through suspects and persons of interest based on the suspects’ known preferred criminal techniques and instruments.

Coincidentally, the world’s major security/surveillance technology supplier now is Palantir which is controlled by New Zealand part-time resident Peter Thiel.

New Zealand’s own entry into this growth market was the launch on the NZX of Wynyard Group which owed its roots to the same programme-generation technology that had proved so successful in the Anglo-New Zealand crime fighting networking installed at Wanganui.

Wynyard in a reprise of New Zealand being either too early or too late in electronics, dismayingly rapidly faded from the NZX, and the security enforcement market.

Royal Commissions and the promise of them have the immediate effect of drawing the sting, acting as a symbolic salve, in instances when the public is considered to have cause to believe that it has been ill-served by the institutions that are supposed to be acting on their behalf, in this instance, watching over them.

Even so the immediate run of departmental investigations will render practical information in the shorter and therefore much more useful term.

Covert surveillance in New Zealand hampered by layers of privacy ethics compliance

New Zealand security agencies have long been vigilant in following up insurgency and from any source or ethnic category.

This had become evident during the 1990s when the agencies had been notably vigilant on any indication of entering New Zealand anyone in the supremacist category, claimed National Press Club president Peter Isaac talking to Greytown Lions.

In this the New Zealand agencies followed the lead of their United States homeland security counterparts which had become preoccupied by the emergence during the 1990s of the survivalism threat most notably in the form of the Unabomber and also the one from the alienated supremacists of which the most horrific outcome was the Oklahoma federal building bombing.

This focus on alienation and survivalism had obscured the developing series of events which led to 911 and the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

When the first attack on this structure was launched in 1993 the trail was insufficiently followed just because at this time the focus was on disaffected whites.

This same diversified focus came to light only much later here following events surrounding Kim Dotcom.

Kim was, and still is, wanted by the United States on copyright infringement grounds

Yet he had sustained a military style assault on his Auckland home and it was proved that he had been investigated by the government’s eavesdropping agency, the GCSB.

The Kim Dotcom affair can be viewed now as causing security agencies to become enmeshed in a web of ethical restraints in regard to the surveillance of locals and those from overseas residing in New Zealand.

The episode with its continuing consent consequences had though demonstrated the willingness of New Zealand’s counter insurgency agencies to work with their foreign counterparts.

Even so this advantage was neutralised in regard to the Christchurch mosque shootings simply because the suspect had no previous brushes anywhere with law enforcement authorities beyond road traffic notices.

This close cross-surveillance had yielded no clues on the mosque suspect Brenton Tarrant just because he had no police record anywhere in terms of violence or threatened violence.

The only tangible footprint was the photo Tarrant had posted of himself in North Korea with what appeared to be his official guides (see above).

Only this rendered him as a person of interest.

Isaac noted that investigators will follow Tarrant’s money trail conundrum centred on how someone from a self-admitted everyday background and without any job had been able to criss-cross the world at will and in some comfort and been able to pay for things like rent and cars and computers and also weaponry and club memberships.

He cautioned the medley of media commentators on dwelling upon any imagined security agency failings.

The Security Intelligence Service and Government Communications Security Bureau could in fact have already intercepted and foiled insurgency attacks from any quarter, but be prevented from crowing about it in order to protect their channels.

Isaac advised the media gallery and associated “commentariat” to pull back from encouraging let alone “stoking” any notion at all that the vast and genuine outpouring of grief somehow exempted the nation as a whole from a perception of involvement with the mosque atrocities here, and thus collective involvement.

Isaac concurred though with the media concensus to the effect that the nation’s lax regulations on guns of all description needed to be drastically tightened up.

But he pointed out that gun regulation was often regarded by the gun owner population which is considered to be around the quarter million mark as a single-issue electoral matter.

Knowing this, politicians trod gingerly around imposing draconian restrictions, a delicacy also engendered by the sporting popularity of firearms.

He disagreed on grounds of unenforceability with imposing restrictions on social media a category that in the aftermath of the mosque atrocity has found itself sharing the same obloquy as automatic rifles.

Social media could not be “squeezed back into the bottle,” he said. As a consumer technology it could only be replaced by “something else.”

Social media he noted followed the path of all new technologies of following a 40 year development time trajectory from initial acceptance to a pervasive presence.

This had been the case with electricity, telephones and cars among others and was replicated by social media which had begun in the United States as DARPANET, a military networking research project and which underpinned the file sharing that enabled social media.

.Isaac, who compiled an early computing text book, “Computing in New Zealand,” noted his own amazement at the righteous indignation of “otherwise perfectly sensible people” when they discovered that their “proudly posted” travel details, shopping outings, restaurant meals, pet photos, school sports days and office outings had all been subsequently acquired in the service of market research.

Isaac had been due to talk to the Lions club about pioneering Greytown newspaperman Richard Wakelin now acknowledged as New Zealand’s first professional journalist in that he had no political or pamphleteering axe to grind.

Wakelin’s successor running the Wairarapa Standard was William Nation, who founded Arbor Day in Greytown, and thus the Green movement.

Nation died in 1930.

Had he lived to practise half a century later, in 1980, Nation would still have been at home with the technology at that time and also with its also application, conjectured Isaac.

Isaac sheeted home the advent of the “pervasiveness” of social media to the epoch between 2004 and 2006 which saw the rapid fire appearance of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

This trio of “disruptive” technologies had conclusively ripped away from the hands of career journalists the last restraining gateways to mass access.

This technologies washed away the journalistic guarantor status held since Richard Wakelin’s era just because practitioners found torn out of their hands their traditional responsibility of quality control in the matter of verifying and calibrating degrees of truth.

China-Antarctic global authority chilled out of Women anniversary Pantheon

Off-message academic professor Anne-Marie Brady found herself out in the cold at the official celebrations centred on International Women's Day.

Professor Brady challenges and questions the policy of successive governments over China.

This China fixation the professor claims represents a posture that puts New Zealand in danger of following in the footsteps of Albania, the Balkan nation which remains impoverished in spite of long being under the economic aegis of China.

Professor Brady points out that China’s policy is to use its resident nationals to influence governments in seeing things from the Beijing point of view.

Internationally, and especially at the Woodrow Wilson Centre research base in Washington, she is acknowledged also for her work in Antarctic geopolitics.

Recent books include The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge) and China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

In a series of investigative treatises Professor Brady discarded the conventional tautology common to such published endeavours and in plain language revealed chapter and verse on Beijing’s tactics applied in New Zealand in order to secure favourable political influence.

Having staked its economic future on China this is a policy interpretation that the current New Zealand government wishes to distance itself from.

Professor Brady believes that as a consequence of her China activity revelations that her home and office have been burgled and her car sabotaged.

She has asked the New Zealand government to provide extra security for herself and her family.

She is a full professor and her status as a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Centre, part of the Smithsonian Institution, means that in her additional capacity as a linguist she is listened to where it matters.

Professor Brady remains a lightning rod for contrary views about economic reliance on China at a time when the New Zealand government must straddle the United States – China chill on Huawei’s presence as a telecoms supplier.

It must also keep the faith with Beijing over for example Chinese fresh water bottling operations in New Zealand at a time when water activists seek to close them down

Labour governments until now could rely on university academics for unquestioning and unreserved approbation in foreign policy..