Political and cultural freedom in New Zealand has reached its most vulnerable point in history

In the past week writ large across the world, we have seen how millions of people have protested extradition laws in Hong Kong. This would allow Hong Kong authorities to extradite Hong Kong residents to China for crimes they have committed instead of being tried in Hong Kong.

Political and cultural freedom in New Zealand has reached its most vulnerable point in history
New Zealand enjoys a free trade agreement with China and cultural, demographic and historical connections – but at what cost?

Why the uproar? Because China has an absolutely atrocious human rights record of torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands to millions of people, sending them to forced labour camps and also harvesting prisoners’ organs for a black market trade in organ transplants. On a more visible scale they oppress all forms of religious worship in China. The western media do cover these stories intermittently. The PRC recently black-listed Wikipedia from their version of the sanitised internet and they are ever-vigilant of their citizens on state-controlled WeChat.

Human Harvest: a documentary about organ harvesting in China

As often happens, ripples of the protests in Hong Kong reverberated across the Pacific. The pageantry of international politics between New Zealand and China was played out in miniature in Aotearoa.  

In 2010, the New Zealand government’s (then) Minister for Justice Amy Adams gave the green light several times to extraditing a New Zealander/Chinese man (Kyung Yup Kim accused of murder in Shanghai in 2009) back to China.

The Court of Appeal in New Zealand then quashed the request from the National government three times. It ruled that the Minister for Justice Amy Adams had too readily and easily accepted the PRC’s request to extradite the accused man.

Political and cultural freedom in New Zealand has reached its most vulnerable point in history
New Zealand enjoys a free trade agreement with China and cultural, demographic and historical connections – but at what cost?

The Minister of Justice is asked to return Mr Kim to a country that has a criminal justice system very different to our own, that has not committed to relevant international instruments in the way or to the extent that New Zealand has – a country in which, it is reliably reported, torture remains widespread … New Zealand has obligations under international law to refuse to return a person to a jurisdiction in which they will be substantial risk of torture, or they will not receive a fair trial. Otago Daily Times.

Again this is a win for New Zealand regarding this one case, but how long can New Zealand hold out with its legal system, when its cultural and economic prosperity is so intricately linked with China?  

A clear trend is happening in the Pacific region, of China strong-arming smaller independent nation-states (Taiwan and Hong Kong) along with larger Western nations like Australia and New Zealand.

Why then is all of this overt power play not gaining any media traction in New Zealand? The two major commercial news sources in New Zealand – Stuff and New Zealand Herald are too preoccupied with stories about fluffy vacuous nonsense about Megan Markle’s body language and reality TV shows. Critical stories about issues that will affect every New Zealander and this country’s future get buried among absolute trash.  

Is there a reason for this white-washing of real issues in the New Zealand media? A darker perspective would posit that the media are attempting to keep people ignorant and placid in the face of international tensions and a looming war that could be ignited at any moment between any of the international players of Iran, US, China, Russia and how this would play out for the average person living in New Zealand.

A kinder perspective of the New Zealand media would involve trotting out a few mediocre retorts: ‘We are simply giving the audience what they want’ or ‘It’s the only way to maintain profitability for our struggling media outlet in the age of the internet’. Yawn. A complete cop-out!

The New Zealand’s media are (as they have always been) reflecting a back to us a lotus eater’s paradise, devoid of any real substance and depth. A place where we can all slip off into a narcotic-induced sleep of blissful ignorance about what is going on with our neighbours and also the changing political and cultural landscape within New Zealand.  

According to the New Zealand Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT). The government have a China Capable Public Sector program:

The China Capable Public Sector (CCPS) programme is a whole-of-government initiative to develop a China savvy public sector with China awareness, knowledge, experience, and leadership both internationally and domestically to engage effectively with China. This exciting initiative is led by MFAT in strong partnership with agency leaders across the public sector.  MFAT

From this we can extrapolate who pulls the strings both at home and abroad.

Given China’s clearly non-democratic justice and legal system, opaque treatment of prisoners and complete lack of an independent media, their online white-washing of the Tiananmen Square massacre –this level of influence isn’t something New Zealand should boast about.

Fashion’s most and least ethical brands – 2018 edition 

According to Baptist World Aid Australia, here are a list of fashion’s most ethical brands and least ethical brands.

There are a lot of parameters in which to judge a brand as being ethical. For the purpose of this article, an ethical fashion brand is defined and graded according to the systems and processes they have in place in factories. These policies and systems can either protect the rights of workers in the supply chain against exploitation, child labour and forced labour. Or, the bad and unethical brands may engage in these nefarious and shameful practices. Although the degree to which fashion brands are exploitative is a sliding scale.

The grading by Baptist World Aid helps consumers to make informed decisions about the origins of their clothes, shoes and homewares. This then influences the practices of the brand itself by exerting pressure on the brands to improve their practices. This isn’t an exhaustive list, these are the brands that are the best and worst of them. For the full list and to check your favourite brand, visit Baptist World Aid.

MOST ETHICAL FASHION BRANDS ( Rated: A+ TO B-)

Adidas

American Apparel

ASOS

Audrey Blue

Barely There

Bonds

C9 by Champion

Cotton On

COuntry Road

Gap

Gear for Sports

Glassons

Hanes

Jump

Kathmandu

Kmart

Liminal Apparel

New Balance

Nudie Jeans

Outland Denim

Patagonia

Reebok

SABA 

Sheridan

Sportscraft

Supre

Target

The North Face

Trenery

Timberland

Witchery

Wonderbra

LEAST ETHICAL FASHION BRANDS (Rated D to F)

AS Colour

Airflex

Abercrombie & Fitch

Atmos&Here

Bardot

Barkers

Basque

Bloch

Blue Illusion

Boohoo

Coco Beach

Decjuba

Diana Ferrari

Dotti

Farmers

Hollister

Jump

Karen Walker

Lacoste

Lowes

Liz Jordan

Mink Pink

Ralph Lauren

Rockmans

Roger David

Seed

Simon De Winter

Somedays Lovin

Supersoft by Diana Ferrari 

TEMT

Table Eight

Trelise Cooper

Uniqlo

Valley Girl

Wallis

Wish

yd.

See the full list here.

Also – choose clothing made from natural fabrics.

If you want to support brands that have a light carbon footprint on the natural environment, you should select clothing made from natural fibres. This means buying clothing made from silk, cotton, linen, wool and hemp. This means that the clothing will break down when put into landfill. However clothing made from synthetic fibres or a combination of natural and synthetic fibres will take thousands of years to break down and cause massive problems for the ever-growing landfills of the world and for future generations.

Clothing made of natural fibres is often more pricey than clothing made from synthetic fibres, because the manufacturing process is more intensive for natural fibre. Although, one benefit of buying natural clothing is the ‘feel’ of it against your skin. Nothing beats linen, silk or cotton against your skin, it undoubtably feels right and comfortable. Synthetics simply don’t have the same comfort as natural fabrics. Also you are doing something wonderful for the world by buying in this way. Let me know below if this information has helped you at all with your decision-making processes.

Every Picture Tells A Story: Auckland by Night Part 2

Our new camera got a big work out on our night walks through the eastern suburbs. This looks towards the city centre and with a huge zoom on the camera we were able to capture the night-time hustle and bustle of the Ports of Auckland. A constant fixture of background activity is always going on there and I have always found ports and the moving of containers somehow hypnotic and satisfying. It’s like watching a game of tetris played by giant machines.

Every Picture Tells A Story: Auckland by Night Part 2

Every Picture Tells A Story: Auckland by Night 1

Every night I was going for a massive walk along Tamaki Drive in Auckland, a long stretch of beach-side road. It was very atmospheric at night and had a sense of eerie abandonment. This bridge in between Orakei and Mission Bay once was a ferry terminal until the 1960’s but is now an old fishing jetty where men congregate every night and cast out lines.

Every Picture Tells A Story: Auckland by Night 1

What Montaigne And Deep Sea Aliens Teach Us About Humanity

Philosopher Michel de Montaigne lived in a time (the 16th century) when nobody batted an eyelid at the ritual murder and wholesale destruction of people, natural environments and cultures – let alone animals. Yet he was shocked and disgusted at these horrors.

He was undoubtedly a kind and gentle man. An anomaly for his time. He thought that we owed all living things small acts of kindness and empathy. From life and death situations, to the trivial everyday encounters that make up our lives.

There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, some mutual obligation. – Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)

What Montaigne And Deep Sea Aliens Teach Us About Humanity
Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne loved animals and found great pleasure in socialising and playing with them.

I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time. – Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)

Montaigne entertained his dog because he can empathise with it and understand it’s need to banish restlessness and to have fun.

One of the reasons that Montaigne has such enduring affect on the way people see things in the 21st century, is that he is interested in the innate intelligence and consciousness of all beings.

He believed that it’s a danger to treat humans and animals as a collective or a group. In reality, it’s the individual who is more important.

He then takes this insight further to include politics. As though an uncanny predictor of the future, he said that the world sinks into barbarism when we don’t make room for small individual selves.

With Montaigne in mind, let us now take a trip into the alternate universe of the remote ocean.

The head of an octopus resembles a translucent scrotum sac. It’s eyes are unblinking and alien, and it has three hearts that pump copper rather than iron-based blood. So it’s probably the least human-like of any animal on the planet. Yet, it may surprise you that an Octopus is equally as intelligent if not more intelligent than a dog.

Below is the stunningly beautiful Indonesian Mimic Octopus that looks very similar to a Bridget Riley painting.

  • What Montaigne And Deep Sea Aliens Teach Us About Humanity
  • What Montaigne And Deep Sea Aliens Teach Us About Humanity

In The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson talks about an experiment carried out with common octopuses. Individual octopuses faced five doors. Only one door had a crab behind it (their favourite food). Each door had a unique symbol on it. After a few tries, the octopus recognised the correct symbol and opened up the right door to get at the food. If the crab is placed behind a door with a new symbol on it, the octopus quickly learns the new symbol.

Henderson also mentions an even more remarkable study. About a group of octopuses that watched an individual octopus going through a maze. When members of the spectator group then took on the maze, they solved problems in the maze a lot quicker than other octopuses that have not been trained.

In this clip, an octopus manages to work out how to untie and open a food canister locked in three different chains, all the while fending off an opportunistic shark.

Foiled by an octopus … from Lauren De Vos on Vimeo.

Octopuses have developed a sophisticated level of intelligence that’s similar to humans, but developed completely independently (an example of convergent evolution). Our last common ancestor was a slug-like creature alive 540 million years ago. We are more closely related to starfish than to the octopus.

Biologist Jennifer Mather, author of the amazing book Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate, suggests that octopuses don’t have a complete consciousness like humans, but they do have primary consciousness that combines memories and perception. They can build up a coherent feeling about what’s happening to them at any given time.

These highly intelligent beings are tragically the subject of live eating rituals in Asia. Given what the octopus knows and understands, and its capacity for feeling, memory and thought. It doesn’t seem right that humans eat octopus. Far from being a lowly and stupid cephalopod, they are remarkable creatures that deserve our respect and attempts at understanding.

We should allow ourselves fantastical moments where we slide out of our own minds and experience the world from an octopus’ point of view. Montaigne would wholeheartedly approve, and he has been right about so many things.

These small acts of understanding and compassion are the only hope that we can have for the future of the world.

Discover More…

Michel de Montaigne’s Essay: Of Cruelty

Discover Magazine: Through the Eyes of an Octopus

Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate

Orion Magazine: Inside the Mind of an Octopus

Gather up the night: An eerie hotel causes confusion on Melbourne’s Eastlink freeway

As an occasional driver along the Eastlink in Melbourne, I have had the odd experience of passing a hotel with no trace of human habitation around it. A hotel completely devoid of people and life and yet that lights up in a unique configuration of lights from fake windows each night.

Located in Melbourne’s south east, the fake hotel cost $1.2 million to erect and inside of its hollow and empty walls there resides nothing but dark shadows and clever folly. The hotel is 20 metres tall, 12m long and 5m in height, lending it an impossible cardboard box configuration.

Designed by local Victorian artist Callum Morton, he likens his Hotel to a parallel universe that had formed the basis of his art for a number of years. “Motorists will view it from their cars as an actual hotel, and perhaps over time as a strangely de-scaled prop that has escaped the theme park or film set. In this world things appear in unlikely contexts in oddly altered forms, as if they have been pushed down a portal from the recent past and popped out mistakenly in this time and place,” says Morton.

The hotel comes out of the monotonous and hypnotic freeway landscape like a surreal apparition. It could be a legimitate building, but then on a second glance, the dimensions and bleak nothingness of the field surrounding it, the perfect rectangular symmetry. The hotel suddenly becomes improbable and ominous, abandoned and post-apocalyptic in scale.

Everything that is eerie and lonely and unglamorous about roadside accommodation is summed up in this almost life size sculpture. It’s more Bates Motel than Sheraton. It reminds me of something in a Simon Stalenhag painting. If by bad luck we were granted entry to the Hotel, then we may be welcomed by twins in matching outfits and blood splashing down the walls.

“I think it’s kind of interesting how putting something in a space that is slightly beguiling or is a little bit strange, how that maybe changes the way people think about art or practice Callum Morton

Another of Callum’s intriguing works

Read more about Callum Morton

I’ve got a life-long obsession with places that have a trap door into another world, paper cities, future metropolises, fake food, abandoned towns and much more.

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes

These photos by Ed Freeman all elicit a deep sense of alienation and a weird sort of fascination. They underline questions that we want answered. What happened here? Who lived here? How did these places fall into disrepair?

Through the atrophy of the material world we can get this uncomfortable sense that we’re all destined for flux, termination and migration. Everything that we build to comfort ourselves is only temporary and literally built on the shifting sands.

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes
On the border of Nevada and California, near Death Valley

 Ed Freeman Image Source

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes

  Ed Freeman Image Source

Photographer Ed Freeman has had an interesting life. He worked for many years in in the music industry; as the road manager on the Beatles’ last tour. He also composed orchestral arrangements for Carly Simon and Cher, and produced Don McLean’s American Pie.

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes
The Do Drop Inn on Route 66

 Ed Freeman Image Source

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes
A temporary house built during WWII in Trona with strange wood panelling

Ed Freeman Image Source

These derelict properties in the desert and byways of Southern California show that Ed Freeman also an immensely talented photographer.

Abandoned Desert Buildings On Creepy Lunar Landscapes
A house in Nyland California

 Ed Freeman Image Source

All of these haunting images are available for purchase at Ed Freeman’s website

I hope you like these images, keep me in the know of any other cool abandoned buildings you find online…

Wild Woman Quote: Don’t wait

Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.
Anne Lamott

Every picture tells a story: Harajuku girls go all freaky

I came across this lovely graffiti on a wall outside of a shop in Harajuku. Although you should also see this exquisite collection of quilts that was captured by Jonelle Patrick. The Japanese have an aesthetic sense that is far superior to most other places, I think.

Lovely graffiti in Harajuku © Content Catnip 2018 www.contentcatnip.com
Lovely graffiti in Harajuku © Content Catnip 2018 http://www.contentcatnip.com

Pagan Date: Samhain

In the southern hemisphere, today we celebrate the pagan new year or Samhain. This ancient gaelic word means Summer’s End.  On this date it’s a good time to reflect on and honour those that have come before us. It’s also a time to release anything that no longer serves you. 

Samhain

Incantation for ancestors 

This is the night when the gateway between
our world and the spirit world is thinnest.
Tonight is a night to call out those who came before.
Tonight I honor my ancestors.
Spirits of my fathers and mothers, I call to you,
and welcome you to join me for this night.
You watch over me always,
protecting and guiding me,
and tonight I thank you.
Your blood runs in my veins,
your spirit is in my heart,
your memories are in my soul.

Incantation to the gods of the underworld 

The harvest has ended, and the fields are bare.
The earth has grown cold, and the land is empty.
The gods of the death are lingering over us,
keeping a watchful eye upon the living.
They wait, patiently, for eternity is theirs.

Hail to you, Anubis! O jackal headed one,
guardian of the realm of the dead.
When my time comes, I hope
you may deem me worthy.

Hail to you, Demeter! O mother of darkness,
May your grief be abated
when your daughter returns once more.

Hail to you, Hecate! O keeper of the gate,
between this world and the underworld.
I ask that when I cross over,
you may guide me with wisdom.

Hail to you, Freya! O mistress of Folkvangr,
guardian of those who fall in battle.
Keep the souls of my ancestors with you.

Hail to you, O gods and goddesses,
those of you who guard the underworld
and guide the dead on their final journey.
At this time of cold and dark,
I honor you, and ask that you watch over me,
and protect me when the day arrives
that I take my final journey.