Black & White

Let me tell you about my Border Collie, Bess.

Bess is a big fluffy bear of a dog, not unlike one of those exfoliating balls you can buy for the shower. She is about eleven years old, which is not old by Collie standards, but old enough to give her the wisdom to know the difference between right and wrong.

Bess never does anything wrong. She has the gentlest and most generous of natures. Her main aim, after eating and sleeping, is to please. The slight tarnishing of the image and the reality is the alacrity with which she despatches rabbits on the farm—but that is a problem only for the rabbits. In all other respects, Bess wouldn’t hurt a fly, which accounts for the proliferation of flies and paucity of rabbits on the farm. She does patrol the road verge, which suggests a latent militarism, but is more a quest for butterflies with which to meld and bond. Bess’s world on the farm is provided by circumstance and fashioned by subservience. Don’t get me wrong: she is not forced to do anything; she just does anything…to please.

She likes me; I like her.

A week ago today, we both lost a mate. A great mate. No worries for Bess; her mate had left before and always come back. This time that won’t be happening. Bess is yet to realise that. But perhaps that’s best for Bess. Because when she does, I think it will likely take her some time to come to terms with. If ever.

In that, she is not alone.

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Warming to my task

I like debate, particularly when it is intelligent and witty as it so often was in central government in the times of Norman Kirk and David Lange, exquisite orators both. By contrast the debates to which I am most often exposed, those in the chambers of the Rodney District Council, are immature, facile, unproductive and, yes, embarrassing.

But they are not boring.

My God, if you want to know boring (though why would you?) you need go no further than a scientific debate. And there is no better example than Global Warming. I use capital letters here because Global Warming, the issue de jour, seems to have taken on a life of its own and become a substance and an entity without really trying and (germane to the debate) without any real proof of really existing.

Yet scientists and the media have embraced it with alacrity. The catalyst for all this is the release of a United Nations report, scientifically-based apparently, but predicated on the same computer models that consistently fail to forecast the next day’s weather. Previously United Nation reports commanding media attention include the revelation that we (New Zealanders) are smacking our children too much and that our poverty levels are reaching third-world status.

Who the hell researches and writes these UN reports, anyway?

That apart, the UN’s Global Warming report has pitted scientist against scientist and, encouraged and courted by the media, they have administered and admonished us with a plethora of profound and boringly prosaic pronouncements on the subject.

It is second only to the Super 14 as being the most boring contest of wills this year.

Let’s move on. The scientists have had their time in the sun.

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