This is edition 2026/127 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. Was This Corrections Case Settled to Avoid a Precedent?
Ani O’Brien — Thought Crimes
- 🔥 A female Corrections officer who “identifies as a man” (Herald: “Adam”) extracted an apology, confidential compensation and a policy rewrite after a Human Rights Commission complaint.
- 🛑 Corrections had barred Adam from rub-down searches of male prisoners; in late 2022 Adam began searches anyway until a senior officer stopped it; prisoners later complained; a Letter of Expectations called the actions “unlawful.”
- ⚖️ Settlement: staff may perform the “full range of duties that align with their gender” — meaning opposite-sex intimate searches can now follow self-ID.
- 🇬🇧 O’Brien contrasts the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 biological-sex ruling and Scotland’s return of male prisoners to male estates with NZ’s continued embedding of gender ideology.
- 🧾 Gender identity is not a listed ground in the Human Rights Act 1993; sex is — she says HRC/Crown Law lean on an untested 17-year-old legal opinion and preferred a quiet settlement over a public tribunal precedent.
- 🎯 Takeaway: NZ First’s Definitions of Woman and Man bill is essential; prisoner privacy must beat staff validation — and the HRC should face a hard legal challenge.
2. National… the Enemy Within?
Pee Kay — Brash & Mitchell / No Minister
- 🎭 Thesis: Labour talks co-governance loudly and often fails; National campaigns on universal rights then quietly embeds race-based institutions once in power.
- 💵 Bolger’s 1994 “Fiscal Envelope” $1b Treaty cap came with Tainui/Ngāi Tahu relativity clauses — top-ups now exceed $780 million.
- 🏗️ RMA 1991 (Simon Upton) locked Māori cultural consultation into resource consents — today a consultation-fee and effective veto culture.
- 🗳️ Electoral Act 1993 kept separate Māori seats against the Royal Commission’s advice and linked seat numbers to the Māori roll.
- 🐟 1992 Sealord deal bankrolled modern tribal corporate power; 2001 restructuring (under Shane Jones’ Waitangi Fisheries Commission) secured 100% Sealord quota control.
- 📜 Shipley’s Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998: statutory acknowledgements, conservation board seats, right of first refusal — “the precise moment National opened the floodgates to modern co-governance.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: the greatest threat to “one person, one vote” may not be the party voters fear — but the party they elect to protect it.
3. What Should We Do About Bad Arguments
A Halfling’s View — Reply to Simon Wilson
- 🗣️ Wilson’s Substack on Brian Tamaki opens “What an arsehole” — Halfling says that is a mood, not a case; contempt for an already-persuaded Auckland debating crowd is not analysis.
- ⚖️ Central non-sequitur: Tamaki said appalling things, was not arrested, therefore NZ needs stronger speech laws — but incitement is already a crime under the Crimes Act and Human Rights Act.
- 📚 Wilson’s own examples (Dave Dobbyn 1984; Tame Iti) show the state misusing speech-adjacent powers and losing — cautionary tales against expanding power, not arguments for it.
- 🧠 “Free speech is a construct” dissolves nothing: democracy, property and Wilson’s Substack are constructs too; nobody serious is an absolutist about true threats or incitement.
- 🔫 Kirk’s murder is a free-speech event; treating it as an accounting entry about the victim’s views flattens the line between words and violence.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Wilson’s best passage — rich litigants killing stories via defamation — is the entire case against vague hate-speech laws: them with the power make the rules.
4. Taxpayer-Funded Theatre with Dire Consequence
Rodney Hide — Brash & Mitchell
- 🏛️ Same Corrections story from Hide’s angle: officer “Adam,” HRRT process, apology, training, confidential compensation — all funded by taxpayers.
- 🗣️ Office of Human Rights Proceedings’ Nicole Browne: “a privilege to represent Adam and affirm transgender rights”; denying identity “infringes on their dignity.”
- 📋 Corrections position statement: staff may perform the full range of duties aligning with identified gender — including opposite-sex intimate searches.
- 🔒 Searches exist for contraband and safety; women prisoners (and men) have legitimate expectations about same-sex intimate contact after trauma histories.
- 🎯 Takeaway: common sense is not bigotry — and a Human Rights Tribunal that cannot define a woman has lost its way and should be abolished.
5. The Response to Ann Widdecombe’s Murder
Simon O’Connor — On Point
- 🕯️ Second Catholic conservative politician murdered in the UK after Sir David Amess (2021); Jo Cox was killed by a far-right extremist in 2016.
- 📰 Within hours, media/police plastered “young, white male” — while simultaneously insisting there was “no room for speculation” on motive; counter-terror police later took the lead.
- 🇳🇿 Double standard: Tauranga LGBT building arson saw immediate hate-crime speculation (later disproven); speculation after a conservative is bludgeoned is treated as taboo.
- 🗣️ Peter Tatchell welcomed her death as a bigot’s fate — then deleted; O’Connor links this to rising youth tolerance of political violence (Gallup/YouGov ~25–30%).
- 📺 BBC felt compelled to note some of her views were “deeply offensive” — as if traditionalists do not find progressive dogmas equally so.
- 🎯 Takeaway: democratic disagreements must be settled with words, not bats and bludgeons.
6. Humans, Unite: The Reign of “AIdeology” Is Here
Matt Taibbi — Racket News
- 🤖 Washington Post/Dartmouth–Stanford testing: major chatbots lean progressive on hot-button questions; even Grok “cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average.”
- 🗣️ Matthew Yglesias: “The most advanced technology in the world has progressive views and conservatives’ only takeaway… is to get mad.”
- 🏗️ Taibbi: NGOs, media-scorers, IRUs, Project Owl (2017 “authoritative content”), NewsGuard and Global Disinformation Index pruned the web for years — so LLMs scrape a tilted ecology.
- 🇬🇧 Europe’s Internet Referral Units: ~95% compliance on early takedown requests — template for DSA and informal FBI/DHS flagging (Twitter Files).
- 💬 ChatGPT admits Google ranking shifts can change the “distribution of available text,” influencing AI “ecologically, even if not mechanically.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: “AIdeology” is not neutral tech choosing left answers — it is the white line of hyper-influential gatekeepers, now automated and snowballing.
7. Kemi Is Right to Flush Out the Wets
Fraser Myers — spiked
- 🧹 Kemi Badenoch ousted Lord Gavin Barwell (ex-May chief of staff) for “repeated public attacks,” including branding her agenda a “Reform tribute act.”
- 📋 Candidate list rule: aspiring Tory MPs who will not scrap net zero and leave the ECHR are barred; >2,000 have signed up to stand.
- 📊 Prosper UK claims ~7 million “pragmatic” voters await a Cameroon restoration — Myers calls this mythical “sensible centre” self-flattery.
- ⚖️ ECHR blocks deportations of foreign criminals on “family life”/torture grounds; net zero has delivered among the highest energy prices in the developed world.
- 🎯 Takeaway: with Reform eating Tory lunch, becoming a business-friendly Lib Dem party will not stem the bleeding — flushing the wets is the minimum.
8. Kemi Kick-Starts Purge of the Tory Wets
Steerpike — The Spectator Australia
- ✉️ After a Lords leave of absence, Barwell will not have the whip restored — Badenoch’s letter distinguishes robust debate from conduct that undermines discipline and mutual respect.
- 🗣️ Barwell had goaded her over “poor strategic judgment,” especially net zero rejection and ECHR exit.
- 🚪 Aspiring candidates who refuse the new platform are off the list; Badenoch: the party will never be a “retirement home for failed politicians.”
- 💧 Prosper UK immediately complained; Amber Rudd, Ruth Davidson and Andy Street remain — for now.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Badenoch is determined to leave the wets high and dry.
9. It’s Time to Talk About Left-Wing Violence
Joanna Williams — spiked
- 📄 Militant group Bash Back published a guide urging “direct harm” to “transphobes”: hit them repeatedly; target MPs’ offices (photo of Wes Streeting’s), Sex Matters, EHRC, Free Speech Union; “choose your weapon” over hammer/mask/fire-extinguisher icons.
- 🧼 Tips to avoid detection: change clothes, wipe DNA with alcohol; “Welcome to a new era of trans rage.”
- 🏚️ Bash Back already vandalised Streeting’s office and smashed windows at a feminist conference in Brighton.
- ⚖️ Parallel: Palestine Action activist Samuel Corner fractured a police officer’s spine with a sledgehammer — then received political cover from Zack Polanski and John McDonnell.
- 🕯️ Widdecombe’s murder now treated as possible terrorism; Cox, Amess and Charlie Kirk show the lethal end of political violence.
- 🎯 Takeaway: words never justify blood — and left-wing violence has been given a free pass that would never be granted to the right.
10. The Hedonic Treadmill
Jeffrey Tucker — The Epoch Times
- 🚢 Jevons paradox: more efficient coal use via steamships raised, not cut, coal demand — efficiency intensifies use.
- 📱 Digital age promised more free time; instead we say “I ran out of time” more than ever — postliterate, phone-at-the-table, weekends eaten by work.
- 🏠 American dream (homeownership, stable families, legacy jobs) feels out of reach under 30; middle-class squeeze is postwar-scale.
- 📚 Phrase coined by Brickman & Campbell (1971): as the environment gets more pleasurable, standards rise and satisfaction fades — “the thrill is gone.”
- 📵 Tucker deadens his phone (no notifications, greyscale, leave it at home); joy returns unplugged — museums, lakes, physical books.
- 🎯 Takeaway: tech is not the enemy of happiness — surrendering moderation to the treadmill is. Jefferson meant a higher pursuit than amuse-yourself-to-death.
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