Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/156 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. Democracy Briefing: Where’s the accountability after the Mt Maunganui report?

Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project

🏚 Davison KC on the Mount Maunganui landslide: six dead in January. They did not need to die. Council warned for 27 years. 2006 estimate: a large slip could put about 30 campers in the path and kill 21.
📋 2023 and 2025: experts recommended a Trigger Action Response Plan. Davison: campers would probably have been evacuated. "The loss of life could in all likelihood have been averted."
📁 Warnings "received, filed, discussed, forwarded, and then left." Not unknown, hidden or beyond foresight. "One competent consultant after another" named the slope.
🏛 "Systemic failure" is his finding. No one person blamed. Andrea Vance: that is the neat trick of modern public-service management. Systems do not build themselves.
🤷 Former mayors Crosby, Brownless, Powell, and commissioner Tolley say the warnings never reached them. If true, the council spent two decades commissioning death-risk reports and not telling the people who run the city.
📄 June 2025 geohazard report went to deputy mayor Scoular and three councillors. Meeting cancelled. They did not read it. CEO Marty Grenfell: never told, reports stayed "operational". He is paid more than $600,000.
🎯 Garner, du Plessis-Allan, Woodham, The Post: the boss of an eight-year shambles should go. Uffindell and Watts call it unforgivable, then leave Grenfell to the council. WorkSafe is looking.
🎯 Takeaway: Lisa Maclennan, a camper, spent five hours trying to evacuate others. She died at 9.30am. Davison's word for the risk: "unowned." 27 years of reports. Six graves. Still no owner.

2. Apologising for Telling the Truth.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter

🎥 Aaron Bastani of Novara Media called Jason Arday a conman. Then he issued an abject public apology for doing it.
📋 Trotter: never mind that Arday was a conman. Never mind the defamation threats, the harassment complaint, the months-long police investigation of a journalist who asked questions.
🎓 Cambridge made him a full professor at 38. Trotter's line: foresight to choose Black parents, plus a plagiarised, fabricated CV.
⚖ Bastani covered it as any honest journalist would. A few days later Arday took his own life. The tables turned. The "racist lynch mob" script wrote itself.
💸 Novara is mid-upgrade. It could not afford a subscriber haemorrhage. Contributors rebelled. Bastani bowed like a Cultural Revolution comrade and hoped the teenage Red Guards would not kick him to death.
🧠 A Left that will not let facts alter the reaction is not elevation. It is decline.
🎭 They prized the skin colour and the neuro-divergence, not the man. When the truth made him useless, they walked away.
🎯 Takeaway: Bastani apologised for telling the truth. Revolutionaries should be made of sterner stuff.

3. DON BRASH: Is the Electoral Commission no longer neutral?

Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell

📧 A supporter applied to be an Election Day volunteer. The Electoral Commission email: agree to "learn about our values and grow your knowledge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the workplace".
⚖ The body that is meant to be impeccably neutral has taken a political position, down to the name Te Tiriti rather than the Treaty of Waitangi.
🗳 Learning the Treaty has nothing to do with handing out papers, counting votes or reporting results. Applicants are not asked. They are compelled.
🚫 Brash: race-based political conditioning has no place in the public service, and least of all in the Electoral Commission.
🏛 Ties it to the Professionals Not Politicians campaign. Real estate, medicine, architecture, law: codes of conduct as political tests. Janet Dickson: accept a Treaty reading or lose the licence.
📣 He wants immediate action from the Commission and the Government. The referee of the election is now running a Treaty seminar as a condition of counting the votes.
🎯 Takeaway: the referee has picked a side and called it values training.

4. RODNEY HIDE: National's Online Safety Bill is a Trojan Horse

Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell

🐑 1990: Hide warned farmers the RMA would end in woolshed-colour diktats and paying for spirits to leave. They thought he was unhinged. Then it arrived, and worse.
📱 The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill is sold the same way: narrow, popular, kids off high-risk social media, platforms to verify age. Parents not fined. Big Tech the target.
🏛 The real shift: a cultural and parental problem is handed to platforms and a new state regulator. "Harm" is elastic. Risk assessments become leverage.
🔮 His forecast: in five years the same machine can treat political or religious advocacy as a child-safety risk. Family First already sits in that zone. No need to "ban transphobia". Signal that hosting it lifts the risk score. Compliance does the rest.
📧 Charities Registration Board dumped Family First, kept Greenpeace and Waipareira. Covid: NZDSOS / NZ Health Forum Facebook pages shut with an official email. The new regulator can do that to Meta with one more.
🏗 Same National Party, same pattern. Limited first clause. Then an enforcement body. Then "safety" walks.
🎯 Takeaway: the first clause is about children. The machinery is about speech.

5. Douglas Murray: The Death Penalty Is Cruel. Hamas Terrorists Deserve It.

Douglas Murray - The Free Press

⚖ Murray has always opposed the death penalty. He cites Camus: the cruelty is making a mind know the time and place of its ending.
🎪 Ben-Gvir degrades the debate: golden-noose lapel pin, execution-themed 50th birthday cakes, a video gloating about public gallows with viewing rooms for victims' families.
🇮🇱 Israel bans capital punishment for most offences. In May the Knesset voted unanimously to allow it for October 7 terrorists. The courts must now decide whether it proceeds, and on whom.
🕯 Exceptions he accepts: Nuremberg hangings, Eichmann in 1962. The Nukhba Force men captured after 7 October invaded to murder, rape, torture and kidnap.
🔄 Extra reason Israelis live with: live prisoners are swap chips. Sinwar was traded in 2011, 1,000-plus terrorists for one soldier. Sinwar: the best news in a Palestinian prison is that an Israeli has been kidnapped.
⚖ Keep them alive and the next kidnapping restarts the calculus. Hang them and the incentive breaks. Treat them as heinous criminals, not combatants.
🌍 Cost: mass hangings would feed the world's equivalence industry. Iran hangs protesters; the NGOs would still find Israel more odious.
🎯 Takeaway: the case is solemn. Ben-Gvir's cakes are not. Eichmann was not sent off with icing.

6. The Data Is Now Overwhelming That It Was The Left, Not The Right, That Radicalized

Michael Shellenberger - Public

📊 Cambridge Political Psychology Lab: right-leaning Americans stayed fairly stable for 35 years. The left-leaning half became 31.5% more socially liberal by 2024 than in 1988. The right moved 2.8% more conservative.
📰 The story sold since 2016: Trump radicalised the GOP, Klein's "asymmetric polarisation", Biden's MAGA-threatens-the-republic speech, Trump-as-Hitler copy.
📈 ANES 35,000-plus responses, 14 core issues, 1988-2024. Pew: Republican view that immigrants strengthen the country rose 30% to 42% (1994-2017). Democrats on the same question: 32% to 84%.
🗳 Gallup: Democratic liberal ID 25% (1994) to 59% (2025). Republican conservative ID 58% to 77%. Rhetoric got hotter. Issue positions on the right did not.
🎓 The leftward lurch is thickest among the college-educated. Professors at 40 universities: 11.5 Democrats per Republican; journalism 20 to 1; under-35s 22.7 to 1. Polarisation rose fastest among over-65s, not the phone addicts.
🏭 Al-Gharbi: elite overproduction. 22 million BA holders (2000-2019) chasing 10 million extra degree jobs. Cancellation as a way to thin the queue. 2008 is the fork: crash, Obama, iPhone.
🪞 Goldberg: liberals did not notice how far they had moved, so they saw conservative extremism. Projection with a newsroom.
🎯 Takeaway: Klein was right about asymmetric polarisation. He had the arrow the wrong way round.

7. Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras

Erick Erickson - The Free Press

🏛 Free Press frame: not a crisis of trust. A crisis of trustworthiness. Government, media, education, medicine spent what they had.
📹 Two live fights: data centres and Flock surveillance cameras. The tech is not the point. Whether spent trust can be earned back is.
🏖 April 2020, San Clemente: 37 tons of sand dumped in a skate park to keep teenagers out. Sheriff's deputies arrested a lone paddleboarder. Cities unbolted basketball rims.
🐀 LA mayor: "snitches get rewards." People rang the tip lines on neighbours whose grandkids came over. Newsom then did The French Laundry.
📅 March 2020: Americans closed shops, schools, funerals. Two weeks to stop the spread. Civic trust is a limited resource. The press, politicians, bureaucrats and experts spent it.
🔒 Paid after the Covid opener. About 3,070 words sit behind the wall. The free cut is the analogy, not the data-centre or Flock case file.
🎯 Takeaway: the argument is that Covid spent the trust now demanded for cameras and server farms. The evidence for both is for subscribers.

8. The wrong end of the telescope

Liam Hehir - The Blue Review

🔭 Hehir's objection is not VPNs, facial ID or adult checkpoints. Those are real. His question is whether this is a proper function of the law at all.
📵 Luxon sold it as the sequel to the school phone ban. Hehir backed that one. He does not buy the sequel. Different kind of power.
🏫 School is compulsory. Staff stand in loco parentis as Crown agents. The Crown may set terms for an enterprise called education. That mandate stops at the gate.
🍔 Social media can be a curse, like unlimited junk food. The Crown does not write the family menu. It does not get to run the family feed either.
👨‍👩‍👧 Parents decide devices, hours and apps. A messaging thread for a school project or a friend who moved away is a parental office, not a Beehive one.
🔧 Fight only the mechanics and you concede the premise. Every engineering fix becomes the new hill. The live question is purpose, not competence.
🎯 The Crown may set a floor when harm is obvious and parents neglect it. Social media harm is usually contingent and individual, not certain and universal.
🎯 Takeaway: looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The state is not a parent with a longer lens.

9. We are already at war with Iran

Stephen Pollard - The Spectator Australia

🇬🇧 Starmer: "This is not our war." Burnham said the same. Pollard: you may not want a war with Iran. Iran is already in one with you.
⚡ This weekend: Iranian hackers shut a British power plant for four days. First time they have pulled that off. Timed with similar hits on US water plants. Treated as a warning shot.
💻 Russia, China, Iran, North Korea already hit NHS, schools, M&S, Jaguar Land Rover. Commons Intelligence and Security Committee: cyber is a "significant area of asymmetric strength" for Iran. Thousands of hackers. Tens of millions of dollars.
🗡 Iran pays criminals to stalk, plot and attack dissidents and Jewish targets. George Stana and Nandito Badea jailed 12 and 8 years for the March 2024 stabbing of Iran International presenter Pouria Zeraati in Wimbledon. Judge: carried out on behalf of the Iranian state.
🕵 Dual national and an Iranian charged under the National Security Act over surveillance of the Israeli embassy, Bevis Marks synagogue, a Jewish centre and the CST. Three other Iranians charged over Iran International staff. They deny it.
🛡 MI5's Sir Ken McCallum: over 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in a year. ISC: at least 15 murder or kidnap attempts against UK-based people since 2022. Tehran sees Britain as "a particularly malevolent opponent".
🇨🇳 Reports this week: China supplied the technology for the cyber attacks. Britain will name Iran and still chase Chinese growth.
🎯 Takeaway: hear no evil is not a strategy. The other side already opened fire.

10. Is short-form video rotting our brains?

David Shipley - The Spectator Australia

📱 New brain study: liked short videos produced "significant deactivation" in cognitive-control regions. Instant gratification up, self-control down. Shipley, who will not watch videos, felt a moment of I-told-you-so.
⚠ Almost all SVA research is post-2020. TikTok 2018, Reels and Shorts later. A lot of it is pandemic-era, and a lot of it is Chinese university students.
📉 Repeated findings: rapid switching weakens recall. TikTok interruptions degrade performance; long YouTube and Twitter do not. Heavy users shrug at losses and decide on thinner evidence.
😞 Meta-analysis: "problematic" short-video use tracks depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness and boredom. Non-problematic use seemed to cut anxiety.
💃 2019-2022: doctors saw a jump in adolescent girls with Tourette-like tics. Some researchers tied it to TikTok #tourettes. Possible social contagion, overlapping lockdown.
🧪 Caveats: no agreed definition of "problematic" or "addiction". Limited use is not shown to harm. Harms cluster in people who had childhood abuse or neglect. Some grey-matter increases. Effects fade when people stop.
🎯 Takeaway: the phone is not a moral emergency for everyone. Put it down and the brain comes back. A ban is a bigger claim than the evidence.

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Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/156