This is edition 2026/175 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: The influence of the Taxpayers' Union in the election
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🗳️ Edwards says the Taxpayers' Union is campaigning to keep Labour out while also supplying much of the election news: polls, candidate debates, and now NZ Herald livestreams of its electorate series.
- 📣 In its annual review, Jordan Williams tells supporters the aim is to 'do everything in our power to ensure that Labour does not return to office'. Edwards calls that legitimate advocacy that still deserves scrutiny.
- 📰 Newsrooms take the free polls and debate packages because budgets are tight. The Union claims 2,467 media mentions in a year; co-founder David Farrar calls it a political 'battle tank' that sometimes plays 'fourth estate'.
- 🏷️ The Herald's Wellington Bays page labels Union material 'Sponsored Stories' and 'advertorial'. Edwards asks who pays, who sets the questions, and what editorial control the Herald still holds.
- 📉 On Q+A, Williams said locking National into 'no new taxes' was a board objective, narrowing the next government's options so spending cuts become the main lever.
- 💰 The manifesto wants core Crown spending down to 25% of GDP from a claimed 32.6% baseline, a gap Jack Tame put near $35 billion a year. Williams admitted the target will not land in three years and that trade-offs exist.
- 🛒 On supermarkets, the Union once blasted 'cartel-like' pricing, yet its remedy leans on cutting planning, consenting and overseas-investment barriers rather than structural breakup.
- 💡 Takeaway: Voters may share the Union's goals, Edwards says, but an advocacy group this deep in the news and the coalition agenda should face the same scrutiny as a political party.
[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER - swap before schedule]
2. Stupid policy ad nauseum
Liberty Scott - Liberty Scott
- 🛒 Liberty Scott asks which MPs could actually run a supermarket as general manager, and not into the ground, as 'Supermarket Policy' becomes election silly season.
- 🟢 He expects little from the Greens: suspicious of prices, profits, salaries and choice, they want their Kiwimart, a command-and-control answer he says mature market democracies do not need.
- 🔵 National, he says, should know better given its stated belief in competitive markets, yet its history since the late 1950s is mostly about holding power, from Muldoon's controls to glacial Key/English reform.
- 😰 Luxon and Willis, desperate in the polls, have dreamed up a supermarket breakup aimed at swing voters groomed to see the sector as predatory.
- 📊 Citing Damien Grant in Stuff, he says supermarket profits are not egregious enough to justify splitting the largest largely franchise chain into two groups.
- 🏪 Owner-operators, not abstract 'fat cats', run New World, PAK'nSAVE and Four Square. Breaking the co-op duplicates warehouses and support and can raise regional prices.
- 🏛️ He frames the policy as Muldoonism with focus-group polish: a re-election stunt that abandons centre-right principle for command-economy optics.
- 💡 Takeaway: If politicians cannot run a store, he asks, why should they redesign the sector that feeds the country just to look busy before the vote?
3. RODNEY HIDE: When the columnist swears
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 📰 Hide says Stuff has tried quizzes, live blogs, explainers, podcasts and vertical video to lift a falling readership, then let 'the kids' take the keyboard and reach for sweary words.
- 🤬 First Andrea Vance with the c-word aimed at female ministers, carefully reviewed by editors. Now Verity Johnson, 'exhausted' by an election that has not started, taking the Lord's name in vain.
- 🕌 He doubts she would use Allah as an oath: 'She's not that brave. Or that progressive.'
- 📉 Will it work? 'Nope.' Swearing in print, he says, is the last trick of a brand that has run out of readers and arguments.
- 🗣️ In an argument, the person who starts swearing has already lost: the room remembers the noise and forgets the point, if there was one.
- 📌 Vance's column landed for the slur, not the analysis. Johnson's fatigue piece will be shared for the spice, not the stock.
- 🎭 Media managers call it cutting through. Hide calls it clickbait with pretend authenticity and selective blasphemy that never swears at their own side's sacred cows.
- 💡 Takeaway: Circulation does not rise because you said a naughty word. Trust falls, standards fall, and the next column needs a bigger bang. Reason 1,001 not to read Stuff.
4. Scapegoats at the Checkout
Simon O'Connor - On Point
- 🎯 O'Connor says every election needs a 'baddie'. This year it is supermarket families running New World and Four Square; last time landlords; before that the Covid years.
- 🎭 Scapegoating distracts from Parliament and lets parties sell 'solutions' once a political target is named.
- 🟢 The Greens want the state to buy out about 120 stores into KiwiMart, run at arm's length by bureaucrats, with little thought for owner-operators who would be bought out of their livelihoods.
- 🔵 National then dumped centre-right credentials, he says, by empowering the Commerce Commission to separate PAK'nSAVE and New World inside Foodstuffs.
- 📊 The catalyst is polls and focus groups on cost of living, a phrase National itself popularised and that has now boomeranged.
- 👨👩👧👦 Foodstuffs' response, posting local owner stories, has been slick. Owners O'Connor knows are confused and upset, and communicating well.
- ✅ He warns of Muldoonism: if it is supermarkets today, who is next? The policy also takes heat off the left's madder ideas and may push core National voters toward ACT.
- 🚪 A cynical exit: the Commerce Commission may decline to act, so National keeps the announcement benefit without follow-through.
- 💡 Takeaway: Tight-race politics may score soft votes, but it damages National's brand and foundational private-enterprise principles.
5. Ireland's insane witch-hunting of Ed Sheeran
Brendan O'Neill - spiked
- 🇮🇪 O'Neill says Dublin's media class has turned on Ed Sheeran for refusing to hate the Jewish state as ferally as they do, after he was lately celebrated as 'culturally Irish'.
- 🎤 The spark is Macklemore being dropped from Sheeran's US tour after stadium bosses balked at Israel-bashing. Support acts and Irish house band Beoga walked out in solidarity.
- ⚖️ Sheeran's statement mourning suffering on 'both sides' made it worse: sympathy for Jews raped and butchered by Hamas is treated as thoughtcrime in virtuous circles.
- 📻 Classic Hits Radio removed Sheeran's songs from playlists for the 'foreseeable future'. Newsweek summed it up as Ireland 'disowning' him.
- 📰 An Irish Mirror screed called him a 'gutless coward' who should never feel welcome again, and the 'antithesis of what it is to be Irish'.
- 🧾 O'Neill calls making Irishness contingent on hating the world's only Jewish state crazy, and the Famine/occupation rhetoric appropriation from a republic unoccupied for a century.
- 🎭 He coins the 'Kneecapification' of Irish culture: fake rebels who hate Brits, bow to the EU, and obsess over the Jewish homeland while Kneecap's manager blames 'Jewish billionaires who control America'.
- 💡 Takeaway: You can wang on about Jews controlling America, he says, but you cannot say there is suffering on both sides. Palestinianism has conquered Ireland as a one-eyed cult.
6. Real-World Data Do Not Show Droughts Getting Worse Globally. Scientists Invented A "Rubbish" Measure That Does.
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🔥 Oxford, Nature, the NYT and others claim the atmosphere's growing 'thirst' has made droughts ~40% more severe globally, with one lead author saying drought land area rose 74% from 2018 to 2022.
- 📉 Time reported a 'permanent' dryness state on 77.6% of land masses using rain divided by a temperature-based thirst estimate; AP and ProPublica have run similar 'planet is drying' lines.
- 🌧️ Rain gauges that measure meteorological drought directly show no substantial global change for at least 120 years, per a 2022 review by Spanish climatologist Sergio Vicente-Serrano.
- 📐 Rising agricultural/ecological drought severity, that review said, 'seems to emerge' from rising atmospheric evaporative demand (AED), a calculation rather than a rainfall measurement.
- 🇪🇺 World Weather Attribution said western Europe's dry spring showed no climate signal in the rain, yet claimed evaporative conditions ~80 times more likely and soil drought ~5 times more likely.
- 🏜️ The worst western US drought year in a thousand years was 1934 at 308 ppm CO2, blamed on a stuck high and dust from plowed fields, not today's 428 ppm world.
- 📄 The IPCC's 2021 assessment: 'low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.'
- 💡 Takeaway: When rainfall records refuse to cooperate, Shellenberger argues, activists invent 'rubbish' thirst indices and apply them backwards. Paid section continues the investigation.
7. How to Fake Climate Science and Fool the World
Roger Pielke Jr. - The Free Press
- 🏔️ On 26 August a rock-and-ice collapse from Langtang Lirung triggered a flood and mudflow that killed thousands on the Nepal-Tibet border.
- 📑 Less than a month later, World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London issued a report and press release tying the disaster to human-caused warming.
- 📰 Major outlets ran with it. WWA said early warning systems were useless at that scale and demanded a rapid fossil-fuel exit plus climate finance.
- 💸 Nepal's government plans a $20 million UN loss-and-damage claim on the back of that supposedly authoritative study.
- 🔁 Pielke notes WWA has run this sequence more than 120 times since 2014: press release, technical report, oddsmaking ('3x more likely'), unchallenged media amplification.
- 🧪 In his free technical twin essay he argues the 'A' in WWA is Assumption, not Attribution: any trending series can be force-fitted to 'climate change', including tongue-in-cheek MLB home runs and patent counts.
- 🏦 He flags WWA's advocacy roots (Climate Central) and funders (Grantham, European Climate Foundation, Bezos Earth Fund).
- 💡 Takeaway: FP is paywalled after the setup. The free Honest Broker twin says climate advocates are 'taking us for fools' and harming climate science itself. FLAG: thin FP preview.
8. Ed Sheeran, Macklemore and the ugly new anti-Semitism
Julie Burchill - The Spectator Australia
- 🎤 Burchill coins 'Feindbewunderung' for loathing someone who then does something she admires: first Boy George's October 7 song, now the Ed Sheeran/Macklemore storm.
- 🆕 She contrasts old right-wing anti-Semitism (Jews kept out of golf clubs for being 'vulgar') with 'Fresh'n'funky' left anti-Semitism that locks Jews out of culture as alleged baby-killers.
- 🏟️ Sheeran dropped Macklemore after Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft threatened to pull the plug. Backing band and support acts flounced; Sarah Ettedgui joked most had to be Googled.
- 🍼 Paloma Faith backed Macklemore on Channel 4 and says 'Free Palestine' to her kids at bedtime. Roger Waters called Sheeran a 'little prick'. Pink stood up for 'my own people' and called it lonelier than expected.
- 💵 Kraft said Sheeran asked him to match a $2 million regional aid gift; Macklemore boasted a $1 million Palestine-linked pledge. Burchill mocks the macho donation Olympics.
- 👃 She notes Macklemore once did 'Jewface' on stage (wig, beard, hooked nose) and asks why left double standards spare that while banning blackface.
- 📊 A poll on anti-Semitic stereotypes found the disease worst among 18-34s and least among over-50s, as Jewish schoolkids hide insignia and face bullying.
- 💡 Takeaway: Quoting Huxley, she says righteous cruelty is a 'moral treat'. That this fashion has reached frivolous pop music shows how unstoppable the revival of Western anti-Semitism has become.
9. Has Trump got more out of Greenland than we think?
Mary Dejevsky - spiked
- 🗺️ After Trump's 'deal' with Denmark and Greenland on 'permanent control' over security, one camp called it a hidden US defeat; Trump circles called it a win short of buying the island.
- 📜 Europe claimed Denmark fobbed him off with a barely revised 1951 Defence of Greenland Agreement still in force, now said to apply in perpetuity rather than for the life of NATO.
- ✍️ Diplomacy loves words that suit everyone. Dejevsky says the unpublished text still deserves scrutiny when it appears, due for signing on UNGA margins.
- 🚫 Trump's Truth Social claimed no US adversary may ever base, deploy or make sensitive investments in Greenland without express US written approval, a sharp shift from 1951.
- 🛡️ He also claims 'permanent control over security and all other needs', language that may limit Greenlandic and Danish sovereignty in practice.
- 🇬🇱 Greenland appears as a named party, with the deal surviving possible future independence. Independence support polls 50-80%, but swapping Danish for US dependence has little traction.
- 🧊 Motives include ice-free routes, Golden Dome missile defence, and screening Chinese mineral interest even if past Chinese prospecting failed on cost.
- 💡 Takeaway: Do not dismiss Trump-camp victory claims. The deal may give Washington a de facto monopoly on security and many investment decisions around Greenland.
10. The monstering of Ed Sheeran proves 'Free Palestine' has become a cult
Tom Slater - spiked
- 🎤 Slater opens on Sheeran forced to start his Philadelphia show with a statement after a week-long struggle session over Macklemore and Israel/Palestine.
- 📝 Sheeran said he tries not to be a political commentator so his shows stay about unity and humanity, not division.
- 🚪 Promoters booted Macklemore after pressure from Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft; other support acts resigned and activists cast Sheeran as a sinister Zionist for not cancelling the tour.
- 🎤 His stage remarks called October 7 horrific (including Nova) and Gaza 'catastrophic, unjustifiable and disproportionate'. Even that bought no leeway.
- 👩⚖️ Zarah Sultana accused him of 'both-sidesing genocide' and sneered 'Enjoy your blood-soaked millions.'
- 🕯️ Slater says Palestinianism is literally a cult: mandatory slogans, vitriol for deviation, monomania, missing only a charismatic leader since Sinwar's death.
- 🔇 This is no longer about Macklemore's right to blather, which free speech should still protect. It is about forcing the music industry to conform, punishing Sheeran for not speaking.
- 😢 Mid-show he nearly broke down over friends who 'backed away' and family who turned on him, then chose not to let ticket-holders down; the crowd roared.
- 💡 Takeaway: If even syrupy Ed Sheeran is 'complicit', no pop star is safe. Millions still see through the bullying, and a few more may just have become Sheeran fans.
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