Posts by Joshua Drummond
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The second wave of infected less likely to be living with pigs.
"Few of the cases appear to have had any contact with live pigs" - from the Guardian.
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Classic (and chilling) picture on the Stuff homepage as of right now - the Mexican army appears ready to shoot the virus on sight.
Ha, that reminds me (in a dark, ironic way) of the Simpsons episode where the Osaka Flu sweeps Springfield and Wiggum has a go at shooting a virus-cloud.
I'm at a mental low-note to be getting this kind of news. I read the comic book version of The Stand a couple of weeks ago. Even hints of pandemics properly freak me out. King did right to base his book around a disease. It's the first half of the book that's scariest by far, much more than the second bit when the supernatural stuff kicks in. -
It's hard to know how worried to be about this. Especially considering it seems like Kiwi kids are swine flu kids. The Google map of "confirmed" cases for swine flu the Herald is running (and I'm aware that the North Shore schoolkids aren't exactly "confirmed" yet) is interesting reading. There's North America, Europe, and here.
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This is actually worrying. It's like a whirlwind of madness, all coalescing around WorldNutDaily. What worries me is that these people are the sort who see Left Behind as a kind of documentary, and who might easily be persuaded that the right thing to do would be to give Angry Jesus the hurry-up. And there are enough of them in power, as well as in the media. I seem to remember reading that Michelle Bachmann had proposed a Senate bill (or something similar - I can't find the original article, so correct me if I'm wrong) against forming a North American Union and abandoning the dollar, not that anything like that is on the cards.
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Similarly, fewer New Zealanders now say they believe in God than did 17 years ago. However, there has been no change in the proportion of respondents who say they believe in a higher power. So perhaps the apparent decline in religiosity reflects a decline in traditional religious loyalties rather than a decline in the religiosity as such.
You've got to wonder if people abandoning staid Christianity are filling that god-shaped hole in their lives with flim-flam. Witness the popularity of Sensing Murder. It seems like just replacing one problematic belief with another.
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I wish Lindsay Perigo and SOLO people would Go Galt. It might stop them sending asinine, wordy, assonance-laden press releases.
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Joshua: run immediately to the nearest library and see if you can borrow this book.
Thanks, Stephen. That's exactly the sort of thing I was after.
And then, you can do this journalistiky thing of asking people. There are plenty of people who can and will explain this stuff.
Yes, I've been known to do that. Problem is, I find when I do that my cherished "stories" often evaporate under the light of actual information, and your find yourself with an unstory that you could never, in good conscience, print. Apply this dilemma to the mainstream and you can almost see why they persist with printing bullshit. A manufactured media feeding frenzy (XOMG SCHOOL VIOLENCE! TO THE YOUR VIEWS PAGE!) is much more saleable than "hey, you know what? This thing we got asked to write about? Turns out there's no story there." From what I hear from people who work in/have escaped from the MSM, they aren't paid to not write stories.
I mean, who would buy the Herald if they didn't have any content?Hang on...
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Would there be scope for Stats NZ or other party to issue a Press Council complaint? Sure would seem like it to me. That's a pretty protracted mangling.
If this were a just world, the proscribed punishment would be to print Keith's post verbatim on the front page.
And Keith: are there any crash-courses in stats I can take to avoid being this problem in the future? I don't want to be the journalist who makes a fuck-up like this. And my maths is terrible. I did touch on stats in journalism school, but we touched on them in much the same way as the reporters/senior Herald staff did in this case. -
__Kapisi an atheist, dont think that can be called irrelevant.__
It's a part of that family's identity, really. The Urales were among the 5% of Samoans who didn't go to church in the 1970s.
Good on him. He played at the Orientation last year at Waikato and was bloody good. We met him afterwards and bought some clothes off of him. One of the coolest, most chilled out people I have ever met. I had no idea he was an athiest, but I think it's brilliant.
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Damn, a lot of people have chipped in on the private prisons thing: I guess my worries are shared by quite a few people. giovanni tiso, where might I find that "Business Behind Bars" doco?
Yes, know I am indulging a bit of pleasurable Wishartism there) and it clearly did a deal with ACT to get their law and order nutjob David Garrett into parliament
I'm also glad to see someone besides me has been engaging in paranoid line-drawing between a Three Strikes/Tough on Crime policy and private prisons. Well, I thought it was paranoia, but Tom Semmens' Wishartising has me worried that it's not.
So does this. But of course, nothing like this could ever happen here.
I guess the thought of private prisons doesn't so much fill me with worry as a deep sense of malaise. Perhaps it's an ideological reflex, but still. I smell 90's deja vu in the air.