Island Life: Bring Out Your Dad
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And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you. They do not realise that things were so crap in the mid-70s that people welcomed Mrs Thatcher as a saviour.
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Our family spent time living in tents on Rangitoto island in the seventies. We had a perfectly good house on the mainland. I still don't know what that was all about.
Sadly, your parents were decades ahead of their time, these days you could parlay that sort of thing into a reality TV series, you could've had Nicky Watson & a bevy of Shortland St/Dancing with the Stars babes in the tent next door.
Or Rodney Hide I suppose.
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Was your dad on the run do you suppose?
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And dear me, it was Grocer Heath, not Maggie Thatcher in 1972. Anyway, my grandad always said it was all Winston Churchill's fault. Everything. Except maybe the War, but that would be a grudging nod.
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Back to swine flu for a moment ..
I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but I think Tony Ryall is doing very well as minister of health.
Mind you, there is some irony in the fact that our relative advanced pandemic preparations are due to the efforts of the same backroom bureaucrats that he was so keen to get rid of while in Opposition. -
And who can be seen busily in the background during his tv appearances.
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Bruce, I don't want to pry but when you wrote "I was not allowed to go to school, or mix with other kids" is that because you had polio? I never got to ask my father about his own six months in isolation during that outbreak.
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Re the vaccine, my understanding is that one has been designed. The problem is strategic wrt production and rollout. The world does not have enough vaccine production capability to produce an H1N1 vaccine as well as one for normal winter 'flu. So national health authorities and the WHO have a tough call.
If they decide to make H1N1 vaccine people will die in greater numbers if normal winter 'flu is the predominant strain, remember it kills too.
If they decide to make normal winter 'flu vaccines and H1N1 gets widespread and more deadly then lots of people will die.
There was supposed to have been a new facility here in Europe producing vaccine via tissue culture rather than using chicken eggs but it has languished. That may look like an expensive mistake.
Personally I am sad about that since the last 'flu vax I had a few years ago (I'm slightly asthmatic) caused an allergic reaction. The injected shoulder began to go very stiff and it spread up my throat. It was just getting to the point when I was becoming seriously worried about my future ability to breathe when it abated. I was working in a lab that did a lot of work with chick embryos so there eggs covered in chicken shit and feathers all over the place as well as the contents so it not surprising I am allergic. I can eat it and handle it without problem, both meat and eggs but I don't fancy having it injected into me.
BTW someone in Glasgow just became the first person to die of Swine flu outside of America. She had underlying health problems. The rate of death is low but normal flu sufferers don't get the intensity of care and Tamiflu prescriptions that H1N1 sufferers have had so I wouldn't read too much into that.
It could simply be the first time we have watched the genesis of a new 'flu (like how normal flu gets re jigged) which will turn out to be mild. That will not, Bill Ralston et al, be a bad thing. Neither will it be a bad thing if people are made more aware of how 'flu spreads by this. We are also testing our anti virals in a real world situation all over the world. These are useful things.
The operative thing is we don't know how this will pan out and neither do those crying media beat up. They would cry just as much if they and theirs were dying from it methinks.
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I was annoyed when the power was turned off just before Dr Who came on.
Paul, are you coming out as a secret Sci-Fi fan?
They do not realise that things were so crap in the mid-70s that people welcomed Mrs Thatcher as a saviour.
It took me a long time to work out why my dad was such a Tory.
Some of my very earliest memories are of rolling power cuts, small mountains of rubbish twenty or thirty feet high in the parks, and getting water from a tanker in the road.
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Computerworld's Darren Greenwood had some nuanced commentary on the above nearly 10 years ago - and it still rings true today. He's still writing for them to this day - not bad for a "lifetime" job.
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Peter
Personally I am sad about that since the last 'flu vax I had a few years ago (I'm slightly asthmatic) caused an allergic reaction.
Allergic reactions to vaccines are reasonably common. The reason is vaccines always include something called adjuvant which is a mixture of chemicals designed to stimulate the immune system. The idea (which works) is that by generally stimulating the immune system (hey wake up!) you get a much better specific response to the organism you are vaccinating against.
The problem is that if you make a mix that stimulates the immune system you fairly often get things like rashes, itching and swelling. Almost always minor but sometimes it can be major, which is why the nurse likes you to wait around for 15 minutes after the jab.
But it's unlikely (possible but unlikely) that you reacted to the chicken part of the mix, especially if you don't react to eggs or chicken now.
The good part of that is that adjuvant varies quite a bit from formulation to formulation. So a vaccine produced by one lab will be different to one produced by another lab. If I was you and wanted to get the flu vaccine I'd try and find out which company manufactured the vaccine you reacted to and see if it is possible to get a flu vaccine from a different manufacturer. It will be a hassle but may be worthwhile.
Oh and I agree entirely about the behind the scenes efforts to prepare for something like this. The work has been done well, those same doctors that "wasted" money in meetings will now be putting those plans into action.
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Chris da Vinci of New South Wales, in the Herald's Readers Views, has nailed it:
Multiple globally disparate h1n1 strains combining in the 1 place is extremely unlikely to be a natural occurrence. The same group that orchestrated 911 and the credit crisis are responsible. There is documented proof of their plan.
Standard protocols and procedures make this impossible unless intentional. Why would they do this you ask? They believe they need to reduce the world's population as the growth is economically unsustainable, they consolidate their resources by grabbing oil in Iraq, stealing money in the credit crisis, weakening nations in the process to create less resistance to the transition.
Then comes swine flu,quarantining and martial law will cement their control and grant them sweeping powers taking away our freedoms. 911 is now proven to be an inside job, it provides proof of what they're prepared to do to achieve their ends. Don't be sheeple!
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At least it makes a change from the other popular theme on the Herald RV, that swine flu has been foisted on us by evil pharmaceutical companies to get us to buy their expired stocks of Tamiflu.
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At least it makes a change from the other popular theme on the Herald RV, that swine flu has been foisted on us by evil pharmaceutical companies to get us to buy their expired stocks of Tamiflu.
But the pharmaceutical companies are the ones who orchestrated 911. Duh.
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But the pharmaceutical companies arethe ones who orchestrated 911. Duh.
Ah, but what you'll never read about in the left-controlled media is the secondary operation below Ground Zero, where Big Pharma agents moved to wipe out a lab run by the Lower Manhattan mole people who were using alien technology stolen from crypts in Giza to develop mind-control drugs disguised as cancer vaccines.
See, large corporations do sometimes do good, if one's willing to take a realistic view of things.
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See, large corporations do sometimes do good, if one's willing to take a realistic view of things.
Since elements within Big Pharma obviously re-packaged those mind control drugs and distrubted them as Gardasil, I'm not so sure I agree.
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Since elements within Big Pharma obviously re-packaged those mind control drugs and distributed them as Gardasil, I'm not so sure I agree.
I understand your concern, but sadly you can't believe everything you hear from Family First.
... It's not the same without any actual conspiracy theorists left on the forum now that lowercase p has departed, is it?
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<misquote>distributed them as Clearasil</misquote>
So instead of wiping out my zits, they took over my mind? OMG!
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Meanwhile, Swine flu parties? WTF?
Let 'em all contract it & die, surely the gene pool will be richer for it.
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So instead of wiping out my zits, they took over my mind?
That does fit all too well with teen behaviour.
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the Lower Manhattan mole people who were using alien technology stolen from crypts in Giza to develop mind-control drugs disguised as cancer vaccines
You forgot the reverse vampires.
Sean Plunket was practically advocating swine flu parties this morning before the public health spokeswoman managed to ram it through his brain that there was a big social cost to everyone getting it all at once.
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Sean Plunket was practically advocating swine flu parties this morning before the public health spokeswoman managed to ram it through his brain that there was a big social cost to everyone getting it all at once.
Yeah, that was a bit of a worry.
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Talking of Maggie, they seem to have her permanently incarcerated now:
Thatcher to remain in hospital as 'precautionary measure'.Some sort of ASBO, I guess.
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It's amazing to me - though it probably shouldn't be - that the same folks who are very fearful of well-tested vaccines are advocating this hugely risky strategy (swine flu parties).
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As Linley Boniface noted in her column in the DomPost, an anti-science agenda appears to underlie all this weirdness:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/2501133/The-great-swine-flu-conspiracy
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