Posts by st ephen
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To be fair, I don't think it's age per se that the proponents of 'alternative' medicine are highlighting. (After all, Christianity is a couple of thousand years old and we all know that's bogus). The inference seems to be that if a "medicinal caste" has been operating continuously for a long period of time, they must have been doing something right or they'd have been run out of town.
There are alternative hypotheses - eg. closed borders preventing access to alternatives, oppression of local alternatives (or is that restricted to 20th C western medicine?), or a few lucky guesses (given the flawed model they're working from) coupled with low expectations and high tolerance of high mortality rates. And maybe an incremental switch to 'modern' alternatives that really do work.
I tend to think the truth is that Western medicine is your best bet for figuring out what is broken, but hasn't been great at providing a complete fix because it hasn't been holistic enough and people are complicated. It's much better at relieving symptoms, but any hocus pocus is good for that.
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And you inevitably start inspecting yourself for flavorsome elements ...
Oh yes. We’ve been doing the rounds lately with our #1, and I became extremely conscious of exactly how much I was making eye contact with the Child Psychologist, sitting up straight and still for the Occupational Therapist and not mumbling to the Speech Language Therapist. I’m sure they’ve seen it all before though, and probably have a label for those kids too – maybe “NOTMAD – No Odder Than Mum And Dad”.
Oh, and 1 vote for Ibuprofen for lower back pain (which had to be administered out in the vege garden where I had been immobile and in agony for 20 minutes. Bugger gardening).
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"Where is the famous skepticism on which journos pride themselves so much?"
It's selective skepticism. Journos have decided not to trust Big Pharma and the Medical Establishment. You know the deal - doctors in the US are in the pockets of the Insurance and Drug companies, and suppress anything that goes against their dogma, so the little guy who actually wants to help people is forced to set up shop across the border etc etc.
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Cheers, Sofie, nothing wrong with your opinions.
I think you need to have a bloody good reason to biff bottles at cops - as in, an actual protest about something important, where your actions might help the cause. And then you expect to face the consequences. "Letting off steam", "A rite-of-passage", "They'll let me off because I'm just a student (or because they'll think I'm a student)", "I'm an anarchist" - these are really dumb reasons.If you're doing something illegal AND you refuse to stop when the police eventually ask you to AND your mates around you start throwing stuff AND you've been pre-warned that there will be no diversion offered this time round... I just can't muster up much sympathy.
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"we are not perfect and I know I tried plenty to have fun but not at the expense of others."
So Sofie, does this mean that you didn't hurl bottles at the police, ambulance drivers and firefighters? Or do you mean "...not at the expense of others apart from the jackbooted tools of the fascist state who had it coming?"
Also - given that 23% of the first batch arrested were not students of any kind (and another 13% were at high school or polytech), can we stop characterising them all as tory-voting second-year accounting students?
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Too many generalisations? How about data:
The first two fines dished out for breaching the liquor ban (night before the Undie 500 I think) went to a process worker and his mill hand flatmate. Pa will be chortling into his cognac at the Club. Not.
The idiot who jumped in the fire was a student at Telford (a polytech for farm-hands).I'm sure that plenty of stereotypical rich white kids will be appearing in court over the next few days. Drunk kids make bad choices. Especially when egged on by those with less to lose.
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Anyone who has marked uni assignments/exams recently will know that the universities are full of people who shouldn't be there. The unis want bums on seats and push their "clients" through regardless of competency, because they need the cash. Same with the polytechs.
These rioters are NOT our future brain surgeons - they are our future munters. Don't make the mistake of confusing them with the bohemians of your youth, who partied their way through multiple aborted degrees before graduating with something from the only faculty that would accept their enrolment (usually philosophy or religion), and then went on to make stellar contributions to NZ culture. These pricks will fuck off to Ozzie and become unemployed chippies, property developers or bent cops. We get left with their student loan, and a new generation of munters hell-bent on "macho oneupmanship".
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Well, whatever is wrong with our wiring, it doesn't affect incandescent bulbs. There are bigger money and power savers available to us anyway - like uninstalling our heat pumps...
From memory, the Consumer report on the EECA website was only able to recommend three or four of the dozen CFL bulbs on offer, which seems like pretty bad odds for the unsuspecting shopper.
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If I had a buck for every person who's told me that CFLs would save me money, I could probably afford to get my house re-wired. Which seems to be the requirement if I want CFLs to last more than a month.
This household is nowhere near breaking even, let alone saving $500. But I don't blame Phil Goff. Not when I can blame the Business that built my house, the Business that made the CFLs' and the Business that sold them to me. Capitalist bastards one and all, right RB? ;-)
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"...especially in the first half."
...at which point District 9 turns into yet another fanboy flick made by fanboys for the fanboys who are going to review it and buy the merchandise and play the video game.
Aliens as oppressed minorities is hardly novel, and plonking the space ship above Johannesburg is hardly subtle, but it was still a neat window on post-apartheid South Africa. Then it went all Peter Jackson-meets-Michael Bay.I had thought a sequel would be pointless - in 2012 the ship comes back and wipes out the humans. The End. But with Farrar running the Nigerian gang, there could be potential.