OPINION
Critical Thinker
Slow news day? Never, with these wee coals to rake over:
Plagues of scare-city
You can always find a ‘researcher’ to gleefully rain on any parade. Enjoying your everyday consumption of avocado/banana/coffee/X fast-moving consumer-good? Hoover it up while you still can, because by 2057 those shelves will be empty. Thanks to a combination of climate change, Christopher Luxon and the earth’s gravitational pull, the world’s supply of helium, Vegemite, gingas and Camembert is depleting “at alarming rates”, with extinction inevitable.
Cue expert: “Through modelling of the worst worst-case scenario, we can determine that it’s highly likely that frivolous pleasures such as nibbling a little chocolate will soon become a thing of the past.”
Plague plagues
Feeling a bit under the weather? Don’t worry, you can always feel worse. Give your overwhelmed immune system a shock of adrenaline with these alarming butt-clenchers:
- “What’s in the lab this week? Five lethal viruses to try not to think about.”
- “Disease Y – 1000 times more deadly than that mole on your back.”
- “From the toes up. The rise and rise, and rise, of flesh-eating bacteria.”
- “She thought it was just a sniffle. Two hours later, she was dead. The hidden killer inside your nostrils.”
- “Yes, excess mortality is through the roof. Here’s why that’s actually a good thing.”
- “Ebola on the bill? But I just ordered the salad.”
- “Hunting you down this flu season: Hipkins’s pox or the next threatening variant?”
- “Let sleeping docs lie. Why your doctor isn’t telling you what they don’t know.”
How are you feeling now? Still with us? In that case, how about another jab? That’s it…just lie back and think of the whanau.
Floods of fear
And now it’s time for the weather (event). Swathes of doom-inducing stories can be harvested from a single ‘dry spell’. Ha! Try ‘deadly drought’ instead. Attach ‘climate change’ and voilà, you’re cooking with gas (but not for long). Throw in some charts that may have been green a few years ago. Now they are larva red and screaming “Danger! The earth is burning! Stop driving the kids to school, give up your selfish coffee, bananas, helium and Camembert and free Golriz before it’s too late!”
The beauty of the weather is that it’s always doing something. And you can bet your bottom bitcoin, it’s something devastating, then that is all your fault. Thankfully, all you have to do is change your entire value system, drastically alter your lifestyle and pay a lot more tax.
Finally, some uplifting news!