Christopher Snowdon's Blog, page 267
February 10, 2012
BBC in cahoots with Big Tobacco, suspects raving lunatic
I have always feared for Stanton Glantz's mental health, but it's only since he started blogging that I've realised that the guy is genuinely certifiable. His latest post is an absolute belter. It seems that the Welsh government is consulting on whether to allow television and film actors to smoke in the studio. This is because the BBC has opened a production centre in Cardiff—there is already an exemption for actors in England—and the corporation has kept some productions in England as a result of the über-draconian favoured by the sheep-worriers.
The exemption is ridiculously narrow. No children can be present (as ever, I urge you to think of the children) and no members of the public are allowed to watch the scene being filmed. The exemption will only apply if "the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for the performer to smoke."
The swivel-eyed professor of nowt has, of course, gone ballistic.
From Glantz's vantage point way down the rabbit hole, the BBC is a pro-smoking organisation.
Nurse!
But the BBC is saying exactly that, Stanton, and that definitely counts as evidence. As the consultation document states...
This means that you can believe one of two things. Either the Welsh Assembly and the BBC are lying because they're engaged in some kind of pro-tobacco industry plot to undermine the smoking ban, or they are telling the truth and the smoking ban is deterring the Beeb from filming more shows in Wales. If you look at the output of both the BBC and the Welsh Assembly in recent years, I think it's pretty clear that if they are are engaged in a pro-smoking conspiracy, it has been phenomenally well-camouflaged.
Glantz continues to rant on about his theories in his usual illiterate style...
A prize to anyone who can explain what the hell he's babbling about.
It gets better...
Yes, that's a much simpler solution, Stan, you old fruitcake.
That's not quite true, is it now? If the BBC is lobbying for this unutterably trivial amendment, it would strongly suggest that they stand to benefit from it—by, for example, not having to spend hours pissing around with CGI. Companies don't generally lobby for policies that won't benefit them, y'see. The tobacco industry, on the other hand, is not lobbying for it and stands to gain—at best—the sale of a couple of packs of cigarettes to be smoked in some god awful period drama.
Yes, yes. But as I've just explained, they're not going to do that because (a) they would not benefit from it; au contraire, they would be damaged by it, and (b) if they wanted to stop actors being, ahem, "poisoned by secondhand smoke at BBC studios", they would do so voluntarily. I know, Stan, that you struggle to comprehend the difference between public and private action, but not everything in life needs to be dealt with through repressive legislation.
I do hope someone at the BBC comes across Stan's blog. It might give them an idea of the type of crack-pots they've been giving such credulous coverage to all these years.
The exemption is ridiculously narrow. No children can be present (as ever, I urge you to think of the children) and no members of the public are allowed to watch the scene being filmed. The exemption will only apply if "the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for the performer to smoke."
The swivel-eyed professor of nowt has, of course, gone ballistic.
BBC lobbying to weaken Welsh smokefree regulations: Yes, this is real.
From Glantz's vantage point way down the rabbit hole, the BBC is a pro-smoking organisation.
...one wonders what else is going on in the shadows. After all, there is a long history of collaboration between Big Tobacco and the movie industry.
Nurse!
There is absolutely no evidence that any movie production moved from one place to another because they couldn't smoke.
But the BBC is saying exactly that, Stanton, and that definitely counts as evidence. As the consultation document states...
The exemption for performers ... would make Wales a more attractive place for programme making and would remove current costs involved with taking smoking scenes on productions being filmed in Wales to England. The smoking ban has been a major issue for a number of productions that have been filmed in Wales, especially period dramas set in a time when smoking was commonplace.
This means that you can believe one of two things. Either the Welsh Assembly and the BBC are lying because they're engaged in some kind of pro-tobacco industry plot to undermine the smoking ban, or they are telling the truth and the smoking ban is deterring the Beeb from filming more shows in Wales. If you look at the output of both the BBC and the Welsh Assembly in recent years, I think it's pretty clear that if they are are engaged in a pro-smoking conspiracy, it has been phenomenally well-camouflaged.
Glantz continues to rant on about his theories in his usual illiterate style...
Are we really to believe that the BBC has ignore [sic] the fact that it just opened a major new production center in Cardiff, Wales to take advantage of lower labor costs that exist in London just so they can favor actors [sic] generate secondhand smoke? I think not.
A prize to anyone who can explain what the hell he's babbling about.
It gets better...
Moreover, there would be nothing to stop BBC [sic] from having an actor wave around an unlit cigarette, cigar or pipe, then put the smoke in with CGI.
Yes, that's a much simpler solution, Stan, you old fruitcake.
The only beneficiary of this change would be the tobacco industry.
That's not quite true, is it now? If the BBC is lobbying for this unutterably trivial amendment, it would strongly suggest that they stand to benefit from it—by, for example, not having to spend hours pissing around with CGI. Companies don't generally lobby for policies that won't benefit them, y'see. The tobacco industry, on the other hand, is not lobbying for it and stands to gain—at best—the sale of a couple of packs of cigarettes to be smoked in some god awful period drama.
If the BBC wants to lobby to get smoking laws changed, they should be lobbying the government in London to remove the exemption that allows actors and other film makers to be poisoned by secondhand smoke at BBC studios in London.
Yes, yes. But as I've just explained, they're not going to do that because (a) they would not benefit from it; au contraire, they would be damaged by it, and (b) if they wanted to stop actors being, ahem, "poisoned by secondhand smoke at BBC studios", they would do so voluntarily. I know, Stan, that you struggle to comprehend the difference between public and private action, but not everything in life needs to be dealt with through repressive legislation.
I do hope someone at the BBC comes across Stan's blog. It might give them an idea of the type of crack-pots they've been giving such credulous coverage to all these years.
February 9, 2012
Sarah Wollaston misled the House
Dick Puddlecote rightly applauds Philip Davies (Con) and Eric Joyce (Lab) for standing up to that appalling Tory paternalist Sarah "let them drink champagne" Wollaston (Doctor's Party) yesterday. Sadly the rest of the MPs demonstrated why the public holds them in such contempt. I considered fisking the whole debate but it is late and it would be exhausting to take on every politician who misled the House. Did I say "misled the House"? That's parliamentary euphemism. They lied. They lied again and again, and if they didn't know they were lying, they're too stupid to be public servants and should be sacked anyway.
Tim Worstall has already picked up on the implicit belief that minimum pricing will raise the dead from their graves. A cretin named Valerie Vaz (whose speech has to be seen to be believed) made the absurd, unsourced claim that "the police ... have to clear up the mess on Saturday evenings at a cost of £13 billion." The bizarre myth that minimum pricing will cost moderate drinkers only £12 a year was repeatedly cited, and when Wollaston took the floor she showed herself to be incapable of understanding the difference between private and public costs, tangible and intangible costs, and internalities and externalities.
Really? The actual cost to the taxpayer is "at least £20 billion"? Just to make sure that wasn't a slip of the tongue, let's look at Wollaston's op-ed at Politics Home yesterday...
Yup, that's what she claims and that is what she told the mother of all parliaments. This would be a reference to the British Cabinet Office report of 2003 which found a total social cost of around £18-20 billion.
Of these costs, £4.7 billion were intangible costs (ie. they are hypothetical - they do not need to be paid by anyone, let alone the taxpayer).
A further £5.5 billion were lost productivity costs which, again, do not represent a bill that needs to be paid.
A further £5.1 billion were private costs related to crime which, once again, do not need to be recouped through the tax system, and the author of the report stressed repeatedly that these costs were at the absolute top end of any realistic estimate.
The only costs which can be considered as "to the taxpayer" are £1.7 billion in healthcare and £2.2 billion in crime and punishment, but since the exchequer receives £9 billion a year in alcohol duty, that hardly makes a compelling case for a compensatory sin tax, does it? (Minimum pricing, as currently proposed, would not compensate the treasury in any case.)
This a reference to a report from the National Social Marketing Centre (Lister, 2007) which sadly is not available online, but I have a copy as I requested it last year.
£16.1 billion of these 'costs' are intangible—imaginary evaluations of life years forgone.
£5 billion are private healthcare costs.
£5.8 billion are private costs related to crime.
£8 billion is the amount spent on "misused" alcohol by consumers (yes, the money drinkers spend on drink is counted as a cost to the taxpayer in Wollaston's world).
Your "lost productivity" makes up £7.3 billion, but who pays this? At a push you could say the drinker pays it, but it's really just income forgone so nobody pays it. Certainly, the taxpayer is not left to pick up the bill. Even in the loosest definition, this is a further cost to the drinker, not the state.
This leaves £6.6 billion as a legitimate cost to the taxpayer. That figure is highly inflated for various reasons and does not include any benefits from alcohol, but it still remains lower than the £9 billion received by the treasury in alcohol duty. So even using these highly dubious figures, drinkers are subsidising teetotallers. From a purely economic standpoint, Wollaston should be petitioning for a maximum unit price.
I have much, much more to say on the subject of crooked cost-to-society estimates and will do so in a paper for the ASI in April. Every figure given by politicians and pressure groups which purport to show the cost of obesity, drinking and smoking wrongly portrays intangible private costs as financial public costs and portrays expenditure by consumers as a cost 'to society'. They are riddled with double-counting, they conspicuously fail to include benefits (such as duty paid) and they are designed only for advocacy.
But as bad as they are, none of the researchers who compile them would ever claim that alcohol costs the taxpayer £20 billion, let alone £55 billion.
And that is just one of the reasons why Sarah Wollaston misled lied to the House on Tuesday.
PS. Eric Crampton has done some outstanding work picking these cost-of-drinking studies apart. This must-read paper relates to Australia and New Zealand but the dodgy methods are just the same as those used in the UK. (Short version here.)
Tim Worstall has already picked up on the implicit belief that minimum pricing will raise the dead from their graves. A cretin named Valerie Vaz (whose speech has to be seen to be believed) made the absurd, unsourced claim that "the police ... have to clear up the mess on Saturday evenings at a cost of £13 billion." The bizarre myth that minimum pricing will cost moderate drinkers only £12 a year was repeatedly cited, and when Wollaston took the floor she showed herself to be incapable of understanding the difference between private and public costs, tangible and intangible costs, and internalities and externalities.
Sarah Wollaston (Totnes, Conservative): What about taxpayers? The cost of the epidemic is out of control. It is at least £20 billion...
Really? The actual cost to the taxpayer is "at least £20 billion"? Just to make sure that wasn't a slip of the tongue, let's look at Wollaston's op-ed at Politics Home yesterday...
Mortality is increasing and also the cost to tax payers; at least £20billion.
Yup, that's what she claims and that is what she told the mother of all parliaments. This would be a reference to the British Cabinet Office report of 2003 which found a total social cost of around £18-20 billion.
Of these costs, £4.7 billion were intangible costs (ie. they are hypothetical - they do not need to be paid by anyone, let alone the taxpayer).
A further £5.5 billion were lost productivity costs which, again, do not represent a bill that needs to be paid.
A further £5.1 billion were private costs related to crime which, once again, do not need to be recouped through the tax system, and the author of the report stressed repeatedly that these costs were at the absolute top end of any realistic estimate.
The only costs which can be considered as "to the taxpayer" are £1.7 billion in healthcare and £2.2 billion in crime and punishment, but since the exchequer receives £9 billion a year in alcohol duty, that hardly makes a compelling case for a compensatory sin tax, does it? (Minimum pricing, as currently proposed, would not compensate the treasury in any case.)
...but if we look at the finer details of the impact on productivity, we will see that the evidence given to the Health Committee when it looked at this issue showed that the cost could be as high as £55 billion
This a reference to a report from the National Social Marketing Centre (Lister, 2007) which sadly is not available online, but I have a copy as I requested it last year.
£16.1 billion of these 'costs' are intangible—imaginary evaluations of life years forgone.
£5 billion are private healthcare costs.
£5.8 billion are private costs related to crime.
£8 billion is the amount spent on "misused" alcohol by consumers (yes, the money drinkers spend on drink is counted as a cost to the taxpayer in Wollaston's world).
Your "lost productivity" makes up £7.3 billion, but who pays this? At a push you could say the drinker pays it, but it's really just income forgone so nobody pays it. Certainly, the taxpayer is not left to pick up the bill. Even in the loosest definition, this is a further cost to the drinker, not the state.
This leaves £6.6 billion as a legitimate cost to the taxpayer. That figure is highly inflated for various reasons and does not include any benefits from alcohol, but it still remains lower than the £9 billion received by the treasury in alcohol duty. So even using these highly dubious figures, drinkers are subsidising teetotallers. From a purely economic standpoint, Wollaston should be petitioning for a maximum unit price.
I have much, much more to say on the subject of crooked cost-to-society estimates and will do so in a paper for the ASI in April. Every figure given by politicians and pressure groups which purport to show the cost of obesity, drinking and smoking wrongly portrays intangible private costs as financial public costs and portrays expenditure by consumers as a cost 'to society'. They are riddled with double-counting, they conspicuously fail to include benefits (such as duty paid) and they are designed only for advocacy.
But as bad as they are, none of the researchers who compile them would ever claim that alcohol costs the taxpayer £20 billion, let alone £55 billion.
And that is just one of the reasons why Sarah Wollaston misled lied to the House on Tuesday.
PS. Eric Crampton has done some outstanding work picking these cost-of-drinking studies apart. This must-read paper relates to Australia and New Zealand but the dodgy methods are just the same as those used in the UK. (Short version here.)
February 8, 2012
February 7, 2012
Another day, another ban in Australia
Australia's attempts to get back to its roots as a massive prison continue apace, with New South Wales banning sunbeds as of 2015. As with plain packaging, there is a pathetic desire to be a trail-blazer of wowserism.
Er, no thanks. We've been doing alright for hundreds of years without having to follow the lead of a puritanical colony on the other side of the world. Lately, politicians have fallen for the peculiar belief that if one country does something, every other country should follow. Denmark's introduced a fat tax! Let's not get left behind. Australia's introducing plain packaging! What are we waiting for? Brazil's banned sunbeds! There's no time to lose. Only today, for example, we had this...
With all due respect to the good people of Mauritius, I couldn't give a tuppenny fuck whether they let people smoke in their cars or not. I would struggle to find the place on a map so why would I want to copy their legal system?
This fetish for borrowing prohibitions from satellite states just because they have done something nobody else would think of doing is the exact opposite of what any rational government would do. When faced with something that is legal in 200+ countries and illegal in one country, the reasonable thing is surely to side with the overwhelming majority rather than the outlier. That is no longer how it works. They're taxing sugar in Hungary! Hurrah! Let's follow the example of the Hungarians. When has that mighty world power ever been wrong?
But back to Australia, the undisputed world leader in illiberalism. The sunbed ban has come from the Environment Minister (?!), who says:
This may be true (I can't be bothered to find out right now—leave a comment if it isn't). Certainly Australia has got to be up there in the rankings, but what do expect when you export several million pasty people from England, Ireland and Scotland and thrust them under the blistering sun of an arid continent? Don't go blaming sunbeds for the nation's skin cancer rate. Take a look at that big yellow thing in the sky.
Needless to say, the irksome, omnipresent über-wowser Simon Chapman was on hand to prattle his usual nonsense...
I'm reminded of the quote which Alan Partridge mistakenly took as a complement: "In his hands the essentially complex becomes inordinately simplistic." I have yet to see any evidence that sunbeds are more dangerous than sunbathing, nor does there seem to be any scientific reason why they should be. Cancer Research UK merely says that:
Similarly, the World Health Organisation says:
The message seems to be that sunbeds are no safer than sunbathing. There is no suggestion that they are less safe. Both carry the risk of sunburn and, therefore, skin cancer. That, we knew. How does it justify a total ban on grown adults tanning themselves on a machine that replicates a natural process? The head of the Cancer Council gives the usual excuse:
In the 21st century, the price of universal health-care is to be told how to live. This is the logic and there will be many more "next logical steps" before it reaches its logical conclusion. Hold tight.
The Angry Exile has more on this.
NSW will be the only place in the world besides Brazil to institute a total ban on ultraviolet solariums tanning units when the laws come into place from December 31, 2014, and cancer groups hope other states and countries will follow.
Er, no thanks. We've been doing alright for hundreds of years without having to follow the lead of a puritanical colony on the other side of the world. Lately, politicians have fallen for the peculiar belief that if one country does something, every other country should follow. Denmark's introduced a fat tax! Let's not get left behind. Australia's introducing plain packaging! What are we waiting for? Brazil's banned sunbeds! There's no time to lose. Only today, for example, we had this...
In Mauritius, smoking is now prohibited in all private cars carrying passengers, regardless of whether children are present.
With all due respect to the good people of Mauritius, I couldn't give a tuppenny fuck whether they let people smoke in their cars or not. I would struggle to find the place on a map so why would I want to copy their legal system?
This fetish for borrowing prohibitions from satellite states just because they have done something nobody else would think of doing is the exact opposite of what any rational government would do. When faced with something that is legal in 200+ countries and illegal in one country, the reasonable thing is surely to side with the overwhelming majority rather than the outlier. That is no longer how it works. They're taxing sugar in Hungary! Hurrah! Let's follow the example of the Hungarians. When has that mighty world power ever been wrong?
But back to Australia, the undisputed world leader in illiberalism. The sunbed ban has come from the Environment Minister (?!), who says:
"Sadly, Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world and this ban is long overdue."
This may be true (I can't be bothered to find out right now—leave a comment if it isn't). Certainly Australia has got to be up there in the rankings, but what do expect when you export several million pasty people from England, Ireland and Scotland and thrust them under the blistering sun of an arid continent? Don't go blaming sunbeds for the nation's skin cancer rate. Take a look at that big yellow thing in the sky.
Needless to say, the irksome, omnipresent über-wowser Simon Chapman was on hand to prattle his usual nonsense...
"Solaria are cancer incubators and we have known that for a good while".
I'm reminded of the quote which Alan Partridge mistakenly took as a complement: "In his hands the essentially complex becomes inordinately simplistic." I have yet to see any evidence that sunbeds are more dangerous than sunbathing, nor does there seem to be any scientific reason why they should be. Cancer Research UK merely says that:
Sunbeds aren't a safe alternative to tanning outdoors. Like the sun, sunbeds give out harmful UV rays which damage the DNA in our skin cells and can cause skin cancer...
The main cause of skin cancer is overexposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Like the sun, sunbeds give off UVA and UVB rays.
Similarly, the World Health Organisation says:
Exposure to UV, either naturally from the sun or from artificial sources such as sunlamps, is a known risk factor for skin cancer...
Any excessive exposure to UV, not just from sunbeds, can result in structural damage to human skin.
The message seems to be that sunbeds are no safer than sunbathing. There is no suggestion that they are less safe. Both carry the risk of sunburn and, therefore, skin cancer. That, we knew. How does it justify a total ban on grown adults tanning themselves on a machine that replicates a natural process? The head of the Cancer Council gives the usual excuse:
He said governments paid for cancers caused by sunbeds so they had a right to ban them.
In the 21st century, the price of universal health-care is to be told how to live. This is the logic and there will be many more "next logical steps" before it reaches its logical conclusion. Hold tight.
The Angry Exile has more on this.
February 6, 2012
Jack3d - health threat or moral panic?
Readers of
The Art of Suppression
will be familiar with knee-jerk prohibitions of party pills and synthetic drugs based on anecdotal evidence. I wonder if
Jack3d
(pronounced 'jacked') is about to follow the same route.The deaths of two U.S. soldiers who collapsed during physical training in the last few months have prompted a military investigation of a popular body-building supplement that was found in their systems.
The dietary supplement Dimethylamylamine, or DMAA, has been banned for sale at stores and commissaries in military bases across the country pending the results of the probe.
DMAA (1,3 dimethylamylamine) is extracted from the geranium plant and is a key ingredient in Jack3d, a dietary supplement much-used by body-builders and soldiers. It acts like mild amphetamine—or strong caffeine, if you prefer—and around 440 million servings of Jack3d have been consumed since 2007. If this stuff was truly dangerous, one would expect an epidemic of deaths to have taken place. Instead, we have two incidents, both involving soldiers who have died "after taking" it. They may have taken absurd quantities, or they may have taken something else as well, or it may all be a coincidence. Coincidence can certainly not be ruled out when a product is so widely consumed—indeed, it would be remarkable if there were not coincidences.
Nevertheless, the US army has banned it from sale on military bases. Meanwhile, in Australia...
Jack3d packed in at Queensland mines
A popular dietary supplement has been banned at a central Queensland coal mine after reports workers were using the stimulant to stay awake on the job.
Heaven forfend! And, interestingly, there is a party pills angle to all this:
It is claimed the drug has been used in the production of party drugs.
It is more than a "claim". Remember BZP? (If not, let me point you again in the direction of The Art of Suppression .) It was selling in the millions in New Zealand until it was banned in 2008. Incredibly, the ban on BZP didn't stop young people wanting to get high (who'd a thunk it?) and DMAA was one of the substitutes that filled the vacuum. This, from 2009:
New party pills leave four seriously ill
Health officials want one of the main ingredients in new-generation party pills restricted after four users became seriously ill.
Advice to the [New Zealand] Government highlights concerns about DMAA (dimethylamylamine), a derivative of geranium oil, which is a "psychoactive substance" that reportedly gives users an adrenaline rush.
DMAA is included in several new-generation party pill substances, including Sunrise and Hummer.
These flooded the market when BZP varieties were banned and were now being sold nationally in stores, including dairies, without age restrictions.
It's the same old story. DMAA was only introduced into the dietary supplement market after ephedrine was banned in the US in 2005 (as an amendment to the Patriot Act (!)—typical American log-rolling). There was never good evidence that either ephedrine or BZP were "killer drugs", although there were a handful of cases where people had died "after taking" it, which is a very different matter. There is a similar lack of evidence that DMAA is a genuine health hazard although, like any drug, it can be abused.
As for Jack3d, this is a very widely used supplement which had no reported health risks until the murky cases of the two soldiers this year. (The people who who were "left seriously ill" after taking DMAA in New Zealand had taken at least a gramme of the stuff in its pure form. A dose of Jack3d contains just 50 milligrammes.)
Genuine health risk or moral panic? We may never get the chance to find out because DMAA may soon go the way of countless other low-strength stimulants—banned on the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc logic. If so, we can be sure that a similar substance will appear to the plug the gap almost immediately.
And so it continues.
February 5, 2012
Offering your scorn
Many years ago I read an interview between Matt Groening (the creator of The Simpsons) and Frank Zappa. The interview doesn't seem to exist online, but I recall them both agreeing that their job was to 'offer their scorn'. No one had to accept the scorn. They didn't even have to acknowledge it. It probably wouldn't make any difference if they did acknowledge it, but it was the artist's job to offer it all the same.
Several years later I saw the greatly under-rated film Election, in which a school teacher (played by Matthew Broderick) spots a bad egg running for student president and recklessly tries to sabotage her campaign because he knows that a victory will set her on course for a life of making other people miserable. The teacher is exposed, Tracey "pick" Flick wins the election and he is ruined. By the end of the film, he has lost his marriage and his job, his nemesis has won and he has nothing. In the final scene, he comes across her by chance—she is now rapidly ascending the greasy pole of politics—and in a futile and impotent gesture, he hurls a milkshake at her car. The end.
If I was to tell you that this scene and the aforementioned quote regularly come to mind as I write my books, speeches, articles and blog-posts, you would get a glimpse of the hopelessness with which I view the pursuit of liberty and tolerance in the second decade of the twenty-first century. To be candid, I do not see myself on the winning side. As I hinted at in yesterday's post, the forces of reason are no match for the forces of ignorance, avarice and fear which outgun us.
With the odds stacked against you, all you can do is offer your scorn. With that in mind, I point you to Carl V. Phillips' recent testimony to the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr Phillips is an honest scientist, too rigorous for the public health movement he represents and too measured for the e-cigarette and smokeless tobacco industries whose products he implicitly or overtly endorses. The FDA committee on tobacco harm reduction, meanwhile, is ostensibly interested in public health but, as Carl writes, is actually "dominated by dedicated anti-tobacco extremists who are opposed to harm reduction, and its external scientific advisory group (TPSAC) is stacked with extremists and junk scientists". For financial and ideological reasons, it exists to promote pharmaceutical nicotine products at the expense of more effective alternatives.
A genuine harm reductionist cannot expect to change anyone's mind in such an environment. You can waste your three minutes' speaking time trying to win favour with a unwinnable audience or you can seize the moment to offer you scorn. Carl chose the latter...
Go over to Ep-ology to read the background of this story and the various references to which the good doctor alludes.
Several years later I saw the greatly under-rated film Election, in which a school teacher (played by Matthew Broderick) spots a bad egg running for student president and recklessly tries to sabotage her campaign because he knows that a victory will set her on course for a life of making other people miserable. The teacher is exposed, Tracey "pick" Flick wins the election and he is ruined. By the end of the film, he has lost his marriage and his job, his nemesis has won and he has nothing. In the final scene, he comes across her by chance—she is now rapidly ascending the greasy pole of politics—and in a futile and impotent gesture, he hurls a milkshake at her car. The end.
If I was to tell you that this scene and the aforementioned quote regularly come to mind as I write my books, speeches, articles and blog-posts, you would get a glimpse of the hopelessness with which I view the pursuit of liberty and tolerance in the second decade of the twenty-first century. To be candid, I do not see myself on the winning side. As I hinted at in yesterday's post, the forces of reason are no match for the forces of ignorance, avarice and fear which outgun us.
With the odds stacked against you, all you can do is offer your scorn. With that in mind, I point you to Carl V. Phillips' recent testimony to the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr Phillips is an honest scientist, too rigorous for the public health movement he represents and too measured for the e-cigarette and smokeless tobacco industries whose products he implicitly or overtly endorses. The FDA committee on tobacco harm reduction, meanwhile, is ostensibly interested in public health but, as Carl writes, is actually "dominated by dedicated anti-tobacco extremists who are opposed to harm reduction, and its external scientific advisory group (TPSAC) is stacked with extremists and junk scientists". For financial and ideological reasons, it exists to promote pharmaceutical nicotine products at the expense of more effective alternatives.
A genuine harm reductionist cannot expect to change anyone's mind in such an environment. You can waste your three minutes' speaking time trying to win favour with a unwinnable audience or you can seize the moment to offer you scorn. Carl chose the latter...
I speak today as an educator with an interest in the nature of science and its role in the functioning of our society, and from that perspective would like to say, "won't someone please think of the children?"
If an impressionable young mind stumbled across how science is often portrayed in this corner of our nation's government, he would be at risk of never becoming scientifically literate, let alone to wanting to be a scientist.
First, science is supposed to be an honest truth-seeking process that attempts to figure out the best possible answer to a question, often via methods that require innovative thinking. Our impressionable young mind, however, might come away:
-believing that science consists of just a few narrowly-defined recipes, rather than taking in all the information we have in myriad forms, available from many forums, and thoughtfully making the best use of it;
-believing that health science focuses on looking only under streetlamps and obsessing about easy but not directly informative work like chemistry, rather than trying to do the more difficult work to translate this and other information into what we really want to know about health effects;
-from today's session, he might believe that science involves such methods as manipulating children into giving the answers you want, speculation-laden anecdotes, limiting reviews of the evidence to exclude any evidence that you wish did not exist, and counting unsupported assertions by authors as evidence;
-and he would be taught that science it is not about identifying how we maximize our knowledge, but that it involves declaring that we just do not know anything, when in fact we know quite a lot.
Our impressionable young mind is not going to think very highly of science, and he might reasonably conclude that the best way to get involved in America's version of science is to go to law school. And, yes, that means that misguided ways of looking at science may be a gateway to more dangerous behaviors.
Second, this poor child would get the impression that a hypothetical cardiovascular condition or cancer 40 years from now will be just as harmful as a near-term case in a current smoker, a case that was caused because smokers are discouraged from switching to low-risk alternatives. Do we really want to tell that child that we expect so little of him, that his generation's health science will be so lousy that the 40-year-out cancer will be no more treatable that it would be today?
Finally, at the very least, I would urge this committee and Center to make sure that any such anti-scientific writing is kept in child-proof packaging, rather that being left laying around on the internet where anyone could stumble across it and damage their developing minds.
Go over to Ep-ology to read the background of this story and the various references to which the good doctor alludes.
February 3, 2012
Goodbye, you lizard scum
I have a post about the 'toxic sugar' canard over at the Adam Smith Institute. Before you go any further, please click over there and have a read.
I would like to leave it there, but there really is so much more to say. Seriously, has the whole world gone insane? I can understand why the media would pick up on a story like this and I can almost understand why a popular science magazine like Nature would publish the wacky article in the first place. It sells. What I don't get is why a bunch of nodding-dog journalists would respond with half-witted opinion pieces such as 'Evil is among us. And it's called sugar'.
It's not that I didn't see it coming. I've been saying for years that the anti-tobacco blueprint would be rolled out to alcohol, food and fizzy drinks. It's just that I didn't think it would happen this quickly and when it did happen, I expected gales of laughter and an anti-nanny state backlash. This is manifestly not happening. That is a problem, but it isn't the biggest problem. The truly terrifying thing is that the intellectual climate is so retarded that Nature can publish such an article without feeling any shame.
Look at the people in the video below. Look at their self-satisfied little faces. These are the authors of the toxic sugar article. They are idiots. I do not say that to be insulting, but as a statement of fact. The woman on the right, in particular, should not be trusted with a pair of scissors. She calls herself a "medical sociologist" and works at UCSF. This should disqualify her from going anywhere near a scientific journal. She thinks that sugar is a poison because it is fermented to make alcohol. If you read the Daily Mail , alcohol is made by "distilling sugar". This is what we're up against: cretinous arguments made still more ludicrous by a woefully uneducated media.
The asshole on the left begins by saying "We are in the midst of the biggest public health crisis in the history of the world." He's not talking about the Black Death, cholera, influenza, malaria or even cigarette smoking. He's talking about people drinking fizzy drinks in North America. The guy is either ignorant or insane or a liar. This one statement is enough to discredit him and yet he has made another video in which he says: "Fructose is ethanol without the buzz ... fructose is poison." That video has had nearly two million hits on Youtube. It's over. The morons have won.
He's another UCSF chump and it's no surprise to find that he's friendly with the anti-smoking loons of that quasi-university. In that same video, he refers to "the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that Stan Glantz runs right across the street. Stan's a good guy. I like Stan a lot." Right there we have another disagreement because Stan is not a good guy. On the contrary, he is a charlatan and a crank and he should be investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned. He is another obsessive fruitcake who has found a pulpit from which to preach his warped, scientifically illiterate ideas thanks to the lax admissions standards of UCSF.
As you may know, Glantz regularly appears on television claiming that half of all teenage smokers picked up the habit solely as a result of seeing smoking in movies. This is a man who should, as Christopher Hitchens might have said, be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign around his neck and selling pencils from a cup. Do interviewers call him on his bampot theories? They do not. Instead he is perched up in San Francisco with millions of dollars of grants and a professorship in a subject which he has not studied at degree level and of which he apparently knows nothing.
Glantz also invented the heart miracle scam. What better illustration of the Western world's plunge into unreason can there be than this? Here we see the perils of the campaigner-researcher, the corruption of peer-review and the pitiful credulity of the media in perfect alignment.
To take just one example, last year Michael Siegel wrote about a heart miracle in one Minnesota county. It was so pathetic I don't think I even mentioned it at the time. In summary, some devious anti-smoking lobbyists cherry-picked a county and claimed that heart attacks had fallen by 45% after the smoking ban. Siegel listed some of the news stories that unquestioningly covered it.
The trick was a simple one. They didn't look at the year of the ban (2007). Instead they compared heart attack rates in 2001 with those of 2008. Sure enough, they fell by 45%, but this was not out of line with the general decline in heart attacks across the USA. The heart attack rate is falling everywhere. You may recall from last week that the UK saw a halving of heart attacks in the same decade. The longer the timeframe the bigger the fall. Cherry-pick one small county (population 150,000) and the effect can be exaggerated further.
This is routine deception on the part of tobacco control, but that is not the point. My point is that you don't need to be privy to this information to work out that "Smoking ban cut heart attacks risk in half" is a bullshit headline. You do not need to be well versed in statistics to work out that, if this were true, half of all heart attacks before the ban were caused by wafts of tobacco smoke in bars and restaurants. And you don't need to be cognisant of medical science to realise that this is simply preposterous.
Similarly, you do you need to understand biology to know that you are not going to get cancer from smelling tobacco on someone's shirt and yet the concept of thirdhand smoke has been widely talked about, not least by the Daily Mail , as if it was anything other than the ramblings of the insane.
Who came up with the idea of thirdhand smoke? Georg Matt. Who's Georg Matt? He's a wacky psychologist based in San Diego. There is a running theme here, is there not?
Where does every crackpot idea come from?
Where does every hysteria-driven, junk science-based ban begin?
Which is the home to the world's worst university?
Which state is dragging the world into an intellectual dark age?
California.
Lex Luther had the right idea. Bill Hicks had the right idea.
California has to go.
I would like to leave it there, but there really is so much more to say. Seriously, has the whole world gone insane? I can understand why the media would pick up on a story like this and I can almost understand why a popular science magazine like Nature would publish the wacky article in the first place. It sells. What I don't get is why a bunch of nodding-dog journalists would respond with half-witted opinion pieces such as 'Evil is among us. And it's called sugar'.
It's not that I didn't see it coming. I've been saying for years that the anti-tobacco blueprint would be rolled out to alcohol, food and fizzy drinks. It's just that I didn't think it would happen this quickly and when it did happen, I expected gales of laughter and an anti-nanny state backlash. This is manifestly not happening. That is a problem, but it isn't the biggest problem. The truly terrifying thing is that the intellectual climate is so retarded that Nature can publish such an article without feeling any shame.
Look at the people in the video below. Look at their self-satisfied little faces. These are the authors of the toxic sugar article. They are idiots. I do not say that to be insulting, but as a statement of fact. The woman on the right, in particular, should not be trusted with a pair of scissors. She calls herself a "medical sociologist" and works at UCSF. This should disqualify her from going anywhere near a scientific journal. She thinks that sugar is a poison because it is fermented to make alcohol. If you read the Daily Mail , alcohol is made by "distilling sugar". This is what we're up against: cretinous arguments made still more ludicrous by a woefully uneducated media.
The asshole on the left begins by saying "We are in the midst of the biggest public health crisis in the history of the world." He's not talking about the Black Death, cholera, influenza, malaria or even cigarette smoking. He's talking about people drinking fizzy drinks in North America. The guy is either ignorant or insane or a liar. This one statement is enough to discredit him and yet he has made another video in which he says: "Fructose is ethanol without the buzz ... fructose is poison." That video has had nearly two million hits on Youtube. It's over. The morons have won.
He's another UCSF chump and it's no surprise to find that he's friendly with the anti-smoking loons of that quasi-university. In that same video, he refers to "the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that Stan Glantz runs right across the street. Stan's a good guy. I like Stan a lot." Right there we have another disagreement because Stan is not a good guy. On the contrary, he is a charlatan and a crank and he should be investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned. He is another obsessive fruitcake who has found a pulpit from which to preach his warped, scientifically illiterate ideas thanks to the lax admissions standards of UCSF.
As you may know, Glantz regularly appears on television claiming that half of all teenage smokers picked up the habit solely as a result of seeing smoking in movies. This is a man who should, as Christopher Hitchens might have said, be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign around his neck and selling pencils from a cup. Do interviewers call him on his bampot theories? They do not. Instead he is perched up in San Francisco with millions of dollars of grants and a professorship in a subject which he has not studied at degree level and of which he apparently knows nothing.
Glantz also invented the heart miracle scam. What better illustration of the Western world's plunge into unreason can there be than this? Here we see the perils of the campaigner-researcher, the corruption of peer-review and the pitiful credulity of the media in perfect alignment.
To take just one example, last year Michael Siegel wrote about a heart miracle in one Minnesota county. It was so pathetic I don't think I even mentioned it at the time. In summary, some devious anti-smoking lobbyists cherry-picked a county and claimed that heart attacks had fallen by 45% after the smoking ban. Siegel listed some of the news stories that unquestioningly covered it.
For example, the headline of an ABC News article reads: "Smoking ban cuts cardiac events 45%, Mayo Clinic says."
A Procor headline reads: "Smoking ban cuts heart attacks in half."
A Thirdage.com article headline reads: "Smoking Ban Cuts Heart Attack Risk In Half."
The UPI headline about the research reads: "Smoking ban cut heart attacks risk in half."
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune headline reads: "Smoking bans cut cardiac events 45%."
The EMax Health headline is: "Smoking bans reduce heart attack rates by half, finds study."
The Business Insider headline reads: "Heart Attacks Decreased By 50% After These Workplaces Launched Smoking Bans."
The trick was a simple one. They didn't look at the year of the ban (2007). Instead they compared heart attack rates in 2001 with those of 2008. Sure enough, they fell by 45%, but this was not out of line with the general decline in heart attacks across the USA. The heart attack rate is falling everywhere. You may recall from last week that the UK saw a halving of heart attacks in the same decade. The longer the timeframe the bigger the fall. Cherry-pick one small county (population 150,000) and the effect can be exaggerated further.
This is routine deception on the part of tobacco control, but that is not the point. My point is that you don't need to be privy to this information to work out that "Smoking ban cut heart attacks risk in half" is a bullshit headline. You do not need to be well versed in statistics to work out that, if this were true, half of all heart attacks before the ban were caused by wafts of tobacco smoke in bars and restaurants. And you don't need to be cognisant of medical science to realise that this is simply preposterous.
Similarly, you do you need to understand biology to know that you are not going to get cancer from smelling tobacco on someone's shirt and yet the concept of thirdhand smoke has been widely talked about, not least by the Daily Mail , as if it was anything other than the ramblings of the insane.
Who came up with the idea of thirdhand smoke? Georg Matt. Who's Georg Matt? He's a wacky psychologist based in San Diego. There is a running theme here, is there not?
Where does every crackpot idea come from?
Where does every hysteria-driven, junk science-based ban begin?
Which is the home to the world's worst university?
Which state is dragging the world into an intellectual dark age?
California.
Lex Luther had the right idea. Bill Hicks had the right idea.
California has to go.
February 2, 2012
"No thanks, we're sweet enough," say lying puritans
As you may have noticed from headlines such as "Sugar 'is toxic and must be regulated just like cigarettes', claim scientists", "Tax and regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco, urge scientists" and "Experts say sugar is as dangerous as alcohol and cigarettes", the slippery slope got a little bit more slippery today. We did try to warn you, you know.
I'll be writing about the absurd Nature article that spawned all this later (it was written by 'public health professionals' from San Francisco. Fancy that!), but for now take a look at the picture that accompanied the piece. It gives you an insight into the twisted minds of the health crusader.
Yes, that's Mary Poppins, and I'm pretty sure that sugar is in plain packaging with a large graphic health warning. A sign of things to come?
I'll be writing about the absurd Nature article that spawned all this later (it was written by 'public health professionals' from San Francisco. Fancy that!), but for now take a look at the picture that accompanied the piece. It gives you an insight into the twisted minds of the health crusader.
Yes, that's Mary Poppins, and I'm pretty sure that sugar is in plain packaging with a large graphic health warning. A sign of things to come?
January 30, 2012
Plain talking
The British anti-tobacco industry is preparing to launch it's latest attempt to justify its existence. A public consultation on plain packaging is expected in March and the Department of Health's various sockpuppets (ASH, Fresh, Smokefree SouthWest etc.) will spend an enormous amount of taxpayers' money getting its employees and supporters to click on websites and send postcards.
The pseudo-journal Tobacco Control has helpfully published a "study" to help campaigners overcome objections from the public. Being Tobacco Control, the methodology is the tried-and-tested 'messing about on the internet' approach, in this instance the inappropriately named Becky Freeman has been reading comments on news stories.
So most people oppose it and most people think it won't work. The reaction of tobacco control is therefore to 'reframe' the issue so things like popularity and efficacy don't get in the way. All in a day's work for ASH et al.
And if they succeed, will the professional zealots leave it there? Of course not. Having passed a plain packaging law in Australia, the crusaders have already skipped onto their next objectives.
You read that right: they want the government to make cigarettes "foul-tasting". And you'll need a license to smoke them. These are the people who once claimed that all they wanted was no-smoking sections in restaurants, remember.
Simon Clark has recently launched a website to allow the sane majority to voice their opposition to all this nonsense. I have written a short blogpost touching on some of the main issues around plain packaging. Do have a read and be sure to sign up on the right-hand side of the page.
The pseudo-journal Tobacco Control has helpfully published a "study" to help campaigners overcome objections from the public. Being Tobacco Control, the methodology is the tried-and-tested 'messing about on the internet' approach, in this instance the inappropriately named Becky Freeman has been reading comments on news stories.
Results Of 117 relevant news items, 41 included 1818 reader comments. 1187 (65.3%) comments contained no reference to plain packaging, and mainly addressed a tobacco tax rise announced at the same time. The comments about plain packaging were more than 2.5 times more likely to oppose than support the policy. The dominant argumentative frame, comprising 27% of oppositional comments, was that plain packaging would be ineffective in reducing smoking. Online reader poll results showed equal support for and opposition to plain packaging.
Conclusions The results of this study can be used by tobacco control advocates to anticipate opposition and assist in reframing and counteracting arguments opposed to plain packaging.
So most people oppose it and most people think it won't work. The reaction of tobacco control is therefore to 'reframe' the issue so things like popularity and efficacy don't get in the way. All in a day's work for ASH et al.
And if they succeed, will the professional zealots leave it there? Of course not. Having passed a plain packaging law in Australia, the crusaders have already skipped onto their next objectives.
LICENCES to puff, foul-tasting cigarettes, and financial incentives to stop smoking are next in a bid to help the nation quit a $5 billion addiction to tobacco revenue before the end of the next decade.
You read that right: they want the government to make cigarettes "foul-tasting". And you'll need a license to smoke them. These are the people who once claimed that all they wanted was no-smoking sections in restaurants, remember.
Simon Clark has recently launched a website to allow the sane majority to voice their opposition to all this nonsense. I have written a short blogpost touching on some of the main issues around plain packaging. Do have a read and be sure to sign up on the right-hand side of the page.
January 28, 2012
A work of art
The Guardian
recently kicked off the campaign for plain packaging this week with an interview with that sad old sociologist Simon Chapman who seems to think that the tobacco industry finds him fascinating:
"Hey, look at me—I'm only half-mad!"
Expect much more about plain packaging in the next few months. The Department of Health has lined up its usual NGOs and fake charities to persuade the public that a policy that is so preposterous that even the most deranged anti-smoking headbangers have only recently endorsed it, should be a priority as we slide back into recession and the EU goes bust.
It won't surprise you to hear that I see plain packaging as a gross infringement of intellectual property, private property and the free market. That it will be extended to other products in due course I consider to be a near-certainty. It is a lunatic idea dreamt up by people who have long since run out of ideas. The entire self-serving and deceitful cabal of 'tobacco control professionals' should be put out to grass. They have done enough damage. Chapman is very proud that the Australian supernanny state has banned e-cigarettes and snus, for example—these people should be in a smokefree prison cell.
David Hockney has better things to do that smack down pointless wowsers like Chapman, but he has done so all the same in today's letters section and it is quite glorious...
Taxi for Chapman...
David Hockney's contribution to culture
Simon Chapman's contribution to culture
"They dislike me intensely because of my prominence and persistence. But I also confuse them because I'm very against the censorship and rating of films because of their tobacco content."
"Hey, look at me—I'm only half-mad!"
Expect much more about plain packaging in the next few months. The Department of Health has lined up its usual NGOs and fake charities to persuade the public that a policy that is so preposterous that even the most deranged anti-smoking headbangers have only recently endorsed it, should be a priority as we slide back into recession and the EU goes bust.
It won't surprise you to hear that I see plain packaging as a gross infringement of intellectual property, private property and the free market. That it will be extended to other products in due course I consider to be a near-certainty. It is a lunatic idea dreamt up by people who have long since run out of ideas. The entire self-serving and deceitful cabal of 'tobacco control professionals' should be put out to grass. They have done enough damage. Chapman is very proud that the Australian supernanny state has banned e-cigarettes and snus, for example—these people should be in a smokefree prison cell.
David Hockney has better things to do that smack down pointless wowsers like Chapman, but he has done so all the same in today's letters section and it is quite glorious...
Why doesn't Mr Chapman debate with a good and satisfied customer of the tobacco companies (Plain packs will make smoking history, 25 January)? Someone who has seen what will replace it as a smoothing, calming contemplative helper. Someone whose friends died of alcohol consumption, not tobacco. Someone who has smoked for nearly as long as he has lived. Someone who knows about the fanatical attitude of haters of tobacco. Someone who is not so naive about advertising and packaging.
Someone who has almost outlived a fanatical anti-smoking father. Someone who is fed up to the teeth with people who think they really know what health is. Someone who is not afraid of the cowardly, crooked politicians who stifle the debate about pleasure in the now. Someone who knows that time is elastic. Someone who knows how easy it is to lie with statistics. Someone who is not a professional agitator, who knows there is no such thing as a professional smoker but knows there are hundreds of dreary, professional, highly paid anti-smokers.
Someone who thinks laughter is good for you as it drains fear from the body. Someone who has something better to do than to try and control the quiet lives of others. Someone who knows we are all a bit different and is fed up with the growing regimentation of people. Someone who knows that smokers can live perfectly average-length lives but heavy drinkers rarely. Someone who is shocked by the growing conformity among people, and what that might mean for a reasonable free society. Someone who prefers the centre of Bohemia to Australian suburbia. Someone who knows we have to die.
David Hockney
Bridlington, East Yorkshire
Taxi for Chapman...
David Hockney's contribution to culture
Simon Chapman's contribution to culture
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