(0) (4)

Exhibit A from the United States. That 100 pattie burger looks tasty...

(Spotted on Marginal Revolution)

Exhibit B from the United Kingdom - wait a few seconds to be diverted.

Both sites for the epicureans amongst us, most certainly.

(1) (62)

I have come across a press release from Britain's National Health Service. The NHS is currently trying to prevent obese people from having hip replacement operations as they do not "deserve" to have such treatment, despite the little matter of their having been taxpayers like the rest of us.

"The NHS, like any proud creation of a socialist, inclusive Britain, has to operate under certain priorities. Indeed its founder, the great Soviet leader Nye Bevan, stated that socialism is about priorities. Well, there is no place and certainly no priority to treat people, who, by laziness, sloth and lack of intelligence, choose to make themselves ill or incapacitated. In fact ill people are a positive nuisance. It is the fit, able-bodied and alert people of Britain who deserve to be treated by the Greatest Health Service Devised by Mankind. No more obese people. No more smokers. No more drinkers. No more red meat eaters and chocolate fans. Such habits have no place in a socialist Britain. Let such vile habits wither away."

I am still trying to vouch for the authenticity of this release. Looks plausible to me.

(1) (8)

As Christmas is almost upon us, it is a pleasure to read a nice article by a doughty basher of nanny-state puritanism, Jacob Sullum. Sullum states what many of us probably instinctively know to be true - a bit of what you fancy is good for you. Dark chocolate (yeh!), red wine (yeh again!) and even red meat (thrice yeh!).

So in the interests of good health, I am now eyeing a bottle of fine Rhone red wine sitting on the rack in the kitchen.

(1) (18)

I have long gotten a laugh from Dilbert, the socially inept engineer comic created by Scott Adams. Usually, Dilbert is harmless, but occasionally he causes real damage. Last Sunday's cartoon, which features Dilbert's mother in an excessive shopping adventure that ends with organ harvesting struck me as rather amusing, but according to Scott Adams' blog, dozens of people failed to see the humour in it:

Recently I killed thousands more people. I don’t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I’ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won’t be inspired to donate.

This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that’s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can’t be more than 1%. Let’s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I’m probably killing 150,000 people.

It’s times like this when “oops” doesn’t seem sufficient.

I bet you did not know that cartoonists could be so dangerous. If you ever meet Scott Adams, approach with extreme caution.

(0) (16)

One of the concerns appearing on the radar is the impact of a flu pandemic upon Africa, where a rudimentary infrastructure for health is combined with the largest number of individuals with HIV and AIDs. A common mistake is to view this latter group as the most vulnerable to a flu pandemic, with a potentially catastrophic death rate.

Recent comments by Dr. Robert Webster, at an avian-influenza conference, organised by the Council for Foreign Relations, in New York, theorised that HIV positive patients and those suffering from cancer could act as incubators for the virus, leading to more virulent strains. However, there is evidence to support the view that immunologically compromised individuals will not facilitate the spread of the pandemic:

Stephen Wolinsky, chief of the infectious diseases division at the Feinberg School of Medicine, concurred that prolonged shedding of the virus was a definite problem but referred to a study published earlier this week that stated that immunodeficiency may in fact be a benefit in the face of avian influenza.

The study, published in the journal Respiratory Research, indicated that the young and healthy may be those most seriously affected by avian influenza, as the body's immuno-response was to produce a storm of cytokines that can lead to respiratory difficulties.

Wolinsky opined that, for Africa, the lack of access to doctors and hospitals may prove to be a greater concern in the fight against avian influenza than the continent's HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This region has been identified as a potential outbreak region for the pandemic. Farming practices that bring farmers into close proximity with poultry, are compounded by non-existent public health schemes and a large proportion of the population suffering from ill-health and malnutrition.

The H5N1 virus overstimulates the immune system, and many of its powerful effects are caused by what medical expert call a "cytokine storm", after the immune molecules excited by the disease.

It was the cytokine storm that overwhelmed so many victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. Aids patients may be spared that fate.

But equally possible, with their immune defences down, they could succumb easily to the disease.

"In that situation," said Laurie Garrett, "vast populations of HIV positive people could be obliterated by the pandemic flu."

Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council of Foreign Relations, was identifying the worst case scenario.

(2) (27)

Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarentee what happened to Ms. Harriton.

I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive...

Why should a doctor be liable for an 'act of God'? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect.

Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one's fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons.

(0) (25)

A study claims that the long-term effects of smoking tobacco can impair mental functions. My goodness, what other horrors can the dreaded weed be held responsible for? I don't smoke and dislike the pong of cigarette smoke in my clothes after visiting a pub, but is there no limit to the ways in which our blessed medical profession want to condemn smoking? The claim rings false to me (I am not a scientist mind so if this can be verified in a peer-reviewed journal, I'll stand corrected). There have been lots of brainy smokers over the years, surely.

I wonder how many members of Mensa have been smokers?

(1) (10)

Just as the NHS is the darling of the British people, it will come as no surprise that its failures are increasingly covered by the tabloids, who have found that the crisis in health provision is a concern to those who have to rely on the state through no fault of their own. High taxes and expensive private health care denies choice to the majority of the population.

One of the latest (and incredible) stories to emerge is a lack of mops in Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow:

PATIENTS spent two days in "grotty" wards - after a hospital ran out of mops.

Cleaners at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow were left stunned after bosses told them of the shortage. And it took two working days for the hospital to replace all the mops.

A source at the closure-threatened hospital said: "We knew things were bad here but this takes the biscuit. Cleaners went to work on Wednesday and were told there were no mops and nothing could be done about it

Only scenes such as these could be caused by a state monopoly of health:

After replacement mops arrived on Thursday, a source revealed that hospital staff celebrated.

The insider revealed: "People were dancing around the boxes, singing and chanting, 'We have mops.' " The source added: "No wonder our hospitals are riddled with MRSA superbugs and such like if they can't get something as simple as this right."

Only the NHS could ration health and mops!

(1) (28)

"Organic farming has been put forward as one of the major pillars of a new, more-sustainable human society that would be "kinder to the earth". Unfortunately, organic farming cannot deliver on that promise. In fact, organic farming is an imminent danger to the world's wildlife and hazard to the health of its own consumers."

Dennis Avery, quoted in Fearing Food, (page 3) by Roger Bate and Julian Morris.

Something for George Moonbat to ponder, I reckon.

(0) (25)

The pharmaceutical industry has been running an ad campaign in the United States saying that reimportation of drugs from Canada were allowed, those drugs might be counterfeit, unregulated and unsafe. This is simple propaganda and nothing more.

Pfizer's Chief Executive Officer Dr Hank McKinnell has come out and contradicted his industry's advertising. On page 69 of his new book, he says that: "Drugs from Canadian pharmacies are as safe as drugs from pharmacies in the United States." Pfizer vice-president Dr Peter Rost says that drug company lobbyists "know full well" that drug reimportation has "been done safely and cost-effectively... in Europe, for over twenty years... The German Federal Health Ministry has verified that not one single confirmed case of a counterfeit medicine has ever come through the parallel trade chain. The UK regulatory authority has described the level of pharmaceutical counterfeiting as 'virtually undetectable'."

They were not speaking on behalf of their employer.

Dr Rost's view is confirmed by Donald MacArthur of the European Association of Euro-Pharmaceutical Companies who in November 2003 testified at a US Senate committee. MacArthur said: "As far as can be ascertained there has never been a single, proven case of a counterfeit medicine leaving the parallel trade supply chain in Europe. Certainly, none has been reported in the two largest markets for incoming parallel trade - the UK and Germany; in the case of the latter, the government has recently verified this fact".

In the US, where reimportation is illegal, counterfeiting is on the rise. The ban on reimportation has led many people who cannot afford the cost of drugs from their local pharmacy to use online shops they have never heard of to illegally get cheap drugs. Some of these websites, which are marketed through spam e-mail, claim to be in Canada but are based in developing countries and fail to deliver anything or supply counterfeit drugs.

If the US wants to fight counterfeit drugs, it should follow the European model and let legitimate, properly-regulated businesses, which consumers can trust, safely and securely reimport pharmaceuticals. That way, the drugs get imported from legitimate wholesalers in Canada and Europe. Contrary to claims of pharma's lobbyists, it is America's ban on reimportation that promotes counterfeiting. The US government should adopt free trade in pharmaceuticals not just to reduce prices but to reduce counterfeiting, too.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

(1) (17)

Last summer, I went on very public record with my opinon that the überhyped and screechingly hysterical 'obesity epidemic' was nothing but a crock of shit, cooked up (in this country at least) by grasping public sector vested interests and amplified by their MSM handmaidens.

While I will continue to do whatever is in my power to undermine this whole wicked, mendacious plot over here, I am pleased to note that there is also some serious fightback going on over on the gun-toting side of the Atlantic:

One would be forgiven for thinking CDC stands for Center for Damage Control. Just a year after its widely-publicized and exceedingly controversial announcement that excess weight kills 400,000 Americans annually, the agency is rumbling, bumbling, stumbling toward an explanation for a new study that says the real figure is just 26,000.

Unfortunately, trial lawyers who see dollar signs where the rest of us see dinner have seized on the CDC's 400,000 deaths number to justify their frivolous crusades.

Now word comes from experts within the CDC that excess weight is about one-fifteenth as dangerous as previously thought, and has a lower death toll than diseases like septicemia and nephritis. Each death is of course tragic. But has anyone heard of the septicemia "epidemic" or the nephritis "tsunami"?

It's said that a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Well, the truth about obesity is finally lacing up. And that's bad news for trial lawyers pursuing obesity lawsuits against food and beverage companies as well as the self-appointed diet dictators seeking extra taxes on foods they don't like.

Not that that will stop them, mind. Truth has little currency when compared to the value of a well-forged career-path or the tantalising lure of brimming public coffers. (By the way, the link above is to the website of an American organisation called the 'Center for Consumer Freedom'. Not only do they appear to be on the side of the Angels but their website looks like an excellent activist resource that is well worth a bookmark).

Still, the backlash has to begin somewhere, somehow and debunking the fraudulently inflated statistics is an important part of that process. However, it is equally important to maintain the principle that, even if all the har'em-scar'em statistics were true (which they clearly are not) then the responsibility for and solution to the problem of obesity lies with the obese themselves and not with judicial system or the apparatus of tax-collection.

(0) (5)

Story here that says that far from being a bad thing, sitting outside in the sun for at least 15 minutes a day is good for you, latest medical findings suggest. It certainly is a bit of a change from the period, I well recall, in the 1990s, when it appeared to be the case that any exposure to sun was fraught with danger as a result of the supposed hole in the ozone layer. I recall the constant worries, fuelled in the press and elsewhere, about skin cancer and the dangers of overdoing the sunshine.

Sometimes you have to just laugh. Of course being exposed to the sun is good for you in moderation! Mankind was not meant to sit indoors or conceal every aspect of the body all the time. Anyone I know who spends the vast majority of his or her time indoors looks, well, unwell, in my opinion. I always make the effort to break out of my office at lunchtime to get what passes for sunshine in this damp country of ours. It is not rocket science.

Coming next: medical experts reveal that regular exercise, eating vegetables and playing sports can do you some good.

(0) (4)

The steady advances in cloning technology holds a great deal of hope the future of the species and the news from Korea and Britain has been pretty damn encouraging over the last few years. It now looks like we could be on the brink of being able to mass produce stem cells and that, boys and girls, could be the gateway to a new era of medical possibilities.

(0) (59)

“This is really the destruction of the National Health Service."

- Professor Vincent Marks of the University of Surrey on the Today programme this morning discussing the modest government announcement to allow more private involvement in the National Health Service.

(0) (8)

It takes some nerve to announce this on the day of a General Election. Mind you, I doubt very much that it would at all influence the outcome:

Patients should be refused treatment because of their age in some cases, government advisers have proposed.

Where age can affect the benefits or risks of treatment, discrimination is appropriate, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said.

Charities representing older people said the recommendations were outrageous and sent out mixed messages.

Wrong. The message is quite clear and will gradually become more acceptable. Within five years, people over 75 will be offered euthanasia when they get sick. Within 10 years it will be mandatory.

(0) (3)

The fine U.S. blogger and libertarian scholar, Tyler Cowen, who's blog Marginal Revolution is well worth a visit (as if I did not have enough things to read, aarrgghh, Ed) has started a specialist blog devoted to tracking developments and medical research surrounding avian flu. Tyler is clearly worried about the spread of new and more powerful viruses and the threat this poses to the health to millions of people around the world.

Rather interesting, I think, that the Internet, which helps to spread ideas with the speed of a virus, is now spawning blogs which are devoted to actual, existing viruses.

(0) (39)

Terri Schiavo died this morning.

I hope that her husband and family can find some peace, if not with each other, than at least within themselves.

Now that the emotional flash point of the debate is gone, I hope that we can have a more considered policy discussion over who should make medical decisions for non-decisional patients, and under what restrictions.

(0) (47)

Nobody is willing to take the position (at least in public) that a person should not be able to refuse medical care in person, on their own behalf. However, many of those now engaged in the struggle over end-of-life health care are, wittingly or not, arguing that some health care decisions should be removed from private hands and made by the state.

The current baseline rule is that your personal autonomy with respect to consenting to or refusing to consent to medical care is pretty much absolute (I am discussing medical care, not mental health care, which operates in a parallel universe on these issues). I note that there are some second-order restrictions on what kind of care is actually available to you, arising from various licensing and regulatory regimes, but leave those aside for now. You can refuse any and all kinds of care, ranging from the most extreme life support to the most mundane blood transfusion, and people do all the time, even when the refusal puts their life at risk.

Things get more complicated when you are unable to decide for yourself (or, what amounts to the same thing, unable to communicate your decision). Someone has to decide what care you will be given. Your ability to make such decisions in advance will, sooner or later, be outrun by the unforeseeable complexities and irreducible detail of your medical care. If nothing else, someone will have to interpret your written instructions and apply them to the messy clinical realities. At the end of the day, if you are not "decisional" you will have a surrogate decision-maker. That decision-maker will either be a private individual or the state.

The current system very rarely results in the state directly taking custody of a medical patient who is not decisional, and is very heavily biased toward leaving health care decisions in private hands, with a fairly limited "reserved" power in the state to hear disputes about who the private decision-maker should be. So far, so good.

Although reasonable people can disagree on whether, for example, Michael Schiavo should be Terri Schiavo's surrogate or one of her parents should be, this dispute is over the proper issue of which private party should make decisions. It is very difficult, I think, to argue that this issue hasn't been fairly and adequately processed by the courts.

However, we are seeing increasing pressure to restrict the decisions that the surrogate can make. This is where it gets tricky, because legal restrictions on the decisions that a private decision-maker can make mean that the state is making that decision. If there is a law on the books that prohibits your surrogate from consenting to experimental treatments, then the state is making the decision that you will not receive that treatment. If there is a law on the books that prohibits your surrogate from withdrawing a feeding tube, then the state is making the decision that you will be fed through a feeding tube.

The current mantra that "if there is any doubt, err on the side of life" is a TV-friendly sound-bite in the service of expanding the control that the state has over your medical care, because this "principle" removes from your surrogate the ability to make health care decisions, and is functionally equivalent to the state ordering that medical care be provided regardless of your wishes. For your own good, of course.

Similarly, the endless agitation for more appeals amounts to agitation for more state review and oversight of a nominally private decision. For your own good, naturally.

In short, to the extent any coherent public policy is being advanced by the people who want the feeding tube re-inserted into Ms. Schiavo, it is a public policy that shrinks the decision-making powers of private decision-makers, and necessarily transfers those decisions from private hands to those of the state.

The over-riding principle that is cited in favor of this transfer of power to the state is the protection of life. However, the protection of life is not an absolute trump card; indeed, when it comes to medical care, personal autonomy overrides protection of life; otherwise, the law would require that life-saving health care be provided to you over your objections.

Nobody is willing to take that step, so advocates for the transfer of power to the state are left in the position of arguing that some decisions that you can make for yourself should never be made by your surrogate, but should be made by the state instead. Those are the only two choices on offer - either the state makes decisions about your end-of-life medical care by prohibiting your surrogate from deciding, or your surrogate decision-maker does.

I think you know where my instincts are when faced with a choice between preserving the private sphere and expanding state control.

(0) (71)

On The Voice of Reason (slogan: "A penny saved is a government oversight"), there is a pretty clear headed little essay of what I think is most the reasonable position on this absurdly emotive case.

(0) (88)

For an excellent overview of the Schiavo case, written by someone with a better work ethic than me (she links to her sources, I just kind of remember their gist), go to Majikthise.

Out of the morass of purely case-specific issues in this case, perhaps the most legitimate policy argument raised by the Schiavo trainwreck has to do with the withdrawal of food and water.

Let's be clear on Schiavo's condition and treatment here: she is being fed and hydrated through a tube in her stomach. She is not feeding herself, and is presumably not capable of taking food and water orally, or the tube would never have been inserted. This kind of feeding and hydration is just as much a medical treatment as having a glucose or saline IV inserted into your arm.

No one attempts to deny that Terri (or anyone else) would be permitted to refuse this treatment for themselves; a law mandating that you receive a given medical treatment against your will would be widely regarded as an abomination.

Similarly, no one seems to be seriously arguing that if Terri were on a ventilator or some other form of artificial "life support", that her guardian should be permitted to withdraw the life support, even though there is no written evidence of what Terri's wishes were in that regard.

This leaves many of the folks who are now arguing for federal intervention into Terri Schiavo's medical treatment in the rather uncomfortable position admitting that (a) she could refuse to consent to being fed through a tube in her stomach, and (b) that her guardian could withdraw other forms of life support, but nonetheless that (c) her guardian cannot refuse consent to her being fed through a tube in her stomach.

Thus, the policy question being posed by this case seems to be whether a surrogate decisionmaker should be compelled by law to "consent" to their ward being fed through a tube in her stomach, unless he can produce written evidence that is what the patient would have wanted.

The case against such a legal mandate boils down to the argument that denying the right to consent or refuse consent to the surrogate is the same as denying it to the patient herself. Of course, the surrogate is not, in fact, the patient, and there may be legitimate boundaries placed on the decisions the guardian can make on behalf of their ward. The question is whether withdrawal of nutrition and hydration is outside of those boundaries, and if so why.

The case for a legal mandate that nutrition and hydration be given over the objections of the legal guardian rests comes down to the argument that, where there is any doubt as to what the patient would want, we should err on the side of keeping them alive. This argument, however, founders on a couple of points. Logically, it cannot be limited to nutrition and hydration, and thus requires that we keep all life support, no matter how extraordinary, in place. Further, it begs the question of how much certainty is enough. Even where a written living will exists, the question can be raised about whether the patient changed her mind.

Because we cold-hearted libertarians care about such things, Terri Schiavo's care is being paid for by taxpayer money through the Medicaid program. Even though her parents have noisily pledged to take all financial responsibility for her care, they have not yet done so, even though the trust fund established out of the proceeds of her malpractice case to pay for her care is nearly exhausted. The annual cost is probably around $80,000 per year.

(0) (43)

Various precincts of the US body politic are obsessed with Terri Schiavo, a young woman who has been at the center of an ongoing familial, legal, and now, sadly, political dogfight.

In very broad terms, Terri Schiavo is unable to make decisions for herself. She is apparently brain damaged, and has been in some degree of coma or "persistent vegetative state" for years. Her husband wants to withdraw artificial life support and let nature take its course. Her parents want her kept on life support indefinitely in the hopes that some day she will make some degree of recovery. As ever, you can find a medical expert to present just about any side of this that you want. This situation is, sadly, all too common.

The uproar around Terri Schiavo illustrates rather nicely the key distinction between libertarians and, well, everyone else. For libertarians, the critical question is "who decides?", based on their belief that you should be able to make your own decisions in life. Most other folks, it seems, don't care "who decides" nearly as much as they care about "what decision is made," and particularly, "whatever decision is made, it damn will better be one I approve of."

In Terri's case, this means that all sorts of folks who you think would know better than to invite the state to participate in medical decision-making are doing exactly that, because Terri's husband has made a decision that they do not approve of.

So, not only have we been treated the spectacle of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, trying to elbow his way to Terri's bedside so he can dictate what care she will receive, we also have various Florida legislators trying to insert the State of Florida into the mix. Now the US Congress, apparently not satisfied with embarrassing itself* in its ongoing investigation into steroid use in major league baseball, is preparing to abuse its subpoena power to block the decision made by Terri's husband.

A fundamental principle of health care law, and one dear to the hearts of libertarians, is that you must give informed consent to any treatment before it is administered to you (with an exception in cases of emergency when you are unable to communicate, in which case the caregivers are allowed to assume you want life-saving treatment). A doctor who treats you without your consent has committed assault and battery. It is your right to refuse any treatment at all, even if it will mean your death, and so long as you are a competent adult no court or legislature can intervene to force treatment on you.

When the patient is not a decisional adult, someone who will make decisions on their behalf must be located. You can appoint your own surrogate decision-maker, via a health care power of attorney (which I strongly recommend). Some states have lists of "deemed" surrogate decision-makers on the statute books, such as spouses, parents, siblings, etc., in rank order so everyone knows who has authority in a given case. As a last resort, a court will appoint a guardian.

The whole process is focused on the proper issue of identifying "who will decide." Once the decision-maker is identified/appointed, they stand in the shoes of the patient. The state retains (or should retain) only the most limited role, to ensure that the decision-maker does not abuse their power. Clearly, the decision to withdraw life support is a decision that Terri Schiavo could make for herself. Indeed, my wife has told me that if she were in Terri's position, that is exactly what she would want. Her husband's decision to make it in her stead is by no means an abuse of his power as her surrogate decision-maker - such decisions are made routinely, every single day, across the country by people charged with the heavy burden of making health care decisions for someone else.

What we have in the Schaivo case, then, is the legally appointed and recognized decision-maker making a choice that is well within his purview. Multiple court reviews have concluded that he is the right person to make the call, and his decision should be honored. To this libertarian, that is the end of the matter, because the very essence of being a libertarian is respecting the decisions of others even when you might decide otherwise. To a broad spectrum of conservatives, however, the fact that medical decision-making should be private is of no concern when the decisions made are decisions they disagree with.

*While at the gym yesterday, I caught a few minutes of the steroid hearings. It was painfully embarassing to see the solons of American governance earnestly seeking noted idiot Jose Canseco's advice on public policy. A quick survey of the fellows in the locker room revealed that this latest Congressional exercise in nannying competent adults and chasing headlines is not being well-received by the public. The universal sentiment was, "Don't they have anything better to do?"

(0) (7)

Stephen Pollard, a former member of Britain's Young Conservatives who is now a New Labour guru, has an article in the Times called: My easy ride in the Senate seat.

Life after his easy ride is getting a little more tricky, with a savaging from Global Growth, the free-market NGO.

(0) (11)

The Centers for Disease Control released new life expectancy figures for the USA today. Average life expectancy is up to 77.6 years, up three tenths in a mere two years. Also remarkable is the rapidly closing gap between the life expectancies of men and women. It was a 7.8 year gap in 1978 and is now down to 5.3 years.

When I was in my twenties I told friends my life's goal was to go downhill skiing on Ganymede at age 120. If the technological exponential keeps going as I expect -- and I am 'lucky' enough not to draw the Ace of Spades -- I might just do it.

See you on the slopes!

For more information, see Space.com's Live Science article.

(0) (19)

Leon Trotsky's views on the role of arts were well known. He argued that art in all its forms existed to convey political messages to the masses and that any other use of the arts was bourgeois nonsense. The idea that it was acceptable for the arts exist to express the personal views of some artist or to simply 'entertain' in a non-political sense (not that anything is really non-political to a statist) was just preposterous to Trotsky. Thus if the state wished to advocate or depreciate something, it was the role of the arts to assist with that process. A modern day example of this would be, say, the relentless demonization of smoking.

Which brings us to the views of the Orwellian sounding Centre for Tobacco Control. This group of lobbyists is infuriated that their calls for smoking to be censored by the British Board of Film Classification (who were once simply known as the Film Censors) has been rejected.

The board's cautious mention of smoking for the first time falls far short of demands that smoking scenes, particularly in any film likely to be seen by children, should be banned in Britain and consigned to the cutting room floor. Professor Gerard Hastings, director of cancer research at the UK's Centre for Tobacco Control, said: "If the BBFC doesn't accept its moral responsibility, it might as well pack up and go home."

And so we discover that this lobby thinks is the 'moral responsibility' of the state to impose standards on entertainment to make them more in accordance with the wishes of our technocratic betters (them, of course). Not only do they wish to make it as difficult as possible for you to make your own non-coerced choices as to what stresses and chemicals you expose your body to, they wish to prevent you seeing images which do not conform to the message they wish to indoctrinate you with. I would be curious to know if Professor Hastings also supports forcing people to take favoured chemicals?

(0) (16)

Remember this?

The sun's rays, which are called ultraviolet A and ultraviolet B rays (UVA and UVB rays) damage your skin. This leads to early wrinkles, skin cancer and other skin problems.

Being in the sun often over time, even if you don't burn, can lead to skin cancer. A tan is the body's desperate attempt to protect itself from the sun's harmful rays.

Well, forget that. Now learn this:

Sunshine might stop certain cancers from growing, including skin cancers, according to two new studies.

One found it helped beat the deadly skin cancer malignant melanoma. The other found the sun helped with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Tobacco is also known to prevent cancer. So get out that sunbed and a packet of cigarettes now. It's for your own good.

(0) (3)

One of the unspoken benefits of globalisation is the use that professionals make of the new instruments and techniques that are publicised over the internet or through the wider dissemination of networks to newly emerging economies, such as India. However, as one example demonstrates, medical professionals in India read or learn about new developments from the West in their specialism but are unable to apply them because they are too expensive or the instruments cannot be imported or the patients are not rich enough to afford them. This is providing a spur to entrepreneurial and philanthropic activity.

Narayana Hrudayalaya is a medical foundation established in India by Mother Teresa's cardiologist, Davi Prasad Shetty. Acknowledging the dilemma faced by all professionals in poorer countries, Shetty aimed to pioneer low-cost cardiac surgery that would prove affordable, with charitable supplements and insurance for even the Bengali peasantry and textile workers inhabiting the countryside around Kolkata.

In an interview with New Scientist, Shetty understood that governments and international bureaucracies were a hindrance, not a benefit.

If there is one organisation that can be squarely blamed it is the WHO. Headquartered in Geneva, separated from reality, it runs its global activities with help from government representatives who are mostly bureaucrats. In the countries I travel to, bureaucrats are a class of people who are experts in nothing but authorities on everything. They are not best-suited to guide planning at the WHO. One of the WHO declarations was "Health for all by 2000". How can a global body make that kind of statement when a country like Zambia does not have an echo-Doppler, without which you cannot detect any heart problem, or when one cannot find a single functioning ECG machine in many African countries?

Apart from the WHO, I have stopped blaming the politicians and bureaucrats. We are better placed to bring about changes by being outsiders, not by being a part of the system. All that the government can do is to stop being an obstacle. If it decides to be a bystander, things will fall in place. My belief is that within ten years, the government healthcare systems in all Third World countries will fold up. The government will not be able to pay even salaries, never mind offering healthcare. In that situation, organisations like ours should come forward to take over and manage it in a professional manner.

Whilst Shetty describes himself as a social worker as a libertarian, he has recognised that governments cannot provide the resources to meet his objectives and that it is best if they stand aside or collapse. When the state is no longer a factor, the economics or healthcare starts to add up.

Yes, it's very different. In Western hospitals, about 60 per cent of the revenue is spent on salaries, while in government hospitals in India, 90 per cent goes on salaries. By contrast, in our hospital only 12 to 13 per cent is spent on salaries. That doesn't mean our doctors are being exploited. Since their output is ten times more, unit operating costs are very low. To earn a given salary in another hospital, a doctor would have to perform one operation a day. With us he might have to operate on five patients. We also work with zero inventory, so the burden lies with the supplier. And since we are the largest consumers of medical disposables, we procure them at a discount of 30 to 35 per cent.

Increasingly, for the pragmatists of the world, freedom provides the answers that the state is unable to.

(2) (38)

Peter Cuthbertson has some pretty clear views about those who would control us for 'our own good'

Any Brit who turns their television on to ITV or Channels 4 or 5 now will sooner or later see a vile new National Health Service advertisement, funded by their own tax money. Showing a young man running around bars and shopping centres spraying foul smells into the air and onto the clothes of others, it literally urges people that just as they would not tolerate anyone who does that, they should fight against the freedom of smokers to light up in bars and pubs. An obvious prelude to the government's campaign to stop restauranteurs and landlords from allowing smoking on their own property, it is no doubt hoped the advertisement will edge public opinion in the nannying direction.

It is difficult to fathom the petty, narrow mind of the sort of otherwise unemployable bureaucrat who came up with this one. But one comes to understand the idea of people feeling aliens in their own country when one sees such things. What a profoundly un-British little broadcast it was. What a sickening way to impose the morality of the elite's stateless global citizen onto a country whose famous tolerance and fair-mindedness is probably what left-liberal nannies feel necessitates such propaganda - sorry, such a campaign of public education - in the first place. One can only hope enough independently-minded people are emboldened by such spiteful nonsense to take stands on behalf of smoking, one of the few remaining mass activities that genuinely is not in some way anti-social, in an age where it seems few Britons can enjoy themselves in a group without being obnoxious to others.

Somehow worse than this, however, one sees explicit use of taxpayers' money to campaign for one side on politically controversial areas, over behaviour that is perfectly legal and normal. This is a precedent that should worry everybody.

In any reporting on a quasi-tyranny, the state's control and use of the media is usually cited to show that a country cannot be a genuine liberal democracy. Chile's slide into dictatorship in the early 1970s is exemplified by Salvador Allende's decision to eliminate criticism of his regime by nationalising the press. Today's Russia is now widely described with the euphemism 'managed democracy' to a considerable degree because so much of its television is under state control: the elections themselves are free, but the state-run television stations campaigned strongly for Vladimir Putin in advance of last March's Presidential election.

It's because the use by the state of the media to advertise its own virtues and ideals is so symbolic of a wider lack of freedom that it is such a good indicator of the health of a society. The state is effectively limitless in its power to take by taxation anything people earn and produce. When it also feels free to use that money to take political stands, often stands opposed by the very people who pay these taxes, that is a signal of an overmighty government, wherever it exists.

When the state, as distinct from any political party, takes on the role of encouraging people to have the correct views and oppose the right habits, the liberty of everyone is made immediately more precarious. There is a very great supply of petty nannies with a favoured cause, and altogether more dangerous authoritarians and social engineeers with their own pet projects, who would love to get their hands on the power the NHS is now abusing. Rest assured, they will find ways of doing so if the precedent now being set is not reversed.

(0) (10)

As the unrelieved gloom surrounding freedom in the UK becomes too much to bear, here is a recommendation for all of those who wish to celebrate the diversity of snackdom before the health fascists force us all to eat lentils and turnips.

Visit snackspot and track down all of those arcane foods such as Gummi Zone Gummi Pizza before they are banned by the edict of Nanny Blair.

(4) (28)

According to Dutch health investigators, going to church can cause lung cancer and other respiratory problems, because of the carcinogenic effects of candles and incense. Dr Theo de Kok, says that it is "very worrying". With Christmas approaching, levels of pollutants would be expected to rise.

The solution is obvious. The European Union must immediately ban church-going for all children, impose a tax on adult church-goers, put health warning signs on the outside of all churches and copies of the Bible.

Oh, and ban Christmas.

Obviously, the EU must also impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on any country that does not comply with this (the USA).

In dreaming up appropriate health warnings for church-going, I like the following:

God kills!
Do not worship God in the presence of children
and cutest of all:
God can seriously damage your unborn child

(0) (15)

Last month a British panel of the Great and Good issued a thumpingly big report on the state of Britain's pensions system covering both the private and state networks of provision. In short, the report said that we are living longer, have fewer children, and hence pensions systems which were constructed in the middle of the last century are buckling under the strain. It is all now a fairly familiar story and likely to prove one of the most ticklish political domestic issues in Europe and north America for the next few years.

But consider this - if we are living longer and able to live healthier lives for longer, and this is causing certain strains to emerge in pension provision, then how do the doomongers square that with the claim that we face all manner of threats to our health? One can barely open the pages of a newspaper or turn on the television without being regaled about all the horrible risks out there, obesity being the latest issue, but by no means the last.

Well, for all our supposed problems, something wonderful has happened to the health of most people in modern industrial nations these past few decades. (Clues: modern medicine, drugs, decline of heavy manual labour, greater awareness of healthy diet, dangers of tobacco, etc). I appreciate that stating such a thing in today's culture of gloom is unfashionable, even reckless, but there it is.

(0) (8)

Business enterprises are often attacked for selling people 'junk food' and not telling them about the health benefits of vegetables.

Well recently ASDA (the British arm of Walmart) labelled its vegetables, explaining that people who eat certain types of vegetable have a lower chance of developing certain forms of cancer.

ASDA was promptly prosecuted and punished. It seems that 'making health claims' is not legal in Britain.

Oh well, back to selling junk. The state is not your friend.

(0) (2)

Via Catallarchy, here is something you do not hear every day from a legislator:

Folks have got to take personal responsibility for their actions.

So said Michigan Representative David Palsrok, sponsor of a bill signed into law today in that state by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm - a law which bans people suing food companies and restaurants for 'making' them fat.

And here is another quotation from the same article which is not quite as much of a shocker:

The Legislature and society should focus on preventing the sale of fatty, sugar-laden products in our nations [sic] schools or requiring that fast food manufacturers provide nutritional information on the food they sell.

Says who? The Michigan Trial Lawyers' Association, of course.

(0) (13)

BBC Radio Four (indeed any part of the B.B.C.) is not where one would expect to find support for liberty, but a few a days ago I heard, on the Radio 4 Today Program, a report on medical care.

According to the report private hospitals in India (including in Calcutta) offer British people medical care at least as good as that provided by the NHS, and in wonderful conditions (marble floors, everything clean rather than the dirt, and decay one finds in British government hospitals - thousands of people die every year in Britain from infections they pick up whilst in government hospitals) and at a small fraction of the cost of the (highly regulated) British private hospitals.

The Labour MP Frank Field (a man known for his honesty - hard to believe in a politician, but it is true in his case) came on to the program and claimed that a constituent of his was being left to go blind by the NHS, people are normally left to rot for long periods of time by the government medical service, but his sight was saved by sending him to an Indian hospital.

The price of his medical care (not including the cost of flying to India, I admit) was £50 - in Britain the medical care would have cost (according to Mr Field) £3000.

So the choices were - go to a highly regulated British private hospital (if you happen to have £3000), rely on government medical care (and go blind), or go overseas.

Being a Labour MP Mr Field wanted the NHS to pay to send people to private hospitals in India (they put administrative barriers in the way of this ["it is too far"] - although they are willing to spend far more money sending people to European hospitals), but this was the closest I have ever come to hearing both the BBC and a Labour MP condemn statism in health care.

(2) (35)

Discussing nationalised healthcare with those of a leftist frame of mind, it occurs to me that one is put at a disadvantage in attempting to demonstrate the merits of a private healthcare system if one restricts the options to a public health system versus private health system. This tends to conflate the separate benefits a private system would provide. Nationalised healthcare systems are wasteful and ruinously expensive but there are actually two separate phenomena contributing to this.

1. Any business which is run by the government will have priorities unrelated to those of the customers of that business and will tend to provide the product or service it wants to provide, in the quantities it wants to produce as opposed to providing the product according to the customer's demand. This leads inexorably to unsatisfied customers, gluts, rationing and shortages.
2. 'Free' healthcare is a problem similar to the tragedy of the commons. If there is no cost to be borne by availing of 'free' healthcare, there is no corrective against frivolous use of this service. The phenomena of bored pensioners visiting the doctor for a chat is solely that of a system where that doctor's time is paid by the taxpayer and not the loquacious geriatric. Hypochondria, held in check by a pay-as-you-go system is positively rewarded by free healthcare.

One is further disadvantaged by conflating nationalised health with redistributionism per se. Thus, if the matter for discussion is simply nationalised health versus private, one must not only convince the sceptic of the benefits of the market but also to abandon a, perhaps cherished, redistributionist outlook. Yet, it is not necessary to do so if these issues are separated. In agreeing to set aside the issue of redistribution in the first place it ought to be possible to agree with the leftist interlocutor that the government does a lousy job of running the health system. An ardent supporter of cradle to grave healthcare, if intellectually honest, may be persuaded to concede that, so long as the government still pays for it, healthcare would be better provided by the private sector. If this step is accepted, such an intellectually honest leftist might also note the role of incentives when healthcare is provided on a no-cost basis. In an alternative system, an individual might be provided with health vouchers or subsidised insurance, perhaps a no claims bonus might apply or a policy excess. In such a system, the government still picks up the tab but there is at least some incentive for the user to modify his consumption.

By separating the issues it may be possible to reach wider agreement on privatising health than would be possible with the issues lumped together. It is probably worth adopting such an incrementalist approach in lieu of the 'greedy' approach of the absolutist. For most of the issues which concern libertarians, a step in the right direction is not only useful in getting closer to one's goal, it may also offer a noticeable improvement in its own right.

(0) (19)

Whenever we touch on the issue of state controlled health system versus private healthcare, we get a smattering of outraged readers who cannot understand why we attack that venerable (in their eyes, not ours) dinosaur, the NHS. It's free and for everybody they screech, you heartless capitalists... would you let your parents/grandparents/children die without treatment and care, if they couldn't afford to go private?!.

The fact is that those I care about are more likely to be in need of treatment and care, as a result of coming into contact with the NHS. I want them to stay away from the NHS, and the government to give them back their money taken to support the giant leech known as national healthcare.

Many people are now frightened that they could pick up a dangerous infection if they go into hospital. It is hardly surprising. More and more of us know someone who has been infected with the superbug, MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Marjorie Evans has been infected with it on eight occasions at the same hospital in Swansea. Now wheelchair-bound as a result, she says: "I'd rather go abroad and trust foreigners."

As James Bartholomew writes in the Telegraph opinion section one is vastly safer in a private hospital and the danger of getting MRSA is a risk affecting patients of the NHS.

The NHS both is the most state-controlled hospital system in the advanced world and has the worst record in Europe. At a practical level, it is because of things like ministers driving hospitals at full capacity to reduce waiting lists, with the result that patients with MRSA cannot always be isolated.

But at a more profound level, the MRSA crisis is because the NHS is a state monopoly. Ministers are always making hospitals respond to the latest newspaper headlines rather than doing what is best in the overall interest of patients; hospital workers - like many employees of state industries - are demoralised and their pay rates are unresponsive, thus causing the local shortages. The state has also closed too many hospitals. The list of ways in which it has increased the risk is endless.

This is a result of the fundamental dynamics (or statics) of the public sector, not any lack of funding. There is no legitimate role for the state in healthcare, education and many other sectors that it appropriated for perpetration of what is so misleading called 'public services'.

The dynamics of the private sector, meanwhile, are simpler and more effective. If you don't treat your customers well, you go out of business.

Indeed, unless you take their money first and then help yourself to it...

(0) (13)

This used to be the state of Britain in the 1970s; a reference to the relative economic decline that accompanied the imperial scuttle. Now, we should use the term in another sense: the transition of the National Health Service from modernity to the Middle Ages.

If you enter a National Health Service hospital, there is a high risk of contracting an infection caused by a dugs resistant bacteria called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which the tabloids have dubbed "superbug". There are numerous stories of patients, who have no choice but to use state provision, due to its monopolistic powers, and have contracted this infection as a consequence. There is one poor unfortunate who has been MRSA positive eight times.

A grandmother who has contracted the MRSA superbug eight times is refusing to return to hospital for a vital operation.

Doctors warned Marjorie Evans, 69, she could die or be bedridden for the rest of her life if she is hit by the infection again. She plans to travel abroad for her hip replacement rather than trust a British hospital. Mrs Evans has caught MRSA during inpatient stays at Morriston Hospital in Swansea since 1992.

One of the major causes of these infections is the inability of NHS hospitals to maintain minimum levels of cleanliness, such as insisting all visitors wash their hands. Once drugs-resistant bacteria have taken hold, they are difficult to eradicate. However, there is an alternative, the private sector:

BMI Healthcare is one of the biggest private hospital groups in the UK, with 47 hospitals. During the course of a year, the group has a quarter of a million in-patients and three-quarters of a million out-patient visits. How many patients in BMI hospitals have acquired MRSA in the blood? None. In fact, over the years, the company has "never" had such a case.

If you do come to Britain, avoid the NHS. For if they do manage to kill you, a task they achieve with ease, you may still not be given last rites as the religious affiliation of your dying husk cannot be disclosed under the Data Protection Act.

The Hospital Chaplaincies Council has criticised several NHS Trusts for their "hysterical" refusal to disclose the religious backgrounds of their patients. The trusts claim that such information is "too sensitive" to share with chaplains.

(0) (49)

Candida Moss, writing in the Spectator, suggests that 'presumed consent' ought to apply for donating organs. On the basis that my comments my not appear in the magazine, here's what I wrote:

Presumed consent is not consent. If it were, then minors or people suffering from dementia might not enjoy the protection from sexual assault that they do at present. Sexual predators could no doubt claim "presumed consent" for their crimes.

There is a difference between medical expedience and morality. There can be no doubt that there would be enormous medical benefits from performing vivisection on human beings, instead of on animals: dosages, differences in metabolic rates etc. would be far easier to calculate.

Rightly, we abhor this and consider controvertial using the results of Nazi experiments on Jews, because it can be considered the partial condoning of horrific actions.

Is it Candida Moss's wish that the state (probably at EU level) ought to nationalize our bodies and redistribute organs according to need? At least Gordon Brown only wants my money.

I might add that the issue of designer babies giving their own consent to being used as experimental animals is another current topic. It seems pretty sick to me.

(0) (41)

Some time ago President Bush offered 15 billion dollars of American taxpayers money for 'the fight against AIDS' in various nations.

Yesterday the Secretary General of the UN denounced the United States for not spending enough money. Now this anger could be dismissed as the Secretary General being upset that so much of the money was going to be spent 'direct' in the nations concerned rather than put through the UN (where the Secretary General's son and his friends could steal some of the money), however this does not explain all the anger directed against the United States at the AIDS conference in Bangkok.

I think the explanation for the anger is very simple - people are never grateful for loot.

Everyone knows that President Bush is not giving his own money when he hands out the 15 billion dollars (assuming that Congress goes along with this idea), he is just taking (by the threat of violence) money from the taxpayers and dishing it out.

Why should anyone be grateful to him? He is not making a sacrifice; he is just handing out the money of the taxpayers. Why should he give 15 billion dollars to the third world, why not 50 billion or 500 hundred billion? It is not costing him anything.

So the various political activists feel no reason to thank President Bush.

It is the old story of 'conservatives' and government spending. No matter how much they spend the activists will always think they can get more money from the 'progressive' politicians and so will shout and scream and stamp their feet.

(0) (40)

I am going to have to find some new term to adequately describe the condition of ignorance that renders its sufferers unable to comprehend the inevitable truth that state-control means political control.

A shining example of this tragically far-too-common form of myopia can be found in one of today's letters to the UK Times [note: link may not work for non-UK readers]:

Sir, Once again the NHS is set fair to become the filling in the Labour and Conservative policy sandwiches, and yet neither party recognises that the biggest problem besetting the service is the very political control each espouses.

Health, like broadcasting, is too important to be the political football of major parties during the first skirmishes of an impending general election. The NHS needs a charter, it needs sensitive management, it needs to value and cherish its long-suffering staff and, above all, it needs to be isolated from the political process.

The man who wrote this letter is a doctor and is, therefore, unlikely to be either dim-witted or uneducated. Yet, he passionately demands (and no doubt expects) a government-run health service that is somehow 'isolated from the political process'.

I have penned a letter of response to the Times pointing out that the only way to get politics out of healthcare is to de-nationalise it and allow provision to be bought and sold on the free market. However, I do not expect the editors of the Times will be inclined to publicise such heretical and 'extreme' views.

(0) (4)

The great canard of the collectivists holds that a free-market in healthcare will assuredly result in healthcare providers hungrily pursuing maximum profits while abandoning the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable to a wretched and untreated fate.

So often and so passionately has this big lie been repeated that it is now accepted by most people in this country as an incontrovertibe truth. Nationalised healthcare, they say, puts people's needs at the top of the agenda where there is no room for ugly money-grubbing.

Only they forgot about ugly bed-grubbing:

A nurse has been jailed for five years for trying to kill two elderly patients at a Cheshire hospital.

Barbara Salisbury, 47, was found guilty of trying to kill them to free up more beds at Leighton Hospital, in Crewe.

Rationed resources require desperate measures. In fact, and given the governmental obsession with reducing waiting times for hospital treatment, I am a little surprised that the Department of Health has not pinned a medal on this woman.

When she finally emerges from her time in stir, Ms Salisbury may well find herself being offered a job back in the NHS as a senior consultant.

(0) (6)

It is strangely comforting to see that the 'class war' instincts of old Labour are not entirely dead yet:

John Reid, the Health Secretary, yesterday dismissed the demand for a blanket ban on smoking as "an obsession of the learned middle class".

Speaking at a Labour Party event, he said he was reluctant to use compulsion to outlaw something that was a source of pleasure, particularly to working class people.

That Mr. Reid has to fight the corner of working-class people at a Labour Party event speaks volumes about the evolutionary path of the modern left.

Earlier, Mr Reid expressed his views even more bluntly when he took part in a round-table discussion with some of those invited to contribute to the consultation.

Told that they were discussing a smoking ban, Mr Reid said: "Let me play devil's advocate. What enjoyment does a 21-year-old mother of three living on a sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they get is having a cigarette."

One participant objected quite strongly, telling Mr Reid her mother died of lung cancer.

But Mr Reid, a former chain smoker who has now given up, said it was best to provide people with information and let them decide what to do for themselves.

Now, perhaps, Mr. Reid can take the next logical step and denounce the levels of tax that working people have to pony up in order to enjoy their smoking habit. Then the bien-pensant can safely re-classify him as a 'right-winger'.

(0) (29)

Compared to the length of time it took to hike up the taxes on tobacco, alcohol and petroleum, the great 'junk food' shakedown has been completed in remarkably quick time. HMG is clearly honing its modus operandi down to a fine art: [note: link to UK Times may not be available to readers based outside the UK]

BRITAIN’S biggest food companies are to be told by the government to pay an “anti-obesity” levy to fund new sports centres or face punitive laws restricting advertising, marketing and labelling.

Firms such as McDonald’s, Walkers and Cadbury Schweppes are to be asked to contribute tens of millions of pounds towards the sports facilities. The government is set to provide £1m for the scheme for every £3m pledged by the food industry. It will be used to build sports centres, gyms, football pitches and tennis courts.

The food industry confirmed this weekend that it was preparing to co-operate with ministers and could provide hundreds of millions of pounds to fend off regulation.

Of course, I knew this was coming but not even I was prepared for the ugly truth to be revealed quite this rapidly. The Treasury must be desperate for the cash.

Yes, it really was only a few short weeks ago that I noticed the wave of 'shock, horror' articles about an 'obesity crisis' ripple right through the Fourth Estate like an electro-magnetic pulse. From out of the blue, every single news organ in the land was suddenly brimming with distraught editorials about how fat all 'our children' were becoming and what could be done about it. Some blamed the food industry, some blamed the public, some blamed advertising, some blamed George Bush, everyone blamed 'rampant capitalism' (as if we have even a faint prospect of such a thing) and former Tory cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit, brought a twitch to everyone's jowls by blaming it on homosexuals.

It all felt far too co-ordinated to be either genuine or the mere manifestation of some form of mass hysteria. In fact, it was neither. It was a deliberate, well-planned and professionally executed 'softening up' operation designed to smooth the political path for the pay-off of a 'junk food' levy.

There is no 'obesity crisis'. It is, and always has been, a fictional hobgoblin to be exploited for maximum fiscal effect and now that endgame has been achieved, press coverage of the 'obesity crisis will suddenly vanish as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. Job done (at least until such time as an increase in the tax is required).

But even if 'our children' were as dumpy as has been so mischieviously claimed, they are going to get thinner now for sure. The tax on the profits of food producers will be passed onto consumers who will now have to pay significantly higher prices for their weekly shopping. As with all such extortions, it is those on fixed or low incomes who will be hit the hardest.

Nor are they to be compensated by the appearance of any brand, spanking new sports facilities which, I predict, will never materialise. A few crumbs of the cash will go to the appointment of some Real Sports Advisers as a Potemkin show, but the lion's share of the money will simply be poured into the great, sucking black-hole of the public sector and lost. That is how it goes in Britain.

So now that our wonderful, caring government has finally solved the 'obesity crisis', all that remains is for us to speculate as to what private sector industry is next on the list for a shakedown. At a rough guess, I'd say telecommunications. There is an awful lot of money sloshing around in that sector right now and that makes it a very tempting target. I do not yet know what pretext will be employed but I am in no doubt whatsoever that it will somehow involve 'our children'.

(2) (21)

Growing up in the 1970's I recall being rather spooked by dire warnings of an impending ice age and the threat that I would spend my adult life shivering in a cave. Some twenty years later that apocalypse vision had been melted clean away by the dire (and considerably shriller) warnings about global warming and, according to everyone who is anyone, I now face the threat of spending what remains of my adult life sizzling like a sausage.

Two decades in which to manage a complete polar reversal in doomsday-scenario is pretty good going but it pales into 'also-ran' status by an eerily similar polar switch in the rather more mundane field of eating disorders.

This is from the BBC website in July 1998:

Doctors have hit out at the media and advertisers for encouraging anorexia by portraying skinny supermodels as the beauty ideal instead of 'more buxom wenches'.

The British Medical Association's annual conference in Cardiff voted overwhelmingly for a motion condemning the media obsession with ultra thin supermodels.

Dr Muriel Broome, a former director of public health, said "the constant image of very thin models" encouraged girls to develop eating disorders. "We urge the media to be more responsible and show more buxom wenches," she said.

I know not whether Dr Broome's advice was acted upon, but I am now informed that we have, indeed, taken on the mantle of buxomness with some considerable gusto. From the BBC website today:

Improving children's eating habits is the key to tackling an obesity "timebomb", MPs have warned.

The Commons Health Select Committee attacks the government, food industry and advertisers for failing to act to stop rising levels of obesity.

From 'ultra-thin models' to 'obesity timebombs' in the space of slightly over half-a-decade. Now I am no statistician but I think even I am qualified to regard that as a quite remarkable national metamorphosis.

Nor are these select MPs (who clearly have nothing better to do) speaking out in some frolic of their own. The media that only five years ago was, apparently, inciting and encouraging starvation and skeletal thinness is now tripping over itself in scolding us for being too fat!

From today's Telegraph:

The food industry should be given three years to end the "cynical" promotion of high-fat, high-sugar food aimed at children, MPs say today.

In a scathing report they criticise high-profile advertising campaigns that use sports stars and celebrities to sell chocolate and crisps and call for a voluntary ban on television food advertisements aimed at children. If the industry fails to act the Government should step in, they say.

And from today's Independent:

Britain's "devastating" epidemic of obesity could threaten the very existence of the NHS, a report warns today.

So it's not all bad news then. And (as if they were going to miss out on all the fun) from today's Guardian:

It should not be a surprise that we have become gripped by an obesity crisis. After all, the warning signs have been there for some time. Lifestyles have become more sedentary. We have become more attached to our cars. Life is also faster; there is less time to prepare food and eat. More parents are working and have less time to cook for, and with, their children. Meanwhile, the food industry has become hyper-competitive and, in the battle for market share, children have become fair game.

This last article is the most significant because it is not from any of the Guardian's usual columnists (although it is written in the same hectoring politburo party line style) but from a certain John Krebs who, we are informed, is:

...chairman of the Food Standards Agency.

So clearly his opinions are above and beyond the febrile scribblings of the average hack. This article is an ex cathedra statement of intent.

Those companies that fail to respond with healthier products will, like the dinosaurs, be doomed to extinction.

For once, a reliable prediction. Reliable because it is self-fulfilling. What he means is that suppliers who do not toe the Food Kommisars line on acceptable products will be actively driven into extinction by the said Food Kommisar and his obedient minions.

I must say that I am rather glad that Mr Krebs has come out and laid it on the line because otherwise there are some unwordly people who might be fooled into believing that this tsunami of propoganda in the press is merely a coincidence or, worse, a reflection of concern about a genuine problem. It is further proof of the axiom that one must never underestimate or dismiss the power of vested interest.

The Food Standards Agency was set up at the tail end of the 1990's as a response to the BSE crisis. Such was the trauma of the 'mad cow disease' outbreak that all food suddenly became suspect and 'da gubbament' had to do something. The something they did was the same thing they always do: they set up another government agency to 'restore public confidence in the food we eat'.

When I first heard of the FSA, I predicted (yes, we can all play that game) that this would spell trouble. And this is why it pays to be cynic because I was right. The BSE crisis has long-since slipped into history and there are no mad cows roaming the quiet countryside anymore (or, at least, the fear of them has been played out). So do we still need a lavishly-funded, well-staffed FSA? Of course we do because food is dangerous once again.

Take careful note because if this is not a text-book case of bureaucratic empire-building, well then, I don't know what is. And if those press articles have not been drafted (or, at the very least approved) by apparatchicks in the FSA then I will eat my hat (fried in butter!).

There is no 'obesity timebomb' in this country or any other country and the only thing that needs to be put on a strict diet is our bloated, grasping, greedy, flatulent public sector. Starve them down to the bone, I say. Make them anorexic. Then we can all get on with enjoying our lives and the fruits of our labours without being nagged into an early grave.

(0) (16)

It is official: food is the new enemy of the international left.

While the crashers were doing their stuff on the neatly-manicured lawns of Geneva, dark plots were being hatched inside the gleaming towers:

All 192 countries in the World Health Organisation have tentatively agreed to an unprecedented policy on diet and health to tackle global obesity.

Did that include the Ethiopeans?

The voluntary plan was hammered out at talks in Geneva in the face of stiff opposition from lobbies such as the sugar-producing nations.

We are privileged indeed to witness the birth of a brand, new imaginary straw-man. Ladies and gentlemen, making its debut on the world stage, but soon to making regular appearances in the columns of every angry, left-wing polemicist in every media venue on earth, please give a warm welcome to..... "the Sugar Lobby" (boo, hiss). Stand right here in the spotlight, Sugar Lobby, and take your place among right-wingers, big tobacco, industrialists, zionists, gun manufacturers, motorists and George Bush.

Nearly one in six people worldwide is now considered overweight.

Amazing is it not? Seems like only five minutes ago that the battlecry of the social-working class was "feed the starving". Now, in the blink of an eye, they have changed it to "starve the fed". Astonishing stuff!

The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says this is the first ever attempt to regulate the world's eating habits.

And we all know that it will not be the last.

Dr Kaare Norum, a Norwegian obesity expert who advised the WHO on the development of the plan, said the agreement was a victory for public health.

DR. NORUM: "I have been studying obese people for many, many years and the incontrovertible data I have collected as a result leads me to conclude that these people are very fat".

WHO: "You are obviously an expert. Come join our committee".

Honestly, the whole article sounds as if it has been lifted from an old issue of Pravda. Mind you, it comes courtesy of the Beeb.

So be warned you choca-holics and doughnut-dunkers: your stodgy, sticky delights are on the hit list. Lock them away in secret bunkers while you still can.

(0) (14)

The May 1 issue of New Scientist contains an item 'Why our fears about fat are misplaced' written by Paul Campos, a Professor of Law from the University of Colorado. We have often stated our belief fat is the new job frontier for government bureaucracy and Professor Campos seems to agree with us. He states unequivocally that no research directly links fat to shorter lifespans. Sedentery lifestyles and other factors, yes. Fat alone? No. In his own words:

Ultimately the current panic over increasing body mass has little to do with science, and everything to do with cultural and political factors that distort scientific enquiry. Among those factors are greed (consensus panels put together by organizations such as WHO that have declared obesity a major health crisis are often made up entirely of doctors who run diet clinics), and cultural anxieties about social overconsumption in general.

He notes that in one recent study:

It added up to just one extra death per 10,000 "overweight" women per year. The authors still treated the findings as strong evidence of a causal relationship between weight and cancer

Professor Campos also has a book on the subject, The Obesity Myth.

(0) (31)

Like a lot of folk who spend much of their time working in an office in Central London, I try to grab what exercise I can by going to a gym. I have been visiting one of these places in London for about eight years, and, gratifyingly, my once pencil-thin physique has acquired a bit more muscle. (I have a long way to go, mind, not that I remotely want to look like the Governor of California). I have also acquired other benefits, such as being able to sleep much better, better chance of avoiding injuries in everyday life, and a better pallor... The benefits have not gone unremarked by my girlfriend, either.

Gymnasiums are now a major business. Their success in the West speaks of an ever-expanding desire on our part to live the healthy life and do something direct about it. I find it amusing that at a time when we are constantly told by our masters that we need new laws, taxes and the like to avoid obesity and other problems, that more folk than ever before are getting off their backsides and working out. Screw the nanny state, put on some gym shoes! It is a rather encouraging sign that the spirit of self-help, at least when it comes to developing a flat stomach or a nice torso, is well alive.

The gym culture also I think shows just how secular British society has become. If you lack faith in an afterlife, and want to squeeze the most out of life on this Earth, then get fit! Also, if you do not believe that pride is a sin, as I do not, then there is nothing wrong in doing one's best to look good and feel physically on top of the world, and enjoy that fact.

(0) (6)

Dave Barry links to this:

Phil Henry said he went to Helen Ellis Hospital in Tarpon Springs and was admitted for abdominal pain. A few days into his stay, his I-V malfunctioned causing his right arm to swell.

"On Tuesday night my right arm started hurting. I rung for a nurse. I didn't get anyone and my arm got swollen up about the size of two golf balls and started bleeding," Henry said.

After ringing for a nurse several times, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

"I took my urinal can and threw it out in the hallway, still got nobody. I hollered two or three times. Nobody came so I picked up the telephone and dialed 911."

He said he told the dispatcher his name, where he was and described the problem with the I-V.

He then asked the dispatcher to call the hospital.

"Then I got a nurse. After that they took good care of me."

Warning to British people: Do not try this with the NHS.

(0) (3)

Tony Blair's 10 Downing Street web site is claiming that some spurious target or other, for the National Health Service to recruit an extra 2,000 General Practitioners, has almost been reached. That is, according to some figures produced, and I use the word advisedly, by the UK government's Department of Health.

However, I have just watched a hilarious piece on Channel4's News programme where the Royal College of General Practitioners challenged how these good news figures had actually been arrived at? I felt like phoning the programme up and telling its producer about a civil service game called Hard Target, which involves a pack of marked cards, a set of rusty darts, and a small bag of pistachio nuts. But I relented and listened on.

With an increasing number of GP surgeries refusing new patients and an increasing shortage of GPs around the country, for instance in Barnsley, as mentioned by Channel4 tonight, and even in relatively well-funded towns in Scotland, the Royal College puts the alleged increase in GPs at something more like 200, rather than 2,000, and if you take into account the increasing number of GP retirements and the increase in part-time GP working, the full-time figure actually shrinks, in real world terms, to something more like 26.

So, well worth increasing the spend on the NHS then, to nearly one hundred billion pounds, from about sixty billion. I know that's almost £1.54 billion pounds per extra GP, but hey, is it really possible for us heartless libertarians to put a monetary price on the sanctity of human life and its guardians in the general practitioner service? Shame on us.

Which leaves me in a dilemma? Do I believe the UK government figures or do I believe the ones from the Royal College of General Practitioners set at about 1% of the government's own claims? It is a toughie, I will admit, but you know me. I always believe everything the government says on principle. For where would civilisation be if we ever lost trust in the government?

I am an Aardvark.

(0) (20)

As someone often accused of never having one word for a subject, where three hundred and fifty seven will do, I am afraid the following act of collectivized lunacy has simply left me stumped. Gazumped. And just plain flummoxed.

A National Health Service surgeon, from the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, has been suspended on full pay, for a week now, in a row over whether he took too many croutons to go with his lunchtime soup.

No, I am really not making this up.

I particularly like the comment from some idiot going under the name of Lord Warner:

I am reliably informed that there will be no detriment to patients, because the work that that doctor was due to perform will be covered by his colleagues

Tell you what, to save NHS costs let's sack every surgeon in the entire country except one, who can cover all the rest. There will be no detriment to patients, obviously. We just better make sure we have a fleet of helicopters ready to whizz him about the country and a good supply of amphetamine pills to keep him awake.

Like I said, words fail me. Just pick your own croutons from the following word soup and gently flavour with Basil:

Parasites. Fools. Cretins. Croutons. Bananas. Idiots. The sooner the NHS is privatized the better. Monkey nuts. Lickspittles. Guardian-reading Enemy Class. Arse. Feck. And of course. Drink. Lots and Lots of Drink.

I particularly like Monkey nuts.

(1) (24)

That's it, I've had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder's HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air.

Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people's responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that's why. So what the hell, let's eat another cream cake, let's drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I'll sue them for a loss of human dignity.

Take, for instance, asthma patients who smoke. I came across many of these, as a medical student, when I worked in the Northern General Hospital, in Sheffield. So why do they smoke when this lands them in an oxygen tent manned by a medical student making a mess of their right-arm, in his pitiful attempts to take blood samples from them every morning? Because the NHS supplies all of the Ventolin Inhalers they may need, supplies all of the incompetent medical students they may need, and supplies all of the sick notes and hospital beds they may need, to help their damaged lungs recover from their stupid and continuing nicotinic self-abuse. Some of them were even happy to be there, to spend a few weeks away from home, relaxing, getting paid on the medical sick note, watching television all day, and chatting to nurses and medical students. Oh yes, and when well enough, slipping outside for a quick smoke.

Would they abuse their bodies as much, smoking with asthma, if they had to supply their own wages insurance, had to pay the full cost for their own Ventolin supplies, and had to pay for their own hospital treatment insurance, to pick up the pieces, at a special ten times rate for asthmatics testing nicotine-positive on their blood samples? Of course they wouldn't. And will more social engineering and more extravagant government targets make them quit smoking? Are you kidding me? They're in hospital, facing death through smoking, right in the face. And a subsidy on Kumquats funded by a tax on chocolate Kit-Kats is going to make them give up? Beam me up, Nanny. Even an outright ban on smoking would only stop them for a few weeks, until the rapidly expanding tobacco and chocolate black markets got them hooked back in again.

When nanny supplies a comfortable cot and a bottle of warm milk, baby is just going to lie there lapping it up, even if it begins a process of artery clogging. And by the way, just what divine right is it you possess anyway to stick your noses into their lives, even if they did choose to be so stupid? I suppose, you might say, because Joe Taxpayer is forced to fund the NHS, so Joe Taxpayer, in the form of your good selves, has the right to make people obey health diktats. I have a better solution. Let's get rid of the filthy disgusting chippy-staffed NHS, instead, problem solved. And let's not forget the sheer hypocrisy of your leading priests, as they genuflect at the font of the God of Society.

You've got lardy High Priest Gordon Brown, whose fat jowls are now dropping well below his tailored shirt collars, and the even fatter and the even lardier Head Whipping Boy John Prescott, whose broad face is the very road map which highlights the dangers of personal over consumption.

And then, of course, there's Social Engineer-in-Chief and Lord High Defender of the Faith, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a coffee-abusing man who can only carry out his job because there's a team of heart specialists waiting 24 hours a day at the Nomenklatura Hospital, in Chelsea, waiting for him to collapse again through overwork, so they can re-start his heart. I assisted in such procedures, in the Rotherham General hospital. But despite what Blair's aides have reported, even when such heart restart procedures are scheduled, they are never routine. Stopping and re-starting someone's heart, to get it into the correct sinus rhythm, is not something you do either lightly or while scoffing a Kit-Kat. It is always dangerous and it is sometimes lethal. Everyone around the table, especially the man with the shock paddles, gets a big hit of adrenaline when the capacitors charge up. Many people die in hospitals. But it's not every day you get to personally perform the action which kills them, especially when it is the bare chest of a British Prime Minister in front of you, all smothered in conductive K-Y Jelly.

But yet we all have to take lessons on health from this workaholic man, who is driving himself into an early grave through endless political briefs and night-time flights, because he is Social Engineering Superman. Despite heart restarts, which are nature's way of telling you to stop politicking and to start gardening, he still knows better than the rest of us as to how we should look after our own health. He even has the right, apparently, to force us how to look after our own health, through taxation and social engineering, because assorted health fascist Guardianistas, who make their obscene gravy-train living from the health-and-welfare monster that is the British state, say that he has this right, as they float around in a comfortable tax-funded sea of their own, smoking cannabis, drinking Chardonnay, and engaging in dubious STD-inducing night-time practices of sexual self discovery.

Well, good luck to you in your private lives. But if you do it, why can't anyone else? Your stupid social engineering, your filthy hospitals, and your unbelievable waste in the NHS, make me, and everyone else, sick. We will all be a damn sight better off, if we simply got rid of all you social engineers, and all of your terrible self-defeating Nanny State works, which make everything worse rather than better. Do you never learn anything? Sixty years of continuing NHS failure and your benighted solution is yet more of the same. It is simply unbelievable. It is time this ratchet was broken.

(0) (5)

It seems Gordon Brown's favourite useful idiot, Derek Wanless, has been at it again. The much-criticised former banker, who disastrously turned the giant NatWest bank into a tiddler taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland, has taken a second lump of taxpayer cash from HM Treasury, to produce a second report telling them, once again, what they wanted to hear in the first place.

This follows his previous report, also commissioned by HM Treasury, which told them National Insurance payroll taxes should be raised to increase government spending on the NHS. Which duly happened, straight after the last General Election.

Dilbert Derek's latest report tells us essentially that the government should do more to look after the health of its citizens. In much the same way, of course, that pig farmers should look after the health of their pigs. Welcome to the farm, citizens.

What this will undoubtedly turn into is a righteous claim, as predicted by our very own Mr David Carr, that HM Treasury should, unwillingly, and after due consideration, raise our taxes again. For our own good. Bless them.

Who cares what the actual tax will be? A fat tax, a hat tax, a stick it up your jumper tax, don't worry, they'll think of something. So my hot gambling tip of the day, if you've got any money left after this year's January self-assessment tax deadline, is to put your loot down on 'More Taxes Soon', in the five o'clock at HM Treasury. This may be your last chance to ever have any spare money, so enjoy it while it lasts. Get a McDonalds with your winnings. Don't worry. They won't mind. They just want your money.

(0) (38)

Back in November 2003, I predicted that the end result of the anti-junk-food campaign would be 'sin taxes':

Then on to Step 5: the levying of 'sin taxes' on hamburgers to 'encourage a change of behaviour'. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.

I hope I will be forgiven for this brief episode of smugness because, not only has my prediction come to pass, but it has come to pass rather more rapidly than even I had anticipated:

A Downing Street-based policy unit has proposed a plan to place a "fat tax" on junk food in an attempt to tackle the rising incidence of heart disease.

According to The Times, the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit raised the prospect of extra duty or VAT being imposed on some of the nation's favourite foods after heart disease overtook cancer as Britain's biggest killer, and more young people started developing diabetes.

That is what it was really all about. All the media-hype, all the hand-wringing, all the brow-furrowing and all the phoney 'caring'. It was all an elaborate ploy by the public sector classes to get their hands on more of your hard-earned. It really is all about revenue.

I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.

(0) (17)

There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.

First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.

However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.

It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:

As for smoking bans in "public places", there are three reasons why they're unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don't have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from "second-hand smoke" has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I've gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it's statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I'm not making this up! People who use this sort of "junk science" to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.

So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.

Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about 'saving the planet' or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.

My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!

[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

(0) (12)

Now see here all you bloody smoking bastards. They have just about had enough of you and your pathetic, juvenile, surly insolence. Why can't you seem to get it through your amazingly thick skulls that this sort of thing just is not on?

They have tried to be reasonable. They have tried to be understanding. But, oh no, that wasn't good enough for you, was it? Well, here's a news flash for you, chummy: the party is over. Their patience is at an end. The 'good cop' routine has not worked, so its time to send in the 'bad cops'. Yes, that's right. The gloves are finally coming off:

Pictures of diseased organs and rotting teeth could feature on cigarette packets under new government plans.

Similar pictures appear in Canada, Thailand, Brazil and Singapore - now a public consultation will be held on whether to introduce them in the UK.

"We need to continue with fresh, hard-hitting ideas, providing more information that will help smokers quit," Health Secretary John Reid said.

And if that does not force you to quit, well, then they are just going to have to break out the Celine Dion records and play them on a loop until you damn well come to your senses.

Don't make them do it!

(0) (12)

I believe I detect some tantalising signs that the Many-Headed Hydra of the British State is, at last, beginning to eat itself:

Institutional racism is a "blot upon the good name of the NHS", a report on the death of a black patient has said.

An inquiry said the failure to give ethnic minority people proper mental health care was a "festering abscess".

It follows the death of schizophrenic patient David Bennett in 1998, after he was restrained at a clinic in Norwich.

Retired High Court judge Sir John Blofeld, who lead the inquiry team, said the death of Mr Bennett - known to friends as Rocky - was "tragic and totally unnecessary".

His team said it believed institutional racism was present throughout NHS mental health services.

This 'institutional racism' thingy has turned out to be a very useful multi-purpose weapon. Perhaps they should drop one into Iraq to help quell the insurgents.

In any event, considering the disproportionately high number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who work in the NHS, I find this accusation very hard to believe. In fact, I will go as far as saying that it is bunkum. Bunkum on stilts. Bunkum with knobs on. About as plausible as an EU anti-corruption drive.

It made more than 20 recommendations including the demand that NHS staff working with the mentally ill are trained in "cultural awareness and sensitivity".

We have to respect the fact that some people choose to be stark, raving bonkers and that that choice is just as valid as people who happen to be in full control of their mental faculties. All states of mind are the same and doing things like eating spiders and lurking around public parks flashing the old one-eyed trouser snake at little old ladies are merely alternative lifestyle choices that we should celebrate. In fact, these people are not barmy at all, they are just....differently conscious.

But, truly, this is a puzzlement. The NHS is the 'Jewel in the Crown' of the public sector and the only thing still holding that wheezing, cankered Leviathan together is the commitment and morale of the staff working within. What better way to dissolve all that goodwill than by subjecting them to the kind of Inquisitional ordeal that 'cultural awareness training' entails?

Do these accusers not appreciate or realise that the possible consequences of their campaign might be to cattle-prod this most sacred of sacred cows straight into the merciless metal teeth of the abbatoir? Or perhaps they do realise but they simply do not care? Perhaps the years of unimpaired success have so sharpened the appetites of these professional race warriors that they have become like ravenous wolves, turning on their class confreres and ripping out great gobs of flesh in a feeding frenzy?

Well, either way, I say it is best to let nature take its course.

(1) (4)

Medical researchers have condemned the new Human Tissues Bill as an impediment to teaching and research.

But scientists say the changes go too far and will make teaching and medical research extremely difficult.

There is no discrimination between whole organs and a collection of a few cells on a microscope slide, they say.

Cancer charities and the Wellcome Trust are calling on ministers to make changes to the Bill.

Doctors have to obtain written consent if they wish to use any form of human tissue removed from a person living or dead, even if they are checking for the prevalence of a virus in the general population. One can think of the consequences if tests could not have been carried out for AIDS, given the level of stigmatisation that accompanied the virus. There is a quandary since informed consent is surely necessary before the tissues of any individual are extracted, preserved and used for any purpose, even if it is for public health.

However, it is estimated that 3,000,000 samples and 100,000,000 blood samples will require written consent, proving another bureaucratic excess for the NHS. Public health is often used as an argument to override the concerns or refusal of an individual to provide any form of sample. No doubt there is an argument that rational individuals will understand the necessity of acting in concert when faced with an unknown disease or epidemic. However, this is often not the case.

Grappling with the issue of public health and a libertarian society, certain questions have presented themselves: Do individuals who refuse to cooperate with ventures sourced in civil society to track and curb the spread of any disease in a minarchy open themselves to claims of compensation since their actions could be viewed as endangering others? At such times, is the action of 'opting out' of a collective venture to track and curb an epidemic by any individual sufficient to trigger claims against that individual on the grounds that their actions placed others in danger?

Perry de Havilland has limited the notion of public health to "communicable diseases", but even here, it is unclear if such matters require a coercive authority mandated to use the measures necessary to curb any disease. As it stands, the new Human Tissues Law will require written consent before any part of your body is taken and used for another purpose, even if it is in your own interest. Surely an advance on the contemporary thefts by state institutions in the name of 'research'.

(2) (8)

I got a Valentine's Card once. I cannot remember the exact year but I think it might have been around 1937.

Since then my doormat has been graced with a small mountain of bills, a cascade of unwanted mail-order catalogues and the occasional muddy footprint. But I harbour no grudges and, as the day of luuuurrve and romance fast approaches, let me take this brief opportunity to extend my warmest wishes to all those gaily courting couples of the world. May the aim of cupid's arrow be straight and true and may it pierce the fluttering heart of paramours everywhere. For what is life but to love, as some philosopher once said. Or should have said.

Forgive the mawkishness but I have been driven to such sentimentalities as a reaction to the rather less enchanting message that is being broadcast from people who, purportedly, are rather more caring than I am:

A hard-hitting advertising campaign to warn young people about the dangers of unsafe sex has been unveiled by the Government.

The campaign, launched in the run-up to Valentine's Day, features cartoon images of realistic looking Valentine's cards, with powerful messages about the risks of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

One features a sunset scene of a couple on the beach with the poem: "Oh Valentine, since you came to me you're always in my thoughts. I'll never forget the night we met and you gave me genital warts."

Another shows a pink teddy bear in obvious pain, with the message: "I love you so much it hurts... when I pee."

Such a bunch of twinkle-eyed, slushy romantics, are they not?

Health Minister Melanie Johnson said it was "vital" to tackle this boom in sexually transmitted diseases and improve sexual health.

"This campaign is aimed at targeting those most at risk by using thought-provoking imagery and direct language.

"The Sex Lottery campaign is targeted specifically at sexually active 18 to 30-year-olds, and has already achieved significant behaviour change.'

At Christmas it's the dangers of overeating, overdrinking and faulty electrical goods. In the summer it's skin cancer, sunstroke and cornea-damage. Now, the season of romance invokes finger-wagging and tut-tutting about STD's. I think what the Department of Dour Presbyterian School Ma'ams is trying to tell us is that life is a bitch, no good will come of it, pleasure is sin and we will all be jolly well sorry we ever started.

While the theological analogy is tempting, it is probably too deep. The real problem lies in there being far too many many state bureaucrats with far too much time on their hands and way too much of our money burning a hole in their pockets. But I do wonder if these people actually mean what they say? I mean, is all this sanctimonious hectoring just a way of bailing out the huge waves of cash that HM Treasury has flooded them with in recent years? Or do people like Melanie Johnson really see the world only in terms of the demons waiting to pounce with malice aforethought on the unsuspecting life-reveller? Are these apparent neuroses just convenient rubrics or is this, in fact, the true face of our political classes that we are seeing, genital-warts and all?

I would like to think that it is the former but, increasingly, I suspect the latter. I really do think that our entire ruling class is deep in the grip of some paralysing psychosis that has turned them into medieval peasants, muttering incantations and kissing toads to protect themselves from the Dark Faeries That Dwell In The Woods.

Generally speaking, the world is a dangerous and worrisome place for defeated and exhausted people.

(0) (11)

So George 'Hitler' Bush and his shadowy cabal of extreme right-wing neo-conservative warmongers are, once again, showing their contempt for the peace-loving, democratic will of the international community:

The United States is challenging a strategy by the World Health Organization (WHO) to tackle obesity.

Some scientists accuse President Bush's administration of planning to water down proposed junk food regulations, in order to protect big business.

No mention of who these 'scientists' are, mind. Perhaps they are Indyscientists.

Anyway, I support the WHO. I think it is only reasonable and fair that I should be told what I can and cannot eat by a panel of experts from Libya, Chad, Cuba and North Korea. It's for my own good!

(0) (35)

I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as 'surveys'. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.

However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:

Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.

The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.

I know exactly who those 'dismayed' people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that 'AIDS' is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.

Africa still has that 'dark continent' quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.

I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80's. From out of nowhere came legions of 'experts' to assure us that it really was the new 'Black Death' and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.

It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.

(0) (22)

With a rapidity which defies belief, Mr Bezos, of Amazon.com, has delivered to my grasping hand Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe's The Myth of National Defense, and a copy of Ludwig von Mises' Bureaucracy, direct from Amazon's Seattle headquarters, via standard shipping, in less than a week. Remarkable.

I thought I'd warm myself up for the big one, from Herr Hoppe, with the 1944 classic from Herr Von Mises. And what a true classic it is. I'm only on page 19, of its one hundred and thirty four pages, but already it has staggered me with its guillotine-sharp language, its brutal power, and its Germanic eloquence. Magnificent.

We simply are unworthy of this greatest of the twentieth century's bearers of the flame of liberty.

One quote has already caught my eye, after a recent David Carr article:

It [modern socialism] is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the 'comrade' is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in.

Now I could mention how clever it was, in 1944, for Von Mises to spot the increasing role, in the 21st century, for our illiberal friends at a certain UK newspaper, but let's take a closer look at the subject of diet, something Professor Mises told us in 1944 the totalitarians would feel bound to try to control us with, for whatever miserable reasons they dream up.

I must also thank Uncle Stephen Pollard for his excellent Times-published article about the Atkins diet. I relapsed from Atkins, somewhat, over November and December. But Uncle Stephen has slapped me round the jowls and got me back on track. When I was that healthy vision of virility, which I keep in my mind, and a blindside rugby flanker, less than 10 years ago, my fighting weight was 14 stone. This crept up to an outlandish 17 stone 10 pounds, over the next few years, following retirement from the scrum, meaning I was 52 pounds overweight. Crikey.

A simple use of Atkins, over a few months, got this down to 15 stone 8 pounds, i.e., I lost 30 pounds, and only had 22 to go. But you get smug on Atkins when none of your clothes fit any more, because you've lost so much weight. So I relaxed the regime and drifted slowly back up to 16 stone 4 pounds. This means I now have 32 pounds to lose, instead of 22. But now I'm back on the program, much to the consternation of UK taxpayer-funded nutritionists, dieticians, and other Von Mises predicted health fascists, everywhere. One was on the UK Today program this morning, virtually accusing the Atkins diet of being worse than that most evil of consumptive habits, smoking, shrilly accusing Boots the Chemist of virtual genocide for daring to stock Atkins-brand chocolate bars. How dare they! Don’t they know who rules this country?

So in my bid to repay Ludwig von Mises, Stephen Pollard, and the late great Dr Atkins himself, and to induce apoplexy into socialist health control fetishists, wherever the sad useless fools may be, I thought I'd pass on a recommendation as to my favourite greasy spoon restaurant, in the whole wide world.

This is, of course, the spectacular Gorge Cafe on the south side of the Caversham Bridge, in Reading. Popular with Reading Festival attendees, motorbikers, and other discerning denizens of monster grills, you just cannot beat the Gorge. Good prices, quick service, top quality sausages, excellent tea, fried eggs always done just the way you like them, and all cooked and served by people who really look like they're enjoying themselves, especially the girls in those modern jeans which only start going down halfway round the bum. Most excellent.

The parking's a bit tough, with only a few spaces outside for Gorge customers, in the BP garage forecourt next door. But as you'll be arriving on your Harley Davidson anyway, don't worry about it (or you can park by the Caversham rowing club, down behind the Holiday Inn hotel opposite, if you get a bit stuck, or in the Rivermeade leisure centre car park, just up the road).

With two split levels in the Gorge, non-smokers like me, who are waiting for the UK government to ban the filthy weed so they can start up again, are well served by the lower non-smoking level, and top quality smokers can relax in the upper level, imbibing their nicotine amongst friends (though good air-conditioning quickly cleans the air). I often dine up there, just to get the fumes. Ah, memories.

What else can I say about the Gorge? They have an excellent Atkins-style breakfast, which is basically their monster grill without the beans or toast, and there's usually plenty of seating room inside, despite the unusual pink ceiling cave decoration which makes you feel like Fred Flintstone would be happy in there.

As greasy spoons go, the Gorge is also a true classic, like Bureaucracy, as any of its regulars will testify. Despite searching, I've yet to find a greasy spoon restaurant as good, or as memorable. Its ceiling, particularly, truly is world class.

After your splendid Atkins-style Gorge breakfast, take a walk down by the Thames, to see the swans, or do this beforehand to build up your appetite. Either way, if you're in Reading, in the Caversham area, and you want to stick two fingers up to the diet and health control freaks you're forced to pay for through your taxes, always make sure you pay a culinary visit to the Gorge. If you can do this on your 1000 cc Ducati Monster, this gets bonus extra points. And remember, extra points means extra rashers of bacon.

(3) (18)

It is now 2004 and may I take this opportunity of wishing all Samizdata readers a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

As for me, I have resolved that I will be in the same bad mood this year that I was in last year. It makes perfect sense. My enemies don't change their ways, so why should I change mine?

It is time to stand up for the "nanny state" - for Jowell and Hodge and, in other areas, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. And also, in general, for the state's right and duty to involve itself in questions of diet, health, family budgets and good parenting.

So it turns out that all the leftie carping about 'big food' in 2003 wasn't a joke after all. They really mean it. I predict, before the end of 2004, a 'burger tax'.

The crucial point which critics of the nanny state fail to mention is that individuals and families don't stand alone. None of us lives in a neutral social space, unharassed, and free to make wise long-term choices. Whatever the philosophical ideal, in the real world we are bombarded by corporate messages cajoling us and our children to consume and borrow. We are inhabitants of the more, now, spend-it, eat-it society, which - let us not forget - boosts the profits of the multinationals.

We are also inhabitants of ban it, tax it, regulate it society which - let us not forget - boosts the profits of the political classes.

Health-hectoring is now being added to enviromentalism and 'anti-racism' as a legitimating ideology of the ruling class. Another self-sustaining justification for their power, wealth and status. Nothing new about that of course, only now they are prepared to put the whole process on public display before nailing it into place.

(0) (10)

Alright, I wrote that quotation myself. But anyway, this is what I hate about the Guardian: it's so damned gloomy (what I hate about the Telegraph of course, is the stair-lift adverts). Can anyone tell me exactly how the Guardian manages to publish this...

Newly revised predictions from the Government's Actuary Department (GAD) reveal that the life expectancy for men who will be born in 2031 has risen to 81 years, compared with 75.9 years for those born in 2002. For women the figure jumps to 84.9 years, compared with 80.5 years for those born last year.

And now the bad news. The figures are around one and a half years higher than the GAD had assumed as recently as its last report in 2001, and will fuel further fears about the ability of future governments to cope with the profound problems associated with an ageing population.

...on the same day as this...

The full scale of the health timebomb caused by Britain's descent into lazy lifestyles is to be exposed in a landmark report by the Government's Chief Medical Officer.

Sir Liam Donaldson will spell out for the first time how two-thirds of Britons are now so inactive - with most people, particularly women, failing to do even the minimum recommended amount of 'moderate' exercise - that they are at risk of getting cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

I don't know which is more shocking and dreadful, the fact that Brits are living longer or the fact that they take no notice of government fitness targets! Did you all get your fitness targets in the post? No? That's strange, neither did I.

Professor Ken Fox, a social psychologist at Bristol University and an expert on how to increase activity levels, said: 'To make a real impact we have to redefine what activity means. You don't have to be sporty to be active. You could use your legs and do a bit more walking, which would really help you.

So, exactly how do they know we're not walking much, or already "incorporating bursts of activity into daily life", eh? Did they see how many times I run up and down stairs every day? No, they did not. They're just being anti-evolutionary for the sake of it:

'We have been conditioned, since Victorian times, to find easier and easier ways of living. We want lots of dishwashers and lots of cars.'

Right. We're living longer because we don't have to slave as scullery-maids or walk ten miles to labour at the cotton-mill each morning.

Readers of Samizdata will of course find the government's attempts at nannying both predictable and irritating. I think what matters more than any "slippery slope" argument, however, is simply that we understand what the anti-capitalist worldview consists of, and work out how to persuade the left that they are wrong. The idea that the progress of human civilisation somehow corrupts and destroys us is as fundamental to anti-capitalism as the idea that a growing population means a growing fiscal burden, as opposed to a growing economy and knowledge-base.

What we need to share in 2004 is our knowledge of how capitalism works, and why it is good. The fixed-wealth theory must be replaced by a common-sense appreciation of economic and evolutionary dynamics. It's not a glamorous job, and it's not a matter of heroically rescuing the UK from certain Khmer Rouge tyranny. It's just about spreading sensible ideas and helping things gradually improve. But few things are more important than that.

(0) (14)

It annoys the hell out of me when I hear the chattering classes in Britain describe this country's decrepit socialist National Health System as 'the envy of the world'… and it astounds me when idiots in the USA think it should be emulated over there.

As someone who has all too much first hand contact with the NHS, as well as having been at the tender mercy of other nation’s healthcare systems when I have broken bones, crashed cars, got shot, fallen through a weak floor, head-butted a flying bottle, been bitten by snakes/dogs/rats/, skied into trees, caught exotic unpronounceable tropical diseases and all the other things that happen to folks such as myself who travel to far off places and foolishly venture out of the hotel… and I can assure you that the NHS is at its best nothing special compared to much of the rest of the world and at its worst, it absolutely sucks. I certainly never saw a dirty ward in a hospital in Croatia or Ghana or the USA like those I have seen in Britain's state run hospitals.

In reality, not only does the NHS provide indifferent care (an appointment I needed once took 11 months to arrange), it does so at vast cost and in reality a large chunk of the burden of healthcare is done privately. In fact, the NHS could not survive without a large healthcare private sector, the size of which Eamonn Butler points out over on the Adam Smith Institute's own blog.

When my grandfather was gravely injured a few years ago, the treatment he received from the NHS was adequate - but after it became apparent that he was not able to look after himself any more due to brain damage, my family ended up shelling out well over £40,000 ($70,000) per year to keep him in a private nursing home which did not smell of piss. I am not complaining, after all what the hell is money for if not for something like that? However the role played by the non-state sector is a largely unsung one and I wish more people in Britain realised that the fact the state does not provide a healthcare service does not mean one will not be provided. If the state did not take such a whack of tax money to fund the monstrosity that is the NHS, far more people would have healthcare insurance.

Of course that might not end up costing much less than the existing system but the evidence outside Britain suggests it would certainly produce a higher quality system than the one of de facto healthcare rationing in use in the UK now.

(1) (22)

The British Medical Association cuts to the chase. No shilly-shallying about. None of these namby-pamby half-measures or pathetic, milquetoast compromises, no, they have decided to go for the kill and demand another full-blown drug war:

Smoking should be completely banned in the UK, according to a top medical journal.

The Lancet said tens of thousands of lives would be saved by making tobacco an illegal substance and possession of cigarettes a crime.

Might as well really. The political climate is right, the enforcement apparatus is all in place and resistance will not be futile because it will be non-existant. In fact, they are probably kicking themselves for not coming out with this sooner.

Dr James said the government had already shown it was willing to pass similar legislation, such as banning the use of hand held mobile phones while driving.

Once again we see that appeasement does not work. Give the bullies an inch and next they want a mile. These people cannot be placated.

Forest director Simon Clark said the Lancet was "the true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot".

He said smokers should not be treated as criminals, adding: "The health fascists are on the march.

Oh no, Simon, they have been on the march for decades. Now they have taken the citadel.

"What next? Will they urge the government to ban fatty foods and dairy products?"

Yes. There is no reason for them not to.

(4) (53)

Empathy is the thing in schools history these days. You get the kids to think their way in to what it was really, truly like to be a fourteenth century Bohemian swineherd and feel their pain. Empathising with groups neglected and derided by the "Kings 'N' Battles" school of history is particularly favoured.

As part of my personal commitment to this school of thought, I'd like to bring up for public view the sufferings of a marginalised and stigmatised group. Slaveowners. Ever thought about their problems, huh? You probably think a person who can legally demand the unlimited services of another human has everything he wants. But you'd be wrong.

The ancient and modern chroniclers agree. Slaves were frequently lazy, dishonest and obstructive. Lacking initiative and zeal. Endlessly prone to saying, "yes massa, coming massa," and yet still somehow unwilling to put their hearts, souls and scrubbing arms into bringing out that deep-clean sparkle when scrubbing out the vomitorium.

Here is Seneca, writing in the Rome of the first century AD: "A household of slaves requires dressing and feeding; a crowd of ravenous creatures have to have their bellies filled, clothing has to be bought, thieving hands have to be watched, and the service we get is rendered with resentment and curses." (From On Tranquillity.)

Seneca knew no other system than slavery. In contrast English observers of the US writing after 1833 could observe the system from outside. I found several quotations in the Penguin Portable Victorian Reader illustrating how shoddy slave-work was. A passionate enemy of slavery, Charles Dickens, wrote "Richmond is a prettily situated town; but like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit) has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is most distressing.”

Even an opponent of slavery as lukewarm as William Makepeace Thackeray had to admit, writing to a friend in England: "Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us …. there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done."

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, describing her experiences in Savannah for The English Woman's Journal, also notes a certain lack of devotion to duty: "The [slave] boy was sent to bring a cart and horse to his master directly, but he very cooly put him off, in a way that would have lost a boy his place in England."

It must all have been very frustrating to the owners. They had important things to do, and here were the lazy good-for-nothing slaves delaying and dallying and just not putting their heart and soul into it.

Now, just possibly you the reader aren't very sympathetic. Just possibly you opine that the slaveowners had only themselves to blame - “Well, of course,” you are saying, “it's no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don't bust a gut.”

So why do so many people expect these familiar laws of human behaviour to suddenly change when the time is now and the work to be done is AIDS research?

In this link Stephen Pollard quotes Roger Bate, writing in the Wall Street Journal, as saying that AIDS drug development is trending downwards.

Why the decline?

Because the drugs companies no longer believe that they are going to get rich out of AIDS research. In fact they begin to doubt they will get any compensation at all. They read the newspapers, they study the speeches of politicians, and they sense that the popular wind is blowing against them. They think, probably rightly, that governments will either force them to sell at a loss drugs that were developed at huge expense or will bypass them and the law entirely by buying generic copies of patent drugs. Governments, after all, are the ones who can change the law when it is inconvenient. One minute the authorities will come down like a ton of bricks on pirate music or pirate videos. The next minute they will say that it is 'unacceptable greed' for companies to actually want to profit from patents on medical discoveries. I accept that there are subtleties and genuine conflicts of principle in the field of intellectual property – but the bottom line is that if pharma companies get nothing but abuse for the work they put in they bloody well won’t put in much more of it. Just as for the slaves, it’s no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don’t bust a gut.

The Concerned Classes have gradually become aware that AIDS research is slowing down. After a period of astonishment that the drugs companies might actually decline to work for nowt they have gone into a huddle and have come up with their usual strategy: force. Dammit, we’ll make them find a cure! Or perhaps we can be more subtle. We'll get the work out of them by veiled threats of legal action and harassment, and by egging on our toadies in the press to yet more slander.

In other words, the master sees the work ill-done and gets out his whip. He need not use it - most of the time. It is enough to finger it in a meaningful manner. This strategy appears to succeed at first. Oh, the hurry and scurry among the slaves! There is great show of work being done. Yes massa, coming massa! But somehow - still - things are still shoddy, unimaginative. Creativity cannot be got by means of a whip.

The slave has his own strategies. Fine says the company. Our research budget will be as big as ever. (Many companies find it useful to have a drainage swamp. Here's where they'll pile the "miscellaneous" funds; they can always contrive to get them back later if need be.) Redundancy looks bad and costs money, so we'll send Arthur to AIDS research. You don't know Arthur? Nice chap, you'll like him. Not top notch, perhaps, but no one actually thinks he's a deadbeat. Still, if things were different he would be let go in hard times - but now they have a much cosier solution. They'll promote him, even. Put his picture in the company magazine and, better yet, the press release. The syrupy article on the fine, public-spirited work Arthur and his team are doing for the suffering people of Africa almost writes itself. The company publicity officer will certainly have a busy morning sending this press release to ministers and journalists and AIDS lobby groups. (Yes massa, coming massa!) Arthur himself is vaguely aware that he has been sidelined, but he doesn't mind. The pressure is off. He is doing Important Work. The status of virtue replaces the status of success. It can be comfortable being a slave.

This is, naturally, a statistical tendency rather than a universal law. Individual researchers of great creativity and diligence will stay in the field of AIDS research for the love of it and humanity – but the pool of talent will be reduced by all those not so altruistic. It’s happening now, and it’s not just the researchers themselves that are affected. Everyone seems to hate medical managers but they are in fact necessary. A talented go-getting manager who wants get promotion, dosh, and glory by saving his company’s ass as expressed in the balance sheet - he'll hot-foot it to some other department than AIDS Research.

That's bad enough. But the real harm is only just beginning. A young medical researcher is wondering which line of study to pursue for his doctorate. New headache pills maybe... the next Ibuprofen? Or AIDS research? But somehow AIDS research just doesn't seem to be where all the hot-shots go any more. Without the glamour of serious profit it is no longer, to use a painfully apt metaphor, sexy. Our researcher is scarcely conscious that his decision has any component of self interest at all, as most of us prefer not to dwell on such things. Somehow the science of headache pills glows a little brighter in his imagination and that of retro-virals looks a little more dowdy.

Some readers may find my comparison of AIDS researchers to slaves rather melodramatic. I admit the charge, in so far as it extends to workers. Individual AIDS researchers are free men and women. The sort of compulsion we are seeing in the field of AIDS research is an infinitely lesser evil for the companies and their workers than the outrage of slavery... a lesser evil for them, but it may kill as many black men and women as slavery ever did.

Slavery is: work for nothing. Slaves are: lazy, obstructive, lacking in zeal. "The work is not well done." Yes, life must have been tough for the owners of lazy slaves. And it always will be. Important work is done by free men.

(1) (26)

Melanie Phillips links to and comments extensively on this article about NHS nursing by Harriet Sergeant from last Saturday's Telegraph, which flags up a publication also by Sergeant from the Centre for Policy Studies, entitled Managing Not To Manage (.pdf only). That's about the management of the entire NHS, and not just the nurses, but the bit of the Telegraph article that particularly caught my attention concerns the way that the education of nurses is now heading:

The training of nurses has promoted them further and further away from the interests of their patients. In the late 1980s, nursing turned itself into an academic profession. Nurses desiring increased status and greater parity with doctors sought to transform their training into a graduate profession. The result is "a frigging mess", according to a member of the King's Fund, a charitable foundation concerned with health.

One senior staff nurse at a hospital in the West Country, who teaches at the local university, pointed out - logically enough - that the academic status of the qualification means "there has to be a lot of theory". But there is too much theory, too much emphasis on social policy and communication skills - and not enough practical work.

At a London A&E department, a staff nurse who had recently qualified complained to me that her training had not prepared her at all. In 18 months of study, she had spent only one and a half hours learning how to take blood pressure and a patient's temperature. On the other hand, a whole afternoon had been devoted to poverty in Russia. …

The usual assumption is that if there is a problem, it will take money to put it right, but that enough money will do it. But training nurses who knew how to nurse didn't take any more money than teaching them about poverty in Russia costs now, surely. The problem will be forcing through the decision to teach nurses well instead of badly. My answer would be to phase out the NHS – gradually, no rush, say over a period of, I don't know, three months – and thus allow a world to re-emerge in which good nurses get paid far more money than bad ones.

Melanie Phillips blames feminism. But why does feminism only seem to do damage to public sector institutions?

(0) (10)

First, they came for the tobacco.

With the 'junk food' demonisation campaign in full swing, now is the time for our heroic public officials to do their stuff:

All foods - including fast food and snacks - should carry clear warnings about their calorie content, MPs suggested on Thursday.

Top executives from McDonalds, Cadbury Schweppes, PepsiCo UK and Kelloggs faced questions from the House of Commons Health Select Committee.

Obesity levels are soaring in the UK, but the firms said they did not believe that this was their fault.

The Food Standards Agency has described the problem as a "ticking timebomb".

Well, they would, wouldn't they. If food were not a problem then we would not need a 'Food Standards Agency' and then we would all be on our way to hell in a handcart (and we all need a handcart because we will simply be too obese to walk there).

This Court of Inquisition is merely Step 2. Step 3 is a choice of either legislative force or 'voluntary code of conduct'. Step 4 is another public campaign (disseminated by a reliably compliant media) because Step 3 'is not working'.

Then on to Step 5: the levying of 'sin taxes' on hamburgers to 'encourage a change of behaviour'. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.

There it is. Step-by-step. Simple when you know how.

We are all in the wrong business.

(0) (29)

Thomas Sowell has an excellent column today laying out in lucid terms the economic ignorance behind current proposals to reform health care in the US.

An OECD study shows that the percentage of patients waiting more than 4 months for elective surgery in English-speaking countries is in single digits only in the United States, where we "lack" the "benefits" of a government-run medical system. In Canada 27 percent of patients wait more than 4 months and in Britain 38 percent. Elective surgery includes some heart surgery.

Shortages where the government sets prices have been common in countries around the world, for centuries on end, whether these shortages have taken the form of waiting lists, black markets, or other ways of coping with the fact that what people demand at an artificially low price exceeds what other people will supply at such prices.

. . . .

Americans, who produce a wholly disproportionate share of the world's new life-saving drugs, are being asked to imitate price control policies in countries where such policies have dried up the costly research behind such discoveries.

. . . .

Politicians who claim to be able to "bring down the cost of health care" are talking about bringing down the prices charged. But prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.

No matter how much lower the government sets the prices paid to doctors, hospitals, or pharmaceutical drug manufacturers, none of this reduces the costs in the slightest.

Evidently, most of our policymakers and "thought leaders" are so gobsmackingly stupid that they cannot retain elementary economics and history in their pointy heads, and by all accounts honestly believe such gibberish as "price controls lower costs."

No matter how many times socialistic policies crash and burn, no matter how many times market-based systems beat the pants off of top-down autocratically controlled systems, the "liberal" elites in government, academia, and the media in the US return time and time again to shopworn socialist prescriptions.

Like a dog to its vomit.

(0) (21)

I was lying on a piece of blue tissue roll in one of Tony Blair's world-class Accident and Emergency hospital departments, a few weeks ago, at around 3am on a Sunday morning. As you do, in such a situation, I was thinking about death, and Simon & Garfunkel albums. But being one who recently qualified as an NLP practitioner, under the tutelage of Californian shaman Richard Bandler, I thought to myself how can I turn this around into a positive experience? How can I come out the other side of this seemingly grim situation mentally refreshed rather than mentally battered? So I made a deal with myself. If I make it out the other side of this alive, I stipulated, I'll turn the entire experience into a piece for Samizdata. You see, some of us mad-eyed libertarians really do care.

So I was going to bend your ears with a Theodore Dalrymple-style diatribe on the drunken street scum of Berkshire, around me, demanding to be allowed to smoke, and arguing with stoic nurses while dripping with blood from self-induced beer-night injuries. I was also going to mention, in passing, the unpleasant tone of the queue managers, the uncomfortable beds, and the reasons why I was waiting to be seen, after a MASH-style nurse triage, rather than why there wasn't already a swarm of surgeons all over me instantly administering reassurance, sympathy, and curative scalpel blades. But then I thought, come on Andrew, stop being such a Victor Meldrew prima donna. You're still breathing, you sad git.

You've got a problem, of that there was no doubt, but at least the nurse had seen me, and had determined that a glorious English sunrise would see my smiling face for at least one more happy time before Death sent Mort along to claim his latest victim. The scum of Berkshire may have been regretting picking fights with broken bottles, and the bed may have been uncomfortable, but the surgeon would be along in a minute, right after seeing that screaming baby that had just come in after me. Maybe I wasn't in the best hospital in the world, and maybe the NHS is crawling with MRSA, and maybe I had been made to shout my medical predicament to the receptionist, behind her plexi-glass shield, so that the fifty other people waiting could hear every detail, but at least I was in the best hospital in the nearest 100 miles, and I would have refused to swap my current position, lying on this blue paper roll, with anything other than instantaneous transportation to Dr McCoy's sick bay on the starship, Enterprise.

Thankfully my condition that night didn't prove immediately fatal, as may be obvious. Three years at the Royal Hallamshire Medical School, in Sheffield, has made me into a dreadful hypochondriac, where I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful. It turned out that what I thought was a potential surgical emergency was something treatable by Nurofen. What a big girl's blouse, you might be thinking, and you might be right. But what happened next, or rather, what didn't happen next, is the real root of the problem within the NHS.

For my rather painful condition, which I later learned happens to 20% of the people in Britain at some point in their lives, usually caused by some form of trauma, might have been a cancer, an aggressive one, and that this nasty potential cause had to be excluded before any further treatment could be considered. So I thanked my nice South African doctor, which New Labour had successfully removed from the world's poorest continent to fill the gaps caused by early-retiring UK doctors sick of endless target-driven paperwork, and asked him how long it would take to organise a proper scan. A day, I asked, maybe by Wednesday?

And then I found out why the NHS has succeeded in delivering Britain the worst cancer death rates in the entire western world. "Oh," he said, with obvious admiration for the way the NHS may manage to treat cancers better than somewhere like, say, Namibia, though even this may be debatable. "Go and see your GP tomorrow. They should be able to sort you out within a couple of weeks."

Within a couple of weeks! You've got to be kidding me? I had something inside me which could have been metastasising right now across my entire body, into my brain, into my lungs, and into my kidneys, and the NHS was going to wait a couple of weeks before taking the issue any further, before even examining me properly? "Don't worry," he said, almost gleeful that he could get me out of his Accident and Emergency department without any further need to treat me; this must have been given him the right to tick some box on a piece of paper, I thought. "It's only a small chance it's cancerous. You're the wrong age group." And with that, he was off, stethoscope around his neck, the way all we poncey medical students used to wear them when desperately trying to impress nurses. Only a small chance of cancer then, not a big one. That was good, nothing really to worry about. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I too had studied those same normal distribution charts he was thinking of, and that I already knew I was in the wrong age group, at least for the bulk of cases. But that these curves had very long tails on both ends, when I last saw them, and I was well within one these tails. But I didn't want to upset the nice doctor. He was a busy man doing his best, I knew the structure of the NHS wasn't his fault, and I was preventing him from carrying out his duty to get that four-hour waiting time target down. Sorry doc. Next time I'll sit outside in a tent, like they have at some NHS hospitals, as the four-hour waiting time target only applies as soon as you cross the department threshold. So if you're held in a tent outside, you can be out there all night but the hospital will still reach its four-hour waiting time goals, as you aren't brought in until it's only three hours and fifty-nine minutes to go before you're seen. Why are bureaucratic targets always just so fine and dandy? And don't laugh America. When the Democrats get in again, and they get Medicare past you, it's your turn next.

Fortunately, before these denizens of the state turfed me off their premises, a nice young lady doctor gave me some impressive looking painkillers, the kind they give to elephants before they shoot them, and sent me into the night, another grateful, though worried, supplicant of the producer-led NHS. Trying to take my mind off things, this led me to think of another major problem the NHS has created, one caused by a subtle jobs protection scheme long hidden under the guise of political correctness. For the government needs doctors, to meet all of its stupid target promises, so it has ramped up the numbers of medical school places. Each medical student takes at least five years to train, soaking up, along the way, hundreds of hours of consultant time, and costing hundreds of thousands of pounds per doctor, to the poor sodding taxpayer.

And shortly after many of them qualify, they give up medicine, or go part-time, to concentrate on looking after their families, often started with another doctor who continues to work in this well-protected and generously salaried, and particularly well-pensioned, state-controlled profession. This is good for the BMA, and the medical establishment, who control the student entry numbers into the medical schools and NHS career grades, as it ensures there are a limited number of doctors who can therefore demand and receive excellent salaries and pensions, as they all move in a cohort up towards lucrative consultant or GP status. Or, as one nice professor said to me back at medical school, "Just keep passing your exams, Andrew, and you've got a well-paid job for life. We've designed it to work out that way. That's why junior doctors will always be under pressure. Because we need to avoid a career pyramid, as each junior doctor must be guaranteed a senior post when they're older, and we can't do that, as a profession, if we expand the numbers of junior doctors." Oh, the highways and byways of jobs-for-the-boys protectionism. And so well camouflaged. Don't you think?

But getting back on-topic, this constant haemorrhaging of newly-qualified doctors is terrible for NHS patients, as there is a constant shortage of doctors. However, it would seem many people go to medical school, not to be doctors, but to meet doctors who they can marry and have children with, with a comfortable middle-class salary to support them all thrown in for fun. Wouldn't a dating agency be cheaper? Well, not to the student, who is still highly subsidised.

Although even Tony Blair's fatuous Junta may make medical students pay a few of the hundreds of thousands of pounds it costs to fund their training, over five years, this will still be a fraction of what it costs the rest of us in tax. So the end result is that the NHS are now throwing billions of pounds at the training of doctors, while knowing it will lose many of them before they become productive, because they were only in it to acquire the right "status" in the first place, or to impress their parents, or just to get a "nice" degree, without ever expecting to work full-time. So what am I suggesting? Slavery? Should we force all newly-qualified doctors to work 60 hours a week, for 20 years, after they qualify? Even better, do we need to round up all those ungrateful drop-outs who did three years, and force them back into the profession to work under the same Gulag conditions, possibly as porters if they won't do their exams?

Well this might be a socialist solution, I suppose, but not what I had in mind. No, what we need to do is make prospective medical students pay the full cost of their medical training, to ensure they're properly motivated to actually practice medicine later, when they qualify, so taxpayers aren't forced to carry the financial burden of impressing Johnny and Jane's parents. The market will remunerate them accordingly, later, via medical charges. We also need to open up the medical schools to however many people want to train in them, so that the dreaded market will work out how many doctors we need, rather than the BMA or the UK government, in their collective wisdom, for their own convenience.

The market will also cut the cost of training as much of what an NHS doctor does in five years is complete rubbish. Yes it's nice that every British doctor knows about virtually every area in the entire medical world, in quite some detail, but is it essential that they do so? Does a psychiatrist really have to pass surgical exams? Does someone who has only ever wanted to be a surgeon really have to study community medicine? You might think so, but it seems clear to me that these long degrees covering every possible topic are mainly about jobs protection and profession entry limitation. The market will be the best place to decide the issue. And for the market to work effectively, to maintain an evolving balanced structure, we need to privatise the NHS in its entirety, so that good hospitals, with good professionals, will prosper and spread best practice, and the bad ones will go bust with inadequate staff everywhere being forced out into professions they're better suited to.

But, I thought, wandering through Reading in the dark, at 4am, nobody is allowed to say anything regarding the numbers of early-profession leavers, in medicine, as it's obvious I'm talking about mostly, though not entirely, female doctors, and that this topic is a sacred cow, with often over 50% of a typical medical school's intake being women, even though the largely male consultants give them less attention than male students, with the system knowing that many of them will fail to make it much further than medical registration and occasional part-time work at their local GP practice. And this is despite medicine being one of the most over-subscribed University courses in the country, where I'm sure many who could do it, and who would stick to it given a chance, are excluded because of the first-year pressure on places. But gotta keep those junior doctor numbers down, remember, to keep a consultant post open to every man, so the admissions tutors and the BMA never complain too much. Full course payment by each student will solve this early-leaver problem immediately, of course, as only the truly dedicated will ever apply. I know I'd certainly have been a little less cavalier in chucking myself into it if I'd known I'd be handed the bill. But what are the chances of this happening to such a profession, one burrowed so deeply and comfortably within the Leviathan? Well, they're odds-on, if I ever become life-president of the United Kingdom with my political motto, "Government is useless, I will hand you back everything". But unlikely otherwise.

BTW, my last political act will be to sack myself to remove the last parasite.

So where was I? Oh yes, wandering off into the night wondering, rather melodramatically it must be added, with the 20-20 benefit of hindsight, if I was about to die. Now, the sensible thing would've been to phone BUPA up the next day and get seen immediately by a consultant, but your useless idiot here panicked. The one last real link I have to my socialist roots is my emotive belief in the NHS, a Soviet-style monopoly to which I devoted three years of my life. So I tried in vain to sleep, something I've had a lot of trouble with over the last few weeks, and retreated into grateful guinea pig mode. "They must know best," I tried to fool myself. "I'm in the wrong age group."

Fool. Next time I'll know what to do, but please forgive my stupidity and halfwit behaviour. It's easy to be rational, when you have a clear mind, but difficult when you're not getting much sleep.

So, the next day at 8:30am sharp, I booked an appointment at my GP's surgery, and I was there by 10am being prodded and poked once again; the most private part of the NHS, the GP system, is one of its few saving graces. "Oh, we should be able to get you into the hospital within two weeks. It seems unlikely it's cancer."

"Yes," I replied. "I'm in the wrong age group." Jesus, did we all read the same textbook? What a bunch of automatons they turned us all into.

And so began the wait. Little sleep. And the wait. The postal workers strike didn't help. "Where is my appointment slip?" I used to wonder, every morning, with increasing fury. Then after the promised two weeks had been and gone, my resolve to trust the NHS finally broke. "Right, that's it. I'll doorstop the bastards if I have to and they'll have to get the police in there to get me out. I'll make sure I take two tape-recorders and a digital camera. Outpatients Department here I come." And then, just before I was about to drive down and physically attack the Byzantine Empire that is the NHS appointments system, a letter popped through the letterbox. The appointment letter had arrived, and more importantly the NHS appointment number within it, a veritable sliver of gold.

"Great," I thought. "It'll be tomorrow morning, and I'll found out one way or the other." And then ripping the sucker open, like a Willy Wonka chocolate bar with a magic ticket, I found out what Dr John Reid, the New Labour Secretary of State for Health, had decided on my behalf. In his magnificence, via one of his numerous flunkeys, he'd decided I needed another ten days on the shelf. Yes, that potentially aggressive cancerous condition was scheduled to be seen 24 days after I had first presented it, in its glory, to the sanctimonious monster that is the NHS. I bet Tony Blair doesn't wait 24 days to be seen in the Chelsea and Westminster, if his toenails need clipping. I bet Tony Blair doesn't wait 24 minutes, but then, of course, the state does need him a lot more than it needs me. All I do, along with all the other miserable suckers, is pay for the damn thing.

And so there I was, finally, this morning, Nurofenned up to the gills, nervous, and perspiring, a grateful supplicant thankful to the monster that was deigning to let me enter its glorious marbled halls. Fortunately, I had the luck to meet one of the nicest and best doctors I have ever met, a total star who would make a fortune in my free health system of the future, who gave me the good (or the bad) news, that you poor unfortunate people haven't heard the last from me yet. Ha ha! I live again, to be accused of insanity by various Guardian readers, Europhiles, other libertarians, and men in white suits.

But Jesus H. Christ. What a terrible four weeks. I suppose if you look at it from a macro point of view, it was a sensible use of resources. It probably wasn't cancer, and consultant surgeons are a precious resource, so from the government's economic point of view they weren't risking losing too much tax income, by sweating me for 24 days while I put my life on hold. And even if I'd died that would've been one less state pension to pay, and my family were probably protected by insurance, so the welfare costs would've been minimal. So let's make him wait. We'll get to him in our own good time. And what's he complaining about anyway? He's alright. Isn't he! And Andrew, baby, it wasn't personal.

Which is of course the point. Only a free system can deliver health care where the person matters, not the system.

And so, I can only say to Mr Blair, in the best J.R.Ewing fashion: "Tony, you can stick the NHS where the sun doesn't shine." From my point of view that was perhaps the worst four weeks of my life, where I was unable to work, unable to sleep, and unable to communicate properly with anyone around me, which made my family's life a total misery coping with this morbid Klutz. What a banana. And they call this a 'service'?

In the sense, of course, that the bull services the cow.

My experience, and the similar experience I'm sure of millions every year in the United Kingdom, in a nutshell, is that this is the battle we have to win, the direct fight between the individual and the state. Here I am, a piddling UK taxpayer, being forced to hand over at least £8,000 pounds a year to a compulsory NHS health insurance policy, for my family, whether I want to or not, and all I get back is something I wouldn't pay £800 pounds a year for, in which I may be lucky or unlucky depending on which specialists I'm designated to see, which is dependent on where I live in the country, and on which particular waiting list target the government, in its vast munificence, is concentrating on, at that particular moment in time. Yet that massive wedge of coerced tax, extracted ultimately at gunpoint from my wallet, prevents me from being able to afford proper health care, for me and my family's benefit, which on a free unprotected market would be better and cheaper, anyway. Well sod that. From now on it's BUPA all the way, either through insurance or direct payment, with as much private health care as I can afford to provide to my family. Professor Hoppe wants me to try to withdraw from the state, to bring about its decline, and I shall do my best to meet his stipulation.

And pity the poor sods who do find, after such waits, that they do have cancer. I shudder to think how long they're currently waiting for the actual treatment. And here's where another old phrase comes back to haunt me from days in Sheffield. I can't remember who said this, perhaps some sarcastic oncologist or other, on a bad day in Sheffield's Western Park hospital, but the refrain was like this. "The patients have to wait so long for radiotherapy, these days, most of them are dead before they get here." Good for clearing waiting lists, I suppose. And for keeping down the payout figures on government pensions. Toot for the NHS? I should coco.

That this monolith, the NHS, has survived so long, is a testament to the virility of the free market which sustains it via taxation, with inflation-busting increases in spending every year for decades failing to realise much in the way of improvement. Someone else may have the exact figures, but a 20% increase in spending on the NHS recently got us something like a 1% improvement in productivity. Let's just thank God that more of the British economy isn't run on these Soviet lines, these days, as it used to be in the 1970s, or we'd all be down the tubes. Maintaining hospitals in this hideously inefficient manner surely cannot continue for much longer. I jest of course. I'm sure it will continue indefinitely until the British people wake up.

However, spitting in the wind as I may be, as an ungrateful taxpayer, who has only had to take this merest brush from the NHS's callous disregard for human life, I demand that this system be changed, and that the people who work within it, and the patients who are forced to use it, are all freed. Immediately. Give me back my money. I am not an NHS number. I am a free man.

The sooner the NHS is privatised the better. It cannot come soon enough.

That, and I'm going to claim maximum marks for managing to sneak the word ' haemorrhaging' into the piece above. And tonight I'm going to drink a very large bottle of champagne. Cheers!

(1) (29)

The Guardianistas are worried. Very worried.

In a fit of anxiety I can only describe as an accute attack of 'foodophobia', they publish two articles on the same day, one of them claiming that young people are too fat:

The child obesity epidemic caused by poor nutrition and lack of exercise is creating a looming health crisis, with average life expectancy expected to drop for the first time in more than a century.

And the other one claiming they are too thin:

Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition - the Eating Disorders Association estimates that 18 per cent of sufferers will not survive. They are usually highly intelligent, gifted young females aged between 15 and 25, but with a perfectionist disposition that drives them to starve themselves.

Honesty, of course, but if we promote the notion that 'thinliness is not just next to godliness, it rates way, way above it' and run pictures of stick-thin models, we are doing just what the experts warn us against: we are influencing vulnerable young minds.

Good grief, what is wrong with all these youngsters? Either they are human blimps or they are walking skeletons. Why can't they just get it right?

What is a caring, concerned person to do??!! The government must get them to eat less....no, wait!...the government must get them to eat more!...oh, it's a nightmare, I tell you, a nightmare.

(0) (22)

What on earth is the use of having friends in high places if they can't do you the odd favour now and then?

The wife of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, was pushed ahead in the queue for emergency treatment at an NHS hospital after Government officials intervened on her behalf, it was claimed yesterday.

Mr Lee said that his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 82, who had suffered a stroke, was given a brain scan four and a half hours earlier than planned at the Royal London Hospital after medical staff were contacted by Downing Street.

Using political leverage to get better treatment is just so much more ethical than paying for it.

This is excellent news. More and faster, please.

(1) (21)

Bernie Greene wonders just how scientific is the science behind the smoking debate?

Epidemiology began with a fellow called John Snow investigating to find the cause of a cholera epidemic in London in the 19th Century. He had the idea that it might be coming from contamination in a well. So he took a map showing the locations of wells and plotted the incidence of the disease on the map. Sure enough they were mostly in close proximity to one particular well. He had the well put out of service and there were no more new cases of cholera. That is a simple story of logic and surveying intelligently applied to test a theory.

It is very unfortunate that it was so simple to solve. He might then have left a better example for his followers.

What if he had found that the 166 ¹ total cholera cases were scattered all over the map pretty evenly but that they all had pink carnations on their coats? One hundred thousand people wore pink carnations and 99,874 did not get cholera.

What does he do now? Well if he were a tobacco investigator he would petition the government to do something about pink carnations. But let's say he is a brighter boy.

He decides to go and interview the cholera cases in more depth.

He asks them all kinds of questions about themselves and about pink carnations - how many years have they been wearing them? How old were they when they started? etc. etc. He gathers all the data and looks for similarities. He gets a few things and tabulates them. He then interviews other people who don't have cholera but who do have pink carnations. He asks all the same questions again and tries to find something about pink carnations that is consistent among those who don't have cholera and is absent from those who do, or vice versa.

He finds one item in common. The cholera sufferers all work in the City though they live all over London. There are lots of carnation wearers in the other group who also work in the City and don't have cholera. So he knows that working in the City isn't the cause either so he correctly calls it another correlation just like pink carnations. But he now has two correlating pieces of data and a line of enquiry worth following.

He now goes back to the cholera group and asks a single new question. "What can you tell me about working in the City and wearing pink carnations?" They tell him it is the thing to do. They tell him all the ladies like it. They tell him their bosses like it. They tell him they buy them from a vendor right next to St Paul's Cathedral. etc. He notes their responses and tabulates them again. He asks the same thing of the non cholera group that also works in the City. They give him lots of very similar answers but on where they buy them from the answers vary and none of them are anywhere near St Paul's Cathedral. So he now has a third correlation and this one is far more promising as it is entirely absent from the non cholera group. He knows it isn't the cause itself because lots of people who go to St Pauls don't also get cholera but in combination with pink carnations he knows it is a significant correlation.

He gets the vendor to close down for a few weeks to see if it makes a difference to the number of new cholera cases. There are no new cases after 10 weeks where formally there had been several new cases each week. This is progress he thinks. He could stop right here, have the vendor permanently closed down and that might be enough to prevent further cases. But as he still doesn't understand how pink carnations and a vendor near St Pauls can be the cause of a cholera epidemic he continues to investigate.

He sets up a watching station opposite the vendor and sits there for many hours watching him ply his trade. He notices one thing that seems to offer a really plausible cause covering all the factors he has so far noted. A woman empties a huge chamber pot into a hole immediately behind the boxes of pink carnations. The scientist walks over and sees that some of the former contents of the woman's chamber pot have spilt into the boxes holding the carnations. He finds they contain the feces of several cholera victims the woman tends to.

It wasn't as easy a case to crack but it does illustrate what a scientist dedicated to truth and who won't compromise with logic would do.

In the case of smoking research I would say that back when the Hill/Doll study of 1956 was done an honest and worthwhile conclusion would have been:

We now know that most cases of lung cancer occur in smokers of a certain amount of tobacco after a long period of time in a very small number of cases relative to the number of smokers who smoke that amount for that long. Tobacco smoking isn't the cause of lung cancers but it is connected in some way that we don't yet understand. We can predict that many more smokers will get lung cancer than will non smokers. Something like 24 times as many. But we must also say again that there are far more smokers than there will ever be cases of lung cancer. This in itself makes it obvious that something else is involved.

Further because we can predict that a very small fraction of all smokers will account for the majority of lung cancer victims, and that because we don't know why this is so, we must responsibly inform smokers of this increase in risk. We must also inform smokers that the risk, whilst small compared to all smokers, is of a grave disease that is likely to be very painful and also fatal. Obviously smokers themselves have to decide if they want to cut down or quit smoking altogether because, as a scientist, our job is to research and discover threats to life but that it is the individual's responsibility to act on that information as he
sees fit.

We now have something new to discover. Most cases of lung cancer occur in a small number of smokers, but if smoking were the cause of those cases then what is preventing it in so many more cases? If smoking is not the cause of lung cancer then what factor is present in those smokers who do get it but which is not present in those who don't?

That to me would have been a logical, decent and honest approach. It may not have been so easy to understand as "Smoking causes lung cancer" but it would have been a whole lot more honest and the consequences of that could have changed subsequent history in many dramatic ways, and might have led some curious researchers into the field who would have known that there were still very significant questions to get answered, and they may have been capable of getting those answers by now.

Instead they told the government that tobacco was causing lung cancer and demanded that something be done about tobacco! Wrong target and thoroughly irresponsible as scientists in my opinion. That was a defining moment in the history of tobacco and it has been in decline ever since. Unfortunately so has epidemiology.

¹ Don't know what the actual number was. This was to make it closer to what Hill/Doll found with regard to lung cancer and smokers. 166 out of 100,000 after decades of 25 grams per day.

Competing interests: I once worked for a tobacconist shop. I am also a
pipe smoker. I'm not a scientist and I could be wrong. I would
appreciate being shown where with logical rather than ad hominem
argument.

Bernie Greene © 2003 . All Rights Reserved

(0) (9)

This posting now is rather non-topical, in that the clutch of words it refers back to was emitted three weeks ago in a news story about how our Prime Minister is going to stop us all getting so fat. I paid attention to this anti-fat initiative because I was interviewed on the radio about it, and one particular little phrase associated with this story has since stuck in my mind. I still have some print-outs of the relevant media coverage. Here's how the Observer reported it:

In a letter to Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, a copy of which has been leaked to The Observer, Blair spells out what he sees as the Government's failure to promote exercise: 'Government policy has not delivered the outcomes we want in this area,' he writes. 'We have started to make progress on the school sport agenda, but also need to more effectively tackle activity levels in the adult population.'

Referring to the Government's long-term target of getting 70 per cent of people physically active by 2020, the letter, written in July, states: 'We need an ambitious delivery strategy, using the Olympic bid as a catalyst, to develop more innovative and interventionist policies across the public, private and voluntary sectors in both health and sport if that target is to be achieved.'

Setting aside the nightmare vision of the Olympic Games being held in Britain and coinciding with a government propaganda barrage tell us all to do physical jerks, the phrase that interested me here was Tony Blair's reference to the government not having "delivered the outcomes" that he wanted.

This phrase – "delivering outcomes" – sums up everything I don't like and don't admire about this government, and it says, in two words, why, despite all the inevitable drawbacks and disappointments it would bring with it, I would prefer a Conservative government instead.

Everyone who writes for this blog and the majority of those who read it wants "limited government", and the way to have limited government is for it to be confined to a core curriculum of rule enforcement – like: don't murder, don't attack people, don't rob, don't riot, don't swindle people – but otherwise, as Americans would say, to butt out. Provided we do not sink below a few extremely low standards of behaviour, what else we do with our lives is – or should be – of no concern to the government. Government is not there to promote all the virtues. It is not there even to restrain or punish all vices. It is there to restrain and punish a very restricted set of vices, of the kind that cause direct and unjustified hurt to others, of the sort which if unpunished and unrestrained would mean people regularly coming to blows with each other. As individuals, government ministers may regret the fact that so many of us fail to display as much in the way of virtue as they might individually like, but so long as we do not do too much, too obviously, of the vice variety, they will not, in their official capacity, bother us.

If symphony orchestras play vilely out of tune, if football supporters shout vulgar and yobbish things at their team's opponents, if architecture is ugly, if the Internet is disgusting, if young people these days are appalling, if people generally are too snobbish, ill-mannered, ungenerous, ugly, graceless, self-centred, nasty – well, that's all very regrettable. But these are not, or should not be, governmental matters, provided none of this results in actual murders, assaults and pillages and fights.

In particular, if the outcome of what shape we all turn out to be is that we turn out in many, many individual cases to be what our doctors regard as obese – again, this should not be government business. This should be for obese people to worry about, when people tease them, or refuse to marry them, or decline to pick them for sports teams, or to give them starring roles in movies.

But in Tony Blair's mind it would seem that obesity is a government issue. Not only does he, as an individual, think that many of us are too fat. He wants the government to make us thinner. He thinks that making us thinner is part of his job. He thinks that thinness is an "outcome" which it is his duty to "deliver".

On its own, such a belief, unrestrained by any other beliefs, would make Tony Blair into a straightforwardly evil tyrant. But to give him credit, he believes in other things also. In particular, he believes that there has to be some freedom, at least in the economic sphere, or there'd be no national wealth to tax, and he believes in himself and his government continuing to win elections. He can't do that if he simply orders us all to do exercises every day. If people start being seriously bullied in a way that they are able to trace directly to Mr Blair this won't turn them from fat Labour voters into thin Labour voters; rather will it turn them from fat Labour voters into fat Conservative voters. Blair won't push it that hard.

So the "outcome", to use Blair's word, of this anti-fatness campaign isn't going to be any less in the way of mass fatness. The only people who will be got at all seriously will be the particular professionals, such as teachers and doctors, who find themselves instructed to make people thinner, by doing … well by doing all the things that such people do anyway, like urging heart problem sufferers to cut down on fatty foods and take some exercise, and by organising games for children to play in. The main difference will be that they will now have to fill in lots of forms about it all, and send them off to London. All of which will cost money and interrupt all their other duties, so the "outcome" will be an increase in public spending and a decline in the efficiency of public services, in the form of a diminished willingness to do the job of supplying such services, to no good effect.

But Mr Blair's belief, and similar beliefs on the part of thousands of other people who are now powerful (in the sense that their mistakes cost the taxpayer money and are seriously annoying to people), that it is Mr Blair's duty to shape not just rules but outcomes has a profound effect on the texture of British public life, and of the kind of "outcomes" we actually end up being surrounded by. If fatness is the government's business, and good manners among young people (that's been a government concern for some time), and educatedness (which famously has been an obsession from day one of this government's existence) – if goodness of all kinds, rather than badness only of very extreme and particular kinds is a constant government concern – then the result is not government that is lean and efficient and authoritative, but government that combines expense, intrusiveness and ineffectualness.

People aren't going to get any less obese and useless as a result of Mr Blair's latest thoughts on obesity. The government is going to get more obese and more useless.

(0) (18)

Interesting story out of Oregon on their state health insurance scheme. Much to the relief of Oregon taxpayers, no doubt, some 40,000 people have dropped out of the Oregon Health Plan program, which provides state-subsidized health insurance.

The reason they dropped out? I don't know, really, but it is interesting that the newspaper casts the story entirely in terms of the poor folk being dropped from the program. I say the participants dropped out because they apparently chose not to pay the premiums, which are as low as $6.00 per month. The response of "advocates" for the poor is just priceless.

Advocates for the poor say the premiums are too expensive for some people and the government may have overestimated the ability of people to mail a check.

"It's an enormous barrier," said Ellen Pinney, director of the Oregon Health Action Committee. "Let alone the $6, there is the whole issue of writing a check or getting a money order, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and putting it in the mail to this place in Portland that must receive it by the due date."

$6.00 a month too expensive? Give me a break. This sounds to me like a classic example of "I can't afford it" as code for "I have other things I would rather spend the money on." If you forego a single trip per month to McDonald's, you will save enough to pay a $6.00 monthly premium.

Really, though, the notion that poor people are incapable of mailing a check has got to be the last word in condescension and infantilization. Believe me, anyone who can fill out the paperwork to qualify for Medicaid or other state-paid health insurance (or find someone to do it for them) is capable of writing a check or getting a money order and putting it in the mail.

I'm not sure what larger point this story illustrates, to tell you the truth. Perhaps the corrosive effect of the welfare state on its recipients. Perhaps that, if you support the welfare state, sooner or later you will start to sound like a total ninny.

Thanks to OpinionJournal for the link.

(0) (37)

Another day, another public enemy.

The campaign to add so-called 'junk food' to the tobacco-alcohol 'axis of evil' has been fulminating for quite a while. There is nothing on the Statute books yet but I think we all know that it is only a matter of time.

In the not-too-distant future, the Samizdata will be reporting the police raids on clandestine onion-ring factories and publishing underground recipes for 'academic and research purposes only'. By that time, I sincerely hope that there will be a wider understading of the social-working class mentality that has led to that woeful state of affairs. Nothing could illustrate that mentality more starkly than this article from the UK Times:

People are incapable of saying no to junk food and other health risks, and it is the duty of the State to influence them, according to a senior public health official.

In defence of the "nanny state", Professor Dr John Ashton, regional director of public health in the North West, said yesterday that government intervention was needed to protect those incapable of protecting themselves. "Individuals cannot protect themselves from bioterrorism, epidemics of Sars, the concerted efforts of the junk food industry, drug dealers and promoters of tobacco and alcohol," he said.

Thus lumping together consumer choice, forces of nature and murderous aggression into one misleading and grossly stupid soundbite.

He said that it was the job of the State, not of the individual alone, to resist health problems brought about by drink, food or drugs. The State had a duty to protect and influence young people, many of whom were building up problems by adopting sedentary lifestyles and eating junk food.

"It is in no one's interest to have an obese generation, riddled with diabetes and degenerative heart disease and a burden on the taxpayer," he said. "The Government has a duty to take action about it.

It is in no-one's interest to have a power-obsessed generation, riddled with this kind of contemptuous paternalism.

The State is the guardian of the weak and underprivileged. It should intervene to encourage people to eat healthily and take exercise.

"Furthermore, it has a duty to ensure that those less well-off in society have safe, warm, low-cost housing, convenient transport links to shops and amenities, and the protection of police on the streets. The State is our protector and we must defend its right to fulfil that function."

There are no citizens, only 'clients'.

He has three grown-up sons, but recently became a father again with his partner Maggi Morris, 47, a director of public health in Preston. Their baby has been named Fabian Che Jed, after the Fabian Society, Che Guevara and the Old Testament prophet Jedediah.

And doesn't that say it all.

There are lots of dark forces at play here but the oft-overlooked one is the element of kulturkampf. What these people mean by 'junk food' is hamburgers, hot-dogs and milk-shakes. For people like Dr.Ashton the hamburger has become a symbol of what they consider to be American cultural imperialism and that is the real basis of their animus.

Quite aside from the fact that the fashionable demonisation of 'fatty food' is ill-founded (which it is), an Indian or Chinese meal contains more fat and calories than McDonalds could ever dish up. As does the homegrown popular delicacy of 'Fish and Chips' (all deep fried). Nonetheless when these people speak it is 'burgers' that they invariably identify as the alleged enemies of public health.

The 'War against Junk Food' has been carefully crafted to fulfil both the practical and ideological needs of the social-working class. Not only will its successful prosecution provide them with more wealth and status but it also opens another front in the cultural and political war against America.

[My thanks to Nigel Meek who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]

(0) (4)

Some people are just so selfish. Rather than queue patiently for their state ration of bread and cabbage, they'll conjour up all sorts of ruses to get an unfair advantage: [from the UK Times]

A GRANDMOTHER at the end of her tether after waiting seven months for an operation mixed cranberry juice with crumbled biscuits to simulate her own blood and dialled 999 for an ambulance.

After claiming to have been vomiting blood, Trizka Litton, 62, was taken to Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry. The mother of three got rid of her fake blood, which she was carrying in a plastic container, before it could be tested and underwent surgery to remedy a serious hiatus hernia.

Obviously an extreme right-winger and an enemy of the people.

“I carried a heavy burden of guilt and shame at being forced to cheat and lie,” Mrs Litton said, “but that vanished when doctors told me just how near death I had been.”

Well, in the circumstances I suppose this indiscretion can be overlooked. But anymore tricks like that and it's re-education for her.

(1) (25)

British smokers are refusing to lie down and die of nagging. The European Union directive requiring that cigarette packets be used as a means of harassing smokers with loud offensive messages like SMOKING KILLS!, YOU WILL DIE! NOW! and the more succinct and efficient FUCK OFF!!! Is soon to be superseded with graphic pictures of diseased organs which will by law have to cover at least 150% of the surface area of the packaging.

Yet good old British creative thinking is successfully combating this ludicrous and patronising nonsense. People have noticed that cigarettes can actually be removed from their packaging and placed in other receptacles, perfectly legally- and that it is still within the law to cover one’s cigarette box with a piece of brightly-coloured fabric! And a whole new market in old-fashioned silver cigarette boxes, and new-style box-covers, has opened up and is blossoming in the UK. What a good idea, and recyclable hence money-saving too, so surely an improvement even on those clever ironic stickers for covering up the offensive messages which were featured in a blog here some time ago. Go capitalism!

It almost makes me want to take up smoking again, just for the pretty cases. If only the things didn’t give one cancer.

(Cue Samizdata blog predicting inevitable future EU plans forcing smokers to hold unmodified and unadorned officially-approved packets up for inspection by the police on demand…)

(2) (36)

I honestly think I have grossly underestimated the entrepreunerial skills of the social-working class. It must take a certain talent to keep inventing new make-work schemes and then successfully sell them to the government.

I cannot imagine how I would begin to pitch this one:

The Government is losing its war against flab after spending £9.6 billion on projects to tackle obesity across all departments.

I just love the idea of porcine civil servants being sent to huff and puff their way around an army assault course but I rather think they are not the intended target of this new 'war'.

Anyway, it seems the government is losing the war. They cannot make fat people slim again by bureaucratic means. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.

The fat epidemic shows no sign of abating.

'Epidemic'! Now there's a panic-inducing trigger-word if ever there was one. I bet that was the deal-closer. 'Minister, unless you write out a blank cheque there's going to be an epidemic!'.

Obesity is serious.

At £9.6 billion, yeah I would say that's bloody serious.

It kills 34,000 people a year in Britain...

And HMG is going to keep spending money until the target of Zero deaths from all causes is reached.

...and costs the economy in England £2.6 billion a year, estimated to rise to £3.6 billion by 2010.

How can they possibly know that?

It cannot, however, be tackled by the Department of Health alone.

Well, it might be helped by fat people going on a diet but we wouldn't want them taking the law into their own hands, would we.

Strategies to deal with obesity in children and adults now involve four Government departments with support at Cabinet level.

The Department of Health and the Health Development Agency, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are all players in the anti-fat campaign.

Defeating the Third Reich didn't require this many people.

And, therein lies the rub because even this public admission of failure will do nothing to stop the flab-fighting government juggernaut now that it has been sent rumbling forth onto the highway of national life. The conspicuous failure of fat children to shrink to normal size will merely prompt demands for 'more resources' to fight yet another phoney war. Problems are not meant to be solved because careers aren't built that way. Problems are to be fabricated and then carefully nurtured and maintained until...well, ever.

The £9.6 billion wasted thus far was merely the appetiser. Small change. Petty cash. Mere peanuts already swallowed up with a forest's worth of reports, initiatives, projections, surveys, committee minutes and action plans. This is Britain where the new national ethos is to throw good money after bad into the bottomless sinkhole of guilt and paranoia.

If any reader is tempted to laugh out loud at the Swiftian absurdity of it all then I can hardly blame them. But really it isn't funny, it's pathetic and it is only a matter of time before it moves beyond the sad to the downright nasty:

One is the Food and Health Action Plan which aims to promote healthy eating in all age groups.

An aspect of this is the schools fruit programme, now being implemented, which aims to give all primary school children in their first three years, a portion of fruit a day.

The second is the Game Plan, a strategy for promoting physical activity with the somewhat vague target of ensuring that 70 per cent of the population is "reasonably active" by 2020.

This is what they call a 'consciousness raising exercise', a customary pre-cursor to new expansions of state power. 'The voluntary approach hasn't worked', they will cry. 'What we need is tough legislation'. And they will most likely get it too and disapproved products will start to be pulled from supermarket shelves and nobody will be allowed to open a bank account until they can produce a 'Physical Fitness Certificate'. This may sound alarmist but the one thing I have never underestimated is the vanity and ambition of our political classes.

Britain isn't obese, it's anaemic. It's life-blood is being drained from it by an army of worthless, self-propogating parasites.

(0) (11)

Colour me cynical (it suits me to a tee) but my opinion of the capabilities and ethics of the British public sector has sunk so low, that I am now inclined to regard their frequent pronouncements as a sort of inverse benchmark.

So when the Food Standards Agency issues an official warning about the allged perils of the Atkins Diet, my instincts tell me to draw the very opposite conclusion:

The first official warning about the dangers of the Atkins diet has been issued by the Government amid concern about the rising number of people opting for the high-fat, high-protein regime.

The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for all the Government's nutritional guidance, has published a statement alerting the public to the health risks of low-carbohydrate diets, including Atkins, claiming that they are linked to heart disease, cancer and even obesity

Surely 'obesity' is the one thing that devotees of the late Dr.Atkins claim to have conquered? And that word 'linked' again. It is fast developing a reputation as quite the most manipulative term in the English language. By employing the word 'linked' in any sort of press release one can convey a sense of ominous threat without the bothersome necessity of explaining precise details or producing so much as one iota of empirical evidence.

I am not sufficiently familiar with these people to question their motives but their methods alone are sufficient to leave me with the firm impression that the Atkins diet is not only healthy but also very effective. Get guzzling that protein.

(2) (49)

Every time there is even a semi-serious debate in this country about the provision of health care and reform of the NHS, the reactionaries cry 'Do we want to be like America?'. It is the British equivalent of 'Do you want Farmer Jones back?'.

Well, do want to be like America?

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study.

The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds.

One of these fine days, that plaintive, theatrical and bogus rhetorical bleat is going to result in a resounding 'yes'.

(1) (13)

I first came across this story in the dead tree Times, and although the virtual Times probably has it too, we have a policy here at Samizdata about linking to that which is that we don't.

So here is the same story from canada.com:

Researchers have discovered a genetic glitch that makes some smokers up to 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than others, a finding that may explain why only 10 per cent of heavy smokers develop the deadly disease.

A simple blood test that will be able to detect which smokers are at an especially high risk of developing lung cancer could be on the market within three years, researchers told the Times of London.

Ah look, they got it from the Times too.

In other words, it will separate ordinary, high-risk smokers from extra high-risk smokers.

It will be interesting to see what the anti-smoking lobby makes of this. They ought to rejoice. But I think they will be angry.

Their starting axiom is that cigarettes are evil. If this discovery makes it that cigarettes actually do less harm than hitherto, that will be bad. They will react like hellfire preachers who have been informed that hell, for many sinners (now identifiable in advance), is not as hot as they had previously supposed, and that sin is accordingly less frightening for these particular sinners to indulge in.

Overall, smokers with low levels of the DNA-repairing enzyme were 120 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers with normal OGG levels. Smokers with the genetic risk factor were also five to 10 times more likely to develop the disease than smokers with normal DNA repair activity.

So smokers with normal levels of DNA-repairing enzyme will now be sinning like there's no tomorrow. Bad. Very bad.

It'll be fun to watch.

(0) (3)

Well, at least the language is sort of getting there:

John Reid, the health secretary, has embarked on the biggest ever programme of ministerial visits to NHS hospitals to persuade staff to accept fundamental changes in working practices to improve the service to patients.

He has told colleagues that the public will not accept there has been genuine improvement in the NHS until patients are treated with the same promptness and respect that they get as consumers of other goods and services.

As 'consumers of other goods and services' they are the paying the piper and therefore calling the tune. Contrast the NHS where the paying customer is the government and the patients are units of production.

Health ministers think their biggest political challenge is to engineer this change in the working culture of NHS organisations. They want them to tailor services to suit the preferences of the individual instead of expecting patients to adjust to the convenience of the professionals.

Fat chance! Public services are not run for the benefit of the public they are run for the benefit of the public sector. If you want 'services to suit the preferences of the individual' you need a free market in healthcare.

So another doomed 'initiative' will shortly bite the dust but not before, I hope, Mr.Reid and his advisers reach the logical conclusions of their own ideas.

(0) (36)

Oh no, the elephants are at the watering hole again.

The government's National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) says that In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment should be free, whatever the heck 'free' means, which I suppose in this case means I have to pay for it whether I want to or not.

Here's one of those hot medical areas which it is easy to avoid discussing. But being one who is constantly trying to seek the best position on any particular 'moral' or 'ethical' position, I was wondering if anyone out there is willing to offer me further guidance? My current views on 'free' IVF treatment are as follows.

Infertility is God's way of letting you know you have several lifestyle alternative choices on offer:

• You could shrug your shoulders, accept God's wisdom, declare your unconditional love for your partner, and then spend the money saved on lavish consumer products, holidays, and financial support for Samizdata's bandwidth costs, rather than nappies, five-bedroomed houses, people carriers, and all the other paraphernalia of decades of expensive child care.
• You could split from your current partner, and you could both try to have a baby with someone else.
• You could adopt one of the many unwanted babies born in the UK, and God bless you if you do.
• If you exist above a bare level of poverty, and dependent on how far above this line you are, you could sell the BMW for a second hand scooter, you could sell the house in the south-east and move to Carlisle, you could cut the foreign holidays and spend your time on camping holidays in Wales, cut the manicures, cut the business coaching sessions, or cut the golf club fees. You could then invest any savings made in private IVF treatments.
• If you exist on a bare level of poverty, and you really don't mind bringing children into the world to share this level of poverty with you, which is a whole thread in itself, you could seek out private charities to help you with the cost of IVF.

Now call me an Old Scrooge McDuck, but what I don't think you have is the right to tap me on the shoulder, relieve me of my wallet, and force me to pay for IVF, or a boob job, or a penis extension, or a tattoo removal, or any other such 'lifestyle' enhancement (for want of a better term), just because it would upset you not to have the treatment.

If we lived in a better world, we in the UK would all have private health insurance, and I would be in the plan which most suited my needs, and I would certainly take the Leviathan Insurance discount for not having IVF cover in event of my present or future infertility, as I'd be quite happy to live with the infertility options presented above, if such a terrible affliction struck me. I would also be quite happy to see you take out the full Leviathan Insurance cover, which did include such protection, if you weren't happy with the above options.

So I suppose this comes down, again, to whether you believe in socialised medicine, and if you do, whether it should provide everything or whether it should provide a certain minimum set of obligations. Although I would much prefer the NHS to be abolished, as soon as is practicable, I can just about stomach being forced to shell out for it, via my taxes, for the ramshackle minimal health services cover it currently provides me and everyone else with. This is because although I object in principle to being forced to contribute to it, under a fully privatised system I would certainly choose to contribute to private health charities to help provide this minimal system. But what I think is an outrage is being forced to pay for the never-ending flow of new and modern treatments which come on-stream as technology advances, while watching the basic system of straightforward illness treatment and emergency cover crumble.

Before even considering IVF, and imagining I was still a socialist, what I would personally like to have 'free' are services such as accessible dentistry, chiropodists, opticians, chiropractors, and other such grey-area 'luxuries'. But of course I can't get them on the NHS, not round my way, because although in cloud-cuckoo moron land everything is 'free' on the NHS, here on planet Earth the laws of economics dictate that scarce resources must be rationed, either via price mechanisms on the free market, or via straightforward socialist queuing and queue-jumping, a system which is especially good for those with friends on the inside, or access to the splendiferous Chelsea and Westminster hospital. So to decide who are the 'deserving', with the NHS, we also have to add on top yet another layer of expensive bureaucrats, with the laughable New Labour acronym of NICE, who ponder like angels in heaven on who deserves what, and for how long, and the periods in which they are eligible. What it must be to be one of these angels ministering out politically correct medical treatments to healthy young couples while old age pensioners with diabetes lose their feet because they can't afford chiropodists.

The sooner the NHS is abolished the better.

(2) (11)

There can be few afflictions more tragic and debilitating than blindness.

So I sincerely hope that this qualifies as some sort of breakthrough:

A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.

Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.

The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.

My very best wishes to Mr.May and to medical team who restored his sight. The possibility that this technique can be used to help blind people everywhere is something that is worth hoping and praying for.

(1) (7)

The UK state has long been scared of the effects of cannabis, especially its anti-state effect on people who want the freedom to eat, and smoke, and drink, whatever the hell they like.

But soon, specially selected National Health Service patients are to be given cannabis as part of a government-funded trial, costing half a million pounds, to see if it can work as an effective pain relief drug.

Of course, all of the sufferers from long-term pain who regularly use cannabis right now, illegally, to get themselves through the long days and nights of multiple sclerosis, and other painful complaints, could have told them this years ago. And have done so, many times. But not to worry. Spending half a million of other people's money costs the government absolutely nothing, after all, so where's the worry?

It should be interesting however, if Her Majesty's Government do legitimise 'medical cannabis'. Expect to see queues out the door of most General Practitioners' surgeries filled with 'migraine' sufferers, for whom Nurofen doesn't quite cut the mustard anymore.

Actually, I can feel this throbbing pain in my left temple, right this second, probably from all this cheese I'm eating on the Atkins diet. Maybe I should chuck the diet in, and get back to carbohydrates? Anybody got any 'interesting' chocolate cake mixture recipes?

(0) (5)

Here's one trend that's going the opposite from the US that's actually good news for the Brits. A new private Accident & Emergency unit is to be opened this October in Brentford, West London. To non-British readers, that's a private Emergency Room.

This has been widely reported as the first attempt to set up ER in the UK wrongly as it turns out. I contacted the BBC and the wording has changed to it claims to be the first. Obviously emergency healthcare in Britain existed before the state nationalized hospitals in 1948.

This report from 1998 shows that at least one serious attempt has been made to charge people for access to emergency healthcare in Britain. It failed for two reasons: the location was not ideal. The middle of Hampstead Heath is not the most obvious demand area for ER services and the Manor House Hospital (owned by a trade union) was sold to property developers.

The other interesting point in the BBC report is the view of the British Medical Association, the monopolistic body that represents the producer interests of doctors in the UK.

A Department of Health survey published in July found 6% of hospital patients waited at least 12 hours in A&E on a trolley or a chair. The government wants 90% of A&E patients to be assessed, treated, discharged or admitted within four hours. But doctors attending the British Medical Association's annual conference in June denounced the target and said it would damage patient care.

So let me see if I have this straight - doctors believe that reducing the amount of time patients lie on trolleys or blood-splattered chairs in the waiting-room (I've sat on some of them), from 12 hours to four hours, being denied treatment, will damage patient care.

Dr Shipman I presume?

(0) (11)

It must have been about a decade ago that I first became aware of the alleged dangers of exposure to the sun and the 'link' between over-exposure to ultra-violet radiation and skin cancer*. Looking back, it was a 'consciousness raising exercise' that mushroomed from 'never heard of it' to widespread health-panic with remarkable speed.

Assisted, perhaps, by the miserabalisit anti-hedonism of the Nineties and the suspiciously convenient dovetailing with the doleful predictions about 'global warming', we should have been more sceptical. But medical opinion was converted and few people have the confidence to fly in the face of such an august edifice. The new orthodoxy was nailed down with copious amounts of 'official' advice to stay in, wrap up, cover up and, if you are foolhardy enough to venture out in the sun, only do so after smothering yourself with gallons of sunblock.

But that was then, and this is now:

A scientist is claiming too much sunscreen can lead to vitamin deficiency.

Professor Michael Holick of Boston University is advising people to spend up to 10 minutes a day in the sun unprotected to guard against a lack of vitamin D.

He said: "In our efforts to protect people from the sun we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater."

So Professor Holick just a publicity-seeking iconoclast or is this the heretical opening shot of a debunking campaign?

Perhaps the only danger we really need to worry about are the risks arising from an over-exposure to 'experts'.

[Note to professional scare-mongers: 'cancer' is the panic word of our age. Linking lifestyle choices to heart disease or kidney failure just doesn't cut the mustard.]

(0) (66)

...the state does, in the person of Mr. Justice Sumner, that is who owns your body.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
- J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Given that so many in the 'free world' are subject to compulsory educational conscription, how many people are in fact 'sovereign' over their own minds? And in an era in which the state can force you to put certain chemicals in your body regardless of your wishes, are you sovereign over your own body? If you are a child, clearly not... and even if you are an adult, clearly not.

The mothers, the sole carers of their daughters, argued that immunisation should be voluntary and it was not right to impose it against the wishes of a caring parent and it would cause them great distress.

The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab but had asked for meningitis protection. Some parents fear the MMR vaccine could be linked to autism, even though doctors and most experts say there is no evidence of a link.

Mr Justice Sumner decided both children should receive the jab because the benefits outweighed the risks.

But her views obviously count for nothing. If you do not truly own the insides of your body, then what are you? "The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab". Is she a slave? A serf? A chattel? I have fulminated before on that particular issue when confronted with people arguing for mandated mass medication... the issue is not one of health but rather 'who owns your body'. What the judges and doctors who would use the violence of state to force other people to change the chemistry of their own bodies show us is not that they care, but rather their totalitarian mindset.

Can it really surprise us that the state does not respect individual property rights or the right of self-defense if it does not even respect the right of individuals to judge what chemicals should or should not be put in your own body? This is not a minor issue because it goes to the very heart of whether your perception of freedom is an illusion or not.

(0) (25)

I think it safe to say that all those people in the British political and media classes who want this country to be 'more European' have good cause to feel quietly satisfied today because parts of Britain are, indeed, starting to resemble East Germany:

The image of hundreds of people queuing to register with an NHS dentist provided a stark reminder of the problems people encounter in finding an NHS dentist, experts say.

They need 'experts' to tell them this?

The queue was prompted by the announcement that a practice in Carmarthen, Wales, could take on 300 more patients - but many more were hoping to register.

The TV news has now picked up on this story and are reporting that over 600 people turned up in the hope of getting state dental treatment. They lined up along the street and had to be issued with lottery tickets in order to prevent disputes breaking out. Over half of them were turned away.

Dr John Renshaw of the British Dental Association told BBC News Online: "That picture evoked a Third World country, where you have to queue to access what ought to be part of NHS care."

No, that picture evoked life behind the Iron Curtain where people queued up all day to get a meal. And for the same reasons!

(0) (25)

A debate is currently raging in libertarian as well as in less refined political circles about whether the USA should allow 'reimportation' of prescription drugs. Basically, the problem is that patented drugs in the US are sold at prices much higher than they are available overseas. Patented drugs are the newer drugs for which no generic equivalents are available, giving the patent-holder a monopoly on that drug while the patent endures.

The drugs are available more cheaply in other countries for a variety of reasons, but in large part because the governments of those other countries have intervened in the drug markets to set prices. Canada, in particular, has 'negotiated' some sweet deals for high-demand drugs, and Americans have flocked across the border to get some of that cheap drug action. With prescription drug prices soaring in the USA, legislation has surfaced to allow drugs to be 'reimported' from these socialist havens at the prices that prevail.

On the one side, many libertarians see lifting the ban on reimporting as a simple case of freeing up the market to let it do its magic. Probably the best case that I have seen for this side of the ledger is Conservative Drug Split at National Review Online.

However, it seems to me that this approach overlooks some pretty major issues. Leaving aside the safety issue, which my clients in the drug industry assure me is no straw argument, I do not believe that the cause of free markets is well-served by allowing reimportation.

To cut a long and sordid story short, prices are so cheap in other countries because the governments of those countries demand that the drugs be sold at slightly above their production cost. They can do this because (a) in many countries the government is a monopsonist via the national health system and/or (b) the government simply threatens to break the patent and start manufacturing the drug itself (or allowing someone else to manufacture the drug).

To claim that the sale or reimportation of drugs that are priced under this system has anything to do with the free market strikes me as delusional. First, of course, the prices now obtaining in these markets are not market prices, but are monopsonist prices extracted by threatening to break the patent. Keeping these drugs out of the relatively free US market is no more of a barrier to free trade than keeping the local fence from selling stolen TVs out of the back of a truck.

Proponents of reimportation seem to assume that, when reimportation is allowed, the drug companies will go to these nations and threaten to either cut them off or raise their prices, and the governments will meekly go along. This in turn assumes that these governments will not simply break the patents, as they have repeatedly threatened to do and in fact have occasionally done in the past. Nor am I convinced that breaking the patents will result in any real consequences for the nations that do so. The only hammer over these nations would be the WTO or other treaties, and I do not believe that the government of the US would go to the mattresses to protect Big Pharma's patents. It never has in the past, and there is no reason to believe that it would in the future. With reimportation allowed, in fact, the US government would have to be crazy to do so, as protecting the patents overseas would dry up sources of cheap drugs that reimportation allows back into the US.

Sadly, the lure of cheap drugs is too much for your average politico to resist, so I think we can look forward to the corruption of the US drug market by overseas socialism.

(0) (13)

It is a central plank of federast propoganda that the European Union is the only way to stop conflagrations like WWI and WWII from happening again. I have always regarded such pronouncements as specious self-delusion. Indeed, certain features of life in wartime Europe are beginning to re-appear, such as austerity, rationing and empty shelves:

Gardeners were banned from buying dozens of pesticides from yesterday under new European rules. The 80 gardening products, mostly lawn treatments, have been withdrawn from the shelves. They can be used until the end of December.

They include many sold by major retailers including B&Q, Asda and Do It All, and are being banned alongside 135 agricultural products.

Thus we are saved from the cataclysmic horror of law treatments. Household cleaning products are probably next.

Nor is this the end but merely the beginning for what we are seeing is the EU's 'precautionary principle' in action. As a result, thousands of chemicals used everyday, domestically and commercially, now have to be subjected to an exhaustive and expensive testing procedure to ensure that they post not the even the merest smidgeon of a hint of a suggestion of a risk to health. This is despite that face that, in most cases, these chemical products have been used for years, even decades, without anyone growing three heads as a consequence.

For many, particularly smaller scale, producers the cost of compliance means bankruptcy so they simply withdraw the products from sale. Result: a gradual emptying of shelves.

And who, exactly, is behind it? As if we couldn't guess:

Friends of the Earth welcomed the move but raised doubts as to whether the outlawed pesticides would be disposed of properly. The environmental pressure group also claimed some products were not covered by the ban despite being proven to damage human health.

Yes, the enviro-mentalists. Europe's 'jihadis'; they may be self-righteous creeps with faces one can never can tired of punching but they have managed to secure themselves a svengali-like grip on the minds of Europe's Cardinals.

By this time next year, Samizata articles will be written on papyrus scrolls and distributed to our readers by mule-train.

(0) (15)

Never mind the 'luck of the Irish', what about the luck of the lawyers? I ask you, has there ever been a group of people so consistently blessed by the fickle finger of fate? Somebody 'up there' must like them, that's for sure.

'Not so', I hear you cry? Well, how's this for proof? No sooner has the legal profession turned its formidable guns on the fast-food industry than, flash-bang-whallop-wham-as if by magic, some learned scientists turn up with a whole bunker full of ammunition:

Women with a high-fat diet may increase their risk of developing breast cancer later in life, say researchers.

A study of more than 13,000 women from Norfolk found that women who ate the most saturated fats - such as those found in chocolate snacks and fast food -were almost twice as likely to develop cancer, compared with those who ate the least.

I am sure it is nothing more than coincidental. Honestly. Really. But, you must surely concede, the timing could not be better.

And is that lucky or what?

(0) (8)

It is a little known fact but Britain is a world-leader in the manufacture and distribution of paranoia. We even export it.

For most of the time our public officials are hard at work busily churning out the stuff for both the domestic and foreign markets. But, what happens when one health-panic runs headlong into another? Well, the whole machine just grinds to an embarrassing halt:

A council has forbidden pupils to apply sunscreen in school - in case other children suffer an allergic reaction.

Cancer Research UK, which launched the Sun Smart campaign to warn of the dangers of the sun, said it was "amazed" by the policy.

Manchester City Council says it is following health and safety guidelines.

Pity the poor child, stuck out on a limb, while two different nannies squawk at them with two entirely conflicting demands. Maybe the nannies could solve the problem (and do everyone a real favour) by just dropping dead from worry.

(5) (18)

Deepest thanks to David Farrer for linking to this fascinating article by Dr Raj Persaud in the Scotsman.

Could your political beliefs determine how long you live? New research from sociologist Dr William Cockerham and colleagues from the University of Alabama in the United States has found that differences in attitudes to looking after your body and your health are predicted by your political allegiances.

It seems those who believe the state should take responsibility for most aspects of life also tend to eschew personal responsibility for taking care of themselves. As a result, they are more likely to engage in lifestyles hazardous to their health, including drinking to excess and not exercising.

The just-published research was conducted among Russians, comparing those who longed for a to return to the old-style Soviet system with those who preferred the free-market approach to the economy.

Personal interviews with almost 9,000 Russians found significant differences in how much they looked after their own health depending on where they placed themselves on the political spectrum.

David says that this reminds him of Glasgow, another great bastion of socialist intellectual self-abuse, and bodily self-abuse by other more enjoyable but equally destructive means. But Dr Raj Persaud doesn't seem to have heard about Glasgow.

The old divisions between socialists and capitalists may have largely disappeared in modern Britain but elsewhere in Europe, particularly in the old eastern bloc countries, the political conflict between socialists and capitalists remains. These countries have experienced unprecedented upheaval since the collapse of the old Soviet systems and it is still not clear to large sections of the electorate that abandoning the old centrally-planned economies has brought any real benefits yet.

But the Russian plunge in life expectancy began several decades ago, so the capitalism they've been having over there lately can hardly be blamed.

Russian male life expectancy stood at 64 years in 1965, but steadily decreased to around 62 years by 1980. Male longevity improved during Gorbachev’s brief (1984-87) anti-alcohol campaign, reaching almost 65 years in 1987, and then entered a period of accelerated decline - centred around the fall of the communist regime - in which life expectancy fell to a modern low of roughly 58 years in 1994. The most recent figures for 2000 show Russian males living 59 years, on average some five years less than in 1965.

Things have improved a tiny bit, in other words, but not nearly enough to take Russians back to the good old days before the system so many of them yearn for began its final collapse.

Persaud ends his article with what can only be called a philosophical attack on the whole idea of collectivised medicine.

The dilemma in politics is that some kind of safety net for those unable to look after themselves seems desirable, yet if the net becomes too extensive it may act as a disincentive for fostering individual personal responsibility for looking after one’s own health.

Solving this dilemma is an urgent requirement of modern politics because it could even determine how long we live.

"Solving this dilemma" sounds an awful lot like "squaring this circle" to me. This is our old friend moral hazard, a sadly familiar concept to all too many providers of care or help. You help someone who's down, to get him back on his feet, and he uses your help to make staying down more comfortable, and when you finally give up with helping him, he's lost the trick of walking. The Welfare State sets up a trampoline, and it turns into a swamp.

(0) (24)

There is a fine article in The Times today (link requires registration and may not work outside UK) by Mick Hume, bemoaning the decline of belief in individual responsibility and the growing use of the word "addiction" to describe almost every form of repetitive behaviour.

As the article can only be read through registration (grrr), here's the opening gaff:

"We are becoming a nation of addiction addicts. Our society has become hooked on the habit of blaming human behaviour on some form of addiction. Apparently normal people - doctors, scientists, politicians (normal? ed), even journalists (ditto? ed) - seem incapable of resisting the urge to inject "addict" or "dependency" into any discussion of social problems."

Exactly. The use of the word addict is used by policymakers to assault the idea of Man as a being with free will. We are all essentially passive victims. By doing so, it opens the floodgates to authortarian control of our lives. Look at the massive lawsuits against tobacco firms. Now I hold no brief for such firms, but the idea that people become so "addicted" to X or Y that they are unable to resist is surely contradicted by evidence all around us of people quitting such repetitive habits. Millions of people have in recent decades quit smoking, for example, like the good David Carr of this parish. Many have taken the painful step of quitting hard drugs or quitting alcohol. Of course change can be acutely difficult, which is why we praise folk who take the step of leading a healthier life.

Addiction is a word in danger of being rendered useless by applying it to just about every form of behaviour which is either frowned upon or a repeat form of activity.

Come to that, I suppose I must be "addicted" to blogging. Help me nurse, I am using Movable Type again!

(0) (8)

Every so often (and it doesn't happen often enough for my liking) the British public remind us of the yawning gap between received wisdom and wisdom.

Ever since the 1940's it has been a core article of faith among the left (and more than a few Conservatives I might add) that services like healthcare and education can only be provided for the masses by central government and funded by general taxation. They even have the gall to denounce alternative models as 'unworkable'.

Well, if the results of this survey are anything to go by, that canard may be reaching the end of its shelf-life:

Voters are prepared to pay for health insurance if it guarantees them better and faster care, according to a ground-breaking new poll that suggests the public is far more open to radical ideas than politicians realise.

The survey finds strong support among taxpayers for a range of controversial policy alternatives, including giving parents the right to choose private schools for their children and American-style "zero tolerance" policing.

I wonder if there is still 'strong support' for British-style "zero tolerance" for self-defence?

The poll appears to contradict the Prime Minister's claim that voters are opposed to health and education solutions that allow individuals to decide where their money is spent.

And it would also appear to contradict my long-held belief that the British public would never relinquish their single-minded devotion to the National Health Service. The day when consumer expectation finally outstrips the ability of the state to keep up with it may be closer than I had imagined.

(0) (21)

The American food giant, Kraft, is taking a number of steps to ward off the threat it may be sued by obese folk claiming its foodstuffs made them so big. This comes in the wake of threats by an American man to sue various fast-food chains for making him so big.

Kraft, of course, is fully entitled as a private company to adjust its products as it wishes. It is probably a wise move. In the U.S., and sadly, increasingly also here in the UK, the idea that the consumer should adopt the posture of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is on the decline. We are increasingly told that we are all victims, passive suffers of the blandishments of big, evil, and mostly multinational corporations.

The idea of taking responsibility for your actions is dying out. We are on the way to all being treated like naughty little moppets in a creche.

And of course if we do still sneak into a fast-food joint for a big burger, there's a chance our state nannies will want the evidence recorded on CCTV.

(2) (6)

Are you gainfully employed? If so, does your wicked employer make all manner of unreasonable demands upon you, such as actually turning up for work or doing the job you're being paid to do?

Up until now, there was no means of redress for such manifest injustice and rank exploitation. But, lo, the dark ages are at an end. Thanks to the Health & Safety Executive, all employers must now comply with a 'Stress Code':

Employers will have to protect their staff from stress - or risk legal action, a watchdog has warned.

The Health and Safety Executive has launched a six-point code which firms must abide by.

They must support their employees and ensure they do not feel overly pressured in their roles.

Now I don't profess to any expert medical knowledge or even any medical knowledge at all but even I know that a broken foot is a broken foot and pretty easy to detect. But how on earth is something as subjective as 'stress' going to be either properly identified or measured?

Well, the bright sparks at the H&S have come up with a forumla:

Companies will be assessed to see if they have reduced stress to manageable levels.

If fewer than 65 to 85% of all staff feel each standard has been met, the company will fail its assessment.

If that isn't a charter for malingerers, clock-watchers, perennial malcontents and compensation-sniffers then I don't know what is. And, short of being paid to go the park every day and feed the ducks, what job doesn't involve some level of stress at some point or other?

Up to 13.4m days a year are lost due to stress at work.

And I wonder how many of those are actually 'I've-got-tickets-to-the-football-match' kind of 'stress'?

It would be tempting to suggest that there is some insidious political agenda behind this but I honestly don't believe that much thought has gone into it. More likely it is another classic case of bureaucratic empire-building which, as in this case, is usually done on the back of quackery, junk science and manipulated statistics.

The result is the same regardless. British entrepreneurs, already snowed under with laws, regulations, diktats and directives, have yet another welfarist function to fulfil and, I daresay, yet another sheaf of related forms that they will be required to waste their time completing.

I have a dream about just how much more prosperous and innovative our society could be if its wealth-creators were not required to spend so much of their productive time jumping through government hoops and avoiding state-created bear-traps that have no right to exist. It is rather similar to the dream that, one day, somebody in the parasitical public sector will realise that there is only so much blood they can draw out of the private sector before the latter simply r