The latest control freak ravings from UKGov are the impending crusade against bottled water:
Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser. “We have to make people think that it’s unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong,” said Tim Lang, the Government’s natural resources commissioner. Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”.
Very telling, no? People deciding to spend their own money on something “borders on being morally unacceptable”. Let me what you what is morally unacceptable: that force addicted control freak tax parasites like Phil Woolas have the gall to tell people how to spend their own damn money. “Immoral”? You do not know the meaning of the word, Woolas.
I loath almost all canned and bottled soft drinks (or ‘soda’ in American parlance)… vile phoney tasting sweet muck… and so I am delighted that finally the UK has followed long standing European custom and now conveniently sells bottled water almost everywhere.
Apparently the aim (as always, sigh) is to make it as “unpopular as smoking”. Whether this will mean a water ban in pubs, and people complaining about how they come home stinking of water, I don’t know.
There’s an air of desperation about them though, isn’t there? A kind of frantic ramping up of the threat level as if deep down they fear the whole thing is falling apart on them and they have to get everything in place before global warming jumps the shark. I wonder if it already has. Live Gore certainly suggested that.
As unpopular and no doubt as licensed.
According to official statistics around 1500 people die from drowning each year. It’s high time that ALL water was banned by Nulab.
They want to make us drink fluoridated water that will turn us into communists.
It’s that damnable dihydrogen monoxide they use as the main ingredient. It is a mix of a high-energy fuel that is explosive, and an accellerant.
Ban it!
Those who ‘run’ The Septic Isle…incredible as always.
In any case, water is for washing ;-))
Is this “morally unacceptable” in the way the UK government has sent troops to two theatres of war and significantly under-equipped them?
Or “morally unacceptable” in the way the UK government has toiled to remove democracy from the nation and at the same time indulged in corruption and electoral fraud via postal voting?
Please tell, so I know where bottled water stands in the current list of important moral issues.
Why? Is there a fixed quality of moral issues to worry about?
I am probably the “greenest” person around here, but bottled water is indeed a damn fine idea. I also detest the sweet stuff, especially when I am really thirsty.
“…force addicted control freak tax parasites like Phil Woolas…” who, as a former ‘President’ of the rabble-rousing ‘National Union Of Students’, is in fine company with the likes of Jack Straw, Trevor Phillips, Stephen Twigg etc
Bottled water ?
Let me get this right: these are the same sickening scum that recommended everyone should buy bottled water to drink during their nauseating campaign against the privatisation of the water industry. After all, capitalists couldn’t possibly supply anything safe now, could they?
Ian B
Global Warming jumped the shark when Big Al won the Yasser Arafat Memorial prize. (If not before.)
It still won’t stop the fascists demanding that the dumb peons eat what they’re told, bought from the local shop that they’re told, drink their tap water and a small glass of local red-wine as they are told and take their vacations locally working on their allotments.
Meanwhile the new aristocracy will be travelling the world eating and drinking as they like, purely in the interests of discussing with each other which action they will be forced to take to limit the ‘footprint’ that the rest of us are stomping on poor old mother Gaiea.
And they will still be wondering what they’ve done wrong as they are marched up the steps of the guillotine or find their feet dangling in thin air as they hang from a lampost.
Jacob: apparently you don’t boat or camp:-)
Bottled water is a good example of a pattern I’ve noticed. First the fashionable left falls in love with something, bottled water, starbucks, SUVs etc etc, call it ‘it’. then the capitalists move in and market ‘it’ to the public who decide they want some of ‘it’ too. Finally ‘it’ having lost its leftist cachet now become a symbol of everything that’s wrong with capitalist society.
Within a few years I predict that if you own a Prius hybrid you’ll be damned as a Gaia hating Republican
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so nauseating. Not, “We have to make it unfashionable”, you’ll notice. That would be contemptible enough, but the form of words betrays the way these people’s minds work: they want to control how we think.
Concur with Taylor. I remember when all the beardy-weirdies had beaten up landrovers or landcruisers so they could ‘commune with nature’ while all normal people had station wagons. Sierra Club et al.
Works better than beer…though perhaps not as much fun 8-))
Col. Jack D. Ripper was right.
More to the point:
Who comprises this “WE” to which von Woolas refers?
Is it a closed group, or can anyone join?
But then, why would they? Still, people do!!
Hey! Not all soda is over-sweet muck. Polar’s Diet Orange Dry (with 5% fruit juice) tastes great. So does Diet Dr. Pepper and Monadnock’s Black Cherry and Black Rasberry flavors. And did I mention that old standby, Moxie? Not a sugary one in the bunch.
So there.
Which is the most vile stuff purporting to be drinkable in the history of… well… history. That they could have come up with something even more ghastly that the non-diet version is a dark miracle. The under taste is metallic and the front-taste is like rancid melted candy. Revolting.
Never tried the others and almost certainly never will. All diet drinks are vile, tasting both sweet and phoney at the same time 😛
Perry, Spot on with Dr Pepper – but I guess you have never tried Irn-Bru?
Many have to force themselves to drink it on the alter of national solidarity;-) Others because simply being able to force it down at all proves just how ‘hard’ they are 😉
“All diet drinks are vile” is an exageration. While Diet Coke certainly tastes like re-cycled battery acid, especially when canned, other sodas manage to shed the sweetness overkill without offense.
I particularly recommend you try those with the word “dry” somewhere on the bottle. Yes, it is a hit or miss process, but there are gems waiting to be found.
Of course, avoid ANY soda in a can. Glass bottles are the best container, if you can find them.
It might be crazy to like bottled water or chemically doused tap water, but if I want to be crazy then who is Woolas to stop me?
Phil A
I’ve tried Irn Bru and I don’t remember it being quite as bad as you describe it, though I must admit I won’t be rushing to try it again.
I do remember, a long time ago, how horrible my first few tastes of tea, coffee and beer were, but with perserverance I’ve managed to overcome my distaste, though my tea habit has been completely broken. I guess it must be the narcotic reward that these drinks offer that does the business.
BTW, Irn Bru had a great advert here over christmas. It was a take of of Raymond Briggs’ Snowman and the last stanza went:
“Now I’m falling through the air,
“I wonder where I’m going to land.
“He nicked my Irn Bru
“And let go of my hand.”
(or ‘soda’ in American parlance)
Its not soda everywhere in the US. In some places its ‘pop’ and in others ‘coke’ (mainly the South for the latter, soda is more east coast/urban and pop more mid-western and rural).
http://popvssoda.com:2998/ has a great map.
We call them soft drinks in the southern USA. I live on the stuff and if it were ever banned or taxed heavily I would be willing to take up arms against my government. The food Nazis over here have already ruined the fast food that I loved so much growing up. They made them switch from beef tallow for their fry fat and now they are making them switch from the more harmful transfats that replaced the beef tallow.
My one hope is that I can live long enough to see everything come full circle and be able to eat highly saturated natural fat again before I die.
The dirty little secret is that we are all going to die. Just because torture, or at least the deprivation of pleasure, supposedly makes us live longer doesn’t mean it is right.
INFIDELS!! Dr. Pepper is the drink of the gods.
Here in dear old Blighty, the great day may not be far off. ‘Healthy’ vegetable oil requires far too much CO2 to make and as for olive oil, well that comes from abroad, by plane!
The greenies are already making noises about curbing the power of the nasty supermarkets so the day will soon dawn when we will all have local shops for local people, and one of those shops will be a butcher’s. I will then be able to indulge my taste for chips,(fries) deep fried in lard and a big fry-up for breakfast, (to set me up for a day’s work scrabbling in the frozen ground for my swedes and turnips).
For Sunday dinner I will be able to have beef roasted in animal fat with roast potatoes and parsnips basted in the juices from the joint, (though we’ll have to re-engineer our beef cattle since the ones we have now have been bred to be too lean to provide much juice.
My only regret is that bacon will be haram. My fry-up won’t be the same without it and when artificial preservatives are finally banned, salt pork and ham would have made excellent sandwich fillers.
Unfortunately, I inherited neither my father’s green thumb nor my mother’s no-nonsense cooking skills so when they ban pre-cooked packaged meals and fast food restaurants, I will quickly starve to death. But heh. It’s for Gaeia so it’s all good.
Beef dripping is the stuff to make chips with, but apart from that spot on Kevin B.
For myself, being a tightwad and my domestic water supply perfectly adequate, I rarely buy the bottled stuff at home.
Abroad though, it’s a different story. Supplies are often contaminated and it is often bloody hot, so you need portable rehydration.
Perhaps they are looking to introduce a joint Smoking/bottled water Licence for the perverse few who are trying to dodge Govt Diktat. Cost ya £20 a year though!
There is a creeping line of thought coming into the leftist media, that would dearly like to see a committee formed that would decide, old Soviet style, what goods and services are “Useful” and those which, in their opinion , are not. All in the cause of “Saving the Planet!” you understand.
Can you imagine the bien pensants having an Islington dinner party without their Andean spring water, Californian wine, Chilean sea bass etc., etc.
Oh maybe once, for the solidarity.
“But not the tap water Cheri dahling! It’s Thames water. It’s been through twelve pairs of kidneys by the time it gets here!”
Ok, so use more ‘enviro-friendly’ tetra packaging in water products – works just fine with milk, orange juice and just about every other liquid product on sale.
I strongly suspect that the argument is nothing at all to do with the water, the bottles or how and where it is produced, but far more likely to be about UK ministers being at the end of a severe bitching from privately-owned water companies about the dent in their profits from companies such as Evian and Volvic. The Biased Broadcasting Company in its Panorama rant on this subject ended on a telling note about how much profit these ‘greedy’ corporations had made.
Having re-read my last comment above I can see that some uncharitable souls might detect a smidgeon of implied criticism of my betters, so to set the record straight I wish to emphasize that I’m sure the Andean spring water is ‘Fair Trade’, the Chilean sea bass is ethically caught from a non-endangered population, the wine is from a Californian lesbian collective, and that sufficient carbon -credits were bought from Fat AL Inc. to ensure no harm was done to Mother.
Actually, I haven’t a clue what is eaten at Islington dinner-parties, but I do have a couple of nephews who are doing ‘… Studies’ degrees so with the imminent closure of the supermarkets and fast food joints they might get jobs ‘downstairs’ and give me an inside line.
Until a few years ago there was essentially no scientifically valid research on the side effects of the addition of fluoride compounds to drinking water, according to a BMJ article. (It does have some intended effects on people who have third-world dental hygiene, at least.) I’ve heard that some worthwhile research has been published since, but I haven’t seen it. Let somebody else, who can’t afford better or who doesn’t know better, be the guinea pig drinking contaminated tap water.
The main reason I stopped drinking tap water, however, is that I kept getting stomach bugs. It happened that they stopped when I switched to bottled water. I don’t recall any other lifestyle changes at the time.
People are unable to see things that are right in front of their nose.
Parasites are a gift from Satan. Although they make life pure Hell, they will destroy you if you fail to control them. Whether you are talking bottled water, mosquitoes, or good old fashioned crooks – parasites are after the free ride on the gravy train you can give them.
Shut off the free ride on the gravy train and you shut off the parasite.