We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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.
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.
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. → Continue reading: Honest science or propaganda?
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. → Continue reading: The menace of “delivering outcomes”
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.
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]
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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