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Just who do these arrogant Canadians think they are?
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien has thrown his weight behind efforts to get a World Health Organization travel warning withdrawn.
Mr Chretien told journalists the WHO had come to the “wrong conclusion” when it advised travellers to avoid Toronto, Canada’s largest city.
We must condemn this aggressive, unilateralist, neo-conservative challenge to the authority of the World Health Organisation.
There are altogether far too many people in the world with far too much time on their hands and not nearly enough genuine trauma in their lives to occupy them. That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the root of so many of our problems.
First it was narcotics, then guns, then tobacco, then fast-food and now it looks like we are witnessing the opening salvoes of the War on Sugar:
The World Health Organization has accused big business interests in the United States of trying to influence a new report on the dangers of consuming too much sugar.
Fresh guidelines to be published by the organisation on Wednesday will stress that sugar should form no more than 10% of a person’s diet.
What a perfect set up! The ‘honest’, ‘caring’, ‘selfless’ professionals of the WHO pitted against the obesity-spreading, profit-obsessed vested interests of the corporate suger industry. I can just see the latest anti-globo protest banner now: ‘SUGAR IS WORSE THAN RICIN’.
Well, let me nail my colours to the mast right here and now and say that I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the corporate neo-sugar mongers on this one. Since I am usually to be found agitating vigourously on behalf of the productive profit-seekers of this world, I am hardly in any mood to abandon them now, especially when they’re genuinely fighting a good fight and probably telling the truth.
And let no-one be fooled by the use of the innocuous word ‘guidelines’. As if these things are merely helpful suggestions. We all should know by now that these directives are only ‘advisory’ until such time as they are successfully enacted into state law. The anti-tobacco injunctions used to be just ‘guidelines’ as well.
“I don’t think this is a very wise strategy by the industry, because the evidence is so strong and the great public believes this message,” said Dr Puska.
Methinks Dr.Puska protests too loudly. Does he really expect us to believe that he gets millions of plaintiff letters from people all over the world saying, “Please rescue us from the capricious tyrrany of sugar, Dr.Puska”?
I don’t buy any of it any more than I bought into the ‘global warming’ hoax which, incidentally, appears to have set the methodological template for all future junk science scares. Nor am I the slightest bit interested in entering any debate as to the merits (or otherwise) of consuming sugar because I simply don’t give a damn. I speak as somebody who has a fair shot at getting a job as Danny De Vito’s body-double but I’ll be damned to the deepest pit of perdition if I am going to sit back and allow some otherwise-unemployable tranzi penpusher tell me what I can or can’t sprinkle on my breakfast cereal.
Never mind Saddam, or Al-Qaeda or gangs of shadowy, homicidal Islamofascists, when are we going to start a War on Busybodies?
Determined to prove that there is a bureaucratic solution to every problem, the European Commission has announced plans to set up a European Centre for disease control:
The European Commission is set, by the end of May, to propose that a European centre for disease prevention and control be set up.
The news comes as several parts of the world succumb to new cases of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) the flu-like virus which attacks the young, old, healthy and unhealthy alike – and has caused several deaths.
Cunning and astute as ever, the Commissioners already have a plan to prevent the spread of SARS in Europe. According to Dutch Health Commissioner Willy Van Der Pimp:
“No further cases of SARS will be allowed into the European Union as this disease does not conform to European safety standards”.
However French Commissioner Bertrand Maginot was even more forthcoming:
“We must abandon the idea that disease can be beaten by medical science. This is simplistic and dangerous and will only be the cause of more disease. Epidemics can only be prevented by negotiating with the various diseases as part of the political process.”
The Commissioners are in the process of forming a sub-committee to look into the ‘root causes’ of disease.
Britain’s Channel 4, whilst known to have more than its fair share of nit-wit journalists, does nonetheless turn out some splendid documentary programmes. The best of the current crop being a series called ‘Secrets of the Dead’ which attempts to explore the science behind great disasters of the past.
This past week (and I cannot help wondering if the scheduling was more than coincidental) they devoted themselves to the great Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918/19 that swept right around the globe and claimed some 20 millions lives. Or at least, that is the death toll that I believed was generally accepted but, according to this documentary, the real toll was between 50 million and 100 million! If that is so then surely it must rate as the single most lethal pandemic in history? Not to mention that fact that, coming hot on the heels of World War I, it has to be the biggest ever kick in the head.
But here is the rub, because according to the senior virologist advising the documentary makers, there is some convincing evidence that the troop concentrations of World War I is what led to the outbreak:
John Oxford and his team found pathology reports from an army camp in Etaples, northern France, that have given him vital clues about the origin of the 1918 pandemic. Etaples was a huge army camp, almost the size of a city. 100,000 soldiers, well and wounded, moved through the camp daily. To supply food to this number, the army installed piggeries at the camp. There is evidence that soldiers bought live geese, chickens and ducks from the local French markets. Crucially, there were lots of opportunities for a flu virus to move from bird to pig, to soldier. Indeed, in the winter of 1916/1917, Etaples pathologists describe a disease-like flu that ended in heliotrope cyanosis and death. John Oxford believes the weight of evidence points toward Etaples as the viral mixing bowl that produced the 1918 strain of flu.
Mr. Oxford also adds,
‘If we had another influenza pandemic, and we will have another influenza pandemic, I think it will make the HIV outbreak almost look like a picnic.’
Blimey! The only thing missing from that is the spooky background music. Still, TV producers do like to spice up their dry-as-dust science programmes with a bit of melodrama and, let’s face it, general doom-mongering has probably overtaken fly-fishing as a favourite recreational activity. But I would more prepared to let this slide into great public melee of cried havoc were it not for the persistant, and increasingly troubling reports, of SARS:
Dr Carlo Urbani, a 46-year-old Italian and an expert on communicable diseases, had identified Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in an American businessman admitted to hospital in Vietnam in February.
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are all confining people to their homes if they have been exposed to the disease.
Isolated cases have been identified in Europe and North America.
Of course, SARS (the technical name for which is ‘shitscarey-itis’) appears to be a virulent form of influenza or pneumonia and we’ve got very large troop concentrations indeed in Iraq and the surrounding vicinity. Who was it that said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme?
Now I am not about to get all wild-eyed and apocalyptic on you. In fact, as soon as I have finished posting this I am going to go to bed and sleep like a baby. Also, and let me be quite emphatic about this for the benefit of the ‘quagmire’ lovers out there, there is no comparison whatsoever between the current hostilities in Iraq and World War I and I do believe that SARS has, in fact, been knocking around South-East Asia for quite a few months but we’ve only recently got to hear about it.
But, crystal-clear distinctions aside, nobody is going to tell me that there isn’t just a hint of eerie resonance here.
So, just three things here so far today, one very short and two rather serious. So here are a couple of curiosities.
First, there is this map, which was originally claimed to have been taken posthumously by Columbia before it burned and crashed. You want this to be true, don’t you? As did Michael Jennings. But as I commented at Michael’s, those killjoys at snopes.com have now killed this particular joy. But it is still a thing of beauty, and certainly has my little country looking its best. Snopes says it is “false”, but their map is even bigger than the one Michael put up, so they liked it even as they trashed it.
And the other is a beating heart, courtesy of b3ta.com. Who are those guys?
When you consider all the metaphorical baggage that has been loaded onto the human heart over the centuries, it turns out to be very small and yucky, and you can swap yours for another with “you” carrying on pretty much as usual. It’s just a pump.
And a picture is just a picture.
An article in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph Sports section speculates as to why the bid for the Olympic Games in London for 2012 might fail. Apparently the expected losses for hosting the games will be a massive £2,600 millions.
However, as no one has actually published what the toal budget would be, I can only assume that normal public sector project costs will apply: i.e. the original sum multiplied by ten. It is easy to see why the government is apparently unconvinced by the urgency of commiting to such a scheme.
My critics may argue that this sum of money spent on promoting the Olympic Games will do a lot less harm than if allocated to almost any other public programme. This is true. One shudders at the thought of what dregs passing themselves off as doctors would be employed in state hospitals if this sort of money got awarded the National Health Service.
Oh dear, I just realised, the NHS has been given that extra sum over the next two years. Perhaps we should have persuaded the government to spend vast amounts of money on hopeless attempts to bring the football World Cup to Staines, or the Winter Olympics to Blackpool, or even finance half a dozen Americas Cup challenges.
I missed this story last week, and so, I’m guessing, did most of you.
A bricklayer plagued by migraines has turned his torment into a brainwave.
Hywel Edwards, 28, from Merthyr Tydfil in the south Wales Valleys, has invented a cap which allows a migraine sufferer to block out the light as well as surround their head with a cold press.
And the idea – thought up after two days’ agony when tablets and lying in a darkened room was not working – is set be a business winner.
The interesting thing about this invention is that Mr Edwards didn’t need any specialised scientific knowledge to think of it, and make it work. He just needed to know what already worked for him, but in a much less user friendly form. He knew that he needed cold applied to his head, and that he wanted the light to his eyes blocked out. It wasn’t rocket science. He just made it work.
Good for him. I hope Mr Edwards gets rich, and gives lots of others the idea that they too could strike it rich, simply by applying common sense and by applying, well, application.
The Centre for Policy Studies published a report warning that the National Health Service is “on the brink of implosion” as government plans for a record 40 billion pound cash injection risk being squandered on bureaucracy. The author of the report, Dr Maurice Slevin, is a cancer specialist at a top London teaching hospital:
“I have seen at first hand the steady decay of a great public institution … The NHS is on the brink of implosion.”
Slevin, who came to England from South Africa and now works at Barts and the London NHS Trust, said he was full of enthusiasm when he started working for the NHS 24 years ago. But today it was clear that the quality of care delivered in Britain was far below that of other western countries. He warned that without major reforms, the 40 billion pound promised for the NHS over the next five years would “simply disappear into deeper and deeper layers of bureaucracy, with more and more monitoring of more and more targets.”
“Waste is endemic. The Department of Health itself admits that up to a fifth of the NHS budget is lost through waste, fraud and inefficiency.”
So it’s not more money that needs to be thrown at the public services as some community minded people would have us believe. The NHS is a strange institution, rooted in the meta-context of the collective effort the British nation experienced during the WWII and resisting any rational discourse by both the politicians and the public. Horror stories of patients suffering at the hands of NHS are part of regular reporting routine and yet, it still seems to be a political suicide to talk about real modernisation and de-nationalisation of the health care system.
Public services, being the most direct way for politicians of bribing the public into voting for them, have always been the most sensitive political issue. I have this horrible vision of the entire GDP disappearing into the NHS blackhole before the British public acknowledges the failure of the NHS as a system of health care provision and confronts the gruesome reality of public services.
It seems the shakedown artists (sorry, legal campaigners) trying to sue fast food colossus McDonalds are not giving up their fight easily, even though a judge recently threw out a case from a man claiming he had been been turned into a lardbutt.
At first, it is tempting to file stories like this under this blog’s ‘humour’ category, and of course in the past stories about overweight folks suing fast-food joints would have been the sort of thing to have been written up in the The Onion or Private Eye. But no longer. It seems one feature of decades of Big Government has been the steady infantilisation of large chunks of the populace to the point where the concept of taking responsibility for one’s own actions no longer applies.
Perhaps folk who sue fast food retailers should instead sue the State education system for making them so dumb in the first place.
I have now been a non-smoker for seven days. A week. Nearly a fiftieth of a year! It is my sad duty to report that I don’t feel any better for having quit. In fact, I feel worse.
The cravings, though fewer and less severe, still lap tauntingly at my nervous system. It’s like having an itch between the shoulder blades. My temper is, shall we say, far from even. I no longer have anything resembling a sleep pattern. Oh I do sleep. At least, I think I sleep. I find myself standing in the bathroom, scratching my arse, yawning and wondering what happened to the last seven hours. That’s sleep, isn’t it? I hope so.
I no longer eat, I graze. Strange hungers afflict me at unorthodox hours. Oh Lord, why don’t cheeseburgers come in packs of twenty? I am accumulating fat like a bear preparing to hibernate.
The mood swings are the worst. Last night the BBC Weather reported roads blocked by snow in the West Midlands. I was on the verge of tears. Euphoria to desolation in the space of half-an-hour is about the norm.
People say stupid things when you’re trying to quit smoking. ‘Hey, David, it’s all in your mind’. ‘No kidding??!! And there was me thinking it was all in my foot. Of course, it’s all in my f*cking mind, you stupid c*nt. If it was all in my computer’s hard-drive I could just delete it and have done with.’
Testy. Did I mention that I was a little testy? Well, I’m a little testy.
I have been asked on more than one occasion why I smoke cigarettes. The answer is all too simple. I smoke cigarettes because I enjoy smoking. No, I love smoking. I love the film-noiresque pose of cupping my hand around a lighter in a breezy street; I love the silky rolling comfort of the little cylinder between my fingers; I love the draw of tangy, rasping smoke into my lungs.
Let’s face it, smoking is sexy. The effortless self-assurance required to exude sex-appeal is precisely the quality required to look good with a cigarette. Healthy food is not, and will never be, sexy. Working out is not sexy either, regardless of the number of leotard-clad catalogue models prancing around aerobically to 80’s disco beats.
Smoking is sexy despite being dangerous. In fact, it is all the more arousing because it is dangerous. It is a daring and insouciant accomodation with a prowling, patient, predatory beast. For those of us who will never know the adrenalin rush of sitting in the cockpit of a Tornado or an F-15, smoking is a defiant dalliance with death.
For me, cigarettes are like a mad, unpredictable and fatally attractive mistress. Even though I know her wild behaviour, her endless painful taunts and unreasonable demands are both eroding my life-force and gouging out my bank account, I love her desperately and irrationally. And for all that she hurts me, I must have her in my life.
Until now, that is. Because I am in the process of ending this corrosive love-affair. Why? Because although I believe that the risks of smoking have been exaggerated for political reasons, even I can no longer ignore the symptoms of the harm being done to my respiratory system. Wheezing after climbing a flight of stairs is one thing but combine that with the trademark hacking, staccato cough I have now developed and that’s enough to set alarm bells ringing. I fear that if I do not end this relationship soon, then my mistress will do me some harm from which I will not have the option of being able to walk away.
So, as I type these words, it is now two-and-a-half days since I stubbed out what I hope will prove to be my last pleasure stick. Despite the nicotine patch on my arm, I am fighting the tickling, torturous craving that sweeps over me in savage, but mercifully brief, waves. Whenever they come they are accompanied by the roaring sound of my mistress banging frantically on my front door demanding to know why I have suddenly stopped returning her calls. Given time, she will tire, get the message and leave me alone. By my reckoning, after four days of this hell, things will get easier.
By this time next week, I hope I will have completely de-coupled myself from this harridan and although I know I will be a better man for being free of her tyrrany, I also know with doleful certainty that I will miss her forever.
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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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