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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency trusted with making sure that we, the people of the United States, don’t come down with the plague is ramping up an advertising campaign. Is it focusing on the threat of smallpox, anthrax, or any other bio-terror threat? How about Ebola, West Nile, or even maybe Hong Kong chicken flu?
No, the CDC has more important things to worry about. Specifically, fat kids. That’s right, American tax dollars are being put to use, in time of war, to tell kids to get in shape. Kids ages 6-17 are being bombarded with a media buy of nearly $3 million dollars (not to mention the cost of creative, the PR agency they hired, additional advertising agency fees, or the costs associated with the on-site events) between now and next July.
As a conservative guess, I would say that the CDC, while being faced with threats to real live national health, are going to be spending somewhere near $15 million dollars putting on a program dedicated to telling fat kids to shape up.
And just to make it better, they are also refusing to discuss the threats facing our nation when it’s been requested for interviews. No questions about smallpox vaccinations, the spread of West Nile – all fat kids, all the time.
And the campaign itself – VERB. That’s right, VERB. As in ‘RUN’, ‘SWIM’, ‘MASTURBATE’1, etc. Here is a list of events:
- Wild & Crazy Kids – Live staged version of the Wild N’ Crazy Kids series, pitting audience members against each other in larger than life stunts.
- Having the kids ‘SIT’ and watch other people be active. Good start. How well do you think the fat kids will do in these stunts?
- MTV Experience Tour – Interactive ‘day village’ that will encourage teens/tweens to experience VERB through a variety of current and relevant booths themed around MTV’s franchises and music.
- MTV. A TV channel. I guess ‘WATCH’ is the message they are trying to get across here.
- Paint the Town – Identify a mural, water tower or other highly visible figure and paint it to resemble a VERB activity. (e.g. Paint a water tower to look like a soccer ball with ‘KICK’ across it).
- ‘VANDALIZE’ will go well with most of the programming on MTV.
- Treasure Hunt – Kids stop at local places to pick up fun merchandise such as hats, t-shirts, etc. Tie-in with radio station, or existing promotion.
- ‘PURCHASE’ will go well with ‘DRIVE’, getting the parents involved.
- Parent Media Tours – Celebrity couple to speak with local media about the importance of getting kids involved in positive activities.
- Back to ‘SIT’ and ‘WATCH’ as celebrities get kids involved in ‘positive’ activities. Are “get busted for drugs” or “sleep with director” considered positive?
- Step Club – Online clubs for kids to participate in programs to increase positive activity by using a pedometer to measure daily steps for a chance to win VERB merchandise.
- ‘CLICK’ is now a way to get thin? Kick ass, office work will be taking on a whole new light now!
Now, I’m not a completely cold-hearted bastard, but this just seems to be a little bit over the top. Besides, most fat kids either have a genetic pre-disposition that won’t be fixed through this program, or they lose weight when they get to college or high school. In fact, this program will do nothing more than give athletic kids a chance to show off, and fat kids something to feel bad about. I understand that weight problems abound, but there have always been fat kids, there will always be fat kids, and nothing in this pork barrel will change that.
So why, at a time when we are faced with so many external threats, are we spending a lot of time and money cross-promoting MTV with taxpayer dollars?
Be sure to check out www.verbnow.com if you think I am kidding about any of this.
1 = Ok, masturbation was left off the list. Just like the state to leave out activities the kids will actually enjoy.
The image above, which I took about an half an hour before writing this article, shows an employee of Britain’s premier cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, standing by the front door having a cigarette. This is a man who works in a cancer hospital and comes face to face with the savage realities of what his habit vastly increases his risk of contracting, on a daily basis.
This picture says something very profound about human nature. One thing is for sure, it says more than any lengthy exegesis I could write about the futility of trying to use the violence of law to mandate behaviour the state feels is in the regulated person’s “best interests”. Ponder that.
On the Libertarian Alliance Forum there’s been a lively debate, among several, involving Chris Tame and (make that versus) Dale Amon, among several, on the rights and wrongs of alternative medicine, sparked by some vile Transnazi scheme involving the control of vitamins by the World Health Organisation or some such in a way that either protects or threatens the US vitamin industry – I couldn’t work out which in the time I had to spare for this.
I mention this argument because I spotted a fine soundbite in among it, which I think deserves wider circulation, from Kevin Carson:
In the 1830s handwashing was alternative medicine.
Perry doesn’t like us to end our postings with quotes, so I won’t and don’t, but to this gem I don’t want to add anything.
Yes, that is right. Regardless of the facts presented about how nationalised industries fail in every other sector, the moral (it is funded by theft) and intellectual (it makes no economic sense) arguments against a socialist health service that is based on force backed appropriation has fallen on deaf ears in Britain.
So how about a purely utilitarian analysis based on life and death? The NHS is institutionally incapable of not perpetrating horrors like this. If you pay taxes in the UK, that is what you are paying for. On nothing other than utilitarian grounds based on self-preservation, do you still want the NHS to survive?
I occasionally use the NHS myself under the logic as as the state forces me to contribute to it regardless of alternate arrangements I might make, I may as well use it to recoup at least some of my own money. In fact I am going to submit to its ‘tender cares’ tomorrow. Wish me luck!
I enjoy reading Iain Murray’s blog The Edge of England’s Sword but I fear he comes a cropper in his anti-drug legalisation screed today.
He attempts to refute the idea that the War on Drugs is every bit as big a disaster of social policy as Prohibition was back in the 1920s.
Excuse me, but the parallels between Prohibition and the War on Drugs are striking and compelling evidence in my view that the current approach to drugs needs to be changed. Criminalisation of drugs has swelled the ranks of organised crime, corrupted law enforcement bodies, artificially driven up the price of drugs to levels so high that addicts commit crimes to fuel their habits, and apart from anything else, is an assault on the core liberal idea that our bodies are our property, not that of the State.
In one paragraph that stands out, Murray writes:
“In any event, the main difference between the two is that society has decided it prefers alcohol legal (there are no polls about restoring alcohol prohibition because it’s such an outlandish suggestion), but is more convinced that drugs confer more harm than benefit overall.”
I love that use of the word “society”. In one fell swoop, logic and evidence are brushed aside. “Society” has “decided” booze can be legal but cannabis cannot. The argument seems to be that because we have had centuries of booze and developed customs to civilise its consumption, we can stick with the current approach, while drugs are relatively new and therefore easier to ban. Even if this were broadly true, longevity is not logic. Alcohol arguably causes far more damage to the fabric of “society” than drug use. Consider the amount of assaults perpetrated by people who are drunk, for example. Consider also issues such as worker absenteeism, chronic ill-health and premature death. Consider how once-brilliant athletes are turned into shells of their former selves through drink.
There is one issue which also comes into play here – The Welfare State. I have no doubt that much of the harm caused by drugs of all kinds is magnified by welfare dependency and the loosening of self discipline that goes with it. I am one of those libertarians who are wary of legalising drugs without first replacing State welfare with a more benign variety.
Mad cow disease (vCJD), foot-and-mouth, MMR, salmonella in eggs… the list goes on and on. The reality of life is that no one has a monopoly on insight, intelligence and information. Yet the state would have us believe that in their case when they say something, is somehow of a higher order compared to any other institution or individual. After all, it that was not the case, how could the fact the state backs its views with the threat of violence be justified?
Yet time and time again we are told in patronising tones that the state’s experts know best, to the extent the state is prepared to after our body chemistry regardless of our individual wishes. We are told for years “Of course British Beef is safe to eat. Our scientists tell us there is nothing to worry about and reports to the contrary are just scare-mongering”… only to discover it can in fact kill us in the most ghastly manner by boring holes in our brains .
Likewise, the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is still foisted on people by Britain’s national Health Service in spite of worries about potentially horrendous side effects. Fortunately, the culture of deference to authority has been breaking down for quite some time as the state finds itself dis-intermediated from the flow of information to people. As yet more information casting doubt upon the safety of MMR comes to light, those who decided to shun the state’s advice and err on the side of safety for their children are shown the wisdom of their ways.
Yet the important issue here is not ‘if it better to fluoridate water’ or ‘should I eat more folic acid’ or ‘should I immunise my children with single jabs or the three-in-one’ or ‘should I wear a seat belt’?’… but ‘Why do I tolerate the state and the experts on its payroll overriding my views on issues which relate directly to my body?’
The fact is fluoride probably does make for better teeth, folic acid for better health, MMR is usually safe and seat belts often save lives. But why on earth entrust these decisions to such a demonstrably fallible institution like the state? We all make mistakes, but the price of individual error is largely confined to the individual making the error or at least to his immediate family or associates… the price for the state making an error however is far wider and much harder to mitigate. When the advice the state gives us proves to be flawed, that can be disastrous, but they it actually makes its views on health as a force backed mandatory law, that should be regarded as intolerable.
In the case of MMR, single vaccines are privately available off the NHS, yet due to the fact people have their money appropriated to fund the NHS regardless of their wishes, the state reduces their ability to actually make meaningful choices independently. In much the same way, you make correctly deduce your children would be better educated either at home or at a private school, yet because the state takes your money and pours it into funding state schools anyway, it greatly reduces the real choice of less wealthy parents to actually opt out.
We are told we have all manner of free choices in the wonderful ‘representative’ democracy in which we live (pick any western country), yet as long as the state appropriates such a large chunk of the money we earn and depend upon to actualise our wishes, the reality is that for many, choice is an illusion as they struggle to manage what remains of their unapproapriated several property.
Related articles
It is a matter of private choice, not a matter of ‘public’ health, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Libertarian ‘Public Health’?, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
The totalitarian mindset, Sunday, June 16, 2002
I agree that Logan (see previous article) is almost certainly not a totalitarian. However I stand by my contention that there is indeed no such thing as ‘public health’ except for communicable diseases not because I disagree with his self evident statement that ‘The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease’ but that ‘health’ is not in fact legitimately ‘public’ except in the case of communicable disease (and possibly some mental illnesses as well) as it goes to who owns a person’s body.
Most other health related matters are essentially only legitimately private rather than public matters. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone spending non-appropriated monies (such as a philanthropic fund) to preach high and low the virtues of folate in bread/low fat diets/wearing seat belts/not smoking/not taking crack cocaine/wearing sensible shoes/eat more fish/eat less fish/avoid mad cow beef or whatever the health scare de jour is… provided the people being preached to ‘for their own good’ are free to respond with a loud yawn and a rude gesture if they are so inclined. Yes, it is legitimate to ‘educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate’… and to induce (not mandate) companies to produce folate bread… but it is not legitimate to mandate it and it was that I was objecting to.
To mass medicate, such as putting folic acid in bread or fluoride in water in such a way that people cannot realistically avoid changes to their body chemistry, is to suggest that the state and its experts actually have some over-riding ownership of everyone’s physical body and they may adjust its chemistry as the likes of Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand see fit. Now it that is not a totalitarian value then I don’t know what is. The issue here is not health but who owns your body!
Logan Spector from the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University takes issue with a previous Samizdata article
I am a libertarian and an epidemiologist, and with these perspectives I must take issue with the statement made by Perry de Havilland that, “Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’.” The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease, so your statement is nonsensical. Of course we can prevent chronic ailments like heart disease or diabetes (though they possibly have infectious etiologies, as is increasingly being suspected for an array of conditions). The question is how- through force or persuasion??
Now, my colleagues in the field are by and large statists who look first to government mandates to improve the public’s health. In fact one of my professors, Godfrey Oakley, is a prominent folic acid researcher and was instrumental in making folate supplementation mandatory. It would give you a pounding headache to hear the list of things he think should be taken care of by government fiat. But just because practitioners of public health have so far relied on coercion for good ends does not mean that non-coercive means are not available or should not be tried.
The first method for improving health, as you imply by your personal use of folic acid, is education. If undertaken by private groups health education is entirely consistent with libertarian principles, no matter how bitterly some segments of libertarianism dislike being told what to do (see www.lewrockwell.com for this perspective). It is, however insufficient to rely solely on individuals’ initiative in improving their health. Folic acid is needed during a critical period very early in pregnancy, before a woman knows she is pregnant. If folate is lacking, neural tube defects (such as spina bifida) can result. Would that every woman with the chance of conceiving were taking folate, but such is not that case.
Well, if it is legitimate to educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate, why would not the same apply to companies as well? U.S. bakeries put up almost no fight to the mandate that they supplement their bread with folate, mainly because the benefit was clear and the cost minimal. Had public health organizations gone directly to bakeries, rather than to the government, they would have had little problem convincing them to supplement. The companies would benefit by touting their altruism (thus negating their altruism but you get the idea), and the public would benefit from improved health. Note that if anyone objected to having folate in their bread, companies would be free to market folate-free bread.
I hope you don’t think that taking this position makes me a totalitarian.
Logan Spector
On 27th of May, two eminent medical professors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand are seriously peeved that the recommendations of the advisory scientific committee on nutrition (COMA) are not going to be supported by the government. Those recommendations are to require by law that all bread in the United Kingdom is fortified with folic acid. This is already mandatory in the USA. In their letter the government funded professors wrote:
We believe that the decision of the Food Standards Agency [not to accept the COMA conclusions] is a mistake and illustrates the structural weakness in our ability to make rational public health decisions. The problem goes further than folic acid. It affects our whole approach to public health.
The contemporary view is that public health is essentially an issue of personal choice. In fact, the essence of public health is that it is a collective strategy that does not require personal choice (it is just there for all to benefit from). At present, individual decisions relating to public health [emphasis added] are a separate issue. We need an agency that is mandated to consider public health in a rational, evidence-based manner, with the authority to recommend policy to government and monitor its implementation. We are, regrettably, far from this paradigm.
We hope that ministers will ignore the view of the Food Standards Agency and implement the strategy proposed by COMA, the Governments’s own scientific advisory committee
First off, let me say that I certainly agree that increasing ones intake of Folic acid has beneficial effects (I take a pill of the stuff myself every day). However that efficacy or otherwise of folic acid is utterly irrelevant. By what warped moral value does COMA and professors Wald and Hoffbrand have the right to decide that the entire population are going to be medicated by the state? There is only one person who has the right to decide if I will add chemicals to my body and that person is me. The only conceivable morally justified circumstances in which I might be medicated against my will is that of highly infectious dangerous diseases, on the theory that if I have smallpox (or whatever) then I would pose a clear threat to others.
Yet that is not the case here, and neither is it in the case of water fluoridation. Both are probably harmless and even beneficial yet it would seem that the morality of using the violence of the state to impose the judgement of technocrats like Wald and Hoffbrand does not even get a mention.
If because it is said to be objectively beneficial to force people to ingest certain chemicals, then why not also allow Wald and Hoffbrand to decide what the nations subjects will be required to eat and not eat? High fat low fibre MacDonald’s burgers? Why not just make them illegal and require all restaurants to serve state approved menus set by COMA? If these professors have no moral problem forcibly medicating millions of people every day ‘for their own good’ then why not try to reduce the incidence of heart disease by shutting down the burger joints and pizza parlours? Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’. My diet and supplements are none of Wald and Hoffbrand’s damn business. How dare they try to put chemicals in MY body without my personal and explicit permission?
Of course the totalitarian mindset demonstrated by these people, rooted in collectivist hubris and moral relativism, sees choice itself as irrational… morality does not even come into it. Yet even on the amoral utilitarian basis under which such people operate and to which they would required us to submit our very body chemistry, we all know how well the state’s retained scientists can be trusted regarding ‘public health’. Look at how well they did regarding ‘mad cow disease’.
Nurses, teachers and other state workers in the UK are about to be ghettoised
As a result of their being unable to afford to buy property in London, HM Government has ‘solved’ the problem by announcing that they are going to be coralled into shanty-towns consisting of factory-made pre-fabricated ‘homes’ (tin sheds and plastic boxes to you and I) to be erected on public land which will be set aside for the purpose.
I particularly love this bit of ‘Newspeak’ from the Housing Minister Lord Falconer:
“It’s comfortable, beautiful housing. I would like to see thousands built a year.”
Rumour has it that the public sector ‘tribes’ will be encouraged to earn extra income from tourists by performing native ritual dances, selling beads and arrow heads etc while said tourists tut, roll their eyes, agree that it’s all so terribly sad and that the government should do something aout it.
Britain’s worst-kept secret is now out in the very public domain. Chancellor Gordon Brown announced his annual budget today and, as widely-expected, has hiked up National Insurance (a type of payroll tax) in order to increase funding of the National Health Service.
This was called the ‘Budget For Health’ by the government. Whose health? Certainly not the health of the economy. The business sector will have to stump up a whopping £3.9 billion a year more in taxes in a desperate attempt by the government to placate its public sector supporters and defer the dark day when the NHS simply collapses.
And it probably will collapse in due course. The NHS is Britain’s version of Yasser Arafat; an odious, Soviet-inspired monstrosity that has caused countless deaths and yet is mysteriously exempt from anything even approaching a critical word. Its status among the British is that of Sacred Cow, nay Red Heiffer. It is the Holy of Holies, the state of which is the barometer by which every government is finally judged. It is hardly a surprise that the press roundly trumpets opinion poll results which overwhelmingly endorse tax rises to improve the NHS when an answer in the negative is probably more outrageous than supporting legalised child-prostitution. The left never miss an opportunity to hector the British public with the admonition that, if they want improved health care, they have to pay for it. I agree, of course. I just think they should cut out the middle-man.
But the cracks have been showing of late. Too many people have been travelling abroad for their health care treatment, forking out for private insurance or watching their elderly relatives expire on trolleys in dank state hospital corridors and you can’t keep that kind of disquiet from spreading. Everybody seems to know or sense that the NHS is crocked and beyond redemption but they are prepared to shut their eyes and wish very, very hard that the government will hose enough money at it to make it all wonderful, gleaming, efficient and keep it free.
It won’t work in the long-term or even the medium-term but the government is gambling that the massive cash boost will tide them over to the next election when they will be able to annouce that they have ‘saved’ the NHS and ensured its future as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. On the face of it, it is a dangerous gamble. The Labour government was elected on the promise that they had put behind them, for ever, their old ‘tax and spend’ policies and it is at least pragmatic to assume that they will be judged harshly for breaking their promise without delivering.
On the other hand, it might just fool ’em by providing a glimmer of ersatz hope. It is almost impossible to underestimate the sacred status of the NHS. The faith it is has traditionally inspired may prove a strong enough medicine to anaesthetise the public’s critical faculties and enable them to go on believing in the Easter Bunny.
In the meantime, we’re all going to get poorer. Poverty is bad for your health.
Several bloggers have reported on the story of a deaf lesbian couple who selected a deaf sperm donor to maximize the chance that ‘their’ daughter would be born deaf. And this is what indeed happened, producing perhaps the world’s first designer handicapped baby.
The way I see it, it is no better, and no different, than if these vile despicable sociopathic women had taken a child and jammed a sharp pencil in its ears to make it deaf. They have intentionally caused harm by any rational objective measure, they are merely using genetic predispositions, rather than sharpened pencils, to do it… it is not a random defect because they have loaded the dice to get the result they want and actually went looking for a donor with defective genes.
I hope the child grows up to hate them for what they did and to do harm back to them. In any reasonable society, the action of these ‘parents’ would be an objectively criminal act quite different from the tragedy of random birth defect. These vile creatures belong in jail for their de facto assault on ‘their’ child.
I am strongly in favour of genetic engineering but would regard creating sentient beings intentionally disabled as just as monstrous as what these evil women did by ‘selective’ breeding.
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