Wednesday 12 May 2010

Crying Wolf.

It's only fair to let the Toriator and the Libdeminatrix settle in before letting loose at them so I'll take the night off. I hope they're still there in the morning. This lot don't have such fun names to play with so there'll be some experimentation over the coming weeks. They'll have to earn their new titles. I'll probably stick with Cameroid because as Prime Monster, he's certain to be a pain in the arse.

Some Lib Dem MPs are muttering about wrecking the coalition at their next party conference. They are idiots. There are now six Lib Dem Ministers and their party has a say in what the Government does. Would they rather go back to the irrelevancy the Clegginator has just hauled them from? Cameroid has the PM job now so if the Lib Dems try to take their ball and go home, they lose six Ministers, they lose all say in policy decisions and the Tories will be in government. Minority administration, sure, but the Oily Fish has run one of those in Scotland and he's made it work. Only the Lib Dems lose - and they'll lose a lot - if the party forces Clegg to pull out.

A coalition with Labour and a rag-tag band of little parties would have lasted all of five minutes and would have precipitated another election at which all the Rainbow Warriors would have suffered badly. Even Count Mandelstein knew that which is why he has let the Rainbow Coalition slip quietly under the water.

The SNP and Plaid Cymru, even by hinting they were going to bend over and take it from Labour, have already caused a collective sharp intake of breath across Wales and Scotland and we don't like doing that here. It's too damn cold.

Besides, do the Lib Dems really believe they would be better off with Labour? The Gorgon wasn't interested in what his own ministers thought and would smear and discredit anyone who so much as disagreed. How do the Lib Dems imagine they would have been regarded? Now the Gorgon has gone but Count Mandelstein remains, as does Darth Campbell and all the rest of them. The Gorgon was not the worst of them, only the most public.

I'll give them a little while. I might wait hours and hours, we'll see. They will need to show they can resist Righteous lies and made-up statistics, which the Righteous have set about proclaiming already. It's the same old stuff. It's still not true and it's obviously not true and that is what makes it dangerous.

The ludicrous assertions on smoking, drinking, salt, fat and so on are so utterly absurd now that people are laughing at them. They are also laughing at other advice, such as 'do not drink' on a bottle of bleach. In the average person's mind, all experts are now proven liars so none of their advice is worth a damn. Looking straight at the sun can damage your eyes? Nah. Yes, people, it can. That particular bit of advice is sound. But how can you tell?

Put yourself in the average working man's place, the man who has not had a life of learning and in most cases, doesn't want it. That is not a disparaging remark. The trouble with 'equality' is that it assumes everyone wants the same things. Some people just want to earn enough to be able to live a pleasant and quiet life. In fact, that's all I want. I'm no use at physical work so I do it using my brain. It's not really different in the end, I just use a different method to get the same result as a bricklayer or a plumber.

A side-effect of being a bricklayer is that you can tell, just by looking, whether a wall is going to stand up or fall down. I can't. A side-effect of what I do is that I can tell which health advice is good and which is not. Bricklayers can't. So when it reaches the utterly absurd and the blatant and easily-proven lie, which it has, they have no option but to regard all such advice as junk.

I used to work with probiotics, now I work more with prebiotics for reasons too dull and uninteresting to relate. In the early 1990's there were loads of products sold as 'probiotics' and some of them were good. Most of them were junk and did nothing at all, they were just 'bandwagon' products from people who didn't give a damn about proving anything, they just wanted a quick buck. Because of that, the whole probiotic industry and research into it became associated with junk science and scammers. There were some that worked, some based on sound research and careful development, but among the many that were junk or outright fraudulent, they were lost. Nobody other than those of us who worked with them could tell which was which.

The same is happening with health advice now. There are so many absolutely absurd pronouncements that people are starting to ignore all advice. The experts are lying to them. So they believe none of it.

If anyone in a position of power ever finds this backwater and has the attention span to get this far, listen up. All those fakecharities and insane control freaks are not mere inconveniences for smokers, drinkers and foodies. They are very, very dangerous. They hide serious advice under a mountain of their petty personal prejudices and that means the serious advice is ignored along with their blatant lies.

Go into Tesco. Find a 500 ml can of own-brand lager. Cheap, isn't it? Find a two litre bottle of own brand water. That two litres of water is not only cheaper than four cans of beer, it is cheaper than one can of beer.

Alcohol cheaper than water? Every single person in this country can walk into Tesco and see that is a lie. Absolutely everyone. Then they see that a GP apparently cannot understand simple arithmetic. Respect for the medical profession? Those oafs can't even compare prices! So when they start going on about other health issues, nobody believes a word of it. Even the ones that are true.

So don't be surprised when you tell them an Ebola pandemic is coming, and they don't believe you.

There was a story when I was a child about The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

I bet they don't tell kids about that any more.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for someone to read it out in the next Parliament. If they can get rid of their fake charities and stop listening to the Righteous, it would do more than increase civil liberties.

It would save lives.

26 comments:

PJH said...

This lot don't have such fun names to play with so there'll be some experimentation over the coming weeks.

Cameregg of the ConDem(n) coalition?

Mrs Rigby said...

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

They don't learn that at school any more, it's old fashioned, and sexist and ... probably cruel to animals too!

"... do the Lib Dems really believe they would be better off with Labour?"
Some of them have very shot memories, the same were condemning the rainbow idea too. They didn't really want to be in government, they're too happy complaining about who is in government.

Gruniad's going to be fun, isn't it?

Mrs Rigby said...

ermm, typo - short memories!

none said...

I've already claimed "Chuckle Brothers"....

Rodin's "the kiss" seemed to be the most apposite image on my Mr Hyde blog.

They are truly gay... spawn of Blur.

...I'd rather have Griffin in No 10 than these gayboys.

It's going to be "nice", but ultimately like a wee dose of the skitters.

Corrugated Soundbite said...

That's no typo, Mrs R ;-)

Billy The Fish said...

Probiotics, sir...

These vile-tasting little bottles of Benecol yoghurt drink that my missus insists I neck every morning. Please tell me they're useless so I can stop taking the wretched things with a clear conscience!

Mark Wadsworth said...

Yeah, well, agreed (I'll give it a couple of days before they start actually lying again - no way will they lift the pub smoking ban, which rests on a Big Lie), and if I were a Lib Dem I'd be over the moon, surely better to get a fifth of your manifesto implemented while in government than none of it while in opposition.

But I'm still a bit disappointed, I thought you'd found a photo' of a wolf that was crying. Had you titled your post Crying 'wolf', then this confusion would not have arisen.

Crumpled Fiveskin said...

" PJH said...
This lot don't have such fun names to play with so there'll be some experimentation over the coming weeks.

Cameregg of the ConDem(n) coalition?"

I'm going to call them "CumClog" the "ConDom Coalition" - the Tories requiring a LibDem prophylactic to fuck the country up the flange with, after it's been repeatedly raped up the shitter by Fascist Labour.

Anonymous said...

LI,

OK, plain and simple: if you don't have an unfortunate genetic tendency (ie. if you're average), how many ciggies and units of alcohol can you have per day/week and not run too much of a risk of pegging out at 60?

JohnRS said...

I'll just stick with CallMeDave and WotsIsName, as to the party name - it's Dem Tories of course!!

I reckon if DemTories take an axe to the quangocracy in the next 2 or 3 months then there's hope for us all. If it hasnt happened by then you can be pretty sure they've been got at by the Righteous and it's time to buy trade goods and weapons.

Pogo said...

I'm a physicist rather than biologist, but the numbers don't care. I don't know about the ciggies, but for alcohol, from what I've seen... Tea totallers have a shorter life-expectancy than moderate drinkers and in order for a male drinker to get back to that of a tea-totaller he needs to drink approx 63 units a week. Assuming a normal Gaussian distribution would therefore suggest that 31 - 32 units a week is the optimum for life expectancy.

IIRC from looking at an american medical school report from a few years ago, you have to be up into the region of 100+ units a week in order to start doing any real, noticeable short-term damage.

Anonymous said...

Osborne's budget will be out at the end of June, and by then, he'll have a pretty good idea of the scale of the books.

With sustained pressure from the blogosphere and pressure groups, perhaps he might be persuaded to curtail government funding of these 'charities'.

Then again, it will be Lansley briefing him on health matters - he who pushed for swine flu vaccinations programmes in schools.

Hmmm.

Anonymous said...

"scale of the horror of the books"!

Leg-iron said...

PJH - Cameregg is a good one. In keeping with modern parlance they could also be DaNi.

The ConDem tag is already in use by the lefties. Apparently one of them can still think a little.

Leg-iron said...

Mrs R - maybe it wasn't a typo...

Leg-iron said...

Oops - CR got there first.

Leg-iron said...

Lutney Chocker - let's see what they do for a few days. So far, no disasters.

Brown started off with a foot and mouth leak from a Government lab and went downhill from there. DaNi will have to work hard to top that.

Leg-iron said...

Billy the Fish - if you don't have gut problems, you don't need them. how are you with apples? Can't say much because the base work is commercial but I can say that I planted two apple trees in my garden last year.

Granny was right. An apple a day...

Leg-iron said...

Mark - Big wolves don't cry.

Leg-iron said...

Crumpled Fiveskin - 'CumClog' sounds like the sort of thing a 'ConDom' does. Nicely linked.

Leg-iron said...

Anon - it's still down to your personal tastes and metabolism. Everyone is affected differently.

Even people who look exactly the same. One might drink a bottle of whisky and still be able to type, another might drink half a beer and be unable to see.

Work out what best suits you and find your own limit, and decide whether whatever you enjoy doing is worth the risks you're told it carries.

You can live on lentils and tofu and possibly live longer - the question is, will you enjoy it? I might die before retirement but I have to remember that the Gorgon has spent my pension already.

So I might not live into the bathchair and adult nappy years because I've enjoyed myself to death. It's a risk I'm willing to take.

Cancer and most other diseases are mostly down to bad luck, you know. The most perfectly-Righteous lifestyle cannot make you immune.

Just live your life in the way that you enjoy. The whole planet might explode next week, you know.

Leg-iron said...

John R - DemTories is a good one. It's what Liverpudlians have called them for years. Dey do dough don't dey dough?

Leg-iron said...

Pogo - so if I drink 63 units a week I'd last as long as a teetotaler?

I'm sure I can cut back to that.

Pogo said...

LI - according to the Assoc of Actuaries, yes. :-)

Why would you want to cut back? We're all going to be sitting in the dark knitting tofu as a television replacement if that prat Huhne has his way... Not much to miss really.

Billy The Fish said...

Thanks for the advice, L.I.
I'm not much of a one for fruit, but I'll take an apple over these vile things.
I don't like milk or yoghurt anyway, and I'm only taking them 'cos the missus buys them. No gut probs here; slightly high cholesterol, but it's that anyway with or without the help of Benny Coll...

none said...

" Pogo said...
Assuming a normal Gaussian distribution would therefore suggest that 31 - 32 units a week is the optimum for life expectancy."

I think you're muddling correlation with causality... surely it's the biscuit versus kebab continuum?

[strokes chin... hmmmmmmmm]

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