Pictured staggered over from here, via Amusing Bunni's birthday party.
I'm sure it was only yesterday I read that one beer a day was officially good for you. The dose has to be absolutely precise because two beers a day and your head goes lumpy. Same newspaper.
If there was any truth in that, I would, by now, have grown at least one extra entire head. Which would have advantages - cigarette in one, drink in the other. I'd just need to grow one more to deal with the salt-saturated chips deep-fried in lard and I'd be happy. Terrifyingly ugly, but happy. I could also hide in alleyways and ask passers-by the time with one head while telling them the time with another.
Actually, that could be a fun new game which might be better than my previous failures - Deathmatch Golf and Anarchist Chess. You need two people and one dark alley. When a poor sap comes along, one of you emerges slightly from the shadows and says 'Excuse me, do you know the time?'
The other remains unseen on the other side of the alley and just calls out the time. Then the first one says 'Thanks' and fades back into the shadows.
Just around the corner, you set up a somewhat overpriced emergency dry-cleaner's.
But I digress. Back to the Demon Drink.
The headline:
Two glasses of wine or beer a day 'doubles the risk' of mouth cancer
The first paragraph:
Drinking two large glasses of wine or two strong pints of beer a day triples the risk of developing mouth cancer, according to a new Government campaign.
Boosting the scare within seconds. If anyone believes any of this crap, then they will never be subcontracted on any of my projects. I have closed off subcontract options on entire institutes for less.
So what is the real risk of mouth cancer? Simon Cooke has already looked it up and it's just above 2 in 100,000 and it has been the same since 1971. I was eleven in 1971 and drinking no booze at all. My efforts since (and they have been strenuous) have made no difference at all to the figures. Nothing has tripled or doubled, nothing has changed at all.
SC notes that the highest of this small risk is among Pakistani men. Oh listen, is that the sound of a thousand Righteous anuses (ani?) in a display of Olympic standard simultaneous puckering? They will call it racist. I will call it biology. Ignore biology in the name of equality and you have rickets and skin cancer and all sorts to deal with. Equality costs the NHS billions.
If I go out into the sunshine with a black friend here, it won't affect him at all but I can turn into Lobster Man even this far north. Equality is a fine idea but it must not override biology.
Pakistan is mostly - not entirely - Muslim. No alcohol. Their bodies developed not experiencing it and not knowing how to deal with it. This is not harmful in itself. When they come here, a place where we love anything fermented, a few will adopt our ways and culturally that's good. Biologically, it's a disaster. Their children will grow up here and (if allowed) will develop a tolerance for the booze but it's too late for the adults.
So let's double that risk from 2 in 100,000 to 4 in 100,000. Scared yet?
Let's triple it from 2 in 100, 000 to 6 in 100, 000. Surely you're scared now? I mean, what are your chances of being in the 99,994 per 100, 000 who do not get throat cancer? Oh, you must be petrified. Let me clean out your dunks cupboard, for safety's sake. You'll thank me one day but I'll be a long way away just in case you work out the scam.
Under the deal, drink producers and retailers, including Diageo, Carlsberg and Majestic Wine, have pledged to provide clear unit labelling, support awareness campaigns and develop a new sponsorship code on responsible drinking.
Ah. As with the tobacco industry, the drinks industry is trying the appeasement approach. So there will shortly be horrible pictures on booze and the price will be out of everyone's reach (except MPs because we subsidise theirs) and the borders will be as sealed against booze as against tobacco (but not illegal immigrants, guns or drugs) and the pub closures will accelerate and the pubs will blame anything but the drinking ban. It's the price of tea and biscuits, the supermarkets sell them cheaper. They have cheesy biscuits on sale cheaper than water!
Meanwhile their ex-customers will make their own arrangements. Just as the anti-tobacco template has rolled out, the resistance template will follow. Fight them? Why? These idiots are easily circumvented. The established businesses don't want your custom so set up your own places. Forget them. They threw you out, remember?
Non-smokers will soon be forming their own Drinky-Drinkies and when they ban those kebabs and chips, there will spring up Drinky-Eaties too. Hopefully with proper onion bhajis and not those damn supermarket dumpling things. Bhajis are not meant to be oven cooked. Real ones are deep fried and are actually less fattening because they are not full of stodge and are actually mostly onion. Whoops - personal prejudice digression.
Yes, there will be Smoky-Drinkies and Drinky-Drinkies and Drinky-Eaties all over the place soon. New ones, and new combinations, as each successive pleasure is banned. Eventually they will merge and we'll need a shorter name for them because Smoky-Drinky-Eaty-Coffee-Salty-etc is going to get a bit unwieldy.
Perhaps we could just call them 'pubs'. By then, nobody else will be using the name anyway.
19 comments:
Funny, innit, how minds think alike. Frank D has emitted something similar, although couched in different terms. Your argument is, essentially, that we will find other ways which circumvent the powers-that-be. Frank's is that no one believes a word the zealots say any more. Funnily enough, the Bolton Smokers Club has also made a similar statement, except that the same idea is expressed in terms of macro-economics. That is, for a long time, the 'purchasing power' of smokers (and drinkers etc) has been being transferred to ASH ET AL (including all the NGOs, Royal Colleges, etc). These people have been spending the money which rightly belongs to smokers and drinkers. But these people who have been spending the money which has been stolen from smokers and drinkers, produce NOTHING except words. They do no actual work for the benefit of the community at all, not even a tune or two. They are leaches, pure and simple.
Next stop total prohibition, and we all know what a success that was, don't we? Didn't alcohol consumption actually rise during those years?
Drinky-Eaties. Meantime, restaurant and cafe trade suffering from smoke bans, salt bans, sugar bans and trans-fat bans will claim it's discount food at the grocery store the problem and politicians will hone in on minimum pricing, while ignoring the obvious.
I found this amusing.
Medical Daily
"Facebook, Twitter Are Harder to Resist Than Cigarettes, Alcohol"
via http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/05/2247204/study-finds-social-media-harder-to-resist-than-cigarettes-alcohol?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29
What I would like to know is the scientific evidence for this? Just interviewing oral cancer patients as to if they drink wine or beer and how much and then assuming a correlation, which wouldn't surprise me, is junk science. Actually, I bet it's just someone's best guess. It's utter bollox of course. Alcohol consumption in the UK continues to fall. This is because it is so damned expensive!
Hi Leg Iron! That piccy did class up my blog b-day Party quite a bit!
Thanks for the shout out. I raised a few in honor of all bloggers who expose the
nanny state nuttiness! Have fun at the pub.
PS I hadn't seen the after dark site of CB yet, funny stuff, I'll have to make some ;-)
This self-righteous crap is all about money and cost. Since the twats have overwhelmed our scarce resources and overly generous World Health Service, free to all there are these"initiatives" aimed purely at a vain attempt to reduce demand. The irony is that for every life "saved" thousands more are imported every day! Stupidity, the first most necessary quality in those seeking power over others.
Leg-Iron,
Bang right on the bhaji front! 100%. I got some cheap from the supermarket recently and my wife refused. And she was right. They ain't the same thing.
The BBC have at least one if not two scares featured in the news bulletins every morning. They also seem to fit the scares to the radio station listener profiles by altering the topic matter of slightly altering the message.
This morning it was smoking in cars whilst children are present. The Welsh assembly seems to think people will stop doing when they realise they are poisoning their children but if they don't they will introduce a ban. How enlightening.
I'm not aware of any of my friends and acquaintances have keeled over due to exposure to fag smoke. I grew up in the 60's and 70's and people smoked then. I'm still alive. Smoking was carried out everywhere. Definitely in cars, buses, trains, airplanes and ships.
What poison anyway? Is there any poison involved?
I also managed to avoid brain damage from car exhausts. I'd imagine a lot of people reading your blog will be of a similar age and we are all doing pretty much okay.
How about we have a rule that says if doctors, scientists, newsreaders, journalists, politicians, environmentalists, social workers and any other such tyrants make any other false, stupid and ludicrous claims they get deprived of the things they complain about or if they don't partake in it they are made to?
I may need to lie done in a dark room for a wee while now.
TediousTantrums
Of course the dose has to be utterly precise, the perils of two drinks is the dark secret of the Inebriati:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zj50DmBFp0
Just spent the weekend in Amsterdam, canals frozen over and my weather app telling me it's -8 degrees but "feels like" -15. Thankfully, I am in a land of liberty. Tucked in a corner of a warm pub with an ashtray on my table. Enjoying cold lager, long conversations without any enforced trips outside in the perishing cold. It is a pity I have to spend 45 minutes in the air to get their when I should be able to wander down to the pub at the bottom of the road. But I get the feeling I will be spending more time in Dutch pubs this year than British ones.
"...anuses (ani?)..."
That's an interesting one I'd never considered before. Mind you, I suppose one doesn't have cause to consider "anus" in the plural very often. Is there a collective for anuses / ani I wonder? Herd? Gaggle? Murder? Collegiate? I'll have to think on that one...
"If I go out into the sunshine with a black friend here, it won't affect him at all but I can turn into Lobster Man..."
Not strictly true. Some years ago when I was living in the south of Greece, some friends came to visit for a couple of weeks.One of them, Sue, who is a quite dark skinned Jamaican Brit, got rather sunburned and had to slather sun block on herself. You could actually see that she was quite red under the black, if you know what I mean. Surprised me.
As for the OP, it's just the same old same old, isn't it. I just hope they'll get fed up with churning out this identical crap day in day out. Surely it must bore them? It certainly bores me.
There is so much left unsaid.
1) If most of those cancers occur in drinkers, the 2/100,000 might be the drinkers' rate.
2) A relative risk increase of 2(doubling) says nothing about the actual risk and only tells us that, if a drinker gets that cancer, there is a 50% probability drinking was not the cause. There is a 50% probability the cancer would have happened anyway.
3) There is no indication of the median age of death; if it is 85, I might decide that getting shit-faced for over 65 years is worth the 50% chance of a 2/100,000 chance of death before then.
4) There is no regard given to a dose-response relationship.
Gary K.
There was also a press release regarding pregnant women and the demon drink straight facedidly read out by nooscaster on BBC Scotchland this morning, no references, no links, nothing, just drink and be very unmerry.
What bollocks.
I don't know id straightfacidly is a word, if if isn't I'm copyrighting it.
Just as smoking, which was in decline up to the smoking ban, is on the rise again. They never learn.
There's a concerted attack on Facebook at the moment by the MSM. Now they've killed the pubs, we're talking online and it was the conversation in the pub they really wanted to kill.
I was thinking of UK sunshine. We feeble gingers should really be nocturnal.
It's not that long since hot tea was THE cause of all oral cancers. Then smoking was THE cause. Eventually it'll be breathing that causes it.
Post a Comment