Link Tank 11/04

Still finding work for idle click-fingers.

Public Health's mirror image delusion - that everyone is as guilty as them

More scientists doubt the reported dangers of salt

Could there be anything more cruel than trans activists experimenting on children?

How to write a bullshit anti-vaping article (pic)

The general election explained with Lego

Schoolchildren banned from running in the playground

Russia unveils new state-funded fast food chain

How much ice you need to cool your beer, according to maths

Los Angeles bans homeless people living in cars, but only at night

Porn broke two police computers in China

Giant killer goldfish

Baseless Californian E-Cig Propaganda

Via my long-standing NorCal fellow jewel robber, David G, I thought you might like to see an example of the absurd propaganda Tobacco Free California is pumping out about e-cigs.

In his words, these ads are being aired "nightly/hourly on nearly all networks/channels daily, produced by taxpayer funds of $75 million", mostly as a result of some 'public health' lunatic - aptly called Chapman - equating harm reduction to an 'outbreak or epidemic'!

There is, of course, no scientific or epidemiological basis for this scaremongery whatsoever.

Fortunately, this was spotted early by a grass roots vaper who supplied an equal and opposite campaign site which messed up their social media efforts, and was therefore then promptly described as being industry-backed by a vacant journalist. Such is life when dealing with anti-smoking cretins and their useful idiots.

Always remember that we're on the side of the angels here, won't you? It's Chapman and his ilk who will be toasting on a pitchfork someday if there is any justice in this world.

NHS Scotland's Sick Policy

Jesus H Christ! How can so much odious and intolerant spite be included in a single article?

EXTRA support staff will be deployed to advise smokers against lighting up in hospital grounds after staff and patients were spotted puffing away just days after new rules were introduced.

Alert! Smokers have been spotted in the vicinity, release the hounds!

And, erm, extra staff? Don't people working in the NHS keep telling us they've got no money and the whole institution is falling apart at the seams?

Professor Alison McCallum, director of public health and health policy at NHS Lothian, said: “We are grateful to the Evening News for highlighting this, enabling us to bring in additional support such as increasing the number of smoking cessation advisers and deploying in these areas over the coming days and weeks."

Oh I see. So they were totally skint until the Evening News told them that smokers were in the car park, at which point the magic money tree began pumping out £20 notes. Or, as is more likely, are funds being diverted from healthcare for the purposes of a pointless witch hunt?

Alison Johnstone, Lothian Green MSP, said: “The ban on smoking at NHS hospitals hardly needs explain[ing], it’s there for a reason ...

No, Alison, it does need explaining because it is not illegal (yet) to smoke outdoors, simply for the reason that there is no conceivable health threat. You do remember, don't you, that smoking was banned indoors because of the danger of mythical passive smoking from a series of {cough}thorough peer-reviewed studies? You're a politician, you surely must remember when bar staff were all of a sudden the most precious people in the nation ... for at least a few months until they were completely forgotten again.

So what reason, exactly, is there for banning smoking in the open air?

“Anyone visiting a hospital, be it staff, patient or visitor, shouldn’t have to pass through a haze of cigarette smoke on their way inside.”

Simple. Place smoking shelters away from entrances and smokers will use them. Problem solved. You're a clever girl, you can work that out for yourself, can't you?

The move – which has been introduced as part of plan to create a tobacco-free generation by 2034 – also bans patients and staff from smoking in their cars on hospital ­property.

For the education of any bemused alien life forms who might be scanning our internet, these are cars which are allowed on NHS property.

And this is a cigarette - which is banned for polluting the lungs of hospital visitors - being smoked ... in a car. I've highlighted it in red in case you can't see it.

Turn the spaceships round, fellas, we're not worth conquering, believe me.

But it's fitting to leave the last word to the architect of this bonanza of astonishingly mean-spirited and malicious pecksniffery north of the border.

[Sheila Duffy, chief executive of health charity ASH Scotland] said: “We want people to understand why the policy is there in the first place. At the moment, seeing smokers is a part of life but that is changing."

Got that smokers? The policy is to make sure no-one ever has to see you. So go home, place a bell outside your door, and let's hope society can forget your sorry existence.

Or, as one commenter to the article put it ...

Clearly a polite request approach isn't working and if the health board isn't prepared to enforce it then they may as well say that all smokers are welcome.

Heaven forbid that smokers - who have paid taxes to pay for the NHS just like everyone else, plus £12bn per year in duty over and above that - should ever be welcome at a hospital, eh?

Truly these people disgust me, may God rot every last one of them.

Mark Their Words, WTO

So, France is the latest country to join in the dunderheaded political mass hysteria of utterly pointless plain packaging. Except that they've added an insurance policy to the legislation in the event - the certain event, that is - that it doesn't work.

French MPs on Friday passed a government-backed proposal to force cigarette-manufacturers to use plain packets without logos, identical in all respects apart from a small mention of their name.

They also voted to impose a ban on smoking in cars, for an obligation for shops to check ID, transparency on lobbying by the industry and restrictions on where Tabacs can be situated. And then there is this.

An extra tax on cigarette manufacturers if their turnover either rises or fails to fall less that three per cent, the government's target for the reduction in sales

It's almost like they have admitted defeat before they have started. Plain packaging is the only measure amongst these which they can vaguely claim to be about driving down smoking prevalence, so they are insuring their stupidity with a tax, just in case.

This is because it is well known by all tobacco controllers that the only device that they can truly claim - without fear of dispute - to be proven to reduce smoking prevalence is duty/taxation, as ASH's APPG Chair Paul Burstow explained to us just a couple of weeks ago.

"If a tobacco levy is introduced, the tobacco industry will have to decide whether to pass on to consumers some, or all, of the cost in higher prices. That would of course have some public health benefits, as price increases are known to be the single most effective policy lever in reducing smoking prevalence"

We have to ask ourselves, then, why it is that governments are faffing around with a policy such as plain packaging - where the efficacy is hotly disputed - when they could just go for something that they know will work. Well, that's if they actually do want there to be less smoking, of course - the fact that state treasuries profit like a motherfucker from smokers tends to cast doubt on their motives somewhat, I find.

All this is very interesting in light of the fact that one of the key arguments being used by the 36 countries objecting to plain packaging via the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is that there are other options that could be employed to achieve a reduction in smoking for all ages.

Or, as the WTO rules put it (emphases mine).

Unnecessary obstacles to trade can result when (i) a regulation is more restrictive than necessary to achieve a given policy objective, or (ii) when it does not fulfil a legitimate objective. A regulation is more restrictive than necessary when the objective pursued can be achieved through alternative measures which have less trade-restricting effects, taking account of the risks non-fulfilment of the objective would create.

What Burstow has told the UK parliament is that there is - indeed - something far more effective than plain packaging, and that it's name is taxation. What France is admitting, too, is that if - as we can expect from the evidence from Australia - plain packaging doesn't work to reduce prevalence by an arbitrary 3%, they will resort to something that they know will work, taxation.

They couldn't make a better case for those objecting to plain packs at the WTO if they tried. I do hope the lawyers acting on behalf of those 36 countries are noting all this down, because it is quite clear that there are, indeed, "alternative measures which have less trade-restricting effects" which don't involve stealing billions of dollars of intellectual property from legal businesses like plain packaging does.

They need only quote the politicians and policy detail of the daft countries who are determined to try something stupid before doing something that works.

If It's Good Enough For Them ...

I'm sure you will have seen round-ups of this year's best April Fool spoof stories earlier this week, but for my money New Zealand's Taxpayers Union outdid them all.

They issued a press release which was absurd yet vaguely plausible; and funny while also emphasising how the public's tax receipts are abused - similarly to over here - to influence and corrupt governments without our consent.

The Taxpayers’ Union has announced its intention to pursue taxpayer-funding to support its advocacy of value for money from every tax dollar. Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director, Jordan Williams, says: 

“Since its inception in October 2013, the Taxpayers’ Union has relied solely on donations and membership subscriptions to allow us to expose government waste and ensure taxpayers receive value for money for every tax dollar spent.” 

“Over the past eighteen months we have come up against sophisticated taxpayer-funded lobby groups such as ASH, Fish & Game, the Health Promotion Agency, anti-sugar group FIZZ, Generation Zero and even the Council of Trade Unions and Business NZ. Combating their calls for a high-tax future for New Zealanders has in itself been taxing on our own finances.” 

“It has become clear that what is needed is another taxpayer-funded lobby group to save taxpayers from the groups they are forced to fund.”

And the glorious denouement ...

“Today we have lodged an application to receive funding from Treasury to become a taxpayer-funded lobby group to oppose the other taxpayer-funded lobby groups, who in turn lobby taxpayer-funded bureaucrats, politicians and themselves.”

Congrats to the NZ TPU for using an annual occasion in April to ridicule a system which takes the piss out of us all 365 days of the year.

Marvellous.

H/T Manx Gent via email

Link Tank 04/04

To read before the rugby starts.

Ban first, think later

Inside a nicotine megafactory (pic)

"A stultifying blanket of bureaucracy, suspicion and fear"

Porn is not coming for our sex lives

Doctors, fed up of being treated like priests? Stop acting like them

Don’t use Nicorette QuickMist. Give up safely

Huge support for liberalising alcohol laws in Ontario

Transport from the world of Thunderbirds

Soda Stream introduces machine to carbonate cocktails

Fast food is the perfect post-workout meal

Animal junkies

Chapman: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Simon Chapman has this week been sharing his knowledge, wisdom, and jaw-dropping hypocrisy.

Careers are often built on lifetime commitment to particular phases of evidence. But if the evidence changes, it is absolutely critical for public trust in the integrity of public health that we acknowledge the facts have changed and, accordingly, that we have changed our minds too. 

[...] 

Two illustrations of the advance of junk and low-quality science are the resilience and influence of climate change denialism, and the current efforts by e-cigarette interest groups to claim that e-cigarettes have revolutionary potential to make smoking history. 

The interest groups behind these two major issues are succeeding in building momentum that may spread to challenge decades of public health and safety legislation.

So, erm, 'experts' must change if the evidence changes, but e-cigarettes threaten salaries and decades of lazy, policy-driven dogma, so they must be fought. Got it.

Further on, lesson 7 speaks of the importance of people in his profession listening to the public.

Ordinary people can make amazing advocates, and we should work with them far more. They bring a compelling authenticity to an issue.

While Lesson 8 stresses the importance of social media and engaging with people.

The internet has utterly revolutionised our lives. And utterly transformed advocacy. There are simply massive global participation rates in social media. Anyone in public health who is not part of this is the equivalent of a scholar in the Gutenberg era who declined to show interest in the potential of books.

All of which is very strange. You see, he is preaching this sage advice to up and coming public health advocates, but does the very opposite himself, as he boasted in January.

Blocking is a bit like putting a sticker on your mailbox saying “no junk mail accepted”, except that unlike with junk mail, it works! 

The concept of an internet troll is unavoidably subjective: what one person regards as hostile or inflammatory can be genuinely intended by the sender as an attempt to engage in debate. But having a Twitter account is not an obligation to engage with anyone seeking to do this

So what Chappers is saying is that social media is brilliant for engaging with the public, and ordinary people should be listened to. Except if the ordinary people disagree with his beliefs, in which case shut down social media avenues of engagement and avoid contact at all costs.

What a tool.