rejection letter

Dear Spammer,

Thank you for your email of 29/03/2011. Unfortunately we will not be downloading your .zip file and infecting our computer with whatever malware it contains.

May we offer you some advice for future scams that might lead to a higher success rate?

1) Use correct grammar. This may sound pedantic but "a spam WAS sent" or "a spam HAS BEEN sent" would be more appropriate use of English than "a spam IS sent". Equally you should have signed off with "Thank you for YOUR attention".

2) We applaud your ingenuity for referring to spam in a spam email in an effort to make it seem that it isn't in fact a spam email. It is a great device and you should expand this for your next iteration of spam emails.

3) Telling us that our password has been changed for safety is a very easy lie to expose. All we would need to do is log in to our Bookface account and check the veracity of this claim.

4) Performing the simple task in 3) above then renders your next sentence also utterly irrelevant as we now know for certain that we do not need to download your malware.

5) As a side issue our current Bookface password is 45 characters long containing upper case, lower case and numerical characters that were randomly generated. We think that level of complexity would prevent all but the most serious of attempts to hack into our account. Anyone so determined will probably find the record of our toilet habits and hangover complaints checklists more than a little dull.


Once again may we thank you for your attempt to infect our machine with malware and wish you every success in your future career.

manwiddicombe

explosive results

When the government said it was going to reduce youth unemployment by increasing the amount of vocational training I didn't think this would be one of the courses .. .. ..

ego soothing measures

If you've got a spare hour you could do worse than watch this presentation by Richard A. Muller in which he discusses climate change.

The thing that the talk highlights is that while the developing world continues to develop, and he believes that they should, anything that the rest of the world does to cut emissions is ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, compared to the potential growth in China and India, the 20% cut in emissions that Western governments are trying to force on their populations is a drop in the ocean.

Therefore the only purpose of the range of measures we are being encouraged to adopt is to make us feel better about ourselves - ecosmugness if you will - because they unlikely to make the slightest bit of difference.

If you have the time it's worth watching the whole thing.

mythical

Research shows a dramatic fall in the number of people who believe that children exist.



Dramatic results from a survey carried out by a leading charitable organisation published today show that the number of people who believe in children has fallen to 13% of the population, the lowest figure since records began. The scientists behind the study postulate that the belief may die out entirely unless the government steps in and intervenes.

"What we're seeing is traditional beliefs being replaced by newer ones" said Helen Lovejoy, spokesperson for the charity involved. "People used to believe in children, santa, and faeries at the bottom of the garden but that has now shifted to homeopathic medicine, the omnipotence of celebrity and the healing power of stones. Unless the government is prepared to do something right now to halt the decline the belief in children may vanish altogether."

Aging pop star Paul Gadd was unavailable for comment.

de ja vu

From the BBC:

A bid to get the government to take a tougher stance on alcohol advertising in the UK has been given the backing of health experts. Tory backbencher Dr Sarah Wollaston will put forward a private member's bill next week to limit the exposure of children to alcohol marketing.

Dr Wollaston believes a French law known as Loi Evin could be adapted for the UK. The legislation was introduced in 1991 and bans alcohol promotion through mediums such as television and social media, while allowing it elsewhere.

Professor Gerard Hastings, a social marketing expert at Stirling University, told the British Medical Journal the law had helped to reduce alcohol consumption in France. Ram Moorthy, of the BMA's board of science, agreed, urging MPs from all parties to support the bill.

The BMA are supporting this as a means to an end. They don't actually want a ban to protect children, they want a total ban on alcohol advertising. When they called for that 18 months ago the public either ignored or rejected the idea.

Gerard Hastings has form. Over the years he has variously campaigned against smoking, alcohol and fast food advertising. I noticed him in 2009 but his involvement goes back much further than that. Back in 1999 the The Cancer Research Campaign's Centre for Tobacco Control Research, Gerard's employers at the time, aimed to

recruit smokers from across the UK to provide "intelligence" on the tobacco industry

Are there any drinkers who still think that they will not be treated in the same way that smokers have been treated? Really?

just fuck off Shenker!

Alcohol Concern are at it again. They have just issued a press release about the cost of alcohol. I could fisk the whole lot but it, like the release, would get repetitive. The continual reference to the phrase "pocket money prices" in an effort to make it gain traction, the constant comparison of the price of generic alcoholic product against branded cola product, it's all the same shit as usual. Except this cracking quote from the findings of their survey

Armed with the average British pocket money of £5.89, you could purchase eight litres of cider, containing 33.6 units - enough for a man to drink more than his recommended daily limit everyday of the week.

How many grown men, over 18 and legally allowed to purchase alcohol, still get pocket money from their parents for fucks sake? How much do your parents give you each week Don?

These organisations are rapidly becoming a parody of themselves and it's long past the time the government should have stopped giving them our money.

Don Shenker, Chief Executive of Alcohol Concern, said: "The figures we've chosen to issue today demonstrate that alcohol remains available for pocket money prices and will continue to do so unless the Government introduces a meaningful price control instead of relying upon banning the sale of alcohol below duty plus VAT.

Yes Don. The figures you've chosen. That says it all really doesn't it?

pissed

The BBC is having another 'attack alcohol' spree.

[Both secondary links are to stories from August 2010]

The Snowolf has already wonderfully dissected the main BBC article from the above image Cheap alcohol sales prompt calls for minimum pricing in which Diane Abbot throws her considerable weight behind the calls to charge more for alcohol. Please go read it if only for the line about pilots ......




I've been reading the HealthScotland report (.pdf) about alcohol and found this table about alcohol pricing (p48). 65% of all alcohol sold as off-sales in the UK, two thirds of it, is sold at less than 45 pence per unit. Raising the unit price to 50ppu would impact all of us, not just the 'problem drinkers'.

A quick glance over at the BBC however reveals that that piece is not the only recent alcohol story. I think we should first look at Sales of spirits 'twice as high in Scotland' as it was published a few days ago.

People in Scotland are buying almost twice as much spirits as their counterparts in England and Wales, according to a report.

Annual sales of spirits were consistently almost double those in England and Wales during that 15 years.

Maybe I'm making a huge assumption but what is one of the major products, one that the EU protected the name of, that is made North of the border? Scotch Whisky. Is it any wonder that spirit sales are high? How many visitors to Scotland take a bottle of Scotch home with them and is this included in the total sales figure? One really interesting quote from that piece is this

Dr Laurence Gruer, NHS Health Scotland's director of public health science, said: "Alcohol-related deaths are three times higher and hospital admissions are four times higher than in the early 1980s. In the most recent years alcohol-related deaths and hospital admissions have declined. This is encouraging but it is important to look at long-term trends and it's certainly too early to tell if the recent improvements will continue."

In the early 1980s there was no centralised way to collect data on hospital admissions, that was introduced in 1987, and the data collected is classified using International Classification of Diseases from the World Health Organisation. The ICD is currently on its tenth revision (ICD10). So Dr Gruer tries to scare you into thinking that things are bad, and have been getting worse, while admitting that actually the number of hospital admissions and alcohol related deaths in Scotland is in decline.

The next story to catch my eye was Scottish teenagers' drink and drug use declines. That's right! In decline!

Substance use by young people in Scotland has declined in the past decade, a study has revealed. The findings are from the latest NHS-funded Health Behaviours in School-aged Children (HBSC) report. The number of young people drinking alcohol at least once a week fell by over a third

Alcohol use is down (and there's no reason to suspect the results in Scotland are not representative of the whole UK) and hospital admissions are down.

But wait! There's another story ..... Elish Angiolini warns of booze crime 'apocalypse'. It's worth watching the video (or you can watch the same video here too) of the interview to pick up on the parts of the transcript that the article doesn't quote, and also the line of questioning by the interviewer which constantly pushes the idea that the price must be raised. Elish says in the interview that

Alcohol seems to disinhibit what is a violent propensity in the individual. It's not that alcohol is to blame...

then goes on to suggest that by removing alcohol from society we will remove the problems of violent crime. She might be correct but punishing the blame free party seems a bit, well, unfair to me. She also makes the comment that people are buying large quantities of

.. strong vodka which is consumed on a night out in quantities which, quite frankly, are fatal

Erm no. If they were fatal quantities they'd only do it the once.



So in summary - alcohol consumption is declining, alcohol related admissions into hospitals are declining, the outgoing chief prosecutor for Scotland says that alcohol is not to blame for crime and Diane Abbot says that we must raise the price of alcohol to reduce alcohol consumption. I think I need a drink.

when a designer hates a logo

Seen at the bottom of the page here, tipped off by B3ta

climate week

Today is the first day of Climate Week (21-27th March 2010). The NDS press release promoting the event says

Climate Week, a week-long occasion that begins on Monday 21 March aims to highlight the many positive steps already being taken by people throughout the country to tackle climate change.

The Met Office is supporting Climate Week, acting as the lead science adviser and providing clear guidance on the results from research and studies undertaken by our climate science experts.

Among this work is the compelling evidence of rising global temperature published in 2010 by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in the US in its annual ‘State of the Climate’ report.

It even provides two handy sets of graphs for us to look at to illustrate just how bad things are





Those graphs concern me. Why are there no labels for any of the data sets? There is no explanation of whether they are raw data or manipulated data and no way for anyone interested after looking at the graph to find out. Without labels they become just squiggly lines with no real meaning.

All of the 'increasing' observations are measured against the change from average. As there is no description of how the 'average' figure was determined that too is meaningless.*


Some of those graphs focus on an extremely narrow 30 year band of observations. Given that the planet is estimated to be in the region of 650,000,000 years old making grand pronouncements after observing 0.00000004615% (30/650,000,000) of the possible data seems a little hasty to me. It may be that the climate is changing, that the earth is warming, but that it is part of an unstoppable natural cycle. None of those graphs prove that human intervention is causing the change.

I'm also curious at the page headers for the two sets of graphs - "Observations consistent with a warming world". The implication to me is that there are observations inconsistent with a warming world but these have been omitted.








*I've had a look at the American NCDC site and I think that the 'average' is probably supposed to be the 20th Century average.

pass the bottle

You may have missed the story a few days ago about a three year old alcoholic that had been treated by Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. In the Daily Mail headline, which I believe is the source of the story, we read that the child was 'fed drink for months' which implies that the parents/guardians had deliberately or specifically engineered the situation. Many later versions of the tale omit this piece of information leaving the impression that the child has been sourcing their own liquor.

The statistic that the child

was among 13 children aged 12 and under who were diagnosed as alcoholics by the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust between 2008 and 2010.

is slightly ambiguous. "between 2008 and 2010" could mean the 12 months of 2009, it could mean a 36 month period from 1st Jan 2008 to the 31st December 2010, or it could mean the 24 months of 2008 and 2009. Knowing which one of those three (or another interpretation that I've not though of) it is might change the perception of the scale of the problem. One child diagnosed per month or one per season? Maybe the

specialist teams and experts on hand who are there to treat young patients with alcohol-related problems

have had some input into how those figures were released in order to justify their continued retention?

We are then informed that 106 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 have been diagnosed as alcoholics in the same period and that 74 (or 'more than 70') of them have been to A&E as a result of "binge drinking". Once again the vagueness of the time period leaves some doubt as to the actual scale of the reported problem and that's before we get into issues of what constitutes "binge drinking" (or as it is reported in some sources "alcohol abuse").

Of course the timing of the story, to coincide with the announcement of the government strategy on public health, was entirely irrelevant. Entirely.

what twitter is for

thanks to @utterslut for the tip off

gordon?

Seen on the BBC site



Kirkcaldy, serious, man, attack ..... it couldn't be could it?

heather mills

curious

To cut a long story short I was hunting around trying to work out if a pub that the brewery would like to supply with beer was a free house or part of a chain. It turns out they are part of the Mitchells and Butlers group which probably means that we stand little chance of getting our beer on their bar. While I was there I looked around the site to see what well known brand names they own and I saw the image below.



What was the photographer thinking when they composed that shot? The white man in the foreground, the asian man a little further back, the black woman in the background slightly hidden behind the drinks menu- lightest, darker, darkest?

stuck

Icebreakers have been called in to free dozens of ships that are trapped in ice in the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg.

The administration of St Petersburg's port said yesterday that at least 97 ships were still waiting for help.

The eastern Gulf of Finland has not seen such thick ice since 1992, according to the Federal Agency of Sea and River Transport. Most of the trapped ships were cargo vessels, but there were also some passenger ferries. Many had been trapped for several days.

That'll be the catastrophic constant upward temperature trend in action then?

quote of the day

If I wanted to be lectured to be irritating busy bodies then I would have voted for Labour last year.

Felicity Parkes on top form again

google search results to be proud of

6/139,000 for "andrew lansley is a cunt"

smiley culture

The police watchdog is investigating the death of the British reggae star Smiley Culture, who has died during a Metropolitan police raid.

The 48-year-old singer, whose real name was David Emmanuel, appears to have died on Tuesday from a stab wound sustained as officers visited his house to make an arrest.

Read more here

The smoking ban as implemented in bars in Belgium

Can you imagine what would happen if the bar had been in the UK? Fines, court appearances, newspaper headlines .. .. ..

vanilla

As Leg-iron points out in the comments of a previous post

I had a play with that anagram site. Did you know that the name Nick Clegg generates no anagrams at all? Not one.

He really is that bland.

*snigger*

at it yet again

Vivienne Nathanson has published a piece on CiF that encourages the desire within me for a very stiff drink. It's either that or my blood will boil.

The World Health Organisation has recognised that alcohol is a major cause of ill-health worldwide and that action on alcohol must fall into three areas: affordability, availability and promotion.

Action on alcohol MUST fall into three areas? Really? The prohibition experiment in America tried to stifle availability and that failed, the Swedish model of taxing alcohol to extreme levels means that it has a thriving black market, and banning advertising didn't noticeably reduce tobacco sales. Maybe the WHO should stop trying to justify the massive cost burden it places on countries

The sad truth is that many drinkers have no idea how much they are drinking, or the harm it is doing.

I would suggest otherwise. Most drinkers know precisely how much they are drinking but the measuring system they use is not the one that you would have them adopt. How many is 'many'? I think that if you are proposing major changes to our lifestyles I'd like you to be a little more precise

Still fewer have any idea that alcohol is a poison that kills, as well as causing chronic liver and other organ damage.

So not very many people know that alcohol can kill in excess? Surely that's an education issue not a taxation issue? How will raising the price increase levels of education?

Drinking at levels that will harm health or lead to premature death occurs in all social classes and all age groups, but the health harms are disproportionately felt by the poorest in our communities.

I cannot better the response to that from one of the CiF commenters who says

All alcohol packs – cans and bottles – must by law be labelled with easy to read information about the number of units within them, the safe drinking levels and a warning message about not exceeding these levels.

Why? Genuinely, why? If someone is going out to get drunk they won't give a shit about your warnings. The only people who'll pay any attention are sanctimonious types who metaphorically beat themselves up over every action they take.

licensing legislation should be strictly enforced

Existing legislation covers all the bases already and we don't need any new laws. Although is it just me or has there been an increase in problematic behaviour since the laws were tightened and more strictly enforced? Maybe if we relaxed them a little ..... ah hell who am I trying to kid? You'd never go for it even if it was proven to work

we must reduce the availability of alcohol by reducing the number of places selling it.

Ah well, your chums over at ASH have made a cracking good start on the pubs with their smoking ban haven't they? Is this what this is? Professional jealousy?

What we need is a joined-up and comprehensive alcohol strategy. This includes dealing with drink-driving laws

we have those already ....

The government must stop ignoring the advice from Peter North and lower the drink-driving limit, and legislate to allow the police to do random roadside testing.

Silly me, you want more Draconian laws rigidly enforced

The good news for government is that we have two alcohol strategies available from the last decade. Action must deal with the problem areas, including pricing

Yes I agree. The price of a pint in a pub has become extortionate ....

and it must have teeth – industry must be in no doubt about the willingness of government to regulate and legislate.

The ones that loved to regulate everything were the ones with the red ties on, we have the Coagulation now who are so different from.....

Independent expert monitoring and evaluation should be built in to make sure we are meeting targets such as a year-on-year real reduction in the numbers who drink excessively.

And who would they be? Your colleague Sir Ian "probably" Gilmore? His comments last month were hardly certain were they. I might even go as far as saying they were just a little bit misleading

If supermarkets can find large sums of money to fund alcohol education, fine. But that money should go to charities who know what they are doing and are wholly independent of industry, such as the Institute of Alcohol Studies and Alcohol Concern who should then commission, and evaluate, the education.

And there it is, then, the point of this piece. A call for funds for your friend Denser Honk and his fake charity. I wonder if you discussed this at your closed meetings (paid for in majority directly from tax revenues)

We should start to legislate today and use voluntary agreements to get action while the process of legislating is under way

Isn't that what is being proposed? I thought you didn't agree with the voluntary agreements to start the process which is why you refused to sign up? It's what you said at the beginning of your article. Make your mind up!

Anything else and we condemn more people to unnecessary deaths,

Ah, you see, no we don't. People who choose to drink heavily do just that - they choose. We don't force them, coerce them, compel them. They do it to themselves. Now it could be argued that the effects of those drinkers are experienced by others and that is true, but it is the fault, the responsibility of the drinkers and not society at large.

Often when help is offered to those for whom alcohol is a problem (I've known a small number who fell into that category) they do not take it, do not change, do not alter their destructive patterns. If anything the intervention prolongs their misery.

not satisfied

Even though Heineken has dropped it's trousers and allowed Newly Anal Reds to buttfuck them with the minimal amount of lube this is clearly not enough for the Temperance brigade. Step forward, among others, one of our least favourite misery spreaders Denser Honk

Don Shenker, chief executive of Alcohol Concern said it was "the worst possible deal for everyone who wants to see alcohol harm reduced. There are no firm targets or any sanctions if the drinks industry fails to fulfil its pledges. It's all carrot and no stick for the drinks industry and supermarkets."

There's not enough threat of punishment in the proposals according to Denser. His name is alongside other signatories to a letter sent to the Health Minister from a group called only "the alcohol panel". These self appointed guardians of sobriety think that they are the only ones that should be allowed to influence public opinion or government policy. Another panel member Original Miser, who only last month tried to deny the facts about dropping rates of alcohol consumption in the UK, said

"it is not acceptable for the drinks industry to drive the pace and direction that such public health policy takes."

By declaring it a 'public health issue*' over and over he and his cohorts are yet again trying to manoeuvre themselves into positions of greater power over everyone else. Just like the anti-smoker lobbyists the anti-drinker consortium has decided that the people that make and sell the product should have no voice. It's almost as if they are afraid that their anti-alcohol stance will not stand up to close scrutiny ......

You've seen the direction the anti-smoker battle is going and now the anti-drinkers are trying to go in exactly the same way. There is no appeasing their thirst to control your life. They will not be happy until prohibition is declared in this country. It might already be too late to stop them.






*For the record there is, in my opinion, no such thing as public health. There's your health, there's my health, and that's it.

weak

Heineken have announced that they are going to reduce the alcohol content of 'one of their leading brands', believed by the many in the media to be their Strongbow Cider, as part of their compliance with one of Newly Anal Reds' raft of voluntary initiatives.

Surely they realise that for every inch they give in to his Temperance agenda he will then push for more? They must have seen the way that the anti-tobacco lobby has manoeuvred.

The only conclusion I can come to is that an accountant somewhere within that organisation, believing that reducing the alcohol in teenage rocket juice is going to increase the volume of sales and therefore profits, agreed to this.

jeremy hunt

Jeremy Hunt, the finger-in-the-dyke culture secretary,

GuessWhoTube

As The Commuter and I sat in the pub last night we, as usual, discussed a wide ranging variety of topics. I can't remember precisely what triggered my need to communicate the name of an American movie actor, who has a reputation for being scary, with a gravelly voice but my inability to remember his name. I could picture his face (and still can even in the cold sober light of this morning) but still cannot remember his name.

"What we need" I said "is an image search engine that allows the user to reduce the options before them based on questions they answer."

"How do you mean?" asked The Commuter.

"Well imagine you would start the search looking for, in this case, an actor. You don't know their name but you know what they look like. We could knock all the Asian and Black actors out of the search, anyone under 30, only keep Americans, that kind of thing. Each question would have a yes/no, or short multiple choice, answer. Eventually, after knocking out all the negatives, you will end up with a much smaller cluster of images to search through to find who it is you are looking for. A bit like the board game."

The Commuter thought for a moment and then said "I like it but it needs a catchy name. How about GuessWhoTube?"

Do you want to own part of a brewery?

I received this by email and John is happy for me to share this with the world

Beer E-News Special Supplement

Ever dreamed of owning, or working in, a Brewery?

Most real ale fans will have had such thoughts at one time or another, but probably dismissed it as an impossible dream. Now there is a way in which you may be able to realise it, in a more convenient and less costly way than you might ever have imagined.

Read on for full details.

Jeannette and I recently attended a meeting to discuss options for the future development of the Adur Brewery. It was reported that with the massive increases in duty over recent years the brewery's present reason for existence seems to be solely to pay taxes, and did not provide enough scope to employ additional assistance. All present wanted to see a situation where the brewery could start to offer new jobs, but to do that, it would need to grow and the meeting discussed various ways to achieve the desired growth. The favoured scenario involved a gradual stepping up of production, a move to larger premises, followed by the installation of new equipment with greater brewing capacity to achieve economies of scale, and the employment of a trainee brewer and an administrative manager.

One way of financing these plans would be to reconstitute the brewery as a form of co-operative, which would allow a greater number of people the opportunity to purchase shares for relatively small amounts (probably in the order of £250, though there may be scope for a category of 'gold membership' for anyone who wants to invest more). It was agreed that the first step would be to assess the likely amount of interest in the local beer enthusiasts community for participating in such a scheme. We agreed to publicise the concept and collate replies on behalf of the brewery.

The advantages to anyone holding a share would be:

• You would have VIP access to the brewery - at present group visits are not practical but co-owners would have the facility to visit and even gain some 'hands on' experience if they wished.
• You would participate in the formation of policy through the annual meeting.
• Your views would be sought on proposals for new beers, the recipes and names for them, and you would be among the first to taste them.
• You would be able to buy the brewery's beers at discounted prices.
• You would receive priority invitations to brewery events.
• You would be showing your support for the concept of a local brewery for your area, in line with CAMRA's LocAle scheme, which tries to ensure that beers are not transported over great distances.

A personal perspective:

In the past Jeannette and I have paid £400 for a single weekend course where we could gain some brewing experience, but we obtained substantially greater value from our investment in the Adur Brewery. We have had a small stake in the brewery since it started. We were not looking for returns in the way of dividends, but rather expressing support for a new local enterprise and a concept we believe in. Since then we have reaped enormous, though intangible, rewards in the amount of fun, interest and experience we have gained through being involved with the brewery.

The pleasure of tasting a new beer, sampled straight from the foaming fermentation vessel, knowing that you have had input into its recipe; helping carry out buckets of spent hops and malt as the mash tun is emptied, with the wonderful aromas all around you; playing an active part in brewery events, such as the two Church Ales and the First Birthday events, when we met famous beer writer, Pete Brown; the satisfaction of seeing stacks of bottles carrying names and labels in which you have helped design. How can you put a price on experiences like that?

Personnel wanted:

If you are looking for a change of career and would like to consider working as a trainee brewer or brewery administrator, please get in touch. The pay would not be great, some days might involve long hours, and the work can be tiring, but the potential satisfaction is enormous! Please also get in touch if you are between jobs and would want to do some voluntary work at the brewery to fill the gap on your CV, to learn new skills - or just for the fun of it. One person who did just that, and spent several months at the brewery, has told us that of all his distinguished work career, that is the part of his CV which attracts most interest. He has also found that it gives him a great deal of 'street cred' - at parties everyone wants to talk to the person who is an authority on how a brewery works!

The small print:

You are doubtless aware that investment in any small business is a risk and should not be regarded as a safe haven for your pension fund! There are no gilt-edged guarantees of dividends, and. if you are interested in the jobs, you should understand that employment in this sector is far from being a life-time job with a pension scheme. An investment of this nature is all about the fun of being involved. and supporting a cause you believe in.

Email if interested:

At present the brewery is only seeking to find out if this particular scenario is viable, so we need to gauge how many people might be interested in participating in such a scheme. Please email me if you think you would like to join in this venture. Expressing interest at this stage will not commit you. If development plans go forward in this form you would receive firm proposals and only then would you need to make a binding commitment.

Cheers!

John Simpson

If you are interested in helping save a local brewery by becoming part of a co-op then email me at the address in the side bar and I will forward it on to John to add to the rapidly growing list of interested parties. If you have any questions add them to the comments and I'll answer the ones I can, confer with John on the ones I don't know.

quote of the day

Scruples and a measure of intellectual honesty mean Labour lacks the shameless gall to distort reality

It could only be Polly.


/disbelief

1984 is a warning not a manual

An army of children is being recruited by police to spy on their classmates.

....ten and 11-year-olds are taught to be vigilant and to identify crimes and suspects within their primary schools.

What. The. Fuck.

I'm going to hell for this but .......

phishing scam

This email allegedly comes from Natwest but when you hover over the link it's not to an obvious site of theirs. If I was a Natwest Online customer and not paying attention ......

under the counter

obtained or sold furtively

I've been pondering yesterday's pronouncements about tobacco by the Conservative health minister Andrew Lansley and the impact they will have. And I laughed because I think that the laws of unintended consequences will definitely come in to play.

Back in the mid 1980's, in the pre-Blockbuster days of video rental shops, you could apparently, if you knew the right people, hire *cough* specialist *cough* movies that were not permitted to be displayed on the shelves. For teenagers the attraction of these items so dangerous they had to kept out of public view was immense. And this is now what is going to happen with tobacco.

Cannabis has been illegal for years but most teenagers know, or know someone who knows, a drug dealer. My teenage self knew a drug dealer but only found out after his conviction and sentence. The point though is that this illegal substance is never displayed in shops, has no glitzy packaging, and yet continues to sell in large quantities on the unregulated market.

On Monday the BBC aired a 30 minute Panorama investigation into illegal tobacco. Which you can watch here until March 2012 (UK based). Others have already dissected the shortcomings, junk science, conflation of 'fake cigarettes' with 'tax evading cigarettes' of the show but there is another angle that, given this announcement, seems relevant. Undercover filming at car boot sales shows cigarette transactions occurring without the tobacco being on view. If the tobacco display ban makes furtively buying cigarettes the norm then surely this plays into the hands of the smugglers?

A friend came back from Brussels where the price of cigarettes is approximately 2/3 of the UK price and the price of rolling tobacco even lower. If the UK goes ahead and banishes branding on cigarette packets to make them less alluring surely the packets purchased on the continent will become increasingly attractive unless the rest of the EU does the same?

I can see these proposals reducing tax income far more than they reduce the rates of smoking and at the same time making smoking more appealing to teenagers. Which will make me laugh (until I cough my lungs up obviously).

recycling gives you cancer

Well according to this BBC article which says

Researchers found toxic chemicals from recycled newspapers have contaminated food sold in many cardboard cartons. The chemicals, known as mineral oils, come from printing inks.

TOXIC! How toxic?

Dr Grob said: "Toxicologists talk about two effects. One is the chronic inflammation of various internal organs and the other one is cancer."

giving it away

The BBC reports that Stephen Williams, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bristol West, has come up with a radical idea that has been published in a pamphlet for the think tank Centre Forum. His plan is for the government to give away all of its shares to the adults in the country who are on the Electoral Register. The shareholders would be forced to keep their shares for a minimum period and could only realise the profit over and above a set price per share. Mr Williams apparently says

"There is danger that when the banks return to the private sector, it is business as usual. There is a general feeling in this country that we need to get something positive in return for the bailout. This plan would recoup the public's investment and allow the taxpayer to get the benefit from any increased value in the banks."

So where do we start then?

Firstly - Transferring the shares out of government control and into the hands of individuals, or as common parlance would describe it THE PRIVATE SECTOR, is apparently going to be better than selling the shares to the private sector.

Secondly - Administering a scheme for 45 million or so people is bound to be far less efficient, and therefore more expensive, than having a single central shareholder. It will no doubt be advertised on TV, then claim forms sent out, then notification forms, then annual statements, the list could go on for a long time.

Thirdly - The public had no choice when the government decided to throw billions of pounds at the banks (media hype and political misdirections aside). Any profit from the sale of the shares could and should be used to pay off the government's accrued national debt.

Fourthly - If the shares increase in value and are sold at a profit the country will, as a whole, benefit from that sale. There is no need to create more bureaucracy to do that.


In my ever so humble opinion this idea is completely hatstand.

flannel

How would you like to have your own personalised flannel to carry around with you all day so that you can dry your hands any time you need to? That's the marketing spin from the company PeopleTowel. No longer will the eco-minded person feel they are destroying the environment by using paper towels; instead they can precycle to make their eco-buddies green with envy.

And it gets better still. There is a competition for you to design your own flannel for that extra personal touch.

I remember the old pull towels that used to inhabit public loos but a campaign against them was launched because apparently they harboured germs and were a danger to public health. Now that we have sanitary, hygienic, one shot, paper towels to use the idea that we should all carry around our own personal flannel, sorry PeopleTowel, is utterly insane. The site itself offers a 1,3 or 5 day supply of them which indicates they expect you to wash your flannel daily. The energy cost of that must be huge over the flannel's lifetime. And don't get me started about having a damp flannel in your pocket.

more on that cycle lane

After the news that Brighton and Hove council are planning to remove a cycle lane (which I approve of) there has been the predictable campaign against the proposals.

This morning during rush hour I drove down, and then about ten minutes later, up the road. I saw a grand total of five cyclists using the cycle lanes while I slowly moved down the road. In my opinion the route isn't quite as popular with the broader cycling community as the campaigners would like to think it is.

I also saw two cyclists knowingly and actively ride through traffic lights that were red as they approached them and another adult cycling on the pavement in the surrounding roads which is not doing cyclists in general any favours at all. As with all the 'them' and 'us' situations our illustrious leaders like to create each side will point to the transgressions of the other as reasons why something should, or shouldn't happen.

The finger pointing has already begun over at the CTC forum. What is interesting is that riders who are members there who have actually used the cycle lanes are not too bothered if they stay or go, because many of them remember how the road was before, but those who see this as a 'loss of cycling infrastructure' are up in arms about it.

I'm all in favour of well thought out road schemes and cycle routes, ones that will benefit everyone, but this one really isn't a shining example of design and planning and it needs to go.

This story is set to run and run though because today the Greens and Labour joined together to vote down the Conservatives' spending plans .. .. ..

that latest alcohol concern propoganda piece

Lazy churnalism from the Mirror, Argus the Evening Standard, the Express and Star, the Herald Scotland, to name but a few organisations that have published the Press Association story without changing a single word, has helped to spread this Alcohol Concern press release, based on their briefing paper[.pdf], far and wide.

In the briefing paper Alcohol Concern restate the claim made by coroner William Armstrong that alcohol can be purchased at supermarkets at a price less than bottled water, they then go on to claim that alcohol consumption rates have been rising in England and Wales since the Second World War before going on to blame the relative cost of alcohol for driving a noticeable shift towards increased home consumption (referencing their own work (which also references their own work) as proof). I'm sure that Dick Puddlecoat (among others) has shown at least two if not all three of these claims to be outdated, spurious, deceitful, or downright lies. The comparison between 'own brand' water and 'branded alcohol' is like comparing lemons and cars, alcohol consumption has been falling since 1999 and the 2001 smoking ban discouraged many smokers from public places.

This latest assault on alcohol comes after Alcohol Concern commissioned RMG to survey four Cardiff supermarkets in December 2010 and report their findings. These include "alcohol in the seasonal aisle", "spirits sold next to mince pies" and "Bottles of wine next to the dairy counter". I'm no expert in these matters but isn't there some kind of double celebration event at the end of December each year? I think it's called Winterval ..... wine and cheese, brandy and mince pies, bottle of sherry for granny as her present ..... none of these seems unreasonable to me but for Don Shenker and his miserable band of temperance enthusiasts they are hideous temptations and must be removed because you, yes you, cannot make purchasing decisions for yourself because you are completely in the thrall of the supermarket marketers.

I was amused by the referenced statement Supermarkets, in particular, have been heavily criticised for selling discounted alcohol because the reference is a Telegraph article in which Don Shenker does the criticising!! There must be someone else who supports you Don?

As we've seen from the anti-smoking lobby one crucial thing to achieve is to make people think that their attitude to something is abnormal by promoting a 'consensus' view, usually aided by producing statistical data from heavily weighted surveys. Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics for the British Medical Association, agrees "We have to start de-normalising alcohol".

Would any Alcohol Concern release be complete without a call for a 50p minimum unit price? This one finishes on it in order to reduce the problem of deep discounting of alcohol by supermarkets. The drinks I went in to buy have cost less and this is a problem? For who precisely?

With the 'savage cuts' needed to "restore the economy" could we stop wasting our money on these miserable killjoy nannying tossers please?

laffer curve in action

Some friends of mine were in Brussels this weekend for a short break. While there they bought cigarettes at €4.50 for 20.

Here in the UK the cheapest I can find that brand retailing is £6.49 for 20.

The Post Office is offering 1.1385€ to the pound at the moment which makes the cigarettes equivalent to £3.95 or a saving of over £2.50 per packet.

Previously the saving was around £1 per packet and, after fuel and travel, not worth the bother. Now it most definitely is.

So I'm going to book a day trip to Belgium and buy a large quantity of cigarettes (for my own personal consumption) and deprive the UK government of a substantial amount of tax revenue.

**CORRECTION** Having now actually seen the packets he bought in Brussels they are 19 not 20 in each for €4.50 or 20.7p per fag. Which is still a huge saving over the UK price of 32.5p per fag.