Mendacity Killed the Khat

From the BBC

The herbal stimulant khat is to be banned by the government, against the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. In January the ACMD said khat should remain a legal substance, saying there was "insufficient evidence" it caused health problems.(1)

But Home Secretary Theresa May has decided to ban it, saying the risks posed could have been underestimated.(2)

Khat will be treated as a class C drug, like anabolic steroids and ketamine. The Home Office said the ban was intended to "protect vulnerable members of our communities"(3) and would be brought in at the "earliest possible opportunity".

Khat is already banned in most of Europe and in a number of other countries, including the US and Canada. The UK's decision to follow suit is based on security and international considerations, in particular concerns the UK could be used as a transit route for khat to other European countries.(4)

"Failure to take decisive action and change the UK's legislative position on khat would place the UK at a serious risk of becoming a single, regional hub for the illegal onward trafficking,"(5) Mrs May said in a statement.

But campaigners said they were "disappointed and concerned" at the government's decision to reject the advisory council's advice. "A more proportionate alternative to banning khat and criminalising its use would have been an import ban or making it a supply offence only as applies, for example, to controlled anabolic steroids," said Martin Barnes from charity Drugscope.(6)

1. There's a bit in one of PJ O'Rourke's books where he describes taking it and it sounded like quite a mild buzz.

2. That's an argument for doing more research, and perhaps taking the "we want people to make their own choices" line than Cameron likes to roll out whenever it suits him.

3. "communities". Right, so it's puritan dog-whistling in favour of non-white puritans against the non-white people who like taking khat.

4. If they create a stupid law then that's their problem. Let them deal with it.

5. And this is a bad thing, how? Do the French care that white van men are filling up with booze at Calais, despite much of it being illegal? Of course not. Whole industries are built on idiot neighbours, from Canadian whisky to gambling in Nevada.

6. I'll never understand that argument. If we think it's OK for someone to possess a drug, why is it wrong for someone to sell it to them?

We can but wonder “now would they have?”

Blogger Richard Seymour has a piece up on Comment is Free at the Guardian entitled  The fake jobseekers' questionnaire reveals a new kind of nanny state which is subheaded “This bogus test is a blatant attempt to 'shape' people and makes a mockery of Tory indictments of government bossiness.”  The indictments he speaks of  were of course to be heard issuing from the lips of persons such as David Cameron and firmly directed towards New Labour  - “We will have to tear down Labour’s big government bureaucracy — ripping up its time-wasting, money-draining, responsibility-sapping nonsense.” being but one example.

What has spurred Richard Seymour, and others, to go into print is the revelation that the government’s  Behavioural Insights Team attached to Number 10 and colloquially known as “the Nudge Unit” had designed an “on-line test” for the DWP which was ostensibly to allow an unemployed job-seeking person to identify their “signature strengths”.  However, it was soon discovered that this “self help test” was specifically designed to give “nothing but positive statements regarding the user's employability” and better yet not only regardless of the input from the user but in the original version  when the user simply clicked through all the questions without providing any answers at all.

Eventually, even the Labour Party became aware of the issue and felt obliged to “say something” and the shadow Work and Pensions secretary Liam Byrne duly put up on his personal website  a stinging rebuke :-

“The Guardian reports that that jobseekers are being asked to complete ‘bogus psychometric tests, as reported here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/30/jobseekers-bogus-psychometric-tests-unemployed. 

No wonder unemployment is higher today than when this government came to power.  Ministers seem to have got jobseekers wasting time on mumbo jumbo personality tests when they should be looking for work”. 

The Labour party would quite clearly never have indulged in such underhand tactics and it seems entirely clear that the life of the “Nudge Unit” would be short lived should Labour be returned to power in 2015.  Or would it?

It is relatively easy, especially given the 1997 – 2010 track record to imagine a Labour administration making full use of such a valuable in-house taxpayer funded resource to devise “on-line surveys” that left users in no doubt, regardless of how they answered any of the questions, that they were 100% absolutely sure in themselves that the one indispensable item they needed to make sure their lives were complete in numerous ways was an ID Card, and the sooner they applied for one and developed a “never leave home without it” mentality the better.

But Labour may not have to have the “should we, shouldn’t we” agonising.  So successful and admired is the BIT that it has been announced today  that it is candidate number 1 in the government’s “mutualisation programme”++. 

++ Update 16:00 :Not everyone thinks this is necessarily a good idea

Going off on a tangent

From The Evening Standard:

Environmental health inspectors have been told to take a hard line on burgers that are not fully cooked through, but Michelin-starred Angela Hartnett, chef patron at Murano in Mayfair and York & Albany gastropub, said Westminster city council should stop meddling and concentrate on “bigger issues”.

She said: "I’ve eaten raw meat, well-done meat — it has never done me any harm. Why not sort out the bike lanes or the traffic?"

Suitably fired up, the Mayor of London has promptly swung into action...

From the Evening Standard:

Boris Johnson has branded rickshaws dangerous and called for them to be banned from the West End.

The Mayor said even responsible operators "cannot ensure the safety of their passengers" and are adding to night-time traffic jams. He wants new laws that would give him the power to sweep the unlicensed and often uninsured pedicabs from central London.

So if "eating a raw burger travelling through London in a rickshaw" is on your things-to-do list, you'd better hurry up. It is unreported whether rickshaw drivers have contacted the council suggested they keep their nose out of people's private travel arrangements and concentrate on bigger issues, like food poisoning.

One out, one in.

Stupid rule kicked out via the front door: Child abuse vetting scheme cancelled as 'draconian'. The original vetting plans covered one in four of the adult population. Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that registration, due to begin next month, has been put on hold. There will be a review of the entire vetting and barring scheme, with a scaling back to "common-sense levels"... The government says the vetting scheme would have been "disproportionate and overly burdensome"...*

Ah... but look what's trying to sneak in via the back door: Clearer and tougher rules are needed to help protect people visting children's farms, experts say. The recommendations were made by an investigation into the biggest ever farm E. coli outbreak. More than 90 people were struck down by the potentially fatal 0157 strain of the bug at Surrey's Godstone Farm last year... The assessment of risk by the farm was inadequate as it primarily relied on visitors washing their hands**, the inquiry said...

* I trust that the ContactPoint database will be scrapped as well, it's not entirely clear.

** How about putting up a couple of big signs saying "Now wash your hands"? Job done. And while this strain may well be 'potentially fatal', none of those 'more than 90 people' appear to have died.

Health Scare, Fakecharity & Fakestatistic Du Jour

From The Soaraway Sun (1):

Shops’ balti is more salty (2) than seawater (3)

Worst offenders were Iceland's balti range, with six ready meals saltier than water in the Atlantic... Healthiest option was Birds Eye chicken curry with rice (4), containing just 0.5g of salt per portion... CASH's (5) Katherine Jenner said curries had become a British institution. But she added: "For every gram of salt taken out of our diet, 6,000 lives are saved and 6,000 heart attacks are prevented." (6)

1) Today's page 3 caption was a classic. The two young women were quoted as saying that the Labour/Lib Dem proposed ban on Page 3 Girls restricted their freedom of expression.

2) Of course balti is salty! If if were sugary, then...

3) How salty is seawater? I know it tastes pretty horrible, but that is not really a measure of 'saltiness', is it?

4) NOW that's what I call value for money! For a measly £1,000 donation (see 5) below) they've got product placement across today's MSM, with Iceland's stuff getting a good kicking.

5) According to their 2008 accounts, their major donors were:

Nissan UK Ltd £168,000 (wot? Toyota, I could understand, but Nissan?)
Food Standards Agency £23,500, Heart Research UK £10,000 and British Heart Foundation £2,500 (these three 'donations' put CASH firmly into fakecharity territory, of course)
Marks and Spencer £1,200
Birds Eye £1,000 (see 4) above)
McCain Foods (GB) Ltd £1,000
Walkers Snacks Ltd £1,000

6) Wot? One gram per portion? Per person? Per day? 6,000 'lives' in the UK? Across the globe? 6,000 per day? Per month? Per year? Are 6,000 lives 'saved' because 6,000 heart attacks are prevented? Do the figures add up to 12,000? Where's the evidence to show that countries with traditionally salt diets have shorter life spans? Oh, right...

They've been doing overtime in The Department of Fakestatistics

From The Daily Mail (where the crowd is lapping it up of course):

Children as young as 11 are drinking the equivalent of 15 shots of vodka a week. An NHS survey of children between 11 and 15 last year found that one in six - an estimated 550,000 - said they had drunk alcohol in the previous week. Their average consumption was 14.6 units - equal to a pint of beer a day.

Had they done a survey on children between 7 and 15, then no doubt they would have found that only one-in-twelve had drunk alcohol, but the article would have started with "Children as young as 7..." Presumably they mean that the one-in-six who drink drink a pint a day; surely that's not the average for all 11-15 year olds?

...Almost as many girls as boys admitted drinking.

They could have said "Boys hardly drink more than girls", couldn't they?

The survey by the NHS Information Centre found that children are much more likely to drink if there is another drinker in their family. Only five per cent of youngsters in teetotal households ever touch alcohol, compared to 31 per cent in households where three or more people drink.

Well duh.

Around half of all pupils said their parents would not mind them drinking as long as they did not have too much.

That's the whole point, isn't it, the concept of "too much" which is by definition usually A Bad Thing.

The survey, which questioned pupils in 263 secondary schools across England, also found small falls in drug-taking and smoking. Eight per cent of pupils said they had taken drugs in the previous month while six per cent were smokers.

Junior spies.

Epic fail in the fakestatistics department

A couple of days ago, we were told that "The total cost of alcohol to society [i.e. England] has been put at £55 billion." That works out at £1,058 per person. From Scotland, now comes the heartening news "Alcohol abuse* [only] costs every Scot £900 a year".

Well done Scotland, problem solved!

* The article sees the words "abuse", "misuse" and "use" as more or less synonymous.

Inflation

From the BBC 8 January 2010:

It is estimated alcohol abuse in England and Wales kills 40,000 people (1) and costs the economy £55 bn (2) every year.

*ahem*

1) From the National Statistical Office: There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991.

2) From The Metro, 22 July 2008: Pubs and clubs have been ordered to help stop binge drinking, amid claims that alcohol abuse costs the country £25 billion a year.... an official report showed alcohol abuse cost the equivalent of £415 a year for every man, woman and child in Britain.

*/ahem*

Ever expanding government in action (2)

From The Metro:

Violent men will be banned from their own homes to give abused partners "breathing space" under new police powers promised by Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

Domestic Violence Protection Orders, to be trialled in two areas, will apply for up to a fortnight in a bid to prevent women having to flee to emergency accommodation such as refuges. Instead they would be offered help and advice by caseworkers on the options open to them if they left the relationship - including securing a longer-term injunction...

OK, yet another gimmick from the government that dreamed up ASBO's and ABC's, so it will either never be implemented; or it will be implemented so badly that it just makes things worse etc. etc. (He knows where you live!). Moving swiftly on ...

... charity Refuge warned that the so-called "go" orders would only be effective if they were backed with sufficient funding and training of professionals...

Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said: "These new orders will protect women from further risk of domestic violence if they are implemented effectively. We hope the Government will underpin these positive initiatives with the funding and training needed to ensure this and, in doing so, alter radically the number of women whose lives are blighted by domestic violence."

The money shot!

Refuge's 2008 accounts show that total income of £8,215,265 includes £2,431,979 "rent" which is presumably a cross charge (the charity has no signifcant property assets on its balance sheet, heck knows to whom they pay it out again. Housing associations, themselves fakecharities, perhaps?).

Out of the remaining £5,783,286; "voluntary income" was £1,128,459 (their donors include the usual suspects like Children in Need and Comic Relief, Note 3); grants for "Supporting people" or "Floating Support" was £3,541,362 (all from the local authority/borough, Note 4); "Grants for services" was £784,010 (all from other government departments or local councils, Note 5); and interest income and "other income" (unspecified) was £329,455.

So that puts Refuge squarely in the "fakecharity" corner. But they'd like a bit more cash and more power anyway, thank you very much.

As Woman On A Raft says ...

From the comments to a recent post:

"Mark - you will have noticed the delicious irony this morning that the two women involved are police officers.

According to Ofsted it is not safe or legal to leave your child with a police officer unless they've had separate registration and validation. The women are complaining that they thought that as they knew each other, they could just disregard the Childcare Act 2006 and the 2008 amendments.

I may wet myself laughing. Police complaining that the rules apply to them. Outrageous.

I have revised my "who dobbed them in" plan to include narked members of the public who may have come in to professional contact with them. On the plus side, Ofsted have admitted that so long as childcare takes place in the child's own home, the whole issue goes away.

Are the women really so thick that they didn't read the act and amendments, which means that the arrangement has only been within the definition of 'reward' since September 2008?"

Glorious. It's a pity that childminding-without-a-licence isn't an arrestable offence, that would have been fun.

More fake statistics ...

From the BBC:

Bans on smoking in public places have had a bigger impact on preventing heart attacks than ever expected, data shows.
Smoking bans cut the number of heart attacks in Europe and North America by up to a third, two studies report...

Earlier this month it was announced that heart attack rates fell by about 10% in England in the year after the ban on smoking in public places was introduced in July 2007 - which is more than originally anticipated. But the latest work, based on the results of numerous different studies collectively involving millions of people, indicated that smoking bans have reduced heart attack rates by as much as 26% per year.

Here we go again. Note how "by up to a third" has become "by as much as 26%" further into the article?

Even ASH (who had supposedly carried out the research in England) have admitted that there was no evidence to support the "about 10%" claim, but presumably they are gambling on the public being dumb enough to just read the headlines and fall for the 10% story, and if they fall for that. no doubt a few will fall for 26% or 30%. I suppose that's how propaganda works, it's the constant drip-drip as much as anything.

Today's bonus round: take a look at the numbers behind this claim in the Metro Stop-smoking scheme 'saved 70,000' which is almost undoubtedly untrue as well, but those poor dears have to try and make sure that they aren't the first thing the next government axes.

Nannies in a tizz

From the BBC:

People are drinking more alcohol by "stealth" because of the stronger drinks on the market, an analysis of consumption in the UK suggests.

The amount of alcohol consumed per person has risen by 10% since 2000 - despite drink sales remaining steady. Researchers Mintel said wines and lagers were becoming stronger and people were unaware of the changes.

It comes as latest figures show a third of men and a fifth of women* drink more than the recommended daily limits. The NHS recommends a limit of three to four units of alcohol per day for men, and two to three units for women...

Yadda, yadda, blah, waffle, I'm sure you get the picture. My personal highlights from that crock of shit are these two claims:

"Consumers have limited information to help them make healthy choices about their alcohol consumption" Don Shenker, of Alcohol Concern

I was at a barbecue recently where a Japanese lass stared fascinatedly at my beer can and told me that in Japan, beer cans were not covered in little charts, tables and warnings telling you how much alcohol is in it and how much, when and where you should and shouldn't drink.

The report said the changes were likely to be down to the stronger drinks that were on sale. The alcohol content of wine is now normally around 13%, while in the past it would have been closer to 11%. Premium 5% lagers were also becoming more popular.

The clue as ever is in the name - "Premium" lager. Given that every can or bottle of drink is plastered with charts, tables and warnings (see above) anyway, I think all but the daftest punter knows that when he (or she) pays a few pence extra for "premium" lager that they're doing this (at least in part) because it is stronger. Or do Alcohol Concern genuinely believe that drinks manufacturers are doing this as part of some evil plot?

* I'm not sure where they get that from. Seven months ago they claimed "Over a third of adults in Britain drink over the recommended daily amount at least one day a week, figures show." A fifth is a lot less than a third, n'est-ce pas?

BBC Won't Reply Because I'm "Abusive"

I sent a complaint to the BBC a few months ago attacking their bias. I requested a reply and didn't get one, so I complained about this last week.

The exact text of my complaint:

A few months ago I sent a complaint opposing your left of centre thinking, and requested a reply. I have not received a reply. Why?

The BBC's response:

Dear Mr Pearson
Thanks for your e-mail.
I understand you'd like to know why your complaint sent on 19 May 2009 wasn't given a response.
Whilst we aim to issue a response to everyone who requests a reply to their complaint, we will not reply to emails that are of an abusive nature.
Unfortunately, your complaint was deemed abusive as it displayed an extremely aggressive tone and therefore was considered inappropriate and harmful towards members of staff.
I realise you may disagree however we must take a firm stance on hurtful and aggressive emails and all correspondence containing these traits will not be tolerated.
In reply to your original complaint, I can assure you that we're well aware of our commitment to fair, balanced and impartial reporting. We don't seek to denigrate any view, nor to promote any view. We seek rather to identify all significant views, and to test them rigorously and fairly on behalf of the audience.
I hope this clarifies the situation for and would like to take you again for taking the time to contact us.
Regards
Gerald McCuskerBBC Complaints

WHAT THE FUCKETY FUCK?! NO. WHAT THE FUCKETY FUCKING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?! WHAT THE FRIGGIN FUCKETY SHITTY FUCK DO WE PAY THESE TWATS FOR?!

Compared to how I normally act (and that's in every day life, not just complaints) my complaint was far from far from far from far from even a tiny, teensy, little bit aggressive. Maybe.
It seems to me they aren't providing the service I pay them for because they feel I am too 'harsh'. WELL THEN LIGHTEN UP AND GET A GRIP OF HOW THINGS WORK IN THE REAL WORLD YOU BUNCH OF PATHETIC, ARSE-LICKING, DILDO-SHOVING, TROUSER-STUFFING, GORDON BROWN-LOVING, TOTALITARIAN, CLIMATE CHANGE-BELIEVING CUNTING ARSEHOLES!

SHOVE IT!!!!!! HOW'S THAT FOR ANGER?!

I think we might all be able to agree I'm a tad pissed off.

"Harmful towards staff" is the bit that gets me though. Well, I'm gladly calling on any member of the BBC staff (who's salary we pay) who can honsestly say they put down their Guardian for a bit to read my complaint and thought to themselves (or even expressed it at a power meeting): "Oh dear, Mr Pearson just asked me why I didn't do my job. I'm so offended I may cancel my eco-class tonight and stay in my house with some fairtrade crisps and cry non-polluted tears."

Go on. Who felt this way?