Tuesday 24 January 2017

If You Believe They're Just Guidelines, You're A Fool

It's a constant source of astonishment to me how a huge section of society seems so incredibly incompetent at learning the lessons of history.

Take yesterday's story about 'killer' toast and roast potatoes, for example. It is pretty clear to anyone with reading skills and an education which included comprehension tests that the risk of cancer from toast and pizza ranges from negligible to non-existent. However, whenever these hysterical scares are published, they are always accompanied on social media by comments from smug, bovine cretins who claim it's just advice and why should we be concerned.

Well, this might be a clue.
Pubs and restaurants could soon be fined for serving well-done items such as triple-cooked chips or thin and crispy pizza under a second phase of the Government's crackdown on burnt food.   
Following the launch of a major public awareness campaign yesterday to help people reduce "cancer-causing" acrylamide in food, the Telegraph can reveal that food safety watchdogs are planning to extend the warning to every food-serving business in Britain.  
Under a new European Union food hygiene directive, due to be adopted in the UK by the the end of 2017, pubs and restaurants will be told to take reasonable steps to reduce acrylamide in food or face enforcement measures.
Now it becomes clear, doesn't it? Yesterday's 'guidance' from the Food Standards Agency wasn't so much a "mind how you go" piece of sage advice for the domestic chef, but more a piece of scaremongering to soften us up for yet more authoritarian nanny state interference in our lives and choices, instigated by the EU and faithfully followed by cowardly British public sector toadies.

I expect some dullards will say that this only affects businesses, but I'm sure I don't need to remind readers here that the pubs and restaurants involved will pass on any fines, or insurance against fines, in their pricing or - just as bad - stop serving up food as their customers prefer it to be served. Successful hospitality businesses thrive by producing what the customer wants to consume, unless of course the state comes in and spanners it all up.

The result will be higher prices and/or food that isn't quite as tasty as you'd ideally like it to be. Whichever way you slice it, the public loses ... and all due to junk science promoted by regulators effectively transferring your loss into a financial benefit to their pockets.

It's far from the first time too. Just last year we had the same kind of ignorant bleating that Silly Sally's corrupt re-jigging of alcohol advice was just an exercise in issuing guidelines, you didn't have to follow them and it wouldn't affect you if you didn't. Yet barely a breath was drawn before those same 'guidelines' were being used to inflate the figures on hazardous drinking in order to demand advertising bans, sales restrictions, taxes and minimum alcohol pricing, it was just a tool; a means to a pre-determined end.

It's hardly a surprise. Scroll back to 1971 when the government came to a deal with the tobacco industry to include messages on cigarette packets and you were benignly advised "WARNING by H.M. Government, SMOKING CAN DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH". What's the problem, eh? You could just ignore it, it's only guidance. Similarly in the 1990s 'public health' was merely educating us that passive smoking could be a problem, no-one was going to obstruct your liberties, it was just a little bit of unobtrusive advice.

Look, if you are one of those who really believes that the insanely lucrative and parasitic global 'public health' Goliath only exists to gently guide you, you are mindfuckingly gullible and your opinion on these kind of issues is about as inspired as a knitted condom is to birth control. There has never been anything remotely altruistic about 'public health', history shows us that. Every move they have ever made has simply been to facilitate something else more draconian; more obscene. To take the "next logical step", and every time that step is taken our lives suffer by becoming more oppressive, expensive or mostly both.

If the laughable notion of deadly roast potatoes helps wake the public up to the repulsive curse of public health fanaticism, that would be great. But I reckon it'll be the same old rolling of eyes around water coolers, in pubs and in every bus queue up and down the country; they'll laugh at the stupidity and just ignorantly mutter about how they're just guidelines as the noose gets gently tightened yet again.

If only we had examples from history to show that 'guidelines' never stay that way, eh? Good grief. 



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