That's fucking stupid

Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

“Drugs deaths up by 67% in Wales in three years” screams the BBC, ensuring that the buzzword “alarming” is thrown in*.

If you the copy/paster journalist had read the report, they’d realise that the researchers have improved their data gathering techniques this year (27 unrecorded cases in Wales in last year’s report), so the “67%” may indeed be an exaggeration.

Oh, and deaths caused by amphetamine and cocaine were down by around a third nationwide (15% to 12%, and 5% to 3% respectively).

But that sort of story wouldn’t generate clicks, would it?

.

* cf. “billowing” regarding fires and “rocking” regarding earthquakes

** remind you of the whole MMR autism thing, perchance?

Those damn nazis gave the concept of eugenics such a bad name yet before the war and for a surprisingly long time afterwards the idea of sterilising people who had undesirable traits was considered routine and normal throughout the western world, particularly in the US. It comes as no surprise then  that Project Prevention comes from the US although they now aim to set up shop in the UK.

The idea is simple: they ask healthcare and law enforcement to refer drug addicts to them and then offer a cash incentive to the addict if they get sterilised. Their mission is to prevent kids being born to addict parents who will most likely abuse/neglect them or let the children become a burden to the state and the rest of society. It’s kinda like the purest sort of “if you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em”.

Cue outraged objection from anyone who doesn’t get the idea of Reductio ad Hitlerum and is a little worried that people might get a teensy weensy bit offended. My favourite bit from the article in the Independent was that “critics say her approach automatically stigmatises all addicts as bad parents”.

I don’t give a flying fuck what sort of stigma this attaches to addicts, they aren’t the victims here. If a person wants to trade the chance of kids for a quick fix then I say bring out the bricks and I’ll do it myself.  I suspect that the £200 offered in the US may have to be increased for this to work over here because kids are worth much more in terms of benefits over here.

The only reservation I have is that of informed consent. An addict is not in their right mind, else they would probably not be doing what they are doing, so should they be able to give consent to commit evolutionary suicide for a quick fix? If they can’t give informed consent in their right mind then isn’t society weeding out the weak? If it’s social Darwinism, or eugenics, then is it really a bad thing?

Despite what the slightly more stupid bible thumpers* say, survival of the fittest is all around us in nature. If eugenics is about selective breeding in the same way it’s applied to show dogs, farm animals or roses then why not apply it to the general public? The state can already be imagined as a farmer who seeks to maximise productivity from the ‘individuals’ in its care. If an animal is weak or useless to the farmer then it’s removed from the herd.

I guess people don’t like thinking of themselves as farmed animals though.

* People who object to evolution are normally too thick to understand evolution. No, the monkeys didn’t turn into humans.

From today’s news headlines:

OMG KIDS TAKING MORE DRUGS. EVERYBODY IS ALARMED!!!

Let’s take a look at that a bit more closely, shall we? Here’s the text from the actual report:

Police recorded drug offences increased by six per cent compared with 2007/08, following an increase of 18 per cent between 2006/07 and 2007/08. Increases in recent years have been largely attributable to increases in the recording of possession of cannabis offences… In 2008/09 possession of cannabis increased by six per cent compared with 2007/08. This increase continues an upward trend in recent years, with possession of cannabis offences recorded by the police rising by 90 per cent since 2004/05. This rise has been largely associated with the increased use of powers to issue cannabis warnings.

and

The [British Crime Survey] is also used to monitor trends in drug use and the figures are published annually. The BCS shows that overall illicit drug use among 16 to 59 year olds decreased from 11.1 per cent in 1996 to 9.3 per cent in 2007/08 and it is now at its lowest level since the BCS started measurement. This decrease is mainly due to successive declines in use of cannabis since 2003/04… This suggests the increase seen in recent years in police recorded drug offences is likely to be due to increase in police activity rather than in drug use.

Just thought I should highlight that. Once again: usage hasn’t risen: police have just been reporting it more.

Chubby motherfucker Kevin Smith, responsible for movies such as Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy along with such travesties as Dogma and Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back*, has been chucked off a flight for being a lardy cunt.

He’s now proceeding to whine to his millions of mindless idiot fans about how hard done by he is for not being allowed to fly on a plane he wasn’t even booked on. It seems he normally books out a row of three seats for him and his frighteningly scrawny wife (yes, the physics of how Harley Quinn came about are beyond me too) but this time the slightly unnerving wife wasn’t there so Kev only opted for two of the seats. Smith then arrived early for the flight he was planning on getting and asked to be bumped up to an earlier flight, one that was pretty full.

This seems to be where the breakdown in communication is. Southwest Air seems to have predicted the explosion in fat fuckery in the USA by introducing a policy 25 years ago which clearly states that tubby bitches who can’t fit in one seat are required to purchase two seats. In walks the lardy cake of shit that is Kevin Smith with two tickets in hand and no spaces on the flight for a double seat. Someone most probably either

1. Assumed the fat fucker was lying about not really needing two seats
2. Figured they couldn’t charge him for two seats if they didn’t give him two seats

Either way the butterball was bumped from that flight to the one that he was originally supposed to take and all should have been well in the world, but our Kevin wasn’t going to let it lie there; he decided to tweet his annoyance to the 1.6 million tossers who want to appear dramatically cooler than they actually are by following him on twitter**.

Now I’m conflicted on this so let’s have a for and against Kevin Smith list, let’s start with the for:

1. They didn’t have the space for his double seat, they could surely have checked that at the checkin desk?
2. He could fit his lardy ass in the seat and the two women seated next to him were ‘perfectly happy’***.
3. I went somewhere with my little brother when he was 12 and he no way took up a full seat. Could I get a discount from the airline? Could I fuck.
4. There was another fat bastard on the plane who didn’t get called out.
5. He has 1.6m twitter followers so fuck the lot of you, he can do what he likes.

On the flip side:

1. He ended up on the same fucking plane that he’d booked his oily ass on.
2. He’s an annoying whiny shitstorm so he probably said something to annoy someone.
3. Even if he didn’t say something to annoy someone I’d throw him off the plane just for giving Ben Affleck so much screen time.
4. Ditto Dogma.
5. Ditto ruining my childhood memories of Luke Skywalker by making Mark Hamill humiliate himself in J&SBSB.

So here’s my solution: let’s weigh all the passengers and their luggage before we fly them anywhere and then charge the cunts by weight.

And Kevin, you’ve got a few quid**** so don’t be tight, never turn right.

*Seriously, that movie was like having all of my senses raped by a tattooed guy called ‘Spider’.

**One must assume these people also follow Ashton Kutcher, President Obama & Shaquille O’Neill

***So fucking excited to be sat next to the world renowned sense raper Kevin Smith that they didn’t mind his flabby ass making an excursion to their seat while his sweaty bingo wings slapped them in the face every time he lifted his chubby arms in the air to make room for breathing

****As evidenced by the fact that you’re ugly as shit but have clearly had sex at least once.

Newsflash: Hundreds of people overdosed on homeopathy treatments at the weekend and nobody died. Some may have been a little giddy with the extra sugar.

It wasn’t a bad stunt, one that got a little bit of coverage in the press. The homeopathy cronies will easily explain the reason that overdoses don’t kill or harm to be due to the safe nature of homeopathy treatment so no real harm is caused to their stories of voodoo and beating glass on leather.

Here’s the thing though: homeopathy does work as a pretty good placebo and the placebo effect is well documented to help people recover from all sorts of unlikely ailments. If thick people want to buy a placebo then it’s got to be cheaper for the NHS than paying for lots of expensive drugs. If it works then the NHS saves money, if it doesn’t then it’s not like we’ve lost an Einstein, is it?

I think everyone should read how it is actually supposed to work, it’s like someone made it up to see just how gullible people would actually be (eaten any spiders in your sleep recently?). Basically you get something that’s bad for you and then watering it down so much that there is none left. An example would be using caffeine to cure insomnia, but then watering it down so much that you would need a tub of water bigger than the known universe to find just a single caffeine molecule. The best bit is that by hitting the flask of water or shaking it makes the water remember what was in it.

I didn’t make that up. Samuel Hahnemann did in 1796 and people still fall for it.

I am now regularly hitting the side of my toilet bowl after I do a big turd so that the water I use to flush it will remember the poo. It’ll also be plenty diluted so extra potent by the time the homeopathy fans drink my shit.