S&F Off-Message Rants & Screeds Du Jour

Peggy

We've pretty much all seen at least one of the Discover Card "Peggy" series of TV commercials and their semi-black, ironic humor never fails to resonate true beyond one's customer service contacts with the credit card industry which is the commercials' instant concern even though the Peggys with whom one usually finds oneself dealing tend to be Indian rather than Russian.

One of the episodes of this series stands out as particularly resonant due not so much Peggy's shenanigans as the response of the hapless customer and her one-word final cry of impotent consumer rage.

C'mon indeed.

Evil

Here's a suggestion by New York Times columnist Mark Bittman that, on its face, looks merely, um, eccentric, but whose underlying principle is pure evil:

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

And — not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.

Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.

A "sound diet", eay? Like, instead of tucking into, say, your juicy, richly fat-marbled, luscious, all-the-fixins cheeseburger, you instead dip into this "healthy", thoroughly disgusting excuse for human-edible food.

The really scary thing is that in our current physical-fitness-obsessed Zeitgeist this evil, tax-"bad"-food suggestion might actually gain some traction. It's a suggestion already put into force, mutatis mutandis, in the case of our current demon du jour, tobacco, which today has been taxed to a point that's all but tantamount to declaring outright prohibition of the commodity, and all in the name of "public health".

Time to head for the barricades to fight the good fight against this most pernicious evil masquerading as a public good. Better to die young than face a long life deprived of those things that make life worth living.

Let's See If We Got This Right

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:06 PM Eastern on 4 Jul. See below.]

Let's see if we got this right.

A hotel chambermaid says she was sexually assaulted by a man in his NYC hotel room when she went in to clean. The man turns out to be none other than Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the I.M.F. and one of France's most prominent citizens, a strong contender for the presidency of France at the next election, and one of the most influential and well-connected men in the world. On the word of the chambermaid and on her word alone, Mr. Strauss-Kahn is arrested and dragged off an Air France jet at Kennedy International Airport, handed over to NYC detectives, promptly arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom and remanded with no bail to Rikers Island prison to await a Grand Jury hearing.

Did we get that right? What's that, we did?

Well, it sounds perfectly reasonable to us. After all, in America all persons are equal under the law, are they not? Why shouldn't the uncorroborated complaint of a mere chambermaid charging criminal sexual behavior on the part of the offender be acted upon in that way no matter how prominent, influential, and well-connected the man against whom the complaint was lodged. It's merely a routine exercise of American jurisprudence, right?

When pigs fly, maybe. If this entire squalid business doesn't in the end turn out to be an engineered setup of Mr. Strauss-Kahn we'll eat the proverbial crow — raw, literally.

---

Update (3:06 PM Eastern on 4 Jul): Just to bring this entry up to date in the light of recent events, a reader remarked after reading the above:

Yeah, I thought it smacked of set-up from the get-go, and the list of suspects is pretty extensive. [...] So the set-up scenario seems to be ever more likely, with the only question, who engineered it? What a roster of suspects!

But, no doubt, it'll play out that the woman acted alone. Fall guy, er, girl...

to which we responded:

Unless, of course, it's the woman herself who under pressure spills the beans; precisely what I expect to happen — if she's not murdered first, that is.

Stay tuned.

Bloody Embarrassing

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 6:36 PM Eastern on 2 May. See below.]

Did everyone who works in the West Wing, the President of The United States included, check their brains at the door when they went to work yesterday?

So Osama bin Laden has been found and killed. Good. But why did the President of The United States make the announcement to the world himself? It was not only bloody embarrassing but bloody demeaning. The President of The United States makes that kind of announcement himself if bin Laden had been found and killed ten days after 9/11, not ten years later. Ten years later, a high-ranking military officer makes that kind of announcement to the world, someone high up in the hierarchy of military command involved with the field operation that did the deed, the President of The United States commenting on the matter some small distancing amount of time later (i.e., small distancing from the actual announcement per se).

Jeez!

---

Update (5:07 AM Eastern on 2 May): NBC and The New York Times are reporting that Osama bin Laden's body has been buried at sea by U.S. forces "in accordance with Islamic customs" presumably subsequent to the body being positively identified as that of Osama bin Laden.

Say what? Are they bloody nuts? Buried at sea? You mean the Arab world has to take our word for it that bin Laden is dead? We better have irrefutable proof of that; proof so compelling that not even the Arabs can doubt or attempt to refute it.

Update 2 (6:36 PM Eastern on 2 May): No one has more hatred in his heart for the Islamist murderers responsible for 9/11 and other atrocities than do we, but the jubilant public celebrations by Americans over the killing of Osama bin Laden are truly ugly — ugly and uncalled for; the sort of public celebrations one would expect from Islamists and their supporters over the killing of one of their high-profile American enemies. Bin Laden has been killed. We Americans ought to have merely noted the event, said, "Good!", then have put it behind us and moved on. We've all more deserving things to celebrate.

Something Very Wrong

Perhaps it's just that we've been watching far too many TV cop shows of late, but there's something very wrong about this story, very wrong indeed. Given her history as set forth in the story, that this young woman should have been involved in such a bizarre and lethal accident seems to us more than merely unlikely. It seems to us just this side of impossible.

Was there in fact murder done here?

Stay Tuned.

It's About Bloody Time!

It's about bloody time that a first-world country began coming to its senses concerning the thoroughly imbecile, totally ineffective, cripplingly costly, almost half-century-old so-called "War On Drugs"; a source of evils more egregious than the imagined evil it's supposed to eradicate.

All illicit substances, including heroin and cocaine, should be legalised, according to a former [British] drugs minister who will today become the most senior [British] politician to push for a dramatic change in the strategy for tackling Britain's drug problems.

Bob Ainsworth will argue that it is better for addicts to receive their fixes on prescription rather than relying for their supply on the international criminal gangs that make billions of pounds from the trade.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Wonder Drug

When I was a kid (I'm talking pre-teen years), I was terrified of dying due to one sort of fatal disease or another, and even more terrified of some of the treatments then available. In my terror, I fantasized that aspirin was a kind of magic drug that would either protect against or cure any disease known to man. As I grew older, a remnant of that fantasy persisted — persisted in sufficient force that in my early twenties I began taking aspirin regularly — two a day — as a non-specific prophylactic against...whatever. Many years later came the discovery that a mere 80mg dose of aspirin a day (the standard aspirin tablet dose is 325mg) was amazingly prophylactic against fatal coronary events. Today, there appeared this:

[P]atients who took aspirin regularly for a period of several years were 21 percent less likely decades later to die of solid tumor cancers....

[...]

As part of [a] new study, published online Monday in the [British medical] journal Lancet, researchers examined the cancer death rates of 25,570 patients who had participated in eight different randomized controlled trials of aspirin that ended up to 20 years earlier.

Participants who had been assigned to the aspirin arms of the studies were 20 percent less likely after 20 years to have died of solid tumor cancers than those who had been in the comparison group taking dummy pills during the clinical trials, and their risk of gastrointestinal cancer death was 35 percent lower. The risk of lung cancer death was 30 percent lower, the risk of colorectal cancer death was 40 percent lower and the risk of esophageal cancer death was 60 percent lower, the study reported.

I'm not in the least surprised. I've known that for decades.

RTWT here.

On The Road To Prohibition

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 3:55 PM Eastern on 23 Nov. See below.]

The U.S. government has taken its next calculated step on the road to the total prohibition of tobacco and all tobacco products. No longer can one order cigarettes or cigarette rolling tobacco either via the Web or via telephone, nor can one receive either of those two products via any public carrier including the U.S. mail. If one wants to purchase either of those products, one must physically visit a bricks-and-mortar store, and purchase them over the counter. For us, that means no more can we roll our own cigarettes as has been our practice for the past twenty years or so, as no bricks-and-mortar outlet for cigarette rolling tobacco exists within our area, and so we'll be forced to begin using ready-mades again — at $80 per carton of ten packs of twenty cigarettes each. The rolling tobacco for that same number of cigarettes (a single 150 gram tin) was lately costing us $25, and before the new federal tax on cigarette tobacco went into effect last year, a mere $10.

We're so enraged by these selectively punitive measures taken by the feds, we're pretty much ready to break out the ol' Uzi and start firing away. Problem is, we don't know where to begin aiming the bloody thing as the targets are ubiquitous and legion. Nothing to do, then, but suffer in smoldering, impotent silence.

---

Update (9:45 AM Eastern on 15 Aug): We downloaded this morning a PDF of the actual legislation (titled, "Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act of 2009" or "PACT Act") referred to above, and read the whole bloody thing (not a particularly pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning). It seems our online tobacco seller of some ten years gave us some really bad information.

Turns out, this act's purpose is NOT to restrict what the act calls "delivery sales" of cigarettes (and the act defines cigarette rolling tobacco as cigarettes for the purpose of the act), but to make certain that the seller pays all local and state taxes on those sales when shipped out of state. While it's true that the act bans shipping cigarettes to consumers out of state through the USPS, it does NOT ban shipping cigarettes to out of state consumers via carriers such as FedEx and UPS, and so, for all consumers, buying cigarettes online or by telephone is just as free now as it's always been.

After discovering this, we were so pissed at our regular online seller for his unbelievable stupidity (although to be completely fair about it, he wasn't the only online tobacco seller to get it wrong; we ran into three or four online sellers that got it wrong in just the same way) that, without informing him of his misunderstanding of the act, we simply looked for another online seller of rolling tobacco that actually knew what the act entailed, and made our purchase from him with no problem at all.

So, false alarm — and a huge relief.

Update 2 (3:55 PM Eastern on 23 Nov): Bad news. We've just been informed that a ruling by the enforcement arm of the federal government (the FTC) has ruled that the PACT act effectively prohibits sale of cigarettes — which definition includes cigarette rolling tobacco — by any means except face-to-face, over-the-counter sales. Period. Full stop. That means that the original text of this post stands, the information contained in our first update is null and void, and smokers such as ourself are screwed — royally.

Fascist pigs!

Why We Hate Apple

Right from the very beginning of our entry into the world of personal computers (1981, with the introduction of the original IBM PC, which machine we acquired from the very first production line run), we've harbored something of a loathing for Apple Computer. First, because of its company-encouraged and –fostered cult-like following, and subsequently because of this sort of paranoid, control-freak behavior; an inviolable corporate way of doing business that's as much an Apple trademark as are their lowercase "i" products today, and has been since the corporation's formation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, had asked for [an] exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the so-called jailbreaking of iPhones and other devices.

[...]

The issue has been a topic of debate between Apple, which says it has the right to control the software on its devices, and technically adept users who want to customize their phones as they see fit. In a legal filing last year with the United States Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress, Apple argued that altered phones infringed on its copyrights because they used modified versions of Apple’s operating system.

RTWT here.

Winston Churchill Denuded

First there was the banning of smoking by any characters in any non-documentary commercial movie no matter how integral a part it might be of a character's, uh, character. Then there was the banning of any character smoking onstage in a live theater production. Now we have a truly frightening Orwellian example of this fanatic, paranoid, anti-Smoking lunacy.

Winston Churchill, whose ever-present cigar was as much an iconic part of who he was as his victory sign, has been summarily transformed into a non-smoker.

Idiots!