Saturday, December 11, 2010

The drinking season

The drinking season is upon us again. Around the world, alcohol deaths will spike again. Unless the perception about drinkers, who are seen to be smart, manly, fun-loving, cool, adventurous, etc., changes, alcohol will keep on winning. Here are the facts:

Alcohol is a slow, slowly but strongly addictive poison which kills about 3000/year in Australia, a great many more world-wide. Its social costs run into billions of dollars annually. But that's not my point.

Those who benefit from the sale of alcohol know this, yet they keep on producing, transporting, advertising and selling it. The only possible conclusion is that they care more about the money they make from their dealings with alcohol than about the deaths and social cost incurred by imbibing. When confronted with these facts they have only the drug dealer's lament to offer,

"if I don't do it, someone else will do it."

That's not my point, either. There will always be rotters.

How should we label the act of buying a slow poison from people who couldn't care less if their customers lived or died and these customers themselves? Stupid, ignorant, moronic, idiotic, all these come to mind. Not one of the labels traditionally associated with drinkers fits.

So, moron, if you want to drink yourself to death, by all means, go ahead, enrich those who couldn't care less about you and drink yourself out of a job, a family and into your grave. Try not to kill anyone else while doing so. Oh, I see, you'll be drunk and can't guarantee that you won't take anyone with you.

Let's all thank the authorities involved for this state of affairs. Many of them are drinkers and many of them make a pretty buck from alcohol.

Change the perception of a drinker from a cool hero to a fool and see alcohol consumption declining. Nobody likes to be a fool.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Wikileaks

The politicians are confused: publishing things embarrassing to them does not put anyone's life or national security at risk. Moreover, invoking national security just to prevent the world from seeing their stupidity and arrogance is morally repugnant. Taxpayers pay for what these self important blockheads send to each other. One would think these taxpayers have a right to see what they pay for. Obviously not. The world over national security is most likely overwhelmingly used for documents that don't have any potential to harm the national security of the countries involved at all. Many of these documents will have the potential to embarrass politicians and bureaucrats, but that has nothing to do with national security.

It is strange, but fact, that wherever people are in power, they will be able to get an army of lick spittle toadies to do their morally repugnant bidding. In the Assange affair these empowered minions are not lacking in numbers. Shame on you! Yes, all of you. You are a stench in the nostrils of God and of mankind.

Julian Assange complains that he has been abandoned by his country, more specifically its government. Julian Assange should know better than to complain about that. He only had his country's, and every other country's, government support when he was a faceless member of the voting cattle and they didn't know him by name or in any way at all. That support only consisted of his government not working actively against him, if he really needed them he would have been on his own. In the cartoon strip of The Little King, the little king once said to one of his minions that kings don't kill each other. They send their people to kill each other. Politicians in every country have a far greater affinity for politicians of other countries than for the people of their own country. Like hyenas, they are of the same species. It should come as no surprise to Julian Assange that the politicians in his own country are willing to throw him under the bus to help out politicians whom Assange embarrassed, even if these embarrassed politicians are from other countries. This is just the way it is.

Some may find it strange that Wikileaks, and its public face, Julian Assange, is treated hostilely by the media. This is not strange at all. Wikileaks succeeded in doing what the world's combined media could not do, and they don't like that. So, the media of the world joined the lick spittle toadies in doing the bidding of the politicians. How absolutely and horribly disgusting they are. They should be ashamed of themselves.

In all my many years this is the first time I've ever heard of Interpol getting involved in apprehending a possible rapist. Note that there is no talk of aggravated rape, physical assault, serial raping, murder or injuries. Did Julian Assange decide that raping goes well with leaking diplomatic communications - might as well, in for a penny, in for a pound? Does he have a history of violence and rape? Or is this something cooked up at the bidding of a politician somewhere?

So, what can one do when these bullies behave like Nazis and communist dictators to silence a small group of people who embarrassed them? If they get away with it, it is another nail in the coffin of freedom of information, all in the name of national security. I believe they believe the odds are so overwhelmingly stacked in their favour that there is no risk to them at all in persecuting wikileaks. The only risk to them is in continued leaks. Are they right? What a sad state of affairs this world is in.