Experts get drunk on power

Your humble Devil is often asked why scientists would "lie" over climate change, as they must be doing if anthropogenic global warming is not the big disaster that is currently claimed. There are, of course, many reasons why this might be seen to be the case.

First, people often misunderstand what scientists are claiming. This is especially true of politicians, who usually have stuff-all knowledge of the underlying concepts, let alone the most recent data. This idea was starkly illustrated when I appeared on the Wolverhampton Politics Show for the second time [MP3], when a LibDem Councillor asked me how I squared my scepticism of AGW with—amongst other things—the hole in the ozone layer "caused by global warming": the ozone layer depletion was not, of course, linked to global warming, but gases known as chlorofluorocarbons.

Second, scientists need money and it so happens that there tends to be more money floating around "politically sensitive issues" because governments give out a lot of cash (the USA spent $4 billion on AGW research last year). Thus, you get the ludicrous sight of scientists appending pieces on the end of their papers, e.g. that they still believe CO₂ drives global warming, even though their paper shows that it never has before.

And sometimes, of course, it is simply because those scientists and experts haven't got a fucking clue and they prefer to lie through their lying fucking liars' teeth in order not to look like a bunch of ignorant twats.

Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits that have shaped health policy in Britain for 20 years were “plucked out of the air” as an “intelligent guess”.

The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever.
...

The disclosure that the 1987 recommendation was prompted by “a feeling that you had to say something” came from Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party that produced it.

He told The Times that the committee’s epidemiologist had confessed that “it’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t” because “we don’t really have any data whatsoever”.

Mr Smith, a former Editor of the British Medical Journal, said that members of the working party were so concerned by growing evidence of the chronic damage caused by heavy, long-term drinking that they felt obliged to produce guidelines. “Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee,” he said.

If fact, not only were these limits plucked out of the air, we now understand that they were not even a very intelligent guess.

Subsequent studies found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers.

One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.

If you look at it that way, these arbitrary guidelines may have cost lives! And yet despite this revelation—despite being rumbled as a bunch of lying cunts—the fucking abysmal health Nazis are moving in to attempt to further curb our "excesses".

In a further attack on Britain’s drinkers, it was revealed yesterday that a coalition of health organisations is mounting a campaign to force a 10 per cent increase in alcohol taxation.

The group, headed by the Royal College of Physicians, is also seeking to secure the support of MPs for stricter regulation of the drinks industry and warnings on alcohol advertising. A total of 21 bodies, including Alcohol Concern and the British Liver Trust, will form the Alcohol Health Alliance, according to Harpers Wine and Spirit magazine.

And here we go again. These fuckers are not interested in the science: they are only interested in one power and money. They want the power to order the world as they see fit, and the money to be able to buy their way out of having to obey their own diktats.

These people are, to an extent, worse than politicians or civil servants; they are special interest pressure groups, often funded by the state (for who else would willingly spend money on these killjoy shits) to lobby the state, interested only in prolonging the world's "problems" so that they can continue to draw their fat, fucking salaries.

They use the classic "ratchet" concept; achieve one restriction and then move to tighten up that restriction and spread the net yet wider. How else are they to survive?

They are parasites and they too shall populate the lamp posts of Britain in time...