Quotulatiousness

May 16, 2012

Scotland’s latest moral panic, soon to spread to England

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

A spectre is haunting Scotland: the spectre of cheap booze and binge drinkers. The most recent regulatory answer, raising the minimum price of alcohol, won’t solve the problem.

Scotland announced minimum pricing for alcohol this week, at 50p a unit; the price of the cheapest spirits will now rise by almost 50%. It will arrive in England soon, although possibly at the more timid rate of 40p per unit. It will only make a tiny difference, says the government, as it contemplates raising prices for a commodity almost all citizens enjoy (86% of the adult population drink alcohol), and at a time when prices are rising everywhere.

So why bother doing it? The government says it will save lives, even as it announces the speed limit on some motorways will be raised to 80mph, which will cost lives. I am not sure if the deaths created on the roads will be offset by the lives saved from gin, but it seems that more deaths on the roads are acceptable, but more deaths from alcohol are not. Do I smell snobbery? David Cameron says that alcohol “generates mayhem on our streets and spreads fear in our communities” — so I suppose I do.

Minimum pricing is a result of a national moral panic about alcohol, which follows on the trail of moral panics about tobacco and obesity, which are created by the tabloids and their beloved pictures of girls vomiting into gutters with their skirts hitched round their waists; there is a whole crocodile of moral panics, squeezing its way into Downing Street as more important issues are ignored.

[. . .]

Drinking is something that terrifies some but delights many. Drinkers can be ghastly, but so can politicians, and so can sober politicians. Minimum pricing comes from an ancient place – the desire for a neat society – and it expresses Cameron’s desire to appear to be doing something, while he does nothing elsewhere. Where one stands on minimum pricing depends entirely on whether you believe it is a person’s unalienable right to get shit-faced drunk at the market price, no matter what your income. When so many rights are threatened, who would dispute it?

May 14, 2012

Scottish minimum alcohol pricing: “Health fascism is back with a vengeance”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

A released statement from Sam Bowman, Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, responding to Scotland’s minimum alcohol price decision:

“Minimum alcohol pricing is a miserable, Victorian-era measure that explicitly targets the poor and the frugal, leaving the more expensive drinks of the middle classes untouched. It’s regressive and paternalistic, treating people as if they’re children to be nannied by the government.

“To make things worse, all signs suggest that the minimum price will be successively raised once it’s in place. This is what happened in the UK with alcohol and tobacco taxes, which are now among the highest in the world. It’s like boiling a frog – bring in a low minimum price that only affects the most marginalized part of society, the poor, and raise it gradually every year without people noticing.

“The reality is that Britain does not have a drink problem. The definition of “binge drinking” has been redefined so that a grown man drinking more than two pints of lager is considered to be “binging”. The number of diseases defined as “alcohol-related” has tripled in the last twenty-five years. In fact, we drink less than we did ten years ago, less than we did one hundred years ago, and far less than we did in the 19th Century. Hysteria about drinking alcohol is a red herring invented by the health lobby. Health fascism is back with a vengeance, and minimum alcohol pricing is just another brick in the wall.”

March 24, 2012

“When you change the meaning of words to suit your purposes, you can ‘prove’ anything”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Sam Bowman discusses the injustice of minimum alcohol pricing at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

I’ve struggled to write something about minimum alcohol pricing today. It’s a hugely important issue, and one I care deeply about. But I can’t help but be angry at the people who’ve proposed it, and the government made up of supposed “conservatives” and “liberals” who plan on implementing it. It’s anti-individualism at its worst.

The “evidence-based” arguments made for minimum alcohol pricing are, in fact, based on distortion and bad science. The policy is paternalistic, indiscriminate, and only hits people who are frugal or on lower incomes. Slippery slope arguments are common, for good reason. But they’re especially appropriate here.

The idea that there should be a price floor for alcohol is well-loved by public health types, and often supported unthinkingly by middle class voters, often due to the media coverage of “binge drinking” among the young. It disproportionally hurts the poor, by increasing the cost of buying the cheapest forms of alcohol (which the poor are more likely to buy). To many, this is seen as a feature rather than a bug, as they assume that it will act to decrease alcohol consumption. Instead, it’s more likely to force poor drinkers to pay less for other things (like food and clothing) and will not measurably decrease alcohol consumption — how is it compassionate to make poor people even more poor?

The politics of this are straightforward but effective: target the most marginal, “problem” group – in this case, binge drinkers – with a low minimum price to pass an apparently-trivial law.

[. . .]

The justifications for this are completely, utterly bogus. Britain does not have a drinking problem: as ASI fellow Chris Snowdon has pointed out, we drink less today than ten years ago, less than a hundred years ago, and far less than we did before that.

Internationally, we are in the middle of the table in the European rankings, behind France, Germany and Spain, and far behind the Czech Republic and Luxemburg.

But what about binge drinking? In fact, the definition of “binge drinking” has been warped beyond all recognition. Four pints in a day counts as a “binge” for an adult man, according to official definitions. A woman drinking three standard (175ml) glasses of wine is “binging” as well.

As Chris points out, the number of diseases defined as “alcohol related” has tripled in the last 25 years. When you change the meaning of words to suit your purposes, you can “prove” anything.

March 17, 2012

Happy (Biologist’s) St. Patrick’s Day

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

I’m resurrecting this nerdy drinking song from last year… As many of you perceptive viewers noticed there were a couple alcohol-induced scientific errors in my last version of this song (gold star, perceptive viewers!) — so I thought this St. Patrick’s day would be a perfect time to correct them.

Lyrics:
In the year of our lord eighteen hundred and eleven
On March the seventeenth day
I will raise up a beer and I’ll raise up a cheer
For Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Here’s to brewers yeast, that humblest of all beasts
Producing carbon gas reducing acetaldehyde
But my friends that isn’t all — it makes ethyl alcohol
That is what the yeast excretes and that’s what we imbibe

Anaerobic isolation
Alcoholic fermentation
NADH oxidation
Give me a beer

[CHORUS]

My intestinal wall absorbs that ethanol
And soon it passes through my blood-brain barrier
There’s a girl in the next seat who I didn’t think that sweet
But after a few drinks I want to marry her
I guess it’s not surprising, my dopamine is rising
And my glutamate receptors are all shot
I’d surely be bemoaning all the extra serotonin
But my judgment is impaired and my confidence is not

Allosteric modulation
No Long Term Potentiation
Hastens my inebriation
Give me a beer

[CHORUS]

When ethanol is in me, some shows up in my kidneys
And inhibits vasopressin by degrees
A decrease in aquaporins hinders water re-absorption
And pretty soon I really have to pee
Well my liver breaks it down so my body can rebound
By my store of glycogen is soon depleted
And tomorrow when I’m sober I will also be hungover
Cause I flushed electrolytes that my nerves and muscles needed

Diuretic activation
Urination urination
Urination dehydration
Give me a beer

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

February 9, 2012

Michael Pinkus: Apathetic Ontario and the LCBO monopoly

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

In the latest issue of his OntarioWineReview.com newsletter, Michael Pinkus again expresses frustration with the government-run monopoly on retail sales of wine and spirits in Ontario:

I have made this point before when talking about the LCBO Food & Drink magazine, which competes directly with other publications in the province for advertising dollars; a magazine that is paid for by the people for the people, which sounds great and a pillar to build a country on, but not when you are competing against the very people who paid the money in the first place (magazine editors, publishers, writers, etc. are taxpayers too). One of the sad realities is that with each bottle a publisher buys they are paying to put themselves out of business.

It’s bad enough that the LCBO are the only game in town to buy booze … it’s bad enough that they waste millions of dollars a year on fancy stores (when they don’t have to) … it’s bad enough that a government run monopoly competes against their own populace and private enterprises for advertising revenue … but now they have to blow dollars on advertising themselves, buying expensive jingles and song rights … is that where you want your tax dollars to go? Could we not find better uses for this money, seriously? And what happened to social responsibility? They are advertising so we’ll buy more — does that seem counter-productive to the social responsibility pact. Heck, I don’t see this many ads for Premier Liquors out of Buffalo, and they have competition.

In the coming weeks we’ll look a little deeper into the LCBO, see what the Auditor General had to say, and read what the pundits are talking about. Find out why our booze prices are being raised mainly because we can’t be trusted as a society to police ourselves when it comes to drinking the devil’s liquid. I just can’t believe that all this is going down and nobody seems to be saying anything on the subject. Over the past few weeks I have been listening to CFRB: John Tory and Jim Richards both made mention, Richards went as far as to speak with Chris Layton (media relations mouthpiece for LCBO) — while both announcers shared their outrage with listeners over various aspects of the LCBO’s conduct (John: advertising; Jim: price raising), the apathetic Ontarians who bothered to call in had very little to say on the matter, many believing the LCBO is doing a bang up job.

A quick search of the blog shows that just about every mention of the LCBO is a negative one. No surprise there: the LCBO is a relic of the post-Prohibition era and is still run in a way that would be familiar to the state-owned “stores” of the old Soviet Union. They are undeniably better both in selection and in service than they used to be, but just about every positive change was wrought by the mere threat that the government of the day was looking at privatization as an option. As soon as the threat went away, the positive changes could be slowed or even stopped: after all, where else are you going to go to buy your wines and spirits?

February 8, 2012

Help combat RRSHS (Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome)

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Timandra Harkness on the latest “scare the shit out of people with blatant propaganda” campaign in Britain:

To put that another way, the campaign is suggesting that if 48,000 women all drank two large glasses of wine every night (it doesn’t specify for how long — a year, 20 years — this is a health campaign after all, so why would we need to see proper research citations?), then out of those assiduous drinkers an extra two would die in a year because they drank more than the government guidelines suggest.

It’s a classic case of RRSHS — Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome. Why bore people with a sober assessment of how likely something is to kill them when you can scream a terrifying figure at them instead? So what if they’re far more likely to die of something else?

And in fact, moderate drinking offers significant protection against heart disease, which kills one in three of us. ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me half as likely to die from a heart attack’, the plasticine figure could truthfully have said.

RRSHS is a variant of the “science by press release” variant of junk science.

Update: Tim Worstall loses his cool over the statistical lies being bandied around in this particular Nanny campaign:

    Prime Minister David Cameron is known to have sympathy with the idea of minimum pricing, which medics say could save nearly 10,000 lives per year if set at 50p per unit.

Gosh, that’s amazing.

    Alcohol related deaths in the UK rose to 9,031 in 2008, up from 8,724 the previous year.

Rilly? A slight rise in the cost of cheap booze will save more lives per year than are lost to all booze?

Hey, why not put it up to £50 a unit and we’ll all live forever?

Forgive me the crudity but I’ve really had it with cunts lying to get their bandwagons rolling.

And in the comments, “PJH” says:

One wonders, of course, if these figures are created in the same way as alcohol related admissions to hospitals.

“30% of this death was due to alcohol, 10% of that teetotaller’s death was due to alcohol, 14.243245% of that other death…”

February 5, 2012

Individual responsibility and underage drinkers attempting to launch bottle rockets from their anuses

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

No, really:

8. [Defendant] was highly intoxicated on this date and time, and decided in his drunken stupor that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his anus on the [Alpha Tau Omega fraternity] deck, located on the back of the ATO house.

10. [Defendant] placed a bottle rocket in his anus [and] ignited the fuse, but instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in Defendant’s rectum, and this startled plaintiff and caused him to jump back, at which time he fell off of the ATO deck, and he became lodged between the deck and an air conditioner unit adjacent to the deck.

13. Per the applicable codes … the deck in question should have had a railing, which comported with said codes.

16. ATO owed plaintiff a duty to provide a safe deck, including a railing, and … a duty to supervise its guests and its own fraternity members, such as Defendant, and other under age persons, from consuming alcohol on its premises, which leads to stupid and dangerous activities, such as shooting bottle rockets out of one’s own anus.

H/T to Dave Owens for the link.

January 24, 2012

The Crazy Years: today’s exhibit, the $100 hot dog infused with 100-year-old cognac

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

There are undoubtedly culinary discoveries yet to be made, some of which may well be amazingly tasty. Pulling together unlikely combinations is certainly one way to discover new and interesting flavours. This one, however, strikes me as being just a little bit crazy:

dougieDog Hot Dogs, a popular Vancouver eatery renowned for its creative all-natural hot dogs, has just added the Dragon Dog to its menu — with a price tag of $100. The hot dog features a foot-long bratwurst infused with hundred-year-old Louis XIII cognac, which costs over $2000 a bottle. Also on the dog, Kobe beef seared in olive and truffle oil and fresh lobster. A picante sauce (ingredients undisclosed) ties the flavors together for 12 inches of absolute culinary decadence.

“In designing this hot dog I wanted to come up with something super tasty and high-end that stays true to the traditional identity of the hot dog — a hot dog that any hot dog lover would enjoy,” explained dougieDOG proprietor and Chief Hot Dog Designer dougie luv.

I’m surprised the owner’s name isn’t C.M.O.T. Dibbler …

January 5, 2012

The quest to re-create Shackleton’s whisky

Filed under: Britain, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:01

AntarcticaYour wee dram of SCIENCE! How they managed to re-create the whisky from Mackinlay & Co. that Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition took along in 1907:

How was the re-creation carried out? Dr. James Pryde, chief chemist at Whyte and Mackay, subjected the samples to a comprehensive chemical analysis, in conjunction with a rigorous sensory analysis (that is, sniffing and tasting). Firstly, it was established that the alcoholic strength of the whisky was high enough that it very likely never froze over the years it spent interred in Antarctica. In winter, the hut reached a minimum temperature of -32.5°C, but, at 47 percent alcohol, the whisky remained liquid down to a couple of degrees cooler than that extreme. This eliminated what had been a significant source of concern about the quality of the sample, that decades of freezing and thawing had altered or ruined it. Carbon dating verified that the whisky did indeed date from the Shackleton era.

Phenol and related phenolic compounds show up in Scotch whiskies, giving them the unmistakable character that’s referred to “peaty,” because the flavor is introduced when the grain is exposed to peat smoke during the malting process. Chemical analysis revealed not only the quantity of phenolics in the Mackinlay — surprisingly low, given that era’s reputation for heavily peated malts — but also the particular balance of compounds, which enabled the experts to pinpoint what region the peat used had likely come from. The answer? Orkney.

Similarly, analysis of the compounds that result from barrel-aging was able to finger the barrels in which the whisky was aged as ones made from American oak and probably used once before to age wine or sherry. Gas chromatograph olfactometry, in which the spirit is broken down into its volatile components and each of these smelled individually by experts, gave clues as to details of the fermentation and distilling process.

December 20, 2011

QotD: Inside the world of Kim Jong-Il

Filed under: Asia, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:00

Kim Jong-il enjoyed the life of a spoiled playboy — fast cars, fast women, cellars of vintage French wines and a passion for Rambo and Daffy Duck videos. He was also said to take pleasure in caviar, Hennessy Cognac and his troupe of 2,000 dancing girls, recruited from the country’s high schools as teenagers to perform in “pleasure groups” in the dictator’s 32-odd villas and palaces — before being pensioned off at 25. Each pleasure group was composed of three teams: a “satisfaction team,” which performed sexual services; a “happiness team,” which provided massage; and a “dancing and singing team.” Visitors were treated to choreographed stripteases, though only Mr. Kim was allowed to avail himself of the other services.

Ian Vandaelle, “Inside the world of Kim Jong-il: The Glorious General and his ‘pleasure groups’”, National Post, 2011-12-20

December 11, 2011

QotD: Alcohol

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:20

It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.

In my opinion Kingers — which I was allowed to call him — was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for “a Dewar’s and water” instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with “white wine”, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.

Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

December 4, 2011

Lowering allowable blood alcohol limits will not make our roads safer

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Jesse Kline on the sounds-good-to-nanny-state-fans legal situation on Ontario roads:

My colleague Matt Gurney argues that creating a legal grey area between federal and provincial laws relating to drunk driving helps no one, and it’s better to have a lower overall limit than two conflicting ones. But lowering the legal limit to .05 is only going to distract police from going after the people who are actually making our roads less safe: dangerous drivers. By lowering the legal limit, we end up punishing motorists who are not driving dangerously, while diverting resources away from catching those who are.

The U.S. embarked on a similar push to reduce the legal limit from .10 to .08 in the 1990s and the results were less than stellar. A 1995 study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found 21 of the 30 states that had adopted the new rule experienced no improvement, or had less safe roads than the rest of the country.

In 2000, the federal government mandated that all states adopt the new standard. In the four years following this change, alcohol-related fatalities actually increased. Part of the reason was that drivers with a blood alcohol content (BAC) between .08 and .10 are generally not the ones swerving all over the road, so police set up checkpoints in order to catch them. This took officers off patrol.

According to Transport Canada’s own data, a person over 19 years of age with a BAC of .015 is statistically just as likely to get into an accident as someone with a blood alcohol level of .099. A majority (80%) of all alcohol-related crashes causing death are caused by drivers with a BAC over .08, while only 5% involve drivers in the grey area between .05 and .08.

October 20, 2011

This is why you don’t want to be a wine importer in Ontario

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

In the lastest issue of the Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus explains the 16-point process that all independent wine and liquor importers have to follow in order to get their products into customers’ hands:

Recently I received an email from an agent giving a blow by blow account of the process of getting booze onto the shelf of our beloved Monopoly, including the hair pulling and gnashing of teeth that goes along with it.

[. . .]

“I can take samples to the Licensees — Restaurants & Hotels — and if they want to buy it this is the procedure:

1) They must purchase a minimum of one full case
2) They must pay the LCBO a 25% deposit
3) If I want to reduce the freight rate down from $100+ per case to a reasonable freight rate . . . more like $12/case then I need to gather a minimum of 20 cases in orders with specific Licensees names on them who have all paid the deposit.
4) The LCBO Private Ordering department then processes the paperwork
5) The producer would then ship the product to an LCBO pick-up location
6) We wait until the LCBO consolidates our small order into a large container with other suppliers
7) The product usually takes 4 months to arrive and then spends another month going through Lab Analysis at a cost to the supplier of $175 per product.
8) When the product finally gets released we have to hope that the original licensees that ordered it all take delivery
9) The producer gets paid 60 – 90 days after the order lands in Ontario (while the agent pays to get it out of the Private Ordering warehouse).
10) The agent then has to chase the customer for at least 90 days to get them to pay since they will likely have an excuse not to have a cheque ready upon delivery
11) We have to do this for a total a 300 cases sold within one year to EARN the privilege of getting into the Consignment warehouse.
12) Once granted consignment space . . . we can start to ship from the producer to the LCBO consignment warehouse by the pallet (~56 cases)
13) In consignment, the product can be shipped without an advanced licensee order . . . but still must sell by the case to customers.
14) The producer gets paid once ALL of the order is sold through: 120 – 240 days later.
15) If the product does not sell through within 120 days of arrival then the LCBO confiscates the remaining order, discounts it, and puts it into a sale warehouse.
16) This frees up more space back in the consignment warehouse so that they can trap more agents into over-shipping and then the LCBO can punish them for trying to treat Ontario like a free enterprise liquor system.

Oh, and if the LCBO decides to add your product to their regular merchandise, you’ll be out of luck as it’ll probably sell for less than you can (and your hotel and restaurant customers are paying for exclusivity in a lot of cases, so they’ll stop ordering through you if it’s available in the LCBO retail stores).

September 30, 2011

Coming soon: the “sober-up” pill

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:09

Scientists at the University of Illinois may have cracked the secret to sobering up after a night on the town:

It’s your mutinous immune system that gives you that sozzled feeling after a boozy session, scientists claim in a paper published today in the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Conk out certain immuno receptors in your brain and you’ll be able to walk in a straight line, perform complex manual tasks and probably even stay awake on the night bus home after a heavy dose of alcoholic refreshment.

These receptors are a particular part of your immune system and scientists have been trying to figure out their connection to alcohol for years. When active TLR4s react with alcohol they release an inflammatory chemical called cytokine that seems to contribute to making us sleepy and poorly-coordinated.

It was a research team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, that made the breakthrough. Their pill works for mice, at least.

September 29, 2011

ReasonTV: Prohibition Vogue

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

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