Townsends
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July 6, 2020
Sober Sailors – Rum Rations In The Navy: Grog
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April 15, 2020
“Experts” and their “models”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, after offering us his current favourite mixed drink recipe, L. Neil Smith gets around to discussing our modern dependence on “experts” wielding their intricate and convoluted computer models to guide our lives:
My preferred variant of Mott’s Clamato … I’ll have to try it with tequila as Neil suggests.
Start with a tall glass of Mott’s Clamato over ice. Many people can’t stand the idea of tomato juice enhanced with sweet clam juice (and some spices), and I won’t try to sell you on it, here. But if you relish it the way I do (I used to buy it by the gallon), then bon appetit! Throw in a healthy shot of tequila — mine is Cuervo Gold, but your mileage may vary. Add a fat slice of lime on the edge of the glass, a slice of lemon, and a slice of orange. The citrus really dresses it up. These are all ingredients I like very much, and together, they take the edge off a day I spent writing 1000 or 2000 words (my record so far is 3200) and let me relax.
At the end of that day, when my lovely and talented wife quits work and comes home — from the dining room, these days — we have a nice, comfortable cocktail hour (she drinks Cuba Libras) and watch Tucker Carlson. Ordinarily, three giant cans of the Budweiser concoction (which is also made with Clamato) will make me the tiniest bit silly. This drink, the Bloody Mermaid (ick) is surprisingly gentle and I have had two and a half so far without embarrassing myself. I love the taste of tequila neat (many don’t), and I would still be doing shooters, except that my loving bride of 36 years won’t let me eat that much salt.
Please enjoy this silly little drink if you can until we’re all free again.
Oh yeah — I couldn’t resist after all. There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’m sure you remember the way “experts” with computer models warned us all about Y2K, and the way it meant the end of Civilization-As-We-Knew-It. Then there was Global Warming — more experts, more computer models — there are still gullible morons out there who believe it’s not an obvious hoax. Now experts and their — increasingly failing — computer models are all telling us we are in the middle of the worst health crisis since the Black Death.
I happen to be, as you know, a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment that you will ever read. Therefore, I cannot endorse the suggestion I’ve heard that whenever an “expert” testifies about anything before any legislative body anywhere, and the words “computer model” come out of his mouth, the Sergeant-at-Arms should smash his face in, drag him out into the street, and shoot him him the back of the head. Perhaps millions of lives could be saved that way, but, as a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment you will ever read, I cannot endorse that position.
So drink up, my dear friends and readers and have the best time — under house arrest — that you possibly can!
April 12, 2020
Minimum alcohol pricing – a policy so good you have to lie about it
Scotland has had legal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages since mid-2018. If you read a random selection of mainstream media coverage, you’d know that it’s been a huge success, with vastly improved public health results at a price to consumers measured in mere pennies. As with all propaganda efforts, if you tell the lies often enough, people may believe you:
There has been all sorts of rubbish written about minimum pricing since it was introduced in Scotland in May 2018. Nicola Sturgeon has lied about in the Scottish Parliament. The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to spin the policy as a success. The public have been told that alcohol-related hospital admissions have gone down when they have gone up. We have seen the media fall for blatant cherry-picking. We have been told that rates of problem drinking have gone down when we don’t have any evidence either way.
One of the few solid facts — that there were more alcohol-related deaths recorded in Scotland in 2018 than in 2017 — has been sidelined. Instead, the media have focused on a disputed, and relatively small, decline in alcohol sales as if that were an end in itself. Any port in a storm (fortified wine sales have definitely benefited from minimum pricing).
Figures from the calendar year of 2018 are of limited use because minimum pricing didn’t begin until May 1st. Today, for the first time, I can reveal the monthly mortality figures for Scotland, England and Wales. They show that there was no difference between the change in annual death rates from alcohol-related causes, regardless of whether the country had minimum pricing in place. Both England/Wales and Scotland saw a decline between May and December of seven per cent (compared to the previous year).
This graph is published in a new briefing paper I have written for the IEA. It summarises all the evidence gathered to date on deaths, hospitalisations and sales, plus exclusive new data.
Importantly, it contains estimates of the costs to consumers. Among the more outlandish claims made by the Sheffield modellers was the idea that moderate and low income consumers would be barely affected by minimum pricing. They predicted that a low income moderate drinker would only pay an extra 4p a year! This was never realistic, not least because it was based on the minimum price being set at 45p and they defined a moderate drinker as someone consuming the equivalent of just two pints of lager a week, but it worked from a PR perspective because it quelled politicians’ fears about the policy being regressive.
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March 29, 2020
Can we keep a few of these innovations after the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak is over?
Chris Selley finds a few of the changes to business practice in Ontario to be definite improvements that we should retain once the panic subsides:
“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Prepping my urban coronavirus hermitage involved packing my freezer with comforting made-ahead delights: pulled pork, chili, various pasta sauces including a life-altering Bolognese ragout recipe from Marie in Quebec City, who runs foodnouveau.com. Mostly, however, I’ve found myself wanting to eat … a bit more downscale. Supplies of Pogos and Bagel Bites are shamefully depleted, well ahead of schedule. And I do love that chicken from Popeye’s.
My superb local fried chicken joint has come up with a very simple and reassuring way to fill walk-up orders. It’s explained on the locked door: You phone in your order from outside, then retreat eight feet; an employee comes to the door with the credit/debit machine, makes eye contact, demonstratively puts on a fresh pair of gloves, opens the door and places the machine on a stool outside, along with the box of gloves. The customer dons a pair of the gloves, completes the transaction, discards the gloves in the waste basket provided, and retreats eight feet again. The employee, wearing fresh gloves, returns with the order and places it, with a smile, on the stool.
This is neither particularly ingenious nor unique. The food-delivery industry has taken to calling it “contactless delivery,” which is an amusingly jargon-y term for “pay in advance and we’ll leave it wherever you tell us and run.” I found myself weirdly impressed, though. Popeye’s system might not scale to Ronald’s place across the street, and I’m certainly not questioning McDo’s decision to shut down everything in Canada except delivery and drive-through. But especially living in a city where most everyone seems to be treating COVID-19 with suitable respect, it’s nice to appreciate the ingenuity that will keep those of us lucky enough to be sentenced to house arrest as comfortable as possible.
And it has been striking to see governments getting out of the way. Ontario, where change is generally about as welcome as a dry cough and fever, is all of a sudden a jurisdiction where licensed foodservice establishments can sell alcoholic beverages with takeout or delivery meals. It’s a place where supermarkets licensed to sell booze can do so as of 7 a.m. British Columbia made the same call on booze delivery and takeout. Alberta has allowed restaurants to sell their booze, period.
It’s hard not to notice that these loosened restrictions come as government-run bottle shops in Ontario and Quebec shorten hours. In Ontario, the Beer Store, a foreign-owned quasi-monopoly, has reduced hours and refuses to refund empty bottles. (There is no other place to refund empty bottles in Ontario.) They say you find out in a crisis who your friends are.
blogTO shows how some Toronto restaurants are getting creative with wine and food delivery options.
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February 6, 2020
QotD: Saint Paul
The anti-booze activists of the church tend to waffle a bit when you bring up the wedding at Cana. It’s a metaphor for something else, they might say, or they come up with biblical quotes to justify their stance, most of which come from that Saint Paul chap, as far as I can figure out. Look, I’m sure Saint Paul was a decent fellow and good to his mother, but he was not a barrel of fun. Old Miseryguts — as I’m sure his former friends called him after his conversion — was against practically everything that makes this vale of tears at all palatable. You will look in vain for a joke of any sort in either of the Epistles to the Corinthians, and the Thessalonians don’t get off much lighter.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
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January 28, 2020
QotD: Drinking and driving
According to BTLPTP, “Drinking drivers are responsible for one-quarter of all people killed on Ontario roads.” In other words, only 75 percent of Ontario traffic fatalities are the work of sober people. Either we have more drunks in Ontario or our sober drivers are better drivers than Britain’s. [Where “one in seven of all deaths on the road involve drivers who are over the legal limit.”]
Now, despite the damning evidence in these brochures that sober people are causing carnage on our roads, the people who know what’s good for us are busy trying to lower the legal blood alcohol limit. Early in 2001 the Quebec government announced that it was lowering the limit from eighty milligrams to fifty, throwing in a complete drinking ban for professional drivers — cabbies, bus drivers, and the like. This last measure was a reaction to — well, nothing at all. Were drunk ambulance drivers creating havoc on the roads of Quebec? No. But it gave the government of Quebec the appearance of having taken a strong stand on something. Predictably, the Ontario government immediately made noises about following suit.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
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January 21, 2020
The United States Goes Dry – Alcohol Prohibition I THE GREAT WAR
The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.
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Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.» SOCIAL MEDIA
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January 14, 2020
QotD: Drinking in Upper Canada
Nor was the early Canadian drinker certain of what was in his drink. McBurney and Byers offer a few recipes of the day. Wisely they note: “These old recipes are presented for interest only; they should not be used.” I’ll say. Their recipe for port calls for 28 gallons of cider, 9 gallons of whiskey, 15 pounds of white sugar, as well as cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, ground cochineal, carbonate of potash, and — if necessary — two ounces of ground alum. I don’t think that’s the way they make it in Portugal. There are no grapes, for starters. I’m trying to imagine how I’d feel the next day. Now I’m trying to stop imagining how I’d feel the next day.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
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December 25, 2019
The Wildest Christmas Party Ever? – December 24th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 1
TimeGhost History
Published 24 Dec 2019The first day of TimeGhost of Christmas is about a legendary Christmas Party bearing the equally legendary name of “the Eggnog Riots”, which took place on Christmas Eve in 1826 at the Military Academy at West Point, New York.
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Written by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
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Creative Producer: Joram Appel
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Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/Sources:
NYPL Digital Collections
From the Noun Project:
Wine by Ayub Irawan
Drunk by Ates Evren Aydinel
Whisky by Made by Made
Rum by Andreja Kirma
clock by Maurício BritoSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Etienne Roussell – “A Winter’s Night”
Mike Franklyn – “Christmas Bliss”A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
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December 5, 2019
QotD: [Literal] Health Nazis
Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”
The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.
Jacob Sullum, “So What If Hitler Was an Anti-Smoker?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2004-12-17.
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October 19, 2019
Churchill Was a Drunk… or Was He? – Doped WW2 Leaders Part 2
World War Two
Published 17 Oct 2019Winston Churchill was one of the most influential figures of World War Two. But as a heavy drinker he must have been under influence of constant drunkenness, right?
Watch Part 1 about Hermann Göring here: https://youtu.be/8H7arcUi7zQ
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– IWM: A 11590
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From the comments:
World War Two
22 hours ago (edited)
We make an effort to approach history as unbiased as possible. The result is what we think is a balanced videos on Churchill’s alcohol (ab)use. For those of you who are new here, we are following World War Two Week by Week, in which we do pay a lot of attention to all those smaller but still significant events. If you would like to watch the series, make sure to subscribe and to click here to start watching from episode one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A1gVm9T0A&list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4Y2QxGw33vYu3t70CAPV7XCheers,
The TimeGhost team.
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October 6, 2019
Finally a reason to climb on the impeachment bandwagon
Andrew Heaton, in his latest newsletter, explains why he’s finally come down on the side of impeaching President Trump:
Okay, here’s the main thing I wanted to talk to you about: America is about to slap a TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT tariff on scotch. The underlying story involves the WTO and Airbus, but I think I can save everybody a lot of time by pointing out that our president is a mouthbreathing protectionist who’s too lazy to read Adam Smith’s wikipedia page.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Tariffs are just taxes, designed to punish you for having the gall to buy something from a foreigner.
- This will hurt Scottish distillers, and potentially price out distillers with low profit margins.
- I might have to switch to wine on dates.
- We have now spent more money needlessly bailing out farmers from a trade war with China than we did bailing out banks under Bush.
- We’ve known about the idiocy of tariffs since The Wealth of Nations came out in 1776.
- Trump, a man lacking an ideological core, for reasons which boggle the mind, seems to genuinely believe tariffs and protectionism are good things, as he has maintained since the 80s.
Chances are if you subscribe to this newsletter you’re not a teetotaler, but on the off chance you are, allow me to make a case against whisky taxes even if you are not personally apoplectic about a tax hike on Laphroaig. (A concoction personally invented by Almighty God. It’s like you’re drinking a campfire. Try it.)
There’s an old saying: when goods don’t cross borders, armies do. I concur with this. In fact my largest contribution to the field of economics (Nobel Prize forthcoming) is Heaton’s Peace Through International Mistresses Theory.My groundbreaking idea is that we want to have an interconnected, global economy with lots of transnational trade, because businessmen will be less supportive of bombing cities their mistresses live in. When trade wars happen, international trade collapses, and suddenly businessmen are flying to Berlin and Paris a lot less. Pretty soon we’re firebombing Tokyo.
It would probably be more appropriate of me to dedicate my political analysis to the forthcoming Ukraine/Trump/Biden/Impeachment circus which will dominate our lives for the next few months. However in my case I don’t need to. The president has messed with my scotch. Now it’s personal. I’m all in.
Impeach the guy.
#FreeTrade
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July 8, 2019
June 26, 2019
Summer Stupidity: LONDON (City Review!)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 25 Jun 2019For more summer fun, we’re heading to London! Let us know what other fun side-content you’d like to see. We’ll see you with more long-form content on Friday!
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May 30, 2019
Doug Ford versus the Ontario neo-prohibitionists, progressive temperance snobs and other social control freaks
During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:
The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.
No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.
It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.
[…]
They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.
The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.
I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.
Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:
Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.
Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.
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