Carnivores, Prepare to Meet Thy Doom! PC NItwits On the Prowl!

Well, we did go to Taman Anggrek today, packed with Chinese New Year revellers.

We enjoyed watching some barongsai dragons capering on the Sinified stage, and had a decent meal too. But it was alarming to find that not one single resto in that huge mall now has a smokers’ area.  We even asked a charming customer service girl.  She was polite and helpful.

If you want a cigarette, it’s out you go, to the space outside the revolving doors, which, ridiculously, has large ‘no smoking’ signs too, but enough Indonesians show blithe disregard for Jakarta Governor Fawzi Bowo’s authoritarian edicts to ensure a pleasant whiff of tobacco out there.

The sticky-beak mentality that has erased free choice in the West has indeed spread to Jakarta, but what further imbecilities await us, as governments delight in widening the scope of their interference in ordinary life.

When we got home tonight, I saw an excellent article in the new issue of Spiked, First They Came for the Smokers…, by Rob Lyons http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11984/ and his first sentence held my attention, as we’d been tucking into lamb chops in Taman Anggrek’s American Grill  (Obama would hate it, festooned as it is with slogans like ‘Liberty, In God We Trust,’ etc.) .

Meat causes cancer. It’s been said so many times that you’d have to be an idiot not to believe it, right?

Lyons proceeds to show that the ill-intentioned do-gooders who have propagated this myth are aiming to add us carnivores to us smokers and us drinkers (yes, I declare a personal stake in this debate!) to the list of bannables.

They are now pointing to a report published by the British Journal of Cancer Research, where  data indicate that red meat increased the risk of pancreatic cancer for men, but not for women, and that the risk of pancreatic cancer rose by 19 per cent for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed.

Lyon points out the obvious possibilities of inaccuracy, like, how many of us recall exactly what and when, never mind what weight of foods, we eat over a period of time. He reckons the eaters were just given questionnaires, not confined like lab rats.

He also asks at what stage any meat, other than that we shoot or stab ourselves, actually becomes processed meat.

He further draws our intention to the fact that correlation does not automatically equal causation. If, for example, vegetarians live longer than folks like me, ‘you don’t need to be a rocket scientist – or a professor of epidemiology – to realise that vegetarians live, on average, quite different lifestyles from people who tuck into burgers and kebabs.

Too right, mate!

And he uses statistics to remind us that even if it’s all as the alarmists say, it’s no big deal….in terms of odds, instead of it being 10,000-to-one that these kebab-and-burger lovers develop pancreatic cancer in any particular year, it would be 6,667-to-one.

Nice one, Rob Lyon, and there we’d leave it, but for his mention of an article in the Observer, some silly bint named Barbara Ellen. So I checked it out, and believe it or nor, she seriously says that ‘people who’ve been informed of the dangers of meat, particularly the cheap processed variety, but who continue to wolf it down, should be held accountable.

Yes, she actually used those words! Here they are, in more detail…many past studies have stated a probable link between too much meat and all manner of cancers and heart problems, as well as links to other conditions, from diabetes and high blood pressure to obesity and Alzheimer’s…I’d be shocked if any of this was considered new enough to shock anyone. ..With this in mind, isn’t it time to ask, exactly how thick, how hard to educate, are meat eaters and why aren’t they held accountable in the same way everyone else is?

At first sight. i’d have taken Ellen’s emoting as a satire, but satire is almost dead these  days, our daily lives a permanent bad joke of state bullying and nannyism. Then I thought to ask, is this woman in her right mind? A fair question, if she writes for the Observer, or indeed the Guardian.  And she admits she’s a vegetarian, a very odd choice in my view, but I don’t harass or torment her for it.

However, my tolerance will not be reciprocated. She is very serious and must be taken very seriously.

For she and her kind have a true gestapo mentality. If it doesn’t fit the PC pattern of desirable behaviour, slap it down.

Your fondness for meat pies could mean you forfeit your right to health service treatment. At the very least, if meat joins smokes and booze on the black list (not banned, of course, they need that tax money – it’s just us smokers who get banned, from Jakarta restos, and EUSSR pubs) we’ll wake up to discover one day that there’s a PC surcharge been added to the cost of a pound of mince (I refuse to talk in kilos!) 

Look at how smokers are denied the right to foster or adopt children. You can be a rabid sexual pervert, in a so-called ‘gay marriage,’ and you’ll have helpless kids handed over to your tender mercies, but light up a Marlboro after dinner and you go on the black-list. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/6730697.stm

Will Ellen and her comrades soon be demanding the same outlawry on all prospective adopters who may include a bacon buttie in the kids’ packed lunches?

Prepare to meet thy doom!

.’