Time, gentlemen

It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out: the British Medical Association has issued a report calling for a ban on all alcohol advertising, including sports and music event sponsorship.

They’re looking to slow rising consumption with the ban, plus some other government mandates: mandatory minimum pricing scheme, reduction of licensing hours for both on-premise and off-premise sales, reducing the density of alcohol outlets, etc.

The focus is on young people (defined in the report as under 25), even though they admit that the entire nation is essentially in its cups most of the time. And that treating alcohol-related conditions costs the National Health Service up to $5B per year.

While I don’t dispute the social and financial costs associated with the kind of drinking that results in piles of vomit outside pubs every night, I have to wonder what they’re talking about when they refer to how cheap it is there. Unless they’ve lowered the prices considerably in the past three years, drink is definitely not the most cost-effective way of numbing your brain. (That would be reality TV shows.)

Plus—it’s unclear that the linchpin of their plan to dry out Britain, a ban on alcohol advertising, would have much of a positive effect. According to the Australian Association on National Advertisers (admittedly not an unbiased group), multiple studies by apparently legitimate and respected researchers would seem to indicate that advertising bans have little or no effect on actual, you know, consumption of alcohol.

Naturally various trade associations are rushing to the defense of the status quo. I particularly love the Wine and Spirit Trade Association’s dire prediction that a ban would “threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people working in the media, advertising, television” and other industries.

Kind of the argument used to prop up GM and Chrysler.

We the suckers...

In case there was any doubt in your mind, a report by the Congressional Oversight Panel has made it official: we-the-people’s involuntary bail-out of GM and Chrysler was basically billions washed down the drain. It’s a “loan” we’ll never see repaid.

You can kiss the initial $23B flung out by the Bush administration goodbye. And even though some chick at Treasury says there’s a “reasonably high probability” that we’ll get some of the nearly $40B back the two failed behemoths cadged from this administration, I don’t see her betting her own McMansion on that probability.

All in all, we’d have been better off investing in amusement parks or chinchilla farms.

Learning from history's mistakes (not)

Ah, the grand old days of black-is-white socialist realism are not entirely behind us. In the revisionist Russian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin & President Dmitri Medvedev that old blackguard Josef Stalin is on his way to rehabilitation. & the latest step in that process is a libel suit being brought by the Man of Steel’s grandson against a historian who wrote a journal article that would not qualify as hagiography.

Seems that Stalin never made policy of the destruction of whole classes of Soviet citizenry (in their tens of millions); didn’t really make a deal with Adolf Hitler & refuse to believe that his fascist friend would actually breach the pact by, you know invading the Soviet Union; didn’t eviscerate the Red Army with the show trials of the 30s; didn’t order the murder of 21,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; & blah, blah, blah.

This is an example of the cyclical nature of both historiography & national development. Were it not a desecration of every soul starved, shot, drowned, frozen, tortured & overworked to death in the service of Stalin’s ambition & by his direct mandate it would be rather farcical.

I mean, really—suing for libel instead of just eviscerating the offender in the bowels of the Lubyanka & sending his family to Siberia? Somewhere Stalin is whirling like a dreydel.

Any road—it doesn’t bode well for Russians today or the nations that interact with them.

Losing fizz

Sad news for those of us who love bubbly: reacting to lowered sales, Champagne houses are acting like OPEC & cutting production.

Seems like an odd response: consumers have cut back on buying the stuff because of straitened circumstances—clearly a statement about price sensitivity; but rather than lower their prices the producers are moving to uphold them artificially.

Zut alors!