Thursday 26 March 2015

Healthy high streets

The medical establishment's bid for world domination continued today, with the Royal Society for Public Health (whoever they are) demanding the right to decide which shops are allowed to open and where they should be allowed to position their goods. In the same way as Lord Darzi has a fascist desire to turn public parks into 'Beacons of Health', this mob wants to live out their Albert Speer fantasies in our town centres.

We believe that business has a responsibility to ensure that what they offer doesn’t undermine the public’s health

Do you? Is that what you think? Because I think it should be up to us what we buy and we can "undermine" our health if we damn well please.

And we want to ensure that local authorities have the powers they need in order to curtail those business practices which may undermine the public’s health and the great work that many public health teams are doing.

Eurgh. The totalitarian tendencies of the 'public health' lobby are on full display in this document. There is no aspect of life that they don't want dominated by lectures and harassment. For example...

On a healthy high street businesses would create opportunities for health optimisation. This could include signposting customers to health services, high street employees engaging customers in healthy conversations, health promotions in local shops, such as health shopping trolleys and outreach activities in pubs and bars, including smoking cessation or health checks.

"Engaging customers in healthy conversations"? What does that even mean? As for "outreach activities in pubs and bars", go on, I dare you.

The businesses on a healthy high street would not only enable basic needs, including access to affordable healthy food and affordable financial services, to be met...

"Affordable" thanks to a system of subsidies and price controls, no doubt. And behold, these zealots have made a little graphic listing the good and bad businesses...


Notice how pubs and bars have suddenly become "health promoting". The RSPH say this is because they "encourage social interaction". A more likely reason is that pubs have been so battered by taxes and the smoking ban that the 'public health' lobby no longer sees them as much of a threat and prefers to pretend to be on their side while they go after the off licences and supermarkets.

Notice also how payday lenders and bookmakers have found themselves on the list of unhealthy businesses, despite having nothing to do with health. This gives the game away that 'public health' itself has nothing to do with health, rather it is a classic middle class crusade against temptation and vice.

This is further confirmed by the RSPH's league table of Britain's healthiest and unhealthiest high streets, which have been plastered across the media today. The 'unhealthy' ones are mostly working class cities in the North and Midlands, whereas the 'healthy' ones are mainly nice southern market towns, like Cambridge and Salisbury, plus a few places north of Watford that Hampstead intellectuals occasionally visit, such as York.

Using a ridiculous methodology, they have decided that Preston has the country's least healthy high street and Shrewsbury, of all places, has the healthiest.

The obesity rate is Shrewsbury is 25.9%, well over the national average and considerably higher than the rate in Preston (20.8%). Just saying.

Naturally, all this bollocks is accompanied by demands for state intervention into all sorts of areas that are none of the state's business. These include:

1. Taxing bookies, payday loan shops, tanning salons and fast food outlets at a higher rate than other businesses to "discourage" them from opening.

2. "Introduction of cigarette-style health warnings" for payday loans, fast food and sunbeds. No slippery slope there, then.

3. "We call on the Government to introduce a ban on the positioning of unhealthy food items next to all checkouts and queuing areas."

4. "Ban the positioning of e-cigarettes next to all checkouts" on the basis that "these products contain nicotine, which is a highly addictive, potentially harmful chemical."

Above all, they want councils to be able to close down 'unhealthy' businesses and cap the number of premises run by any one industry at the (totally arbitrary) limit of five per cent.

At a time when high street shops are closing at the rate of 16 a day, the 'public health' lobby are just the people to finish them off. These obsessives must be resisted.

16 comments:

Christopher Snowdon said...

If someone tried to berate me about my health in the highstreet, I'd club them out of the way with my box mod

Christopher Snowdon said...

One more false accusation and health scare claim... Grants for a future study... "E-Cigarettes May Cause Skull Fractures" ?

Christopher Snowdon said...

Well of course a boarded-up shop is far healthier than a tanning salon.

And the "pubs and bars" they refer to must be the "community pubs" so beloved of CAMRA but actually conspicuous by their absence on the average High Street.

Christopher Snowdon said...

At a time when high street shops are closing at the rate of 16 a day, the 'public health' lobby are just the people to finish them off.

Well, they did exactly that for the pubs, so why not the 'unhealthy' shops, too?

And one wonders what types of shops apart from betting shops etc they would decide comes under their 'unhealthy' classification. Delicatessens? (Processed meats, high fat soft cheeses). Confectioners? (Sugar). Cake shops? (Sugar again). Fish and chip shops? (Get out the garlic and silver crosses for that one).

The fact is that once they get started, the list will include any shop that they personally don't like, and we'll end up with high streets where you can only buy mung beans, quinoa and tofu, grown on 'sustainable' plantations under 'fair trade' rules.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Surely, if libraries, leisure centres, heath services pay council tax/business rates it's all funded by the LA? Which means that private businesses and home owners would probably see their obligatory contributions rise.

Christopher Snowdon said...

It is clear that the 'public health' mob is really interested in total lifestyle control. They are essentially eliminating all choice in an Orwellian template strengthened by merging government and 'healthist' cells (just like communist political officers). Note that key elements of the healthy high street are on-going re-education and propaganda to achieve behavior modification.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Really, really, why don't these tossers just toss off to North Korea? It sounds just the place they would like.

It's as if they see themselves as missionaries, suffering selflessly in a horrid, forsaken land full of frightful customs, saving us heathens from our backward ways.

Newsflash, 'Public Health'. We don't like you, we don't need you and we won't miss you when you go.

Christopher Snowdon said...

WTF??????
Let me be perfectly frank (I am from Germany, lived next to Eastern Germany for almost 30 years of my life, and studied Russian while the Soviet Union was alive and well):
Even Adolf Hitler, and the rulers of both the German Democratic Republic (=socialist East Germany) and of the Soviet Union did not, repeat not, attempt to rule such aspects of their citizens' lives.


This shit is reminiscient of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell's "1984" - total control over every aspect of the subjects' lives.


Does that "health group" have a Hitler complex? Alternatively Stalin or Mussolini.


"health reach out" in bars and pubs indeed. Like the health police coming in and harassing people. Disgusting. Maybe black SS uniforms would be suitable.


Yuck!

Christopher Snowdon said...

A "cigarette-style health warning" for payday lenders?! What could they even be? Pictures of homeless people?

This large organisation also provides "recognised qualifications" such as an "award in healthier foods and special diets" and "Award in Health Improvement". The aim of this qualification is to provide the learner with the knowledge and confidence to offer opportunistic brief advice to, or engage in brief interventions with, individuals about behaviour change which could improve their health and well being.

So basically provide courses which instill their own slightly warped views of health and tell people how to tell other people how to be "healthier".

Fantastic work, great charity, they make such a difference to people's lives.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Horses led to water often refuse to drink. Their mung bean High Street would be emptier than their heads.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Please give me a reference to a clinical study that demonstrates nicotine has any potential for dependence (or 'addiction' if you prefer). I've been looking for one for years and haven't managed to find one yet (those you can find will involve smokers, and smoking causes dependence on nicotine; without tobacco, it is impossible to create nicotine dependence clinically).

On the other hand, there are many CTs where large quantities of nicotine were administered to never-smokers, daily, for months on end (in some cases, nicotine to the equivalent of 15 cigarettes a day) for investigating its beneficial effects on certain medical conditions - and no subject has ever shown any indication of reinforcement, withdrawal, continuation or dependence. Ever.

To the normal, sane, honest or uncorrupted person this generally indicates that nicotine has no potential for dependence outside of delivery within a tobacco vehicle.

Christopher Snowdon said...

“The medical establishment’s bid for world domination” = eugenics.

This deranged quest has been going on for decades. In the
last 10 years there have been more and more Departments of Global or Population Health popping up; there are terms like “global health governance” being flung about. And now they’re talking about the required composition of the “high street”. We’re getting right to the [medical] “Therapeutic State”. The Socratic maxim of “the unexamined life is not worth living…” has been transformed into “the medically unexamined life is not worth living….” And, the questionable adage of “only the good die young” has been replaced by the as questionable “only the good die very, very old”. Over the last few decades we’ve witnessed the medicalization of everyday life.

These [medically-dominated] Public Health folk are dangerously deluded. They are shallow, megalomaniacal, narcissistic, neurotic,
bigoted, pathological liars with a “god complex” (delusions of benevolence and omniscience). This shallowness needs to be examined. The medical folk are obsessed with the physical state, i.e., physicalism; health has again been perversely reduced to a physical, absence-of-disease phenomenon. People obsessed with their physical state to the point where it occupies pretty well
all of their time – as suggested by allusions to the [medical] “Therapeutic State” – is not a healthy situation at all. It’s sick mentally, socially, morally, and ideo-politically. There are dimensions to health other than the physical, completely obliterated in physicalism.

We wouldn’t have heard this sort of social-engineering talk, as to the extent of control, a few decades ago. Something has happened in the recent past where these deluded miscreants now have the gall to even propose this sort of repugnant social-engineering. People should be wary because these nut cases have created a Public Health infrastructure on a global scale. Government health bureaucracies are loaded with these petty dictators that have hog-tied their nations to globalist (e.g., WHO) treaties and programs. It makes little difference which political parties get into power. Politicians are advised by the same unelected government bureaucrats. For example, a seemingly normal politician is made Health Minister. After a few sessions with their health bureaucrats the politician is spat out as a rabid antismoking zealot able to effortlessly parrot the standard slogans.

We seem to have no grasp that the eugenics catastrophe of early last century was led by the medically-aligned. This was supposed to be one of the critical lessons: Health is not just a physical phenomenon; the medically-aligned should not be allowed to monopolize the definition of health; the medically-aligned and social engineering is a dangerous mix. Yet here we are again.

Christopher Snowdon said...

Post-graduate degrees in Public Health are a dangerous “education”. These courses rest on the medical model and teach fixed, ideological stances, e.g., anti-tobacco is a “given”. Students undergo a crash course in “bio-statistics”. And with this “education” students are let loose to “fix up” the world. These folk don’t understand too much about history, or philosophical systems of thought debated over millennia, or science. They’re really not very
bright; they don’t understand too much of anything. Yet they have been coached into believing that they are the “fixer uppers” of the world. This is a recipe for disaster. This is how we’ve gotten to these nitwits now arrogantly proposing more of the “Therapeutic State”.

--------

Welcome, new students to the Public Health® Master’s course.
You are important people. You are here because you want to help the world. Put aside every pre-conception you may have about health and help. It has been shown numerous times that if tobacco and alcohol are eradicated, and if people’s diets and physical exercise are overseen by the government, we can almost guarantee a disease-free and crime-free life.

Your most noble goal, then, as a Public Health® advocate, is
bringing this circumstance to fruition. And we have time-tested methods towards this end:

1) Extortionate taxes;
2) Denormalization/normalization techniques;
3) The bastardization of science and of statistical and causal inference.

As the course proceeds, we will delve more deeply into these
time-tested methods. By the time you graduate, you will be able to apply these methods as second nature. With your newly-acquired knowledge you will be able to conduct research that always arrives at the required conclusion and for which there is a never-ending supply of funds. Importantly is that your policy indications will appear as science-based. You will be well-equipped to pressure
decision, policy, and law-makers into making “responsible” decisions. You will also be trained to disregard any criticism that you might encounter.

As your career progresses, you will be rubbing shoulders with the world’s elite. You’ll enjoy fine cocktail parties, dinners, and
recreational activities at 5-star events. You’ll become part of a highly important world network; you’ll be “connected”. Doesn’t that sound exciting?

Christopher Snowdon said...

Required interview with any Public Health advocate on their social engineering aspirations.

Interviewer: Do you believe you’re god?
PH Advocate: Don’t be ridiculous.

Interviewer: Well, you seem to believe that you have a definitive world view that not only should all abide by but all should be forced (e.g., laws) to abide by.
PH Advocate: Science tells us…..

Interviewer: So, science is god?
PH Advocate: No. Doctors also tell us…..

Interviewer: So, doctors are god?
PH Advocate: No. We’re only trying to help people.

Interviewer: But you haven’t told us why your view is “helpful”. What makes your view superior to anyone else’s? You still haven’t told us why you’re trying to play god. You’re wanting to dictate more and more how people conduct themselves….. even to total control. Yet, the fact is you’re not god. Maybe what you have is a “god complex”. That sounds more like it.
PH Advocate: [silence]

Christopher Snowdon said...

Public Health is an ideological/financial lackey for the medical industrial complex. Ask how much time [medically-monopolized] Public Health spends on clearing up the medical establishment of major, long-standing problems.

Background on iatrogenesis:
http://f2cscotland.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/dangers-to-life-and-public-health-lobby.html

The latest on iatrogenic effect:
http://www.newsmaxhealth.com/Headline/medical-errors-malpractice-doctors/2014/08/26/id/590884/

Christopher Snowdon said...

A problem with the “physical obsessed”.