Quote of the day #2...

... comes from the magisterial (and much-missed) Mr Eugenides, writing over at Think Scotland. [Emphasis mine.]

I am not a smoker. The first time I had an asthma attack was after a particularly smoke-filled birthday party in a long-gone student flat. These days, I am more careful; I carry my inhaler, open windows to let people puff away, avoid or ration my time in excessively smoky atmospheres. What I don’t do, and will never do, is tell other people how to run their damn lives, nor treat them like bloody children, nor give my backing or blessing to joyless, interfering busybodies who mistake pointless bansturbation for statesmanship. If there’s anything more loathsome than the smell of stale cigarettes, it’s the stench of hypocrisy and cant.

Quite.

And, taken with Timmy's fisking of this load of old crap by authoritarian medico and Tory MP, Dan Poulter—could there be a worse combination?—I find myself, once again, concluding that we could go a long way to removing said stench by preventing doctors from pontificating about anything at all.

Doctors tend to be a bunch of arrogant wankers with a god complex as it is: we certainly shouldn't be electing the fascist little shits into positions of power.

Medical bleg

Can anyone help me to find the total deaths attributed to iatrogenesis in a single, recent year in the UK (preferably 2011)?

Google seems to be remarkably unhelpful, since the first few pages of results give figures for the US, or scenarios for particular conditions—such as CJD or AIDS—or are from highly suspect sources, such as chiropractic websites.

The most common figure that I can find is astonishingly high—can it really be true that doctors kill some 52,000 people a year by being utterly crap?

Oh, and if anyone thinks that I want these figures in order to launch a sustained attack on the medical profession then let me assure you that nothing could be closer to the truth.

So, anyone...?

Congratulations to Ben Goldacre

Look at Ben... No wonder he's smiling—he's won a gold star for cleverness!

It's so nice to see Dr Ben Goldacre—champion of science and scourge of dodgy-report pedlars—join some socio-economic dots, as he has on Twitter today.

Well, actually, he's part-way there: his first Tweet approvingly quotes the TUC-backed Touchstone blog as an authority on public sector pay—presumably because he thinks that what they have to say is not in any way biased...

the self-pitying fantasy emerging among middle class ppl that their friends in public sector get a better deal is wrong bit.ly/vfkCgg

The blog post in question, of course, only concentrates on actual wages rather than all the benefits—such as gold-plated pensions. It seems rather hypocritical for the self-appointed scourge of selective statistic-quoting scientific studies to so uncritically cite such a source as "evidence" although, to be fair, Goldacre does mention another benefit of working in the public sector... [Emphasis mine.]

there are some terrible problems in the public sector - like, for some insane reason we don't sack shit people - but salary is not one.

Of course, for those working in the public sector, the fact that "we don't sack shit people" is a benefit: it's only a one of those "terrible problems in the public sector" if you actually have to use the so-called services. As the Daily Mash so succinctly puts it...

Businesses also fear that if public sector workers’ demands aren’t met, they may look for jobs in the private sector, costing billions in incompetence-related mistakes.

But that's not really what this little article is about. No, I come to praise Benny-boy, not to bury him. Because, you see, Dr Ben then makes a connection—all on his ownsome, without any help. Which I think is just lovely.

also, public sector pay is "geographically inelastic". private sector wages in London are a third higher. public sector, marginal weighting.

Yes, Ben—and...? Oh look—he's got it!

this has interesting consequences. personal experience only, but i think the public sector attracts better quality ppl outside of london.

Oh, well done! Well done, Ben. Have a gold star, and I shall tell your mummy how clever you've been today...

You see, what Benny has done is to independently reach the same conclusion as this Centre for Economic Performance Report [PDF]—which was published in January 2008.

I highlighted it—whilst filleting Kerron "voice of the delectable Left" Cross—after Timmy wrote about it at the Adam Smith Institute blog under the title of Centralisation kills!*.

What the authors did was look at the quality and productivity of nursing across the country, this being measured by the percentage of those admitted to hospital after a heart attack (AMI) who died in the subsequent 30 days. As we're all told so often of the connection between (relative) poverty and bad health we would expect the rates to be higher in poor areas. Quite the contrary: the richer the area surrounding the hospital the worse the survival rate. The reason for this is that nurses' wages are set centrally, to be the same (with very little geographic variation) right across the country. However, wages in general are not the same across the country:

Pay for nurses and physicians in NHS hospitals, which provide almost all hospital care in the UK, is set by a central review body that sets pay scales in which there is limited regional variation. The variation that exists does not fully reflect the wages differentials in the external labor markets in which the staff are employed. Regional pay differences are considerable in the UK. For example, female white-collar wages in North East England are about 60 percent lower than in Inner London and these persist after controlling for human capital characteristics and other factors.

It isn't that wages are too high in low wage areas, but that they are too low for nurses in high wage areas. This leads to both a shortage of people willing to do the job itself and hospitals relying upon agency staff who are not constrained by the national pay scale: but agency staff are, by the very nature of their shift by shift employment, unlikely to know the systems and hospitals as well as permanent. The end effect is:

A 10 percent increase in the outside wage isassociated with a 4 percent to 8 percent increase in AMI death rates.

That is, where hospitals cannot pay the going rate for trained staff because of the national pay setting, people die. All in the name of equality no doubt, for a job's worth the same amount of pay where ever it is to some people. The only solution to this is to abolish such national pay rates and allow local employers to pay what they need to attract the staff they desire.

So, well done Ben Goldacre, for understanding some basic economics and applying it—even if he is some years behind. Perhaps the good doctor will now campaign against the national pay deal because the downsides are pretty unpleasant for those poor bastards who have to use his beloved public sector services...

All of which rather puts into perspective the current wrangles over national bargaining for police pay, other public sector workers, even the negotiations with civil servants and doctors. We shouldn't be having such national problems because we shouldn't be having such national negotiations in the first place. For centralisation of pay bargaining kills people.

Yes, the national pay deal—negotiated and backed by the Unions who are about to go on strike—actually kills people unnecessarily.

We have had a report showing this for nearly four years now: instead of allowing the union bosses to call the shots with strikes, perhaps we should actually prosecute them for corporate manslaughter. Or murder. I'm not fussed.

Perhaps I should write to Ben and ask if he would support such a campaign?

It should be easy if phrased right, e.g.

Dear Ben, will you back my campaign to imprison union leaders responsible for the national pay deal, or are you actually in favour of the NHS needlessly killing its victims patients...?

Now, if we could just teach Ben about the problems with the National Minimum Wage then we might actually make some progress. Unfortunately, Ben has not replied to my Tweet pointing this out...

* And both the ASI link and the report had changed since I wrote that post, so I spent an inordinate amount of time tracking it down this morning. I have corrected the links there and, of course, here.

Destroy the medical profession

As regular readers will know, your humble Devil is no fan of the medical profession: sentences such as , and "when will these fucking medical types shut their fucking cakeholes and get on with their job of patching people up?" might have led viewers to conclusion that I think that doctors are a total bunch of fuckers who should be beaten to death with their own stethoscopes.

And said viewers would be correct. But it's nice to see my view validated by Sam Bowman at the Adam Smith Institute.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public"—Adam Smith

As usual, Adam Smith was right. Today I can think of no trade about which the above is more true than the medical profession. I don’t just mean doctors’ use of occupational licensure laws to keep their prices artificially inflated. Politically active groups of doctors are possibly the greatest single threat to personal freedom that there is in the UK today. Their motivation isn't necessarily their wallets, but their egos. Bullies like to use the state to push people around so they feel powerful.

As I outlined in my commentary on Working Class Patients And The Medial Establishment: Self-help in Britain from the mid-nineteeth century to 1948, David Green states very clearly that the medical profession are actually motivated by both "their wallets" and "their egos".

The organised medical profession had long resented the dominance of the medical consumer, and particularly resented working-class control of medical "gentlemen". The BMA were equally anxious to obtain more pay and, above all, higher status for doctors.

As regular readers will know, the combination of the BMA and the private insurance companies led directly to the destruction of the Friendly Societies—social corporations that provided primary care and unemployment benefits for the working classes—through the lobbying of MPs involved in the 1911 National Insurance Act. [Emphasis mine.]

The essence of working-class social insurance was democratic self-organisation: amendments to the Bill obtained by the BMA and the Combine [the private insurers' trade association] undermined it. Doctors' pay had been kept within limits that ordinary maual workers could afford: under pressure, the government doubled doctors' incomes and financed this transfer of wealth from insured workers to the medical profession by means of a regressive poll tax, flat-rate National Insurance Contributions.

I have said it many times, and I shall say it again—doctors are not your friends and the medical profession couldn't give two shits for anything other than big, fat pay-cheques. And, as I said back in June 2010, ...

...whilst the doctors continue to run our medical services, and continue to bribe, bully and poison our rulers—and whilst our rulers still have the power to force us to obey these bastards—we will never be free...

They medical profession are a bunch of thugs, driven by self-importance, conceit and greed, whose only motivation for existence is to bleed you dry and then present you—or someone near to you—a massive bill. But, they are also suffer from an almost incredible arrogance in that they believe their every prognostication to be gospel, every utterance to be truth and every opinion to be law. They are cunts of the very first water.

So, since we have now established this principle, let us see what has driven the ASI's Sam Bowman to attack the bastards on this occasion.

There’s a sad example of this in today’s call in the Lancet, a medical journal that is often used as a political mouthpiece by campaigning doctors, for the government to introduce a “fat tax” to curb obesity.

Of course, the proposal is utterly specious. It's pretty dubious whether the "obesity epidemic" claims are true or not. And which diet plan should be implemented? Is it bacon, sugar, bread or something else that makes us fat? Will political parties of this fat tax utopian future be divided between the Low-Carb Party and the Low-Fat Party? And what if fat people's early mortality rates mean that they actually save the government money in pension and care home bills?

The doctors err even by their own logic. As Will Wilkinson has pointed out, if fat taxers thought things through, they would favour a tax on fat people themselves, not on the food they eat. Taxing food punishes people who exercise so that they can enjoy Big Macs, but not people who are so lazy that they balloon out while eating a balanced diet.

Of course, to the average doctor—who has coddled and protected, in importance and financially, by the state for a century—corporations must automatically be evil (otherwise they wouldn't actually sell things, right? They'd do it out of charidee); not only that, but the Ordinary People, the hoi polloi, are too stupid and bovine to make their own choices.

Of course, this should be no business of the doctors': their job should be to shut the fuck up and do their job of patching people up (and charging a suitable fee, of course). And in a free society, that is precisely what would happen.

However, we do not live in a free society: we live in a Welfare State*. And in the Welfare State (and particularly this one), the health service is administered by the state and the doctors are the gate-keepers. It is the hoi polloi, who pay for this health service, of course, but—since we are given no choice about it—we are (as I have said many times) in hock to the state.

The state is the provider of a service: the National Health Service in this case. Because the state provides and "pays" (through taxes, of course) for this service, it has the power to dictate to the population.

Obesity costs money over and above a "normal" person's treatment. Even if the obese person has private medical insurance, they cannot opt out of the NHS because they are forced to contribute to the NHS through their NICs. And, in fact, because of various laws—an ambulance can only take you to a state A&E;, all GPs are employed by the state—no one can opt out of the state-provided system entirely.

In this way, everyone is in debt to the state. And as long as everyone is in debt to the state, the state, fundamentally, has the right to tell the population how to behave. And this debt can never actually be discharged: you are in debt to—and thus subject to the whim of—the state from the moment that you are born until the moment that you die.

And, remember, there is no actual contract to sign (or not sign) so the government can—and does—keep on shifting the terms of this agreement as and when it likes. It's a little like Lando Calrissian's bargain with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back: "This deal just gets worse..."

As such, no one in this country owns their own body; no one in this country owns their own life. Everyone is effectively in hock to the state because you can never, ever opt out of state provision.

Once again, it seems that Sam Bowman agrees with me on this...

The justification for pushing people around like this is the NHS. Shouldn’t people have to pay for their own illnesses? Well, yes – that’s how personal responsibility works. But having an NHS removes the personal responsibility, and artificial attempts to inject it into the system are doubly illiberal and wrong.

The government (and the electorate, for that matter) forces people to be in the NHS. You have no choice in the matter, and you can’t opt out of it. Jamie Whyte put it well: "first the do-gooders conjure up the external costs by insisting that no one should have to pay for his own medical care, then they tell us that they must interfere with behavior that damages our health because it imposes costs on others." This is perverse and illiberal.

Yes, and the doctors—and their spiritual buddies, the politicians—love it: this way, they can all feel important, and all line their pockets.

The tax would only affect the poor—rich people's spending habits wouldn't be dented. How easy it must be for doctors to pontificate about the need for a fat tax, knowing that such a tax would hardly affect them at all.

Indeed, what with doctors having to take on the treatment of all of these extra obese people, surely it must be time for another contract "negotiation"**—trebles all round!

This creepy, controlling paternalism has plenty of fans in politics on both sides of the partisan divide. Doctors are the politicians' enablers, lending the weight of their “expertise” to the nanny instinct of the political class in exchange for the feeling of being important.

Which is precisely the same relationship that the government has with Fake Charities—many of which are also run by doctors and their creepy little acolytes.

No amount of expertise – medical or otherwise – should give somebody the right to interfere with another adult’s choices. Nor should democracy be used as an excuse to violate the sovereignty of the individual. If fat people are costing the NHS money, that's a mark against having an NHS, not against having fat people.

Quite. And all of this relates to the conclusion of my June 2010 post linked to above...

Most of you will have seen—in the newspapers and, in particular, on blogs written by members of the medical profession—claims that doctors should be allowed to run the NHS, because they know what they are doing. Of course they do: they want to run your lives and giving the medicos control of the NHS would give them the ultimate tool to do so. That would ensure a much "higher status for doctors" and the edict would be simple—obey us or be left to die.

If you doubt this, just take a long at some of the news stories around, especially as regards the medical profession's urgings to deny healthcare to smokers, drinkers and fat people. True, the BMA tend to side with Fake Charities more than the insurance companies these days, but the process is the same; government-funded "medical advisers"—no less effective or poisonous than Grima Wormtongue—whisper into politicians' rights ears, whilst government-funded "charities" bolster the message from the left.

Our New Coalition Overlords™ promised to take on the vested interests but, narrow-minded as they are, they seem to mean only the bankers and other huge commercial interests whose establishment status flows from the rules and regulations imposed by government.

But no mention has been made of those other vested interests: those—like the medical profession—whose power, privilege and money is propped up by the government and funded by the blood of taxpayers. There are so many of them that a stupid person might find it difficult to know where to start.

But, actually, it is really very simple: if we want decent welfare for all, affordable medical care and freedom, we need to return to "democratic self-organisation". And if we wish to do that, we have to smash and utterly destroy the organised medical profession, and grind it into the dust.

We need to return these arrogant doctors, and their associated scum (a category in which I include politicians), to beings servants of the consumer, not the masters. But whilst the doctors continue to run our medical services, and continue to bribe, bully and poison our rulers—and whilst our rulers still have the power to force us to obey these bastards—we will never be free, and we will never have a proper, functioning society.

To paraphrase P J O'Rourke, when the legislators can decide what can be bought and sold, the first thing for sale are the legislators. And the medical profession bought them a hundred years ago.

Destroy the power of the BMA and the medical profession and we can begin to struggle towards freedom. Leave them in place—poisoning public debate and raping the freedom of ordinary people in order to gain money and prestige—and we will always be slaves.

All of the above continues to be true—nothing has changed. So every time that you see a doctor warning of some dire consequence of anyone's lifestyle, don't condemn their victims—that is the precise reaction that these fuckers want from you, the better to divide and conquer.

Imagine, instead, how much you would like these bastards to stop hectoring you and bossing you about—and think, therefore, about how best to damage and destroy the entire medical profession. Think about how best to humble the arrogant, dictatorial doctors who urge the government to ban and tax your pleasures, how to put the lazy, hoity-toity nurses who starve their patients to death back into their proper place and, most important of all, how to blast apart all of their evil bloody trade unions.

And try not to laugh too much whilst you do so...

* Not for much longer, of course, because the Welfare State is utterly bankrupt across the world.

** Where the doctors tell the politicians how much cash they want and how little actual doctoring they want to do, and the politicians agree. After all, it's not their money, eh?

I can't believe it's not food fascism

Who will rid me of these turbulent quacks?

Butter should be banned to protect the nation's health, according to a leading heart surgeon.

Shyam Kolvekar says only radical action can save growing numbers of young adults from heart attacks and clogged arteries.

Yeah, because rates of coronary heart disease have really been spiralling recently haven't they?


Desperate times, my friends. Desperate times.

"When a patient comes to me, they have established coronary heart disease. We are the last resort."

Do you know why that is, Kolvekar? It's because you're a fucking heart surgeon. When will you doctors come to terms with the fact that in your line of work you're going encounter an unusually large number of sick people? If you don't like it, may I suggest you find a different profession, preferably one which doesn't give you a platform to spread your warped ideas?

However, his views sparked a fierce backlash from the farming industry and TV chefs.

I should bloody well think so. And which TV chef would be flying the flag of freedom here?

A spokesman for Jamie Oliver...

A fucking spokesman? He's not the Pope. Surely the man can speak for himself, or has the cat got his fat tongue?

... who has championed improved nutrition in schools, said: 'He is completely against a ban on butter. He uses butter in his recipes, for example for roasting potatoes in his Christmas programme.

'He doesn't like the whole kind of food police, we must ban everything, point of view.'

You could have fooled me. Last time I saw the mockney twat he was waddling round schools showing skinny kids what they'd look like if the government didn't ban KitKats.

Surely this is the same Jamie Oliver who wanted to ban packed lunches?

The television chef Jamie Oliver has fiercely criticised parents who feed their children "junk", describing some youngsters' diets as a crime.

He said 70 per cent of packed lunches given to schoolchildren were "disgraceful" and he would like to see them banned.

And didn't he want to ban 'junk food' advertising?

Oliver also called for a ban on junk food advertising for children and in the new programme tells Tony Blair that a voluntary code sounds "a bit wet".

And surely, above all, he was the figurehead for the campaign to ban a huge range of food and drink from school canteens?

Secondary schools are banned from serving chocolate, crisps and sugary drinks under a new obesity crackdown introduced today.

From this term, all state secondaries in England are required to provide healthy menus introduced in the wake of a high-profile campaign by Jamie Oliver, the television chef.

Under guidelines, junk food is banned from vending machines and tuck shops while salt must be removed from canteen tables.

And when it transpired that kids didn't want to eat his boiled vegetables, wasn't he quite keen on banning children leaving school at lunch-time?

Jamie Oliver says a ban on Denbighshire pupils leaving school for lunch could help promote healthy eating.

So what's the matter, Oliver, has the prohibitionist beast finally turned on you? Perhaps you thought that by cosying up to the food fascists, they might turn a blind eye to your own pleasures. Well think again, fatso. Your chickens are coming home to roost.

So who the hell is Dr. Shyam Kolvekar anyway, and how have his foul opinions found their way into the national press? Who could possibly want to ban butter?

Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company that works for Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine.

Words fail me. They really do.

Drinking is good for you again! For the moment…

Oh look, it seems that doctors may have got it wrong. Again. Apparently, heavy drinking—amongst men, anyway—can stave off heart disease.

Do you ignore safe drinking limits and consume far more alcohol than official health advice recommends? If so, it seems that while your bingeing will horrify doctors, it will also – for men at least – halve your risk of contracting coronary heart disease.

Until now, studies have pinpointed moderate drinking as being beneficial to heart health. But research reported today in the journal Heart found that men who consume large or very large amounts of alcohol are least at risk of developing the condition, which kills more than 90,000 Britons a year.

Men who drink regularly, even in small quantities, are more than 30% less likely to suffer from heart disease, it found. But those who drink the most cut their risk by the most. Those classed as high consumers of alcohol, between 30 and 90 grams per day, had 54% less chance of getting the disease, while those deemed to have a very high intake, of more than 90 grams or at least eight glasses of wine a day, were 50% less likely.

Alcohol is thought to enhance heart health by keeping cholesterol levels down and so stopping arteries from clogging up.

But, actually, doctors don't have a fucking clue but will, nonetheless, keep pulling pointless theories out of their arseholes as long as they can keep getting the funding.

The research is based on the experience of 15,500 men and 26,000 women aged 26-69 in Spain, which has one of the world's highest intakes of alcohol per head and one of the lowest death rates from chronic heart disease. Women enjoyed some protective benefit, but it was not statistically significant .

Controversy surrounds the link between alcohol and heart disease, and opinion is divided about the findings. Heart's editor, Prof Adam Timmis of the London Chest Hospital, said the study was significant because of the unusually large number of participants.
...

Robert Sutton, professor of surgery at Liverpool University, said the study was flawed, underpowered intellectually and gave "a highly biased view of the effects of alcohol".

Or, to put it another way, we should ignore the data collected from 41,500 people and, instead, listen to the opinion of just one man—that man being an unknown surgeon who has not undertaken a study of 41,500 people's drinking habits.

Hmmmmmm...

A drink or three

The egregious wibblings of John Cowan stirred something in the copious brains of your humble Devil; I seemed to have written about such limiting factors in drinking before.

Oh yes...

I am rather behind with this, but that is because I thought that I had better calm down first. Then, whilst having a few libations (considerably more than three) with Witchibus last night, I realised that I still haven't calmed down, so I may as well write about it anyway.

ONE of Britain’s leading surgeons has called on the government to introduce curbs on the sale of alcohol, limiting the amount that customers can consume per visit to a pub or bar.

John Smith, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, believes that such restrictions would be the logical next step to improving the nation’s health following the ban on smoking in public buildings.

John? John, are you there? Can you listen to me now, please?

John, you are a sodding surgeon. You are President of a bunch of surgeons. Surgeons are here to patch people up, OK? They are not here to make politics, so why don't you take your drinking limit and shove it up your arse? And then you can FUCK OFF! The last thing that we need is interfering busybodies like you giving this bunch of fascist wankscum ideas. I bet some fucking lightbulbs went off in the Labour policy unit when you came up with that idea, John.

And, indeed, it seems that they did. In fact, the connections obviously went off in your humble Devil's head, because I then wrote the following post.

Now, obviously, there are very many pubs, so restricting people to three drinks in one would be a stupid idea; people will just decamp to another pub. However, imagine if, every time that you bought a drink, then you had to produce some kind of credit card type thing, which you would put into a machine and it would count the number of drinks that you bought in a day. If you were over your limit of three drinks, then you could not buy another. A database of that sort would not be difficult to build (the logistics of communications might be more problematic, but Switch seems to work it OK. Generally).

You could of course, get around this: a friend of yours doesn't want to go out, so you get a lend of his card which you use after your limit has run out. Unless the card was personalised in some way.

You know, like an ID Card or something...

All that was back in December 2005: obviously John Cowan has a long memory.

And he's still a cunt.

Splendid news

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

This just in from the Beeb:

Unhealthy men 'may lose 10 years'

Middle-aged men who smoke, have high blood pressure and raised cholesterol levels face dying about 10 years before healthier counterparts, a study warns.

Dr Robert Clarke, of the Clinical Trial Service Unit at the University led the study.

He said: "'We've shown that men at age 50 who smoke, have high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels can expect to survive to 74 years of age, while those who have none of these risk factors can expect to live until 83."

Fuck me, but is this really what it all comes down to? The endless public health scare stories. The fascist smoking legislation. The rapacious tax rises. The fake charities. The obesity 'epidemic'. Ian bastard Gilmore. It all comes down to the risk of dying at the age of 74? And I can eat what I want and smoke tabs as well? 

This is the least scary scare story I've ever seen, and I've seen Troll 2. 

Doctors, if you're reading this:  74 years is more than enough time for me to do all the things I plan to do in this life. I'll leave all that senility, dribbling and pissing myself to someone else, if it's all the same to you. 

Risk very much accepted, now fuck off and leave me alone. Don't worry about those taxes I've been paying. To be honest, I never expected to see that money again anyway. Use it to buy a catheter for an 83 year old nonsmoking vegetarian. I'm off out.  

Doctor, no

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

Courtesy of the BBC, I see that a handful of quacks have managed to drag their fat, lazy arses off the golf course for long enough to spout more ill-informed, authoritarian bollocks.

Doctors warn on climate failure

Is there nothing these cunts won't pontificate on? I fully expect to hear the British Medical Association giving us their solution to the England football team's perennial problems on the left side of midfield which, knowing them, will involve banning opposing sides from fielding right-backs.

Failure to agree a new UN climate deal in December will bring a "global health catastrophe", say 18 of the world's professional medical organisations.

Writing in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, they urge doctors to "take a lead" on the climate issue.

And I urge you, dear doctors, to shut the hell up. Since you talk nothing but drivel about subjects which vaguely fall into your own sphere of expertise, your opinions on other issues are worth less than fuck all.  

What kind of "lead" do you expect doctors to take? Considering that years of blanket coverage on global warming has made the public more sceptical about your end-of-the-world cult, I somehow doubt that hysterical squealings from a bunch of legalised drug-dealers are going to turn the tide.

"Even without climate change, the case for clean power, electric cars, saving forests, energy efficiency, and new agriculture technology is strong."

Leaving aside the fact that these issues are well beyond the remit of the medical profession, we would, I think, agree that at least most of these issues are important. The question is whether we will achieve them by bringing the Western economy to its knees whilst throwing billions at tin-pot dictators in Africa. 

Could we not spend a bit more time addressing malaria and AIDS in the Third World and a bit less time worrying about alligators basking off the coast of Sweden? Would the billions being spent on windmills not be better used providing clean water, vaccinations and medicine for the poor of the world? Y'know, progress?

There is a corresponding editorial written by Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist who talks alarmist rubbish about obesity, and Lord Michael Jay, a former diplomat, who"chairs the health charity Merlin."

So not real doctors then. And the 'charity' Merlin, naturally, receives vast sums from the state so they can use their millenarian fantasies to extort still more cash from the taxpayer, as its accounts show:

UK Department for International Development: £12,833,106

EU: £11,833,106

Aside from appealing to their rampaging god complex, the quackocracy gets excited about catastrophic AGW because it gives them an excuse to push their tee-total/vegan/puritan agenda: 

"A low-carbon economy will mean less pollution. A low carbon-diet (especially eating less meat) and more exercise will mean less cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease."

Will it fuck. As NickM writes at Counting Cats:

The medics clearly know nothing about climatology but are still using it as yet one more stick to try and beat us into health compliance.

 

Go read the whole thing. It's excellent. I will only add that at the bottom of the Lancet/British Medical Journal letter is the e-mail of the main contact. Ladies and gentlemen, making his thousandth appearances in the Devil's Kitchen, it's...

Ian.Gilmore@rcplondon.ac.uk

This fucker better hope I never seize the reins of power because he is so far ahead in the race to be first up against the wall that it's no longer a contest.