Chris Snowdon on the dishonesty of ‘minimum price’ lobbyists and the prohibitionist tendency: 

There is much more that could be said about this thinly veiled piece of lobbying. The inexplicable lack of a control group, for example, or the mystery of why official hospital records were not enough for the authors – instead they created their own “estimates” of how many people died. But the bottom line is that these people are lying with statistics. The result – and almost certainly the intention – of their study is to make people believe that fewer people died of alcohol-related diseases in British Columbia between 2002-09 as a result of minimum pricing. “Nearly a third” fewer in fact. 

Theodore Dalrymple on an appetite for doom: 

The apocalyptic pessimist… believes that the end of the world is nigh, and secretly is rather pleased about it. If he is of a scientific bent, he does the following: he takes an undesirable trend and projects it indefinitely into the future until whatever is the object of the trend destroys the world. For example, he might take the fact that Staphylococci reproduce exponentially on a Petri dish to mean that, within the week, the entire biosphere will consist of Staphylococci and nothing else. Man will be crushed under the weight of bacteria. Paul Ehrlich is of that ilk. His belief in the end of the world precedes his belief in any particular cause of it. 

As Fabian Tassano said,  

Thinking, it will be recalled, is the activity one performs before one has arrived at the answer. 

And Tim Worstall parses the logic of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas: 

60% higher is an interesting definition of lower, isn’t it?

Note Ms Lucas’ use of the term “demand management.” Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

A mistake that the Institute for Centrifugal Research works tirelessly to correct. The ICR’s “pioneering achievements in the realms of brain manipulation, excessive G-Force and prenatal simulations” are illustrated, quite vividly, in Till Nowak’s short documentary, presented below. I beg you, please, wait for the ‘wedding cake’ amusement ride.

Via Things, a site you may want to bookmark.

Incidentally, this blog is six years old today. So cake for everyone.

Iron Man 3. // Filming in infra-red. // Tulip fields, from above. // Abusing Sellotape. // Volkswagen van of note. // Vintage one-wheeled motorcycle. // “Designed to drop from the sky and land prepared for action, the Paratrooper folding bike can tackle any terrain.” // Jeremy Clarkson drives a very small car. // Does your mobile Antarctic research station look like this? // Twelve peculiar cameras. // “Dad, can we have some bat pups?” // Pure White Paper. // Cardboard creations. // How to tie your shoelaces. Because it seems you’re doing it all wrong. // Facebook pranking. // And via MeFi… Things fitting perfectly into other things. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Meanwhile, in the Arts. 

A video compendium of conceptual performance and physical theatre. Contains nudity, writhing and vegetable slurry. 

Magdalena Chowaniec, Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann perform Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus: “Three young Viennese artists/dancers from Chile, Poland and Switzerland translate the actionist mystery into a vegetarian orgy in which dead carrots take the place of the massacred lamb. A portrait of our time.”

I Demand You Demand My Art. 

The Observer’s Elizabeth Day asks, “Should artists have to work?”

Stipends allowed Bettina Camilla Vestergaard to travel to Los Angeles and spend six months sitting in her car at taxpayers’ expense while “exploring collective identity” in ways never quite made clear. Oh, and doing a spot of shopping. For art, of course. After sufficient time had been spent idling and, as she puts it, “slowly but surely reducing my mental activity to a purposeless series of meaningless events,” Ms Vestergaard struck upon a deep and fearsome idea. Specifically, to let strangers deface her car with inane marker pen graffiti. This radical feat allegedly “explored” how “identity and gender is constituted in public space.” Though, again, the details are somewhat sketchy. The freewheeling disposal of other people’s earnings also allowed Ms Vestergaard to film herself and her friends looking bored, tearing up grass and pondering the evils of capitalism. And, in an all too brief moment of awareness, wondering if what they do is actually any good and worth anyone’s attention. The resulting videos, all bankrolled by the Danish taxpayer and showing highlights of four days’ artistic inactivity, have been available online for over a year and have to date attracted zero comments and no discernible traffic except via this blog.

The Pure Ones Will Guide Us.

Meet Joan Brady: novelist, umbrage-taker, colossal hypocrite.

Corporations, see, are wicked. They “chew us up and spit us out,” and how could anyone with a soul want to be part of that – especially an artist like Joan Brady, for whom purity is everything? Of course, this being the Guardian, Ms Brady’s display of indignation is just a tad selective. Despite the author’s outrage, I somehow doubt that Whitbread will be getting their prize money back. I think we can also assume that our morally lofty wordsmith won’t be withdrawing her novels from Waterstones and Amazon, both of which have no doubt aroused very similar umbrage from many small booksellers. And it’s perhaps worth noting that Ms Brady’s latest novel, The Blue Death, is published by Simon & Schuster, an imposing division of that even more imposing multinational corporation, CBS.

We’re Compensating You for That Face.

Unattractive people need affirmative action too.

Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t want to be regarded as officially ugly?

As usual, I’ve hidden chocolate and booze in the greatest hits.