01.07.14
I’ll drink to that!
One of America’s pressing problems, TIME magazine and a doctor’s group at the Centers for Disease Control informs is, wait a beat, excessive drinking!
“Excessive drinking’s medical impact drains the country of $200 billion yearly, according to the CDC …” reads the magazine.
A CDC doctor behind a report on the drinking problem says his colleagues should now engage in “motivational interviewing” with their patients to curb the plague of excessive drinking.
No word on whether an alternative method, eliminating mass unemployment and underemployment, was considered to reduce American excessive drinking, or whether excessive drinking was used as a pain killer or, perhaps, an anti-depressant, cheap drink being easier to access than prescription medication and psychotherapy to cure the blues.
Internet advertising is the best advertising.
Tom Paterson said,
January 7, 2014 at 9:09 pm
This is my subject specialization. I am a gutter-alcoholic but I’ve not had a drink this century. I’m not a 12 stepper (but whatever works for you); I was lucky enough to be admitted to a lunatic asylum suffering from the DTs and came out sober … comme j’ai dit deja, je suis Boudu sauve des eaux. (From a medical treatment point of view you were better off being a drunk in the old USSR.)
Consider these random points:
They say (the vendors) that alcohol is an acquired taste … this suggests that you may not enjoy the taste until you are habituated (hence alco-pops).
You’re the scientist, but (experientially) alcohol seems to have a very long half-life … it seems to take weeks to completely metabolize all the break-down products (I’m guessing). I grew up in an industrial town. Every payday the working stiffs would blow all their money on booze; the wives would wait until they had passed out unconscious and then salvage as much of the pay-packet as remained in their pockets.They were apparently sober all week, maybe sober all month, but as soon as they had the money then the urge to drink themselves into unconsciousness seemed to be absolutely compelling. To me that suggests strong habituation at the very least … that they were never truly sober during the days or weeks without booze, they were just counting down the hours to the next drink; confirmed by personal experience.
By me, there is no such thing as an addictive personality, there are only addictive drugs. If you think otherwise consider that within living memory at least 50 % of the adult population were addicted to tobacco. The majority of those smokers took their habit to the grave. The decline in smokers stems from *recruitment failure* as a result of a change in social attitudes and education. (I stopped smoking over a period of months using nicotine patches … once I was sober, of course!)
I enjoy the taste of the best German alcohol-free beers (as long as they are chilled). Friends who still drink the hard stuff cannot stand alcohol-free beer. I offer them a bottle, they spit it out. Why? They say they are not alkies … I say ‘prove it, go for a month without a drink’ … they can’t do it.
You can quibble or disagree … it won’t bother me, I think I’m right … whatever gets you through the night. This is a vastly complex subject and I’ve just quickly skimmed a stone across its surface. Surely, though, our weaknesses are ruthlessly exploited.
There’s no space for the Mary Tyler Moore story … but she was quite right about that one Martini in the evening after work.
George Smith said,
January 7, 2014 at 10:12 pm
Good post! Ethyl alcohol has virtually no taste. I’ve not tried alcohol free beers but I don’t drink just for the taste and have no problem admitting it. I’m not much on such matters as you know. I will take bang for buck.
I played in a band that did biker bars. The owners loved bikers. Why? Their numbers were few compared to a regular clientele but they spent exponentially more. In fact, they spent a great deal more of their pay. This is another anecdotal bit congruent with your industrial town observation.
Habituation, I’ll buy it. But why habituation? Because it does something to the myelin sheath or the electric conductivity of brain cells that makes life …
feel differently, or adjusts your feeling about life.
Where they hard drinkers in Bethlehem? Damn right they were. Lehigh University was a most spectacularly hard drinking campus. The entire south side was as the place crumbled in the Eighties.
Tom Paterson said,
January 7, 2014 at 10:28 pm
*Ethyl alcohol has virtually no taste.*
Maybe *taste* was the wrong word. Whatever it is that makes you shudder and retch at the age of 12 when you raid your parents’ drinks cabinet for gin or Scotch. Just the smell of it was stomach-turning. But industrial ethyl alcohol (if you dare!) has a warm cotton-candy taste, I seem to recall.
The biochemistry is hellishly complex (like all biochemistry!). My No Bell’s prize.
Tom Paterson said,
January 7, 2014 at 11:22 pm
Et in Arcadia Sterno!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
*On the morning of March 8, 2012, the FBI arrested Kurniawan at his home in Arcadia, California. When agents searched his house, they found inexpensive Napa wines with notes indicating they would be passed off as older vintages of Bordeaux, corks, stamps, labels, and other tools involved in counterfeiting wine. He was indicted on several counts of mail fraud and wire fraud in New York on March 9. Later investigations indicated that Kurniawan was purchasing inexpensive, though old, Burgundy wines and re-labeling them with prestigious producer names and vintages.*
Christoph Hechl said,
January 8, 2014 at 12:38 am
I think this is another PR trick to marginalize and stigmatize poor people.
You put the label “alcoholics” on them and after that everybody, including themselves, has no problem thinking about them in terms of “had it coming”, “own fault” and so on.
People have lost hope, because no way they use seems to change anything. Hope for real change has been purposefully stifeled to supress any real opposition.
Drugs make people weak and passive, but in history this was always a perfect breeding ground for charismatic extremists, that lead people straight into some kind of war.
Actually i have placed a bet, that this centuries european war will start in or because of britain, because right now they seem to be farthest away from anything considered democratic and justifiable.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/06/law-to-stop-eveyone-everything
George Smith said,
January 8, 2014 at 10:10 am
Breaching them will not be classed as a criminal offence, but can still carry a custodial sentence: without committing a crime, you can be imprisoned for up to two years.
This is rather shocking. But the piece underlines the sentiment that’s in the US re freedom. In the US, freedom means ‘freedom to shop’ to quite a few. And if you can’t shop, you need to be invisible or gone. So there has been an explosion in enforcement of cleanliness and parking overnight rules to chase the homeless around. The ordnances were also used extensively to break up Occupy Wall Street protests, most infamously handing down criminal charges for chalking sidewalks.
There’s a bleak paradox in the CDC thing. Prior to Obamacare, it would seem unlikely that “doctors” would have had much opportunity to patients to give “motivational interviews” to curb excessive drinking because they wouldn’t see many of them — no insurance or capability to see a doctor except in an emergency room.
Now that changes a bit. Broadly, birth rates have fallen in the US, mostly attributed to bad economic times, suicides and death rates are up in the class afflicted by misery, so it’s not that surprising that one might see a so-called problem with “excessive drinking.”
It’s just an embarrassing symptom. Can’t do anything about the most pressing problems so we’ll tut-tut people gently about “excessive drinking.”
With regards to the wine counterfeiter in Arcadia, he — apparently — was famous, for taking his wares to the high-end. He obviously knew where the money was.
Tom Paterson said,
January 8, 2014 at 10:47 am
You know my fondness for finding old texts which show that nothing ever changes. Here’s Dostoevsky writing about London (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions):
*Whitechapel is, if anything, even worse, ‘with its half-naked, savage, and hungry population’. In the face of terrible poverty, ‘the masses grow numb and wander about like zombies’ , and the main problem is drinking: ‘Everyone is drunk, not with cheer but dismally, miserably, and, in a rather strange way, silently. […] Everyone rushes as fast as he can to drink until he loses consciousness’. And it seems to have an even more profound effect on Dostoevsky: ‘On such a night at two o’clock I once got lost and for a long time roamed the streets in the midst of the numberless crowd of dismal people […] the impression of what I saw tormented me for three days afterwards’.*
That paragraph was excerpted from this short essay:
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/12/19/russians-in-london-dostoevsky/
I couldn’t find the original Dostoevsky … that’s why we still need libraries!
Tom Paterson said,
January 8, 2014 at 11:46 am
But we did manage to change things:
*”How come you don’t work eighteen hours a day? Your great grandparents [did]. You know why? Because in Chicago, back in 1886, four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day — it was the Haymarket affair — for you.” And I’ve got him pinned against the mailbox. He can’t get away, you know. The bus [hasn’t come], and he’s all trembling and she’s scared. She drops the Vanity Fair. I pick it up; I’m very gallant. I give her the Vanity Fair. No bus. Now I’ve got them pinned. “How many hours of week do you work?” He says, “Forty.” “How come you don’t work eighty hours, ninety hours? Because your grandparents [did], and because men and women got their heads busted fighting for you for the forty-hour week, back in the thirties.”
By this time the bus comes; they rush on. I never saw them again. But I’ll bet you … See, they live in the condominium that faces the bus stop. And I’ll bet you up on the 25th floor, she’s looking out every day, and he says, “Is that old nut still down there?”
Now, I can’t blame them, because how do they know? Who told them? What do they know about unions? So that’s what I mean about a national Alzheimer’s disease. It’s that aspect. So all these books deal with memory as well. What was it like during World War II? What was it like during the Depression? What’s it like being black in a white-dominant [society]? What’s it like growing old? What’s the job of a teacher or a welder like?*
Conversations with Studs Terkel
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Terkel/terkel-con0.html
George Smith said,
January 8, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Bravo. Reminds me of the time I posted a couple years ago about my friend’s losing battle with cancer. We were sitting in the group chemotherapy room, the television was on with news about OWS, and a woman in the chair across looked at us and said, “What do they want?” And she was well-to-do and very shocked by the scenes.
So we replied, “They want jobs.” And she answered something about being lazy and people who wanted jobs and were willing to work could have them. And neither of us had the heart to argue in the cancer ward.
I like to reference books in terms of some national security arguments and the transmogrification of the military and national security megaplex. During WWII, the US military’s primary task was not bombing paupers. And you could write a book about the total change in theology that came with the tectonic shift in national aims and the primacy of defense spending in a vacuum where others gave up the field. Which is why the term asymmetric was invented by our military theologians. What was needed was to come up with a term that would rationalize why you were going to hammer paupers, because they were always allegedly coming up with ways to strike you down “asymmetrically.” An asymmetric rationalization is used to deal with everyone who doesn’t spend what we do on the military and security, which is, well, everyone.
And I think I’m also going to raise the topic of starting open threads.
More this week on the matter, maybe.
Tom Paterson said,
January 8, 2014 at 1:27 pm
*And I think I’m also going to raise the topic of starting open threads.*
You deserve to make something out of this. But how?
I’ll buy Christoph’s bet and then bet against it (the British state is ruthlessly efficient at suppressing dissent … and they’ve had a lot of practice); we could get a whole Goldman,Sachs thing going.
Tom Paterson said,
January 9, 2014 at 6:16 pm
There’s probably about as much chance of an old-fashioned shooting war in Europe as there is of a war between the USA and the People’s Republic (see Dick Destiny passim) and for many of the same reasons.
In fact there is already a bitter war raging in England (and many other European states) between the rich and the poor … and it surely wasn’t the poor that started it.
I have a saying: modern Spain had two great tragedies; the first tragedy was the birth of Franco; the second was his death. A terrible price was paid to establish his wretched fascist state, but at least there was some stability (like Iraq before the monstrous war there). Youth unemployment in Spain now stands at 57 %:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/spains-youth-unemployment-rate-hits-57-7-europe-faces-lost-generation-1431480
In Greece the same general history and situation now:
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2014/1/9/european-crisis/greece-unemployment-rate-lifts
Youth unemployment in Greece is 57 %.
I could go on.
The legislation Monbiot was describing in the Guardian piece cited above was amended in the House of Lords (the upper chamber) and is not now quite so Draconian (the usual pattern of ask for a lot and then, when rebuffed, settle for what you wanted in the first place). It has yet to be enacted. I am not hopeful. I mentioned the poor sods who got 4 years apiece for indiscreet posts on FB!
The incessant creation of new laws (when a thousand years’-worth of old ones is more than adequate for any occasion) is another facet of the Empire of Dogshit.
And so it goes.
Sir Robert Mark, former Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis :
“a good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs”.
George Smith said,
January 9, 2014 at 7:37 pm
Youth unemployment in the US is a debacle, too, although not as catastrophic as in Spain. The pigeons will only slowly come home to roost, but they will. There is going to be an entire generation that is very angry when it gets older, just as angry as I am and I am old.
Corporate America fell on Americans and not a bit of it has yet scarcely acknowledged the problem. Everything we’ve had in the last twelve months is virtually nothing, public relations talk about inequality. News today, in Google,
Macy’s, a corporate department store, slashes its poorly paid retail workforce. It’s stock goes up.
Jeff Bezos’ warehouse fulfillment centers killed two people over the shopping season. But the Wall Street Journal runs a story on “bar raisers” at Amazon, upper tier Amazon employees who are put of the screening process at the company to ensure that only best for the Amazon culture get hired. The majority of Amazon’s workers, well over 100,000, are employed in warehouses and are not screened this way, because they’re bottom-out-of-sight Walmart-style employees and handled by third party contractors.
However, Bezos’ popularity seems to have hit the skids, permanently. His delivery drone dog-and-pony show on 60 Minutes earned him only mockery. And his emergency service premium fly out from the Galapagos due to kidney stone emergency — well, let’s just say, the silence in sympathy was deafening.
Tom Paterson said,
January 9, 2014 at 11:28 pm
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304753504579285133045398344
*Amazon believes the program, created in the company’s infancy and honed by founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, screens out cultural misfits …*
The WSJ, last refuge of the cultural misfits!
A sailor’s life for me:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/24/who-wants-serve-billionaire-superyachts
Christoph Hechl said,
January 10, 2014 at 12:20 am
There is a reason, why i chose the word war:
I see the following chain of events as rather likely
– contrast between lower and upper end of the social ladder increasing, upper end sees no reason to NOT rub their extraordinary position in everyones face
– people frustrated from futile tries to change the loss of actual democracy, with every method to do so in an orderly fashion inaffactive
– a spiral of increasing pressure from the masses with increasing suppression from the haves
– a violent outbreak, that catches on in one country
– said country underestimated the amount of desperation of their own people and ends up in a civil war
– consistent with the history of the last decades other nations will not honor the rule of not involving in internal conflicts
– people in those countries disagree with their own governments fight against the poor in former “brother states”
— big scale civil war people against money and power
— people lose.
btw i named britain not because of that article alone
George Smith said,
January 10, 2014 at 10:26 am
That’s not an unreasonable set of predictions. It happened in Egypt and that still is a horrid place. Suppression took over after the momentary joy of the the removal of Mubarak.
This country has already suppressed one bout of social unrest, OWS. It’s well set up to do so after the war on terror, militarization of urban police forces and expansion of private sector anti-terror fusion centers through the Dept of Homeland Security.
Tom Paterson said,
January 10, 2014 at 11:14 am
what I believe today
boss, since nobody cares what I believe I have decided to believe something I can be happy believing: today I am a hard-line catalonia anarchist, marxist in temperament and analysis, eco-green, a friend of the earth and bezos-hater. money is just a way to kill people without getting blood on your hands; a way to avoid paying what you owe; a way to rob people without having to front it out face-to-face in the street; a way to burgle without having to be a second-storey man or john dean (before he stepped into the light); a way to control people without having to watch them all the time; a way to harvest thought; the agent orange of the immortal soul. and all that liberty, equality and fraternity stuff, you know i believe, aleksandr herzen and pyotr kropotkin. that’s what I really think, boss, and I feel cleaner and much younger for having said it. don’t ask about the parentheses and the colon.
yours, ever-lovingly, archy
People would start vanity threads like that and then where would you be?
George Smith said,
January 10, 2014 at 4:45 pm
Thumbs up.