Stupidity Ahoy
Europe continues to amaze with their pedantic mentality. What did I say about tobacco hysteria being used to go after other things?
The advertising business has jumped on the environmental bandwagon, finding ways to give all sorts of industries a “green” tuneup and profiting in the process. But is it about to backfire?
The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause. Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.
The process of going from people smoking on talk shows and in grocery stores to being forced to only be able to smoke in zoned areas (shades of the Warsaw ghetto!) was a slow process. But it started with warning labels in the early 60s. Then NO SMOKING signs started appearing more frequently.
Now, you might think they would never ban cars, but there are many people who would like to. They want everyone to ride mass transit. Of course, if someone comes up with a clean alternative to gas, they might force everyone at some point to convert. But greens have this psychotic tendency to demand people change to some technology like wind power, and then try to ban it because it kills birds.
Personally, I am sick of warning labels. They should only be on things like medicine or rat poison. Thanks to trial lawyers, they’re on almost everything now. Soon they will tattoo them on people. WARNING: PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND IRRATIONAL. HANDLE WITH CARE.
Wait, maybe they should tattoo that on bureaucrats and politicians.
This is precisely what happened with Prop 65 in CA. Because the original law has a zero tolerance limit, as detection technology improves they’ve had to extend the warnings farther and farther. Now most public buildings simply have the Prop 65 signs on their front door. I was at St. Mary’s Hospital last week and they’ve got one up on every entrance, now.
I’d be delighted to see cars, like cigarette packs, required to have 30% of their surface covered with lurid photos of crash victims and screaming warnings about pollution and accidents. Schadenfreude was made for this.
My favorite warning label of all time was on a rock sampling hammer: “Warning! Do not use to strike hard objects as they may chip and shatter causing injury.” Second place goes to the label on a Yamaha motorcycle battery: “Do not drink the contents of this battery.” And finally, the runner-up, on my (very expensive, audiophile-grade) stereo amplifier: “Do not place under dripping water, as electrocution may result.”
And one final rant: Nasal snuff has a medical track record of zero harm. That is, in over 400 years of medical investigation, it’s never been linked to any physical harm at all, ever. Yet in the EU 50% of the package has to have a warning saying “This products causes cancer!”. Not “may.” Not “is believed by the State.” Just flat-out “Causes cancer!” despite the fact that there is no proof whatsoever this is true.
The State has become the biggest “boy who cried wolf” that ever existed.
Heck, Joe Jackson was smirking about how stupid this all was 20 years ago ("Everything gives you cancer"), and it’s just gotten worse.
To wrap up, an amusing article:
http://tinyurl.com/2lugflPosted by on 10/28 at 04:33 PMI just remembered another bit of rank stupidity I encountered. When the cig companies started pulling the additives and putting “No additives!” on the packs, CA forced them to add the following line to the usual gibberish: “Warning: no additives does not mean this is a safer cigarette.”
Think about it.Posted by on 10/29 at 06:40 PM
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