Freedom to Drink

As someone who enjoys beer, wine and spirits, the following report from the Center for Consumer Freedom documenting the activities of the neo-prohibitionary group The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is quite disturbing.


America's anti-alcohol movement is composed of dozens of
overlapping community groups, research institutions, and advocacy
organizations, but they are brought together and given
direction by one entity: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
(RWJF). Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the RWJF has spent
more than $265 million between 1997 and 2002 to tax, vilify,
and restrict access to alcoholic beverages. Nearly every study
disparaging alcohol in the mass media, every legislative push to
limit marketing or increase taxes, and every supposedly 'grassroots'
anti-alcohol movement was conceived and coordinated at
the RWJF's headquarters. Thanks to this one foundation, the
U.S. anti-alcohol movement speaks with one voice.



I don't know much about either group, but the assertions made against the neo-prohibitionists do match my own observations of a slow but steady reduction of freedoms regarding alcohol consumption. I wont argue against the merit of some of these restrictions, but I do worry about a continuing effort to push the boundary past what I see a reasonable compromise between safety and freedom.




Full Report


Via The Center For Consumer Freedom

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shark Crackers

The movie Jaws has been a fan favorite for 30 years. A lot has been written about the impact Jaws had on the movie making business and summer swimming habits but there's one aspect of the movie that's seldom been discussed, the impact Jaws had on the image of the saltine cracker. Before Robert Shaw's Quint, a cracker was a bland cake of baked flour only good as a surface to hold peanut butter or cheese, but not after. Quint elevated the cracker into the snack of sailors and shark hunters. What man has not wanted to calmly snap chunks of a cracker while saying the words: Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish! Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go. Much like the Eucharist is a symbol of Christ in the Catholic tradition, in Jaws, the cracker forms the edible representation of the
Read more

Running roughshod or ripshod

A common euphamism for political power abuse is saying someone or organization has ' run ripshod ' through the land. I was going to use the phrase myself the other day when I realized I had no idea what ripshod meant. I searched around and found many other users but no place that could define the word. This started me thinking that perhaps every example I found was just a perpetuation of a common mistake. I tried aother variations on the phrase and finnally hit upon a more common usage: run roughshod. The words roughshod and ripshod don't really sound the same but people use them in the same manner in similar contexts. Does anyone know the proper usage?
Read more

Axis, Axes, Axii?

While writing another post (it will probably follow this one) I needed to pluralize axis. None of the guesses I came up with passed the spell checker so I Googled it. The first hit I got was from a drafting company. (Interesting aside: word order matters in Google more than I realized - searching for "plural axis" didn't get the same dictionary oriented results as "axis plural") According to these folks the answer is: Grammatical Note : The plural of axis is axes. Some radical etymologists insist that the plural form of axis is axii, but that is only if there are three or more; One axis, two axes, three axii. The word axii, however, still doesn’t pass the spell checker, so perhaps getting grammar lessons from a drafting company isn’t such a great idea. More legitimate authorities simply list axes as the plural. If you do visit the above link to drafing company, can you answer me a question, what the heck are those diagrams depicting. I
Read more