In which the pond is tempted to prohibit use of the term "nanny state" or at least to imagine the Caterists as a giant demonic Merino ...

The pond has no idea how Huffington Post is going down under - the pond never visits the new site because it's unutterably and invariably lame, as shown recently by this exercise in news priorities ...

The pond found the click baiting and trolling on the American site intolerable enough, but now that the pond is automatically re-directed to the Australian version, even the site's occasional interesting story on American politics and media - often ripped from other sources - requires a scrolling down and a clicking to get re-directed, or the VPN in constant operation, and it's all too tedious up against the very limited rewards ... better to go back to the original sources ...

And now for the record, it's on to the Caterists, railing yet again at nanny staters ...

The chief interest here, for those interested to learn how the Caterists could previously have found themselves digging a hole for themselves at a quarry, is to see how a tax is conflated with American prohibition, which is to say the banning of alcohol ...

It takes a time - the Caterists are prolix, windy and full of verbiage, but eventually, through a thicket, a veritable blizzard of nanny state rhetoric we get there ...

You can see  how the logic runs.

Obesity is an imagined crisis - just don't talk to any doctor in a public hospital and see what they think about this "imagined crisis".

In fact the pond is sick of one doctor friend harassing the pond about the eating, drinking and smoking habits of her patients, as if the pond could stop the innate capacity of the lumpenproletariat to indulge in self-harm. The pond's already doing as much self-harm as it can manage in best Tamworth style

And then, having decried the imagined crisis comes the good news that sugar is on the slide in soda anyway ... though why we should care, because fat is good and sugar is good, and we don't have any kind of obesity crisis ... and Australian obesity rates climbing faster than anywhere else in the world, study shows.

Of course it's important work for the Caterists and the IPA and such like that people continue to access to everything that's bad because it's their right and their choice, and a handy profit turner and besides, once everyone's forced out of the private health system for smoking and drinking and obesity, the finger can be pointed at the public health system for being too expensive and deserving cots, and next week the Caterists can be running a story about health costs spiralling out of control, and the need to make people pay more for their health care, but wait, we haven't yet reached hair-raising stories about prohibition, as promised.

Oh what the heck, break time, time for a sponsor's message about the benefits of sugar:

Australia trading cheap medicine for sugar exports.

Never mind, when we do reach those confusing tales of prohibition, libertarians and socialists in the audience might wonder if the Caterists are even more mind-numbingly confused than usual.

Heck, if you follow the tax angle, then all sorts of goodies - marijuana, heroin, cocaine amongst them - might be sold, albeit taxed up the wazoo.

Guess we'll have to wait for the Caterists to catch up on that one. Let's hope they don't go nanny state and start yabbering about prohibition.

Sadly, the Caterists, being bears of little brain, can't feel an entrepreneurial angle, even if it were to bite them on the bum, and instead we must endure obligatory references to same sex marriage and coalmining.

Indeed, indeed, and it led the pond to think that the pro-obesity brigade may not want to make people slimmer - after all, what's wrong with fat, chocolate and sugar? - and they sure know how to make government confused, as people get fatter, the public health system endures exceptional stress and strain, and yet it's all for the best in the best of all non-prohibitive worlds ...

Unfortunately, the pond has a darker view of the world, and the infinite capacity of people to do themselves harm, and to add to the cost of running things ...

As Sly Stallone once sort of famously said, Indulgence is the disease, and tax is the cure.

Indulgence can lead to all sorts of problems.

Why it knows for a fact that if you put some cackling geese in front of a microphone or sit them down at a keyboard, the legal system is likely to undergo a period of immense activity, to the point where it might crack, like a dam or a quarry wall, under the strain ...

And now because the pond gets too agitated when thinking of refugees, and why they're locked up with hardened criminals in assorted gulag hell holes, we have to settle for a Rowe cartoon, and catch the twittering Rowe here.