Day 15, and the pond takes some time out to share fairy floss thinking and toffee apple wit with the Caterists ...

There, the pond wanted any stray reader to get in the right, fluffy, sugary mind set ... 

After all, soon enough a Caterist is likely to hover into view, and any notion of intelligence perforce must be flung into the fairy floss machine ...

(Note: only an artist's impression of the Caterist mind at work).

Now it was probably only a coincidence that the bouffant one got caught up in the sugar hit candy machine this day ...

But the Caterist had no excuse ... because he was back on his favourite hobby horse ...

Now the pond gets it. The pond's as libertarian as the next taxpayer-subsidised loon ...

There's no such notion as community or public health in Caterist land. There's probably no such thing as community or public, just "I'm all right Jack and Jacqueline and youse can just get fucked."

Better to be fat, ugly and stupid and a class A dimwit rorter like Michael Costa than try to retain some semblance of health.

But we take on notice the issue that the problem isn't that governments invariably do things badly, but that they do stuff at all ...

No doubt because the private sector does things so much better, such as flogging cigarettes, booze, sugar and high fructose syrup, and frankly if you're an addict, why don't you just crawl away and die, preferably not at the taxpayers' expense and by clogging up the public hospital and health system, but if you must do that, clog away, so that the rich can whine and moan about the rising cost of health care ...

Of course we've heard all this before, in the matter of cigarette consumption, alcohol advertising and all the rest of it. The denial of any connection, the right of people to flog poison and the right of people to consume it, and where's the harm ...

It's as if the plague of obesity - try walking down Peel street in Tamworth any given day - could just be walked off with a little bit of parental guidance ...

Any gesture in any other direction - suggestions, help, carrot or stick, is just a waste of time as it interferes with Coca Cola Amatil's plan to rule the world. You don't have to look far for the connections ...

Here, have one of these. Go on, you can afford it ...

And so on and so forth. But back to the Caterists ...

Nobody believes?

By golly that Nobody is a worry ...

But the trouble with Nobody is that nobody hasn't got much of a statistical argument, at least when all that's offered is a sample of verbal diarrhoea of the "ridiculous", "alarmanomics", "cherry picking", "big scary number" kind ...

Followed by the monstrous stupidity of suggesting everyone's better off fat, in much the same way that we'd all be better off on a soma diet because it'd keep us all quiet ...

Now the pond understands this was a Caterist attempt at humour.

In much the same way as some find an elephant's fart funny.

It's a wonderful distraction and it avoids any necessity for the Caterists to have at hand some actual data to confound and refute the report mentioned ...

(see here).

It would have been nice to have seen that data and those arguments, rather than being forced to mop up some Caterist dribble, perhaps a sign of eating a stick too many of fairy floss before sitting down at the keyboard.

All the pond knows is that there's an emergency doctor that constantly complains to the pond about the way most of her patients are killing themselves, notably by way of their eating habits, which put car deaths in the modest camp of minor roadkill ...

What to do about it?

Well if you're a Caterist, nothing.

But right at the end of the compassionate, caring, considerate Caterist carry-on, there was that note about the Caterist being the executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.

That reminded the pond, yet again, that Caterists scribbling for the reptiles are cross-subsidised by a generous taxpayer subsidy ...

Which leads to a repeat of that famous remark ...

Governments invariably do these taxpayer subsidy things badly, but that's not the issue. The real problem is that they do this stuff - stuff the taxpayer-subsidised Caterists down our collective throats - at all ...

Never mind, let's hear it for Nobody yet again ...

Silly Alice. There's nothing like reading Caterists to make you feel faint ...