Scientists. What a bunch of arrogant tosspots. They sit there in their white coats and safety goggles, poking holes in mice and performing unwholesome rituals with test tubes, then have the bare-faced cheek to tell us normal people what to do because they've drawn a graph saying giving ecstasy to horses is dangerous. Well, I've had enough of it. So too have Alan Johnson, part-time Home Secretary and full-time garden gnome impersonator, and this thoroughly agreeable Andrew Wilson chap whose recent Daily Mail column single-handedly exposed the whole scientific community for the godless intellectual despots that they are.

What pushed these two over the edge were the comments made by 'Professor' David Nutt, an interfering moustachioed busybody with a superlative ego complex. Nutt, one of the government's top scientific advisors, had the temerity to dispense some advice which directly contradicted current government policy. "Cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco", he declared, supposedly citing some meaningless 'evidence' along with it. Having clearly overstepped the well defined boundaries of his advisory role by committing such an act, he then proceeded to throw an indignant hissy fit when Johnson sacked him, bawling on about free speech and the erosion of public trust in science.

Earth to David Nutt: this is the real world, not some sanitised university laboratory chock full of Bunsen burners and teeny tiny little molecules. According to science, drugs are nothing but placid granules of psychoactive substances. But in the real world, these little granules are more than enough to corrupt our otherwise innocent children's impressionable and weak brains. A mere whiff of drugs is more than enough to send a well-adjusted young child spiralling into a torrid frenzy of sex and violence (just illegal drugs that is, alcohol is fine). But the scientists don't tell you that, because they're just staring at the molecules. They don't see the bigger picture.

As Andrew Wilson says, Nutt and his science cronies are arrogant beyond measure, zealously insisting that their 'truth' is the only truth and crusading against anyone brave enough to suggest otherwise. But scientific advice is so laughably inconsistent that you have to wonder who they think they're fooling. Science thinks it has a trump card: the so-called 'scientific method', which is basically a licence for them to change their minds whenever they like, based on some random crackpot turning up at the eleventh hour with some new evidence. How can we possibly be expected to pass legislation based on this constant flip-flopping? That's not what the law is about. MAKE A DECISION, SCIENCE, AND STICK WITH IT.

If scientists always got their way, we'd be living in a hellish version of the world ruled by logic and evidence. The 'irrational' instincts, feelings and fears which have sustained us from the days of witch-burning to our modern day flag-burning would be thrown casually aside like a dead cat. Hearts and minds would be replaced with graphs and lines. This is the vision that David Nutt and his ilk obsess over from the underground caves in which they dwell, emerging only in the dark of night with their subversive attempts to poison our minds by telling us that MMR is safe or that there's no such thing as potatoes. Nice try, professor, but we're more intelligent than you give us credit for. We won't be fooled by your pleas for reason or clearly presented empirical evidence - we KNOW what is right, and it's not in your text books or your peer-reviewed papers. It's right there in our collective conscience, enshrined and enforced by our infallible judicial system. How much more clarity do we need?

Nutt's ridiculous and immoral assertion that we should force-feed babies heroin has revealed the true colour of science - the colour of evil. (It's a murky brown, in case you were wondering). With this latest lie ringing in the public's ears, we are forced to question what other blatant mistruths have been propagated by the scientific community. Global warming, for instance, is very unlikely to have been caused by human pollution. I'd hypothesise that it is instead caused by Jupiter's gravity pushing us closer to the Sun. The lab rats would probably ask me to prove my theory, but guess what, science? They don't make tape measures that long. You can't prove everything, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. Gravity is just everything being a bit sticky. In Australia, heat doesn't rise, it falls. The list goes on.

Not only was Nutt's claim about drugs being safe wrong, as we all know from watching The Wire, but it was also highly unethical. Andrew Nelson wrote that modern day scientists are nothing more than little lab coat Hitlers, running around punching apes and pumping chemicals into our water supply, unchecked by anything other than their own warped sense of morality, and I agree. Science has been responsible for virtually every aspect of our decaying moral fabric for the last hundred years, from the atomic bomb to internet pornography and transsexuals. And they're still at it, with geneticists across the world playing God by growing ears on mice and creating clones of David Bellamy. Yet these insipid intellectual hooligans wish to be the arbiters of our morality, and tell us what to do and think and insert into ourselves. They've got some nerve.

David Nutt is not a politician. No one voted for him. All he's done is spend a lifetime studying facts, evaluating evidence and drawing pithy conclusions. Alan Johnson, on the other hand, is a remarkable man. 15,000 people voted for him at the last election. That's a lot of people. If you imagined every person that voted for Alan Johnson as a pea, then imagined eating all those peas, you'd be bloody sick of peas when you eventually finished eating them. The question is a simple one and it has a simple answer: who do you trust to tell you what to do? Alan Johnson, of course. David Nutt is a dangerous maniac who doesn't know what he's talking about, and all scientists are the same. What do you have to say to that, science?

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Posted: 8/11/2009 - 7:44pm by Pete

My new phone doesn't work. If I try and take a picture of my face with the front-mounted camera, the whole thing locks up. Admittedly this may be my fault for having such a puke-spewingly ugly face that even an emotionless lump of silicon and software can't look at me without having a mild psychological breakdown. But it's not just the camera. The GPS system refuses to tell me where I am - my social skills are so bad, it seems, that I can't even communicate with geostationary satellites - and the memory card stubbornly refuses to be ejected from its compartment.

This is all happening after the Carphone Warehouse supposedly fixed the bloody thing. They didn't fix it, they made it worse. The camera just used to blank me - now it has an epileptic fit if I so much as go near it. I would like nothing more than to march into their poxy shop, lame phone in hand, and shower the social spastics behind the counter with my spit and anger. But I can't right now. I need the phone. I need the 3G modem, because I don't have an internet connection in my flat. I don't have an internet connection because BT took three weeks to connect the phone line, and then O2 Broadband didn't process my order properly, doubling the time it took for a connection date to be set.

Of course, I'm lucky to be in a flat at all. My letting agent was so monumentally useless, so farcically moronic, that I'm genuinely surprised the flat even exists, let alone that I'm sat in it right now. For weeks I had been engaged in a war of intellectual attrition with a man known only as 'Danny'. My arsenal of emails and phone calls was no match for his refusal to respond to them. After an eternity of tiresome nonsense about credit checks and guarantors, victory, although Pyrrhic, was mine, and so was the flat. I almost fainted when I turned on the taps and discovered they worked. And it was water coming out of them, not torrents of vaginal blood or drips of hedgehog snot. OK, three quarters of the light bulbs were out and a recent postcode change has put the address into the middle of a postal version of the Bermuda Triangle, but you can't expect fucking miracles.

Problems. Everywhere. Constantly. We spend our lives scrambling hopelessly up an infinite mountain of problems. Forgot to buy milk? There's a problem. Mice in your pantry scoffing all the Doritos? Another problem. Just shit yourself in your last pair of clean trousers? In the middle of the office? In front of Peter Mandelson and an ITN lunchtime news film crew? Big problem. For every foothold to be found on this wretched cliff, an avalanche of misery lurks just a few feet up, ready to descend on you in the form of anything from a broken boiler to a full-on stroke. And no matter how far the scree drags you - down past an expired warranty, bumping over the gasman who can't find your house, into the claim form that got lost in the latest mail strike - you're still on the mountain. The problems never go away.

Yet still we climb. It's no real surprise that nothing works - after all, if there were no problems, there would be no need for solutions, and pretty much everyone would be out of a job. What would Darryl at the Carphone Warehouse do if my phone just worked? Sit around wanking all day? Perish the thought. We need problems, because we need to provide solutions, and if the provision of solutions causes more problems, which it inevitably does, then that's even better. It's an endless, suffocating cycle of failure that we all depend on yet constantly bemoan. And whenever God or Karma or whatever you want to call the dipshit pulling all the cosmic strings has run out of stuff to throw at us, we're pretty adept at inventing our own problems to keep ourselves busy.

Take the example of a shop, where, I am told, staff spend their night shifts manually sifting through every piece of stock, crossing the price in Euros off the labels in case their moronic customers get confused by that strange alien glyph, the mystical €. This is a problem that hardly needs to be solved at all, although the ingenious idea of not printing the European price on the labels in the first place has clearly escaped the intellectual powerhouses further up the chain of command. Time is wasted, money is lost, staff are unhappy - it's a perfect problem; completely artificial and arbitrary, with a brilliantly half-baked solution that fishtails into creating even more misery.

I seem to encounter more problems than most people. I certainly complain about them more - both frequently and loudly, without much thought for the consequences. This is probably why I'm so popular. But I thrive on these little difficulties, these little farts of fate. Nothing gets me more fired up than a delayed train disrupting my morning commute. I'll harp on for hours about a broken umbrella or an innocuous looking paving slab which turns into a deep, cavernous lake when you step on it, soaking your shoe in the process. The Dominos delivery man not being able to find my house is a day's worth of material. Something big like a Tube strike or broken electrical goods keep me going for weeks. It's brilliant introductory material. "Hi, my name's Pete and my dishwasher's fucked! Something to do with the intake pipe. Costs a shitload to fix apparently! What's your name?" I practically have a fit when Windows Vista can't find my wireless network. It's something to talk about, after all.

As you read the start of this blog, it may have seemed like I was complaining about my broken phone, about my nonexistent broadband, about my dim-witted letting agent. And I was. But in a way, I was also thanking them. And I am truly thankful to have something to moan about, just like I'm thankful for all the problems that exist that keep me in my job, just like you too should be. This world is a mess in which nothing works - a dysfunctional, frustrating, beautiful mess. Praise be.

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Posted: 11/10/2009 - 7:09pm by Pete

Alcohol. It's bloody great, isn't it? Who'd have thought a simple chain of molecules could be the cause of so much fun and jollity? Everyone loves a bit of alcohol, from troublesome babies with irresponsible parents who just want a quiet night's sleep, through to big city executives who just want all the pain to go away. But, in direct contradiction to what I just typed, not everyone loves alcohol. There exists in our great society a niche group of do-gooders and killjoys who have managed to get the idea into their heads that drinking yourself into the gutter every night is not always the solution to all life's ills.

It's all well and good for these nutjobs to entertain their deluded notions in the privacy of their own homes or cells. But unfortunately, some of them have had the temerity to try and inflict this namby-pamby nonsense on the rest of us good and sensible folk. I was alerted to this alarming fact a few weeks ago whilst listening to Spotify, a music streaming program which tries to placate the music industry by farting out an annoying advert every ten seconds like an incredibly flatulent Bono. One of the said adverts had this gist:

"You know the drink adverts which always end with 'please drink responsibly'? Well what does 'please drink responsibly' actually mean? Click the link to find out blah blah blah I have no friends blah blah blah dick."

The advert, despite annoying me and disrupting the flow of whatever crap I was listening to, raised an interesting point. What does it mean to drink responsibly? So I went to the website and sought out the answer. Unsurprisingly, I did not like the answer.

It basically amounts to this. If you drink 3 to 4 'units' (as a man) or 2 to 3 (as a woman or a loser), in a single night, then you are drinking responsibly. You're probably the sort of person who brings out their 'best cutlery' at dinner parties and types full text questions into the Ask Jeeves search engine. Any more than that, and you're unfathomably reckless; an irresponsible maniac driving a car with your feet through the middle of an orphanage's playground, or juggling with anthrax canisters on a packed commuter train. A 'unit' is not very much. Two pints of Kronenbourg (or two glasses of wine) puts you over the limit. Another two and you're officially a binge drinker, a menace to society and probably a potential rapist. Congratulations.

The concept of assigning such a strict numerical value to 'responsibility' seems almost farcical. Sure, our society is one of arbitrary restrictions: speed limits to slow us down, calorie limits to stop us getting fat, bandwidth limits to stop us downloading all the porn in the world. But drinking isn't like driving, eating or masturbating: we do it for FUN, and fun isn't fun when it's limited and regulated and rammed down your throat by a bunch of smug, patronising twats. What's more, the 'responsibility quota' is so ridiculously low that if it were adhered to, the average pub trip would be shorter than Ian Huntley's Facebook friend list.

Let's face it. Most alcohol does not taste very nice. A pint of Carling might as well be a crock of fermented piss poured onto a dozen rotting egg yolks. A Bacardi Breezer, which already tastes like sugar mixed with petrol, gives your teeth a feeling more commonly associated with gnawing on tree sap. After a few yellow ones your mouth is so discoloured most people will think you have jaundice. Of course, some beers and wines are perfectly palatable, but such delicacies are generally eschewed in favour of cheaper options in the course of an average binge. The point is, when people drink alcohol, they're drinking to get drunk.

I know I'm not exactly delivering earth shattering wisdom with that last revelation. But I get the impression that these 'responsible drinking' jobsworths, with their receding hairlines and stamp collections, have spectacularly missed the point. People LIKE getting drunk. They enjoy it, silly! There's nothing better than a few pints down the pub with your mates, and then a few more drinks in the club, then maybe a few more to wash away the taste of sick in your mouth, topped-off with a dirty kebab containing more e-coli than meat, then a stumble home, a dizzying haze of half-remembered faux-pas and entanglements with the constabulary, an unconscious stupor, a groggy, joyless Sunday morning with a puddle of vomit at the end of your bed, an empty wallet strewn on the floor, and all the regret for your latest misdeeds swimming around your throbbing, aching head. What could possibly be more fun than that?

OK, maybe the last bit doesn't sound like so much fun. That's the part these responsible drinking campaigns hook in to. I guess they wouldn't be so convincing if they focused on all the positives of alcohol consumption: the disinhibition, the increased confidence, the fact that my asinine jokes sound almost amusing. Alcohol use may predicate a hangover, or sometimes an official caution, but cumulatively, the fun you'll have whilst drunk will outweigh the potential side effects or criminal record. If that baseless claim hasn't convinced you, just look at this graph which I've constructed without any evidence or scientific process whatsoever.

As you can see, the graph inclines more slowly than it declines, clearly showing that you have more fun than misery on an average night out (based on time). If you're struggling to understand, don't let it worry your pretty little head, dear. Just take my word for it.

So, thanks to science and graphs, it's been irrefutably established that binge drinking is a bloody good laugh and there's no real reason not to do it. Yet I can still hear the subdued voices of the responsible drinking crowd protesting. "It's all very well if you just drink to have a good time," they whinge. "But what about the anti-social behaviour caused by alcohol?" But that's exactly the same argument as 'guns kill people'. Sure they do. So do sharks. And bendy buses. But just as the gun is held by the marauding psychopath and/or racist LAPD officer (delete as appropriate), so too is the pint of Stella held by the council estate shitbag with more Asbos than tattoos. That's where the problem is. The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of drinking 'irresponsibly' without starting a fight with a plate glass window or pissing on an elderly woman. There is such a thing as responsible binge drinking, you know.

You'll probably keep reading in the press that Britain has a binge drinking problem. That's bollocks. What we have is a binge drinking solution; a solution to the dulling monotony of existence, a solution to the suffocating restrictions of social mores, a solution to the stifling boredom that would otherwise plague our empty, meaningless lives. So raise your glasses, down your pints, and strawpedo your alcopops: three cheers for binge drinking! I'll drink to that.

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Posted: 16/8/2009 - 7:49pm by Pete