Pressure is mounting on the U.S. government to redefine the safe level of alcohol consumption down to zero, reports Christopher Snowdon in The Spectator – and the push is being driven by some of the same researchers who’ve been making life miserable for Canadian social drinkers. As in Canada, they seek to discredit the view that moderate drinking contributes to cardio-vascular health by challenging the famous “J-Curve” which, backed by decades of science, demonstrates that social drinkers are likely to live longer than teetotallers.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
