Next Target of the Nanny State -- your TV?

Researchers in Australia reached far up their asses and pulled out a fascinating "fact": one hour of TV can shorten your life by 22 minutes. That makes one hour of TV as deadly as smoking 2 (gasp!) cigarettes! OMG!!!
Eleventy!!11!!

It's just another case of post hoc not equaling propter hoc, of course -- correlation just isn't causation. They looked at  a cross-sectional survey of people 25 and up at the turn of the millennium, and asked them how much TV they watched. They then looked at national mortality rates for the year 2008, and attempted to correlate the two numbers. That's interesting, of course, but it means exactly nothing.

I'm interested in how this will be used by the nanny statists to screw with our freedoms. Will the Center for Science¹ in the Public Interest² wage a war on television, like they've done against salt? Will Mike Bloomberg mandate an age limit for TV watching? Whatever it is, you know someone's going to jump on this study  like your host on a 5-pound  bucket of bacon.


1: well, propaganda spun as science
2: umm, not in the public interest. In the interest of superannuatated hippies, maybe?