Facelessness

On BBC: "An advert designed to run on the London Underground was rejected because it contained bacon, butter, eggs and jam, an online supermarket said."

Have a look at that picture. Unless you've religious objections to pork (I'm tempted to include vegans in that category), nothing screams "unhealthy!" Just the opposite--it is a collection of foods with which to make other things. The food collection and poses of the people suggest that a home-made family dinner will soon appear.

Somebody decided that the advertisement violated a rule that "Foods found to be high in fat, sugar and salt are now not allowed to feature in advertisements on public transport." Somebody not only decided that this spread was unhealthy, somebody else had to approve it for publication.

We'll never know who. A bureaucrat.

There's good reason for protecting bureaucrats from outside pressure. If you knew who made the decisions about toy safety, you could bribe or intimidate them into going after your competitors' products. (From time to time I wonder if this does happen. The FBI hasn't proved immune to influence.)

On the other hand, some things are so egregiously stupid (I'm thinking of several school boards that got themselves in the news this last year), that some kind of unveiling or impeachment seems appropriate.

Of course such a process could be abused in its turn when something happens that the deep pocketed or well-connected don't care for.

So perhaps it is best to leave things as they are. Though the prospect of consigning the idiots (Hanlon's Razor) to a harmless post counting sand is a pleasant one.