Tag: Health

Get those Tobacco Seeds in.

Posted on by Neal Asher

The future of The Departure is closer than you think. Take for example this little wheeze (excuse the pun) suggested by Simon Chapman in that hotbed of totalitarianism, Australia. Now, maybe you don’t agree with smoking, but remember that where the anti-smokers lead the anti-alcohol, fat, sugar (name your poison) brigade follow:

Under the proposal, a license would give the smoker a right to a limited quota of tobacco supply, say 10 cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day and so on. There is a fee payable to government to give the consumer the right to use tobacco. The more tobacco the license holder pre‑commits to smoke, the higher the license fee involved.

Under the licensing plan consumers would be asked to pass a test, ‘not dissimilar to a driving test’ Chapman stated, to qualify for a right to receive a license to legally purchase tobacco.

Based on the questionable notion that smokers lack an awareness of at least three decades of heavily publicised research about health problems that smoking causes, the government would see itself fit to decide for the smoker the amount of cigarettes he or she is allowed to smoke.

Read this guys additional comments below as well. Coming your way soon: a licence to fart.

Resolutions

Posted on by Neal Asher

A lot of people tend to make New Year resolutions but for me it’s becoming the ‘back from Crete’ resolution. After my initial greedy splurge on the Internet, reading sometimes as much as seven months’ worth of various blogs, and discovering as always ‘same old shit; different month’, I resolve not to spend quite so much time on it. However, that’s just the same as my, ‘I’m never drinking again!’ after a particularly bad hangover.

Resolutions I will stick to are these: I will continue with my twenty sit-ups and twenty press-ups every morning, I’ll cycle during from Monday to Friday as much as weather permits, and I’ll do two weight-training sessions a week. Another thing I resolve to do, because I was lazy this summer in this respect, is spend one hour a day learning Greek. I want to return there (unless of course it becomes dangerous to do so) with at least every single phrase from my Rough Guide imbedded in my mind. Starting Monday I’ll get my head down with Jupiter War, finishing working backwards through it, and writing the rest of the chapter starts and inserting all of them. After that I need to write blurbs for Zero Point, and perhaps a synopsis, then it’s either time for some short stories or work on Penny Royal.

Another thing I’ll have a pop at will be more of those video clips I did last year, with you providing the questions and me either answering or muttering my way out of trouble. To that end please start asking your questions in the comments section here. Try to be precise and try to bear in mind stuff already known, like, yes I am returning to the Polity – I said so in the paragraph above.

The Bully State – Brian Monteith

Posted on by Neal Asher

The End of Tolerance

‘Even if I am a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.’ – Mahatma Gandhi.

This is pretty good as it covers the lies and fact twisting used to push through legislation ‘for our own good’. I didn’t, for example, know about the measurable rise in deaths in countries that introduced the seatbelt law – the unintended consequence of people feeling safer so driving faster and closer to the car in front – nor how the statistics in Britain were skewed by the drink drive ban. Nor did I know the story of Fred Hill, who was a WWII dispatch rider, and his protest against being forced to wear a crash helmet – a protest that led to him dying in Pentonville prison. It was also interesting to read about how the IRA killed more people than any Muslim terrorist in this country yet no need was felt for ID cards and all the rest of the autocratic anti-terror legislation. I of course did know about the lies, fact twisting and ‘consultations’ with bought-and-paid-for NGOs used to push through the smoking ban, and how the same methods are being used on alcohol and ‘unhealthy’ foods.

‘The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.’ – Henry Louis Mencken.

This book ventures into the mindset of the people who want to control every aspect of our lives, and points out that though the majority of them are politically correct dicks in the Labour Party, and their useful idiots in local councils, they are by no means unique – the urge in politicians to lecture and admonish and generally treat voters like idiot children is a strong one. To a certain extent it is dated, in that it was published under the Anti-Midas Gordon Brown, and an awful lot has happened since then. However, this does not undermine the central thesis of the Nanny State turning into the Bully State in which advice and nannying to try and change people’s behaviour have turned into fines and prison sentences.

‘The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be the defenders of minorities’ – Ayn Rand.

Fukushima Radiation

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks Peter Walker for directing my attention here. Wow, I’m astounded to read this on a BBC news website (though he lost me a bit with his mention of climate change), and really wish this kind of sanity appeared in its TV news programs . It doesn’t. I select out the BBC in this respect mainly because it’s funded by a compulsory tax, yet ITV and Sky have been just as bad. I must add that I have found a TV news program that seems free of much of the bias of the ones above and from which I at last obtained some sensible perspective on what’s happening in Libya. Ironically that program is ‘Russia Today’.

And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll – 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer – which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let’s look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m – areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl

Go read the whole thing.

A Non-Smoker Writes…

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s a pretty balanced view on smoking. Go read it all.

A year to 18 months ago I was a non-smoker who was anti-smoking – not to the extent where I would challenge strangers who were smokers or seek to embarrass them, but certainly someone who supported the evermore restrictive practices placed upon those wishing to smoke.

So it was one of the most unexpected shift in my thinking over the past year to become pro-smoking – or rather pro the right to choose to smoke.

H/T Found a Voice

Time to Stop Paying N.I.?

Posted on by Neal Asher

West Kent PCT tells us, “We are committed to delivering equality of opportunity for all service users, carers, staff and wider communities.”

And now tells us:

From this month, patients who smoke and need planned surgery will have to complete a NHS Stop Smoking course before their operation.

Patients who are clinically obese or with a BMI (body mass index) of more than 30 will also have their surgery delayed and will have to carry out a weight loss programme.

So, if you smoke or you are too fat you don’t get the surgery. It doesn’t matter that this is a service you have been forced to pay for all your life.

H/T Dick Puddlecote

Rex Bionics

Posted on by Neal Asher

Well, seeing as after alibaba’s comment about Rex Bionics someone from the company left a comment too, I finally went and had a good look at the site. Excellent stuff. It’s quite surprising to realize we are still in an age when the inventor(s) in a shed can make a difference:

Rex, the Robotic Exoskeleton, is primarily the invention of two men, Richard Little and Robert Irving who have been close friends since they first met at high school over 20 years ago in Fort William, Scotland.

Sharing a love for cars and tinkering with machines, the two friends left school to study engineering and went on to work together at various times and in various climates throughout their careers until they both decided to emigrate to New Zealand in the early 1990s.

With already so much in common, the two friends also had first-hand knowledge of some of the obstacles and access issues faced many wheelchair users. Both have mothers who use wheelchairs, and when Robert Irving received a diagnosis for Multiple Sclerosis himself just over seven years ago, he understood that he might also need to use a wheelchair one day.

That was when the two friends and founders of Rex Bionics decided that they would use their engineering know-how to develop a realistic standing and walking alternative to wheelchairs.

Watching this video my first thought was about how slow these robotic legs are, but then realized that it’s not just about being able to walk, since there’s lots of health issues involved too: blood supply, muscle movement, bladder etc. I then have to wonder about other practicalities, like battery life, but it turns out that ain’t such a probem. Two hours isn’t going to take you along the length of the Penine Way, but the improvements in lifestyle could be huge. Then there are things like unit cost what with these bionic legs having ‘4700 parts and a complicated array of software’ as compared to a wheelchair (with our NHS and NICE these things must be thought about in Britain), but you cannot make comparisons like that. I don’t know if these things are quite well enough developed to enable a paraplegic to go to the toilet, but I’m guessing that possibility is not far away, then just think of the overall savings to society as a whole: no more houses needing to be built with wheelchair access, no more the necessity of toilets for the disabled.

However, they need to move faster, and they need to be designed in such a way that a person can sit and take a dump while wearing them. Sorry to be crude, but that’s reality. Maybe if you’re still checking in, Thomas, you can tell us about this sort of stuff?

On Yer Bike

Posted on by Neal Asher

It’s very definitely been the case that since coming back from Crete I’ve been spending far too much time on the Internet, and the most exercise I’ve had is moving the furniture out of a bedroom ready for a new carpet. And, as is usual with me, I’ve started to get annoyed with how indolent and crappy I feel.

Time to get on my bike again.

My usual route has been from our house here over to my mother’s house, where I would have a cup of tea and a chat, before cycling back again – an eight mile round trip. Last winter, because it was so damned cold, I didn’t do it as much as I should have. My resolution this winter is that I will cycle this route three times a week. The only times I won’t do this is if there’s an actual blizzard, ice on the roads, or a torrential downpour. I’ve also resolved to throw in a bit of weight training too.

Today was the first day. Cycling to my mother’s house against a headwind left me absolutely knackered, but the trip back wasn’t so bad. Once I got back I collected a dustpan and brush so as to occupy myself, in the rest period between each weight-training set, sweeping up all the crap that had blown into our garage over the summer. The training itself was surprisingly easy, and only left me feeling a bit tired and shaky, however, the real effects won’t kick in until tomorrow.

Why such madness? I need it. You have to remember that before I got taken on by Macmillan I worked in a very physical job for 13 years. Maybe I need the endorphins. Anyway, if I don’t get some exercise I’ll end up looking like this:

’nuff said.