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
Y’know, there are lots of conspiracy theories running around the world – the moon landings were falsified, alien spacecraft in AREA 51 – but I’m here to tell you now that one of them is true: there are aliens amongst us. If you were to split open a particular shiny forehead that’s been prominent on your TVs and in your newspapers you would reveal the green lizard skin of glombulfrog from the planet Zaarg. Cameron is not alone, of course, glombulfrogs have taken control of all the parliaments and senates across the world, because nothing else could possibly explain their deep disconnect from real human beings.
It is a conspiracy to give us the worst possible rulers, to fuck up our financial systems, blow our money on complete rubbish, involve us in pointless wars, control and dictate, nanny and generally leave us so totally and utterly pissed off with them. The purpose of this is quite simple. When, in about ten years, the invasion arrives and the particle beams lash down, turning the House of Commons to rubble, the White House to a smoking ruin, the European Parliament to a bomb site snowed with the pages from burning accounts books, we’ll all cheer. When the glombulfrogs stride out of their massive space ships and tell us that they are now in charge, there will be a collective worldwide sigh of relief and cries of, ‘Thank fuck for that.’
The latest Cameroonism is a perfect example of how they work:
‘Hey, the country is in huge debt, people are worried about their finances, worried about the massive amounts of money we’re blowing, so how can we hack them off further?’ he asked at a recent glombulfrog focus group.
‘I know,’ a climber in the frog hierarchy answered, ‘let’s spend some money on something completely needless and pointless just like our agents in the previous government did. That always seemed to work.’
‘Ahah,’ said the Camerofrog, ‘let’s do a happiness consultation and spend, I dunno, a couple of million.’
‘Only a couple of million?’
‘Well, we can’t get too drastic – the main invasion fleet won’t arrive for another ten years.’
‘Very true – we do actually need something left to rule.’
Feeling in the need of reading a bit more science I picked up a copy of New Scientist (as mentioned in a previous post). It was slightly off-putting for me seeing the front cover picture of a ‘green’ city and the title ‘Urban Utopia – why the city is greener than the country’ but I persevered. I even decided to swallow bile and try reading the main ‘Escape to the City Story’. Perhaps I was being unfair, perhaps I’m too biased, perhaps I need to read more of this sort of stuff to get a more balanced view.
The basic contention of the article is of course quite correct: people packed together in cities will use less energy because resources are concentrated. They don’t need private transport, all their turds go in the same sewer, there’s less need to run electricity through miles of wires or water through miles of pipes. The dustbin men won’t burn as much fuel collecting the rubbish etc etc. So far, so bleeding obvious.
But about five paragraphs in we are told that UN reports suggest ‘that in 2008, 50% of the world’s population lived in urban settlements, which together take up just 3% of the Earth’s land area’. Yeah, okay, got that: battery farmed chickens take up less land than free-range ones.
Then, the next paragraph gives us: ‘This mass exodus from the countryside should lift the strain of intensive agriculture from the land, allowing forests to bounce back.’
I am absolutely stunned at the deep stupidity of that statement. Are we to suppose that city dwellers subsist on a more meagre diet than those in the country? Is the contention here that city dwellers can exist on organic carrots and tap water and that this will relieve ‘the strain of intensive agriculture’?
This was another lazy divisive article to display the magazine’s green credentials. A fairly unsurprising product of a BBC ‘science’ researcher who already has a history of producing such trash. There’s also a sinister edge here concerning how much easier it is to deliver ‘services’ to city dwellers, and to deal with their ‘social problems’.
Of course, it’s also so much easier to look after animals when they’re in a zoo.
Note: the next article in the magazine, one titled ‘Nurturing Nature’, explains to us how children raised in cities are more obese than those raised in the country. Go figure.
A gene linked with sociality and novelty-seeking may make people more liberal in outlook, but only if they had plenty of friends during adolescence. The gene, DRD4-7R makes a dopamine receptor and was identified from DNA samples and a survey of 2547 adolescents.
It’s this kind of dross in New Scientist that sets my teeth gnashing. Admittedly it was taken from ‘The Journal of Politics’ and is little but a snippet, but that it appears in NS tells you something about the underlying mind set.
The words ‘linked with’ immediately remind me of the now famous words of Al Gore in his film when he informed us that ice core data shows a ‘correlation’ between CO2 rises and temperature rises, and then neglected to mention that the ice cores showed CO2 rising approximately 800 years after the temperature rise. How, precisely, is a gene that makes a dopamine receptor ‘linked with sociality and novelty-seeking’?
The next weasel word is ‘may’, as this gene ‘may make people more liberal in outlook’. Now what definition of ‘liberal’ are we talking about: the adjective in the dictionary, or espousing present day liberal views and politics, which tend to bear no relation to the aforementioned adjective? What exactly is being said here?
Then we get the bit about the necessity for having friends in adolescence for this gene to express its liberalism. Of course the implication here is that if you are ‘liberal’ you are probably sociable, novelty-seeking and not a Billy-no-mates. If you’re not ‘liberal’ you’re probably a sad fuck who had no friends when you were younger.
All this comes from a survey and DNA sampling of 2574 adolescents. So, how many of these adolescents did not have this gene? How many of them really ‘fessed up to having no friends? How did you establish any link at all between this particular scrap of DNA and the traits mentioned? And since when did opinion become science? Karl Popper must be revolving in his grave.
If you stack £50 notes on top of each other, one after the other, the stack would need to be over 6000 miles high to achieve that amount. If you threw £50 notes out of a window at a rate of one every second, it would take you over 3000 years to reduce that stack to zero. Martin Durkin came out with various neat little analogies during Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, like, for example, Chancellor Osborne’s spending cuts being the equivalent of trying to empty a full to over-flowing bath, which is still filling from the taps, with an egg cup. He also came out with some plain statements of fact, like, the debt for every man, woman and child in Britain is £77,000, and growing, like, if you sold off every house in Britain that wouldn’t pay it.
He also tells us in simple terms how we got into this position what with politicians buying votes, spending on crap, borrowing from the future to saddle future generations with debt. By politicians, who all agree that monopolies are a bad thing, creating state monopolies, like one of the biggest on Earth, the NHS. And he has a neat counter to the claim that any other option would lead to in-it-for-profit medical organisations. Do we refuse to buy our next car from Toyota, our next flat screen from Samsung or our next loaf of bread from Asda because they are all in it for the profit? Would we instead prefer state-manufactured products like the wonderful stuff produced by the soviets?
Of course, the Keynesians, Guardianistas and other daft socialists would claim, ‘But it’s not that simple!’ It is. You don’t spend what you haven’t got, and you don’t keep borrowing when you’re already heavily in debt. Simples.
Another target is welfare, the dole, how we are paying people to sit on their arses and remain in poverty. Last year the welfare bill was larger than the tax collected, which is unsustainable madness. Durkin tells us that the public sector in Britain is now bigger than the private sector and is a bloated parasite sucking up wealth, killing its host. If this continues the money will die and, really, before we get out of that there will be blood on the streets.
But there’s a way out and it is quite simple. Slash the public sector by half, make welfare a limited net and not a lifetime one, privatize the NHS and get rid of all those non-jobs because, when the figures are totted up, all those state jobs we regard as essential are filled by about 2 million employees, whilst on top of them are 5.5 million bureaucrats. Slash taxes to 20%, flat, nothing else, and paid only by those earning above something like £15,000 a year. Don’t, for example, tax someone on £15,000 then feed the tax back to them in benefits after the pointless bureaucracy created for the purpose has taken its cut. All of this would instigate an almost immediate regeneration, as it did in Hong Kong, the tiger economies and China (which incidentally has a public sector about half the size of Britain’s).
It’s not going to happen, however. Because the public sector is now 53% of the economy, and most of those working in it are not going to be turkeys voting for Christmas. It’s also the case that a large proportion of the population doesn’t have a clue about economics, and have thought processes that end at ‘money from the government’ and cannot stretch to ‘but the government has to get its money from somewhere’. Many don’t realise that every time the government does some ‘quantitative easing’ it’s actually taxing them yet again. Many don’t understand that whilst money will never run out, it can soon enough end up being valueless.
I rather think that sitting in our nice warm houses, with our shiny cars outside, with our TVs, computers and mobile phones, with our frequent trips to the supermarket and regular purchases off the Internet, we’re living in a false reality. It’s like one of those disaster movies in which you first see the cast of characters living their daily lives before things turn nasty. The asteroid is drawing closer, the terrorists are finishing the bomb wiring and loading their weapons, the tsunami is just starting to rise over the horizon or, being more relevant and prosaic in our case, the bailiffs are starting up their vans.
I wonder if now is the time to load the loft with canned goods, buy a generator and stock up on diesel, and then inquire of the local hoodies where it might be possible to buy an AK47. I wonder if right now is the time to take out any savings we have and turn them into Krugerrands, before Sterling turns into a poor and slippery substitute for Andrex.
Wednesday 25th
I would say it’s a certainty that I’m going to end up with a sack load of chillies here. Previously I’ve preserved them in olive oil or vinegar, but find they tend to lose their kick that way. This year I’ve decided I’ll dry a load, and turn the rest into something we tend to use quite a lot of: sweet chilli sauce. Has anyone out there done this? After reading various recipes on the Internet I’m inclined to a big saucepan into which will go a pint of vinegar plus a pint of sugar, one whole bulb of garlick then chopped up chillies right to the brim, boiling then bottling…
Monday 30th
Well, a test run using honey instead of sugar (we were given a jar here and simply don’t use it) seems to have worked. Now I have to buy some vinegar and sugar and just wait until I’ve got at least half a bucketload of chillies. At present rates of ripening that should be in about a couple of weeks.
Other projects on the go: I’ve cut from the tobacco plants a collection of leaves that were damaged by the wind and am drying them. The problem is that they dry out rather quickly here and so remain green. Perhaps I need to somehow slow down the drying process. Then again, they’re ‘green’ so they must be good for me.
The beach is now starting to empty. Most of the holidaymakers in the small apartment blocks in Makrigialos are Greeks, usually over from the mainland, with just a scattering of other nationalities. The big hotels at the end of the place, the Micropoli and the Sun Wing, are mostly occupied by Scandinavians – and yes very many of them seem to be blonde. It’s something we are supposed to ignore in this politically correct world, but national traits are much in evidence here. If you see someone running along the beach with one of those strap-on heart monitors around his chest, or cycling vigorously up a hill in temperatures above 30, you can generally guarantee he’s German. Tall women with blonde hair down to their perfectly formed arses are generally Scandinavian whilst the big blonde square-jawed men who look capable of snapping your neck like a twig can be both of the aforementioned. The lugubrious beer-drinkers with big moustaches are often Dutch, whilst the ape-haired men with wives who appear to think that children outside the womb are still attached by an umbilical cord are usually Greek. I haven’t nailed down the few French here, but I’ve been told they are the ones who dislike having to use that international tongue called English. And, unfortunately, Mr fat shaven-headed lobster skin clad in knee-length shorts and a Manchester United shirt, with the gross tattooed wife in tow, is generally British.
Tuesday 31st
Tomorrow Greece is introducing its fourth ban on smoking in indoor public places, and the politically correct wankers who want to force their world-view on everyone else are diligently analysing why the previous bans didn’t work. Apparently they need to be more forceful, they need to make the rules clearer, there’s a need for big fines and it is utterly necessary that smokers be pilloried, racked and beaten with strips of nicotine patches until they die. You see, the barmen and women, and THE CHILDREN must be protected from that lethal, killing secondhand smoke … Wasn’t it Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie forcefully enough and often enough it will be believed?
Well, the reason why the previous bans didn’t work is quite simple. According to Athens News 42% of Greeks smoke, 63% of Greek men smoke, 39% of Greek women smoke, 37% of Greek children aged 12 to 17 smoke and 45% of the 16 to 25 age bracket smoke. What we are seeing here with the undermining of the rules, the twisting of the legislation, the lack of enforcement and the complete disregard for the new laws is something called … now what are the words … oh yeah, what we are seeing here is ‘democracy in action’.
You see, whilst 42% of Greeks smoke and there’ll be some of those who want to be forced to stop, there’s an even larger proportion of the remaining 58% of non-smokers who fall into these categories: ‘children’, ‘it’s got fuck-all to do with the government’, ‘stop telling people how to live their lives’, ‘surely it’s up to the bar owners’ and the huge category called ‘frankly I don’t give a shit’. In our democracies the governments in power would be hugely grateful to get into power on a 42% vote. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the European population would be hugely grateful for governments that did what they were voted into power to do, without corruption, instead of acting as enforcers for the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
In the same paper in which I was reading about the new smoking ban here I also learned that small businesses (ie those employing less than 50 people) make up 98.7% of the Greek economy. So, bearing that in mind, one should also bear in mind that tourism is the country’s second largest income. It would therefore not be too much of a stretch to add that a large proportion of those small businesses are bars, restaurants and nightclubs. Perhaps the Greek government should bear in mind, as it scrabbles for money to cover its huge debts, that in Britain, in 2007, the pub closure rate leapt from 4 a month to 27 a month, and has not dropped below that rate ever since. In fact, the shape of Britain has now been changed forever, with many pubs that were serving beer when Sir Walter Rayleigh was sparking up his pipe, now being gutted and turned into residential homes. And what was different about 2007? Oh yeah, the smoking ban. Occam’s Razor doesn’t lie.
This really should have been on prime time TV, but was put out on BBC4. It wouldn’t surprise me if pressure was brought to bear to not broadcast it on BBC1.
This is a program about about the exposing of those fraudulent bastards who run this country. It’s on I-player for another five days only, then it’ll probably be buried for the next ten years.
Here’s a couple of books I read recently, both with generally the same theme: those who once considered or a certain political persuasion discovering that they no longer recognize their own political club. Their club has become authoritarian, turned the word ‘liberal’ into a dirty word and has devalued the word ‘racism’. Following through on its hate of Western civilization (though mainly America) and an ill-defined guilt about being born there, it also now supports, by making it an offense even to criticise them, fascist fundamentalists who oppress women, would kill homosexuals and aim to crush us all under a hellish theocratic regime. Through multiculturalism it has created divisions in society, reinforced by positive discrimination, which is ‘discrimination’ still. All those battles fought by the lib/left for women’s rights, homosexual rights, for freedom and against racism, all turned on their head and thrown away.
Of the two I find the Andrews’ book clearer and more cogent. Both books, however, have the power to make you angry by neatly collating and slapping down in black and white those things you probably already know. Unless you’re still a member of that club, that is.
Here’s some I’ve letters sent to Athens News, a paper in English focusing mainly on Greek news:
Dear Sir,
A previous writer to this paper expressed disappointment at the ‘windows’ in the coming smoking ban here in Greece. This person was apparently looking forward ‘with bated breath’ to the time when he or she could go into a taverna, bar or club without the result of ‘stinging eyes, my clothes and hair stinking and the air suffocating me’. I have to say I read and heard much of the same sort of hysterical nonsense prior to the British smoking ban: many non-smokers shouting about their ‘right’ not to have these dirty, evil smokers inflicted upon them. These vocal anti-smokers also happily repeated the propaganda of the government and organizations it funds, like ASH, which stated that there would be no loss of trade to pubs and clubs because the smokers leaving such establishments would be replaced the non-smokers flocking back. However, we see the true results of the British ban now.
Prior to that ban, in 2007, the rate of pub closure across Britain was four every week. After the ban it rose to twenty-seven every week as all those belligerent anti-smokers failed to return to the pubs. Many bingo halls and working men’s clubs have also gone to the wall, and tens of thousands of those previously employed in all such places lost their jobs. Many pubs even lost non-smoker customers because they didn’t want to go to places now empty of their smoker friends. For those who have hung on we even have the ridiculous situation of non-smokers following smokers outside so they will still have someone to talk to. And perhaps they are right to go outside because, as many discovered, the smells from the toilets and the stale beer are now no longer disguised by the smell of cigarette smoke.
Outside, of course, they might also spot the owner of the pub who, having paid hundreds of thousands for the place, now cannot smoke a cigarette on his own premises. Such blanket bans are totalitarian – the bar owners should be the ones to decide whether or not they will allow smoking. The justification, of course, is ‘health’ and the lies about passive smoking. The reality is that only politicized ‘science’ came up with any figures on passive smoking and, as has already been proven by bans elsewhere, they in no way reduce the number of smokers. And those inflicting such bans are utterly two-faced, as we know by the smoking room at the London G7 Conference, and the failure to enforce non-smoking in the European Parliament.
The smoking ban in Britain was an unmitigated disaster for the pub trade and, if enforced in the same way here, it will kill tavernas, clubs, kafenions and restaurants. No arguments: people will go out of business, jobs will be lost, the government will lose revenue and more freedom will be destroyed by an autocratic state.
Sincerely
Neal Asher
Crete.
Dear Sir,
A blossom from a hot pink bourgainvilla blew in through the front window and settled in my lap. It was dried out like ricepaper and it almost seemed to me that Crete was saying, “Sorry, this is the only consolation I have to offer.” Before considering that this might be a keepsake – something as insubstantial to remember this restaurant by as the promise of a politician – I ground it to dust on the tablecloth. None of the owners or waiters saw or complained, since they were sitting at one of the few outside tables smoking cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke on their own property.
Yes, the smoking ban has arrived in Greece, and the bansturbators have won another battle for totalitarianism. I wrote a letter to this paper before about it and there they were, whingeing about their clothes smelling of cigarette smoke after they’ve been in a bar, totally ignoring the point that in many cases their choice is likely to be a bar that allows smoking or no bar at all.
So, there you have it: until such a time as I see ashtrays back on the tables of this restaurant I have enjoyed for a couple of years, I won’t be eating there. It’s a shame but what can I do? Just as so many pub owners (or rather, erstwhile pub owners) have discovered in Britain, a lot of people don’t protest loudly enough, but given the opportunity always vote with their feet.
I wish I was living in a British or a Greek democracy but, really, in Europe democracy drew its last terminal-smoker asthmatic breath about twenty years ago as the EU project built up momentum.
Understand this, Cretans, in five years time there will be no smoking licences and there will be no exceptions, and the bansturbators will be after your raki next. Do you for one moment think all those stills, all that unregistered, unmonitored and most importantly, untaxed fun is in any way part of the EU plan?
Sincerely,
Neal Asher