H/T Rich White for this:
On Tuesday night, the Santa Monica City Council passed an ordinance requiring smokers who live in apartments to register with their landlords. The ordinance also requires landlords to distribute a map pinpointing where smokers live to all residents in the building.
Santa Monica Councilman Kevin McKeown called this disclosure mandate an attempt to “demonize smokers.” Evoking images of Nazi Germany persecution of Jews, McKeown said, “You might as well hammer a big yellow S on their front doors.”
The anti-smoking measure passed the Santa Monica City Council on a 4-2 vote based on concerns about the dangers of second-hand smoke.
Santa Monica smokers are free to smoke in their current apartments as long as they register with their landlord. Units occupied by smokers who fail to disclose their smoking statuses will automatically become “non-smoking” units.
Those who smoke in non-smoking units will face a $100 fine. Repeat offenders will be subject to citations as high as $500.
The ordinance also bans smoking in any newly constructed apartment/condo units and mandates that existing apartment units become non-smoking units once they become vacant.
In 2010, Santa Monica banned smoking in common areas and patios of multi-unit residences.
Who are the four councillors who voted for this? What are their names, and where do they live? So that someone can paint a big yellow S on their doors. Except that the S won’t stand for ‘smoker’.
Today I got over 2000 hits, mostly on Smoking Ban Inspector Stripped Naked. It seems to have gone a bit viral. I wonder why.
Anyway, here’s Chuck Prophet with Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.
“Today I got over 2000 hits2″
Blimey Frank!
I was pleased to get 16 hits from one Polish person yesterday!
Well done!
Lol!! I can relate to that Fredrik! Congrats Frank:-)
Err…jredheadgirl here…sorry for the typos-
I believe you. I totally believe in you, Jred.
I met you once, one magic night, a year or two back, and I’ll never ever forget.
It was a tremendous honour. I’m kinda stupid about never forgetting.
Well, you’re in my blogroll. And have been for quite a long time.
I’m certain your friend Chloe, who just posted hate comments on the Inspector Stripped Naked story just now will love to post here and applaud the requirement that smokers begin registering the same way Nazis had undesireables register, so they knew where they were when their final solution was ready to be enacted. Chloe just HATES smokers. So she/he will LOVE reading this story, which can only be GOOD GOOD news to a hateful biggoted person, such as Chloe.
Apartments are still quite safe to smoke in despite this new rule, the worst place to smoke is outdoors near mothers and children, you will have to expect verbal abuse as it will happen and if you get too close to mothers they will strike out and try and snatch cigarettes from your mouth.
Yes Chuck, unless the smoker happens to be 16st, a skinhead/rides a harley and has gang/prison tatts. In that case you can smoke as many as you want, where you want.
Hey we had mothers too!
This is really bad.
Santa Monica, if I understand correctly, may be extremely, almost communistically left-wing-progressive, along the line of SF, Berkeley or Santa Cruz up in NorCal. This is typical for California though, to enact these kinds of laws. The unbelievable part is that like in SF, where 75% of the votes were in favor of Prop 29 last month, the majority will call this “freedom”.
the majority will call this “freedom”
In the late 1930s, early 1940s, several towns and regions of Germany and the occupied countries proudly reported to have become “free” – “judenfrei”, “free of Jews”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenfrei
Santa Monica et al. soon will pride itself to be “free of smokers”.
Chloe will be thrilled. This is something she dreams of and supports intensely, that is why she posted hateful comments and will probabl post more hateful comments in support of this way of thinking. Sure, it’s aiding and abetting the same mindset as Hitler, but hey, Chloe loves thinking that way and knows she is right. Right Chloe?
As someone who lived in Los Angeles for a decade, even I’m surprised by the extreme nature of this ordinance/law. This is simply outrageous…and scary. I now know that my significant other and I made the right choice by getting the hell out of there last November. We didn’t want to abandon being near the music industry, but just thinking about being stuck in a place like Santa Monica now stresses me out beyond belief, and we all know that constant stress wreaks havoc on one’s health, happiness, and security. Unbelievable. It’s such a beautiful place too…such a shame.
You got out just in time!
And I’m still stuck here and it’s scary, it truly is. It’s not just the smoking bans either, though that is personally the most scary to myself. They’ve actually gone cuckoo at this point and truly do believe a lie is the truth, slavery is freedom and hatred is love. UCSF campus gives me the willies, like the set of a Frankenstein movie. The rest of SF is just as bad though and SJ to the south I hear is getting worse too. It all is. CA has become one of the anti-smoking capitals of the world, along with Australia on the “other side of the pond” as it sits out here. I might be leaving soon too, don’t know yet.
Well, you have an English friend here – although I don’t know what good it will do you.
Well, it will help keep me sane at least, the blog. Thank God for that at least and thank you very much.
Cool song/video btw:-)
Yeah, it’s real cool, isn’t it.
Indeed:-)
There is actually that new CA “state” law that began this year, which requires all landlords to designate which locations the smokers are “not”, thus by omission, pointing out where all the smokers “are”. With this new ordinance in Santa Monica, they are just taking it the one further step, head on heels of the similar statewide law that came into effect recently. They wasted no time in taking it the one extra step this time either. For some reason, the Anti-Smoking Industry in California is accelerating its time tables it seems.
I’d rather live in a house (if I/we could afford it) or a trailer out in the desert. Living in a trailer is beginning to look like a good idea…
..most trailers are larger than the living quarters provided by most overpriced apartments in SoCal anyway:-)
Jred when I was in CALI they wanted a grand a month for a simple 1 room efficiency apt in Oxnard. Needless to say I lived in my camper in my aunts driveway for a year in 86 going to electrician c school in Port Huneme. That was in Norwalk…….rode the hawg up 101 nearly everyday absolutely beautiful and we had smoking back then.
http://santamonica.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=2786
7-C: Introduction and First Reading of an Ordinance Amending Chapter 4.44 of the Municipal Code to require Designation and Disclosure of Smoking Status of Residential Units and to provide remedies for smoking in all units designated non-smoking.
Santa Monica City Council Members voted : 4-2
Mayor Richard Bloom : YES
Mayor Pro Tempore Gleam Davis : Absent
Robert Holbrook : YES
Kevin McKeown : NO
Pam O’Connor : NO
Terry O’Day : YES
Bobby Shriver : YES
Okay. Those are the names. What are the addresses?
Under California State Privacy Laws, addresses of politicians and other elected and appointed government officials are specifically not permitted to be disclosed and their where-abouts is mandated to remain secure, for their own safety. I believe (may be wrong, but believe) that is state and not just local city/county law in SF, but everywhere. Anyhow, a lot of people of that sort have already established family trusts as non-profit corporations and then use the address of a registered agent, usually attorney or accountant who handles the trust account, on any and all public records. Thus if you could even find addresses for these people, half the time it would just be some downtown law or accounting firm building. If they are fervently anti-smoking, then they probably have already received a lot of bribes, payola and grift from the Anti-Smoking Industry that has accumulated over the years, making them wealthy and in need of a family non-profit trust account, so they will remain anonymous in public records, either way. These are the wealthy and elite, mind you, who feign poverty and “goodness for the people” when they cleanse their sins by formulating more and more anti-smoking hate campaigns, like this latest just thought up in Santa Monica.
Why am I so unsurprised?
Bobby Shriver — as in a son of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy (JFK’s sister)? So it would seem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Shriver
‘Robert Sargent “Bobby” Shriver III (born April 28, 1954) is an American activist, attorney, journalist and a Democratic member of the Santa Monica City Council in Santa Monica, California. He is a former mayor of the City of Santa Monica and currently serves as a member of the Santa Monica City Council.[1] With the retirement of his cousin, U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) in January 2011, Shriver is the only member of the Kennedy family serving in elected office.[2]‘
Strange really, that he should thereafter become the author of a piece of legislation akin to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, as Rose points out.
I don’t get why he would run for city council under those circumstances, but, hey … what do I know? ;)
Frank, both you and Leg Iron had similarly themed blogs today, and between them and several news stories in the last month, I decided to make this posting…
Some of you may know that I’ve been working on a project for the last few years: a book titled “TobakkoNacht — Fighting The Antismokers’ Endgame.”
It’s not a replacement for, or even a sequel to, my Dissecting book. I see it instead as something of an extensive add-on or supplement to Brains: something for those who’ve read the first book and think it was good enough to deserve an expansion.
The first part of the book consists of a rather long short story — just on the borderline of being classed as a novelette (7,500 words) — that gives its title to book as a whole. I haven’t really talked much about the book before because I want it to be judged on its content rather than on its title, and because its content will extend far beyond a simple short future fiction dystopia story.
I actually *did* put the story up on Amazon’s kindle a bit over three years ago though, and anyone here who’d like to read it (either on Kindle or on their computer with the Amazon’s Kindle-to-PC program) is welcome to check it out over there. The original was written in the late 1990s, and the “Bear Killer” introduction was added in the early 2000s. The bulk of the story as it appears on Kindle (and as it will appear in the book upon publication near the end of this year) has remained almost unchanged except for a few sentences in the “Kindling” “historical” section, and I’ve always felt sad that I wasn’t confident enough in it to put it out when first written. Unfortunately the early feedback I got on it from some friends was that it was just “too crazy” and its publication would end up labeling me as such a “tin-foil hat” person that Brains itself would be destroyed by it.
Heh, over the last year or two my new worry has been whether I’ll get it out before it simply becomes a history book! ::sigh::
In any event, if you’d like to see my own version of “KristallNacht II” just look up TobakkoNacht on Kindle. One note: in the book version I will be discussing Kristallnacht itself more extensively, along with Godwin’s Law and maybe McFadden’s Law — See: http://encyclopedia.smokersclub.com/265.html
- Michael
OT: FDA spies on its own scientists, bugs home computers, fires guys it labels as “collaborators” and “actors.”. (And someone w/i the article invokes the Gestapo). This, then, is Government Science Today
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/fda-surveillance-of-scientists-spread-to-outside-critics.html?_r=1&ref=health&pagewanted=all
As for Santa Monica… nothing left to say.
Walt,
That link you gave us a couple of days ago to the smoker intention survey.
They’ve pulled it!
Suspect they cottoned on to the fact the people they were asking to participate don’t like them very much and were not afraid to let them know – very forcefully!
San Francisco surgeon seeks partial recount of anti-tobacco Prop. 29
Dr. John Maa, a member of the American Heart Assn., files a request for a partial recount of the June 5 tobacco tax ballot initiative, which lost by less than 1 percentage point.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tobacco-recount-20120713,0,7173372.story?track=rss
I thought they’d be asking for one.
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My WordPress hit map was looking rather pretty last night.
Leg-iron is on the story too. And so is Pat Nurse. And Grandad too.
And Grandad is getting some extremely apathetic, almost pro-smoking-ban-enthusiastic type comments already. Pat, none yet. That is an interesting map. It would be nice to see it more often after other articles of high interest. I wonder from where in the US, North, South, East or West the majority of hits are coming from.
I only get told that the hits are from the USA, no further details. But judging from what US commenters here have said, they come from all over the USA.
Frank, if you get a free map like the one I have (ClustrMaps, bottom left hand column of my home page), you’ll see what towns they are from on the day and, afterward, a cumulative total by state. The stats roll down to zero at the end of every year, but they save your archive from the previous year for country totals. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy to sign up for.
Interesting. Does it only display the year’s total?
I had heard before that the Nazis were able to find the Jews through the census.
It seems that the question was first asked in the 1933 German census, shortly after Hitler came to power.
As there were no computers, the search was apparently conducted by cross-referencing with a punch card sorting system devised at IBM.
The same system was apparently then used with censuses from other occupied countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html
I first came across the Nuremberg laws after wondering if there had ever been anyone else who had even thought of banning people from parks and beaches apart from modern American anti-smokers.
It seems that there had.
Jews banned from parks, restaurants and swimming pools
Jews excluded from cinema, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, beaches and holiday resorts
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/decrees/decrees.html
“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.” I think most know who originally outlined this strategy that has so enthusiastically been adopted by Tobacco Control. Who would think that smoking bans in the home would even be conceivable five years ago, let alone actually implemented? A thousand reductions indeed.
Just some other parallels. 1939 – Jews forced to have ID cards with the letter “J” in them (Aren’t the likes of Chapman calling for licenses, nowadays? Certainly the above Santa Monica story is a parallel).
1939 – Jews denounced as subhuman. “Well we all know about the policy of denormalisation. It’s a real thing, mentioned in Parliament by MPS, even. They seem proud of it).
1939 – Jewish businesses seized and given to Aryan. (Okay, this one not done yet, but smoking bans prevent smoking in privately owned business premises and so is an example of the State dictating what is and is not acceptable in someone’s own business. And smokers can be sacked simply for being smokers with no legal redress. It also perfectly legal to specify “non smoker” in job adverts, thus depriving smokers of income and the means of income).
1939 – Jewish homes forced to have yellow stars nailed to them. (see Santa Monica story, above).
1939 – Jews not allowed to mingle with non-Jews by law (er, “designated smoking zones”, anyone? In outside areas? (So much for it being about health…). And what is the banning of smoking (er, the act which defines a smoker) from bars, pubs, offices, libraries, stadia, parks, beaches etc, except the denial of the right to meet and congregate? ASH may say they have banned smoking, not the smoker. But there is no distinction – it’s like Hitler saying these laws don’t apply to gays, just to gay sex (something which, unlike Judaism, but like smoking, is an action that is undertaken by the person doing it). Yet we all know there is little difference between the action and the person doing the action, in the eyes of these people and petty laws. Many gay people ended up in the gas chambers – I’m sure the Gestapo didn’t wait to catch them “in the act.”
The next big development in the Final Solution came with the camps. Considering most people who would shout “Godwin’s Law” at such observations would agree that so far pretty much everything outlined above has come to pass EXCEPT the camps, maybe they’ll stop hiding behind such nonsense and accept that something very sinister is going on. And maybe people like Simon Clarke wouldn’t be so damn hesitant to start throwing around the “Nazi” word. This is WAY beyond “Nanny State”…. We are entering new areas which we haven’t encountered since the last century….
It appears the Nazis have discovered an even lower level to use in their denormalization campaign!
A real tear jerker NOT!
Dying cancer patient has to walk into hospital through cigarette fumes
Jul 15 2012 Exclusive by Norman Silvester
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2012/07/15/dying-cancer-patient-has-to-walk-into-hospital-through-cigarette-fumes-86908-23908742/?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:dfa75669-bdbb-47ee-8e77-a4b9c2d0d3fd
This was the excuse Tom Ammiano used to ban retail tobacco sales in pharmacies inside SF. He is the SF, CA lib-prog-communist who of course loves marijuana smokers but despises/hates/abhors “filthy tobacco smokers”. He said that tobacco retailing must be banned in drug stores because people coming there to buy medicine while being ill would be insulted seeing that other people are there buying cigarettes who are not ill. Thus the “filthy smokers” must be punished as well as the retailers, which now all tobacco retail displays at those stores have been removed and replaced by NRT sales displays instead. That is the ultimate in display bans and plain packaging – you simply outlaw the retailing of tobacco altogether, make it illegal – on account of someone under the weather coming in for an aspirin or even someone deathly ill coming in for prescription drugs might see the tobacco display and be insulted that the smokers aren’t sick instead of them. That was his logic – and the city council rubber stamped it into law. They always make a false argument by playing the “cancer card”.
Mind you unpleasant people can always think up unpleasant things to do to others and if those unpleasant things happen to be remarkably similar to other things done by people before, doesn’t mean that it is anything more than coincidence.
For example, smokers are known to be gregarious people, so it doesn’t take much thought to realise that finding a way to isolate them will cause them distress.
Sufficient distress to take their medicine and be welcomed back into the fold.
Doesn’t seem to have worked though, so I suppose you have to keep cranking up the pressure until the individual finally breaks, though I’m sure that even now a lot of people are wishing they had never got involved.
The Milgram experiment has a lot to teach us.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
This is what Santa Monica’s Terry O’Day was saying when he was a candidate.
The research actually shows that secondhand smoke is harmless. But anyway he’s now voted through what can only be described as “a tool to harass or evict existing tenants”.
Seems that the same council is in the news for other reasons.
06/14/2012
Santa Monica City Council UNANIMOUSLY Bans Nativity Scenes—Bigots Run City Hall
Excuse me, what is a Nativity Scene?
(Yes, I read the linked article, but I don’t understand it at all.)
Jesus being born in the manger with the 3 wise men and all!
Yet these same people break their backs to bend over backwards making accommodations for Muslims…
Frank –
In response to your earlier comment re ClustrMaps, you’ll get a real time count by town/city and country (it can hold 14 or so locations per hour) when you click on it.
During the active ClustrMaps year, you’ll be able to see how many people access your site by state / province / department by clicking on the country in the righthand column. You’ll also see a cumulative view by country, updated every 24 hours.
After the info is archived, you can view it by country total for that year. No drill-down available, but at that point, it’s a bit immaterial.
It’s well worth a try. Please email me if you have any questions.
Rheinhold–
Nativity scenes are usually displayed at Christmas time and depict, with more or less miniature 3 dimensional figures, the birth of Christ. Usually it’s a manger (lots of straw around) Joseph, Mary, the Baby, and some animals looking on, sometimes a few angels and sometimes the wise men.
Mr. A–
we may not have camps in the near future but we’re heading towards ghettos. After all, if cities ban renting to smokers (and in Santa Monica,eg, only the current smokers are grandfathered in; once they move, no smokers can occupy those units) then where will smokers live, except in a ghetto in– no doubt– some lousy part of town, or remote weedy outskirts (if any will still have us). Only after that, I’d suppose, come the camps, originally to be known as Refugee Camps, at least till the Arbeit Macht Frei sign appears. (Rheinhold can correct my spelling on that.)
Thanks for your explanation, Walt, but now I understand even less. :(
I know these “scenes” (now that I understand what is meant) very well, we got them here too, extensively – but how can anyone want to ban something like that???
Arbeit Macht Frei
Spelling is correct.
Communists and atheists is the easy answer!
We had a similar situation with the then London Mayor, a Mr. Livingston. He had on his payroll a staff member charged with the responsibility of identifying issues that could help as well as those that might offend ethnic minorities.
(London claims to be the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Europe, therefore it has an awful lot of ethnic minorities). She came up with stacks of good ideas, like having brochures and signs written in a whole bunch of languages and scripts.
Anyway this lady came up with the novel idea that London should stop using the term Christmas and simply re-brand it as a “Mid Winter Festival” and we should quit with things like Jewish stars and X’mas trees and lots of lights and Santa Claus.
Didn’t go down at all well with the ethnic majority and provided an excellent opportunity for far right groups like the English Defence League as well as the British National Party to attract new members. At that time our Christian religious leaders were not quite as vocal and it came down to a few journalists who asked Muslim, Hindu and other religious leaders what they thought “offensive” about X’mas.
In fact it turned out that none of them gave a toss and stacks of small shopkeepers said they made a packet over the Christmas period. Shortly thereafter Mr. Livingston lost his position as Mayor, with many commentators claiming it was because he had introduced Congestion Charging. In fact it’s because Mr. Livingstone is a rather small minded, politically correct, rampant socialist with the vision of a Sea Slug.
He stood for election again this year…. for the same position…. and failed again. Claims to have retired from politics. Have my doubts.
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Reinhold, you wrote, ” but how can anyone want to ban something like that???”
Simple: there are crazy people out there, and unfortunately we’ve allowed them into the mainstream.
- MJM
I have a question:
Have there been any other media outlets, save for the West Hollywood Patch, that are covering this story?
I have conducted a brief search and have come up with nothing. Strange. Why the silence?
Typo/grammar error galore on my part again…”Are there any other media outlets that are currently covering this story”? Sorry….been reading and reading up..trying to keep up, lol…tired:-)
Isn’t silence the usual way of covering stories like this by the mass media? In the UK, the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007 was the trigger for almost zero mass media coverage, even tho it had been the biggest thing that had hit Britain in 50 years. I don’t expect anything from the mass media these days. I don’t believe them anymore.
“Isn’t silence the usual way of covering stories like this…”
It appears to be the case Frank. I’m assuming that (in this case) it’s largely for political reasons… This is an election year after all. The proliferation of this story far and wide could stand to make (some) on the Left appear too extreme even for some on the far-Left, thus hurting the Obama campaign.
..Ugh… This should be a national story.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston Churchill
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