H/T Harley for the article by Chris Snowdon in the Adam Smith Institute:
This is not the first time tobacco prohibition has raised its head this year. The advocacy journal Tobacco Control kicked things off with a special edition featuring several articles about what it calls the ‘endgame’. In February, the historian Robert Proctor published the first overtly prohibitionist book of the new era, the title of which—‘Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition’—requires little explanation. More recently, an academic named Craig Dalton has set up a website to campaign for a “ban on retail tobacco.”
Of course they’ve always said that they don’t want to prohibit tobacco. But everyone knows that’s a lie. Everyone knows that’s exactly what they want to do. And now the truth is coming out.
Is it just me, that I have an increasing feeling that discussions of this sort are taking place in some sort of separate reality, a bubble world set apart from and insulated from ordinary reality? There’s an increasing unreality about it all, which makes me think I’m watching a movie in which all these antismoking nutjobs are talking to each other and making recommendations and plans for everyone, and I’m trying to find the remote to switch channels. I’m finding them harder and harder to take seriously.
I have my own internal debate about smoking, but it’s one that’s moved in the exact opposite direction to the internal debates of the antismoker set. Five or six years ago, I believed (without any great conviction) that smoking caused lung cancer. Now I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t. So while they seem to have moved north to discuss tobacco prohibition, I’ve left the building, and walked about 10 blocks south.
I wonder whether they’re carrying the politicians with them? I wonder if David Cameron and Nick Clegg feel the same sense of deepening unreality when they listen to the antismokers? Or are they busy right now discussing how to bring in tobacco prohibition as a matter of urgency?
It’s not just smoking. I increasingly have the same feeling about global warming. A couple of days back the climate alarmists were saying that the current arctic ice melt was more serious than the EU crisis. And I just wondered what planet they were living on.
But then actually I have much the same feeling about the EU crisis too. All these people – Draghi, Monti, Merkel, Schauble, Rajoy, Hollande – and their endless discussions are becoming more and more unreal to me, as if they were actors in some sort of TV soap opera called Eurocrisis, in which in each weekly episode Herman van Rompuy declares that the crisis is over and it will all be plain sailing from now on, and everyone believes him for about 3 seconds until the crisis is renewed with even greater intensity as some new country or bank calls for a bail-out. And you wonder whether to switch over to some other channel, and find something a bit more down to earth – like Dr Who -. Someone said a few months back that Brussels was referred to as the “spaceship” in Germany. That’s pretty much how I think of them too now. A spaceship, and getting further and further away.
Perhaps this is how debates of these sorts end: after being aired in the main parliament chamber, the dispute next becomes shifted to a side room next to the main chamber, and is then moved to a back room in a nearby annex, and thence to a garden shed in an allotment in a distant town, and finally to a tent in the middle of the Sahara desert. At the outset everybody pays a lot of attention, and the press report everything, but gradually interest falls away, and the reports come fewer and further between, until it’s just a couple of people arguing about whether to electrocute all the smokers with copper wires or to just crucify them with copper nails.
Perhaps that will be the fate of Tobacco Control, and global warming alarmism, and eurofanaticism: they’ll all just gradually get sidelined. They become irrelevant and unimportant, and they simply drop out of discussions which are always focused on the most urgent and pressing concerns of the day. And these aren’t the concerns of Tobacco Control. Or the concerns of the climate alarmists. Or even the concerns of the EU aristocracy.
Perhaps it’s sheer exhaustion. Ten years ago my central concerns were 9/11 and the Iraq war. But I haven’t thought about those for years now. At some point there’s nothing more that can be thought about them. And in fact, I begin to wonder what I thought about them anyway.
Smoking bans, global warming, and the EU crisis, all remain hot topics of the day. But perhaps the antismoking zealots and the global warming alarmists have had their day in the sun, and they’re now fading into irrelevance, and the increasing sense of unreality that surrounds them is a symptom of their growing irrelevance. Everyone’s made up their minds anyway. And the combatants slowly drift apart thereafter, like-minded talking with like-minded, and ignoring the opposition.
I wonder what everyone will be talking about in five years time? The high price of turnips? The approach of asteroid Nemesis? The plague of killer mutant zombies in Madagascar? It’ll make a welcome change, whatever it is.
Frank Davis 
Frank I say this:
1 The governments broke and now wants a higher tax on the rich as klegg says to stop anarchy
2 Tobacco brings in xxxx billion pounds a year
3 Prohibition brings in 0000 pounds a year
4 Prohibtiion makes the chinese bootleggers rich at the ex-chequers loss
5 I see TC being thrown under the double decker bus as it costs the taxpayers money and the rich too!
6 TC is history and the financial depression is what did them in along with governments ravenous appetite for our money.
Can you see all the pensioners rioting in the streets because they lost their pensions! Or were cut to balance the budget, public health hospitals closed and shuttered due to financial revenue losses that cant be made up…..Higher taxes on everyone and they still cant close the gap!
I wouldnt want to be in Kleggs shoes its fixing to get really nasty. I especially hope to see Deb Arnazi in the bread lines!
I agree with this. The TC lot are bonkers and probably do want prohibition, but the governments (who have used them) don’t and will try to hold them back by withdrawing funding.
As for the planet, what I think is: whether Global Warming is true or not doesn’t matter – it’s over-run with far too many insane human beings who are rapidly polluting it and depleting it of resources, messing up the weather systems, extinguishing other species and rendering vast tracts of land uninhabitable. I’ve been following Fukushima since Day One and now I’m looking at these sink-hole things in Louisiana that are swallowing whole cypress trees and exuding evil fumes. Meanwhile, the Chosen Few are desperately seeking out a new planet to move to and bugger up.
I’d just like to be allowed to smoke. You wouldn’t think that was too much to ask, would you – but apparently it is.
Harleyrider’s bunker looks like the way forward
Frank, you wrote, “Is it just me, that I have an increasing feeling that discussions of this sort are taking place in some sort of separate reality, a bubble world set apart from and insulated from ordinary reality? There’s an increasing unreality about it all, which makes me think I’m watching a movie in which all these antismoking nutjobs are talking to each other and making recommendations and plans for everyone, and I’m trying to find the remote to switch channels. I’m finding them harder and harder to take seriously.”
Take them seriously Frank. Unfortunately giving a fringe group $500+ million dollars a year allows nutjobs to structure reality for the rest of us. Ten years ago Stanton Glantz was talking about how a smoker would light up in in a group of people and people would start quietly moving away while trying to fan the smoke away from themselves and coughing. He spoke of that as being the “normal” reaction that he observed.
At the time of course he was just being a blithering nutjob. Outside of his own little circle of freaks NO ONE behaved that way. BUT… ten years and hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars later — and such a scene is no longer a rarity. It’s still not as universal as the Antis would like, but in many situations nowadays, you WOULD see such a reaction… all created thanks to brainwashing by the media … all purchased with the power that the money has given to the fringers.
The truly frightening thing is what it says about how easily populations can be manipulated. Orwell’s 1984 has been shown to be possible: with the use of modern media a government can make its people believe and do almost anything. I shudder to think what the “average person” in China is being taught through their media about the rest of the world. And I have very serious doubts that the US population would stand up for long if they were hit with propaganda promoting war with Iran or Syria or just about anyone: people seem to have a tendency to want to believe whatever anyone in authority tells them to believe. It saves them from the pain of thinking for themselves and they never have to take any blame if their wrong: after all, they were just doing what that “cognizant authorities” told them was right.
:/
MJM
Orwell’s 1984 has been shown to be possible: with the use of modern media a government can make its people believe and do almost anything.
Only if they’re listening, watching, or reading.
Someone like me – without TV, radio, or newspaper – is very hard to reach. Most of what I read is mediated through third parties (like DP, Leggy, Snowdon, and so on).
”I wonder whether they’re carrying the politicians with them?”
I think that the politicians’ and the MSM’s deafening silence on so many anti-smoking stories these days (relatively speaking) speaks volumes about how keen they are on smoking prohibition. I don’t think this springs from any great humanitarian desire to protect the rights or freedoms of adults to choose to smoke, or even a sign that some long-buried sense of fairness has been awoken and has told them that enough is enough and it’s time to move on from harassing smokers at least to harassing another group for a change, because I don’t think that politicians or the MSM have any positive motivations for anything they do, ever, at any time or in any circumstances. No, I think the hard fact is that politicians are now genuinely caught between a rock and a hard place, and it isn’t one they are going to be able to get out of easily. Having funded and supported the anti-smoking lobby sufficiently for it to wield the kind of power and influence it does, I think that politicians have realised that they have created something of a monster which they can’t actually control, and which now poses a very real threat to their own (the politicians’, that is) financial wellbeing with all their attempts to extend the ban, or now – as you point out here – talk of tobacco prohibition. They’ll never admit to either fact, of course, but I’m sure they’re aware of it just the same. But having publicly wedded themselves firmly to the anti-smoking cause, they can’t really turn round now and start backtracking, because to do so would cause screeches of outrage from anti-smokers, accusations of u-turns by anti-smoking politicians and, of course, would further denigrate their already poor standing in the public’s eyes by showing them to be nothing more than a bunch of liars who are only too ready to support anyone who happens to be in charge of a particular bandwagon which might get them a few votes.
So, how do they get out of this whilst saving face at the same time? Well, one thing they can do (and are doing) is to severely cut funding to many of the anti-smoking “causes” which they have, until now, been only too ready to throw our tax money at. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that ASH have had to turn to the Lottery for funding in the last couple of years. They could have done that years ago – but they didn’t need to, because they were doing perfectly nicely, thank you, off the back of the public via the Labour Government.
But that won’t end it. As well as cutting funding, they can quietly distance themselves from the whole anti-smoking/pro-choice argument and simply refuse to address it – which they have also done. Except when directly asked about their own smoking habits, both Cameron and Clegg have been remarkably non-committal about further progress on the anti-smoking front. Even Nanny Milton has “pulled her horns in” and stopped going for all those smiley photo-calls with her big chum Debs Arnott – now, why is that? Could it possibly be that she’s had her “orders” from her superiors that as little attention as possible is to be drawn to the whole issue? And of course, without politicians’ wholehearted support and visible or vocal opinions on the matter either way, there isn’t very much for the MSM to report, either.
I think they’re probably hoping, deep down inside, that if they keep very, very quiet about it, everyone will just “get used to” the smoking ban and lose interest in it and will, eventually, forget that they had anything to do with it. Which, of course, many non-smokers have already done, because for most of them it was a bit of a non-issue in the first place. Unfortunately for the politicians, however, what they have failed to recognise is that for smokers, the ban isn’t something that can ever “go away” or become a “non-issue” because it’s always there, affecting all of us in a negative way each and every single day of our lives. It’s like having a running sore which never heals and is always painful. Some days it’s more painful than others, but there’s never a day when it isn’t painful at all. And who, in all honesty, could say that they’d ever “get used” to that – even if they wanted to?
Jax
Your final para is a work of art Sir. Thanks.
It’s unfortunate that I see Osborne and his 2p a cigarette tax at the last budget as not only pandering to TC but also adding to inflation. He’s never clarified if the escalator will revert to 2% above inflation, continue at 5%, or be scrapped.
While we have lightweights like him and Clegg in positions of authority, I suspect TC will continue to pander to their vanity. Being unable to do anything of consequence, TC allow them (as they did with Jack Mc Connell in Scotland) to do something they can claim a success.
The debate has for far too long centred around extending life and not about the quality of life. We’ve lost so very much because of that and I suspect much of the potential of our youngsters will never be tested because of it. That cossetting, cloying attitude, that finger pointing extends to virtually everything.
It’s a safe bet for politicians, although one or two have made attempts to curb Health and Safety for ruining village fetes and playgrounds and such, they’ve failed.
Of greater concern is the EU. They don’t have the same relationship with voters and some of the weaker EU states prefer to use it as “big brother” to force through legislation. We pay lip service and – as with prisoner voting rights – once in a while we defy them.
Unfortunately the EU tends to use the UK as a beacon of enlightenment when it comes to the smoking ban – and I suspect many senior politicians here are rather proud of that.
If it dies down, as it has – to an extent – in Scotland, it’s only because the SNP doesn’t want to alienate too many prior to this (idiotic) Independence Vote. If the info I get about the coalition is vaguely accurate, it’s close to stalemate and may unravel long before May 2015.
Yet Osborne and his 2p tax and his gibberish about “greatest cause of premature etc” still rankle – as does Cameron and his “I don’t believe in bans”. There’s very little the Conservatives can do to undo that and my main concern is they turn the tables and leave a scorched earth for their successors.
It’s like having a running sore which never heals and is always painful.
Exactly. People like me are never going to ‘get used’ to the smoking ban. In fact, quite the opposite in my case: I just get angrier and angrier.
Same here and I vent that thru fightin back.
And you’ve got a gun.
Mmmmm Quite so.
Thats my 3 inch colt 44-40 SAA peacemaker
I just got a new 45 caliber six gun and hell I can hit pretty good with that one too.
Some days I can go out back and from 50-75 feet hit 5 on 5 and other days I might hit 2 or 3 in 5 shots at my 2x4x4 inch targets I cut out. I like em because they splinter out real nice and blow apart. But of course thats all fast draw,not aiming just from the hip! But again I started fast draw shooting back in 1980 and gave it up for about 10 years and just started back 6 months ago. Believe you me it took nearly 5000 rounds shot to get to where I could routinely hit my targets on fast draw. But ehh its one hell of a fun sport.
We aren’t allowed to have guns any more.
I always wanted to learn to shoot, but being right handed and left eyed, I was told that it was a bad idea.
Still this is a wonderful place to visit if I ever go into town.
http://www.royalarmouries.org/visit-us/leeds/leeds-galleries/war
With video
The Hall of Steel is awe inspiring, though this is probably the picture of it that shows that least.
“The displays around and inside the stairwell consist of mainly 17th century armour and 19th century military equipment. There are over 2,500 objects and they represent the largest mass display of arms and armour since the 19th century.
At the base of the stair is an area filled with mortars and cannon around the walls.”
http://www.royalarmouries.org/visit-us/leeds/leeds-galleries/hall-of-steel
Ace gift shop last time I went several years ago, but they’ve probably banned half the merchandise by now.
Boy Id love to see that!
I think you would enjoy it.
There was absolute fury when they moved the Royal Armouries from London to Leeds, but it meant they could show more of the massive collection.
Turns out that there’s even a branch in Kentucky.
“The Royal Armouries occupies the entire third floor of the Frazier History Museum. It presents the remarkable history of the British Isles, from 1066 to the early 1900s, through inspired narrative, state-of-the art audio visual and multi-media displays, dramatic life-sized tableaux and a collection of nearly 400 artefacts never previously displayed together.”
http://www.royalarmouries.org/visit-us/louisville-kentucky
Rose, we are allowed guns, as I have several. I have the right handed/left eyed thing too, I just learned to shoot left handed, it isn’t as difficult as you would imagine.
I’m right-handed. But I have no idea if I’m left or right-eyed. How do you tell if you’re left or right-eyed?
Thanks Rose its only 1 and half hours away!
Budvar my son is amindextrious if I spelled it right! He can shoot equally good with either hand!
And you right its not that hard to do……….although I cant hit a thing left handed unless I sight it in. It takes time to get the feel down to hit on the fast draw but I doubt Id ever be able to do it lefty style.
Frank Davis says:
August 30, 2012 at 2:47 pm
I’m right-handed. But I have no idea if I’m left or right-eyed. How do you tell if you’re left or right-eyed?
Thats the thing Frank when you aim a gun or rifle your usually using the dominant eye. I had to start wearing glasses awhile back and well I had the scoped 30-6 rifle on xmas day it was 10 degrees out and well I took it to the farm to shoot it from the truck with the wife. I made the mistake of taking my glasses off and sighting in and fired off a round. Ya I got to close and it popped me in the eye. I turned around and the wife saw blood pouring from my eyebrow!
Anyway I spent the next 2 hours getting 3 stitches at the hospital…….on xmas day!
Back in the days when I had an air rifle, I’m pretty sure that I sighted it with my right eye.
But these days I sometimes find myself look at books and computer screens with my right eye shut, so I’m just using my left eye.
Frank
Hold up your right index finger at arms length and using both eyes line it up with the door frame or similar vertical object. Then shut one eye, if your finger is still in line with the object that’s your dominant eye, if it skips off to one side then it’s not.
Frank, to check eye dominance (a variation on Rose’s method):
1 x A4 sheet of paper and a glass of milk;
Cut, say, a 15mm square in the middle of the sheet;
Hold the A4 sheet between you and the computer screen – the screen should probably be ~600mm from your face, the sheet, about ~300mm;
Move the sheet closer or further from your face in attempting to see (with both eyes open), comfortably, “Frank Davis” (in the comments section) on the computer screen through the 15mm square;
While holding the sheet steady, close only your left eye. Can you still see “Frank Davis”? Open the left eye again. Now close only your right eye. Can you still see “Frank Davis”? You will be able to see “Frank Davis” with your dominant eye.
Oh, the milk? Having completed the exercise, you can now have a drink.
:)
For some folk, at different times during the day their non-dominant eye might temporarily become dominant.
Harley,
” amindextrious”
You were close. Ambidextrous.
I tried Rose’s method several times, and found that my finger was on one side of the door jamb with one eye shut, and on the other side with the other side shut. Neither eye seemed to be dominant.
I tried Magnetic’s method, and the first time my right eye was doing the reading, and the second time the left eye was. But if I put the hole on the screen (where both eyes could see the letters) and gradually moved it towards me, forcing a choice between eyes, my right eye seemed to win.
So maybe I’m right-eyed.
Crazy and Exhausted. Robert Proctor is crazy. I can see him in at a mockup Stanford University World Behavior Headquarters with buttons and blinking lights and a Houston-style NASA control room map projection, huddled together with his fellow mad scientist/fake doctor Stanton Glantz from up the road a piece in San Francisco.
There’s a big red button labeled “Total Prohibition” that’s enclosed in a titanium-hardened wire cage to prevent anyone from haphazardly pressing it. But Robert is that guy who wet dreams at night about actually pressing that button some day. He’s recently secretly purchased a pair of super-duper bolt-cutters, and he’s gonna’ do it, by golly, he’s gonna’ really do it. He’s gonna’ push the Red Button.
I ended up over at the Amazon page for his kookie new book. Now I don’t know much about what Amazon numbers mean, maybe Leggy knows more about this, but it says his Golden Holocaust book is #66,894. Should we all be impressed or should we have a good laugh at Crazy Robert’s expense?
Does that mean that the only people forking out $36.51 for 2.6 pounds of this crazy man’s control-freak fantasies are a few fellow world saving, knight-errants in his little leftwing bubble of latter day Don Quixotes?
I know the area, Palo Alto, CA, that he operates out of and there are definitely avant-garde delusions of grandeur in the air there. It’s kind of like how Prop 29 won by a large margin there and in the fourteen nearby contiguous counties nearby, but lost by 400,000 votes outside of this progressive La Mancha.
He and Glantz are at the ‘push the red button’ stage and the rest of the world is at the ‘enough is enough’ stage.
66,000 @ Amazon means that this week it was the 66,000th most-ordered book (from Amazon). Considering Amazon’s scope, that’s not as bad as it looks since some books come in at, for example, 583,211 but it’s not all that meaningful since, in some weeks, selling 50 copies could get you that spot. IOW, a Best Seller it ain’t. The ratings also depend on how new a book is and what, if any, coverage it got. Assuming this is a relatively new book, touted through the TC underground and possibly reviewed in such literary bastions as “Tobacco Control,” , I’ll also assume that most of those who bought it were fellow TC’ers who’d buy it while it’s new or not buy it at all. If you’re curious, check it next month and watch it fall. You can also feel free to leave snarky comments. Just make your stiletto sound seriously analytical.
On Frank’s subject of the week that I’m just catching up with, I agree with MJM and much of Jax’s posts. The other element that hooks all the pols is the “rising cost of health care”‘ that threatens to sink economies. As long as they remain idiotically convinced that death is itself a Lifestyle Disease and that eliminating Style will eliminate– no, they don’t care about death; what they mind is the expensive illness that precedes it– they’ll continue to pursue the smokers and the eaters. I doubt that half of them believe in the mythos of secondhand smoke, but they do believe that smokers are costing a lot of money. And eventually they believe their own propaganda. Even if they started out knowing it was crap, its sheer repetition has a mesmerizing effect from which even its perpetrators aren’t immune.
Frank: over the next weekend, I’ll try entering the forms again at the proper site and let you know how I fared. This week has been, how should I put it, “crazy.”
Don’t push yourself. If it’s too hard, don’t do it. There are other ways.
@ MJM.
Pre-2007 I thought all NWO conspiracy people were nutjobs and tinfoil hat wearers (and indeed, many are). However, some of them have stumbled upon the truth. There is an obvious (and provable link) between Big Pharma, sock puppet quangos and fake charities, the EU and WHO, organisations like Common Purpose and the established media, politicians, law enforcement agencies etc.
“The truly frightening thing is what it says about how easily populations can be manipulated.”
Indeed. And I suspect that that is what the whole anti-smoking hysteria has been about from day one.
LIQUOR: Gentlemanly Temperance
1935
“In the two decades before Prohibition, those lifelong teetotalers John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his father gave the Anti-Saloon League their staunch moral support and $350,323.67. When he declared for Repeal in 1932, Mr. Rockefeller by no means meant that he was quitting his long war on liquor. Having despaired at last of temperance by statute, he set his agents searching the world for other methods of attack.”
“What the Council proposes to do is spend $100,000 or more per year in attempting to persuade U. S. citizens to drink like gentlemen, to acquire “an attitude of individual responsibility toward the use of liquor.”
“Our messages will travel over the airwaves, reach the eye and ear through the screen and stage, and fashion public thought through advertising and other kinds of publicity”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755063,00.html
Exactly what anti-tobacco has done and now the template is established.
Just to complete the story above! And Rose thanks for the TIME link
Antismoking is not new. It has a long, sordid history. The three antismoking crusades of the last century have been eugenics-driven. In eugenics, health is erroneously reduced to an entirely biological phenomenon and where a self-installed elite attempt to engineer/breed a “better” human herd. In addition to a genetic aspect, eugenics views tobacco and alcohol as racial poisons needing to be eradicated (negative eugenics). Antismoking was rife in early-1900s USA. Smoking and tobacco sales were banned in quite a number of American states.
http://www.americanheritage.com/artic….
Dillow (1981) notes that the bulk of antismoking claims were fraudulent and inflammatory. Dillow fails to note that the antismoking crusade of the early-1900s USA was eugenics-driven: Eugenics was mainstream in the USA at this time. At the turn of the last century, eugenics was mainstream in the USA, the UK, some European countries, and a number of Scandinavian countries. The USA appears to be the most prominent. The mega-wealthy in the USA (e.g., Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Kellogg) were supporters and funders of eugenics (and antismoking, anti-alcohol) – and still are. Rockefeller and Ford were also prominent supporters of Nazi eugenics. (Rockefeller also created the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Foundation, and the American Lung Association in this eugenics framework). Rockefeller and Ford had trade agreements with the Nazis through the 1930s
…
Precisely.
MPs say no to cigarette packaging bid
THURROCK’S two MPs have written to the Secretary of State for Health urging him to cancel plans to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
Conservatives Jackie Doyle-Price and Stephen Metcalfe are among 50 MPs who believe the proposals will have “extremely negative consequences” for the country and won’t discourage people from smoking either.
The letter to Andrew Lansley they have signed states: “There is no reliable evidence that plain packaging will have any public health benefit, no country in the world has yet to introduce it.
However, such a measure could have extremely negative consequences elsewhere.
“This proposal will be a smuggler’s charter.
“We are worried that standardised packaging would make smuggling simpler and exacerbate this already critical problem as criminal organisations would only be required to master one pack design.”
The letter adds the proposals threaten more than 5,500 jobs in the UK tobacco industry and more than 65,000 jobs in the associated supply chain. The MPs are also worried about commercial freedom.
http://www.thurrockgazette.co.uk/news/9898364.MPs_say_no_to_cigarette_packaging_bid/
Has comments too!
This is a mildly encouraging story, Harley, if only because Thurrock’s last MP (Labour – resigned shortly before the last election) was a raging anti-smoker and although not a “leading light” in the anti-smoking movement was a definite supporter of it and voted strongly for the ban in 2006. Good that he’s been replaced by someone with at least a modicum of common sense. Wonder what their views on the ban are???
WTF IS BLOOMY LOSING CONTROL OF NEW YORK CITY
NYC Softens Public School ‘Discipline Code’…
No Longer Suspend Students For Smoking, Cutting Class, Cursing…
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/08/29/new-nyc-doe-discipline-rules-aim-to-reduce-student-suspensions/
Is it the first sign the nazis are cracking!
Well this is different.
Pitching an Organic Cigarette for Hipsters
“Hestia Tobacco positions itself as the first truly independent organic cigarette company, and there are a number of strong elements to the pitch. It starts very clearly with David Sley introducing himself, the company and a three-pronged investment thesis. What he has created is an organic cigarette company, aimed at the young, socially conscious market that still engages in smoking.
Mr. Sley seems to know precisely who his customer is: hipsters who shop at “farmers markets and vinyl record stores.”
“Mr. Sley says there is only one other major marketer of organic cigarettes: Natural American Spirit, a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies and the maker of Camel, Salem and many other major brands. As Mr. Sley correctly points out, this gives American Spirit less credibility as a truly independent brand, which is probably important to the target customer.”
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/pitching-an-organic-cigarette-for-hipsters/
I’m not sure what to make of that, do I count as a hipster?
Go on Hestia, impress me.
(I have been seen in farmer’s markets occasionally and do own some elderly vinyl)
As an example, some vinyl I own.
All together now –
Rose the Bloody basterds have blocked your video from playing in america!
It says: This video contains content from WMG and Warner Chappell,one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
Tsk
Oh well, American you tube must surely have a copy of Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song, without the footage, I just wanted a picture of the cover with the song.
“Led Zeppelin III’s original vinyl edition was packaged in a gatefold sleeve with an innovative cover, designed by Zacron, a multi-media artist whom Page had met in 1963 whilst Zacron was a student at Kingston College of Art”
“The cover and interior gatefold art consisted of a surreal collection of seemingly random images on a white background, many of them connected thematically with flight or aviation (as in “Zeppelin”).
Behind the front cover was a rotatable laminated card disc, or volvelles, covered with more images, including photos of the band members, which showed through holes in the cover. Moving an image into place behind one hole would usually bring one or two others into place behind other holes.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin_III
And kept me amused for about 5 minutes every time I played it.
The EU in the middle of the Sahara?
If they were in charge of the Sahara, in 5 years they would be importing sand and the UK would be paying the shipping costs!!!!