Frank, April 2014

April 11, 2014 finds Frank reflecting on his Idle Theory: I’ve been angry today that the 40-year struggle to get the Idle Theory into the world is over. Who knows whether I succeeded or not?

The next day: I was arguing last night that Idle Theory is something I’ve already done, and there’s no point in re-doing it. It would be like some band re-issuing the same piece of music. Idle Theory is a way of thinking about life. Some people find it attractive.

He became more despondent as the day wore on: Everything is disintegrating. A & H don’t really want to buy me any tobacco when they go on holiday to Portugal…. I have to respond to that as both of us enjoyed tracking down tobacco for Frank when we were abroad. We eventually found what was wanted in downtown Lisbon. And he was wrong – things didn’t fall apart.

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Frank from November 2017

I’m responding to a request from RdM who asked if I could look through the diary around his November 14, 2017 flat earth versus spherical blog. I came across entries on November 11 – he wrote more than 5 pages that day – I ‘ve scanned three. Half way down the first he writes…Brigette and me arguing with Grainé whether or not the earth was flat. What a wonderful conversation!

How it develops, I don’t know but at least the subject is touched on.

Frank’s writing isn’t the easiest to come to terms with and I might try OCR to see if I can get a more polished result. But his own writing does provide colour if not light.

The day was a good one for him. His last entry – which I include – begins: It’s been a remarkable day…

A

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Frank from February 2020

This instalment of Frank’s diary/journal covers parts of February 24th and 25th 2020.

He starts the page with comments on Rush Limbaugh and moves on to the smoking ban, his health, the Earth’s albedo and Glaciation, mentioning barrel-vaulted cathedrals in the process.

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From Frank’s archive – 6th October 2012

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Frank Davis – a lost voice

Frank Davis – Christopher Francis Davis – died on October 8, 2021. He was 73 and is much missed by his family and friends. His blog of 10 years is being preserved here as a tribute to his writings, the ideas he explored and his commitment to his values.

In the months since his passing a fuller picture of his thinking and the pathways he travelled has come to light. There is a mass of paper, computer data and much else that will need to be reviewed and taken further – or not.

A website containing a fuller spectrum of his output is under consideration – as a record of the flow from an original mind.

For the moment, however, there will be regular monthly posts to this blog – in the form of scans taken from his notebooks and other papers. They may not have particular relevance to immediate concerns but it will mean his voice will continue to be heard.

Living in an overregulated, overtaxed, brainwashed prison camp

Delingpole:

Oh the contrast with the overregulated, overtaxed, brainwashed prison camp of mostly compliant sheep and grim apparatchiks to which I am now unhappily returned. Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom is much, much closer politically, socially and economically to Tito’s Yugoslavia than it is to Milanović’s Croatia.

It’s been like this since the smoking ban of 1 July 2007, if not before.

In other news…

Pope Francis Calls for ‘Net Zero Carbon Emissions as Soon as Possible’

What the hell does he know about it?

I suppose climate alarmism is our new religion, with its own new vision of hell.

But then…

Pope’s Swiss Guards Resign Over Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination

Serves him right. Covid is also a new religion.

…

Tucker Carlson: Public Health has become America’s reigning religion

Good Riddance

Good news.

Goodbye and good riddance to Public Health England.

All these public health organisations are essentially coercive, for the simple reason that they intrude upon individual autonomy. My health is no longer my concern alone, but the concern of an organisation that claims to know better than I do what’s good for me.

One of the results of this, of course, are smoking bans. Alcohol prohibition in the USA was another. So also are various drug prohibitions. Covid vaccination mandates are just the latest example.

It’s inevitable when some people think they know what’s good for everyone else. It’s why we’re now living in a medical tyranny. What you think doesn’t matter: only the experts get a hearing.

There are many sorts of public works which increase people’s freedom without invading their autonomy. Roads and bridges are good examples. You don’t have to use them if you don’t want to.

The same applies to wind farms or solar farms when added to other forms of energy. But banning cars or internal combustion engines removes freedom, by forcing people to use only officially-approved forms of energy. Same with banning burning coal or wood.

All bans are coercive. And people will always resist coercion. Which is why I expect a public revolt against the bullies in Public Health.

Unfortunately Public Health England is to be replaced by the equally Orwellian Office for Health Promotion and Disparities.

How are they going to deal with health “disparities? With the fact that some people are healthier and more long-lived than others? One obvious solution would be to have a mandatory maximum lifetime of 65 or 70 years, and prevent people from “unfairly” living to the age of 80 or 90, by denying healthcare to anyone over the mandatory maximum age. All in the name of “equality”. Where else can the pursuit of equality lead?

We should be glad of inequality. We should be glad that we are all different sizes and shapes and colours. Inequality is the measure of our freedom.

What is the war on obesity but the demonisation of large people? What does “overweight” mean other than the idolisation of some arbitrary ideal weight? I myself have always been “underweight”. We should accept people as they are, not bully them to conform to some ideal. We should seek the greatest diversity rather than the greatest uniformity.

Bushcraft Bear

I’ve been following the volcanic eruption on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. 

The best reports come from somebody called Bushcraft Bear.

Bushcraft Bear is just a guy with a webcam standing on a hill in La Palma, talking about what he’s seeing. Yet somehow it’s better than the TV news, even if they’ve got drone and helicopter views. How come it’s better?

One answer is that the TV news is crammed into a couple of minutes of a news show from presenters who are nowhere near the place. By contrast Bushcraft Bear will talk for 15 or 20 minutes, and will describe what he sees and hears and smells.

Over 16 hours Bushcraft Bear’s video above got 171k views. Over the same 16 hours a Sky News report on the volcano got 219k views. So Bushcraft Bear was doing nearly as well as Sky News, and a lot better than many other news outlets.

Add also that, unlike Sky News, Bushcraft Bear’s English is far from perfect.

What’s he got that they haven’t? Bushcraft Bear is authentic. He’s saying what he thinks. Sky News presenters are saying what they’re told to say.

And that’s refreshing.

I hope to see many more reports from Bushcraft Bears all over the world.

Social Isolation Tyranny

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/28/australia-official-warns-sydney-residents-unvaccinated-will-face-social-isolation-difficult-life/

Unvaccinated residents of Sydney, Australia, will face social isolation and a difficult life should they continue to resist vaccination, says New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Just like smokers.

Australia went from a free country to a police state in less than a year.

Smokers have been experiencing this tyranny for much longer than that.

Soon everyone else will too.

P.S. “…they spent decades trying to scare us about overpopulation, global cooling, the amazon rainforest (allegedly disappearing), and finally, climate change, and they failed. A virus comes along and they realized that this cut across ideologies, cut across political affiliation and they were able to declare an emergency and suspend normal democracy. They were able to achieve their one-party state with an unelected bureaucracy.”

The Absolute Tyranny of Public Health

Via Clicky:

Australia has fallen.. a man is arrested 200mtrs from his house.. his crime.? Having a cigarette 🚬 pic.twitter.com/c3l0K28X0b

— Pelham (@Resist_05) September 26, 2021

Four or five policemen tackle an Aussie smoker, quite likely injuring him in the process.

In other news…

Health workers should be given priority access to fuel in UK, says senior doctor

“Everyone will have their own reasons for needing to fill up but as pumps run dry there is a real risk that NHS staff won’t be able to do their jobs and provide vital services and care to people who urgently need it.

“While the government has said it is putting plans in place to alleviate the shortage of HGV drivers to transport fuel, the results of this won’t be immediate. Healthcare and essential workers must therefore be given priority access to fuel so they can continue their crucial work and guarantee care to patients.”

Health is now more important than anything else.

Health is more important than freedom or autonomy or democracy or self-government. It’s more important than friendship , conviviality, laughter, and song.

It’s unsurprising that senior doctors regard health as paramount: it’s their job. But must the rest of us share their opinion?

A soldier in an army places his health at risk. He may be shot and killed. Should he value his own health above that of his country’s liberty? That many men have nevertheless gone to war shows that there was something that they valued more than life or health. Was that a mistake?

When Winston Churchill said “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”, wasn’t he giving bad medical advice? Shouldn’t he have said that “we will quickly surrender, to save our lives and protect our health”?

Perhaps it is that public health attains its supremacy when other values have been abandoned, and all that remains is just the desire to stay alive.

We are always placing our lives at risk. We do it when we drive cars or fly in planes or go swimming. Even making a cup of tea or reading a book has health risks attached. Simply being alive means being in danger of death. If we were in no danger of death we would not be alive.

Could it be that the safer our lives become, the less alive we are? And life is lived most intensely when in the greatest danger of losing it? If we could live forever there would be no point in living.

Public health is slowly killing us all as it sets out to eliminate all risk from life. Public health is taking away the thrill of it all.

It does so by vastly exaggerating first the risks of smoking, and then those of climate change, and now of Covid-19.

Public health must be killed before we can recover our lives.