Amor Vincit Omnia

I sometimes wonder whether they’ll ever stamp out smoking.

And the answer seems to be that they won’t. After all, they’ve been trying for over 100 years without success. Over 400 years if you go back to James I.

And their problem may be very simple. Smokers like smoking, and antismokers hate smoking. Antismokers are driven by hatred. They want to stop something. They want to control and restrict something. They don’t have a positive vision of some sort of better world. They have a negative vision of a world from which something has been subtracted.

“Smoke-free” means free of smoke, minus smoke. It doesn’t mean free in the sense of increased freedom of choice. It means free in the sense of absence of choice.

So they have an uphill battle as they try to prohibit something rather than encourage something.

The alcohol prohibitionists have the same problem. And that may be why Prohibition failed. Prohibition looked for a diminished world with a restricted range of choice.

And the prohibitionists always exaggerate the threat posed by whatever it is they’re trying to prohibit. Most smokers aren’t killed by smoking, and most drinkers aren’t killed by alcohol. Same is true of carbon dioxide.

Prohibitionists of whatever stripe are obsessed with evil. Theirs is a world in which they are fighting one satanic evil after another. And most of these evils are things that other people like or enjoy, that other people see as good.

So it comes down to a fight between good and evil, between love and hate.

Amor Vincit Omnia: love wins over everything.

Lockdowns and Microchips

Zerohedge:

Iconic author Frederick Forsyth has accused the UK government of waging a “campaign of mass fear” against the British public by using psychological methods to ensure compliance with lockdown that resemble those used against East Berliners in the 1960’s.

Forsyth was responding to an article published in the Telegraph which exposed the “covert tactics” being used by the British government to frighten the public into complying with COVID regulations.

The article quoted a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist who warned that there was “growing concern within my field about using fear and shame as a driver of behaviour change.”

Nothing new here. They’ve been using fear and shame and social exclusion against smokers for a very long time.

In other news:

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a COVID vaccine that will work on all variants and has developed an implantable microchip that it says will continuously monitor the human body for signs of the virus.Retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician heading up DARPA’s response to the pandemic, appeared on 60 Minutes to demonstrate the technology.

Holding up a vial of green tissue-like gel, which contains the chip, Hepburn proclaimed “You put it underneath your skin and what that tells you is that there are chemical reactions going on inside the body, and that signal means you are going to have symptoms tomorrow.”

“It’s like a ‘check engine’ light,” Hepburn added, noting that those with the chip “would get the signal, then self-administer a blood draw and test themselves on site.”

“We can have that information in three to five minutes,” Hepburn continued, adding “As you truncate that time, as you diagnose and treat, what you do is you stop the infection in its tracks.”

Next, a microchip that will continuously monitor the human body for signs of tobacco use?

Why not? They say there’s a “smoking pandemic”.

The microchip would alert the public health authorities the moment you light up.

They want to control everyone.

Is It Worth Watching TV?

I haven’t owned a TV licence for over 10 years. I got threatening letters for quite a long time, but I simply replied that I didn’t own a TV set. After a while the letters stopped. It’s saved me about 150 pounds a year.

Now it’s rumoured that the licence fee is to be scrapped. So I’ll be able to watch TV again.

But I have a question for regular TV viewers: is it worth watching?

It certainly used to be 20+ years ago. But I have no interest in Celebrity Come Dancing and similar dross.

Jeremy Paxman used to be pretty good, but I think he’s defunct now. Anyone remember Cliff Michelmore? Or the Brains Trust?

What little I see on other people’s TV sets isn’t very impressive.

It was better in black and white.

Royal Clowns

James Delingpole::

Prince William has confirmed that he’s at least as dodgy a kingly prospect as his father the Prince of Wales by calling for a ‘Reset.’

William, who is second in line to the British throne, slipped the codeword into a video broadcast for the environmental charity Conservation International.

‘All of us, across all sectors of society, and in every corner of the globe must come together to fundamentally reset our relationship with nature and our trajectory as a species.’

First it was Charles, Then it was Harry and Meghan Markle. Now it’s William.

I’m getting sick of all these noisy princes.

They’re a bunch of woke clowns.

What do they know that I don’t?

The Queen seems to be the only royal with her head screwed on properly.

What’s going to happen when she’s gone? I expect the public standing of the royal family will collapse. She’s the only one keeping it afloat.

She’s always stayed above politics. But the rest of these clowns don’t.

The French had a revolution 200 years ago. The Russians had one 100 years ago. Perhaps it’s Britain’s turn next. Who’s going to be our next Oliver Cromwell?

….

P.S. RIP Prince Philip. James Delingpole:

The late Duke of Edinburgh was no fool. One way he showed this was in his attitude to the climate change scare: unlike his idiot son Charles or his brainwashed grandsons William and Harry, he knew it to be a load of old nonsense

The British Police State

Breitbart:

Mr Farage reminded Britons during a YouTube broadcast on Wednesday that he had warned the government was “taking far too much power” and eroding Britons’ liberties for several months, but that “all of this went a step too far” following Hancock’s “diktat”, saying the health minister had become “completely drunk on his own power”.

“We are fast becoming a police state,” Mr Farage later remarked.

Former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption had also warned that government ministers’ ability to force through new measures and police expanded powers to enforce it made Britain increasingly look like a “police state”.

This is nothing new. Britain has been a police state since the smoking ban of 1 July 2007. Current plans are simply for the extension of this police state in response to the vastly exaggerated Covid pandemic.

But nobody ever points this out. Not even Nigel Farage or Laurence Fox.

Perhaps a police state was always inevitable once vast amounts of data on everybody started being stored on computer. It became a police state when the state set out to control its own people’s customs. This first applied to smoking, but soon it will apply to everything else – e.g. diet, clothing. religion

Britain will remain a police state until people can once again sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette.

No End to Pandemics

ZeroHedge:

Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.
Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

This has already happened. And it happened a long time ago. The July 2007 smoking ban was a draconian lockdown of smokers against the smoking “pandemic”. It could be achieved because smokers had become a small minority who could be easily isolated.

The government learned a lot from that. The current lockdown is a repeat of the exercise, using a different but equally exaggerated pandemic. But this time everyone gets locked down, everyone gets isolated

Public Health now trumps everything else. And so now we can expect that all future lockdowns will invoke Public Health. It’s more important than free speech, democracy, and every existing law. It’s the only thing that matters.

So when the current Covid health emergency ends, it will be followed by another one.

In fact, there seems to be no end to the Covid pandemic. Exotic new variants are being found every week or two. It’s been going for a year, and looks set to last another year or two. It’s enormously economically and socially destructive, but so was the smoking ban. It served to concentrate power in government, and that’s what they want.

The end result, in the long run, will be the death of Public Health. Nobody will believe a word they say, and not just about the current pandemic, but everything else as well. The loss of faith will extend far beyond this. It will extend to science in general, and it will extend to the government. It could get very ugly.

Already we have.

UK Supreme Court Judge Expects People Will Be Forced To Wear Masks, Stay Home For Ten Years

Human-Punishing Regulations

Breitbart:

Morano noted, “Every major environmental figure [and] climate activist has praised the COVID [coronavirus] lockdowns as essentially a model for what we should be doing with climate, so that gives you an idea of where they want to go with the Green New Deal.”

“It’s an endless parade of human-punishing regulations,” he added.

And what else are smoking bans than human-punishing regulations?

These people hate humanity. They must hate themselves as well.

Defiantly Waving a Cigarette

I thought this was a refreshing video.

In almost every video I watch these days, nobody ever smokes. It seems to be a compulsory part of the process of denormalising smoking to portray a world in which nobody ever smokes. James Delingpole advertises himself with a pipe in his mouth, but I’ve never actually seen him smoke a pipe.

But in this video Rod Liddle smokes all the way through. In fact he smokes three cigarettes. He chain-smokes. And makes no attempt to hide the fact.

And I watched not him but his cigarette. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, it was such an unusual sight.

I have no idea what he was talking about. BLM? Lockdowns? Something like that.

All I could see was a man defiantly waving a lit cigarette.

More power to Rod Liddle. May there be many more like him.

Most Smokers Don’t Get Cancer

Not really any friend of smokers. about one minute in Lionel says: Most smokers don’t get cancer.

He’s right of course, but it’s not what it says on my tobacco packs.

Everything that’s said on tobacco packs is a lie.

One day that’ll bring the death of Tobacco Control. Public Health, the WHO, and all the rest of these bullying bastards..

Portofino

Pure escapism.

I found this video quite delightful. It’s the video record of a walk around the little Italian town of Portofino, and along the paths overlooking it in the hills above. The video records fragments of the conversation of passers-by, and the sound of cicadas in the bushes lining the paths, as well as road traffic and waves lapping on the harbour beach. There’s little or no accompanying commentary.

I was pleased to see ashtrays on many of the outdoor tables in the town. And if it had been up to me, I would have sat all day at one of those tables with a beer and a cigarette, quietly gazing on the colourful scene, the girls in summer clothes,. the boats moored in the harbour, and the deep blue Mediterranean sea.

Watching it was like a little holiday in itself.

There seem to be lots of such videos. I found one on the forum in Rome. And another on the town of Sorrento. I’m sure there are many more.