Monthly Archives: March 2011

A Breath of Fresh Air

Posted on March 31, 2011 by the archivist

H/T Pat Nurse for this: Stigmatised, marginalised and treated with no sense of proportionality, British smokers are being reduced to the perilous and irrational status that a number of minorities suffered in Germany around 1934 and 5. Today, 23% of … Continue reading →

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Multicellular Politics

Posted on March 30, 2011 by the archivist

A couple of days back, I posted a piece on the Idle Theory of Politics. The gist of it was that in busy, hardworking societies, the job of making the political decisions was perforce left to one person – the … Continue reading →

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Legitimate Aspirations

Posted on March 29, 2011 by the archivist

I was listening to the Libya Conference that was being chaired by David Cameron. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, was speaking. He addressed everybody as “excellencies”, and spoke of “meeting the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people”. It … Continue reading →

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Democracy

Posted on March 29, 2011 by the archivist

I keep reading about the New World Order that is going to usher in the One World Government which is going to be the most tyrannical in the whole of recorded history, with everybody a micro-chipped serf in a corporate … Continue reading →

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The Uglifiers

Posted on March 28, 2011 by the archivist

I’ve been reading the philosopher Karl Popper’s autobiography, Unended Quest. It’s quite heavy going. He writes about essentialism and nominalism and realism and progressivism and historicism and subjectivism and Darwinism. As best I can make out, whenever Popper identified some … Continue reading →

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Pervasive Unreality

Posted on March 27, 2011 by the archivist

One or two further thoughts on my last post, in which I produced some evidence suggesting that the uprisings in the Arab world were in part a consequence of the smoking bans which have been multiplying through the region over … Continue reading →

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Are Arab Smokers Revolting?

Posted on March 26, 2011 by the archivist

I became intrigued last night by the idea that the Jasmine Revolution spreading across the Middle East and North Africa might in part be a response to the appearance of smoking bans in these countries. So I’ve been doing a … Continue reading →

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Vichy Britain

Posted on March 25, 2011 by the archivist

It always seems to me that, in the long run, the smoking ban will prove to be a disaster for the cause of antismoking. It will set it back 100 years or more. I’ve said this before, but their cause … Continue reading →

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Impact of Smokefree Legislation

Posted on March 24, 2011 by the archivist

H/T to DP for Impact of the Smokefree Legislation in England. I looked at the section on Changes in behaviour (page 9). It was a longitudinal study conducted in six contrasting areas located in and around two major cities, one in the … Continue reading →

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Supermoon etc.

Posted on March 22, 2011 by the archivist

I’ve come across two explanations for the 11 March Japanese earthquake. One struck me as rather more plausible than the other. The plausible explanation was that of the ‘Supermoon’, which is what happens when a full moon or a new … Continue reading →

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