The Invisible Minority

One thing that puzzles me: why are smokers an invisible minority? Blacks, women, gays, etc. are all highly visible minorities, and politicians court them. So why aren’t they courting smokers? Why don’t they ever mention them? Why can’t they even see them?

It occurred to me this morning that there may be a simple explanation for this invisibility, and it can be found in ubiquitous No Smoking signs.

Can you see it?

No, of course you can’t. Because it’s invisible.  What’s missing from this No Smoking sign is the smoker smoking the cigarette. He’s been airbrushed out.

Cigarettes don’t light themselves or smoke themselves. With every lit cigarette there is always an accompanying smoker. So when smoking is banned, so also are smokers. And if No Smoking signs included the smoker it would be clear that a particular sort of person was being prohibited.

So here’s the explanation for why smokers are invisible: They’ve been airbrushed out of No Smoking signs, and thereby airbrushed out of society. Cigarettes have become highly visible, and smokers invisible. Or smokers only become visible when they light cigarettes, rather like pedestrians only become visible at night if standing under street lights..

It’s also why the prohibitions on smokers can be (and are) so draconian. By removing the smoker, the target of the prohibition becomes a thing: a cigarette. And things have no rights. Only people have rights. So by focusing attention only on the cigarette, and ignoring its accompanying smoker, it becomes possible to enact legislation which targets the cigarette, but seemingly not the smoker, because the smoker is not shown. And once cigarettes can be unapologetically stubbed out, crushed, chopped up, pushed outside, dumped on the streets, smokers can unapologetically crushed, pushed outside, dumped on the streets.

So, for example, if you want to ban women from somewhere, without seeming to be doing so, you would ban some of the attributes of women, For example, little black dresses and high heel shoes. No woman would be depicted.

Another thing about No Smoking signs is that they are imported traffic signs. On Britain’s roads (and probably everywhere else) a universal sign language has emerged. In this new language a sign with a red circle around it is a sign that commands motorists . And a sign with a diagonal red line through is a prohibition on something. The sign at right prohibits turning right. Long before Britain’s smokers were assailed with No Smoking signs, Britain’s motorists were being ordered around by traffic signs.

And if the motorists would obey traffic signs, perhaps the same sort of instructions, using the same universal language, could be employed elsewhere. And they are indeed being used elsewhere, first in No Smoking signs, but now also No Vaping signs, or combined No Smoking Or Vaping signs. There are lots more of these new hieroglyphs now.

Bullying Bastard Doctors

Thanks to Rose for drawing attention to this report:

At a glance | Prof Dame Sally Davies’ review of obesity crisis

Key proposals:

Ban eating or drinking anything but plain water on all urban public transport

Extend sugar tax on drinks to cover milkshake and flavoured coffees

Consider new taxes on all unhealthy foods, if action is not taken to cut their sugar content. Alternatively, put snacks in plain packaging, as has happened for cigarettes

Overhaul VAT so all unhealthy fare is consistently covered, and healthy foods exempt

Place a calorie cap on all meals sold in cafes and restaurants

End any advertising or marketing of unhealthy products at sports or concerts. Only sell low calorie food as such events

It’s quite mind-bending, really. Clearly smoking bans and the hyper-taxation of tobacco were just the tip of the iceberg. Dame Sally Davies doesn’t just want want to control what people smoke, but also what they eat. No doubt she also wants to regulate what they drink too.

If she gets her way, everyone is going to start hating bullying bastard doctors like her. Everyone is going to start hating doctors. And it’ll signal the death of the medical profession.

What she’s doing is to step into the moral void left by the decay of Christianity, and start introducing a new medical morality, in which “sinful” behaviour is replaced by “unhealthy” behaviour.

And she has no hesitation whatsoever about making her her edicts into the law of the land. So that if you eat or drink anything but plain water on public transport, you’ll have a fine slapped on you.

It goes further: she wants to change human culture.

“It is about changing the culture so snacking is no longer normalised. We need to make the bus, the train and the tube a safe place for children,” she said.

“It is a mindless way to eat and seeing other people eating does prompt you to think about eating.”

What’s wrong with snacking? Why does seeing people eating on public transport make it unsafe for children? If seeing people eating “prompts people to think about eating”, isn’t that exactly what happens in restaurants? Does she want to ban people “mindlessly” eating in restaurants too?

“We need to change the culture so food is not centre stage. We know that calories are better controlled if you eat breakfast, lunch and tea or supper rather than if you eat on the run.”

Why are calories better controlled if you eat at set times of the day? Why should we control calories? How many people sit down at for lunch and count the calories in their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding? How do you know how many calories are in a big fat crispy roast potato? Is it written on them?

Furthermore, some people need more calories than others. Large people who who perform heavy outdoor manual labour (e.g. digging ditches) are doing more physical work than pen-pushers in well-heated offices, so they’ll need more calories (because that’s what calories are: physical work). Anyone’s required calorie intake is determined by their calorie expenditure. If you live a busy active life, you’ll be using up calories faster than someone who remains seated all day. So if we’re to be “mindful” about our calorie intake, shouldn’t we be mindful about our calories expenditures, what we’re doing all day?

I have no objection to people thinking about calories. In my ice age simulation models I’m thinking about calories all the time – just not the calories in food, but the calories of heat which flow from the Sun and the centre of the Earth. And clearly Dame Sally Davies thinks about food in the same way as I do: as calories. What’s different is that she is a petty tyrant, in ways that I am not. She wants to control and regulate people, and I don’t. I want to free people, not control them.

What’s worse is that Sally Davies isn’t in the least bit an unusual Chief Medical Officer. After all, her predecessors include not only Sir Liam Donaldson (who threatened to resign if smoking wasn’t banned in all pubs in Britain, not just in those that served food), but also the notorious Sir George Godber. She comes from an entire new culture of petty tyranny which is has emerged in the medical profession over the past half century or more. These people are no longer interested in merely curing disease or caring for the sick: they want to control people’s behaviour right down to the details of every morsel of food they eat.

In my view, medical doctors are essentially no different from car mechanics. Their job is to repair people in the same way as mechanics repair cars. It’s not the job of mechanics to tell their customers where, or how fast , or how far they should drive their cars: that’s for the drivers to decide. But this is precisely what the tyrannical new doctors in the medical profession want to do. And they are quite open in their wish to make their prescriptions into statute law.

It will come to a collision between this upstart medical profession and the countless millions of people that they want to control and to command. And the inevitable result will be the destruction of the medical profession, and the diminution of their status to something akin to that of car mechanics. The medical profession will go the same way as the bullying, browbeating bishops and priests before them, and for the same reason.

Were The Pyramids Artesian Wells?

I don’t want to think about Brexit. And I bet you don’t want to either.

…

So instead I’ll think about the Pyramids of Egypt.

Several interesting things about the pyramids at Giza:

First, they all have long causeways, with stone embankments, leading away from them, sloping down towards the river Nile from the raised Giza plateau.

Second, they all have large internal chambers and tunnels.

Third, less well known, is that they have a maze of tunnels deep beneath them.

A vast network of underground chambers and water tunnels have been discovered beneath several of the world’s most well-known pyramids, including the Great Pyramid on Egypt’s Giza Plateau.

Fourthly, all the pyramids – including the earliest Step Pyramid of Djoser to the south, which also has shafts and tunnels beneath it – are located on the west bank of the Nile, just south of the fertile Nile delta.

Fifth, the Sahara desert, which extends for hundreds of miles to the west, was several thousand years ago a fertile land covered with rivers and lakes and plants and animals. But it gradually dried up, leaving the desert we see today. But there remains a lot of water under the Sahara, some of which can be seen at the various oases (e.g. Siwa) dotted across it.

As the Sahara dried out, the Nile remained the only river flowing through a dry and barren land. The Nile was a river which regularly flooded, and it was these floods which allowed its flood plains to cultivate crops.

But sometimes the Nile floods failed, and when that happened there was famine (and perhaps also drought) in Egypt. So another source of water was used: the water deep under the Sahara desert. The Egyptians built artesian wells to bring it to the surface.

An artesian well is simply a well that doesn’t require a pump to bring water to the surface; this occurs when there is enough pressure in the aquifer. The pressure forces the water to the surface without any sort of assistance.

The earliest natural artesian well in Egypt may have been at Siwa, which has a large natural rock plateau, applying pressure to the ground;

The pyramids of Giza may have been copies of the Siwa “pyramid”, and applied pressure to the ground to force up water from below. It was like squeezing a damp sponge. This water rose up through a network of tunnels and shafts to the surface, where it flowed out into the causeways to reservoirs or the river below.

As water was pumped out of the ground, and the water table below slowly fell, more and more pressure was needed to bring up water. So more and more rocks were added to the pyramids above, and pyramids rose higher and higher, and got heavier and heavier.

The first pyramids were probably quite small, because not much pressure needed to be applied to the ground to force up water. But as the water table fell, bigger and bigger, and heavier and heavier pyramids were needed. Giza was somehow or other a place where there was (and still is) a lot of underground water.

The pyramids probably also had to have stopcocks and safety valves to stop water flowing out of them when there was plenty of water in the Nile, and pyramid water wasn’t needed. Hence the elaborate chambers in the pyramids.

Pyramids might also have been dismantled and rebuilt. When one pyramid ran dry, the Egyptians simply carried the rocks away, and re-erected them elsewhere. This is why there are several pyramids that have vanished (e.g. Abu Rawash).

One notable fact about the pyramid at Abu Rawash is that the upper most part of the pyramid has seemingly disappeared, revealing the internal passage that runs down into the bedrock. Explanations to why this pyramid is missing its top vary. The second point of interest that this pyramid provides is that it is built on top of a hillock.

Eventually, perhaps after many hundreds of years, these artesian well pyramids stopped working, and the pyramid building era came to an end (perhaps in the reign of the Pharaoh Unas, the causeway of whose pyramid is shown below).

The chaotic First Intermediate Period in Egyptian history followed shortly after the reign of Unas.  Perhaps this was because the pyramids ceased working, and famine and drought returned to Egypt.

…

Wasn’t that better than Brexit?

 

Why are we Measuring People Like Carpets?

Thank goodness she’s leaving.

Ban and tax our way out of obesity – top doctor

Could it be curtains for the buffet car? Banning snacks on public transport is just one way England’s departing chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, reckons the government could act to prevent childhood obesity. Others include tobacco-style plain packaging for junk food, a calorie cap for restaurant meals, adding VAT to products like cakes, and banning advertising of unhealthy food. If the measures sound extreme, so do the figures. The proportion of children deemed obese by their final year of primary school has quadrupled since 1990, with about a third of all year six pupils classed as overweight or obese. The health secretary says ministers will study the recommendations “closely”. But the railway trolley of drinks and light refreshments might be around for a while yet. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has previously expressed scepticism about measures such as so-called sin taxes.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an obese child in England. I’m sure I would have noticed. In my experience, children are almost never obese. Adults are quite often obese. Nobody used to bother about it.

But then, “deemed obese” isn’t quite the same as obese. Obsessive weight-watchers, in my experience, are people who look fine to me, but will insist that they’re “putting on too much weight.” And I guess if you’re a supermodel of some sort, you may notice the addition of even a single pound of weight.

Let’s suppose that some kids genuinely are obese. What business of the government is it to try to regulate people’s weight anyway? How is banning snacks on public transport going to bring their weight down? How long do English kids spend on trains and buses every day? It can’t be more than about half an hour. How many sandwiches can you eat in half an hour?

No, if there are obese kids, it’s more likely because they’re being well fed at home, or they’re being well fed at school. Banning snacks on public transport will probably have zero effect on child obesity.

And anyway I suspect that it’s imaginary obesity that is easily generated simply by changing what’s deemed obese. From the Orwellian Calorie Control Council:

BMI is a measure which takes into account a person’s weight and height to gauge total body fat in adults. Someone with a BMI of 26 to 27 is about 20 percent overweight, which is generally believed to carry moderate health risks. A BMI of 30 and higher is considered obese. … A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight.

BMI less than 18.5 is considered underweight. All it needs is the stroke of a regulatory pen to change 30 to 25, and bingo, overnight you’ll quadruple the number of obese people. Wikipedia:

Body mass index (BMI) is a value derived from the mass (weight) and height of a person. The BMI is defined as the body mass divided by the square of the body height, and is universally expressed in units of kg/m2, resulting from mass in kilograms and height in metres.

What has the dimensions of mass per square metre? In my glaciation heat flow models I use density, which is mass per cubic metre, never mass per square metre, or even mass per metre. I suppose that things like carpets will have a mass per square metre. It’s called area density. I suppose cables and ropes will have a linear density or mass per metre.

What the hell is the square of body height? Why are we measuring people like carpets? Human bodies have a skin surface area of about 1.5 square metres, and given an average adult body weight of 70 kg, that means that they’ll have an area density – body mass per unit body area – of 70/1.5 or about 46.5. But given adult body height 0f 1.75 m, mass per square height is 70 / 1.75², or a BMI of nearly 23.

Body Mass Index, BMI, is a pretty meaningless number. It’s not even the same as area density, which would be a crazy way to measure people anyway. Two-year-old toddlers:

Average weight for a 24-month-old is 26.5 pounds for girls and 27.5 pounds for boys, according to the World Health Organization. How tall is the average 2-year-old? Average height for a 24-month-old is 33.5 inches for girls and 34.2 inches for boys.

27.5 pounds is 12.47 kg. And 34.2 inches is 0.87 m. BMI is 16.47

Typical weight of newborn babies is 2.5 to 4 kg, and height is 0.5 m, So babies generally have a BMI of 10 to 16.

So why aren’t babies and children regarded as underweight? Could it be that worried health-conscious parents have been feeding their underweight children to get their BMI up from 16 to 20? Well, no, while adults are compared to fixed values, children are compared with other children in their own age group. Which means that they’re compared to an ever-changing scale. Your obese child is overweight by comparison with other children in the same age group – which could mean that they’re all underweight.

The whole thing is crazy and meaningless. It’s crazy, meaningless non-science. BMI is a deeply meaningless number. It’s not even the same as area density

It’s the same of course with tobacco and alcohol and everything else. It’s all crazy, meaningless non-science. And it results in crazy, meaningless laws like smoking bans and buffet car bans.

Think For Yourself

In a comment yesterday, Joe L wrote:

There appears to be a concerted effort to demonize vaping which exploded in recent weeks.

Not being a vaper, I don’t pay much attention to vaping news, so I’ll simply take his word for this. But it prompted the thought that there seems to be a concerted effort currently under way in multiple directions.

After all, we’ve been also seeing a concerted effort, with Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, to push the climate change agenda back to the centre of public attention, after languishing in the doldrums for the past few years.

At the same time, after having got nowhere with the Mueller investigation, a whole series of new attacks are being launched on Donald Trump, with shadowy “whistleblowers” emerging to accuse him of applying pressure to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings there, and Nancy Pelosi launching an “impeachment” inquiry about it. Add to that mounting rumours that Hillary Clinton is going to enter the 2020 presidential race.

And then of course there’s Brexit, with increasingly desperate attempts being made in recent weeks in the UK parliament and courts to prevent it from happening.

Add it all up, and it looks like a concerted global attempt to get the faltering globalist project back on the track. The Empire is striking back.

All these various pushes seem to have the character of propaganda wars, and to all be advancing one new lie or other:

1) E-cigarettes cause cancer.
2) We’ve only got 11 years to do something about climate change.
3) Rep. Adam Schiff seems to have simply made stuff up about what Donald Trump said to the Ukrainian president.
4) A No Deal Brexit would be a catastrophe.

It’s all scaremongering and lies.

Unless, of course, you believe it all.

And it all comes down to what you believe, or who you believe. In the past, most people believed in one religion or other. And now most people (in the developed world) believe in Science. They used to put their faith in bishops and priests, but now they put their faith in doctors and scientists and experts. And that’s just as much a belief system as any religion. It entails believing what you’re told by some authority figure.

What happens when that trust ebbs away? I never had much faith in bishops and priests, but I have increasingly little faith in doctors and scientists and experts. They all seem to be simply making stuff up, just like Adam Schiff. They’re no longer trying to discover truth, but instead to use their prestige to get people to believe them, and do what they tell them to do.

My response is (to try) to think for myself. Perhaps that’s the only possible response in a world in which trustworthy authorities have largely vanished. You’re on your own. You’ve only got your own judgement available to you.

This isn’t new. This sort of large scale loss of faith and trust happened during the Reformation circa 1500, when large numbers of Protestants started disbelieving the Pope in Rome, some even believing that he was a satanic figure. And these Protestants started thinking for themselves, and in doing so they fractured into hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of rival sects, as much at war with each other as they were with Rome. And now we’re seeing the same thing happening with the Church of Science.

In my own case, thinking for myself about climate change has resulted in me building dynamic heat flow models of ice ages – because I used to build heat flow models of buildings 40 years ago. And I’ve come up with my own new Theory Of Ice Ages (Brief outline: During glacial periods thick snow on the surface of the Earth makes the underlying socks slowly warm up over thousands of years, and eventually melt the overlying snow, after which the rocks rapidly cool down during the subsequent brief interglacial period, allowing snow to again settle on them and and repeat the cycle.) However, climate scientists seem oblivious to this idea, and so it’s a new heresy. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that one should expect to see when people stop trusting experts and start thinking for themselves. They’ll come up with their own ideas just like the Protestants in 1500 came up with their own interpretations of the Bible. So I’m a modern-day Shaker or Quaker or Ranter. And, still greater heresy, I’ve come to believe that Global Warming is a Good Thing, because it might just delay or prevent the onset of the otherwise inevitable next Ice Age. How terrible! Don’t be too surprised if I get my head chopped off, because chopping people’s heads off is the one sure way of stopping people thinking for themselves.

But I expect to see lots and lots of people thinking for themselves about not just climate change, but everything else as well. They’re going to be forced to think for themselves. And they’ll come up with all sorts of outlandish ideas. A whole forest of them is going to spring up.

But that’s how science works. Science advances when people start thinking for themselves, rather than blindly following authorities. As Feynman said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Isaac Newton was just thinking for himself. And so were Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler. And they were all thinking for themselves because the authoritative structure of the world in which they were living was coming apart, and they had to do their own thinking, in the exact same way that sailors who leap off a sinking ship into the sea have to do their own swimming.

It Probably Won’t Happen

These people are mad:

Police have arrested 280 people in London at the start of two weeks of protests by environmental campaigners.

Extinction Rebellion activists are protesting in cities around the world, including Berlin, Amsterdam and Sydney.

Organisers have blockaded key sites in central London, in addition to demonstrating outside government departments.

Some have glued and chained themselves to roads and vehicles, while others were planning to camp overnight.

They’re not facing extinction. They’re just worried about a world that might be slightly hotter than it used to be, and with sea levels slightly higher. And they’re worried about something that may never happen.

Back in my day, 50 or 60 years ago, we worried about nuclear war, and people marched on the streets in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We worried about things like the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which really would bring the complete extinction of Britain.

I grew up in post-war Britain in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophes of WW1 and WW2. I expected WW3 to start any day. I thought that I would probably die in a ditch somewhere in France or north Africa, a soldier clutching a rifle.

When I was 15 or so, I bought a book called Survival. It taught people how to survive in the outdoor, natural world with bows and arrows, and how to start fires with wooden sticks. I remember nothing of it now, except How To Roast Hedgehogs (bury them under a layer of mud, and light a fire on top of them).

After a while I ceased to worry about WW3, and instead started worrying about the Population Bomb, Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, Acid Rain, and the Ozone Hole. And then when that wore off I started worrying about Stock Market Crashes and Economic Downwaves. Now, more exotically, I worry (very slightly) about Asteroid Impacts and Ice Ages. But, above all, I’ve gradually realised, of all these various anxieties, that It Probably Won’t Happen.

I’m fairly typical of my post-war Boomer generation. We were all expecting the worst. Hence the gloomy lamenting blues music of the era. And hence also my childhood private army of toy soldiers, who were forever dying in ditches, clutching rifles.

The odd thing about it is that this profound pessimism still endures, even in little girls like Greta Thunberg. Perhaps that’s because she’s Swedish, and the further north you go in Europe, the more pessimistic people get, most likely because of the cold, sunless winters. The happiest countries in Europe are the southern ones like Greece and Spain, where it’s sunny all the time, and the people are sunny too.

And if you’re a natural Swedish pessimist, you can always find something to be pessimistic about. The world is full of catastrophes waiting to happen.

It seems it wasn’t always like this. Back in about 1900 there seem to been a lot of optimists around, dreaming of building utopian new societies. They thought a new world was just round the corner, just a step away. People like Lenin and Trotsky must have been supremely optimistic if they really thought that they could create a wonderful new society, a heaven on earth. But of course these idealistic, optimistic revolutionaries never manage to construct heaven: they always end up creating hell.

I was never any sort of optimistic revolutionary. I never dreamed of creating a utopian, smoke-free new society. That world was (and is) always going to be another dystopia.  I simply wanted to survive. And in fact I survived very well. I never actually had to roast a hedgehog. I never carried a rifle. I count myself a lucky man. I never wanted to build a better world, but instead just hoped to preserve the imperfect one we already had. I never had the urge to tear down the existing world and build a new one from scratch. I never had plans for everyone.

Perhaps it’s human nature to imagine the worst that might happen, and also to imagine the best that might happen. But all too often that means inhabiting an imaginary world populated with imaginary people. Extinction Rebellion activists are terrified of completely imaginary climate change. A lot of Americans are terrified of a completely imaginary president Donald Trump. And a lot of Brits are terrified of a completely imaginary Brexit. And so on.

It probably won’t happen.

The Politics Of Panic

Picture showing how much water is on the Earth:

Rather nice how they’ve drained the oceans and got the ice from Greenland too.

It’s a slightly scary picture too (although I don’t think it’s intended to be). It looks like the big sphere could roll like a marble over the surface of the Earth, bouncing a bit over mountain ranges, and finally maybe even bouncing right off the surface of the Earth, and becoming a new satellite of the Earth.

Other people really are trying to scare people (my added emphases):

New Climate Report Suggests NYC Could Be Under Water Sooner Than Predicted

Turns out sea levels may be on track to rise by more than double the unsettling figure climate scientists previously projected, and all within a century. A new study, released Monday, predicts a rise of 6.6 feet by 2100, if global temps warm by 9 degrees Fahrenheit…

The report’s lead author, Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol, emphasized to the BBC that the odds of achieving the 5-degree warming disaster model are about 5 percent, and certainly avoidable if we take aggressive steps to scale back emissions…yesterday? years, decades ago? right freakin’ NOW? All the above, probably, so regardless, 5 percent odds should alarm you.

“If I said to you that there was a one in 20 chance that if you crossed the road you would be squashed you wouldn’t go near it,” Bamber told the BBC. “Even a 1 percent probability means that a one in a hundred year flood is something that could happen in your lifetime. I think that a 5 percent probability, crikey—I think that’s a serious risk.”

Jonathan Bamber wants to scare people. They’ve been scaring people for a long time. From 2011:

Sea Level Rise Could Turn New York Into Venice, Experts Warn

 “A lot of New York City is less than 16 feet above mean sea level,” he said. “Lower Manhattan, some points are five feet above sea level. These areas are vulnerable and New York City knows it. Compared to other cities, which are only now beginning to wake up to this issue, I think New York City is much further ahead…”

In this scenario, New York in 200 years looks like Venice. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have melted ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and raised our local sea level by six to eight feet. Inundating storms at certain times of year swell the harbor until it spills into the streets. Dozens of skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan have been sealed at the base and entrances added to higher floors. The streets of the financial district have become canals.

This makes it sound like Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets are just like big freezer ice cubes slowly melting in a glass on a hot summer day. And that’s probably how a lot of people think about it. That’s the model they use: melting ice cubes. They don’t seem to know that about as much ice is being added on top of the ice sheets as is being subtracted from them at their perimeter. The ice sheets are like rivers – frozen rivers. Worrying about ice sheets melting is like worrying that rivers will run dry if water keeps on flowing out of them into the sea. Did you know that it takes only 3 months for water to flow from the headwaters of the Mississippi river to the Gulf of Mexico? Three months! That’s all you’ve got! Grab some water while stocks last!

Al Gore has been on the scare-mongering bandwagon for a long time. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a new arrival on the scene with her Green New Deal. As far as I can see almost all the Democrat presidential candidates are on board the climate change scare-mongering bandwagon.

That’s our politics these days. The politics of panic. They’re trying to stampede people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

It started with the tobacco scare, and moved on to the environmental tobacco smoke scare. Now the same scare tactics are being used with absolutely everything, including Brexit.