Pollution

Gary K first drew attention to this:

THE air pollution that city dwellers are exposed to is as bad for the health as smoking a packet of cigarettes a day, a shock report warns.

Maybe city air pollution is not so bad after all?

Following this Walt drew attention to a related report:

“Rates of chronic lung disease in this country are going up and increasingly it is recognized that this disease occurs in nonsmokers,” said Kaufman, also a professor of internal medicine and a physician at UW School of Medicine. “We really need to understand what’s causing chronic lung disease, and it appears that air pollution exposures that are common and hard to avoid might be a major contributor.”

If “we really need to understand what’s causing chronic lung disease”, it can only mean that we currently don’t understand what’s causing chronic lung disease.

And if it “appears” that air pollution exposures that are common and hard to avoid “might” be a major contributor, it can only mean that they’re really just guessing it might be.

And what’s “air pollution”? Personally I don’t think tobacco smoke is “air pollution”. I’ve always liked the smell of tobacco smoke. And I’ve been smoking unfiltered roll-ups for 50 years without ill effect. And I’ve made it to the age of 71 years. What more could I ask for?

If tobacco smoke is “air pollution”, then is the smoke from a campfire or a barbecue also “air pollution”? Are perfumes and fragrances “air pollution”? Is the smell of frying bacon or baking bread also “air pollution”? Is any odour at all “air pollution”? Is the sea spray in the air on beaches “air pollution”? Is the sand blowing in the air along those beaches “air pollution”? Is the smell of gasoline at gas stations “air pollution”? Are nitrogen and carbon dioxide different forms of “air pollution” in the atmosphere? Are the oceans “polluted” with sodium chloride?

Is music a form of “air pollution”? Is loud or obscene conversation a form of “air pollution”? Is any sort of conversation “air pollution”?

And doesn’t calling something “pollution” really just mean that it’s something you personally don’t like. “I would have enjoyed my coffee a lot more if it hadn’t been polluted with milk.”

“Pollution” is a loaded word. To say that something is “polluted” is to say that it has been debauched or corrupted or poisoned. Why not just say “mixed” or “blended”? Coffee comes mixed with milk and sugar, not “polluted” with milk and sugar.

A lot of people seem to look at the world around them and see it as a poisoned world. But I think that that says more about them than it does about the world. For the “poison” they see is more in their imagination than it is in the world. If you can’t stand smoky bars filled with the babble of conversation and the tinkle of music playing on the juke box and the snatch of scent and the clink of glasses, that says much more about you than it does about those places. It says you’re some sort of killjoy. Or some sort of snowflake. Or something even worse.

Anyway, Professor Kaufman of UW School of Medicine is really just telling everyone that he hasn’t a clue what causes chronic lung disease. And that’s actually what I thought all along. I think that most of these self-styled experts haven’t really got a clue about anything that they’re supposed to possess expertise about. It’s not just medicine. It’s everything else too. It would be really refreshing if a few of these people would say something like: “Well, I’ve been studying this stuff all my life, but to be quite honest, I have no more of a clue today about it then I did when I started.” But no, they never say that. Or they hardly ever say that. Instead they usually pretend to know something. And as soon as anyone pretends to know something, somebody will believe them. Because we all wish that somebody somewhere knew something about it. We want to believe that, even if we ourselves don’t understand what’s going on, somebody else does. It’s too awful to contemplate the possibility that nobody knows.

The Endarkenment

I keep saying that Tobacco Control tells lies.  From Mandy Vincent and Roobeedoo today, this story in the Guardian:

I saw an advert looking for models for tobacco warnings. It was paid, so I applied and made the shortlist. I asked what I needed to bring to wear and they sent me a one-line email saying: “This is what we need you to do,” and attached a picture of a naked guy curled up in a ball. They told me I would get €100.

The other people on the shoot were from the photographer’s agency. They were after all sorts of setups: “Woman looking sad in wheelchair”, “Man blowing smoke in a baby’s face”, “Dead man in a morgue”. I went into a weird studio and they told me to take all my clothes off. I lay down on a makeshift bed while two guys on ladders stood over me, photographing. They were directing me from up there, asking me to look more anguished, or more angry, or asking me to rearrange myself because my testicles were in shot. But they got the shot. It wasn’t until the cigarette packets came out that I discovered it would be a warning about impotence.

The next shoot was even weirder. This time, I was offered €200 and asked to come to a disused hospital on the outskirts of Berlin. They painted my face grey, put me in a body bag and took me to the morgue. Being in a body bag really freaked me out, especially when the photographer zipped the bag up fully and whispered: “This is for Dresden,” before unzipping me. He had a dark sense of humour. That’s the warning advert where I’m playing the dead guy.

We’re in a propaganda war. And propaganda is really just lies that you want to get people to believe. The antismokers in Tobacco Control want to get people to believe that smoking kills.

I knew that the pictures on tobacco products were fraudulent, and very often weren’t even of smokers. I wasn’t aware that the whole thing was such a complete fraud, quite such an elaborate lie.

I should have known better. Tobacco Control is always lying. Everything they say is a lie. And one day it’s going to come back and smack them in the face. One day people will just stop believing them. They’ll stop believing everything they say.

It’s not just tobacco they’re telling lies about. They’re telling lies about everything, all the time. These days you can’t believe anyone. You can’t trust anyone.

I sometimes wonder whether WW2 ever ended. Or whether it ended, but the propaganda war that accompanied it never ended, but was just redirected in new directions. Shortly after the end of WW2, the propaganda machine was redirected into a war on smoking. And they used all the tricks of the trade to get people to stop smoking. And when they were quite successful, they redirected the propaganda machine into a war on alcohol and sugar and butter. And now they’re running a propaganda war against carbon dioxide as well. Using children like Greta Thunberg.

And most people seem to believe the propaganda. And so now there are millions of people spooked about tobacco and alcohol and sugar and fat and carbon dioxide. But there are also more and more people who have simply stopped believing any of it.

Take Jeffrey Epstein. What happened? Does anyone believe the stories in the mainstream media? Does anyone really know what happened? Does anyone really have any way of knowing what really happened? I don’t know what happened, and furthermore I doubt I’ll ever know. That’s how it is these days. It starts with a mystery, and then it gets even more mysterious, and you end up knowing less and less rather than more and more. You never get enlightened: you only ever become more and more endarkened.

We’re living in an Age of Endarkenment. Instead of lights being turned on, they’re being turned off. Instead of learning more and more about everything, we’re learning less and less.

De-normalising Normality

Rush Limbaugh wasn’t actually talking about smoking, but he may as well have been.

Now, to me, the dangerous thing here is… I mean, these people exist and they’ve always existed, but they have this arrogance of supremacy and contempt about them that they automatically conclude that they are the ones who are normal and that they are the ones who are in the majority and that they have the right, not just to disagree with these people, but to go out and destroy them, to impugn them.

I think if you had to boil down the thing that worries me most about the country, it’s not a specific thing. It is what is becoming and what has happened to these formally universally accepted characteristics of “normal,” and now those characteristics have become the definitions of a threat, the definitions of a problem. They have become the characteristics that the left wants to destroy. Now, I understand why.

It’s because the left knows it’s not normal, and nobody wants to run around thinking they’re abnormal. Nobody wants to think that. So these people are weaponizing and attempting to redefine what’s normal with them and their beliefs and behaviors as the definitions, which, okay. But what do they do with people who then no longer qualify? Then there’s out and out punishment! They want to punish these people who always have been the definition of normal because they never were normal in these people’s minds, and it’s time that they essentially be wiped out.

I grew up in a world of smoking, and for me smokers have always been the definition of normal. But antismokers want to punish smokers, because they never saw smoking as normal. Antismokers want to wipe out smokers and smoking.

They’ve quite deliberately set out to de-normalise smoking. That’s the word they use themselves: de-normalise. Which means that it used to be normal, and they’re trying to make it no longer normal. They’re trying to de-normalise normality.

In fact, it’s not just smoking that they’re trying to de-normalise. They’re trying to de-normalise more or less everything. They’re trying to de-normalise Christianity. And to de-normalise patriotism. And to de-normalise heterosexuality. And to de-normalise language (or at least de-normalise words like “he” and “she”). And de-normalise meat-eating. And so on.

I think the idea is that if you can de-normalise pretty much everything, then you can define a new set of norms. And then you’ve redefine normality from being one thing to being something else. And if you can re-define “yours” to be “mine”, then what was once yours will become mine.

The ultimate aim is political. To achieve some sort of socialist utopia, you de-normalise Capitalism, and you normalise Communism.

But up at back of all this is a belief that norms actually can be redefined. Which is like believing that lies can become truths, if repeated enough times. And that’s how Tobacco Control works. It works by telling lies about tobacco. It tells lie after lie after lie.

The lying has never been more obvious than when it came to vaping. As soon as e-cigarettes appeared, the antismokers instantly started telling lies about them too. Because that’s all that the antismokers in Tobacco Control have always been doing: telling lies.

And that’s all that Public Health does: tell lies. They tell lies not just about tobacco, but also about alcohol, and sugar, and fat, and meat, and salt. And it’s all lies. It’s non-stop, wall-to-wall lies.

Something Winston Churchill once said:

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

And Tobacco Control and Public Health are fighting a war. And so they tell lies. They tell whole brigades and battalions and armies of lies.

But in their case there has ceased to be any truth that is being protected.  All they have is a pack of lies. There’s nothing else.

But I think the truth eventually defeats the lies. Three equations: 1+1 = 1,  1+1 = 2,  1+1 = 3. One of them is true, and the other two are lies. I think I know which one is true, and it will always be true, regardless of how often the lies are repeated.

And I think it’s the same with normality. Normality is also a kind of truth. And normality wins out in the end. In fact, it won out at the beginning, because that’s why it was normality to start with.

Great Migrations

Interesting:

What we’re looking at is actually the biggest migration since the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. There will be tens of millions—scores of millions—of Africans trying to get into Europe. I don’t know how the Europeans will keep them out.

Africa is the only part of the world where the population is still growing and growing rapidly. Africa south of the Sahara was about 6% of the world’s population in the ’50s, now it’s about 16%. But by the turn of the century, it’s going to be 45%.

Why is Africa the only place in the world where the population is still growing? Because it’s largely undeveloped. But that might change soon, because the Chinese are arriving in large numbers.

We’re seeing a veritable recolonization of Africa. Each time I visit Africa, there are more Chinese. It doesn’t matter which country; they’re everywhere…

It’s supposed to be official Chinese policy to migrate about 300 million Chinese to Africa in the years to come. They’re employed in building roads, railroads, ports, mines, and other infrastructure… The Chinese are lending billions to African governments.

If the Chinese develop Africa, its current population explosion will end as living standards rise, and so will the current migration to Europe. And that will probably happen well before the end of this century.

But why was there a barbarian invasion of the Roman empire in about 400 AD? What made millions of Vandals, Goths, and Huns come bursting into Europe from the northeast?

My guess is: climate change. 400 AD was the end of the Roman Warm Period which lasted from 250 BC to 400 AD.  And at the end of this period the Rhine and the Danube – the northern borders of the Roman empire – seem to have frozen over quite frequently. e.g. 378 AD and 405 AD. And when that happened the Vandals, Goths, and Huns could just walk across the rivers. The emperor Marcus Aurelius even fought a battle on the frozen Danube in 173 AD.  And if these major European rivers were freezing over, most likely the Vistula and the Dnieper and the Don and the Volga were freezing over too. So the Vandals, Goths, and Huns were most likely refugees from freezing lands where crops were failing and animals dying. They had no choice but to migrate, and to migrate south. And that’s exactly what they did when they burst into the Roman empire. They spread south into France and Spain and Italy as well.

If this migration stopped, it was probably because these Dark Ages only lasted for a few hundred years, and were followed by the Medieval Warm Period, which was another period of European economic growth and stability.

But the barbarian invasion of the Roman empire wasn’t the only mass migration around this time. There was also a mass movement of Norsemen, also heading south, circa 850 AD. The Norsemen invaded Britain, and also France (Normandy).

And another mass migration came from Arabia with the rise of Islam after the death of Mohammed in 632 AD. Within a century the whole of north Africa had been conquered, and much of Spain. The Moors were only halted at the battle of Tours in 732 AD.

After the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the climate of Europe (and perhaps the whole world) got steadily colder. And by 1640 we were in the depths of the Little Ice Age. And that’s around the time that another vast migration began. For in 1492 the Spanish and Portuguese started to occupy the New World, closely followed by the French, the Dutch, and the British. When the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Britain to Massachusetts in 1620, they were the first of millions of Europeans who migrated to not just the New World, but pretty much everywhere else as well (Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand). This was perhaps the greatest explosion of peoples across the world in the entirety of human history. And it started just when Europe was deep in the Little Ice Age, and it saw millions of Europeans heading south, just like the invading Vandals, Goths, and Huns a thousand years before them.

The period 1400 to 1600 AD was also the time, during the Ming dynasty, when the Great Wall of China was built in stone to stop mass incursions from the north. The Chinese had been building this wall on and off for about 2000 years. So it rather looks like they were facing a new invasion from the north just when Europeans were sailing south to escape freezing Europe. And one of these invaders was none other than the Mongolian Genghis Khan circa 1200 AD, during another cold snap.

This isn’t how history is usually taught. For the most part climate plays no part in history, which is usually said to be driven by completely different factors. But I think that a strong case can be made that a great many mass movements of peoples were driven by climate change, and almost always by climate cooling. For it seems that in warm periods like the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period and our current Warm Period are times when civilisations rise and technological innovations multiply. And it’s conversely in Cold Periods when civilisations fall. The fall of the Western Roman empire in 476 AD took place during one of these cold periods. And the fall of the Eastern Roman empire in 1453 also took place at the beginning of another cold spell.

Seen this way, we should welcome our current global warming, and encourage more of it. What we should worry about is another period of cooling. The start of a new ice age would be a disaster for Canadians, Americans, Europeans, and Russians, and it would start another powerful southern migration, far stronger than the current northern migration from Africa.

Asthma and Ice Ages

Chris Snowdon has an interesting graph showing how asthma deaths have been rising since the 2007 smoking ban:

It reminds me that, about 100 years ago, doctors used to prescribe smoking as a treatment for asthma. Can anyone even begin to imagine that happening now?

I used to have an asthmatic friend in Devon, around the time of the smoking ban. She told me that when she was young, and suffered from a lot of asthma attacks, she longed to be able to smoke. And when I knew her she was a regular smoker, and we used to meet up in pubs and play pool and talk and listen to music on the juke box. I never saw her have a single asthma attack.

After the smoking ban that bit of social life ended, of course, and I saw less and less of her. Her attitude to the smoking ban was fatalistic. She said that there was nothing that could be done about it. She thought it was pointless to write to our MP, like I had done.

She wasn’t very well off, and so she may well now be someone who has been forced to stop smoking given the draconian taxation of tobacco. And so this morning I’ve been wondering whether, in the absence of tobacco, she’s been getting asthma attacks again. In fact, I’m wondering if she might even be one of the casualties in the graph above. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

…

I’ve been running my glaciation model some more. I now have 18 geological columns at 5º intervals from the Earth’s equator to its North Pole. I started with a 12,000 year long interglacial without any snow, and then I started dropping 25 m of snow every 275 years at every latitude.

During the interglacial, the Earth’s surface gradually cooled (blue), but when the snow started falling, and a thick layer of insulating snow built up, the surface rocks began to heat up (red). Unsurprisingly the snow got deepest (about 3 km) at the Pole on the left side, shallowest at the equator on the right.

After the surface rocks had heated up enough, they gradually melted the snow, first at the equator, and finally the pole. Although in this case the snow didn’t completely melt, and about 100 m of it still remained after 750,000 years.

This residual layer of snow kept the surface rocks warm. But if the snow had melted the surface rocks would have quickly got cold. (“Quickly”, as in “within 10,000 years”) .

Climate scientists don’t seem to build models like my simple dynamic heat flow model, in which I calculate the daily conductive heat flows up and down the 18 geological columns, and can do 750,000 years of simple calculations in a few hours on my £130 PC computer. My model can apply daily solar heat gains at the surface of the Earth at any latitude, and recently I’ve got it to do Milankovitch cycles as well. I can even simulate global atmospheric warming by changing the emissivity of the air in the atmosphere.

Climate scientists’ supercomputer models seem to only run for 100 years at most, so even if they’re doing the math the same way I am, they’d never see the surface rock warming that I do, because surface rocks take many thousands of years to warm up and cool down – and anyway their models seem to be almost exclusively atmospheric models. And that’s why they find ice ages so mysterious. Unable to see the subglacial surface rock warming, they can’t explain ice ages, so they’ve supposed that CO2-induced global warming (and cooling) must be far stronger than it actually is. And so now we have a global warming panic, and Greta Thunberg.

…

Finally, great pity that nobody paid any attention to Ann Coulter.

Will Climate Change Soon Dominate Politics?

I’m intrigued about the way that global warming seems to be becoming a huge political issue. It just seems to get bigger and bigger. For example:

AOC’s Chief-Of-Staff Admits Green New Deal About Implementing Socialism – ‘It wasn’t originally a climate thing at all’ – It’s a ‘change-the-entire-economy thing’

It’s become a climate thing? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the latest Democrat superstar. Is it goodbye socialism, hello climate? Does climate change now matter more than economics? It’s beginning to look like it does. Another example:

‘Climate Change Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism’ – Identity politics invades climate change debate

Isn’t it more that climate change is invading identity politics? It’s beginning to look like people’s identity will be defined not by their sex or colour or religion, but whether they’re global warming alarmists or sceptics (or “denialists”).

How about this:

Eat insects? ‘Meat patch’ to stop cravings? New UN report takes aim at meat eating – UN seeks expansion of climate agenda to regulate what you eat…

Christiana Figueres, the former United Nations official responsible for the 2015 Paris climate agreement, has a startling vision for restaurants of the future: Anyone who wants a steak should be banished.

“How about restaurants in 10-15 years start treating carnivores the same way that smokers are treated?” Figueres suggested during a recent conference. “If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant.”

The idea is that cattle and sheep add methane to the atmosphere, and methane is a greenhouse gas.

For the past 18 months I’ve been thinking a lot about the Earth’s climate, as I’ve been slowly developing my Theory of Ice Ages. And at the same time I’ve had the feeling that it was all a bit of an obscure and unimportant topic. But perhaps it isn’t? Perhaps climate change is going to become more and more pressing and urgent a concern?

I had the feeling, 10 years back, with Climategate, that the global warming alarmists had suffered a catastrophic defeat, and they’d all be forgotten soon. But I’m now beginning to think that maybe they’ve got over that catastrophe, and are getting stronger again.

And there are good reasons why climate change should become a primary – and even the primary – topic of political debate. After all, what does it matter how societies and economies are organised if we’re all going to be toast in a century or so? Building Socialism or Communism can wait, but climate change won’t wait. If you really, really believe that the whole world is going to get a lot hotter, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are going to melt, raising sea levels by 70 metres, that’s something that is far more important than Socialism or Communism or Democracy or the US Constitution. And maybe that’s why global warming alarmism seems to be growing rather than receding.

But my own views on climate change have been changing pretty radically. For I’ve become more concerned whether our current warm interglacial period may be coming to an end, just like all the interglacials that preceded it, and will usher in a new ice age which will be far worse than a 70 metre rise in sea levels.

In fact, I’ve now come to believe that global warming is a Good Thing, if it’ll help stave off an impending ice age, by raising global air temperatures by a degree or two. In fact, I worry whether we’ve had enough global warming to prevent it. Maybe we need more?Maybe we should burn more coal and oil and wood? I certainly think that, but for the Industrial Revolution that began a few centuries ago, we would now be in imminent danger of a renewed ice age. And I also think that, if the world becomes “carbon-free” anytime soon, it could trigger a new ice age, as the Earth’s atmosphere cools down. And if climate change alarmism really is gathering new strength, and becoming politically mainstream, we could well see strenuous attempts to become “carbon-free”.

Anyway, my feeling today is that global warming alarmism isn’t going to go away: it’s going to get stronger and stronger. It’s going to completely dominate politics, driving all the old political controversies of yesteryear into oblivion.

40 Years of Hurt

Simon Clark has been promoting a new report: 40 Years of Hurt: The hyper-regulation of smokers 1979-2019.

“What began decades ago as a legitimate public health campaign to educate people about the risks of smoking has become a moral crusade that threatens our culture of tolerance and diversity.”

Just the title prompted a lot of questions in me. Why 40? Why not 12? Or 100?

And why is this a legitimate public health campaign? And does it educate people about the risks of smoking? Does anyone really know what the risks of smoking really are?

I share the sense of hurt, of course. I wake up every day thinking about the smoking ban. But that sense of hurt – or of oppression or exclusion – really only began on 1 July 2007, the day the UK public smoking ban came into force. As far as I am concerned, Britain hasn’t been the same place since. Everything changed that day. Absolutely everything.

So, for me personally, the hurt only goes back 12 years. Before that I didn’t feel hurt. I remember noticing when smoking got banned in some carriages on trains. But back then the bans were piecemeal, slowly creeping. I suppose they were worried about generating a backlash. But by 1 July 2007, they’d gained much more confidence. There was nothing piecemeal about the ban that came into force that day: it extended to every pub and restaurant and cafe and club in the entirety of the UK. Bang! And all and everywhere on the very same day.

These days I see it as a war, and a war that is essentially no different than WW1 or WW2. It’s just a war that’s not (yet) being fought with guns and bombs. And in wars people attempt to impose their will on other people. And the antismokers want to make people stop smoking. They want to make everyone stop smoking, everywhere. And not just everywhere in Britain, but everywhere in the world.

I don’t know how many smokers there are in the world, but if 20% of the population of the world are smokers, that’s about 1.5 billion people that the antismokers in Tobacco Control intend to impose their will on.

Will they succeed? I very much doubt it. There is no single ideology that has ever completely captured the whole world, and the antismoking ideology of Tobacco Control is unlikely to be the first. Because every ideology always generates its own opposition. Every force always and invariably produces its own counter-force.

The current intense War on Smoking is also really just one campaign in a war that has been going on a very long time. It’s a war that’s been going on for over 500 years, since the first tobacco plants arrived in Europe from the New World. For if some people instantly loved tobacco, then some people instantly hated it.

It’s probably true of everything, that – whatever it is – there will be some people that love it, and some people that hate it. And somehow or other – I really don’t quite know why – the smoke-haters have been multiplying in numbers over the past century or so, and becoming more and more powerful. And, conversely, smokers have been retreating before them as they have advanced.

But resistance is slowly mounting. And it’s slowly mounting everywhere in the world. That’s what always happens with resistance.  And because this is a global war on smoking, we are seeing the emergence of global resistance.

And because there are so many smokers under attack all over the world, there are bound to be global political consequences following on from this war on smoking. And many of these consequences will be surprising and unexpected consequences.

For in my own case, the war on smoking that is being waged against me has had the surprising consequence that I voted for Brexit. I voted for Brexit because the EU has emerged as being a close ally of Tobacco Control, urging – even requiring – member states to impose draconian smoking bans on their own peoples. There are all sorts of other reasons why I could have voted to leave the EU, but that happens to be the really compelling reason for me.

Equally, if I’m a Trump supporter, it’s not because I’m a great believer in the man, but instead because his principal opponent at the last election was Hillary Clinton, who happens to be a world-renowned antismoker. For me, Donald Trump is simply the enemy of my enemy. And I hope he really does Lock Her Up.

And that’s just me. All smokers everywhere will also be reacting to the intense war that has been launched on them, Is it really any wonder if so many countries are on the brink of civil war, with so many people under attack? Looking across the English channel to France, I can’t help but think that many of Yellow Vest protesters are actually Yellow Finger protesters, protesting against the virulently antismoking Emmanuel Macron.

And if mass shootings seem to be taking place with increased frequency in the USA, might that not be because millions of US smokers are also under a continual intense attack which is dividing communities, shattering friendships, setting people against each other. Is it entirely coincidental that the Dayton shooter fired on people smoking and drinking outside bars? He may as well have been working for Tobacco Control.

And is global warming alarmism completely unrelated to the war on smoking? Tobacco smoke contains carbon dioxide, and so antismokers are very likely to be as worried about global warming as they are about secondhand smoke, because they’re pretty much the exact same thing. So the battle lines are drawn up there as well.

People who are under intense attack may not fight back directly at their enemies. They may not have the means to do so. But they can often fight back indirectly. So if the EU wants to ban smoking throughout Europe, I can vote for Brexit. If Emmanuel Macron wants to get French people to stop smoking, I can join the Gilets Jaunes. If Hillary Clinton runs for President, I can vote for Donald Trump. And I think that a great many British and French and American smokers are doing exactly that. They may not tell anyone that this is what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. In fact, they may not even know themselves why they loathe Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron and Jeremy Corbyn, and everyone like them.  In such manner, and in countless other indirect ways, smokers can secretly fight back against their antismoking enemies.

It’s going to be a very, very long war. If it’s already been fought for the past 500 years, it will very likely last for another 500 years.