Distrust and Disbelief

Anti-vax protest placard in Daily Mail:
Regardless of Covid-19, as a general injunction for our times, this might even be good advice.

I think the Covid scare is overblown (even though I suspect it’s what I came down with back in January), and a vaccine will probably be pretty ineffective against a rapidly-mutating virus. Legiron is a microbiologist, so he probably knows best:

So, the Big Scary Story of the day is that Covid-19 will be present forever. (Trigger warning: It’s the Daily Mail, so keep your blood pressure pills handy if you open the link).

Of course it will. SARS, MERS, bird flu, swine flu, all the rest are still here. And there will never be a successful vaccine against any of them.

Piers Corbyn:

“I’m not going to wear a mask at all… it’s complete madness”

ZeroHedge:

Modern man is now entering realms of dystopia only imagined before by the likes of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, with more than a hint of Philip K. Dick. What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life.

It used just to be tobacco smoke that was regarded as a health threat, and it was only smokers who were expelled from society. Now it’s Covid, and everybody has been expelled. We’re all in the same boat now.

And perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps that will mean that a lot more people will begin to see how we’re all being railroaded with exaggerated health threats of one kind or other, as if “health” is the only thing that matters, and everything else is unimportant.

 

The Megalith Builders

For the past 2 or 3 years I’ve been taking an interest in ice ages. In part this has been because it’s seemed to me that our current Holocene warm  interglacial is more likely to come to an end soon with a return of ice age conditions, than it is to bring the kind of global warming that many people are so worried about. I’ve even built my own simple global climate model: many years ago as an architectural student I used to build electronic heat flow models.The ice sheets in my model melt at their base, and are replenished by snow on top, waxing and waning in depth and extent.. And this is what is actually happening with the ice sheets on both Greenland and Antarctica. Temperatures beneath the ice rise above freezing point, and streams of water flow from under them.

And the odd thing about this is that in a glaciated world the only places that humans could survive would be in the warren of tunnels beneath the ice. These regions would have been warm, and with a plentiful supply of fresh water. I’ve begun to wonder if there might have been enough sunlight filtering down through transparent ice to even enable plants to be grown in hothouse conditions. But because the ice is always melting, the ice sheets are always slowly descending by a few inches every decade, and so I wondered if the ice needed to be held up to prevent the tunnels beneath them being crushed.

And this led on to the novel idea that megalithic structures – stone circles and avenues and dolmens and menhirs – found all over the world may have had exactly this purpose: to hold up hundreds of metres of overlying ice. That was why they were so big: they had to carry hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ice. This warm underworld would have had chambers with barrel vaults and domes of ice, dimly lit by sunlight filtering down from above, supported by vast stone or ice pillars, with underfloor heating maintaining air at a more or less constant temperature. They would have been like transparent Roman thermae. They would also have been like mediaeval cathedrals or modern steel and glass buildings. To build them rocks would have been slid across the surface of the ice, and then lowered down to the base of the ice sheet through vertical shafts,

Subglacial Stonehenge access shaft

This is a quite different method of construction than those imagined today, with thousands of toiling slaves hauling rocks up slopes as they were built upwards. The stones would have been slid across the ice from high mountain quarries many miles away, and lowered on ropes. Relatively few people would have been needed. In the case of Stonehenge, the bluestones come from the Preseli mountains 140 km away in Wales, and the sarsen stones come from the nearby Marlborough downs. In both cases the quarries from which the rocks were transported were several hundred metres above the Stonehenge site. Stonehenge would not have been a temple or an astronomical observatory, but instead an access portal to the underworld beneath on Salisbury plain,  much like a London underground station (and with much the same purpose), roughly equidistant from the present south coast of England and the rivers Thames and Severn.

There are some problems with this idea, of course. For a start it is not believed that Stonehenge was buried beneath an ice sheet during the last ice age. Furthermore it is believed that Stonehenge was built only 5000 years or so ago, not over 12,000 years ago during the last ice age. But the extent of glaciation in Britain is not known with exactitude: evidence of glaciation is usually found in the form of moraines or drumlins made up of rocks transported by the slow-moving ice sheets, and deposited on the land surface below when the ice melted. But this would only seem to have happened where the ice was very deep: modern snowfalls, even those that are deep and long-lasting – do not leave such evidence of their presence. An ice sheet only a few hundred metres deep may have left little or no evidence of its existence, particularly if it had lain motionless on a flat plain like Salisbury plain. And if Stonehenge had been constructed by lowering its stones through an ice sheet, there would have been no abundant flora or fauna  initially present to allow carbon dating. It would only have been after the ice had melted that plants and animals and modern humans would have gained access to the site: the subglacial underworld would have been swept away in a flood as the ice melted, leaving barely a trace. Stonehnge radiocarbon dating may produce relatively recent dates simply because Stonehenge only emerged from the ice relatively recently.

I’ve never encountered an explanation anything like this for the purpose and construction of the megalithic structures around the world. It relies upon a number of suppositions, the untruth of any of which would serve to negate it, Firstly that the world had much more extensive ice sheets than is presently supposed. Secondly that there were in many places warm environmental conditions beneath the ice. Thirdly that humans were able to live in some of these places, accessing them either by the rivers that flowed out from under the ice sheets, or by vertical  shafts through the ice as just described. Fourthly that they were entirely swept away by a global flood at the end of the last ice age, after which humans had to adapt to a completely new environment,

It’s a completely different picture of history. And it’s one which is at odds with the current consensus. But it’s nevertheless a perfectly rational hypothesis. It simply supposes far more extensive glaciation during the last ice age than is presently believed. It does not suppose that the civilisation that built the megaliths was highly advanced: it was a stone age culture that built using stone and ropes and ox-drawn sleds : no aliens or flying machines required.

There’s more that could be added. Was Roman architecture a reflection of a far more ancient ice architecture? Were doric and ionic and corinthian column capitals a recollection of slowly melting ice columns? Were the “clashing rocks” of Homer’s Odyssey icebergs? Was mummification a substitute for the older practice of deep-freezing the dead?

I doubt if this idea will ever catch on, somehow.

I suspect it’s a bit too far out.

Strange Times

It’s all rather surreal.

Tucker Carlson:

WHO director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “The Covid-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change.”

What the hell has Covid-19 got to do with climate change? Nothing, obviously.

They’re all interchangeable. Covid-19. Climate change. Smoking bans. Brexit. Trump. Greta.

Greta Thunberg via RdM:

Infectious diseases expert and University of Edinburgh professor Mark Woolhouse:

“Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease,”

…as seen elsewhere

At Least 13 Killed In Peru Nightclub Stampede Triggered By Police ‘Social Distancing’ Raid

Also Joe L has created a page on the protective effect of smoking against Covid-19. I’ve uploaded this, and will add a link to it in my References section. Further suggestions for it are welcome.

Scares and Counter-Scares

James Delingpole:

Unless you live somewhere enlightened like Sweden, you’ll have had personal experience of this authoritarian lunacy – compulsory masks, extended quarantines, and so on. To anyone familiar with the nature of the pandemic it seems as if the entire global political and administrative class has lost its head.

But the question is: why?

Why are politicians and civil servants overreacting in this way? And why are so many people actually applauding as more and more of their freedoms are curtailed and their economies are destroyed in the name of health and safety?

My view is that the climate change scare has a lot to do with it. For nearly three decades — it started with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit — the West, especially, has been relentlessly propagandised into believing that the end of the world is imminent and that urgent, expensive and disruptive action must be taken to prevent it.

The Coronavirus scare has only been under way for about 8 months, while the climate change scare has been up and running for about 30 years. But the War on Tobacco has been going for at least 70 years, if not a good deal longer, and has an even greater claim to being the foundational scare underlying all the others.

All of them entail relentless propaganda directed against a largely invisible threat – the common cold virus, carbon dioxide, or tobacco smoke . All of them entail ever-mounting authoritarian lunacy of one kind or other. In the UK, it arguably began with…

the Children’s Act of 1908. The act prohibited the sale of tobacco products to youths less than sixteen years of age…

And there’s a lot of money to be made from these scare campaigns. In the case of tobacco, via the Master Settlement Agreement:

The states settled their Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry for recovery of their tobacco-related health-care costs.[1]:25 In exchange, the companies agreed to curtail or cease certain tobacco marketing practices, as well as to pay, in perpetuity, various annual payments to the states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. The money also funds a new anti-smoking advocacy group, called the Truth Initiative, that is responsible for such campaigns as Truth and maintains a public archive of documents resulting from the cases. (my added emphasis)

The playbook is the same. First establish and promote the existence of an invisible health threat of one kind or other. Then monetise the threat by imposing taxes on those deemed responsible (fossil fuel industry, tobacco industry). Finally, ensure that the threat never goes away:

Advisor To British Government Warns Coronavirus “Might Be With Us Forever”

Each new scare adds a new burden of taxation on the population. Each new scare also adds new restrictions on people’s behaviour. And each new scare acts to push the economy into recession, and even depression. In the case of the Coronavirus,

Congressional leaders ,,, are in the early stages of drafting a fifth mammoth aid bill to stave off a total collapse of the U.S. economy while infusing cash in health efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic.

With the Coronavirus scare, the economic impact has been intensified because it has been added on top of pre-existing scares (the global warming scare and the tobacco scare, and most likely several other scares as well), all of which push the economy towards recession.

Where does it end? With scare-mongering unchecked, it can only end in economic collapse, now visible in the empty streets of New York City:

Once the economy crashes, the flow of money into the parasitic scare rackets dries up, and the scare-mongers go broke as well. This includes the mainstream media, who have been among the principal scare-mongers. It must also include the scare-mongering Public Health industry, and the scare-mongering WHO. It will probably include the supine tobacco companies that signed up to the Master Settlement Agreement.

But in any economy there is always a demand for the products on sale in it: food, fuel, shelter. But there isn’t any corresponding demand for scares, which always need to be manufactured by scare-mongers. So the post-crash world will likely be free of scares. It will anyway be scary enough in itself, with mass unemployment and poverty. With nobody actively pushing them, the Coronavirus scare and the Global Warming scare and the Tobacco scare will all fade away. A new optimism will grow up in their place. After the worst of it, things will only get better.

Of course, in time the cycle will repeat. It always does. What will be the next big scare? My own guess is that the Global Warming scare will be replaced by the Ice Age counter-scare, particularly since an economic crash will see a large reduction in the human CO2 emissions that are driving the current Global Warming scare. But with luck it’ll be a few decades before the climate alarmists to flip from warming to cooling alarmism. Although it’s already started:

To The Horror Of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here

We may also expect that the current Obesity scare will be replaced by an emaciation or anorexia counter-scare. And, who knows, the current Tobacco scare will be replaced by a counter-scare as all the benefits of tobacco begin to be recognised in a tobacco-free world (not least of which is the protective effect of tobacco against Coronavirus).

A Bit Of Fun

Asked about QAnon a couple of days back, Donald Trump had an interesting response:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday offered encouragement to proponents of QAnon, a viral conspiracy theory that has gained a widespread following among people who believe the president is secretly battling a criminal band of sex traffickers, and suggested that its proponents were patriots upset with unrest in Democratic cities.

“I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” Mr. Trump said during a White House news conference ostensibly about the coronavirus. “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”

When told by a reporter about the central premise of the QAnon theory — a belief that Mr. Trump is saving the world from a satanic cult made up of pedophiles and cannibals connected to Democratic Party figures, so-called deep-state actors and Hollywood celebrities — Mr. Trump did not question the validity of the movement or the truth of those claims.

Instead, he offered his help.

“Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” the president said lightly, responding to a reporter who asked if he could support that theory. “If I can help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”

Mr. Trump’s cavalier response was a remarkable public expression of support for conspiracy theorists who have operated in the darkest corners of the internet and have at times been charged with domestic terrorism and planned kidnapping.

Is QAnon a conspiracy theory?

In my understanding, QAnon – or more exactly Q – is someone working with Donald Trump in the White House, dropping enigmatic clues on 4chan about what Trump was planning to do. Q also dropped “proofs” of his proximity to Trump, by posting seconds before or seconds after Trump’s tweets.

I took quite a lot of interest in Q when I first heard of him, because it seemed like a new and interesting way of communicating. But I got bored when Q’s predictions seldom seemed to come true: nobody was ever indicted. People wondered why the MSM didn’t ask Trump about Q directly. It seems that they now have done so at last.

In my read of Q, it’s not really that “Mr. Trump is saving the world from a satanic cult made up of pedophiles and cannibals” or that Q is advocating “domestic terrorism and planned kidnapping.” What’s interesting is his apparent close proximity to Trump (some people think that Q actually is Trump).

Sample recent Q post:

Q !!Hs1Jq13jV6 ID: 04cbbc No.10351242       4622
Aug 19 2020 21:14:09 (EST) NEW

Ask yourself a very simple question –
Why is everything re: ‘Q’ being censored, banned, and attacked?
When do you expend ammunition [resources]?
Q

The answer to the second question is “when you’re over the target”. And the answer to the first question follows from the second: Q is censored, banned, and attacked when he targets Trump’s enemies.

The best thing Trump’s enemies could do would be to simply ignore Q. But they don’t. And this draws more attention to him. If this is a conspiracy theory, it’s because the MSM themselves conspire to keep Q alive.

I think Q is really just a bit of fun in an otherwise funless world.

Why Worry?

Hot on the heels of the news from Simon Clark that ASH is having its government funding slashed is the news that Public Health England is going to be abolished.

Public Health England – goodbye and good riddance

It seems to have been a very bad week for Tobacco Control. And probably for the reason I suggested in my last post: the emergence of Covid-19 as the UK’s prime health threat.

But in at least once sense nothing has changed at all: it’s still all about health.

Why are some people so obsessed with health?

Until a few months ago I was blessed with perfect health, and never thought about it much. And so was everyone else I knew. The modern obsession with health seems to have been a new development. Where has it come from? If you read Plato and Aristotle, and in fact any philosopher, none of them seems to worry much about health. Yet they lived in far unhealthier times than ours, when there were no vaccines against any disease, and no cures either.  Why is it that in one of the healthiest times in history that so many people now seem to worry about little else?

One possible explanation is that only healthy people will ever worry about health. It’s only when you’ve got something that you can worry about losing it.

The same applies with Climate Change. It’s only when you’ve got a nice, balanced climate that you’re likely to start worrying about losing it. It’s the same people who worry about their own health who will also worry about the health of planet Earth. It’s the same worry writ large.

Yet even though my health is no longer perfect, I still don’t worry about health. My heart is no longer working quite as well as it did for the past 72 years of my life. But is that very surprising? I’ve grown old, and people die when they get old. Nobody escapes. And I won’t either. So why worry about it?

So I carry on smoking and drinking as much as I ever did. And I also keep on eating “unhealthy food”, like hamburgers, and fish and chips.

Why stop now?

And anyway I don’t believe that what anyone eats or drinks or smokes has very much effect on how long they live. I’m not a believer in lifestyle medicine.

And also I think – heretical thought – that all lives must end. I think that if a life has a beginning, it must also have an end. If there’s a bookend on one end of a bookshelf, there must also be one at the other end. It’s those bookends that frame the life recounted in the books between.

And I’ve had a good life. In fact I’ve had a magic life. I didn’t get sent off to fight for years in a trench in Flanders in 1914. And I didn’t die in the Plague Year of 1665. Nor during the Black Death of 1347. Nor during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. I’ve been lucky. So why should I complain? Be glad of what you have.

The health-obsessed healthists want to live forever, but I don’t. They’re like those ancient Egyptians who hoped that they would live unending lives in some afterlife. But I don’t want an afterlife. I’m just grateful for the beautiful life I’ve already lived.

…

 

 

A New Wolf

Taking Liberties:

ASH campaign grant slashed from £350,000 to £70,000

This looks like a large (and long-overdue) cut in funding for ASH.

But perhaps it just reflects the fact that there’s a new kid in town: the coronavirus pandemic. And this newcomer is now demanding funds that in the past would have gone to well-established antismoking, anti-alcohol, anti-fast-food, and global warming lobbyists. The coronavirus pandemic is killing thousands of people right now, rather than after 50 years of smoking, or after 100 years of global warming. It’s a clear and present danger, and this is what has jumped it to the top of the list of threats.

And the coronavirus pandemic isn’t going to fade away any time soon. In fact it looks set to remain in play for years to come as a second, third, and fourth wave of it are expected to come rolling in. Most pandemics last a few months, but this one is set to become a permanent fixture.

And it has direct effects in ways that the old threats mostly never had. People are required to wear masks, isolate themselves, quarantine themselves, get vaccinated (when a vaccine eventually shows up), have their contacts traced, and more. Lots of businesses are going broke, unable to survive in the new coronavirus-dominated social environment.

So the old threats are struggling to stay relevant. And one way they are trying to do this is to hook themselves onto the new threat. So we have Quit For Covid (even though there is abundant evidence that smoking is protective against it).

It’s the same with global warming:

Exclusive poll: Amid COVID-19, Americans Don’t Care About Climate Change Anymore

Peter Hitchens:

In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of our existence.

It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren.

It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings.

It has ordered us to stay at home, scolded or fined us for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering our front gardens.

It has forced millions of us to stop working, sabotaged the educations – at school and university – of untold numbers of young people and has become our boss and paymaster in the biggest state takeover of life and work ever attempted by non-Communists.

Soon we will discover that it has also wrecked an already wobbly economy and separated untold numbers of us from jobs and businesses we thought were safe. Soon, too, it will also separate us from our savings, through punishing tax and savage inflation, to pay for the disaster it has caused.

Now it presumes to tell us what to wear. And what it wants us to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.

And this is the whole idea: it’s a new excuse to take control of everybody and everything.

But the new Covid-19 threat is just as much an exaggerated threat as all the other well-established threats. It’s treated like it was the Plague or the Black Death that will kill a quarter of the population, but it’s actually not much worse than a standard ‘flu epidemic.

But if there’s a silver lining to it, it may be that we are witnessing the demise of all the old threats: We could be at last saying goodbye to ASH, goodbye to the obesity epidemic, goodbye to climate change/global warming, and goodbye to all the rest of the threats with which we’ve been terrorised for the past 30 years and more.

Perhaps it’s simply that all these threats have sell-by dates, and need to be regularly replaced by new threats. If you’re going to cry wolf the whole time, you periodically have to replace the old wolf with a new wolf. And Covid-19 is the new wolf.

Life will be no better for smokers than it was before. It won’t just be that smokers will be exiled to the outside of pubs and restaurants: it’s that there won’t be any pubs or restaurants for them to sit outside, once people are forbidden from gathering together anywhere for any reason at all. We’re entering a new and completely atomised society, everyone confined to their own homes, and held together by nothing but a state-controlled internet.

A Separate Reality

A couple of days ago I watched Forest’s latest Zoom webinar on The Nanny State of the Nation. It featured two people from Public Health. Both wanted more nanny state.

I’ve been calling these kinds of people bullying bastards (and worse) for a long time.

Yet it was still a shock to discover, after hearing both of them speak for a few minutes, that this was exactly what they both were: bullying bastards.

In fact they were worse than mere bullying bastards. They were arrogant, power-hungry, bullying bastards.

And I didn’t really want to hear what they had to say because these people have dominated the media for decades, and they’re the only voices anyone hears.

The only person in the webinar who expressed anything like my own feelings was Pat Nurse, who said she was filled with burning anger at people taking away her freedom to run her own life in the way she wanted, smoking and all. She just wanted to be left alone.

But these people are never going to leave other people alone. They inhabit a separate universe, one that seems to be in profound and perpetual crisis. For a start, in their world there’s an “obesity epidemic”. There’s also even a “child obesity epidemic”.  It’s something that I’ve somehow never noticed. Where I live, hardly anybody ever strikes me as being obese. There’s a school near where I live, and I often see children walking home from school, and none of them have ever struck me as being remotely obese. When I was at school 60 years ago, none of my fellow pupils was obese (except one). But the public health zealots wear different spectacles than I do, and they have re-defined obesity to include carrying the slightest amount of body fat, which they can somehow immediately detect.

And if there’s an “obesity epidemic”, there is of course also a “smoking epidemic” and an “alcohol epidemic”.and a “carbon epidemic” in addition to our current “coronavirus epidemic” – every single one vastly exaggerated.

Why should anyone be bothered about how fat other people are? Smokers exhale smoke, and drinkers can get a bit noisy, and that might bother them. But what do fat people do? Nothing.

Objecting to fat people means objecting to what people are. It’s like objecting to tall people. Or thin people. Or red-headed people.

They disapprove. They disapprove of everything. They disapprove of the world as it is.

And it’s not just that they disapprove, but they want something done about it. And usually what they want are laws to prevent it.

These people are never of their own accord going to leave other people alone. They’re going to have to be stopped.

P.S. Simon Clark has sent me a link to Pat Nurse’s contribution. The whole video is here..

Complete Contempt

Something Rose drew attention to:

WHO LAUNCHES PARTNERSHIP WITH THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY TO HELP SMOKERS QUIT

Read that again:To help smokers quit.

They do it to help smokers quit. That’s their moral justification. They’re helping people. They’re helping people do something they want to do. What can be better than that?

This is how you sleep peacefully at night if you work in Tobacco Control: You tell yourself that you’re helping people.

Except it’s a lie. It’s a lie they’re telling themselves.

What they’re actually doing is forcing people to do something that they don’t want to do. If they wanted to do it, they’d have just done it. Lots of people have done it. Lots of people have given up smoking. It’s not that difficult if you want to do it. It’s only difficult if you don’t want to do it. And if people don’t quit smoking it’s really because they don’t want to quit smoking.

So how do you sleep at night if you’re trying to force people to do something they don’t want to do? Here’s where another reason is wheeled in: they don’t want to quit smoking because they’re addicts. Smokers don’t just enjoy smoking: they’re hooked on it. And so it’s not a free choice they’re making. Smokers are incapable of free choice. If they were capable of free choice they’d choose to quit smoking. But they’re incapable of this, so us folks in Tobacco Control have to intervene to overrule their non-functioning freedom of choice, and decide on their behalf. We know better than they do what’s good for them.

And once this new line of reasoning has been introduced, it becomes possible – in fact it becomes necessary – to ignore what smokers think or say. There’s no need to ask them (and they never do). We know what’s good for them. We have to make these stupid people’s choices for them.

And the same line of reasoning can be extended to anything else: they’re addicts, and we need to help them overcome their addiction. Alcohol is as addictive as tobacco. Fast food is as addictive as tobacco. Fossil fuels are as addictive as tobacco. And so on. It’s why they’re forever finding things which are “the new tobacco.” For example:

We must accept that junk food is the new tobacco

There are more and more things that we’re regarded as being addicted to. So there are more and more things that demand that somebody intervene to prevent it happening.

In the end, everyone has to have everything decided for them. It’s a complete tyranny. It’s also a global tyranny. Wherever smoking is banned, there tyranny has arrived.

Smokers are simply among the first people to experience this tyranny. But everyone else is gradually experiencing it as well. The current coronavirus pandemic is an example, with people being instructed to wear masks, or distance themselves from other people. They’re being told what to do. They can’t make their own choices. They’re expected to do what a class of self-appointed guardians tell them to do.

But it seems they’re increasingly not doing what they’re told to do..

In fact, they’re increasingly doing the opposite.

Huge crowds flock to UK beaches for third straight day as warnings ignored again

It’s one reason why the mainstream media – the source of authoritative opinion – are increasingly ignored. Fewer and fewer people are listening to them. Why should they, when nobody listens to them?

The experts and the pundits and the authorities are increasingly being ignored. And they’re being ignored because these experts and pundits and authorities themselves ignore  people that they think are incapable of making free choices (because in this case they’re addicted to beaches)

And this is inevitable. If people are ignored, they’ll ignore the people who are ignoring them. They’ll both ignore each other. So it’s only natural that self-appointed experts and pundits and authorities are increasingly being ignored. Not just with tobacco, but with everything else as well.

In the end the self-appointed experts and pundits and authorities will be swept away, as belief and trust in them vanishes, and nobody listens to them and nobody cares what happens to them. The WHO and the pharmaceutical companies and Public Health and Tobacco Control are all going to be swept away. They have complete contempt for us, and we have complete contempt for them.

They’ll Never Stop

Antismoking zealots are idealists trying to create an ideal world. It’s what all idealists everywhere are always trying to do. It’s what all progressives everywhere are always trying to do.

And that’s why they’ll never go away. They’ll just carry or trying and trying and trying to create a perfect world. And their perfect world is always a non-smoking, “smoke-free” world.

And that’s because smoking is itself evidence of the imperfection of the world. Smoking is something that people do when they’re stressed out in this far-from-perfect world. It’s a symptom of dis-ease, or at least unease. In times of trouble, people reach for cigarettes.

An idealistic friend of mine once said of our world: “This could be heaven.” And I disagreed. Because I don’t think this world can ever be heaven. The most we can hope for is a slight improvement here and there. And we have to recognise that some of our attempts to create a perfect world make it into a far worse world.

And this is exactly what smoking bans do. Smoking bans make the world a worse place, not a better place. They make it a worse place by forcing everyone to pretend that it’s a better place, a place where nobody needs a crutch. Smoking bans create a fraudulent world.

The battleship Bismarck was shot to pieces before it sank. The wreck on the sea floor was being filmed (48:40) using a remotely-operated vehicle:

“This is where Heinz Steig met a friend of his who had his legs blown off, where the spotlight is right now according to Heinz. The guy asked for a last cigarette, and Heinz gave it to him.”

The guy wanted a cigarette because his legs had been blown off. And his friend stopped and gave him one. It was a simple act of mercy.

But there’s no mercy among antismokers. An antismoking zealot would never have given that dying man a cigarette. He wouldn’t have had a cigarette on him anyway. Instead he would probably have given him a lecture about the perils of smoking.

We’re all aboard the Bismarck, one way or other. We’re all having our legs blown off. And so we all want cigarettes. But the bastard antismokers want us to pretend that we don’t. And they never stop their bullying and browbeating. They want us all to put on a happy face and pretend that we’re in a perfect world, not in some kind of hell.

And they’ll never stop, because they’ll never stop wanting this to be the perfect world it never can be. The real crime of smokers is to not go along with the pretence that it is.