Why Are They All Such Control Freaks?

It never ends. From the comments:

64% of adults support smoking being banned in all cars

This isn’t about health. This is about control. These people want to control other people. The clue is in the second word in the name: Tobacco Control.

Why are these people all such complete control freaks? Why are they always on the watch for what other people are doing? Why can’t they just mind their own business?

What does it matter if 64% of adults want something? Someone should simply tell them that they can’t have it.

I was offered an invitation of some sort to The Battle Of Ideas. I didn’t go. I never go anywhere these days. But Simon Clark went, and recounted some of his experiences:

This year I was asked to take part in a session that asked the question, ‘How can we deal with problem lifestyles?’, to which the organisers added, ‘Whose responsibility is it to deal with people who smoke, drink or eat ‘too much’?’ and ‘Should the state step in?’

Why have the ways that other people live become “problem lifestyles”? What precisely is the problem? Why should it be anyone’s “responsibility” to “deal with it”? Why should the state step in? Is it any different if people smoke, drink and eat, than if they read books, hum tunes, or do crossword puzzles?

Anyway, the Independent yesterday published an article that, had it appeared 24 hours earlier, would have been worth mentioning in the meeting. Headlined ‘Alcohol consumption will soon follow smoking and meat-eating in becoming a social evil’, it argued that ‘The number of units people drink is declining and consuming less may soon become a badge of honour in the same way not smoking or not eating meat have become.’

Who decides what is and isn’t a “social evil”? Who decides what “new norms” there are to be? Has meat-eating become a social evil? Not for Jordan Peterson, it seems:

Peterson adopted an all-beef diet on the advice of his daughter, Mikhaila, who had been following a similar meat-based diet in what she claims was a successful attempt to treat her chronic auto-immune problems. Peterson père claims that the diet has worked for him as well.

How subversive can you get? I love the idea of an all-meat diet, purely as a counter to all the other diets that are around these days.

All of which reminds me of an idea I had way back in 2007, shortly after the introduction of the UK smoking ban. And it was that smokers should start wearing rings to which white tubes with red tips were attached (right). So when the police pull you over, you say: “No, officer, I’m not smoking. This is just a rather elaborate ring that I like wearing. I’ve got another one just like it on my other hand too. See?” The white tubes might be long or short, fat or thin. And they need not be white. They might also be torches, with LEDs in their tips, that light up when squeezed. “No, officer, this isn’t a cigarette: it’s a torch. I always like to have one handy.” Or, “No, officer, this isn’t a cigarette: it’s a food blender and coffee stirrer. It’s got a little propeller in the tip, that starts when you tap the end. Perfect for when there are no spoons available and you don’t want to dip your pinky in your coffee.”

Well, are you going to be thrown out of a restaurant for wearing a slightly unusual ring? At what point does a little tube stop looking like a cigarette, and start looking like a middle finger?

Why are all these people such control freaks? What is that impels them to “intervene” in other people’s lives. I suppose that if you’re in a bus doing 70 mph, with the driver slumped over the wheel, his hands hanging limply by the floor, you might feel the need to intervene, grab hold of the wheel, take control of the bus. Or is it that these people have come to realise that they’re living on a little spinning rock that’s revolving around a white hot star, and it’s all totally out of control, and has always been totally out of anyone’s control, and always will be.

Slowly Shifting Opinions

I ought to be interested in our upcoming General Election here in the UK, but I’m not really. I’ll be quite interested in the outcome of an election that has been described as People versus Parliament, but I just wish it would soon be over. Will the Parliament conform to the People, or will the People conform to the Parliament? My guess is that it will be more the former than the latter. I think that the British people have been becoming more conservative in recent years – a trend that seems to be almost global these days.

What is it that drives these gradual changes in public opinion? Some would say that it’s all driven by “opinion leaders” in the mainstream media. And in Britain I think this was probably true when we only had two or three TV channels, and five or six newspapers of note. But it seems to me that now, in the internet era, there are hundreds of opinions available, and thousands of rival would-be opinion leaders.

I suspect that what really drives opinion are the countless interactions that people have with each other, and it is this rather than anything else that makes for slow sea changes in outlook.

In Britain 70 years ago, there was a Conservative party that was the party of King and Empire and the established aristocratic social order. And there was an upstart Labour party that was populated by progressive socialists of one kind or other, dominated by trade unions. But over the ensuing 70 years both the Labour and Conservative parties gradually metamorphosed into quite different entities. With the loss of Empire, the old Conservative party began to disintegrate. And the old imperial class increasingly threw in its lot with the rising European state that was emerging across the English Channel. But at the same time, the decline of the trade unions resulted in the disintegration of the old Labour party. Tony Blair’s New Labour was in many ways a far more conservative party than Old Labour. And the New Conservative party was far more progressive than the old Conservative party. Conservative and Labour became more and more alike, quite possibly simply as a result of rubbing up against each other for 70 years, and gradually adopting each other’s ideas.

The result is that we now have a progressive political class that is a) wedded to Europe, b) antismoking, c) environmentally aware (or is it “woke”?). It was David Cameron who re-invented the Conservative party as almost a new Green party. And it was also Cameron who sanctioned gay marriage. How much more progressive can one get? David Cameron may as well have been a socialist.

But at the same time it would seem that the British people have been going in the opposite direction, and becoming gradually more conservative, and more traditional. The same seems to be happening everywhere else with the rise of “national populism.” It may simply be a reaction to being lectured about Europe and smoking and the environment and climate change and everything else. People have had enough of it all. They’ve stopped listening. They no longer want to know what Prince Charles thinks (did they ever?), or what David Attenborough thinks, or any of the rest of the Great and the Good.

The set of opinions that anyone holds is as much a marker of their social class as the set of clothes they wear. One is expected to have the right set of opinions just like one is expected to wear the right set of clothes, and the two are perhaps interchangeable. Both indicate that you are a member of some club. And in these clubs strong efforts are made to ensure conformity of both opinion and clothing. And in the most tight-knit clubs, the members are like individual bricks in a wall, holding each other in place, correcting even the slightest infraction of the accepted conventions.

But in Britain over the past 70 years, all these tight-knit clubs have been gradually coming apart. The walls have all come tumbling down. And into the cracks all sorts of strange new ideas have grown and flourished. Could any British Conservative Prime Minister of 60 or 70 years ago have entertained ideas as outlandish as Climate Change? It was probably quite literally unthinkable.

Nevertheless the slow currents of changing opinion throw up these sorts of surprises all the time. To many Americans Donald Trump seems like a throwback to a former dark age, not only in the opinions he holds, but also the clothes he wears, and the hairstyle he maintains. And all of it tells them that he’s not an American progressive of the kind they approve. He has all the wrong opinions. And yet many Americans share his opinions. They’re tired of being lectured all the time as well.

We’ll find out in a few weeks whether the British people are continuing to become more conservative while the British political class has been becoming more progressive. There could well be a conservative clean sweep. But I won’t be betting on it.

All Passes Away

I imagine that in a century or two, people will wonder what all the fuss was about today. Why were they so concerned about Brexit back then? Why were they worried about global warming? Why did they ban smoking? Why the fuss about Donald Trump? Didn’t they have better things to be concerned about?

After all, in 325 AD, the Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea.

Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, establishing uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.

What the heck was that all about? Didn’t they have some more important things to attend to – like the state of the roads in Bithynia , or piracy in the Mediterranean?

Constantine might have had similar questions, if presented with a list of things that were in dispute 1,700 years later. Would it have been possible to explain to him what people in 2019 were arguing about?

Of our present matters of dispute, global warming alarmism is the simplest one to explain. And it’s about the belief of some climate scientists that human emissions of carbon dioxide are acting to warm the Earth’s atmosphere, and could end up melting what ice remains on the surface of the planet, in places like Greenland and Antarctica, and covering the Earth with a 70 metre thick extra layer of water, and drowning every coastal city in the world.

In the matter of smoking bans, it’s almost equally simple. Smoking has been banned because of the belief of some doctors that tiny amounts of tobacco smoke in the air cause lung cancer (and any number of other diseases as well). And there’s not really much of a dispute about this, because almost everybody believes it, and those who don’t believe it are ignored.

Brexit? What’s that all about? That’s not so straightforward. But it boils down to whether you think Britain should be a self-governing country, or whether it should be a part of the European Union – which is a sort of new Roman empire of a kind that Constantine would have instantly recognised, seeing as he happened to be a Roman emperor.

And Donald Trump? What’s the fuss about there? Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone knows. There’s just something about Orange Man Bad that enrages some people. They think he is completely the wrong sort of guy to have been elected President of the United States. And in this respect Constantine would have completely understood this phenomenon, because there were probably any number of people back in 325 AD who thought that Constantine was the wrong kind of guy to be a Roman emperor.

So I think Constantine would have immediately understood what’s now called the Trump Derangement Syndrome, and he would have immediately understood what Brexit and the European Union were all about too. But I suspect he would have been puzzled about our modern aversion to smoke, because ancient Greece and Rome were very smoky places. There was smoke everywhere from open fires and ovens, and even from candles and oil lamps. The very idea of “smoke-free” would probably have struck him as wishful thinking.

And I think Constantine would have been completely baffled by carbon dioxide. He would have never heard of the modern idea that all materials are made up of atoms tied together to form molecules, with carbon dioxide being carbon atoms joined to oxygen atoms. Constantine would have regarded carbon dioxide as a fictional substance. And carbon and oxygen as well.

But would Constantine have been able to explain to us moderns the difference between God the Son and God the Father (and God the Holy Ghost)? And would he have been able to explain why it was important to get the date of Easter right? He probably would, because he had just convened a council to debate precisely these matters. Is there anyone who can explain these things today? I don’t think there is.

But perhaps a Freudian psychologist might attempt to explain the Trinity by referencing the modern trinity of Superego, Ego, and Id? But can anyone explain what Superego, Ego, and Id are? Probably not. Or probably every psychologist  has his own idea of what they are. Which is why Jungian and Adlerian psychologists split from Freudian psychologists. And also why new Christian sects were forever splitting away from the Christian orthodoxy that Constantine was trying to get settled at Nicaea, which was a sort of IPCC climate conference of its time.

It all passes away after a while. One day nobody will give two hoots about the EU, smoking bans, carbon dioxide, or Donald Trump. It’ll be past history. And nobody will have the first clue what the fuss was all about. They’ll be far more worried about Artificial Intelligence, and whether their vacuum cleaners are trying to kill them.

New Religions

Three minutes and twenty seconds into their conversation, James Delingpole asked 100 year old James Lovelock:

“How do I get to live to 100 and beyond, and be as hale as you are?”

And James Lovelock replied:

“The most important thing is not to smoke.”

And my heart sank.

It emerged over the next few minutes that James Lovelock had smoked cigarettes (Players Navy Cut) for 40 years, until he had a heart attack, for which he blamed smoking.  He’d grown up in a smokers’ household “full of cigarette smoke, you could hardly see the other wall.”

Whence the certainty about the perils of smoking? One possible explanation:

In 1948, Lovelock received a PhD degree in medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He spent the next two decades working at London’s National Institute for Medical Research.

Born in 1919, Lovelock would have been about 30 years old in 1948, and so must have continued to smoke for another 10 years, surrounded by people like Richard Doll and his army of antismoking doctors. I’d thought that Lovelock was a physicist or something, but he wasn’t at all. It would appear that he was an antismoking doctor, just like Richard Doll and George Godber. He’s straight out of the heart of the beast.

So it would seem that his Gaia Hypothesis was really an idea from within medicine, not physics or chemistry as I had imagined.

Thinking about it later, I wondered how Lovelock knew with such apparent certainty that his longevity was the result of not smoking, and that smoking had caused his heart attack. The likely answer is that Lovelock has no idea whatsoever what his longevity is due to, nor any idea what caused his heart attack. For could we not equally ascribe Lovelock’s longevity not so much to the fact that he stopped smoking after 40 years, but instead to the fact that he had smoked for 40 years, and grew up in a smoke-filled household? Why not? It’s as good an explanation as any.

James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is very arguably one of the fundamental ideas underlying the modern Green movement.

First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding,

But James Lovelock is no Greenie. In fact he sees the likes of Extinction Rebellion as a new religion. How odd that one of the founding fathers of this new religion is not a believer in it.

He’s also the founding father of the Ozone Hole CFC scare, after he invented a device to measure their concentration in the atmosphere. I wonder if he’s not a believer in that religion either.

A little later in their conversation James Delingpole declared that he liked marijuana. “So do we,” said Lovelock, “But we take it medicinally (CBD).”

So James Lovelock and James Delingpole are both pot-heads! Delingpole presents an image of himself as a pipe smoker, but it would seem that it’s not tobacco that he smokes in his pipe. And was it that in the 1960s Lovelock stopped smoking tobacco, and started smoking pot, just like many other people? And given that pot smokers very often have an almost religious belief in the medicinal powers of pot, I’m surprised that Lovelock didn’t ascribe his longevity to having smoked pot for 50 years.

Lovelock also emerged as being strongly in favour of nuclear power, which he regarded as harmless, but having been demonised by the oil and coal and gas industries.

Strangest of all, perhaps, it also emerged hat Lovelock had been building bombs during the time of the Spanish civil war – something he refused to elaborate on.

I was disappointed to learn that Lovelock was an antismoker, But given the medical environment in which he worked for 20 years, it was probably mandatory in those circles to be antismoking. It was, after all, the In Thing back then. And, much like the Gaia hypothesis, it also went on to become a new religion.

Pent Up Energy

Taking Liberties:

Death of another civilised, smoker-friendly nation

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2019

As of today, Austria is the latest country to ban smoking in restaurants, cafes and bars.

The writing has been on the wall since the country’s coalition government fell apart earlier this year in the wake of a scandal involving a senior member of the far right Freedom Party.

Amazing that Austria managed to hold out so long. The antismokers must be cock-a-hoop.

But given the determination of the EU to stamp out smoking everywhere in Europe, it was probably more or less inevitable. And it’s probably more or less inevitable that the same will happen with those parts of Germany where smoking is still tolerated.

How did they manage to hold out for so long? The answer is almost certainly one word: Hitler. The antismoking Hitler was born in Austria, and ruled Germany, and many people there have never forgotten it, and can never forget it. And the arrival of smoking bans in Austria is the return of Nazism. Smokers are Europe’s new Jews. It’s their turn to be reviled and excluded, refused jobs and medicine, and maybe even eventually murdered en masse. History is repeating itself.

I was quoting David Hockney just yesterday:

“Hitler was the biggest anti-smoker of them all, you couldn’t smoke in his presence – which is why I notice in Germany there are quite a lot of smokers because they can’t demonise smokers there.”

A great many Austrians woke up yesterday to find that they had become members an excluded subclass. They’ll be having the exact same experience that I had on 1 July 2007, when the UK came into force, of bafflement and rage and resignation and disbelief. To some of them it might even seem like another Anschluss: they’ve just joined the pan-European antismoking club.

Back in 1938, it didn’t last very long. Seven years later Austria had regained its independence. And the same is very likely to happen this time too. For now we are seeing many millions of people experiencing the same persecution, almost everywhere in Europe. There are millions and millions of baffled, enraged, resigned, disbelieving smokers all over Europe.

I wrote yesterday:

Nobody else will suggest this, but it seems to me very likely that it’s not “national populism” that’s now tearing Europe apart: it’s disenchanted smokers.

This won agreement from Jax in a comment under that post:

But there’s a thing about anger, as any decent psychologist will tell you: if it can’t be expressed in a direct way towards its real cause, then it almost inevitably comes out elsewhere. So, yes, I think that much of the present unrest and upheaval going on, certainly in the West, is actually driven to a great degree by angry smokers, even if many – possibly most – of those smokers don’t even themselves recognise it. Look at where all the biggest “surprise” upheavals have occurred – in the USA with the election of the wildcard Donald Trump; in the UK with the unexpected two-fingered Brexit referendum result; in France with the ongoing and sustained gilet jaunes protests; in Spain with the Catalans’ continued demands for independence even in the face of open State violence; and elsewhere around Europe with the increasing popularity of all the so-called “nationalist” parties so clearly feared by the EU.

I completely agree with Jax. The real anger that smokers feel is going to be expressed in one way or another. I think anger is just like Potential Energy in physics, that gets converted into Kinetic Energy. In something like a spring, the system acquires the maximum of potential energy when compressed, and the maximum of kinetic energy when released. Potential energy is pent-up energy. And so is anger. In fact energy and anger may well be etymologically very closely related. And Europe has just reached something like its maximum of pent-up potential energy, pent-up anger, as a few million Austrians join the ranks of the excluded and persecuted.

There’s an explosion coming, an overdue release of pent-up anger. It’s already started in Britain and France and Spain. It’s going to consume the whole of Europe. I expect to see riots in Austria soon. I expect to see riots everywhere. They won’t be riots against smoking bans: they’ll be riots against almost everything but smoking bans. Europe is about to be torn apart. In fact, Europe is already beginning to be torn apart.

Do Smokers Need Organising?

Business Insider 2017:

In her new book, “What Happened” — officially out next Tuesday — Hillary Clinton wrote that her biggest regret from the campaign trail last year was saying she would put coal miners out of business.

Saying that ensured that she’d lose the votes of miners and people in mining-related industries. Nobody had to organise miners against her. All they had to do is hear what she said.

What she probably isn’t aware of is that, as perhaps America’s principal antismoker, she’d already lost the votes of America’s smokers, who comprise a far larger fraction of the electorate than miners.

…there is a ban on all kinds of smoking in the White House. At First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s orders, all ashtrays have been removed, and at her insistence, they are never to be placed on tables for official dinners. Apparently, her target was cigarettes, yet the effect of her decision also covers cigars.

Nobody had to organise smokers to not vote for her. As soon as they found out what she was, they were never going to. Most of them wouldn’t have told anybody. They wouldn’t have written letters to newspapers about it.

Hillary Clinton was unelectable because she hadn’t just trodden on miners, but she’d also trodden on smokers. She’d probably trodden on any number of other people as well. And they’d all decided not to vote for her.

With rumours that, if Hillary doesn’t run, Michael Bloomberg might step into the 2020 presidential race, it’s worth pointing out that he’s the guy who, as mayor of New York City, more or less single-handedly got smoking banned there. And America’s smokers will have noticed that. And, if he runs, they won’t be voting for him either. So Michael Bloomberg is probably as unelectable as Hillary Clinton.

David Hockney in the Guardian, November 2016:

“…I must admit I wasn’t that keen on Hillary because when the Clintons were in the White House they banned smoking immediately.

“I said, well that would welcome Hitler a lot more than Churchill. Churchill smoked 10 cigars a day for 70 years and lived to be 90, so I don’t know what they’re going on about. And Hitler was the biggest anti-smoker of them all, you couldn’t smoke in his presence – which is why I notice in Germany there are quite a lot of smokers because they can’t demonise smokers there.”

It’s an idiosyncratic reason for a political leaning, but Hockney has been smoking since 1954 and takes delight at thumbing his nose at the demonisation of his habit.

I don’t think there’s anything idiosyncratic or peculiar about this. I think David Hockney was simply telling it how it was (and still is) for smokers. Or it’s no more idiosyncratic than American miners not voting for Hillary because she was anti-coal.

As I’ve remarked several times, I used to be pro-EU until in 2010 I found out that the EU was pushing for smoking bans everywhere in Europe. More recently I’ve learned that it had been since at least 1989. Overnight I swung from being pro-EU to anti-EU. And I also started to believe that the EU was a doomed political project, because it had made itself far too many enemies among the smokers of Europe. How can a political project possibly succeed if it demonises about a third of its population? It’s a politically crazy thing to do.

Nobody else will suggest this, but it seems to me very likely that it’s not “national populism” that’s now tearing Europe apart: it’s disenchanted smokers. Nobody had to organise them to do that. They were just going to turn against the EU as soon as they found out that it was helping to lead the war on smoking, just like America’s miners were going to turn their back on Hillary Clinton as soon as they found out that she intended to do them out of their jobs.

Recently I heard Nigel Farage say that he became a eurosceptic back in about 1990 because he “didn’t like the way things were going in the EU.” That’s very non-specific. There could have been any number of ways things were going that he didn’t like. But I wonder… might it have been because he found out back then about the EU’s plans to rid Europe of smokers, 15 years before I did? Might it have been that Nigel Farage felt the exact same revulsion that I did for the EU’s antismoking plans, 15 years before me? I wonder how many converts he made to UKIP simply by pointing out to blissfully ignorant smokers (like me) what the EU was planning for them?

Do smokers need organising? Perhaps they don’t. All they need is to be kept informed, and they’ll do whatever is necessary, and do it automatically, without bidding. There’s maybe no more need for smokers to get organised than there was for America’s miners to be organised against Hillary Clinton, because they were organised the moment she opened her mouth and revealed her plans for them. There was no need for demonstrations or marches or sit-ins because there was no need to draw attention to what she’d said, no need for “consciousness-raising”, because everybody already knew all they needed to know.

And the apparent disorganisation of smokers, and their consequent invisibility, may also be an asset. Because their enemies are unaware of their intentions. Their enemies are paying no attention to them whatsoever. And so they’ll find out far too late that there’s an army at their gate, one that they never saw coming.

The Malthusian Illusion

Thomas Malthus still exerts great influence.

Malthus was a demographer before he was ever considered an economist. He first came to prominence for his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population. In it, he raised the question of how population growth related to the economy. He affirmed that there were many events, good and bad, that affected the economy in ways no one had ever deliberated upon before. The main point of his essay was that population multiplies geometrically (1,2,4,8) and food arithmetically (1,2,3,4); therefore, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance. Thus eventually, in the future, there wouldn’t be enough food for the whole of humanity to consume and people would starve.

An even simpler presentation of Malthus’ idea is: There’s only so much stuff (land, food, water, coal, oil, etc.), and once you start consuming it, you’re sooner or later going to run out of it.

This kind of thinking is what underpins the Green movement, and the quest for “sustainable” lifestyles. It’s why Greens want to limit populations, and even reduce them to “sustainable” levels, that can be maintained indefinitely into the future. It’s why they think we must stop burning coal and oil and gas, because if we don’t it will eventually run out. And it’s why we must limit human populations by birth control and abortion. And it’s why we must close down our consumer societies, because they’re “greedily” consuming too much stuff.

I was thinking this morning that there were probably Malthusians back in the Stone Age, and when the first flint tools started to appear they were warning that if this carried on we’d eventually run out of flintstones.

But they never ran out of rocks in the Stone Age. What actually happened was that they figured out how to make much better tools using copper and bronze, and later iron and steel. There was continual technological innovation.

But the Malthusian mindset always assumes the fixity of the natural world, and the fixity of technology. In their way of seeing, nothing ever changes. There’s an exact constant amount of flint, land, water, air, coal, oil, gas, iron, copper, etc. and we should minimise our consumption of all of them. In fact, we should go back to before the Stone Age, when we started depleting precious resources.

But there’s plenty of land in the world. For a start, 70% of the Earth is covered in water. And most (57%) of the land is covered in uninhabitable deserts and mountains:

The total land surface area of Earth is about 57,308,738 square miles, of which about 33% is desert and about 24% is mountainous.

In fact it’s probably a lot more than 57% uninhabitable, if you add in bogs and marshes,, and river flood plains, and remote islands, all of which are difficult to inhabit. And if we ever do actually run out of land, we can always start building colonies in space. In fact we almost certainly will one day. Seen that way, there’s actually an infinite amount of “land”. It’s just that it gets harder and harder to make new land.

And do populations always grow geometrically? Not really. These days we’ve got very effective means of birth control. And we’ve always had abortion and infanticide. And in addition there are human social institutions like marriage which regulate human reproduction. Furthermore, the more prosperous people become, the lower their birthrates fall, which is why places like Europe have dwindling populations, and the authorities feel it necessary to ship in labour from elsewhere. It seems entirely plausible that, if the whole world became as prosperous as Europe and America now is, the world population would actually start to fall.

Perhaps the worst thing about our new Malthusians is that they invariably want to make plans for how to deal with whatever Malthusian crisis they see ahead, and make laws to enforce these plans. So we are now all being forced by lever-tightening legal constraints to reduce coal and oil and gas consumption (because otherwise we’ll run out), and stop burning anything at all (to prevent us all boiling), and there are armies of self-styled “experts” telling us what we should eat and drink and smoke. And it’s all driven by the dread that we are going to run out of coal and oil and gas, or suffer a surfeit of carbon dioxide. We’re being driven by fear.

The entire mentality needs to be called into question. We don’t really know what the future will bring, and so it’s impossible to plan for it. What we need to do is to respond flexibly to events as they unfold. And rather than having central planning by an army of experts (most of whom haven’t a clue what they’re talking about), we should allow ordinary people to make whatever choices they need to make, whether it’s for more children or less, more consumption or less, in response to the circumstances in which they find themselves. We need to replace top-down control with bottom-up control.

And maybe with the rise of “national populism” these days we’re beginning to see the demise of planned and regulated societies in favour of allowing people to do what they choose to do, rather than let other people make their choices for them.

Boris and Nigel

So we’re going to have an election after all. I didn’t think we’d get one. I wonder what changed Jeremy Corbyn’s mind? Perhaps it was that John Bercow wasn’t sitting in the Speaker’s chair in Parliament yesterday.

I’ve been watching Nigel Farage on LBC quite a lot recently. He’s been predicting an early election, and he was right about that. Here he is talking yesterday:

Most of the show is given over to taking phone calls from listeners. And that’s one of the things that’s remarkable about Nigel Farage: he listens to people. He seems to listen all the time. He says that when he goes to his local supermarket to buy something, people stop and talk to him. He’s always talking to people, and usually listening. He must have talked to millions of people over his political lifetime. And that’s why he has such a good grasp of how the British people think. Is there another politician like him? I can’t think of one.

I read somewhere recently that he was the most significant politician in Britain today. And I think that’s true. If Britain voted for Brexit, it’s thanks to Nigel. I don’t think it would have happened otherwise. And I don’t think we’d be having an election in a month or so if it weren’t for him. And yet he’s not even an MP. He hasn’t even got a knighthood or anything either. He’s just an MEP in the European parliament.

And it’s not as if he’s a great speaker. He speaks very simply. He makes his points clearly. Everybody can understand him.

What a contrast with Boris Johnson. our classically educated Prime Minister. Boris can (and does) quote Latin texts. He can almost certainly quote Greek texts as well. He’s written a lot of books ranging over many subjects. And he’s a journalist. And he’s now the most recognisable politician in Britain. He’s got his own unique Boris brand. He’s witty and erudite. I can’t think of any Prime Minister in the past century like him, except Winston Churchill.

But does Boris listen to people like Nigel does? I doubt it. I think he’s more interested in his own opinions than other people’s.

Nigel has said that he wants an alliance with Boris at the next election. He says that the Conservatives would win a large majority in an alliance. Without an alliance, the Brexiter vote is likely to be split between the Conservative party and the Brexit party.

But Boris doesn’t seem interested. He seems to be looking for a purely Conservative party victory. Perhaps he doesn’t like the idea of Nigel in his cabinet.

I’ve no idea what will happen in the election. But I think that the British people have been getting angrier and angrier, and they’re likely vote out the current inmates of Parliament en masse.  But I could be wrong. In fact, I probably am.

One last thought. Nigel sticks up for smokers. I saw him speak at Stony Stratford. And he went back several times to ensure that no street smoking ban was introduced there. But while Boris doesn’t smoke, he once sent me (or his parliamentary secretary sent me) a large cigar. So I suspect that Boris isn’t an antismoker. And having two of the principal actors in modern British politics not being bullying progressives might be a good sign. Maybe one or other of them might do something for Britain’s persecuted smokers that previous Conservatives have not?

The Empire of the European Union

It’s going to be hard to avoid discussing Brexit and the EU for the next few days, until on 31 October Brexit doesn’t happen, and we remain in the EU until 31 January, after which time the can will be kicked even further down the road.

I used to be in favour of the EU when it was the EEC: the European Economic Community. It seemed perfectly reasonable to wish to join this local community organisation, much in the way that it would be perfectly sensible to join a local golf club. What was there to be lost?

As it turned out, there was everything to be lost. For no sooner had it acquired sufficient numbers of members, the EEC metamorphosed into the EU, the European Union, with its own parliament, its own supreme court, its own laws, and soon now its own army. It was as if a lot of people had joined a golf club, only to find that the golf club had become the principal power in the land, rather as if St Andrews golf club had taken over running the adjacent town of St Andrews, and in fact the whole of Scotland, and all its laws were being decided by golfers.

The EU gradually took on the scale of a superstate, and indeed an empire. And a great many Eurocrats are quite candid in calling it an “empire.” Would the British people have voted in 1975 to join a new Austro-Hungarian Empire, if that had been the question in the referendum? I very much doubt they would have. And in fact I very much doubt any other country would have voted to join either. And what we’re seeing now is the growing revolt of all the peoples of Europe against this new empire which they’ve found themselves locked inside.

And there’s nothing new about large European empires. The first, and the most long-lasting, was of course the Roman Empire, but since then there have been numerous attempts (by Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler) to construct a new European empire. And the European Union is just the latest attempt. And instead of expanding by force of arms, it has grown through a long succession of treaties.

What the Europhiles in the EU really want is to create a new power bloc that can rival the USA and Russia and China (and maybe India and Brazil as well). These are people who think in terms of the world, and of power blocs within it. They want to be sitting at the top table when it comes to making global decisions. And the only way to make it to the top table (like Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in 1945) is to join the biggest power bloc you possibly can.

At Yalta, Churchill was only invited to the top table because he represented the power bloc of the British Empire. Ten years later he would not have been invited, because the British Empire had disintegrated, with most of its former colonies gaining their independence. And that was when the newly-unemployed imperialists in Britain started looking round for a new empire to join, and found one gradually emerging right on their doorstep in Europe.

Imperialists are concerned with power – military power -, and with nothing else whatsoever. The bigger the power bloc that you can construct, the larger the army you can raise. And that is why the belated creation of an EU army is now top of the agenda in Brussels. It is, after all, ultimately what empires are all about.

But all these empires first rise and then fall. And in the case of the EU empire, which expanded very rapidly over a few decades in the second half of the 20th century, signs of decay and disintegration are already evident everywhere. And this decay is almost entirely internal, and grows out of the inevitable rivalry between the imperial power centre and the imperial periphery. In Rome, this was the rivalry between Rome and its colonies. In the USA it’s the rivalry between Washington and the surrounding US states. And in the EU it’s between Brussels and the nation states of the EU. No doubt it’s the same with Beijing and the rest of China, or Delhi and the rest of India.

So the EU today is a nascent but already disintegrating new European empire. Brexit is one sign of that disintegration. And the rise of “national populist” parties all over Europe is another sign of it. Sooner or later other countries than Britain will want to gain independence from the EU. And if there is to be a new European war it will almost certainly feature the newly-formed EU army invading states that seek to secede from the Union – in the exact same way that the Confederate states tried to secede from the American Union. There’ll be tanks on the streets of Rome with little circles of stars painted on them should Italy attempt to secede from the European Union. And maybe they’ll be on the streets of London as well.

Stop The Scaremongering

Leaving Brexit aside.

Huffington Post:

Sir David Attenborough has lauded teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg, praising her “passion” and “insight”.

The veteran broadcaster is currently gearing up to unveil his new show Seven Worlds, One Planet, which explores the differences in the seven continents, and has also been very vocal about climate change, previously singing the praises of Greta’s efforts to raise awareness around the subject.

What does it mean to “raise awareness” about climate change? It would seem to mean drawing attention to it. And in particular it means drawing attention to one possible kind of climate change: global warming.

I’m also trying to “raise awareness” about climate change, but not in the way that Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg have been: I’ve been building my own simple climate simulation model, and I hope thereby to raise my own awareness and improve my own understanding of how the Earth’s climate works.

I’ve already done something like this with my orbital simulation model, which allows me to model the orbits of asteroids. So when I read something like this, I can if I want investigate the reports more deeply:

NASA’s asteroid tracking system has detected four space rocks that are currently hurtling toward Earth. According to the space agency, one of the approaching asteroids is almost as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza…

CNEOS noted that 2019 UT1 will approach Earth on Oct. 28 at 11:02 a.m. EDT. During this time, the asteroid will be about 0.01215 astronomical units or roughly 1.1 million miles away…

The agency predicted that 2019 UE1 will zip past the planet on Oct. 28 at 12:51 p.m. EDT from a distance of 0.02191 astronomical units or about 2 million miles away.

Since the Moon is about a quarter of a million miles away, they may as well have headlines which express alarm about that truly colossal body which is far, far closer to the Earth than either 2019 UT1  or 2019 UE1, and far closer all the time. I can occasionally even see the damn thing out of my window at night, without using a giant telescope.

But how many people know how far away the Moon is? I wouldn’t be surprised if hardly anybody does. It’s not something I was taught in school.

The media are scare-mongering about asteroids. And they’re also scare-mongering about climate change. And they’re scaremongering about Brexit. And, of course, they’re also scaremongering about tobacco smoke. And with people being scared by one thing after another, it’s really no surprise if many people believe the scare stories. And it’s equally no surprise if equally many people don’t.

And the result is a society which is polarised in multiple different ways. If X is some cause for alarm, then there will be a large body of X-believers and an equally large body of X-deniers. This is true of the global warming, of Brexit, of tobacco smoke, and of flu (I came across a report today that there’s a nasty flu virus in Australia), and of more or less everything else.

And X-believers and X-deniers usually can’t debate with each other, because neither side really knows any more about X than the other. Their convictions really boil down to either believing what experts tell them, or disbelieving what experts tell them. They either place their trust in experts, or they don’t (and since I’m building my own climate model, I’m clearly someone who doesn’t have much faith in experts).

In the case where X = tobacco smoke alarmism, we’re now at the point where not only can X-believers and X-deniers no longer debate the matter rationally, but also that they can’t be in the same room together, or even in the same building together. How long before climate change alarmists and climate change deniers can’t be in the same room together? How long before the two sides are fighting on the streets with each other? How long before there’s open civil war?

This constant scaremongering ( aka “raising awareness” ) is fracturing society more and more. It’s just like lighting a fire under a pot of water: at some point it will come to the boil.

Perhaps that’s what the scaremongers want? I occasionally wonder if it’s part of some fiendish political plot. But when an entire society has been brought to the boil, it’s not going to be anything that anyone will be able to control: it’ll be complete chaos. There will be no winners when the pot boils over, and the lid comes off.

So I think that there’ll soon come calls to Stop All The Scaremongering, as more and more people in positions of authority realise that the situation is becoming very dangerous. And then there will appear a new breed of experts who will talk down the dangers of everything, rather than talk them up. Asteroids, climate change, Brexit, Trump, tobacco smoke, flu: nothing to worry about.

No sign of any of them yet.