Uncharted Waters

Rush Limbaugh a couple of days ago on the House impeachment inquiry:

Now, as I have emphasized a lot, what’s going on in the country right now with this particular story is not so much a partisan divide, left versus right, conservative versus liberal, Republican versus Democrat. It’s bigger than that. What we are in the middle of — and it does not ever get presented this way in the nation’s mainstream media — we are literally the middle of constitutional crisis.

We have the entirety, almost, of the Washington government, the elites, the establishment effectively attempting an end run around the Constitution. They’re trying to reverse the election results of 2016. They’re trying to nullify them without another election. This is the height of anti-constitutional or unconstitutionalism.

This is a brazen attempt by the people in Washington to tell the rest of the country, “What you think and how you vote really doesn’t matter in the end because we’re gonna have this country run the way we want to run it with us running it. And every election is just a little exercise making you think you matter, but you really don’t.” That’s what this is. Make no mistake about it. That’s what this is.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think that the exact same thing is happening in the UK. We’re in a constitutional crisis too. For while the Washington elites are trying to get rid of Donald Trump, the UK political elite is trying to reverse the EU referendum result. What they’re saying to the British people is:

“What you think and how you vote really doesn’t matter in the end because we’re gonna have this country run the way we want to run it with us running it. And every election is just a little exercise making you think you matter, but you really don’t.”

The Lib Dems are nothing if not honest: they simply want to revoke Article 50, and lock Britain inside Europe. But the Labour party seems to be not much different: they seem to want another referendum, and a different result, that will lock Britain inside Europe. The last thing either of them want is a General Election, letting the people decide, because, well, they want to run the country their way, damn the people.

They’ve already forced an unwilling Boris Johnson to go begging to Brussels for an extension past 31 October. And because Brussels wants to keep Britain inside the EU, Brussels will grant it. There is effectively no longer any British Government: Britain is being run directly by the EU, in concert with their allies in the UK Parliament and Supreme Court and House of Lords, which are all stuffed full of Remainers. They may as well all have EU flags flying above them. In fact, they probably do.

And with the next election on 5 May 2022, they’ve got 2½ years in which to tie Britain even more closely to the EU than it ever was before, as an EU colony with no vote in Brussels, and instead some EU-appointed satrap governing Britain (very likely John Bercow, who has after all proven his allegiance to the EU over and over again).

Will the British people sit patiently waiting to be allowed to finally vote on 5 May 2022? I doubt it. I think there’ll be huge demonstrations outside Parliament, with farm tractors dropping manure at its doors, and counter-protests by Antifa and Extinction Rebellion. Parliament’s business will come to a halt. EU-appointed Prime Minister John Bercow will have to flee Number 10, Downing Street. Where to? Brussels, of course. Britain’s Remainer Parliament will relocate to Brussels. And a hastily-raised EU army will be sent to pacify Britain.

And they’ll probably vastly increase immigration to Britain, with the assistance of the UN:

The UN Migration Agency/International Organization for Migration (IOM) has hailed the arrival of its “first” planeload of 154 Somali migrants to Germany, along with dozens of Syrians transported to Romania using European Union funds.

The IOM, which promotes mass migration as “inevitable, desirable, [and] necessary”, announced the arrival of “its first international charter flight” of 154 Somalis from Ethiopia to Germany — with  “An additional 220 refugees [to] depart for Germany on a second IOM-chartered flight in mid-November” — in an official press release.

I’m speculating, of course. But this is the way things are going right now. We’re in uncharted waters.

And much the same is going to happen in the USA, with the American people getting angrier and angrier at increasingly desperate attempts to subvert their last election.

Clean Sweep Coming

I suppose I ought to say something about Brexit, but I have nothing to say, except that I don’t think Britain will be leaving the EU on 31 October.

Here’s Raedwald‘s view:

This rogue parliament has placed itself in opposition to the people of Britain. We must clear it out, flush the odious feculence from our parliament. We demand an election NOW.

I agree that we need to flush out this parliament. I also agree that we need to have an election to do this. But I think that’s why we won’t get an election. It needs a large majority of MPs to vote for one, and given that a large majority of the same MPs are likely to be casualties in any such election, they’re hardly going to vote for one, are they? I think they’re going to hang onto their seats while they’ve still got them. I think they’re going to wait until 5 May 2022, the date of the next election under the Fixed Term Parliament Act.

I also think that, when they get the chance, the British people will deliver a terrible judgment upon all the MPs in this current parliament. I think the whole lot will be flushed out. Remainers, Leavers, Fence-sitters, the lot. It’ll be a clean sweep.

At least on 31 October, Speaker John Bercow will be stepping down as he announced he would a few weeks ago. But will he actually do so? I won’t be at all surprised if he reverses his decision, and announces that he’s going to carry on, if necessary until 5 May 2022.

Raedwald may be a smoker:

I am old enough to remember Franco ruling a Spain that had been politically and culturally shut off from democratic Europe since 1939. When tourism could be resisted no longer, from the early 1970s, the social impact was akin to dropping a lump of Sodium in water. The harsh, backward rule of a Catholic church complicit in fascism (unelected technocratic experts who thought they knew best what was good for people), a population fearful of the secret police and the night-time hammering at the door, could not withstand the bikini and the transistor radio. Democracy is contagious.

And in my heavy-smoking days when Spain sold cheap fags, the £60 cost of a day-return trip to Barcelona with easyjet was exactly equivalent to the saving of UK duty on just one single carton of cigarettes. The aircraft left Gatwick at about 7am and Barcelona at about 4pm, allowing for a leisurely lunch in the Ramblas and to be home in time for Eastenders. There were always little tents and roped off areas in the large expanse of flat, scrubby wasteland between the city and the airport; only later did I find that they were exhuming the remains of the victims of Franco’s death squads, clearing the ground for development. That made me value democracy even more.

If he was heavy-smoking back then, does that mean he’s light-smoking now? Or that he no longer smokes at all?

And was Franco a fascist? My impression has generally been that he was more of an ultra-conservative than a fascist. He was a traditionalist who simply wanted to keep Spain the way it had been. He wasn’t a fascist ideologue like Mussolini or Hitler. And he kept Spain out of WW2.

And if fascism is unelected technocratic experts who think they know best what is good for people, then isn’t modern Britain a fascist state? Fascism is also the exercise of state power, rather than the democratic will of the people, to achieve desired goals. By either definition, smoking bans are always fascistic in character. And with smoking bans nearly everywhere in the world, what we now have is global fascism.

Don’t Mention The Ban

A few days ago I got an email invitation from the Academy of Ideas. It said:

The Battle of Ideas is a weekend of lively debate and discussion on today’s most pressing political, cultural and artistic issues. The weekend will tackle tough contemporary questions through wide-ranging, thought-provoking and wonderfully argumentative debate.

An antidote to today’s climate of offence taking, the festival slogan is: FREE SPEECH ALLOWED.

A list of speakers/contributors was appended, some of whom I’d heard of (David Starkey, Brendan O’Neill, Frank Furedi), most of whom I hadn’t.

I won’t be attending. I won’t be attending because I won’t be welcome. I won’t be welcome on the train to London. And I won’t be welcome in any London hotel. And I won’t be welcome at the Barbican, where the event is being held on 2 – 3 November. And finally, when they all get talking about “today’s most pressing political, cultural and artistic issues”, the one pressing issue they won’t be talking about is smoking bans. Because none of these people ever do. It’s not a welcome subject of discussion. Smokers aren’t welcome anywhere.

It’s one reason why I lose interest in today’s public intellectuals: None of them ever talk about smoking bans.

But yesterday I came across a public intellectual who – gasp! – actually did mention smoking bans. He was Charles Murray, author of the Bell Curve and a number of other books, in conversation back in 2012 with Ronald Bailey:

RB: So they do know how the other half should live. Is that correct?
CM: Yeah, but they shouldn’t be able to make laws. By the way they’re not making laws saying that people have to work and people have to get married. They are talking about making laws about what they should eat, so they aren’t as fat as they are. They have all sorts of things – smoking, of course, being the obvious example – of going way beyond protecting people from secondhand smoke and instead sort of trying to enforce that dictum about how people ought to live their lives. There are all sorts of ways in which they are regulating the life out of all kinds of occupations, which prevents people from living their lives as they see fit. The people at the top are not doing a bad job of living their own lives. What I don’t want is to give them the power to decide how everybody else should. I would like them to say more openly that we think the way we’re behaving is a good way to live. Say it as a cultural statement of what they consider to be right and wrong. Don’t use the power of the state to try to enforce what your opinions are.

And Brendan O’Neill, one of the participants in the Battle of Ideas, in fact wrote in 2017 about smoking bans:

I hate the smoking ban. I hate what it has done to this nation. It has ripped out its soul. It has sterilised it, sanitised it, turned this country of the raucous public house and yellowed fingers wrapped lovingly around glistening, gold pints into one massive gastro hangout in which everything is clean and child-friendly and boring.

I’ve been reading stuff by Brendan O’Neill for years, on and off. I can’t remember him ever mentioning smoking bans before. But it seems that once in a blue moon he does mention them.

Why Can’t I Build Cancer Models?

Regular readers will know that for the past 18 months I’ve been constructing simulation models of heat flow in snow and ice on the surface of the Earth. For I had the idea 18 months ago that if a deep pile of snow lands on the surface of the Earth, it will act as a blanket to warm the surface, which will eventually melt the overlying snow. This idea underpinned an outline explanation for how ice ages worked: Lots of snow fell on the ground everywhere. The ground beneath the snow slowly warmed up. And after a few thousand years melted the snow. Whereupon the ground cooled down again, and when it was cold enough it got covered in snow again. And that was the ice age cycle of glacial and interglacial periods.

It all relates to the current rancorous debate about global warming. It’s my small contribution to that debate. My two bits.

But I wish I could have contributed something to the debate about smoking instead. Because my hot button issue is smoking bans, not global warming, or even Brexit. Why couldn’t I have thought about the epidemiological science of how Smoking Causes Lung Cancer? Why couldn’t I build a computer cancer model?

And that’s an interesting question. And my answer is that there is no science underpinning the idea that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer. There’s nothing there.

The same isn’t true of climate science. There’s lots and lots of real science in there. There are glaciologists and geologists and physicists busy studying ice sheets and rocks and air. They measure temperatures, weigh things, measure things, and calculate things. If I have a complaint about climate science, it’s not that I think that what they’re doing isn’t science, but rather that I don’t think their science has developed far enough for them to understand something as complex as the Earth’s climate.

I bought a book last year called Principles of Planetary Climate, by Raymond Pierrehumbert. I have no doubt whatsoever that he’s a climate scientist, because the book is chockablock full of equations and graphs. But the most interesting thing about the book is that Pierrehumbert is quite candid in saying that there are a lot of things that climate scientists don’t understand. The opening lines of chapter one – The Big Questions – are:

This chapter will survey a few of the major questions raised by observed features of present and past Earth and planetary climates. Some of these questions have been answered to one extent or other, but many remain largely unresolved.

They’ve got Big Questions? And they don’t know the answers to some of them? How much don’t they know? And these guys are telling us that Carbon Dioxide Causes Global Warming? They’re telling us that, but at the same time they’re telling us that there’s all sorts of stuff that they simply don’t understand? Can we please wait until these guys actually understand everything, or everything we really need to know, before doing something as drastic as decarbonising the economy.

But then science is always being driven by ignorance. In science, people are always trying to find the answers to questions they’ve got about things they don’t understand. It’s become a matter of such great urgency now that billions and billions of dollars are being thrown into climate science, in the desperate attempt to get to understand the Earth’s climate better. And they’re doing real science with thermometers and weighing machines and rulers. They’re measuring stuff.

So where are the billions of dollars in tobacco science research? Where are the papers showing exactly how tobacco smoke causes lung cancer? Or even the latest theory of how it does so?

The answer is that there are no dollars being piled into explaining how Smoking Causes Lung Cancer. And there never has been. There have been a few inconclusive studies with dogs. All the rest of the debate has been purely statistical in nature. For while they still have no idea how smoking causes lung cancer, they think that it probably causes lung cancer somehow or other. And they think there are other probable contributory causes, including age, HPV, radioactivity, genes, etc. The ‘proofs’ that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer are purely mathematical. The whole battle has been fought out in the field of statistics. There’s no science involved. Just mathematics.

Smoking has been banned because it’s believed that it probably causes cancer. In fact it’s been banned because there’s a small outside chance that it might just be a contributory cause of cancer, in the exact same way that Visiting West Africa is a Probable Contributory Factor for Malaria.

So while there’s a real scientific debate, and real scientific research being done in climate science, the same isn’t true of the debate about smoking and lung cancer. In climate science there’s a genuine (very heated) debate going on. But in smoking science The Debate Is Over. And the debate is over because there never was a debate. And there never was a debate because there was never any science.

What we’re seeing in the smoking non-debate is an example of Lysenko science. Lysenko believed that wheat crops could be increased using a process called “vernalisation.” Hardly anybody in Russia believed Lysenko. But one very important person did believe him, and his name was Joseph Stalin. And what Stalin thought was what everybody in Russia had to think too. And the belief that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer is a Lysenko-type idea which has become a dogma because Important People believe it. These important people seem mostly to reside in the medical profession. Somehow or other lots of doctors became convinced around 1950 that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, and have been using the power and prestige of their profession to help drive a PR campaign – a propaganda campaign – to convince everyone else that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, simply by repeating the assertion over and over again. And they’ve been astonishingly successful. For now everybody knows that Smoking Causes Lung Cancer as more or less the one thing in life that they’re absolutely certain about. It’s become impossible to think otherwise.

There’s a genuine debate going on about climate science because there’s real science behind it. There’s no debate about smoking because there’s no science behind it, and so nothing to debate. When it comes to smoking, we’re in the realms of mass psychology, and mass psychological conditioning. It’s not about what is the case, but what you believe is the case.

It’s why Tobacco Control must be destroyed. All they’re doing is enforce a belief system that’s unsupported by any science. And when Tobacco Control is finally destroyed, it’s going to take with it much of the medical profession and the mainstream mass media.

So I can build heat flow models of snow and ice because there’s science I can use, but I can’t build smoke and cancer flow models of lungs and tissue because there’s no science there. There’s just a dogmatic propaganda-driven belief system.

If Nobody Complains

It always puzzles me that smokers are so invisible. Why is that? Why are some social outcast groups highly visible, but not smokers?

The answer perhaps is that smokers don’t complain. They just adapt to the new circumstances they find themselves in, and just get on with life.

And because they don’t complain, the new circumstances become even more oppressive. But once again the smokers just adapt to the new worse circumstances they find themselves in, and just get on with life.

Whereupon their circumstances get even worse.

It’s perhaps not that Tobacco Control is particularly oppressive, but that they never get any complaints from smokers.

Why don’t smokers complain? Why do they quietly endure everything that’s done to them? Is this peculiar to smokers? Other people complain. Some people complain a lot about almost everything.

Parallel example: A road gets blocked by local council roadworks when new sewerage systems are being installed. When commuters and shoppers find the road is blocked, they change their planned routes to avoid the blocked road. They quickly adapt to the new situation. They expect the roadworks to be completed within a few days or weeks. Nobody complains to the local council. But because the local council gets no complaints from blocking one road, they then block another. Everybody adapts once again. Nobody complains. So the council then feels free to block as many roads as it likes, because nobody ever complains, whatever they do. In the end, the few roads that remain open are blocked with traffic jams. The whole road network grinds to a halt. Maybe then, when everyone is suffering, everyone starts complaining. Or rather the people who will complain about almost anything will start complaining on behalf of all the people who never complain about anything.

It takes an effort to complain. There are costs attached to complaining. People would rather not do it. Nobody in a restaurant wants to send back a plate of food for being inedible. Instead they usually just don’t eat it. Or they order something else in addition. Maybe the chef only realises that he didn’t cook the potatoes for long enough when plates come back laden with uneaten potato. It would have been quicker if some one had complained, and said “These potatoes are undercooked”, and the chef could have fixed the problem. But if nobody complains, how is the chef to know that he hasn’t cooked the potatoes enough?

Or perhaps it’s that, in any society anywhere, some people are at the top of the pile, and some at the bottom. If you’re at the top of the pile you expect your every whim to be granted. But if you’re on the bottom, you expect none of your wishes to be granted. If you’re at the bottom of the heap, you never complain. You just endure what’s thrown at you.

So in the past, when blacks and gays and women were at the bottom of the pile, they didn’t complain. It was only when a Rosa Parks or an Emily Pankhurst started loudly complaining that people began to notice them. Up until then, nobody noticed any of them. They were invisible.

The pile is always moving. There are always people who are rising up the pile, and there are other people descending. Smokers are people who have been descending. They’ve gradually been expelled from more and more places. The same probably once happened to blacks and gays and women way back whenever. One day they were on top of the world, and then the next they were on the bottom. It’s perhaps only when you get to the very bottom that you start complaining. But before you’ve got to the bottom you just adapt to your changing circumstances. You endure it, until it becomes unendurable.

Also smokers now expect to be excluded. The nasty little round red-rimmed No Smoking signs are always telling them that they can’t smoke here, and they can’t smoke there. They expect things to get worse. And so things actually do get worse. And they’ll get worse and worse until they’re unendurable.

For a long time blacks and gays and women didn’t complain. But at some point it probably became unendurable. And smokers will eventually reach that point too. And then what…?

Give Them An Inch

The UK smoking ban of 1 July 2007 was arguably preceded by several other social revolutions over previous decades.

One of these was the switch in Britain from imperial units to metric units, known as metrication. I can still remember the day, 15 February 1971, when the old Pounds, Shillings, and Pence were replaced by Pounds and New Pence. I was working at Westminster City Council at the time, and I can still remember standing outside on that watery sunlit day in Victoria Street looking at the unfamiliar, very shiny new coins in my hand.

Metrication was also accompanied by changes in weights and measures. We were to stop using yards, feet, and inches, and instead use metres and centimetres and millimetres. And we were to stop using pounds and ounces as weights, and use kilograms instead. I don’t think all of these changes happened on 15 February 1971. And indeed some of them never happened at all.

For it never proved possible to replace the imperial miles on British road signs with metric kilometres. And it continues to be possible to buy potatoes in pounds rather than kilograms. And of course pubs sell beer by the imperial pint rather than the metric litre or demi.

Unlike the smoking ban, metrication affected absolutely everybody. And at the time, aged 23, I was in favour of metrication for the simple reason that the decimal system was mathematically much easier to use than the complex imperial system.

Nevertheless, because I had been taught in childhood how to work with pounds, shillings, and pence, and with yards, feet and inches, and with pounds and ounces, they had become my most fundamental categories of measure. I knew how long a yard was. I didn’t know how long a metre was, except that it wasn’t much different from a yard.

And these days, although I rigorously use metres and kilograms in my calculations of heat flow, I continue to think about everything else using the measures of my childhood. So I’ll tell you that I’m five feet eight inches high, and that I weigh nine stones.

The old measures are built into the English language. We say: “Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile.” We don’t say: “Give them a centimetre, and they’ll take a kilometre.”

The result of metrication was, for me, a split mind. Or at least a mind in which two rival measurement systems co-existed. Metrication imposed a kind of schizophrenia (Greek schizo means split) on the British people. My generation all have split personalities in this sense: we were raised with one set of measures, but we’re forced by law to live with another set. Which is a bit like being raised a Christian, and forced to become a Muslim (which also seems to be happening).

And not everybody liked this. And there’s still a British Resistance to metrication. We’ve kept our miles. And we’ve kept our pints. And we’ve also kept our Pound Sterling. They are, in profound senses, part of who we are.

Was metrication a good thing? As I’ve said, it seemed to me at the time to be an improvement, a simplification. But I now wonder whether it really was. After all, although it’s easier to add and subtract numbers using a decimal system, does it really matter when these calculations are now mostly performed by microprocessors in tills and weighing machines and speedometers? It would have been perfectly possible, a few years after 1971, to have tills that optionally displayed prices in pounds, shillings, and pence, or feet and inches, or any other units you might care to mention. It wasn’t really necessary for metrication to be imposed on the British people. They could have quite happily continued with their old currency, and their old weights and measures, with computers performing any necessary conversions.

Metrication in Britain was, in many ways, a prelude to joining the European Common Market. The metric system is a French invention:

Gabriel Mouton, a church vicar in Lyons, France, is considered by many to be the founding father of the metric system. In 1670, Mouton proposed a decimal system of measurement that French scientists would spend years further refining. In 1790, the national assembly of France called for an invariable standard of weights and measurements having as its basis a unit of length based on the Earth’s circumference. As a convenience the system would be decimal based, with larger and smaller multiples of each unit arrived at by dividing and multiplying by 10 and its powers.

Isn’t it interesting that the French Revolution (which began in 1789) coincided with a change in French weights and measures. It would have meant a disordering of French customary thinking of the kind I’ve described as happening to the British around 1970. Their world would have been turned upside down. Might this disorder have fed into the revolution? Could it have been that the French Revolution was a revolt by French traditionalists against the new-fangled weights and measures dreamt up by aristocratic revolutionaries?

The Aristocrat who revolutionised chemistry: Before Madame Guillotine claimed him, Antoine Lavoisier transformed chemistry into a modern science with his revolutionary set of terms and symbols.

Was Lavoisier executed because he was such a revolutionary? I’ll have to ask some French bloke. I’m sure they’ll know.

Is it any different today? Metrication was a top-down revolution imposed by the British government on the British people. The smoking ban was another piece of top-down social engineering. Neither of them were much liked. And both of them are drivers of Brexit, with the political elites playing the Lavoisiers of our time, and equally likely to meet the same sticky end.

Pop News

I must say that when someone posted a comment here a few days ago with the Canning Town video, I didn’t know what it was about. It looked to me like I was watching some politician being pulled off a stage while addressing a crowd somewhere, and I wondered whether he was a famous one.

It was only when I kept coming across the same video, and other variants of it, that I realised that it was an Extinction Rebellion protester standing on top of a London tube train being heckled by a crowd of commuters, who eventually pulled him (and his companion) off it.

The (not-so-) strange thing about this bit of news was that it had first been recorded by multiple mobile phones, and then uploaded to the internet (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and then had gone viral. And something “goes viral” when other people copy it and post it elsewhere, and the news spreads in a wave across the internet.

The same thing happens with music. The Hit Parade of the 1950s and 60s and onwards was made up of music that had “gone viral” before “going viral” had been invented. And the Canning Town incident was pop news in the same way that the Hit Parade is pop music. It was an example of people making their own news in the same way that they can make their own music.

More and more of the mainstream media News seems to be made up of pop news of this sort. Another current example is of the Spanish Civil Guard beating up Catalan separatist protesters in Barcelona (which I know well, having visited it many times). And other ones are the riots in Hong Kong, and the Gilet Jaunes protests in France.

The mainstream media used to be able to define what was and what wasn’t news, but now it seems that they’re increasingly finding that their news arrived pre-defined for them, and they’re following the news rather than leading it.

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the mainstream broadcast media are seeing their audiences/readerships decline: the news is coming from new sources other than paid reporters. And it’s arriving unfiltered: the people holding the mobile phones in Canning Town weren’t providing a running commentary on what they were seeing, nor an editorial perspective.

It seems that the mainstream media added their own editorial overview when they got the footage, and described it as “shocking violence” against noble climate protesters. But was it that violent? And was it that shocking? What were commuters supposed to do with the Extinction Rebellion protesters who were preventing them getting to work? Applaud? Perhaps that’s what most people in the mainstream media thought they should have done? But they didn’t. And that showed what little public support these protesters really had:

Extinction Rebellion called the clashes between protesters and commuters at a tube station on Thursday “regretful” as the group admitted the incident was “a huge own goal”.

It was indeed a huge own goal, because it showed the world how little real popular support there really was for Extinction Rebellion, regardless of how our top-down-controlling politically correct mainstream media tried to spin it.

It won’t help if our newly politically correct police investigate the commuters instead of the protesters:

‘VIGILANTE ATTACK’ Cops investigate COMMUTERS caught up in Extinction Rebellion chaos after protester was pulled off Tube train roof

We are perhaps seeing the demise of mainstream media News, and its replacement by pop news from multiple sources trending on a News Hit Parade, and accompanied by pop editorial comment on it (like the piece I’ve just written).

It’s getting harder and harder for our political elites to tell us what to think. For we’re all becoming reporters, and we’re all becoming editors, and maybe we’re all becoming police as well (what else were those Canning Town commuters doing?).

For a further pop editorial overview of the decline of the mainstream media, here’s the ever-sunny Steve Turley:

I’ll Remain a Proud Social Pariah

Author Naomi Klein (No Logo) talking recently (35:00 minutes in) about stopping smoking:

“I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, and I didn’t stop smoking because I suddenly realised it was bad for me. I knew it was bad for me. I stopped when my government passed enough laws that I was turned into a social pariah. I live in a cold climate, and I had been banished from restaurants and bars and I was shivering outside… because we had regulatory answers to the epidemic of cancer, and I decided, well, this really isn’t worth it any more and I’m freezing alone outside smoking and I don’t want to do that anymore. So yeah we can make those changes, but we need regulations that make it easier for people to do that.”

I’ve had the exact same experience, of course. I also was turned into a social pariah. I too was shivering outside. But that’s as far as our two experiences overlap.

For while she decided to do what was being demanded of her, and stop smoking, cease to be a pariah and stay warm, I refused to give in to the bullying bastards, carried on smoking out in the cold, and have remained a social pariah for the past 12 years.

I think Naomi Klein just gave in to the bullies. And I don’t think there’s anything admirable about that. I think it’s just plain weak. I admire people who will stand up to bullies, not give in to them.

But the way she describes it, it was an enlightened government that enacted regulations that “made it easier for people” to do what government asked. She regards the government as benignly helping her to make the right choice. I regard the same government as tyrannical.

And now, with the “climate crisis” she wants government to be equally benign, and “make it easier for people” to make the right choices about carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s the difference between the authoritarian Left and the libertarian Right. The Left regards government as essentially benign (and so we need more of it). And the Right regards government as essentially tyrannical (and we need as little as possible of it)

It reminds me of a friend of mine who, shortly before the UK smoking ban came into force on 1 July 2007, told me that he was looking forward to the ban, because he hoped it would make him stop smoking. I was appalled that he wanted the government to help give him the strength to do something he couldn’t do himself. He too wanted the government to “make it easier for people” like him to stop smoking. It marked the point at which our friendship began to cool. (I might add that he never did stop smoking, despite the assistance of the benign British government in making him a social pariah, and exiling him to the outdoors.)

I’m never going to do what he and Naomi Klein did. I’m never going to come knocking at the door, saying that I’ve stopped smoking, and asking to be let back in. I’m going to carry on being a pariah. And I’m going to be proud to be a social pariah. For now I don’t want to belong to their bullying bastard world anyway.

The Thunberg Regime

I ought to be interested in the debate about Boris’ Brexit Deal in Parliament today, but I’m not, perhaps because:

Remain supporters have hatched a plan to ensure Boris Johnson will be forced to ask for a Brexit extension even if his deal passes in the Commons today.

Sir Oliver Letwin, the former Tory minister, has tabled an amendment to the Brexit deal that would require the Prime Minister to request an extension as an “insurance policy” in case the necessary legislation to enact the deal had not been passed by Oct 31.

We’re going to remain in the EU because the Remainers will keep asking for (and getting) one extension after another, indefinitely into the future.

My prediction for 31 October: the EU will have granted Britain a two-year extension of remaining in the EU. Maybe they’ll even give us a 100-year extension. Why not?

And we won’t have an election until the next fixed term parliamentary election on 5 May 2022.

Or will we have one then? Pretty much every MP in Parliament dreads the next election, because most Remainer MPs will lose their seats. The next election will see the death of the Conservative party, and the Labour party, and the Lib Dems too. And it’ll see the rise of the new Brexit party, and perhaps also an anti-Brexit party as well. And they will define British politics for the foreseeable future.

Unless… the last act of this Remainer parliament will be to extend the fixed term period between UK elections from 5 years to 100 years. Or 200 years. Or 500 years. Why not? We’ll still be a “parliamentary democracy”. It’s just that elections will only happen every 500 years.

I wouldn’t put it past them to do this. After all, they think that They Know Better than the British people what’s good for them. These are, for the most part, the very same people who voted for the UK smoking ban in 2006, and in doing so told Britain’s 13 million smokers that We Know Better Than You Do What’s Good For You.

These globalists want the whole world to become one vast administrative state, run by Experts Who Know Better Than You Do What’s Good For You. It will be just like the Soviet Union, but on a global scale. Trotsky would be delighted.

This is also what the Climate Alarmists want, of course. In the face of the mounting Climate Crisis/Catastrophe, Spaceship Earth is going to need to have a single captain, just like Captain Kirk of Star Trek, making decisions for the whole world. You can’t have one country reducing carbon dioxide emissions, while other countries are increasing them: all countries are going to have reduce emissions to zero in 12 years. (Or is it 11 now? We’re almost in the Final Countdown)

Who’s going to be the World Leader? Most likely Greta Thunberg. She will be 28 years old by then.

In the coming Thunberg regime, it will be illegal to light any fires at all anywhere, ever. People will be shot dead for smoking, not because smoking is “unhealthy”, but because cigarettes add deadly carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Unable to heat their homes, or cook, or travel anywhere, millions of people will die during the Thunberg regime. The global population will fall from 7 billion to 1 million. Which is round about what the Greens want.

But then, with carbon dioxide having been scrubbed out of the atmosphere, the unexpected will happen: a new Ice Age will start.

And that will be the end of the Thunberg regime, and of the global administrative state, as the whole world becomes covered in snow and ice, except for a thin strip at the equator. In this depopulated world, smoking won’t be banned because it’s unhealthy, or because it causes global warming, but because the little remaining agricultural land will be needed to grow food, not luxuries like tobacco. When one reason for banning smoking lapses, another one will be found.

The Rapid Appearance of Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a surprisingly new organisation. It seems to have originated in the UK in May 2018, barely 18 months ago:

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics signing a call to action in support in October 2018, and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!…

Extinction Rebellion wants to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown.

Some of its full-time members are paid. A year after its formation by a bunch of university academics, it acquired a Youth Wing. And now hundreds of XR activists are being arrested in London:

Extinction Rebellion arrests soar to over 1,000 in four days of protests.

Here’s Nigel Farage talking very civilly to one of them a few days ago:

What are they all about? They think we face extinction as a result of CO2-induced climate change, and we have to take drastic action to prevent it.

But it seems it’s actually much more than CO2 that they’re worried about, according to one of their co-founders:

The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion writes that the climate protest “isn’t about the climate” and is actually about toppling European civilisation and ending the idea that heterosexuality is “normal.”

Wait, what?

In a lengthy article for Medium entitled ‘Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate’, Stuart Basden reveals the true goals of the far-left environmentalist action group.

Basden asserts that whatever climate problems exist can’t be fixed and that the movement should instead be focused on tearing down the entire system of western capitalism

So they’re neo-Marxists of some sort. Or watermelons: Green on the outside, Red on the inside. Who would have guessed?

In the lengthy article, whose title is “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate“, the real problems are seen as White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Eurocentrism, Hetero-sexism, and Class Hierarchy.

According to Wikipedia, however, it is in fact about climate, and its stated aims are:

1) Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
2) Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025.
3) Government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice.

And its “principles” include “a shared vision of change”, “momentum-driven organising”, “creating a culture that is healthy, resilient, and adaptable”, in the face of our current “toxic system”.

It uses words that are oddly familiar: “shared”, “achieve”, “challenge”, “change”, “collectively”, “planning”, “organise.” As soon as people use words like this, you know they’re Marxists of some kind. The same words have been in use for 100 years or more.

In short, the whole thing is pretty vague, and it would seem that already, within 18 months of its formation, its founders are at loggerheads with each other.

But clearly they really are highly organised, and highly effective. And they’ve already reached New York.

Whatever next? If something like this can spring up in 18 months, then soon they’ll be springing up in 18 weeks, or 18 days, or 18 hours.