Wednesday 31 March 2010

Tyranny of the Scientists.

I know this isn't a scientific journal and you lot don't give a stuff about references, but here's where this little tale originated:

New Scientist, issue 2743, 16th January 2010, page 20. 'A UN for science' by Lorna Casselton. She is the Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. Did you know this scientific institution now has its own foreign secretary? It was news to me.

I've been qualified as a scientist since my B.Sc. in 1981. Then the PhD, the apprenticeships (we call them post-docs), lectureships and finally my own lab. I have never heard of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues. Have you?

To be fair, they formed in 1993 so they weren't around when I was young and gullible and still believed science knew best in all things.

It all looks harmless enough but scientists are not politicians. We tend to work with logic and we tend to think that the results of rigorous research, being True, will naturally be accepted as-is by everyone else. We are shocked when research is spun and twisted to suit an agenda but we then think 'oh, they must have misunderstood'. Most of us anyway.

Some of us have become cynics, and some scientists are crooks. Surprised? Scientists are human beings and any group of humans contains a few dodgy ones.

Here's the IAP strategic plan. Does the term 'strategic plan' ring any bells? It's not the sort of wording scientists tend to use. Science is more 'Push the button and see what happens'. Do you think scientists are running this thing? Scientists hate all administrative functions, they just get in the way of dabbling in things we don't understand, tampering with the fabric of life and unleashing forces we can't control. Timesheets? We fill out a year's worth in an afternoon and send off one a week. Really. We do. I certainly did and I wasn't alone. That's why the timesheets perfectly match what we're supposed to be doing. Well, I don't have those any more and I'm very pleased about it. It was a very tedious afternoon, once a year.

Scientists don't do politics and we don't like having to be managers. We are tyrants in our own little domains. If a technician screws up, we'll show them once more. If they screw up again they'll get a bollocking. If they persistently screw up we'll 'promote' them to someone else's department if we can't sack them. Where our research is concerned, we are merciless. If anyone came into my lab and messed around, I'd use something I once used on a HND class. A tube of water. Hold it up and say 'How much anthrax is in this tube? Who's going to distract me so much that I end up dropping it?' Nowadays, of course, such pleasurable activities are denied lecturers by those who have taken over the management of science. And the management of the IAP. Who might that be? Here's a clue from that strategy document:

Move as expeditiously as possible in selecting and appointing a IAP Executive Director, cognizant of the operational restraints associated with its relationship with UNESCO.

Who talks like that? Yes, it's the Righteous. Scientists care nothing for 'executive directors' or 'operational restraints'. We ignore such nonsensical ideas. From the New Scientist article :

The organisation's ambition is to become the most influential voice for the world's scientists amid the clamour of politicians and lobby groups.

We Know Best. The aim of the organisation is to influence policy. To tell those elected representatives what to do. The scientists, for the most part, have the best of intentions but they are not running the show. They are not directly advising governments. They are not the ones insisting that more women enter science in the name of equality, whether they like it or not. It's all filtered through a managerial level, a Righteous level, that has an agenda so alien to science that scientists have trouble even seeing it.

Scientists are seen as 'clever people who know stuff' and we are. Getting a PhD is not easy. You have to be pretty intelligent to start with - but intelligence is not the same thing a streetwise, not at all. That's why you get scientists recommending reverse-osmosis purification for drinking water with no concern as to the running costs. These people would not drink from a stream without a full spectrographic analysis, BOD, COD, total bacterial counts and heavy metal content while in fact, all you need to be sure of is that you're not downstream of sheep or cattle. Real life rarely troubles modern science.

I recall one meeting at a place I worked in the past, about an upcoming open day. One of those present - an astoundingly brilliant man - was not happy that we were 'dumbing down' exhibits. The people will surely understand, was his argument. He could not grasp that many adults are illiterate and even those who were pretty intelligent hadn't studied this area of research and needed it put in simple terms. It did not occur to him that the things that were obvious to him would not be obvious to others who hadn't spent their lives - or even a moment - studying it.

Organisations like this are not run by scientists because scientists do not run organisations. We run labs. Scientists are easily swayed by someone saying 'I'll do all that admin stuff, you just do research'. It takes a long time for the scientist to realise that most of the 'admin stuff' isn't necessary at all. Most never do, because to be honest, we're not paying it any attention most of the time.

So the Righteous now run science and it's not science that advises policy, but Righteous morality.

Since 1993, science has been corrupted and politicised to the point where it is now barely recognisable. Scientists didn't do it. Scientists, on the whole, didn't notice it happening and many still haven't, even though the roots of it were obvious when I was an undergraduate.

Remember that idea of 'promoting' a useless technician to be someone else's problem? We do that with scientists too. They didn't get to be lab managers because they were good at managing, they got the job because they were bloody useless in the lab. Back then, it didn't matter who the manager was because we all ignored them anyway. It was their job to make sure the autoclave worked and the store was stocked and we all had our correct allocation of funding but 'doing what they ordered' was simply not going to happen. Those managers were lackeys.

It's different now. The useless have risen to higher positions and have started demanding respect and power. Respect they have not earned and power they should not be allowed.

Science brought this on itself by a lack of logical thinking. Moving the useless and spiteful into management positions seemed sensible at the time - we didn't want to do them ourselves - but now the scum is floating on the surface and suffocating everything underneath.

Corruption is rife, as it is everywhere the Righteous take control. Lies and spin and agendas and 'strategic plans' and 'mission statements' fill the world of science and I am delighted to operate independently of it now. Oh, I could make much more money if I played their game but I make enough and I have a lot of fun needling them. Mission statement? What the hell sort of science has a mission statement? It's something MacDonald's might have but science is not a franchise.

Science is broken and as a retiring ex-boss once said 'We used to chase knowledge, now we chase money." It's true. When I left the mainstream, getting grants was far more important than discovering or inventing anything. The grants were awarded on the latest 'Big Agenda Thing' and still are. I am more free as a self-employed scientist working for industry than I ever was working under public funding. Now, I can say 'No, it won't work'.

Righteous, you have broken my favourite toy. You have turned science into a carnival show. You have set up 'wimmin' and 'cheeldren' games as you have in politics and you play to the moneylending Pharmers who now invade our temple of logic and reproducibility.

The total wreckage and rebuilding of science is the only way out now. We have to start again.

Homeopathic smoking.

Further to that link to Frank's article in the previous post, here are two articles from New Scientist worth looking up. I'm not a subscriber so don't have archive access. The references are to the real-paper magazines.

Issue 2745, 30th January 2010, page 22: "Overdosing on nothing", in which the New Scientist supports those 'activists' who publicly swallowed huge doses of homeopathic medicine to prove it didn't do anything. New Scientist regards homeopathy as 'an arcane 18th century ritual' and scoffs at it.

I've never tried homeopathy so I don't care if it works or not. I'm not going to argue about it. Seriously, I don't care who drinks whatever dilution of what, as long as they don't make me drink it.

Issue 2747, 13th February 2010, page 15 (yes, just two weeks later): "Carcinogenic residue may pose third-hand smoke danger", in which the New Scientist reports, perfectly seriously, that barely detectable amounts of tobacco smoke - utterly insignificant when compared to the amount of smoke produced by one puff on one cigarette - will kill you.

Now, let's hear the nonsmokers (I mean antismokers, of course) justify why homeopathic principles are to be ridiculed in all instances except where they are applied to tobacco smoke. Smokiopathy, anyone?


Incidentally, New Scientist is also opposed to the teaching of creationism in schools, while at the same time regarding anyone who questions the doctrine of Climatology as a deranged heretic. Doublethink is alive and well at NuSci.

It's not science. it's NuScience and there's a reason for that.

Which I have just found the article for. Well, reports all done, I've been tidying this office and even I have to admit, it's an absolute disgrace. The dust has progressed even beyond what the average human male can ignore. That's a lot of dust.

Some of it has spawned new forms of life, I think. I certainly haven't seen anything with that many legs before.

Tuesday 30 March 2010

Done

The latest report is done and I can now reduce, if not eliminate, Campylobacter as a hazard for those too dim to understand that raw chicken is pretty filthy.

Will the government be interested? I doubt it. They have shown no interest in reducing Clostridium difficile as a hospital infection and just yawn at the prospect of entirely eliminating Salmonella as a hazard. I can only assume that Al the Oily Fish and the Brown Gorgon are happy to let patients die in there while the diseases flourish. Logic allows no other conclusion.

Luckily I work for private companies. Lucky for you too because they'll push to get this stuff available. When it is, I'll let you know what it's marketed as.

This report also details an entirely new method for rapid assessment of potential good stuff. Dammit, I should have priced it higher.

Never mind. I'm still the only one who knows how it works.

Better hope I don't get lung cancer from homeopathic smoke exposure, eh? Because if I'm dying, the whole world is coming with me.

Monday 29 March 2010

Weird science.

A short one today because I'm working again. Have to get all the invoices out so the companies can write off that expenditure in this tax year - but it all comes as cheques so it won't go in my bank until after April 5th.

Fortunately, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist has already done the hard part for me. In my reports, anything that is statistically less than 95% likely to be different is considered the same. Many of those junk scientists are declaring important differences at 10% confidence. If a student had ever tried that, they would have received a zero mark from me. There is no point even doing the experiment at that level of confidence. If you were to simply guess the answer you'd have a 50% chance of being right. As it is, levels of difference that no sane statistician would even contemplate are being used to scare us into compliance.

It's not just in the statistics.

In that last post, the linked story claims that the rats showed an overwhelming preference for 'junk' food over their 'healthy' diet. What it does not mention is that the 'healthy' diet comes as a dry chemical mix that has been formulated by scientists to provide everything a rat metabolism needs. Unfortunately it tastes like eating a powdered, gritty own-brand muesli with no milk. Given the choice of that or a sausage, I'd tolerate a mild electric shock to get the sausage.

If I was fed on the dry powder diet from birth and then experienced bacon, I'd refuse to eat the dry powder again.

The results prove only that rats have a sense of taste and smell, and don't like the crap they are routinely fed. It's junk science.

There is more and more of it, and now it is being defended with 'We know best and you're all stupid' because there really is no other defence these pretend-scientists can apply.

New Scientist recently poured scorn on those who want the teaching of global warming in schools to be balanced with 'It might not really be happening' and 'Not all scientists agree on this', rather than the frankly ridiculous assertion that 'the science is settled'. New Scientist compares that with calls for the teaching of creationism in science class.

The climate heretics are not calling for the introduction of a whole new subject area, a subject that properly belongs in religion class rather than science class. They are calling for a balanced approach to a scientific idea, an unproven one. They are in fact doing the opposite of the creationists - they are calling for the removal of a religious doctrine that should really be in a green-painted classroom taught by someone in a hair shirt and sandals, and built around a fine old oak known as the 'hugging tree'.

Now, James Lovelock complains that we are all too stupid to save the planet. This is the guy who claimed that the whole planet was one living thing (Gaia) and was self-regulating. Now he believes it's not self-regulating at all, and we have to do it.

To that end, he wants to suspend democracy. That's right, an unelected tree-hugger wants to rule us on his say-so and his alone. On the basis of some seriously dodgy science, we are to give up all freedoms and democratic processes.

Harmless? The Climatologists have the ear of the Gorgon. The Gorgon would love to suspend democracy. Permanently.

We are all expecting an election on May 6th. There has been no announcement. Parliament has not been dissolved. Labour are still making up new laws. All it will take is one sunny day and bingo - global warming! Emergency! Postpone the election while we deal with it! It will take centuries!

Would you put it past him?

Don't imagine you can trust the scientific community either. There has been something in the wind for a very long time and it's getting close enough to see now.

Junkie food.

If you like fast food or 'junk' food you are now an addict. Just like smokers. And heroin users. So it's soon going to be just fine for the Righteous to treat you the same way.

The Daily Hypertension reports that sausages, bacon and cheesecake are highly addictive and that once you've tasted them you will be craving them forever. Which is odd because I've tasted all of them and only eat them occasionally. Tonight was lamb - my favourite because it's a legal way to eat a baby.

I sometimes have sausage, egg and chips but I don't recall ever feeling I had to have that. It's one of those 'no time to think' meals, or 'can't be bothered shopping' meals. Bacon rolls are great but again, I don't go out of my way to get one. As for cheesecake, I haven't eaten that for a very long time. I've eaten burgers but only when there's nothing else available. Addicted?

The 'addiction' part is nonsense. It's where the antismokers started, all those years ago. You are addicted and you can't stop, you really want to but you haven't realised it yet. You are not enjoying it, you are addicted. We will help. Just bow to us and let us control your life.

Now you can expect to be reviled in the street if you have a burger. It doesn't matter if you are stick-thin. It's not about obesity any more. It's now an addiction and it must be denormalised. Entirely. Someone eating a burger when they are not fat is like someone smoking when they don't have cancer. It will be regarded as 'only a matter of time before your vile addiction kills you'.

Eating such foods around children will get you arrested. You will not be able to buy burgers if you have a child with you in case you plan to give them to the child. They will be in plain packaging with pictures of Bernard Manning on them and you'll have to get them from the shuttered freezer.

They've moved on from the fat people now. They are targeting the food so if you like sausages, you might as well take up smoking and tank down as much booze as you can get. You are going to be reviled anyway. Make it worth your while.

Sausages tomorrow night, I think. With chips. And bacon, and probably cheesecake to follow.

Best get a few in before they are all banned.

__

When did sausages and bacon become 'junk food'? Those are old traditional foods and a properly-made sausage contains no junk at all. Bacon is just thinly-sliced pig. I have a feeling this 'junk food' definition is going to get wider.

Sunday 28 March 2010

Party political broadcast 6...

On behalf of the Old Holborn Party.




The only party political broadcast I've ever wanted to watch twice.

Created by Cold Steel Rain.

This has to be the ultimate scare story.

Tap water can now make you fat, give you cancer and fill you with lead. It's even worse than smoking. Passive hydration can be but moments away now.

Naturally, it's in the Daily Eek!

Tap water is safe. Unless there's a specific problem, it's drinkable. It's not very interesting, but it is possible to drink the stuff if you really want to, or if you run out of whisky. (Not tonight. Tesco have responded to the new booze duty by knocking ten quid off Isle of Jura. They are also selling a litre of Grants for twelve quid.)

You're not likely to get Guinea worm or Giardia from tap water in the UK. You're not even likely to get cholera these days. No, not even Cryptosporidium. Tap water is not something that anyone needs to get tense about.

In some places - such as here - the over-use of chlorination makes the stuff taste terrible and can make your tea taste as if the milk's gone off. It also makes espressos taste odd. So I have a filter-tap that deals with the taste. Lots of people have them, they are cheap and easy to fit, and how often you need to change the filter depends on how much you use. The filter is there because the water tastes funny, but there's no danger in drinking the unfiltered stuff. I just don't like the taste.

This is severe overkill -

I believe the best way to serve ourselves the cleanest water possible is to use a reverse osmosis purification kit.

Reverse osmosis purification is what I use in the lab. It is very expensive but it's important when preparing media for growing bacteria. Why? Because the water that comes out of the tap has been treated to kill bacteria. Tap water is therefore useless when your aim is to grow bacteria.

I don't drink that water. It's 'work' water. I would not install an RO unit at home because it takes a long time to purify the water - and if it's working fast, it's not working properly. There is absolutely no need for it, and if you use it to fill bottles with water, keep in mind that the water in your bottles now contains nothing that can stop bacterial growth.

I was going to say that the only thing left to scare us with now is air - but I seem to remember they've already started on that one.

An awful lot of people are going to believe this, you know. Can't drink alcohol, can't drink fizzy pop, and now can't drink water. An awful lot of people are going to be ordering those RO units for their homes too. That's actually a good thing for me, it'll bring down the price of those filter units, but it's an absolute waste of money for everyone else.

Water is safe. You can drink it.

If you must.

Slavery abolished by Labour.

A Government spokesman demonstrating how to make Government policy appear logical.

Picture hallucinated from the film 'Airplane'.


Pub landlord Nick Hogan was prosecuted, fined more than the average baby-thumper and then sent to jail for far longer than a Labour peer who flattened someone with his car. For what exactly? Because he refused to act as an unpaid enforcement officer for a law he disagreed with. Note that he was not prosecuted for smoking - he was prosecuted for not stopping other people smoking.

Why would any landlord not want to be part of the Righteous Brigade? Well, for one thing, because being one of the Righteous' unpaid and unwilling enforcers is dangerous. You want to stop a drunk smoking? He is not going to think 'Oh, it's those blasted Righteous behind it all'. He is going to turn on you. Sometimes violently.

If you don't act as an unpaid enforcer, the Righteous turn on you. Either way, you're the one who gets crapped on.

But wait, what's this?

Fresh from the unwiped bottom of MiniJust comes another dry clinker of wisdom. The same people who demand that all owners of private premises act as unpaid police and put themselves at risk so the Righteous don't have to, have come up with a new law to stop people forcing other people to do work they don't want to do... no, don't try to make sense of it, it will make your head hurt.

The new offence of holding another person in slavery or servitude, or requiring another person to perform forced or compulsory labour, is set out in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Those found guilty face a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

So, when the police charge you with 'allowing others to smoke', you can now immediately countercharge with 'requiring another person to perform forced labour' because that is exactly what they are doing. Act as an unpaid enforcer or face the wrath of the Righteous. Forcing landlords and other business premises operators to work for free as frontline law enforcers, at personal risk, is a direct violation of this new law.

You might get six months. They'll get 14 years.

So, who wants to let the Dreadful Arnott know? We should draw straws for the pleasure.

(A short one tonight. The clocks have gone forward so I'm an hour later than I thought).


UPDATE: Devil's Kitchen found their get-out clause. It's another law that applies to us but not to them.

Saturday 27 March 2010

Smoky-Drinky time.

Off to Smoky-Drinky, the last one before our favoured tipple goes up in price.

I'm taking along printouts of this, because it's in a mainstream newspaper and the Smoky-Drinkers will have more success arguing with the loonies armed with newspapers than we have ever had armed with facts.

Back later.

A resource revamped.

UKwebspider has moved to new premises, and now has a whole gang of helpers. I don't blame him, the work he was putting in was astounding and probably knackering.

So the UK News Network is now in the blogroll and the old UKwebspider site is in the archive (Hibernation Corner) as long as it remains online.

It's an excellent resource which finds things most of us don't have time to look for. Worth watching.

Friday 26 March 2010

The EU SS is born.

Subrosa and Fausty both have this story.

Europol can access personal information on anyone – including their political opinions and sexual preferences – if it suspects, rightly or wrongly, that they may be involved in any “preparatory act” which could lead to criminal activity.

You do not need to commit a crime. You do not need to be planning to commit a crime. They only need to think you might and they need no more than that suspicion in order to access whatever information they feel like and track your movements.

Europol have, no doubt, a long list of suspects. Very long. In fact, everyone is on it but themselves.

They can track Emails and phone calls and website visits already. They can track your car through number plate recognition, they can track you through CCTV with face recognition software, they can track credit card and bank transactions. The EU have already pushed to make any insult to the EU or disagreement with its pronouncements a crime.

They can arrest and charge you for things that are not a crime in this country and they can export you to anywhere they like and lock you up without telling you or anyone else where you are or what you are accused of.

Europol have been absorbed into the EU parliament. They are not an independent police force. they are the SS.

And the Gorgon's Goblins respond to this with...

The Home Office insisted the changes were in Britain’s interests.

How, exactly?

A spokesman said: “Europol is now in a much stronger position to better support our fight against serious and organised crime and terrorism.”

They were already in a position to do that. Now they are in a much stronger position to fight dissenting voices, the BNP and other groups, people who don't agree with the ban of the day, and to keep the population terrified and in line. I wonder if they'll have those little skull badges on their caps again?

Email, phone calls, web use, travel, shopping, personal tracking, they will soon be able to detail exactly where you went and who you spoke to and what you said. The only thing they haven't yet brought under total surveillance is the written and posted letter.

Ah, but in the interests of 'stopping tobacco smuggling' (by post?) that's taken care of too.

'Nothing to hide, nothing to fear' - there are still some who think that's true. When you meet one, ask them to consider what would follow if they start their mantra with:

'When you have nowhere to hide...'

The depth of lunacy.


Some smokers will know what that is. Especially those who venture into more exotic forms of smoking.

That is a pack of 'Rips', which is a continuous roll of rolling paper with gum along one edge. You pull out the length you want and rip it off. With this, you can make a quick two-puffer or something that needs a tripod to smoke. Any length of smoke you want.

Which kind of wrecks the latest Labour lunacy, spotted by Manwiddicombe, in which longer cigarettes are to be taxed as if each one was two. Or more than two, if they're really long. You could be paying double or triple duty on those Superkings.

From January 1 next year, any cigarette longer than 8cm – excluding the tip – will be treated as another cigarette and have extra duty slapped imposed on it. For each additional 3cm, or part thereof, it will be treated as yet another cigarette.

This means that a 12cm cigarette, for example, will be treated as three cigarettes.

Three centimetres or part thereof. That's the taxable unit of cigarette. If your favourite brand is 8.1 cm (excluding filter) you pay double duty. If it's 11.1 cm, you pay triple duty. For any fraction of 3 cm over your alloted tobacco ration you're going to pay another lot of duty. With VAT on top.

If you smoke long readymades, start practising rolling. You can get filters, even menthol ones, and there are a range of tobaccos available. They don't all taste the same.

Then get a pack of Rips and roll them as long as you like.

Oh, and find yourself one of those 'continent visitors' too. Packet tobacco seems more easily available than readymades, although that might be because I haven't looked for readymades. As the duty goes up and up, the range of tobacco with incomprehensible warnings on the pack will increase along with the price differential.

Soon it won't matter whether the UK stuff comes in grey packets from behind a screen. Nobody will be buying it from there.

If you live on the continent and feel like a visit to the UK, you will soon be able to fund your entire trip with a bag full of baccy.

The changes come as part of this week's Budget's "Enforcement and Compliance" measures. An HMRC spokesman said that the technical change "is designed to stop a tax avoidance method".

Tax avoidance? If you like longer cigarettes, you buy longer ones. If you don't like longer cigarettes, buying the long ones is silly because you'll just end up wasting half of it. Nobody smokes Superkings as a 'tax avoidance method'. They smoke them because they like them.

As for 'enforcement and compliance', Chancellor, you can ram that into a sunless orifice so hard that it will make your eyebrows change places. Then twist it. You are not there to enforce your personal morality on this country. You are there to run the infrastructure and enforce actual, real laws. Ones that make sense.

Compliance? Not from me, matey. You hate me, remember? You have declared war on me. You despise my smoking and drinking and salt and fat and practically everything else about me. You have empowered an army of fake-coughing whiners to insult and berate me whenever they feel like it and have left me no recourse in the face of this blatant discrimination. You have forced me outdoors and then followed me out there to berate me some more. Now you plan to follow me home and push me around inside my own house. Compliance? With the self-declared enemy? Never.

If, one day, I have to set up an indoor tobacco farm, I will do it and you are not dealing with a simple chav here. You won't find it, and any inspector who does find it will be fertilising it. When that day comes, just remember who started this war.

None of these 'enforced compliance' ideas will reduce smoking. None of them will prevent children taking it up. They will make tobacco irresistible to children because it will be the ultimate act of rebellion. How will they hear about it if it is hidden away? Dick Puddlecote has the answer. Every one of these measures will a) increase smoking prevalence, b) encourage children to experiment with smoking and c) reduce the income from duty.

If anyone feels like trying to explain this to an antismoker or a politician, be my guest. I prefer a softer wall to bang my head on.

Thursday 25 March 2010

No Crow.

No, it's not about Bob 'all out, comrades' Crow and his last-ditch attempt to destroy any chance of his pet Gorgon getting back in at the election. Constantly Furious and Al-Jahom have that one covered.

This is about CAMRA's apparent realisation that something isn't quite right with the world, even when viewed through a frothy glass. Beer duty just keeps going up and up, and Ciderman is crying into his glass. Why, oh why, are the government doing this to them? After they were so supportive of getting all of us vile smokers and our inferior-grade tobacco out of their pubs, which then closed.

Well, we smokers could all crow 'Told you so' but I'm not going to do that. Not least because I like, or rather used to like, going to the pub as often as possible. I rarely visit now. It's weather dependent these days. CAMRA were delighted when I was effectively banned, along with thousands like me, and are now bleating because the price of beer is going up.

Well, business rates, staff, stock, all has to be paid for and with fewer customers there's no option but to charge each one more. And the government total tax take is down because fewer pints are sold and their answer to that is always - always - to increase the duty per pint to keep their tax take the same.

I'm not going to crow about it because the current denormalisation being experienced by drinkers (all drinkers, not just the cans-in-the-park ones) is not the first, and won't be the last time.

There's no point in CAMRA keeping up their 'But we are responsible drinkers, we are the elite of drinkers' protest because the Ban Boys simply do not care. You are drinkers. As far as they are concerned, there is only one kind of drinker. The kind that must be eradicated. Just as there is only one kind of smoker, the kind that blow smoke into prams and stub out their cigarettes in pensioners' eyes. All the same.

Drink controls are coming. Already it's impossible to have a bottle of wine with a picnic in many places. Escalating duty, just like cigarettes. It's not going to stop. Pubs are changing into restaurants where drinking without a meal is already frowned on. It's not illegal, it probably never will be, but those restaurants are in the food business now. Booze is secondary. Once you finish the meal (and you're not going to get away with a bag of pork scratchings) you'll be hustled out to make room for the next profitable customer.

Pubs can't survive much more of this. There are some very nice out-of-town pubs but unless you know someone with a car who is happy to drink orange juice all evening, they are out of range. Country buses don't run late. Around here, you'd have to leave the pub by 8 pm to get home - and for many pubs, you'd have to leave a lot earlier. There is really no point in allowing 24-hour drinking if nobody can get there.

So, CAMRA, no crowing here. I want those pubs too. I want to be able to smoke in some of them - not all, I'm not selfish enough to demand that all pubs cater to my personal preferences - but you won't let me.

If smokers could go to the pub, we'd spend money in there. They wouldn't have to turn into restaurants, the overall tax take wouldn't drop so fast so the government wouldn't have to keep increasing it quite so much, the publican would make more money overall so wouldn't have to raise prices, and pubs closures would slow, maybe even reverse.

It's not going to happen though, is it? The people CAMRA have sided with are not only out to get rid of smokers.

They're after drinkers too. Not the Saturday night boozy scrappers. Those are too risky to tackle. Instead, they go for the easy targets who like a pint or two now and then. You know, like real ale connoisseurs.

I don't think that's quite sunk in yet. It'll be too late when it does.

No more eyebrows.

Well, it seems a certain Sarky Frog and a Mangy Merkin are just itching to get that EU-wide total control they've been after all this time. They have proposed a central EU 'economic government' that will spell the end of individual countrys' budgets and instead impose them centrally. With targets, naturally, and no doubt with fines for not meeting those targets.

This was the natural consequence of a single currency, and to be honest I'm surprised it took them so long. Perhaps they were just waiting for a disaster to make it feasible - if not unavoidable. Bailing out Greece gives them the perfect excuse to say 'Zis must not 'appen again' and to make sure it doesn't, they'll take over.

Gordon Brown was last night examining the wording of the statement to see whether it was restricted to eurozone members or has possible implications for British economic sovereignty.

The Brown Gorgon better have his brown trousers on for this one. If it is restricted to the Euro members now, it's only a matter of time. Then, it doesn't matter who is Chancellor. They could give the job to a chimp. Although maybe not - the last time they tried that he sold all our gold to buy bananas for his Monkeyband friends.

It comes at a time when a Conservative government has promised Britons a vote on any new EU treaty if it wins the general election.

That's because they don't think anyone has realised there won't be any new treaties. There will be amendments to Lisbon, and we won't get a vote on any of them because it's not a new treaty. Nice try, Cameroids.

When the Lisbon Treaty was agreed, European leaders, including Mr Brown, said that it would be the last attempt to change the EU's basic rules until least 2020.

Politicians told us lies? Say it isn't so!

All the EU need is an excuse to fiddle around with Lisbon and they can slip in any new rule they like. There is not a damn thing any of us, even our elected representatives, can do about it.

And here's an excuse -

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has called for the Lisbon Treaty to be amended in order to prevent any repetition of the current Greek crisis, which has threatened to tear apart the euro.

Amended? Amended how, mein Fuhrer? Oh, I mean mein Merkin.

Well, let's see. Herbie Remploy-van has already tried, without an amendment, to take economic control.

Mr Van Rompuy, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, is an enthusiastic supporter of "la gouvernement économique" and last month upset many national capitals by trying impose "top down" economic targets.

And guess who they've put in charge of the 'special task force' to make Remploy-van-man's dream come true?

I wonder how many will really believe that this will end with central control of the economy? I bet there are a few who think they'll stop at that. They'll be the ones who thought it was going to stop at being a trading bloc.

Eyebrows isn't bothered. He knows he's shafted whoever wins the next election. Even if the Gorgon's Goblins get their seats back, Eyebrows will be bounced by Balls. If the EU get their way, Eyebrows could well be the last British Chancellor ever. Then those tax-and-spend policies will be run by people who are even more enthusiastic about it than the profligates we currently have. I suspect Eyebrows knows it, too.

So he's taking his last chance to twist the knife...

I wouldn't take one of those lone boating trips for a while if I were you, Eyebrows.

Party political broadcast 5...

... on behalf of the British National Party.




Yes, it's a cheap shot but if the BNP don't have a sense of humour then they shouldn't be playing this game.

This is Britain. We don't play nice here. None of our main parties realise this. I wonder if the smaller ones have worked it out?

Wednesday 24 March 2010

Carsmoke and guilt.

I've been smoking in my car
It smells like an old-time bar
With smoke, the inside I fill
Till it seeps out through the sills.

With apologies to Madness.

'Thou shalt not smoke in thy horseless carriage' is the latest commandment handed down by a sock full of spaghetti tied up ugly who thinks he is the Medical Moses but who looks more like the last turkey in the shop. It's a good thing Moses wasn't a Labour minister. Those two slabs of rock in his hands would be the only part of the mountain not covered with new laws.

Lots of coverage of this one, as you'd expect. I'm late again but that last rant had to come out or I'd have eaten my keyboard.

Well, you might imagine I'm all ranted out after that last blast but trust me, that never happens. I have to keep the blood pressure up, you know. So let's look at this new idea the Righteous have put out to scare all those feeble little minds.

Take a close look at this link again. Note that the scaremongers don't consider the possibility of opening a window, and base their scare on a momentary peak, not on a continuous level. There is no continuous level unless the vehicle is filled with smokers and they smoke on a relay-team basis. Otherwise, it's a momentary exposure that will only apply if the car is stationary with all the windows rolled up tight.

When the car is moving, air flows through the cabin even if all the windows are closed. Or did you think they were airtight? That would prove inconvenient on long journeys.

Then there's the carbon monoxide crap. That particular junk-science ploy was used once before when gullible drones were charged with the task of checking smokers' CO content on the street. They'd get a smoker to blow into a little machine and then tell them how much carbon monoxide they exhaled.

On. The. Street.

It had to be on the street. Had to be, because the carbon monoxide from vehicle exhausts will put your breath-CO into high levels even if you don't smoke, have never smoked and have never even witnessed a lit cigarette. Those levels will overwhelm anything that comes from a paper tube full of leaves. That is why they did not check a single non-smoker. No control group could be permitted because that would have blown the scam.

Real science: There is simply not enough carbon in a single cigarette to produce a high level of CO in your lungs even if you burned it sideways and inhaled it with your head in a box. Most of the carbon comes off as CO2. Incomplete combustion can produce CO but there's not even one whole tobacco leaf in a cigarette. They also claim benzene, formaldehyde, and all manner of other carbon compounds are formed and will seek out a non-smoker and kill them.

Look at a cigarette. Weigh it. If it was a solid carbon rod it would be a very, very thin one. It simply does not contain enough of anything to do what these people claim. It is a physical impossibility to fill a room with toxins from that amount of leaves even if they were laburnum dipped in cyanide. Outside, we are expected to fill the street with poisonous fumes. That's not possible unless we have a bonfire in the middle of the street with about four tons of tobacco in it, there's no wind and the street has a roof.

Carbon monoxide in a car with the engine running should come as no surprise to anyone. Take a look at where your ventilation system goes.

Ah, but let's not let reality get in the way of a good smoker-bashing session.

Here's a comment from a car forum (I don't have one, and I've never owned a Honda). As you'd expect, the smokers are incensed that their personal space is to be legally invaded and as you'd also expect, there's always one...

A total ban in cars gets my vote..... awful habit and apart from the dangers of second hand smoke, smoking itself whilst driving most be more dangerous than driving while talking on a mobile phone.....

I think a ban is all you can do as you see that many numpties smoking with a car full of kids on the school run.

"I don't like it so it must be banned. For the cheeeeldren. It's even more dangerous than another banned thing because I say it must be and I don't need no steenking facts so there."

Not 'my' children, someone else's. Not 'my' favourite things, someone else's. Their children, their problem. It's their future so why would it affect me or anyone else if they turn their children into kippers? Except of course they don't. My father smoked and I'm not tanned at all. He smoked in a little Hillman Imp and I didn't die. Neither did my brother nor my non-smoking mother. In fact, none of us have died yet and none of us have cancer. My mother has arthritis - go on, antismokers, I double-dare you.

Smoking while driving could be considered 'driving without due care and attention' which would also cover phones, eating a sandwich, drinking from a can of pop, ogling passing miniskirts or juggling. Something that could come up if you crashed while smoking, so watch out for that because if they can get you for smoking, they will. Smoking when parked constitutes no hazard to others at all. And yet there is support for a ban.

Sitting in traffic, not smoking, with the windows open, next to an articulated lorry, will do far more damage to you than a little paper tube of leaves. Even with the windows closed, it comes in through the vents. And yet the little tube of leaves gets the blame for everything. Just like standing on a station platform while a hundred-ton diesel engine roars by. The guy with the little tube of leaves is the problem.

Reality? Hah, who needs it?

Certainly not this one...

The people who believe smoking / passive smoking is a bogus health concern are those who still believe the world is flat, the Earth is at the centre of the universe and Sunderland will ever win the Premiership!!!

Flat-earther is the new 'racist'. The Gorgon used that one on climate heretics recently. New Scientist compares calls to teach children that global warming might be wrong to calls for teaching them creationism in science class. It's the same game. 'Our stats are bogus, our arguments tissue-thin, and if you don't believe them you are stupid'. It's that old Righteous technique of shouting 'racist' to shut up debate. I told you they didn't have very many methods, didn't I? They just recycle them. All their methods are in any book on the Spanish Inquisition. Nothing has changed except the wording. Heretic!

This goes deeper than simple smoker-bashing. Any non-smoker with lung cancer will blame their smoking friends. Their smoking friends, unless they know this scam, will be racked with guilt for the rest of their lives for no reason other than it makes a smug arsehole somewhere feel very proud of themselves. Anyone with heart disease or with any of the other problems blamed on smoking - just about everything - will blame their smoking friends. Anyone whose child gets asthma or any other illness will blame their smoking friends even if they have never smoked around that child. Third hand smoke, you see? Not one shred of evidence for second hand smoke and already they pretend third hand smoke is a fact. Facts don't need evidence any more. They just need a good number of morons willing to believe anything that suits their prejudices.

So what, you may think? So what if those filthy smokers feel guilty?

Well, take a look at this.

And if you shrug that one off, try this.

It's not just smokers who are going to suffer from this massive guilt trip brought to you by the makers of every pogrom in the history of humanity. Everyone can join in. Inquisition time, and everyone is guilty. Feeeel that guilt! Lash yourself, buy a celice, wear thorns on the inside of your clothes and fill your underwear with lobsters. You must atone for the guilt. Sounding familiar yet? Of course it is. It's the same thing.

Simply being a smoker now means getting the blame for absolutely every illness suffered by anyone anywhere, even if they've never seen you smoke. And some of you will cheer the trucks when they take us away.

Then you'll wonder how you manage to still get cancer or heart disease or ringworm or hangnail when there are no smokers to blame it on, and you'll ask difficult questions and kick up a fuss because all those things were not eradicated even though you did your part and helped destroy the heretics...

...and then the trucks will come back for you.

Second hand smoke is a lie. Third hand smoke is a bigger lie. Any damage caused by smoking applies only to the smoker and not to anyone else. If you get cancer and blame me, it is the last thing you will ever say to me because I am not going to hang around anyone so stupid it could be contagious. Second hand stupid is just as real as second hand smoke, you know. So if anyone wants to blame me for their own problems, I will not even respond, I will leave and that will be the last conversation we have. I will feel no guilt because there is nothing to feel guilty about.

And no, before someone pops it up, Roy Castle did not die of passive smoking. He had a cancer that could not have been triggered by smoking. He is the only example held up by anyone, ever, that passive smoking can cause harm and his death was not attributable to smoking.

Passive smoking deaths so far proven - zero.

If smoking is banned in cars I will buy an old banger, SORN it, stand it in the garden on bricks and smoke in it.

And it will have a no-smoking sign in it too. A big one, big enough to use as an ashtray.

A long rant that's been building for a while.

Okay. Stocking up on whisky when you have the will power of Patty Hackett faced with a dodgy offer for lobbying is a bad idea. I have loads of the stuff now and am going through a quality control sequence that would make any council moron proud. And yet I will rant, because it is ranting time (GMT) and there's probably a Labour law defining the time and length of rants and what they should be about, which I will studiously ignore.

Three years ago, I wrote this.

I was wrong. I thought the Muslims were the only group being set up to take all the blame and I thought the 'change leader' tactic was met when the Brown Gorgon ousted the Tiny Blur. But then, three years ago, I hadn't realised that they were all becoming the same party. The political party. So we are only now at stage 5 in that scheme.

It wasn't just the Muslims. Oh, you guys have been set up a treat, but there are many more. Socialists love to beat Thatcherites with the out-of-context 'there is no such thing as society' quote but thanks to the socialists, there really is, now, no such thing as society.

We are back to Neolithic tribalism. Insult one member of a tribe and they all come after you. With a modern refinement - so much as look at someone the wrong way and they call the police, then self-appointed tribal leaders will howl and scream in the media about how it's 'so unfair' and they'll demand that everyone is forced to accept them as they are whether they like it or not and everyone should avert their eyes and move aside in the name of Equality because in order to be equal, they have to be more equal than anyone else and....

...pause for breath.

There is no equality in this country and there can never be as long as we have a government - any government - who put one group above another.

Every time I mention smoking, some indoctrinated loon comes along and says 'Smokers are selfish. I don't want to breathe their fumes and I don't want to go to pubs where smokers are and I don't want to have to wash my hair and change my clothes so they must all be banned from absolutely everywhere so that I can have things all my own way and these selfish people won't be able to inconvenience me in the slightest. Including in their own cars and in their own homes where they are bothering nobody else at all.' The most indoctrinated will read that over and over and see no problem with it. Really, they just won't see it.

These loons believe what they are told and are happy to regard smokers as subhuman. Why? Because the government says it's fine for them to do this and further, they encourage it with mandatory 'no smoking' signs everywhere, including places where nobody has ever smoked. Anyone defying this ban must be hounded as a pariah. Even allowing someone else to smoke is now a terrible sin. Soon you will be fined for not having a 'no smoking' sign in your car even if you have never smoked and don't know anyone who does. Soon after that, you'll have to have them displayed prominently in every room of your house whether it matches the decor or not.

All of the antismoking propaganda is lies. Oh, I know it's risky to inhale the smoke from burning leaves but only for me. Not for anyone around me. And yet there are statements in the press like this:

EAC chairman Tim Yeo said: “Air pollution probably causes more deaths than passive smoking, traffic accidents or obesity [...] In the worst affected areas this invisible killer could be taking years off the lives of people most at risk, such as those with asthma.”

Falling pianos cause more deaths than passive smoking. Meteorite strikes have passive smoking beaten on the 'deaths' scale. The score attributed to lightning makes passive smoking hang its head in embarrassment. And yet here it is held up alongside traffic accidents as a major killer. Not one death or even one illness - not one - has been proven to be caused by passive smoking and yet there are smug faces everywhere telling people that it's a proven fact, innit?

The fact is, passive smoking is less dangerous than standing upwind of a bonfire. The tiny whiff of burning plant material reaching you from that fire contains more 'smoke' than even a whacking great Cuban cigar. And yet these feeble excuses for humanity will breathe deeply of the bonfire but run away screaming from someone with half a gram of leaves in a paper tube. And they will call smokers 'weak'. They still don't see it, you know. Doublethink is a powerful thing.

There are many non-smokers who really couldn't give a stuff about all this rubbish. There are many antismokers who know it's all based on lies but go along with it because they have the chance to push someone else around. Then there are the militants of ASH and those fat pompous idiots who have somehow contrived to turn their medical positions into a new Politburo for controlling the masses. They are the dangerous ones but the ire of the smoker often turns on the non-smoker. That's unfair but it's bound to happen. Even the statement 'I don't smoke' is now enough to send many smokers into wary withdrawal. There are some who have been so consistently abused that they now react in a Pavlovian manner to non-smokers, and can over-react to a few words.

It's as if everyone wearing a red jacket whacked you with a stick. Soon, you start avoiding anyone in a red jacket because they're likely to whack you. If someone wearing a red jacket approached you with peaceful intent, you're going to back away and snarl at them. You might even decide on a pre-emptive whack.

Muslims often regard non-Muslims with suspicion. There were always some, but not many, who would do this. Now it's becoming endemic. A few radicals have made so much noise about 'Muslim rights' that many people have turned against Muslims, and the Muslims react by being wary of everyone else, and often over-react to a few words. It's the same technique as applied to smokers.

Gay rights activists make so much noise about the slightest insult that straight people soon get cheesed off with it and start being unpleasant to gays. There were always some, but the constant noise from the activists only serves to justify their actions and swell their numbers. Gays respond by being wary of non-gays and often over-react to a few words. It's the same technique as applied to smokers.

Black special-interest groups serve only to segregate black people from white ones. They have no other function. White people see these groups as getting special treatment and they turn against blacks. Black people respond by being wary of whites and often over-react to a few words. It's that technique again.

The same technique, over and over. Set one group against another by giving one group special treatment for a while, then drop them. For years we have heard how travelling people can set up a permanent base, ignore planning permission laws, ignore any laws they like and get away with it. The public will now have no sympathy when the government turn on those travellers.

When two Muslim women were refused entry to a plane because they did not want to go through the nudie scanner, who gave a crap? Really. We've been conditioned with 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' and 'terrorists are Muslim' and our first conclusion is not 'Those women just didn't want to be ogled at', but 'Ah-ha, something to hide, eh?' We have been trained to regard 'them' as a separate group, and 'they' have been trained to accept it. Smokers, the obese, Muslims, gays, black, Asian, the list grows by the day. Motorists and dog-owners are soon to join the rest of us on the naughty step. Motorists already have one foot on it.

Refuse the nudie scanner and you don't fly, yet when a member of airport staff walked through a scanner, was observed and commented on by another member of staff, the observer is sacked and handed over to the police and the 'victim' says this:

Ms Margetson told the newspaper: ''I can't bear to think about the body scanner thing.

''I'm totally traumatised. I've spoken to the police about it. I'm in too much of a state to go to work.''

Really? That guy who you managed to get sacked has been staring at every passenger going through that machine because that's his job. If they don't like it, they don't fly. And yet you are totally traumatised by going through once? So, I would imagine, are many people and some of them would very much like to speak to the police about it. We don't have that option. Airport staff are more important than their customers and we hate you and are wary of you because of it. Here's that technique once more.

Who is doing this? Are Muslims the ones calling for a politician to be arrested for saying he doesn't like the veil? Are those non-smokers all delighted that their pubs are empty and closing? Is every black person overjoyed that white people can't join their clubs? Is every gay person really trying to force schools to teach five-year-olds about gay sex?

No.

This doesn't come from the groups involved. It comes from the Righteous who are unelected but who have contrived to control the government. ASH don't care if the pubs, clubs, cafes etc all close down. They want to stamp on smokers' faces. The 'equality' quangos don't care if Muslims get the blame for their ridiculous assertions of offence. The Muslims are a means to an end for them. Those shadowy figures encouraging black or gay militancy are not necessarily black or gay themselves. The blacks and the gays are a means to an end. As is anyone overweight, anyone disabled, anyone different in any way at all. They are tools in Righteous hands.

They are coming out of the woodwork now, those Righteous. They have the Gorgon's government trained to accept their every pronouncement and have most of the Cameroid's next government trained too. The Cameroid has accepted the smoking ban as a 'done deal', thinks we are all happy with it and will do nothing at all to relax it. In fact, he's likely to make it worse. As long as that is the Tory position, they cannot possibly expect a smoker's vote.

Al the Oily Fish is delighted with the idea of minimum pricing on booze and will not back down. Scottish Labour oppose it now, but if they get back in, they'll implement it. So would the Lib Dems. All of them hate smokers and drinkers and yet expect us to vote for them.

In today's bodge-it, Eyebrows introduced a whacking tax on anyone buying a new car. The same new cars Count Mandelstein's scrappage scheme was to encourage us to buy. Older cars are to be taxed because they are deemed filthy polar bear killers and new cars are supertaxed. If you drive and you vote for this shower, you are certifiable.

In the end, it really doesn't matter because the people you vote for will just do as they are told by people you didn't vote for and have never heard of until they creep out from under their stones. Here are a few of them -

Dreadful Arnott - Who voted for this woman, or for anyone in her organisation, to dictate to us what we can and cannot be permitted to do with a legal substance on private property?

Don Shenker - Who voted for this man. or for anyone in his organisation, to dictate to us exactly how much we can be allowed to drink and what we must pay for it?

Liam Donaldson - did we vote for him to dictate what we can and cannot smoke, drink or eat?

The Muslim Council of Britain - did any Muslims even get a vote on that?

The ACPO - no voting here, it's a private company which we have to pay for but have no say in who's in there.

Many, many more.

And yet we are railing against smokers or non-smokers, Muslim or Christian, black or white, driver or pedestrian, gay or straight when none of those groups are the ones causing the divisions. The segregation is a symptom, not the cause.

While we fight amongst ourselves, we fail to notice the unelected who now dictate Government policy designed to deepen those divisions and keep us distracted. We see the face of the Gorgon, or the Cameroid, or the Oily Fish, or that bloke from the Lib Dems and we think they are in control but they are puppets. We turn our ire on the EU because we think they are the puppet masters but really, they are just one big wasteful civil service office finding ways to spend more and more without any risk of actually achieving anything.

Minimum pricing on anything at all is illegal under EU law. Imposing limits on how much tobacco anyone can bring in from the continent is illegal under EU law. Free trade and protectionism don't mix. The EU/ECHR has stated that keeping innocent people's DNA is illegal.

The Righteous don't even bow to the EU. They are far more dangerous, more so because they rarely work in combination with each other. Bringing down one of them won't even faze the rest. We could get out of the EU at a stroke with a simple referendum, we can replace Labour with another party by voting enough of them out of office, but the Righteous are not a party, not a group, not a coherent organisation of any kind. They are immune to public censure because there is no mechanism to remove them, even though they rely heavily on public funds.

We are paying our own tormentors and we have no means to stop paying.

Eyebrows, today, had the opportunity to stop them all at once. He could have saved a hell of a lot of money by announcing that a government funded charity is not a charity, that the taxpayer should not be funding organisations unless they have a say in what that organisation does and who runs it, and that therefore government funding to charities will stop at once unless the boards of those charities are elected by the people paying for them. He could have done that. He didn't touch the Righteous at all.

Neither will the Tories. Nor the Lib Dems. They will continue to hand huge wads of tax income to people who will use it to beat those taxpayers about the head. Either they are scared of the Righteous or they are happy to see the people of this country subdivided into smaller and smaller warring factions until the whole lot gets back to the Green dream of mediaeval fortress villages. With a 'no smoking' sign tattooed on the neck of every horse.

I don't believe the government is scared of the Righteous. They hold the purse strings and they could stop it all if they wanted to. Just stop the cheques and the whole nanny state will fold up in a matter of days.

They won't. They won't because they are drunk with the power the Righteous let them have over little people's lives. The politicians we currently have will not help us because they are also isolated. Those who didn't fall for the expenses greedfest were encouraged to boost their claims. That does not excuse them. They could have refused but the pressure of 'everyone else is doing it and you're odd if you don't' is not to be underestimated. Once most of them were in the game, peer pressure does the rest. Then it's exposed and the politicians and the people are at war. The same technique as applied to smokers.

So now, the politicians have no friends outside Westminster, other than the siren voices of those Righteous who tell them of ways they can be popular. Just get rid of those smokers. Eighty percent of the population want them gone. Get rid of those fat people, they cost the taxpayer money. Get the polluting drivers off the roads. The people are getting sick because of them. They will thank you for it one day.

The politicians won't help us because they are Righteous pets now. Just another faction, another minority group under the control of insidious whispers and lies. They think they are doing the right thing because the Righteous tell them so. They are no longer listening to us, and haven't been for a long time.

The only way to stop it is to cut government funding to all those charities and quangos. All of it, to all of them. The only way to achieve that is to clear out every Righteous controlled MP from Westminster and elect an entirely new set. That will not happen at this election.

Where we get new MPs, they will be selected not on their ability but on their gender, religion, sexual orientation or skin colour. The Righteous want that because they want to limit the range of candidates and weed out any who might cause them problems. That's also why they want candidates brought in from outside the area. They must have a stronger connection to the party than to the people they represent so they will vote as instructed. They will vote as their leader is instructed to instruct them.

The Righteous rarely stand for election. They seek more secure positions from which they can exert control. They exert that control by dividing people into groups and they have done this with Parliament. All those parties are the same now, they all want the same level of control over the minutiae of our lives, and why? Because they don't see us as human. They see us the same way the antismokers see the smokers. A nuisance to be controlled. They will not listen to us in exactly the same way that an antismoker will not listen to a smoker. Exactly the same.

All the same technique. We are now one group, the politicians are a different group.

MPs, you have been duped. You no longer represent us, you are pets of the Righteous. Stop listening to those suave whispers. Those people are not there to help you, they are there to control you and through you, us.

You, MPs, can stop this. At a stroke. And reduce the deficit into the bargain.

Stop paying people to bully us. Then we can vote for you.

Thinking sleazy thoughts.

Okay, the whisky level has just exceeded the level of sensible scientific writing so it's blogging time.

I remember when John Major was Prime Monster. You know, the grey one. After Thatchzilla, he was definitely the B-feature for that particular show. The newspapers tried to make out he was having an affair and nobody would believe them.

Major? The Grey Librarian? Never! He gave the impression he slept in Paisley pyjamas, had cocoa at bedtime and a boiled egg with toast soldiers every morning, and he always kept his socks on. No way could he be having an affair. But then... the egg should have given us a clue. The wench with the nose of great size (extraordinarily tenuous link to Kate Bush song there, the clue is in the rhythm) who warned him about the deadliness of his eggs then took him aside for a little egg-fertilisation practice.

Then there was David Mellor, the most hideous creature to have been born of woman or sea anemone or some Hell-inspired cross between the two. He'd been bonking away in a Chelsea shirt and the newspapers had photos. I couldn't look.

I remember thinking that if I looked like him, and the newspapers said 'We're going to tell the world you had sex. With a woman', I'd be thinking 'Oh, thank you. Nobody will believe me when I tell them'.

I think the point is, if there is one, that when Major's government did sleaze, a lot of it was funny. Grey Major was bonking the woman who modelled for Concorde while Mellor probably paid a woman to tell the papers she'd slept with him because he couldn't possibly pay her enough to really do it. There just wasn't that much money in the world at that time. Quantitative Sleazing hadn't been invented.

The current Gorgon government are not funny. They don't entertain like Carry On After Thatcher did. They are more like the Gorgonfather. The stuff coming out now is just nasty. Very, very nasty indeed.

But then, socialists don't do 'funny'. If Cameron wins in May, can I recommend the Benny Hill theme as triumphal music?

With clips of Boris chasing scantily-clad nubile wenches around the Commons. It doesn't mean a damn thing in terms of policy but it would cheer us all up no end.

Go on, Dave. You know you want to. Sod the PC rubbish. That's a socialist idea and you really don't want us to start calling you Red Dave, now do you?

Tuesday 23 March 2010

Penny for the Guy and other news.

Frantically working, still. I have a habit of expanding experiments and now have quite a web of data to unravel, which is interesting but time-consuming. There was also a supplementary experiment added to this one (yes, there was an extra charge) and blending in those results is not as easy as it sounds.

Plus, today was last-chance stocking-up day before the Bodge-it tomorrow. Which will be live-blogged by many, but not by me (no internet access at the lab). Corrugated Soundbite has the list. It will unfortunately all come as a nasty surprise to me when I get home. Never mind, I have laid in a good supply of nasty-surprise medicine to help me deal with it.

If you're driving, get that car filled up first thing tomorrow but don't go too fast. It's the end of the month and I've noticed the camera-vans parked everywhere again. They aren't even trying to be subtle about it any more. Last week of every month, target-meeting week. If you're out and about, don't drop anything or photograph anything or sneeze or twitch or deviate in any way from the State clone appearance.

Old Holborn is after your pennies again. He only needs a few grand to run his campaign to be elected as MP 'V' and since he's likely to run the entire campaign in costume, that has got to be worth paying to see even if he doesn't win. I'll bung a few quid his way later. He has conscripted the tenacious Anna Raccoon to run things, so you never know, with all the main parties doing their best to avoid election, he might actually be sitting on those green benches in May.

I won't be standing, not here. This place is not yet ready for a non-socialist candidate.

Back to work. I'll catch up on comments later and there's a rant building...

Random thought....

Still working but something occurred to me while I was rolling up some thinking-leaves. I just want to place it here for opinions and will probably come back to it in detail later.

How many anti-smokers enjoy Parma ham or smoked salmon or kippers? And have they grasped how those things are made?

When (if) they do, will they realise that the risk of third hand smoke is only comparable to those things if they saturate their sofa with smoke and then eat it?

It's also given me an idea for a meal - Parma ham, smoked salmon, the Ardbeg and a cigar. It ALL tastes of SMOKE! Oh, the Righteous will burst their brains trying to take it in.

Monday 22 March 2010

A quickie.

Damn this real life stuff. It takes so much time.

A quick news roundup -

Tesco have the one-litre bottle of Grants at £12, so get some in if you haven't already. Morrison's have Ledaig at £15, and Glen Grant at that price too. I'll be calling in tomorrow before the eyebrow tax takes effect.

Old Holborn is to stand for election for Jury Team. With mask or without, that's the question. The other question is - is it a mask?

Ukwebspider needs assistance. He's been spending a lot of time and putting in a lot of effort to compile those links. I can't promise to be any help for the next couple of months at least but if anyone can spare a bit of time, call in and take a look.

Drivers, your time has come. You are about to be blamed for those heart attacks and cancers that have been blamed on smoking, drinking and obesity (yes, the same ones). Apparently you kill more people than passive smoking which can't be hard, because passive smoking has yet to even make anyone ill, never mind claim a notch in a lighter. Just for fun, your government will test the amount of particulates you produce, including the ones you throw up from the roads... which are currently covered in dry grit left over from winter. Hey, you didn't expect them to play fair, did you?

The Brown Gorgon has examined the latest Labour scandal with one eye and declared 'I see no ships'.

And, just so we're clear that ours is not the only country with lunatics in charge, Argentina is to solve its inflation problem with cheap haddock. I hope the Gorgon hasn't heard about this yet.


Back later. Report writing.

Get the Kampfy Chair!


No reason. It just made me laugh.

Sunday 21 March 2010

Tales of darkness, despair and the Labour party.

The seventies throwbacks that run UNITE have been silly little people. Getting all uppity and shirty in the current climate guarantees that their nasty operation will be examined in some detail, and it has been. Their taxpayer-funded sidelines are coming into the light, the degree to which they run the Labour Party is becoming clearer and more public by the day, and their vicious intimidatory techniques are being documented. You think those stories of phone-throwing and shouting levelled at the Brown Gorgon were bad? Take a look at what his paymasters get up to.

The Labour party, the unions, same thing. The unions control Labour now. It doesn't matter which Labour MP you vote for, they are not going to be able to do a thing without the approval of a load of people you didn't vote for. The Tories will still be run by the EU, which is bad, but Labour are run by both the EU and the unions, and their two masters want different things. Very different things.

The EU want cuts, the unions want more spending. Labour are in the middle and have no power to decide. So the unions call strikes when those EU-demanded cuts start coming. The Brown Gorgon has not intervened because he can't. He can't intervene in the BA problem either because BA are doing what the EU demand - trimming back their business to stay solvent - the only sensible thing they can do. The unions not only refuse to allow this, they expect BA to magically produce more money so their members can have pay rises and the union can increase the amount they take from those members in dues.

It goes deeper than simple union control of a political party. RantinRab and Subrosa, and others, have mentioned Glasgow council's links to crime gangs and as more and more of that comes out, it starts to look very dodgy indeed. A quango has just bunged a public-money bribe Labour's way, to add to the money laundered through the unions, and the police have to get permission to investigate Glasgow's Labour friends.

Meanwhile, Labour are to scrap the UK-wide elderly care schemes and use the money to buy votes in England. They don't care about Scotland, because Scotland voted SNP and must now be punished for that. Large swathes of Scotland are filled with idiots who will vote for socialism in one form or another anyway because it's easier than looking after themselves.

What the hell happened to those burly kilted warriors who could walk from one end of the country to the other and find whatever they needed along the way? Now they fester in council tower blocks, watching an Australian playing a Scottish hero while swigging from a can of beer and stuffing themselves with deep-fried pizza. March on London? They can barely make it to the bus stop. They'll turn purple at the idea they are weak and shout 'Ah can sure look after ma'sel', ye just step ootside an' say it, pal'. but that's not what I mean and you know it. Deep down, you know it. Once the benefits train stops - which it must soon, now the money's run out - you're going to be eating your children to stay alive because there will be nothing else. You voted for this. Time and again, you voted for it and you are going to vote for it next time too.

Labour have taken full advantage. Not just in Scotland but all over the UK, they have set up captive voters who cannot vote against them because they are stuck in dead ends with nothing but benefits to keep them alive. Most of those trapped voted for it, so it's hard to care. Many of them don't want to get out of there, and when those people lose their free cash, it will be impossible to care. Some do want to get out, but Labour's benefits trap is a strong one. The only way out is to give up everything and start from scratch, and that's certainly not an easy option.

Now we are run not by the people those Labourites voted for, but by people we have never even heard of, who have never stood for election, in the unions and the EU and increasingly, it seems, in criminal gangs. All seem able to escape the consequences of their activities simply by dropping a few pennies at the feet of the nearest Labour MP and shouting 'Dance for your pennies, laddie'.

How low will they go? Well, a short comment by Prodicus gives a hint.

The EU have already redone referenda when they didn't get the answer they wanted. The precedent is set. If this government doesn't get the answer they want at the next election...

... would they make us all vote again until we get it right?

The EU couldn't object. They've done the same thing. The unions and the gangs won't object. They want that answer too. The only real question would be - how many times will we have to tell them?

The ones that got away.

An anonymous tip in the comments led to the Angryteen blog, which has just started up.

Apparently it's run by two teenagers. If that's true, they've escaped the Ballsification of the education system and are thinking for themselves.

So there is hope.

Party political broadcast 4...

...on behalf of the Green party.

There will be no TV transmission because that causes goblin farming.

Instead, here are our candidates, none of whom exhale any CO2 at all. And most of whom are green or are rapidly becoming so. Our election slogan - Every candidate an ecosystem.

Vote Green, you know it mocks science.

Saturday 20 March 2010

Dripping water on a stone.

I've been following Captain Ranty's 'Freeman' journey with some interest. I haven't declared myself Freeman yet, because I like to know exactly what I'm letting myself in for before taking such a step and I want to be armed with every minute detail before making a decision that big. If you're going to take on the entire apparatus of State, you need to know exactly how it all works before you start. There is a hell of a lot to learn.

It's rather like my job. If I were to start dabbling around with these bacteria without knowing exactly what I was doing from the outset, I'd soon need a fridge full of toilet paper and a good supply of rehydration mixture. So I'm cautious. I like to know how it all works before I press 'go'.

So far, it seems that demands for things like council tax can be regarded as if they were invoices issued by a company that you have no contract with. The same goes for television licences and all other similar demands. It's as if Tesco delivered a vanload of stuff you hadn't ordered, then demanded you pay for it, and then took you to court when you refused.

In court, and even in dealing with the police, all that ritual isn't just pomp and tradition. It all has meaning, it all involves signs and codes which are as good as an exchange of contracts and if you don't see them coming, they've got you. They appear to be such little things.

For instance, when a policeman reads you your rights and ends with 'Do you understand', it seems a harmless enough question. 'Did you, or did you not, understand what I just said?' That isn't what it means though. Answering 'yes' to that question means you have just accepted the limited range of rights spelled out by the policeman and forfeited all other rights. You have accepted a contract which gives the police authority over you. They don't have any authority over you, you know, unless you have broken an actual law.

Even the act of standing up when a judge or magistrate enters a courtroom is an acceptance of contract. You show, in that act, deference to the judge and when he sits down before you do, you symbolically accept his superiority over you. You give jurisdiction to that court by that simple act.

The forces of law know what all these symbols and movements and answers really mean. When you don't follow the exact protocol, they are stumped.

The Freeman method is not an easy course of action to take. It means going up against people who are experts in these matters, who are trained and well practised and who know the fine detail of court protocols, and it is a very serious matter indeed if you get it wrong. If a court succeeds in getting you to submit to its jurisdiction after you have given them a hard time for a few hours, you can be sure they will be especially vindictive. if you start this fight, you have to be certain of winning it.

Losing is not an option because losing does not put you back where you started. Once you set this thing in motion, there is no way back to where you started. You win it all or lose it all. It is not something to take on lightly.

Lately there have been calls to speed up the process of changing this country. UKwebspider has lost patience, as have others now and then, and I can see why. It is frustrating to see such a slow pace of change but remember, we're up against people who have set up this system over a period of centuries. We are not going to defeat it in a few short months, we need to understand exactly how it works before we can fight it.

What can we do? It's easy to feel powerless in the face of a State machine that is designed to make us feel powerless. They have authority, don't they? Well, no, they don't, in most cases. It's all about contracts and that's especially true when those 'authorities' are set up as profit-making businesses. Unless you agree to a contract with them, they have no authority over you. They cannot simply demand money for a 'service' you have not requested.

There are a few things we can do, listed most recently here, and previously here. Most of them look like small things, but from what I've been finding, the State controls us by even smaller things. Stand up when an official orders you to stand up, and your obedience gives them authority over you. It's that simple. I don't know if it can work the other way - if you are presented with a council official on your doorstep, you insist he comes inside to discuss whatever he wants, and he complies, has he handed authority to you? Still a lot to learn.

It will not be easy and it will not be quick. Bloggers, even the big guns like Guido Fawkes, have only a tiny fraction of the population of this country listening to us and those that are listening are mostly those who already agree. Press releases? The press ignore the Freeman issue entirely. They ignore the smoking-ban compromises reached in the rest of Europe. They ignore the questions hanging over the global warming scam. They ignore Geert Wilders' trial in Holland. They ignored Nick Hogan's plight until he was freed, then made a grudging mention which was soon buried under the latest celebrity shagfest or who-has-the-shiniest-outfit contest filled with grinning vacuous bints with smiles as fixed as a gecko's and tits more plastic than Barbie's. Even if the apparatus of State could be exposed in the press, it would disappear under a mountain of glitz and irrelevancies and save-the-vouchers-for-your-very-own-free-ID-card rubbish. They are also, for the most part, what you might refer to as 'not entirely impartial'. The mainstream press are not going to help at all. There is no quick way to get any message out.

The quickest way would be an uprising but that must not happen. Oh, the government would love it to happen, which is why they went on and on about the 'summer of rage' last year which turned out to be a very British 'summer of being rather miffed, as long as it's not raining' instead. That's why they harass photographers, say they won't, then do it again, then say they won't do it again... it's why they fine people for dropping their wallet or overfilling their bins or sending their children to a good school or putting a baked bean tin in the paper bin. They want an explosion. The Gorgon would love to invoke his civil contingencies act.

Rioting must not happen because it will not work. We are fragmented. Ex-smokers who have moved to Electrofag now despise smokers as much as the antismokers do, but both those groups also despise each other. Real-ale drinkers still look down on canned-lager drinkers as being an inferior species. Thin people have been set against fat people, black against white, Muslim against Christian, gay against straight in ways that were never before so open and so State-approved. Any rioters will get only a small support base, they will be easily crushed and then there will be armed patrols on the streets 'for our own safety'. The rage on the streets is not focused enough for a riot to be effective. It has been misdirected by the Government and the MSM for years and cannot easily be controlled. By anyone.

There are other ways. Nonviolent ways. Slow, patient ways. I am not naturally patient but I force myself to be. Last week I finally convinced two Smoky-Drinkers that the party they vote for because they always have is the same party that has made the Smoky-Drinky places necessary, and the same party that now wants to price those malt whiskies out of their reach. They now realise they have been voting for a party that hates them.

There are others. many others, who vote as they have always done for no other reason than that it is how they have always voted. One by one, I work on them, and point out what they had not realised. Those votes they cast are directly related to the reasons they have to stand out in the cold to smoke, and are paying more for the privilege, and can't afford to go to the pub too often anyway. Those votes are the reason they are dictated to on levels so petty as to define exactly how far their bin must be from the kerb and what time it must be out. Those votes are directly related to why they are out of work and now can't even get a job collecting trolleys in the supermarket.

One by one. It will take time, but I hope that each one will go on to tell others and that the idea will spread. I will never have a BBC slot to explain this. I will never have even a corner of an obscure page of the Daily Sport to explain this. One by one, like water dripping on a stone, I make a tiny and imperceptible difference. But as long as I keep that drip-drip-drip going, as long as those I convince add to the dripping effects, the stone will start to wear through and one day it will crack. It won't be quick. It won't happen in time to sway the election but I hope, by then, at least in this little corner of the country, someone will notice a dent in that majority they have felt so entitled to claim as their own.

It would be quicker if we were not fragmented. Even those opposed to the smoking ban - freedom2choose and FOREST and others - are competing with each other at some level. Some Electrosmokers act like born-again non-smokers while some real smokers regard Electrosmokers as traitors. They want the same thing. They want to smoke indoors. People's front of Judea, Judean People's Front. Fragmentary groups who bicker amongst themselves are easily dealt with. There are so many now. Even black groups, Muslim groups, gay groups, Christian groups, all fragmented into subgroups that spend more time arguing with each other than with those they were originally designed to argue with.

There will always be 'my way or no way' individuals in every group. Every group. No exceptions. I have seen comments by smokers deriding Electrofag as a girlie feeble excuse for smoking. I have seen Electrosmokers talking about smokers in terms ASH would be proud of. ASH want us all treated as scum, folks. If we fight amongst ourselves, we are doing half their work for them.

The fragmentation cannot easily be fixed. So we need a new common ground. One that does not involve a specific lifestyle choice.

So consider. If you are feeling put-upon, if you feel your life is somehow less pleasant than it was, if you find people are calling you names and the press is printing stories about how terrible you are... who did that?

If you are Muslim, you are blamed for terrorist activity even though there hasn't been any in this country for years. Who did that? Who is blaming you? Who is saying it's your fault they have to install nudie scanners at airports? Who is saying it's your fault there are now barriers and policemen at every railway station? Are any of the other parties promising anything different? Are you really going to vote for a party that hates you?

If you are a photographer, are you going to vote for a party that will allow the police and pseudoplods to harass you? If you are overweight, are you going to vote for a party that will deny you treatment if you get sick and put you on bread-and-water for your own good? If you are gay, are you really going to vote for a party that makes a big issue out of it by patronising you with 'we is down wiv da gay folk' bollocks when you know they are not remotely interested? If you are Christian and you vote for any of the main three parties, well, that is turning the other cheek so far you'll probably snap your neck. They hate you. All of you.

They want your vote because it's worth money and power to them. Even if they lose, your vote is worth money to them. They don't care about any of us in the slightest, never have and never will. Once they are in, they have five years free reign to slap us around to their heart's content. All of us. You might not smoke, you might hate smoking, you might be delighted that smokers are getting a beating but do you drive? Drink? Attend any religious gathering? Put salt on your food? Like red meat? Prefer to wear a hat when outdoors? Have a waistline outside State limits? You will experience exactly the same thing because you have voted for a party that hates you.

For an individual, the only way out is the Freeman route. No riot will work because no fragmented group can ever get enough people together to do it. The only way to survive the Freeman route is to spend a lot of time learning absolutely everything about it before you start. This is not some whizz-bang afternoon session with a management consultant telling you when to use 'paradigm' and 'customer-centric-delivery-matrix' and other nonsense that lets you take control of a corporation by sounding as if you almost have a functional brain.

This takes a lot of time and a lot of learning and a lot of thought. This State is a nasty and devious thing. Every day we make contracts without even knowing it. The deception has increased in recent years.

I remember, many years ago, watching TV shows about private detectives and lawyers, few of which I can remember (Raymond Burr as 'Ironside' is one). There was a rule with a court summons. It had to be delivered into your hand. Until it touched your hand it was not binding. You had to physically accept the summons. Dropping it through the letterbox was no good, you could just leave it there. I remember thinking it was a bit like passing the Runes (I was allowed to watch scary films as a youngster and if I hadn't been, I might not have such a long list of short stories to my name now) because unless you accepted it, it didn't affect you.

I don't see that on TV law-oriented shows any more. There is no mention of the summons at all. Do they come by post now, and if they do, can you claim not to have touched it, therefore you are not bound by it?

How many know?

The intricacies of the legal system are astounding. It is all based on your acceptance of contract and acceptance of someone else's authority. The way in which that acceptance is agreed is cryptic and convoluted and if you don't understand it all, it is easy to be caught out.

Go back through Captain Ranty's blog for a start, but be aware it's just a start. This is a very deep rabbit hole indeed and learning about it is much more like learning Kung Fu than learning chess.

While learning, keep dripping water on that stone. The more drips, the faster it will break.