Look, children, if you don't smoke, this will happen to your face.You'll turn into the Joker and you'll become deranged.
We smokers can't really expect the pubs to support us when the tobacco industry doesn't give a damn about us. They are willing to see their customers shafted by the likes of ASH and their puppets in government and when taken to task, all they can do is make excuses. We can't trust the tobacco companies. We're better off growing our own.
So who can we trust? The pub industry? Despite their own industry falling apart because the weather this year has been too vile for al-fresco smoking, they are, by and large, trying to blame their problems on supermarkets selling booze cheaper. Which the supermarkets and indeed off-licences have always done. The pub was never about price. It was about socialising. Now it's only about socialising if you don't smoke. If you do, you might as well stay home and pay off-sales prices. Why pay a premium to smoke in the rain? CAMRA won't see it. The pubs won't see it. When the current oppression breaks, Smoky-Drinky will get a licence and New Pub will rise from the bankrupt remnants of the old. We already have regulars to rely on.
We can't rely on the pubs. With a few notable exceptions, they have caved in.
The government? Not a chance. The government are all spineless and mindless and in thrall to the Joker pictured above. They are only interested in us when it's time to vote. None of them give a well-rotted cowpat about us in between voting days. They are in it for themselves and I wouldn't trust any of them any further than I could comfortably expel a badger from my left nostril. They are as reliable as a wax fireplace. Utterly useless and one enormously expensive white elephant.
The antismokers target anyone in the public eye who might like a cigarette. It's for the cheeeldren. The cheeeldren might see. The cheeeldren will definitely take up smoking if they see sportsmen or film stars or even vacant bimbos on daytime TV smoking. These new cheeldren aren't worth keeping if they are that weak-willed.
I was 21 when I first decided I'd like a smoke. My father smoked since before I was born. Never interested me. As children, he used to send my brother and I to the corner shop to pick up a pack of cigarettes. We were allowed to buy sweets with the change. It never occurred to either of us to be even remotely interested in the cigarettes. Then one day, the shop said 'no'. This did not deprive us of cigarettes. It deprived us of sweets because our father had to go to the shop himself.
In all the films of my youth, everyone smoked. Cigarette machines were outside the corner shops. George Best was the greatest footballer around and not one of us took up smoking or boozing as a result.
These modern cheeeldren are so weak-willed that even a picture of Winston Churchill with a cigar will turn them into fifty-a-day Players Navy Cut puffers. Why keep them? What use are such easily-led morons? We have enough politicians. Let natural selection take its course and weed out the stupid and the feeble.
None of my friends smoked when I started. I started not because of films or sporting heroes or peer pressure or shiny packets, not even because of my father's smoking. I started because of flies.
Even then, I knew that nicotine was poisonous to insects (and that chocolate was poisonous to dogs, and that cow crap was lunch to flies but poisonous to humans. There's a reason I have so many qualifications in biology).
So, when camping, I'd buy a few cigars to keep the flies away. It worked. I tried cigarettes as a cheaper option but didn't like them. Rollups were better - Franklin's was my choice at the time. Then a brief foray into pipe smoking, some bandying about between readymades and rollups and finally settling on rollups with occasional cigars. I decided I enjoyed it so I carried on.
Back then, if you were a smoker at any outdoor event, the non-smokers loved you because your smoke kept the evening insects away. I remember many occasions where I'd move away from a non-smoking group to light up, only to be called back as a human insect repellent. I can't pinpoint when that changed into 'we love being bitten by flies, you can smoke in the next county, you filthy scum' but it has. The antismokers prefer to risk infection from insect bites rather than tolerate a subhuman in their midst nowadays.
The really weird part is that some of those who wanted me around to repel insects years ago, are the same ones who now want me in a rowing boat five miles out to sea before I light up. They honestly don't remember twenty years ago. Doublethink in action.
So even those old nonsmoking friends are friends no longer.
The pharmaceutical industry and the Face of Po, the Dreadful Arnott, don't want us to stop smoking but they want us to keep trying. They want us to use patches and gum that they know don't work. We are to fail to quit and return to smoking so they can sell us the patches and gum again. And again and again. Pharmers and ASH are in the business of profit, not health. They are not our friends.
The world of medicine sees us as an anomaly to be eradicated. We are not Standard Humans and must be made to fit. We're far from the only ones in their sights. Anyone putting their trust in the medical establishment needs their head examined.
So who is left? We can't rely on medics, Pharmers, old nonsmoking friends, anyone in any position of authority, the pubs, not even the tobacco companies we support.
Other smokers, surely? We can rely on each other. Can't we?
How many smokers have you heard supporting the smoking ban? It's much nicer in pubs without the smoke, they say. Oh, that's really comforting to hear while shivering in the snow or trying to light a cigarette in the rain. Maybe it is much nicer inside for them, when they are allowed inside. For me, the inside of a pub is now a place of oppression and pointlessness.
There's also 'I'm a smoker but I hate the smell of smoke'. Then you are an idiot. If you don't like it, don't do it. I never buy spiced rum because I don't like it. I never eat marzipan because I don't like it. See? It's not hard. Doing something you hate when you don't have to is just stupid. It's also exactly what the Dreadful Arnott wants to hear.
There's that CAMRA favourite - 'I smoke decent stuff, everyone else smokes crap and they should be excluded from my wonderful presence'. I like particular tobaccos and don't like others. I have enough of a brain to see that if I demand others' tobacco preferences be curtailed, then they have an equal right to demand mine be similarly curtailed. CAMRA's members - and others - have no such mental capacity.
Many smokers now go outside their own homes to smoke. Soon that will be enforced and they'll just accept it because they've been conditioned to do it already. They have fallen for the second-hand smoke lies and the 'for the cheeeldren' made-up nonsense.
Smokers are not just isolated. We are divided too. All on the basis of what? Science? Facts? Research? No. All on the basis of lies and personal prejudice. The Dreadful Arnott and the BMA have lied over and over and they have escaped censure and scrutiny at every turn. It has now reached the point where brainless wenches on TV can call for the shooting of smokers and nobody bats an eyelid.
Pat Nurse suggests the prosecution of the Dreadful Arnott for inciting hatred and for fraud. I think it's a good idea.
Oh, I am sure the government and the legal system will brush it aside but in doing that, they will make clear that smokers are of no consequence to them. If those mindless TV harridans had called for the expulsion of travellers or the shooting of disabled people or the rounding up of Muslims, they would be in court today. Because their remarks were aimed at smokers, nothing will happen to them. Smokers are an approved hate target. The same treatment, applied to any other group, would bring the full force of the law. If you smoke you are held in less regard than dog shit by your government. It's fine to hate you.
That is what needs to be made clear to those smokers who are cowed into apologising for their own existence every day.
We are hated, and the government not only approves of that hate, it sponsors it.
With our own money.
26 comments:
I don't like the smell of yesterday's ciggies. I might not like the smell of today's but I'm too busy smoking them to notice. But I don't like the smell of yesterday's.
So, just before I crawl into my pit for a few hours of snoring I light an incence stick in the living room. It clears all traces of ciggy smell.
"Why keep them? What use are such easily-led morons?"
To us? None.
To the Righteous? Well, let's see. What could they possibly want with a generation of easily-led, frightened-of-their-own-shadow, uncritical thinkers and sheep..?
A puzzle, indeed.
Personally I think that it should be up to landlords whether or not they allow smoking. I'm not a smoker myself but this is surely a matter of personal choice.
Trying to recall before the smoking ban was in place I would move if I found the atmosphere around me too smoky. The one really annoying thing that smokers used to do is hold their cigarette out to the side when not inhaling so that the rising smoke didn't get in their face but not concerning themselves whether perhaps it was then in the face of the person at the adjacent table. That is purely anti-social - if you want to smoke take the side effects yourself.
Ultimately the biggest problem in repealing a ban is purely the fact that the ban is in place. It may sound a bit odd but people are now used to smoke free bars. I visited Las Vegas recently - Nevada still permits smoking indoors. On the first eveneing I almost fell off the bar stool when the person next to me lit up. Not because I find it particularly disconcerting but because I am not used to seeing it now.
While I would support giving landlords the choice I think it will be a difficult battle even though the nannying pricks in Labour are out of office
That is true. The landlord of the local pub's solution to the lack of people in his pub is to lower prices in pubs and raise taxes in the supermarket. Which is daft as it's not about price so much as about convenience as you say. Smokers aren't suddenly going to flock back to the pub just because a pint is 20p cheaper than it was last week.
Yup, the publicans definitely have their heads in the sand alright.
As the beer in pubs becomes increasingly dull anyway I've found it's about the right time to do something about my weight and I've had a gastric band fitted (privately, obviously - my treatment so far has been very good indeed, unlike the horror stories I've heard about the NHS!).
It's funny that, even as quite a big pubgoer, I'm not missing the pub all that much, probably because they are horrid, flat shells of their former selves anyway. What is there to miss?
Oh god, that HAG'S picture up in front of me again.
huuuuuuuugh ! huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrlllllllllllll huuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh !
I know what you mean Lady V, but half an hour after the initial strangeness, being in a smoking pub would feel normal. It is like meeting up with a former very close friend after twenty years. Problem is with the anti smokers being reminded of their defeat by the smell of smoke pouring out of smoking rooms like dry ice at rock cocert. If there were separate smoking pubs, the anti smokers would find it very difficult to object. Like the old story of someone complaining that their neighbour was walking around naked. The man from the Council comes round and says he can't see into the neighbours living room. "But you can if you climb on top of the wardrobe". Anyway LV, you will be able to ready yourself to consume the fruits of our inevitable glorious victory by visiting the newly legal smoking bars in Amsterdam (See VelvetGlove).
A defeat for the Anti-Smoking bigots in Holland, at least their Government can reach a sensible decision.
http://f2cscotland.blogspot.com/2010/09/dutch-ban-for-small-pubs-lifted-again.html
Good point about the insects!
One of the few reasons for living in England is that it has relatively few insects flying around, but puffing away gets this down to near zero, which is roughly my inset-tolerance-threshold.
Bet the Dreadful Arnott's broomstick hides in a cupboard so as not to set eyes on her.
Who can you rely on?
I'm reminded of a scene from the Ian Dury biopic. It's a flashback to his youth, when his dad (played by Ray Winstone) tells him "you're born alone, and you die alone. And in between, you're on your own."
Mind you, I'd rather be on my own than one of the Righteous.
The prosecution of the Dreadful Arnott for inciting hatred and for fraud. I think it's a good idea.
Arnott, and similar others, in the antismoker industry are just paid mouthpieces. The actual problem is the global domination of the World Health[ist] Organization (Eugenics Central). Most countries have signed up to the WHO’s “Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” (FCTC). The FCTC has particular obligations that must be met by participating countries towards, ultimately, a SmokeFree® World, e.g., indoor bans, outdoor bans, display bans. The path to a Smokefree World requires denormalization and stigmatization of smoking/smokers. This is an ugly, sickly process that runs on propaganda – promoting irrational belief, fear and hatred. What should be of concern is that government health bureaucracies around the world are dominated by a eugenics (biological reductionist, materialist) idea of health, have signed on to the FCTC, and are allowing their various cultures to be dismantled and replaced by social uniformity, i.e., a move towards global statism.
(see the Godber Blueprint
www.rampant-antismoking.com )
Emphasis on The Children® is also a eugenics tactic. Eugenicists view themselves as “owning” the human herd. Smoking is depicted as an “undesirable” behaviour. The following generations - The Children® - must therefore be protected from the undesirable behaviour in engineering a superior human herd.
The following is from the Globalink propaganda site (Globalink is a tobacco control network linking the WHO and local groups).
“Some tobacco control advocates express concern about focusing on children and tobacco, rather than on all tobacco addicts. This is a valid concern when the term
"tobacco-free children" plays into the hands of company propagandists. These propagandists then (falsely) claim that they, too, are deeply concerned about youth tobacco use—and only youth tobacco use.
But many of the most powerful messages for tobacco control advocates focus on youth and tobacco, even when the goal is to build support for comprehensive tobacco control policies that will protect adult smokers.
Politicians appreciate the power of simple, hard-hitting messages. That is why, when comprehensive tobacco control legislation was being debated in the US Senate, virtually every senator who sought to persuade others to support this legislation began by reciting a version of this message: "Every day in America, 3,000 children start smoking; 1,000 of them will die early from the diseases smoking causes."
This simple message presents scientifically sound logic. It is morally authoritative: Every society recognizes the moral imperative of a government to protect defenseless children. And protecting children has always been an issue that evokes passion.
The term "tobacco-free children" speaks to the mind and the heart, as Klein urges. It brings to mind the idea of freedom and brings to the heart feelings of protectiveness toward children.
This is why one of the most sophisticated and renowned US organizations that advocate comprehensive tobacco control laws—laws to protect not only children—named itself the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.” [the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is actually a Pharma-Philanthropy creation – Robert Woods Johnson Foundation – promoting antismoking for the purpose of generating demand for essentially useless pharmaceutical nicotine replacement products].
http://strategyguides.globalink.org/guide01_07.htm
The prosecution of the Dreadful Arnott for inciting hatred and for fraud. I think it's a good idea.
Arnott, and similar others, in the antismoker industry are just paid mouthpieces. The actual problem is the global domination of the World Health[ist] Organization (Eugenics Central). Most countries have signed up to the WHO’s “Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” (FCTC). The FCTC has particular obligations that must be met by participating countries towards, ultimately, a SmokeFree® World, e.g., indoor bans, outdoor bans, display bans. The path to a Smokefree World requires denormalization and stigmatization of smoking/smokers. This is an ugly, sickly process that runs on propaganda – promoting irrational belief, fear and hatred. What should be of concern is that government health bureaucracies around the world are dominated by a eugenics (biological reductionist, materialist) idea of health, have signed on to the FCTC, and are allowing their various cultures to be dismantled and replaced by social uniformity, i.e., a move towards global statism.
(see the Godber Blueprint
www.rampant-antismoking.com )
Emphasis on The Children® is also a eugenics tactic. Eugenicists view themselves as “owning” the human herd. Smoking is depicted as an “undesirable” behaviour. The following generations - The Children® - must therefore be protected from the undesirable behaviour in engineering a superior human herd.
The following is from the Globalink propaganda site (Globalink is a tobacco control network linking the WHO and local groups).
“Some tobacco control advocates express concern about focusing on children and tobacco, rather than on all tobacco addicts. This is a valid concern when the term
"tobacco-free children" plays into the hands of company propagandists. These propagandists then (falsely) claim that they, too, are deeply concerned about youth tobacco use—and only youth tobacco use.
But many of the most powerful messages for tobacco control advocates focus on youth and tobacco, even when the goal is to build support for comprehensive tobacco control policies that will protect adult smokers.
Politicians appreciate the power of simple, hard-hitting messages. That is why, when comprehensive tobacco control legislation was being debated in the US Senate, virtually every senator who sought to persuade others to support this legislation began by reciting a version of this message: "Every day in America, 3,000 children start smoking; 1,000 of them will die early from the diseases smoking causes."
This simple message presents scientifically sound logic. It is morally authoritative: Every society recognizes the moral imperative of a government to protect defenseless children. And protecting children has always been an issue that evokes passion.
The term "tobacco-free children" speaks to the mind and the heart, as Klein urges. It brings to mind the idea of freedom and brings to the heart feelings of protectiveness toward children.
This is why one of the most sophisticated and renowned US organizations that advocate comprehensive tobacco control laws—laws to protect not only children—named itself the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.” [the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is actually a Pharma-Philanthropy creation – Robert Woods Johnson Foundation – promoting antismoking for the purpose of generating demand for essentially useless pharmaceutical nicotine replacement products].
http://strategyguides.globalink.org/guide01_07.htm
I used to like Passing Clouds. I enjoyed Turkish tobacco. I've been told the EU has banned the import of Turkish fags. But.......subsidises the Greek tobacco farmers. Mind you, they can only sell their tarry crappy tobacco to Africa. Certainly not within the EU. This is rank hipocracy.
I've never smoked, but used to like the atmosphere in smoky pubs.
Do the new puritans believe no one's ever going to die now because smoking has been banned in pubs? I wish I could understand their mentality.
This is what was supposed to happen
Nicotine patches and gum to be sold in pubs
"Leading firms are taking advantage of changes in the regulation of nicotine replacement products by targeting areas where smokers are most likely to suffer cravings. The first nicotine gum machines, the postsmoking ban equivalent of the dingy fixtures found in the corner of watering holes across the country, will arrive in venues next month."
"Deborah Arnott, director of the antismoking group ASH, said that addicts should be allowed to use as many patches or take as much gum as they need to give them a chance to quit"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article1969233.ece
I don't know if it did, I stopped going.
Rose
The tobacco companies have even bowed down to HMRC and have restricted U.K. brands of tobacco in Belgium.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=163292983687342
She isn't just dreadful,look at that narrow piched righteous face.She is trying hard to smile and look normal but just comes across as an insensative officious schoolmarm.Do you remember the scene in the munsters film where the daughter was trying to smile and the rest of the class screamed,that picture is just like it.
I think a poster like that may keep the vermin away,will paste one on my dustbin.
Stupid or evil? I can't decide.
http://www.1010global.org/no-pressure
Sir, I enjoy your blog very much indeed, but I am afraid that stakes are going up...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UHN3zHoYA0&feature=player_embedded#!
May I just say that, being non-Brit, I find general attitude of indigenous population in this country terribly disappointing.
Fatbigot - old ashtrays are a different matter to smoke. I doubt anyone likes that smell. But those who object to active smoke, while being smokers, are still idiots.
It would be like me drinking spiced rum all night and complaining about the taste. Complaining about the smell of stale whisky in the morning, I'd be fine with. Some of them don't work well with oxidation.
JuliaM - But I can scare away their entire army with a hamburger, a can of shandy and an unlit cigarette. i think they've overdone the 'weakling' part of their plan.
Lady Virginia - I've seen those people who wave around a lit cigarette and it's not something 'smokers' do, it's something 'inconsiderate morons' do. They'd do the same with a whirring chainsaw and have no regard for who was in the way.
It's burning, it's hot and it will make holes in things if you're not careful with it. Most smokers realise this.
But then, whatever your lifestyle choices, there is always an inconsiderate moron or two out to give you a bad name. I like whisky, lots of it, but I have never vandalised anything and I've never started a fight. Most drinkers could say the same.
The non-morons just don't get noticed.
Paul - I've no idea what pubs are like over the past year because it's been almost continuous rain since June hare, and not exactly great before that. So even if they manage to sell below supermarket prices I still won't go. There are more important things than the price of beer.
Good luck with the weight loss - the way things are going we'll all have to be anorexic to be 'approved' soon anyway.
I might be anorexic already. Every time I look in a mirror, I think I'm too fat.
Anon 14:39 - she's enough to spoil your enjoyment of a Batman film, isn't she?
LI: Thanks. It's surprisingly plain sailing, actually (no issues at all, and my provider actually gives a toss about my wellbeing, unlike the NHS!).
have a lot to lose (I need to lose about 13 stone to fit in with the BMA's definition of the British Standard Human) - fat chance. Ten stone will be enough.
Most people fret far too much about their weight but in some circumstances, like mine, it is justified. Still won't have anyone telling me how I should live my life though.
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