You know that feeling you get when someone asks you a question and you're sure you know the answer but can't quite grasp it? Or, and maybe this is specific to scientists, when you're looking at a load of data and you just know there's something in there but you can't quite make it out?
The feeling that there is an answer being dangled in front of your nose, but you're blindfolded and you can't see it nor can you catch it.
Sometimes that feeling is wrong. Sometimes it turns out you were just seeing patterns in the noise, like the images that seem to appear on a fuzzy TV screen. It happens. Once I spent ages meddling with a batch of mass-spectrometer data and came out with a dead straight line. Fortunately I realised before I showed anyone else that all those manipulations had ended with me plotting one variable against another and there was no real data in there any more! I could have been in charge of a climate science lab by now if hadn't put that graph in the shredder.
The trouble with scientists is that we can't help putting data together and looking for patterns. We can't help it. So we'll keep looking for the elusive connections until either we find it or we are satisfied that there isn't one. Unfortunately, a lot of scientists these days seem to think they must find the connection at all costs even if none exist. They usually get contracts with ASH and the Pharmers.
So, does the connection exist?
There seems, on the surface, no sense or logic behind hiding tobacco displays and demanding plain packaging. If they can't be seen anyway, they could have flashing LEDs all over them for all anyone sensible would care. They could have dayglo packaging adorned with nude images of the purchaser's choice. Nobody but the smoker will see them anyway. They're all behind the screen.
Put that together with the hysteria from the taxman about smugling and about counterfeit tobacco. Counterfeiters go to incredible lengths to make packaging that looks just like the real article, as SBC points out here. Now, when there was a big problem with fake banknotes, the banknotes were enhanced with UV-glowing strips and fancy patterns that were hard to copy. With credit and bank cards, they had holograms and later microchips added. Every time there is a counterfeiting issue the logical approach is followed - make it harder to copy.
Yet with tobacco, the response to counterfeiting is a) make the packaging really easy to copy and b) hide the packets so the general public don't know what the real ones look like and will therefore find it impossible to spot fakes.
If the goal is health improvement, why make it much easier for the fakers to sell dodgy and eventually, dangerous fake tobacco?
Everyone knows now that patches and gum have a 98% failure rate for those who are trying to stop smoking, but Electrofag has proved a success for those who don't actually want to stop but who want to cut out the actual smoke part. Yet the medics push the useless alternative and demonise the effective one. Then there are things like snus, which pose little to no health risk to the user and no 'secondary' risk, even imaginary, to anyone at all. Those are banned. Smoking tobacco is not.
By now, the whole world has heard of the suicide pills, Champix and Zyban. Next there will be an injection to stop you smoking. How? It's explained well by the first commenter on Dick Puddlecote's article but to put it in layman's terms, it claims to block the 'nicotine receptors' in the brain.
The problem is, as the scientists involved must surely know, there is no such thing as a 'nicotine receptor'. Nicotine, like caffeine, bonds to things loosely called 'pleasure receptors'. This is what makes you feel good when you have a smoke, or a coffee, or a cream cake, or whatever it is that makes you, personally, happy. It doesn't need to be an external stimulus. Some people activate those receptors by jogging or trainspotting or driving fast cars or getting a promotion. Whatever floats your boat, it's biochemically much the same thing.
So what Champix does, and what that injection will do, is not 'block nicotine receptors'. They block your ability to enjoy anything at all. Coffee. Tea. Promotion. That rare outing by a Deltic or getting the window seat right behind a GWR Hall class. Driving with the top down. Those films that come with a free box of tissues. Beer. Knitting. Throwing darts at pictures of politicians. Anything at all.
Therefore you are very likely to get depressed because nothing is enjoyable any more. In the name of improving your health they want you to kill yourself. Oh, they know it. It's not as if these neurological researchers are ignorant of what they intend.
So what data do we have? Smokers are banned from everywhere and the noose is tightening. Smokers must make use of ineffective products but must not use effective products if they want an alternative to smoking. The price is hiked to the point where more and more people can't afford not to buy from Man with a Van. It continues to rise until the only thing in most people's price range is the dodgy stuff. Which might be okay now but which will start to be cut with dried grass or horseshit as the price goes up further. Try to bring in legally-bought tobacco from the EU and you're treated like criminal. Medications range from the useless to the deadly but those are the only options available. The options with potential to be highly effective are demonised and discarded.
Does that sound as if it has anything to do with health? To me it sounds more like systematic persecution and eradication.
Then look at booze. Banned in increasing numbers of public places. I'm not talking about public drunkenness, I'm talking about a single bottle of standard beer. The price is increasing which will encourage bootlegging and counterfeiting. Dodgy bottles of wine are already appearing with increasing frequency. The 'units per week' was a made-up number but it's not only being treated as if it was passed down from God but the limit is gradually decreasing. Now you are to believe that even a sniff of alcohol will give you cancer. Passive drinking is already here. Drink more than the made-up number per week and you have a 'problem'. Every court case involving violence seems to be linked to drink.
It's the same thing. Nothing to do with health at all. Why cure when you can simply eradicate?
The same pattern is in the obesity scare, the salt scare, all of it. Is it just a pattern in random fuzz? It looks clearer every day. It looks to me as if someone's decided that the best way to save the NHS is to kill anyone who isn't in perfect health.
As someone who's read a fair bit of history, it looks very much like something that was once referred to as 'Aryan'
I just can't be certain yet.
23 comments:
It looks to me as if someone's decided that the best way to save the NHS is to kill anyone who isn't in perfect health.
I think you're right. And I think it's something that started happening once the medical profession stopped trying to 'cure disease', and started instead to promote 'health'.
It looks like it's the same thing, but it's not. The 'curing disease' paradigm is one in which disease is regarded as a fundamental medical fact of life, and it's what doctors focused their attention upon. They weren't interested in healthy people.
But once you've shifted from 'curing or alleviating disease' to 'creating a healthy society', health becomes the central concern. You cease to be interested in disease, because it simply exemplifies ill-health, which is what you don't want. You may not even bother to treat it any more. Instead, in order to 'create a healthy society' you're more or less driven to start getting rid of unhealthy people. After all, what simpler way is there to create a healthy society than simply bumping off sick people.
It's a bit like breeding pigeons. If you're trying to breed a particular kind of pigeon (say with a pink mottled head or something) you only let ones like that breed, and eliminate all the rest. Same if you're trying to breed 'healthy' pigeons. You just eliminate any which come down with any disease.
Once 'health' has become the goal, the obvious way to achieve a healthy society is to get rid of 'unhealthy' people. And it's not just smokers and drinkers and fat people: it's anyone who comes down with any disease at all. And instead of curing people, doctors and hospitals start killing them.
Like Harold Shipman.
I just posted a long comment with a link, and it's vanished.
Here it is again, minus the link:
It looks to me as if someone's decided that the best way to save the NHS is to kill anyone who isn't in perfect health.
I think you're right. And I think it's something that started happening once the medical profession stopped trying to 'cure disease', and started instead to promote 'health'.
It looks like it's the same thing, but it's not. The 'curing disease' paradigm is one in which disease is regarded as a fundamental medical fact of life, and it's what doctors focused their attention upon. They weren't interested in healthy people.
But once you've shifted from 'curing or alleviating disease' to 'creating a healthy society', health becomes the central concern. You cease to be interested in disease, because it simply exemplifies ill-health, which is what you don't want. You may not even bother to treat it any more. Instead, in order to 'create a healthy society' you're more or less driven to start getting rid of unhealthy people. After all, what simpler way is there to create a healthy society than simply bumping off sick people.
It's a bit like breeding pigeons. If you're trying to breed a particular kind of pigeon (say with a pink mottled head or something) you only let ones like that breed, and eliminate all the rest. Same if you're trying to breed 'healthy' pigeons. You just eliminate any which come down with any disease.
Once 'health' has become the goal, the obvious way to achieve a healthy society is to get rid of 'unhealthy' people. And it's not just smokers and drinkers and fat people: it's anyone who comes down with any disease at all. And instead of curing people, doctors and hospitals start killing them.
Like Harold Shipman.
11 April 2011 03:08
There's the collective responsibility approach, too - i.e. because some people are violent hooligans when they drink in public, all public drinking must be banned. And we won't tell you those areas in which it is allowed, so you can have a picnic. Anyone who asks is seen as a criminal.
Because some people are drunken yobs after they've been drinking, alcohol must be restricted.
The precedent really isn't hard to see. Yet even people who drink and smoke in pubs cannot see this. They cannot see where this is heading. People really don't want to know and they automatically dismiss and ignore any outsiders. It's only when they're feeling the full effect of this that it will finally click, and for many others they will be cheering our oppressors all the way to the gas chambers.
Mention Enoch Powell, for example, even in a historical context in a pub (i.e. mentioning parts of his career other than that speech) and you're automatically written off as a racist. It's insidious and very damaging.
As for the NHS - there's a very good article on the Spiked website about discriminatory healthcare here.
And another article here about GPs and medical staff who implore the public to 'save the NHS' without realising that, because they often treat the public like scum, they are less than interested in their self-serving message.
The Spaminator has ben busy again.
Funny thing is, it's never caught any actual spam.
Frank - sounds right. 'The National Health' now overrides the health of the individual.
But, like ASH, they have not considered what happens if they ever succeed.
Paul - the 'health professionals' are now treated with absolute suspicion because they've reached the point where everyone with an IQ higher than 'politician' can see how obvious the lies are.
So people assume it's all lies. Even the stuff that originally wasn't.
The effect will be more sick people, and more doctors refusing to treat them.
Interesting times ahead.
The people who can think for themselves can see through it, yes, but there are an awful lot of people that can't. More fool them.
Aryan...?
Maybe.
To quote from the Hitler Youth booklet 'You Have The Duty To Be Healthy':
"Dieses Wort des Führers weist uns zugleich auf die völkische Auswirkung des Alkoholmissbrauchs hin. Ein Volk von entarteten Schwächlingen kann zahlenmäßig noch so groß sein, es wird schließlich an sich selbst zugrunde gehen."
which in off-the-top-of-my-head-five-am Quick and Dirty translation reads:
" These words of the Fuhrer also direct us towards the effects of alcohol upon the population. A race of degenerate Weaklings may number so many, it will in the end destroy itself"
oh and on the subject of all white ciggy packs, the comment of my teenage kids was: "Pure white packs? CooOOOOL!"
There are lots of 'real' doctors and research scientists --- Surely they must be getting fed up with being associated with what you so clearly describe.
Will integrity and commonsense fight back??????
"It looks to me as if someone's decided that the best way to save the NHS is to kill anyone who isn't in perfect health."
I thought the NHS was working on that itself, one superbug at a time...
Good post LI,
When you combine the mantra of "Prevention is better than cure" with the "precautionary Principle" and the general promotion of risk aversion the outcome is predictable. Mix up there philosophies with a liberal helping of "cost to society" bullshit and you have a recipe for disaster.
Only this morning "the ageing population" is once again being blamed for huge costs to the NHS. Now can some doctor please come up with a vaccine which will prevent old age just in case old age realises a risk to the financial health of the NHS.
As someone once said, what would a bad health policy look like. Well, something like we have now, really.
Interesting how all this 'public health' activity fits (not) with the Hippocratic Oath, that supposedly sacred document. Doctors promise this:
WITH PURITY, HOLINESS AND BENEFICENCE I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent danger, I will neither treat any patient nor carry out any research on any human being without the valid informed consent of the subject or the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of that individual. Into whatever patient setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief or corruption and further from the seduction of any patient.
NB the health of that individual not the nation or one's bank balance.
Cleaning the hive - that's right. Have you noticed all those flourescent jackets? The "queen" wants "workers" to even look like bees! The bee emblem is used by HM the Q as it has been since ancient Egypt. Bees don't have individual worth, defective "units" are expunged, and they don't think. They follow orders, working or fighting on demand and are incapable of critical thinking. It's happening. What was the census but an inventory? And what's with the incinerators? EU requirement for chicken waste disposal. Hmm.
Medicine and the Public: The 1962 Report of the Royal College of Physicians and the New Public Health
Virginia Berridge
"The idea of outlining specific courses of action was anathema to a society that associated “propaganda” with wartime central direction, and with earlier Nazi propaganda.
Health education at this time placed its faith in the citizenship of its recipients.
One can see the government departments edging toward this change in the discussion of smoking, prodded also by tensions in the organization and funding of health education.
The civil servant Enid Russell Smith, always an incisive analyst of events, commented in 1962 that government could draw in future on two things: parents' concern for their children, and the changes taking place in the medical profession.
Publicity would have the authority of the profession.
So far, she commented, the state had not sought to protect individuals from doing harm to their own health if they were not harming the health of others; alcohol was an exception to the rule, and also drugs of addiction, but for both it was the social consequences rather than individual health that was paramount.
The new line might be that the costs fell on the state, and so government should stop people from damaging their health—but, she commented presciently, once government took on this role, it would not stop at smoking"
Costs to the state
Harm to others
Children
Addiction
Medical
It looks like they are still following her advice to the letter.
Rose
Dear Real Leg-iron
The body societal systems to be suffering from an increasing range of 'diseases' which mimic human diseases including auto-immune diseases (over-active defence systems attacking the body - eg the police, the 'security' services and the medical profession), cancers (eg government departments at every level and quangos which spread and multiply, often impeding the functioning of useful organs of state or preventing them from working altogether), immuno-deficiency disease: HSID - Human Society Immuno-deficiency Disease (immigration control breakdown, police incompetence or abdication of duty to protect the public from real crime, while persecuting honest people as an auto-immune disorder as above).
There are many other human disorders which can be identified with equivalents in society's current woes, including mental health issues.
This could be the foundation of an entire new science.
Where do I apply for funding?
DP
PS Last Friday’s insanity du jour: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20110408/tuk-20-000-underage-sunbed-fines-dba1618.html
David Attenborough was on the BBC, a couple of years ago, discussing the Optimum Population Trust. Throughout, he drove home the message that population growth, at it's current rate is unsustainable and must be reduced. Have a look at their website www.populationmatters.org
They have some interesting ideas about how this is going to be achieved!
Dear Real Leg-iron
I posted a comment at 10.57am today which has yet to appear.
I previewed the comment and it contains a single example of HTML. It showed in the preview and when I clicked 'publish', but while your main url shows 17 comments, the comment site (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2170981338945747646&postID=6122260609290153002&isPopup=true) shows only 15.
I suspect two comments are quarantined. Whether previewing or HTML or both together are the problem, this information may help to solve.
Or not.
DP
How did we arrive at this state? What is driving this righteous obsession with forcing us to give up the things we enjoy? I am baffled.
Here's my theory, for what it's worth.
If you look at the earlier uses of the things we enjoy, you will often find that some of them were a part of a folk medicine that dates back thousands of years and possibly most importantly,can't be patented.
Rose
"The same pattern is in the obesity scare, the salt scare, all of it. Is it just a pattern in random fuzz?"
Maybe.
Salt
"The use of iodized table salt in the United States today prevents iodine deficiency. However, the Great Lakes, Midwest, and inner mountain areas of the United States were once called the "goiter belt," because a high number of goiter cases occurred there. A lack of enough iodine is still common in central Asia, the Andes region of South America, and central Africa"
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001178.htm
Iodine deficiency disorder (IDD) is a serious public health threat for 2 billion people worldwide. It is the leading cause of mental development disorders in young children, from cretinism to more subtle degrees of impaired cognitive development which can lead to poor school performance and reduced work capacity in hundred of millions of children.
It is implicated in still-birth, miscarriage, physical impairment and thyroid dysfunction. As such, it is crucially important that pregnant women and young children in particular get adequate levels of iodine.
IDD can easily be prevented at low cost, however, with small quantities of iodine.
One of the best and least expensive methods of preventing iodine deficiency disorder is by simply iodizing table salt, which is currently done in many countries."
http://www.who.int/nmh/iodine/en/
"Amid concern that people in the United States are consuming inadequate amounts of iodine, scientists in Texas have found that 53 percent of iodized salt samples contained less than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended level of this key nutrient. Iodized table salt is the main source of iodine for most individuals, they note in a study scheduled for the Feb. 15 issue of ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology
Purnendu K. Dasgupta and colleagues point out that iodine intake has been decreasing in the United States for decades. The reasons include reduced use of iodine-based additives in livestock feed and bread, and public health warnings about salt’s role in high blood pressure."
http://www.physorg.com/news121340568.html
Rose
The Archers started an anti-smoking theme today. I wonder what method for giving up they will be promoting. Tune in tomorrow.
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