Wild West meets WWW.

On the orders of an 'acting detective inspector', the Fitwatch site has been closed.

Like the Moose, I had to think about this one. On the one hand, I cannot support the rioters because rioting only leads to harsher controls. In fact, our leaders welcome such riots because then they can push for those controls and most people will agree. Just as with the RIPA laws and the anti-tourist laws, people will think the new restrictions will be applied only to the few who actually cause trouble. It amazes me how many people can be fooled by the same trick over and over again.

It's not really about the riots this time. It's about the closure of a website on the instruction of a police officer who has no authority to do that. No court order, no evidence, no due process, just a letter and bang - the site is gone.

Snowolf noticed something. The letter contains no orders to shut the site. Merely a request, but worded in that Mafia-style 'offer you can't refuse' manner.

Trooper Thompson noticed something else. The letter refers to 'offenders'. Not 'suspects'. We used to have an 'innocent until proven guilty' rule in this country, but Labour did away with that and the Coagulation show no signs of bringing it back. As the Trooper says, in the old days, anyone arrested was 'helping police with their enquiries'. Now, anyone the police want to talk to is automatically an offender.

So while I disagree absolutely with any form of violent protest, who in their right mind could support the closure of any website on the basis of a request backed up by veiled threats, issued by an acting DI whose force refers to those they might want to question as offenders, and all in the absence of any due process of law at all?

Well, there is one consolation. As usual, the actions of the imbeciles put in charge of us have backfired in spectacular fashion. I, for one, was not even aware of the alleged 'advice to offenders' on that website, but I am now.

Once, it was on one page of one website. Since the heavy hand of the law came down, it has gone viral.

The sensible thing would have been to leave it alone, but those words are anathema to the oafs who believe themselves important. So, now, that advice is far more available than it ever would have been if it had been left on one website frequented by a few activists.

Having read it, it is no more controversial than the advice Nightjack used to give, or the sort of thing Old Holborn publishes. It does not advocate running from the law, only not making it too easy for the police to pin something on you. Especially if you didn't actually do anything but just happened to be in the vicinity and were photographed.

Fitwatch support the actions of the rioters. I do not. Rioting will bring down ever more draconian laws and regulations on us all and we will be barely able to move without a stop-and-search. This kind of protest is likely to be far more effective.

Those who agree with tighter controls will imagine they will only be applied to 'student types' but then they are the same people who believe that harassing photographers and forcing tourists to delete their holiday snaps is a fair and reasonable application of anti-terror laws. The ones who believe that the correct application of RIPA is to set up Bin Police and spy on parents who might be sending their children to the 'wrong' school. Idiots, in other words. There are a lot of them.

Even though I can have no sympathy for any rioter who is arrested, this approach by the police cannot be justified. This is not the Wild West. The Sheriff's word is not law. In any sane and sensible world, the 'acting DI' would have his status changed to 'acting Jobseeker' and a full and abject apology would be forthcoming. These things will not happen. There will be a mealy-mouthed justification and that site will stay down. The public will take the side of the police because the public, as a collective, are really pretty dim. They will only see police action against offenders (who have not been arrested, never mind convicted of anything) and they will not understand that officers of the law are not above the courts when it comes to the application of law.

So the general public will accept the police stance and will not be surprised when it happens again. And again and again. When the police declare who is an offender and who must be silenced without all that tedious legal nonsense getting in the way. When this new power filters down through the ranks until one day, everyone stopped by a PCSO is automatically categorised as an offender. No, the public will not be surprised.

The first time they will experience surprise is when it happens to them.

Let this one go and the precedent is set. It's a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Lawyers - you folk should really be paying attention here. The police are about to take a step that will allow them to bypass your entire profession. You'll all be out of work. No more money.

I'm finding it difficult to sympathise, but then the alternative on offer is much worse.

Speak up, smokophobe.

Did you know smoking now makes you deaf? Oh yes indeedy, there is no age-related ailment that cannot be blamed on smoking. Even if you don't smoke. It causes ageing of the skin, did you know? Time doesn't do that. Smoking does. It causes hearing loss. Getting older plays no part in that. It's smoking.

If nobody smoked, everyone would be immortal and in perfect health. Believe it, antismokers. You know you want to. You believe all the rest of the crap and you know that line is on the way, so get it over with. Believe it now. Oh, what am I saying? Most of you believe it already.

The original article, posted by the unquestioning drones who masquerade as BBC reporters, is full of howlers that nobody in the BBC has the brains to see.

Experts believe tobacco smoke may disrupt blood flow in the small vessels of the ear.

This could starve the organ of oxygen and lead to a build up of toxic waste, causing damage.

If that happened, the outer ear would atrophy and drop off. At the very least, it would become inflamed and painful. A build-up of toxic material in any part of the body does not happen without symptoms - and if there are no symptoms at all, on what basis do the 'experts' believe there is anything to investigate?

The inner ear, where the hearing part happens, is protected from the outside world by a membrane called an eardrum. The only part smoke could affect is the outer ear. Which will, if affected, show signs of damage. Ever seen any?

The harm is different to that caused by noise exposure or simple ageing.

What harm? All we have so far is 'experts believe in something that has shown no symptoms and has not been definitely linked to anything'. And yet in the very next sentence, the theory is proved. That's ASH science folks. Think of a number and it's always the right one.

In the study, the researchers from the University of Miami and Florida International University looked at the hearing test results of 3,307 non-smoking volunteers - some who were ex-smokers and some who had never smoked in their lifetime.

No active smokers? Well, no, those persistently non-deaf smokers would mess up the statistics, wouldn't they? Smokers just won't do as they are told.

To assess passive smoke exposure, the volunteers had their blood checked for a byproduct of nicotine, called cotinine, which is made when the body comes into contact with tobacco smoke.

Also when it comes into contact with potatoes, tomatoes and all sorts of other vegetables. Oh, no! They have just proved that tomatoes make you deaf! Ban them at once!

This revealed that people exposed to second-hand smoke were far more likely to have poorer hearing than others, and to a degree where they might struggle to follow a conversation in the presence of background noise.

The thing about cotinine is that it's not like mercury. It is not cumulative. So you will only have it in you if you have recently smoked, or had a meal with your five-a-day vegetables, or eaten anything with tomatoes in it (I'm not sure, but I suspect tomato sauce counts. Tomato juice certainly does). All this reveals is a remarkably tenuous link between cotinine levels today and hearing loss over the last 10-20 years. Cotinine levels will be different tomorrow, depending on what the volunteers had for lunch. Oh, and vitamin B3 will boost your levels too. Because it's derived from nicotine.

Where did these volunteers get exposed to recent second-hand smoke? We can't smoke indoors anywhere, and outdoors you'd have to have a tobacco bonfire to inhale enough to show up. Cotinine doesn't stay in you. It goes away fairly quickly. The only way you're going to get tobacco-derived cotinine is if you sit around in a smoke-filled room for hours - and there are no smoke-filled rooms any more. They've been banned.

You'd also have to test your blood immediately after leaving that room because your body will wash away the traces of cotinine soon afterwards.

The study links a temporary blood level of a vegetable-derived compound with a long-term issue. Science? Really? When did the principles of science get abandoned and replaced with some quasi-religious 'I believe it therefore it is proved' madness? Do they perform their experiments at night, in a circle of otter's blood, dressed in black lab coats with stars and moons on them? How long before the word 'experiment' is replaced with 'invocation'?

Yet people will believe it because the magicians call themselves 'experts', and the nonsense fits with the smokophobe prejudices so they simply won't question it. They don't want to think. It hurts them.

Hearing loss can often be very frustrating and lead to social isolation, if not quickly addressed.

Social isolation? <> Oh, I wonder what that can possibly feel like. Perhaps it feels a bit like being excluded from all public places and sneered at with Government approval?< /sarcasm >. Social isolation is what they have done to smokers, deliberately, and here they are pretending they give a crap about its effects on people? It's their main weapon.

These are the same 'scientists' who would decry homeopathy or astrology as 'pesudoscience' and yet what they are doing is far, far worse. They are making stuff up and using it to reduce a whole section of society to subhuman status. Say what you like about astrology and homeopathy, at least their practitioners don't call for people to be controlled and even killed. Antismokers do, regularly.

Smoking isn't good for me. I know it's not good for me. There is a risk, it's nowhere near as big a risk as the antismokers claim but it is there. I accept the risk because I enjoy a smoke. Just as a car driver accepts the risks associated with driving or a mountain climber or bungee jumper accept the risks associated with doing what they enjoy. Smoking poses no risk to anyone else, and these attempts to make smokers feel guilty over imagined harm are nothing more than spiteful social control.

The propaganda is now so silly that all it does is make smokers angry and more determined never to stop. It has one further, more sinister effect.

Since it is patently ridiculous to blame all these things on smoking, the real potential hazards are now lost among the mountains of insane and easily debunked claims. Children can see through claims as stupid as 'even seeing a packet will make you smoke' and 'smoking causes infections that we used to think were caused by bacteria and viruses but we now know that tobacco contains little demons that are released when the leaves are burned'. Really. That is what the claims amount to and even children can see through that.

So when you tell them they risk lung damage if they smoke too much (note: too much of anything can be harmful, even water), they don't believe you because they will file that along with the rest of the nonsense. So where is that disincentive now? Lost among the forest of lies that the antismokers have planted around it.

I don't want to see children smoking. It seems logical to me that a still-developing body is much more at risk of chemical damage than a fully-formed adult. However, what will happen if I were to tell children that?

They will file it under 'smoking-related lies' and light one up.

Nice one, antismokers.



Update: The Snowolf has reached a similar conclusion. All disease is now caused by 'tobacco goblins'.

Happiness.

When you go to measuring my success
Don't count money, count happiness

I wondered where they got the idea. It's a really diddy idea after all, suitably produced by the Diddyman Psycho Ward Coagulation. If only Ken were here to keep them under control with his Teeth of Shiny Doom and the dreaded Hair of Entanglement.

Our ever-smiling overlords (sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile - you must know this one) are to decide how happy we are, based on one-size-fits-all questions. Which, of course, will work as well as everything else they do.

So, how is my social life? I no longer visit pubs, cafes or restaurants because of the smoking ban so it's not great. Happy? No.

Working life? I have to work for half the year just to pay the taxes, and that's not even counting VAT. Happy? No.

Gardening? The last three summers have been dreadful, cold and wet, despite the papers telling me we are experiencing the hottest years ever. I remember years in my youth where my skin actually blistered in the sun. I am not the sunbathing type. However, those years have never been back. Yet I have to pay higher fuel bills because of the myth of global warming. Happy? No.

I am not made happy by the same things as you. You might like golf or football or tennis. I don't. I like fishing, you might not. I am happiest with a good malt whisky and some good tobacco, a still, warm evening outdoors at the side of a fishing pond or river. You might despise those things. You might enjoy a night in a club with loud music and flashing lights. You won't meet me in there. Those places scare the crap out of me.

This 'happiness index' is a farce. It will be fixed and fudged and will be even less reliable than an EU annual accounting report. Every single person on the face of the planet has their own idea of what makes them happy and even with six billion of us, very few will coincide.

So what's it really for? Well, if you are happier than the other guy, you need to compensate him. He is sad, you see, and money makes it all better. So where will it lead?

Happy tax, happy tax,
You're smiling now
But that won't last.

I thank the Lords
That I've been whacked
With more than my share of
Happy tax.

Except... I am not happy




(No dwarfists saying 'So, which one are you then?' please. I'm Grumpy, if you must know.)

Another smoky pub punished.

I mean, come on. One pub. Not even a whole one. Do all you antismokers, few as you are, really need every single bar in every single pub? If you weren't all so far up your own sphincters that it's amazing you can smell smoke anyway (that burning smell is your brain overheating under the strain, not tobacco smoke) you'd be able to relax for a moment and say 'Okay. Smokers can have one pub per town. One. The rest is ours'.

You can't, can you? Not one pub. Not even that shack behind the nuclear power station, overlooking the cyanide factory and the sewage works. You can't even let us have that.

It is not about the health of bar staff. It is not about the health of nonsmokers. It is not about second hand smoke. It is all about you waving your underdeveloped willies and claiming superhuman status. For you, it's all about being first in line for smart uniforms with shiny jackboots and caps with skulls on them. It's all about being the first to pull the lever on the gas chambers, isn't it? What, did you think the Nazis were some kind of demonic entities? No, they were people. Just like you. Exactly like you.

Spiteful, vicious, self-important, pathetic people whose only means of giving justification to their worthless existences is to demean someone else, for no real reason at all. No, 'I don't like the smell' is not a real reason. It is pathetic, childish whining. I don't like the smell of the cleaning fluid used on buses but I put up with it in order to get from one place to another. Without complaint. I don't like the smells coming out of burger joints but I have never called for them to be banned or controlled in any way. I just don't go in there. That's what adults do, antismokers. We don't need Mommy to chase away the nasty thing. We just avoid the nasty thing. It's not difficult for adults to do that.

Disgusting, depraved, degenerate people are the only kind who would seek to prevent others from enjoying a legal pastime in a place where it doesn't affect them in the slightest. You forced us outside of the places you never went into anyway, and then you complained that we're smoking outside. Is that something that comes from a rational mind?

Because of your evil minds, smokers will have to leave their credit cards inside restaurants if they go out for a smoke. Oh, you won't care. You will be delighted to pretend that only smokers do a runner without paying. You will be ecstatic that only smokers will be treated as criminals. it will not occur to you, not for one moment, that maybe, just maybe, those runners who 'went outside for a smoke' were not even smokers, but merely used it as a smokophobe-provided easy excuse to escape their bill. Would this not have happened in a nonsmoking world? When smokers could smoke indoors, did it never, ever happen? Really? Will smokers be happy to return to restaurants that clearly don't trust them? Will this have no effect on restaurants?

Another pub has been fined to death because of the Smoke Inquisition. The antismokers will cheer. They don't care if pubs close. To them, the loss of everything British is just fine as long as their little fairy-stroked nostril hairs are not inconvenienced.

Again, there is an appeal to pay the fine. This time there is no PayPal, just an address to send a cheque. Never send cash through the post, and if you send a postal order, remember to cross it (so it has to be paid into a bank with the recipient's name) and keep the counterfoil.

Antismokers, look at what you want. You want us thrown out of places you never wanted to visit anyway. You want us marginalised. You want to see us hounded and punished. You want us thrown out of places where consenting adults indulge in a legal pastime, away from all of you and causing none of you any inconvenience at all. You, many of you, want us beaten and killed.

Then look at what smokers want.

We want to be left alone. That's it. That is really the only thing we want.

So, go on, call me selfish.

Rudolph the Dead Roast Reindeer.

We have a recently-opened Lidl in town. All I have sampled there so far are Glen Orchy and Hunter's Glen. I have not yet ventured further than the whisky section although I note they sell Lambrusco. Remember that stuff? I thought it had faded away.

I'll have to explore further because it seems they are selling something I have not tried before. Reindeer meat. I'll pick up a bottle of Glen Orchy while I'm there, to have alongside Santa's drive unit, with chips. It could turn out to be this year's Christmas lunch. With a little red hat on top and a side order of deep-fried elves in batter. So if Santa doesn't make it to your house this year, you'll know he passed mine first.

They're not really Santa's reindeer, kids. His can fly, remember? You can't catch them with a snowmobile.

You need high powered rifles for those.


The best part of the hyped-up horror in the Mail is that alongside the tale of terrible hunters chasing Santa's little pets for food, they've put a recipe. They really need a sober editor, I think.

Stay healthy for the scrapyard.

Once again, the antismoker attacks continue even after the smoker has died. Again, there is outcry that smokers are donating organs that might not be perfect, but are sufficiently better than the ones held by nonsmokers that doctors consider surgery and all those anti-rejection drugs worthwhile.

This is why I no longer have a donor card. I expect to face smokophobic abuse right up to the day I die. I will not give them an excuse to carry on insulting me afterwards.

Desperate transplant patients are being given the lungs of chain smokers because the NHS is so short of organ donations.
Surgeons are also being forced to use diseased body parts from cancer sufferers, drug addicts and the very elderly.

Then refuse to accept donations from smokers, drug addicts, cancer sufferers and the elderly. Why not? Oh, right, it's because those donated organs are better than the ones you have. You'd be dead without them and then how could you whine and complain? Well you will not use my own lungs to berate me. You will not use my own heart to pump your bile around. You will not use my liver to bleat about my drinking habits. You will not use my corneas to spy on smokers. I will be cremated intact, just to be sure you don't get desperate enough to dig me up for spares.

Soon, there will be the inevitable 'Oh, but if you don't donate, someone will die who might have lived. You're just selfish'. If you're thinking that way, read that last paragraph again. Imagine being insulted, denormalised, treated like filth every day. Now imagine someone else doing that to you using your lungs and your eyes and your heart. Imagine that after you die, those saved by your organ donations spend the rest of their time telling the world that you, the donor, were scum. Still want to donate?

I do not. I also don't want a donation. I don't want to be kept alive on immunosuppressant drugs, can't smoke, can't drink, wondering when that organ will be rejected or fail. If I'm ever told I have weeks to live I will stock up on tobacco and whisky and pass out of this life without even realising. I'll be so pickled it will be impossible to give an exact time of death. Actually, cremation could be risky. Anyone present had better bring welding goggles and sun cream.

So don't tell me I'd accept an organ if I needed one. I will not. I'll keep mine and you keep yours.

Professor James Neuberger, associate medical director of the NHS Blood and Transplant, the Government agency responsible for organ donations said: 'In an ideal world you would rather have lungs from 20-year-old healthy people who have never smoked, but that isn't a luxury we have.

Yet. Let the Greens get their way and there'll be plenty available from the culls.

Healthy 20-year-olds don't tend to die conveniently in hospital where their organs can be harvested at once. The sick and the elderly do, which is why their organs are used. 'Healthy donor' is an oxymoron because to be a donor, you have to be dead and that situation cannot fall under even the broadest definition of 'healthy'.

Last week doctors warned that the quality of organs was decreasing because growing numbers of donors are either obese or very elderly

The number of donors over 70 has also quadrupled in the last decade.

Those who are obese are more likely to have coronary heart disease, so their hearts are damaged, as well as fatty livers and pancreases which will not function as well

All organs decline with age so they will less useful for the donor.

Just let that last line sink in. 'Less useful' (they mean recipient, not donor, obviously). Then check the first line again. 'Quality of organs'. These doctors are telling us off because we aren't keeping ourselves fit and healthy for the day they break us up for spares.

Stop smoking, stop drinking, lose weight, exercise, because otherwise those cultivated organs can't be harvested. Never mind how you want to live your life. That's not up to you. Your job is to grow healthy organs for transplant. You're a farm animal. Don't live too long - old organs don't transplant so well. Don't get fat - you'll spoil those spare parts.

Who is getting these organs? How can a nonsmoker ever need a lung transplant, or a non-drinker need a liver transplant? Surely those are the only causes of lung and liver disease these days? What's that? They aren't? Certain pressure groups would disagree with you there, you know.

Look, if you need a transplant and are willing to accept one, that's up to you. If you are going to sneer at the donor, don't expect them to donate. Think of it this way:- Two street beggars ask you for money. One is polite, the other hurls abuse and threats at you. Which one's hat is your change going to land in?

...last year a young woman died just five months after being given the lungs of a 30-a-day smoker.
Lyndsey Scott, 28, a cystic fibrosis sufferer, developed severe pneumonia shortly after the transplant.
She was never told the organs would be coming from a smoker and her family claimed that she would never had gone ahead with the operation if she had known.

She did not die of emphysema, cancer, bronchitis or any other 'smoking related' disease. She died of pneumonia.

How? Well, here's a clue. To prevent rejection, your immune system has to be suppressed with drugs for the rest of your life. That leaves you open to all sorts of infections. She was not killed by the smokers' lungs but by a secondary infection following surgery. The smoking donor also didn't die of a smoking related disease because if they had, those lungs would have been unfit for transplant. Yet she would have rejected the lungs, her family say, simply because someone chose to smoke with them. They came from a pariah.

My body parts are not a commodity. They are not the property of 'society'. They are mine and I will use them as I see fit. I am not here as a spare part bank for you. I do not have a responsibility to look after my organs so that you can have them later.

Those who donate theirs, do so out of generosity and do not expect to have their memories defiled as a result of offering to save a stranger's life. As a smoker, I know exactly what to expect if I were to donate my still-functioning organs after my death. Posthumous abuse.

Knowing that, why would I donate?

Linking and drinking.

Smoky-Drinky night, so here's a mixed bag of links for the evening.

It seems the Libertarian party is not free to choose its own leader unless the Government approves. Yes, you can now only be Libertarian with Government permission. I can't help feeling the Government has slightly missed the point.

Minimum pricing on booze was hailed by the Ban Brigade as a great thing. I wonder how they feel about minimum pricing on food?

There is an I Am Spartacus campaign on Twitter, in which many people are repeating the 'airport bomb' joke to see if the police and courts can fine them all. Because you see, a joke about blowing up an airport will cause alarm even if there is no evidence of intent.

On the other hand, you can post online that you have the deliberate intent to kill a smoker and call for everyone to go out and beat up smokers. That, it seems, is not covered by the 'hate speech' laws because it's Government-approved hate. Isn't that right, Mr. Clegg?

If you are an antismoker, you are also allowed to publish deliberate lies in order to demonise a particular group of people who have done you no harm. That's not illegal either because those are Government-approved lies. Isn't that right, Mr. Clegg?

There's no point reporting the antismoker hatred to the police. It's not illegal to hate those the Government has declared denormalised. Just ask Mr. Clegg.

Besides, the police are going to be busy stopping every car they see, in order to catch someone not breaking a law and then fine them for it, if ACPO get their way.

Right. Off out to smoke and drink and maybe pick up some chocolate on the way. If I manage to get back without being killed by a rabid antismoker, antidrinker or antichoc maniac I'll probably have something else to write about.

Unless I get arrested for writing in the meantime. It'll soon be illegal to be literate because it's 'elitist', and because the majority won't be and will therefore vote to ban it.

Oooo, it's nasty...

The Holocaust was something so nasty that no horror writer, not even the great ones like Clive Barker or Stephen King, has ever thought to use as a backdrop. There are things that are just too horrible for horror fiction.

It wasn't only Jews, you know. Disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses also made that cattle-truck trip to Hell and there were more. It cannot be made into any form of entertainment.

Unless you are of the preferred groups. In which case you can make stories of love within the piled corpses or of bravery in the face of the ovens and the gas. Such stories make us feel good but they are not the real story.

Tell it as it really was and you are boycotted.

I only watched the less-than-a-minute trailer and that alone was nasty but that is what really happened. It wasn't bloody Disneyland they went to . It was gas and the extraction of gold teeth with pliers and the removal of rings by cutting of fingers and bodies piled in pits, not necessarily completely dead at any stage, and it was absolutely evil.

Boycotting such a depiction is equally evil. This is what happens when a section of society is declared non-human and denormalised. This is where it leads. Everyone should see this film.

It will make you sick, yes. It will horrify you, yes. You will have terrible dreams about it, yes.

But if it is shunted away under the carpet as the gentle souls would have it, there can only be one result.

It will happen again.

It is horrible but it really happened, it was done, and it was done not by monsters and demons but by people like you and me.

Face it. Otherwise we can never change it.

All those lives wasted.

Once a year, this country falls silent for two minutes. Two minutes. Once a year. It's not asking a lot. Considering that it is done to honour those who have fallen permanently silent while defending our country, it is asking nothing at all. Two minutes out of the 24/7 culture that has sprung up around us. Two minutes without a tweet or a phone or a keyboard or a voice. Once a year. Hardly an onerous request.

Remembrance Day, November 11th, is the most solemn - indeed, the only truly solemn ritual in this country. Christmas? We're mostly plastered and raucous and busy stuffing ourselves with calories for Christmas. We buy each other willie warmers and hideous sweaters and wine bottles locked into wooden puzzles you can only get into with a Dremel. Fortunately I have one.

Even Christians enjoy Christmas - it is the celebration of the birth of Christ, after all. Easter? Chocolate eggs and rabbits. The old pagan ways still persist even though it has officially become the date of Christ's crucifixion. Even so, it is not a solemn occasion, even for Christians, since Christianity believes Christ died for our sins and came back a few days later anyway. Again, it's about celebration, not morose introspection.

Saints' days, especially Saint Bank who gets more holidays than the rest of them put together, are not regarded as solemn days. New Year, Halloween, Bonfire Night, all of them are an excuse for a bit of R&R.

The only one we take seriously and solemnly is Remembrance Day, November 11th. It is the one occasion when nobody laughs or jokes. The only gifts given are wreaths for the dead. At 11 am, for two minutes, we are silent in honour of our fighting dead.

You can rename Christmas as 'Winterval' and we'll say 'tut'. You can ban celebration of Easter in case it upsets the Muslims and we'll say 'tsk'. When NHS Grampian tried that, a few years ago, the most vocal 'tsk' -ers were the local Muslim groups who had never asked for any such thing.

Tell us that Halloween is offensive because of its roots in the Pagan Samheim festival and we'll say 'Yeah, we know' and carry on with the toffee apples and the fake blood. Tell us that Guy Fawkes was a traitor who tried to blow up parliament and we'll cheer him harder. Harder still, these days.

But burn a poppy and shout 'English soldiers go to hell' during that two minutes of silence we observe once a year and you have crossed the line.

And yet, what happens? The Sun report persists in calling the EDL 'far right' and telling us that one of them was arrested on suspicion of having class A drugs, while their leader was arrested for assaulting a police officer. They also refer to 'alleged poppy burners' despite showing a photo of them burning the poppy. The fault is redirected to those who protest at having this country's most solemn day corrupted.

So what of these disgusting poppy-burners, those who seek to cast scorn and derision on the only truly serious and solemn thing the British people ever do? Is it okay in their law to deride the most important traditions of the host country? It seems not. It seems that, in fact, Hideous Harman's 'equality' laws are in full effect there - if someone claims you said something to offend, whether you really did or not, it's ropey necktie time.

We don't have the death sentence and I don't want it. I don't want to live in a country where the State can decide whether you live or die, no matter what you've done. No, not even for murder. The dissonance of 'You are a murderer, and murder is wrong, so we're going to murder you for it and it's not wrong when we do it, only when you do it,' is too much for me.

We do, however, have hate speech laws which are applied with such reckless disregard for common sense that really, would anyone trust our judiciary with a death sentence? It would be only a matter of time before the black cap appeared because someone was overheard telling one of those 'Englishman, Scotsman and Welshman' jokes. I would trust our current legal system about as far as I could spit a badger into a gale force headwind.

Yet, make a joke and you're in the dock. You're sneered at by Parliament, those angelic cherubs who have never done a thing wrong in their lives. You are a Thought Criminal and you must go off to Room 101 and face the rats.

Unless you are Lefty Student Wunderkind.

I agree with students protesting. I never did as a student, I was a science student and proper courses don't leave time for such frivolity. However, students protest, it's what they do.

Smashing up buildings is not protesting. It's vandalism. Stealing is not protesting. It's theft. You would think Tanzil Choudhury, the Masked Cricketer photographed with a stolen cricket bat and his name, course and university tagged to the photo (in which he is in a futile disguise) would have known these things. He is variously a law graduate or a law student, depending on which source you read. Good luck getting a law partnership to take you on, you self-confessed thieving vandal.

Arrested, prosecuted, censured, or will he still be a law student on Monday morning?

Then there is the university lecturer who wears the Batman logo on his head, who claims that the smashing time was planned, and that government buildings are legitimate targets.

Arrested, prosecuted, censured, or will he still be a lecturer on Monday morning?

If I had kids I wouldn't let them anywhere near these universities. They might get killed on one of the lecturer-organised day trips (bring your own hammer). This particular lecturer is part of a group called 'revolution' -

Revolution’s website states: ‘We are a group of young activists who are fed up with unemployment, war, poverty, cuts and capitalism. We want to bring down Cam and Clegg’s millionaire coalition and replace it with socialism.’

Now, I am aware that if these people were knives we'd only have to worry about papercuts, but even so. They have memories that goldfish could beat. The Coagulation have only been in power for five months. We had thirteen years of socialism in which we declared war on two countries who have never threatened us and the country is now in inescapable poverty for the foreseeable future. They want to replace what we have with the Gorgon and the Blur. Okay. Show me how it will be different because it hasn't changed yet, as far as I can see.

Oh, and Mr Lecturer? Under socialism, you would be paid the same as a sewer sweeper. So your university would be instantly irrelevant.

The youth who perhaps became the ‘face’ of the riots after he was pictured wearing a stolen Met cap and hurling a chair through the window of 30 Millbank was 17-year-old Lewis Evans, a sixth-form pupil at Hackney Community College.

He told the Mail on Wednesday: ‘I came here today with the intention of ****ing things up and hopefully we’ve succeeded.’

As far as your chances of getting into university next year are concerned, I suspect you have ****ed that up pretty comprehensively. Have a nice future, Lewis. Trolley collecting isn't so bad once you get used to it.

Look at the courses they are coming from. See any physicists, biologists, chemists or mathematicians in there? Any forensic scientists or business management students?

Law. Oriental and African Studies. Dance. DANCE! You can get a degree in that now? I suppose there's also a degree in policeman's hat-stealing (for which we taxpayers will fund replacements) and in hurling fire extinguishers into crowds. No doubt 'Chair through Window' will be the main attraction at the Tate next year.

Goldsmith's College London have declared their lefty definition of 'violence':

"We the undersigned wish to congratulate staff and students on the magnificent anti-cuts demonstration this afternoon," the lecturers said. "We wish to condemn and distance ourselves from the divisive and, in our view, counterproductive statements issued by NUS and [national] UCU concerning the occupation of the Conservative party HQ. The real violence in this situation relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts."

And yet, make a joke on Twitter and the full force of the law will come down on you. Tear up a building and throw a fire extinguisher off a roof, declare that the violence was preplanned and that you'll do it again, and what happens? Oh, you're a real fucking hero. That's not violence. Pointing out that there is no money left is violence.

Two minutes silence for those who died so that these people might live in this country and spout their socialist and Islamic bile.

I bet their ghosts wish they hadn't bothered. They could all have sat at home and let the Bosch march in. How much worse could it really have been? In fact, how different would it really have been? At all?

We used to have a Conservative party. The Whigs used to mean something too. Socialism has always been a cancer, a sham, a pretext. It has never meant what it claimed to mean. We used to have a real government. Real leaders. They're all gone now. Lay a wreath for our new leaders alongside the others, but don't make it out of poppies.

Make it out of something yellow. With a white feather to set it off.

Armistice day.

As a token of respect for those stronger and more courageous than me, this blog will carry no long rant during Armistice Day.

This year there has been a new development, and I have to wonder what on Earth made these people think that this was a good idea.

Back tomorrow.