Frank Davis | Banging on about the Smoking Ban

Time 2021-06-04 23:11:24

Web Name: Frank Davis | Banging on about the Smoking Ban

WebSite: http://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com

ID:181188

Keywords:

Banging,on,Frank,

Description:

Bullying bastardsHospitality bosses reacted with fury today after five councils in England banned smoking outside pubs, cafes and restaurants with others considering joining them as the Government tries to make the UK smoke free by 2030.Newcastle City Council, Manchester City Council, Durham County Council, Northumberland County Council and North Tyneside Council have all banned smoking on the pavements where outdoor hospitality venues have tables.And Oxfordshire County Council is set to follow suit under plans for the first smoke-free county, with employers expected to asked to enforce smoke-free spaces outside shops, offices and factories to help staff kick their habit.il There are a lot of things I don t believe.I don t believe that smoking causes lung cancer. I grew up in the 1950s in a world where everyone smoked. My father smoked. My grandfather smoked. My mother occasionally smoked. None of them died of lung cancer. The first person I knew who died of lung cancer didn t smoke.The association of lung cancer with smoking is purely statistical. The incidence of lung cancer started increasing at the same time that cigarettes started becoming popular in the early 20th century. Ergo the one caused the other. This became an unquestionable medical certainty in about 1950, and the basis for gradually multiplying smoking restrictions ever since. Yet there s never been an explanation for exactly how smoking causes lung cancer. Instead smoking and not just smoking cigarettes is now said to cause nearly every malady in the sun. Smoking has been thoroughly demonised.I also don t believe that human-emitted carbon dioxide causes global warming. Volcanoes produce far more carbon dioxide than humans. And in my own dynamic heat flow models of the Earth, it wasn t carbon dioxide that caused a cycle of ice ages and interglacials. It was a minor contributor.And I don t believe that Covid-19 is causing a plague worse than bubonic plague, requiring lockdowns everywhere.What seems to be happening is that all these things carbon dioxide, Covid-19, and tobacco are being used to try to control human behaviour. We re living in a medical tyranny in which self-styled experts dictate our behaviour. How long can this go on? It s a new religion. A new blind faith in experts. And I ve never been a believer. I ve never trusted experts, I ve always tried to do my own thinking, not let somebody else do it for me. It s why I build my own heat flow models and my own orbital simulation models.I m an unbeliever in a world of believers. I often wonder whether top-down state-sponsored prohibition like the current smoking ban can ever succeed in the long term.One simple fact is that after 14 years of the prohibition in the UK, I m still smoking. I m never going to give up smoking. To do so would be to surrender to the bullies in Public Health. So even if I come to hate smoking, I m not going to stop. I ve dug in my heels.But anyway smoking is one of life s pleasures. Who wants to give up one of life s pleasures?Furthermore, I no longer believe anything that Public Health says about anything. Covid-19 scaremongering is a good example. It s been a complete loss of faith. Am I unusual? I don t think I am, except in being vocal about it.Smoking is never going to be eradicated. The rise of vaping is an interesting example; it s smoking without tobacco smoke. It looks just like smoking. And that s why Public Health wants to eradicate vaping as well.The truth is that Public Health is entirely concerned with appearances.Public Health obviously wants to ban alcohol as well. They re prohibitionists who want to prohibit things. They have no positive vision of adding anything to the world. They just want to subtract things. They don t want a fuller life: they want a diminished life, a minimal life. They want a prison world.I think that if they d been successful at prohibiting smoking they would have started prohibiting alcohol as well. And then they d have moved on to prohibit sugar and meat and fast food. But they didn t succeed.I don t think they can ever succeed.I think they ll just fade away.And then after a while they ll be back again, trying to prohibit something else. Ignoring the news, which is always awful, I ve been watching a video of a placid cycle ride along the Via Appia in Italy.The road is surprisingly narrow. It s not much wider than an English country lane. Roman legionaries marching along it would have only been three or four abreast.In the video there are very few cars on the road, with people walking or cycling along it in bright sunshine. There are a few horses as well.Along the sides there are numerous tombs and ruins. Much of the road is still made up of the original irregular basalt rocks from which it was constructed circa 300 BC. French Civil War Over Islamism?I was a bit shocked to read that French generals are warning of civil war if Islamism in France isn t countered. But perhaps after the 2015 Bataclan massacre something like it was always looming.Unthinkable? Maybe not. A lot of French people are thinking it.But a civil war between the indigenous people of France and Islamists would surely spread rapidly to almost every other country in Europe. Most of them have the same problem. They are libertarian countries with illiberal Islamic minorities.Is it even a civil war? It s a war that has already raged between Europe civilisation and Islam for 1200 years, fought across Spain and France and Palestine. It s just been in abeyance in recent years, while Europe was a global superpower. But now resurgent Islam poses the same threat again. It s a cultural head-on collision. Co-existence is impossible.The re-ignition of this long war will likely result in an Islamic holocaust in Europe, with mosques being demolished and Muslims expelled. It s a war that will extend into the Middle East as it s carried to the heart of Islam.What else can happen?Perhaps the French generals are scaremongering.If they re right, we ll all start smoking again, and that ll be the end of the antismoking bullies. Once again I ve had great difficulty trying to post anything on WordPress. I don t get offered the option to add a new post. It s only by clicking on more or less everything I can that I eventually get offered this option. And by then I ve forgotten what I wanted to say. A lot of people are complaining about Covid lockdowns. They re not used to it.But smokers have been facing lockdowns for years. Smoking bans are smoker lockdowns. Smokers are used to it. They re a small excluded minority, and nobody pays any attention to them.But now everybody is being locked down. The minority has become a majority, And it can t be ignored.And perhaps now a few more people will realise what a monster Public Health has become, and that it s full of bullies who have no compunction about demonising entire classes of people, all in the name of Health . Nothing is more important than Health . It s a new idol.But humans are always gambling with their health. They re always taking risks. There s be no progress but for all the risks people have taken to learn to fly, to sail across oceans, to build trains and cars. A lot of people have died doing those things.A risk-free life is no life at all.Health isn t the only thing that matters. There are plenty of other things that matter. Truth. Reason. Honesty. Compassion. Humour. The list is endless. And they will re-assert themselves one day, and we ll be freed from the tyranny of Health.Perhaps it s not surprising that medics become obsessed with health. It s what they deal with all the time. Like mathematicians deal in numbers, and soldiers deal in weapons. They need to learn to step back from it, and gain a wider perspective.Health is becoming a dirty word. Public Health even dirtier. Smokers never seem to get angry about smoking bans. But maybe that s because they ve been under attack all their lives. They re used to it.On Forest s Zoom meeting recently Jacob Grier said it went back to the 1940s and 50s, But it goes back further than that. It goes back to Hitler in the 1930s, and to King James circa 1600. There have been antismokers for as long as there s been smoking.And smokers don t fight back. They just roll with the punches. With each new prohibition they just move another few yards down the street.One day there ll be no smoking allowed anywhere.And then?Can anything really be prohibited by law? Cannabis was demonised and prohibited for a long time, but now it seems to gradually being legalised. Now it s tobacco that s being demonised and prohibited. The evil eye has switched from one thing to another.. It seems that something always has to be demonised and prohibited. Maybe it s that when anything is persecuted enough, the persecution loses power, and the persecuted recover their strength.. The emperors Nero and Diocletian persecuted Christians, and then Christianity took over the Roman empire. Would that have happened without a period of intense persecution? Christianity is the religion of the persecuted: its founder was crucified.Same with alcohol prohibition. That didn t last long either.No Smoking signs indicate persecution. There aren t any No Blacks signs, or No Women signs these days I ve lost my thread.I m having a lot of difficulty with WordPress these days. It used to be easy to post a new blog, but now it takes me ages 10 or 15 minutes to be able to just start or finish editing a new post. There s a + option to start a new post, and that option no longer appears. I have to hunt for it.I have less to say, and it s harder to say it.Lionel seems to have the same problem. I was listening to birdsong at 6 am this morning, and was struck by how much of it seemed to be made up of distinct sentences made up of distinct words or tweets. Are blackbirds saying things that we don t understand? It seemed very likely.It all kicks off at the crack of dawn, and lasts about quarter of an hour. The blackbirds move from one place to another. And this morning one of those places was right outside my window, and I was surprised just how loud it was.It reminded me of Rudyard Kipling s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi when the birds all sing, Ding-dong-tock. Nag is dead, after the mongoose kills the snake. It was one of the first books I read as a child, and remains a vivid memory. I remember being taught to read by my mother, and thinking that it was all just pointless gazing at sheets of paper, and I had better things to do. I changed my mind after reading my first story, and started reading avidly.It was the same after my mother taught me to write. After that I started writing my own stories about cats and mice that lived around an old mill pond. I wrote whole books of stories, the main character of which was a cat called Twinkle, in my barely-legible handwriting.After that I carried on writing all my life. I felt that writing helped me to slow down my thinking as I searched for the words to express myself. I filled reams of paper with words.Writing a blog was a natural continuation of that.But these days I seem to have less and less to say. I have in the past written about megalithic structures.The idea I had was that, with the surfaces of the ice sheets uninhabitable, humans may have lived in warm caverns beneath the ice, building megalithic structures to hold up the ice..Most megalithic structures are sited on high ground. so that water will drain away from them. Megaliths beneath melting ice would thus have been kept relatively dry.The exposed overlying ice would have melted faster between megaliths, resulting in the formation of domes and barrel vaults, and ice capitals atop the megaliths which may well have resembled ionic and corinthian capitals. Greek and Roman architecture might well have origins in a deep subglacial past, recreated in a postglacial environment.It would probably have been necessary to have raised floors above the streams of water on the ground surface.Air temperatures in these subglacial chambers would have needed to be above freezing in order to melt the ice above. They may have been very warm.If the ice was not deep, in daytime a pale blue light would have shone down through the ice.With plentiful fresh water, mild temperatures, and light from above, the subglacial world would have been an ideal habitat for humans and other animals.It s  usually thought that it took a colossal effort by thousands of people to raise these megalithic structures. But in a glacial world it may have been quite easy to slide large rocks over ice that had become a skating rink, and also relatively easy to drop such rocks into position. The megaliths were not raised.: they were lowered. They were quarried from hills above the ice surface, slid across it, and dropped into place.This could explain why there are thousands of megalithic structures in Britain. They were quite easy to make.It would also mean that the megaliths were built during the ice age, over 13,000 years ago, not after it. They are generally dated much younger because surrounding soils have carbon deposits of such ages. But the megaliths of the ice age would have had no such soils until the ice age ended and plants and animals began growing around them.The biggest problem for humans would have been to find food in this barren glacial world. But if fish spawned in the warm glacial rivers beneath the ice, migrating as they still do today, humans might have had abundant food, much of which they could keep deep frozen in the ice around them, and cooked in hot springs. In addition there would have been other cave inhabitants, like bats and birds, to supplement their diet. There may have been all sorts of animals that found refuge in the caves beneath the ice.Given a largely featureless ice sheet, navigation across it would have relied upon the sky. Humans would have needed to look up to find out where they were, following the sun and stars. Murray Rothbard wrote the following article in August 1994 Quick: Which is America’s Most Persecuted Minority? No, you’re wrong. (And it’s not Big Business either: one of Ayn Rand’s more ludicrous pronouncements.)All right, consider this: Which group has been increasingly illegalized, shamed and denigrated first by the Establishment, and then, following its lead, by society at large? Which group, far from coming out of the closet, has been literally forced back into the closet after centuries of walking proudly in the public square? And which group has tragically internalized the value-system of its oppressors, so that they are deeply ashamed and guilty about practicing their rites and customs? Which group is so brow-beaten that it never thinks of defending itself, any attempt at which is publicly condemned and ridiculed? Which group is considered such sinners that the use of doctored statistics against them is considered legitimate means in a worthy cause?I refer, of course, to that once proud race, tobacco-smokers, a group once revered and envied, but now there are none so poor as to do them reverence. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Join 232 other followers Email Address: Privacy Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

TAGS:Banging on Frank 

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

Banging on about the Smoking Ban

Hot Websites