LEST WE FORGET ...

...how inhumane humanity can be.

Today is to remember the futility of war, the deaths of those who fought for freedom as opposed to qualified freedom, and the civilian victims of such conflicts who no one stood up for until it was too late.





Never can such horror ever be allowed to happen again - even to the Palestinians - and just because the official Nazi Party no longer exists that doesn't mean the danger of race hatred and ethnic cleansing is gone.

The Israeli nation should know better than anyone about the sanctity of life and the respect of different cultures but when former PMs say things like : "The Palestinians should be crushed like grasshoppers - their heads smashed against boulders and walls..." it makes me fear that history at some near point in this modern future will be repeated somewhere in the Western world soon.



The Nazis gave nothing but hatred and puritanism to the world in terms of health and race and it is frightening to think there are nutters out there who praise Hitler's work

It is because Hitler invented the concept of SHS and set the template for modern tobacco control that I know it is evil and morally wrong. It comes from a perverted and twisted mind wracked by hatred and intolerance. It it what my grandfather and father fought against. Their lives, and those of the war dead, should not sacrificed on the bonfire of modern civil liberties for any old paid for excuse. Modern Govts should distance themselves instead of embracing any part of Nazi ideology as socially beneficial including smoke free. It never was good for anyone - ever - and never could be because it depends on socical division, exclusion and the promotion of fear and hatred to succeed.

It cannot be said with one breath that what Hitler did to the Jews and other "undesirables" was evil while saying in another that what he did to smokers was good - unless it comes from a mind that already thinks that some people deserve to be treated better than others based on who they are and what they do when it hurts no one else.

Lest We Forget - people died in harrowing circumstances to promote a brand of ideology that should be the template of all things to avoid rather than the template to rebuild society in the ideological perfect image of one of the worst butchers of humanity in modern times.

STILL THE BLIND CAN'T SEE

Image from HERE

Interesting news today from the Telegraph which reports how the Labour Party's membership has fallen to the same levels it had in 1900 when it began.

It's interesting to note that the biggest exodus of former party members was in 2007 - I wonder what could have happened in that year to turn off so many core supporters?

Total Labour membership fell by nearly 6,000 during 2007, the year Gordon Brown replaced Mr Blair as leader. It is believed to have gone on falling during the first half of this year too.

I just wish that these so called political commentators would wake up to the impact of the smoking ban on their support. To be honest, I had high hopes when Brown came along because he wasn't Tony Bliar and I had hoped he would be what he said he would be - honest and without spin - but then that was just spin wasn't it.

The smoking ban was the single cause that turned me against my father and grandfather's party of choice and heaped upon that grievance was the fact that Labour would just not listen to the concerns of smokers.

And it looks like support is draining away from the Tories too who are blindly following Labour's anti-smoker policies.

I wonder where that lost support from both parties is going. Certainly not to the irrelevant Limp Dumps who have let just about everybody down.

There really are none so blind as those who can't see and they will suffer for it.

REMOVE THIS NHS BURDON

It seems to me that the only people draining the NHS of much needed cash are those healthists in the industry sucking the life out of it by furthering their own highly paid careers through scaremongering and getting public support by insulting selected lifestyle groups.



Despite telling us for ages that fat people are costing the NHS as much as the ficitional "smokers", so they need bullying into the perfect size 10, they now appear to be saying that no matter what fat people do they still won't lose weight.



"Once you are fat it is unlikely you will ever return to your former size, no matter how hard you diet.

Scientists have confirmed what most dieters already suspect; most people who lose weight end up putting it back on again, according to a long-term study of 25,000 men and women living in the UK.

The scientists, from the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development, tracked 5,362 adults who were born in 1946, and 20,000 born in 1958, assessing their weight, blood pressure and lifestyles.

While around 12 million Britons go on diets of one kind or another every year, only around 10 per cent lose a significant amount of weight, and most regain it within a year.

Dr Rebecca Hardy told the Sunday Times: "Both groups began increasing in weight in the 1980s and since then people have been increasing in mass all through life.

"For men it goes steadily through life. For women it starts slowly and accelerates in the mid-thirties. Once people become overweight they continue relentlessly upwards. They hardly ever go back down."



Note how the article is carefully manipulated to calm fears of the terrifying prospect of too many fat people running loose in the UK to show that help is at hand - Just Call the Professionals.



"A few lose weight but very few get back to normal. The best policy is to prevent people becoming overweight."

However, the study findings don't mean that all diets are a waste of time. Some, which promote eating healthier foods and increasing physical activity, can still make a positive impact on a person's health.

Around six out of 10 adults in the UK are now overweight, with one in four categorised as obese."



And they are stocking up on those professionals being paid to bully people into perfection but they don't say at what cost to the NHS or that it's more about jobs for them and career progression than it is to save fat people from dying or hurting others.



Passive Obesity seems to be the rage these days and it looks like public humiliation, hatred and disgust of this particular lifestyle group is about to become public policy.



Of course we smokers and now drinkers know that public health bodies lie to push forward self interest groups' own political ideological agendas but has there ever been a campaign so nasty as targeting someone who is overweight?



I doubt very much that drinkers, smokers, and the overweight cost the NHS anything like the fantastical figures plucked from the air, but for sure the healthists, scientists, academics, so-called "Charity" leaders, and NHS and related industry staff get whopping amounts of our taxes.



This is what needs to be addressed if the NHS is to remain in a healthy condition in future.

BLOGGING ABSENCE

A lack of blogging over the last couple of weeks has been down to being too busy at work and completely frazzled and knackered by the time I get home. Added to that has been an irritating pain in my right elbow which I've put down to repetitive strain injury from using the laptop too much.

Using the computer mouse doesn't appear to result in the same burning, aching pain - although it doesn't appear to ease the problem either. Perhaps they should ban laptops for our own good. But then maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas for more prohibition.

Life in the real, as opposed to the virtual, world has been different. I've been trying to reach smokers who are not online by giving out Resistance stickers. Most have taken them with interest. A couple have refused. I found that odd. Those stickers I placed on smoker bins in Skegness have stayed. Those I've posted in Lincoln have disappeared. I have none left now that I'm working in Louth so I just talk with the smokers who share the same bench in the Market Place at lunchtime.

One my jobs was to work on a story from the British Beer and Pub Association about the beer tax hike which the organisation says will lead to the loss of 10,000 jobs in the industry and many more pub closures. I spoke to a local on site brewer landlord, who has opened his own independent pub, and a fourth generation local brewer for their views. Both agreed the tax would be disastrous. I couldn't avoid asking them how they felt about the smoking ban.

The pub landlord - who is a supporter of choice - says that his choice, even without the ban, would be non-smoking for practical business reasons. : "75% of people don't smoke so it makes sense to have a non-smoking pub for the majority of customers," he said. I never asked whether he would think it worth it if he could offer separate facilities to attract 100% of customers. This man was not, incidentally, an anti-smoker by any means.

The fourth generation brewer's view was that there were too many pubs before 2007 and so some had to go and the nature of pub going had changed. She said "families don't want to be smoked out anymore." She had business in London, lived in London, and so I guessed it was a Metropolitan view and not one familiar to the majority of small local communities that this brewer's pubs serve.

Another pub landlord - a never smoker - in a historic small town was just as angry as smokers about the ban. He said if there were three pubs in a village, then two of them should be smoking and one non-smoking. I pointed out that the majority customer was non-smoking but he believed that the majority of non-smokers don't visit pubs. The majority of smokers do. He said that was evidenced by the rapid rate of pub closures after the ban when the imaginary non-smokers failed to pack pubs in smokers' places as was promised by the anti-smoking industry.

In my blogging absence, I've also watched a fair bit of TV. I like Waking the Dead on Sunday and Monday - which could be an apt description of what UKIP is trying to do in NuBritain - but then I am a sucker for a good crime drama. I love and hate Thursday nights which is my sweary night. I don't know if my other half is more interested in the political programmes I watch - like 10 O'clock Live, Question Time or This Week - or amused by the amount of times I shout "fuck off, get to fuck, fucking knob," at some sanctimonious or misleading politician.

I did enjoy "watching Nigel Farage on 10 O'clock Live the other week. He makes me smile not swear. The link begins with irritating adverts you can't move on but when the programme starts, go about 17 minutes in to watch Farage's performance.

It looks like I'll be swamped with work for the next couple of weeks at least which means I won't get time to see my GP about my elbow which isn't getting any better. I guess that means light blogging may continue for a while longer.

PERPETUAL ANGER

Twice in two days I've launched into a random rant about the smoking issue and I've realised that I've been in perpetual rage since July 2007. It isn't getting any better despite my wish that it would.

I never felt this way before and I don't think that anger will abate until the fraudulent anti-smoking industry stops funding untruthful propaganda designed to stigmatise smokers with a daily drip feed of hate designed to socially exclude them and bully them whenever the occasion arises.

The industry, which depends on the harassment of smokers for profit and the naivety of Govt minister to push it's fraud into policy, is calling the Tobacco Display Ban an urgent matter of child protection.

As usual it is out of touch with reality but it is more about the Denormalisation aspect of promoting - again by daily drip feed - "smokers as child abusers" rather than any real and meaningful effort to protect children from taking up smoking.

They say :

The tobacco industry depends for its future on recruiting and addicting new consumers, many of whom begin smoking as children. Such legal challenges are undoubtedly costly to government in terms of both legal fees and time spent defending these public health measures through the courts. However the costs to our society run deeper still, and will be measured in lives lost as this lethal and addictive product continues to recruit new users.

Note how they deliberately use the word "addictive" and their emotive use of children as human shields. But they are talking about a time more familiar to my childhood over 40 years ago. Perhaps they haven't noticed how much has changed or they are so dependant on their jobs that they have to keep on coming up with new scare tactics to frighten the public. Perhaps they are just being deliberately fraudulent with a view to influencing policy against smokers because they hate them. It's hard not to think this given what they have done and it's hard to think they care about children. I am the childhood smoker they want to eventually criminalise as an adult because I wasn't of the generation that heard their message.

ASH's insane idea to ban sales of tobacco - which is what will happen as a result of their madness because of the costly charge of shop refits - will force open the black market and lead kids of any age to get tobacco far more easily, and drugs if the baccy man has those in his stash too.

As a child smoker who took up the habit aged 8 years old, I know that what they are proposing will only make the situation worse. So much has changed since I used to go to the shop with my dinner money and I know for a fact that responsible shop owners haven't sold to under 16s (which used to be the law) in 30 years.

Yes, some get caught out but usually because the anti-smoking industry has set a trap by deliberately sending in older looking youths to further their argument for a ban. They are creating a problem that isn't there because it helps to take forward their ideology of tobacco eradication and stigmatisation of legal businesses and adults associated with tobacco consumption and sales.

If they get their way, tobacco use will go undeground like drug use and, well, we all know that kids today don't use drugs because they are not on sale down the local shop or supermarket.

I mean, I must be be on something myself when I sit through court cases such as that of a 17 year old girl with a £200 a day heroin habit.

What makes me so angry these days is the pure unintellectual rubbish that those who you would expect to know better take on board without even consulting with anyone else who might have useful and specialist information to add.

They will not work with us for the greater good of everyone because we are "the enemy" - not Big Tobacco but the little man or woman. And it's the poor they get at most because as the weakest members of our society they can. While the rich can smoke, drink and eat themselves to excess, the poor are denied simple pleasures because of, well, being poor.

That inequality angers me and I rage because decades ago we decided as a society that stigmatisation, bullying and harrassment was wrong and equality was right. We even had laws to protect people from being sacked from jobs, or discriminated in the workplace because of their lifestyles and yet no law exists to protect smokers from being sacked for being smokers or being refused jobs because of being a smoker.

A friend told me about photoassist.com, a photo agency, which she says prefers non-smoker employees but expects smokers to sign a pledge to say they won't smoke at work. That is the law so it's insulting and I'm sure they don't ask those who like alcohol, or the occasional glass of wine to sign any pledge not to drink at work or eat unhealthy food. Perhaps that's coming. The barriers to fairness have been smashed down.

Why this kind of harassment is being legalised by Govts on the fraud of the Unelected smoke free industry made up of ASH, their partners, and their pharmaceutical bedfellows is beyond me. I've never understood it and that angers me too. I find these days that it takes just a mention of the smoking issue to make me fly into rage.

The first rant this week was at the check out at Iceland when the cashier told me how her husband was photographed by the local press in a sort of "show and shame" piece about the problem of smokers outside of hospitals.

We were chatting about the local Netto up the road being taken over by Asda and supermarket shopping generally as my junk food/ microwave specials were passed through the barcode reader. She said she liked Morrison's and smoking came up when I told her we boycotted that store because they sacked two employees at Christmas for smoking in the car park.

She's a non-smoker supporter of choice. She doesn't like smoking next to her but she has no problem at all with separate areas in public places or separate public places. What got me angry was how embarrassed she was at her husband's actions. I said she was supposed to feel like that because of the whole "Denormalisation" and pro-stigmatisation programme. I said she should have been proud of him.

I also went off on one yesterday during a debate about the BBC's alleged "impartiality." I said the smoking issue was a prime example of how the BBC doesn't present both sides and indulges in press release propaganda on this issue.

The BBC's coverage of Communist USA's New York outdoor smoking ban, for example, has not one word from the other side of the debate nor does the BBC care how people - especially the elderly - will be affected by this.

If the BBC cared to ask they would soon learn that this issue has nothing to do with smoking.

During my ranting debate with a colleague, it was said that the broadcaster, nor any other "responsible" media, would want to do anything that could be accused of promoting smoking because whatever we think about choice, smoking is "bad for you."

They don't even ask if we promote smoking - they assume we do and don't care that they are slandering us. They don't ever report, for example, that we just want to be left alone and want the harassment to end but we don't go around telling people to take up smoking.

In the same way the Broadcaster harasses young and vulnerable families with children who can't afford a TV licence, they also use the power of their partciular media and influence to stigmatise smokers. The BBC is on board with the plan. Perhaps it doesn't realise how much it has been used.

The BBC has never, for example, even bothered to debate the alleged stance that "smoking kills and is bad for you."

I believe that for some people it is "bad" but not all and that is the risk we take. If the effects of smoking on smokers is different, and if genetics has at least something to do with the illnesses we get, that might explain why some die after a few years of smoking while others smoke from childhood to 100 years old and stay in relative good health their whole lives.

The antis say these people are in the minority - well they are anyway - but actually when it comes to smokers, those who die young are unfortunately in the minority.

As a child smoker with no legislation at the time to protect me - except for my mother's back hand if she caught me at it - and as an adult who has always smoked and fears that quitting could seriously damage my health, I still wait for serious and truthful research to be done on why some die young and others smoke unaffected. Inconvenient maybe but true none the less.

Tobacco used in moderation can be good for you actually. Before the propaganda, health promotion, EU directives, changes in legislation, public health programmes, nannying and now nudging, doctors would tell patients to smoke moderately for their health in some circumstances. A non-smoking young colleague was told recently that smoking can ease endometriosis, ironically because she doesn't smoke nor wants to take it up.

A real medical nurse friend of mine with 30 years experience also said two or three cigarettes a day sorts out irritable bowel syndrome. Tobacco is a herb, despite being maligned as a "drug" to hype up the "addiction" angle. When I read the ingredients on a packet of Boots own brand herbal seasick pills the other day, I noted tabacum was one of the ingredients. So it's OK to use the natural product when packaged and pushed by Big Pharma but somehow wrong to buy it from Big "evil" Tobacco.

The word is getting out via blogs, and the recent good news in Holland which has negotiated some fairness back on to the agenda is testament to that, but it seems the corrupted UK State institutions are trying to stop us from talking because they don't like what we say.

It seems other people across the world are raging as much as me but for different reasons. If the oppressive states of Britain and the USA are anything to go by then the likes of Egypt would be well advised to avoid democracy which in this NuWorld is simply about elective dictatorship and doing as you are told by the state.

All freedom has gone. The anti-smoker industry murdered it and until they back off, I fear my rage will continue and my compulsion for this tiresome battle will never end.

GOVT BACKS RISE IN CHILD SMOKING

According to Chris Snowdon the NuGovt has shown itself to be as gullible as the last in backing moves to increase child smoking.

The government is currently planning to ask retailers to cover up their displays of cigarettes from next year to protect children. But now cigarette packets could also be made a standard colour like grey, rather than the existing bright colours.


In effectively announcing the tobacco display ban they have taken control of tobacco sales from the beleagured small shop owner and put them into the hands of criminals who won't check ID to see if their customers are under age.

But then that socially backward organisation ASH - which lies to achieve it's ideological aims - wants more children to start smoking to ensure that ASH can continue into the next generation and beyond.

The above video serves as a reminder that criminals all over the world will be celebrating this news and setting up business plans for when tobacco becomes illegal and smokers are criminalised.

I mean hiding things that are bad from you from shop displays immediately leads to lack of sales doesn't it? Just ask the millionaire black market drug dealers. They'll tell you that no one uses illegal drugs - not even the 12 year olds - because they don't see them on the shop shelves.

The most disturbing part of the news that NuTories/ConDems have taken this on shows just how thick our leaders are. I really expected them to have some intelligence. Perhaps I expected too much. But then when you are as anti-smoking as health persecutor Andrew Lansley, I'm afraid that intellect flies out of the window chased by pure and unadulterated hate.

Meanwhile, ASH demands that no-one is allowed to see a pack of cigarettes and yet happily advertises them on it's Flickr page Can this disgusting group get any more despicable and hypocritical?

Parents who don't want their children to smoke now have more to worry about. Not only will the black marketeers offer cigarettes to the under age but other products in their stash bag as well.

Oh my Govt, what have you done?

* - Regular readers may have noticed that I've removed the "defender of liberty" image of Philip Davies MP. Not one Tory will get space on my page until I see some kind of tolerance being shown towards smokers from the NuGovt. Philip is great in that he has said and done as much as his party will allow. Frankly he is in the wrong party and until he moves over to one that is more Libertarian, then there is no point in backing him. His masters are not listening to him either.

The same goes for Karl McCartney. I'm grateful that Karl - my MP - is not Gillian Merron and he did vote for choice in pubs, but unless he starts taking real moves to end persecution of smokers then he will never get my support.

I'm sick of smokers and their representatives being frozen out of all negotiations. Permitted lip service to keep us quiet from Govt representatives like Karl and Philip is simply not enough. Tolerance or war - nothing between.