Heavy fuel

Not sure what to make of this one. Do ten readers of this blog really believe that drinking 15 pints of Stella or Abbot a week makes someone a “heavy drinker”? That’s hardly two pints a day. Or did they interpret it as “what is the official government line?” Even that is 50 units a week, which in the terms of the poll would equate to 20 pints.

If this reflects the genuine opinion of blog readers, it’s hardly surprising that the pub trade is on its knees.

JUSTICE OR VENGEANCE?

David Cameron talks tough about what will happen to rioters who have been identified and arrested but he could actually do something useful and end the automatic anonymity afforded to under 18s under Sec 39 of the Children's and Young Person's Act 1933 .



I wrote about my own youth horror story and how the whole tragedy was made worse by Govt policy backing for the out of the control kids involved who used it to their own advantage to evade justice and the consequences of their wrong doing.



They knew that they could, quite literally, get away with murder. Any youngster under 18 never has to face severe consequences for their wrong doing because the law states they must be handled with kid gloves.



I've seen some horrible youth cases in court and just as many outrageously soft approaches by magistrates who have to punish them. It is extremely hard to persuade a bench that the most violent of these young criminals should be named and shamed. Often exposing their wrong doing to the wider community is left far too late ** for any chance of rehabilitation, remorse or community protection.



I accept, up to a point, the argument that press reporting of youths could award them glory and recognition for bad behaviour among their peers, when they don't excel at anything else, but I also know from experience that most youth and adult offenders fear press exposure far more than any sentence that magistrates hand out. Certainly the majority of parents are mortified at such shame brought on their family - even those in the underclass who try to do the best they can. To say ALL underclass parents are crap is like is saying ALL Muslims are terrorists.



One case where I successfully applied for reporting restrictions to be lifted was a boy and his mates who terrorised elderly neighbours in a quiet village and attacked them with baseball bats. The bench allowed one boy to be named but not photographed.



Another that was refused despite much effort from the press, was a girl gang who beat up any kid they came across, robbed them, smashed up property and then assigned each other with the appropriate offence based on the likely outcome given their varying criminal records. Youths go through a gamut of sentencing options before getting locked up and by then they don't appear to care.



At least if violent youths could be named and identified from press reports, the communities they live in would know to avoid them.



NuLabour's youths have been preying on individuals in their communities for a decade so it was always just a question of time before they turned on communities themselves. They need to be reined in and adults need to be allowed to be their moral guide without fear of prosecution if they take reasonable action against youths who threaten them, their families or their property. And just because they are under 18, that should not give them an automatic right to be believed above their adult victims.



The fact that kids have nothing to fear from the law was made clear in yet another interview trying to probe the reason for the recent mob violence :



None of the group was concerned about the unprecedented police efforts to catch those responsible. Because there were so many people looting they believed their chances of not getting caught were "quite good."



One of them must have inadvertently given police a clue :



A 17-year-old said he stopped in Clapham Junction solely to target a store where he had been refused work. He said: "It was Comet - they didn't reply to me emailing my CV, or going up there so this was payback man, payback."



Despite the fact that in my own experience parents were part of the problem and actually as threatening as their horrendous kids, I don't support what can only be described as vengeance from the state in taking council homes from these yobs' families or stripping them of benefits.



We really can't be sure that all of the parents were involved or even knew of their kids involvement in the riots. In a lot of cases, adults have been terrified into over-pampering their kids from fear of being seen as child abusers by taking them to task. Like it or not, sometimes a clip around the ear does it when all else fails - and that does not equate to beating and torturing which should be the real concerns of child abuse allegations.



The teens told Sky News their parents were unaware of their activities. One said he had been told to stay in his bedroom but climbed out of the window to join in the looting.



The very fact that we are not allowed to know who these troublesome youths are also means we cannot tell whether an injustice has been committed or not on those families to be evicted by Govt vengeance.



And one wonders if the middle and upper class parents of rioting youths will also feel state wrath at failing to bring up their kids in accordance with state views.





Photo from here



If we are serious about mending "Broken Britain" then maybe we should be looking at one rule for all no matter what class they come from and ending the protection of those who attack adults and others in their neighbourhoods.



** H/T Orphans of Liberty

SMOKERPHOBIC MILTON MUST RESIGN

You may remember that I saw my MP Karl McCartney last month and spoke to him about smoker discrimination and Govt backed Smokerphobia. He wrote to Anne Milton, who rattled off the usual DoH reply to smoker's concerns, and asked me to get back in touch with him if I needed further help. I referred him to this post which laid out my response.



I've had another letter from him today with another reply from Milton who trots out the same old, same old, DoH's line and over-egged health propaganda. She includes again information that smokers kill their babies who die of SIDS despite pointing out to her a support group's concerns that blaming parents for the loss of their baby is just plain morally wrong.



SIDS is defined as an unexplained death. Linking it to smoking based on statistics because it's a believable guess, without actual biological proof, is like saying that because a flock of storks flew over the Maternity Wing of a hospital they must have left the high number of babies who happened to be born that day.



What is shocking about the information she quotes is that the Govt singles out 40 individual parents for blame because they are the ones at the other end of the "40 SIDS deaths per year" she quotes. And yet she goes further to blame smokers for one in five of ALL SIDS. If this is true, then I believe it is in the public interest to name each and every one of those babies that smokers have killed.



The war on vulnerable smoker parents has intensified with the invented myth of Third Hand Smoke now being bandied about as a cause of infant death. Just look at some of the results from a google search here.



The top link shows a comment from a woman only too ready and willing to believe smokers' clothes kill babies before the science has even been manipulated and fraudulently statisticised. But then she lives in the Aussie Third Reich and is programmed to fear, loathe, shun and avoid smokers based on untrue propaganda.



The result of encouraging hatred against smokers is not more keenly felt than that even tinier minority who lose their babies to SIDS. They lose them no more than non smokers or never smokers but they are an easy target for abuse to ease another person's grief by finding an easy cause to blame for the same great loss.



In my previous post taking Milton's ideological information to task, one parent said :



Firstly as the parent of a SIDS victim I would thank you for standing up for a minority of parents who lose their babies to what is probably one of the most misunderstood causes of infant mortality that occour. I would like to point out that by definition SIDS has not any causation nor by definition can it have due to its official guidelines for usage. SIDS is only ever diagnosed as a cause of death in cases where there is no other defineable reason for death.



Secondly there have been occaisions where the parents of SIDS victims have suffered the implication that they commit infanticide in the comments of some Scottish and North-Eastern newspapers which causes an immense amount of stress to parents who are already overwhelmed with grief, who already are wondering if something they did was to blame and for a small part of the media, a small number of politicians and even charities to add to their burden is beyond the bounds of common decency.





Milton defends encouraging abuse of vulnerable parents and smokers in general because it's laid out in the policy document written by ASH "Healthy Lives, Healthy People : A Tobacco Control Plan for England."



She says the DoH is not in the ideological pocket of ASH because ASH reflects the Govt's policy on smoker hatred so it's views suit the Govt's purpose. Debs and Co don't get special treatment. Milton insists ASH is a "charity" (*snigger*) and mentions the value of Labour's unelected Third Sector. She says Govt persecution of smokers is open to Competition - so anyone but ASH can apply - but obviously not on smoking itself as only the Pharmaceutical industry which competes directly with the Tobacco Industry to supply nicotine, is allowed a say.



I also detailed some cases of discrimination in the workplace to Karl and Milton's reply was to go online and have a look at the Equality Act 2010. I did,. Smokers are not mentioned but they should be given job ads like this below from my local paper over a year ago. I haven't looked at vacancies since after complaining about this ad and getting nowhere. It is not illegal to exclude smokers from applying for jobs.







What offends me about the job ad above is the employer's view that smokers are, by definition, uncaring, untrustworthy, and unreliable. I really don't get that Govt can't see this and really can't do something about ensuring protection for smokers at work against bigoted and prejudicial discrimination.



Milton is smokerphobic as her fears for the public's health are obscenely unfounded, and she is not impartial on the issue. What her Govt is doing with it's health policy, based on commercial and self interst marketing techniques and targeted at eradicating smokers by forcing them to quit through coercion, public bullying and blatent discrimination, is encouraging the immoral and the nasty such as this charmer whose obvious concern is the health of his fellow citizen.



Please increase your intake of snouts as much as possible 80-90 a day should do the trick so you have fatal a heart attack rather than long lasting emphysema or cancer with all those bottles of oxygen and nursing care and using up inhalers every five paces. that way the rest of us won't have to foot such a big treatment bill & before you say it the amount raised in tax from fags does not even come close to covering the cost of treating smoking related complaints so please die quickly , thanks



Anne Milton is supporting hatred of a minority group based on ideological rather than health concerns. She should quit now. Oh my, I feel an E-Petition coming on - if only I technologically could - hint, hint.



I will be writing to Karl again because I really do want to know Milton's plans for us when we have been bullied and abused down to 18.5% of the country. My guess is criminalisation as murderers, thieves, ne'er do wells, rioters, and general scum, but I wonder if she will be courageous enough to admit it?



Meanwhile, I leave you with this excellent piece from the View From Cullingworth on the recent public unrest, why it might have happened and the best way forward for a stable and socially healthy society. And this bloke, like Karl, is a Conservative so one wonders how much support Milton really has within her own party at both upper and grass roots level. I think she would be more at home in NuLabour.



Cllr Cooke says in response to the riots, and for the general good of the country, and I agree:



The reformation is simple – we should neuter government, take away from it the power to fix markets in the interests of those with the best lobbyists and biggest bribes. It is the overweening state that created the sinful world ... not some wider moral malaise.



The sooner we take away the power of Govt to fix the nicotine market, and bolster self interest Third Sectors, as the first step back to normality, the sooner fairness, impartiality, and truth will return as our moral guide and we can all get back to getting on with each other without Govt interference.