Every day the papers carry some story, each one more ridiculous that the last claiming that picking your nose causes knee cancer or that using a telescope will cause your eyes to drop out.  Some claims are so patently absurd that you have to laugh, but they are still printed in that air of frenzy that would have you believe they have discovered the meaning of life.

Why?

What is the point of all this garbage?

In an ideal world, the WHO or whatever would inform us that Professor Fred has discovered a possible link between sugar and obesity, or that the University of Narnia thinks cigarettes may be bad for you, and they would then leave us to make our own decisions.  After all, it’s my body, my health and my life.  That’s called free will.

One of the latest bits of blindingly useless bits of information to emerge is that Ireland is to have a 72% increase in cancers by 2030.  Apparently Bulgaria is the place to be with a 2.2% increase.  What use is this information?  Instead of wittering on about future trends, why don’t they just devote their time to finding cures?

Why has the WHO published these figures?  What possible purpose can they serve except to cause depression amongst the gullible few who actually believe the claptrap?  Are we all supposed to suddenly change our lifestyles?  Are we all supposed to switch from high sugar to sugar free?  On second thoughts, sugar will kill you and so will sugar free, so you can’t win there.  It can serve no purpose whatsoever except to justify some grossly inflated salary somewhere.

Of course in the last few years, governments have taken it upon themselves to force us to live their lifestyle of choice.  Smokers have taken the brunt of the greatest “denormalisation” programme since Hitler decided he didn’t like Jews, and now they are turning their attention to drinkers and eaters.  They won’t be happy until we are all eating government regulated food, drinking government approved drink and exercising following an exercise regime laid down by… [you’ve guessed it] government.  Even then, people are still going to fall ill and die so what will they have actually achieved, apart from making society miserable?

Possibly the last paragraph in the WHO statement is the most telling -

“We need to urgently look at introducing fat and sugar taxes and how these unhealthy foods are promoted, and even greater restrictions on the advertising and sale of tobacco”

So having failed to “educate” us, they want reams of further government control on how we live our lives.  [Though I would love to know how they intend to further restrict tobacco advertising here in Ireland – the only places where you ever see any sight or mention of tobacco is in the breathless press releases by ASH and on the little signs in tobacconists about not selling tobacco to under 21s.]

I just cannot see the point to it all.

Irish officials may adopt UK scheme to cut smoking rates

There are quite a few questions I would have to ask about this.

For a start, I would love to know just what sort of magic bullet the gubmint seem to think this bloke has, that they invite the Gardai and Revenue along. Who is this bloke who seems to claim he can achieve what virtually every country in Europe has failed to do?

Actually, the answer is probably quite simple. He is an expert at bullshitting.

I have seen dozens of statistics that purport to prove without a shadow of a doubt that the rate of heart attacks has fallen dramatically after the introduction of a smoking ban.  And without exception every one of those proofs has proved to be a load of codswallop.  Heart attack rates have been falling steadily just about everywhere, and there isn’t a single case where smoking bans have caused the rate to vary, so the quoted figures, I can guarantee are the figures for the natural decline.  I notice he doesn’t hive a time period for this decline?  Is it since 2005?  2000?  1950?

I have tried to find the source of the figures he quotes, but I came up with a blank.  The nearest I could find was the crowd mentioned in the article called Fresh [Smokefree North East].  Reading through this site there is precious little in the way of hard figures.  It is full of innuendos and the glib clichés that the Righteous love so much -  “it is estimated that”, “a growing body of evidence that” and “the figures show” [which is never accompanied by the “figures”].

One of the claims is that “A campaign against tobacco smuggling has been very successful”.  Apparently this remarkable claim is based on a “survey” of 4000 people.  Now, how can a survey prove that smuggling has decreased? Unless the 4000 are all smugglers whining about their loss of trade, I can’t see how this “survey” can prove anything.  If some health freaks ring me up and ask my about my illicit tobacco supplies, do you really, honestly think I am going to give them the unvarnished truth?  Hah!  I will lie through my teeth just to confuse their figures.

There is one little statement though that really gets me going – “We know from the drink driving law that we can change people’s behaviour”.  Oh boy!  This is the Smug Righteous at their best!  Who is the “we”?  A group of smug little bastards who really sincerely believe that they know what’s best for us and believe they have a natural right to herd us into their way of thinking.

After all, we can’t think for ourselves.

Can we?

You can go “cold turkey”.  You decide one morning that this is it – you are no longer a smoker and you just stop.  You resist all temptations and that is that – you are no longer a smoker.

Another method that is becoming increasingly popular is to switch to the electronic equivalent – the e-cigarette, the e-pipe or the e-cigar.  While these have been marketed as smoking alternatives, increasing numbers of ex-smokers are reporting that they very successfully used the e-route to quit altogether.

The method we hear most about is the so-called “nicotine replacement therapy” – the patch, the gum and the nicotine inhalers.  Of the three methods these have been proved to be the least successful by far, over a long period.  They tout themselves as being successful but that is only measuring cessation rates after a month or less.  After a year, most smokers who have tried this route are back on the fags again.

The likes of ASH and the other Anti-smoker organisations would have you believe that the aim of their campaigns is to get people to stop smoking.  You would imagine therefore that they would chose the most successful route and would advertise that.  You would imagine that they would be delighted at the e-equivalent for a start.  Here is a method that has a proven high success rate and achieves their aims.  So why are they so desperate to have the e-cigarette banned or at the very least, subject to the same restrictions as cigarettes?  Does that make sense?

If you check any of the government quit smoking campaigns or look at the ASH cessation methods, they all suggest that the best way to quit is to “contact your doctor or pharmacist”.  Why would that be?  A doctor or pharmacist doesn’t sell e-cigarettes?  You don’t need a doctor or pharmacist to tell you to go “cold turkey”?  But what have doctors and pharmacists have in common?  Yup – the pharmaceutical trade.  They are both going to suggest the least successful method – the pharmaceutically produced patch, gum or inhaler.  They will even promote Champix, which has incredibly dangerous side effects.

Why is this?  Why do ASH et al insist on promoting the least successful method while attacking the more successful?

Surely you can come to the obvious conclusion?

Would it help if I mentioned pharmaceutical sponsorship and grants?

An organisation whose primary aim is supposed to be the health and welfare of the nation is forcing smokers not just to leave hospital buildings but is now forcing them out onto the road.

There is no logic behind this move, as even those who believe in the myth of Environmental Tobacco Smoke will have to admit that smoke outdoors poses no health risk whatsoever?  Those same people will have to admit that standing by the side of a road in one’s pyjamas on a cold winter’s day is not exactly the healthiest of actions?  Even some of the more enlightened members of the medical profession can see that.

I am no expert on the individual hospitals around the country, but amongst the hospitals I am familiar with, leaving the hospital grounds will bring you out to a very busy main road, or else there is one hell of a long walk to get to the perimeter of the grounds.  Forcing either option is nothing short of dangerous and spiteful.

Of course, reading the first article above we find some telling pointers.

“The HSE’s director of public health policy, Dr Fenton Howell, who is a former chairman of Ash, the anti-smoking lobby group, …….”

So here we have The Righteous in plain view again.  This is not about health – it is about a single minded obsession with beating down and humiliating smokers at every opportunity.

“He added: ‘We need to recognise that there is almost a sense that cigarettes are not as dangerous as they are. Five and a half thousand people die from tobacco every year, and there are thousands admitted to hospital beds because of their addiction.’”

At least he is beginning to get the message.  Cigarettes are not the equivalent of a loaded gun.  What he is really saying here is that people are starting to think that cigarettes are not as dangerous as ASH claim they are.  And then he plays ASH’s favourite game of plucking figures out of the air. There is nothing like a spot of emotive figure-juggling!

“We can’t manage patients by letting them continue the thing that brought them into hospital in the first place.”

OK.  Apply that to the few cases where you genuinely think that smoking may have contributed to the problem, but then you also have to force all victims of sports injuries to renounce sport for life.  All road accident injuries must have their driving licence immediately revoked, or they must be banned from the pavements.  Patent rubbish.

Probably the most telling statement in the article is near the top -

“The introduction of the smoking ban is being staggered so professionals within the hospital can get sufficient training in smoking cessation therapies such as nicotine patches and gum.”

There couldn’t possibly be a connection between between the fact that the anti-smoking lobby are so heavily funded by Pharma, and the promotion of Pharma products that have been proven to be useless?

Could there?

Somehow I ended up on a site belonging to a British MP.  Now this little twat calls himself a liberal yet he is one of those idiots that believes that selling cigarettes in plain packaging is somehow going to stop people smoking.

He seems to be under the impression that the colour of a cigarette package somehow entices “children” to buy the things?  This must be one of the most deluded ideas that the Puritans have come up with yet.

When I started smoking, it was a case of nipping into a tobacconist and buying a cigarette.  Yes.  That’s right – one cigarette.  To this day I couldn’t tell you what brand it was or what colour its packaging was.  I know that practice of selling single fags has been stopped but it does indicate that packaging played no part in my choice.  Later on in life, I started buying them by the pack.  As far as I remember, I used to smoke Country Life which had a rather drab design, but was nice an cheap.

I have never heard of an instance where a twelve year old wanders into a tobacconist, sees the packs all stacked up behind the counter, and thinks to himself  “Wow! I must buy one of those.  They look great!”.  For a start, there is an age restriction on buying the things, so if he is under eighteen he shouldn’t be able to buy them anyway.

Plain packaging will have several effects.  It will make the tobacconists life far harder as he now has to read every label to make sure he is selling the right brand.  It is going to cost a fortune. The biggest consequence though will be a boom time for counterfeiters.  One outcome I can guarantee won’t happen though is that fewer people will buy them.

So far, the efforts of the Righteous have resulted in the closure of hundreds, nay thousands of pubs with the consequent loss of jobs.  It has divided society and stigmatised a large minority of the population.  The one thing it has failed to do is to reduce levels of smoking.  On the contrary, levels in Ireland have increased by 2% since the bans came in.

It’s worth reading that article.  It is a scary insight into the mind of a deluded bigot.  Here is a man on a mission to save people from themselves.

The best reading though is in the comments!

I was reading Róisín Shortarse’s framework for tobacco control in Ireland and I came across That Figure again.  Incidentally, this is the same Róisín Shortarse who thinks raising the price of booze will cure all alcohol problems.

And what is That Figure you may ask?

“It is estimated that [smoking] related healthcare costs account for up to 15% of all annual healthcare costs here”

Strangely the paper then talks about “between 6% and 15% of all annual healthcare costs” which seems rather vague to say the least? And that would also assume that 85 to 94% of all healthcare costs are incurred by non-smokers?

But that’s beside the point.  The point is

How?

How do they estimate that smokers cost the health service €365 million a year?  What exactly incurs these costs and how do they know they are “smoking related”?

I have been smoking now for over forty years.  I have never been to the doctor with anything that could remotely be described as “smoking related”.  I have had my medical trials and tribulations but none of them had anything to do with smoking.  What’s more, I know a lot of people who smoke and they have the same story.  Sadly I did know a few people who died of cancer but the majority never smoked in their lives.

So what is this mysterious ailment that is incurring these huge costs?  Are they counting everyone who presents with a cough and assume that they are all smokers?  Are they assuming that all cancers are “smoking related”?  Is every child who presents with Glue Ear counted amongst the smoking casualties?

I would love to know where they get their figures from.

And why do I suspect that they are figures that are gleefully plucked out of the air to scare the sheeple?

The paint is barely dry on the New Year and they are banging on about smoking again.

Apparently 5,500 smokers die every year according to our HSE.

This is actually correct.

You see, to the best of my knowledge around 28,000 people die here each year from all causes.  And seeing as around 20% of them will be smokers then that represents 2,700 deaths which is near enough.  It’s very strange that the HSE ignores the 22,300 non-smokers who die each year.  Are they not worth a mention?

Also there is the claim that “One in every two smokers will die of a tobacco related illness”.

The problem with this line is that I don’t know what a smoking related illness is, and nor does the medical world.  They ascribe just about anything to smoking , from cot-deaths and glue-ear through to nipples falling off.  The result is that anyone who dies from any illness which is considered to be smoking related is counted a victim of smoking.  Their problem is that they have never discovered a disease that is uniquely caused by smoking so they will never know if that person would have died anyway.  It’s much more convenient to compare the actual cause of death against the long list of “smoking related” and if they find a match then bingo – another victim of the evil weed.

Of course I dispute the claim that one in every two smokers will die.  The truth is that all smokers will die.  And so will all non-smokers.

Death is a sad fact of life

The British Medical Association wants smoking banned in all cars.

There are so many things that are wrong about this that I’m not sure where to start.

First of all, the figures used by the BMA [supposedly the medical authority] that smoke in cars is 23 times stronger that the levels found in a smoky pub are based on nothing more than junk science and have actually been retracted in a very quiet press release.  Of course the damage is done now and the Antis are gleefully quoting the original figure.

All that apart, I would ask what right anyone has to dictate what I do in my car?  Maybe an argument could be made for not smoking in a car with children present but what about when I am the only occupant?  Are they claiming that my smoking produces second hand smoke that may kill me?  My car is my own space.  I paid heavily for the car and each year I pay heavily for insurance, road tax and a car test.  Every time I pull into the pumps I give the government another great whack of my cash.  I pay dearly to run my car and no one is going to tell me what I can or cannot do in it.  As far as I am concerned, if I want to do something in my car that doesn’t affect the safety of my driving, I will do it.

There is not one single justification for this intrusion into privacy.  It is just another spiteful attempt to denormalise smokers and presumably to extort more money from them in fines.

You may wonder why I am so worked up about something that won’t affect me, but unfortunately Ireland seems to have signed up to the race to see who can produce the harshest anti-smoker regime.  What happens in the UK will inevitably happen here.

One aspect of this proposed ban which I haven’t seen mentioned is the effect of forcing drivers not to smoke.  Smoking has been proved to improve concentration, and also smokers find the odd cigarette to be soothing.  Both these benefits can only be an aid to driving.  Similarly, preventing someone from smoking can produce a shortness of temper and a distraction.

I would consider myself to be a reasonably good driver.  In the forty years I have been driving I have had many accidents – too many to count, but I was to blame in only one of those accidents when my brakes failed.  I consider myself to be a calm and considerate driver.  I may pass the odd comment when I witness bad driving but I’m not one to wave two fingers out the window or even to yell profanities.

Some years ago, I stopped smoking.  One of the things I noticed was the way my driving changed.  I admit that my driving became atrocious.  I became aggressive and angry, and shudder to think of the accidents that I very nearly caused.  There were a few reasons why I went back to smoking the pipe, and one of the major ones was because I literally terrified of my own driving.  Once I started smoking again, the old placid, considerate driver returned.

I would therefore make a simple prediction.  If this ban is imposed in the U.K. I predict that the accident rate is going to noticeably increase as will the incidents of “road rage”.

You have been warned.

-oOo-

This article also appears in Smoking out the Truth.

I honestly thought our Minister for Health had more sense.  I was stunned therefore to see that he is not only contemplating banning smoking in a car where there are children but is talking of going the whole hog and banning smoking in cars altogether, whether there are children or not.

I own my car.  I paid a lot of good money for it and what’s more I pay the government a lot of good money every year for the privilege of running it.  I also shell out a lot of money to the government when I buy tobacco.  It is my property and the state, or anyone else has no right to tell me what I can do in it, provided that action in itself is legal. 

There has been a massive amount of propaganda over the years about smoking, to the point where the truth has long since been buried.  One aspect of smoking which they don’t mention nowadays [purely because it would be politically incorrect] is that nicotine has a lot of advantages including improving concentration, attention and memory. [also here and here]  Now I would have thought that anything that aided concentration and attention would be a damned good thing for a motorists, but instead of that they are going to force a smoker to abstain, thereby causing irritability which not exactly desirable behind the wheel of a car?

One of the most galling aspects of this intrusion into our private lives is that this legislation seems to be less a health issue and more an attempt to “get one up on” Wales who are also contemplating a ban.  There seems to be a race on to see who can bring in the most draconian laws.  I remember when Micheal Martin brought in the ban on workplace smoking that there was much gloating at the fact that “we were first”.

This is a bad move.  There is no justification for it whatsoever other than rolling forward the agenda set by ASH who won’t be happy until we are all shelling out for nicotine patches and nicotine gum [you don’t seriously think it’s about health, do you?].  It is the final confirmation of a Nanny State becoming the Bully State.

In the meantime, Luke Clancy and his cronies are convinced that it is “safer to have the exhaust pipe on the inside of the car than to smoke cigarettes in terms of fine particulate matter”.  I would like to issue a challenge.

I am prepared to sit in a car for any number of hours if Clancy, or Reilly will sit in another car breathing exhaust fumes for the same period.

Considering that over the past years I have consistently thrown the mockers at Global Warming and the Anti-Smoking crusades, that may appear to be true.  In fact, just the opposite is true.

In my school days, one of my favourite subjects was physics.  I later went on to study physics as part of my third level course.  So while I wouldn’t call myself a scientist, I do think I know a little bit about theories and experimentation.

The process in science is quite simple.  You formulate a theory, and you then design experiments to test that theory.  If the results of the experiment fit in with the theory then you know that you are on the right path, and if they don’t then you discard the theory.  Simple.

Modern science however takes a different path.  You formulate your theory and if the experiment doesn’t prove the theory you discard the experiment.  The reason for this is simple – modern science is driven by cash and ideology, and has nothing to do with the search for truth and enlightenment.

This distortion of science seems to have become the accepted norm.  I have seen advertisements for research where they have gone so far as to state the desired outcome in return for the funding.  If you don’t find what they want you to find then you don’t get the cash.  Is anyone going to find other than the desired outcome under these conditions?

In the case of Global Warming, so much has been invested that Global Warming has to be fact.  Industries have sprung up on its back, taxes have been imposed and a multi trillion industry has grown.  It is inconceivable that Global Warming could be false.  Is any government or academic institution going to back research that proves it is false?  The fact that many eminent scientists dispute it is hushed up, as it HAS to be true, whether it is true or false.

Similarly the Anti-smoking science has reached the status of a cult religion.  To speak out against it is heresy.  No doctor in his right mind dare claim that Environmental Tobacco Smoke is harmless despite very strong evidence that it is.  Even the World Health Organisation is ignoring its own research and is declaring the argument closed.  There is massive funding at stake here both from governments [via so called charities] and the pharmaceutical industry.

Science these days has become a democratic affair.  Whether the arguments are right or wrong, what counts is the number of people who believe those arguments.  We constantly hear such lines as “the clear consensus of opinion” and “the science is established”.  No one dare argue the cases they will be pilloried and ridiculed.

I would just ask you to consider one little fact -

Once upon a time, the Earth was flat and also was the centre of the Universe.  That was considered to be an “established fact” and to argue against either “fact” was an act of heresy.

Just ask Galileo.