Most blatantly made-up story of the week.

Getting past the Daily Mail site is like passing a fatal road accident. You know you shouldn’t look. You know you’re likely to see something that will disturb and distress you, but you just can’t help it. Then there it is in all its gory detail, and what has been seen cannot be unseen.

Once in a while, the Mail does go that little bit too far and transcend propaganda. Off into Absurdity-Land where only the dimmest of drones and the most sociopathic of tobacco-control maniacs dwell. Then it’s not gory or disturbing at all. It’s a cartoon car crash, a comical and badly drawn tangle of lines and lies and pretend characters in pretend pain.

Today they presented the story of a nine-year-old child begging the NHS KillDaSmoker helpline for help in giving up smoking. The child cannot of course be named or pictured or identified in any way. Somewhere in the UK? Somewhere over the rainbow, more likely.

It’s all there. All the standard and by now very old propaganda. He tried one cigarette once and was hooked. Then he realised what it was doing to his health and tried to stop but could not. He just had to keep smoking. Finally he begged the ‘Experts who have Said’ for help in kicking his (by now, perhaps) 100-a-day habit. This is supposed to be the mindset fo a nine-year-old and you, dear reader, are supposed to be stupid enough to believe it. If I had put this out as fiction, the reviews would have been more caustic than the blood of an Alien face-hugger.

All utter rubbish. One cigarette does not hook anyone. My first pack of ten came from a vending machine outside a shop. I’d been smoking cigars for a while but hadn’t bothered with cigarettes. So I thought I’d try the cheaper option.

I smoked one. It was vile. I stuck the rest into a dry-stone wall, lit them and watched them burn away. Rolling tobacco was more to my taste although I did find later that different readymade brands were different blends. Some were reasonably good, some were dreadful. They all sell so I guess for some people’s tastes it’s the other way around.

It’s like whisky. In Wales we mostly saw Bells or Famous Grouse in my youth. There were a few malt whiskies but then, as now, they were more expensive. Having tried Bells and Grouse , and found them to be terrible, I wasn’t going to risk money on malts. As far as I knew, I didn’t like whisky very much. That changed when I came to Scotland where people practically ambush you in the street and force it down your throat. Go drinking with the Scots and there will be whisky involved at some stage – often it’s all there is. That’s when I found that Bells wasn’t the only whisky flavour around.

Bells also sells in large amounts. So a lot of people must like it. There is a smoky-drinker who hates Islay malts but loves Speyside ones. I adore the peaty malts, the peatier the better. All a matter of taste.

Back to the point. That first cigarette did not hook me at all. I found it repellent. Yet I had always liked the aroma of my grandfather’s smokes. His were rollies, made with Franklin’s tobacco. I tried that some months after my first cigarette and it was a very different experience. Like a little paper cigar.

Readymades have always, to me, had a chemical aftertaste. Rollies (and cigars and pipes) don’t have that. It can’t be the paper because now I’m tubing leaf there’s no chemical taste. Something in the processing, maybe. Anyway, I found it harsh and I was over 20 when I tried that first cigarette. Must be hard going for a nine-year-old to stick at it.

Also, back then there were only vague mutterings of ‘it’ll stunt your growth’ and such things from the antismoker camp. I still like saying that to smoking six-footers. Now, kids are bombarded with antismoking as soon as the State get their hooks into them. The idea that a nine-year-old only found out it was ‘bad for him’ after he’d been smoking for a while is derisory. He’d had that message hammered home since he was five. They all have.

There are still young kids who start smoking. Of course there are. The antismokers taunt them with this forbidden fruit every single day, everywhere they look. Of course they are curious. Of course they will want to try it. Kids rebel, it’s what they do. They test boundaries and push limits. These days, thanks to Leftie indoctrination, there are no boundaries and no limits – or at least, no real punishment for crossing them.

When I was very small I could have bought a packet of smokes any time I wanted. In fact I often did. My father sent me and my little brother to the corner shop to buy his smokes. We had not the slightest interest in those cigarettes, we were only interested in how many sweets we could buy with the change. Then came the day of the age limit. The shop wouldn’t sell us Dad’s fags so no change, and no sweets. That age limit was 16. Might have been 14 at first, I was too young to care.

Recently it became 18, which was nasty, I thought. What about all those 17-year-olds smoking legally today who can’t get any more tomorrow? No phasing-in either. Bang. Overnight. Today you are legal, tomorrow you’re not.

Which sort of begs the question – how is a nine-year-old getting cigarettes? It begs another question – how much bloody pocket money does this kid get? Fags must be near £10 a pack by now. I’m in regular employment and I’m spending time each evening shredding leaves and stuffing them into tubes because I can’t afford to buy them in the shops. How the Hell is a nine-year-old doing it?

Let’s not bother rehashing the lies about ‘one smoke and you’re hooked’ and all the rest. Let’s look at what tobacco control has achieved.

The age limit for buying cigarettes is now 18. Increased from 16 at the behest of tobacco control to stop young kids taking up the habit. Yet it’s tobacco control themselves who claim that thousands of young kids are taking up the habit. TC 0, kids 1.

Smoking propaganda is so prevalent now that it’s almost an O-level in itself in schools. All this propaganda paid for by taxes and run by the very well paid ‘Experts who Say’ has, by their own admission, had absolutely no effect whatsoever on kids taking up smoking. TC 0, kids 2.

Cigarette prices have skyrocketed thanks to the scaremongering of tobacco control. Low paid adults can’t afford them. Kids can’t possibly afford them. They seem to have less trouble affording them than I do. TC 0, kids 3.

Smoking bans are everywhere now but for schoolkids there has been no change. Smoking was not allowed in school when I was there and that was (mumble mumble) years ago. The teachers could smoke in their staff room but not in front of us kids. Oh, we knew they smoked in there because a sixth-former lined the woodwork teacher’s ashtray with nitrogen triiodide. He wasn’t expelled but he did get a whack.  Well worth it, he said.

We had bike sheds, big brick ones, never saw a single bike in them but saw a lot of fag-ends behind them. It was banned in school then just as it is now. It made no difference then and it doesn’t now. TC 0, kids 4.

The antis hid all the cigarettes behind the Doors of Shame to stop kids even seeing them and now complain that more kids than ever are taking up smoking when they can’t see them, can’t buy them and are banned from smoking them anywhere. TC 0, kids 5.

Plain packaging is next. This will be as effective as all the other antismoking campaigns in that more kids than before will be taking up smoking. I predict the result as TC 0, kids 6.

The government are delighted with the antismokers. They are bringing in far more tobacco duty than those old tobacco ads ever did. They are ensuring that smoking never dies out when we old smokers shuffle off aged 100 or so. The government will need all that new tobacco revenue to cover the cost of our pensions and they know it.

Every day, smoking is in the news with the tagline, ‘Kids, you should not do this. It is rebellious and cool and will make your friends think you are hard and fearless’. That’s not what they think they are saying but it is what they are saying. Children do not give a flying fuck about mortality. Not one child on the planet believes it applies to them. Not one child believes they can die. Not one. They can jump off things and shoot arrows at each other and even set each other on fire and they have no thought about the consequences. No child, in the entire history of humanity, ever has thought about consequences until they get to that ‘whoops’ moment. Tell them, every day, that smoking will kill them. They will just have to try it. When they don’t die after  the first one they have proved you wrong and you lose. That is how a child mind works. Simple logic, no complexity.

These days, a lot of adults don’t believe they can die either. When every day is the same round of a flat half-can of Stella for breakfast followed by flobbing out in front of the Jeremy Kyle show with the cold remnants of last night’s pizza, who would imagine anything would ever change? They don’t believe they will die. This is incomprehensible to me. At my rate of whisky intake I’m actually surprised every time I wake up, thinking ‘Oh what, I have to do it again?’

That nine year old… there is no mention of teachers or parents in the article. We are told that smokers stink, that we can be easily identified by the green cloud of foul miasma that follows us everywhere. Yet no teacher, mother, father or sibling noticed that this nine year old child stank like a pipe smoking tweed wearing biology teacher? How can that be? Aren’t we all just like the reekie lums o’ the auld toon, puffing out oor stench o’ vile smook an’ terrible, terrible disease?

By all the laws of Studies have Shown and Experts have Said, this nine-year-old smoker cannot exist. It is impossible. All the bans and controls imposed to date make his existence impossible.

If he exists then not one of Tobacco Control’s measures have worked. A hell of a lot of tax money has been wasted. A lot of people have been well paid to be utterly useless. Cameron and Clegg have been so stupid that the most transparent and blatant of con artists have ripped your money from their pockets.

Either the story is true or it is not. Either way, the Coagulation, and the Moribund Party too, look like utter dicks with a gullibility rating that is off the scale. There is no face-saving way out of this one.

So what’s it gonna be then, droogies?

:D

 

Quiet weekend

I have drawn Saturday Late and Sunday Early this weekend so will be mostly silent.

Then I have a week off so will be babbling.

For Oestre Sunday I have some interesting images.

Avoid eggs that open at the top.

Now that’s what I call a Kinder surprise.If you prefer your chocolate slow-moving and moaning ‘Braaaiiiiins’ then this is for you.

And here is the real deal your parents made, kids.

Easter. The time of hollow eggs that are big enough to hide a scorpion or a tarantula inside.

Bite into them, children. You might not have one of mine.

Happy Oestre.

What a sad and stupid people…

…the human race has become.

Over in America, a teenager is accused of peeing in a reservoir.  A pint, maybe, of sterile urine (if you don’t have an infection, urine is sterile) into 38 million gallons of reservoir water which is most definitely not sterile. Are there no fish in the reservoir? No insects? No birds wading, swimming, flying over? No animals along the banks?

Reservoir water is full of shit and bacteria. That’s why water companies have to go to such great lengths to clean it up before pumping it into homes. One pint of sterile urine actually made those 38,000,000 gallons 0.0000003% less contaminated for a brief moment, until the bacteria moved in on that little bit of urea. The ‘contamination’ would be undetectable within seconds because the bacteria will have eaten it.

So the teen is arrested and charged and the water company plans to dump all of those 38 million gallons because it is now ‘contaminated’. What was it before? Pure, pristine, distilled and sterile? Evidently that is what they believed it was.

There are people out there who drink their own urine. It has no appeal for me (unless I ever discover it’s still 40-proof when it comes out) but those who do it have never been reported to suffer any ill effects. Even if they have a bladder infection, what harm can it do? They already have that infection anyway.

Nobody with any sense drinks water straight from a reservoir without treating it with something. Boiling, or water purifying tablets, or whatever. That large body of standing water is one big pit of watery poo. Every species in the vicinity will have taken a dump in it and some of those species carry bacteria that do them no harm – but which will make us shit through every available orifice if they get into us.

A pint of pee is of no consequence whatsoever. The local authorities even tested the water and found no pee. Not surprising – as I said, bacteria will soon dispose of the urea and not just that of human origin, but from bats, rats, birds, otters, fish…. oh, just think of an animal. They all use the reservoir as a toilet.

What is surprising is that they tested. Why? What the Hell did they hope to find? How big do they imagine this guy’s bladder is? What do they think he’s been drinking? There was nothing to test for. Their normal routine tests would never pick it up, in fact I don’t believe any test ever would.

It’s not the first time this kind of stupidity has floated up. It’s like the turd that’s scared of the dark so won’t leave the bowl.

In 2011, the city dumped 7.8 million gallons of water from the reservoir after another man urinated in it.

What do they do when there’s a dead bird floating around, I wonder? Empty it all and get in there with bleach and brooms? That doesn’t sound unlikely, and it would be a lot worse for water quality than the pint of pee. In reality, they are not worried about dead rats or foxes or cows or corpses, only about teenager pee.

This is the mindset that produces the terror of second hand smoke – even second hand steam – while declaring a street full of diesel fumes to be ‘fresh air’. This is the mindset that is terrified of putting too much salt on their highly processed GM foods. ‘Made from reclaimed meat’ is food-speak for ‘Don’t eat this, it’s bone scrapings, gristle, ears and testicle bags all mashed up and formed into the rough shape of something edible, then covered in batter so you can’t see it.’

I know people who live on those things but won’t eat liver. Liver is a great meat. And very cheap because idiots think it’s horrible while they tuck into testicle-bags and snouts in batter. I like to eat liver. Have to, considering my drinking habits. I need the parts to make more of my own liver every day.

Thirty-eight million gallons of water are to be wasted in a drought area because one teenager might or might not have dropped a pint of urine in there. What about the concrete-booted bodies the Mob have left there? No problem because the water purification system will remove all trace of them. There will be no eyes popping out of your taps, probably. But keep watching. You never know.

However, teenager pee will retain its form after any kind of processing and will emerge intact into one single pint of tap water one day. It could all be in one pint of beer. Okay, fair enough, some of the cheap beers do actually taste as if they were not so much brewed as urinated into the bottles but even so.

You know, we have installations that can turn raw sewage into drinkable water these days. It’s pretty hard work but it does work. What goes in is utterly disgusting but what comes out is safe to drink. Against that, is there really any danger from a bit of second-hand fizzy pop diluted to a level of 1 in 304000000? That is 0.003 parts per million or 3 parts per billion which is even less than the amount of anything remotely dangerous in the Electrofag steam on its way into the vaper. Yet you can terrify a drone with what comes out.

Getting a pint of pee out of an entire reservoir of water involves no actual work of any kind at all. The normal water purification process deals with far more really dangerous stuff every day. The pint of pee is nothing, it’s already diluted away and dispensed with by the teeming bacterial load of the water within seconds. If there was any intelligence left in the world there never would have been any idiots testing for it.

Did you know that water looks crystal clear when it has 10,000 bacteria per millilitre? It has to get to around 1,000,000 per millilitre before it even looks a bit cloudy. That crystal clear lake or sea water is definitely not sterile.

Urine is sterile, unless you have an infection. Water, any water, even tap water, is not.

In the end it does not even matter. All the dangerous bugs are taken out of tap water and the water is tested to make sure. I don’t drink it anyway, it has no taste and fish do unmentioanable things in it. I prefer my water to be mixed and fermented before drinking, like in the old (very old) days when it was safer to drink small beer than to drink water. They knew what they were doing.

Stupidity is rife. It is everywhere but it is not where you’d expect it to be.

I had a visitor to the toilets in Local Shop today. A zombie mouth breather in the flesh, with her brood of monstrous simians in tow. I left there expecting to come back to a trashed toilet.

No. She and her brood had left the place very clean indeed. Far better than I have seen after some pompous middle class wannabe aristos had been in there. She wasn’t much to look at but I bet her house is clean. Okay, she won’t be on University Challenge but then neither will those wannabe aristos who evidently have butlers at home to flush for them. Dirty old tarts. And the pompous-git blokes are no better.

One of Winston Smith’s quotes in ’1984′ was ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’. He might have been right. Now that I have descended from the ivory tower of science into the real world of people who don’t know what IQ means and who actually believe that while a group of crows is a ‘murder of crows’, two or three crows is just a ‘manslaughter’ (today, and it was once again the same poor gullible girl. She’s lovely, I just can’t help myself) – I can see that Orwell had a point.

It’s the proles who have standards. They have control of their children. They have Heritage and a past to look at. Ignore the chavs, I’m talking about the real proles now. The ones I came from, grew up with and thought were all gone into the benefits entrapment.

They still exist but are forgotten. They don’t get into the Daily Mail because they are not whining about their lives, they just get on with it. The real proles are still there.

They are the ones who will laugh at peeing into reservoirs because they know what else pees in there. They are the ones who will, without any microbiological training, instinctively understand why this is wrong.

They, those proles, are the real hope for the future because they are the ones nobody pays any attention to.

The ones nobody tries to control because they don’t think it’s worthwhile.

 

Paedopocalypse Now!

The PaedoEye has turned on Cyril Smith. Hard to believe nobody noticed him before. You’d have needed a stepladder to overlook him.

Strange how all these tales come out when the perpetrator is conveniently dead. You can blame the dead for anything. There’s sod all they can do about it. Cyril Smith can’t even come back as a ghost, there isn’t enough ectoplasm on the planet to allow him to materialise.

I blame Cyril Smith for the Earth’s axial tilt, especially now he’s stopped moving around and is buried in one place. Local gravity fields will have warped around his burial place, a depression orbited by pies. Please don’t let them bury John Prescott nearby or the planet will topple. Rumour has it that part of the Pennines only came into existence when they had to find somewhere to dump the excess earth from his grave.

I digress, but that lot just had to come out. It’s the whisky talking. I have some very chatty whisky here. The sort that has more to say than ‘Drink me’.

There is a Labour MP claiming that Cyril ‘Planetoid’ Smith was just part of a high level paedo ring operating at the heart of Government and silencing anyone who tried to disclose what was going on. I don’t know which Labour MP. It was something I read in Local Rag at work today – the sort of Local Rag that would have headlined the sinking of the Titanic as ‘Aberdeen couple lost at sea’. There is a longstanding rumour that they really did that but it’s not true. There were two couples.

Anyway, there have long been people claiming the existence of a high level paedo ring. As conspiracy theories go, it’s easy to laugh off but impossible to refute with evidence. We all know what a lot of those MPs are like – in it for themselves, out of touch with reality, pervy orange-sucking self-throttling while masturbating weirdos. They aren’t all like that. There are one or two who have some contact with reality now and then. Some don’t even suck oranges while masturbating, I hear.

Which gives rise to a wonderful yes/no question to ask the unwary. “Do you suck oranges while masturbating with a ligature around your neck? Yes or no”. Add it to the list that begins “Have you stopped beating your wife?” To which the only sensible answer is “I tried to, but she won’t let me.”

If such a ring exists, it is in a position to silence all those who try to reveal it. Consider the paedo motivation from the other angle – it is not that teachers and priests are all paedos, but that paedos will try to get jobs as teachers and priests. They will try to get into a position where they have access to the snot-nosed, disease-ridden objects of their utterly incomprehensible lust. Some will inevitably get through because that criminal records check only works on those who have one. For a peado, getting into a position where you have control of every child in the country and an army of SS to get them for you must be the ultimate dream.

But then, it has to be said, the Church often doesn’t help itself…

East Anglia used to be where the Romans put all the weirdos and oddballs to keep them out of the way, you know. The name was originally Esta Angulus, or ‘those who are oddly made’. It explains a lot.

Back to the point, although I should point out at this point that the point I intend to point at has not been sharpened, is probably dull and likely to be pointless. Pressing on regardless…

What if.

What if there really is a paedo ring in government, still, to this day? What if they keep getting their paedo pals into positions of pokery power? What if it’s all true? What if that bloke they keep arresting for shouting about the Holly Greig case is right after all? What if all those forced adoptions and SS-stolen children really were stolen to order? What if?

What would be their logical course of action?

Well let’s see. First they would have to try to blame it all on someone else. That will only stave off the inevitable  Eventually they will still be found out. So blaming it on the Savilator and others of his time might have worked – if it wasn’t for the inconvenience of the live ones actually defending themselves and being found not guilty.

Blaming it on celebs didn’t work. Blaming it on priests and teachers has not worked. Getting kids as young as five to learn about sex, both straight and (ahem) ‘alternative’ hasn’t made it go away. That will work, but it’ll take years. When those kids grow up they  will see the connection between sex and infants as normal. This is horrifying, disgusting, and adds a whole new and exceptionally vicious slant to Panoptica, the book-in-process that cannot keep up with reality.

All of this has done one thing. It has immunised the public against it all. So Mr. Pebbleglasses has been found to be whipping out his unmentionables in front of the nursery class. At first, shock horror. Now, increasingly – Yawn, another one.

Finally, then, we come to the place where the politicians reveal their dead paedos. Cyril Smith first, since there have been hints and stories for years. I bet Ted Heath is next because he’s also conveniently dead and because there are already rumours that link him with the Savilator.

So I predict, with my hat wrapped in tinfoil, that this will culminate in “We used to have a paedo ring in government but we don’t now, honest. Hello small boy, do you want to see some puppies? (cough) The microphone is off, isn’t it?”

I used to laugh at all conspiracy theories. I didn’t even believe in the existence of Common Purpose, but I have since seen the amateurishly exaggerated body language of their crazed wench-in-charge on YouTube. She could learn a lot from Jeeves’ ultra-subtle inflections of the word ‘Indeed’. Well she could, if she was capable, but she isn’t.

So now it makes me wonder. What if it’s all true? The logic attaching  events to this theory is sound, but that does not in itself make the theory correct. It only makes it possible or at most probable. When the people in the spotlight are the ones with the power to turn off the spotlight it’s very hard to be sure.

Opinions are welcome, even those that say I’m bonkers.

Oo dun dat den?

Local Postman is a random sod. The post can arrive any time between 8 am and 5 pm, probably depending on how much he had to drink the night before.

My shift work changed midweek, I am now on a 3 pm start rather than horrible morning starts. The afternoon guy is clearing a load of gravel from his front garden and fair enough, having to do that in the morning and then work a six-hour shift would be a bugger. Since I detest the pre-noon hours with a passion, swapping shifts was a mutually beneficial arrangement. It also lets me at the Caol Ila because I have time for the peat-breath to dissipate before starting work. The good whiskies are supplemented tonight with Glen Orchy – I have to make the good stuff last, you know, and once the taste buds are burned, the good stuff would just be wasted.

This new shift pattern, I thought, would help with a little item I had ordered. The Zenit-EM came without a lens cap and I also like to have a skylight filter on every lens. I don’t believe those filters really do much light-related stuff, but if the camera ever gets bashed, a scratched skylight filter costs an awful lot less than a scratched lens. I had ordered a bundle, 52mm skylight and polarising filters, lens cap and lens hood for less than a tenner. So I was expecting a small box of photographic equipment.

Surely Local Postie would manage to get to the house before I left at about 2:30? Not a chance. There was a little card through the door – fortunately the package was at a neighbours’ house so he really had brought it with him this time. A smoking neighbour, a real person, not the Plastic Man next door or Drunken Loonie the other side.

Off I went, expecting maybe a two-inch cube.

Did you ever see that episode of ‘One Foot in the Grave’ where Victor Meldrew is sent a giant plastic bluebottle and has no idea who sent it or why? I have six years to go until pension day and things already happen to me that are as strange, or stranger, than happened to him.

The box was immense and wasn’t delivered by Local Postie at all. It was at the size where the post office would go ‘Ooo, expensive’ but other carriers would deal with no problem. I briefly wondered if I had mistakenly ordered filters and lens cap for a 5.2-metre astronomer’s telescope until I opened it.

It does contain photographic equipment. A Jessop enlarger and lots of accessories! Aside from the film developing tank, the entire darkroom is in there. I am in the photography business once more.

It’s a better enlarger than my old Zenit. This one looks like it means business. The Zenit looked like something patched together by a Russian peasant out of bits that fell off a satellite. It worked well, I’ll give it that, but it wasn’t really what you might call ‘techno’.

The one thing I have not found in the box is who it’s from. This extremely generous benefactor is so far anonymous. Maybe he, she or it wishes to remain so in which case I will respect that.

Or maybe I have not yet found the note among the mass of gear I’m playing with here.

So if it was you. please let me know. I’d like to make sure you get the first copies of Panoptica and Inside Outside, at least – and signed copies of any of my books you don’t have. I only wish I could offer more but I run a tight ship here and it’s all at sea ;)

The attic is the best place for a darkroom. There are no windows and all residual light is easily blocked. There is power up there, my father put it in before he had his over-70 non-age-related-stroke (smoking causes premature ageing but smokers do not age, according to the NHS, and working in coal mines for most of your adult life has no effect on health). The railway is up there too but that is in transition from N to OO and there is plenty more room. Well, if I reorganise the junk, there will be.

Reveal yourself, Darkroom Banksie, and terrible stories will be on their way to disturb your dreams.

It’s the least I can do. Actually, at this stage of Leg-iron finance, it is probably the most I can do…

 

Thunderstealers – The Salties.

Some time ago (and quite often, actually), VGIF have debunked the myth of the massive decline in heart attacks as a result of the smoking ban. It has never stopped the antismokers claiming great success, and nothing ever will. They just keep on spouting gibberish and ignore facts.

The other Righteous Ban Brigades are using the same template so all do the same thing. Unfortunately for the antismokers, their copycats aren’t bright enough to come up with new success stories of their own. They steal more than just the template.

Yes, the Salties claim that the massive reduction in heart attacks – also high blood pressure and strokes, which everyone knows are only caused by smoking, is entirely their doing. To make their claim watertight they are starting with 2003, a few years before the smoking ban. So the antismokers can’t steal it back.

The VGIF article linked at the top was from 2009. Right in the middle of it all. Heart attacks were going out of fashion before the smoking ban – and the Salties are claiming the credit. I note from their imagined figures that half of all heart attack and stroke users die from their habit. There’s really not much creative thought going into any of this, is there?

I don’t recall too much action from the Salties in 2003. There were initial moves around that time and earlier. In one place I worked, around 1990, the staff canteen were told not to add salt to the food when cooking. This was abandoned when it was found that the staff just added even more at the table. There were occasional mutterings from the Salties but nothing they did had any real lasting effect on anyone’s salt use. Well, except the gullible, who ended up as salt (and intelligence) deprivation cases

The bans on salt cellars at restaurant tables have really only recently been pushed upon us – well, upon the unfortunate lab-rat residents of Bloombergland, mostly – and I note that some USA companies now do a very nice line in pocket salt cellars. They are available on Amazon. Very cheap but we in the UK would have to pay postage from the US which is more than the item. Until the salt bans get properly under way here. Then the pocket salt cellars will be hanging up at the checkouts alongside Electrofags, tobacco seeds, leaf shredders and packs of homebrew yeast.

No, they aren’t all hanging there yet. Give it another year or two.

The Salties are now muscling in on antismoker territory. Another claim of a heart attack miracle due to an ‘intervention’ hardly anyone paid the slightest attention to. Like the antismoking interventions.

Official figures show smoking rates as static at just over 20%. If the antis had any brains at all they would be alarmed at this, since those figures come from UK sales. They don’t include homegrown or EU-bought smokes. They don’t include Man with a Van. If smoking prevalence appears static while more and more of us source our baccy from non-UK shops (and one day, from rambling in the woods and picking wild leaves. My best plant managed to seed last year. Not many pods but considering how many seeds each pod holds, one pod is way more than I need) then it can only mean that real smoking figures are on the increase.

I don’t travel around much so my observations are merely local and scientifically irrelevant. I see a lot of young smokers now. This is surprising. The rhetoric of the antis, the indoctrination from all sides, the inconvenience of having to go outside to smoke, the subhuman status, the constant villification… and yet there seem to still be a lot of young smokers.

Why are they starting? If I was 20 now, it would be a far less easy option than when I was really 20 (holy crap, that’s nearly a quarter of a century ago!). The price is extortionate, pubs and cafes and everywhere else shove you out into the cold, the government and the NHS encourage everyone else to hate you and hit you. It’s like strolling through Berlin in 1938 dressed as Fagin and shouting ‘Oy vay, there are too many goyim here, we should be rid of them’ and being surprised at what happened next.

Why are they starting and why are they continuing?

I think they are starting because it’s in the news all the time and they are curious. It’s the same as the reason that, in the 1960s, ‘certain children’ put bangers into bottles because they were forcefully and explicity told not to do that. Waste of time anyway, we – I mean they – never managed to make a single bottle explode. We – uh, they – did make interesting craters in fresh cowpats but kids aren’t allowed to play with those any more either. Not even the dried out ‘free frisbees’.

The price will get to those young smokers. They will buy plants and/or seeds and grow it themselves, they will soon find that a trip to Europe more than pays for itself in the money saved on baccy. They will move on from their shop-bought smokes, the next generation will start on the shop-bought ones for the same reasons (and also because they will be in interestingly gory packs) and they will then move on to cheaper options too. Rinse and repeat.

The official figure will hover around 20% while the real figure climbs back to the old 80% without any of the idiots in charge even noticing. Not until election day rolls around. Too late. By the time any of these morons realise what a doorstep response of ‘I like to smoke, your party hates me’ really means, they will be polling below the Stickleback Taxidermy party.

All the claims of the Salties, the Sugabans, the Booze Removers, the Chubby Checkers, all of them, are stolen from the tobacco template and the claims of the antismoker lobby . All of them.

When the antismoker lot collapse, the whole house of cards goes down.

So is it happening? As I said, I have a very limited range of observation here. I am seeing, locally, a lot of young smokers.

Is anyone else seeing the same?

 

Mob justice.

Apparently it is not considered ‘good form’ to refer to the Local Shop customers as ‘blank-eyed harridans’ or ‘the zombie horde’ even though both, especially the latter, are true. It has taken me a long time to realise why I’m the only one who feels like he’s in a zombie film sometimes.

Once an hour, the jannie on duty has to do a floor check. This is hardly an onerous task in little Local Shop. All it involves is checking each aisle for dropped things or spilled things and sorting out any we find. Most times it takes five minutes.

When doing this I am not shopping nor am I stacking shelves or checking expiry dates since I never do any of those things in there. Those jobs are for customers and staff. So the customers and staff are concentrating on one job, the job involving the shelf directly in front of them, while I am idly scanning the whole place for anything out of place. They are tightly focused on a small area, my attention is widened to take in a large area at that point.

That’s why I notice that, often, the shop is full of silent, shuffling people who don’t know each other and are therefore not conversing. It’s also why the staff and other customers don’t notice that we are enacting a scene from ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and I’m the one pretending to be a zombie so as not to be noticed.

There are other things to find. Lazy buggers drop items they’re looking at and instead of picking them up, they kick them under the shelves. I have a grabber-thing to hook those items back out. Occasionally there are coins, usually pennies and fivepences that I suppose aren’t really worth the effort of picking up any more.

When I find coins I put them on the nearest till, on the (rarely manned) customer services desk or just on a shelf so a local child can have a bit of extra pocket money. It is a bad idea to have cash on you when working in a shop. My wallet stays in the locker.

It’s a sensible rule. Suppose I took £20 out of the cash machine on the way to work (it is pure coincidence that that is the price of Ben Bracken) and left it in my pocket. When cashing up, one till is found to be £20 short. There would naturally be a pocket-check on all staff. It’s what I would do if I was manager.

So the till is down £20 and I have £20 cash in my pocket. Looks bad, doesn’t it? I almost never get a receipt from the cash machine and that wouldn’t prove innocence anyway. Possession of the money also would not prove guilt but it would make continued working in Local Shop very difficult. So I get rid of any coins I find at once. The situation therefore cannot arise.

Even if, later, it was found that the missing £20 had slipped under the till drawer, that initial suspicion would linger. Every time something went missing, whispers would start and fingers would point. The only safe way is to follow that rule – never have cash on you when working in a shop.

The mentality that spawned the Inquisition, that drives North Korea’s Gangnam-style leader, is still alive in all of humanity. Especially the stupid ones. If you are accused then you must have done something. Otherwise why would you be suspected of anything at all?

Jimmy Saliva is now being villified as a terrible, terrible man – but we can never hear his side of the story. It is said that he seduced young girls but I was alive at that time. I remember the girls screaming at the Beatles and the Stones and throwing themselves at pop stars and disc jockeys. I really doubt that very much ‘seduction’ was really required.

While I always did, and still do, regard Saliva as a creepy weirdo, I think the allegations are blown way out of proportion. Maybe he did commit rape and he almost certainly had sex with underage girls but there has been nothing to suggest paedophilia. Nothing involving small children, none of the really nasty stuff. Nothing claimed against him has been proven and yet it is all accepted as fact.

Now we have all sorts of sex-pest allegations coming out of the woodwork that are not so much ‘historic’ as ‘antique’. Stuart Hall was the only one convicted and that’s because he confessed. He must be kicking himself now – not one other case has stood up in court.

Lives are ruined anyway. That bloke from the garage on Coronation Street was found not guilty – but the case dragged up his infidelity and drinking and splashed them all over the news. Nobody cared about those non-crimes before but if he wasn’t fiddling with kiddies, he must be guilty of something. The Daily Inquisition had photos of him, after his trial, having one (yes one) pint of beer and crowed about his alcoholism. Really? They should try visiting a smoky-drinky, and none of us are alkies. None of us wake up and want booze before coffee and all of us can leave the drink alone when it has to be left alone.

As now – I have to get up early tomorrow so can eye up the Caol Ila but not drink any. I’d have peat-breath in the morning and the blank-eyed harridans would probably complain. That one gets saved for savouring later, on nights when I’m not working the next day. If I am working in the afternoon I can easily get through at least half a bottle of whisky the night before  and be fine for work. Maybe I can do that with an 8 am wake-up too, but it’ll hurt, so I won’t. Whisky is limited this week but I have six days off next week… the bottle recyclers will get a boost.

I am digressing as usual. The point in the case of the garage bloke is that he has been villified for things that a) he was never charged with and b) aren’t actually crimes.

The confirmed shirt-lifter Nigel Evans was on the radio at work today. He has been accused of gay rape and has been found not guilty. Not good enough for the hounds that now infest Guido Fawkes’ comments. I remember when that place was worth commenting at and visiting often. It was, in fact, Guido and Devil’s Kitchen (along with the smoking ban) that were instrumental in turning this place from a Livejournal absurdist blog into something that beat MPs in the Total Politics listings. Now, any comment left at Guido’s is lost among the mass of trolls and loonies he lets out to play there. That’s not free speech. That’s just a mess.

Guido’s article says that Sarah Woolaston was involved in a smear campaign against Evans. All I see in what he has written there is someone going to Ms Woolaston and saying they’ve been poked in places they’d rather not have been poked in and on hearing this, she advised them to contact the police. Which, based on what she is likely to have heard, is what pretty much anyone would have said. No conspiracy there. If someone came to me and said they’d been raped – in any hole – my response would be the same. Talk to the police, there’s bugger all I can do about it.

So Nigel Evans was charged, lost his job as deputy speaker, had all sorts of private-life stuff dragged into the open and spent all his money paying for his defence. And was found not guilty. So that should be the end of it, right?

Nope. He was accused so he must be guilty of something.

Whether you agree with or approve of his sexual preferences is irrelevant. He was charged with a crime, taken to court, and found not guilty of that crime. Either we have a justice system or we don’t. Okay, it’s a random pile of nonsense most of the time but we either accept the verdict or descend into total anarchy with mobs dispensing Inquisition-style punishments for crimes admitted to under the sort of torture that would get you to admit you rape shrews.

Nigel Evans says his court costs should be paid. Yes they should. If he had been found guilty you can bet he’d be paying the CPS costs. In every case where the defendant is found not guilty, the cost of defence should be paid by the accuser. That should be standard practice.

Here is a snippet from Guido’s article -

That shock, he says, turned to anger when Evans appeared defiant in interviews with several Sunday newspapers. “Nigel would not admit a crime, he did admit making an inappropriate drunken pass at me. Surely that is wrong. His audacity in the aftermath of the trial is galling. To see him paint himself as the victim in all this is just awful.” 

If he has been acquitted, why would he admit a crime? The accusations were tested in court and he was not guilty. No crime. An inappropriate drunken pass is not a crime. It used to be, back when being gay was illegal and that’s not all that far back. Do the progressives who infest Guido’s comments want a return to the trial of Oscar Wilde?

The whole ‘sexual assault’ thing is overblown. If some drunk guy fondled my danglies I would be, to put it mildly, unimpressed. But I would shrug it off and avoid that guy in future. It is not a matter for the police. If the same guy set about me with a lump hammer I would definitely call the police. Yet the drunken fondling is sexual assault and that is far more important than the lump hammer assault. Even though the former is an annoyance and the latter is a lot of actual pain.

I don’t care about Nigel Evans’ sexual preferences. It’s not as if he lives next door or is ever likely to. So his home life is none of my concern. In fact, I don’t care about the home lives of the people who really do live next door. This bloke’s private life is of no interest at all.

And it should be of no interest or relevance to anyone else. Did he poke a bloke who preferred to remain unpoked? The court decided that no, he did not. So give him back his job and give him back his money. As for the other charges, unwelcome fondling is an annoyance and not something that causes lasting damage unless you are so dreadfully insecure that I can take your soul and shred it with a few words. I have met such people.

Some of those ‘victims’ didn’t even consider themselves victims. What a farce.

It is not, as Banjo Boy thinks, anything to do with homophobia. It is not even to do with MPs although it is hard to argue against the idea of giving them a little taste of what they inflict on the rest of us now and then.

No, it is all to do with public humiliation of those in the public eye. Killing your heroes. Get the drones to a point where they cannot trust anyone, cannot hear the words of those who are not Of The Left and will rise, mob-like, on command, to bring down the heretic. Even when the prosecution fails to burn them.

Heard any allegations against any Leftie celebs? No, neither have I. Only Cyril Smith, who is accused of poking small boys with something he couldn’t possibly reach and would have needed a complex arrangement of mirrors to even see. But then he was a Lib Dem and the hard left don’t like those either. Noticed that the Cyril Smith stuff came out after the Libbies lumped in with the Tories? Coincidence, surely.

Enough for tonight. I have to sleep.

 

Hat-tip to Roobedoo for those links.