Covert Rationing.

Some time ago, there were reports of a poor olive harvest with a resulting shortage of good quality olive oil. Suddenly, olive oil went from ‘good for you’ to ‘bad for you’ in the eyes of the Food Freaks. You don’t want this, oh no, it’s bad for you, and if you want it there might not be enough for us.

Now we have sugar as the new smoking. It’s addictive, you must have it or you will suffer withdawal symptoms and since it’s what your brain runs on, these symptoms can be pretty severe. Naturally, anti-everything Puritans will suffer no ill effects from a total sugar withdrawal since they are already brain dead anyway.

This new demonisation has a cause. There might not be enough sugar to go around, so naturally the plebs must be scared away from wanting to have any. Demand by plebs will only push up the price, and the plebs won’t riot when they can’t get something they’re scared to have anyway.

The Puritans gave up on salt control very abruptly, didn’t they? There’s no shortage of salt. I bought a 3 kg bag in Poundland the other day and I’ll buy more. They also sell plastic containers to store it in. Tesco sell the same size plastic containers for four times the price. It only has to keep the stuff dry on a garage shelf, it’s not some kind of kitchen fashion statement. A one-pound plastic box does the same as a four-pound plastic box.

I’ll have to lay in a stock of sugar too. There are six pounds of frozen plums waiting for the demijohns to be freed up – although I have noticed, on eBay, plastic fermentation bins that will be far easier to get the first fermentation run out of. There’s a lot of mashed fruit in that first run and demijohns have very narrow necks.

Also, I have been eyeing up those huge plastic bottles of cheap supermarket water. Much cheaper than demijohns and so easy to fit with an airlock… but I’m digressing as usual.

I wonder about this antismoking stuff. I used to think it was based entirely on spite because there is no other clear motivation. There is no advantage to the Dreadful Arnott and her drones if we all stop smoking. It is already banned anywhere it could trouble the delicate nostrils of the girlie-men. Banning it in private cars (and soon homes) does not improve the life of a single whining toadie anywhere. There is no reason for it other than pure spite.

Maybe there is. The level of control over the hive-mind of the drones that was established by the antismokers has proved useful. They believe the crap about second, third and nine hundredth hand smoke, they believe all smokers are stupid (a very useful thing to have them believe, I find). They believe it all.

The same technique formed the Church of Climatology with its army of useful idiots who believe what they are told to believe. It has formed the legions who think that eating any kind of fat will make you fat, who believe that sugar is addictive, that inhaling a wisp of smoke from half a gram of burning leaf is more deadly than sucking on a SUV tailpipe (I’m going to get one of them to prove it, one day, I just need to find one stupid enough), that meat and cheese are deadly, that tax is a good thing, that the amount of time you sit at your desk is a measure of how much work you’re doing… and so on.

On that last point, I have sat at this desk all evening and achieved bugger all. It’s too early to write and I have to sleep in order to work tomorrow. Soon this mad time-frame will end and I can get back to normal hours, spent in the cold darkness of past-midnight when the ideas that come border on the dangerously insane. Luckily for the rest of this town, all I ever do is write about them. It just has to be dark and silent save for the scratching at the windows and the creak of distant doors in an empty house.

A quick digression (it’s worth it) – here are some two-line stories that are worth a few minutes of your time. I didn’t think of any of them, I’m ashamed to admit. I especially liked No. 13.

Five a day. Units per week. Smoke that becomes ever deadlier the more it is diluted. Remove fats, salt and sugar from your diet and you will live forever (you won’t last a month). All utter nonsense and all believed, unquestioningly, by the drones. All because they have been trained by the antismokers to believe absolutely anything at all.

Recently I resisted temptation. One of the Local Shop girls had apparently waved to me as she came out of the swimming pool. I never go there but I pass it every day on the way to work. She was mortified that I hadn’t seen her because it made her look as if she was some kind of loony waving at nobody.

Normally, there is one thing more delightful than wrecking someone’s day, and that is wrecking their entire lives. For the lulz. But, I quite like this girl so I didn’t say what was in my mind. “Swimming pool? You go in there? It’s just a load of people sharing a bath full of each others’ filth.”

She’s young and the young are thoroughly indoctrinated. Their minds can now be turned with just a few well chosen words. It would have been cruel. But funny.

If only she had been an antismoker. I’d have listed the bacteria in the water and described the growths in the filters. She’d never have bathed again and could have become a Green.

I think I’m going soft in my old age, you know.

The conditioning of the antismoking mindset has a purpose. You want to raise the chocolate ration from 35g to 25g and have them rejoice? You can now do that. They will not notice.

There is no need to publicise shortages any more. All you need do is tell the drones it’s as bad as smoking and they won’t want any. Then the price won’t go up.

The smart ones stock up from the pound shops, before the supermarkets notice the ‘shortage’ stories among the hype of the ‘bad for you’ stories.

Poundland currently have 1.5 kg of sugar for a pound. And the plastic containers to keep it in. I’ll be in there tomorrow. No rush, the drones won’t touch it.