Desperados.

Last night I resisted the temptation to play with the internet after Smoky-Drinky. It was a mighty drinking session indeed, right into the bigger small hours so I didn’t even get as far as Lolcats. Suitably refreshed, I have spent this day off doing exactly what I had planned to do. Nothing at all.

Well, not quite. There was eating and other essential stuff, like filling the cigarette case for tomorrow. This week it’s day shift, there is the unpleasantness of earliness but the shift finishes mid-afternoon and leaves time for some garden preparation.

There was also inspiration for a short story. One of my more cruel ones. This inspiration arrived in the afternoon’s quick browse of Lolcats and looks like this –

I’ve sketched it out and left it to ferment. The more devious twists will insert themselves.

There is also the eternal question of ‘Is there a God?’

I’m veering towards the opnion that there must be. Someone is making all these idiots and most of them are far too stupid to work out how to reproduce by themselves. Okay, perhaps more of a devil than a God. There have been times when I have been convinced of the existence of a malevolent entity who has it in for me personally but maybe we all have one of those. They take human form and have so far passed themselves off as human, but they are gradually losing their grip.

I have scoured this article on air pollution causing autism for any mention of smoking, but have found none. The commenters don’t believe in air pollution unless smoking is in there somewhere, because they have been repeatedly told that all the world’s ills can only be caused by smoking.

Oh, and because it threatens their cars and their AGA stoves. Little Cleggy threatened to ban all petrol and diesel engines just the other day and have us all in electric cars pulled by horses or huskies. I have wondered about the rising popularity of pet huskies. Do these people know something?

With the Clegg wanting cars banned, it is no surprise to find, a couple of days later, a coincidental report blaming one or more smoking-related diseases on cars. It’s probably a lot more accurate than anything the SHS crowd have ever come up with – but we now have catalytic converters, lean burn engines, fuel economy enforced by price, and that’s just cars. I grew up in streets where every house had a coal fire and a belching chimney. Cars had big and inefficient engines. There were fewer of them, but driving around belching black smoke was common. New houses don’t even have chimneys or fireplaces, they are built with central heating.

As one of those commenters pointed out, the air is generally less crappy than it used to be, so how can it be causing a rise in autism? I wonder if that same commenter had such trouble with rapidly declining smoking rates causing a rapid rise in all kinds of ‘smoking-related’ diseases? Probably not.

The rise in autism is caused by the same thing that made nicotine addictive. Medics changing the rules. Now, if you don’t like parties and are content in your own company, you are mild Asperger’s and are on the ‘autism spectrum’. Clever, eh? Make it a spectrum and we are all on it somewhere. Autism and Aperger’s are real diseases but the definition has been extended to the generally unsociable. Just as ‘obese’ no longer requires one to need a mirror to inspect anything below the waist. ‘Obese’ now encompasses the ones we used to call ‘a bit chubby’.

There are all kinds of respiratory diseases that can, and should, be linked to traffic fumes and all kinds of spraycans, but they dare not muscle in on the antismokers. Not yet. This is a first salvo from the anti-transport Righteous against the anti-tobacco Righteous and, well, get the popcorn ready. The anti-transport mob are just getting revved up. It’s going to get entertaining.

Especially since the antismokers already have a big fight on another front. Electrofag produces flavoured steam. It doesn’t even need to have nicotine in it. Food grade flavourings, food grade thickener, and about three volts of battery. Nothing to scare anyone
but the most gullible – when you find one, try to find out if they have a navel. I don’t believe these people were born. They must have been grown in a lab somewhere.

The fight against Electrofag is increasingly desperate. More and more idiots are imposing bans – not because of any real danger but because Electrofag can’t prove it’s perfectly harmless. So now they have come for your cars, antismokers. Can you prove your car is perfectly harmless? They don’t have to prove risk in order to ban it now. You have to prove a total absence of any risk at all – and that’s not possible. Cars are far easier to ban than Electrofag on this reasoning and they are already banning Electrofag. Basically, drivers, you’re fucked.

The antis slap down Electrofag adverts like a game of whack-a-mole. They aren’t subject to the ban on tobacco advertising because they are not tobacco. Snus are banned, ads for snuff, leaves or seeds won’t get on TV but Electrofag has no need for any tobacco involvement at all. As I said, it need not even contain nicotine. Yet it keeps getting banned because the antismokers make no money from it. Those Electrofag sites that villify smokers? Well guys, we saw this coming. We didn’t tell you because you hate us so suck it up. Get used to it. We have.

The antismokers also have to defend their plain packaging debacle. Doesn’t bother me, I now have two proper cigarette cases, a few Bull Brand tins that each hold 20, tubes with no tobacco company names and a leaf shredder. I’ve been on plain packaging for ages. It makes no difference at all.

It occurred to me recently that learning skills such as brewing booze and growing/curing tobacco would be very much in demand when civilisation collapses. I have a feeling they might well be in demand a lot sooner.

Plain packaging, as VGIF points out, is nothing short of comical since even the non-plain packs aren’t all real. The fakers don’t need to produce counterfeit packs. They just make up their own.

There is also no reason to produce fake tobacco. A smoker might buy a cheap pack of fakes, take one puff and think ‘That’s disgusting’ and never buy it again. We can tell, yes, really, we can. Why fake it? The tobacco is the cheapest part of the whole deal and if the fakers are in places like China, growing it and curing it is extremely easy and very cheap. Since around 80% of the price of a pack is duty, you can sell at half retail price and still make a hefty profit with real, good tobacco. Hell, you can sell a premium tobacco in your fake fags and you’ll be a market leader in no time!

.If the criminals sell decent cigarettes at half retail price – or even 75% retail price – they will clean up. Even allowing for losses when crossing borders into the BanLands. Antismokers will simply pretend it isn’t happening.

As long as there is money to be had, antismoking will continue. As will anti-everything else. The money will run out. It always does.

Currently the antismokers are funded by those who sell patches and gum to idiot medics who think they work. They do not work and are not meant to. They are meant to produce a cycle of stop-fail-resume-stop in smokers who don’t really want to stop and who believe that nicotine is addictive. It isn’t. When you want to stop you will just stop. If you are forced to stop when you don’t want to then you will become resentful. The only way anyone ever really stops smoking is when they decide they aren’t enjoying it any more. Then they just stop doing it.

The patches and gun will fall out of favour eventually. The NHS will stop buying them from the Pharmers when they find the smokers aren’t taking up the ‘free’ ones any more (or, as a way outside chance, the witchdoctors develop a brain and actually think for themselves). Then the Pharmers will stop funding the antismokers because there’s no more profit to be had.

Electrofag is hastening that day of Patchageddon, because Electrofag is a million times better than some Band-Aid with a leaf under it. The Pharmers know it so they have set their pet haters onto Electrofag. ‘It looks like smoking’. That really is all they have. Chewing a pen looks like smoking. Expect that to be banned soon.

Now the Antismoking Righteous have to contend with the Antitransport Riighteous stealing their smoking-related diseases, as well as the Antichubbies claiming heart attacks and strokes as their own and that’s before we even get to the common sense views that smoking cannot possibly cause middle ear infections, because those are caused by bacteria and viruses that are absolutely destroyed by burning. Smoke – and ash – are sterile.

Their desperation is clear in their new and deranged ramblings. Their masters, the Pharmers, are being drawn into the debacle more and more each day and they will not like that. They prefer to control their gibbering puppets from behind the scenes. The man behind the curtain is getting far more attention than he wants. We see you, Pharmer. We see the scam of your silly stop-smoking rubbish and wonder if you produce anything at all that really does work. Best guess? Probably not. Best just stick to generics and buy no branded stuff at all, eh? The Pharmers are outed as fakers and scammers by their determination to pay for the ASH Inquisition.

Antismoking pretended that there was no slippery slope, that tobacco was special, that their madness could never be extended to burgers or booze or butter. It has gone much, much further. They cannot control it now and the other Righteous who use their template are stealing all their ideas.

The antismokers are desperate. Their drones keep playing the game even when the game wants to scrap their Chelsea tractors and their children’s Tonka toys. I’m sure the future kids will love their Christmas wind generators and horse-drawn Prius and solar light-the-dim-LED presents.

The drones still haven’t made the connection with the antismokers and the Pharmers in all of this, but they will.

When they do, we’re going to need continuous popcorn-makers.