The Terrible Thing is coming!

There was once a cartoon dog called Towser. I can’t recall the name of his cat friend, but I do remember the King, the Wizard and Doctor Smellie. It was a most amusing cartoon and my favourite episode was the one with The Terrible Thing.

The Terrible Thing was an imaginary beast that took on real form and… well, it was pretty terrible. Everyone was scared of it even though it never actually did any real harm at all. It just scared people. And dogs.

These days we have a Terrible Thing in the form of tobacco smoke. Everyone is terrified of it, even though it has all, from second hand smoke to the invisible and odourless death miasma now portrayed as the latest Terrible Thing, so far turned out to have done no harm to anyone at all.

Invisible and odourless tobacco smoke conveniently sidesteps the awkward problem of those who follow all health advice and persist in dying anyway. They never smelled or saw any tobacco smoke but it must have been there or they wouldn’t be dead. Therefore it was the odourless and invisible kind of magic tobacco smoke. The Terrible Thing got them. Modern science in action there.

Modern science has lately turned its attention to those who exceed the daily allowance of waistline inches. Have you noticed that word in recent pronouncements? Alcohol, salt, sugar, everything. It’s no longer ‘recommended daily intake’. It’s now a ‘daily allowance’. What you are allowed to have, dictated by people who don’t know you or care about you at all. These people really do want total control over every aspect of your life. The question is, are you going to let them?

It’s an urgent question because once they have that control it’s going to be very hard to get it back. Deal with it now or live with it forever.

Look at what they did to smokers. Once they got the pub ban and the workplace ban – even if you work alone in your own business it’s illegal to smoke in your place of work – did it end? Did it hell. They are banning it in private cars and open spaces and pushing for a ban in private homes. For the cheeeldren, because evil tobacco smoke lurks around for ages, looking for tender young nostrils to dive into. People actually believe this shit.

You cannot smoke on a railway station platform in case it interferes with the emissions from the 100-ton diesel engine passing through with thirty coal trucks leaving a trail of coal dust in the air. That’s harmless. Half a gram of burning leaf is deadly. Modern logic. People genuinely believe it.

I had thought that once the madmen had passed the absurdity horizon, even the dimmest and most gullible drones would start to sit up and take notice. Yet the absurdity horizon is way behind us now and still the drones believe anything they are told.

Since the drones accepted the invisible and odourless deadly smoke, we will now be graced with the spectacle of them trying not to breathe because the air will make them fat. Thanks are due to CynaraeStMary for that link.

Really. Modern science now claims that everyone who lives in a city is fat and everyone who lives in the countryside is thin. Unless they smoke. All smokers are logically overweight. Expect your doctor to put you on a diet next time you tell him/her/it that you smoke, even if you look like a skeleton dipped in latex. You smoke, smoke makes you fat, therefore you are fat even if you’re obviously not.

It’s the same logic that has doctors declaring that if you have lung cancer, you are a smoker even if you have never taken a single puff of smoke. You have a smoking related disease therefore you are a smoker. Nothing else could cause that disease.

Two people can eat the same foods, and do the same exercise, but over the course of a few years, one may put on more weight and develop a faulty metabolism – thanks to the atmosphere around their home.

Or maybe it’s because they are two different people. Science and medicine have totally lost sight of the variability of the human genome and treat us all as clones. We must fit the mould of the British Standard Human or we must be adjusted and forced to conform. Difference is evil.

Some people are fat because they eat more calories than they burn. Some are fat because they have a glandular imbalance. Some because they are on medication that affects metabolism and some just like it that way.

Some are fat because they are genetically predisposed to store food calories rather than burn them. That (sigh) is why fat parents often have fat children, science. Would you like me to say it again, more slowly? Should I use shorter words?

Science and medicine used to know all this stuff. It’s all gone now, all the knowledge accumulated over many years of study and experimentation. All forgotten in the pursuit of some Borg-like conformity to an arbitrary standard human. We must all be the same. Exactly the same. The human race is to become the Trabant species of the universe. Identical and useless.

So now the air will make you fat. The Terrible Thing is coming again, this time for the fat people.

We have not yet heard about the airborne alcohol fumes that will render you unfit to drive if you catch a whiff from an opened bottle, but it’s coming. The drones will believe it all and they will run in fear from the Terrible Thing that has never harmed anyone, just as they always have and always will.

There’s only one true thing to know about every Terrible Thing that shows up.

It isn’t real.