Health and Safety

Both of these are relative terms. I am in relatively good health, but won’t be running any marathons or partaking of athletic activities of any kind in the foreseeable future. Mostly that’s because I don’t want to – the idea of lifting heavy things that don’t need to be moved or running when nobody is chasing me is just silly. I don’t need to be any stronger or faster than I am now, unless there is an incident involving a falling piano in my future.

Since I’m not particularly musical, that seems unlikely.

As for safety, that is an exceedingly relative term. It is not and should never become an absolute. That’s not possible anyway, and certainly not desirable.

A world in which you are absolutely safe all the time is really just a prison. A solitary confinement in a rubber room. No belts, no sharp objects. That’s the only way to be fully safe and you just know there are people out there who think it’s a good idea.

Sugar is now more dangerous than tobacco. The Coca-Cola truck is now more evil than the drug pusher at the school gates. The relativity here was somehow inverted in the last decade or so. It is insane, but there are those with influence who are also insane and that’s where it comes from.

I have actually seen these people insist on Twitter that Electrofag contains all the same chemicals as tobacco. If it did, it would taste and feel exactly like smoking and every single one of us would have switched by now. Since Electrofag contains no tobacco and doesn’t burn anything, the idea that it produces the same as a cigarette is comical to the point where your underwear is at risk.

Invert the inversions, as suggested by @BuckoTheMoose on Twitter, and smoking is no more dangerous than a fizzy drink. I can go with that. Relatively, on that scale, Electrofag is less dangerous than a glass of water.

There are much more dangerous things to worry about. The 2000+ nuclear explosions we humans have set off in the last 75 years and we’re still playing with those huge fireworks. All that fallout is in the air we breathe and people want to believe that half a gram of burning leaf, 100 metres away, is dangerous? Really?

How about the snooping and controlling laws passed by governments who say they will never misuse them? maybe that government won’t, but what about the next one? Or the one after that? Can’t happen?

Hitler was voted into power. The people handed him control of Germany. He didn’t come to power on a promise to declare war on every country he’d heard of and round up and kill millions of people just because he didn’t like them. Yet that’s what he did.

He had to pass into law his own Enabling Act before he could do it. Imagine if he inherited an Emergency Powers Act from the previous government. How much easier would it have been to take total control then?

Governments insist we must mitigate tiny risks to protect our health and not use the NHS that we’ve paid for, and not risk taking time off work for sickness or injury. That might harm the economy. Yes, the same economy that successive governments have turned into a basket case by spending our money even before they’ve taken it from us.

Yet the governments are the ones creating enabling acts for future power crazed maniacs to use and funding (with our money) weapons that can wipe us all out in an instant. Worse, weapons that gradually poison the entire atmosphere even though they’ve never been fired at anyone. The tests are enough to have that effect.

Don’t nag me about my smoking, drinking or diet. None of these things harm anyone else. The evidence suggests that haven’t really done much to me either. I’m not the one poisoning your atmosphere with radioactive fallout. I’m not the one enacting laws that North Korea haven’t thought of yet. I’m not trying to control anyone else’s life at all.

When you put the real health and safety issues of this world in context, I’m relatively harmless.