Ban the Banned

Suzi Quatro could have done something brilliant with this title.

Our Ruddy Home Secretary has decided to ban ‘zombie knives’. Take a look at what she wants to ban.

Three throwing knives, useless in unpracticed hands. They are fixed blade so are already illegal to cary. Already banned.

Some stupidly thin wobbly-edged blade that you could probaby bend in half with your hands. Still, it’s long and half-sharp and illegal to carry in public. Already banned.

An axe shaped so as to be pretty much useless and again, too thin to be practical. Also illegal to carry in public anyway, as are all axes unless you’re off to chop some wood. Already banned.

A lurid green version of a liner-lock knife. Used to be common but it’s now illegal to have a lock knife in public. Already banned.

Finally, at the bottom, some kind of fishing implement I think. It has no purpose other than slashing and is the most non-excusable offensive weapon of the lot. Even before all the other things were banned, I’d bet you’d have been arrested for having that. Anyway, it’s definitely already banned.

Look again at those ‘weapons’. The throwing knives are dangerous if you can use them. The liner-lock is dangerous in the wrong hands. The fishing thing is an obvious weapon. It has no other use. Except maybe for clearing weeds from between patio slabs but it doesn’t look like it would be very good at that. A crack hoe would do a better job.

The axe is a useless toy. It’s far too thin and light for any practical application and even as a weapon it’s not going to do what a cheap splitting or garden cutting axe would do. As for the ‘sword’, come at me with that and I’ll beat you with a broom. It’s pressed steel sheet. That’s why you can buy these things for under £10. They are crap. Sharpened at the front half only and it won’t hold an edge. It’s cheap soft steel. The sharpened bit has non-sharp notches cut into it for no reason at all. It is all just for show. I wouldn’t accept one as a gift, never mind buy it. If gang members are really bragging they have these, they are a laughing stock.

These ‘zombie weapons’ are ornamental toys. I have some ornamental swords that look really impressive but if you try to use them in a real fight, the blade is likely to come off the handle. You grab one of those. I’ll grab the kitchen chopping knives. I will win.

Nobody, as far as I can see in the news, has ever used one of these toys in a real attack. Nevertheless, carrying any of them in public is already illegal and frankly, why would you? Aside from the lock knife, none of them have any practical use and none of them are any use in self defence either. The whole ‘zombie knife’ shit is just an excuse to disarm us more.

On June 1, 2018, footage emerged of a cyclist using a zombie knife to try and smash the window of a car in an apparent road rage row.

That was not a ‘zombie knife’. That was a real and very dangerous big knife. What they propose to ban has nothing to do with that already fucking illegal massive knife. It’s just an excuse.

A long list of dangerous weapons that glamorise violence will also be included in the total ban, putting them on the same legal footing as unlicensed firearms.
They include sword sticks, butterfly knives and blowpipes, as well as a range of martial arts weapons such as deathstars and handclaws.

Sword sticks and butterfly knives have been banned in the UK for many years. I used to use a site called Blades-UK which dropped those from its listings 20 or more years ago. Because they were no longer legal to sell. Yeah. Already banned. Pity I missed out, I’d have liked a butterfly knife.

Deathstars and handclaws come under ‘fixed blade knives’ and are already illegal. I know nothing of blowpipes but I bet they aren’t hard to make.

Our Ruddy Home Secretary wants to make it illegal to have anything sharp at home, whether you take it on the street or not.

I mean, come on. I have a scythe. In this garden, in summer, I need it. It has a grass blade and a ditch blade for the wooded parts. I have oilstones and whetstones and a peening kit. Grinding wheels and files. I have the means to make a tyre iron sharp. And we are to be scared of lurid green toys?

What this country needs is not more bans.

What this country needs is a government that is not entirely populated by idiots.

Yeah. Not happening, is it?

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Writing and the Death of Speech

Author payments are done for this quarter. I wanted them dealt with quickly because the Phone People are going to replace the bent pole tomorrow. Since they do this for a living they will probably be very quick but if there are problems it might run to days.

If you have not heard from me, you didn’t sell any this quarter. Sorry. I will put out zero-reports when the phone line is fixed but when it is, if you have neither had a payment nor a zero-report, please do get in touch.

I have changed the payment rules. It’s no longer 50/50 on profits. The author gets 75%, I get 25%. Two reasons – it encourages authors to write more and it encourages me to up my game on marketing. So far I have not been great at it. I must force myself to improve.

It’s going to get more difficult. The EU is about to fulfil Tess ‘Jackboots’ May’s wettest of wet dreams and utterly destroy the internet within the EU. Oh Remainers will be happy because they think it won’t affect them but as Frank Davis says:

The EU is going to “tax internet links to websites and online data that serve as sources for commentary and opinion.”

Commentary and opinion covers every blog. It covers every Amazon link to any book on anything. How do you advertise your book when anyone who links to it has to pay a tax? Nobody is going to do it.

If (when) the cretins in charge make this happen, I will have to pay a tax for that link to Frank’s blog. If the EU put something on their website and I link to it, I’ll get taxed. They can put up ‘Plan for the extermination of white people’ on the EU site and if you link to it, you have to pay a tax.

Can’t afford it? Then you can’t talk about it. It will apply to absolutely everything that can be classed as ‘commentary’ or ‘opinion’. Free speech for the rich… but who is listening? When you can’t discuss it, why bother reading it at all?

Might as well delete your YouTube, Farcebok and Twatter accounts. They are going to cost you a fortune. No point reading any online newspaper at all because you cannot link to any story on any of them without paying a tax. The elite can do as they damn well please and we proles are forbidden to mention it unless we can afford it because that is New Liberalism.

It does not apply outside the EU of course. If we were outside the EU, as we should have been by now, we could laugh at this totalitarian nonsense. However, we have an idiot running the country, a bad-hair totalitarian who once pushed for a DNA database of everyone and drooled over the prospect of internet control. Well here it is. Who thinks our Prime Monster will object, in any way at all, to this? She has dreamed of this day her entire career.

I remember when we had a Conservative party as a counterpoint to the closet communists of Labour. Now we choose – Fascism or Nazism. There is no Conservative party any more and there never will be again. There is no ‘working class’ Labour party any more and there never will be again. Choose your vote carefully. Totalitarian #1 orTotalitarian #2. There is no option #3.

Actually there is, but not enough people will take it. They will vote like automatons for the same shit they have always voted for and then moan that things are getting worse. Newsflash, fuckwits. It’s getting worse because you voted for it to get worse. Put your X in a different box and see if it makes things better. Seriously, ask yourself, can it really get any worse?

Yes. Yes it can. China is in awe of the controls those you vote for are about to push on you and this is just the start. You want more total control of your life? Vote for it as you have always done. Vote for slavery for your children and grandchildren because that’s what your parents voted for so it must be right.

Or you could, just maybe, make a change. Make a difference. Vote for someone who is not in power now. Vote for someone new. Actually look at the manifestos rather than just the colour of the rosette and keep in mind that those you voted into power have never, ever done what they promised to do. If your favourites are useless, as they have all proven to be, what’s the harm in giving someone else a chance?

This kind of subversive idea is exactly what the EU want to suppress with their kindergarten view of how the Internet works. Oh they will do it and you won’t be allowed to even see these ideas any more. I, and many others, will be wiped off-visible-line by taxation and prosecution.

Oh yes, a big test case and harsh penalties will soon shut up every blog on the net. At least in the EU.

We’ll still be talking. You just won’t hear us any more.

And speaking for myself, I don’t care. I am sick of trying to save lost causes. Vote your persecutors back in if you want that. But there is one thing you must know.

Nobody is coming to save you. You vote for it, you live with it.

Crouching Tiger, Militant Caterer

(The phone post is still bent over but the engineers have rewired it. I have internet again. At some point they will disconnect it to fix it properly but I have downloaded the last three months’ sales in case I can’t get to tomorrow night’s final numbers for this quarter. It’s not likely there will be a last minute rush but I always live in hope…)

 

The Mockney slimeball is still at it. Having proved he can’t run a restaurant business he is now trying to ruin everyone else’s business so he won’t feel so bad.

His latest wheeze is to attack things that have existed before his mother plopped him into the world like a pink squalling turd with a thick tongue poking out of a face that should have been roundly slapped from the beginning. And should still be getting a daily slap to this very day.

Seriously though, what in God’s name is our government thinking? They are not only taking policy advice from the caterers, they are bragging about doing so and then actually acting on it as if Jimmy the Oil and his sidekick Huge Feathery-Wailingwall were more than just jumped-up kitchen staff.

The people we elected to run the UK are genuinely taking advice on packaging that’s been around for decades, and on the ‘future of the NHS’, from the kitchen staff. A chef who, incidentally, is presiding over the collapse of a business that is based on cooking. His area of expertise. He can’t get that right and yet our utterly cretinous ‘leaders’ laud him as an expert on the NHS and on the marketing employed by actually successful businesses who have been around longer than he has.

Personally, there is something I find more depressing, more humiliating for this country than having the caterers decide how to run it. And that is that the people we elected to do the running of the country are so bereft of any form of rational thought that they jump on any idea being promoted by any available idiot just so they can (they think) look good.

Newsflash, Gubblement Monsters: You do not look good. You look like a bunch of children being mesmerised by the Magic Roundabout and actually believing cows and dogs can talk, that living with a lorry suspension spring up your arse is a viable option and that rabbits spend their days spaced out on dope. You halfwits will believe any old shit, won’t you? Why are there never any candidates with actual sense available?

Next up, if it hasn’t already happened, the Rice Crispies elves are an insult to short people and the Coco Pops characters are racist. Well, even cycling is racist now so there is no limit.

Breakfast cereals are being marketed to kids. THEY ARE FOR FUCKING KIDS! That has always been their target market. It’s their reason to exist. Okay, adults like them too but then adults like chocolate and toffee and custard and pretty much all the things they grew up with.

What is the Jamie Oliver generation going to grow up on? Tofu and water and hardtack with a side order of smug catering staff presided over by a ruling class with minds so pure they are totally untouched by the ravages of intelligence.

Today’s children are going to have a really shit childhood thanks to the likes of Oliver “Please sir, can I have some more bans” and Huge Farty-Shittingstall and the upcoming wave of Militant Caterers. All enabled by a government that is far, far worse than useless and shows no sign of getting any better.

This is not going to save your restaurants, you idiots. According to the rules you are demanding, nobody will be allowed to eat in any of them.

Won’t affect me, really. I have never visited a ‘celebrity’ kitchen staff restaurant and never will.

The sooner all your businesses collapse, the better. You can beg on the streets for scraps and I won’t give you any. I’ll eat my MacDonalds with fries right in front of you and express exaggerated, almost orgasmic pleasure until you drool out the last drops of water in your bodies and blow away in a dust-cloud of dehydrated despicability.

Next election I will not vote for any of the current ‘main’ parties. Every one of them is utterly mindless. Not a single one of them has the intelligence to run a whelk stall.

When they look to the kitchen for policy, they have lost their last shred of credibility.

 

Outage

Something, most likely a tractor with a wide load, has knocked over the phone pole at the bottom of the drive.

No landline or internet for a few days. This will delay author payments this quarter and I have no access to the main email accounts either so hopefully they all still read the blog.

It’s tough enough just putting this post up using the phone. I’ll be back when the wires are fixed. Hopefully soon! 

 UPDATE It’s already fixed! Just over 24 hours – pretty impressive.

Starbucks’ bogs

I spent four years as a janitor in the down times. This is no time to discuss the reason I fell, she’s gone now. Before that I was a successful microbiologist, working as a lecturer, researcher and consultant and I still am, really. The ‘doctor’ title is one I earned. It’s not linked to the job. Sometimes the spectre of microbiology work resurfaces but I’m not sure I care any more. Science is so thoroughly ruined by all the well publicised fakery out there I’d rather not be one. So now I’m a publisher. Fledgeling but getting the hang of it.

I worked as a janitor in a shop. The bottom of the pile, the Dalit of the retail world, despite being slightly better paid than most of the shelf stackers and till bleepers. It took them a year to find out I was a doctor. It took one of them two years to find out my name wasn’t Alan because I kept answering to it.

I learned a lot. I learned why shop-based food poisoning occurs. I learned how the very structure of a food shop makes such outbreaks close to inevitable. I’m not parting with that for free. I might drop bits here and there to get the right people interested but if you ever want a full report it’s going to cost. I also, subsequently, found out that nobody gives a shit. So I’ll probably never write that report.

Anyway. The shop had a small cafe and also a small toilet block. I wasn’t happy with the arrangement, the toilets should have been attached to the cafe not off into the food aisles but they rented the premises so couldn’t really do much about it.  Management at least had the sense to surround the toilet entrance with greetings cards, wrapping paper and household goods like paper towels. So you didn’t come out with shitty hands and immediately paw the precooked meats. Management, in some areas, weren’t total idiots.

We Secret Ninja Cleaners cleaned those toilets once an hour. Does that sound excessive? Someone shitted up one of those toilets five minutes after I cleaned it. Once, at the end of a shift, I had refilled the paper towel holders and when Mopman took over, he said the paper towels in the gents had run out. Impossible. I put three packs in the dispenser only an hour earlier.

It turned out an OCD sufferer with handwashing problems had used all the paper towels and flushed them. The resulting blockage backed up all the toilets and required expert plumbing assistance to sort out – at massive cost.

There was a time when someone’s arse exploded in the disabled toilet. The consequence was indescribable. As someone who has spent his life dealing with intestinal contents I was the most qualified person within 30 miles to deal with this situation – but not on janitor pay. I refused.

They had to get in a professional shit-stirrer in a hazmat suit who demanded a signature for disposing of hazardous waste. I was right – and so was the assistant manager who would not let his staff touch this. If someone’s arse exploded like that then the spatter (pebbledash, there was a hell of a lot of it) might well be infected with something horrible and staff handling food for sale should never be anywhere near it.

The overall manager disagreed. He thought that if the (doctor of microbiology) janitor won’t touch it, his (largely school kids on pocketmoney) staff could easily deal with it. Fortunately he wasn’t on that time.

The toilets were not technically open to the public but the buggers used them anyway. You couldn’t stop them. How can you prove they weren’t planning to go to the cafe or load a trolley after they had a dump? There was one suited shit who’d come in, pick up a basket, and leave a few minutes later placing the empty basket back in the stack. He probably still does it. Not my problem now.

We didn’t have an entry code for the bogs. You didn’t have to buy anything to use them. So we got all kinds of weirdoes in there. I once found a drunk asleep in there and throught I had found my first Bog Body. Unforunately the chavvy cunt was alive. He was picked up by the police (they used to care about real offline crimes) a few shops away where he was being extra cunty.

Starbucks, after a single incident where a non-customer was refused the pee code, now have their bogs open to all and sundry. So they are full of junkies and dirty protestors. Who would expect that?

Now… Starbucks are virulently antismoking so I don’t go there anyway. This whole story has no relevance to me personally. I have no reason (apart from a bit of gloating) to delight in this news.

I see it more as a warning to other businesses who are planning to capitulate to the New Puritans.

They want to destroy capitalism and that’s you. Yeah. That’s you, that is.

And you silly fuckers are agreeing to it.

Lucozade, Ribena, Starbucks, bye bye you capitalist self righteous suicides.

We know a song about that, don’t we?

Money and smoking

If you live in the UK or any other idiot-controlled country where smoking is the main source of government hate and revenue, any saving is a good thing.

Currently it is impossible to buy a pack of 20 cigarettes for less than £8 in the UK. Rolling baccy is slightly less eyewatering but still a sting. Any chance I have to go elsewhere in the EU, I load up. It’s just common sense. Of course, after Brexit they’ll limit us again but while we are in this silly customs union we might as well make the best of it.

I have been playing around with the IQOS and the microfags for some time now and yes,  I know all about the turncoat Philip Morris and all the reasons why I should stick with real fags from real fag-sellers and I don’t care about the politics. This is about the contents of my bank account which have never been large and never will be.

A pack of real smokes is £8. A pack of microfags is £7. Plus, I have already taken £60 in Amazon vouchers from the IQOS survey thing which has more than covered the initial cost of the device plus 100 microfags. I am encouraged to persevere with this thing.

I have tried the amber (full strength) and the turquoise (girlie menthol) microfags. The amber ones are pretty good. The menthol don’t seem very mentholated, it’s there but it’s a hint not a blast. I can get the cleaning sticks from Amazon using the vouchers so they are technically free. You need those, the thing does need a cleanout once in a while or it tastes like smoking dried weasel poo.  I used the vouchers for a lot of other things too, including whisky. I have not yet tried the yellow (apparently ‘smooth’) but I just ordered some. I will report on them when I get them.

(UPDATE) I now have the yellow ones. They are indeed milder than the amber. Not bad if you prefer a smoother, less intense smoke but I’ll stick with the amber ones. They suit me best. Along with real ones of course but cost alone is going to force a switch here.)

Okay okay, you want to tell me how Philip Morris are sell-outs. Find me one vape company that does not repeat theTobacco Control mantra of ‘smoking is eeeevil. Tobacco companies are eeevil. Buy from us instead’ and maybe I’ll listen. This is a tobacco company doing business, that’s all it is. Tobacco in a different form. Trying to get through the current round of Prohibition. I don’t blame them for trying to stay in business.

Anyway, if they were really trying to appease tobacco control they should have talked to the (sensible) vapers first because appeasement never works. Those filthy Puritans hate anything that looks like fun, including IQOS. Especially IQOS because it uses real tobacco.

I like it. I don’t care who invented it or where it originated. I’ve used it more often, and for longer, than any Electrofag I’ve ever tried. And now that it’s reached a pound a pack (often more) cheaper than smoking, I’ll use it more often. I’ll still need real ones for driving because the IQOS can’t just dangle from your lips when both hands are busy but at home, it’s a useful thing.

Tell me I shouldn’t support this thing. I don’t care. Tell me I should go totally to vaping. I’ve tried quite a few Electrofags and they are a lot of fun but it just doesn’t stick. It doesn’t work for me. I don’t care. IQOS has persisted longer than any Electrofag I tried and I think that’s because it really does taste like tobacco. The one flavour Electrofag never quite got right.

The price differential is going to increase. The IQOS microfags might go down in price with more uptake, they might not. But I will state with absolute certainty that tobacco prices are going to keep climbing fast. Getting into alternatives is vital for my wallet.

Sure, every time I go to Denmark I will come back with a bag full of Vikings or Skjold. Maybe a tub of Home Roll or similar (about £30 for 280g). I will be resuming tobacco planting in the near future. I will continue to ‘cut’ tubing baccy and rolling baccy (also a lot cheaper outside the UK) with low strength pipe tobacco.

But the price saving on IQOS is now at a level that looks significant, and it works as a substitute for the real thing for me. I’ll be using it more and more in the future.

Well yes, principles are important but the long and short of it is – IQOS is cutting down my spend on heavily taxed tobacco in a way no Electrofag has yet managed. I don’t have health problems, the biggest issue for me at the moment is cost. When I first tried IQOS, which was a matter of weeks ago, the price difference per pack of 20 was pennies. It’s already £1 and it’s going to get a lot bigger. I’m sticking with it.

And if that makes you think of me as a traitor to smoking, a sell-out to The Man or some kind of hybrid smoker-vaper monstrosity, I don’t care.

I do what works for me. I do not do what other people tell me to do. No matter who is doing the telling. Never have and never will.

If that comes as a shock you really haven’t been reading this blog for very long, have you?

Tobacco, the wonder plant

As suggested by Smoking Scot in comments, here is Nisakiman’s elegant idea for a ‘smokers welcome here’ image:

It comes from an idea a long time ago which I seem to recall was started by either Frank Davis or Junican. I’d like to be more specific but I’m afraid I was very, very drunk at the time. I’d actually written two of the stories in the latest Underdog Anthology around that time and entirely forgotten about them… yeah, pretty drunk.

Tobacco is currently villified by the Righteous and their indoctinated dancing clowns of hate but the original inhabitants of America (is that the latest PC term? Please forgive me for not caring) knew a lot more about this plant. They used it for more than just a sly puff at the back of the wigwam sheds.

Modern science has been gradually catching up. Well, the discovery of vitamin B3, Niacin, aka nicotinic acid, and its derivation from nicotine happened a long time ago. There is much more though.

Tipped by Sam in email – Tobacco flowers have a yeast-killer in them.

I had seen this go by on Twitter along with another claim that tobacco may have anti-cancer properties (now there’s a twist, eh?) but no antismoker worth their bile would accept a cancer treatment that came from the tobacco plant, naturally.

This yeast-killing antibiotic (the term is usually used to mean an antibacterial in my world but we’ll let that slide) is vey interesting. It works on Candida albicans, a ‘mostly harmless’ yeast that can still cause thrush and other, not necessarily fatal but really annoying infections. I wonder if it works on other yeast/fungi? Athlete’s foot is really hard to permanently dispose of. Ringworm is an evil fucker and there is speculation (not proof) that seborrhaic dermatitis has a yeast as a causative agent. They are all hard or impossible to cure at  the moment. Should we rub some tobacco flowers on it and see?

The article talks about the ornamental versions of Nicotiana but you know they have to be so, so careful these days. Ornamental tobacco is no use for smoking but as with all these domesticated things it’s a toned down, weaker version of the wild one that has to survive with no watering or plant food or weeding or pest control.

I’m betting real tobacco flowers are way more effective than the domesticated, pampered ones. These plants are quite capable of looking after themselves. In many ways.

Tobacco has multiple medicinal properties. Who knew? Pretty much everyone before the white man’s Puritan horde decided they didn’t like it. Hating tobacco is racist now. There’s one to have fun with.

I look forward to the first tales of antismokers refusing niacin, the new anttfungals and the new anticancer drugs because they come from tobacco. You can watch them suffer and die while watching me not care.

They have no sympathy for me. Expect none in return.