The Religion of Health

Muslim countries' news headlines often include information about groups trying to push through new fatwas, Islamic legal pronouncements given by those deemed to have authority such as clerics or scholars, on how best to follow Islam. Being a broadly secular country, I would expect the UK to be free from this kind of thing yet there are echoes of it on a daily basis whenever I switch the news on, or pick up a newspaper. I am not, you might have guessed, referring to the Church of England, as Justin Welby graces us with his expert views on topics as varied as interest on payday loans, energy prices and food banks (or is that Labour MP Stella Creasy?) relatively infrequently, thankfully. Instead it is public health I believe to be a cult that gullible politicians, state funded "charities" and public health doctors are pushing to make a full scale national religion, and with some success. Instead of headlines such as, "Penang Should Cancel 'Un-Islamic' Zumba Carnival, says NGO", which recently appeared in Malaysia's Rakyat Post, we are treated to front pages that are no less ludicrous, like "Ban Smoking in London's Public Parks and Squares".

Granted, it's incredibly easy to say that health-related headlines are "based on science" (despite how utterly spurious most of the research and proclamations actually are) whereas mystical rulings based on books written hundreds of years ago about a man being flown up to heaven on what's basically Pegasus but probably named Abdul or something, are not, but what healthists don't seem to recognise is that not everybody shares their priorities. For some people life satisfaction comes from living in an insulated (with multicoloured knitting wrapped around the outside) caravan with a miniature windmill strapped to the top, trying to confine their carbon footprint to a hemp baby boot, for others it comes from living life in the minute with maple syrup and mustard glazed pulled pork pancakes, a Tom Collins, a cigar, a harem of women and a blackjack table. We are not all the same. A quick scan through the comments on any Guardian article talking about ridiculous nanny state proposals such as those made by Labour, leaked in May, and one would think living to 100 is some sort of duty for all citizens. Here of course the "costs to the NHS" are cited, which is a pile of rubbish anyway as studies all show that not only do fat people and smokers cost healthcare systems less than "healthy people", they also save a huge amount in pensions which will be going towards 104 year old retired Guardian readers telling nurses to make sure they're using organic plastic in the cannula they're having inserted while informing them that the 2031 Japanese tsunami never would have happened had we ceased to use fossil fuels at the beginning of the 21st century. And whether or not we should even have an NHS (spoiler: we shouldn't) is a conversation for another day, but it's funny how those who want penalties for people who have come to A+E for falling over when drunk but not for someone falling over while extreme cycling on a rocky mountain or something, the only difference apparently being that the latter person is stupid enough to think that their daft endeavour was in the name of Health.

Warnings about various activities taking on average x number of days, weeks or months off your life also presents living to 100 as the healthists' version of "getting to heaven". So essentially it's even worse than traditional religions in that there're no 72 virgins, and no Jesus and harp-playing angels on a cloud while you feast on hog roast and wine after a lifetime of restricting yourself for your religion. After a century of abiding by the gospel of Health, ensuring never to miss your 4 hours a day of exercise, "mindfulness training" and meditation, and avoiding sinful substances such as sugar, alcohol, nicotine, meat and salt, what's your great reward? Better than 72 virgins? Better than angels playing the harp while you feast and meet everyone you ever wanted to meet who ever died? No. Afraid not. There's just you, in a wheelchair, blowing out three candles on a cake, one candle reading "1" and the other two reading "0". Great. Here you are. You've made it!

And it's not just gluttony (obesity, sugar, smoking) and sloth (not signed up to a Bokwa class yet? It's the new Zumba apparently. Though I still haven't a clue what the established Zumba looks like) of the 7 Deadly Sins that have been co-opted by public health. Lust is also a "public health issue" and not just in the sense of condoms and getting tested for STDs. In May the Telegraph reported that a panel of health workers, social workers, academics, activists and the usual suspects declared that pornography is a "major public health crisis", an "untreated pandemic" that "needs to be tackled in the same manner as smoking or drink-driving." As those working in public health tend to be raving socialists, greed, also features strongly in the "public health epidemic" discourse, with medical journal The Lancet pronouncing "neoliberalism" and "overconsumption" to be public health issues as well as "income inequality" according to lefty think tank Joseph Rowntree Foundation. In fact public health seems to have decided the only of the original Deadly 7 not to be sins and instead to be lauded  are envy (of people richer than them), wrath (at fast food, alcohol and tobacco industries which people willingly buy) and, most of all, pride in that they think they know what's best for everybody, even with regards to economic systems.

Much as Justin Welby would probably be wise to concentrate on the Church of England rather than what payday loans companies are doing, public health should stick to dealing with small matters like communicable diseases and safe drinking water instead of wanting to act like a world dictator. Oh, and a final note on fatwas - Indonesia's second largest Islamic organisation, Muhammadiyah received nearly $400,000 in grants from the US-based public health organisation "Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use" between 2009 and 2011. During this time, Muhammidiyah issued a fatwa ruling that tobacco is prohibited in Islam. Make of that what you will.

"Social Change UK" and Taxpayer-Funded Lies and Bullying

"Social Change UK" is a "social research and campaigns society" which boasts a client list of, er, 95% taxpayers' money (NHS and various government departments) with the odd pharmaceutical company thrown in for good measure. Its campaigns are the kinds of hateful, joyless nagging that the state should really not be spending our money on, "We're working with the government to tackle climate change", anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns. The usual. They were behind the "Healthier Takeaways" campaign in 2013 which involved lobbying Indian restaurants and takeaways and telling them to remove all salt from mains, all sugar from desserts all fats from cooking and replace cream in savoury dishes and desserts with skimmed milk. Yes, really.

This project is innovative because we changed the behaviour of those who supply the food rather than directly targeting consumers to ask them to cut down or cut out. Our research told us that most people already know that takeaway food can be unhealthy and we decided to look at ways we can make it easier for people to eat more healthily but still enjoy takeaway food. We felt that if we can work with the industry to help them to produce healthier products for consumers we are one step closer to tackling the impact of a diet high in salt and saturated fat.

As one can see, we have gone way past the point of public health bods warning that people aren't "informed" enough to make decisions. These "Social Change UK" people are perfectly aware that people know that takeaways aren't necessarily healthy but the blasted pesky public still wanted to sin against the gods of Health, so instead go for what they call "health by stealth" - lobbying for establishments to make their food bland and tasteless in hope that the plebs won't notice. Also, for what it's worth, recommendations to lower salt have been totally discredited (with current daily recommendations so low they're actually putting people at risk of early death, and the average daily amount currently consumed by people still too low) and the purported "risks" of saturated fat have now been disproven. In fact the continuing of the public health march against salt in the face of all evidence is yet another of the things that convinces me these organisations exist to try and stamp out all pleasure and everything that brings enjoyment in the world rather than being driven by anything to do with "health", but I digress. Also, this project attracted all of 17 Facebook 'likes'.

Our friends at Social Change UK attracted the ire of vapers a few months ago for an awful article about electronic cigarettes which contained the usual unsubstantiated, scaremongering drivel.

The allure of the different flavours from redbull, strawberry milkshake and gummy bear flavour E-cigarettes are creating a generation of vapour hungry school kids. And without trying to sound too Mary Whitehouse, I would like to NOT see young people manipulated and sucked into a chemical cloud created in large by the very people who created a large smoke cloud for so many generations. 

There have been claims that the large variety of flavours now available (There are over 300) such as bubblegum, strawberry milkshake, toffee and gummy bear target children instead of adults. How many adults do you know that would pick a gummy bear flavoured E-cigarette? 

Most of the blog entries read a bit like something that's been put through Google's translation tool, as shown below, and I'd be surprised if these women have scraped a 'C' grade English GCSE between them. What's depressing is that taxpayers' money is doled out to any old cabal of cretins as long as they're "on-message," the message inevitably being interfering, nannying, big state claptrap.

Since the appeal of web surfing, television shows, video games, mobile phones, and tablets usage are on the rise, the general UK is living more of a sedentary lifestyle than in years past.

 Anyway, back to the point. The delightful Social Change UK have come up with a new campaign, one so hideously warped and imperious that one ponders the fact if it were a group of people other than vapers and smokers being singled out that it wouldn't somehow fall foul of our ridiculous "hate speech" laws, never mind the fact it is funded by the state. It is essentially a hate campaign which tells girls they are worthless and will never amount to anything if they smoke or use an electronic cigarette. If these posters said the same of girls who have, for example, underage sex no doubt the left would be up in arms decrying the campaign as "slut shaming". It's double standards, not doubles, all round for these awful people. Without further ado, I present the "Social Change UK" hatefest, in which they revel in the fact they've engineered society to despise smokers.

That's funny because people who smoke used to be taken seriously. Perhaps being taken seriously should, in a decent society have nothing to do with whether or not someone smokes or vapes and if one isn't taken seriously because of activities they partake in for leisure then it's because of the bastards who commission these campaigns rather than anything to do with the activity in question.

This gent seems to be doing quite well, and I didn't even have to type in "forensic scientist smoking" or anything of the sort. I merely typed (without quotation marks) "forensic scientist 1960" into Google image search, attempting to hark back to a time when people were rather wary of singling out a group of people for hatred, having learnt from history that to do so ends in disaster. Speaking of which...

 


Again the question isn't asked of why she wouldn't be respected, as we know the answer is that public health apparatchiks have created this sorry state of affairs where we tut at pictures of David Cameron on the beach because he hasn't got a six pack. Reminds me that it's depressing, to say the least, that nowadays drinking, smoking, plump Churchill would be unelectable whereas anti-smoking, teetotal, vegetarian and slim Hitler would be considered a "role-model". Society went badly wrong where one's private behaviours and their health status became more important than the ideas they espouse.

Quite what this has to do with vaping I really don't know, as literally no literature ever suggests vaping has any effect whatsoever on one's ambulatory speed or level of fitness. And nowadays, police work is more likely to involve arresting autistic kids for insulting feminists on Twitter, or raiding the homes of septuagenarian pop singers for 'historic' alleged crimes than running round "catching bad guys" anyway.

Again, how times have changed. Why would they not respect a doctor who smoked? Would they not respect a doctor who didn't participate in marathons? A doctor who drank a bottle of wine over the weekend? A doctor who enjoyed a bacon sandwich every now and then? Probably not, the way things are going with health fascism. And with a doctor who vaped... how would anyone even know whether they did or not?
The thing is, I find these posters, when it comes down to it, really offensive. Offensive because they dictate to girls of an impressionable age, many of whom probably have mothers and grandmothers who smoke, that because of a behaviour people choose to engage in that isn't harming anyone else, that they are and deserve to be failures. Offensive because it's divisive and seeks to pit people against each other. Offensive because it's pointing out and entrenching problems that its very own side, public health, created. Offensive because with regards to vaping, there's no evidence behind it whatsoever and it's pedaling fear and lies for ideology's sake. But unlike most people who label things "offensive" and shout about it, I'm not seeking for it to be censored and for the police to bolster my sense of having a right to be offended by punishing those who have offended me. I'm simply asking that lies and hatred are not paid for with taxpayers' money.

Jane's Merrick's Thinly Veiled Callousness and Bigotry

An article by Jane Merrick in The Independent caught my eye for the fact its content amounts to little more than, "I hate the sight of smokers." Devoid of any thought or logic, it essentially reads like a spittle-flecked outburst of bigotry that would be unacceptable against any other group of people, and it's grotesquely evident the lack of empathy she has for smokers as people - everything is about her, her her, and smokers are just grotesque entities without feelings.

Some of them are in wheelchairs, dressed in their pastel green hospital gowns, others looking so frail you wonder whether they should be out of bed at all and outside in the cold. All of them are smoking.

As you walk into the hospital, with the stress and worry of your own illness or that of a member of your family uppermost in your mind, it is a truly depressing sight.

Yes, fuck these bastards depressing me with their wheelchairs and frailness, SMOKING! Don't they know that I'm having a mole removed today and that I'm worried about how big the scar will be. These people look disgusting. They shouldn't be outside, they should be in the morgue. Now what time's my yoga class tomorrow again?

As a former smoker, and as someone instinctively wary about the state becoming too much of a nanny, I should be in favour of allowing patients to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t affect others.

Aaaaaaaand here it comes, as predictably as racist comments tumble out of the mouth succeeding, "I'm not racist, but..."

But when Professor Mike Kelly, public health chief of Nice, says the NHS needs a “culture shift” to end “the terrible spectacle of people on drips in hospital gowns smoking outside hospital entrances”, I am afraid he is right.  

Why is it a "terrible spectacle"? And why should people be protected by things they see as being "terrible spectacles"? People used to find unmarried mothers/very young mothers with their babies a "terrible spectacle". To save the faint of heart from seeing a choice of which they disapprove, should teen mothers be sent to the convent? Some people find gay couples a "terrible spectacle", should they be locked up in prison? Quite clearly no. Basically, if you find people engaging in a legal activity to be a "terrible spectacle", don't look.

It is one thing to not stop a smoker satisfying his or her addiction – if they are fit enough to walk off site, then let them do that. But if the patient is not able to walk that far, the last thing they should be doing is smoking. The NHS should not act as an enabler for their addictions, either by permitting nurses or healthcare assistants to help the patient down the stairs, or by providing the shelter in the first place.

"The last thing they should be doing is smoking." Hmm, is that right?  What should they be doing then, crying with frustration that they're stuck in hospital stressed out of their mind that they're somewhere horrible that they don't want to be and unable to engage in one of the few pleasures that can break up one's day? Where one can contemplate things and have a few minutes to themselves? Should a patient with days to live be spending their last days craving a cigarette, some respite from their horrible situation, wanting to engage in one of the few activities that can help them feel normal again and as if they're back in the real world rather than the hell of hospital? Should they be smoking in the toilet, only to then be restrained and held down like a criminal as they emerge from the bathroom, a crew of security screaming at them?
What should terminally ill smokers be doing, Jane? Not to mention the number of ill people who will check themselves out without having full treatment because they cannot smoke. I know, I am one of these people who have done this, and with this there will be millions more.

From my smoking days, I know there is nothing like seeing a group of people puffing away on cigarettes to make you also want a fag. Like banning smoking in pubs (instrumental in helping me quit several years ago), removing it from the NHS will indeed encourage an out-of-sight-out-of-mind cultural shift – and improve patients’ lives.

So because you're an intolerant ex-smoker who is apparently mentally thrown into disarray at the sight of a cigarette, you want smokers to suffer more in their worst times. Should all sight of alcohol be removed from society for the sake of alcoholics? I assume you drink, Jane. Don't you know that you with your glass of rosé could trigger off a recovering alcoholic to go on a binge that loses him his job and the life he'd tried to piece back together? Better not drink in front of anyone, ever again. You can't tell who's a recovering alcoholic and who isn't, after all. Your lip-service to "improve patients' lives" at the end of this paragraph fools no one. You don't give a shit about the patients, you KNOW it will make their lives considerably more uncomfortable, you're just selfish and despise smokers.

For nurses, doctors and other staff who want to smoke in their breaks, trusts should be even tougher: don’t smoke when you’re on duty. I will never forget the moment a midwife, on a home visit to my week-old baby, put her finger in my daughter’s mouth to demonstrate latching-on. As my baby clamped her lips around the midwife’s finger, the smell of fresh cigarette smoke wafted around her hands, and I recoiled in horror. Any who comes into contact with patients – nurses who have hands-on contact - should not be doing their jobs smelling of smoke. Staff will say they need a cigarette to relieve stress, but the long-term effects of smoking do more harm.

Staff are constantly washing their hands with sanitiser gel etc, the chances of her not having done are negligible, and even so, there are far worse things you could be "recoiling in horror" about such as the superbugs and deadly infections which plague NHS wards on a regular basis being on her hands. But again at the end you let slip that it's the smell of smoke that so terrifies you, not the thought that she'd rubbed her fingers in tobacco and not washed them. I think you have a phobia to be honest - get a therapist for it, you can beat it. Staff "will say they need a cigarette to relieve stress" probably because they do need a cigarette to relieve stress. I have spoken to numerous members of staff who say after the horrendous things they see, a cigarette helps bring them back to composure. "The long term effects of smoking do more harm"? Than what? A mental breakdown? Medical blunders that kill patients because the nurses can't concentrate due to being forced not to smoke? Again, Jane, you know you are lying but you don't care because you're consumed by your hatred of smokers and smoking.

Nice’s new advice underlines the mixed messages we are given on public health. The Government, after the election, promised to introduce plain packaging on cigarettes, acknowledging the evidence that it would curb smoking, but then caved into pressure from the tobacco industry by shelving the plans. Ministers should back Nice on smoking in hospitals – but they should also look again at plain packaging to wean us off this habit altogether.

They didn't "acknowledge the evidence" because there was not and is still not any evidence. In fact the entirety of this paragraph is ill-informed nonsense, but that doesn't matter. You just want anything to be done to punish smokers. It doesn't matter whether or not it will work, as long as they are being punished until they agree to stop being human filth and agree to join civilised society by stopping smoking.

Smoking, Vaping and "No Such Thing as Safe Sex"

Emily wrinkled her nose as she saw a man and woman walking down the street holding hands. She looked around to make sure there hadn't been any children watching and, satisfied that there weren't, breathed a sigh of relief. "Public displays of affection" as they were once called, now rightly looked down upon as advertisements designed to lure children into having sex, had almost become a thing of the past. Feeling twinges of irritation that the government still weren't taking action about such shocking and dangerous displays despite the fact hundreds of children take up having sex every day, she felt relieved as she reached the door to the safety of her office. She hurried up the stairs to find her colleagues hunched round a desk covered in papers, shaking their heads and muttering.

"Emily," said Alison, motioning towards the circular table where the office staff were sitting. Emily walked over, pulling a chair from one of the vacant desks, moving it to sit with everyone else.
Alison tugged her arm.

 "ITV ran an advert for condoms last night," she spoke urgently.

"B-but why? People don't need condom-"

"And MPs are getting letters from constituents about how they can do sexual acts with much less risk of cervical cancer, throat cancer, tongue cancer, herpes, chlamydia, AIDS and all the other terrible things associated with sexual acts."

"So they say," Emily spat. "Condoms can still break. And we'd nearly stopped sex in its tracks. It's a completely unnecessary risk."

"What do we do now?" Martin chimed from the other side of the table, looking up from his papers.

Twirling a strand of her curly hair around her finger so hard it almost felt close to being torn out, Alison, almost hyperventilating gasped, "Why?!! Why won't Big Sex stop marketing killer products to people? Do they not have children? Do they not care if their grandmothers get gonorrhea and their children get AIDS? Is money so important to them that human life means nothing?"

"They say this new product makes it safer-" Martin began, but he was interrupted by Emily.

"Except that as we know, there's no such thing as safe sex. This will encourage more people to have sex meaning more people will die of illnesses related to sex, more children will start having sex. It will make children think there is such a thing as safe sex, just as it's been denormalised."

The staff of the Institute for a Healthy National Workforce all grimaced. They knew that condoms posed a serious risk to all the good work they'd done in denormalising sex. It had been a difficult road. Big Sex had of course opposed them at every step of the way, as businesses are wont to do - putting profit before people is their game. Then there were members of the public who had been tricked by Big Sex into thinking that there'd be a depopulation crisis if sex was banned. Of course, we were able to educate them that such scare stories simply wouldn't be the case, and millions of babies are happily born in the UK every year to couples who go, risk free, to the NHS Fertilisation Centres so that the sperm can be deposited in a tube, tested for risk and then implanted in the woman via a spatula. Many people now wouldn't dream of having sex due to the highly successful education campaigns. Emily's favourite was one that had been piloted at train stations nationwide in the previous year's festive season - actors dressed as giant, diseased vaginas ran up to commuters and began to envelope them, before giving them informational pamphlets on how sex kills. Britain was so close to being a sex-free society. But then there were the libertarians. Emily felt sick and anxious whenever she heard the word.

"So what do we do?" Martin asked again.

"We've got to get condoms off the market. Millions of people will die if we don't," Emily spoke, eyes almost glazed as she clenched her fists.

"There's no such thing as safe sex."

Health Advocates Hold Emergency Meeting in Bid to Tackle Growing Problem of 'Big Sun'

DANGER: Experts warn that millions of children will die as a result of being exposed to sunlight

NEWSFLASH - Doctors, public health experts and politicians last week held emergency meetings last week to combat the sunburn epidemic after experts warn sun cream does not provide adequate protection. Over the last two weeks, in Britain, an estimated 9 million children have contracted sunburn, increasing their chances of dying later in life, and increasing their chances of skin cancer. In order to protect the public, possible considerations included mandatory niqabs for all citizens and free flights to Siberia for all citizens when the temperature exceeds 20C. Inspired by "The Simpsons Movie", enquiries into whether fitting a giant, sun-blocking dome over the whole of the United Kingdom were made, but deemed not to be viable due to limitations in technology.

A spokesperson commented, "Tough action will be needed to combat the significant health dangers caused by the sun, and we must address these issues urgently.

 "Many have taken precautions to protect their children's health but due to Big Sun's refusal to comply with doctors' UK voluntary regulations, we must urge the government to consider legislation. We urge the government to impose a curfew between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00, with fines for failure to comply."

"I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition)

Post courtesy of NannyingTyrants. The only reason I am posting this here (when it is not mine) is because the tobacco control wonks have tried to have it censored. I don't know who this retarded, hideous bastard is, but he deserves millions of years of contempt for trying to make the poor poorer and for thinking he's somehow morally superior to everyone just because he doesn't smoke.



If the name Daniel Clayton doesn't ring any tobacco control industry bells, do not be concerned.  In comparison to the Root of All Evil, The Dreadful, Anna Gilmore, Stanton Glantz, or other well-known tobacco control industry names, nobody would consider to list Daniel Clayton among them. He used to work for ASH Wales as their Youth Health Specialist (which is, in my humble opinion, more than bit frightening that people like this have had access to our kids, especially after you've read through the contents of his tweet history), before moving on to some other Public Health job in Cardiff. He's nobody, really. It would be difficult to even class him as a "useful idiot."  No, do not be alarmed if you've not heard about this rugby-loving, fan of Pink Floyd, and generally mouthy prohibitionist before; he is just another one of Public Health's True Believers, blindly following and parroting whatever propaganda the tobacco control industry machine can produce.

Mr Daniel Clayton
There is a YouTube vid of him here, but I don't recommend watching it

But I bring him up today because Daniel Clayton likes to tweet absurdities on a regular basis. In other words, his moronic and often overtly socialist and sometimes communistic tweets entertain me.  Indeed, it was enormously entertaining to see him get all worked up over a union asking it members to oppose plain packaging.  In his mind, unions are socialist "for the greater public good" constructs, much like he views the whole of the NHS and every other taxpayer-funded group you can think of, and therefore unions should also toe the tobacco control line. But when unions don't toe the line, Daniel Clayton does not forget nor forgive.  He's kind of like a little terrier set loose from its lead, padding through the estate, nipping at the ankles of the postman who dares to stray into the little mutt's territory:  Harmless? Not too bright? A nuisance, perhaps? Well, it's amusing to me.

I could go on, but I'll get to the point.  Mr Clayton posted this tweet today:

Now, OK, think about this for a moment.  Mr Clayton isn't sure whether cannabis should be legalised, but if it is made legal, so long as people who smoke weed don't use tobacco in their spliffs, then that's fine by him.  You see, in his view, only the evil tobacco plant kills people. Or perhaps his view is simpler than that: Tobacco companies kill people.  It should be noted that Mr Clayton does not like capitalism, big business, or indeed much of anything but socialised taxpayer-funded quangos and government bodies.  But the above tweet is absurd in its hypocrisy, and I point it out today because it illustrates the next big movement in the tobacco control industry.

The tobacco control industry won't necessarily come out in support of cannabis use, but they will aggressively campaign for people to smoke their weed without using tobacco.  If you're in America, this is no big deal.  Most pot-smoking Americans smoke a J neat -- that is, no tobacco is used when rolling it up.  Bong lovers do not use tobacco either, and of course the ever favourite easy-to-carry pot pipe is also smoked with only cannabis in the bowl ... in the States.  But here in the UK and within Europe, a lot of cannabis smokers prefer to roll up a fatty with a bit of tobacco mixed in.  Every culture and region goes about smoking cannabis their own way.

But shame on you Europeans and Britons who use tobacco whilst getting high! The tobacco control industry does not approve! Don't you realise that the magical tobacco plant is a billion times more dangerous than cannabis?  Does it not matter to you that that very same potentially cancer-causing chemicals present in tobacco smoke are also present in cannabis smoke? You may as well give up cooking food and attending bonfire parties or enjoying the warmth of a log-burning fireplace.  The same potentially cancer-causing chemical constituents of any burning plant material are present in all of these things. The same ones. Including cannabis.

The tobacco control industry won't tell you that. Their agenda is to destroy tobacco companies and make smokers' lives as miserable as possible in the process. So if you mix tobacco in with your spliff, you are funding the tobacco industry, and they do not like it one bit.

It's not about health. It's about controlling your  choices whilst promoting their agenda against an industry they do not like.  Daniel Clayton cannot see the wood for the trees. He is blinded by the tobacco control industry's hateful campaigns against consumers of tobacco products and the companies and farmers who supply the consumers.  Destroy them all, no matter the costs to society.

I can only imagine a similar fate happening to a legal Big Cannabis industry, should something like that ever occur.

Just so we're all clear about what is and is not acceptable when it comes to smoking cannabis, a demonstration using pictures for your viewing pleasure:

This is fine:

Rolling a fatty neat - no tobacco

This is also [extremely] fine:

Hitting a bong, whilst naked and wearing only stockings is acceptable behaviour - no tobacco
Propane torch, optional

This is completely unacceptable:

Rolling a spliff with hand rolling tobacco -- this is very, very bad

And this is also right out:

Rolling a spliff with tobacco from a cigarette is also very bad

Update: Thanks to DP for the link to the ASH 2012 conference tweet (see comments).

Non-Conformist Conformist Non-Conformist Conformists...(?)

For years we've had communists/socialists/"progressives" desperately trying to get McDonald's shut down with all manner of campaigns from "Oooooh, McDonald's is making your kids fat! They're evil" to "McDonald's is an evil corporation making money from killing your children!!!" and "public health" idiots have even begun referring to the food industry as the sinister sounding "Big Food". Cue moral panic, as there is nothing that distresses middle class lefties more than THE MASSES BUYING THINGS THEY DON'T LIKE!
'Why oh why won't these plebs eat locally sourced, organic, vegan anti-capitalist healthy stuff!?' they wail.



It must all be an evil plot by corporations! They brainwash our children! This is entirely the fault of capitalism! Thank goodness my cosmopolitan, white middle class friends and I are so smart that we can see past the corporations' evil stare and mind-numbing advertisements. Now we must protect the poor people's children! They are so fat! Fat is disgusting! Look at this fat child!



Well, apart from the fact that it doesn't add up, and young people who eat at McDonald's every day weigh less than those who don't. In fact, it's pretty much inverse proportional - people who went to McDonald's more frequently weighed less.
So stop with the lame anti-capitalist bullshit and using pictures of children's bodies to push an agenda. Ironically anti-McDonald's people who complain about fat children and say how gross they are yadda yadda tend to be the exact same ones who also use skinny models' and celebrities' bodies to push the same anti-capitalist agenda!



Adbusters (a perfect example of this kind of dreadful mindset, and also the source of the above "anti-consumerism" pictures) interestingly has this poster on its site, in the midst of a big load of anti-Nike propaganda

yet its website sells

YEAH! DAMN CONFORMIST NIKE SHOES! IF YOU WANT TO BE A NON-CONFORMIST, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BUY THESE RECYCLED TYRE AND HEMP ONES FROM OUR STORE, FOR $110.


WHAT DO YOU WANT, ANTI-CAPITALISTS!? For us to be thin? fat? Buy shoes? Not buy shoes?What?!
Oh right, ok. You want everyone to be you



The sorts of people who genuinely believe that because they are so virulently anti-capitalist and anti-corporation etc that they are infallible and wonderful people, when actually all they are is sneering snobs who despise “the little people” every bit as much as they loathe McDonald’s and Nike and other corporations. They despise them supposedly for “doing as they’re told” by advertising, but what they really despise them for is for not doing as they’re told by these upper middle class, smug bores.