frank_davis

Tom Harris, in Land of Angry, takes up the issue of commenters who, regardless of the topic he's writing about, will use the opportunity to have another go at the government. He asks:


Well, that's me! I'm angry, and angry all the time. And I regularly post up comments on Tom's blog, very often about the thing I'm angry about: the smoking ban.


That's me too. In my private life I'm as angry about the smoking ban as I am online. Although I don't think many other people are. He ends by saying:


I responded to Tom by suggesting that much of current 'normal' political concern was at one time entirely 'abnormal'. I wrote:


Replying in the following comment, Tom conceded the point, but said:


To which I replied:


I added that half of the steam would go out of these issues if they were seriously addressed. And I believe that this would happen. People shout all the louder the less they think they're getting a hearing. They quieten down when they feel their grievance has been addressed.

Take the three issues Tom cited: the EU, the smoking ban, and Labour's police state. They never get a decent public airing. There' no debate about them. They're not talked about in the media. And yet they matter to some people. True, they probably don't matter much to most 'normal' people. But hot political issues very often aren't about what most contented 'normal' people are concerned about, but with what some minority or other is angry about. Unemployed people are usually a minority, but nevertheless unemployment is a political issue. The closure of a steel mill in a town only affects a minority of people, but it's still a political issue. Discrimination against gays or blacks only affects a minority of people, but it's a political issue.

The odd thing about the EU is that it used to be a political issue that got endlessly discussed 10 or 20 years ago. Now it hardly gets mentioned, even though the passions it arouses have not dimmed, but have, if anything, intensified. The EU is not a hot-button issue for me, but all the same I'm genuinely puzzled about the current lack of debate about it.

As for Labour's police state, it's not a hot-button issue for me either. But then, I haven't been fined £200 for stubbing a cigarette out in the street. Yet. If I had been, it would be a very big issue.

As for the smoking ban, that's a hot-button issue for me because it's had a direct impact on me, and a very unpleasant one. So it's a big issue for me, and I'm angry about it and I blog about it and post comments about it. It's something that hurts. It hurts like a foot that's been run over. It hurts to the point that it's very often the only thing I want to talk about.

At any point in the unfolding political process, people are getting hurt. Once it was the unemployed. Or blacks. Or gays. Or women. Or handicapped people. And they made a fuss about it, and something was done. Maybe not enough. But something. But now different people are being hurt, and in different ways. And there's yet to be any real public recognition of these new grievances, just like once there wasn't any recognition of the plight of the unemployed, blacks, and gays. A new set of problems has appeared, a new set of grievances. And in time those will be addressed, and then there will be another new set of grievances about something else. And so it will continue, ad infinitum. There will always be problems. There will always be grievances. That's just how life is.

And the solution to all these problems and grievances is to seriously address them as rapidly as possible. If they're not addressed, people will just shout louder and louder until they are addressed. If they're not addressed, people will just get angrier and angrier. Just like the unemployed got angry. And the homeless got angry. And blacks got angry. And gays got angry.

The mistake, I think, of someone like Tom Harris is to suppose that there is one single set of 'normal' political issues about which people can reasonably become exercised, and that all other issues - such as the EU, or the smoking ban, or Labour's police state - are 'abnormal' issues about which people are unreasonably angry, and which don't merit serious attention. I'll bet that in 1900 or whenever, when unemployment was becoming an issue, plenty of politicians refused to take it seriously. No politician would now.

And the same is true of the welter of political issues which have emerged in recent years. The political issue of the EU is not going to go away. Neither is the political issue of the smoking ban. Nor (if Labour is re-elected in May) is the political issue of Labour's police state. They'll only begin to go away when they are openly and honestly addressed, rather than swept under the carpet as they are at the moment, because some people don't think they're serious enough to merit serious attention.

It's not Tom Harris that is the problem here. He at least is able to gaze upon his angry commenters with dismay. That's a start. And that start is a hundred times better than that managed by the wider political establishment, which remains largely oblivious to all but those historical political issues which it has historically successfully addressed, and which is why this is increasingly the Land of Angry.

I have a sneaking admiration for bartenders. Theirs is no easy job. I know because I tried my hand at it once. And rapidly realised that it was a job that I just couldn't do.

I found out years back when, overhearing the landlord of the River saying that he couldn't find any bar staff for the next week, I piped up and offered to stand in for a few nights. The landlord looked rather surprised at this offer from one of his regular customers. But he rapidly accepted the offer. I was to start on the coming Sunday night night. 5 pm. Minimum wage.

And so that Sunday I showed up at the promised hour and took my place behind the bar. The pub was very quiet in those days, and so there was nobody to serve, and so I soon found myself leaning against the bar and reflecting on how different the pub looked from behind the counter than it did from in front of it, and how it was rather like a theatre with the customers seated in the auditorium, and the bar staff the actors on the brightly lit stage, whose curtains swung open at 5 pm every night, and closed at 10:30 pm, after a few encores. Not that the bar staff were quite like actors really...

I was reflecting upon all this when I heard a discreet cough from the far end of the bar. Four of five people had materialised behind it without me noticing. So I went and served them the pints of this and that which they requested, praying that none of them would ask for a whisky and soda or a gin and tonic or anything that required any skill to prepare. Fortunately none did. Although I had to pull another pint of Guinness for one of them after he pointed out that it was completely flat, and that it should have a thick creamy head on top of it, and it didn't.

And with that I resumed gazing at the fascinating scene inside the bar, with stacks of glasses, and bins full of empties, and pails with nameless fluids drying inside them. In the passage behind the bar there was one place where the ceiling dipped down to below head height, and after smacking my head against it three or four times, I began to think that what was needed was a slight excavation of the floor, and the laying of a new damp-proof course, and a few inches of concrete in a gentle sweep which might possibly be a parabola. Or was it an ellipse?..

I was interrupted by the rattling of keys. "Can we have some service?" somebody called, a bit testily. Somehow or other, another two people had magically appeared at the bar.

And there was my problem with bartending. It requires constant attention. But as soon as I'd served someone, I'd relax and drift off into some reverie or other until woken by a cough or a rattling of keys or (as happened later that night) a loud ringing of the bell above the bar. And I was constitutionally incapable, it seemed, of being attentive. I was all right if I had some pre-defined task to perform, like writing a computer programme, adding new subroutines to it, and fixing their bugs. I could do that for hour after hour. But stand behind a bar just waiting for someone to come in? Could I do that? Nope. It was just too, too difficult.

So now I have a new admiration for bartenders. Bartenders like June, who has been working behind the bar at the River for years, is a perfect ace. Arrive anywhere at the bar, and she'll have noticed you within 5 seconds, even if she's serving someone else. And she'll call down and say, "Be with you in a second!" And she will be. And when she comes, it'll be with a welcoming smile (another thing I couldn't manage. How do they do that?). And you know that if you asked her for a piña colada rather than a pint of the usual, she'd whip one up inside a minute. And she knows what your usual is too, of course.

I've sometimes watched June with wonderment. She always has one eye on the bar behind her, even when she'd serving you and smiling and engaging in a little banter. She never keeps still. She never sits thoughtfully on a stool, or gazes into space like I would. She maintains 100% full attention, all the time. I don't know how she does it.

And I that's why she's an ace. And why she'd have also made an ace Spitfire pilot. I was once told that wartime fighter pilots were forever darting glances over their shoulders, even when they were off duty and sitting in pubs drinking beer. They were constantly attentive, always on the lookout for bandits at 6 o'clock, just like alert bartenders are on the lookout for customers. You survived if you were a fighter pilot if you could see that ME109 a split second or two before a rookie pilot would.

It's a tad revisionist, but I reckon it was Britain's bartenders that saved Britain, as they took to the skies in 1940. Nothing to do with the design of the Spitfire at all. The nation of shopkeepers was simultaneously a nation of natural fighter pilots. Not that the Germans didn't have bartenders too. But in Germany you serve all your bierkeller customers with one single three-gallon Steinzeugkrug of Hofmeister each at the start of the evening, and a few hours later they're all sleeping it off under their tables. Easy. Then you can spend the rest of the evening discussing Hegelian dialectics or Nietzschean eternal recurrence or whatever. That's German efficiency for you. It's the British, with their little half pint and pint glasses, who keep coming back to the bar for refills 24 times an evening, and so keep the bartenders on their toes the whole time - but train them in key fighter pilot skills. Of course, by the same token, the British obviously aren't as philosophical as Germans. But then philosophy isn't much use in a dog-fight over Dungeness, is it?

I'm glad I cleared that up.

Me? What sort of fighter pilot would I have made? Well I think we all know. I'd have been gazing out of the cockpit and wondering if that was Crowborough down there in the Sussex hills, or was it Rotherfield, and trying to make out Luxford lane in the maze of fields. And I'd have just managed to to locate the junction of the lane with Queen's road when the machine gun bullets would have shattered the cockpit perspex into a thousand shards around me, and lit up the instrument panel with sparkling impacts, and the flames come licking over my useless arm, and the ground come spinning up to meet me.

Me, all I want is to be able to sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette. But if you want to do that these days it seems you have to have a revolution. So right, let's have a revolution. And hang all the bastard MPs who voted for the smoking ban from lamp posts. That's what you do in revolutions, isn't it?

Of course, not all MPs voted for the smoking ban, so they wouldn't all swing. Tom Harris wouldn't swing. Quite a few MPs wouldn't. And neither would Boris Johnson.

And Boris Johnson is one of the few politicians I've had any time for in recent years. He's been a breath of fresh air, whether he's been writing as editor of the Spectator, or presenting Have I Got News For You, or fronting documentaries about the Roman Empire, or running for parliament or mayor, or conducting scandalous affairs with assorted brainy beauties. It made a change from the rest of the dreary suits and shapeless twinsets that inhabit Westminster.

But now I don't know quite what to think of Boris. I simply don't understand why, last week, he came out and wrote a piece in the Telegraph downplaying the Climategate scandal which has, very arguably, succeeded in derailing the Copenhagen conference, and making world leaders look like bumbling fools. Not that we didn't know that already.


That 'deep instinct' used to be yours as well, Boris. That deep gut instinct that people are trying to pull the wool over your eyes, and fool you into doing something you don't want to do, don't need to do, and indeed would be a complete mug to do.

That 'deep instinct' used to be known as common sense. And common sense used to be something that people drew on when they looked around them with their own eyes, and formed their own opinions, never mind what thousands of scientists and environmentalists might be telling them. And right now my own two eyes are telling me that I'm sitting in bed with a pullover and a heavy cloak and the blankets over me, and a hot water bottle under my knee. There's nothing 'inductive' about it. Nor will there be anything inductive about  it when I next pluck up the courage to head down to the frozen kitchen to boil up another cup of tea that will have cooled to a tepid liquid within 5 or 10 minutes. It's freezing. Effing freezing.

And not just here. There's snow on the beach in Nice today. And there are thousands of Eurostar passengers screaming blue murder having spent a night in the channel tunnel after condensation brought five trains to a halt as they left deep-frozen France.

Global warming? You must be joking. The planet has been cooling for the past 10 years. And that's what people are noticing, despite all the claims of thousands of scientists (well, 50 or 60 IPCC lead writers) that we're going to 'fry'. And the scientists are deeply embarrassed by it. And we know they're deeply embarrassed, because we've read the emails in which they say so. Here's UEA boffin Kevin Trenberth writing just two months ago on 12 October 2009:


So why the heck do you choose this moment to convert to the Church of Global Warming? I mean, really! Of all times, this? Quite obviously you've been nobbled. It's all hands to the pumps on the good ship Global Warming, isn't it? And you've been roped in too, as Mayor of London, to try vainly to staunch the flow of collapsing public belief as the Eddystone rock of Climategate has torn an enormous and ever-widening hole in the side of that ill-starred, jerry-built paddleboat.

And it's a scam and a fraud. The threat of carbon dioxide is a threat as illusory as the equally non-existent threat of environmental tobacco smoke. It's all the same thing. And all these various frauds and scams are coming apart. And it's bringing down an entire political class. And the media empires that won't report either of them. Or any of the other ones.

There's nothing for it.

Another lamp post please.

I keep an eye open for reports on HPV, since reading that, while it causes cervical cancer, it's also linked rather less strongly to genital and anal cancer.  I turned up another couple of links tonight. The first from the Mouth Cancer Foundation relates to oral cancer:


What is meant by "combine tobacco and alcohol with HPV"? It sounds like they might physically serve in some manner to enable HPV to enter epithelial cells, with nicotine holding the cells open while the alcohol washes it in or something.

But most likely it doesn't mean that at all. It probably simply means that people with a history of oral sex are quite likely to also have a history of smoking and drinking.  Let me guess: I bet that they're quite likely to have a history of listening to loud rock music. dancing, and dressing fashionably smartly. That is they'll have histories of doing all the things that people do when they go and try to get themselves laid. They get a bit drunk to lose their inhibitions, and they smoke cigarettes to calm their nerves, and then they hope they'll, well,.. get lucky.

And what counts as oral sex? Is it just oral-genital sex, or does that include mouth-to-mouth snogging? It probably does include the latter, because anything that transfers tissue from mouth to mouth is likely to tranfser HPV from one mouth to another. But so also is sharing someone's food or cup or fork. There can be all sorts of ways that a virus can be transferred from one person to another. The less material that is transferred, the less likely someone is to get infected.

And in the same token, if all those people smoking and drinking out on the dance floor in a club at night are more likely to get laid and infect each other with HPV, it follows that non-smoking non-drinkers who stay at home at night reading books are less likely to get laid, and contract an HPV infection. 

Second link from WebMD relates to throat cancer:


What's meant by "head and neck cancers"? A neck isn't quite the same thing as a throat. It seems to be suggesting that cancers on the outside of the neck or head aren't associated with tobacco and alcohol. Transfer of HPV from mouth to head or neck might not be sexual at all. They might be transferred by coughing or sneezing or a peck on the cheek. No 'sex' at all. And so no need for tobacco and alcohol, those two great sexual enablers.

Epithelial cells, which cover the entire surface of the body, inside and outside , are also found in lungs:


So if HPV 16 and 18 targets epithelial cells, it will most likely target epithelial cells in the lung as well. As I've reported before, HPV has been found in 25% of lung cancer cases, and sometimes (in Japan) in as many as 80% of cases.

If HPV is the true cause of many cancers, including lung cancer, then why was there such an upsurge in cancer in the 20th century? And the answer may be that it had nothing to directly do with smoking, but had everything to do with relaxing sexual mores, which may have paradoxically come as a response to improving medical treatments of the more common sexually transmitted diseases - like syphilis and gonorrhea - and also, equally importantly, improving contraception. Once people were having multiple sexual partners and engaging in experimental sex, HPV started jumping from person to person. But why was it lung cancer so often? Perhaps because the surface area of human lungs is very large:


The external surface area of a human is about 2 or 3 square metres.This suggests an airborne HPV transmission route person to person. An airborne stray packet of HPV may have a good probability of ending up in human lungs. But how? Maybe it was because back then people danced cheek-to-cheek on crowded dance floors, changing partners every few dances. While they danced, cheek to cheek, and very often nose by nose, they breathed in airborne HPV. If so, then the reason that lung cancer incidence peaked in the late 20th century (if it has peaked) is because by then people danced separately after dances like the jive and the twist became fashionable. It could be that Chubby Checker single-handedly did far more to cut the incidence of lung cancer than all the doctors in the world laid end to end.

And that the waltz was the dance of death.

POSTSCRIPT: If lung cancer is the consequence, 10 or more years later, of HPV infection, why was there an asymmetry in its incidence between men and women, with women getting it a lot less often? One way this might have happened would have been if lots of men had sex with relatively few women - e.g. prostitutes or 'loose women'. If there was an asymmetry between men and women's sexual practices - i.e. a 'double standard' - with fewer women becoming sexually liberated, then fewer women would have been infected. And there was indeed a double standard. But as women also became more sexually liberated, HPV would have spread from the red light districts to the wider community, and an epidemic of lung cancer started. If so, to specifically cause lung cancer, it suggests that HPV must have 'taken off' and become airborne at some point, perhaps concentrated in a very localised HPV-rich 'hot spots', like clubs and bars.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference seems to have descended into farce. It's not just that the attending countries can't seem to be able to agree about anything inside the building. What's been going on outside is almost as interesting.

It seems that the UN organisers booked a 15,000 seat venue. Environmental NGOs from around the world then sent in a list of over 30,000 delegates who wished to attend.

Spot a problem there? No? Neither did the IPCC. This is, after all, climate science. Who cares about numbers? Numbers are just things to be tweaked and massaged and bent this way and that, aren't they?

So, 15,000 people were left standing outside. But that was only the beginning. Once they'd booked this 15,000 seat venue, the IPCC then decided in its infinite wisdom that only 7,000 people could be allowed in at a time. Nobody seems to know what the reason for this was. Maybe they were worried that CO2 levels in the chamber would exceed 500 parts per million and cause runaway man-made conference warming. Better safe than sorry. The numbers outside increased from 15,000 to 23,000.

And then the number allowed into the venue was reduced to 300 on Thursday and Friday. This was presumably to allow space to park the private jets of the big shots who'd come for the final two days. So that's 29,700 people standing around outside in the icy cold of Copenhagen. And it started snowing on Wednesday night.


Well, you can't blame them really, can you? You spend the whole year rattling a can on the streets of Camden Town for global warming, and you use your meagre savings (what you managed to collect in the can) to fly to Copenhagen hoping to see Barry O'Bama and Brad Pitt and the Hockey Team, and you end up standing knee deep in snow all day. Before being arrested, that is. It's enough to turn anyone into a climate sceptic.


Not that climate sceptics got much of a better deal. After being barred from the conference himself, Viscount Christopher Monckton was left lying battered and bruised on the street by police. And he'd been speaking there.

Can't make it up, can you? Or maybe you can. From elsewhere on the streets of Copenhagen, Sub Rosa carries an on-the-spot report from Mrs Dansk Pastry.

Here, sit down. You're looking a bit down. Like a man condemned to a long spell in prison. Dick Puddlecote must be prescient or something, to have more or less written your obituary just two or three days before you abruptly resigned as Chief Medical Officer. Or was it cause and effect? Y'know, post hoc ergo propter hoc. You can never tell these days what might be causing what.

I won't go over the ground that Dick covered. But he didn't touch on another triumph of yours, the online application system that resulted in 15,000 junior doctors not being able to find jobs. What a massive blow that must've been to your creaking health service. Well done!

The greatest triumph of all, of course, was the complete smoking ban in public places, which you spearheaded, at one point even threatening to resign if the government didn't adopt a total ban. That ban hasn't saved any lives at all. And it even had the added bonus of destroying a venerable traditional pub culture, shattering communities, and dividing friends. Well, not entirely. Your schemes for minimum prices for alcohol would probably have finished off the few stalwart drinkers left in Britain's pubs.

What a catalogue of achievements in 60 years! Rumour was you'd soon be on your way next to Switzerland, and the headquarters of the WHO. But what's there left to ban, when more or less everything that can be banned already has been banned or restricted? Tobacco. Alcohol. Salt. Sugar. Well, you know the list better than I do. All the names of those killers on that big sheet of paper of yours have each been crossed out now, like so many enemies eliminated. You must be asking yourself: what's there left to be banned or restricted or taxed into oblivion? I'll tell you what. It's a whole new mission for you.

Sand.

Yes, sand.

You look surprised. I thought you would be. So let me explain, Don. Do you mind if I call you Don?

You've heard of silicosis, haven't you? That disease which causes nodular lesions in the upper lobes of the lungs, and whose acute form brings shortness of breath, fever, and the bluish skin known as cyanosis. It's sometimes misdiagnosed as pulmonary edema, or pneumonia or tuberculosis. And with 15,000 fewer doctors in the NHS, it'll probably soon get misdiagnosed as bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, and even swine flu as well.

Well, silicosis is caused by inhaling crystalline silica dust into the lungs. And what's crystalline silica dust called when it's at home? Sand.

And where do you find most sand? Beaches.

And what do lots of families do on glorious hot summer days? Why, they climb in their cars and they head for the beach, with their children in the back seat with spades and buckets and beach balls. And when they're there what do they do but lie down nearly naked on the sand, sometimes face down? And what do their children do? They run around kicking up sand, or they sit in it building sandcastles.

I see your eyes are beginning to light up.

So here we have this killer substance, sand or CSD, which is known to cause silicosis and all the other diseases I mentioned, and we have this relatively new social custom of family trips to the beaches where this substance is most abundantly found. So here's another opportunity to put 'lifestyle medicine' into practice yet again.

If you remember, not many years ago, smoking was regarded as a perfectly healthy activity. No longer. It's been denormalised. Rather like drinking is now also being denormalised. Well here's something else to be denormalised. Sand. Sand and everything associated with sand. Like sunbathing, and swimming, and paddling, and fishing, and beachcombing, and kicking around beach balls.

It's going to be an uphill struggle to denormalise sand, I realise. But it was an uphill struggle to denormalise smoking. So it can be done. Sand is usually seen as clean and white and wave-washed. And sunbathing and swimming and kicking around beach balls is regarded as perhaps the prime example of living a healthy lifestyle. But with a long campaign the public attitudes can be changed. Stopping calling it 'sand' would be a start. 'CSD' is much better. It sounds more medical and scientific and, well, vaguely alarming. Another name should be given to 'beaches' as well. 'CSD-contaminated sites' is the best I've come up with so far. Then in carefully staged public campaigns you start to ramp up the dangers of inhaling CSD, and all the diseases that are likely to result 10 or 20 years later. And then you play the ace card: the children. You slowly ram it into parents' heads that by taking their children to beaches they're more or less sentencing them to an early death. There'd have to bans on advertisements for beach holidays in Bermuda and so on. The tourist trade will fight like mad against it, but we can handle them the same way we handled Big Tobacco: we call them evil. Merchants of death luring innocent people to their deaths in faraway places.

Of course there'll have to be all the usual epidemiological studies done to demonstrate the danger of CSD. But that's no problem. Modern epidemiologists are well versed in finding health threats in more or less anything you point them at. They'll find a small risk of cancer, heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, cholera, typhoid, rabies, polio, impetigo, and so on. You name it, they'll find a small risk factor. And if they don't find a risk factor the first time they look, they'll almost certainly find one the 35th time they look. And all we'll need is one study that shows an increased risk of, oh, 10% or 20% or so. I'm talking the same figures as environmental tobacco smoke, of course. But then you know all this, don't you?

You're beginning to look positively jolly, Donnie.

And here's a bonus. As you know, it used to be smoking that got blamed for every disease under the sun. Yet while fewer and fewer people smoke, the incidence of lung cancer has kept on rising. Worse still, more and more people who've never smoked in their lives are developing lung cancer. What do we do when smoking has been eliminated and the last smoker has been taken behind a shed and shot? Blaming everything on smoking is going to look more and more implausible. And this is where sand, or CSD, comes in. New medical studies will show that sand was the real culprit. The studies haven't been written yet, but that's what they'll show.

Of course there'll have to be a few other threats associated with beaches other than the sand. But there are plenty of them. There's always a small increased danger of drowning associated with visiting any beaches. And there's an even smaller risk of being eaten by sharks. I'm working on an idea for a beach-denormalisation ad campaign based loosely on Jaws. Only in this version it's not the Great White that's the real danger, but the sand that all the holidaymakers are sitting on. Nice twist, eh?

And there's another plus too. Remember all those non-smokers who complained that they had to shower after visiting smoke-filled bars. Well, a lot of people do exactly the same when they come back from the beach, because sand clings to wet skin for hours, and it gets everywhere. Especially up your crack. If you don't wash it off, it eventually falls off into your clothes, into your bed, onto the floor. Secondhand CSD. At the moment most people don't mind about going to beaches and showering afterwards. But once CSD has been identified as a health hazard they're going to start complaining about having to shower. Just like with tobacco smoke which they never used to care about. And they'll start wanting sand-free holidays, and maybe even sand-free beaches.

And of course the real bonanza is that you get to wreck what used to be a happy, carefree pastime - going to the beach -, and convert it into something ugly and dangerous and dirty. We'll manage to close down another social activity that used to bring whole families together in shared enjoyment. And it'll empty the beaches, little by little, just like pubs and bars have gradually emptied. Won't that be wonderful?

And that's the real point, isn't it? It's not about health. It never was. It was always about stopping people doing things that they enjoy doing. Things that they don't really need to do. Like smoke cigarettes, and drink beer, and munch crisps and chocolates. This is about bringing back fear and guilt and shame. And government control.

And it's all straight out of the tobacco denormalisation playbook. Just cross out 'tobacco' and replace it with 'sand'. You won't have to do anything else.

You're looking positively ecstatic now, Donnie babe. A man reborn. No, don't bother to thank me. It's all in a day's work. We look after our own here. Here in Hell.

George Monbiot has been writing in the Guardian about some summit conference that's been going on.


Well, obviously this is about smoking. And it's true: the 'heroic age' when people could light cigarettes in pubs and bars is over, for the time being at least. And now it's all 'your right to smoke cigarettes stops at my nose'. In this pusillanimous New Age, we must be cautious and constrained, and ever-mindful of other people. There can be no more carefree smoking, careless of the lung cancer tomorrow. Non-smokers must be accommodated - but smokers need not be.


Yes, it's true. I'm angry. And I'm a part of that growing movement. I don't like health and safety regulations, especially the ones about environmental tobacco smoke. And I don't like the ever-rising tax on tobacco. And I could do with a gun these days. I seriously do not want to be unreasonably constrained. "Trampling on the lives of others", of course, means smoking in pubs. And that mystery gas in the atmosphere is environmental tobacco smoke.


Well, the golden age of smoke-filled pubs has ended, for the time being. And I do indeed have difficulty finding the words to express my hatred for the vile smoking ban. And while I've never read Atlas Shrugged, I can well see the fascism and puritan religiosity and sheer misanthropy of the antismokers. But do I know at heart that it's really just about the decency I owe to other people to not light up in their presence?

And well, no, I don't know that. I don't accept that it's an indecent thing to smoke a cigarette in the company of other people. I know that for some people it is. But it isn't for me. And it isn't for most of the people I've known throughout my life. It's true that cigarettes produce a characteristic odour. But so do lots of things. Most foods produce an odour as well. So do many wines and beers. In fact, more or less everything generates an odour. If these people are going to ask me to not smoke in their presence, then next they'll be asking me to not eat or drink in their presence. And if they find the odours that fill the air everywhere so objectionable, won't they next start complaining about the words and music that also fill the air. Are they going to start saying that "your right to express your poisonous opinions stops at my ears"? I think they are.

The real indecency is not that people smoke cigarettes in the company of other people, but that no consideration whatsoever is shown towards smokers. The antismokers demand that smokers show decency towards non-smokers, but will show no decency whatsoever towards smokers, who are also human beings. They demand that smokers show decency towatds them, but they will not reciprocate in any way whatsoever. They do not seek any accommodation with smokers: they seek to eliminate them entirely.


So it's the smokers who are the bullies, eh? Not the bully state that pushes them out on to the streets, drives them from their jobs and their homes? Smokers are driven from pillar to post, yet it is they who are the bullies. What a twisted, upside down view of life.


Well, yes, the split is between smokers and antismokers. And you'll find conservative smokers and liberal smokers and reactionary smokers, and you'll also find conservative and liberal and reactionary antismokers. I stopped voting for the Liberal Democrats because they'd become illiberal antismokers. The battle lines are now drawn between proud smokers and vindictive antismokers. The smokers want to expand their freedom, which has already been grievousy restricted. And the antismokers want to restrain and restrict smokers even more than they already have.


Indeed they are. It's all been very one-sided so far, with smokers taking all the blows. It won't be like that forever. Decency demands that smokers have places where they can smoke and drink in each other's company. Let the smokers have their own pubs, and the antismokers have theirs.


Well, of course, Monbiot wasn't writing about smoking and smoking bans at all. I'm sure you knew that. He was writing about the Copenhagen conference, and climate change/global warming. But it's remarkable how easily - almost effortlessly - his arguments about the one can be applied to the other. I didn't have to change a word he wrote. I just missed out one or two of them. It was easy because essentially the same arguments are made in both cases.

I don't know for sure, but I bet that Monbiot is a virulent antismoker. And it occurs to me that when Monbiot sees a smoker, he sees the very personification of polluting industrial civilisation, with smokers as one-man factories pouring out toxic smoke from their chimney pipes, and with a crowded pub full of smokers giving every appearance of some satanic Victorian mill town. The fanaticism of antismokers may simply be another manifestation of the fanaticism of anti-industry environmentalists.

Anyway, whether or not Monbiot was writing about ETS or CO2, it's true that an age of heroism is over. It has been overtaken by an age of timid fearfulness, a time when every shadow is blown up by imagination into a threatening bogey. Monbiot man is driven by fear. Fear of carbon dioxide. Fear of tobacco smoke. Fear of ubiquitous terrorists. Fear of avian flu and swine flu. Fear of everything. It's all fear, fear, fear, and more fear. A few decades after heroically sending a man to the moon, an entire civilisation is in the grip of irrational fear.

I dropped in at the River this afternoon intending to have a quick e-cig-assisted half of lager. The pub was almost empty, but there were logs blazing in the wide fireplace, and with nobody sat in the armchairs around it. And so after I'd bought my drink I sat down by the fire, and gazed into the glowing red heart of the fire as my chilled hands gradually warmed.

As I looked at the fire I tried to estimate the weight of the wood burning in it, and came up with a guess of about 15 kg. That's 15,000 gms. So, with a cigarette weighing 1 gm, I was looking at 15,000 cigarettes burning. And the log fire would be producing all the combustion products that cigarettes produce, including carbon, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide, and thousands of other compounds. About the only thing missing from it was nicotine.

I soon rectified that. My e-cig was running low on nicotine, and so I slid out the near-empty container, and slipped in a high-strength nicotine replacement, and tossed the discarded container onto the fire, thereby instantly converting it into 15,000 very mild cigarettes.

And then, getting a satisfying hit from the newly refilled e-cig, I sat wondering at the hypocrisy of allowing people to burn 15,000 cigarettes in the open grates of fires, but not smoke a single one in their own mouths.And while 99.99% of the smoke from the fire would have been going straight up the chimney, 0.01% would have been escaping into the pub lounge. And that would be the same as someone smoking one and half cigarettes inside the pub.

I'd intended to just have a half, but it was warm and comfortable by the fire, and I was enjoying both the lager and the e-cig, and so I had another lager. At the bar I exchanged a few words with the people there, and waved to someone I knew, and chatted to the barmaid, before returning to my armchair to sit placidly gazing into space, and feeling, well,.. happy.

I was well into my second pint of lager, with all plans of going home shelved, when I suddenly realised that I was experiencing something that I hadn't experienced for two and a half years - the pleasure of sitting inside a pub, drinking and smoking. Of course, I wasn't actually smoking, but my e-cig was doing an admirable job of pretending to be a cigarette - its best ever.

And it all came flooding back, how it used to be. I was experiencing what it had once been like to be relaxed and at ease inside a pub, chatting to one or two people, and feeling part of a little community, and sitting gazing absently into space, turning things placidly over in my mind.

A few years ago, I used to go to the River every day, just for an hour or so, to drink a pint of lager, and smoke a few cigarettes, and gaze unseeingly into space, lost in thought. It used to be like going to church, and partaking an ancient and mysterious ceremony, and emerging an hour or so later a more calm and relaxed person than I was when I went in. It's what I had missed most of all after the smoking ban: those long hours of tranquil meditation.

The smoking ban hasn't stopped me smoking. If anything I smoke more now than I ever did, having returned from Barcelona armed with numerous cigars. What the smoking ban took away was everything else. Pleasure. Relaxation. Community. Friendship. Meditation. Freedom. And those are the things that I want back.

I've become something of a foot soldier in a war over the past few years. It's not a war I wanted to fight. If anyone had told me only 5 years ago that I'd be devoting considerable amounts of my time to fighting antismoking, I would have laughed. But then I wasn't a militant smoker back then. And I am now.

And I suppose that, as a soldier, I'll just have to learn to do without pleasure and relaxation and community and friendship and meditation and freedom. That's how it is with soldiers. It isn't much fun to be one. But there's no alternative. Because if I want those things back, I'm going to have to fight for them.

Reading something later online about antismokers, I couldn't help but notice that they always seem to identify their enemy as the tobacco industry. Or, as they like to call it, the Industry. And maybe once it was like that. But now their enemy is no longer the Industry: their enemy is me. And what am I? I am recalcitrant humanity, refusing to bend to the will of totalitarians, as people always do. The antismokers are not fighting the Industry; they are fighting the human race. They're fighting against ordinary people who just want to enjoy themselves in the way they choose - which is the only way that anybody ever does enjoy themselves.

It'll be a long war. The antismokers are enormously powerful, and people like me are all but powerless. The antismokers like to portray the Industry as super-rich and super-powerful and super-ruthless, but the antismoking movement have themselves long since stepped into their shoes, and become all of those things. The antismoking movement (which is itself an industry spreading hate and lies) may once have been a David facing a Goliath Industry, but now it has itself become Goliath. And it's people like me who have become the Davids facing this new Goliath that's taking away their freedom and their community and their pleasure.

I could have stayed all afternoon and all evening sitting by the fire in the River. But in the end, I got up and left. Maybe it'll be like that again one day. If not, I hope it endures as a vivid memory in years to come, of what it is I'm fighting for.

I wasn't in the least bit surprised when I heard the following exchange between Fern Britton and Tony Blair.


I wasn't surprised because it's what I always thought Blair would have done, and because it's the way so much politics is done these days. You decide what you're going to do, and then you look around for some plausible pretext for doing it. If the pretext is subsequently shown to be fraudulent, it doesn't matter, because by then you'll have done what you wanted to do, and it'll be past history.

The WMDs were the main public pretext for invading Iraq. And here was the man who was Prime Minister of Britain at the time in effect saying , "Well, if there hadn't been any WMDs, we'd have to had to have dreamt up some other excuse to invade Iraq." Except it wasn't what he was 'in effect' saying; it was what he was quite openly and undisguisedly saying, in so many words.

The same thing is going on with Global Warming. Some people have decided that Western civilisation consumes too much oil and gas and coal, and could do with adopting a minimal luxury-free way of life. But if you want to change an entire culture this way, you don't come out and say so. No. You instead invent something called Anthropogenic Global Warming, and you build it up into an enormous threat that we've got to act on right now, by stopping using oil and gas and coal, and adopting a minimal luxury-free way of life. And when it's done, and it turns out that there never was any Global Warming threat, it doesn't really matter, because it was just a pretext to get people to change their lifestyles, and once it's been done there'll be no going back. Or so you think.

And the same goes for the smoking ban. Doctors and other assorted pundits decided that people should stop smoking. But rather than coming out and asking them to do so, they instead claimed that something called Environmental Tobacco Smoke was killing people in their thousands, and we had to ban smoking in pubs and clubs. Now. No exceptions. And when it turns out that there wasn't really any threat at all, it won't really matter, because they'll have succeeded in doing what they wanted to do, which was to stop people smoking anywhere except their own homes, and maybe not even there. And there'll be no going back, antismokers always insist. Once it's been made law, that's the end of it.

In each of these three cases, the chosen threat was a gas of some sort. Sarin or mustard gas. Carbon dioxide. Tobacco smoke. And that's probably because gas, unlike bullets, is invisible stuff that gets everywhere. It's invisible and it's ubiquitous and it's very, very dangerous. Gases are really scary kinds of threats.

I don't think that it can be a complete accident that the threat of an invisible gas has been used in each of these three cases. It's too much of a coincidence. And it's a very, very effective. Tony Blair got the war he wanted using it. The medical profession got the smoking bans they wanted using it. And environmentalists are well on their way to shutting down Western civilisation using it.

In some ways all modern threats share the same sort of vaporous, ubiquitous characteristics of gases. The threat of terrorism is a vague, amorphous threat. The terrorists are everywhere and nowhere, and the location of their leaders is permanently unknown. They kill hardly anybody, but they could easily metamorphose into an enormous threat if they got a dirty suitcase nuclear bomb The threat of infectious diseases - like avian flu or swine flu - is equally amorphous, and equally permanent.

The Iraq war. The smoking ban. Global warming. Swine flu. In each case utter and complete and cynical dishonesty is used to achieve the desired goals of a minority of righteous bastards. They get their way by shamelessly lying to people who trust them. And very often they do enormous damage. In Iraq large bombs are still going off in Baghdad seven years after the Iraq war began. The smoking ban is destroying a traditional convivial culture. The threat of global warming is being used as a pretext for hobbling a busy, industrious, and successful civilisation. All of these various threats provide rich opportunities for bureaucrats of one sort or another to loot the public purse and feather their own nests while they keep cranking up the fear factor to get even more.

But it won't last forever. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Abraham Lincoln said that.

In the short term, this political technique works, because most people trust authorities. After all, you're supposed to be able to trust authorities. But since the method essentially entails duping and propagandising people, they are bound to eventually find out. And the result will be a collapse of trust in authority. Of political authorities. Of medical authorities. Of scientific authorities. In fact, of authority in general.

The attempt to scare people, using exaggerations and lies, can only be successful while people continue to trust the various authorities who are trying (often very successfully) to scare them. Once they discover that they're being fooled, trust will evaporate, and anger will mount. And eventually they will find out. And then authority of every kind will fall into disrepute. There will be demands for honesty and openness and accountability.

We're currently being duped and defrauded in so many different ways that the coming backlash is likely to be very, very powerful. Easily powerful enough to topple governments. People who are sick of being duped by political authorities like Tony Blair, or by scientific authorities like UEA climate scientists, and by medical authorities like Sir Liam Donaldson, will all find common cause. They'll all have different individual reasons for wanting to overthrow authority of one sort or other, but it'll all boil down to loathing for any self-styled authority figures in whom they'll have zero belief. Any number of quangos and fake charities will have their public funds withdrawn, and be closed down, and see their previously overpaid employees fired en masse. There will be trials. There may even be tumbrils rolling through the streets to la Place de la Guillotine. It will be a global French Revolution, as an entire political class and its authoritative henchmen are overthrown.

It's going to happen. It's inevitable. It can't be stopped. And it's already started.

While attention is on the Copenhagen climate conference and the measures it will agree to combat global warming, I thought I'd take a look at the past few ice ages.

The Foresight Institute provides some historical perspective showing the ambient temperatures going back 50,000 years as recovered from a Greenland ice core. It shows (see below) that temperatures were around 20 degrees C lower only 15,000 years ago. We are currently living in an interglacial period that's been going about 12,000 years - the plateau on the right of the chart below.

In fact, over the past 2.5 million years or more, the earth has been flipping in and out of ice ages with considerable regularity (see second chart below). In general, the periods of glaciation have been long relative to the warm interglacial interludes. And the periods of glaciation have been getting longer and deeper.

Over the past 400,000 years, there have been 4 interglacial periods, including our own. The previous one was about 120,000 years ago, and it lasted about 10,000 years, and was 2 or 3 degrees warmer than our current one. The one before that was about 240,000 years ago, and that only lasted about 2,000 years. And the one before that was 320,000 years ago, and lasted 7,000 years. So, The earth has spent only about 30,000 of the past 400,000 years - 7.5 percent of the time - in warm interglacials. All of recorded human history is crammed into the second half of our current 12,000 year warm spell. Yet anatomically modern humans have been around for for 150,000 years.

Looking at the temperature data from the Vostok ice cores from Antarctica, two of the previous three interglacials have begun with temperatures peaking fairly early in the interglacial before gradual cooling resumed. In the subsequent ice age, the lowest temperatures come at the end, just before the next interglacial starts. The pattern of glaciation is a sawtooth with sharply rising temperatures followed by gradually falling temperatures. And our present interglacial seems to be following the same pattern, with peak temperatures about 8,000 years ago, and about 2 degrees C warmer than now. Over the past 6,000 years temperatures have been falling. So we are on the down-slope into the next ice age. If it follows the same pattern as before, it won't freeze over suddenly. It'll just get colder and colder as the centuries go by.

But that supposes that there's a metronomic regularity to what happens. At present, the main theory about what governs ice ages is that of the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch. His theory was that cyclic changes in the obliquity or tilt (in a 41,000 year cycle) and precession (~23,000 year cycle) of the axis of the earth combined with changes in the eccentricity (0 = circular) of the orbit of the earth (100,000 year cycle) would bring a varying regime of northern hemisphere insolation (sunshine). And this would sometimes result in cool summers during which ice that had formed in winter would not entirely melt. As a result, ice sheets would gradually grow from one year to the next.

In the 1930s Milankovitch's theory met with scepticism for a number of reasons. In the first place, his predictions did not concur with the accepted ice age chronology of the time. Furthermore, during ice ages the ice sheets had expanded at both the poles, and not just the north pole. It was only when ice cores and ocean deposits revealed a 100,000 year cycle that the theory began to gain acceptance. But even then there were problems. The variations in the tilt of the the earth's axis and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit were very small, and the consequent variations in insolation in the northern hemisphere were also very small. Not enough in themselves, it was felt, to cause the cycles of glaciation. There had to be some way in which their effect was amplified. And one candidate for this amplifier was the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As the earth cooled, the cooling oceans would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, cooling the earth further. And when the earth warmed, carbon dioxide would be released by the warming oceans, warming the earth further. Ice cores revealed that carbon dioxide had indeed risen and fallen in this manner during previous glaciations. Carbon dioxide now made its appearance as a climate change amplifier, leveraging the Milankovitch insolation variations to produce a considerable effect.

There were other causes of concern. Milankovitch did not include another cycle, which is the inclination of the earth's orbit to the plane of the solar system. This is another 100,000 year cycle. And why did a 41,000 year cycle change to a 100,000 year cycle about three-quarters of a million years ago?

Apart from the question of the agreement of the predictions of the cycle with past glaciations, there was also the matter of future glaciations. Previous interglacials had only lasted a few thousand years. How long would our present-day interglacial continue? In 1966, Emiliani predicted a new glaciation would "begin in a few thousand years". A decade later, Kukla thought that the next ice age was "due very soon", perhaps even beginning within a century or so. The current view, using the latest models seems to be that:


So the current view is that our modern interglacial has another 60,000 years to run, and we're still near the beginning of it.

But, now that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide had been invoked to explain how the small variations in insolation predicted by Milankovitch had been amplified to produce a sequence of ice ages and interglacials, carbon dioxide took on a new life of its own. If natural cycles of warming and cooling could be thus amplified, then the same would surely happen with the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human industry. The threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was born.

What's to be made of it all? The most obvious point is that climate science has been clearly been undergoing rapid development over the past century, and this is continuing. It's not a settled science. For about 40 years Milankovitch was ignored, but new data from the sea bed brought his rehabilitation. A new ice age was then felt to be imminent. But now the carbon dioxide amplifier which was invoked to make his theory work has elbowed aside its parent, and Milankovitch has, so to speak, been returned to the gulag.

But now that we know that climate scientists have been busy "hiding the decline", and abolishing the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, one has to wonder whether Milankovitch may also have been secretly buried for the exact same reason. After all, what is more inconvenient to the global warming hypothesis than a global cooling hypothesis which has, as we now know, led some experts to predict the return of ice age conditions within a century or so? When Global Climate Models (GCMs) can have their sensitivity adjusted to conform to the expectations of researchers, what is to stop the sensitivity of Milankovitch prediction models having their sensitivity cranked upwards or downwards to conform to the same expectations? And do the latest Milankovitch prediction models have the currently-fashionable AGW hypothesis built into them? Is that why the current interglacial is now expected to last another 60,000 years - 60,000 years longer than any previous one?

The worst of it all is that, as the climate debate ebbs and flows, the entire global political establshment is now in lockstep with it, and busily issuing decrees to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to ward off the global warming predicted by the current 'settled' science. But in a decade or so, it's perfectly possible that some new hypothesis will have emerged, reversing previous advice. Governments now act as amplifiers of the fragile climate science consensus in much the way that carbon dioxide is supposed to amplify the Milankovitch cycles. They're blowing hot at the moment, but could well start blowing cold any time, as climate fashion changes yet again.

But all is not lost. It may be possible to predict when the next flip in the political climate will take place. Milankovitch first enjoyed a brief burst of interest in the 1930s, and then was largely ignored for the next 40 years until the 1970s, when his theory enjoyed a brief revival, before being asphyxiated by carbon dioxide for the next 40 years. That's a 40-year cycle of waxing and waning interest. This being climate science, and all about extending trends into the future, we may confidently use this 40 year cycle to predict the return of Milankovitch's star sometime in the 2010s. In addition, the sun no longer seems to have any sunspots, which is historically correlated with periods of cold. And, above all, it's darn cold in Devon this afternoon.

I've always been puzzled why people believe different things. Different things than I believe. And what I believe always strikes me as being the epitome of good sense. It always does. To me, leastways.

Way back in my childhood, we used to come out of church on a Sunday morning, and mill around saying hello and how are you to the other parishioners, and then step out onto the village green to walk or cycle or drive home. Nothing odd about that. Except that while we were doing that, exactly the same thing was happening on the other side of that Sussex village green, outside another church. Yet the two congregations never met or mixed. They never even said hello to each other. They never said anything at all to each other.

One day I asked my mother who they were, those people on the other side of the green. And she said, "That's the Church of England." And I said, "But aren't we English too?" And my mother said, "Well, yes, we are English. But we believe different things than they do." She didn't go into it any further. So I was left thinking that the protestants on the other side of the green maybe thought that murder was okay, or something. I don't think my mother really knew what they believed, because she never spelled it out. And I didn't really know what I, on my side of the green, was supposed to believe either.

Years later, I gradually found out that the teachings of the Church of England were almost exactly the same the teachings of the Catholic church on my side of the green. They both worshipped the same God, who was incarnated (made flesh) in Jesus Christ, and they both read pretty much the same Bible, and adhered to the same Ten Commandments. The differences between the two churches were fractional. The Protestants didn't believe in the final authority of the Catholic Pope in Rome. And they didn't believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation whereby the communion bread was supposed to actually turn into the body and blood of Christ at some point in the ceremony of the mass. And there were a few other itsy-bitsy points of disagreement. As best I could make out, Catholics and Protestants believed in 99.99% the same things, but the 0.01% that they disagreed over had made for 500 years of religious conflict and persecution and murder.

But my trouble was that I didn't believe any of it. Not really. The first problem I had was with this God thing. What and where was this God? And why should anyone worship him? And why was there only one god? The Greeks and the Romans and Egyptians had hundreds of the buggers. And what on earth was meant by incarnation? And who had written the Bible? And what did the first commandment really mean? And, for that matter, the second one? And transubstantiation was an utterly mind-boggling notion. I wasn't in the least bit surprised that protestants couldn't stomach that particular idea.

I never got any answers to any of my questions. I could never make any sense of the myriad doctrines that I was supposed to believe in, but couldn't believe in. And so once I'd passed beyond the jurisdiction of my mother and the church, I ceased to believe in all the doctrines that I'd never really believed in the first place. Which was an extremely easy thing to do.

But I did come up with my own theory of transubstantiation. And that was that, when the priest ate the bread and wine, it got converted from being bread and wine into his own flesh and blood. After being digested, that is. As I saw it, when Jesus said, "This is my body. This is my blood," all he was trying to point out was that when he ate and drank these things they were transmuted - transubstantiated - into his own flesh and blood. And that's exactly what you'll find in any modern biochemistry or biology textbook. What actually happens, chemists have discovered, is that the bread and wine are torn apart into their constituent amino acids and sugars and starches and stuff, and these are then used as the building blocks to build muscles and bones and blood vessels and blood. Jesus was pointing out the bleeding obvious, and not some sort of profoundly mysterious magical process. Well, at least, I hope he was. But when he was pointing it out, it perhaps wasn't as bleeding obvious as it is now. And is it bleeding obvious even now? How many people know what happens inside them when they eat a packet of crisps and wash it down with a pint of wifebeater?

I've never encountered my theory of transubstantiation anywhere. Nobody much discusses that theological problem these days anyway. And I figure that if the Pope ever found out what I thought about it, he'd declare me to be a heretic needing to be burned at the stake or something. Like Galileo. Except that Galileo wasn't burned at the stake.

But that was 50 years ago. These days, the Church on the other side of the metaphorical green teaches the doctrine that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the entire planet, and killing us all, and the church on my side of the green reckons that carbon dioxide is benign stuff that helps plants to grow, and there's nothing to worry about at all. And the church on the other side is also the church of antismokers who say that smoking - and even passive smoking - causes lung cancer. It's the First Church of Poison Gas. Of toxic CO2 and ETS. And the doctrine of passive smoking must be a doctrine at least as recondite as transubstantiation.

Yet once again it's maybe just a matter of simple chemistry and physics and biology, just like with the transubstantiation business. In time, we'll maybe get to understand exactly how carbon dioxide interacts with sunlight to warm (or not warm) our little spinning planet. But right now we don't really know. Nor do we really know what causes lung cancer. Some of us are Catholics about these matters, believing what our current religious authorities - doctors and climate scientists - tell us, and some of us are Protestants who trust our own judgment, and we seem to be approaching another religious war over it all, just like 500 years ago.

And perhaps religious beliefs are the beliefs that people have which they think are plausible for one reason or other, but which they can't fully justify rationally. They are beliefs that are glued together with faith. They are incomplete buildings held up by timber props of faith until substantial pillars of knowledge replace them. And sometimes those props are never replaced. Religious conflicts end when we finally replace the wooden props of belief with stone pillars of understanding. Yet even the stone pillars fall down.

We like to think that these days we're rational and scientific and enlightened in ways that people who lived only a few centuries ago were not. But we're not really much more enlightened than they were. It's sheer vanity to suppose that we are. We laugh at their silly beliefs, but we can't see that we ourselves believe any number of equally mad things

In Sir Richard Doll's Times obituary, of his first paper - the London Hospitals study - it is reported that:


A few days back Christopher Snowdon put up a chart showing that US oil production strongly correlated with rock music quality during the second half of the 20th century. Another great example of cause and effect. I guess that as more oil was produced, and America got wealthier, it produced more quality rock music celebrating that wealth. Something like that. It's obvious really. I'm surprised that I hadn't seen it myself.

And now today Letters From A Tory has - perhaps inadvertently - highlighted another one.


Clear relationship! That's shorthand for 'causal connection', of course. Clear relationship. Correlation. Causation. All the same thing.

That set me thinking about my own personal history of road accidents. The first one was when I came off my motorbike on the Thames Embankment in London about 35 years ago. I was annoyed at being sent on a futile, wasted journey across London. It rained while I was on my way back, and the roads became covered with a treacherous film of slime, and the bike skidded from under me when I angrily braked too hard. I didn't have a drink before. But I had one shortly afterwards.

Then there was the time, 10 years later, when I was driving a van, turning onto a road outside a pub car park, and the driver door swung open into the oncoming traffic, and as I reached out to close it, I forgot to take my foot off the gas pedal. The van continued turning, mounted the pavement and knocked down a lamp post. I must have drunk a whole half pint of beer just before that one.

And then there was the time I was driving my father back to hospital after a home visit. He'd had a stroke which had left him as strong as an ox, but mentally handicapped and unable to speak. Once he realised that he was going to be taken back to the hospital, he refused to get into the car. It took ages to induce him to get in. We'd hardly got a few hundred yards than he started to try to open the passenger door and get out. I went round a corner and clipped the front of a car emerging from a gate. I must've had a lunchtime glass of wine about an hour before that one.

The most bizarre one came after I'd been playing a Formula 1 Grand Prix computer game all day. This involved putting your foot down on the long curving straights, and then braking hard and turning sharply when you arrived at the next hairpin. After playing this all day, I jumped into my Mini to go buy something, and on the way back I found myself driving like I was in a F1 Grand Prix race. Arriving at a roundabout, I braked hard and turned the wheel over - and drove across the grass in the middle of roundabout. A few hundred yards later I spun the car through 90 degrees coming into another corner. And I hadn't touched a drop.

Of those four accidents, I put the first down to a combination of road conditions and being angry. And the second to a faulty door catch and my inexperience as a driver. And the third to the stress and distraction of my father in the car. And the last to having somehow had my driving brain temporarily rewired while playing a computer game. None were caused by alcohol. Alcohol was hardly a player at all.

And I've never had an accident driving while drunk. Not that I've ever driven while really totally plastered. But I'm sure I've been over the legal limit plenty of times. In my experience I drive perfectly well, technically, when I'm under the influence. I'm in control of the car. But I tend to get a bit headstrong. I'll take corners faster. I'll accelerate and brake harder. I'll throw the car around a bit. Driving seems too easy when I'm feeling a bit merry. And that seems to be the real danger: overconfidence.

When I drive I like to devote my whole attention to the road ahead. I hardly ever even play the radio. I don't like to even talk. And I like to be ice cool. Any distraction, and I drive worse. If anything is on my mind, and I'm worried or angry, I drive less well. Same if I'm tired or haven't slept well. Or if I'm driving an unfamiliar car whose handling I haven't figured out. It takes me months to get to know a new car.

In my personal experience, the real perils of driving arise when something takes my attention off the road ahead. It can be something that actually happens, like someone talking, or dropping something. Or it can just be something I'm thinking about, angrily or worriedly. If my attention is diverted for just a second or two, I can easily end up off the road.

But alcohol doesn't distract my attention. I think it slows up my reactions slightly. And it makes me a bit overconfident. But of itself that's not enough, in my view, to make me a menace as a drunk driver. There has to be something else to distract me if I'm going to end up wrapped around a tree.

But then, I've never driven a car with half of bottle of whisky inside me. So I don't actually know. Maybe I'll try it sometime.

I'm beginning to think tonight that maybe drink doesn't cause car accidents, but is simply a contributory factor. And maybe quite a small one. Far less than it's made out to be. And I already don't think that carbon dioxide causes global warming. It's just a contributory factor. And probably quite a small one. (I'm not even sure these days that the planet has been warming, given the poverty of the raw data, and the fact that it gets adjusted.) And I don't think smoking causes lung cancer. It looks more and more like a contributory factor. And maybe quite a small one.

It seems to be the besetting sin of our age to take small contributory factors and promote them to be prime causes. The strongest correlation points to the cause. Correlation is causation. The car crash happened because the driver was drunk. He got lung cancer because he smoked. The planet has been warming because CO2 levels have been rising. They are obvious candidates as causal agents, like prime suspects in a murder case. So much, in fact, that the police are so convinced that they will sometimes suppress counter-evidence in order to secure a conviction. Or climate scientists are so convinced that they will try to suppress sceptical points of view.

But I still reckon that US oil production was what made for all that great rock music of the 1960s. It's an open-and-shut case. It's obvious really.

As the Climategate scandal has broken on the internet over the past couple of weeks or so, and there've been howls of rage at the non-coverage of it by the mainstream media, I thought I'd take a look at the American left blogosphere to see how it was playing there. I visited the Dailykos and Americablog and Digby to find out. I found that they're paying no attention to it at all. I found one thread on Kos that mentioned it, and read the comments, and was interested that quite a few commenters were rather disturbed by it. They were being referred, rather dismissively, to a page which listed 'the 10 greatest lies about climate change', with each lie dealt with a perfunctory few words. Visitors were asked to select which they thought was the greatest lie.

So, if anyone's still complaining about the coverage given by the BBC to Climategate (and I'm not), then they they might be interested to know that the coverage of Climategate in the US left wing blogosphere is almost exactly zero. They know it's happening, but they're not talking about it. It's a non-event.

On Americablog, in just about the only reference I managed to find about it, I was directed to Wunderblog, and a long dismissal of Manufactured Doubt by tobacco companies, asbestos and CFC manufacturers, and climate change denialists. It ended up saying:


Now, you might ask how it was that I knew where to go to discover what American left wing blogs are saying. And the answer is that 5 years or so ago, I spent a lot of time reading them. Back then I was (as I still am) an opponent of the Iraq war, and if you were such an opponent that was the place to find out the latest news, which - as ever - wasn't being covered by the mainstream media.

So I was back in familiar territory, reading these blogs. I recognised names that I'd not read in years. I was rather pleased to see that they were all still going, and still churning out words. I felt a pang of something like homesickness. Americablog was my favourite blog, for it's crisp and incisive news comments. Kos was also a favourite, as the biggest blog in America, and almost an empire in itself. Digby for the thoughtfulness of Digby himself.

So why did I stop reading them? Well, in part it was because public opinion swung heavily against the Iraq war as people found out that there weren't any WMDs and they'd been lied into war. The job was done. But it was more than that.

One day I started noticing that Americablog was beginning to carry strongly approving reports on smoking bans being imposed here and there around the world. I was a bit disturbed by this. Why did Americablog approve, I asked in the comments. The answer was delivered by Americablog's proprietor, John Aravosis. "Your right to smoke stops at my nose", he declared. Smokers, he went on, should engage in their filthy activity [he didn't actually call it that, but it was the implication] in the privacy of their own homes, and nowhere else. I wasn't the only commenter who protested. There were several others. They all got equally short shrift.

Now, one of the things about this response that really shocked me was that I knew that John Aravosis was a gay activist. What was an openly gay activist, pursuing equal rights for gays, doing demanding that smokers be driven into their own closets, and that smokers be made into pariahs a bit like, well ... gays? Couldn't he see what he was doing? And the answer, was no, he couldn't.

At that point my good opinion of John Aravosis and Americablog completely collapsed. He just wanted his own gay lifestyle recognised and honoured. But no way was he going to extend the same rights to filthy smokers like me. He had rights, and smokers had no rights. He was quite happy to see their rights removed, and smokers driven into the closet that gays like him were just emerging from.

Rather bewildered, I went over to the Dailykos to try to find out what the view there was. And there I discovered that Kos himself was also a virulent antismoker. Oh, dear. So I turned to Digby. Digby was much more sympathetic, but said that he himself was an ex-smoker who'd taken about a decade to kick the habit.

I'd thought I was among liberal, open-minded, accepting sorts of kindred spirits. And I'd now found out that I wasn't. They might have been 'liberal' about all sorts of things, including smoking cannabis, but they didn't want to know cigarette smokers. They didn't even want to think about them.

My exit from the US left wing blogosphere came the very next day. Overnight, any sense of mine that these people were open-minded, liberal kinds of people evaporated. They were simply people with their own list of approved and disapproved behaviours. Being black or gay was approved. Smoking tobacco was not. These people were as intolerant as the Ku Klux Klan. They were just intolerant and bigoted in an opposite sense. They were the mirror image.

I still find it a bit odd that I'm now regarded as a Libertarian and slightly Right Wing (see right margin). I'm not at all sure that I'm either. But these days it's mostly the Libertarian bloggers who speak the most sense to me. I can understand the rage of the Devil about all sorts of things, because I feel much the same way myself.

But have I changed? I don't really think I've changed very much. All that's happened over the past few years is that the wheel of fortune has turned, and I've found myself belonging to a newly-persecuted minority: smokers. There is an evil eye, it seems, much like the one above Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, which is directed first upon one set of people - Jews, blacks, gays - and then upon another - smokers, drinkers, fat people. The real moral lesson - don't persecute people for what they are - has not been learned. The righteous are proud of their record of protest against the persecution of blacks and gays and lesbians, but are completely blind to the wholly new persecution they have launched against smokers and drinkers and all the rest. They just can't see that refusing any place for smokers in pubs is exactly the same as refusing places for blacks on buses in Montgomery, Alabama.

What starts out as a radical cause becomes, a few decades later, the established orthodoxy. The street protester becomes a cabinet minister. The radical Left, once established in power, become the New Right (and also the New Righteous). The portly cabinet minister in his limousine still thinks of himself as a young firebrand, and remembers his days marching on the streets, and his nights in prison, but he is no such thing any longer. His previously radical views have become near-universal norms that must be protected and conserved. He has become a conservative of a sort, if not exactly like his conservative father. No longer a protester himself, he instead himself orders police to arrest protesters, whom he invariably identifies as rightwingers, whatever their cause.

The Right, in any age, might be said to be whatever protects and upholds the established order, whatever that happens to be. And the Left is whatever is perpetually trying to subvert and overthrow the same established orthodoxy, whose iniquities they perceive with singular clarity. Because any established order always contains iniquities The natural leftist is a critic of orthodoxy. While the natural rightist is an admirer and upholder of the same orthodoxy.

The doctrine of global warming is a newly established orthodoxy, adopted by presidents and prime ministers, broadcast on the mainstream media, and preached from pulpits. What could be more established and orthodox than global warming? And the new conservatives are the supporters of this new conservative orthodoxy. It's about conserving the earth, no less, isn't it? And the new radicals are the sceptics and critics of this new orthodoxy. 50 years ago those radicals would have been defiantly smoking marijuana as a symbol of their radicalism. Now they defiantly smoke tobacco for the exact same reason. And I've had the fortune (or misfortune) to have been a radical of both kinds.

The wheel of fortune spins, and the evil eye moves on.

This blog runs on anger. I wake up angry every day. Angry about the smoking ban. It's an anger that never goes away. Over my first mug of tea, I'm newly shocked every morning at the sheer vileness of the ban, and I'm already beginning to mutter to myself.

"The bastards. The filthy bastards."

Anger is something rather new in my life. I've met angry people before, and wondered what was eating them. Now that I've become an angry man myself, I have a much better idea.

I don't like anger, but I think it's better than despair. And I think that people do despair in the face of this ban, as it crushes them, crushes their lives, crushes their society, crushes their world. And people can be consumed by despair, and spiral downward into depression. And I imagine that a lot of people have done so over the past few years.

Not me, though. Occasionally I feel a bit down. But mostly what I feel is a slow, simmering anger. The anger is a kind of fire. Despair and depression would correspond with the fire going out, the cigarette being finally stubbed out, and me giving up smoking. Or just Giving Up. It's no accident that people talk about 'giving up smoking'. Take away the 'smoking' and anyone who's talking about 'giving up smoking' is really talking about 'giving up'. Surrendering. Coming out of their slit trench with their arms raised, and throwing their weapons to the ground. An ex-smoker, forced to give up smoking, is like a defeated soldier who has surrendered to superior forces. And perhaps if anyone wants to explore the psychology of such ex-smokers, that would be a good start point.

But if one danger with any fire is that it will go out, the opposite danger is that it will get bigger and bigger, and hotter and hotter, and consume everything in a firestorm that stretches from horizon to horizon. Some days I've been so consumed with anger that I've just sat shaking with rage all day. And when I'm angry my heart pounds and my head buzzes and I can feel the blood pumping through my veins, to the point where I can easily imagine that I'll burst a blood vessel or have a heart attack or something. And when, weeks later, they found my cold body slumped head on keyboard, dead cigarette between my fingers, they'd call it a 'smoking-related death', of course. Except it wouldn't be. It would be an anger-related death. These days I sometimes wonder whether many people who have strokes and heart attacks are people who died enraged. An old man is trying to open a tin, and he can't do it, and he fills up with frustrated rage, and - pop - it's too much for his old, wheezy blood system like a rush of hot water is too much for ancient radiators in a elderly central heating system. If he'd been a serene old man, he might have lived to be 100. But he wasn't. If I was to study strokes and heart attacks, I think that's where I'd start.

In between going out and burning out of control, fire is useful. The little flame on my cigarette lighter is an example of a useful flame. The smouldering tip of my cigarette is another useful fire. The succession of explosions in the cylinders of my car as I drive along in it is another kind of useful fire. The ignition of gunpowder in a pistol cartridge is another. The list of useful fires is endless. Modern civilisation has harnessed all sorts of useful fires. And the antis want to put them all out. Antismokers and anti-global-warming zealots seem to share a single hatred: a hatred of fire.

But controlled anger, like controlled fire, may also be something useful, something creative. What I've been feeling most of the time is useless anger. It's anger which isn't being set to work to do something productive

Anger tends towards violence. I've probably smashed more things over the past couple of years than I have in my entire life. It's useless violence. But it's only been a pallid reflection of all the violence that I've imagined. Violence that has found its expression on these pages, as when I imagined Sir Liam Donaldson being led out into the garden of his house, and hanged from his own apple tree. And this is how we culturally cope with anger - through imagination. Our movies and books are full up with sex and violence, but it's all entirely imaginary. It's impermissible to actually hang Sir Liam Donaldson from his apple tree, but it's not impermissible to imagine doing so. Or not yet. After all, I'm not really quite sure that I actually want to hang him. I might prefer to burn him.

Anger and violence are probably best expressed fictionally, where nobody actually gets hurt. I've asked this question before elsewhere, but which was the most productive George Orwell: the imaginative one who wrote Animal Farm and 1984, or the real one who fired off rifles in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War? Which one is remembered? Which one exerted greatest influence? It's a question that Orwell probably asked himself, but didn't know the answer to. But we know. 60 or 70 years later, we know that it was Orwell the imaginative writer who continues to exert a powerful influence, to the point that we even describe our dystopian world as 'Orwellian'.

So I've been turning over the idea of writing some sort of novel in which my anger finds fictional expression in ways that it cannot licitly do so in actuality. I've begun to construct an imaginary dystopia, much like our own, in which a cast of characters enacts all the things that I've imagined doing, and in which the consequences and morality of it all is explored. It looks like a good way of exploring anger. A plot for the book has begun to form, as well as the cast of characters, and a number of scenes of spectacular violence. And as I write it, I'm thinking of publishing it chapter by chapter on this blog. After all, I figure that no publisher would touch it. It would 'send the wrong message'. Very much so.

It wouldn't replace the blog. It would just get slotted into the blog with all the other posts. And readers could suggest plot developments. Or demand revisions. Would it be set in the present day or the past or the future? Would it be placed in Britain or America or Europe or nowhere? Would it be a romance or a thriller or a comedy? I don't know.

But I've not written fiction before. Or very little. I don't know how to work with a cast of characters. When I first learned to write, not long after I'd learned to read, I started writing a long set of stories about a bunch of animals. I'd first read about them in some children's book, and was so enthralled with them that I was terribly disappointed to get to the end of the book. So I carried on writing further books myself, using the original cast of characters. I wrote about 10 of them. All scrawled in school exercise books. And illustrated. And horrifically violent. The main characters were two cats. One was called Twinkle, and the other one was Captain Jake. It was a bit like Animal Farm with its Snowdrop and Napoleon. And it was dreadful stuff. The fun was had writing it, not reading it.

I have three main characters. Vin and Marta and Steve. The names came to me one day. In the opening scene they are sitting together on by a river, talking and drinking cans of beer and smoking cigarettes in the sun. I can see the scene extraordinarily clearly, as if it was a memory of mine, even though it isn't. But I know almost nothing about them. Who are they? I only know something about what they're going to do. As I examine the scene, I look for clues. From Marta's miniskirt, I can guess that it's set in the present, and that she'd quite young. But it could be anywhere in the world.

How on earth do people write novels? Is this a way to start writing a novel?

For the past two weeks the internet has been awash with the Climategate controversy, but the mainstream media haven't seemed to want to know about it, just reporting it as the theft of a few unimportant emails. So I was astonished earlier this evening, listening to BBC Radio 4 PM, to find it leading with the Climategate story, and how Saudi Arabia was saying that no agreement could be reached at Copenhagen in the light of these revelations. There followed quite a long report featuring a couple of the BBC staffers, Harrabin and Black, who told the story pretty straight, if managing to play down the influence of the revelations on the science.

Also interviewed was Professor Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, who said that he'd asked Sir Muir Russell, recently-retired Vice Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, to head an enquiry. Asked by PM's Eddy Mair when he first learned of the matter, he replied, "The 18th" and then went on to say, rather hesitantly, that the story broke two or three days later. That's odd, because 'FOIA' posted a message on the Air Vent on 17 November, and that's when the story first broke on the internet. I learned about it on the 19th when it appeared on WUWT, and wrote about it a couple of days later. Similar questions were raised about Professor Phil Jones of the UEA Hadley Climate Research Centre when he spoke about the hack on 19 November and said (from memory) that he'd only just found out.

Also a bit odd was hearing Eddy Mair say that the emails had been generating great controversy. Well, yes, they had - but not on the BBC. The question Eddie Mair asked of Acton could equally have been asked of Eddy Mair. When did he first hear about the controversy?

I suppose that once the Saudis had raised the matter of the hacked emails, and the UEA had announced an enquiry, the BBC could no longer sit on the story. Or maybe it's right that it should have held back from reporting the internet furore rather than plunge in immediately. It's history now, because this story is now well and truly mainstream. But the sense remains that the BBC would rather that the story had just gone away.

Elsewhere, on the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger perceives the threat the scandal poses not just to climate science, but to the reputation of science as a whole.


Quite so. There's too much lousy science around these days. And once the lid has been ripped off the corrupt climate science process, perhaps people will start to notice some of the equally corrupt science that underpins the science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke, and indeed all antismoking science, which has been used to justify imposing by law an equally vast reordering of human behaviour in their social lives, as smokers have been expelled from bars and restaurants all round the world. And that's not something the world has been about to undertake, but which it is currently undertaking right now.

POSTSCRIPT: If the BBC has begun to rather unwillingly report Climategate, the same doesn't seem to be true in the USA.

A day or so back Tom Harris quoted from a Labour List piece by Michael Merrick - Culture clash: how Labour can look to reconnect with the poor -, wondering why people were deserting Labour and what could be done to get them back.



He identifies the problem as a clash of cultures:


So there all these ordinary working people who feel culturally dispossessed, and nobody in the Labour party will listen to them. It's not just about immigration that they're not listened to, but also school/parental discipline, capital punishment, patriotism, euro-scepticism, and morality. And the reason that nobody will listen to them is because the Labour party has abandoned its traditional roots for a liberal (that'll be 'liberal' in the American sense, and not in the least bit 'liberal' in the traditional English sense) ideology which grew up in the aftermath of the 1960s.

I won't disagree with a word of that. I think it's almost exactly right. The Labour party has been taken over by latte Guardianistas and champagne socialists who have little or nothing - and want little or nothing - to do with the working men having a beer inside (and a cigarette outside) a traditional English pub, and who voted Labour into office 12 years ago. A cultural war has been launched by the New Labour establishment upon the Old Labour voters they're supposed to represent.

But as I read the piece, it was the smoking ban that came sharply to mind. For what better exemplifies that cultural war than the smoking ban? The smoking ban has been the very spearhead of that cultural war. Yet it wasn't mentioned at all by Merrick. But then, the smoking ban is never mentioned anywhere ever. Immigration? That's a genuine, valid issue. The EU? That's another one. Schools? Another biggie. The health service? Certainly. But the smoking ban? Ha, ha. You must be joking. You cannot be serious. The smoking ban is trivial by comparison with the weighty issues of immigration, the EU, housing, education, healthcare, and so on.

But is it?

I'm single, childless, in good health, not quite penniless, and I live out in the Devon countryside. So my interest in schools and education is approximately zero. And my interest in hospitals and healthcare not much greater. And my concern with immigration is nearly zilch. And my interest in the EU is pretty minimal as well (yesterday excepted). None of these things have much of a real, tangible impact upon me. My interest in them is abstract. In order to think about them I have to ask myself: What if I had children? What if I was unwell? What if I lived in Bradford? What if the EU did this or that?

But the smoking ban has had a colossal impact on me. It's estranged me from my local pub and its little community. It's taken away a sense of belonging. It's made me feel like a stranger in my own country. It's made everyday life extraordinarily uncomfortable, as I look for places where I might enjoy a smoke. It's cut me off from friends who no longer go to the unwelcoming pubs. It's divided me from non-smoking friends in ways I never was before. It's bringing me a gradually deepening isolation and alienation. In my entire life I've never known anything so profoundly cruel and divisive - and so utterly unnecessary.

In my life, the EU doesn't matter much. Nor does education, healthcare, or immigration. In my life, the smoking ban matters more than all of them put together. What can the EU do to me? Take away my country and its traditions? The smoking ban already has already done that. What can immigration do to me? Fill up the country with aliens and strangers who usurp my place? The smoking ban has already done that too, as I sit outside banished from my pub. What does it matter to me what becomes of hospitals and healthcare? As a smoker I'm likely to be denied any access to them anyway. What concern should I have for education and morality, when schools are places where children are taught intolerance for smokers (and little else as far as I can see)?

The smoking ban gave me a whole set of problems where there weren't any problems before. And it hasn't even stopped me smoking, like it was supposed to. Nor even reduced it in the slightest. In fact it's made me determined to carry on smoking regardless. It's made me angry, and when I'm angry I smoke more, not less.

And the smoking ban has made me not only angry but also increasingly intolerant. Why should I continue to be tolerant now that I am no longer tolerated? Is intolerance a one-way street, so that only antismoking bigots are allowed to practise and promote intolerance, while smokers must suffer in silence? No, of course it isn't. The intolerance of antismokers for me results in my reciprocal intolerance for them. And official state-sponsored intolerance of smokers has made me intolerant of the state and of officialdom in all its forms. And particularly this parliament and the MPs that voted for the smoking ban that's made my life so hard for me. And the EU too, which just looks like another layer of crushing bureaucracy. In fact the smoking ban has made me more intolerant of absolutely everything. I don't have any genuine immigration problem in my life here in rural Devon, but I'm less tolerant of it anyway. And I'm markedly less tolerant of Islam, even if it's another personal non-problem. The health service and the medical profession? Don't talk to me about that crew of rabid antismokers, or I'll burst a blood vessel.

So if anyone came and asked me what I thought about immigration, Islam, the health service, the EU, the UK parliament, I'd come out with markedly more intolerant and hawkish views than I would have only 3 years ago, when I was a tolerant Lib-Demy sort of person. But it wouldn't be because I had a real problem with any of them, but because the smoking ban has made me into a generally far more intolerant person than I once was. But nobody will ask me what I feel about the smoking ban. People with clipboards will ask me my views on immigration, Islam, the EU, and all the rest of it, because those are regarded as genuine issues of concern. But the smoking ban is not regarded as something that merits equivalent attention. It's supposed to be just a successful public health measure, which everyone loves, particularly smokers.

And everyone knows that they're not supposed to mention the smoking ban. It's supposed to be a trivial non-issue. Not as important as real, bread-and-butter issues like immigration and the EU. People don't feel they're allowed to talk about the ban. Asking his constituents about immigration, Tom Harris reported that


Why do people feel they need, like Corporal Jones in Dad's Army, 'permission to speak'? Because everybody knows what they're supposed to think. They're told every day by the righteous on TV and radio and in newspapers. And while they don't have permission to speak freely, they'll just parrot what they've been told they should think, rather than what they actually think. And if they think that they now have permission to say what they feel about immigration, that's because a few politicians (mostly BNP) have been brave enough to drag it into the public arena of debate, and in so doing 'permitted' everyone else to speak their minds.

But nobody has permission to speak about the smoking ban. That remains a no-no. No politician has managed to haul that one into the public discourse as a serious issue in its own right. Any politician who tried would probably get howled down by irate health lobbyists and doctors, much like climate change sceptics today. And Michael Merrick didn't mention it either, although he must know about that particular elephant in the room.

And yet my own guess is that the smoking ban has had by far the greatest cultural impact upon Britain over the past 3 years than anything else. It's been during that time that UKIP and the BNP (both of which are against the smoking ban) have begun to make significant electoral progress. It's been during that time that the public esteem for MPs (who voted for the ban) has collapsed. And EU scepticism has continued to mount. And respect for authorities has plunged.

One day people will get 'permission to speak' about the smoking ban, and say what they really feel rather than what they're supposed to feel. And I bet there'll be an eruption of protest at it. All sorts of horror stories will be told. And I also bet that it will be found that, just like with me, anger at MPs' expenses and the EU and immigration and everything else will turn out very often to simply be 'impermissible' anger at the smoking ban redirected at 'permissible' targets. And maybe then politicians and pundits and media will finally wake up and realise what how enormously socially and culturally destructive the smoking ban has truly been.

I was reading Captain Ranty's Theft Report yesterday. He wrote that as of midnight, as the new EU comes into being, Britons will lose a whole raft of ancient rights. Habeas Corpus, which protects against the state locking people up without any justification. Trial by jury. Innocence until proven guilty. British sovereignty. And democracy.

Those were the only five items that Captain Ranty mentioned, having got too depressed to add the further fifteen or twenty items he'd intended to add to the list of lost rights. But he did add that, after midnight, it became a crime to criticise the EU.

You'd think the govmint would have at least shoved a flyer through into every letterbox in the country telling people that something so momentous was going to happen. The local rubbish collectors round here have the courtesy to tell people when their collection days change over Xmas and the New Year.

But I really have no idea at all whether Captain Ranty is right about this or not. I do know that there are plenty of people who agree with him, however. But I also know that there are people on the pro-EU side of the fence who say it's all bunkum, and there's nothing to worry about at all, and Britain will carry on being the same old Britain it always has been, and the fears of likes of Captain Ranty are simply their private nightmares.

But there's hardly any debate about it. I can't remember the last time I saw or heard any debate or discussion about the EU in the media. It's another one of those public discussions which haven't been happening. Like any public discussion of the smoking ban. That doesn't happen. Or any open discussion of climate change scepticism. That doesn't happen either. There are all sorts of public debates that never happen. And in the absence of public debate, with advocates and critics making their cases, it's very difficult for people to form opinions, to be swayed one way or the other.

For the most part, I've mostly been pro-EU in a hazy sort of optimistic way. I like the idea of a family of trading nations with a set of formal European institutions which allow them to sort out their differences through a process of law rather than through a process of war. But by a happy family of nations I didn't mean a European superstate into which European states would be subsumed, and centrally directed in every respect. Is the EU which came into existence at midnight a centralised superstate or a family of nations? I have no idea. Some people say it's the former. Others say it's the latter. And I don't know who is right.

The one thing that I have been watching the EU for is any sign of a Europe-wide smoking ban coming out of Brussels. So far there hasn't been one. But the EU is as much a nest of antismoking bigots as anywhere else, and they're actively discussing such a ban. The day that the EU enacts such a smoking ban is the day I turn against the EU, even if it's the happy-family-of-nations EU of which I approve.

But time will tell. Time will tell if there is to be a Europe-wide smoking ban. And time will tell whether at midnight we lost habeas corpus, trial by jury, innocent until proved guilty, national sovereignty, and democracy. I'll be keeping an ear open from now on for mentions in the media of habeas corpus and jury trials. Or a country called Britain and a county called Yorkshire. And I'll be interested to see whether we have a General Election next year. If I don't hear anything about any of them, I'll be able to guess why.

In the meanwhile, I will say this: that if we have lost all these things, then nobody consulted me about it. And if they had, I would have said I wanted to keep the traditional legal and political structures that have evolved over many centuries in Britain, and which I have no doubt have served to make this country a happy place to live. And if all these things have been taken away, without my consent, and indeed without my knowledge either, I see no reason whatsoever why I should abide by any new arrangements that have been put in place of them. Why on earth should I? I owe nothing to Europe. I owe it no allegiance. Nor does anyone else. The British people weren't consulted either.

So, if at midnight the protection of habeas corpus disappeared, then fuck the EU.

And if trial by jury also vanished, then fuck the EU again.

And if innocence until proven guilty became obsolete, then fuck the EU sideways.

And if national sovereignty evaporated at midnight, then fuck the EU up its arse.

And if democracy ended at midnight, then fuck the EU up its arse sideways with a chainsaw.

There. I think that should count as 'criticism of the EU' which Captain Ranty said would have become illegal at the stroke of midnight. I look forward to the arrival of Eurocop thought polizei in the morning. And if Frank Davis' blog disappears or falls silent, you'll know why. And so, most probably, will I.

Captain Ranty also predicted bloodshed and death and running battles on the streets. And, if we have indeed lost all these ancient rights tonight, then he's quite right. That's what will happen. When the people wake up to what he tells us has happened, they will take back their country. And they will hang every single last one of those people who did this to them.

And if it hasn't happened, they won't.

And if it hasn't happened, but in the next few years the EU introduces a Europe-wide smoking ban that overrides local regional laws, then I will say: Fuck The EU. Screw the Ode to Joy. And Bugger the EU flag.

And if none of these things happens, then please carry on as happily as before.

N.B. This was posted at 00:02 1 December 2009

Hat tip to Leg-Iron. My, my. Doctors are trying to clamber aboard the global warming bandwagon. The Climate and Health Council has said that GPs should offer climate change advice to patients.


Controversial is it? I'm sure that the medical establishment is all aboard for this one. Sounds right up their street. All a GP has to do after he's checked his patients' smoking and drinking and obesity status is ask a few more questions and give out some medical advice. Thinking of flying to Spain for a holiday? Don't. Planning to buy a new car? Don't. Walk instead. Walking is good for you. Wondering whether to install an improved central heating system? Don't. Put on more clothes instead. Shivering is good for you. Doctor's orders.

I did a bit of digging to find out what the health impacts of global warming were supposed to be. And turned up this scenario calculated using the climate model from the Hadley Centre (heard of them recently?) in 2002. By 2080 UK temperatures could rise by 2 to 4 degrees C. Winters would become wetter, and summers drier. Sea levels would rise by a metre or so. Cloud cover would decrease during summer.

The health impacts of these were assessed as being about 3,000 more heat-related UK deaths in summer, but 20,000 fewer cold-related deaths in winter. So an improvement there. But increased flooding would bring mental health problems for flood victims (this seems to be the principal health impact). Increased UV exposure would result in 5,000 more cases of skin cancer, and 2,000 more cataracts per year. Mosquitoes might re-introduce malaria, and ticks might increase the incidence of encephalitis. Lyme disease and West Nile fever might also increase. There'd be 10,000 more cases of Salmonella infections. There'd be likely to be increased waterborne infections by cryptosporidium and campylobacter. There'd also be increase in personal injuries from flying debris and falling trees. Stormier weather would result in up to 50% less air pollution, and associated health impacts.

But the UK already has an estimated 60 - 80,000 cold-related deaths each year, and 100,000 cases of food poisoning.

Hardly a terrifying scenario. This doesn't seem to have deterred Prof Mike Gill, from the University of Surrey, who co-chairs the Climate and Health Council:


'Maximising influence' means increasing the power of doctors to interfere in people's lives. And while the climate change scenario just sketched out isn't particularly worrying, once the passive smoking epidemiologists are set to work to figure out the likely health consequences of climate change, the numbers of premature deaths is likely to increase a hundred fold. After all, Sir Richard Peto said that the smoking ban would save 500,000 lives. Floods, malaria, Lyme disease, skin cancer, cataracts, heat waves and the rest will surely threaten a few million lives. Chief Health Officer Sir Liam Donaldson must be rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of issuing decrees and edicts to meet the threat.

A union between global warmists and health zealots is a natural, really. They're both species of fascists who want to control people in every way they possibly can. They both use scare tactics to panic governments and populations into adopting unnecessary and crass policies.Their aim is to generate a sense of crisis during which something like martial law is declared, allowing governments to take direct control over the lives of the citizenry indefinitely. And global warming poses an ever-growing threat. Sea levels are projected to rise by a mere metre or so over the coming century, but if Greenland ice melts, that will raise sea levels by 70 metres, in which case the map of Britain would look rather different than it does now (see right). Think of the totalitarian possibilities of that: you'd need a permit to go from Manchester to Sheffield in that flooded country. What an opportunity to order people around! What an opportunity to make people do things they wouldn't otherwise do! And that's the whole point of the exercise, after all.

I welcome the union of these fascists. The health fascists and the climate fascists. Because it's easier to cut off one head rather than two. Let them be bound closer and closer together, until they are indistinguishable from each other.

Please. Pretty please.

Because the Global Warming scam has hit an iceberg, and it's sinking. Even arch-guru George Monbiot can see the writing on the wall, as he calls for the resignation of Professor Phil Jones of Hadley CRU (who produced the climate scenario featured above). So let the health fascists drown with the climate fascists, chained together indissolubly. And public trust in doctors evaporate.

Perhaps the most telling event of my visit to Spain took place shortly after I'd got back to England. I'd met up with a friend of mine for a dinner at a restaurant, and at the end of it he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and fingered one, saying how he'd like a smoke. And I said that if he was in Spain, he could smoke one, and no-one would bat an eyelid. And I started rolling a cigarette to take outside. Next thing I knew my friend had stood up and was waving his arms around frantically. It took me a few seconds to figure out why: once I'd rolled the cigarette, I'd simply put it in my mouth and lit it, in the middle of a crowded Indian restaurant. I just did what came naturally. I hadn't planned on doing it. If he hadn't drawn my attention to it, I probably wouldn't have noticed for a minute or two.

That wouldn't have happened a week ago. And it showed how easily two and a half years of conditioning under Britain's draconian anti-smoking regime was erased by just five days in Spain. It takes an effort to not smoke. A smoker has to keep on telling himself, "No, I mustn't smoke". It requires constant self-denial to not smoke. It's much easier to just light a cigarette. And that means that smoking is the default activity, the natural activity for smokers. It's what they will do, left to themselves. If the pressure to not smoke ever relaxes, smokers will go back to smoking. It takes a really big effort by smokers to not smoke. And they'll give up making the effort given half a chance. Or a few days in Spain.

It's a rather strange thought, but the British smoking ban only works because British smokers make it work. They work very hard at making it work, saying No to themselves all day. And two and a half years into the ban, they have to work just as hard as they did on day one of the ban. It doesn't get any easier.

If antismokers hoped that, after several years of restraining themselves, smokers would find that not smoking came naturally, they're profoundly mistaken. Smoking remains the default, natural activity for smokers. And it takes a continual effort on their part to not smoke. Non-smoking doesn't come at all naturally. And that means that smoking bans are very fragile things, that can all too easily come apart. Smoking bans are sandcastles: they look solid, but from the moment they're constructed they're starting to fall down. They require a continual effort of repair to prevent them reverting to the natural state of sand.

Why do Britain's smokers go on doing restraining themselves? Well, because it's against the law, mostly. But also because they half believe that passive smoking really does kill people. And if it doesn't kill anyone, it's because they have been told that it's an antisocial pastime. And it's also because they feel they really should give up smoking, like so many people they know have done. And it's because they're convinced that the future will non-smoking, and smoking will soon be as much a thing of the past as spitting or keeping pet dogs. And it's also because they're ashamed to be smokers.

So while Britain's smokers believe all this nonsense, they'll carry on restraining themselves, and carry on telling themselves No a couple of hundred times a day. And it really is all nonsense. Passive smoking doesn't kill anybody: even the lousy antismoking studies say so. Nor is it that smoking is an antisocial pastime: it's the antismokers who are the real antisocial killjoys. And would smokers feel any need to give up smoking, if they were to find out that the research into active smoking is so much junk science as well? And why should they admire anyone who has given up smoking, if giving up smoking simply entails saying No to yourself for the rest of your life. And why on earth should they believe that the future is non-smoking, when all the historical evidence is that smoking bans fail whenever they're tried? And why should they be ashamed of being smokers, when so many of their illustrious forebears were smokers? Like Winston Churchill. Pablo Picasso. Albert Einstein. And tens of thousands of others. Millions of them.

Smokers carry around all these illusions about smoking. But they're really the victims of a gigantic confidence trick. One that's been perpetrated by the medical establishment and anti-smoking organisations over many decades using sophisticated propaganda techniques. It's taken a colossal effort to fool smokers into restraining themselves from smoking. And if that effort ever eases up, if the propaganda ever ceases, smokers will rapidly revert to doing what comes naturally - smoking.

Bans fail because the effort needed to maintain the illusion becomes too great. Smokers know perfectly well that their smoke harms no-one. They also know that it doesn't even harm them (they wouldn't smoke if they believed it did). And they know that smoking is a socially inclusive practice, as smokers are bound together in an enveloping mantle of smoke. And smokers don't really admire people who've given up smoking: they don't want to be naysayers forbidding themselves from every pleasure in life. And it takes an enormous barrage of unrelenting propaganda for smokers to be made to forget all these things they know, and to erase their personal knowledge. And that personal knowledge is always eating away at the false, artificial, propaganda-induced 'knowledge' that has usurped their true knowledge, their natural common sense. Switch off the propaganda, and that common sense will gradually come to the fore again, and will prevail over manufactured knowledge.

Most likely the smoking ban will fail when smokers cease to believe the lies they've been told. And they are always ceasing to believe those lies. It takes a constant rain of propaganda lies to keep them from reverting to their natural state. And once smokers cease to believe the lies they've been told, at the same time they cease to have any incentive to restrain themselves from smoking. And when they cease restraining themselves, they'll start to spontaneously light up, just like I lit up in that Indian restaurant last night. And when they see people no longer restraining themselves from smoking, other smokers will cease to restrain themselves as well. Whole pubs will suddenly start smoking overnight. And other nearby pubs will rapidly catch the bug.

At a pub earlier in the evening I got talking about smoking to one of the drinkers. He agreed that the research showed there was little or no threat from passive smoking. He said pubs should be allowed to choose to be smoking or non-smoking. But he said that while he liked smoking, he didn't like being a smoker. It wasn't a good thing to be these days. So here was a smoker who was ashamed of being a smoker. And he also said that things would only get worse. So here was another smoker who could see the future with 20-20 foresight, and the future was non-smoking. He'd broken through one or two illusions, but he remained entangled by the rest of them. If he could have become a proud smoker again, and dispensed with the imaginary smokefree future which held him spellbound, he'd have been at the point of spontaneously lighting up.

I think I'm going to start constructing a new future. It'll be one in which everyone smokes. Children too. And it'll be a future in which the antismokers have had all their lies exposed, and they've all been rounded up and shot. Or maybe not shot. Just hanged. And everyone will wonder why they went along with the madness for so long.

My trip is coming to an end. But I've taken the opportunity to survey the non-tourist area of Barcelona (Esplugues) where I've been staying for the number of bars and cafes in it. I counted 29 of them. When I return in a year or so, I'll be concerned to see how many are left after a year of a total smoking ban. Of the 29, only 3 were non-smoking. Some of the bars were tiny, with only two or three little tables in them.

The smoking ban in Spain looks set to be a total ban. There will be no smoking permitted in any cafes or bars or restaurants after 1 Jan 2010. All this just two years after many restaurants had spent a lot of money creating separate smoking and non-smoking areas to conform to the current mild ban, which allows larger restaurants to have separate areas, and for small bars to choose to be smoking or non-smoking. Money wasted, it would seem.

I stopped off for a drink with my Spanish friend at El Gran Jaguar, a little street cafe with 5 or 6 tables and a few stools around the bar, and ashtrays on the tables. And mi amiga asked Stephanie, who worked behind the bar, whether she was at all worried about the total ban. She said she was very worried. And when she learned that I was English, she switched effortlessly from Spanish to English. She spoke animatedly and at length. She said that 80% of her customers were smokers, and if they couldn´t smoke in her cafe, theý'd stay at home. There were no tables outside her cafe: there was no space for any in the street outside.

I asked whether she had spoken to other cafe proprietors, and she said that they didn't seem to be particularly bothered about the coming ban. I asked if there as any organisation of bar and cafe owners protesting about it. She said there was no organisation. "When do Spanish people ever organise about anything?" she asked.

She pointed to the large cigarette machine in one corner, controlled from behind the bar, and said that with fewer customers, she´d sell fewer cigarettes. She paid taxes on the machine, and was wondering whether it was worth keeping. If cafe proprietors got together and stopped paying their taxes on such machines, the government would lose a considerable income. It would hit them in their wallets where it hurt.

Stephanie's mother joined us a little later, and confirmed what her daughter had been saying. She railed against the government trying to control everybody´s lives in all sorts of ways. She said she thought the government was trying to drive small cafes out of business.

El Gran Jaguar was the first cafe where I've enquired about the mood. And from this single sample, it would seem that the mood is one of deep unhappiness. But, just like in Britain, there is no organisation, no resistance. Or at least, not yet. I said that in Holland and Germany, similar bans had met with strong resistance, and had in many cases been reversed. Mi amiga also said that the existing mild ban was not enforced anyway, and if the latest strict ban as not enforced either, then it would be no more successful than the current ban.

With a few days more left in Spain, I'll be making more enquiries to see whether Stephanie is alone in feeling deeply worried.

I suspect that she's very far from being alone.

Another sunny day in Barcelona.

But I'm feeling rather frustrated by the language barrier. My Spanish is good enough for me to buy coffees and beers and empanadas, but not good enough to conduct conversations. I sit in bars and look at the proprietors behind the bar and wonder what they think about the looming smoking ban. If I could speak Spanish fluently I´d just ask them, and they'd tell me, and I'd know in about 10 seconds. But I can't, so I don't.

And I'm beginning to think that my questionnaire idea isn't very good. First I have to 1) frame the questions in English, and then I have to 2)translate them into Spanish, and then I have to 3) get them printed, and then I have to 4) go round a few bars and ask for them to be filled in, and then I have to 5) collate the results. 1) is fairly easy, 2) isn´t impossible given online translators (one commenter gave a useful lead here, thanks), and neither is 3) now I´ve found out that the cyber cafe I'm using will print out text for me. Nor is 4) particularly hard - in fact it would be a pleasure. The problem sits between 4) and 5), and it's that I can't expect busy bartenders/proprietors to drop everything to fill out my questionnaire right then and there in front of me. They'll almost certainly want time to think, and a day or two to reply, maybe more. They've got a job to do. And, in the end, this questionnaire is just my way of trying to get round my inability to speak fluent Spanish.

So I'm thinking that I might try to get my principal Spanish contact here to stroll around a few cafes and bars with me, just to ask a couple of questions while we´re buying a cortado. All I want to find out is whether little bars in Barcelona are worried about the ban. And if not, why not. It would be easy for her. But she's rather busy at the moment. Very busy, in fact.

If the English experience was anything to go by, Spanish bars will be looking on the bright side. In short, they'll be in denial. They'll maybe just have to find out for themselves.

But I'm determined not to leave Barcelona in a couple of days time without having gained at least an inkling of the mood in Spanish cafes and bars. But if nothing else I do have some good contacts here that I can ask to keep an eye on things over coming months.

I flew into Barcelona last night. Within an hour or so I was in a little bar with a beer in front of me and a cigarette in my hand. So nice to be somewhere civilised again. But there was an edge of grief as I looked at the relaxed people chatting at the bar and smoking, because in a month or so a total ban comes into force in Spain. I´m still not sure whether it´s quite as comprehensive as the UK ban.

My Spanish friend on the other side of the table said that bar owners were already protesting that the ban would close many of them down, so it sounds like there will be resistance. She also told me that Madrid was one of several autonomous regions in Spain, and that it had refused to enforce the existing mild ban. That´s the one that allows bars with an area less than 100 square metres to choose to be smoking or non-smoking. Doesn't seem likely they'll be enforcing the new, more comprehensive ban.

I woke up this morning into what seemed like a warm sunny English summer day, enjoyed a couple of slow cafes con leche and cigarettes in the cafe next to the hotel, and then strolled through the sunlit streets to find the cyber cafe I'm now sat inside. It looks like I should be able keep posting.

I'm now wondering if there might be something I can usefully do while I'm here. I might be able to find out more about the new smoking ban, and just how comprehensive it is. I'm also wondering if I might ask at cafes and bars whether the proprietors plan to fight the ban. Not that I could actually ask, because my Spanish is only sufficient to order myself a beer. But I might be able to compose, with Spanish help, a little written or printed questionnaire for them to them to peruse while I sit at a table with mi cerveza.

Perhaps, if anyone has any suggestions, they could leave them in the comments. I'll be here for a few days. The sort of questions I was thinking of asking were: do you think the new ban will affect your business? Do you propose to propose to protest against the new ban? Do you think there will be compliance with the new ban?

Over the next week I'll be posting intermittently, or not at all.

The Global Warming debate is so much more interesting on the web than it is in the mass media. In fact there's no real debate about it at all in the media. The debate's been over for years.

But on the web there's one breaking story after another. A few months back the big story was that lone amateur sleuth Steve McIntyre had finally got hold of some tree-ring data he'd been requesting for years, and had found out that the latest Hockey Stick showing a rapid rise in temperatures at the end of the 20th century were based on just 12 trees in the Yamal peninsula in Russia. In fact maybe just one tree - The Most Influential Tree In The World.

Then at the end of last month influential climate sceptic Lord Monckton of Brenchley made waves with a viral campaign against the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Treaty that he said was going to be signed by world leaders next month. But which probably isn't going to be signed now.

And now there's the latest revelation, which is that someone seems to have hacked into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and deposited 160 MB of emails, documents, pdfs, data, and Fortran computer code on a website in Russia for anyone to download and read. Or maybe it wasn't a hacker, but the mole that's said to lurk inside CRU: Deep Cool.

You never get news like this on the Beeb. Which is why I don't listen to it much. Except to see what they're not reporting these days. All the real news is on the web.

So I've been reading bits and pieces of the stuff that's emerging as hordes of climate sceptics have begun to explore this windfall. The emerging consensus seems to be that it's genuine stuff, and no hoax. If only because Hadley CRU have said that they've been hacked. The bits of stuff I've been reading today don't sound like a hoax. Here, for example, is an explanation why Steve McIntyre's Freedom Of Information requests were refused:

Reading Dick Puddlecote and Christopher Snowdon discussing food today set me thinking about 'healthism' again. I got thinking about how, over the last 10 or 20 years, people have started to have their BMI (body mass index) measured. That never used to happen. One day I got weighed round at my GP's practice, and had my height measured, and my BMI was read off from a large chart. I came in just above the diagonal 'underweight' cut-off line, a long way from the diagonal 'overweight' cut-off.

I haven't had this done since, but I remember hearing that the definitions of overweight 'obesity' had been tightened up a few years back, with the result that lots of people suddenly became 'obese' overnight. It may well have been that, at the same time, I became, unbeknownst to me, underweight and 'anorexic'. If so, would my GP have started advising me to eat more? Or go to a gym and pump iron so as to build up muscle weight in the form of biceps and triceps?

At the same time as all this was going on there started to be media coverage of the 'obesity epidemic'. Rather less noticed, there's also been a war going on against underweight anorexics. Kate Moss (does she look thin?) was in the news today for saying that her personal motto was: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels".. How dare she!


The article went on to condemn her as 'irresponsible':


This is quite extraordinary venom being directed at someone for simply being too thin rather than too fat. And it goes to show that the underweight are getting as bad press as the overweight.

Has any of this got anything to do with health? No, not really. It's about a physical ideal. The ideal human, we are being told, is not too fat and not too thin, and all should aspire to aim to hit the ever-narrowing gap between these two extremes, which is being periodically arbitrarily redefined to squeeze people towards an ever-tighter definition of perfection.

Is there really any medical justification for this? Last I heard, fat people tend to live longer than thin people. So shouldn't people be encouraged to get fat, so that they'll live longer? After all, they keep telling smokers that they live on average 10 years shorter lives than non-smokers, and should stop smoking. But it's a useful thing to be able to store up body fat. Body fat is an energy store. There was probably a time when people regularly put on weight in the autumn while food was abundant, and then lost it all as they starved over winter when food was scarce. The extra layer of insulation probably served to help keep them warm through the cold winter. There are lots of good reasons why the ability to store energy as body fat is a highly useful evolutionary trait.

So it's got nothing to do with health. It's entirely to do with attaining a fit, muscular, well-exercised, non-smoking, non-drinking ideal. It's an aesthetic idea of 'health' which has as its ideal a particular kind of beautiful body. It's an idea of a healthiness that looks healthy, fit, dynamic. Whether or not smoking actually is unhealthy, it looks unhealthy. And whether or not drinking actually is unheathy, it looks unhealthy. People who are too fat look unhealthy, and people who are too thin also look unhealthy. This new 'health' is all about appearances. It's not about how people actually feel in themselves. It's about how they look to other people. Your new healthist GP doesn't need to take your temperature, or measure your blood pressure, or your blood sugar level. He can tell whether you're healthy or not with just one glance the moment you walk through the door.

There's no science to this. Or what purports to be science is pseudoscience. The 'science' is in service of an aesthetic ideal. The science is just a way of expressing approval or disapproval, and dressing it with numbers and graphs. Instead of just saying, "We don't like you", they'll tell you you're "clinically obese", or that your BMI "exceeds 3.3" or some other arbitrary number. The numbers are actually meaningless. It's like giving someone 7 out of 10 for an essay they've written, rather than saying "Pretty good". It's moral judgement dressed up as mathematics.

It's why antismoking organisations hate e-cigarettes and demand that they're banned along with real cigarettes. It's not because e-cigarettes are actually unhealthy, but because they look unhealthy: they look like real cigarettes. And it's also why antismokers demand that they not even have to see anyone smoking. Appearances are everything in modern healthism.

It also explains why cigarette packets are now defaced with pictures of diseased lungs, cancerous growths, rotten teeth, and limp dicks. These are images of disease, unsupported by any facts. They exist solely to conjure up an image of ill-health. They associate tobacco with an image of ill-health. And the image is all-important. The image is everything.

Modern healthism is setting out to create a society that looks healthy, rather than a society that, by any objective measure, actually is healthy. It's setting out to create a society of fit-looking, muscular-looking, and visibly-non-smoking and visibly-teetotal men and women who can be seen jogging and exercising. In fact that's why joggers go jogging. It does them not an iota of good. In fact, it harms them. But it enables them to be seen to be doing something 'healthy', and that's all that matters. Same for working out and pumping iron and all the rest. It does people no real good. But it enables them to look good. And then, in the privacy of their own homes, where nobody can see them, the self-same people will do all sorts of drugs and get up to all sorts of actually-unhealthy activities. But so long as nobody sees them doing it, it doesn't matter.

Modern healthism is about superficial appearances. And of course such superficial appearances will never include any kind of intellectual ability. Because intellect is invisible. So it doesn't exist. The sprinter in the Olympic 100 metres may not be able to read or write, but nobody will be able to see that. So it doesn't matter.

And the whole of our society is increasingly superficial. That's what spin is all about. The spin doctor is trying to make things look good, even if they are actually dire. The spin doctor is trying to grab headlines, because headlines are all that most people see. Appearance is everything, once again.

And what is superficial is also what is sham. We live in a sham culture. Everything is sham. Nothing is real. It's all cardboard and bill posters and advertising. It's utterly empty. And it gets emptier all the time.

I'm no lawyer. So when I read the following a year or more ago about the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it didn't mean that much to me.

Spain introduced a partial smoking ban in 2006, under whose terms bars and restaurants with a floor area less than 100 square metres could opt to be either smoking or non-smoking. Most opted for smoking. Naturally this wasn't enough for the antismoking Nazis, and now it appears that Spain is going to join Britain with a total ban on smoking indoors in public places on 1 Jan 2010. Examiner 9 Nov 2009:

It was sunny today, and I sat outside the pub by the river again, as I have been all summer, and for the third summer in succession. I've got used to sitting alone by the river, lost in thought, gazing at the rippling water flowing by. I've come to realise that the river has a variety of moods, that range from a languid calm to swollen hurrying anger. In sunshine it dances or shimmers. Under grey skies it darkens and broods. I've begun to think that if and when the smoking ban is ever lifted, I'll probably carry on sitting by the river anyway. I've grown used to it.

But it's that time of year again when it's getting too cold to sit outside. Today, even though it was sunny, and not particularly windy, I was beginning to feel a bit cold by the time I finished my drink. In previous years this has been the signal to stop going to the pub at all, and to wait until the sun returns the following spring. But this year I've got myself an e-cig, and I've been trying it out inside the pub.

It's a slightly odd experience simply to sit inside a pub at all, after all the months I've spent outside. Since the ban, I'd not had a single drink inside it, until I got the e-cig a month or two ago. It's been distinctly weird to return to sit in seats that I used to to sit on every day a few years ago. It's been a bit like returning to a town that I once lived in, recognising familiar landmarks, and yet aware that somehow it's not quite the same. The carpet had changed, for one. And I no longer felt like I belonged any more.

And I was sharply reminded of one of the downsides of being inside a pub. I'd barely sat down when a couple of children came sprinting by, chasing each other round the tables and shrieking. I'd forgotten about all the kids running around inside pubs these days. And the indulgent parents who make no attempt to control them. When children were first admitted into pubs, thoroughly modern and liberal me approved of it. It would make for a more Mediterranean experience, because children are often found in bars in continental countries. But they're not the wild children of modern Britain who run around shrieking. My liberal approval of children in pubs ended the afternoon that a mother laid her baby down on the carpeted floor right in front of me and changed its nappy, and my beer suddenly didn't taste quite right any more. I think I'm becoming a paedophobe. I'm beginning to think that children should all be locked up in institutions of some sort, and subjected to the strictest discipline, until the age of about 16. At the present rate, in a few years time, I can well imagine that I'll have become a misogynist as well. After all, if children are a nuisance, how much more annoyingly diverting are women?

Forty or fifty years ago, there were no children in British pubs. There weren't that many women either. Pubs were places where men went to escape from nagging wives and blubbing children, and to drink and smoke themselves to insensibility. But little by little the women began to invade. Instead of being left at home, the wife came too. And not long after the wives, the children followed. And then whole families. And finally the righteous. And the righteous didn't much like the men drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. It was only a matter of time before the smokers were evicted. And it won't be very much longer before the drinkers are evicted as well. And at that point the pubs which were once refuges from family life will have become no different from family homes, with toys strewn on the floor, children running round, nappies being changed, and old grannies being helped to the door on their walking frames. The pubs will have metamorphosed into family houses. And private houses will turn into pubs.

For the exiled smokers and drinkers have already started meeting up some place or other, often their own homes, bringing their own beer and whisky, sitting around makeshift tables smoking and drinking and belching and swearing. And telling blue jokes. And singing bawdy songs. No children will be allowed. Women will only be tolerated if they can drink a man under the table. If there are tables.

I've begun to dream longingly of such places. They'd be smoky little dens that would only serve beer or cider or whisky. There would be no soft drinks. There would be no carpets There'd be no juke boxes or fruit machines. There'd be no food. The drink would be served in broken porcelain mugs. They'd just be places where a man could forget his troubles. Or make himself forget with a prodigious amounts of strong drink and tobacco. There would be no health and safety regulations. There'd be no closing times. They'd be lawless places with their own primal codes of honour. They would be places to escape from overbearing civilisation, from a stupefying burden of petty and vindictive laws. Too much law breeds a taste for anarchy.

The righteous, of course, would find such places intolerable. They would come in hot pursuit. The smoky dives would be regularly raided by police - if the police dared to venture into them at all. The righteous know no tolerance. But by then the intolerant righteous have always themselves been intolerable. Everyone hates them. Everyone has always hated them. And they hate everyone else. Beneath their sanctimonious piety, hatred is the only coin in which they ever deal.

In time, of course, the smoky little bars would become more civilised. They'd start to sell soft drinks and crisps. Carpets would appear on the floor. Soft lighting would replace bare lamps. Women would return. And after them would come the children. And then finally the righteous - from whom everybody, young and old, man and women, is always trying to escape - would follow with their rules and regulations, to expel the men and the smokers and drinkers all over again. And so history would repeat itself, with slight variations, century after century.

Occasionally I come across something that exemplifies perfectly why I'm so sceptical about official pronouncements.

Today I read about Mitchell Taylor on Jennifer Marohasy's blog. Taylor is a polar bear expert with 30 years of experience in polar bear research. He has been attending meetings of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) since 1981. He's also a sceptic about global warming (AGW). This is the email he received from its outgoing chairman informing him he was no longer welcome: