THE BRITISH THREAD II

I know that.

Fags were the first ditch not the last.

At least I stayed in the first ditch longest but now I'm back in the second with the deserters of the first ditch but I'm not so much thinking about defending the second ditch yet as trying to find a way of re-taking the first.

The third ditch is probably saturated fat and after that driving and then walking down the street without having permission all of which activities kill and injure far more people every year than passive smoking the only known victim of which was Mr Castle and the evidence for that was based on an unproven assertion.

What is so funny is that the first ditch was the easiest ditch to defend as the attack on it was a complete load of bollocks. The second ditch is a much tougher proposition because drinking not only costs a lot more in health problems and inefficiency than tobacco ever could but causes many other subsiduary problems such as sexual assault, criminal damage, litter, fighting and general mayhem. All those difficulties were considerably reduced by the tranquillising effects of what J.M. Barrie called my Lady Nicotine.

Obviously DIY will be outlawed and only accredited tradesmen and women will be authorised to change a bloody light bulb at £40 for the call out and £20 an hour with parts extra. . Any visit to an A and E on a nice summer's day can easily justify that on the same argument as was used on passive smoking.

You're on a kiddies slide to Winston Smith. Your grandchildren, assuming they have any brains left, will think of you as the most useless freedom fighters that the world has ever witnessed and will wish you had all been neutered at birth.

And all the while the multi-million pound investigation into "Cash for Honours" has been cancelled because, as the BBC announced last night, if it was pursued with vigour questions would have been raised about the integrity of the police themselves in other unrelated fields.

I missed that. Tell us more, please.

Interesting, and credible.

But it should all settle down in 12 months or so.

What beats me is how grown up men, I can excuse ladies for obvious reasons, can ever have thought that this battle had anything to do with smoking. Smoking was merely the easiest cudgel.

It is an aspect of the revolution whereby the Paperwork Party, control freaks right down to the lowest ranks, seek hegemony over the life of the nation. They are not like the aristocracy which was a small and easily identified group. They were not like the mandarins of the upper middle class who were also a quite small group and held official positions which anyone interested was easily aware of. This lot of lower middle class twits are a large and diffuse group who connect up through various media organisations, conferences and such like (mobile phones and networking) and difficult to get into the crosswires. They are not easily identified and they have only one objective which is personal greed. They don't give a monkey's toss-off about saving lives and as for saving taxpayer's money that is the very last thing they are interested in. They have even taken over local newspapers. The Evening Posts and Telegraphs in your locality are owned and controlled in London. They are no longer local papers at all. And the same with your regional TV. That is why the devolution movement is so strong. Not everybody is stupid. The Lancashire Evening Post, which is owned by the Yorkshire Post, which is owned by one of the two big groups based in London, once referred to an interest rate hike as "crippling" in an editorial and the Financial Times showed that Lancashire's economy benefitted from higher interest rates and the London one didn't. I gave up reading the mush they were giving out but you can bet your boots that all these local papers spoke out in favour of the smoking ban just as they did in favour of the lottery which is a scheme to pump money out of the provinces and into London and remove men only rooms in private clubs which were a traditional focus of working men's politics.

They are almost identical with the defunct Communist Party in the ex-Soviet Union.

Mac wrote-



The gist of what I heard, and I can't give it accurately because I only saw it the once, was that those in the firing line on Cash for Questions knew things about the police which the police wouldn't wish to be made public and that if the investigation went any further they would fight back using that stuff. A no score draw in effect resulted between two wings of the Paperwork Party with a large amount of money having been wasted because the threat must have been known about from the start.

What I might add to that is probably best left unsaid but the BBC's political correspondent who made the statements had a very world-weary and cynical expression on his face which left little doubt in my mind that he was thinking roughly what I was thinking.

But we all have to be honest and accept that had we been up close in either camp we would probably have behaved the way they did. Which means that the problem is systemic as one might expect with a non-wealth creating Paperwork Party having become so vast that it can decide the result of elections.

The softest and easiest answer is for people to cease to vote in elections and let them play with themselves until they blow it which they inevitably will.

During the last petrol panic I witnessed representitives of 5 bureaucracies fighting it out on the forecourt over which one had the most power to marshal the motorists in the queues and control the owner of the forecourt so that no out of hours deals were done at £10 a gallon which many would have been glad to pay. It was a pathetic sight. The gruesome details would have entertained Franz Kafka for months.

For the £ to be rising against the $ suggests to me that America is in an even bigger tangle and I think that little else can be expected from non-smoking nations for reasons I have given in previous posts relating to nicotine's effect on brain function.

There are plenty of fiddles going on in China Spendi, and you can have a fag near enough anywhere there!


I even saw a tanker driver in Bejing filling under-ground tanks at a petrol station with a fag in his gob, and it was lit..

Shall we all emigrate?

Not me. I'll stay and fight. The truth will out.

There was a bloke in the pub last night who kept an unlit fag in his mouth all the time I was in.

So the French are not yet where we are. I have also heard that the smoking ban in EEC offices was rendered defunct simply by being ignored.

They haven't even needed to resort to that tactic here. Our MPs just exempted themselves from the act like they do from wage inflation policy.

Anyway the above quote from Google generated these responses-






And could easily have been "selected" like members of production teams in phone-in shows were selected to win the prizes. You can skew a poll result simply by polling at certain times of day.



Perhaps Francis will be kind enough to report on these matters.

Evening chaps!


How they hangin'?


I've been out of U.K. wearing carbon flip-flops.

Which reminds me...

Eunice had to go to the clinic regarding the rhino-like skin on her heels. The chiropidist said she had 'flip-flop' feet. I pissed myself laughing at that one.

x

Hi smogsie-

Have you been loonmighting overseas?

Hi there Smorgsie, we have missed you.

Tell Eunice that I recently got a great foot-file at Sainsbury's (it is made by Scholl, so you could get one there) which is big enough and rough enough to take the skin off a rhino.

Definitely the business.

Just watched a DVD of that new Clint film about the staging of the 'raising of the flag on Iwo Jima' photograph, was quite good, I never knew the full story.

That's if it is the full story...

x

It pains me to say but I'm with Spendi on this.

The "system" manipulates data to induce people in accepting such behavior that they can control them.

Now, who is the system?

A undefined group of people but mainly the politicians, media tycoons, captains of industry.

Control freaks, which goals are rather simply: to make people be like a herd so they can get even your skin out of you, while making you feel it's your choice.

And they aren't stopping any time soon..

Spendi is right in that the UK is ahead of France about this.

But everything is put in place to make you think you need more safety, for example: French government is planning the installation of surveillance cameras just like the UK.

and so on...

All these others tell you you're getting better. Only Bob has the guts to get up and tell you you're being screwed.

Thanks Francis. I hope your pain has eased off. I have heard before that the pain of agreeing with me soon fades.



You ought to have added in their understrappers, lickspittles, lackeys and dupes who all, apart from the last mentioned, have their snout into this evergushing trough. People do need more safety when they are nervous. So they make 'em nervous and out pours the gravy.

Do you think Francis that they will end up like Luc Goddard showed them at the end of Alphaville? I do. It's sort of like watching a boulder roll downhill. One can predict where it's going from where it's been. They have never been known to reverse direction when left to their own devices. And the sooner they are stopped the less messy it will be, or, to put it another way, the longer you dither over stopping them the bigger the mess will be.

It's the old, old story. As soon as a society gets rich everybody wants to be in the Paperwork Party. Nobody wants to really work. Work becomes distasteful and signifies gamma status. And nepotism does the rest. You won't see their kids mending the roads or picking turnips. It might suggest that the genetic material in the family tree wasn't up to snuff.

I wonder when the germ free working environment will come into being. Be a long while I suppose. Cost too much. Lives are not worth what that would cost. Better not campaign on germ free environments. And germ laden environments cost an absolute fortune. You would all need Hazmat suits. Marks and Sparks doing middle range stuff. Scented air supply. Filtered of course. Dew-drop rose petal for Mac.

When they say that it costs the NHS £1.7 billion to treat smokers they don't tell you that that's the top line. It's almost all wages. So a third goes straight back where it came from. It actually never leaves where it came from. Then, when the wages are spent they are spent on wages as well and by the time Mr Darling presses the "SUBMIT" button it probable reads 4 pence. (Poetic license invoked.) It is all wages because everything comes out of the earth and until work is applied to it it has no value. You have a cascade of wages. A third tax at each interface. A lot more at some interfaces like the pub. A bloody lot more.

Ever bent down to pick a penny up or even put up with them about your person? A pint of beer is 6 inches high and costs , say, £2.50. All tax.

If you divide the 6 inches by 250 you get a very shallow cylinder of beer of height about one fortieth of an inch and valued at 1 pence. Then you watch them dispense the stuff and it becomes obvious that a penny isn't worth a frog's fart in a hurricane, and a penny is the crucial difference between £3.99 and £4. And we all know how important that is. And it takes calories to bend down and straighten up again looking pleased with yourself or lugging all that copper around all day long. Weight stops trains my Daddy always told me when we were studying racing form together. And calories cost money.

To continue with the song- which is License To Kill-

An announcement will be clearly made in tomorrows newspapers that the licensing hours are going to be reviewed!

It's ridiculous allowing people like Spendi to be out at un-Godly hours making trouble!

We will no doubt be closing the doors on whatever pubs remain at 10pm again, with a late closing at 10.30 on a Saturday. Close them all day on a Sunday, as this should be treated as The Lords Day and he doesn't like drunkards and sots all over the place.

So, no doubt we can expect the Temperance Society soon to be resurrected and we all will be encouraged to Sign The Pledge.

And not before time.

Despatch from the front line in which no-one is mentioned.

Tonight was the first real test of the smoking ban (SB) in my pub.

There was a turn on.

I must say that there was a marked difference in the quality of the ladies from the good old days.

Anyone who had just returned on a slow boat from China and had six pints under his belt would probably have given the one shaped like a rhombus a go. As for the rest one would have had to have recourse to the wild horses on fifteen.

But I did discover a new personal assessment test. The Integrity Quotient. IQ for short.

How to measure this is to set a series of questions about mirror images and numerical conundrums and get a number, say 138, and then add tit size.

So, for example, a person who scored 87 on the mirror images and numerical conundrums and had 54 inch tits would have an IQ of 141, which is pretty hot stuff. On the other hand a person who scored 87 on the mirror images and numerical conundrums and is hollow chested would score 87 minus his tit size.

Any person who scores 138 on the mirror images and numerical conundrums with a tit size of 36 or more needs watching with the utmost care. Only qualified persons should approach them.

I feel sure smorgsie will peer review my science and confirm the conclusions I have drawn from the raw empirical data.

I don't think they went away...

I hear there is a Temperance Bar in Bolton.

x

Stone me, Smorgie, you are up early of a Sunday morning.

Have you been filing Eunice's feet?

For our overseas readers, Britain has had much heavy rain and subesquent widespread surface flooding, in really unprecedented amounts.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6910438.stm
I blame people smoking, upsetting the weather. No strawberries and cream on the lawn this weekend.

Luckily we went to Stratford-on-Avon a month or so ago when it was dry and sunny (remember how that felt like?). This weekend would have been our alternative choice.