Baaaaaaaa

Click for linky

Some highlights, though the libertarian view I’ve quoted en bloc because it’s just too good not to. I’ve balanced this by cutting the nanny campaigner’s views to shreds. I’d intended to fisk it but it’s such total arse gravy that I just wanted to stick my head in the oven. Click the link if you want to read it in full, and remember to vote in the poll while you’re there.

THE WINEMAKER STEPHEN STRACHAN

WINEMAKERS understand why some people like the idea of health warnings on alcohol containers. It’s simple, consistent, gets the message onto the product itself and is easy for policy makers to implement and monitor.

The problem is that warning labels don’t change drinking habits. Instead they impose unnecessary restrictions and costs on producers and take a simplistic approach to dealing with a complex problem.

[…]

Let’s also be clear that our goal is to reduce harmful consumption of alcohol, not all consumption. That point is lost on those who refuse to accept that, while alcohol abuse is a serious problem requiring a serious response, moderate consumption is a normal part of a healthy lifestyle for those who choose it.

Stephen Strachan is chief executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia.

THE LIBERTARIAN TIM WILSON

MANDATED alcohol warning labels don’t work and perpetuate the government-sponsored drift away from individual choice and responsibility that fuels alcohol abuse.

Our society is built on principles protecting our rights to choose our own life. That requires us to accept responsibility for our actions. Every time the government steps in we promote a nanny state that infantilises individuals.

Compromise on these principles requires evidence that good intentions will work. Alcohol warning labels don’t fit the bill.

We all know there are health consequences from heavy drinking.

People choose to drink alcohol; and sometimes it is to the point of abuse to get drunk.

If that is someone’s objective, they won’t slow down from a warning label.

The objective of such regulations is to de-normalise consumption, placing government preference above individual choice.

It is straight out of the regulatory playbook targeted at another product disliked by public health campaigners.

Publicly released sample alcohol warning labels include: ”drinking alcohol increases your risk of developing cancer” and ”drinking alcohol damages the young developing brain”.

The parallels are clear, despite contrary protests of campaigners.

On ABC1’s Lateline, a public health campaigner, Michael Daube, claimed his push for text-based alcohol warning labels was ”a mile away from the kind of grisly warnings that go with cigarette packs”. He continued: ‘These are informative warnings, but they’re not designed to put people off drinking completely.”

These statements are misleading and, as president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, Daube knows it.

As the shock value of text-based labels reduced, their graphic nature increased, coupled with other tight regulations. We can expect the same for alcohol.

Warning labels are only one more step down the nanny state path of government directing behaviour.

No one disputes that alcohol consumption has consequences. We’ve known that for at least 2000 years. Anyone who has had a few glasses of wine within an hour has figured that out.

The right direction is to create a culture of responsibility where people are free to choose, make mistakes and learn from them – not look to government for permission when it fosters a culture of us not taking responsibility.

Tim Wilson is a policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs.

THE DRINKER LYSSA TROMPF

I’M NOT answering this question from the perspective of a girl who doesn’t want to know the truth; that the beverages she’s pouring down her gullet and into the glasses of others each weekend are harmful. I know the poisons of alcohol, I’ve experienced the hangovers, heard the stories, had the addicted family members.

Despite this, I disagree with a move to place warning labels on packaged drinks. As a long-time bartender and club promoter, I know drinks will be consumed with barely an eye on the container from which the sip-ee consumes. The drinker, with the dark of a bar or party in combination with that undeniable level of ”carefree” that stops him complaining about things like the bourbon he was poured when he asked for a vodka, isn’t going to notice the label.

On top of this come the very common licensing laws that have bartenders decanting most bottled drinks, and even some in cans, into plastic containers – so again the message is lost and this money is literally thrown in the bin.

[…]

Lyssa Trompf is a bartender and music promoter.

THE CAMPAIGNER MICHAEL THORN

… A government-regulated alcohol warning label regime needs to be rolled out alongside a comprehensive education campaign.

The government has taken the first step towards pregnancy warning labels by moving to mandate labels within two years. Now it must show strong leadership and implement a label based on the best available evidence, and one that people will notice.

Michael Thorn is the chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.

As a footnote I admit to some surprise that The Age published three views opposing the prototypical Nanny State solution of regulation and warning labels and only one wowser supporting it, though it’s kind of irrelevant when so many people are crying – over their Sunday evening dinner with a nice glass of Pinot – to be saved from the demon drink by saintly warning labels and the benevolent guiding hand of the government.

‘Kinell! If anyone wants me I shall be up a (very metaphorical) tower with a (similarly metaphorical) rifle.

Misanthropes speak

Yesterday I mentioned that there seemed to be disappointment in some areas – oh, alright, it was The Guardian – that 2011 has not seen record temperatures and warble gloaming is not baking us all to death in our revolting, right wing, miserable selfishness. It’s no great surprise that they’re not alone, being in the company of none other than Phil Jones. Yes, him again.

>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug’s paper that said something like –
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
record, 1998!
[…]

When you profess a belief that warming will be catastrophic and kill millions that’s a really lovely thing to hope for, Phil, you great humanitarian, you. And did you even consider how unlikely this actually is to happen? At the time you wrote that, January 2009, you must already have been aware that in your own HADCRUT3 record the nine years 1999-2007 inclusive all failed to exceed your desired record, and since there are only sixteen years from 1998 to 2014 that was mathematically impossible even if 2009-14 all broke it. It should already have been crystal clear when you wrote that email that what you were hoping for simply would not, could not, happen. Expressing the hope that it would might suggest getting some primary school level maths wrong, or it might suggest that jigging the figures to make some of the years that weren’t quite warm enough just a little warmer was being considered. Wouldn’t be as good as real warming, which if I understand the warmist ideology is not good but bad yet is also good if it’s bad for people, but it might be good enough if it persuades people to support policies which are bad for them. Or something.

I’m not going to speculate which of those is more likely, but I will say this. A bloody good dose of global warming might be just the thing needed to help Phil Jones thaw out his fucking heart.

H/T Watts Up With That.

Some people really are weapons grade cunts

Despite liberally sprinkling my posts with Anglo-Saxon on many occasions I try not to put swearwords in post titles too often if I can help it. However, it’s hard to avoid it when I read something like this.

Click pic for link – also at The Telegraph

The needle on my personal misanthropy meter went so sharply to the right of the dial that it broke the stop off, smashed through the side of the case and is now stuck a half inch deep in the wall. What kind of colossal übercunt does that? What kind of fucking parasite sinks that low? Actually using the word ‘parasite’ is a little unfair and I should probably apologise now, just in case I’ve offended any cases of amoebic dysentery that resent the comparison with cunts who take off their own kind in time of natural disaster. They might live in shit and spend much of their time making their victims feeling wretched and miserable, but at least parasitic amoebas don’t sink to doing it to their own kind.

Of course the unspeakable fucking mutations that were responsible almost certainly didn’t know they were looting the home of someone who’d died, that they were stealing the possessions of her grieving family. But they surely would have known that some people had died or at least that it was a strong possibility. The fact that there had been a fucking earthquake can’t have escaped their attention, for Christ’s sake. It’s not a huge mental leap to imagine that when looting damaged and unattended homes you might possibly be only one remove from fucking grave robbing.

Obviously I hope that they’re caught, that the New Zealand police and prosecutors nail them with a completely watertight case, and that the court chooses to impose the most severe sentences that it can to reflect the utter depths of bastardry and cuntishness that is using the damage caused by a fucking earthquake as an opportunity to steal. That’s certainly what ought to happen in a civilised society, but failing that some poetic justice would be appropriate… is it wrong of me to hope that a fucking building falls on them too?

Cunts.

A pathetic bellend with an uninspiring career who deserves to disappear up his own arse with alacrity…

… meets David Hasselhoff.

Easy choice.

The Snowolf has been looking at women in their fifties. One, Nigella Lawson, TV domestic goddess and Queen of Food Porn is 51 and looking fabulous. The other is Gillian McKeith, slightly older, and known for describing herself as a doctor until it became clear that poking through people bowel movements and telling them that the nutritional value of food depends on what colour it is does not, in actual fact, count. Even allowing for the slight age gap NotDoctor McKeith looks less fabulous than the Domestic Goddess Food Porn Queen. In fact she looks like she not only sucks lemons to get that face but could also, if she decided it was bad for people, suck every photon of every ray of sunshine right off the fucking crop.

I’m betting she eats alone, in silence, probably indulging in a spot of scouring at the same time.

Wouldn’t surprise me, Snowolf, wouldn’t surprise me. Nor would it surprise me if he’s right in his guess that Nigella, queen of full fat desserts, good cuts of meat and food that’s not mere fuel but a joy to eat, tends to eat with friends and family and with laughter and light. And he finishes with an absolute killer of a point.

These two pictures demonstrate what the Righteous, the people that would have you smoke-free, drink-free, fat-free, friend-free, choice-free, freedom-free actually look like, and what they want you to look like. It also shows how those who want everyone to spend the time we have on this Earth actually living and loving, rather than surviving and cowering in fear, look.

Which would you rather be?

An easy sell as far as I’m concerned. Food porn and fun over Righteousness and shit sniffing every day.

Denormalisation and the march of hatred.

Over at Leg-iron’s there’s a post on discrimination in which he says:

“You cannot, so far, tell who we are unless we’re actually smoking but that’s going to change. We will be made identifiable. Third hand smoke will be the excuse.”

Which prompted me to write in the comments,

Perhaps some sort of yellow star motif? It’ll make aiming easier when the time comes…

I don’t say that lightly since I have Jewish neighbours that I like and respect, and obviously what’s going on has yet to reach Shoah proportions (and we should all very much hope that it never does) but all the same the parallels are disturbing. While some may be prepared to live and let live those who believe they are in the right – the Righteous, to use Leg-iron’s expression – make no room, sometimes literally no room, for those who disagree.

Not “Smoking is not allowed”. It’s actual smokers who are not allowed

And it doesn’t stop there either. Smokers can be discriminated against when it comes to employment etc. too (see here, here, here and, from the US, this), all of which, it has been decided, is perfectly legal. Note again that like the sign above it is not merely the activity which is banned but the people who do it. Look at the sign again. Now look at this one.

See? Unwanted activities are being prohibited, but the implication is that the people who skateboard, ride bicycles or go rollerblading are okay to be there as long as they don’t do those activities. The first sign says no smokers, full stop, end of discussion. No credit is given for being a smoker who is currently not smoking and for all anyone knows will refrain from lighting up until they’re elsewhere. The message is aimed at the people, not their pastime. Smoker? Sod off.

Now it might be suggested that in fact this is just exercising property rights and that property owners are entitled not only to prohibit smoking – as I do in my home, being an ex-smoker* – but also to make smokers themselves unwelcome. It might also be suggested that an employer should be able to hire whoever the hell they like without being under any obligation to justify that decision. And since I’m all for the freedom to make personal choices I’d tend to agree with both, except for two sticking points. First, the reverse does not apply – you are not allowed to discriminate in favour of smokers and you have no say in this, property rights notwithstanding. You may own your business premises lock, stock and barrel but you may not encourage all the smokers driven from other establishments to come to your place to smoke and spend to their hearts’ content. You have no choice and no rights over your property in regards to smoking. None at all. If you don’t want smokers you may think you’re free to choose but this is just an illusion brought about by the fact that your wishes and those of the Righteous are aligned on this point. Just wait, they’ll get around to something you do do or are in favour of sooner or later.

Second, any other kind of discrimination against a group probably would be illegal. Remember the No Blacks, No Irish signs? I don’t. They went in my infancy, if not before. And before anyone suggests that smoking is a choice whereas you can’t help your skin colour or nation of birth please bear in mind that religion is also a choice and you can’t discriminate against that either. Don’t believe me? Go put a job ad up and include something saying Muslims, Jews and Hindus need not apply and see what happens. Go on, I’ll wait while you get a pen ….. oh, you’ll be fined, will you? Breaking the law, is it? But you might conceivably want to put something like that if the position was for a slaughterman and you didn’t want anyone who might refuse to deal with pigs or cows on religious grounds (though my advice would be simply to state “must be willing to slaughter and butcher all kinds of livestock”), and the fact is you can’t. Smoking though, well, it seems you can put “Smokers Need Not Apply” and that’s just fine, even though religion and how seriously to take it is as much a personal choice as smoking. Any way you choose to look at it smokers are a special case in that they, and not simply the activity of smoking, can be targets for discrimination that is largely unacceptable if not illegal in most other areas of life.

And it’s not just the legal treatment that sets them aside. Look at the hate and bile being spat at smokers these days. Dick Puddlecote has a nice collection going, and here are a few examples (spelling left as the DP found it):

…let’s have free loaded pistols for use by these smokers there too so that they can end their pathetic lives…

[Smokers] have the right to die. That’s it.

Pubs … can certainly survive without smokers. I hope the cold winter kills a few more off in fact

Smokers need to have the words, STUPID IDIOT across their foreheads!

Yellow star! Yellow star! You just need to cross out “Jude” first.

SMOKERS, PLEASE die from diseases from cigarettes sooner rather than later, so there will be less of you around, stinking up every place you go.

You are second-class citizens. If you don’t like it, move. I don’t want you here anyway.

We should do them a favor and give them a quick clean bullet through the head.

I want all smoker dead, but especially morning smokers and any one who smokes on campus. DIE!!

Smokers scum of the Earth, a cull next.

They deserve to be robbed.

I have always looked down at the “filth” or brown fingered,brown teethed lower classes that smoke.

I’ve hated smokers for many years and I am almost positive that one day, I will successfully kill someone who smokes. I encourage any non-smokers who are reading this to go out and kick the shit out of smokers.

If a person is caught smoking, he or she should be shot on sight. The world would be a better place!

Doesn’t this sound at all familiar? A few decades ago in Germany certain groups, Jewish people amongst them, were first denormalised and demonised, then ultimately dehumanised. Untermenschen, they were called – subhumans – and what was said about them fits in so well with the comments quoted above (and incidentally, Dick Puddlecote has links to all of these comments – they’re quite real).

Early 1938 sign. Translation: “Jews not wanted in Behringersdorf.” Sound at all familiar?

Get out of here! Go away! Leave! Leave us!

You are second-class citizens. If you don’t like it, move. I don’t want you here anyway.

You’re filthy! You’re scum! You disgust us!

I have always looked down at the “filth” or brown fingered,brown teethed lower classes that smoke.

They deserve to be robbed.

We hate you! Go and die, will you? Why can’t you go away and just die?! 

SMOKERS, PLEASE die … sooner rather than later, so there will be less of you around, stinking up every place you go.

… I hope the cold winter kills a few more off in fact

[Smokers] have the right to die. That’s it.

Just die! Die! DIE!!

… a cull next….. shot on sight….. a quick clean bullet …..want all smoker dead…..
one day, I will successfully kill someone who smokes… 

It’s not just legislative attacks specifically targeting them that they need to worry about, but also this foaming hatred whipped up by the constant process of denormalising, demonising and dehumanising smokers. What should give all of us pause for thought is that if you change just the last word of that sentence to Slavs or Jews or Poles it could have come from a history book on the 1930s, and if those times are any guide we haven’t seen the end of this. Wikipedia notes that “The Holocaust was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II.” Follow that link and you see what kind of legislation we’re talking about. A ban on Jews marrying non-Jews, for example. Not a million miles off the ban on smokers being foster parents that I linked to in the fourth paragraph, I’d suggest. Even if you accept the passive smoking argument – and let’s not even get into the lunacy of 2+Nth hand smoke – the ban is once again not on the activity but on the person. Smokers, not smoking. There were laws on the employment of Jews – they were banned from the Civil Service, for example – and Jews employing non-Jews, just in case it rubbed off and sullied a Nazi or something, and in the same para I linked to an article on legal EU approved discrimination of smokers, again the people rather than the act of smoking. And why, given that smoking is already banned in the workplace, and indeed could always have been banned by business owners if they chose? Because, according to the firm concerned, not only might they take a smoke break (seems prejudicial) but even if they don’t they will smell and get ill, and they must be stupid – no more evidence being required for that last half-formed thought than that they chose to continue smoking.

“I would consider smoking as interfering with standards. I’m talking about smoking breaks but not only that – their smell, their intelligence, their illnesses are all factors. That’s why the line was there. Smokers will not be employed, so there is no point in coming for an interview.”

Interviewed on an Irish radio station, Tobin added that anyone who could continue to smoke despite health warnings was obviously not intelligent enough to work for his company. But smokers’ groups have reacted angrily, accusing him of “health fascism”.

I’d certainly call it fascism when even ASH – ASH, for Christ’s sake – thought that was going a bit far.

Ian Willmore, a spokesman for anti-smoking group Ash, believes refusing to employ smokers is “thoroughly bad public policy”.

He said: “We are not interested in discriminating against people because they are smokers. We are interested in helping them quit. Our advice to employers would be not to do that unless there is a clear occupational reason why smoking is not possible.

“We are not an organisation that exists to persecute smokers. We are an organisation that exists to reduce the amount of harm that smoking does.” But he added that encouraging employees to quit could cut days lost to sickness and boost productivity.

It’s sort of nice to know you’ve got limits, Ian, but you or people like you let the djinni out of the bottle. Don’t expect me not to tar you with the fascist brush – or should it be fASHist? – as well just because someone even more hate-filled has appeared. Especially not after that little apologia at the end.

And fascism really does seem the appropriate word when anti-smokers have their Nuremburg laws to bash smokers with and show every sign of continuing to add to them. It’s progressed to special treatment of tobacco as a good so as to further inconvenience smokers – in some places (at least one state in Australia, and no doubt others before long) tobacco must be kept behind closed doors or hidden out of sight under the counter, and plain packaging has been mooted. This makes no difference at all to non-smokers. Why should I care what colour the packet is or whether I can see it? But it makes the smoker’s life just a little bit more difficult since he’s unable to glance at the shelves and see if his preferred brand is in stock. Now he must queue up and ask, wasting his time if they’re not in stock. But fuck him, he’s just a stinking smoker, right, eh, ASH? His time isn’t important to any real people. Why not just beat him up, smash his windows and take his property? Why not round them all up and keep them away from decent people? Who honestly gives a rip?

I’ll tell you who: me. I care. Even though I stopped smoking a while ago now I care, and I oppose the continued official harassment, legalised bullying and discrimination, and the anonymous threats that they suffer.

Not. In. My. Name. Mother-fuckers.

I don’t like the smoke anymore but if it’s blowing in my face it’s not hard to take a step or two to avoid it. And even that’s indoors only. Outside the smoke disperses so quickly in all but the lightest breeze that it’s a non-issue, and in the lightest breezes or very still air it tends to go straight up. I can only get hit with smoke outdoors if someone actually blows it in my face, and this has never happened even once since I quit. Nor did I ever do it to anyone in the years I smoked. Yes, you can still get the smell, and like a lot of non-smokers I don’t like it much either, but for Christ’s sake it’s just a smell. I’ve smelt worse farts. I’ve smelt worse BO. I’ve smelt more overpowering perfume. I will not take part in or condone the persecution others because of an odour, and I will carry on speaking up for those who wish to smoke. And there’s a reason for that, a very simple one.

The march of hatred is moving on, and it’s only a matter of time before they come to me. I ducked their hatred once when I quit smoking (for reasons of my own) but by then attention had already turned to drink. As it happened I barely drank anyway and have gradually become a non-drinker too, so I’ve ducked it again a second time. However, I cannot keep this up. I am not politically correct by nature; I could do with losing a few kilos; I’m for shooters’ rights and would support gun ownership for defence; I like to put lots of salt on my food; I eat meat and I’m prepared to catch it and kill it myself if push came to shove; I don’t believe in global warming; I’m in favour of individual liberty (subject to the Non-Aggression Principle), including the freedom to say something I find utterly vile and repulsive, such as many of the quotes in this post. I could go on but the bottom line is this – the bastards will find something about me to hate sooner or later. The Nazis had been obsessed with Jews for many years, arguably decades if you count the anti-semitism of the Völkisch movement from which the Nazis took many ideas, but we all know it didn’t stop there. Niemöller had it dead right, because by the end – long before the end, in fact – the Nazis were gunning for absolutely anyone who didn’t fit their ideals. That meant Communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, gypsies, Slavs and many eastern Europeans, a whole lot of Soviet POWs, and many physically and mentally disabled people (to say nothing of anyone who simply opposed any of this). Their march of hatred carried on until finally they were stopped, but the price was bitterly high. The twenty-first century march of hatred has not been stopped, and if moves to further restrict the liberty of smokers even outdoors is any guide I’d say that if anything it seems to be gathering pace.** I mean, go read that. Just go have a quick read. We’re lucky to have the climate for a café culture at least part of the year here, though not so much this year with all the rain we’ve had, and having driven the smokers outside many places began putting tables and chairs out for them. Not all were able to do this – pavements have to be wide enough, for example, pubs might need a beer garden – but I think most of those who could did so. I’m sure some made it non-smoking outdoors too but that was their choice, and the smokers would be able to find other places. Not any more. They must now be driven away altogether, even though groups of smokers outside are a big part of the reason some places have an outdoor area in the first place. As one Melbourne smoker from Carlton by the name of Yooblues put it:

ENOUGH ALREADY!
I stand outside in freezing conditions or in the rain
I cross the street when I see a mother with a pram
I stand downwind from any group
I go outside at the footy
I don’t smoke in my car
I put up with the little “cough cough” innuendos and disparaging looks from the health nutters
I keep every butt and dispose of it thoughtfully
I pick the downwind table outside restaurants
I don’t charge you for second hand smoke that cost me a fortune to imbibe first hand
Now RACK OFF and leave me alone!

First offence? You’ll probably get away with crucifixion

Poor bastard.

I don’t know what the bansturbators will eventually come and get me for, but I know they will come and I can even see some of them already. Being a bit fat is already in the spot searchlights and gun bannery has been going on for a century, but there’s my proud climate heresy as well. If I’m lucky I might only be executed by controlled explosion for that, but since my heresy goes back a way it could mean some people will seize my property and either leave me in a desert or throw me into bear infested freezing Arctic waters, all the while torturing me with their cheerful brand of amateur close harmony singing. Thanks, but I’d rather be over-enthusiastically resuscitated by a sixty a day smoker of re-made rollies.

The time has come for reasonable people to stop taking in the bullshit about twenty-third hand smoke, draw a line on the ground behind themselves and tell the Righteous in a firm voice that this is where it stops and now is when it ends – we stand with the smokers, and we stand with the drinkers, and we stand with the salad dodgers, and we stand with the gun owners, and the ones who like a spliff and the ones who like a bet and the ones who who like to play shoot-’em-up video games, even though we ourselves might not do any of those things. In fact, we must say, we stand with all who do not meet your ideals or accept your dogma, because eventually that group includes more or less everybody.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Benjamin Franklin

I stand with the smokers even though I don’t smoke because they do me no harm and I enjoy the company of several smokers. But I should stand with the smokers anyway out of pure self-interest because, as Niemöller pointed out, if I don’t there will be nobody to stand with me when it’s my turn.

* I may be an ex-smoker but I am certainly not a reformed smoker, and if someone came here and suggested I am I shall push them down the stairs. “Reformed” implies I feel guilt for smoking in the past and I don’t. Not a bit of it. It was something I used to do but eventually stopped, that’s all. If only those absolutely addicted to bansturbation would do the same.

**Oh yes, that’s our wonderful new Liberal In Name Only Victorian state government for you – I knew the bastards wouldn’t take long before showing how ilLiberal they really are. Hey, that makes “LINOs”. That’s a keeper for the blog tag collection. It’s just a shame you have to be loaded before you can walk on them.

What are they teaching kids these days?

By the approving sounds of some lecturers, rioting, trespass and property damage. I dunno, once upon a time it was apples on the desk. In my school days it the occasional bag of sweets or, for one particular teacher, Monster Munch. Now it seems like if you want to be teacher’s pet you have to smash a few windows in and drop fire extinguishers on coppers from a high roof.

The coming catastrophist mantra.

Warble gloaming could, according to James Delingpole, be circling the drain, and we should get ready for what he calls the next Big Lie: biodiversity. Personally this seems like something I can get right behind for a change. I’m all for more diversity so let’s get cracking. I suggest we start by genetically modifying absolutely anything that moves and then anything that doesn’t until it begins to move, and we keep going until the bio is so amazingly diverse that people are having to shoot down their breakfast cereal in the mornings after it’s smashed its way out of the packet and is flying round the room chasing the cat.

They’re grrrrrrrrrrreat.

Do you think Greenpeace will have me?

Nuclear missive.

As it’s been more than ably covered by WUWT and James Delingpole I’m a bit late to this, I know, but there is one aspect to Hal Lewis’s superb resignation letter to the American Physical Society I want to draw attention to, and that is its timing. The very same weekend the 10:10 mob had intended to launch their little promo movie in which anyone displaying scepticism or apathy to The Cause is summarily executed by being exploded, a respected physicist writes such things as:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

And:

… the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

And:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

And:

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

And:

The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch…

The whole thing is worth a thorough read and tends to support what I’ve suspected for a long time, namely that there is now so much money involved that the whole field of climate research has become an industry in itself. And like any industry Big Eco moves to promote it’s interests, though as the 10:10 film showed it’s just as capable of publicity own goals. It’s only natural that it will also want to protect them, and we shouldn’t forget for a second that 10:10 showed us how that might work as well.

10:10 regret to announce that Professor Lewis is no longer available for comment.

P.S. – I hope the fact that next month’s talks on warble gloaming are (a) being talked down and may not get the same level of government attendees as in the past, and (b) is yet again being held in a beautiful and luxurious tourist resort – and, incidentally, to which nearly all the attendees will presumably fly by magical no carbon emitting aircraft as the citizens of the majority of their respective countries hope for a warmer winter than the last one – isn’t being overlooked what with all these resigning professors and exploding children. If you’re all very good Chris Huhne might spend some of your money on a postcard.

Bastards!

The oxygen of publicity.

No time for much of a blog today so I’ll let this stand alone. Via The Filthy Engineer I see that EU Referendum is starting a campaign to heap all the shit on O₂ that it deserves for its continued support of the 10:10 campaign, producers of the eco-murder video. Admittedly this might seem like I’m going against my libertarian principles but I’m not saying that O₂ can’t support whoever they like and for whatever reasons, just that the eco-fascists they’re sponsoring are people who are more worried (though it seemed not actually that worried) about offending people than the fact that their wet dream of being able to blow up anyone deemed insufficiently enthusiastic would be nothing less than murder. And that, I feel, is an excellent reason to find another mobile phone service provider if you’re with O₂.

I feel another video might be in order if I have the time over the weekend.

Someone somewhere is really pissed off at 10:10.

http://eyetube.me/misc/flash/VidiScript_player.swf

Yeah, I know Downfall mashups are so last year, but I just couldn’t resist it.

An alternative 10:10 video.

I realise I’ve not just broken Godwin’s Law with that vid but thrown it from the top of a cliff and set its house on fire, but as I said before this is how the most extreme Gaiaists and alarmists, and increasingly the ones who might think of themselves as moderate, see other human beings. This is the value they put on the lives of people who not just disagree but don’t joyously embrace the cause and the rituals that come with it. A shrug of the shoulders instead of enthusiasm for the hair shirts is all it takes to reduce the value of your life to zero.

The new Untermenschen – UPDATED

They’re everywhere, the new Untermenschen. You probably know several yourself. A smoker or two, obviously, that goes without saying. And drinkers too, of course, and people who put extra salt on their chips, and in fact people who like chips in the first place unless they’re pretty stringent about hitting the gym and working them back off again. Yes, we all know that in the Ninth Circle of Hell Judas Iscariot will be smoking, drinking and tucking into over salted so-called junk food without taking any exercise, but the criteria for being among the new Untermenschen doesn’t end with simple personal lifestyle choices that don’t fit in with the Strength Through Joy-ism of the state and it’s nannies. Oh no. If you don’t commit to the new state religion as well, even if you do actually believe in it, then you too are an Untermensch.

And so you should be killed, preferably as graphically as possible pour encourager les autres.

+++UPDATE+++

At this point I had embedded the original movie from YouTube but thanks to microdave in the comments I see this morning that the backlash has grown during the night and the vid has now been taken down. However, they’ve just been reminded that once anything hits the interwebs it’s probably there for good, and so it has proved. There are dozens on YouTube and they’re probably going up faster than they can be taken down, and even if that dies down it still won’t have gone since microdave snagged a copy to stick on EyeTube and which I’m using to replace the defunct YouTube one.

Great work, Dave. They’ll have a hard time getting this genie back in the bottle.

http://eyetube.me/misc/flash/VidiScript_player.swf

Your choice. You don’t have to join in. No pressure… BLAM

No pressure – because not joining in makes your continued existence unnecessary. You are, you see, entirely disposable. Even that bird who used to be in the X-Files can be disposed of, her contribution deemed insufficient to allow her life to continue. She believed enough to do the voiceover but didn’t plan to join in the rituals, and that won’t do because it’s not just your belief the Gaists demand. It’s your unswerving obedience. Failure deserves death, instant and very, very bloody death. They’re not actually killing anyone yet, but it’s getting pretty obvious how they feel about anyone not singing from their hymn book.

And of course it’s not just them because the anti-smoke, anti-drink, anti-meat, anti-fat, anti-personal choice mobs think no more of you than do the Gaiasts. Very soon we will all be Untermenschen in the eyes of somebody, if we’re not already. We can choose to stand up now and say, ‘Enough.’ Or we can wait for one of them to give us our final order:

“Stand by the wall, you fucking scum!”

H/T WUWT.

Green is the colour of evil, dictatorship and death.

As disgraceful as what’s being done to the Thompsons is (see last post) we should remember that for some greenies this is only the beginning, and that what they really want is to kill off most – about 90% – of the world’s population either directly or by encouraging disease and starvation in the third world, to sterilise many of the rest by force, to licence having children (actually a child), to set up re-education gulags for those who aren’t on message but for whatever reason aren’t killed (yet, I presume), and to have the few remaining people completely under the control of their ruling elite and living the kind of life that hasn’t existed in Western nations for several centuries. There are people out there who absolutely and sincerely believe that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and others in the Window Licking Happy Massacres Club were doing the world, as distinct from humanity, a favour but didn’t go far enough. And this man, Pentti Linkola, is one of them.

Philosopher Pentti Linkola has built an enthusiastic following of self-described “eco-fascists” receptive to his message that the state should enact draconian measures of “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” in order to make people comply with environmental dictates.

Jesus Christ Almighty, you can almost hear the marching jacksandals, can’t you? Form an orderly queue at your nearest gun shop if you’re not keen on the idea of going quietly when this fucker’s greenshirt stomrtroopers kick your door in. You really shouldn’t judge by pictures but there’s something about that photo of him that to me makes him look like he’s evaluating the person behind the camera. It’s a look I’ve always imagined was on the face of Josef Mengele and fellow Nazis as they experimented on prisoners. It’s a look of someone who doesn’t just not value human life but values the extinguishing of it. Or maybe that’s just the impression I have because he says things like this.

[World War Three would be] a happy occasion for the planet…. If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.

I like the idea of him sacrificing himself without hesitating but I’m not so keen on all the other stuff. Admittedly I feel pretty misanthropic myself, ooooh, about four or five times a week, but I don’t want everyone else dead or even necessarily converted to my way of thinking – I just wish their apparently congenital need to suck the state’s tit from the cradle to the grave while they tweep out in front of the idiot’s lantern wasn’t stopping me from living my way. Smiler up there wants to go so much further, further even than the likes of Porridge, Lovelocke and Moonbat, and if there was a button I could press to interrupt the X-Factor with a short message to the effect that this greenie at the least, and almost certainly many others, would very much like everyone watching the show to die please, I’d happily sacrifice a few minutes of other people’s on-air freak wrangling* if it meant millions of people finally learned how genuinely dangerous these eco-tools, or rather eco-facists as some of them are beginning to admit, can be.

Gentlemen… ‘Eco Prevails!’

Islam? Osama bin Liner? Don’t make me fucking laugh. He might harbour dreams of a caliphate and the conversion of western nations to his particular fantasy, but relatively speaking that’s chickenshit. What Linkola and his fellow believers want is basically the end of the world.

* TM Daily Mash.

Destroy the unbeliever! Kill the heretic!

Modern Greenism is a funny thing. In some ways it’s like many other industries – it has products to sell and needs to create a market for them, it’s ruthlessly protective, chock full of vested interests and it lobbies both governments and media all over the world to ensure that it gets lots of promotion and regulatory, ah, environments that suit it, which is why I often refer to it as Big Eco. Yet it’s also like religion in that they’ve got people performing the prescribed rituals even when there’s a self evident and needless risk of setting the cat on fire, they’ve persuaded courts that religious discrimination laws apply to them, and that they really, really, really hate infidels er… heretics er… unbelievers er… sceptics. Seriously, you only have to look at the reaction to Lomborg’s ‘return’ to the fold and the whole more-joy-in-heaven-over-one-sinner-who-repenteth-y tone to it, even though the guy really wasn’t saying anything very different from what he’d said before, and how the warmist zealots treated him when they thought he was an AGW apostate.

Nor do you even have to write a book saying it might not be as bad as all that and that anyway it’d be cheaper simply to adapt to any warming to attract the green wrath. Oh, no. Just saying you’re not a believer can get your life ruined, as explained by Anthony Watts (update here).

I need your help, because they need your help. Please read this whole story and consider if you can help. WUWT readers may recall this story: Death of a Feedlot Operator …in which the anal-retentive government of West Australia has “licensed” a family farm out of operation due to some shonky science and arbitrary application of the “sniff test”. Yes that’s right, cattle farms smell, so do pig farms, as does any farm.

Even windfarms once you take into account the niff from the chunks of dead birds dropping from the sky. But this shouldn’t be a problem in a country in which agriculture is still such a huge part of life and the economy that Aussie farmers are supplying beef to McDonalds not just domestically but even in the US. Just considering livestock alone and ignoring crops and wines the agriculture industry earns nearly a billion dollars from exports, about two thirds from beef. So it seems a little odd that the WA government would, as Anthony Watts claims, regulate out of business a cattle farming family – Rotarians, incidentally – who’ve invested in environmental standards by planting trees, using a worm farm to break down waste and have invested in odour reduction system precisely to address the concerns that people living nearby would have (though for my money living in rural Oz and complaining about farms is like moving to the end of the Heathrow runway and whinging about the noise). What could possibly be…

…now it’s reason to shut one out due to baseless complaints from the local greens. And, it all started when Matt Thompson started doubting global warming and talking about it publicly.

Ah, yes. That’d do it.

Click to embiggerse

It goes without saying that my position on telling people what they can do with their own land, land that they occupy legally, is the typical libertarian one of non-interference unless you can actually show that someone else is losing out, and as I mentioned above not living with a farm-y smell in an area that is so heavily agricultural should not come anywhere near qualifying. However, Australia’s track record on this is not something it should be proud of, especially since it so often seems to be in the name of that which is Holy and Green. The Thompsons are joining reluctant company such as Peter Spencer, a farmer driven to go on hunger strike to protest a ban preventing him from clearing his property of vegetation so that the land can count towards Australia’s carbon sinks, incidentally rendering him effectively unable to farm on his own farm and making his land virtually worthless. A billion dollars of exports and they’re simply not important enough for the the government to care about, and indeed, judging from Jo Nova via WUWT, the Thompsons weren’t even on the radar at one point (my emphasis).

The Thompsons waited a full year to get Works Approval for a 15,000 head feedlot. After they had already committed the capital, the rules kept shifting. They discovered they’d need ongoing licenses as well. After several years of ramping up the capacity on these licenses, things changed. Matt spoke out as a skeptic. About that time, the renewals were delayed, then the numbers were cut in half, and new conditions were added that were impossible to meet. To feed and supply water for thousands of cattle the Thompsons had to sign agreements in advance to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods they could not use, but had no way of knowing that at the time. When they appealed, it took 18 months to get “vindicated” but by then there was only six months left on the “two year” license. Not enough to set up all the contracts and run a business. The new sub-clauses meant that even licenses for a qualified “10,000″ head had vague untestable conditions: the license you have when you don’t have a license.

The usual bureaucratic goalpost shifting up to a point and then suddenly, no doubt completely by coincidence, delays and restrictions and more delays that basically destroyed the farm as a business despite the Thompsons ‘winning’.

It’s a fucking strange kind of win that can really only be celebrated by the other side, and that’s the situation now because the business is screwed and the Thompson family have just days to get out before the NAB bank, who had once promised not to act till the end of the year, repossess the property. This, by the way, is the same NAB bank who are currently running this advert about how wonderful they are towards small business. As such an appeal is running to help the Thompsons, and if you can spare a few quid I’d highly recommend you pop along either to WUWT or Jo Nova, read the whole thing and click on the Paypal Donate button on your way out. If not then please at least repost it, Twatterise it or do whatever you can do with Facebook about it. If you’re in Australia you could write to the WA Premier and relevant minsters as suggested on WUWT (see ‘Update 3‘ down the page), and if you bank with NAB you might think about moving banks and writing a letter to explain why.

And if you ever decide to visit West Australia, which is a beautiful part of the country, do remember to take a clothes peg with you on the off chance you might be in the area where the Thompson’ farm is and hopefully still will be. It probably won’t smell much even if by some miracle they’re still farming there, but on the off chance that you find a greenie whining about the cow farts hurting the sky you can do everyone a favour and use it to peg his lips together.

H/T Obo. I was very late to this having been a little too busy to catch up on who on the blogroll has written what lately, and only a shirt while ago happened to notice Obo’s appeal to Oz based folks to spread the word about it.

* ‘Predictions’ have mostly been long since downgraded to ‘projections’ and then ‘scenarios’. I was under the impression that theories with a real claim to be scientific are normally not shy of making predictions. It’s what they’re fucking for. As with so many things this does not apply to warble gloaming theories, partly because it’s half religion and half Big Eco business and partly because they seem to prefer any actual predictions they make to be untestable by anyone not prepared to wait around for a hundred years or so.