Tobacco Control Out Of Control

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Today’s piece by Frank Davis is called The Tobacco Control Mentality. It concerns a Canadian study by their Tobacco Control industry. Frank sums up the gist of part of their “reasoning”,

“For Tobacco Control, it seems that the ideal individual is one who lives life in a prudent, calculating way and is ever-vigilant of risks, self-regulating and productive – and in accordance with expert advice.

“The “self-managing” or “self-governing” or “self-regulating” individual is one who exercises iron self-control. He resists the temptation to take up smoking. Or indeed anything else. He doesn’t take risks.

“Smokers, by contrast, exhibit lack of self-control. They don’t regulate or govern or manage themselves properly. Worse still, their propensity to engage in risky behaviours like smoking extends elsewhere…”

But, as he points out,

“After all, everybody engages in self-regulation of one kind or other. Nobody ever does exactly what they like the whole time.

“The real crime of the self-regulating smoker is to disregard experts and other authorities, and be an autonomous individual. And once he has disregarded authority in respect of smoking, it’s quite likely he’ll disregard it in respect of pretty well everything else as well.

“Tobacco Control’s ideal individual is one who believes what he’s told, and who does what he’s told, by authorities of one sort or other.”

He then gets to the reason for their zealotry,

“One might say that Tobacco Control is primarily about top-down moral regulation. This used once to be the concern of religions of one sort or other. But with the decline of religious observance, Tobacco Control (or Public Health) has stepped in to fill the moral vacuum. The virtues and vices of the old religions have been adopted wholesale, but renamed. The bishops and priests have been replaced by “experts” and “researchers”, and the old theology by “reason” and “science”. Good conduct has been replaced by “healthy living”, and failure to conduct one’s life in accordance with its tenets results in “premature death”. The “true believers” in this new pseudo-religion believe everything they’re told, and live in fear of a variety of new hobgoblins in the form of tobacco, alcohol, sugar, salt, fat, and carbon dioxide, which they live as much in fear of as the Devil himself.”

I had to read more of this ‘study’. It is very interesting. The language and attitudes are astounding.

Firstly, when did ‘tobacco control’ start calling themselves by the name? I consider it a derogatory term. When did it get to the stage where their superiority permitted them to be unapologetically forthright? Was it after the compliant “low-hanging fruit” they mentioned had been largely picked off with TC’s propaganda (incl. guilt trips)?

Not only is there a tobacco “epidemic” (according to the WHO), but there has been a “war on smoking in Euro–American societies” and of course, the first casualty in war is truth. But it’s a war, so lying is OK and in an age of moral relativism, truth is whatever you want it to be.

We know that a lot of TC’s coercion revolves around thinking about the cheeeldren, yet, “The popularity of smoking among young people challenges the progress of cessation and prevention campaigns.”

They note that (like elsewhere), smoking is more prevalent among poor people. Of course it is. The punitive taxes will make you poor(er) than the non-smoking, non-risk taking, weigher-upping, intelligent ones who listen to TC.

But I’m sure they mean people from lower-income families, meaning that their ‘war’ is against the financially worst-off in society. Part of that war is lobbying for increased taxes and ever more ingenious ways of dehumanising smokers. These are the people Tobacco Control are now trying to “reach”. Then there’s all their preaching. Hardly surprising that,

In recent years it has become clear that Canadian tobacco control faces a particular challenge with regard to youth smoking, with the prevalence of smoking in Canada highest (21%) in people aged 20–24 (Health Canada 2010).

Talking of preaching, I agree that these modern crusades are a replacement for religion; their ‘studies’ and edicts are the new scriptures. Except that they don’t seem to do forgiveness and they definitely don’t do ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, although they probably think that their constant propaganda and impoverishing and making life difficult in many other ways is a tough kind of love which has to be done to make those at TC feel ‘spiritually’ awake.

You can tell by their language how they see their role and they admit their use of mind control like the cultists they are, “Not only are there age differentials with regard to smoking prevalence but interventionists are becoming increasingly concerned with the imbalanced effect of their programming across socially differentiated youth.”

I had thought that propaganda was their forte, yet they invented this:

In Ontario, ‘Stupid.ca’ is a well-known provincial programme targeting youth smoking.

Calling your ‘target’ (harder to reach fruit: unreceptive to TC) ‘stupid’ sounds, er, stupid. Or are they referring to themselves?

Anyway, type in that and you go directly to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care. The second tab in is “About the Ministry”. Just like you would find on a typical religious website!

Back to the ‘study’. TC have various projects going on to try to influence the youth, in this vein,

They suggest that with the right kind of knowledge, young people can be made responsible and thereby make the right choices: that is, with the help of these tools, self-controlled and smart youth will be able to stop smoking.

It’s the same tried and failed method as used for curbing drug-use and teenage pregnancy/STDs. The result is that it encourages experimentation and guess what, it produces more adults engaging in what the do-gooders are supposedly railing against, so it keeps the social engineers in business for evermore.

It’s something I have noticed recently that people’s number one priority with their job is their salary rather than their service. I have lately experienced it personally in several fields, particularly in the ‘caring’ professions. And yet, I have had far more support and consideration from the least likely of sources.

Frank’s initial quote from the study about “‘the self who is expected to live life in a prudent, calculating way and to be ever-vigilant of risks, self-regulating and productive…” is a strange tactic to try to reach “the socially marginalised youth smoker”, who think they will live just about forever and are often prepared to take risks because that’s what young people do, whether knowingly or through ‘peer pressure’ or some other cue.

It doesn’t follow that they cannot also be “productive”.

It’s the constant nannying/bulling/restraints/legislation that seems to be causing people to be less productive. TC just haven’t a clue. They think they’re clever talking about “Foucault’s biopolitics of population” but when it comes down to it, they don’t understand how to reach the youth who continue to smoke. Worse (from their point of view – or is it – as I’ve previously hinted at?), their ideas seem to be meaningless at best and probably counter-productive.

I found this interesting, Youth smokers are thus not only framed as smokers: smoking appears to engender other deviant social and behavioural tendencies. So, smoking is “deviant”. I suppose it would be, according to their religion.

Then there’s this cracker,

A number of interviewees made comparisons between tobacco and illicit drugs, particularly crack cocaine, expressing the view that in Vancouver tobacco use was seen to be on par with smoking crack.

Many years ago, in the UK, I noticed that tobacco and alcohol were being bundled in with illicit drugs. Again, weird propaganda which may have encouraged those normal smokers and drinkers to experiment with these ‘other drugs’?

So confused are they now in Vancouver that they don’t seem to know the difference between a cigarette and crack. Does this kind of weirdness go part and parcel with the dumbing down of ‘education’? Or just the constant bleating about cigarettes being a ‘drug’?

Don’t choke on your coffee at this next bit,

The one thing that we most desperately need in this province is funding for NRTs, nicotine replacement therapy or pharma, pharmacotherapy – [Zyban, Champex]…

The nicotine replacement therapies are well-known for being practically useless. Champix/Chantix and Zyban have been linked to hundreds of suicides. In July 2009, America’s FDA ordered the makers, Pfizer and GSK, to put warnings on the boxes about the risk of “serious mental health events”

“The US Food and Drug Administration said that the warnings on Chantix (varenicline) and Zyban (bupropion) will highlight the risk of changes in behaviour, “depressed mood hostility, and suicidal thoughts when taking these drugs”.”

Yet doctors still prescribe these killers.

You will choke on this one. These are the thoughts of one practitioner:

I think that it is more the … not lobbying, I am using the wrong term, but this kind of demonisation that we have done of smokers that has made people stop smoking. The smoker is the ‘big bad guy’, after the paedophile comes the smoker practically, these days, in our society, the bad guys. You see a smoker outside smoking a cigarette, children, ‘Oh’ and they look at the smoker with big wide eyes as though he was going to kill a baby seal in Alaska. It’s the same thing for them, it is really the demon. They are really viewed, we marginalise, we really, really do marginalise smokers, the more we do, the less place smokers have.

They do acknowledge the “unintended consequence”, “that tobacco control discourse and
policy may even be creating a bond among those leftover people who smoke.”

The strange reasoning throughout seems to be that if you stopped the youth from smoking then all their other ‘risky’ behaviour would go away, that their ‘mental issues’ would be healed and that their ‘socio-economic’ status would be improved.

Maybe this shows, more than anything, that these social engineers live on a different planet?

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Fraud, Errors and Bribes Costing the NHS Billions

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‘Healthcare’ – what it boils down to.

Or rather, the taxpayer. Today’s post from Frank Davis is about the situation in the USA, where millions and billions of dollars are being paid in bonuses to doctors and on programmes telling Americans how to eat and on other “support” efforts to modify behaviour.

He contrasts this against the Ebola outbreak and how the Bridgestone Corporation in Liberia responded:

“The rubber plantation has 8,000 workers with 71,000 dependents. It is an hour north-east of Monrovia, surrounded by Ebola outbreaks. The virus arrived on the plantation in March. Knowing that the UN and the Liberian government were not going to save them, the managers sat around a rubber tree and googled “Ebola” and learned on the run instead. They turned shipping containers into isolation units, trucks into ambulances, and chemical cleaning suits into “haz-mat” gear. They trained cleaners, and teachers, they blocked visitors, and over the next five months dealt with 71 infections, but by early October were clear of the virus. There were only 17 survivors (the same 70% mortality rate as elsewhere). But without good management, there could have been so many more deaths.”

I wondered how wasteful with our money our own ‘authorities’ in the UK are.

In 2012, the Institute of Economic Affairs claimed that £12 billion of taxpayers’ money was handed to 27,000 charities including those campaigning for issues with “no widespread support” such as foreign aid and temperance.

Of course, the primary purpose of the fake ‘charity’ is to ‘astroturf’ to give a legitimacy to planned government policies largely concerned with health (i.e. nanying/bullying), environmentalism (i.e. more legislation and taxes) and ‘human rights’ (i.e. cultural subversion and an excuse for removing the rights of everyone who is not a Protected One).

On purely health-related matters, the money wasted is obscene and everyone is on the fiddle. I don’t mean every single person is crooked, but doctors, chemists, pharma companies – everyone.

Bent pharmacists:

“Taxpayers are being charged up to 40 times the usual cost for common over-the-counter products being prescribed by NHS doctors, The Telegraph can disclose.

The NHS is currently paying up to £89.50 for cod-liver oil capsules — identical versions of which can be bought on the high street for about £3.50. Taxpayers are also being hit with inflated costs for vitamin E, evening primrose oil and other over-the-counter products.

Despite being freely available without prescription, the products are all regularly prescribed by GPs and NHS doctors — a situation which now appears to be being exploited for commercial gain. The prescription pricing scandal has emerged in the past two years because of a loophole in the rules which allows chemists to select “suitable” products from drug companies and bill the taxpayer.

The disclosures will add to fears that the system is not being properly policed. Last month, The Telegraph revealed that drug companies were colluding with pharmacists to overcharge the NHS millions of pounds for a group of drugs called “specials”.

The prices of more than 20,000 drugs could have been artificially inflated, with backhanders paid to chemists who agreed to sell them. Representatives of some pharmaceutical companies agreed to invoice chemists for drugs at up to double their actual cost.”

From Better Data:

“The current evidence shows that for most patients, all drugs from this class [statins] are equally safe and effective, so doctors are usually advised to use the cheapest. The analysis examined how much money was spent in each area on the more expensive drugs. It looks at the entire prescriptions dataset (37 million rows of data), and therefore represents results from facts, not models. If the research had been conducted a year ago, over £200m could have been saved, looking forward the team expect to identify similar potential savings.

This is part of a wider issue of spending on proprietary drugs in cases where good and far cheaper generic equivalents exist. Previous research has estimated that these wider patterns cost the NHS over £1 billion pounds a year in excess spend*.

The cost of an individual prescription item can vary from as little as 81p for a generic, to over £20 for drugs still under licence to the pharmaceutical companies that develop.”

There is the cost of plain fraud (the upfront variety):

“The former head of NHS Counter Fraud Services has warned in a report that fraud is costing the NHS £5bn a year, with a further £2bn lost to financial errors.

The amount lost to fraud alone could pay for nearly 250,000 nurses, according to the report. It is the focus of an investigation by the Panorama programme, which is due to be broadcast tonight on BBC One at 8.30pm.

Jim Gee, co-author of the Portsmouth University study, was director of NHS Counter Fraud Services for eight years until 2006.

The £7bn estimate is based on a comparison with global figures, which suggest average losses to fraud and error of around 7% of healthcare budgets. It is 20 times higher than the figure recorded in the government’s annual fraud indicator report.”

Back in the USA,

“The pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline has been fined $3bn (£1.9bn) after admitting bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable antidepressants to children. Glaxo is also expected to admit failing to report safety problems with the diabetes drug Avandia in a district court in Boston on Thursday.

The company encouraged sales reps in the US to mis-sell three drugs to doctors and lavished hospitality and kickbacks on those who agreed to write extra prescriptions, including trips to resorts in Bermuda, Jamaica and California.”

The WHO are notoriously crooked and incompetent; a giant fake charity whose Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan, has been continuing to sideline Ebola to attend an anti-smoking conference in Moscow. Like the national governments and their fake charities, the WHO clearly exists to act in exactly the same way: astroturfing for the World Government, to bully people over climate change and with their tobacco and obesity “epidemics” and who have also criminally boosted the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

If only ‘healthcare’ truly was about health and care and not money and social engineering.

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Scottish ‘Independence’ or The EU Knighted Kingdom?

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Unless you have spent the past couple of years in Fingal’s Cave, you will know that today could herald the beginning of the end of over 300 years of this United Kingdom and make Alex Salmond an unlikely modern-day William Wallace. For a short time.

Or we will remain as the full United Kingdom (less most of Ireland, which left nearly a century ago). The leaders of the LibLabCon Party have all been in Scotland recently to campaign for a ‘No’ vote. Suddenly they care about us. Or do they?

Personally, I believe that devolution was intended to produce a total break-up of the UK to weaken this (once) beacon of hope anchored just offshore from a continent which has produced quite a few individuals who were determined to control as much of it as possible through warfare.

It’s different this time only in that the empire-builders are using their brains rather than their (armed forces’) brawn. They have used schools and ‘entertainment’ to dumb down the past couple of generations; mass immigration to dilute patriotism and to divide and conquer; their friends in the media to instill fear into acceptance and appreciation of the EU.

I more-or-less got to the nub of the issue (in my view) in my previous post:

Scotland is a very rich country, but ‘independence’ would leave us (more) impoverished under the yoke of incompetent and compromised politicians and weighed down by the EU ball and chain.

‘Independence’, as I have argued all along, is direct rule from Brussels cutting out the Westminster middlemen. Between the EU and the SNP in particular, I can envisage Scotland becoming the model police state for the World.

So can Leg-iron, who is writing a dystopic novel,

Since I decided on Scotland for Panoptica, the story is flying.

What does ‘independence’ mean when we are largely ruled by outsiders, politically, and much of what is inside Scotland is owned by people outside Scotland.

For example, Scotland is famous for alcohol. Production and over-consumption. But few of ‘our’ major companies appear to be Scottish-owned. Of about eight alcoholic drinks/companies I explored, all were owned by non-Scots, from island malts to ‘our’ two biggest brewers. Scottish Power is owned by the Spanish. The Bank of Scotland is owned by Lloyds as is Scottish Widows. Scotland’s three top-selling ‘newspapers’ are owned by the Sun and Mirror. Every major town centre comprises roughly the same shops owned by transnational corporations. And so on. Much of our land is foreign-owned:

HALF of Scotland is owned by just 500 people, few of whom are actually Scots.

Dick Puddlecote wrote about a Telegraph piece by Chris Snowdon: Whose child is it anyway? about a school in Yorkshire where packed lunches have been banned and concerning the head teacher’s use of the term “our children”,

She uses the term to imply ownership by her institution, perhaps even by the nation.

Here in Scotland, “Our children and grandchildren” is a popular phrase right now.

The ‘No’ camp says that “Our children and grandchildren will be better off if we stay in the Union”.

The ‘Yes’ camp insists that “Our children’s and grandchildren’s future will be more secure when we are free to make our own choices”, etc., etc.

So, these are ‘Scotland’s children’. The SNP ‘government’ is rolling out GIRFEC (Getting it right for every child), which means that every Scottish child will have a “Named Person” as a state nanny throughout their entire childhood; the person depends at what stage in life the child is at, but they will be free to share personal information about the child with other ‘agencies’ without approval from the parents.

Clearly, up here, “our children” and all future children are considered property of the state.

This is happening with or without indepretendence.

Anna Raccoon sheds some interesting light on what could happen if we really do get indepretendence. She starts off whimsically,

For a start, ‘freed from Westminster rule’ – you’ll get 59 belligerent Westminster MPs dumped back on you – and you’ll have to feed and house them. They’re a fiendishly expensive hobby, used to lavish expenses, and some of them have proved none too honest; we shan’t be contributing to their board and keep any longer – personally, we’ll be glad to see the back of them.

She then agrees with me and quite a number of ‘Yes’ men and women,

I don’t quite understand how ‘independence’ and ‘freed from Westminster rule’ equates with your desire to join the EU and live under the yoke of Brussels.

The former Commission President, Jacques Delors, predicted in July 1988 that within ten years 80% of economic legislation, and perhaps also fiscal and social legislation, would be of EC/EU origin.

At present it’s about 50%. So you’ll only be half free…but if that’s what you want, you’re welcome.

She also mentions that the UK skipped out of the Schengen agreement, but Scotland won’t be able to,

…but when Gretna Green is chock full of returning Syrian jihadists terrorising the neighbourhood, waiting to thump some Weeggie lorry driver over the head in order to have a chance of getting over the border into the UK – and you pull into a newly ‘independent Scottish’ petrol station near the border at midnight and find the pavement covered in sleeping figures in djellabas hidden under a mountain of old rags…wha’d’you mean it won’t happen?

Free movement in Europe and all that, my wee Jock pal, the only reason we concentrate our efforts on the English channel is because that is currently the favoured place of illegal entry – once the word gets out in Bamako that you can ‘just stroll into the UK’ from those beautiful heather covered mountains up in Scotland, and there is nothing stopping you travelling to Scotland…

Salmond wants lots and lots of immigration, which makes you wonder what he thinks is so wrong with Scotland being full of Scots. Sounds like he doesn’t actually like his fellow countrymen and women and their “children and grandchildren” very much.

Or is he another globalist puppet like Cameron, Blair et al intent on delivering global governance? Does the sun rise in the east every morning?

I believe he is a traitor, just like all recent UK Prime Ministers and many of their ministers and civil servants.

Leg-iron made an interesting point that now is maybe not the right time for Scottish independence, but maybe in the fairly near future. I’m sure we’ll have another chance if what the globalists want is a disunited kingdom, like the Irish had a second chance to vote for the Lisbon Treaty after voting the ‘wrong’ way the first time.

But what of a ‘No’ vote. What’s to become of this EU Knighted Kingdom, already weakened through decades of subversion, job-destroying legislation and policies designed to deliberately plunge us deeply into debt?

Unless UKIP can get into government and do what they have promised, the UK is guaranteed to go the same way as a perpetually socialist Scotland, governed out of Brussels and Geneva and signatories to every dodgy ‘legally-binding’ international environmental agreement, further destroying our industry and power supplies and every ‘human rights’ manifesto, further robbing us of basic freedoms to accommodate the whims of the latest Chosen Group.

As far as I can see, with the world a more dangerous place than I can remember, even at the height of the Cold War, the UK is becoming ever more divided, debt-ridden, demoralised and ripe for a take-over.

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As New Poll Puts ‘Yes’ Camp Ahead, Do Scots Know What is at Stake?

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I haven’t written very much at all about the Scottish ‘independence’ referendum, because, like Frank Davis, I assumed that the ‘No’ votes would overwhelm the ‘Yes’, but…

Shock Poll: ‘Yes’ Camp Takes Lead in Scottish Independence Referendum.

After the undecideds have been removed from the equation, the YouGov poll for the Sunday Times, gives the yes campaign a lead of 51 percent to 49.

A ‘Yes’ vote would be just as planned. To break up the UK would be a serious victory for the global strategists in these times of coercing every country to abide by the same rules. Of course, at Westminster, they’ve been generally complying anyway, but with UKIP’s rise there’s at least the hope now that the damage can be reversed.

Not for an ‘independent’ Scotland, though. We have a very rich country here which could easily thrive with ‘normal’ people running things, but socialists (globalist puppets) would always be in charge and they subjugate and impoverish people.

We already know that the SNP ignores us (overturning wind farm planning permission refusals; ignoring their consultation on same-sex ‘marriage’) and wants to control us tightly, like the ‘named person’ for every child and the 50p per unit minimum price of alcohol.

They are also the ultimate watermelons: they propose that Scotland will be 100% powered by renewables by 2020. I’m sure they will participate fully in Agenda 21, if the decision to allow a eugenicist conference in the Scottish Parliament is anything to go by,

The radical group [Optimum Population Trust – now known as Population Matters] is urging First Minister Alex Salmond to launch a Government campaign to curb family size, using the slogan “two’s plenty”.

OPT is calling for Scotland’s population to be cut by a quarter.

I believe that they are likely to give in to such ideas – even a one-child policy. We know that Salmond would like half the World to live here, hence anyone from the EU, apart from England, Wales and N. Ireland, can already study here free. Scotland would soon become unrecognisable. Limiting family size would help his plans for mass immigration – indeed, it would be necessary to bring in younger people from abroad to do the work to pay the taxes to support the retired.

Scotland doesn’t have the same quality of dissenting voices as England does. I expect with indepretendence we would be up to our necks with socialism from alternate SNP and Labour governments obeying every command from the leftist EU, Council of Europe, UN agencies, climate change conferences, etc.

Scotland could be rich, like Norway and Switzerland, but I’m sure we would end up like an impoverished Soviet satellite state. I think it’s the wrong time and definitely the wrong people who will be ‘leading’ us.

The Darien scheme and much more recently, New Labour’s ‘Scottish Mafia’, show that we just haven’t had sufficiently intelligent people involved in politics in Scotland for centuries. If that ever changes and genuine independence is on offer then – and only then – would it be worth considering.

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Not such a gay day after all

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Six months ago, I wrote a post called Canterbury is officially ‘gay’ enough. The local ‘Pride’ group had reported the Council to the Local Government Ombudsman for allegedly failing in its ‘duty’ to promote and cater for homosexuality in the city, despite giving financial backing to their cause. The claim was rejected.

The pride group, which is chaired by Andrew Brettell, called on the council to provide an LGBT community drop-in centre, a gay bar and put forward the potential for ‘pink tourism’ and the importance of regular LGBT culture in the city.

The Pink News reports today,

The only gay bar in Canterbury, a city which was condemned by a local Pride group for not being gay enough, has closed.

CO2 was opened six months ago on King Street but is closing because of a lack of business.

Darren Bister, co-owner of the pub, told Kent News: “We are closing because it is just not very successful at the moment. It is a waste of time, a waste of our work and a waste of money.

Right, so they wasted their own money and not council tax payers’ cash, which is what ‘Pride’ thought they had some sort of divine right to dip into.

He said the local gay community had not supported the bar but added he did not believe homophobia was an issue.

Golly, that makes a change! Did I read that correctly?

Blister said: “Anything here would get complaints no matter what venue it is. The locals don’t want anything here full stop.”

But Pride in Canterbury chairman Andrew Brettell blamed the council for not supporting the venture.

He said: “Until the council sends out a clear message that it is okay for the gay community to be out and proud in the city businesses and ventures that strive to serve and build up that community will find it difficult to succeed.

He doesn’t give up, this one, does he? It’s The Blame Game; please welcome back our reigning champion… Mr Andrew Brrrrrettell.

“The city’s many homophobes must think Christmas has already arrived.”

Erm, it’s just passed, actually. Must be a few weeks old, this story.

The Pride group had complained that the local council was unwilling to promote a “thriving LGBT community” and accused it of ignoring their complaints.

Why not ask the locals if they want such a thriving community. Obviously even the local homosexuals didn’t, but hey ho, it’s the Council’s fault.

It had asked for a gay bar, an LGBT community drop-in centre and regular celebration of LGBT culture in the city.

Did they say please?

Beam me up Scotty!

Love, hate and the threat to internet free speech

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Richard Carvath is standing as an independent candidate for Salford and Eccles in the upcoming general election, and he has upset a few people by sharing his views on homosexuality. On Monday, he wrote a blog entry called, “Tories select homosexual pervert for Salford and Eccles.”

Woof! No messing. He continues,

The Conservative Party has just selected homosexual Matthew Sephton as their candidate for Salford and Eccles.

As a rival [and pro-heterosexual!] candidate I welcome Matthew to the contest for Salford and Eccles.

Matthew’s own blog is heavy with pro homosexual pervert content: see here, here and here….

I very much doubt that the vast majority of the Salford and Eccles electorate will want to be represented by a prominent homosexual activist – and one who neither lives nor works in the constituency.

The following day, he received a letter from the local constabulary,

“Richard Carvath

We have received a complaint today regarding concerns over the content of your blog article dated Monday 7th December 2009.

A reader of your article has made a complaint that the content is offensive and feels strongly enough to report this matter to the police. He wishes for you to be advised over the potential alarm and distress caused by your article. Whilst not taking this at face value and understanding the meaning of language and how it can be misinterpreted, it could be argued that the context of the comments made could be construed to be borderline criminal.

At this stage I feel it would be advisable for you to remove this from your blog thereby preventing misinterpretation.

Your assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated. …

Regards

PC2401 Jacky Thompson.”

So, the police are now ‘advising’ people to take down blog posts if someone doesn’t like them. Thankfully, Mr. Carvath told them a few home truths.

“Dear PC Thompson,

Thank you for your email.

There is nothing criminal about my blog article and so I have no intention of removing it for the foreseeable future.

Well exactly, but in a dictatorship, truth gets censored.

Homosexuality is a perversion: that is both moral truth and medical fact. Therefore it is quite reasonable for me to refer to a person in whom the perversion of homosexuality is manifest as a homosexual pervert. Let me make it clear that I do not use the term ‘homosexual pervert’ as a pejorative term – derogation is not my motive in using the term; I use the term simply to convey the true nature of what homosexuality is because I believe that the truth matters.

He explains a very important distinction here, and one which seems to escape many people.

I’m aware that you are employed by an organisation [GMP] which is politically in favour of homosexual perversion. I’m aware that GMP celebrates its association with the militant perverts’ organisation Stonewall. I’m aware of the secular humanist socio-political orthodoxy of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ which GMP panders to.

Can’t argue with any of that.

My advice to you is to stop being a social engineer trying to suppress free speech and get on with genuine police work.

Hear, hear!

It is not a crime to criticise homosexuality and nor is it a crime to refer to a public gay political activist as a homosexual pervert.

Even if it were a crime I’m a British evangelical Christian so nothing and nobody is going to tell me what I can and can’t say in my own country. As a Christian I speak and act out of love – not hate – so my motive for referring to homosexuality as a perversion is love.

My advice to you is to get on with dealing with real crime like robbery, rape and murder and stop trying to suppress free speech.

Never has there been clearer proof of the vital importance of the Waddington free speech safeguard!

Absolutely.

Most of the replies left on his blog seem to be from angry heterosexuals. Perhaps Mr Carvath’s strength and honesty of language has made folks’ brains go into meltdown. I left this comment myself,

These comments from heterosexuals go to show how well they have been trained by the media.

How has this been achieved? Read the blueprint from the USA.

“The first order of business is desensitization of the American public concerning gays and gay rights.”

“Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible. The principle behind this advice is simple: almost any behavior begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close quarters and among your acquaintances.”

“Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers. In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented, instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be seem as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression.”

Homosexuals don’t want their lifestyle criticised. Fair enough, I suppose. None of us likes being disagreed with, especially while we are entrenched in sin, but nobody is infallible and beyond criticism. Furthermore, everyone has the right to call a spade a spade. Just like the messages left on Mr Carvath’s blog and the Pink News website, where personal criticism of him and his faith are rife.

But then, over the past few years we have come to expect some people to believe they are more equal than others.

Someone called Jeff Duncan even reported Mr Carvath to the police again via a police website and urged others to follow, saying,

Hiss [sic] vile homophobic hate remarks have STILL not been removed.

What these people should realise, and be very thankful for, is that we live in a society that does tolerate differences of opinion. Those who claimed to be persecuted are now the persecutors. They have become that strong and prideful tribe.

NEW BLOG UP AT LAST!

YES!

Take A Walk Down Real Street

Coming Soon…

I am in the process of starting a new blog. Once I work out how to incorporate WordPress into my own domain I will post the link here and you can continue to read my thoughts on New Labour and what Gordon Brown’s vision of a ‘New World Order’ will actually entail for us proles.

I may also post items about my many other interests and try to lighten up a bit, although I make to promises.

If anyone can offer advice on how to add WordPress to my site and allow me to add my own advertising banners (for my own websites), then please get in touch.

Pond Life?

This is my first post for a couple of weeks; there have been some teething problems with my new business venture, but that’s to be expected.

I am considering starting a new blog so I can write on any subject that interests me on the day. I am getting a bit fed up concentrating on New Labour. It is pretty tedious and a bit depressing. The other mainstream parties need exposing too, especially on the run up to elections.

I also want to comment on other things like the pond life who murdered two soldiers in N. Ireland. They call themselves the ‘Real IRA’. They are like many people these days – a tiny band who think they know better than and speak for everyone else. Fortunately, most people know how to use words to try and convince. It is also much more effective. What to do but send in the big boys and make an example of these totally selfish parasites?

Perhaps a Creationist like me shouldn’t refer to fellow human beings as ‘pond life’, and they are fellow human beings, like it or not.

I’ve filed this under ‘Heroes and Cowards’. Guess which category you skulk among, ‘dissidents’?

Bryan Gould disowns New Labour

Hat tip to Tom Harris for pointing out Bryan Gould’s article, I disown this government, in the Guardian’s Comment is Free.

I remember Mr Gould, former Labour MP and member of the shadow cabinet, as a seemingly decent sort of bloke – far too decent for New Labour, as it transpires.

He returned to his native New Zealand in the mid-Nineties to work in a university, but disowns his former Party with these words.

The floor is all yours, Mr Gould…

Those, like me (and almost everyone I know in the Labour party), who have been critical over the years of New Labour and its record in government, might have expected that the passage of time would bring with it a kinder judgment. And in my case, in particular, it might have been thought that – 12,000 miles away in New Zealand – distance would lend enchantment.

How, then, to explain that the more we take the long view of the Blair and now the Brown government, the sharper seem the contours of its failures and betrayals? How is it that the features of its landscape that grow – as our perspective lengthens – in shocking, anger-making prominence are those shameful episodes at home and abroad which cumulatively are a complete denial of what a Labour government (or any British government) should have been about?

There have been of course many good and decent day-by-day achievements of this government. Across the whole range of political issues, I do not say that Britain did not do better under Labour than it would have done under most alternatives. But these achievements have been molehills, judged against the towering peaks scaled by New Labour in its rejection not only of Labour, but of any decent and civilised values.

The first – and for that reason perhaps most unexpected – contravention of civilised norms was the Iraq war. The damning judgment of that doomed enterprise has been repeatedly rehearsed, but to read the charge sheet again is still a shocking experience. A British prime minister, claiming the right to moral leadership and an almost religious duty to confront evil, sucked up to a soon-to-be discredited US president and helped to launch an invasion of a distant country – an invasion based upon a lie, and one that flew in the face of international law, undermined the United Nations, alienated the whole of the Muslim world, seemed to validate the claims of terrorists and those who recruited them, destroyed the country that was invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, took many young soldiers to their unnecessary deaths, and rightly reduced Britain’s standing in the world.

The New Labour government still refuses to acknowledge that any of this was wrong. It will not even countenance an independent inquiry into how such a fatal mistake was made.

It may seem improbable that the scale of the Iraq calamity could be matched in any other area of government. Yet, as the reasons for and scale of the global recession become clear, it is also increasingly apparent that another global (as well as British) disaster can be laid – substantially, if only partly – at the door of the New Labour government.

It was, after all, that government which enthusiastically endorsed the virtues of the “free” market, which turned its back on the need for regulation, which celebrated the excesses of the City, which proclaimed that it was “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich”. The government that should have protected the interests of ordinary people was dazzled by the super-rich; unsuspecting Labour supporters found themselves thrown on the tender mercies of a marketplace that was cleared of any limits that might have restricted the rich and powerful. There have been no more enthusiastic cheerleaders for the culture of greed and excess than New Labour ministers.

On the central issue of politics – the willingness of government to use its democratic legitimacy to intervene in the market in order to restrain its excesses – the New Labour government ensured that the dice lay where they fell and applauded as they did. It was Tony Blair who, standing shoulder to shoulder with Rupert Murdoch, proclaimed that the future lay with the “globalisers” and that those who wanted to reclaim some control over their lives were “isolationists, nationalists and nativists”. It was Gordon Brown who removed the major economic decisions from democratic control and handed them over to unaccountable bankers.

That betrayal of those who looked to a Labour government to help them has seen a rapid widening of inequality and a sharp intensification of social disintegration. It is the jobs, homes and lives of ordinary people that have borne the brunt. The country is a weaker and poorer place as a result.

But even that failure pales by comparison with the latest revelations about the abandonment by New Labour of any pretence to civilised standards. We now know that this government connived with the Bush administration to hold people illegally, to kidnap them in secret, and to torture them while in custody – all in the name of a war against the forces of darkness. The perpetrators of these outrages seem to believe that they can be washed clean by simply declaring their superior morality.

Nothing more clearly distinguishes those beyond the pale than their willingness to use the secret, illegal and cowardly infliction of pain to terrify, cow and bend to their will helpless people being held without charge or trial or legal redress. It beggars belief that any British government could, in a supposed democracy, do so, and not even bother to respond to its critics. It is simply incredible that a Labour government claiming to represent the values of the Labour movement could believe in these circumstances that it has any right to remain in office.

For me, this is too much. I am sick to the stomach. I disown this so-called Labour government. I protest.