I seem to remember a time when a skull and crossbones symbol was regularly displayed on sorts of bottles, such as household cleaners, something like this:
I intended to paste a smaller version, but that is how it came out.
I dare say that that symbol is still used in some circumstances, but it seems to have been replaced by an exclamation mark inside a red square standing on a corner for common usage. And the sign is bigger and includes text, and there are whole lists of ‘not to…’.
So what can we expect graphic warnings on alcoholic beverage containers to look like? Gory livers? Spewing girls? Boys spread out on street benches? Battered children? Certainly, we can expect children to figure strongly.
And we can expect the text to read, “Drinking causes cancer”, “Drinking causes heart disease”, “Drinking causes lung cancer”, etc.
And then there’s obesity. Sugar packets, biscuits, chocolate wrappers will have pics of fatties in hospital with tubes poking out from every orifice and the same list of sugar-caused diseases.
Now then, when that future unfolds, what value will the little exclamation marks inside squares standing on a corner have?
All of that crap could be avoided by simply plastering alcoholic beverage containers with a huge skull and crossbones symbol, just like the one above.
Why did the anti-tobacco Zealots not think of that with regard to cig packets? It would have been far better than all those pretty, fake pictures, which look like art. Is it not weird that TobCON can display their ‘art’ on billions of cig packets whilst the Manchester Art Gallery has removed this painting from its walls:
It is called ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ by John William Waterhouse. You can read about it here:
The first sentence is quite comical:
“It is a painting that shows pubescent, naked nymphs tempting a handsome young man to his doom, but is it an erotic Victorian fantasy too far, and one which, in the current climate, is unsuitable and offensive to modern audiences?”
Pubescent? Those girls look pretty well-developed to me. ‘Unsuitable?’ ‘Offensive?’ A work of art is ‘unsuitable’ for an Art Gallery? And pray tell me how girls showing bare breasts is ‘offensive’? Go to any beach in Spain in summer and look around.
Or perhaps the ‘offence’ is justified, if indeed it shows girls tempting a young man. After all, only males are predators. It will not do to have pictures, no matter how famous, hanging on the walls of Art Galleries which suggest that girls are not as pristine pure as the Feminists want them to appear. Perhaps the Feminists should have had the wall knocked out as well, since it had been defiled.
It will be interesting to see how the challenge to the snus ban proceeds. I believe that the challenge is based upon the idea that the EU has proclaimed that ‘everyone has a right to health’, or some such. But, by banning snus, it has deprived people of a very much healthier option to cigs.
Who know what will happen in the future? The Scot Nats have already pushed through Minimum Pricing. They are expecting that MUP will price strong ales and ciders and such out of the reach of hard drinkers. Or perhaps they think that the higher prices will deter people from drinking strong ales and ciders in the first place. But it is all so simplistic, don’t you think?, regardless of University studies. Human nature does not work that way, and never has.
So let them cover beer glasses and wine bottles with their ‘art’. Eventually, people will start laughing at them, and see the ‘art’ as cartoons. But it does seem that younger people are not as interested in booze as was the case when I was in my twenties. either my granddaughter, or my two grandsons, both in the twenties, are interested in going to the pub. They used to be a bit, but now they prefer computer games. Perhaps computer games are the new tobacco and alcohol. No doubt, in due course, computer games will be found, via Uni studies, to cause heart disease, liver disease, lung cancer, etc.
So we can look back at Doll’s Doctors Study, and ask why he did not take into account all the other unhealthy activities of doctors over the period studied. Middle aged doctors to me always seemed similar to priests – they were almost always rather rotund. Not obese, but decidedly ‘thick around the waist’. Maybe they overate a little, and drank a little too much alcohol and smoked and spent their leisure hours reading The Lancet. Perhaps it was those types of doctors who succumbed a little earlier than the average, and significantly earlier that non-smokes, non-drinkers, non-rotund, readers of Reveille (that was a popular paper/magazine which was big on tits in the 1960s and around that time. In 1979, it merged with ‘Tit Bits’ magazine).
The passage of time is revealing that anti-tobacco ‘art’ on cig packets is useless. But, when you think about it, how can it be otherwise? I have a Spanish packet in front of me which has a nice piece of ‘art’. It show an ashtray with a human fetus formed by the ash in the tray, and there is a hand holding a cig and creating the fetus picture with the cig. The suggestion is that the cig is creating the fetus. The text says, in Spanish, “Smoking reduces fertility”. Jesus! I thought that the UN/WHO wanted population reduction! If what they say is true (smoking reduces fertility), should they not be encouraging smoking? Further, according to them, smokers die before they can claim their pensions. Is that not a good thing? Of what use are decrepit pensioners?
You know what, perhaps modern means of waging war are a good thing. They mean that it is possible for all us old farts to obliterate each other by using drones. We could also obliterate all the old women, who are witches. That would be much better than young men and women being slaughtered. Perhaps we could also obliterate a lot of surplus babies.
For when ASH ET AL deliberately demonise any free-market ‘solution’ to the ‘smoking epidemic’, they kill babies, according to their own studies.
Who know where it will end? The Zealots are burying themselves, gradually, under the weight of their own contradictions. ‘Extend the lives of individuals when they are retired’. Why? ‘Stop useless layabouts killing themselves by drinking’. Why? ‘Stop 70 year-old from smoking to keep them alive’. Why?
There is something about politics which stinks, and I am not sure what it is. How to define it. Why did Cameron and his Cabinet waste time and money creating a law that cig packets must depict anti-smoking ‘art’? What made those people think that that was important? Why did the lack the courage to just say “FUCK OFF!” And why do such people continue to fund leaches who contradict themselves?
It isn’t easy to envisage, but it is possible to imagine a time when booze and cigs are cheap and when food is expensive. For, if your Gov acted logically, it would want people to die earlier in old age than later.
The really, really important thing is OLD AGE! An old man cannot compete, physically, with a young man. The UN, WHO, EU, at the top, are replete with old men (and women). They are supposed to be wise, but they are anything but. They are authoritarians. They are cruel.
The smoking ban was cruel. It imposed penalties not only upon smokers but also upon non-smokers who happened to own pubs and restaurants and similar places. Did PM Blair know what he was doing – what cruelty he had devised? Did he know that threatening publicans with swingeing fines was no different from Stalin’s Gulags in principle? But the threat was even worse – such a publican could have his licence withdrawn, in which case he could not run a pub ever again.
And yet he is parading about as though he was a ‘wise man’. He is nothing of the sort. He is a ‘Zealot’ in the worst possible way.
The whole of TobCON is authoritarian. It always has been. When massive taxes distort the free market, then entrepreneurs take advantage. There is nothing wrong with what they do. What is wrong is the cruelty of massive taxes.
What is important to understand is that Government is not MORAL. That is very important. It is opportunistic. There is no morality in taxing smokers, drinkers, motorists, more than non-smokers, etc.
Thus, the reality is that petrol especially should not have duty imposed upon it. It makes no sense whatsoever. It reduces our competitiveness in the world by imposing extra costs. But so do all the other duties because they absorb spending power which could be multiplied throughout the economy. EG, if I buy a product at a price of £100, and £70 is tax, then I cannot spend that £70 on other things which produce activity in the economy, and consequent activity taxes. Such taxes are the capture of wealth and nothing else.
If I buy a packet of cigs in the UK, then 70% of the price is a direct transfer of my wealth to charlatans.
There is a case to be made that all ‘duties’ should be done away with. They are a very, very nasty distortion of costs, and make it harder for the UK to compete in the world.
The weird thing is that all those taxes could be replaced easily with a ‘land value tax’. Let us not go there tonight. I am talking about revenues, and not excuses to raise taxes from minorities such as smokers.
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Perhaps MPs should impose ‘skull and crossbones’ warnings on any literature which imposes penalties, including their own authoritarian dictats, meaning that the information is poisonous.
Bolton Smokers Club 