Of course, if Lawson hadn't been available, then I'd have to obtain the rights to something like this:
 |
| Eugenia Diordiychuk (a.k.a. Katie Fey) - Playmate of the Year 2009 Source (NSFW - but we all know you're going to click the link anyway): |
Featured Posts
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Teaser
Lawson Narse created this fantastic artwork for the music project I've been working on. I love it. More details coming soon. Stand by.
Of course, if Lawson hadn't been available, then I'd have to obtain the rights to something like this:
... yeah. Definitely, yeah.
Of course, if Lawson hadn't been available, then I'd have to obtain the rights to something like this:
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Register Your Protest Against Hate Campaigns
Note: This is a guest post by Penny. I am presently busy with a truly awesome music project and watching the fifth season of Fringe (priorities, you know?), so Penny has kindly agreed to allow me to publish this. -- Jay
How many people are aware - when they pop their cash into charity collecting tins or sponsor a pal involved in a fund-raising campaign for some ‘worthy’ cause - that the very charities who ask us to fund them may be actively involved in the hate campaign against the smokers of Britain?
That is certainly the case with the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK and I find it personally offensive that these ‘charities’ should have involved themselves in persecuting the very people who fund them. They create highly emotive adverts, aimed at encouraging us to give to their causes, and then involve themselves in some very high-profile campaigns against the hapless smokers whose money they will still cheerfully take.
I cannot bear such hypocrisy on the part of organisations like CRUK and the BHF and therefore, a friend and I devised some ‘fake fivers’ to put in charity tins proffered by either organisation. In no way do these look real money, but they do state on them that they are intended as a peaceful protest against the coalition between charities and government in the campaign against smokers.
I hope plenty of people will use the ‘fivers’ in the future, as a demonstration to CRUK and the BHF that we strongly disapprove of their hypocrisy.
Well, I am no hypocrite, and today I found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to stand by my principles when friends asked me to sponsor them in the CRUK Race for Life. A laudable cause, by anyone’s standards, and a year ago, I’d have given them a fiver or two and wished them the very best of luck.
But today, something in my water told me that I had to stand by my own principles and the promise I made to register my protest. So, I told my friend (my hairdresser), and the rest of the staff and clients in the hair salon, that I was very sorry but I couldn’t sponsor her. I explained that I have signed up to protest against the persecution of smokers by organisations like CRUK.
As I put my case, even those who had at first scowled and grumbled at me started to see I had a point. “You are right to stand by your principles,” said one, having initially registered her shock and disgust at my attitude.
And I know that I AM. As far as I’m concerned, charities like CRUK and the BHF should either stop persecuting those who fund them and happen to smoke as well, or they should come straight out with it and admit they loathe smokers and don’t actually care if we refuse to donate to them. In my opinion, charities have no business to be involving themselves in politics anyway, unless that is one of the specific purposes for which they were created. Neither Cancer Research UK nor the British Heart Foundation can truly claim that they were inaugurated to spearhead hate campaigns against those whose lifestyles perhaps don’t fit the ‘ideal’ they envisage.
My hairdresser friend, and everyone else present at the salon today, accepted my argument and I didn’t feel hated for standing by my principles. Perhaps this is the way forward (or one of them, at any rate) for the smokers of this country who are so sick of being on the receiving end of such hatred from so many quarters.
My question, now, is whether to email or write to CRUK, enclosing a couple of my fake fivers and explaining that they’ve missed out on a tenner towards their otherwise fantastic cause. Would they care? I wonder. Perhaps not. Maybe my little, one-woman protest in the hairdresser’s today will count for nothing in the greater scheme of things. But for all I know, other smokers across the UK might be taking a similar stance and refusing to donate their hard-earned cash to a charity which uses its influence to persecute them. If enough ‘ones’ stand up to be counted, then eventually, we might make a difference and the powerful charities who contribute to making our lives such a misery might just have to climb down a peg or two.
Consider joining me, won’t you?
Front:
Reverse:
Alternative Front (less reserved):
***
How many people are aware - when they pop their cash into charity collecting tins or sponsor a pal involved in a fund-raising campaign for some ‘worthy’ cause - that the very charities who ask us to fund them may be actively involved in the hate campaign against the smokers of Britain?
That is certainly the case with the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK and I find it personally offensive that these ‘charities’ should have involved themselves in persecuting the very people who fund them. They create highly emotive adverts, aimed at encouraging us to give to their causes, and then involve themselves in some very high-profile campaigns against the hapless smokers whose money they will still cheerfully take.
I cannot bear such hypocrisy on the part of organisations like CRUK and the BHF and therefore, a friend and I devised some ‘fake fivers’ to put in charity tins proffered by either organisation. In no way do these look real money, but they do state on them that they are intended as a peaceful protest against the coalition between charities and government in the campaign against smokers.
I hope plenty of people will use the ‘fivers’ in the future, as a demonstration to CRUK and the BHF that we strongly disapprove of their hypocrisy.
Well, I am no hypocrite, and today I found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to stand by my principles when friends asked me to sponsor them in the CRUK Race for Life. A laudable cause, by anyone’s standards, and a year ago, I’d have given them a fiver or two and wished them the very best of luck.
But today, something in my water told me that I had to stand by my own principles and the promise I made to register my protest. So, I told my friend (my hairdresser), and the rest of the staff and clients in the hair salon, that I was very sorry but I couldn’t sponsor her. I explained that I have signed up to protest against the persecution of smokers by organisations like CRUK.
As I put my case, even those who had at first scowled and grumbled at me started to see I had a point. “You are right to stand by your principles,” said one, having initially registered her shock and disgust at my attitude.
And I know that I AM. As far as I’m concerned, charities like CRUK and the BHF should either stop persecuting those who fund them and happen to smoke as well, or they should come straight out with it and admit they loathe smokers and don’t actually care if we refuse to donate to them. In my opinion, charities have no business to be involving themselves in politics anyway, unless that is one of the specific purposes for which they were created. Neither Cancer Research UK nor the British Heart Foundation can truly claim that they were inaugurated to spearhead hate campaigns against those whose lifestyles perhaps don’t fit the ‘ideal’ they envisage.
My hairdresser friend, and everyone else present at the salon today, accepted my argument and I didn’t feel hated for standing by my principles. Perhaps this is the way forward (or one of them, at any rate) for the smokers of this country who are so sick of being on the receiving end of such hatred from so many quarters.
My question, now, is whether to email or write to CRUK, enclosing a couple of my fake fivers and explaining that they’ve missed out on a tenner towards their otherwise fantastic cause. Would they care? I wonder. Perhaps not. Maybe my little, one-woman protest in the hairdresser’s today will count for nothing in the greater scheme of things. But for all I know, other smokers across the UK might be taking a similar stance and refusing to donate their hard-earned cash to a charity which uses its influence to persecute them. If enough ‘ones’ stand up to be counted, then eventually, we might make a difference and the powerful charities who contribute to making our lives such a misery might just have to climb down a peg or two.
Consider joining me, won’t you?
Front:
Reverse:
Alternative Front (less reserved):
Saturday, 11 May 2013
TobaccoTactics Wiki Stats Debunked - UPDATED with Awesomeness
[This post was originally published at 12:08 p.m. on Friday, 10 May 2013. It has been updated with further awesomeness and republished accordingly. See Updates 1 and 2 below.]
With all of the half-truths, distortions of fact, misdirection and flat-out lies that the tobacco control industry ejaculates on a hourly basis, sometimes the lies are so fantastical that the mind boggles. I suppose we're used to it, or at least we expect it. Even so, you would think they would at least be clever enough to lie about something that no-one could ever prove false. This is not the case it seems.
On the main page of the University of Bath's TobaccoTactics wiki, under the heading "Is TobaccoTactics.org meant for me?" and in sub-section "Visitor Statistics" is one such falsehood that can be proven false. It reads:
Really? C'mon, pull the other one, ladies. 1.4 million hits from web viewers all over the world in 10 months' time is a huge number of hits for a brand new web site that doesn't have stolen images of nude celebs or Lolcats. But the statistics the editors of TobaccoTactics have put on their main page do not seem to be true or accurate. I know this becauseTyler knows this the site's own statistics show an entirely different story. Have a look:
Those statistics shown above are screen-capped from the TobaccoTactics wiki statistics page on 9 May 2013. You can view the current stats here via this link.
The truth according to the wiki software, which is designed to keep track of this kind of stuff, is that the wiki has had only 409,826 views as of this writing. That's a far cry from "1.4 million hits and 800,000 pages served." And of those views, how many were generated by the wiki's editors and didn't come from outside of the University of Bath?
But it's worse than that. Because apparently Anna Gilmore (the Queen of Junk Science) and Eveline Lubbers not only suck at lying, they might also suck at maths, too. The Visitor Statistics statement on the main page says they get "a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits." OK, 6,300 is an average, a median, so some days the wiki would get less and some days more, but it's impossible for me to know what the highs are and lows are without having access to daily stat information. We'll just have to go with their bullshit figure of 6,300.
So let's completely waste our time by doing some basic calculations.*
Let's put the date of the launch of the wiki at 1 June 2012 (it was actually around the 5th, 6th or 7th of June, I can't recall which day, but I'll give them a few extra days).
The statistics they gave were taken from 1 June 2012 to 30 April 2013, or eleven months, or 334 days.
1,400,000 divided by 334 =
4,192
But Eveline Lubbers wrote that the daily average was 6,300. OK, let's calculate for that:
Let's multiply 334 by 6300.
We get 2,104,200 hits.
So the figure they gave is 1,400,000 hits, which is 704,200 hits fewer than the result calculated for an average of 6,300 hits daily. Something isn't right. I mean, sure it's possible that they they could have 20,000 hits in single day to come up with such a high average, but that possibility is extremely unlikely.
None of that matters, though. Because the statistics page's View Statistics says they've only had 409,826 proper hits. That's a difference of 990,174 hits, even after nine extra days have passed from the end of April.
The statistics page also says that "Views to non-existing pages and special pages are not included." Is it possible that the special pages of the wiki, an area that few people would bother to look at or even knew existed, received a whopping 990,174 hits, more than twice the number of actual content page views? Anything is possible in the fairy tale land of tobacco control, as we all know, but in this case probably not. The only possible explanations I can think of are spammers inundating the site with referral link spam all day long, or a few hundred web-crawlers (such as Google or Bing) indexing the entire site per day. Even those are beyond the realm of probability. Another explanation is that the extra views are generated by the editors as they edit and upload files to the wiki. If the latter is the case, it's incredibly disingenuous to count those as page hits on your main page. One last explanation I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, the statistics page is broken or was reset, but I think that is also unlikely.
So what do we know? We have 409,826 "proper" page views or all-time content page hits by 9 May 2013. What's the real average? Let's calculate from 1 June 2012 to 9 May 2013. That is 343 days.
409,826 divided by 343 =
1,195 (avg)
You know, 1200 hits average per day is not shabby. It's a decent figure. It's not huge; it's not tiny. It's a fair amount of hits for an anti-smoker hate site set up to attack bloggers and anybody that disagrees with the tobacco control industry. Sure, the wiki is not overwhelmingly popular by any stretch, but what anti-smoker site is? Regardless, why do they feel the need to state an average figure that is five times higher? Why do they claim they have received almost 3.5 times more hits overall?
Well, maybe the answers to those last two questions is the tobacco control industry cannot help but make shit up to give the appearance of massive support. This is a public relations confidence trick. Tell people you have a huge fan base, and you hope that people will believe you are a force to be reckoned with. The truth, however, is that their support is marginal.
The truth is that we can never trust any person or organisation in the tobacco control industry. We certainly never trusted Anna Gilmore in the past, so no reason now to start trusting her or sidekick, Eveline Lubbers, either.
*If my maths are incorrect or if I missed something, please let me know in the comments so I can correct -- I had "indulged"with a few drinks last night whilst writing this post.
UPDATE (10 May 2013, 21:20) : I have just received a message that the TobaccoTactics wiki is updated with evidence of from their server logs or something. I haven't checked myself because I'm in the middle of something right now, but in the in interest of fairness I wanted to put a quick note on this post that they have responded. I will check later and certainly I will update this post further after I have looked at what they've posted. -- Jay
UPDATE 2 (11 May 2013, 00:20): I have now had a chance to review Eveline's web statistics. I thank Eveline Lubbers for having the courage to post them up. I am pleased to say that my post above remains a more accurate picture of the traffic the TobaccoTactics wiki receives. I will explain below.
But first this very important message to Eveline Lubbers:
Look, Eveline. I don't know you, and I don't mean to be cruel, but you know absolutely fuck all about the Internet (using Google, Twitter and editing a wiki does not make you an expert) and you know even less about correctly interpreting web statistics. There must be hundreds of capable IT persons at the University of Bath. I would strongly advise you to consult with any of them, and after that kindly update your wiki's main page accordingly. Or you could hire me. My fee is twice the amount they are paying you. The upside to hiring me is that at least you know I would be honest and fair (if not a bit foul-mouthed at at times). The downside for me is that I'd have to spend time with the Tobacco Control Research Group and I cannot think of anything more horrible at present (excluding Karen -- she's a cutie). And if you think for one second that I enjoy writing about this shit, you're wrong. I'd rather be doing anything else, but there's no way in hell I'm going to sit back and let the tobacco control industry deceive everybody. I certainly don't need to teach you how to analyse data. But hey, if you want a propaganda war, I will beat you at it every time -- I will "pwn" you. I think you should stick to being an author or whatever you do best, and this gig with Anna, no matter how well paid it is for you, it is not for you. I hope we are very clear, Ms Lubbers. I'm sorry I have to tell you these things. You're ruining your reputation every day you work for the tobacco control industry.
OK, so let's begin analysing the wiki traffic stats. This is the image that Eveline posted up on the wiki to show their traffic:
So I know that looks impressive -- 1,527,557 "hits" -- but hits are misleading until you understand what they really mean. For now, let me highlight the only two important columns in your charts you need to concern yourself with to understand your "true traffic" stats.
See there? The visits column is what you want. And over the last eleven months you got 227,649 visits. This is, unfortunately for the TobaccoTactics team, even worse that what the wiki statistics show and what I wrote above. But here we have real data to look at and to do some maths on. So I will.
The first thing to do in complete fairness, however, is to toss out the June stats, because I think the TobaccoTactics team didn't start their web traffic analysis until the last week or so of June, based on the stats. June's stats appear to be very, very low. So, as you do with statistics, we're eliminating them from the calculations (I'll add them back in later by assuming that the 2,345 is one week's worth of data). Likewise, I will exclude May's statistics, since we're only 10 or 11 days in, but will not add that in.
Here is a screen cap of my calculations based on the above data:
So from July 2012 to April 2013, you have had a total of 216,756 visits, with (and this is naughty, because averaging averages is absolutely rubbish maths, but the hell with it, the results are mostly identical for figures this small) an average of 713 visits per day during this time period.
That is respectable traffic. That is nothing to be ashamed about.
But I want to be fair. So I'm going to include June's data, and I'm going to have to adjust June's stats because the data provided above looks like an aberration. I will assume that the June data of 78 views and 2345 hits is only one week's worth of traffic. It could more, it could be less. But I don't know, and neither do you, it seems. So, I will multiply the Monthly visits by four, or 2,345 x 4 = 9,380. I admit this seems a bit low, but... give me more and I'll fix it. Here's an adjusted spreadsheet:
Right. The TobaccoTactics traffic is actually better off by excluding June altogether as you can see (and see how fair I am to you guys? I'm Mr Fairness. Definitely fair. So fair that ... eh, never mind).
If we count June, then we have an overall average of 677 visits daily and a total of 226,136 visits during those eleven months. This isn't shabby either. It's better than what I get on my blog -- granted, I haven't been posting much lately, but I digress.
So you're probably wondering why thecrackers "hits" don't matter. That's because one page view can generate 4, 5, 6, a dozen or more hits. Why? Because it does. It's a quirk of how the Internet works. But I don't want you to take my word as fact, so I've found this guy, whose job it is to analyse this stuff, to explain it to you:
See? I'm not making it up. You might also want to read this page from that guy which explains how to interpret web stats much better than I ever could.
So, there you have it. And now you know why we will never trust any research or data that comes out of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. Because ... well, my friend Bucko The Moose put it most succinctly in his tweet this afternoon:
Can you update your fucking wiki with the proper visitor stats now, please? Thanks.
UPDATE 3 (11 May 2013 17:50): Grandad weighs in here with his post 9.2 million hits. Nice one.
UPDATE 4 (12 May 2013 18:12): Simon Clark of FOREST also wrote this piece called "Stats life – welcome to the fictional world of tobacco control."
With all of the half-truths, distortions of fact, misdirection and flat-out lies that the tobacco control industry ejaculates on a hourly basis, sometimes the lies are so fantastical that the mind boggles. I suppose we're used to it, or at least we expect it. Even so, you would think they would at least be clever enough to lie about something that no-one could ever prove false. This is not the case it seems.
On the main page of the University of Bath's TobaccoTactics wiki, under the heading "Is TobaccoTactics.org meant for me?" and in sub-section "Visitor Statistics" is one such falsehood that can be proven false. It reads:
Since it was launched in June 2012, the website has received 1.4 million hits, with over 800,000 pages served with a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits! These April 2013 statistics, along with positive feedback from users of the site, reflect its success and popularity.Here's a screen-capped image, just to confirm the above:
 |
| Over 1 bazillion served! We would we lie to you? (Don't answer that.) |
Really? C'mon, pull the other one, ladies. 1.4 million hits from web viewers all over the world in 10 months' time is a huge number of hits for a brand new web site that doesn't have stolen images of nude celebs or Lolcats. But the statistics the editors of TobaccoTactics have put on their main page do not seem to be true or accurate. I know this because
 |
| Click to enlargify - see highlighted text |
Those statistics shown above are screen-capped from the TobaccoTactics wiki statistics page on 9 May 2013. You can view the current stats here via this link.
The truth according to the wiki software, which is designed to keep track of this kind of stuff, is that the wiki has had only 409,826 views as of this writing. That's a far cry from "1.4 million hits and 800,000 pages served." And of those views, how many were generated by the wiki's editors and didn't come from outside of the University of Bath?
But it's worse than that. Because apparently Anna Gilmore (the Queen of Junk Science) and Eveline Lubbers not only suck at lying, they might also suck at maths, too. The Visitor Statistics statement on the main page says they get "a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits." OK, 6,300 is an average, a median, so some days the wiki would get less and some days more, but it's impossible for me to know what the highs are and lows are without having access to daily stat information. We'll just have to go with their bullshit figure of 6,300.
So let's completely waste our time by doing some basic calculations.*
Let's put the date of the launch of the wiki at 1 June 2012 (it was actually around the 5th, 6th or 7th of June, I can't recall which day, but I'll give them a few extra days).
The statistics they gave were taken from 1 June 2012 to 30 April 2013, or eleven months, or 334 days.
1,400,000 divided by 334 =
4,192
But Eveline Lubbers wrote that the daily average was 6,300. OK, let's calculate for that:
Let's multiply 334 by 6300.
We get 2,104,200 hits.
So the figure they gave is 1,400,000 hits, which is 704,200 hits fewer than the result calculated for an average of 6,300 hits daily. Something isn't right. I mean, sure it's possible that they they could have 20,000 hits in single day to come up with such a high average, but that possibility is extremely unlikely.
None of that matters, though. Because the statistics page's View Statistics says they've only had 409,826 proper hits. That's a difference of 990,174 hits, even after nine extra days have passed from the end of April.
The statistics page also says that "Views to non-existing pages and special pages are not included." Is it possible that the special pages of the wiki, an area that few people would bother to look at or even knew existed, received a whopping 990,174 hits, more than twice the number of actual content page views? Anything is possible in the fairy tale land of tobacco control, as we all know, but in this case probably not. The only possible explanations I can think of are spammers inundating the site with referral link spam all day long, or a few hundred web-crawlers (such as Google or Bing) indexing the entire site per day. Even those are beyond the realm of probability. Another explanation is that the extra views are generated by the editors as they edit and upload files to the wiki. If the latter is the case, it's incredibly disingenuous to count those as page hits on your main page. One last explanation I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, the statistics page is broken or was reset, but I think that is also unlikely.
So what do we know? We have 409,826 "proper" page views or all-time content page hits by 9 May 2013. What's the real average? Let's calculate from 1 June 2012 to 9 May 2013. That is 343 days.
409,826 divided by 343 =
1,195 (avg)
You know, 1200 hits average per day is not shabby. It's a decent figure. It's not huge; it's not tiny. It's a fair amount of hits for an anti-smoker hate site set up to attack bloggers and anybody that disagrees with the tobacco control industry. Sure, the wiki is not overwhelmingly popular by any stretch, but what anti-smoker site is? Regardless, why do they feel the need to state an average figure that is five times higher? Why do they claim they have received almost 3.5 times more hits overall?
Well, maybe the answers to those last two questions is the tobacco control industry cannot help but make shit up to give the appearance of massive support. This is a public relations confidence trick. Tell people you have a huge fan base, and you hope that people will believe you are a force to be reckoned with. The truth, however, is that their support is marginal.
The truth is that we can never trust any person or organisation in the tobacco control industry. We certainly never trusted Anna Gilmore in the past, so no reason now to start trusting her or sidekick, Eveline Lubbers, either.
*If my maths are incorrect or if I missed something, please let me know in the comments so I can correct -- I had "indulged"with a few drinks last night whilst writing this post.
UPDATE (10 May 2013, 21:20) : I have just received a message that the TobaccoTactics wiki is updated with evidence of from their server logs or something. I haven't checked myself because I'm in the middle of something right now, but in the in interest of fairness I wanted to put a quick note on this post that they have responded. I will check later and certainly I will update this post further after I have looked at what they've posted. -- Jay
UPDATE 2 (11 May 2013, 00:20): I have now had a chance to review Eveline's web statistics. I thank Eveline Lubbers for having the courage to post them up. I am pleased to say that my post above remains a more accurate picture of the traffic the TobaccoTactics wiki receives. I will explain below.
But first this very important message to Eveline Lubbers:
Look, Eveline. I don't know you, and I don't mean to be cruel, but you know absolutely fuck all about the Internet (using Google, Twitter and editing a wiki does not make you an expert) and you know even less about correctly interpreting web statistics. There must be hundreds of capable IT persons at the University of Bath. I would strongly advise you to consult with any of them, and after that kindly update your wiki's main page accordingly. Or you could hire me. My fee is twice the amount they are paying you. The upside to hiring me is that at least you know I would be honest and fair (if not a bit foul-mouthed at at times). The downside for me is that I'd have to spend time with the Tobacco Control Research Group and I cannot think of anything more horrible at present (excluding Karen -- she's a cutie). And if you think for one second that I enjoy writing about this shit, you're wrong. I'd rather be doing anything else, but there's no way in hell I'm going to sit back and let the tobacco control industry deceive everybody. I certainly don't need to teach you how to analyse data. But hey, if you want a propaganda war, I will beat you at it every time -- I will "pwn" you. I think you should stick to being an author or whatever you do best, and this gig with Anna, no matter how well paid it is for you, it is not for you. I hope we are very clear, Ms Lubbers. I'm sorry I have to tell you these things. You're ruining your reputation every day you work for the tobacco control industry.
OK, so let's begin analysing the wiki traffic stats. This is the image that Eveline posted up on the wiki to show their traffic:
 |
| Click to enlargify Source: TobaccoTactics |
 |
| The only data you should look at is "Visits" |
The first thing to do in complete fairness, however, is to toss out the June stats, because I think the TobaccoTactics team didn't start their web traffic analysis until the last week or so of June, based on the stats. June's stats appear to be very, very low. So, as you do with statistics, we're eliminating them from the calculations (I'll add them back in later by assuming that the 2,345 is one week's worth of data). Likewise, I will exclude May's statistics, since we're only 10 or 11 days in, but will not add that in.
Here is a screen cap of my calculations based on the above data:
 |
| Jay's super awesome calculations in Excel |
So from July 2012 to April 2013, you have had a total of 216,756 visits, with (and this is naughty, because averaging averages is absolutely rubbish maths, but the hell with it, the results are mostly identical for figures this small) an average of 713 visits per day during this time period.
That is respectable traffic. That is nothing to be ashamed about.
But I want to be fair. So I'm going to include June's data, and I'm going to have to adjust June's stats because the data provided above looks like an aberration. I will assume that the June data of 78 views and 2345 hits is only one week's worth of traffic. It could more, it could be less. But I don't know, and neither do you, it seems. So, I will multiply the Monthly visits by four, or 2,345 x 4 = 9,380. I admit this seems a bit low, but... give me more and I'll fix it. Here's an adjusted spreadsheet:
 |
| We should have left June out of the calculations |
Right. The TobaccoTactics traffic is actually better off by excluding June altogether as you can see (and see how fair I am to you guys? I'm Mr Fairness. Definitely fair. So fair that ... eh, never mind).
If we count June, then we have an overall average of 677 visits daily and a total of 226,136 visits during those eleven months. This isn't shabby either. It's better than what I get on my blog -- granted, I haven't been posting much lately, but I digress.
So you're probably wondering why the
 |
| Source: Elbel Consulting Services, LLC |
See? I'm not making it up. You might also want to read this page from that guy which explains how to interpret web stats much better than I ever could.
So, there you have it. And now you know why we will never trust any research or data that comes out of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. Because ... well, my friend Bucko The Moose put it most succinctly in his tweet this afternoon:
 |
| I favourited this tweet for its awesomeness. |
Can you update your fucking wiki with the proper visitor stats now, please? Thanks.
UPDATE 3 (11 May 2013 17:50): Grandad weighs in here with his post 9.2 million hits. Nice one.
UPDATE 4 (12 May 2013 18:12): Simon Clark of FOREST also wrote this piece called "Stats life – welcome to the fictional world of tobacco control."
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Battle Won, War Not Over Yet
Well, the Queen's speech is over and she made no mention of plain packaging. This means that The Guardian's leading tobacco control industry journalist, Patrick Wintour, who wrote last March that plain packaging would be in the Queen's speech, was either deceived by an anonymous senior Whitehall source, or worse, Wintour made it all up as part of another dirty confidence trick by the tobacco control industry. Perhaps it could be a little of both? I don't know.
But I do know that the Department ofHealth Hate has still not released the results of the so-called public consultation on plain packaging of tobacco products, so I fail to understand how government ministers -- with their "open minds" -- could have the necessary information to make an informed decision. Because the results have not been released, it certainly lends some credibility to the theory that the tobacco control industry used Patrick Wintour to push for plain packaging legislation. And I suppose that it could be possible that they did this because Tobacco Programme Manager Andrew Black's report was unable to hide the truth of the overwhelming opposition to plain packaging in the UK.
That's all conjecture and speculation, I admit. I have no idea what is going on, or who has done what in respect of deceiving the general public with con tricks. Like you, I have no special access to ministers or civil servants; I have no connections to anyone involved with public health's hate campaigns against consumers of legal tobacco products. I suspect that further Freedom of Information requests may shed some light on why nine months have elapsed since the consultation closed and there has not been a whisper from the DH about the results.
So we have won this battle, but the war is on-going. We have many more battles to fight. We need to keep the pressure on our MPs to do the right thing, which is to leave us alone and stop wasting taxpayers' money on denormalisation programmes that clearly have no impact on smoking uptake rates, if we are to believe the tobacco control industry's claim that more kids are taking up smoking than ever before.
To all of you who have written to your MPs, signed petitions or postcards and sent in detailed responses to the so-called public consultation on plain packaging, I sincerely thank you for your efforts. You rock!
In closing, here are some fun images I made and posted up on Twitter and Facebook the past few days. Feel free to share them anywhere and everywhere. I made them for you to enjoy.
But I do know that the Department of
That's all conjecture and speculation, I admit. I have no idea what is going on, or who has done what in respect of deceiving the general public with con tricks. Like you, I have no special access to ministers or civil servants; I have no connections to anyone involved with public health's hate campaigns against consumers of legal tobacco products. I suspect that further Freedom of Information requests may shed some light on why nine months have elapsed since the consultation closed and there has not been a whisper from the DH about the results.
So we have won this battle, but the war is on-going. We have many more battles to fight. We need to keep the pressure on our MPs to do the right thing, which is to leave us alone and stop wasting taxpayers' money on denormalisation programmes that clearly have no impact on smoking uptake rates, if we are to believe the tobacco control industry's claim that more kids are taking up smoking than ever before.
To all of you who have written to your MPs, signed petitions or postcards and sent in detailed responses to the so-called public consultation on plain packaging, I sincerely thank you for your efforts. You rock!
In closing, here are some fun images I made and posted up on Twitter and Facebook the past few days. Feel free to share them anywhere and everywhere. I made them for you to enjoy.
Sunday, 5 May 2013
The Root of All Evil Goes Too Far? - An Investigation
I know that I have been a bit quiet on the blogging front of late, but even so I have remained busy keeping an eye on the absurd antics of the health zealots. A month ago somebody created a parody account on Twitter to mock Carl Phillips. It came to my attention because that somebody followed me on Twitter. Parody accounts are a dime-a-dozen on Twitter and sometimes they can be funny, but as a general unwritten rule you parody and make fun of the person only -- you should not involve the subject's family. Ever. Not only is that incredibly poor taste, it's just fucking wrong. The somebody parodying Carl Phillips broke that rule with his very first tweet by mentioning and including an image of the real Carl Phillips's child (note: I've blurred the image of the child):
So when I saw the above tweet, I decided that I would never follow that evil fucker's account and I didn't want it to follow me. I didn't block the account, merely forced the account to unfollow me. The reason I did not block this bastard's parody account is because I knew someday I might have to tweet to it (today is that day), and if the account is blocked, Twitter won't let you tweet back and forth.
Despite my beliefs about what is and what isn't acceptable parody material, I decided to ignore it even though I had a good idea who created the parody and why they created the account. A month ago, I saw little point in bringing any exposure to this cunt's hateful account on Twitter. But the shitbag decided to follow me again, and that is why I decided to confirm my suspicions about who is behind this travesty of a parody and to write this blog post today.
Here's the thing. Everybody has a unique "writing style." I'm not talking about handwriting analysis (although that's a related discipline). We all have peculiar habits of speech, preferred word choices, grammar issues, punctuation usage, etc. Do you prefer the Oxford comma or not? Do you use single quotation marks or double quotation marks? Do you prefer certain abbreviations or writing short cuts? And so on. It is likely that you are not even aware of your own writing style. But you do have one, as do I. Indeed, I began this paragraph with one of my oft-used habits of speech: "Here's the thing." I also like to begin sentences with a conjunction (often considered naughty), or I overuse the word "indeed." Sometimes I confuse tenses or slip into a passive voice writing style because I often attempt to write as though I am speaking to a person in real life, and my real life speech is grammatically lazy.
It is not difficult to discern a person's writing style. Simply, you will need to pay close attention to how things were written over many samples of writing and then look for patterns. By using this method, I believe that I have deduced precisely who created the Carl Phillips account. Whilst I cannot prove conclusively that my deduction is correct without having access to Twitter's IP logs or this somebody's computer, I feel about 95% confident that I am right.
Who is it?
I believe that Professor Simon Chapman, a.k.a. The Root of All Evil, created the parody account of Carl Phillips. What follows are the reasons why I believe this.
As of this writing, the parody account has tweeted twelve times. This is a small sample, but it is enough. Here are the tweets in reverse-chronological order:
Now, the first tweet in the list, which was tweeted today, is incredibly informative and interesting. It reads:
The first item is the hashtagged word "#onanism." This is an obscure word. I would think that few people know what it means. You almost never hear anybody use this word in everyday speech, and rarely do you see anyone write it. It is uncommon. There may be a good reason for that, however, because the word either means "masturbation" or "withdrawal of the penis in sexual intercourse so that ejaculation takes place outside the vagina; coitus interruptus" so not exactly something you're going to hear in grandma's knitting circle, or any circle for that matter. In the above tweet's context, I presume that the intended meaning is "masturbation." But Simon Chapman knows what this word means; he has used it before.
Here on the Watching The Deniers blog, one of the Root of All Evil's favourite hangouts, is a comment by Professor Simon Chapman -- note the highlighted text and the bit that follows that says "not her words," which can only be interpreted as "Simon Chapman chose the wording 'onanistic rubbish'":
Not convinced? OK, how about this tweet by Professor Chapman where he attacks an anti-windfarm advocate:
I checked the web page mentioned -- not one instance of "onanist" or "onanism" or "onan-anything" appears on that page. I also checked @stopthesething's tweets, and out of 450 total tweets at the time of this writing, not one tweet by @stopthesethings uses the words "onanist" or "onanism." So we have another instance of Simon Chapman choosing the wording to describe an individual as a masturbator. I am beginning to believe that The Root of All Evil touches himself each time he has occasion to use any of these "onan-something" words.
Of course two instances of using "onanism" or "onanist" proves nothing. So we need to find more writing style patterns.
The second thing to notice in the tweet above is the use of double quotation marks to emphasise a word on Twitter (note: you cannot italicise or bold words on Twitter, you must find another means for emphasis). In this case it is the word "completists." Some people prefer to use single quotation marks for emphasis, others prefer to capitalise a word, and still others prefer to surround a word with asterisks like so -- *completists* -- to show only but a few ways one can employ emphasis on social media that lacks text formatting. The use of double quotation marks proves nothing, it is simply a marker or an indicator of one's preference, or more precisely, of one's style. The Root of All Evil is consistent in his use of double quotes in tweets for word emphasis when he's being nasty or for other ad hominem attacks on people, as shown in the following three examples (there are many, many more examples than only these):
Out of 2,037 tweets from Simon Chapman's tweet history (excluding retweets of others'), he used double quotes 253 times (12.4%). Obviously, not all of those double quotes usages are for word emphasis, but the majority certainly are.
So in only one tweet we now have two examples of Chapman's preferred writing style -- word choice and punctuation style (double quotes) for emphasis. Bear with me, though, we are not done yet.
Let's look at another peculiar quirk of the parody account's writing style. Out of the twelve tweets, two of them use a shortened ellipsis (which should be three dots "...") by using only two dots as so: " .. ":
and this tweet (which I will cover again below):
Well, even I have to admit that this is not incontrovertible proof ... yet.
Let's find another habit of speech. Looking over Simon Chapman's tweet, it seems he loves to use the word "Guess" to start a sentence, almost always when being hateful and putting other people down. And will you look at this? The parody account does, too:
I know some of you may not be convinced yet. To be honest, I couldn't stand up and say for certain that the parody account was definitely Simon Chapman's by this point. No, I needed to find more examples. So I did.
The abbreviation of the word "committee" to "c'tee" for instance. Here is the parody account's second tweet:
Mere coincidence? It might be if it were not for all of the other coincidences listed above.
How about this, then? The use of the words "pretty much." The parody account's profile reads:
Do you need more? Fine. In an earlier tweet I already covered above, here's a literary reference to the Emperor's New Clothes (or No Clothes):
Parody account:
Parody:
I don't know about you, but I think those are quite a few "coincidences" in only twelve tweets from the parody account. Still, it is all circumstantial. There's no "hard evidence" that Simon Chapman, The Root of All Evil, is the shitbag behind the Carl Phillips parody account. But the patterns in writing style certainly appear to the be same as Chapman's. If only I had another dozen tweets from the parody account then I could be more certain.
There is something else to cover. Every crime needs a "motivation" and when someone goes on trial the prosecution presents its theory to explain the defendant's motivation for committing the crime. So I'm going to present a theory as to why I believe Simon Chapman created the parody account to attack and defame Carl Phillips.
I'm going to call it "The Butt-hurt theory." Yes, our little Root of All Evil is thinner-skinned than he would like everyone to believe. Chapman is the kind of guy who posts up a link to a PDF containing quotes from his "critics" on his Twitter profile, because he probably feels that some people were unfairly criticising him, to wit:
But I think the reason that Simon Chapman created the parody account of Carl Phillips is because Chapman believes that Phillips created this parody account of Chapman, @SlMONCHAPMAN.
And the reason I think that Chapman believes that is because of this tweet by the real Carl Phillips:
I think this tweet made The Root of All Evil very suspicious indeed. In fairness, the "whoever you are" could be interpreted as a sly wink of some kind. But I personally do not believe that the real Carl Phillips created the fake Simon Chapman parody account. I say this because Carl asked me over a month ago if I knew who created the Chapman parody, and I truly doubt he would ask me that in order to create some kind of misdirection or trickery to cover himself. Why would he? We're on the same side of the debate. I am certain that Carl would have told me if he had created the parody.
But Simon Chapman doesn't know who created the Chapman parody (nor do I, for that matter), which has been silent on Twitter for almost a month, so Chapman can only surmise like the rest of us. And I think the Root of All Evil got butt-hurt that someone would dare to create a parody of himself and retaliated by creating a parody of Phillips. To be honest, using "onanism" is the big giveaway. Nobody uses that word. Chapman slipped up there.
Nevertheless, if Professor Simon Chapman is in fact the Phillips parody account, and I have every reason to believe that he is based on everything I have shown you above, then it makes you wonder all sorts of things.
Like: Why is a supposedly "respected" and tenured academic at the University of Sydney attempting to defame another individual through a shabby parody account on Twitter? Surely a man in Chapman's position would be able to rise above such pettiness.
Oh, wait. No, the Root of All Evil is all about the pettiness.
He always has been.
The real mystery is not whether Simon Chapman is behind the Carl Phillips parody, a vile and hateful account on Twitter that stoops so low as to attack and degrade an innocent, newborn baby in the very first tweet. The real mystery is why anyone bothers to listen to such an awful, despicable human being? And with all of the hateful, petty things the Root of All Evil has done (and will continue to do), why does he still have a job at the University of Sydney? And should he continue to be educating our young adults with his brand of filthy hatred towards others?
I cannot know the answers to those questions. I do know what I think and believe. I'd be ashamed to be an alumnus of the University of Sydney, and I'd never consider sending my children to a school that condones of hate campaigns by one of its professors. Every day that Chapman remains a professor at that institution is another day the university is further tarnished.
Perhaps it does not matter what I think. But I wonder: What do you believe? Does the evidence above convince you? Has the Root of All Evil gone too far?
UPDATE (Monday, 6 May 2013)
If the above evidence isn't enough, then here's another "coincidence" with the abbreviation "supplt" that I missed the first time around:
Parody account:
And here's something else to consider. Both the parody account and Simon Chapman occasionally tweet from an iPad (not all the time, only sometimes) as you can see from the two images below:
So when I saw the above tweet, I decided that I would never follow that evil fucker's account and I didn't want it to follow me. I didn't block the account, merely forced the account to unfollow me. The reason I did not block this bastard's parody account is because I knew someday I might have to tweet to it (today is that day), and if the account is blocked, Twitter won't let you tweet back and forth.
Despite my beliefs about what is and what isn't acceptable parody material, I decided to ignore it even though I had a good idea who created the parody and why they created the account. A month ago, I saw little point in bringing any exposure to this cunt's hateful account on Twitter. But the shitbag decided to follow me again, and that is why I decided to confirm my suspicions about who is behind this travesty of a parody and to write this blog post today.
Here's the thing. Everybody has a unique "writing style." I'm not talking about handwriting analysis (although that's a related discipline). We all have peculiar habits of speech, preferred word choices, grammar issues, punctuation usage, etc. Do you prefer the Oxford comma or not? Do you use single quotation marks or double quotation marks? Do you prefer certain abbreviations or writing short cuts? And so on. It is likely that you are not even aware of your own writing style. But you do have one, as do I. Indeed, I began this paragraph with one of my oft-used habits of speech: "Here's the thing." I also like to begin sentences with a conjunction (often considered naughty), or I overuse the word "indeed." Sometimes I confuse tenses or slip into a passive voice writing style because I often attempt to write as though I am speaking to a person in real life, and my real life speech is grammatically lazy.
It is not difficult to discern a person's writing style. Simply, you will need to pay close attention to how things were written over many samples of writing and then look for patterns. By using this method, I believe that I have deduced precisely who created the Carl Phillips account. Whilst I cannot prove conclusively that my deduction is correct without having access to Twitter's IP logs or this somebody's computer, I feel about 95% confident that I am right.
Who is it?
I believe that Professor Simon Chapman, a.k.a. The Root of All Evil, created the parody account of Carl Phillips. What follows are the reasons why I believe this.
As of this writing, the parody account has tweeted twelve times. This is a small sample, but it is enough. Here are the tweets in reverse-chronological order:
 |
| Click to enlargify image |
* * *
Now, the first tweet in the list, which was tweeted today, is incredibly informative and interesting. It reads:
I know there are "completists" out there who want to collect everything I write. See end of http://t.co/B7Tv1wYVvb #onanism #vanityThere are two important items in that tweet to notice.
The first item is the hashtagged word "#onanism." This is an obscure word. I would think that few people know what it means. You almost never hear anybody use this word in everyday speech, and rarely do you see anyone write it. It is uncommon. There may be a good reason for that, however, because the word either means "masturbation" or "withdrawal of the penis in sexual intercourse so that ejaculation takes place outside the vagina; coitus interruptus" so not exactly something you're going to hear in grandma's knitting circle, or any circle for that matter. In the above tweet's context, I presume that the intended meaning is "masturbation." But Simon Chapman knows what this word means; he has used it before.
Here on the Watching The Deniers blog, one of the Root of All Evil's favourite hangouts, is a comment by Professor Simon Chapman -- note the highlighted text and the bit that follows that says "not her words," which can only be interpreted as "Simon Chapman chose the wording 'onanistic rubbish'":
I checked the web page mentioned -- not one instance of "onanist" or "onanism" or "onan-anything" appears on that page. I also checked @stopthesething's tweets, and out of 450 total tweets at the time of this writing, not one tweet by @stopthesethings uses the words "onanist" or "onanism." So we have another instance of Simon Chapman choosing the wording to describe an individual as a masturbator. I am beginning to believe that The Root of All Evil touches himself each time he has occasion to use any of these "onan-something" words.
Of course two instances of using "onanism" or "onanist" proves nothing. So we need to find more writing style patterns.
The second thing to notice in the tweet above is the use of double quotation marks to emphasise a word on Twitter (note: you cannot italicise or bold words on Twitter, you must find another means for emphasis). In this case it is the word "completists." Some people prefer to use single quotation marks for emphasis, others prefer to capitalise a word, and still others prefer to surround a word with asterisks like so -- *completists* -- to show only but a few ways one can employ emphasis on social media that lacks text formatting. The use of double quotation marks proves nothing, it is simply a marker or an indicator of one's preference, or more precisely, of one's style. The Root of All Evil is consistent in his use of double quotes in tweets for word emphasis when he's being nasty or for other ad hominem attacks on people, as shown in the following three examples (there are many, many more examples than only these):
 |
| Twitter link |
 |
| Twitter link |
 |
| Twitter link |
Out of 2,037 tweets from Simon Chapman's tweet history (excluding retweets of others'), he used double quotes 253 times (12.4%). Obviously, not all of those double quotes usages are for word emphasis, but the majority certainly are.
So in only one tweet we now have two examples of Chapman's preferred writing style -- word choice and punctuation style (double quotes) for emphasis. Bear with me, though, we are not done yet.
* * *
Let's look at another peculiar quirk of the parody account's writing style. Out of the twelve tweets, two of them use a shortened ellipsis (which should be three dots "...") by using only two dots as so: " .. ":
Anna Gilmore is a pretend economist, unlike me..I've never published a single thing in the dismal science, but don't let that fool you (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/327115880582496256)
and this tweet (which I will cover again below):
Going to THR ball soon as Emperor with No Clothes. Hope my pony tail grows long enough to preserve my modesty. But hey .. not into modesty (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/324444806417874944)Simon Chapman, The Root of All Evil, uses this odd shortened ellipsis at least 40 times. Here are few examples, and please note that there are at least 37 more tweets where this quirky convention for ellipses is used:
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| Twitter link |
 |
| Twitter link |
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| Twitter link |
Well, even I have to admit that this is not incontrovertible proof ... yet.
* * *
Let's find another habit of speech. Looking over Simon Chapman's tweet, it seems he loves to use the word "Guess" to start a sentence, almost always when being hateful and putting other people down. And will you look at this? The parody account does, too:
Guess who cites my research most? It's ME! (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/325706117441286146)And a few of Chapman's tweets:
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| Twitter link |
 |
| Twitter link |
* * *
I know some of you may not be convinced yet. To be honest, I couldn't stand up and say for certain that the parody account was definitely Simon Chapman's by this point. No, I needed to find more examples. So I did.
The abbreviation of the word "committee" to "c'tee" for instance. Here is the parody account's second tweet:
Hope RJR doesn't publicize my membership of BAT's scientific c'tee. Doing best to make out CASSA is grass roots pure (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/322289135148744704)Here is one by Simon Chapman:
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| Twitter link |
Mere coincidence? It might be if it were not for all of the other coincidences listed above.
* * *
How about this, then? The use of the words "pretty much." The parody account's profile reads:
Parody account of Professor CarlVPhillips, self-declared & undisputed world authority on tobacco control & pretty much anything really.Here's a tweet by Chapman:
 |
| Twitter link |
* * *
Do you need more? Fine. In an earlier tweet I already covered above, here's a literary reference to the Emperor's New Clothes (or No Clothes):
Parody account:
"Going to THR ball soon as Emperor with No Clothes. Hope my pony tail grows long enough to preserve my modesty. But hey .. not into modesty" (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/324444806417874944)From Chapman's account:
 |
| Twitter link |
* * *
What? Did you think we were finished? Hell, no. Here's another coincidence: using the words "snout" and "trough" (albeit a common expression, it serves to show that Chapman uses it, too):Parody:
@Dick_Puddlecote what sort of a retainer are you on, Bigus Dickus? Keen to get my snout deeper in the tobacco trough. Can we share notes? (https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/329885237628780544)Chapman's:
 |
| Twitter link |
* * *
I don't know about you, but I think those are quite a few "coincidences" in only twelve tweets from the parody account. Still, it is all circumstantial. There's no "hard evidence" that Simon Chapman, The Root of All Evil, is the shitbag behind the Carl Phillips parody account. But the patterns in writing style certainly appear to the be same as Chapman's. If only I had another dozen tweets from the parody account then I could be more certain.
There is something else to cover. Every crime needs a "motivation" and when someone goes on trial the prosecution presents its theory to explain the defendant's motivation for committing the crime. So I'm going to present a theory as to why I believe Simon Chapman created the parody account to attack and defame Carl Phillips.
I'm going to call it "The Butt-hurt theory." Yes, our little Root of All Evil is thinner-skinned than he would like everyone to believe. Chapman is the kind of guy who posts up a link to a PDF containing quotes from his "critics" on his Twitter profile, because he probably feels that some people were unfairly criticising him, to wit:
 | |||||
| What a jerk! |
But I think the reason that Simon Chapman created the parody account of Carl Phillips is because Chapman believes that Phillips created this parody account of Chapman, @SlMONCHAPMAN.
 |
| Loving the Kim Jong Un background. |
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| Twitter link |
But Simon Chapman doesn't know who created the Chapman parody (nor do I, for that matter), which has been silent on Twitter for almost a month, so Chapman can only surmise like the rest of us. And I think the Root of All Evil got butt-hurt that someone would dare to create a parody of himself and retaliated by creating a parody of Phillips. To be honest, using "onanism" is the big giveaway. Nobody uses that word. Chapman slipped up there.
Nevertheless, if Professor Simon Chapman is in fact the Phillips parody account, and I have every reason to believe that he is based on everything I have shown you above, then it makes you wonder all sorts of things.
Like: Why is a supposedly "respected" and tenured academic at the University of Sydney attempting to defame another individual through a shabby parody account on Twitter? Surely a man in Chapman's position would be able to rise above such pettiness.
Oh, wait. No, the Root of All Evil is all about the pettiness.
He always has been.
The real mystery is not whether Simon Chapman is behind the Carl Phillips parody, a vile and hateful account on Twitter that stoops so low as to attack and degrade an innocent, newborn baby in the very first tweet. The real mystery is why anyone bothers to listen to such an awful, despicable human being? And with all of the hateful, petty things the Root of All Evil has done (and will continue to do), why does he still have a job at the University of Sydney? And should he continue to be educating our young adults with his brand of filthy hatred towards others?
I cannot know the answers to those questions. I do know what I think and believe. I'd be ashamed to be an alumnus of the University of Sydney, and I'd never consider sending my children to a school that condones of hate campaigns by one of its professors. Every day that Chapman remains a professor at that institution is another day the university is further tarnished.
Perhaps it does not matter what I think. But I wonder: What do you believe? Does the evidence above convince you? Has the Root of All Evil gone too far?
UPDATE (Monday, 6 May 2013)
If the above evidence isn't enough, then here's another "coincidence" with the abbreviation "supplt" that I missed the first time around:
Parody account:
All authors of @TC_BMJ's Endgame supplt are liars & jokes! Only I possess TheTruth. So why am I in the wilderness?(https://twitter.com/CARLVPHlLLlPS/status/324444237351497728)Simon Chapman's:
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| Twitter link |
And here's something else to consider. Both the parody account and Simon Chapman occasionally tweet from an iPad (not all the time, only sometimes) as you can see from the two images below:
Saturday, 4 May 2013
Back in Black
Just about everybody knows by now that the UK is not planning to proceed with plain packaging (or standardised packs, as the anti-smokers are now calling them) for tobacco products. And while it looks we've finally had some success after over a decade of being denormalised and tortured by public health zealots, I'm not holding my breath that this is the end of it. It is possible, perhaps you could say very likely, that plain packs will be mandated through back door EU legislation at some point in the future. But for now, I'm pleased to say that it appears, as of today anyway, that common sense has prevailed for once.
Naturally, the anti-smoker rhetoric from the True Believers on Twitter has reached hyper-hysterical proportions. You know it's bad for the anti-smokers when they tweet to random celebrities, who were never part of a conversation on Twitter, in a sad, desperate attempt to find someone -- anyone -- famous to support their cause. Like this one from Nick Hopkinson (@COPDdoc) trying to drag Owen Jones into the plain packaging debate:
If the name Nick Hopkinson sounds familiar, he's that ... er... annoying twat? ... hopeless lunatic? ... let's just say "that guy" who incessantly tweets about Tesco's tobacco displays. I admit that I had great fun winding him up with the following petty tweet on Twitter yesterday:
Well, I don't really want to spend more time writing about anti-smoker morons on Twitter. No, there's something far more serious to blog about.
I would like to tell you a story.
This is a story about deception, about lies through omission, about mainstream media propaganda, and at the heart of this torrid tale both the evil villains known as The Dreadful, and her faithful minion, the Department of Health's Tobacco Programme Manager, Mr Andrew Black.
Without further ado, let us don our tin-foil hats and travel Back in Black.
Once upon a time there was a journalist named Sam Masters who wrote an article for The Independent. He titled this shabby piece of anti-smoker propaganda "Tobacco lobby told Government: branding ban will cost you millions." The article Sam Masters wrote began with:
From a top-floor office in Hatton Garden in central London, the headquarters of the New Inquisition in England, the evil queen of propaganda known colloquially as The Dreadful opened her gob, revealing her dangerous, pointy fangs, and let out the most horrible, ear-piercing scream anyone in the world had ever heard. Children up to fifty miles away suffered The Dreadful's wails and cried for help, but there was no help to give. Some have said that The Dreadful's scream caused several signal failures on the Tube's Central Line, and chalk cliffs to crumble and fall into the sea on the Jurassic coast in Dorset, but these claims cannot be substantiated. And when the scream finally died out, The Dreadful, still hysterical and drenched with her venomous spittle, said, "The tobacco industry clearly tried to use this meeting with officials to lobby against standard packaging rather than provide any hard evidence."
This was also inaccurate. Yet hardly surprising, for no person can remember the last time The Dreadful spoke the truth. Indeed, it was always The Dreadful's job to lie or distort the truth to support her wicked agenda of denormalisation.
The truth was that The Dreadful's minion, who is a friend of fellow Australian, The Root of All Evil, had invited the representatives of Imperial to his lair at Wellington House near Waterloo Station. Because The Dreadful's minion, Andrew Black, had to do this as part of the Impact Assessment of the so-called public consultation on plain packaging of tobacco products, a process by which everyone knew was always designed to destroy tobacco companies' ability to distinguish their brands from their competitors' brands. So to see the truth, one must be willing to look at the actual freedom of information release:
How strange that journalist Sam Masters failed to mention this information. Stranger still is this anonymous minister's quote in Sam Master's propaganda piece:
And even stranger than all of what has already been written is the Department of Health's decision to once again selectively release a sole freedom of information request ("FOI") when almost all other FOIs are not published on-line and kept hidden from the public's view, unless a brave warrior knows the precise magic words and means to release the FOI from the Department of Health's information repository.
There can be only one reason for the Department of Health to do this (we can never know if Andrew Black is responsible, however, but it does seem possible):
To deceive the public with false propaganda.
But it came too late. Because good people like you thwarted the anti-smokers' New Inquisition by writing to your MPs and telling them to oppose plain packs. You and countless others won the battles on Facebook and Twitter, too! You are heroes, all of you. Yes, you, dear readers! Your herculean efforts foiled the New Inquisition's dastardly plans for control and domination. The world is a safer place. The world thanks you.
And so the Dreadful and her minions have lost the war for plain packaging and they have grown most desperate. Everything that the New Inquisition will spew forth now and in the future will be woeful pleas and hateful deceptions designed to fool the unwary and unthinking.
Beware! Beware all Britons! Beware world! These are dark, Black days and you must remain vigilant. The Dreadful and her sheep-minions from hell will stop at nothing to make you believe in their fairy tales and sorrowful conspiracy theories. Armed with brainwashing ray guns, they will use slogans obtained from the darkest pits of the anti-smoker underworld that say "Put Our Kids First" and "Put Kids First," which are designed to make you feel, not think. Do not be fooled by these powerful deceptions. Know that only the evillest of all evil beings will invoke the "protect the children" incantations to sway opinion.
There is nothing to fear, however. In the fullness of time, in a more enlightened era, it will come to pass that the world will not look kindly upon The Dreadful and Andrew Black and the others who belong to the New Inquisition. These evil creatures who believe in censorship, bans and prohibition, and those who give them quarter will be despised for all eternity.
And the world will once again be a happy place full of sunshine and bunnies, with freedom and civil liberties for all.
Update (Sunday, 5 May 2013): Simon Clark also writes about the Independent article here. I wonder if he saw the above? And the Guardian also covers the story with another nasty quote from The Dreadful:
Naturally, the anti-smoker rhetoric from the True Believers on Twitter has reached hyper-hysterical proportions. You know it's bad for the anti-smokers when they tweet to random celebrities, who were never part of a conversation on Twitter, in a sad, desperate attempt to find someone -- anyone -- famous to support their cause. Like this one from Nick Hopkinson (@COPDdoc) trying to drag Owen Jones into the plain packaging debate:
 |
 |
I would like to tell you a story.
This is a story about deception, about lies through omission, about mainstream media propaganda, and at the heart of this torrid tale both the evil villains known as The Dreadful, and her faithful minion, the Department of Health's Tobacco Programme Manager, Mr Andrew Black.
Without further ado, let us don our tin-foil hats and travel Back in Black.
Back in Black
A Tale of Deception
by Jay
Once upon a time there was a journalist named Sam Masters who wrote an article for The Independent. He titled this shabby piece of anti-smoker propaganda "Tobacco lobby told Government: branding ban will cost you millions." The article Sam Masters wrote began with:
"Department of Health civil servants met lobbyists from the cigarette manufacturer Imperial Tobacco before the Government shelved proposals to introduce plain packaging laws this week, it can be revealed."The journalist's use of the word "lobbyists" to describe two representatives from Imperial Tobacco was an inaccuracy. One might be tempted to say it was a bald-faced lie. But let us not quibble over semantics, for we only need to read a bit more of the article to understand why journalist Sam Masters used the term lobbyists instead of representatives.
From a top-floor office in Hatton Garden in central London, the headquarters of the New Inquisition in England, the evil queen of propaganda known colloquially as The Dreadful opened her gob, revealing her dangerous, pointy fangs, and let out the most horrible, ear-piercing scream anyone in the world had ever heard. Children up to fifty miles away suffered The Dreadful's wails and cried for help, but there was no help to give. Some have said that The Dreadful's scream caused several signal failures on the Tube's Central Line, and chalk cliffs to crumble and fall into the sea on the Jurassic coast in Dorset, but these claims cannot be substantiated. And when the scream finally died out, The Dreadful, still hysterical and drenched with her venomous spittle, said, "The tobacco industry clearly tried to use this meeting with officials to lobby against standard packaging rather than provide any hard evidence."
This was also inaccurate. Yet hardly surprising, for no person can remember the last time The Dreadful spoke the truth. Indeed, it was always The Dreadful's job to lie or distort the truth to support her wicked agenda of denormalisation.
 |
| An artist's stylised depiction of The Dreadful, presumably in happier days |
The truth was that The Dreadful's minion, who is a friend of fellow Australian, The Root of All Evil, had invited the representatives of Imperial to his lair at Wellington House near Waterloo Station. Because The Dreadful's minion, Andrew Black, had to do this as part of the Impact Assessment of the so-called public consultation on plain packaging of tobacco products, a process by which everyone knew was always designed to destroy tobacco companies' ability to distinguish their brands from their competitors' brands. So to see the truth, one must be willing to look at the actual freedom of information release:
How strange that journalist Sam Masters failed to mention this information. Stranger still is this anonymous minister's quote in Sam Master's propaganda piece:
"[a] minister familiar with the consultation process, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Independent: “My concern is that the tobacco companies have inveigled their way into persuading a number of important players to reject standardised packaging.”Which minister said that and why would he or she choose to be anonymous? This was suspicious. Some had claimed that it came from a member of a secretive cabal hell-bent on eradicating a quarter of the British population, a nasty and vile group called the APPG on Smoking on Health. Alas, no evidence was to be found that the quote did come from that cabal.
And even stranger than all of what has already been written is the Department of Health's decision to once again selectively release a sole freedom of information request ("FOI") when almost all other FOIs are not published on-line and kept hidden from the public's view, unless a brave warrior knows the precise magic words and means to release the FOI from the Department of Health's information repository.
There can be only one reason for the Department of Health to do this (we can never know if Andrew Black is responsible, however, but it does seem possible):
To deceive the public with false propaganda.
But it came too late. Because good people like you thwarted the anti-smokers' New Inquisition by writing to your MPs and telling them to oppose plain packs. You and countless others won the battles on Facebook and Twitter, too! You are heroes, all of you. Yes, you, dear readers! Your herculean efforts foiled the New Inquisition's dastardly plans for control and domination. The world is a safer place. The world thanks you.
And so the Dreadful and her minions have lost the war for plain packaging and they have grown most desperate. Everything that the New Inquisition will spew forth now and in the future will be woeful pleas and hateful deceptions designed to fool the unwary and unthinking.
Beware! Beware all Britons! Beware world! These are dark, Black days and you must remain vigilant. The Dreadful and her sheep-minions from hell will stop at nothing to make you believe in their fairy tales and sorrowful conspiracy theories. Armed with brainwashing ray guns, they will use slogans obtained from the darkest pits of the anti-smoker underworld that say "Put Our Kids First" and "Put Kids First," which are designed to make you feel, not think. Do not be fooled by these powerful deceptions. Know that only the evillest of all evil beings will invoke the "protect the children" incantations to sway opinion.
There is nothing to fear, however. In the fullness of time, in a more enlightened era, it will come to pass that the world will not look kindly upon The Dreadful and Andrew Black and the others who belong to the New Inquisition. These evil creatures who believe in censorship, bans and prohibition, and those who give them quarter will be despised for all eternity.
And the world will once again be a happy place full of sunshine and bunnies, with freedom and civil liberties for all.
The End
Update (Sunday, 5 May 2013): Simon Clark also writes about the Independent article here. I wonder if he saw the above? And the Guardian also covers the story with another nasty quote from The Dreadful:
"It looks as if the noxious mix of rightwing Australian populism, as represented by Crosby and his lobbying firm, and English saloon bar reactionaries, as embodied by [Nigel] Farage and Ukip, may succeed in preventing this government from proceeding with standardised cigarette packs, despite their popularity with the public."Translation: Toys. Thrown. From. Pram.
Friday, 3 May 2013
Daniel Clayton Strikes Back (Sort of)
I wanted to write about the (apparently) successful campaign against plain packaging today, but it will have to wait because something else has happened that needs to be addressed. It is this:
The trouble with most of the people working for tobacco control is that they are short-sighted morons. They never seem to understand the potential consequences of their actions. Worse, their first impulse is to ban and censor things they do not like. And when they do, I get annoyed.
Take Dan Clayton, for instance. He used to work for ASH Wales, but his latest employer is Stop Smoking Wales, an NHS smoking cessation organisation based in Cardiff. Dan Clayton used to be on Twitter under the handle @savemethecolour, but very recently he deleted his Twitter account for reasons unknown. He and I had a brief exchange about the substance of his tweets immediately following Margaret Thatcher's death. I tweeted:
Because Dan Clayton deleted his Twitter account, I do not have his replies available, and unfortunately, Twitter does not always send an e-mail notification for each "mention" one gets on Twitter. But if memory serves correctly, Dan Clayton responded along the lines of:
"Why are you watching my feed?"
It should be noted that Dan Clayton hated it when (as he considered it) the "pro-smoking lobby" followed him on Twitter. He had blocked just about everybody who attempted to follow him.
And then he replied with (roughly):
"Can't you read? There is nothing offensive in my tweets about Thatcher."
But of course I thought there was. Thatcher's body wasn't even cold, the news about her death only a few hours old, and it appeared to me that Dan Clayton was gloating over her death on Twitter. One of his tweets had an image comparing Dracula (as played by Gary Oldman) to a pic of Thatcher. The tweet suggested that Thatcher's death was a bluff, that she was a vampire, or as Clayton had put it: "Nosferatu." So, I had intended to point out that particular tweet to Dan Clayton, but lo and behold, Mr Clayton had deleted it. Now why do that if it wasn't offensive, Dan? Instead, I replied to Clayton with this tweet:
Dan Clayton's next tweet to me was (roughly):
"Good work! Keep up the anonymous trolling. Byeee!" or something like that.
Funny thing is, my tweet to Clayton about saving his offensive tweet was a bluff. I hadn't saved anything. I didn't really care enough about it or Dan Clayton to bother saving it (although I regret that decision now as I write this post). I was merely winding him up on Twitter, as you do. Because a few weeks earlier I had spotted a tweet from him complaining that his Twitter account had caused him a bit of grief at work. Somebody (it wasn't me), had written to Dan Clayton's boss and complained. If I recall correctly, Dan had to delete some of his "blue tweets" as he put it. So, it's possible that he deleted the Thatcher tweets to avoid getting in any further trouble at work. I have no idea.
The very next day, Dan Clayton deleted his Twitter account @savemethecolour. I really don't know why. Perhaps his employer forced him to delete the account, or perhaps he's just a coward. Who knows? Maybe the above exchange had something to do with it? (I should point out here that Clayton's colleague, Laura Rich, on Twitter as @belle_rich, made her Twitter account private following my tweets to her and Clayton. To be fair to Ms Rich, she did reply saying she did not hate Thatcher, and it's possible that I misinterpreted her retweet of George Galloway's "may she burn in the hellfires" tweet about Thatcher as an endorsement.) Whatever the reason for Clayton's disappearance from Twitter, I do think his absence from social media has been a wonderful thing for humanity.
And that, I thought, was that. Except I was wrong.
Last night I got a notification from Google's Blogger that my earlier post about Dan Clayton was taken down. It is titled: "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition)." If you're in the UK, and you try to view the page, then you will see this message:
The blog post, however, remains open to everybody outside of the UK. And if you are in the UK and would like to see the post in its entirety and uncensored, you can easily do so by following this link:
http://nannyingtyrants.blogspot.com/ncr/2012/11/i-drone.html
Alternatively, you can visit the Hell Nanny blog, where it has been re-posted.
I don't know the reason for the takedown, though. And I may never find out. You might recall that I had another post about Bruce Guthrie taken down in Australia a year ago, and I still don't know the reason for that takedown. Because Google and Blogger fail to inform authors of the reason, instead sending takedown notices to Chilling Effects, who are clearly overwhelmed with work and unable to process takedowns in a timely manner.
I loathe all forms of censorship, and of course censoring things is the prohibitionists' action of choice. A takedown is censorship. So, here's the thing. I hereby freely release the text and HTML of my "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition) post into the public domain, to be freely reposted with or without attribution to this blog. Do what you like with it. BUT! Some important things to note: I don't know the reason for the takedown, so you republish at your own risk. It's possible that one of the images I used could be the reason, maybe this one (although, I created that image from a screen cap of this awful fucking video starring Dan Clatyon when he worked for ASH Wales). Also note that all of the links to Dan Clayton's former Twitter account @savemethecolour will no longer work because he deleted his account. Anyway, the "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition) post is now yours.
You know, I really feel bad for the Welsh who stop in at Stop Smoking Wales and have to deal with people like Dan Clayton. I cannot say for certain what it's like for those people, but I imagine it's horrible. I mean, imagine being face-to-face with him:
The above video is from NHS Wales's Champions4Health YouTube channel. Rejoice. Your money paid for this shite propaganda.
On the other hand, take some comfort that some people in Cardiff have no love for the Stop Smoking Wales (SSW) team, as evidenced by this tweet from another SSW employee:
For more about Daniel "Dan" Clayton, formerly of ASH Wales, and probably still working for the NHS at Stop Smoking Wales (assuming he hasn't been sacked for his dreadful social media skills), you may also wish to read the following:
http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tesco-discovers-that-appeasement-doesnt.html
http://nannyingtyrants.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/big-lottery-fund-grants-hard-at-work.html
The trouble with most of the people working for tobacco control is that they are short-sighted morons. They never seem to understand the potential consequences of their actions. Worse, their first impulse is to ban and censor things they do not like. And when they do, I get annoyed.
Take Dan Clayton, for instance. He used to work for ASH Wales, but his latest employer is Stop Smoking Wales, an NHS smoking cessation organisation based in Cardiff. Dan Clayton used to be on Twitter under the handle @savemethecolour, but very recently he deleted his Twitter account for reasons unknown. He and I had a brief exchange about the substance of his tweets immediately following Margaret Thatcher's death. I tweeted:
 |
Because Dan Clayton deleted his Twitter account, I do not have his replies available, and unfortunately, Twitter does not always send an e-mail notification for each "mention" one gets on Twitter. But if memory serves correctly, Dan Clayton responded along the lines of:
"Why are you watching my feed?"
It should be noted that Dan Clayton hated it when (as he considered it) the "pro-smoking lobby" followed him on Twitter. He had blocked just about everybody who attempted to follow him.
And then he replied with (roughly):
"Can't you read? There is nothing offensive in my tweets about Thatcher."
But of course I thought there was. Thatcher's body wasn't even cold, the news about her death only a few hours old, and it appeared to me that Dan Clayton was gloating over her death on Twitter. One of his tweets had an image comparing Dracula (as played by Gary Oldman) to a pic of Thatcher. The tweet suggested that Thatcher's death was a bluff, that she was a vampire, or as Clayton had put it: "Nosferatu." So, I had intended to point out that particular tweet to Dan Clayton, but lo and behold, Mr Clayton had deleted it. Now why do that if it wasn't offensive, Dan? Instead, I replied to Clayton with this tweet:
 |
Dan Clayton's next tweet to me was (roughly):
"Good work! Keep up the anonymous trolling. Byeee!" or something like that.
Funny thing is, my tweet to Clayton about saving his offensive tweet was a bluff. I hadn't saved anything. I didn't really care enough about it or Dan Clayton to bother saving it (although I regret that decision now as I write this post). I was merely winding him up on Twitter, as you do. Because a few weeks earlier I had spotted a tweet from him complaining that his Twitter account had caused him a bit of grief at work. Somebody (it wasn't me), had written to Dan Clayton's boss and complained. If I recall correctly, Dan had to delete some of his "blue tweets" as he put it. So, it's possible that he deleted the Thatcher tweets to avoid getting in any further trouble at work. I have no idea.
The very next day, Dan Clayton deleted his Twitter account @savemethecolour. I really don't know why. Perhaps his employer forced him to delete the account, or perhaps he's just a coward. Who knows? Maybe the above exchange had something to do with it? (I should point out here that Clayton's colleague, Laura Rich, on Twitter as @belle_rich, made her Twitter account private following my tweets to her and Clayton. To be fair to Ms Rich, she did reply saying she did not hate Thatcher, and it's possible that I misinterpreted her retweet of George Galloway's "may she burn in the hellfires" tweet about Thatcher as an endorsement.) Whatever the reason for Clayton's disappearance from Twitter, I do think his absence from social media has been a wonderful thing for humanity.
And that, I thought, was that. Except I was wrong.
Last night I got a notification from Google's Blogger that my earlier post about Dan Clayton was taken down. It is titled: "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition)." If you're in the UK, and you try to view the page, then you will see this message:
The blog post, however, remains open to everybody outside of the UK. And if you are in the UK and would like to see the post in its entirety and uncensored, you can easily do so by following this link:
http://nannyingtyrants.blogspot.com/ncr/2012/11/i-drone.html
Alternatively, you can visit the Hell Nanny blog, where it has been re-posted.
I don't know the reason for the takedown, though. And I may never find out. You might recall that I had another post about Bruce Guthrie taken down in Australia a year ago, and I still don't know the reason for that takedown. Because Google and Blogger fail to inform authors of the reason, instead sending takedown notices to Chilling Effects, who are clearly overwhelmed with work and unable to process takedowns in a timely manner.
I loathe all forms of censorship, and of course censoring things is the prohibitionists' action of choice. A takedown is censorship. So, here's the thing. I hereby freely release the text and HTML of my "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition) post into the public domain, to be freely reposted with or without attribution to this blog. Do what you like with it. BUT! Some important things to note: I don't know the reason for the takedown, so you republish at your own risk. It's possible that one of the images I used could be the reason, maybe this one (although, I created that image from a screen cap of this awful fucking video starring Dan Clatyon when he worked for ASH Wales). Also note that all of the links to Dan Clayton's former Twitter account @savemethecolour will no longer work because he deleted his account. Anyway, the "I, Drone (Special Cannabis Edition) post is now yours.
You know, I really feel bad for the Welsh who stop in at Stop Smoking Wales and have to deal with people like Dan Clayton. I cannot say for certain what it's like for those people, but I imagine it's horrible. I mean, imagine being face-to-face with him:
The above video is from NHS Wales's Champions4Health YouTube channel. Rejoice. Your money paid for this shite propaganda.
On the other hand, take some comfort that some people in Cardiff have no love for the Stop Smoking Wales (SSW) team, as evidenced by this tweet from another SSW employee:
 |
For more about Daniel "Dan" Clayton, formerly of ASH Wales, and probably still working for the NHS at Stop Smoking Wales (assuming he hasn't been sacked for his dreadful social media skills), you may also wish to read the following:
http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tesco-discovers-that-appeasement-doesnt.html
http://nannyingtyrants.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/big-lottery-fund-grants-hard-at-work.html
Friday, 29 March 2013
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Dirty Tricks
For the past few weeks, it's been a struggle to write new blog posts. Every time I sat down to write a new post, either somebody else had already covered it on their blog or something else happened and I decided to abandon my draft. It happened again yesterday. I was working on a new post, tentatively titled "Black Hole," which was about how we've heard nothing about the plain packs consultation from Andrew Black at the Department of Health, when the political editor of the Guardian, Patrick Wintour, published this article titled "Government to legislate for plain cigarette packaging this year."
The Guardian article claims that our government, with its so-called "open mind," has already made its decision without ever seeing the consultation report. I would have thought that government would at least pretend to go through the motions. Yet, I also believe that the government made its decision before the consultation was held, and that everything to date has been merely a box-ticking exercise designed to give the illusion of fairness and democracy.
So what's happening? Is this yet another one of ASH's and CRUK's dirty, under-handed confidence tricks, as suggested by both Christopher Snowdon and Simon Clark? Or is our government so brazen in its disregard for democracy and its citizens that it will abandon all pretence of fair play and do whatever it likes? Could it be both? I think so. Indeed, our ministers aim to deceive us at every opportunity, for here we see Stephen Williams MP, who is ASH's front man in government, re-tweeting the Guardian article as though it is fact:
I think it is obvious that the government does not have an open mind. It never had an open mind about this. The consultation never would have happened if the unelected civil servants hadn't already made up their minds on behalf of the elected MPs, who will do as the civil servants tell them. Let's look at Patrick Wintour's article again and note the source.
Perhaps we should expect Andrew Black's report any day now. Perhaps the Guardian article is advance notice. And when Black's report does get published, what kind of trickery and deception will we find in it?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Ministers are to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes along the Australian model with legislation this year, after becoming convinced that the branding is a key factor in why young people start to smoke.Interestingly, my draft post anticipated this precise course of action happening even to include a total ban on smoking in all private vehicles (regardless if children are present) because that's the only way such a ban can be enforced. The only difference in my draft being that Andrew Black's plain packaging consultation report would be released first (eventually) and then the government would enact its totalitarian legislation for plain packaging and add the smoking in private vehicles ban to the legislation.
The legislation, to be announced in the Queen's speech in May, is also expected to ban smoking in cars carrying anyone aged under 16 years. Ministers acknowledge that the ban is likely to be difficult for the police to enforce, but they believe peer group pressure will have an impact similar to the ban on drivers using mobile phones.
David Cameron referred to the possibility of introducing plain packaging last week, without putting a timetable on it. Ministers are convinced that the ban is necessary to take the next step to reduce smoking in the UK.
"We are going to follow what they have done in Australia. The evidence suggests it is going to deter young smokers. There is going to be legislation," said a senior Whitehall source said.
The Guardian article claims that our government, with its so-called "open mind," has already made its decision without ever seeing the consultation report. I would have thought that government would at least pretend to go through the motions. Yet, I also believe that the government made its decision before the consultation was held, and that everything to date has been merely a box-ticking exercise designed to give the illusion of fairness and democracy.
So what's happening? Is this yet another one of ASH's and CRUK's dirty, under-handed confidence tricks, as suggested by both Christopher Snowdon and Simon Clark? Or is our government so brazen in its disregard for democracy and its citizens that it will abandon all pretence of fair play and do whatever it likes? Could it be both? I think so. Indeed, our ministers aim to deceive us at every opportunity, for here we see Stephen Williams MP, who is ASH's front man in government, re-tweeting the Guardian article as though it is fact:
I think it is obvious that the government does not have an open mind. It never had an open mind about this. The consultation never would have happened if the unelected civil servants hadn't already made up their minds on behalf of the elected MPs, who will do as the civil servants tell them. Let's look at Patrick Wintour's article again and note the source.
"There is going to be legislation," said a senior Whitehall source said.Who is this source? Andrew Black? Some other unelected tyrant who knows what's best for you? And why did the Guardian run this piece before the consultation report has been published? And why hasn't the report been published? The consultation closed 10 August 2012, and here we are in the first week of March 2013. Almost all consultations have their findings published within three months, and yet this one has been mysteriously delayed for an additional four months. This is unprecedented. And it reeks of corruption and deception.
Perhaps we should expect Andrew Black's report any day now. Perhaps the Guardian article is advance notice. And when Black's report does get published, what kind of trickery and deception will we find in it?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Vote for Ray Hall
My previous post about the Beer, Baccy and Crumpet party rocketed into second place of all time popular posts on this blog, with most of that traffic being referred from Google searches on the party name. When I hastily wrote the post, I had no idea who Ray Hall was or why he was running. I certainly did not expect the post to receive much attention. I was wrong, though. I am also pleased to report that my tongue-in-cheek assumption that "Crumpet" could refer to the slang usage for woman was indeed incorrect.
According to this article in the Eastleigh News, "Crumpet" is an acronym, although I'm unsure what that acronym actually is -- the article doesn't say and only mentions the letter T (for taxes). If anybody knows the full meaning of the acronym, drop me a line in the comments and I'll update accordingly.
One thing I am very sure about is that if I lived in Eastleigh, I would definitely vote for Ray Hall. If any candidate understands the general public, the common folk as it were, then it's Ray Hall. He is not a career politician, and that fact alone endears me to him. More important, he understands that the pub trade in Britain has been decimated and wants to change that. He believes that smokers, who pay an enormous amount of tax, should be treated with respect, and he would like to see ventilated smoking rooms in pubs where it is practical to do so. A very reasonable compromise. Mr Hall, who is 73-years-old, also hopes to see the BB&C party go national for the 2015 general elections, and based on his common sense views, I would certainly like to see that happen, so if you need any help now or in the future, Ray, I'm sure we can find plenty of like-minded volunteers.
Anyway, do read the whole article linked above and be delighted.
If you live in Eastleigh, you might consider giving your vote to Ray Hall. Reportedly, the odds of him winning are 1000 to 1 (Hall has bet a fiver on himself to win and I say good luck, sir!). But really, who doesn't love an underdog? There is no such thing as a wasted vote.
Thanks to Virginia, a stalwart defender of common sense and liberty on social media and author of the Hell Nanny blog, for posting the link to this article on Facebook and Twitter.
According to this article in the Eastleigh News, "Crumpet" is an acronym, although I'm unsure what that acronym actually is -- the article doesn't say and only mentions the letter T (for taxes). If anybody knows the full meaning of the acronym, drop me a line in the comments and I'll update accordingly.
One thing I am very sure about is that if I lived in Eastleigh, I would definitely vote for Ray Hall. If any candidate understands the general public, the common folk as it were, then it's Ray Hall. He is not a career politician, and that fact alone endears me to him. More important, he understands that the pub trade in Britain has been decimated and wants to change that. He believes that smokers, who pay an enormous amount of tax, should be treated with respect, and he would like to see ventilated smoking rooms in pubs where it is practical to do so. A very reasonable compromise. Mr Hall, who is 73-years-old, also hopes to see the BB&C party go national for the 2015 general elections, and based on his common sense views, I would certainly like to see that happen, so if you need any help now or in the future, Ray, I'm sure we can find plenty of like-minded volunteers.
Anyway, do read the whole article linked above and be delighted.
If you live in Eastleigh, you might consider giving your vote to Ray Hall. Reportedly, the odds of him winning are 1000 to 1 (Hall has bet a fiver on himself to win and I say good luck, sir!). But really, who doesn't love an underdog? There is no such thing as a wasted vote.
Thanks to Virginia, a stalwart defender of common sense and liberty on social media and author of the Hell Nanny blog, for posting the link to this article on Facebook and Twitter.
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Beer, Baccy and Crumpets
In case you hadn't noticed, there is a candidate in the Eastleigh by-election named Ray Hall, who is running for the Beer, Baccy and Crumpet party. I don't know anything about Mr Hall, but I love the party name. One assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that "crumpet" refers not to the actual foodstuff but rather the older slang usage -- woman. £500 well spent, if you ask me.
In honour of beer, baccy and women then, I give you this delightful photo album comprised of 21 glorious images, all of which are certain to enrage the nannies. If you have a favourite, let me know in the comments.
Several images were stolen (with thanks!) from the Women Drinking Beer blog on Tumblr. Enjoy.
In honour of beer, baccy and women then, I give you this delightful photo album comprised of 21 glorious images, all of which are certain to enrage the nannies. If you have a favourite, let me know in the comments.
Several images were stolen (with thanks!) from the Women Drinking Beer blog on Tumblr. Enjoy.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
The Return of the Professor of Prohibition and his AARB
Can you spot what is horribly wrong with the below children's jacket? Take a moment. Go on. It'll be fun.
Did you see what is so shockingly wrong?
No?
Want a clue? Look closely the clothing tag and the zipper. Then read this this "shocking" article published by none other than Australia's favourite prohibition propaganda rag, the Sydney Morning Herald:
More importantly, alcohol companies can still advertise on radio, TV, and billboards. That is way too much freedom for the purveyors of the demon drink because children might see them. So something must be done to protect the children. And that something is Mike Daube's laughable and pathetic Alcohol Advertising Review Board (AARB), whose stated mission is:
Secondly, the AARB is grossly misleading. It's not a government organisation and it has no power over advertisers. Daube et al set up the AARB to compete with the Australia Association of National Advertisers (AANA), because they are more or less self-regulated and Daube doesn't like that. The AANA is not best pleased with Daube's efforts, that's for certain:
You might be wondering if the AARB is having any success in "regulating" alcohol advertising (apart from easily duping the Health Editors in the media, particularly and in this instance Amy Corderoy of the Sydney Morning Herald -- see end of this post for a bonus article written by Amy today). Well, no, it isn't. Let us all have a hearty laugh at the AARB's pathetic and sad quarterly report (PDF 372kb), which indicates very clearly that alcohol advertisers are simply ignoring Daube, as well they should:
Do take the time to read some of the quarterly report. It's hilarious and so very sad all the way through. "Ermagerd! Children might see these things and die!" But what about that shocking Jim Beam advertising on the kiddies' clothing -- what happened with that? Let's have a look (emphasis added on the really important bit at the end):
Ooh... "reconsider their sponsorship of V8 Supercars" they "requested". So much for tobacco being a unique product. There is no doubt that Daube's intention is to remove all alcohol sponsorship from every sport, to protect children from being targeted by evil promotions and advertising. It worked against tobacco companies, so no reason in Daube's mind that it wouldn't work against alcohol companies. So far, the makers of Jim Beam have ignored Daube and his minions of prohibition. And may Beam Global long continue to do so. One can only hope that alcohol companies have learnt a lesson from what has happened to tobacco companies, who tried to appease the public health inquisitors and got severely burnt by it.
How parents dress their children is their business. It's not the business of government, and it's definitely not the business of nannying tyrants like Daube the Dickhead and his various prohibitionist organisations. There is no way a four-year-old will be harmed by a clothing tag. So dress your kids however you like and tell the nannies to go to hell.
Bonus article by Amy Corderoy for your reading displeasure, "Profits before health, say experts":
You don't say! No slippery slope there, then...
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| Click image to enlargify |
No?
Want a clue? Look closely the clothing tag and the zipper. Then read this this "shocking" article published by none other than Australia's favourite prohibition propaganda rag, the Sydney Morning Herald:
Jim Beam-branded clothing is being sold to children as young as four, in what public health experts have said is one of the most shocking examples of alcohol advertising they have seen.OK, let's just analyse that once sentence and ask ourselves these questions:
- Are there any four-year-olds in the world who buy their own jackets?
- Do four-year-olds read clothing tags? (Do adults, for that matter?)
- Are clothing tags and zippers now considered advertising?
- Would any four-year-old make a connection with alcohol and a clothing tag?
- How many four-year-olds are considering drinking Jim Beam because of a clothing tag on a jacket?
- How many four-year-olds drink whiskey or even want to?
- What kind of dickhead would make an issue out of a clothing tag and boldly claim it's alcohol advertising targeting children?
“This is the most shocking alcohol promotion I have seen. It would be hard to think of anything more cynical than children’s clothing advertising alcohol. This promotion turns children into mobile billboards for whisky, and encourages them to associate themselves with the Jim Beam brand.”Oh, I can think of plenty of cynical promotions that use children, Daube. Pretty much everything you have ever done in fact. Why is it that you and others like you are allowed to use children to promote your beliefs? That is of course a direct violation of Jay's Law:
Any person, group, organisation or government that uses children to promote and disseminate propaganda designed to encourage societal and/or legislative change for any agenda or cause, regardless of claimed benefits or their intent, shall be considered execrable, evil and tyrannical.That is exactly what you do, Daube. You use kids to help promote your prohibitionist agenda with your McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth:
Young peopleOf course the real issue here is whether alcohol companies should be allowed to advertise at all. Indeed, having successfully banned all tobacco promotions and sponsorship, prohibitionists like Daube are earnestly seeking to do the same thing with alcohol. That domino effect or slippery slope that the anti-smokers ceaselessly claim doesn't exist because tobacco is a unique product ...? Of course it exists! Alcohol and junk food are next on the hit list for the nannying tyrants. In the case of motor sport racing, tobacco companies can no longer sponsor racing teams. So alcohol companies, like Jim Beam, have stepped in to fill in the void, because for the moment, they can:
Do you want to help reduce harms from alcohol among other young people?
We’re looking for young people to help us raise awareness of harmful drinking and call for action to prevent harm from alcohol.
Our Mission:Firstly, there is nothing independent about the AARB. It was set up and staffed with members of Daube's McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth organisation (MCAAY), including the Chair of the AARB, Professor Fiona Stanley, who appears on the advisory board for MCAAY. The AARB web site was registered by MCAAY's Information and Research Officer, Hannah Pierce. This is nothing but a front organisation for MCAAY as another means of lobbying government. (Can we call this a sockpuppet org? I dunno.)
To administer an independent alcohol advertising complaint review service to help protect the community from inappropriate alcohol advertising and encourage effective regulation of alcohol advertising.
Secondly, the AARB is grossly misleading. It's not a government organisation and it has no power over advertisers. Daube et al set up the AARB to compete with the Australia Association of National Advertisers (AANA), because they are more or less self-regulated and Daube doesn't like that. The AANA is not best pleased with Daube's efforts, that's for certain:
Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) today called for the disbandment of the Alcohol Advertising Review Board (AARB), which continues to mislead the public as to its purpose.Indeed, even I was misled for about three minutes (until I researched it), thinking that Daube's AARB was a legit government-sanctioned operation with powers to regulate advertisers. In truth, the AARB is nothing more than a paper tiger organisation, staffed with prohibitionists. It has absolutely no power and relies on its hyper-sensationalised press releases sent to the media to give it the appearance of legitimacy and to deceive the public.
[...]
“There are already a number of regulatory protections in place in terms of messaging and placement of alcohol advertising. It is an effective system, underpinned by a transparent and robust complaints handling system that delivers responses to consumer complainants within 30 days,” said AANA Director of Codes, Policy and Regulatory Affairs, Alina Bain.
“The AARB purported to provide an alternative complaints mechanism but has failed to deliver a consumer benefit. Professor Mike Daube’s own comments that AARB is “working to their own timelines” confirms that it was not designed to act as a genuine complaints handling system for the consumer,” said Ms Bain.
“The AARB system has set itself up as legislator, plaintiff, judge and jury. It has developed its own codes and is adjudicating complaints from within its own ranks. It flies in the face of established self-regulatory principles, which include independence of code making and adjudication. What’s more it has misled the public as to its purpose,” said Ms Bain.
You might be wondering if the AARB is having any success in "regulating" alcohol advertising (apart from easily duping the Health Editors in the media, particularly and in this instance Amy Corderoy of the Sydney Morning Herald -- see end of this post for a bonus article written by Amy today). Well, no, it isn't. Let us all have a hearty laugh at the AARB's pathetic and sad quarterly report (PDF 372kb), which indicates very clearly that alcohol advertisers are simply ignoring Daube, as well they should:
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| "No Advertiser chose to participate in the AARB process" |
Do take the time to read some of the quarterly report. It's hilarious and so very sad all the way through. "Ermagerd! Children might see these things and die!" But what about that shocking Jim Beam advertising on the kiddies' clothing -- what happened with that? Let's have a look (emphasis added on the really important bit at the end):
Alcohol and motor racing
The AARB received a complaint regarding Jim Beam Racing Kids Team clothing, available to purchase from the V8 Supercars Official Online Store.
Advertisement: At the time of the complaint, five items were available to purchase from the Jim Beam Racing Kids Team clothing line: three different children’s t-shirts, a children’s jacket and a children’s cap. The children’s clothing featured Jim Beam colours and branding, with the words “Jim Beam” replaced by “The Team”.
Complaint: The complainant believed it was highly inappropriate for children to be wearing alcohol company-branded clothing. They noted that while the words “Jim Beam” had been replaced with “The Team”, the clothing still featured the recognisable Jim Beam branding, through colours, typography and patterns. The complainant believed the clothing was directed at children and young people, associated Jim Beam with youth and believed children would be highly exposed to the Jim Beam branding (ref 91/12).
Determination: Upheld in part.
Contravened section (3)(c) of the Content Code, on the basis that Jim Beam used its recognisable branding (design, style and colours) but displayed it in a slightly disguised form on the ‘Kid’s Team’ merchandise.
Contravened sections (4)(a)(i)(1) and (4)(a)(i)(2) of the Content Code and section (1)(i) of the Placement Code, on the basis that the merchandise directly targeted young people, associated Jim Beam with youth, and the placement of the alcohol advertisement on children’s clothing meant children would be exposed to it.
Action: The AARB requested the Jim Beam Racing Kids Team merchandise line be withdrawn immediately, and that the Advertiser, Beam Global, reconsider their sponsorship of V8 Supercars. As of 11 February 2013, the AARB had not been notified of any action by Beam Global in response to the determination.
Ooh... "reconsider their sponsorship of V8 Supercars" they "requested". So much for tobacco being a unique product. There is no doubt that Daube's intention is to remove all alcohol sponsorship from every sport, to protect children from being targeted by evil promotions and advertising. It worked against tobacco companies, so no reason in Daube's mind that it wouldn't work against alcohol companies. So far, the makers of Jim Beam have ignored Daube and his minions of prohibition. And may Beam Global long continue to do so. One can only hope that alcohol companies have learnt a lesson from what has happened to tobacco companies, who tried to appease the public health inquisitors and got severely burnt by it.
How parents dress their children is their business. It's not the business of government, and it's definitely not the business of nannying tyrants like Daube the Dickhead and his various prohibitionist organisations. There is no way a four-year-old will be harmed by a clothing tag. So dress your kids however you like and tell the nannies to go to hell.
Bonus article by Amy Corderoy for your reading displeasure, "Profits before health, say experts":
ALCOHOL and processed food companies are employing the same tactics as Big Tobacco to increase their profits at the expense of people's lives, health experts say.
You don't say! No slippery slope there, then...
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