Sunday, 26 April 2009

They rave about the peril of sunbeds... then let us fry our brains on cannabis

The great puzzle of our time is why some pleasures are official sins, while others are smirkingly condoned by authority.

Understand why and you will know what is wrong with our degenerate ruling class.

In theory, the idea is that we all have a stern national duty to take lots of care of ourselves so that we do not become a burden on the holy, wonderful NHS.

cannabis

Cannabis: Not banning the drug is contributing to a growing mental health threat for the British population

We guard ourselves from self-inflicted illness or injury for the sake of others.

Since my childhood I have been ceaselessly lectured about how to stay safe and healthy, with varying degrees of success.

The simple slogans of the TV campaigns still echo in my memory, and no doubt in millions of others.

 

More...

'Don't ask a man to drink and drive', 'One for the road? None for the road!', 'Clunk Click every trip'.

Propaganda isn't enough on its own. Law and fear are needed too.

Listen to an Englishman whinge when his driving licence is taken away, and you will see that there is still such a thing as punishment in our society, and it works.

I can remember the measurable change in the national atmosphere when the police began serious breathalysing.

Similar determination made us all wear seat belts. If only they'd do the same about the arrogant, murderous cretins who use mobile phones while driving.

The authorities also quite clearly know that advertising and the behaviour of actors and presenters on TV and in films affect behaviour.

That is why they have banned tobacco commercials and why it now seems astonishing that Joan Bakewell used to smoke while presenting the BBC's Late Night Line-Up in the Sixties.

Nobody ever said during any of these campaigns that it was all right to drive a bit above the alcohol limit, or that just a few cigarettes a day were safer than none, or that you could leave your seat-belt off for short trips.

The reason was simple. If you soften your message, you spread doubt about whether you really mean it.

I'll stay out of the savagely comical area of 'sex education' here because it's just too big.

But look at the revelations that a Government-funded agency, supposed to discourage the use of illegal drugs, has been doing the exact opposite.

Callers have been told, apparently by giggling lunatics on 'helplines', that various forms of lawless brain-frying are really all right. No surprise to me.

Some years ago I emailed this outfit, which claimed to answer any questions about drugs, with the query: 'Is it wrong to take illegal drugs?'.

I received an answer of bottomless uselessness, when 'yes' was all they needed to say.

Then there's the endless shifting of 'classifications' of drugs.

Anyone who knows anything about the subject realises that cannabis is among the most dangerous drugs in existence, laying waste to young minds and rotting any society where it takes hold.

But the establishment, notably including Mr David Cameron and various joke policemen, make it almost impossible to get this message across by falling for the well funded and brilliantly directed global campaign to 'decriminalise' this poison.

Many of them would like to make it legal and are prevented only by the international treaties which forbid them to do so.

Instead they sap, weaken and confuse the law until it is a dead letter. Some even lie that cannabis has medical benefits.

Why are they so feeble in stamping out a major and rapidly growing mental health threat when they fret about the amount of salt in hamburgers, try to frighten us into drinking disgusting skimmed milk, rave about the danger of sun-tan parlours and would rather shut down all the pubs in Britain and Ireland than let even one of them allow people to smoke inside it?

Simple. Their generation has been, in the direct sense of the word, corrupted by the drug culture, one which believes profoundly that pleasure is the highest law and that reward should be available without effort.

This trumps any concern for health or safety. No civilisation can last long based on such sick principles.

We have to choose, and soon, between the self-serving, twisted lies of the soft-on-drugs lobby and the truth - which is that if you don't ban cannabis with stern laws, you will get epidemic mental illness hand in hand with irreversible moral decay.

You know it makes sense.


Zuma gets his machine guns but Mandela forfeits his halo

The sad picture of poor Nelson Mandela giving his endorsement to the unlovely new South African President Jacob Zuma ought to (but won't) force Mr Mandela's simpering and uncritical admirers to reconsider.

Jacob Zuma

Helping hand: Nelson Mandela with Jacob Zuma, left, and former wife Winnie at an ANC rally

Zuma, whose signature tune is Bring Me My Machine Gun and who is surrounded by a fog of unresolved allegations of corruption, is ultimately the product of the African National Congress, for which Mr Mandela provided such good public relations for so long.

Zuma would not be possible without Mandela.

Mr Zuma has his machine gun, in fact he now has thousands of them. Please take away Mr Mandela's halo.


A closet Marxist, but I liked Jack

Actually I rather liked the late trades union leader Jack Jones, who was friendly and helpful to me when I was an apprentice labour reporter long ago, and who performed acts of personal kindness to people known to me.

He was a big man in all senses - the old stern, incorruptible type of revolutionary, who lived a genuinely austere life and had demonstrated great physical courage in the Spanish Civil War.

But in the years to come I hope people will come to realise that he and many like him, who were hugely powerful in the Labour Party and in government in the Seventies, were far closer to Marxism and the Kremlin than the public ever imagined.

This country never had a proper Communist Party, unlike France, Italy and Germany.

Instead, there was a potent and influential faction in Labour - and it is still there.


* I am glad speed limits on major roads are to be cut. Many existing limits are absurdly high.

I just wish police would stop relying on speed cameras (though these make it easier for the law-abiding, who are no longer hooted and menaced for keeping within the rules) and go back to patrolling the roads and looking for bad drivers.

Our driving test is now so easy that a well-drilled wombat could pass it, many drivers are high on drugs, and the standard driving style, learned from car chase movies, seems to be violent acceleration followed by violent braking, punctuated by swearing and rude gestures.


* There is no point at all moaning about tax rises or the huge new deficit unless you are ready to reconsider the whole basis of modern British politics - that government is a machine for giving handouts to the people, and employing its friends.

Unless and until the enormous welfare state is reduced to what is really necessary, and the giant state payroll is brought under control, we live on the edge of national bankruptcy.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 10:42