I'm not much interested in fashion, so I wasn't in the least bit bothered when I heard that Christian Dior fashion designer John Galliano had been fired for making antisemitic remarks.

And so it was largely by accident that I finally watched this heavily-edited video of him making the remarks. What I saw was astonishing ( Read more... )

The war on smokers and drinkers and fat people is quite manifestly part of a global eugenics programme. So I've been thinking about eugenics a bit ( Read more... )

A line in an article in Der Spiegel from a few months back caught my attention:

In an interview with the German daily Die Welt, Dalli announced that he would take much stronger action against smoking and that the European Commission would introduce plans for new legislation in 2011 ( Read more... )

I've never tried to quit smoking. And I don't think I ever will. But lots of people do try, sometimes using drugs like Chantix. Here's the Douglass Report on Chantix:

Smokers have been dropping like flies lately, and it’s not because of the supposed risks of their habit ( Read more... )

Frank Davis writes.

In CATCH-4, a week or so back, Chris Snowdon wrote:

Since the obvious explanation for this strong, dose-sensitive association is that chronic smoking raises the risk of lung cancer significantly, any defence of smoking as the causative factor must provide an alternative. That alternative must be closely correlated with smoking ( Read more... )

Frank Davis adds his 2 cents to the discussion.

Yesterday Chris Snowdon, writing on his blog about the current discussion here, said:

So untrustworthy have anti-smoking campaigners been in their handling of science in recent years that it is not surprising that some people find it difficult to believe anything they say.
Quite so. Anti-smoking zealots ( Read more... )

There's been quite a lot of response to Herman van Rompuy's State of Europe speech a day or two back. He said:

"We have together to fight the danger of a new Euro-scepticism. This is no longer the monopoly of a few countries. In every Member State, there are people who believe their country can survive alone in the globalised world. It is more ( Read more... )

 Via Banned, a comment in the New Statesman:

Smoking Hot
23 October 2010 at 00:22
Read this Mr Cable. l had the honour of taking D-Day veterans back to Normandy this July courtesy of Heroes Return. What follows is a conversation that l was party too. lt is verbatim and the only alterations l shall make is censoring the swearing. Don't judge them by ( Read more... )