I heard the news today, oh boy..

[SeanMacGabhann]

I nearly agreed with this and then thought "hang on a sec, WAR is ok but drugdealing isn't???"

Maybe them terrrrrrists are on to something

[bigbadwolf]

"Maybe them terrrrrrists are on to something."

Or Mike Flowers.

[Brendan]

Smokers should be praised not banned. They contribute many billions more to the economy than they take in healthcare

?There is no more selfless and heroic breed of civilian than smokers, who contribute many billions more to the economy than they take in healthcare, and save untold billions more by declining to claim the state pension due to early death.?

While that is more dark humor than scientific fact he makes some interesting points in this article.

[bigbadwolf]

?There is no more selfless and heroic breed of civilian than smokers, who contribute many billions more to the economy than they take in healthcare, and save untold billions more by declining to claim the state pension due to early death.?

Someone's gotta do it. Where do I pick up my cheque?

[Ted Max]

I'm going to try and guess who wrote that without opening the link.

1. Hitchens (C or P)

2. The Liddle

3. The Marlboro Man

4. Peregrine Worsthorne (where is he now?)

Any of them?

[bigbadwolf]

Frank Butcher or the ghost of Bernard Manning?

[Ted Max]

5. Mark Lawson

6. AnnaJ (EDF)

7. Dial-a-Johnson (Frank, Rachel, Boris, Anthony & the...)

8. Mark Kermode

9. David Aaronovitch

or...

10. Matthew Norman (yes, I looked.)

[Brendan]

Muley Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> It's a small distinction, and of no comfort to the

> Afrikaans, but didn't the British action against

> the Boers ultimately have a military purpous

> rather than being motivated by concepts of racial

> purity/inferiority?

Sorry, I?ve just read this. Not entirely correct, no it wasn?t about racial purity but it was an attack on and attempt to eradicate a cultural identity rather than a purely military exercise.

Yes the genocide* was intended to break the guerilla war. That was the excuse Kitchener used in order to have his plans implemented. The other reason was to depopulate the Transvaal and parts of the Free State and eradicate the Transvaal Boers as simply beating them in war and governing them had proved impossible. They sat on top of and had political sway over the world?s largest supply of gold. They were in the way of the mining magnates.

Thankfully, due to opposition very much from some of the British themselves, Kitchener didn?t succeed in killing off the entire nation. The English did however move in and take over the economy and the Boers were left impoverished, landless, disenfranchised and economically discriminated against. (Which in turn led to the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism and all the bullshit that brought with it. But that?s another, often ignoble, story)

That?s just a very brief overview. Sorry I could have left it alone but for some reason I feel compelled to set the record straight. For what little it?s worth.

Back to how smoking is good for all of us.

* and it was genocide even though it didn?t succeed and the army still deny it. We can get into that separately but (mockney) assume that I know what the term means and that I wouldn?t use it incorrectly.

[bigbadwolf]

Answering Ted Max.

Richard Littlejohn?

[Brendan]

Isn?t Anthony Worrall Thompson an outspoken member of the Smoking is Good for you League?

[bigbadwolf]

I thought all chefs smoke, well, French chefs do anyway.

[Ted Max]

Thankfully, due to opposition very much from some of the British themselves,

Ref: Emily Hobhouse, and the radical wing of the Liberal Party (David Llord George). Although Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader at this point, waited until public opinion swayed until he spoke out against military stratey.

At a late point in the Second War, the British military actually started refusing women and children entry to the camps. They justified this as responding to objections about conditions in the camps. But of course it burdened the Boer military with ill, starving and immobile civilians, slowing them down, and making them less effective. A double result for the British.

Admitting them to the camps and then feeding and treating them, of course, was the other (untaken) option.

[bigbadwolf]

The Boers smoked pipes didn't they?

[Brendan]

Everyone smoked pipes back then. Women, children, dogs.

It is a dying and beautiful art far more elegant than the crude dose of concentrated, nicotine injected into the body by tailor made cigarettes.

What the fuck are tailors doing making cigarettes in the first place?

EDIT: to make sense.

[Ted Max]

And butlers. Although perhaps rolling one up for your employer is an old buttling skill.

[Brendan]

I thought I would back my satement up with some old photographs depicting life at the end of the 19th Century

http://www.ramshornstudio.com/d6b52e90.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2272/2171677617_05c5f469a3.jpg?v=0

http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/Pix/NAT/84/10466984_T.JPG

[Brendan]

Meet me! Meet me! I?m important. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2009/09/not_so_special.html

But we speak the same language. We?re very, very important don?t you know.

France? Germany? Where are theses places, in Spain somewhere?

[EDKiwi]

I was just reading this:

Obama meets John Key (NZ PM)

I'm sure like most things the NZ press has got all over excited about the whole thing but after reading that BBC article it now seems quite funny, poor ol Gordon.

[Brendan]

Poor ol Gordon indeed;

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/obama-to-meet-bulgarian-deputy-sports-minister-200909242087/

[Brendan]

What is telling about this is that the BBC article was first entitled ?No. 10 Frantic about Brown Snub? or something like that. Then it mysteriously changed to ?No 10 denies Obama snub to Brown?

[Moos]

I really get annoyed by this sort of thing though: "There's our debt in two world wars, and especially the last one. If Franklin Roosevelt hadn't prepared for years to come in on our side we would probably have lost. If we had, Europe would have been a different place." More crassly, Americans have been known to utter such sentences as 'you'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us'.

Er, well, yes. Not to mention the poor Russians who fought and died in their millions, or any of the rest of the allies. The Americans fought desperately against getting involved in "Europe's War" and only did so after the Japanese rather directly brought them into the conflict. It's a very good thing that they did come into the war, but it's pretty rich to expect gratitude from the allies that they would happily have left to swing if it hadn't been for Pearl Harbour.

[Brendan]

I?ve always thought/suspected that the American?s were going to get involved in the war at some stage anyway in order to secure an allied (to them) power base in Europe but Pearl Harbour just forced their hand a little earlier.

I also don?t think they were in a position to get involved in the earlier stages of the war.

[mockney piers]

More accurately if they hadn't got involved the French would be speaking Russian, well, in the Warsaw pact.

We'd have probably been finlandised and with a full Germany and France (which is downright commie at the best of times) communism may well have been successful (it was always intended for Berlin Paris and london, Marx never intended it for a backward agrarian economy) the cold war would have been a case of containing US power and the world may indeed have been a different place.

I'm pretty sure central America would still be screwed but the Vietnamese would have been much happier.

[Brendan]

Commie! My grandfather didn?t die in his hundreds for our freedom to hear that type of dissident, ungodly nonsense spouted in the free world.

[Santerme]

My question to Americans is always, would you have declared war on Germany after Pearl Harbour?

Remember it was Germany who declared war on the United States.

I am not so sure they would have