Logging onto Yahoo to check my mail today I noticed a Press Association story on the news page.
AIR POLLUTION CAUSING 55,000 EARLY DEATHS A YEAR IN UK
screamed the headline in that quiet, mumbling, self deprecating way Internet headlines have of screaming because they know they will never be able to match Screaming Banner Headlines of the tabloids.
On reading the story I learned The House Of Commons Environmental Protection Committee, with a title like that not a body one would expect to come up with a pzazzy headline, is concerned that Britain’s poor air quality is causing 55,000 early deaths every year.
If these self righteous idiots think air quality is bad now it just shows they have never looked at a Lowry paining or a picture of London or any of the big cities in the 1950’s. Or maybe I am misreading the whole thing and with “climate change science” discredited ( latest: sea ice loss science challenged) they are just looking for an excuse for a new tax to replace the carbon tax they were relying on to make us pay for their financial mismanagement.
When I read stories like this I’m always reminded of a story Jill, a friend of my wife, likes to tell. Jill used to live next door to a very old lady who would sometimes, in bad weather, ask for help with her daily shopping. She went to the shop about 100 yards from her house every day because it got her out of the house where she spent most of her time alone. The shopping list was always the same. Two tins of tomato soup, a small loaf, a half bottle of sweet sherry and ten cigarettes. At weekends she also bought butter.
When the woman died aged 87 it was Margaret, a nurse, who found her and called the doctor. With the death duly certified the Do. said “I told her many times to give up smoking. She might have had a few more years if she had listened to me.
Yeah, and maybe she would not have thanked anyone for those few more years.
The point these self righteous do – gooders always miss is that we all die of something, sometime. The alternative, living and ageing forever, is too horrible to contemplate. The powers that be don’t want us to drink or smoke because it might hasten our demise, they don’t want us to pollute because we will damage our hearts and lungs so no Barbies, bonfires, hot curries or things that involve industrial processes, they want to tax us off the road to stop us colliding with trees or driving off cliffs, they want us to give up tasty food because fats might clog our arteries. Risk (aka fun) must be eliminated from everything. For the sake of our own safety and longevity they want us to forswear everything that makes life worth living.
Meanwhile medical advances manage to delay death without delaying decrepitude to anything like the same extent.
So in the future when nobody is allowed to die because it will mean some civil servant has missed his target we will all have to commit mass suicide to avoid dying of boredom.
The most exciting pastime we will be allowed to take part in, at a safe distance of course, is Trainspotting.
Choose life.
Pollution Causing Early Deaths
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