Hmm, remember my story about Gorbachev trying to prohibit alcohol and creating a much larger problem?
Somebody is trying to manufacture a drug addiction epidemic in New Zealand. Somebody has gotten a bribe. Somebody needs a drugged population that will be even easier to manipulate.
“trying to manufacture a drug addiction epidemic in New Zealand”
Exactly what I thought when I heard about this idea.The only question is what drug will be pushed on teenagers instead…. probably something that will make some pharma company a lot of money.
It also (eventually and finally) made me wonder if the endless round of ‘booster’ shots is mean to normalize needle use and if some drug that is injected into the muscles is in the works (or already on the streets).
“beautiful, stylish people smoking”
The least sinister explanation I can come up with is that vaping will be left alone and they want to create a generation of vapers.
Where I am it’s very big among young people especially guys… I think there are at least as many young vapers as smokers…
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Loved Award of the Sakharov Prize 2021: statement by Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny (full speech at the link):
https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/award-of-the-sakharov-prize-2021-statement-by-daria-navalnaya-daughter-of-alexei-navalny_I215457-V_v
My favorite and most important part is this (it’s longish but worth it imo):
00:10:28SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, You know, they’ll say to me, I understand why are you feeling this way. Because it concerns your family and close ones, but in the real world, however, we have to be more pragmatic. And in those hallways, I’ll nod my head and say, yes, of course. What else I can say? I’m a 20 year old college student and I don’t feel very comfortable arguing with with experience and responsible pragmatics.
00:10:58SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, However, here today, taking advantage of the fact that I have the microphone, no one will take it away from me and I don’t have to argue with anyone personally feeling impolite. I would like to oppose that pragmatism. This is the Sakharov prize.
00:11:25SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, This is the Sakharov prize, and Andrei Sakharov was probably one of the most non pragmatic people on the planet. I don’t understand why those who advocate for pragmatic relations with the dictators can’t simply open the history books. It would be a very pragmatic act and having it done, it’s very easy to understand the inescapable political law. The personification of dictators and tyrants never works.
00:12:00SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, No matter how many people try to deceive themselves, hoping that another madmen who clings to power will behave decently in response to concessions and flirtations, it will never happen. The very essence of authoritarian power involves a constant increase in bets, an increase in aggression and the search for new enemies and those who once said, let’s not push Lukashenko and continue the dialogue.
00:12:28SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, When he was beating people up and throwing them behind bars, achieve only that now in order to sentence someone, Lukashenko has to stop a whole passenger plane. Another thing that pragmatists don’t want to do for some reason, which urges them to remember about the expenses and economic losses, is simply to pick up a calculator and see how much their pragmatism costs, in particular to the European taxpayers.
00:13:00SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, Years of flirting with Putin made it clear to him that, to increase his ratings, he can start a war. How much worse will the world with Ukraine cost to Europe? Even now, with so many news on Russian troops coming to the Ukraine border, no one’s really talking about it. No pragmatic trade corporation will recoup the share of the direct loss that will have to be incurred.
00:13:29SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, Not to mention the cost of the time of the Western politicians like yourselves have already spent on solving the problem instead of dealing with their own affairs in their own countries. One of the opposition leaders, Boris Nemtsov, is killed was shot in the back right by the Kremlin. And then comes the pragmatists and say as well, We can’t do much about it. Let’s limit ourselves to a tough statement and then continue the conversation.
00:13:57SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, And then, they’ll kill the second, and the third, and the fourth will be killed in the centre of Berlin, and the fifth in the UK. And then they also blow up some warehouses in Europe, and then they start killing with chemical weapons. And what we know is just unsuccessful assassination attempts.
00:14:18SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, How many were successful? We already know that a real terrorist group has been created inside Putin’s special services, killing citizens of my country without a hearing or trial without justice. They were close to killing my mother. They nearly killed my father, and none will guarantee that tomorrow European politicians won’t start falling dead by simply touching a doorknob.
00:14:47SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, And now you’re already increasing the police budget. You give a lot of money to special services, spend billions on new ways to detect those toxic substances, and these are the consequences of pragmatism. Don’t push it. We need to act carefully and not anger them, says the pragmatists.
00:15:10SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, And tomorrow, dictators inspired by half measures of the western of the West will transport thousands of people to the border of the European Union, forcing women and children to storm the fences and secretly dreaming of someone being shot or trampled in the crowd. Let pragmatists answer.
00:15:30SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, How much will cost to Poland, to Lithuania or to the entire European Union? They will answer to me. What do you want? These are sovereign states. They have their own governments. Our capabilities are very limited. Are you proposing a nuclear war to free the political prisoners? Of course, I don’t propose starting a war.
00:15:55SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, However, I will note that although it’s not successful, it has started and there are real victims and they’re using both cyber and chemical weapons. The fact that European banks frequently launder corrupted billions of the yachts of Putin’s oligarchs continue being sensations on European Mediterranean.
00:16:24SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, That 99 percent of top officials of Russia and Belarus directly involved in crimes are also freely allowed to travel in Europe, just like their families, are all sure signs that many of those who make decisions don’t even try to win at least the small wars in this battle. They talk too much and think about the realm of politics, considering actions based on ideas and principles which frankly are naive and stupid.
00:17:07SOUNDBITE (English), Daria NAVALNAYA, daughter of Alexei Navalny, And you know what, it seems to me that the problem is that the desire to appeal to the dictators again and again, not to anger him, to ignore his crimes as long as it’s possible, is not a pragmatic approach at all. It’s time to say it straight: under the sign of pragmatism, there is cynicism, hypocrisy and corruption. There is a constant war between idealism and pragmatism.
NZ is full of some of the most aggressive yet peculiar control freaks on the planet. An example is that a few years ago, government permission was required to order certain magazines from a newsagent.
To me it sounds like someone set up a well funded committee several years ago that came up with a “roadmap” about getting rid of tobacco products, where the people appointed to the committee were both stubborn and friends with other highly ranked medical people in the country and/or bureaucracy.
Those committee members are probably sticking to their roadmap like glue and are too closely connected to other powerful people to dislodge, which means that their petty whims will be enacted come hell or high water.
By way of personal experience, I had an argument several years ago with a highly ranker medical person in Australia – nearly as bad as NZ – on a similar committee, where I argued that the government there had a disingenuous and cynical tobacco policy.
My reasoning was that since the Australian government allowed cigarette vending machines in places that served alcohol like bars, nightclubs etc, then it was making cigarettes available to reformed or quitting smokers while they were intoxicated, and hence most likely to relapse.
Any government that knowingly did that was, to my sense, being disingenuous about wanting to reduce or eliminate smoking.
That was coupled with the fact that tobacco duties in Australia are enough to actually fund the entire Australian military.
That highly ranker medical person, no matter how hard I pressed about why what I had said was logical, could only say “No, you’re wrong. You’re just wrong”.
That is the kind of pig headed “I’m on the committee and you’re not, so everything I say is true and oh, Im a doctor” type of person probably in charge over in NZ who is doing all of this imo.
“disingenuous about wanting to reduce or eliminate smoking”
I haven’t thought that governments wanted that for… oh many years now.
This blog is very good on government anti-tobacco campaigns (and similar topics) and changed how I look at that (and similar topics) very profoundly.
https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/
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I’m having an interesting time reading the link you posted, so thankyou cliff 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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