Via Dick, I see that the Marxism that is gripping the French state is careering out of all control. Oh, how I suspect the French are looking more kindly on Sarkozy now…
After recent health-driven moves to tax or restrict the use of energy drinks, artificial sweeteners and electronic cigarettes, French health authorities have now set their sights on cracking down on scented candles and incense, because their aroma could be masking toxic fumes.
Because, of course, people have died in their millions from inhaling smoke from joss sticks and scented candles.
The French have always tended towards control freak government, having a Napoleonic rather than common law system, but this has been balanced by the French people indulging in civil disobedience. When living there, I noticed a tendency to ignore government diktats if they didn’t suit and I suspect much the same will happen here (at least, I hope so). The scaremongering about toxic fumes is just that; scaremongering. You are more likely to inhale life-threatening levels of carcinogens from taking deep breaths out on the highways when a diesel juggernaut is thundering past, not from burning a joss stick in your home. But even if they are dangerous, it is not the place of the state to decree whether people should burn them in their own houses.
But, and this is the important point here – the state; and ours isn’t that far behind – seems to think that it should control the very air you breathe in your own home. Now if that isn’t arrogance and nannying fuss-bucketting in shed-loads, I don’t know what is. Likewise the intention to tax energy drinks to discourage their consumption. It is absolutely none of the government’s business what the citizen chooses to imbibe. The state has no business encouraging or discouraging anything – because and I seem to have to keep stating this; it is none of their business. In electing Hollande, the French have released a monster – a raging control freak who is determined to manage the minutia of the French citizens’ lives – even to the air they breathe in their own homes. Such overweening arrogance is hard to comprehend, but the man is managing it, as our socialist control freaks doubtless look on with a mix of envy and admiration.
I do hope, come 2017, they show this monster the door…
I read this piece on Dick’s site and nearly fell off my chair I could have sworn it was April the first….BUT NOOO dear god the marxist French need beating to death with a sack full of frogs legs and Hollande could use some sauce and a side salad to finish him off totaly.
“…I do hope, come 2017, they show this monster the door…”
Preferably the door to a holding cell in the Bastille, awaiting a tumbril…
(Why shouldn’t the froggies re-introduce lolly traditions of bygone times?)
Give ’em time. The French are much more likely than we are to topple unpopular despots.
They used to top unpopular despots…
(Or de-top, if you wish to be pedantic).
It seems that Hollande is the most unpopular president ever:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/us-france-hollande-poll-idUSBRE99R0U320131028
So he has a lot to contend with.
He was elected in May 2012, so he should have settled in by now. With with all this stuff on his plate, it is reasonable to assume that government departments are taking advantage. The same sort of thing happens here all the time. The activities of the departments are akin to “Now is a good time to break bad news”. You can imagine the conversation among the mandarins: “Right chaps. The Pres is in deep shit. Is there anything in the pipe-line that we could do with making progress with?” “Yes,Boss” pipes up junior minister Jacques. “You know that stuff we were talking about a couple of months ago? The business about incense fumes? That has been ready and waiting for a few weeks. We could start the ball rolling with that”. “Good thinking, Jacques! Oh, you might as well throw in candle fumes as well”
It seems to me that the system works that way. When the coalition was formed, there was a lot of horse-trading about which per projects should go ahead. Having decided, the mandarin experts agreed to do the work involved in pricing up and all that. Meanwhile, deep inside the health dept, other mandarins were working on tobacco control industry projects and alcohol control projects. Given the right moment, they whisked Subry off to Luxembourg to sign the UK up to the tobacco directive and, around the same time, issued a statement from the MHRA about ecigs.
How can the Health Minister agree that he has no control over the mandarins? All he can do is keep stum and how it will go away.
OUr political system stinks.
“Our political system stinks” …………… and so do our politicians.
The point is they are meant to represent the public good and they are all incapable of doing so because they are spineless and self serving, it’s the ethos, morality and humanity of the politicians thats broken and poisoned and they poison everything in their wake.