The war on fun

Hugely enjoyable evening at the IEA on Thursday.

The first Forest event of the year attracted a full house. Actually it was significantly over-subscribed and we had to stop accepting registrations in case the room got seriously over-crowded.

However, a combination of poor weather and the usual no shows (normal for a free event like this) meant that numbers stayed on the right side of what was comfortable.

Appropriately, given the subject was prohibition, there was a faint speakeasy feel to the evening, with a makeshift bar serving drinks before and after the discussion.

Our panel - Chris Snowdon, Reem Ibrahim (IEA), Henry Hill (ConservativeHome), and Kara Kennedy (The Spectator) - were uniformly excellent.

Reem, who is in her final year at the London School of Economics, is 20. Kara, a staff writer at The Spectator World (the US edition of the magazine), is 24. Collectively it was the youngest panel we’ve ever had.

It was also one of the most entertaining.

If more politicians attended events like this they might be less inclined to ban things that many people enjoy, but it cheers me to know that in 2023 there is still opposition to the fun police.

The difficulty is uniting and organising that opposition into a coherent political force when most consumers, young and old, just want to be left alone.

Kara, btw, was invited to take part after I read her article ‘An ode to smoking’.

The tone of her piece in this week’s Spectator is somewhat darker but it’s equally arresting - ‘The killer next door: growing up in the murder capital of Wales’.

Do read it if you can.

Alternatively here’s another article, written, she told me, that very afternoon - ‘An ode to good breasts’.

Take your pick.

PS. According to The Sun, IEA director-general Mark Littlewood is to be made a peer in Liz Truss’s resignation honours list.

If and when the story is confirmed I may comment further. In the meantime I am keeping every finger crossed that it’s true!

Below (clockwise from top left): Chris Snowdon, Kara Kennedy, Henry Hill, Reem Ibrahim. Photos: Stuart Mitchell

Comments

[Rose2]

Simon
Did you catch the aforementiond Chris Snowdons' new study he found ?

A grudging piece entitled

Live to die another day: novel insights may explain the pathophysiology behind smoker’s paradox in SARS-CoV-2 infection
3 March 2023

"The severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection demonstrates a highly variable and unpredictable course. Several reports have claimed a smoker’s paradox in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), in line with previous suggestions that smoking is associated with better survival after acute myocardial infarction and appears protective in preeclampsia.

Several plausible physiological explanations exist accounting for the paradoxical observation of smoking engendering protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this review, we delineate novel mechanisms whereby smoking habits and smokers’ genetic polymorphism status affecting various nitric oxide (NO) pathways"

"While transient NO bioavailability increase and beneficial immunoregulatory modulations through the above-mentioned pathways using exogenous, endogenous, genetic and/or therapeutic modalities may have direct and specific, viricidal SARS-CoV-2 effects, employing tobacco smoke inhalation to achieve protection equals self-harm. Tobacco smoking remains the leading cause of death, illness, and impoverishment."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11010-023-04681-8

This confusing and hard to read link that baffled Christopher Snowden, may be better understood by reading:

The composition of cigarette smoke: a chronology of the studies of four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
RODGMAN A.; PERFETTI T.A.
2006

"In addition, the exceptional study on MSS PAHs by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) personnel in the 1970s indicated no "supercarcinogen" was present. Only recently has the concept of complex mixtures in relation to the understanding of the complexity of carcinogenesis taken hold.
Perhaps the reason why MSS is less tumorigenic than expected in humans is because of the presence of other MSS components that inhibit or prevent tumorigenesis.

For example, it is well known that MSS contains numerous anticarcinogens present in quantifies significantly greater than those of the PAHs of concern. When one reviews the history of these four PAHs in MSS or CSC it is clear that many unanswered questions remain."
https://www.coresta.org/abstracts/composition-cigarette-smoke-chronology-studies-four-polycyclic-aromatic-hydrocarbons-2245

They just missed the mitigating factors out.

However while SARS-CoV-2 is still around and nothing is unique in nature best keep taking the beetroot juice.
"But normal blood vessel function depends on the body's ability to naturally produce a compound called nitric oxide. Drinking nitrate-rich beet juice helps improve blood vessel function at altitude by giving the body alternative building blocks to make nitric oxide."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151012083808.htm