In the British government’s latest round of throwing policy at the wall to see what sticks, a bill has just cleared parliament that would permanently ban tobacco products (cigarettes, vapes, dip, etc) for anyone currently under the age of 18.
To be clear: this is not just a ban on smoking for under-18s. It’s already illegal to smoke in the UK if you’re a minor. What this bill proposes is that, if you were born on or after January 1, 2009, you would not be allowed to buy or consume any tobacco product ever, in your life.
You may or may not know this about me, but I’m descended from a long line of thieves, smugglers, and enemies of the state. My great-grandfather, Harry Walker, was a runaway Barnardo Home Boy, rum-runner, World War I veteran, and rural policeman. There is considerable overlap between some of those life stages. Apparently, the only reason he wasn’t kicked out of the Alberta Provincial Police for bootlegging is because he appealed to his local member of parliament—incidentally, also one of his customers—who got him transferred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police instead. The APP was disbanded shortly afterward.
So when I heard about this upcoming ban, every one of my ancestors sat up and recognized it as a foundation for the easiest bootlegging operation of all time.
Think about it! You wouldn’t even have to go through the hassle of smuggling the product over the border. Tobacco would remain legal to import and sell in the UK; everyone born before 2009 would still be allowed to smoke, after all. All you’d need to do is legally buy the product in bulk, then sell it off at a markup to all the pissed off twenty-somethings who missed the boat. And as time went on, your customer base would only get bigger.
Anyway, if the bottom falls out of this whole writing thing, you’ll find me on the streets of Newcastle selling loose cigarettes.
New Novelette: “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree”
A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.
“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is the eleventh story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.
This one’s a story about navigating a sexual relationship with someone when their trauma keeps looming over the both of you and you’re not really sure what to do about it. It’s also a story about stealing from the English for fun and profit.
It therefore contains, as my friend Ian described it, “twenty pages of theft and fucking.”
This Week’s Links
The Dumbest Hack of the Year Exposed a Very Real Problem
Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from “forcefully” being inserted “into every facet of your conscious experience.” At another, he celebrated “undermining democracy.” At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as “actually really sweet and tender and loving,” while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being “so alone.”
‘Everyone is Replaceable’: Death Rattles Oregon Amazon Facility
For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt.
Man Lights 1.2 Million Square Foot Warehouse on Fire for Not Paying Him Enough
The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video.
On a related note, Green Party MP Hannah Spencer recently set off a minor uproar for pointing out it’s a bit weird how much everyone in parliament drinks. So it turns out the same government officials who want to ban smoking, porn, and transing your gender are a little sensitive about anyone looking sideways at their lifestyles.
-K
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