November 3 - Once Scorned, Smokers Are Now Okay - Using more liberal criteria to evaluate potential lung donors combined with aggressive donor management significantly increases the availability of potential lung donors, and ultimately decreases mortality of recipients on the waiting list, says a new study presented at CHEST 2003, the 69th annual international scientific assembly of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP). The new study introduces the concept of physician-directed protocol (PDP), which incorporates the evaluation and management of every possible lung donor using more liberal or "extended" donor criteria and intensive education of pulmonologists and staff of the Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) in evaluating and managing donors with a set protocol. The study shows that with the use of this protocol, the number of lung donations increased by 119 percent and mean waiting time decreased by 70 percent. A related study also found that the use of lungs obtained from extended donors did not compromise the health of the organ recipient.

Extended donors include smokers.  Until now, the lungs of smokers were deemed unacceptable for organ donation.  Reality said otherwise but the demonization campaign conducted by anti-tobacco specifies that smoking is so horrible that all smokers are physically defective.  Their organs have been ruined and should never be used to save a life.  Such nonsense needlessly reduced the number of organs.  Those who know better finally are correcting the situation.  Removing organs from the transplant pool is just one more example of how anti-tobacco is hazardous to the health of the public.

October 31 - Here comes the gluttony pacemaker -- As the smoking cessation business attracts a bunch of minor parasites who try to steal some market crumbs from Big Pharma, the same thing is happening for the business of food cessation. Here comes the appetite pacemaker, an ingenious device by the impressive name of Implantable Gastric Stimulator which, similarly to the cardiac pacemaker, generates in the patient (once his stomach has been ripped open to install it) a series of electrical impulses that fool the patient into feeling that he has eaten enough. Although already on the market in Europe, the pacemaker is not yet approved by the US FDA. Nevertheless, it already returns excellent money in form of “studies” and experiments. Once installed in the stomach, the doctors turn a knob and – buzzzz! – here come pain and discomfort. The knob is then turned the other way just a little until the pain disappears.

In the “studies”, one third of the patients did not lose any weight, while in others the contraption did not work because some wire came loose between forkfuls of food. But it was sufficient to rip the stomach open once again, fix the wires and -- voilà! – pounds and pounds were lost! The contraption means to compete with other technology that employs even more ripping and sewing. The whole thing seems legitimate because, of course, everyone knows that eating more or less, nowadays, is not a matter of personal will but addiction – often caused by multinational scum such as McDonald's and Burger King, real ‘Philip Morrises of food’, that get rich on the skin (better, on the lard) of their victims. Even electronic gizmos, therefore, become an essential weapon for the final victory of socialism which, finally after donning the white coats of “public health”, may even make it as a serious social system after 100 years of failures – especially with the help of the pharmaceutical multinationals (which are not in any case capitalist anymore when it comes to paying off politically correct crusades such as anti-smoking/alcohol/food). Please forgive the sarcasm, but when one reads stuff like this the alternative would be rage which, as everyone knows, is not good for your health. Thus, it is better to laugh and smoke one on it -- after a delightful cheeseburger with French Fries and Coca-Cola -- under a no smoking sign.

October 31 - Smoking increases the risk of Multiple Sclerosis – Why not? -- Here is another small jewel of false and biased information on smoking. We read: “Smokers are up to three times as likely to develop multiple sclerosis than nonsmokers, researchers said on Monday. Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway and Harvard University in Massachusetts surveyed 22,000 people aged 40 to 47 from 1997 to 1999”. Instead of bothering you with the usual rhetoric and disdain against those who should be in jail rather than in universities and on ministerial chairs, let’s cut to the chase and see how these “scientists” con public opinion this time.

First of all the emotional shooting: "Cigarette smoke is a cocktail of chemicals [oh, boy! That’s bad!... But so are tomatoes] that are potentially neurotoxins" – we might just as well say that each person is a potential killer. So?... But may readers stop reading right here – their emotions and superstitions being reconfirmed: smoking kills. Instead, we go on to the amusing stuff: “When asked specifically how smoking triggers the disease, Ascherio [the boss of the Harvard School of Public Health in charge of the study] responded, ‘Honestly we don't know’ “ (the "honest" word has a purpose, of course: "more research is needed"). That means that there isn’t the slightest biological proof, but just a statistical association based on hypotheses and the opinions of self-portraying “experts”. Second, how many people have been actually examined? 87 – although the reader is still stuck on the 22,000 figure – an important touch of credibility for gulling the credulous who fail to read carefully. We then learn that of the 87 people examined, 66 smoked – or smoked at least one cigarette a day – but not even that “pulls” enough for credibility. Thus, Ascherio calls for help by appealing to other studies that have shown the same lack of evidence and concludes -- as all the healthist junk scientists do -- that the sum of many zeroes is more than zero: "Putting all the studies together, I feel pretty confident to say that, at this point, smoking increases the risk of multiple sclerosis". Mmmhh… Still not good enough, so let's get some more reinforcement from Gary Franklin at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Seattle, who says that “the effect of smoking… is not like the relative risk of smoking and lung cancer [for which, of course, there is no biological proof of causality, either] … if I had a patient who was maybe at risk for MS because someone else had it in the family, ... and were smoking, I'd probably tell them to stop smoking" – As if he would not tell him that anyway…!

Finally here comes Stephen Reingold, vice president for research programs at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (see their site, where the word “smoking” does not exist -- time for a politically correct update) who, in order not to expose the con job openly, makes use of the politically correct: smoking is one factor that could trigger multiple sclerosis in people genetically susceptible to developing it, but "The disease is not caused by smoking." To exclude a priori smoking as a cause of a disease with an unknown cause does not make any sense – unless we read the message that Reingold cannot give us openly (the career before the truth, for Pete’s sake!): the relationship between smoking and MS is a fraud and a nonsense – just like the rest of the “evidence” that the pharmacrats administer to us. Believe it or not, this “study” has been published in the October issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology, and it will certainly enjoy a good re-launch in the trash can as “new and incontrovertible evidence” on the dangers of smoking by the usual charlatans. What to do? You guessed right: let’s smoke one on it under a no-smoking sign.

October 31 - As Clear As Mud - You can smoke here but not there. You can smoke then but not now. You can sell tobacco but not at a fair price. You can shine our shoes too, then just maybe, we'll let you do a little of what you want to do, and have always done, on your own property.

Such is the reasoning of Halifax, Canada's Regional Councillors, regarding permission to smoke in designated "tobacco bars." Halifax bar owners tried compliance and appeasement, but they may have to give up kowtowing, and copy a page from the Irish. Ireland's Health Tyrants will not reason, so Irish restaurateurs have banded together, in a promise of total defiance. At a certain point, you just have to meet force, with force. 

October 30 - Big Mamma Has Your Best Interests At Heart - At CDC, Gerberding has said one of her first acts as director was to open stairwells. Putting in carpeting, music and allowing employees to hang children's art has made it more appealing to use them, she said "along with turning off some of the elevators." 

How precious and how telling.  In yet another puff piece about how obesity is the number one health problem in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease, Control shares her thoughts on how to gently prod the indolent into shaping up.  It's very simple.  Decorate the stairwells of high rises in soothing colors, install some yummy carpets, pipe in some music and decorate the walls with drawings scrawled by children.  With a comforting and safe place, the docile employees will be so thrilled to climb those stairs and lose those pounds.

Julie Gerberding is preaching the new gospel of anti-fat while revealing just how condescending the officious elite is towards the American public.  With a little bit of nagging and a little bit of cajoling, benevolent health "educators" can show the masses the way to the good life of good health.  A catastrophe would occur if people were left alone to live their lives as they see fit.  The catastrophe, of course, would be that legions of over-paid, under-worked government gravy-train riders would be out of work.  Now that would turn the taxpayers' frowny faces into smiles.

October 29 - Forbidden Images - Once an image of absolute normality -- Hollywood used cigarettes to establish everything from intimacy to boredom -- cigarettes have become rare and loaded in their meanings.

In this photograph, of men dressed in camouflage tans and browns, standing against sand-colored wall, the cigarettes take on a strange power. They are a tiny talisman of the stressed-out, grief-stricken, war-weary soldier. They establish the normality of daily life as a soldier in Iraq -- a normality that by any standard is excruciatingly abnormal -- with brilliant clarity. 

"The cigarette has all but disappeared from American newspapers. Anti-smoking activists have made it a problematic image, arguing that showing smoking in anything but an unflattering light could encourage young smokers," notes this Washington Post article. 

The question is, why does the Post, or other media, censor depiction of reality to suit the demands of a prohibitionist crusade? Smoking is a reality, smokers are common, and most of them are fine people. Was it a good idea for publishers or movie makers deliberately to show blacks or gays in an "unflattering light" when societies wished to belittle and vilify those groups? 

This Post reporter says that publishing photographs of soldiers smoking cigarettes in Iraq is justifiable because these abnormal images (in fact abnormal for the Post or the New York Times Magazine he cites) help illustrate the abnormal stress our soldiers face. Newspapers feel depiction of tobacco smoking, a ubiquitous practice everybody has seen virtually everywhere every day for centuries, requires extraordinary justification today. 

If "anti-smoking activists" have made images of smoking "problematic" for journalists, so have they done, regarding all factual reporting on the subject. Supremely acquiescent bias — a voluntary censorship of anything about smoking and smokers not cast in "unflattering light" — is the politically correct editorial policy of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and an astounding multitude of other media outlets. 

At the same time, reporting on war, oppression, corruption, celebrity rape, or murder proceeds as always, indeed becoming ever more graphic in our times. Reporters need not bow and plead to justify thorough and explicit coverage of those things, for those things, it seems, do not pose unspeakably terrible threats to the world, and do not represent unbearably obscene examples to our children. Lucky Strikes do. 

October 29 - Two Tobacco Companies Merge - R.J. Reynolds and rival Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. agreed to merge Monday, uniting two venerable tobacco companies that have fallen on hard times amid a series of lawsuits and competition from cheaper cigarette brands.

British American Tobacco chairman Martin Broughton said the merger "will improve our competitive position in the most important cigarette market in the world."

What's this?  The United States is the most important cigarette market in the world?  That statement will set the bow ties of the anti-tobacco operatives spinning.  Anti-tobacco has spent a fortune trying to convince the American public that smoking is beyond passé.  In reality more people smoke now than when anti-tobacco first injected its poisonous agenda into society.  The tobacco market is huge in this country and it continues to grow.

Whether this merger will benefit smokers is problematic.  Although the high taxes, smoking restrictions and demonization originate with anti-smoking special interests, the tobacco industry for the past 10 years has capitulated cravenly every step of the way.  With its enormous resources, the industry could have crushed anti-tobacco and saved everyone, smokers and nonsmokers alike, the divisiveness and negativity that goes hand in hand with the "anti" ethos.

Certainly the country is better off having one larger tobacco company to compete with the world's largest cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris.  PM has led the way in bending over before anti-tobacco demands.  When anti-tobacco shrieks, "jump,"  PM asks, "how high?"  PM's groveling, however, has certainly delivered to its bottom line.  Paying out protection money in the shakedown racket conducted in the nation's courts has been an operating expense that has resulted in lucrative dividends.  PM is now so popular with the states' attorneys general that a dozens jetted to Illinois recently to beg the legislature to pass legislation that was specifically favorable to the company.  Smokers, the source of PM's enormous wealth, have been brutalized by the company's partnership with the government.  Had PM taken over RJR, smokers would really have something to worry about.

October 28 - WHO Really Has Their Best Interests At Heart? - "A shocking 60 percent of the Western Cape's high school pupils tried smoking cigarettes last year," shrieks the news item from South Africa.  Shock is the theme of these revelations as the reporter reveals "shocking statistics" on the number of young people who have tried cigarettes.  The hysterical story ends by reporting that Health Minister Piet Meyer is "shocked" at the results of the study.

There's a lot of shock and awe over an innocuous pleasure enjoyed by millions for hundreds of years.  We confess that we are a bit shocked over the hysteria about smoking in a country where the average life expectancy is 46.5 years and where one in five adults is infected with the AIDS virus.  We are shocked and disgusted that the World Health Organization has elevated smoking as its top priority.  We are shocked, and the South Africans should be angered, that their health minister is joining with the WHO in a charade that substitutes real public health with the fashionable prejudices of Western elites, who care more about wisps of tobacco smoke than they do about children quaking with malarial fevers and AIDS-ridden peons dropping dead.

October 28 - The Hazards Of A Smoke-Free Environment - The decision to smoke, or to avoid "second-hand" smoke, is a question to be answered by each individual based on his own values and his own assessment of the risks. This is the same kind of decision free people make regarding every aspect of their lives: how much to spend or invest, whom to befriend or sleep with, whether to go to college or get a job, whether to get married or divorced, and so on.

All of these decisions involve risks; some have demonstrably harmful consequences; most are controversial and invite disapproval from the neighbors. But the individual must be free to make these decisions. He must be free, because his life belongs to him -- not to his neighbors -- and only his own judgment can guide him through it.

Yet when it comes to smoking, this freedom is under attack. Cigarette smokers are a numerical minority, practicing a habit considered annoying and unpleasant to the majority. So the majority has simply commandeered the power of government and used it to dictate their behavior.

The joke, of course, is that the majority, as well as society itself, is composed of individuals.  There is no such thing as a "majority" consciousness.  The "majority" that supposedly screams for smoking bans is a collection of individuals who each enjoy activities and pleasures that might be deplored in turn by the tiny elite that has managed to pressure politicians to impose smoking bans.  Smoking bans today, alcohol bans tomorrow, followed by bans on "unhealthy" foods the day after.  When all is tallied up, the elite doesn't approve of much that the great unwashed does or thinks.  As long as we allow this unelected elite to foist its artificial construct of ever changing "majorities" against targeted subsets, our freedom will continue to disappear.  

October 27 - Statements from the throne of conmanship - As Britain still recognises freedom of choice in stating that national smoking bans are contrary to liberty, pressure by the international health gangsters is rising. Gro Harlem Bruntdland, former head of the World Health Organisation gang, while “preparing” Norway for a new fascist era of total prohibition, ‘warned [British] ministers that unless they were prepared to face political "discomfort" they wouldn't be going far enough - and would make little headway in getting smoking rates down.’ The “political discomfort” she refers to, of course, would result from spitting in the face of scientific integrity and respect for constitutional freedoms and democracy. It is a well known fact that the health risks of passive smoke are not even statistically proven to exist. The (already manipulated) maximum risk elevation is 30%, while even junk science multifactorial epidemiology requires at least 100% elevation just to establish that a risk exists. Stating that there is a risk with just 30% is a fraud – which makes cons out of all those who are competent and yet endorse such claims.

But let’s never forget that people like Gro are supporting public hatred and contempt for the beautiful habit. “The aim of the Norwegian ban is not only to protect [from what?] staff that work in these establishments from the harmful effects of passive smoking, but also to ‘de-normalise’ smoking as a social pastime.” The official reason for that is yet another statistical fraud: the disease and mortality of smoking, for which not even one death can be scientifically proven to be caused by the use of tobacco. Nevertheless, the WHO gang “attributes” 4-5 million deaths to smoking in the face of this lack of proof. This is to advance the agenda of marketing and social control by pharmaceutical multinationals, who have “public health” in their pockets.

Now, here is the big question: since passive smoke dangers are a fraud, those who say that the dangers exist are con artists, as we have already said. What are cons doing as health authorities – with attendant great powers and media attention – when they belong in jail? Have we become so complacent, so contemptuous of liberty and personal choice, so afraid of freedom and so selfish and cowardly as to allow such individuals -- who openly call the elimination of personal choice and responsibility “progress” -- a place in the seats of power? When they advocate the advancement of repression, state control and taxation through frauds? Yes, it is a very uncomfortable question, for it really puts us in front of what we are becoming. But it has to be answered, sooner or later. If, after endless disinformation propaganda, people are still smoking, it means that a large chunk of the population wants to smoke. Thus they are entitled to do so in the spirit of our liberal democratic systems – complete with full right of access to the social structures and functions while exercising this choice.

If there is a “denormalisation” to be done, therefore, it must be carried out for social aberrations and misfits such as Bruntdland and her ilk, who want to bend the world to their image and agendas, and have made a career out of deception and scientific frauds to gain political power and social control – a real insult to the medical profession to which she shamelessly belongs. This is to be stopped with all means up to and including force – and the use of force in defence of freedom is morally and politically ethical and necessary, to guard against tyranny and rule by the corrupt.

October 27 - Cracking Down On Happiness - A positive attitude is good for many things, but apparently not for people who are about to light up. Scientists at Penn’s Tobacco Use Research Center found that smokers who reported happier moods had higher levels of nicotine boost—the measure of the increase in blood-nicotine level—after smoking a single cigarette than did their less cheerful counterparts.

So now the anti-tobacco operatives are on record deploring happiness.  Happiness, of course, when it applies to smokers who enjoy a smoke when they are feeling great.  As always, the researchers express surprise whenever their presuppositions are voided.  They had expected more nicotine intake when smokers are sad or depressed.  In any case the real purpose of this study is the age old quest of the busy grant junkie:

More research is needed to determine if smokers with higher levels of nicotine boost are more prone to relapse, Lerman says.

Always more money and in this case more money to push more powerful pharmaceutical nicotine:

Such people might benefit from “treatment that gives more rapid nicotine delivery, like a nicotine spray,” instead of a patch, which delivers nicotine more slowly.”

Considering that nicotine delivery devices are definitely not cool, don't work and are incredibly expensive, hooking up a happy smoking to one of these nostrums will be sure to summon in the blues.

October 27 - Smoking Grandmothers Exonerated - Speaking of how there is enough money in these economically straightened times to study every single minuscule aspect of smoking, Wanda Hamilton found this gem:

They'll NEVER run out of things to study.

There was another rich one in the Oct. 18, 2003 BMJ, "Effects of grandmothers' smoking in pregnancy on birth weight: intergenerational cohort study" (Hypponen E, Smith GD, Power C).  Yes, that's right. They were trying to prove (and expected to prove) that if a woman smoked when she was pregnant, it would affect the birth weight of her GRANDCHILD.

But they didn't find what they were looking for. Also note that they are talking about GRAMS in lower birth weight (up to minus 48) when there are 28 grams in a single ounce.

I had a laugh about this, and then laughed even harder when someone from our own National Institute of Health sent in a testy response letter saying the investigators failed to mention his own study on this which was done a few years earlier.