ASH thrives in ignorance and brutal environments, and believes that fear of its crooked lawyers and intimidation by its activists will eventually force smokers into submission, and entire cultures to change. Indeed, this may even work for a while, as it worked for ASH's ideological relatives in the Germany of the 30's. But, then as now, scum runs downhill at the slightest tip of the plane, and we are ready with the sifter. We can feel the tremors already.

Politics First, Research Second? - You can take away the question mark, Detroit News! "...The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)" [...] "...is not known for its dedication to truth and honesty in research. Indeed, a federal judge recently blasted the EPA for deliberately relaxing research standards to establish that second-hand smoke caused cancer, something that no independent study has been able to corroborate."

Totally untouched by the exposure of the EPA as a dishonest entity, the anti-tobacco cartel's second-in-command, chain-smoker Al Gore now directs the EPA to waste another 10 million taxpayer's dollars to "study the link between rising asthma rates among children and environmental pollutants" (read: Environmental Tobacco Smoke). Guess what the result of the "studies" are going to be! More junk science for the cartel to trumpet about.

But we are not surprised. Having deceived the public on ETS (and much more) the EPA has committed a criminal act for which nobody will pay, in the face of honesty and integrity. And its great anti-tobacco supporter -- the Clinton Administration -- has given AMPLE EVIDENCE of being a criminal administration itself, defying due process, allowing scientific and political fraud to become insitutionalized while fooling the public. The Clinton administration and the EPA are a match made in gangsters' heaven.

AN EVIL COURT OF LIES The concept that smoking tobacco is a criminal act is going to its most horrendous expression in Utah. Now there is a special Tobacco Court to indict and punish kids for smoking tobacco. This Holy Inquisition-style tribunal is the brainchild of the sick mind of 3rd District Juvenile Court Judge Joseph Anderson. This individual and his supporters - who are clearly the ones who should be appearing before a court - justify the intimidation of kids with the same old, belied slogans: Anti-tobacco inquisitor Joseph Anderson: Utah's Mighty Butt Czar "... more than 3,000 kids become regular smokers every day in America" -- FALSE. It has been revealed in the American press that this THEORETICAL figure applies to YOUNG ADULTS, not minors. "... and that nearly a third will die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses" -- FALSE. These figures are based on a theoretical mathematical model that has NOTHING to do with reality. And to add insult to injury, every smoker or ex-smoker who dies is AUTOMATICALLY logged as a premature death, REGARDLESS OF THE AGE OF DEATH. This is how the anti-tobacco criminals cheat the population. Naively, many people associate the concept of a court with the one of justice and truth. When it comes to this court, nothing could be farther from reality. What actually runs this tribunal -- and the anti-tobacco cartel it represents -- is puritanical lust for political power and control, and a desire to shape the next generation with the same crooked mould of lies and intolerance, as well as contempt for pleasure in life. It's bad enough that this court is predicated on untruthful assumptions and a newly-minted trendy notion that tobacco is "a gate-way" drug. But the Tobacco Court does something even worse - it turns schools into genuine police enforcement agencies by conferring on them the function of issuing citations to "offenders." Indeed, this court represents the sad contemporary spirit of a society so culturally, morally and ideologically bankrupt, the only gratification left is the persecution of its members. When the Right is in power, the persecution turns towards homosexuals and abortion clinics. When the Left controls the nation, political corruption reigns, and the health establishment is unleashed to become a fetid force of persecution for those who cherish self-determination, personal liberty and physical pleasure. Only determination, and continuous resistance and obstruction to the anti-tobacco cartel will help to protect and restore the right of self-determination, including the right to smoke -- and to paraphrase the last sentence of this article: "So heads up, kids. Time to light up while the court is in session."

EPA: Smoke and Mirrors - Another article from the Detroit News about the corruption of EPA, and the criminal anti-tobacco cartel it represents. "A federal judge last month issued a 92-page opinion blasting the Environmental Protection Agency's assertion that second-hand tobacco smoke causes cancer. [...] Most studies have failed to establish a significant link between second-hand smoke and cancer. The risk from drinking coffee or milk appears greater. Undaunted, the EPA in 1993 defined second-hand smoke as a Class A carcinogen, or cancer-causing agent. The EPA's findings received wide coverage in the press and inspired smoking bans in workplaces, airplanes and eateries. There was even talk of regulating tobacco use inside residences - in order to protect children, of course."

Things Are Getting Hot Up in the Air - The absurd smoking prohibition in airplanes drives many people to exasperation. Here are two stories that are actually meant to show how bad smokers are -- and maybe, these people were actually violent. But if the airlines would be respectful of the right of smokers to light up in airplanes, and at least special smoking flight were made available, these kinds of incidents would not happen -- since they never happened before.

It is clear that the brutal suppression of smoking in airplanes, based on glaringly fraudulent claims on the dangers of ETS is meeting with an ever-growing resistance. For one incident that gets reported, very many more go unreported. We are supportive, and sympathetic to those people who lose it when locked in a flying cage for many hours, being coerced to behave against their nature after paying hefty fares for the only transportation available for overseas travels.

Return of the Smokelings - A reader from Damascus, Nesrin Shaheen, has written for us this story depicting a fantastic future in which smokers will be removed from society and sent to Nova Subterranean, a separate world for smokers only, much like the early penal colonies in Australia. But is it really fantasy? It seems to us that Nesrin's story represents the world as intended by the health control freaks of the anti-tobacco cartel.

FORCES Canada's Reader Fight Hypocrisy in Winnipeg - One of our readers, Mr. Warren Klass, is currently fighting a battle against moral and political hypocrisy in Winnipeg. Mayoralty candidate Coun. Glenn Murray, known to enthusiastically support and promote the most draconian anti-smoking by-laws in Winnipeg, hosted a fund-raiser where people were actively smoking cigars. Apparently, secondhand smoke changes its chemical nature according to the money involved: it becomes very dangerous to health when the money comes from anti-smoking grants from the pharmaceutical industry, but turns harmless when the funds that have to be raised come from smokers as well.

The Return of Puritanism - "In 1885, as he lay dying of cancer, Ulysses Simpson Grant, former president and former commanding general of the Union Army, received an injection of brandy in his arm to ease his pain. The next day, the Women's Christian Temperance Union denounced the doctors for giving the general intoxicating liquor. At the high tide of American Puritanism, the WCTU symbolized a Victorian obsession that still rules politics. Today, both parties are fixated on OPB, Other People's Behavior, using scorn, piety, and false pity."

A War on Drugs, But Just a Murmur on Booze - Does Big Alcohol benefit from the war on smokers? Certainly the figures cited in this opinion piece from the San Francisco Examiner demonstrate what any individual of common sense knows. Alcohol abuse is very costly to society and far more harmful to 'kids' than is smoking. Smoking has not killed one child. The same cannot be said of alcohol. The author represents a California busybody organization that surely would like to see its take from the taxpayers increased to the hefty amounts enjoyed by the anti-tobacco cartel.

HEALTH NAZIS OUT OF CONTROL - Attacking Industries from Tobacco to Milk - As FORCES predicted long ago, anti-tobacco is just an exercise for future repressions and financial extortion. A huge socio-economic machine and a mentality have been created in order to implement and rationalize the systematic preying of the very people and industries that allow the country to function. And the health establishment thrives on this cancer.

OREGON: NEW DEFEAT FOR THE ANTI-TOBACCO CARTEL - JUDGE DISMISSES A MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR LAWSUIT - Kissing the ass of the twisted puritanical virtues of anti-tobacco seems to be the mandatory ritual judges must take before telling the anti-smoking cartel to go to hell. "The lawsuit details an allegedly sordid history of irresponsible corporate management and unchecked greed on the part of the tobacco industry," Judge Marsh wrote. "However compelling these charges may be, there are very sound judicial policy reasons for limiting legal actions to those parties most directly injured by the harmful conduct." -- In what seems to be a cascade effect, anti-tobacco lawsuits are thrown out of court one after the other. The cartel is in trouble, and this is a splendid opportunity for the forces of liberty and self-determination to intensify the effort to eliminate anti-tobacco.

THE HYSTERIA AND CONTEMPT FOR JUSTICE OF THE ANTI-TOBACCO OPERATIVES SHOWS WELL AFTER DEFEAT IN INDIANA -- LAWYERS ASSOCIATION REBUKES ATTORNEY GENERAL: THIS IS TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THEM - "The Indianapolis Bar Association has issued a rare rebuke to the state's highest-ranking lawyer, Attorney General Jeffrey Modisett. In a letter sent this week to Modisett and two newspapers, the bar association takes the attorney general to task for harshly criticizing a local judge who dismissed the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The bar association particularly is upset with Modisett for staging a dramatic news conference at which he crumpled, then tossed aside, a copy of the court order dismissing the case." -- Thank you, anti-tobacco cartel, for having your operatives showing the world who you really are!

NARO PRESIDENT POINTS TO NORTH CAROLINA RULING AS REINFORCING OIL INDUSTRY'S CONCERNS OVER ACTIONS BY FEDERAL ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCIES - ADA, Okla., Aug. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- The following release was issued today by National Association of Royalty Owners: ``A ruling by a federal judge in North Carolina that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrongly declared secondhand tobacco smoke a carcinogen based on 'junk science' reinforces the long-held conviction by the oil and gas industry that many federal agencies often use unproved theories to support politically correct environmental agendas,'' James L. Stafford, president of the Ada, Oklahoma-based National Association of Royalty Owners (NARO) said today.

EPA'S CRUSADERS - Powerful article by George F. Will, Washington Post - "This assault on the idea of personal responsibility, Prager writes, further pollutes 'a country that regularly teaches its citizens to blame others -- government, ads, parents, schools, movies, genes, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, sexism, racism -- for their poor decisions and problems.' This assault, a result of the politics produced by a culture of irresponsibility, is an emblematic fruit of Clintonism."

TOBACCO'S REACTION TO RULING ON SECOND HAND SMOKE - DEAD-ON CONCLUSIONS are made in this article by Jerry Heaster: "...Politically, the industry and smokers have no chance of translating legal victories into major rights victories unless they're willing to become a political force. This isn't likely for a group that, although it's 40-million strong, allows itself to be brow-beaten and dispatched on daily guilt trips at whim. The industry is obligated to fight for its rights in court, of course, but it's missing the boat by not organizing its customer base as a political force. Joe Camel may sell cigarettes, but what smokers really need is a political rallying point. It's the only thing that makes sense for a business and its customer masses in an era of interest-group power politics."

AMERICAN LUNG ASSOCIATION HELPS PRISON TO SUPPRESS CIVIL RIGHTS: SO WHAT IF THE DANGERS OF ETS ARE A FRAUD? - LUZERNE PRISON: YOU WILL QUIT SMOKING -- LIKE IT OR NOT - The brutal American prison system (this time combined with the brutality of anti-tobacco fascism) is showing its ugly face again, this time with the help of the American Lung Association. Effective August 1st, in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility cigarettes are forbidden. Period. Not inside, not outside. The mere possession of them implies punishment. Excuse? Possible lawsuits because of second hand smoke -- never mind the exposure of the fraud. Real reason? The social cancer represented by the anti-tobacco cartel has a political agenda of control, and it will be implemented with force. That leaves only one alternative: use force to fight it back. If there will be no fighting, we will deserve everything we'll get.

RISK REASSESSMENT - "...But now that a federal judge has overturned the EPA's decision to classify what it calls 'environmental tobacco smoke' as a known human carcinogen, skepticism about the hazards of ETS will be harder to dismiss." -- By Jacob Sullum