ARTICLES FROM OTHER
SOURCES
ARCHIVE 53
Articles logged from October 2000 to November 2000
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Liz is aghast that the most important
issue to the American public, cigarette smoking, is not making an
appearance in this presidential campaign. She can't believe it and
her rhetoric is as overheated as a grant junkie's upturned palm.
Relax, Liz. The reason cigarette smoking is being ignored by the
candidates is that, in the poll-driven world in which we live, tobacco
isn't on the radar screen. People just don't care. Sorry, Liz,
but that's just the way it is. To brighten up your day, we include some
of the more risible phrases from Liz's whine. "What is the point of arguing about education, taxation or equal rights while ignoring an insidious threat to our society which undermines our chance for life itself -- robbing us of the opportunity to lead a long and healthy life?" Tobacco is an insidious threat?
Funny how it wasn't a threat until millions of dollars from our taxes
began to appear in the pockets of people like Elizabeth Whelan who are
paid to tell us how insidious is tobacco. "We are not talking here about "choice" and "individual rights," but only about the undeniable fact that more than 400,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they smoke cigarettes." Don't worry, Liz. No one could
ever accuse you or your fellow control freaks of valuing
"choice" or "individual rights". But since you
bring up the 400,000 premature deaths scam, we are pleased not only to
deny these figures as fact but show them for what they are. Lies,
damned lies. "Tragically, the answer is that both candidates are terrified of alienating the tobacco industry and its multitude of corporate subsidiaries" Terrified of the tobacco industry? Come off it Liz. No one is terrified of the tobacco industry. The full weight of the federal government, legions of trial lawyers and the entire media complex have brought the tobacco industry to its knees. The more it is pummeled, the more acquiescent it becomes. Gore and Bush are not terrified, they are politicians who know that this issue has been milked dry and that there is no profit in hyping an issue that doesn't garner any votes. Maybe they remember Skip Humphrey of Minnesota. Maybe they remember how this politician trampled innocent bystanders to grab any microphone to trumpet his anti-tobacco message. Maybe they remember that Humphrey lost the governor's race to a former pro wrestler. Anti-tobacco doesn't play in Peoria, it doesn't play in Minnesota, it doesn't play in America. Wipe your tears away, Liz and get over it.
Unlike the heady days of 1994 when anti-tobacco, with the support of the state's largest hospitality association, rammed the smoking ban through the ignorant California legislature, the politicians are facing a concerted effort by business people who will not take the smoking ban lying down. The bar owners' goal is to completely derail the legislation or alter it significantly. Although the activism is encouraging it is distressing that the restaurant owners, who face the same smoking ban, are content to let the bar owners fight the battle alone. When initially proposed, the smoking ban exempted the bars. The restaurant owners cried foul stating that a ban that affected them and not bars was unfair. Using the inane "leveling the playing field" argument, the ban was rewritten to include bars. Now the restaurateurs are leaving it to the bars to save them all from unwarranted government intrusion. The Ames Chamber of Commerce as of yet has inexplicably not taken a position on the smoking ban. Until all productive citizens band together to resist the nanny state, the old tactic of "divide and conquer" will serve anti-tobacco well.
Oak Creek, Colorado, believes that levying fines on teenagers who are caught smoking in public will solve the problem. This one town is not alone in fuzzy thinking. In nearby Hayden, a similar law was enacted in an attempt to reduce underage smoking in a town where 50% of high school teenagers smoke. The pervasive anti-tobacco education in Hayden has pushed teen smoking to astronomical heights so what is needed, according to anti-tobacco, is more of the same. The City Fathers of Oak Creek and Hayden would be pleasantly surprised at how quickly the perceived tobacco problem could be solved if they recognized that the "problem" is artificially generated, not really a problem at all and hardly worthy of the endless fussing and perpetual attacks on smokers and young people. Years from now, people will marvel over the inordinate quantities of public time and money wasted during the 1990's and the early years of the 21 century over an innocuous pleasure that sane people don't care about.
Keywords are mendacious, fascist and bigots. The only word missing from this excellent evaluation of anti-tobacco fanaticism by a fed-up nonsmoker is rapaciousness. Sheer greed for loot is the vice exhibited by all the key players making their living off anti-tobacco. Herb Greer superbly conveys the awareness gradually permeating society that anti-tobacco is a nasty piece of goods far more concerned about control that health. The extreme measures advocated by the zealots is resulting in a backlash that will flush the charlatans into the sewer.
Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said that smoking in bars is immaterial to their desire to frequent bars. Given the unreliability of Public Health polls on smoking issues, this percentage is extremely high and emphasizes the indifference that the vast majority of people feel about smoking. A similarly biased survey conducted by the San Francisco Tobacco Control Section produced the same result in spite of the convoluted wording of the questions. People don't care about tobacco and surveys have consistently shown that the majority of Californians support the right of businesses to enact their own smoking policies. The Chronicle story is an excellent example of a special interest press release swallowed and regurgitated by anti-tobacco media. The veracity of this story may be judged by an actual lie in the final paragraph. The reporter states that the ban on smoking in bars was delayed by the tobacco industry. In fact, the delay was written by a Democrat Assemblyman and supported by the hospitality industry. The delay was approved by the legislature overwhelmingly. The tobacco industry has done absolutely nothing to overturn this law. The Chronicle's propaganda always portrays the smoking-ban controversy as a battle between the angelic health establishment and the satanic tobacco industry. Smokers and businesses, let alone the general public, have no place in the media's scripted spin.
The University of California is particularly subject to charges of hypocrisy since it receives hundreds of millions from tobacco in the form of grants funded by tobacco taxes. It's most famous "researcher" is the mechanical engineer turned heart expert Stanton Glantz. Without tobacco money funding his statistical alchemy, Glantz, and his fellow charlatans would have to get real jobs to justify their presence on the staff of what once was a great University. We'll believe in the saintliness of the University of California when it declines all money from tobacco. We'll check back when hell freezes over.
Facing lost revenue, the politicians passed a law forbidding New Yorkers from buying cigarettes from the Internet, by mail-order or via telephone sales. New York is the only state with such a law. The law is obviously unconstitutional but small details such as that rarely stop the political class from screwing the public. What is surprising is that a cigarette manufacturer has filed suit to overturn the law. Brown & Williamson Corp. is taking the right step by standing up for itself and its customers. At some point the cigarette companies must accept that whatever they do in the PR realm to rehabilitate their image will never be enough for the zealots who want to prohibit tobacco and destroy the cigarette companies.
Free speech? Due process? Evidence? Who needs THEM?
Anti-tobacco realizes that time is running out for its oppressive agenda and is taking a risk that most likely will backfire as it attempts to challenge Michigan's smoking law which prohibits localities from banning smoking in restaurants. The city of Marquette, bullied as always by entities such as the American Cancer Society, enacted a restaurant smoking ban in 1997. Locals sued and the ban was overturned before it was scheduled to go into effect in 1998 due to the state's preemption law . Now the city, egged on again by anti-tobacco special interests, is appealing that ruling. The article, although obviously copied from anti-tobacco press releases, inadvertently notes that there are four states with preemption laws that work in favor of anti-tobacco. Of the four only California has a state smoking ban law that comes close to banning smoking in all restaurants and bars. The other three have laws that are riddled with exemptions and those states are filled with restaurants where smoking is permitted. If anti-tobacco is successful in Michigan then the precedent for taking on the state law in California will have been effected. Most of California's cities and counties have laws that are far less draconian than the state law that was shuffled quietly through the legislature in 1994. San Francisco, for instance, has a smoking ban that is far more civilized than that imposed by Sacramento. Many localities have no local laws at all. If the California preemption law can be overturned, that state would be well on its way to rehabilitation.
Ventura was so chastened that he denied the whole incident and said his comments about smoking and drinking was a joke. How is it possible that a giant of a man, a veteran of the macho world of wrestling and the governor of a state, is so reduced to the status of a school girl smoking in the lavatory? Neither Clinton nor Ventura are converts to the anti-tobacco agenda. Clinton uses tobacco as a wedge issue while Ventura was the victor over one of the most famous anti-tobacco politicians in the United States. Both men are smokers but even they, masters of their universes have been neutered by the ethos of the reprimanding nanny. Very sad. Hooray for Russia and Aeroflot!
"Russian airline giant Aeroflot said Wednesday that its envoys have urged the U.S. government to lift a smoking ban on regular airline flights between the United States and other countries." ... “The head of Aeroflot's legal department, Boris Yeliseyev, said that if the ban remains in place, Russia may retaliate by demanding that international airliners that carry Russian passengers have Russian-speaking flight attendants on board, in accordance with Russian law.“ ... “Russia is one of the most smoker-friendly nations in the world, with few limits on smoking in public places." Good on you, Russian Aeroflot and thank you! The US seem to think that they can break international law in the name of junk science and "health" the same way they infringe on the rights of their smoking citizens. Does it take a friendly giant like Russia to keep madness at home? It sure seems that way.
During the production of one of the Truth Campaign's incomprehensible anti-smoking advertisements, a horse plunged to its death and several others where injured badly. The ad contains body-bags slung on saddles symbolizing the body count caused by the cigarette industry while the madly galloping horses are a metaphor for - - oh, who cares since the commercial is an absolute mess. The Truth Campaign is the publicly funded playground for old freeze-dried hippies who are finally realizing their dream of bashing American corporations. The ads have nothing to do with smoking, let alone Truth, and make sense only to the 60's refugees who watch them through a fog of marijuana smoke.
“ We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech!” That was the response of one university department head at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University to a proposal for a course on “political correctness.” After concluding that some students in his university felt pressured to parrot a set of prevailing opinions in order to pass their courses, sociologist Dr. Richard Zeller decided to offer the course to give students a critical look at so-called political correctness in the interest of intellectual balance. Far from being welcomed as a contribution to intellectual debate and academic diversity, the course proposal was drummed off campus – along with Dr. Zeller. Today’s academics, convinced that their (often unexamined) orthodoxies offer the only path to truth, light, and human justice, are terrified of any dissent. They seem to think that the only people who could possibly disagree with them on key social issues are those who are malevolent, exploitative and in bad faith. These censorious academicians do dishonor to a long and hard-won tradition of intellectual integrity and dispassionate debate. Their job is to teach students how to think – not to do their thinking for them.
At the end of the book, the pigs have appropriated the farm house for themselves, have the best food to eat and are even hobnobbing with the despised neighboring farmers. When confronted with their obviously superior and unequal status in the barnyard utopia, the head pig smugly states: "All animals are equal but some are more equal" Stanton Glantz is now the head hog in California. The state's Supreme Court has so determined by refusing to hear an appeal by a tax-payers organization challenging the political nature of Glantz' anti-smoker activities. Under state law, public money must not fund political action. Some of Glantz' activities are unquestionably political, the most infamous was a study he did tabulating political donations to California politicians. Two lower courts ruled in Glantz' favor by noting that his political action is permitted because it furthers the legislature's avowed anti-tobacco policies. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, letting the lower courts' rulings stand. The rule of law in California has increasingly become irrelevant, not only on tobacco issues, but on a myriad of issues that have attracted special interest pandering. Now that Glantz has been given a personal dispensation to spend public money on his political agenda, the floodgates will be opened for any ambitious, politically connected demagogue to bilk the citizens.
Not only do the soft drink manufacturers try to addict you with caffeine to secure customers young and old, but they also try to kill you with Aspartame! And you thought you could avoid the deadly effects of sugar! Definitely, the grounds for a lawsuit exist: Coca Cola and Pepsi KNOWINGLY put caffeine, as “addictive” as nicotine (except when sold by the pharmacartels) in their products to KILL their diabetic customers with sugar substitutes. Quick, let us TAX soft drinks to compensate for the social cost! Let us EDUCATE the children in schools too, and tell them a pile of lies to scare them off. Or, let us follow the Canadian antismoking example, and put pictures of dying people and diseased organs on 50% of the labels… that will teach them... the miracles of junk science!
Clinton's own Justice Department conducted six intense criminal investigations of the tobacco industry over several years and came up empty handed. The contention that this most examined and litigated industry has anything to hide at this point borders on the insane, which explains the goofiness of a quote by anti-tobacco operative Richard Daynard to the effect that Judge Kessler did the Clinton Administration a favor by throwing out a huge part of its suit. George Bush has vowed to end the Justice's persecution of the tobacco industry should he be elected President.
The con artists are reduced to recycling prior studies giving them a new twist. Such is the case in a study from England suggesting that secondhand smoke inhibits women's fertility. This study is in response to the male impotency studies making the round a few years ago. As inane and inconclusive as this study is, the coverage by BBC News is more noteworthy as an example of biased and one-sided reporting. The Daily Record and Sunday Mail, a competing news outlet, noted in its coverage of the study that the conclusion of passive smoke inhibiting fertility "flies in the face of a study by Britain's IVF pioneer, Professor Robert Winston. Prof Winston surveyed thousands of couples at Hammersmith Hospital in London earlier this year and found there was no difference in conception levels for smoking and non-smoking couples." Somehow the post WWII baby boom hit England, the United States and Western Europe when smoking rates were at their highest. Food for thought. Junk Across The Atlantic At Columbia University, the junksters are shredding money pursuing Racial and Gender obsessions so loved by academia. According to the two imaginative researchers, woman and white people are more susceptible to nicotine addiction. Since nicotine addiction didn't exist a few years ago, the conclusions from this study are suitably murky except for the implication that this is only the first step in a series of much needed, and suitably expensive, studies. |
Quit
smoking, and have a seizure... that's good for your health! - 
