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ARCHIVE 55
Articles logged from December 2000 to Present
SHOPPING ADDICTION CURE BEING TESTED AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY -
Added December 22, 2000 -
Women, do you like to shop? You're sick, you're addicts
- and you need a cure! Deb Lambert from Accuracy in Academia reports:' While biotech stocks thrive on news of prospective cures for cancer and heart disease, a group of Stanford University researchers are testing a cure for "shopping addiction." If it materializes, the least likely sector to cheer its arrival will be the nation's retailers.
The American Psychological Association believes that shopping
addiction is a widespread problem. In fact, a recent Washington Times article
noted that the mental health of thousands of Americans is at risk. Current APA estimates
show that 15 million shoppers suffer from a compulsive shopping addiction
and another 40 million are "on the brink." The clinical term for this problem is "onionmania" or
binge shopping, "where victims buy scads of clothes, shoes and accessories but are so
plagued by guilt that the only balm is another buy." Not surprisingly, 90 percent of those addicted are women. Why?
Some researchers believe that low seratonin levels, which can cause
depression and self-loathing, are responsible for compulsive shopping. The answer? Another drug - like Prozac perhaps, which Stanford
researchers believe can increase the brain's supply of seratonin, the neurotransmitter
that affects mood changes. Washington Times couldn't help injecting some humor into this situation by wondering if every price tag should contain a Surgeon General's message, i.e. "Warning: Purchasing this item may make you feel guilty and deplete your bank account." Or "This product has a gender-based disparate impact; female shoppers are nine times more likely to develop onionmania." ' Yes, laughing is better than crying indeed. But Stanford University should be renamed Junk Science University, as it is sadly known for the production of tons of junk science against smoking as well.
In England a study was conducted to determine whether ETS exposure at home requires more medical attention for asthmatic children than for those whose parents don't smoke. The researchers' assumption that secondhand smoke is a major cause of respiratory morbidity in children was flatly contradicted by their findings. It seems that smoke in the home not only doesn't send asthmatic children to the doctor but has quite the opposite result. As the conclusion states: "High levels of parental smoking in the home are associated with a reduction in health care contacts for asthma." It's embarrassing when the conclusion of a study contradicts the desired outcome. The researchers make a half-hearted attempt to spin the results into the anti-tobacco court but what remains is yet another wedge in the anti-tobacco wall of hysteria.
The Wareham story contains many of the elements common to the smoking ban struggles. The Board of Health admits now that it knew the smoking ban would produce lost sales in the restaurants and bars but imposed it anyway. The Board of Health took on running local businesses without assuming any of the responsibilities such as investment, paying taxes or attracting customers. The Board of Health did not prove that its action was necessary for the public good since there is absolutely no proof that secondhand smoke poses any hazards. The businesses, although they fought the ban, haven't seriously questioned the right of the Board of Health to impose the ban. Worse, some have said that they wouldn't oppose a smoking ban if it applied to the entire state. This is like a sheep endorsing a walk through the slaughter house as long as all the sheep make that trip. The hospitality industry must grow up, get some principles and fight these bans on the grounds that "public" smoking bans do not include private property which the public may patronize. The good news is that the people of Wareham have discovered that they can put an end to bureaucratic tyranny. They packed the hearing and let their outrage be heard. They now need to work on stiffening the spines of the bar and restaurant owners.
The researchers of the study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, confess to being dismayed with their results. "This approach [public school anti-tobacco education] was started 25 years ago and has been adopted in many school districts around the country. We were surprised and disappointed to see it did not produce the results predicted," said one. Anti-tobacco predicted that more education fueled with more money would eliminate smoking. Instead, under their programs, teenagers begin smoking at younger ages than when there was no anti-smoking programs. The number of teenage smokers also consistently skyrockets whenever anti-tobacco campaigns engulf the schools.< The various components of the anti-tobacco enterprise recently launched aggressive state-by-state lobbying efforts to snag yet more money to radically expand anti-tobacco indoctrination. They want to raise state tobacco taxes as well as blackmail the legislatures to cough up more tobacco settlement money. The National Cancer Institute's study is an abject admission of failure and should be required reading by the country's governor's, legislature and educational establishment.
The attorneys general brought home the loot to their states, the big cigarette companies got to raise the praise of smokes as high as their customers will tolerate and the trial lawyers get $750-million per year for five years and $500-million per year thereafter. The smokers, of course got nothing. Justice was also the big looser as the authors of this article prove.
Bush, although hardly mentioning it during the campaign, lists tort reform as one of his major accomplishments in Texas. What happened in Texas may not apply on the federal level but the lawyerly panic over Bush's win must be built upon and exploited This articles lists the pros and cons of Bush enacting meaningful tort reform.
Although Kirk Kleinschmidt speaks like a pubescent girl on steroids, his orders will be taken seriously by Governor Gray Davis of California. When the previous governor, along with the state legislature, had the temerity to use a tiny portion of the funds generated by the state's tobacco tax to provide medical care for the poor during the long California recession, the anti-tobacco enterprise pulled out the big guns. Acting on the principle of "not one red cent for health care", they took out full page advertisements in the New York Times excoriating the governor for daring to touch "their" money. The hardball tactics worked and Governor Davis is firmly leashed by the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the American Cancer Society. Kleinschmidt's stooge, Stanton Glantz, recently concocted numbers based upon an inconclusive study purporting to show that California's anti-tobacco education campaign saves lives. According to Glantz, exactly 8,300 people died because the legislature and the previous governor extracted the pittance from the state's tobacco tax and used it to care for sick children. Not only are the politicians warned to keep their, and their constituents', hands off the tax money but they would be well advised to start shoveling more cash to the anti-tobacco cartel. With the billions of dollars from the tobacco settlement itching to be spent, Kleinschmidt and his fellow leaches want more public money even though, under their education campaign, smoking rates have accelerated. Even they admit that their programs have failed, despite the billion dollars spent and their latest ploy can only be construed as a blatant attempt to shakedown the governor and the legislature. The Sacramento politicians, who are expert at counting votes, need to pull their heads out of the sand and start counting. Kleinschmidt and his cronies cannot drum up any votes, do not contribute any good to society and exist only to extort. Get some backbone and throw them out on their well-upholstered rear-ends.
In a nutshell, here is one of the most obviously illegal components of the so-called tobacco settlement. Cigarette companies who were not parties to the agreement between the states' attorneys general and the big cigarette manufacturers are compelled to deposit money in escrow accounts administered by each state. This outrageous requirement was written into each state's legislation to protect the big tobacco companies' and the states financial interests. The independent manufacturer must raise their prices to ensure they cannot effectively compete with the big cigarette companies. The small Virginia company filing the suit claims it has developed a curing process that eliminates a whole class of chemicals that many scientists believe are the most cancer-causing components in tobacco. If true - a big if, since no one has ever proved that tobacco smoke causes cancer, let alone what substances to blame - the greed of the settlement participants becomes more glaring. Several anti-trust suits are pending throughout the country and this suit is a welcome addition to overturn the illegal tobacco settlement.
After eight fetid years of the Clinton psycho-drama, Washington is anticipating a return to normality that has been sorely missed. The New York Post's take on the style of entertaining likely to be inaugurated by the new president provides hope to those who are worn out by the new-age Puritanism and anti-pleasure ethos schizophrenically combined with the moral squalor so characteristic of the current occupants. White House entertaining took a nose-dive after Mrs. Clinton prissily banned smoking while the continuous parade of Hollywood sycophants lowered the tone even further. Throw out the California Cuisine, bring on the barbecue and light up the smokes!
Two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control released a study constructed to show that the lung cancer rate in California is dropping dramatically due to anti-tobacco education. Uncritically reported by the compliant media, the actual release from the CDC is replete with the "probably", "may be", "in part" fudge-factoring verbiage one has come to expect from propagandists walking the fine line between hype and fraud. "The difference in the rate of decline in lung and bronchus cancer incidence rates between California and other U.S. regions may be related, in part, to the significant declines in smoking rates as a result of California tobacco control initiatives." "... although decreased population smoking rates in California are probably responsible for reduced rates of lung and bronchus cancer, a cause-and-effort [sic] relation cannot be determined through population-based assessments." Add this evasive language to the following conclusion from the abstract "Smoking cessation and mortality trends among 118,000 Californians, 1960-1997", co-authored by Clark Heath of the American Cancer Society, and the punch from CDC's latest effort doesn't amount to much. "These results indicate there has been no important decline in either the absolute or relative death rates from all causes and lung cancer for cigarette smokers as a whole compared with never smokers in this large cohort, in spite of a substantial degree of smoking cessation." Today the University of California - San Francisco, Stanton Glantz' fiefdom, issued the companion piece to the CDC's report that deaths due to smoking have dropped because of the anti-tobacco/anti-smoker ads infecting the state's airwaves. As with the CDC report, proof is not required. "The researchers derived the estimate by computing the difference between the actual rate of heart disease in California and the predicted rate without the program, multiplied by the state's population." The assumptions upon which this calculation is based cannot be supported since parts of the equation are not real. No one knows whether the anti-tobacco program is successful or whether it is a failure. Anti-tobacco itself reports conflicting numbers depending upon the political result it wishes to produce. Earlier this year Wanda Hamilton, whose research into the statistical and scientific muddle of California's anti-tobacco education program provides much needed clarity, noted:
The real purpose of these two studies touting California's anti-tobacco education programs is to provide a foundation on which to build the case to impose a Proposition 99 tobacco tax on every state in the Union. The tobacco settlement has been a big disappointment for the cartel since the vast majority of that ill-gotten loot has gone to state legislatures and the trial lawyers who shook down the tobacco industry. Despite its squeals of outrage, the cartel has been firmly rebuffed by a breed of animal far tougher than anti-tobacco parasites; the politicians. The American Lung Association, Cancer Society, Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids will be taking the junk from UCSF and the CDC to state capitals from coast to coast to peddle their perpetual funding scheme. The scam has already started in New England. The evidence they will use is ambiguous and contradicted by their own people. The programs they will tout are failures by every rational standard. The most relevant fact to convey to the politicians is that the California Legislature hates Proposition 99.
No one is arguing that the people of Friendship Heights, MD are Nazi's but the mentality rampant in their tiny village is one that Hitler and his spiritual heirs are always willing to exploit. The messages behind the ban are that some people are less worthy of respect than others, that non-conformists must be compelled to conform and that people are the property of the state. Friendship Heights is not the first community to ban smoking outdoors, although it is the first to have the ban cover every square inch, and it won't be the last. In California there have been a few ultra-leftist enclaves that have enacted some sort of outdoor smoking ban, usually as a politically correct way to harass the street bums.
The perpetrator, a Manhattan limousine liberal whose vote-getting activities are illegal, was videotaped by a security officer at a homeless shelter where she was exchanging packs of cigarettes for Gore votes. A Wisconsin state representatives excepts charges to be filed.
The Wall Street Journal highlights a few of the Gore lawyers, some of whom are prominent in the tobacco settlement outrage, who are not doing so well in Florida as the Gore campaign had hoped. The massive invasion of lawyers and the attempt to win the election by shady legal maneuvers is a spectacle that should prod the Congress to reform a legal system that is out of control.
Perhaps the most despicable slander is the non-existent link between secondhand smoke and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The devastation hitting parents when their infant dies with no apparent cause is unimaginable. Despite the best of care, despite all the love, their child has died while sleeping. The guilt is acute and impossible to assuage. Anti-tobacco, through its cynical plan to demonize smokers at all costs, has promulgated the false notion that some SIDS deaths are due to secondhand smoke in the home. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has so aggressive in promoting the phony link between SIDS and ETS that the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Alliance found it necessary to reprimand ASH for its vicious smear tactics. A Canadian SIDS study, conducted between 1991 and 1997, is notable in that it doesn't mention secondhand smoke at all despite the hysteria regarding smoking and tobacco. The study does support the contention that SIDS is related to the position in which the infant sleeps. Anti-tobacco interest groups such as ASH have a lot of amends to make for their unforgivable assault upon grieving parents.
When debating California's last tax increase, the 50 cent-per-pack increase sold to the electorate by uber daddy Rob Reiner, all the shills and operatives swore that increasing a carton of cigarettes by $5.00 would not result in black markets, smuggling or violence. The media have supported that contention by keeping quiet the growing problem of strong armed robberies, the growing black market of cigarettes and the lost tax revenue to the state's general fund. The San Francisco Examiner has broken the silence with a detailed report of the consequences of special interest greed. The piece is detailed, well written and researched and, best of all, doesn't push an agenda. In San Jose, robbers broke into a warehouse, pistol whipped the owner and made off with a van filled with cartons of cigarettes. A minimum wage employee of a convenience store ends up in the hospital with a broken arm and a fractured jaw after a violent heist of 20 cartons of cigarettes. It's only a matter of time before some poor working class slob is murdered so that Rob Reiner, the American Lung Association and the other bloodsuckers can enjoy their plush offices and high salaries as they save the world for their bottom lines. A note on the quality of the Examiner's web site is in order. Until last week San Francisco had two daily newspapers, both rabidly anti-tobacco, whose stories appeared on a co-owned web site. The San Francisco Examiner was a bit more thuggish than the San Francisco Chronicle but both were wholly owned subsidiaries of the anti-tobacco enterprise. When the San Jose heist occurred, for instance, neither paper considered it worthy of coverage although both could be depended upon to report prominently any inane anti-tobacco study or Stanton Glantz fib. Last week the owners of the San Francisco Examiner took over the San Francisco Chronicle. The Examiner is now under the ownership of people who previously put out a weekly paper focused solely on local matters. The Examiner no longer shares the web site with the Chronicle and has launched its own. It needs work. If you can't read it you may wish to print it out. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "printer-friendly version". The new Examiner's web site may need work but the new owners should be congratulated for reporting a growing problem facing society due to the obscene taxes on cigarettes. |
