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"When health is equated with
freedom, liberty as a political concept vanishes." January 26 [03:00 GMT] - About Dogs and Smokers - When smokers were thrown out of Washington State bars the spin masters in the press and anti-tobacco assured the public that "clean air" would draw the throngs into the establishments that depended upon smokers for survival. The throngs of nonsmokers haven't materialized but the spinners keep spinning. For the legislature comes a proposal to allow hospitality venues the option of permitting customers to bring their dogs onto the premises. As one canine enthusiast said, dog owners, if allowed to bring their pets, would be more likely to go out on the town. Oddly that same logic applied to smokers, namely they would be likelier to frequent bars and restaurants if they could smoke, is completely discounted by the behavior modification artists that now run the state. Some people truly are more equal than others as Norman Kjono observes. January 26 [03:00 GMT] - Smoking Ban Lawsuit Coming - The Northwest Pennsylvania Manufacturers Assocation announced Friday it will file a lawsuit against Erie county`s new smoking ban. The Association believes state law and the Clean Air Act give business owners the right to have dominion over their property. The group, which represents 4500 business in the Erie region, recently surveyed members. 62% believe government has no right to restrict smoking in privately owned public places and place of employment... and 57% said the association should actively oppose the newly approved legislation. That`s why the board of governors of the Manufacturers Association voted to actively oppose the ban with a lawsuit. — Jet TV Action News. War is a terrible thing. Both lives and livelihoods can be and indeed are often lost forever. What makes it even more tragic is to continually read about and see the warriors going off to battle unprepared, unarmed and, worse yet, to the wrong battlefield. As long as secondhand smoke is legally classified as a health issue there is no property over which owners have "dominion", it's that simple. Until we educate the public, our local medical professionals, and the politicians about the fraudulent use of the available studies concerning secondhand smoke, or until we legally prove in a court of law the fraudulent of the use of the studies concerning secondhand smoke, it will remain "legally classified" as a "health issue". Let's look at the "rights" issue a little. That is certainly an important consideration and under proper circumstances property rights, as well as all other right" should be taken very seriously. Were ETS to actually present the extraordinary health risks that anti-tobacco activists claim, however, bingo halls and state-run casinos would have no more “right” to permit it in their establishments than they have a right to serve tainted food or contaminated drinking water. When it comes to addressing well-documented and certain health risks that are credibly proven by legitimate science, public health departments are properly granted very strong powers of inspection and enforcement. Should there be a breakout of typhoid the Health Departments would quite properly demand that the business owner repair an open cess-pool behind his establishment. Were the drinking water in a bar to be shown to include dangerous bacteria well above established limits that bar would be required to fix the problem or close the doors. Any bar or tavern owner who refused to do so because they had “rights” would properly be cited and then closed down if they persisted in refusing to address that threat to public health. Asserting business owner “rights” without addressing the lack of genuine risk from ETS in a meaningful way is to advocate irresponsible public health anarchy. In effect, those who oppose smoking bans based exclusively on business owner or consumers rights are saying loud and clear to the public that they demand their “right” to persist in maintaining a direct and immediate threat to public health because it will cost them money to abate the threat. Is it any wonder the pro smokers cannot garner public support? The struggle for freedom can only be won by disproving the science being used, only then can our "rights" arguments become valid. To address one issue you must address the other. Establishing Second Hand Smoke as a "health issue" is what the anti tobacco extremists have done. We must reverse this, using legitimate science, before we can argue our "rights". Fighting the smoking bans based on 'rights' will never win on its own merit; as the last ten years have repeatedly proven. January 25 [03:30 GMT] - Salt reduction demanded - A bossy, so-called health promotion group demands that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) limit the amount of salt that can be used in meat and poultry products. In this press release dressing itself up as news, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) huffily demands that the USDA remove salt from the list of substances "generally recognized as safe." CSPI wants salt to be treated as a food additive, a typical distortion of reality that is common to health pressure groups. The CSPI, which is made up of people who haven't worked a day in a legitimate business, assures consumers that food products will be just as tasty using the amount of salt the group deems sufficient. Just as restaurant and bar owners are judged by the elite as too stupid to run their own businesses by catering to the customer base they wish to attract, often smokers, so too food purveyors are too dim to be trusted with keeping their customers happy. CSPI is happy to run other people's business without assuming any of the risk. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is supported financially by a pharmaceutical front group so this organization doesn't have to worry about where its next pay check will be coming from. January 25 [03:30 GMT] - Bowing to the pressure group - To great fanfare and an orgy of self-congratulation San Francisco years ago banned cigarette ads that were near schools. That law was gutted by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling but the politician responsible for the now empty ban ran on it and eventually became mayor. When he was railing against the evil cigarette he was asked whether he would ever enact a similar law prohibiting alcohol advertising from the city's streets. The cynical chuckled when he said he would and weren't surprised when he didn't follow through since he made his living in part by selling alcohol. Puritanism, however, is relentless and the days of alcohol advertising are coming to an end on city property such as buses, subway stations and bus shelters. As usual there is no groundswell of hostility to booze ads. The new policy, which will cost the city big bucks, is in response from complaints of one anti-alcohol organization that isn't even located in San Francisco. That's how it works, the shrieking special interest group, funded by pharmacy money, gets its way at the expense of the people whose taxes keep the city running January 24 [02:00 GMT] - Poor Pfizer - Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is closing plants and laying of thousands off workers. Quel dommage. The company's latest problems coincide with its halting development of a cholesterol drug but its malaise runs deeper than one aborted attempt to foist yet another drug upon the public. Pfizer, through subsidiaries, is a big time player in the smoking cessation rackets and recently introduced a nicotine receptor blocker, a product that appears designed to ensnare the smoker who believes that nicotine is bad. Other smokers are offered a panoply of produces infused with "good" pharmaceutical nicotine. The bottom line for all these nostrums is explained by Norman Kjono who has studied the mercantile machinations of anti-tobacco extensively. January 24 [02:00 GMT] - Race to the bottom - Not a week goes by without a municipality upping the ante in the high-stakes poker game to prove who hates smokers most. Political mediocrities who are medium-sized frogs in small ponds are realizing that bludgeoning smokers is a guaranteed means to get one's name in the newspapers. Bangor Maine is not a city that often encroaches on the public conscience but last week we all read how the city council there passed a law forbidding drivers from smoking in their own cars if there are any passengers less than 18 years of age. Dr. Michael Siegel, himself an advocate of tobacco control, is a bit nonplussed at the over-heated rhetoric from the Bangor ruling class, as well as from the cheerleaders in tobacco control. If, as the car-ban proponents say they believe, banning smoking in the presence of children while driving "trumps all other arguments" or "[banning car smoking] isn’t about civil liberties at all. It’s about protecting children’s health" or Bangor is "a community where the health of its kids doesn’t take a back seat to the bad habits of their parents" why oh why hasn't smoking been banned in homes where children reside? Nonplussed actually may be too gentle a word to describe Siegel's opinion of the Bangor politicians and their cohorts in anti-tobacco. After years immersed in the hypocrisy of a movement that has lost its bearing, Siegel now calls such nonsense what it is; crap.
January 24
[02:00
GMT]
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Baghdad can smoke – but not Obama?
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Quick quiz. Is smoking nowadays perceived as:
If the question applies to ordinary citizens, the only socially acceptable answer is of course C. If you’re a politician being groomed for a presidential run (yes, we’re talking about Barack Obama), A, B, D, or E may apply, especially if you’re a Democrat. When it comes to choosing who the next president will be, the person who will help decide the fate of the American nation and the course of the Iraq mess (where second-hand smoke as a public health hazard is ... down the list of concerns), it’s important to agonize about whether or not the candidate smokes and what that means. As far as we’re concerned, reports that Obama did a yes-I’m-sinner-but-I’m-working-on-it turn over the smoking issue makes him instantly less interesting. With all of the really important issues that the electorate should be focusing on, he had an opportunity to point out that that’s what people should be doing. Instead he followed the grim fashion of unnecessarily apologizing for himself. Doesn’t sound like breathtakingly refreshing new leadership potential to us. January 23 [03:15 GMT] - False information from antitobacco and its lying spin machine, once again – “A reanalysis of nicotine yield from major brand name cigarettes sold in Massachusetts from 1997 to 2005 has confirmed that manufacturers have steadily increased the levels of this agent in cigarettes… (MDPH) … found that increases in smoke nicotine yield per cigarette averaged 1.6 percent each year, or about 11 percent over a seven-year period (1998-2005). Nicotine is the primary addictive agent in cigarettes.” As Michael Siegel exhaustively explains this umpteenth piece of antitobacco straightforward false information, we are facing the usual tricks and false “alarm”. The “alarm” itself is ridiculous even if it were true, for nicotine is a harmless substance. Yes-yes, they say that it is addictive and they want you to believe that if nicotine were taken out of cigarettes you would basically quit smoking. Don’t believe that for an instant. In fact people smoke for the taste, the pleasure, the ritual and the wonderful power of socialization between smokers that tobacco always had since pre-Columbian times. People choose to smoke. But all that is to be disregarded as these linear-minded idiots want you to believe that you smoke only because of nicotine - that's right, the very same nicotine that removes addiction when you buy it from Big Pharma! It must be kept in mind that the less the nicotine, the more you smoke – to the point that in England the Select Committee on Tobacco and Health (SCOTH) has recommended for the past several years that cigarette producers maintain or increase the proportion of nicotine in the smoke. That is also exactly what the US Institute of Medicine said in 2003 in the voluminous report “Clearing the Smoke: Assessing the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction”, National Academy Press – a report that has been utterly ignored by corrupt and irresponsible “public health authorities” and their buddies antismoking the pharma-activists because it is contrary to the fraudulent and never-ending stream of misinformation on nicotine and smoking. Equally ignored are the beneficial effects of smoking, established with the same questionable epidemiology that claims a “scientific” link between smoking and cancer. Either it is all true or it is all false. The health “authorities” should pick one and say it all – but that is ridiculous in itself because it presumes that the institutions of “public health” are not populated and controlled by incompetent crooks. In conclusion, not only is the latest blast against the tobacco industry utterly false, but unfortunately so – for a lot of nicotine in cigarettes keeps you from smoking lots of them, and inhaling what it is said (without scientific proof) to cause disease. January 23 [03:15 GMT] - Enriching Big Drugs for your own good - So you want to stop smoking. Bully for you! You will join society's elect, but only if you quit in the correct way. Forget about "going cold turkey", the method responsible for the highest quit rates. Better to follow the exhortation of anti-smoking organizations who will direct you to your local drug store so that you can exchange nicotine supplier from Big Tobacco to the pharmaceutical industry. Nicotine is nicotine, right? Not quite since Big Drugs charges far more than Big Tobacco for a jolt of nicotine. Be aware, as is Dr. Gagliano, that plunging into the world of cessation devices means that your chance of successfully quitting are far less than if you just stopped smoking. January 23 [03:15 GMT] - The Collective Imbecile - From a Brazilian perspective, philosopher Olavo de Carvalho offers a provocative commentary on the failure of intellectual culture (with the consequent degeneration of more general public debate) that we are experiencing everywhere today. Ideas win followers by affective contagion, and once they become dominant they do not even need to display a pretension for truthfulness. They possess a better argument: the force of numbers that spreads the fear of isolation (vaguely identified with misery and madness) in the souls of the recalcitrant ones. Underneath the festive adherence to the new intellectual fashions, the persuasive machinery of psychological terror gloomily creaks on. These are the dominant tendencies in the scientific and philosophical debate of today’s world. January 23 [03:15 GMT] - The dose makes the poison - One of the dichotomies of our culture is that as society becomes more hysterically prissy it is simultaneously attaining a degree of vulgarity that would shock and dismay previous generations who smoked cigarettes everywhere and enjoyed a stiff cocktail with lunch. From California, the vortex of hypochondria and crudity comes a sad tale of juvenile radio jocks who ran a stupid contest that resulted in the death of a young mother of three. The premise of the stunt was to induce a gaggle of greedy materialists into drinking as much water as possible to win a video game. After downing more than two gallons of water the young mother died. She didn't win the video game. A terrible story of water intoxication and heads rolled at the radio station in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable lawsuits. Of interest to this site is the undeniable fact that ingesting water led to a premature death. This was not a statistically generated death, like the secondhand smoke deaths hawked by anti-tobacco con artists. The contestant would be alive had the contest consisted of people chain smoking for as long as the guzzled the water that killed one of them. Anti-tobacco delights in enumerating the "cancer-causing" agents in tobacco smoke and boy are some of them scary-sounding. Drinking quantities of some of them would lead to illness and perhaps death. Of course in the minute amounts contained in a cigarette or even in hundreds of cartons of cigarettes no harm will come to the smoker, let alone the nearby non-smoker. Banning smoking in office buildings, restaurants and bars makes as much sense as banning water, even though water actually can kill. January 22 [03:45 GMT] - Separating trans fat from fiction - It’s clear that the trans fat prohibitionists haven’t at all established their case that trans fat is dangerous. So why the ban? Is it then merely a politically opportunistic response to public pressure? Not at all. Most people apparently don’t give a damn. So if neither public health concerns nor political pressures provide a reason for the ban movement, why is there a ban movement? The next couple of items may yield some clues. Discrimination January 22 [03:45 GMT] - Lucky Susan Paynter - One of the charms of tobacco control is how it deludes itself by seeing itself as a benign force for good. Actually only the lower echelons see it in that light for the ones who run tobacco control know damn well that they are in this racket for the money and power it brings them. Susan Paynter is a useful idiot who is not only deluded about the true nature of tobacco control but who is incapable of examining life outside her narrow prejudices and circle of friends just as blind as herself. Nuances are not for the Susan Paynter's of the world but for a nuanced view of anti-tobacco bigotry we can go to Norman Kjono who derives much amusement from watching a soi-disant progressive cheerfully betray any truly progressive thoughts or emotions that rattle around a vacant brain. Smoking bans are good for business January 22 [03:45 GMT] - Fat chance - It is highly unlikely a smoking ban will be lifted for the "big game" day because, as a "health issue", second hand smoke must be treated the same as e-coli. Would businesses be granted permission to serve food tainted with e-coli for the "big game" day, just to make some extra bucks? Whether innocently ignorant or apathetic, these business owners would rather see a statewide ban to "level the playing field" than oppose the fraudulent use of the studies done on secondhand smoke. That is unfortunate, as stopping the fraudulent use of these studies would also stop the fraudulent use of studies in a lot of other areas of major concern, from trans-fats to gun control, from forced vaccines of minors and adults to forced mental health evaluations and much more. Tobacco Control January 22 [03:45 GMT] - They never apologise, they pretend to explain - In Casablanca, the classic movie starring Ingrid Berman and Humphrey Bogard, the representative of the craven Vichy regime, Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains, gets a hearty laugh when he professes to be shocked (shocked!) that gambling is going on in a gambling joint. Renault's world-weary cynicism would be a welcome addition to today's culture where absurd impossibilities are regularly promoted by a health regime every bit as corrupt as Vichy during World War II. Anne MacDiarmid plays Captain Renault to a tobacco control advocate whose naivety seems indestructible.
Junk Science and Propaganda January 22 [03:45 GMT] - Anthropogenic climate change or faith-based global warming - You would have to be living under a rock to have missed last month's endless recitation of how warm this winter has been in the Northeast part of the United States. Such unseasonable weather was judged proof that man is heating up the globe, leading to a fiasco of Biblical proportions. Never mind that the Intermountain West was buried under deep snow or that central Utah was seeing the lowest temperatures it had seen in decades. The warmth duly fled the Northeast but the canards keep quacking. From frigid Maine comes a true-believer who fires up the faithful with a global warming sermon that would be laughable if the media and the cowardly politicians didn't get all their information from just this sort of zealot. Most of the comments from readers are far more valuable than the article itself. Moving on to zany California we are treated to a precious bit of hubris that makes all the global warming gloom and doom truly delicious. On California's efforts to cut so-called greenhouse gasses and thereby halt man-made global warming, the governor waxed eloquent:
"We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta," [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger, who played Hercules in his first film role, told legislators at the capitol. "Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there." — Reuters, Jan. 9 One week later the city-state was crying uncle and bringing out the begging bowl: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the federal government Tuesday for disaster aid because of an ongoing cold snap that has destroyed nearly $1 billion worth of California citrus. . . . Visiting a Fresno orange grove, Schwarzenegger said he was asking the U.S. government for disaster status, which would allow California to seek aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Small Business Administration to offset losses to growers and other businesses." — Associated Press, Jan. 16 How it works January 22 [03:45 GMT] - Smoking bans, class warfare and plain old power struggles - Now that it has become abundantly clear that the anti-smoking movement is not really that interested in public health per se, people are starting to wonder about why the ban juggernaut keeps on rolling. Brooke Oberwetter, a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who helped lead the Ban-the-Ban organization opposing the Washington, DC smoking ban, offers some interesting comments on the issue of smoking bans, class warfare and plain old power politics. Governments and activists do things because it is worth their while, whether the booty be in money, votes, power, or some other gain. Thus, group warfare — be it the promotion of one’s class, race, sexual lifestyle, age cohort, religion or whatever — is always “the point.” Indeed, I never really understood the term “identity politics.” It’s all identity politics. Paternalism is just a friendly way of talking about it.
January 22
[03:45 GMT]
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The Drama of the Day -
As
an Anti Smoker Advocate, if you can fuel the hysteria, you are worth your money.
Whether it makes sense, just doesn’t matter. A nice example came up today:
Nicotine levels in
Higher nicotine levels in cigarettes can’t spread any “pandemic”. They are not even dangerous. They reduce the amount of potentially harmful substances you need to inhale for the same amount of nicotine. And that’s quite a useful health measure, isn’t it? Of course time and time again the anti-tobacco gangsters enact policies that run counter to true public health. Reducing nicotine in cigarettes, which is the goal of this so-called study, would, by anti-tobacco's own research, be harmful to the public. It would, however, benefit anti-tobacco's big-money patrons, the international pharmaceutical compaies.
January 22
[03:45 GMT]
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If facts don’t work – try it with emotion - The European Commission presented a new advertising campaign – to
be broadcast on 80 TV channels throughout all 27 member states of the European
Union:
The new advertising
campaign focuses on the negative health effects of passive smoking. The advert
depicts a young adolescent experiencing breathing difficulties in her daily
activities, and shows her watching her parents smoking in the living room.
January 22
[03:45 GMT]
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Lighting up in the home 'could cost you your life' - It’s great
to know that your government – in this special case the
LET'S GO TO THE (FORCES) MOVIES
But there is more - much more. In these movies not only is the bad guy the non smoker, but drinkers drink without guilt, eaters eat without warning labels, cars are driven without safety belts and without the terror of radar/laser speed traps. The sexiest women have a cigarette in their mouth, a glass of whiskey on one hand and the head of their lovers on the other. Men kiss them like real men -- no worries about "harmful" fumes from their mouths. And - most important of all - there are no no-smoking signs, and the sinister cultural aberration they represent. You will see a free and guilt-free world - the way it was, the way it should be, and the way it can be again. Young people - perhaps with surprise - will discover that when there was no health and safety paranoia life went on anyway - and it was better, much better. Why? Because the ministry of environment's job (if it existed) was that of keeping the roads clean, and the function of the ministries of "health" was to stay out of politics, control contagious diseases and keep public kitchens and toilets clean - exactly what "public health" is cut out to do. To have such an adult world back, wouldn't it be worth to give up some month of (statistical) life after the age of 77? Here is a little teaser: a scene from "Farewell My Lovely" that should be an inspiration for all smokers on how to deal with the anti-smokers.
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