|
Big Brother knows what's good for you
September 14 [19:00 GMT] - We have the technology: what are we waiting for?... - Drinkers, junkies (and soon smokers): you will not escape us. We will dig you out. We make you breathe in machines, we have computers to instantly recognize your fingerprints, to know your criminal record (and even what you bought yesterday). We have cameras in the streets. We force you to pee in glasses - to make sure that you don't take the funny stuff we do not like. Now we will scan your eyes. You cannot hide anything from us, WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. You will not do what (we say) is bad for you – not even when you don’t hurt anyone, not even when you do it in the privacy of your home, alone or with others. Why? Because we are the Therapeutic State that knows what’s good for you. And we make laws that force you to do it. Sadly, up to a short time ago, we did not have the technical means to really intrude in your life the way we wanted -- but fortunately things are changing, and ever-advancing technology is coming to help. Do you remember all that old-fashioned, useless crap about moral boundaries, respect of the individual, privacy, ownership of your existence, choice, personal liberties…? Finally it is all fading away thanks to the baby-boomer generation in firm control of the situation. To the business at hand, then! Thanks to the elimination of those stupid obstacles, the Final Victory over vice and behaviour is afoot. We can check your every action, decision, choice – to make sure that you do what we say is right for you. Wake up, the social contract is changing, and we are altering the deal -- every day, unilaterally, as fast as we please. That's the way of "progress": get used to it.
And of
course we don't take away your freedom of choice, you little whining
brat!... You are always free to choose to go to jail and to pay
fines! Let's put it all together: morality is defeated, technology is in
place, and the police machine is well-oiled and all ready to be your pal. All we need is the
list of citizens to control. Let’s see… Thanks to terrorism (what a
godsend it is!)
the Constitution is being forgotten (...and what a pain in the neck that was!)
We already have drinkers and junkies firmly in hand. Fatsos and smokers are
coming along. All is proceeding well and according to plans. Imagine what a
heaven the world is becoming… no more arguments even about
whether you are tired or not: just
look into the
machine and
it’ll make the decision. Soon you’ll have just one easy
choice to make: go to sleep or go to jail. Isn’t this wonderful
progress? Readers' contributions September 14 [19:00 GMT] - It's a Shame about Australia - This reader contribution concerns a recent trip to Australia with his wife. Australia used to be a nice, free place where one could go and look forward to a future of freedom. Then the healthist cancer came - and Australia got one of the worst case of metastasis. Antitobacco is the most pronounced expression of the "health revolution" - that is, of the regression into a rough, obtuse and backwards mentality that puts the perception of health before the right to freedom, hates the joy of living and poisons it with fears - and all implemented with arrogance and fraud. Antismoking in Australia is one bad case of all that - perhaps the worst of them all. "Down Under" indeed - in every sense of the world. God help the nice, smoking people in Australia - better yet: may they learn to defend themselves. Some kids never grow
September 14
[19:00
GMT]
-
University plays babysitter to smokers
- When they were young, baby-boomers insisted on taking risks, on making
(sometimes foolish decisions) on their own, on challenging authority, and on
exploring the world on their own terms. They tried, as all young people do, to
come to terms with their own ideas about integrity and personhood, and in doing
so, they sometimes brutally refuted the ideas of their parents. Many in the
“youth revolution” had some cause for regret in the years to come, and they came
to question their early rebellion. For some, it was the beginning of wisdom. For
many others, it was the beginning of “the reactionary revolution”. September 13 [17:52 GMT] - American Cancer Society demands that the federal government funds cancer research... isn't that the job of the American Cancer Society? - Of course it is , but since the American Cancer Society is wasting all of its (and RWJF) resources on funding smoking ban efforts, even though secondhand smoke levels are 25,000 times SAFER than required (not a health hazard), ACS does not have the ability to fulfill its obligation to donors by funding cancer research, and fulfill its promise to the pharmaceutical nicotine interests at the same time....to fund smoking ban efforts. So ACS is demanding that the federal government provide funding for cancer research. (Continues on Clearing the Air)
From philosophy....
“Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco companies. But this obsession with the danger of smoking isn't as simple as it might appear.”
... to the fight for rights and human respect September 12 [14:00 GMT] - The EPA's fine particulate matter (PM2.5) standards, lung disease, and mortality – In these corrupt times, the great trick to hold on to power and money is to keep people in a constant state of alarm and hysteria. Together with the passive smoke fraud (and strictly related to it) is the fraud of atmospheric fine particles. Fine particles (PM2.5), being so small, can go deep into pulmonary alveoli. This is, however, where the knowledge ends. The actual effects of the particles on people are guessed with the old villain, multifactorial epidemiology – yes, the very same used for passive smoke. Through questionnaires and “creative interpretations” of utterly unreliable data, risk is assessed and once again – like passive smoke – we are talking about a mere 10-20% risk elevation, which is absolutely insufficient to establish that the risk is real due to the huge number of un-measurable confounders. There is no way to know - not even to have a pointer - whether fine particles constitute any danger at all for health. After all, we have been exposed to them since the dawn of time, and more in the past than in the present. On the other hand, as in the case of smoking, the social and economic cost of laws and regulation against this indemonstrable danger is no guess at all: “…the standards have cost at least $70 billion a year to implement [in the US alone!], eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, and likely have cost lives (because of the huge cost) without providing any public health benefit.” Antitobacco all over again. As long as epidemiology is portrayed and considered a legitimate “science” -- and science it is not -- a handful of professional cons armed with questionnaires and computers keeps on costing hundreds of billions a year to the world while killing liberties, industries and economy in the name of false public health. All those thousands of junk science-based laws must be replaced with just one -- that makes the use of epidemiology of this kind illegal as base for public policy. One last consideration is in order: smokers (individuals or groups) routinely point their finger at fine particles ("pollution") to show that they are the “real” (or at least a more “serious”) cause of the diseases attributed to smoking. The untold hope is that “the people” realize who the "real villain” is, go after it and leave them alone – something that obviously does not work. But once again their finger points in the wrong direction, as the real villain is multifactorial epidemiology, the devastating weapon of corrupt states and institutions. ... and more junk science!
September 12 [14:00 GMT] - And finally a study that is not trash science: Carbon monoxide may help prevent debilitating pregnancy condition; New Queen's study explains why smoking mothers less prone to pre-eclampsia - Sure, one can immediately think that we don't rate this study a junk because it shows a benefit of smoking - and during pregnancy to boot! But it's not so. This study is valid because it is an empirical one, as opposed to questionnaires and attributions. "...Tissue from the placentas of nonsmoking women who had delivered babies by caesarian section was exposed to the same kind of oxidative stress – not enough oxygen being supplied through the blood – experienced by women with pre-eclampsia. When the tissues were treated with carbon monoxide, at levels similar to those found in the blood of smoking mothers, cell death in the placenta was significantly reduced". There you go, verifiable science at work, no guesses, no questionnaires: experiment and observe the results - and smoking gets exempted! The Canadian researchers must be shaking in their boots - and in fact here comes the ever-present political caveat in a great rush: "...He stresses however that any perceived benefit of smoking during pregnancy is outweighed by the many risks: premature membrane rupture, preterm delivery, stillbirth, low birth weight, and sudden infant death syndrome". Sure, sure... but all those trash attributions are based on speculations and on - you guess it! - questionnaires on how many cigs mothers smoked, biases in data, political agendas and arbitrary attributions. This is an experimental study that can be truly replicated, and that demonstrates that smoking helps the future mother, like generations and generations of healthy children born from smoking parents have already overwhelmingly demonstrated. Incidentally, prior evidence on pre-eclampsia confirmed the reduced risk of developing it with tobacco exposure. Click here for further documentation on the multiple benefits of smoking during pregnancy. From Michael Siegel's blog September 12 [14:00 GMT] - The face of antismoking arrogance: Attorneys General hide Legacy's conflict of interest in presenting data on effectiveness of Truth Campaign - To say that antitobacco has absolutely no shame or decency is a waste of words. Not only the antismoking gangs want to interfere with the freedom of information and expression consecrated in the First Amendment; not only do they want to influence the free choice of people on smoking, but they also want to achieve that by presenting (what else is new?...) false data to hide that antitobacco advertisement does not work. If General Motors did something like that it would be faced by a multi-billion dollars law suit for false advertisement; but antismoking groups are obviously above the law. Siegel tells us the rest of the story. We only have this to add: people who exist only by lying (and are in a system that rewards them) can only lie every step of the way – to the point that they perceive their own lies as truth, and name their campaigns accordingly. September 12 [14:00 GMT] - Nicotine yield of Philip Morris cigarettes drops in 2005; [nicotine] yields of Philip Morris cigarettes have actually declined since 1997 – Nicotine contents go up! Nicotine contents go down! Anything goes to keep the antismoking gangs on the media. But – yes, you guessed already!! – that is yet another lie: “The rest of the story is that in contrast to the report, which gained widespread media attention and led to newspaper articles throughout the nation implicating Philip Morris in a scheme to increase its nicotine levels over the past seven years or so, the truth appears to be that there has been no real change in nicotine yields of Philip Morris cigarettes, including Marlboro, over the past nine years.” …Could it be that the antismokers’ zeal to “treat” us as smokers is actually a cry for help, begging us to treat them? They are obviously affected by what is called compulsive lying -- a psychiatric disorder that is more and more recognized; it seems to be related to depression. More on compulsive lying here. Could it really be that, instead of "treating" free choice, the antismokers are those who need treatment? You’ll never know: human needs manifest themselves in strange ways, sometimes. Perhaps we are hearing a desperate cry for help that smokers, media and politicians have never understood. The passive smoke fraud
HIDE THAT DATA!!! "Smoking bans are good for business... didn't you know?"
September 11
[16:45 GMT]
-
The antis are squirming over this one
- A radical anti-organization is aghast that a local newspaper forced them to
disgorge the entire contents of an air-quality “study”. From Michael Siegel's blog September 11 [16:23 GMT] - Finally an appropriate definition for the antitobacco disease! - For the first time ever to our knowledge we see an appropriate definition of the antismoking social involution: a “faith”: “…Members of Faith United Against Tobacco, a diverse coalition of clergy and lay members throughout the country, sent a letter to all Congressional candidates urging them to support legislation that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority over tobacco products. The legislation would protect kids from tobacco and save lives” reports Michael Siegel, who tells us the rest of the story (and how effortlessly many are falling into Philip Morris' trap thanks to Tobacco Free Kids). The rest of our story is even shorter: it truly takes an act of faith to fight an “epidemic” for which no one death can be scientifically demonstrated to be caused by smoking. Rather, one must have faith in fraud and junk science and be contemptuous of liberty, personal choice, freedom of information, expression, advertisement. Finally, one must believe in repression and prohibition to the point of being sick. We believe that we have described an antismoking activist sufficiently well.
September 11
[16:23 GMT]
-
Misrepresentation of
nicotine report leading to confusion
- In the last few days we have sufficiently discussed the myth of nicotine
"damages" and "addictiveness". It does not hurt to emphasize the obvious,
however: "...I didn't hear
anti-smoking groups applauding the cigarette companies for decreasing the
addictiveness of their products and making it easier for smokers to quit when
the companies substantially reduced the nicotine yields of their products over
past decades", writes Siegel. And the obvious is: anti-smoking groups
cannot and
will not applaud the cigarette companies no matter what they do because
antitobacco has
nothing to do with public health. It has to do with persecution and corrupt
public policy. It has nothing to do with debate, either. But everything to do with
war -
and in war nobody cares about what's fair or true, as long as the enemy ends up
killed. It would be nice if smokers (and the industry that supplies them) put
that through their heads - and start behaving accordingly: if one must end
up dead, better them than us.
Health Gestapo and intimidation
Profiting from the fraud September
10
[13:10
GMT]
-
RWF and Johnson & Johnson cash in on the smoking bans
- Here's how the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation and Johnson & Johnson Company now capitalize on the
smoking bans which they funded. Smoking bans are good for business... didn't you know? September 10 [13:10 GMT] - Washington, D.C.: "The smoking ban will bankrupt your business? See if we care, find another job! - There are no worlds strong enough to describe the arrogance of the antismoking enterprise. As evidence that smoking bans destroy the economy becomes irrepressible, the antitobacco scum simply gets more in your face, counting that the majority of businesses and smokers are too sheepish to seriously fight the fraud-based smoking bans. Try this for size: "[the delay is intended to] give employees a chance to make some financial accommodations, either change careers or at least have a good head start in saving some money so that once this [the smoking ban] is implemented... for them to be able to sustain themselves." See how generous they are?... They even "kindly" delay the ban so you can find another job before they bankrupt your businesses. Aren't these fraudulent bastards thoughtful - but (fraudulent) "public health" uber alles! In different times we would have called for taking to the streets, set up demonstrations and get armed with rotten eggs to throw this public trash out of office - once and for all. Today our calls are much more modest: what about the victims of antitobacco growing a pair first?...
Prohibition and antitobacco's statistical frauds |