A day or so back, in respect of claims that smoking causes lung cancer, MikeF commented:
The battle against Tobacco Control is a two front war. Fighting ONLY about secondhand smoke concedes the LARGER battle – and that, I submit, can only lead to the loss of the war.
I entirely agree.
Here are a couple of good examples of how to lose the war. In the first one the author, who teaches philosophy, sets out his stall thus:
The most widely cited reasons for regulating smoking are the obvious health concerns. We have heard the statistics about the dangers of smoking. No one can plausibly claim today that smoking is a harmless pastime…
He returns to the theme again shortly afterwards.
We must grant that smoking is bad. We must also acknowledge that passive smoke is bad. It is not, however, the proper function of law to root out things because they are bad. Law is best confined to keeping people from violating one another’s individual rights…
And, for good measure, once again:
This issue is not how bad smoking is. The badness is assumed. Just because you are doing something bad does not mean that people have a right to stop you, even if that conduct hurts them. Not all harms are rights violations.
It’s rights that matter most. People have got rights, and so he discusses rights briefly:
These things, “rights”: what are they? We might have a murky sense of what they are, but it is hard to pin down, because they are not physical things that you can measure or hold in your hand.
Yes, it is difficult, isn’t it, when you can’t hold things in your hand? I know the feeling.
Anyway, smoking is bad, bad, and bad, but people have got rights. Even if you can’t pin them down, or measure them, or hold them in your hand.
The second one is by a leftist antismoker.
Let me clarify my own status in this picture. I’m a former smoker, one who has been smoke-free for a dozen years and has no residual desire to take it up again. I don’t like to be in the presence of smoking and don’t allow it in my home. Nonetheless, I question the fervour against smokers and wondered at the truth behind the stories we’re told…
He thinks that secondhand (and thirdhand) smoke health risks are exaggerated. He complains that Big Pharma are preventing e-cigarettes from being used. Nevertheless he reiterates:
Smoking is bad for you. That’s well established. Whether it’s as bad as is claimed is open to question, but the basic fact that smoking tobacco is harmful is pretty much open and shut.
He even discovers several health benefits of smoking. But just in case you thought he might be a getting a tiny bit sympathetic to the filthy habit, he again reiterates:
Should a non-smoker start smoking? Of course not. However, since we’ve seen the dishonesty in studies funded directly or indirectly by Big Pharma, we should be questioning the validity of most of the anti-smoking pseudo-science that’s out there. Certainly we’re likely to find that smoking is harmful, but the question should be put in focus. If it’s bad, just how bad?
He ends by relating it back to socialism. Socialists, he tells us, have great respect for science. Even, unfortunately, if it’s bad science conducted by Pharma companies, which are driven by a capitalist lust for profit.
And we must never, ever, get self-righteous or allow the craven lust for profits to manipulate science, and thereby us, so that we vilify the victims and make the wrong choices in resolving problems—as seems clear is happening now to smokers.
If these guys were lawyers representing the accused in a murder trial, they would probably have stood before the jury, and declared:
“My client is a very, very bad man. There can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever about that. And I must say that I don’t personally like him one bit myself, even if he is my client. And he stinks to high heaven too. But you the jury must set aside his sheer, revolting, irremediable badness, and his awful smell, along with his untrustworthiness, and his dishonesty, and his many other character defects, and ask yourself, ‘Could someone that bad have possibly driven a stake through the heart of Chester Ames III on the night of 17 January last year?’ And if you do think so, then even though he’s a very bad man, he’s still got rights. We can’t hold these rights in our hands, or weigh them or measure them. We can’t pin them down with, erm, …stakes. But we’ve still got them, just like we’ve got minds and souls and dreams and bank accounts. It may have been a bad, bad, bad thing to do, but − even if he did do it, and I have no doubt he was fully capable of doing it − my client had a perfect right to drive a stake through the heart of Chester Ames III that night, because he did it − if he did it − in the privacy of his own home. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.”
Somehow or other, I don’t think the jury would have been persuaded. I think that once the accused had been described by his own lawyer as a very bad man, some of them might have thought that was sufficient reason in itself to send him to death row, regardless of whether he killed Chester Ames or not. And they may well have also concluded that he had no rights either. Or didn’t deserve any.
I’m no trial lawyer, but I don’t think I would have gone about defending my client by immediately conceding that he was a very bad man, and fully capable of driving a stake through anybody’s heart at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t seem quite like the right way to kick off a defence, somehow.
But I guess that’s just me.
Frank Davis 
Frank, to at least some extent I disagree with you and MikeF (and, I’m guessing, a number of others) on this point.
Why?
Two reasons really:
1) Unless you’re stronger than your enemy, or at least his equal, you need to hit him at his weakest point. Secondhand (and, even more so, the thirdhand etc nonsense) is his weakest point: a lot of people have doubts about whether the Antis are telling the truth about it and it’s very easy for us to show, quite convincingly and from a number of different angles, that they are lying.
2) Never shoot above the heads of your audience. 95% of the population believes strongly that smoking is both very bad for one’s health AND is a proven and major cause of lung cancer. Whether that’s true or not is totally irrelevant when it comes to fighting smoking bans: it can be COMPLETELY true… and yet smoking bans be COMPLETELY unjustified.
So I see spending energy fighting that particular battle to be a detraction from our strength and energy that we simply can’t afford at this point. It’s a MUCH harder battle to fight, and we’re barely getting by with the skin of our teeth even fighting the battle of secondhand smoke, a battle where we’ve got a lot more public sympathy (heh, still not great: probably about 60-80% of the population buys the ETS junk almost as much as they do the primary smoking stuff), and a battle where we’ve got a lot more in the way of juicy fraudulent targets to aim at.
In a war there might be a big strong citadel that built to withstand cannon fire and we’re the rabble with slingshots. We’re wasting our stones on that citadel EVEN THOUGH it might be true that conquering it would immediately open up the rest of the countryside. As the underdogs we need to seek out their poorly defended fronts and attack those areas and “gain land.” As we gain land, just as in war, we gain the respect and support of the populace (Since they see a chance that we might “win” and everyone wants to be on the “winning side” of things.) Fortunately for us, there’s a whole BUNCH of very poorly defended territory out there for us to attack and make gains on … and I think personally that it’s THOSE areas we need to concentrate on at this point. The citadel is just too entrenched: we could have the Pope, the Chief Mullah, and the Dalai Lama ALL agree that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer… and they’d be laughed at.
Final thought: Never give your enemies an excuse to portray you as ridiculous: in today’s world, NO MATTER WHAT THE TRUTH MIGHT BE, to say that smoking itself is not bad for one’s health is immediately perceived by the VAST majority of the population as being ridiculous. And once they’ve landed you in that corner, they’ll simply dismiss everything else you say as babble. And then no one will hear your other messages — the ones on secondhand smoke, or the pubs closing, or the harms of bans, or the ways the “Study Of The Day” is always twisted, etc etc. Those are all messages we are good at delivering and can deliver very successfully, because we DEFINITELY know what we’re talking about.
OK… sorry to have gone on so long, and I know and am happy to accept that others disagree with me, but dem be mah thoughts!
– MJM
Good points.
But it slightly seems like a counsel of despair. We’re weak, and we’re losing, so we can’t afford to attack the citadel. So we must confine ourselves to hit-and-run attacks on patrols.
But then, if the citadel is the centre from which the patrols emerge and to which they return, then there’s no possibility that you’ll ever win, because you’re not taking on the root source of the problem. The patrols are going to just keep on coming. You still lose, but a bit more slowly than if you just surrendered right now.
And do we have to use the lowest common denominator? Do we have to pander to our audience’s prejudices?
And how weak are we anyway? We are perhaps only as weak as we have persuaded ourselves that we are weak.
Never give your enemies an excuse to portray you as ridiculous
I don’t mind looking ridiculous. I’m not concerned with appearances. I’m concerned with the truth, even if the truth might seem ridiculous to some people.
It’s the antismokers who are concerned with appearances. Everything they do is about appearances. They do the appearance of research to produce the appearance of figures which appear to show whatever they want them to show. It’s all illusion. If we concern ourselves with appearances, with illusions, we’re just playing their game. And we don’t need to do that.
Good response, but let me continue from it. Sticking with the military analogy, what you’re really doing is grabbing back the countryside that slipped away from you when you were even weaker and were unorganized. (Which, over the last 15 years or so, we have been.) And as you regain that countryside you gain the strength of the population that comes along with it… a certain percentage who, realizing that you’ve got some winning points, begin to wonder if indeed the citadel itself IS vulnerable.
The looking ridiculous doesn’t matter at all in terms of “the enemy” — just in terms of the perceptions of those you’re trying to communicate with. The entrenched state can pull out its bullhorn as much as it wants and yell “Don’t pay any attention to them folks. They’re idiot rabble rousers and they’re crazy and they can’t win.” But if that’s ALL they can do, and MEANWHILE you’re adding square mile by square mile to your wins in the countryside, the population will ignore the State and its bullhorn.
You can’t completely ignore appearances when you’re trying to win the hearts and minds of the population: appearances can be more important than reality sometimes: the Antismokers KNOW this, and that’s why they fight on that battlefield all the time. Stanton Glantz will get up and say “Parents are avoiding taking their kids to the movies if the movies have smoking in them.” Absolutely ridiculous assertion. But over most of the last ten years that he’s been making it we haven’t had enough of a shot at the microphone to show it’s ridiculous. The end result? Parents begin believing that indeed, that IS the way they’re supposed to behave, and therefore they DO start to behave that way.
The Antis have a God complex, a belief that they can make ANYTHING a reality simply by SAYING it’s a reality. To a great extent that’s been true throughout the 90s and early 2000s because they had no opposition (tobacco companies and bars were helpless against them: waving empty wallets in the air loses every time when the opposition is waving dead babies.) If you’re going to win a war you need to give the appearance that you have a solid chance of winning the war, and, at least at this point, there is no way in Hades we could convince more than a minute minute portion of the population that we could win a war based on smoking being harmless. So therefore… I believe in not even fighting over on that battlefront: hit the Antis at their clearest, simplest, weakest lies… the lies that people know in their hearts might be lies.
Note how, on the message boards, they will always conflate smoking and secondhand smoke exposure, trying to portray them as the same thing. They do that because they know they’ve got 95% of the population firmly in their pocket regarding beliefs on smoking. The Antis would love NOTHING so much as to see us fighting them on that battlefield: they’re strong enough that EVEN IF our side was correct in such an argument we have no chance of beating them on it right now. There’s a reason guerillas use guerilla tactics in a war rather than spending all their resources on a tank: that tank ain’t worth beans against the battalion of tanks the enemy has. You don’t start buying tanks until you have enough support to buy a number equal to what your enemy has.
(Heh… we what Iearned while studying for my Peace Studies degree?)
– MJM
Sticking with the military analogy
It’s a bit more than an analogy. We are actually fighting a real war here. And it behooves us to think in military terms.
You can’t completely ignore appearances when you’re trying to win the hearts and minds of the population: appearances can be more important than reality sometimes
The war, as I see it, is the war between smokers and Tobacco Control. It’s a war of mutual annihilation. Either they annihilate us, or we annihilate them.
So in my view this is not about “winning the hearts and minds of the population” any more than it is ever part of military intention. It’s a peripheral concern. The principal goal of military operations is to defeat your enemy. Everything else is secondary. And the primary goal of our military enterprise must be the complete destruction of Tobacco Control. And it must be that from the outset, even if we aren’t quite sure how to achieve that goal.
Because I really don’t care what Mr and Mrs Joe Average might think of me, while I’m fighting for my own survival. I’m not looking to win Oscars for some performance. Because this isn’t a movie, and it isn’t a TV reality show either.
I believe in not even fighting over on that battlefront: hit the Antis at their clearest, simplest, weakest lies… the lies that people know in their hearts might be lies.
Are they the weakest lies? They’re lies that are relying upon the central ‘citadel’ lie. They’re only as strong as it is. And the central lie is not really very strong at all. In fact it’s arguably the first and weakest lie of all.
There’s a reason guerillas use guerilla tactics in a war rather than spending all their resources on a tank: that tank ain’t worth beans against the battalion of tanks the enemy has.
And maybe that they can’t afford to buy tanks. Guerrillas wrong-foot their enemies by refusing to fight on their enemies’ chosen battlefields with their enemies’ chosen weapons.
Oddly enough, I was reading earlier about a piece of military history which is maybe a bit relevant. When the Japanese invaded many Pacific islands in WW2, they made Rabaul in the northeast corner of New Britain (didn’t know there was a new one!) into one of their main Pacific bases, along with the Truk lagoon further north. And as I was reading about when US forces captured first one island and then another, I kept waiting for them to re-capture Rabaul. I waited and waited and waited. Eventually, the answer emerged: they never did re-capture Rabaul. They skipped past it, and simply let it remain in Japanese hands. Rabaul only surrendered when Japan itself surrendered. And it was found to contain 70,000 Japanese troops, uselessly cut off (and quite probably starving) from a war that had simply gone round them. And that’s a good example of when you don’t attack a citadel.
Because the US instead concentrated on attacking the real citadel: Japan itself. They didn’t bother with the Rabaul extension. Maybe not even the Truk extension either (although I don’t know about that one).
To continue with my earlier comment, the ‘citadel’ doctrine that smoking causes lung cancer really is the root of the problem, because notions of supposed secondhand and thirdhand smoking dangers are simply slight extensions of that core firsthand smoke doctrine. And while that doctrine remains in place, unquestioned, it’s always going to be possible for them to run little extensions (or ‘patrols’) out of it, in any direction they like.
Once people were made to believe that smoking causes lung cancer, they could be got to believe anything at all that was a slight variation on the same idea. And that’s why I think that it’s the citadel that must be attacked, not the extensions of it.
Damn good post, MJM – but we still need to sow doubts somehow. Tricky though it is, we need to be able to respond to the statement, “My acquaintance died at the age of 53 from lung cancer because of smoking” with the response, “My acquaintance is still alive, and has not died from lung cancer, at the age of 93, despite smoking”. Only in that way will we get people to realise that individual responses matter. Only in that way will we show that ‘lifestyle epidemiology’ is meaningless at the level of individuals.
We see this failure in the following way:
Despite the certitude of Doll’s Doctors Study, the fact is that only 1,000 of the deaths of the doctors studied (out of 25,000 deaths) were due to lung cancer, even though smoking doctors were 4 times more numerous than non-smoking doctors. Thus, the really important question is why was it that so few smoking doctors got lung cancer, and why did the ones that did get LC do so? It could just as easily be inferred that the non-smoking doctors had a genetic aversion to tobacco smoke.
And what about the failure of Tobacco Control to bring forward evidence that smoking causes LC in the McTear Case? We ‘tobacco zealots’ have no power to emphasis that decision, but tobacco companies do have the power. Why have they not been broadcasting it far and wide?There is something really odd about that.
I fear that there is collusion between tobacco companies and tobacco control. That would explain the arrogance of tobacco control. Tobacco Control militates against comepetition.
“notions of supposed secondhand and thirdhand smoking dangers are simply slight extensions of that core firsthand smoke doctrine.” Frank, *if* the extensions were “slight” then I’d agree with you. But we both know they’re NOT slight… they’re crazy extensions. And people can SEE that craziness.
Hmmm… to move to a political rather than a military analogy: Say the President is totally corrupt and has hired a whole circle of corrupt advisors, but, despite that, the President is immensely popular. In a situation like that, you do NOT attack the President… because no one will listen to you. Instead you attack the advisors… the ones that people generally feel are a bit slimy to begin with. As you bring down more and more of the advisors then people begin to realize that the rot MUST be coming from SOMEwhere…. and that that somewhere must be the President!
Only when you’ve reached that point (and I think it’s a point where we have been making steady progress toward even while losing a lot of ban battles) THEN you can attack the core of the rot itself if you think you have a good attack.
Why do I think we’re making that progress: just in the past year or two we’ve begun winning more local battles, and there have been more voices on newsboards and in newspaper editorials questioning the need for things like outdoor smoking bans. The Antis have overextended themselves and there’s no way for them to retrench. They WILL lose a lot of their territory over the next few years. If they lose their funding along with the territory then they’ll collapse altogether: the fuel for their tank is green.
– MJM
Frank, *if* the extensions were “slight” then I’d agree with you. But we both know they’re NOT slight…
Well, I might know that, and so might you, but does everybody else? Because once you’ve accepted that smoking harms people who smoke, then surely it’s not too hard to argue that smoking harms not just smokers, but everyone around them? And they get 1/10th or 1/100th of the killing toxins in smoke. And in that sense, it is only a slight extension on the underlying claim.
Anyway, I agree that they’re over-extended. Much like the Japanese in Rabaul, or the Germans at Stalingrad.
(and at this point I think I need to return to my regularly scheduled programming for the evening here… I’m being a bad boy and playing hooky when I’ve got obligations to meet! :> ) I’ll check back tomorrow though… and maybe a few others will have weighed in!
:)
MJM
I must to bed.
Grantz and Simple Simon are inquisitors. They are persecutors. They want to STERILIZE smokers, and they use silly ‘lifestyle’ epidemiology studies to justify the sterilisation.
“Sterilize”: “to make bugfree”.
On the one hand, it seems as though people (mostly nonsmokers, btw) who want to defend smokers or protest the over-reaching crap of the Ants, feel they need to concede the point that most of their “audience” agrees with (perhaps to establish trust) before they can go on. In a way, it’s almost like a Sanity Test. (Do you know what year it is? Who’s the president of the United States? Do you think smoking’s “bad”?). W/o proving their “sanity” by agreeing that smoking is a Terrible Thing, they’d be, or fear they’d be, dismissed as nuts. I also note that a lot of them begin with, “I’ve never smoked and I hate the smell of smoke, but…” Thus “proving” their own niceness, objectivity (no addled addict-speak HERE) as well as their sanity
HOWEVER
I disagree strongly with MJM that we ourselves should make those concessions, When in doubt, punt. Sidestep. Don’t engage. If the subject has to do with SHS and someone brings up the subject of smokING, just say, that’s another subject, let’s get back to the point. If you absolutely have to deal with it, zigzag to the concepts of risk v. cause; to Gary K’s kind of stats or the fact that 92% of smokers DON’T EVER get lung cancer, I’d avoid making a categorical “no it doesn’t” statement (fall the sanity test and lose the rest of your points) but it’s also possible to start to cast doubts in the form of questions.
Must say that I really did LOL at the defense attorney’s summation.
In a way, it’s almost like a Sanity Test.
It’s the same with global warming, pretty much. You’re deemed insane if you disagree. Only with global warming there’s far more scepticism than with smoking. Nevertheless, they’re trying the same thing there.
Personally, I couldn’t give a hoot whether I passed any of their sanity tests or not.
“with global warming there’s far more scepticism than with smoking”
Yes, but to reiterate a point I made elsewhere in this thread: if the internet had been around at the time of publication of the Doctors study (and other comtemporary ones), and given the then total acceptance of smoking, do you not think that the scepticism would have been at least as great as the AGW scam?
Doubtless we would have witnessed the energence of the 1950s equivalents of McIntyre and McKitrick, Watts etc and the rest, as they say, might have been history!
Oh sure, I agree. If the internet had been around, it would probably have got nowhere. And yet there were critics and sceptics back the 1950s. Sir Ronald Fisher was a rather prominent one, who even wrote a book about it. But Fisher died in the 1960s, and Tobacco Control just kept repeating what you’ve found in the Telegraph. And it was their message, driven no doubt by funds from big foundations, that gradually suffused throughout society, and became an ‘established fact’.
The thing that puzzles me about the 1950s is that Ronald Fisher was a friend of Bradford Hill. So it all seems to have been a rather good-humoured disagreement. That is no longer the case, however.
Sticking with the military analogy
“In a war there might be a big strong citadel that built to withstand cannon fire and we’re the rabble with slingshots”
Faced with such a problem in the old days, we used to undermine it, so that all their defences came to naught and the mighty edifice they had created crumbled about their ears.
For example, in 2007 the nicotine content of vegetables was only known to a very few and was hard to find even in scientific papers, in 2013 it’s everywhere and quoted on newspaper threads.
When anti-tobacco scaremongering is put into context with everyday life, like the formaldehyde in apples or the hydrogen cyanide in a pot of blackberry jam, it’s not so scary after all.
“Undermining of a castle wall or tower was one of the most feared events by the Lord of the castle, for it led to his defeat.
Undermining was carried out by “sappers” or miners. They would dig a subterranean passage under the walls or tower of the castle for the purpose of gaining access or to collapse the structure.
Mining was in response to the stone keeps, towers, and walls that could not be burned or battered down with primitive siege engines. While digging the tunnel, the sappers would build wooden supports. After completing the tunnel, brush mixed with hog fat, would be placed near the wooden supports. Sometimes whole hogs would be placed in the tunnel.
After the placement of the flammable material all the sappers would be ordered to leave the tunnel, with the exception of the torchman. He would set the tunnel on fire and run for the tunnel opening.
As the wooden tunnel supports burned they would collapse, in turn the stone walls, or towers would also collapse.”
http://castles-of-britain.com/undermining.htm
An encouraging image, don’t you think?
Socialism has a great respect for science?
Bwahahahahahahaha!
Has he ever heard of L-Y-S-E-N-K-O-I-S-M.
1.
There are many good points made. However, I’ll add another variation altogether – briefly.
What’s required is an overview, a greater context, for interpreting what’s occurring now.
Antismoking has a history and, most importantly, a recent history. The sorts of claims we’re hearing now have been heard in America for the past 150 years and in Nazi Germany. Critically, the bulk of claims about smoking over this time were fraudulent, highly inflammatory, and, for a time, influential.
In the antismoking leading to WWII, claims were plucked out of thin air, quite literally made up. But the claims were made by so-called religious and/or medical “authorities”. The most influential with the legislature were medical “authorities” through eugenics. They were wrongly viewed as “scientific and scholarly”. The deception inflicted on society was the logical fallacy of “appeal to authority” – well, if doctors say so, it must be right. This is a big mistake, and one that is being repeated now.
While people are obsessed by only the detail of particular “studies”, important as that is, no-one seems to be asking about the symptoms and danger of moralizing, social-engineering fanaticism/zealotry/extremism. This was at the root of the eugenics catastrophe of less than a century ago. It points to people in positions of “authority” that are clearly deranged, blinded by a dangerously incoherent world view. And the medical establishment is highly prone to deranged ideology, vested financial interests, and a “god complex”. If we consider the medical zealotry that pushed antismoking (amongst other things) early last century, health claims became progressively more absurd and demands progressively more draconian and destructive. What sort of mentality makes things up to push self-interested agenda, masqueraded as “authoritative”? Those who exploit “authority” to advance a deranged agenda are messed-up minds that promote irrational fear and hatred, social division, and bigotry in the public at large. There’s clearly a mental disorder at work amongst other dysfunction/deficiencies characterized by Narcissism, dictatorial/authoritarian tendencies, delusions of grandeur/infallibility (god complex), pathological lying.
The same pattern is being repeated. But no-one is asking about the mind of the zealot/extremist, particularly the mindset of medical social engineering. The current antismoking crusade was legitimized/authorized by a self-installed, medically-aligned clique (see Godber Blueprint). It is another deranged medical grab for social domination, a continuation of the eugenics of earlier last century in America and Germany. The battle is not with antismokers, per se. It is with the prostituting of medical authority that has legitimized antismokers….. that has set antismokers loose.
The only critical difference now is that rather than making up claims outright, contemporary health claims rely on a bastardized version of science (lifestyle epidemiology), a bastardization of statistical and causal inference (e.g., reliance on the flimsy statistic of RR and “causation by consensus”), bastardized definitions (e.g., “addiction”), and an obliteration of the critical toxicological maxim of dosimetry. It’s institutionalized incompetence that allows all manner of baseless agenda-driven claims to be “legitimized”.
The current antismoking onslaught involves the typical eugenics “personnel” – physicians, biologists, pharmacologists, statisticians, and, more recently, behaviorists. It involves the same physicalism/materialism (biological reductionism) that produces a perverse, sterile definition of health stripped of the art, detail, and humanity of living. It involves the same primacy of the medical establishment and social-engineering intent where all should be coerced to abide by this superficial, “medicalized” framework, i.e. medical imperialism. It involves the same denormalization and mass propaganda techniques, a constant playing on the primal fear of disease and death, to achieve social-engineering goals.
2.
It’s not only antismoking. More recently we’ve seen the slide for control to alcohol, drinks, and food using the tobacco “template”. These all represent the behavioral dimension of eugenics – anti-tobacco/alcohol, dietary prescriptions/proscriptions, physical exercise – pushed by the same medically-aligned groups. So the problem is greater than just antismoking; unbridled antismoking is but one symptom. Yet the situation is even worse. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a “reference bible” for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. With each edition, the manual gets larger. With the most recent – DSM5 – there isn’t much left that people can be doing that couldn’t somehow be construed as some “mental disorder” requiring medical intervention and usually with pharmaceutical remediation (i.e., vested financial interest). For example, tobacco use is considered a “mental disorder” – “tobacco use disorder” – and this also allows for the sale of pharmaceutical products. We are [again] witnessing a medical take-over of society; the medical industrial complex gets ever larger. Welcome to the [medical] “therapeutic state”.
So, in historical context, can the medical establishment get things not only wrong but terribly wrong? Absolutely. Can the medical establishment be corrupt? Absolutely. Can the medical establishment wreak social havoc? Absolutely. For example, employment discrimination and the denial of medical treatment to those who smoke were also seen early last century. The medical establishment is very capable of demonstrating a dangerous, cruel streak that is socially destabilizing. Consider that 1 in 4 – that’s 25% – doctors responding in a recent poll indicated that they provided lesser care to smokers. If it was 1%, it should be sounding alarm bells; 25% is catastrophic. Alarm bells are ringing. But there are few that can hear them or are prepared to highlight the perversity of the trend. To their great shame, the medicos have [again] allowed a bigoted streak to flourish, i.e., institutionalized bigotry, that compromises their primary role of providing medical treatment to the best of their ability and in non-judgmental terms.
In summary, history is antismoking and the medical establishment’s weakest point. Most in Public Health, TC, and the public are clueless. The few in PH that have been forced to address some of the history haven’t handled it well. They’ve been caught out badly. Antismoking was well advanced before information about previous crusades became available in greater detail. And the current crusade sounds very much like previous crusades, and previous crusades were based on a plethora of lies chasing a moralizing, social-engineering agenda. Another weak point is the peculiar, exaggerated, highly inflammatory language of fanaticism/zealotry/extremism. The use of such words as “kill”, “death”, “murder”, “poison”, “toxic”, “danger” are highly prevalent. Consider the Godber Blueprint. There’s one publication that instructs on the use of such words. Such use goes far, far beyond the statistical information which is at the core of current antismoking. This is not the language of science but of manipulating, moralizing extremism/activism. This highly exaggerated language can also be seen in descriptions by the brainwashed of smoke/smoking, particularly outdoors – wisps of smoke turn into a “wall” or “tunnel” or “cloud” of smoke. Also, baseless, highly inflammatory claims concerning smoke “danger” that are presented under the guise of science and authority promote mental dysfunction, e.g., anxiety disorders, somatization, hypochondria, amongst the [gullible] public. Another commenter has mentioned the severe limitations of population-level statistics. Unless speaking of high-level predictors (not so in PH), population-level statistics have no application at the individual level. Yet there are doctors telling individual patients that their disease was specifically “caused” by smoking. Worse still, there are doctors telling individual nonsmoking patients that their disease (e.g., LC) was specifically “caused” by SHS exposure (e.g., in the lunchroom, the nightclub, etc). This conduct is terribly delinquent. Finally, as mentioned earlier, appeasement of fanaticism/zealotry/extremism leads to progressively more absurd health claims and more draconian demands. Certainly, the deterioration in claims from firsthand to secondhand to thirdhand smoke fits this pattern and needs to be highlighted.
Everyone here is being very interesting indeed today. (I hope I’m not going to bring the standard down too much.)
What exactly is the ‘citadel’ composed of? A belief based on pseudoscience (from Doll onwards). Anything else?
And what lies behind this pseudoscience; what necessitated it – whose financial/political interests? Is that part of the ‘citadel’, too? And how and why was it so successfully accepted as being real science – by scientists, the BMA and politicians? Is the answer to that also part of the ‘citadel’?
I take MJM’s point that, if we’re trying to persuade people and win recruits, we should focus our energies on where we’re most likely to succeed, on tobacco-control’s weakest points, and not waste them in having to defend ourselves from accusations of ridiculousness, denial or conspiracy-theory.
Most people haven’t got time or inclination to listen at length to why the ‘science’ is crap (or to hear our theories, whatever they may be, about what lay behind it all right at the start and still does), but if they’ll take on some of it then SHS is the weak point to go for. Tobacco-control’s other big weak point, I think, is the argument mentioned by the first of Frank’s quoted writers – this business of private and public property, the difference between them, and who has the ‘right’ to decide what goes on inside them. This applies to buildings – pubs, restaurants, workplaces, cars, planes, trains, etc – and human bodies. I think most people (smokers and non-smokers) would agree that this right does not belong to a government. Therefore, a blanket smoking ban is a diktat too far.
Mind you, non-smokers (and that’s most people) generally never think about all this (they will when it’s their bit of enjoyment that’s been taken away – they might thank us then). It’s easy for them to forget that smokers and smoking even exist. I think it’s important to remind them: if I’m with non-smokers for any length of time I tend to say, ‘Well, I’m going for a cigarette now’ (rather than just sneak off and have one). I never pretend I don’t smoke. it concerns me that some smokers I know do more-or-less pretend they don’t smoke – in company, at the doctor’s, when completing surveys, etc etc. This skews the figures and encourages the de-normalisation process. If we do nothing else, I think we should be ‘out’ as smokers.
Margo
I totally agree with your point that “Most people haven’t got time or inclination to listen at length to why the ‘science’ is crap” – this is totally true. But proving that “the science is crap” is not something that should be targeted at the man in the street anyway, it is necessary to show that the whole edifice of anti-tobacco legislation is built on a foundation of untruth and wild exaggeration, and is, as such, completely unnecessary. To this extent the scientific rebuttal has to be aimed at politicians, the media and other decision-makers.
Let’s be honest, man in the street is generally too docile to do anything against authority, anyway. In this country we are renowned for being great moaners, but not for taking action. So you can understand why the political classes don’t give a shit what man in the street thinks, whether it be a valid scientific opinion or any other.
What we need to do is to target different groups with different messages and approaches. If, for example, we can start to impress on man in the street that the government constantly lies to them, then we can start to rabble-rouse (I use the term deliberately, as this is how the Unions were effective in getting people to march and demonstrate in the 1970s, 80s etc). There’s nothing more guaranteed to put the shits up politicians than a sizeable demonstration of public opinion.
And we need to ensure that smoking is seen as just one aspect of life that has been the subject of lies and misanthropic social engineering – on its own it is past the point of being able to garner enough support as a stand-alone issue.
And we need to defy the legislation in every way we can (which doesn’t always have to involve taking big risks).
Most importantly, though, we must never allow our opponents to “draw lines”, by wich I mean that history must never go unchallenged. It is all to easy to just rail against the latest daft newspaper report with the odd dodgy statistic or two, whilst allowing the misanthropes to keep using soundbites such as “4,000 chemicals in smoke” (I have asked for the names of these – no-one has done so), “of which 60 are carcinogenic” (to humans or animals? In the quantities found in cigarettes?), or the one that most pisses me off, “half of smokers will die from their habit” (Says who? Absolutely no evidence of this, none at all). These are the things that man in the street might trot out in a casual debate – they should always be challenged. Always.
As an aside, but an example of the above: we must all remember the great “heart attack miracle”, in which, after the ban on smoking was introduced in Scotland, the number of heart attacks was alleged (by the egregious Pell study) to have fallen by 17%. Do you remember how much analysis was done by ‘our side’ to totally prove (using public information) that the reduction was actually an unremarkable 7%?
Yet time has elapsed and still the 17% figure is quoted to demonstrate the “success” of the smoking ban. But, do you know what? The latest published figure for the number of heart attacks in Scotland (for 2011/12) is 16% higher than in the year before the smoking ban. Let me repeat that for you with emphasis:
the number of heart attacks in Scotland (for 2011/12) is 16% higher than in the year before the smoking ban
Furthermore, heart attacks in Scotland are now at their highest since 1998/99, so “five years of the smoking ban have reversed over 10 years of progress in reducing heart attacks” is the sort of headline we should be reading.
All in all, we are all on the same side, and we all share the same goal, but there is no single means of achieving that goal: we need action on many fronts, and we must never, ever allow history to be defined by our opponents.
Apologies for a couple of typos – and missing the word “ban” from my penultimate paragraph!
[There were more than a couple, but I may have found most of them. Frank]
I am indebted to you, sir!
Any logical why reason why WordPress doesn’t support comment editing – others do. I know we could compose a post in, say, MS Word, and do the spell check there, but it still doesn’t completely get round my fat-fingered typing and the “fingers going faster than brain” syndrome!
There’s nothing worse than pressing “Post Comment” and then seeing a bunch of typos that apparently didn’t exist 20 seconds earlier! Especially to someone who, like me, is a bit of a grammar nazi!
Any logical why reason why..?
None that I know of.
Two very diligent people (Alan Rodgman and Thomas Perfetti) have identified 9,600 chemicals in the tobacco plant and/or tobacco smoke.
There is a 2,332 page book (with a CD-ROM) that costs $ 269.37 U.S. (and which I’ve not bought no less read, and not being a chemist, probably wouldn’t understand if I tried to read it).
Thanks for that Mike – but $269?!!
Much as I would love to see the list of all of the named constituents – and in partcular, how many remain if isotopes are discounted – I think I’ll take a rain-check rather than forking out that kind of money!
I’d also like to find out if similar, thorough chemical analyses have ever been carried out on any other substance or plant – and if not, why not?
Strewth – even the Kindle version is nearly $200!
Yes, I agree.
I have a lot to say, but scarcely know where to start. I am still convinced delving into the whole science, studies, statistics, facts, histories etc etc, is lastly not the pertinent aspect to our battle.
If this were the 70s, we’d be attacking the antis not with figures and facts, but attacking them directly – we’d go RIGHT to where it’d hurt them the most, and make short work of them. We would be attacking the person.
Is Stanton Glantz the sort of goon you want to be seated next to at a dinner party? Look at the guy. Would you want a little troll like Bahnzaf as your college roommate, with his dark little blots for eyes? A guy who’s spent his life having his name misspelled, or pronounced wrong over a loudspeaker, a little rat simmering with hate against the world?
As I once saw on a link here, someone said: “Vehement anti-smokers are weak people, because they get off on a manufactured outrage that they cannot express in other areas of their lives, so this is their only way they can exert dominance and control over a stranger.”
Weak people indeed. Now we can post back and forth about dangers and non-dangers, social disintegration, bars closing blah blah blah for another 10 years – we can make unceasing blog-clogs all over the net, but so can our enemies – it’s a permanent engagement.
Ohhhh, but we can’t go and make personal attacks in this pc age, can we? And THAT is how our enemy hits us, our weakest point.
So the little man, the little shit, can climb up today on the biggest soapbox he can find, and make any loud claim he wants – normally he couldn’t command the attention of a flea, attacking smokers is just a tool he uses to draw attention and with it power, position – he’s got us there.
Imagine: if there weren’t a smoking battle, where would twerps and goons like Glantz and Bahnzaf be? Totally ignored, just a couple of nobodys – and they know it.
This is how I see things.
We can choose to ignore this side of the matter, but there’s something there.
Think of Nigel Farage and his attack on Van Rompoy.
I suspect you’ll find little support here.
I call Tobacco Control “advocates” screwballs and assholes. But I also point out factual and logical flaws in their arguments.
Figures and facts are what antis claim is the truth. Figures and facts (and their interpretation) are the basis of science.
I have an odd last name. I’ve had it misspelled and mispronounced throughout my life. It doesn’t bother me a bit.
Going after the person, I wouldn’t want to be seated next to you at a dinner party or be your college roommate.
“Imagine: if there weren’t a smoking battle, where would twerps and goons like Glantz and Bahnzaf be? Totally ignored, just a couple of nobodys – and they know it.”
You’re correct. As just rabid antismokers they would be unknowns. The problem is the medical framework that’s legitimized these nitwits, that’s set them loose. For example, Glands, a mechanical engineer, was given a professorship in medicine at the University of Califraudia (Ban Francisco). He’s also referred to as a professor of cardiology. It adds “medical weight” to the baseless antismoking claims, i.e., “appeal to authority”. The entire antismoking crusade, just like early last century, is based on the fraud of appeal to authority. In this case, medical authority.
I’m with Frank on this subject. Indeed, my views have changed from ‘neutral’ to ‘very sceptical’ when it comes to the issue of smoking-related health ‘risks’, after I read This article in the Telegraph the other day, which opened with the words:
“It is now more than 60 years since the British scientist Richard Doll first proved, beyond doubt, that tobacco kills.”
Proved beyond doubt? Even though I have previously tended to accept that the strong statistical association between smoking and lung conditions (but not heart diseases) are probably suggestive of a causal link, that line really grated with me. It was barely (if at all) challenged in the ensuing comments, although someone made a reference to the McTear case, and I decided that I would (for the first time) have a look at what went on – I confess that, whilst I knew the outcome, I’d never read the details submissions and conclusions. I tracked down the document via Junican’s excellent blog, and I read it – it took me 3 days!
But what an eye-opener this was. What a revelation! You could pretty well forget Alf McTear; this was ‘Big Tobacco’ on trial, with ASH pulling the prosecution strings, whilst using the poor, hapless McTears as pawns in their odious little games. All ASH needed to do was to convince an impartial judge that smoking caused lung cancer and the door would have been open to the potential financial destruction of their main enemy.
And they lost! I don’t just mean that Mrs McTear lost, I mean ASH lost – and big time! And, in particular, both counsels brought to the attention of the court enough evidence (in my view) to change my opinion towards a view that there is a very strong possibility that tobacco smoking is not causal of anything (pleasure aside), and that all of the past research (especially Doll’s) needs to be put through detailed, almost forensic, reanalysis, to ascertain whether it is (a) credible from a mathematical perspective, (b) unbiased, (c) methodologically sound, and (d) actually producing results that match the rhetoric of today’s “smoking kills” received wisdom. In my immediate view, they are likely to fail on all 4 counts, but the reanalysis needs doing – thoroughly and impartially.
A few things that stood out to me from the McTear case:
1.The arrogance of anti-tobacco was demonstrated by their incredibly poor selection of witnesses for the prosecution. With the bumbling, inept Professor Friend, the smooth ’empty suit’ marketing man, Gerard Hastings, and the ‘useful idiot’ of McTear’s GP, nothing was presented that offered a single clue into whether or not smoking caused lung cancer.
2. Then there was Richard Doll – and what a revelation this was! I must own up that I met Richard Doll several times in the 1970s when I was doing some work on Cancer Statistics for an IARC publication, of which he was one of the editors. He always came across as impeccably mannered, very gentle and polite with everyone. Yet in court he was brash and arrogant. Clearly he was so wedded to his original “Doctors” study that he couldn’t stand anyone questioning it, to the extent that he just resorted to ad hominem attacks on upwards of a dozen scientists who were more eminent in their particular fields than him. He clearly upset the judge with his attacks, and having read the evidence in chronological order I had formed the exact same view as Nimmo Smith, to the extent that Doll was singled out for criticism in the judge’s summation. ASH must have assumed that all they had to do was put the “guru”, the “heroic” Richard Doll, on the stand and the case would be over. In truth, he did their ’cause’ more harm than good!
3. By comparison, Imperial Tobacco had lined up a very impressive set of expert witnesses for the defence. So good were they, that the prosecution counsel could only resort to the smear tactics of trying to persuade the judge that they (some of them) were ‘tainted’ because they had received Big Tobacco funding, and that he should thus discount their evidence. They failed again. You just know, that once the argument shifts into ‘ad hominem’ mode, then it is being lost. This was a very important point in the case.
4. I was amazed at the parallels between the AGW crusade, and the ‘TCLC’ (Tobacco-Caused Lung Cancer) one. I had, like many I guess, drawn such comparisons between AGW and the passive smoking campaign, but, in truth, the real comparison should be with the campaign to demonise active smoking. Most striking was the (again arrogant assumption) of the prosecution, presumably planted by ASH, that constantly stressing the “consensus” among doctors that smoking causes lung cancer would provide proof of causality. Again ASH failed.
5. In my view, the argument that there had been a steep rise in lung cancer cases in the first part of the 20th century (the “epidemic”) was totally disproved on many grounds, but most especially the development of better diagnostic techniques, the confusion in pathologists between various types of lung diseases, and the increasing longevity of the population. Whilst I would like to actually see, and analyse, some real data, I am now of the strong view that lung cancer was always around, but rarely spotted. In any event, I don’t believe there is any correlation between trends in lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Just as I don’t believe there is any concomitant correlation between carbon dioxide and putative ‘global’ warming.
6. The only effort made to explain how ‘risk’ statistics are calculated came from one of Imperial Tobacco’s witnesses (an Epidemiologist) – and a damn good job he did too! Sufficient, in fact, to demonstrate exactly what is known, ie that epidemiology, when used by the public health and medical professions, is a tool of advocacy rather than scientific discovery. This holds true just as much in research into active smoking as it does for passive smoking.
7. I had long been suspicious about the paucity of the research that, allegedly, ‘proves’ that smoking causes lung cancer. This was reaffirmed by the range of studies brought into evidence. So much action and belief is predicated on such a small amount of evidence. Just as with AGW, it is clear that the desired outcomes came from a handful of epidemiological studies that enabled the then medical establishment to declare that the “debate is over”. Just as today, the ‘research’ seemed to have been conducted to meet the desired outcome.Had the internet been around in the 1950s and 60s, I doubt that they would have got away with it.
I’ll stop now, as this comment is turning into an essay! It just demonstrates what an effect the McTear case has had on me. In effect, Tobacco was placed on Trial for being responsible for millions of deaths – and Tobacco was exonerated. Well it was so in legal terms, now we need to move on and prove that the doubts about its guilt are real, and that, if Tobacco is truly innocent of the charges, it needs to be given a fulsome pardon – with massive damages – by those who sought to destroy it.
There is a big job to be done. It is much bigger than getting one’s pub back (although this is a laudable a priori aim), but we will never win the argument by accepting that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. At this point in time all one can truly say is that “it might”. So let’s stop pissing around, always trying to defend against the most recent anti-smoking attacks (of which, let’s be honest, we are losing all but some very minor ones), and concentrate on striking at the heart of the monster that is anti-tobacco.
Brian Bond
“It is now more than 60 years since the British scientist Richard Doll first proved, beyond doubt, that tobacco kills.”
Clearly he’s referring to the the London Hospitals Study published in 1950. That was the study in which 98% of the sample were smokers, and so 98% of those who had lung cancer were also smokers. 98% of them were probably Londoners too.
The more I think about that ‘study’, the more I think that it was deliberately designed to single out smokers, and pin the blame for lung cancer on smoking. And then repeat this lie again and again in order to establish it as incontestable fact in the public mind.
I read (bits of) the McTear case 4 or 5 years ago, I do agree that Richard Doll came over astonishingly badly, and that he quickly fell back on ad hominem attacks. If the verdict had gone the other way, TC would have been trumpeting it in the media for the past 10 years. But they didn’t, and so hardly anyone knows about it. Because the media never advertise TC failures.
I agree there is a big job. And it’s much bigger than getting our pubs back. But it will only be when we get our pubs back that we will know that we have won.
“The more I think about that ‘study’, the more I think that it was deliberately designed to single out smokers, and pin the blame for lung cancer on smoking. And then repeat this lie again and again in order to establish it as incontestable fact in the public mind.”
That’s the point. I was taken in (in 1974) by Richard Doll’s pleasant demeanour and friendliness towards a young (smoking) graduate mathematician starting out on a ‘challenging’ carrer, to the extent that I had since accepted as an act of faith that he would have worked to impeccable standards in his various researches.
You do, though, don’t you? It’s like all of those doctors whose medical training includes all of the relevant received wisdom about smoking and lung cancer – they just can’t disbelieve research carried out by one of their own. They are doctors, remember, they are infallible! (Except when they are not – which is maybe why iatrogensis is arguably the leading cause of premature death!) I doubt most ordinary doctors would recognise that their profession is so riddled with political activism – notwithstanding the activities of RCP, BMA etc.
I doubt if it would be now be possible to do a full reanalysis of the Doctors Study. One would need, at least, a copy of all the raw data and full details of the mathematical equations used in the analysis. One of Imperial Tobacco’s witnesses complained in the McTear evidence about being unable see the numbers in the studies that supported the claims being made – especially Doll’s. Again the judge picked up on this in his summation. Parallels with Steve McIntyre vs Michael Mann, Phil Jones etc?
I won’t consider to have won anything if we only ever gain a concession to be ‘allowed’ to smoke in (some) parts of (some) pubs. Yes, it would be a start, but would it constitute a big ‘push-back’. I stopped being a regular pub-goer when we had kids, so the pub ban has affected me less than others (ie I used to go fairly infrequently, now I never go at all), but I do understand and fully support the importance of this to others.
What I want is a return to smoking carriages on trains; I want to be free to light up on a station platform, and not having a tannoy barking out “this station operates a no-smoking policy”, when there isn’t another person on the whole station; I want to enjoy a smoke in a restaurant; in a cricket ground (at my seat); on a plane (which might enable me to fly again) and, most of all, I want all smokers to be able to enjoy the undoubted benefits to productivity and well-being of being able to smoke while working (I work form home now, so I still enjoy this genuine benefit).
All in all, I won’t consider we have ‘won’, until smoking can be again seen as ‘normal’ – and I don’t accept that something is only normal if >50% do it – and the raving loonies of anti-tobacco no longer pollute the health, political and media professions.
We will only ever do that by exonerating tobacco. If it does end up being proven that tobacco really does kill, then all is lost – and probably rightly so. In the meantime I will wait until I can retire from working, but then devote my time and acquired skills to seeking out the truth behind the rhetoric.
You do, though, don’t you?
Yes, you do automatically suppose that their work is of impeccable standards, and that they know what they’re talking about, and really are experts, etc, etc.
But I think that we’re now moving into a situation where that is no longer being automatically thought. One of the surprises of the Isis study, for me, was the collapse of trust in the media and experts in general, and not just among smokers. There’s a withdrawal of belief/trust. I don’t know the reasons, but I think it may simply be that people are being asked to believe all sorts of things they never believed before (e.g. global warming, passive smoking, etc) and they’ve had enough. They’ve begun to switch off. There comes a point where the incessant media campaigns start to have the reverse effect than intended.
And once you’ve ceased to trust these people, there’s really no way that they can ever recover that trust. I expect, pretty soon, some of these people to start asking, “How can we regain public trust?”
Written too quickly, without enough thought, but….
In my comment that Frank linked, I said: “Those who fight Tobacco Control each do so in their own way, using their own knowledge, skills, and best judgment.”
MJM, I see your comments all over the place. Keep up the good work!
But it is not my work.
Their ain’t much you can say in a comment or, on TV or radio, in a 60 second (if you’re lucky) sound bite. Too many decades have passed. Too many lies have been told. (The Environmental Protection Agency’s report on secondhand smoke is – I forget – over 600 pages long? Whatever, it’s impossible to critique all the errors in a few paragraphs.)
Tobacco Control zealots are a small minority, albeit with a very loud voice, and “science” on their side. Debate with a zealot and all you’ll get is a river of factoids that “prove” their case.
I’m sure that 99% of the population believes that smoking causes lung cancer. I’m equally sure that their belief is based on statements of “experts” like the U.S. Surgeon General.
I’m as sure as I get that average people have a brain. Above all, I’m sure that average people MUST be engaged on the issue of primary smoking. If NO ONE disputes their ideas, THEY WILL NEVER CHANGE THEIR IDEAS.
Challenging established beliefs is God awful tough. But who ever said that fighting a war is fun?
Average people can be engaged in discussion. Make a point that they’ll at least consider, and maybe they’ll listen to a second point – and a third.
Given an argument about secondhand smoke, could you say, “Well, even the case about primary smoking has logical flaws,” and then ask a question that I’m damn sure no zealot could answer – but equally a question that an average person might accept as legitimate?
Walt C had a good question that I’ll state in my own terms. Given that smokers get lung cancer more frequently than non-smokers (relative risk) why is it that LESS THAN 10% of smokers die of lung cancer? (Actual risk.) Worse, smoking supposedly causes100+ diseases. (Some fatal, and some not.) Given ANY of these diseases (except heart disease which is the biggest killer) do even 10% of smokers die or suffer from these diseases? Why is it that 90% do not?
100 + diseases? Is the most lethal substance in the universe is cigarette smoke? What else causes 100 + diseases? (What do you mean by the word cause? Relative risk?)
Note cigarette. Cigar and pipe smokers (even for lung cancer) don’t develop most of these diseases. Why not? Some chemical in cigarettes but not cigars and pipes?
Given that CIGARETTE smokers get lung cancer more frequently than non-smokers, how much more frequently? Per the first Surgeon General’s report the answer is 11 times (commonly stated as 10 times, or 10 to 20 times). BUT – this is based on 7 cohort studies. One study says 5 times more frequently, four studies say 10 times more frequently, two other studies say 15 and 20 times more frequently. (11 is the average.) Seven studies give four different answers. Which is true – 5, 10, 15, or 20? Plus there are case control studies that say the risk is less than 5 and more than 20. After 60 years of “research,” what is the number?
Why is the flu a smoking related disease? Ditto cervical cancer. (Chris Snowdon did an excellent post on this; link supplied on request.) Both diseases are “caused” by viruses. What chemical in smoke effects the incidences of these diseases in smokers?
Compared to non-smokers, smokers are more likely to commit suicide, to die in accidents, and to be murdered. What chemical in cigarette smoke is responsible for these deaths?
Why, why, why, why? How, how, how, how? Where is the biology? The chemistry?
I wrote my essay on Auerbach to address a question. Why can’t lung cancer be induced in animals by exposure to tobacco smoke? Why can’t ANY smoking related disease be induced in animals? Chemicals in smoke cause 100 + diseases – UNIQUELY in human beings? For 60 years scientists have tried to induce disease in animals by exposure to smoke. They have failed. Miserably.
Why, why, why, why? (Maybe because there’s no chemical in smoke that causes anything?)
Auerbach scared the hell out of tobacco companies. Lung cancer produced in twelve dogs! Per the press release. Per the published study, however, there were microscopic changes in the lungs of TWO dogs that Auerbach INTERPERTED AS PRE-CANCEROUS.
There are lots more questions I could ask that zealots would only answer with some irrelevant factoid. Damn the zealots! What I say is addressed to people (like me) of average intelligence.
BUT WHY SHOULD AVERAGE NON-SMOKERS CARE? Because if the “smoking causes lung cancer” theory is wrong, how many other modern medical facts are also wrong? (And obviously the issue of secondhand smoke is revealed to be the fraud it always was.)
Non-smoker or smoker, I’ve asked questions. Do you know the answers? Your doctor will advise this or that. But suppose your doctor is wrong? (Second opinion, anyone?) Your life might depend on what you believe.
Bottom line (and certainly not fully argued here), the “smoking causes” theory is as irrational as the belief that witches cast spells to make you sick and kill your chickens and sheep. Get the average person to ask questions. If they’re not presented with logical answers, maybe – just maybe – they’ll change their beliefs. Maybe – just maybe – they’ll ask questions of their own.
PRE-CANCEROUS
I have a bit of trouble with this concept. Pre-something means before-something. So something is pre-cancerous before cancer has developed. So the pre-cancerous lungs were lungs before lung cancer developed.
So it seems to me that perfectly healthy lungs were being described as pre-cancerous. Healthy people are pre-cancerous. I don’t have flu right now, so I’m pre-flu. And also pre-malarial, and pre-leprous, and pre-plague, and pre-any other disease you care to mention.
‘Pre-cancerous’ just seems to me to be a verbal device to introduce cancer into something where no cancer is present, to create the presence of something where it actually is absent.
Agree again.
The wife of a friend of mine was told, after a routine breast scan, that certain chemical deposits were found in her breast amd that she needed a rescan. This then, apparently showed, “evidence of pre-cancerous cells” (more or less a direct quote).
She then foolishly (in my view) followed the advice given and underwent a double mastectomy. In other words, she was physically butchered for a cancer that she didn’t have, and with no certainty that it would develop, all on the say-so of a doctor who was a true ‘believer’ in her branch of oncology.
The final tragedy, is that the lady’s health suffered from post-operative infections and thrombosis, to the extent that she is in worse chronic health today (3 years later) than she was on the day that she went for the first scan.
We must always question what the medical profession say. They don’t like it, but, given their conservative tendencies, if we didn’t, they would still be using leeches, red hot pokers, and drilling holes in skulls!
Angelina Jolie.
Unlike Angelina Jolie, my friend’s wife has absolutely no history of breast – or any other – cancer. Her risk was assessed entirely on “pre-cancerous” cells.
Aargh bollocks! That should be “family history” above (or below – I can’t tell where this comment is going!)
This could have happened to me. Around 1990 after a mamogram I was told I had microcalcification which suggested cancer and they wanted to book me in immediately to remove a part of my breast. I can’t explain it but every instinct screamed not to do it. I paid to see the best breast cancer specialist I could find and he was able to tell me that the pattern I had would be seen in any woman who had a child. He explained that there are two different patterns and one one that could be a precursor to breast cancer was quite different. I have been fine since, still had the mamograms but that was the best money I ever spent. I just wonder how often it has happened.
It can certainly be highlighted that particular organizations such as the Office of the Surgeon-General and the Centers for Disease Control in America have long been hijacked by antismoking activists. Concerning tobacco, they have become no more than propaganda outlets. A plethora of other activist groups (e.g., cancer society, heart foundation, medical association) then parrot the information as “authoritative”. The claims of these hijacked organizations are even used by other countries to institute antismoking measures.
Concerning “appeal to authority”, the following is a comment from 6 months back. It’s a good case study in manipulation and fraud:
We need to keep an eye on the “glorified mechanic” – Stantonitis Glands – and his buddies. We know that the WHO has had an “initiative” for some time concerning smoking in movies. The goal has been to have movies with smoking scenes attract an “R” rating or to browbeat movie-makers into eliminating all smoking in movies that will screen to under-18s…… even, say, a cartoon turtle smoking.
Stantonitis is a WHO lackey, well and long connected in the GlobaLink network. If the WHO has an “initiative” (e.g., bans don’t hurt business, heart miracles, movie censorship), Stantonitis is the chief go-to dimwit to provide scientific “evidence”. You can hear Glands responding to a phone call from the WHO – “Sure, Louie…… I’ll whip up a research paper while I’m on the toilet tonight”.
So, the glorified mechanic has lent his considerable [physical and ego] weight behind the “initiative”, concocting his inimitable, fifth-rate, error-riddled, agenda-driven “research”.
For those that are familiar with research concerning perception/cognition/action, the term “cause” is rarely, if ever, used. But Glands is a mechanic – a mechanistic thinker. So, let’s see what Glands and his physicalist (mechanistic) buddies have done with this “research”.
The Surgeon-General Report (2012) declares:
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young people.
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/dhhss-new-betobaccofreegov-ignores-2012-surgeon-generals-report
We’re not dealing with chemical/physical reactions where the term “cause” can be imputed. We’re talking about depictions of smoking on screen. But the physicalists refer to “exposures” to depictions of smoking “causing” The Children™ to take up smoking as if …. hoobilooby rays come off the image of a cigarette (as opposed to poopinoopy rays that come off all other images) on a screen and enter the brains of The Children™, “causing” them to take up smoking. It’s a load of agenda-driven blather that is showing up how far out of their depth these bona fide imbeciles really are.
But the glorified mechanic has more. This from his blog:
Smoking in PG-13 films causes 18% of new youth smoking
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/smoking-pg-13-films-causes-18-new-youth-smoking
There’s that word “cause” again. The cited article even refers to a “dose-response” of screen “exposures” to smoking uptake.
Even the CDC – naturally – has produced “research”:
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/new-study-published-cdc-more-onscreen-tobacco-use-movies-aimed-young-viewers-means-more-kids-will-st
We’ve seen the pattern again and again over the last three decades: The “smoking in movies” is a good case study in the modus operandus of the antismoking putzes. Agenda-driven nitwits, e.g., the glorified mechanic, conduct “research” (or over-interpret research) that, lo and behold, supports an antismoking initiative. Within a short time, it becomes “mounting evidence”, which is then only a short hop to “the science is settled”. And it typically involves the same corrupted organizations. The Office of the Surgeon-General, long committed to the smokefree utopia and whose reports on smoking are typically crawling with long-time, high-profile antismoking activists, will make a “causal” declaration. So, too, will the CDC. Then the plethora of antismoking organizations will cite the SG and CDC “declarations” as “authoritative”, i.e., logical fallacy of “appeal to authority”. Within a short time, what was initially a load of junk quickly becomes mass propagated as “fact”. It’s a closed propaganda loop run by a network of deranged nitwits and their useful idiots. It’s extraordinarily pathetic and socially destabilizing, at the very least.
“….that saw the U.S. Surgeon General release a landmark report concluding that exposure to on-screen smoking causes children to smoke. This also prompted 38 state attorney generals to write media company CEOs, in the spring of 2012, that “each time the industry releases another movie that depicts smoking, it does so with the full knowledge of the harm it will bring children who watch it.”
More “appeal to authority”:
“The U.S. Surgeon General, the nation’s doctor, has concluded there isn’t just a connection, there is a causal relationship between children’s exposure to smoking on screen and their starting to smoke. This makes the movie companies potentially culpable,” says Reverend Michael Crosby, Tobacco Program Coordinator at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility(ICCR). As of December 19, shareholder resolutions have been filed at Time Warner (Warner Bros.), CBS, and Comcast (NBC Universal) by ICCR members. As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that promotes corporate responsibility though shareholder advocacy, and members of ICCR also intend to submit resolutions to Disney, News Corp (Fox), Sony, and Viacom (Paramount) in the first quarter of 2013.
And then there are the usual suspects, e.g., the disease and dismembered body-organ groups, with further “appeal to authority”:
National medical organizations including the American Medical Association, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have joined the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.N.’s World Health Organization in calling for the elimination of smoking in youth movies or the adoption of an R rating for any film that shows tobacco use.
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/media-shareholders-tell-major-studios-“quit-smoking-youth-rated-movies”
If this trash wasn’t enough, the “CDC will regularly reporting [sic] smoking in movies along with other key public health indicators”
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cdc-will-regularly-reporting-smoking-movies-along-other-key-public-health-indicators
“This action puts the smoking that the big media companies put in their movies on the same category as other disease vectors.”
Have we got that? Smoking in movies will be in the same category as other “disease vectors”.
These miscreants are really after wholesale public smoking bans – indoor and out. They are softening up the public with the idea that children shouldn’t be “exposed” to depictions of smoking in movies because it “causes” The Children™ to take up smoking. If they can get bans/”R”-rating passed for particular movies, then the next step will be – well how much more influential are “live” smokers in “causing” The Children™ to take up smoking? Smoking should be banned everywhere for the sake of The Children™. Which gets us right back to the Godber Blueprint…. Godber’s own sentiment…. “Nor should people be allowed to lead children astray by smoking in their presence”.
Just when you think we’ve reached the thick end of the mental cesspit that is antismoking, the effluent of neurosis/bigotry gets thicker still….. the neurosis/bigotry bandwagon – the hysteria – gets further out of control. Check out this blather-fest:
Warning: Some Oscar® Nominated Films May Cause Kids to Smoke
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/warning-some-oscarr-nominated-films-may-cause-kids-to-smoke-1759222.htm
But this one really shoves the hysteria along – get ready:
Smoking in movies kills
The most effective, least intrusive way to cut tobacco exposure would be to rate future movies with smoking in them R. Producers would simply reserve the smoking for their R-rated films, the way they now routinely regulate other content. Movies rated G, PG, and PG-13 would be smoke-free, cutting teens’ risk from on-screen smoking in half. Hollywood’s rating system doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Yet the R’s result will rank among the most important public health advances of our time. One letter can now save thousands of lives.
http://www.leaderherald.com/page/content.detail/id/554196/Smoking-in-movies-kills.html?nav=5008
There we have it! It began not long ago with some amby-pamby, agenda-driven “research” and we’re already at “smoking in movies kills” and that an “R”-rating for smoking in films “will rank among the most important public health advances of our time”. Antismoking zealots are dangerous nut cases. For each level of appeasement, the fanatical nitwits sink into further derangement – and society with them. This insanity…. this deteriorating circumstance…. needs to be pointed out to the public over and over again. This current case study also provides an insight into how ambient tobacco smoke was turned into something on a par with a bio-weapon like, say, sarin gas (not to mention many claims about active smoking).
Sorry, Frank. I have a comment in the dungeon.
Wow, this subject has lit the blue touch paper, and rightly so. Some excellent comments!
I agree with your point about SHS etc. to a certain extent MJM, but I believe we have all-but won that battle, even though they are constantly thinking of new ways/angles to push it. you allude to that suggestion too;
“Secondhand (and, even more so, the thirdhand etc nonsense) is his weakest point: a lot of people have doubts about whether the Antis are telling the truth about it and it’s very easy for us to show, quite convincingly and from a number of different angles, that they are lying.
“And people can SEE that craziness.”
We need to build on that increasing public awareness. In any debate now, as a rule of thumb, I merely state that “SHS is as good as HARMLESS” and refer to the now wide variation in literature available on the internet such as the ‘fighting back. homestead’ , the ‘TC Tactics’ web pages or your excellent work ‘dissecting anti-smokers’ brains’ etc. (ie I basically state that ‘the debate is over’ regarding SHS – taking a leaf out of their book).
The anti-smoker industry continues to pretend that ‘everyone knows’ about SHS ‘harm’ almost entirely by use of ‘appeal to authority’, hoping that that tactic will be as successful as the primary smoking ‘everyone knows’ deception. I believe the public are becoming wise to this more and more (as a result of the work, comments etc we have done on SHS) and we should be taking advantage of this increasing distrust in anti-smoker junk science to emphasize the anomalies and contradictions that are inherent in the anti-smoker, primary smoking ‘harm’ case – There are many!
“… they will always conflate smoking and secondhand smoke exposure, trying to portray them as the same thing…. The Antis would love NOTHING so much as to see us fighting them on that battlefield
I disagree on this point. This was once true because ‘they’ thought that the arguments were unassailable, but less so today as we see cancer, for instance, continue to increase despite the reduction in smoking. They do NOT want to fight on this battlefield!!
I remember, some years ago, reading some advice from an anti-smoker high priest (someone like Glantz) to anti-smoker advocates – that they should NOT engage in any debate about primary smoking as to do so would lend some credence to their opponents argument – even to argue against would infer there are questions to be answered, and could raise doubts about, and weaken their ‘everyone knows’ slogan.
You will rarely find that ‘they’ will engage in any debate about primary smoking. If they do, it will almost certainly be one of the few gullible ‘believers’ rather than the increasingly prevalent ‘professional’ anti-smoker commentator, and it will almost certainly be little more than a reference to “millions of scientists and doctors” who would, apparently, disagree – “you’re a fool – debate closed”. Remember that they attempted to ridicule with the SHS argument too? Good arguments and clear logical debate stymied that then – it can do so again?
Let’s not forget that the anti-smoker propaganda machine needs to ‘maintain the initiative’ by constantly introducing new campaigns etc. It has worked well up to now by keeping their opponents (us) ‘on the back foot’. While we are busy exposing one campaign as rubbish, they have already worked out their next step, with the previous one quickly forgotten about. We have been constantly defending a rearguard action.
I am hopeful that their UK defeat on the plain packs issue will prove to have been the anti-smoker Stalingrad, it is their first major setback! They will scream like stuffed pigs and stamp their feet to try and regain that initiative if we allow them to. Calling them out on primary smoking and forcing them to debate about it could divert them away from their agenda and force them to fight their own rearguard action. They WILL resist any debate on primary smoking and WILL try to sidestep if they can.
‘They’ have only one hymn sheet that they all must sing to, we do not – this is a strength, not a weakness. If you disagree with attacking the primary smoking deception, that’s fine, keep attacking SHS and related junk science – as long as you don’t undermine the battle on primary smoking in the process.
Exposing SHS junk science is not enough; it IS time to expose the primary smoking deception. The contrary evidence that smoking causes any disease is mounting but hindsight, common sense and rational logic may be all that is needed to expose it.
Kin_Free
This pretty well destroys the Myth of second hand smoke:
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16741714-lungs-from-pack-a-day-smokers-safe-for-transplant-study-finds?lite
Lungs from pack-a-day smokers safe for transplant, study finds.
By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News.
Using lung transplants from heavy smokers may sound like a cruel joke, but a new study finds that organs taken from people who puffed a pack a day for more than 20 years are likely safe.
What’s more, the analysis of lung transplant data from the U.S. between 2005 and 2011 confirms what transplant experts say they already know: For some patients on a crowded organ waiting list, lungs from smokers are better than none.
“I think people are grateful just to have a shot at getting lungs,” said Dr. Sharven Taghavi, a cardiovascular surgical resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, who led the new study………………………
Ive done the math here and this is how it works out with second ahnd smoke and people inhaling it!
The 16 cities study conducted by the U.S. DEPT OF ENERGY and later by Oakridge National laboratories discovered:
Cigarette smoke, bartenders annual exposure to smoke rises, at most, to the equivalent of 6 cigarettes/year.
146,000 CIGARETTES SMOKED IN 20 YEARS AT 1 PACK A DAY.
A bartender would have to work in second hand smoke for 2433 years to get an equivalent dose.
Then the average non-smoker in a ventilated restaurant for an hour would have to go back and forth each day for 119,000 years to get an equivalent 20 years of smoking a pack a day! Pretty well impossible ehh!
Here we are,there they are with Billions of dollars and the MSM on there side.
We have truth,they have lies…………..
Weve shown them as liars,they will not openly debate us any longer nearly anywhere.
Ive for a long time fought the 2 front war……….
First you destroy the shs mythology then after that hit the direct smoking issue head on.
If they lied about shs all along then its not a far jump to wonder about the direct smoking claims too!
How many of us always thought they had direct proof of causation to smoking for their claims!
A raise of hands would likely include all of us……………….yet we find they ahve never ever proven one damnable claim they ever made to direct smoking,none nada nowhere!
After 6 years looking and fighting it just simply appears the Nazis back in the 1950s took ordinairy old age disease and renamed them ” SMOKING RELATED”!
Statistical magic is junk science…………………
We find most all LC cases in the 78-82 year old bracket…………..yet we find only 6-9% of life long smokers if ever get LC……………
Now does direct smoking cause LC? I think the answer is it maybe a contributatory element but not the only element to consider. The major player here is each persons own GENETIC CODE!
That is where the true answer lies not in single issues but in all multifactorial elements especially the person themselves.
If smoking caused we would see a 100% of anyone who smokes getting LC yet we dont! Its not even close.
In this comments run this needs to be reposted:
JOINT STATEMENT ON THE RE-ASSESSMENT OF THE TOXICOLOGICAL TESTING OF TOBACCO PRODUCTS”
7 October, the COT meeting on 26 October and the COC meeting on 18
November 2004.
http://cot.food.gov.uk/pdfs/cotstatementtobacco0409
“5. The Committees commented that tobacco smoke was a highly complex chemical mixture and that the causative agents for smoke induced diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, effects on reproduction and on offspring) was unknown. The mechanisms by which tobacco induced adverse effects were not established. The best information related to tobacco smoke – induced lung cancer, but even in this instance a detailed mechanism was not available. The Committees therefore agreed that on the basis of current knowledge it would be very difficult to identify a toxicological testing strategy or a biomonitoring approach for use in volunteer studies with smokers where the end-points determined or biomarkers measured were predictive of the overall burden of tobacco-induced adverse disease.”
Epidemiologists Vote to Keep Doing Junk Science
http://www.manhealthissue.com/2007/06/epidemiologists-vote-to-keep-doing-junk-science.html
Epidemiologists Vote to Keep Doing Junk Science
Epidemiology Monitor (October 1997)
An estimated 300 attendees a recent meeting of the American College of
Epidemiology voted approximately 2 to 1 to keep doing junk science!
Specifically, the attending epidemiologists voted against a motion
proposed in an Oxford-style debate that “risk factor” epidemiology is
placing the field of epidemiology at risk of losing its credibility.
Risk factor epidemiology focuses on specific cause-and-effect
relationships–like heavy coffee drinking increases heart attack risk. A
different approach to epidemiology might take a broader
perspective–placing heart attack risk in the context of more than just
one risk factor, including social factors.
Risk factor epidemiology is nothing more than a perpetual junk science machine.
But as NIEHS epidemiologist Marilyn Tseng said “It’s hard to be an
epidemiologist and vote that what most of us are doing is actually harmful
to epidemiology.”
But who really cares about what they’re doing to epidemiology. I thought
it was public health that mattered!
we have seen the “SELECTIVE” blindness disease that
Scientist have practiced over the past ten years. Seems the only color they
see is GREEN BACKS, it’s a very infectious disease that has spread through
the Scientific community with the same speed that any infectious disease
would spread. And has affected the T(thinking) Cells as well as sight.
Seems their eyes see only what their paid to see. To be honest, I feel
after the Agent Orange Ranch Hand Study, and the Slutz and Nutz Implant
Study, they have cast a dark shadow over their profession of being anything
other than traveling professional witnesses for corporate hire with a lack
of moral concern to their obligation of science and truth.
The true “Risk Factor” is a question of ; will they ever be able to earn
back the respect of their profession as an Oath to Science, instead of
corporate paid witnesses with selective vision?
Oh, if this seems way harsh, it’s nothing compared to the damage of peoples
lives that selective blindness has caused!
The rise of a pseudo-scientific links lobby
Every day there seems to be a new study making a link between food, chemicals or lifestyle and ill-health. None of them has any link with reality.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/13287
Human lungs ‘brush’ themselves clean of contaminants
Friday, September 07, 2012 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Human lungs contain a tiny network of constantly moving “brushes” that flush contaminants out of the respiratory system, according to research conducted by scientists from the University of North Carolina and published in the journal Science.
Scientists have known for a long time that the respiratory system protects itself by means of a coating of mucus, which is sticky enough to trap pollutants and keep them from reaching the body’s cells. When needed, the body can expel this mucus through a runny nose or a cough.
“The air we breathe isn’t exactly clean, and we take in many dangerous elements with every breath,” said lead researcher Michael Rubinstein.
“We need a mechanism to remove all the junk we breathe in, and the way it’s done is with a very sticky gel, called mucus, that catches these particles and removes them with the help of tiny cilia. The cilia are constantly beating, even while we sleep.
“In a coordinated fashion, they push mucus, containing foreign objects, out of the lungs, and we either swallow it or spit it out. These cilia even beat for a few hours after we die. If they stopped, we’d be flooded with mucus that provides a fertile breeding ground for bacteria.”
But until now, researchers have never understood why the mucus does not stick to or even infiltrate the respiratory cells themselves. The foremost theory, known as the “gel-on-liquid model,” posited that an as-yet-undiscovered watery “periciliary” layer kept mucus and cilia separate. The problem with this theory was always that to the best of scientific knowledge, mucus should eventually dissolve into such a watery layer, not remain separate.
“We can’t have a watery layer separating sticky mucus from our cells because there is an osmotic pressure in the mucus that causes it to expand in water,” Rubinstein says. “So what is really keeping the mucus from sticking to our cells?”
“Gel-on-brush”
To get to the bottom of the mystery, the researchers used modern imaging techniques to examine the interior of the lungs. They found a dense network of brush-like structures that sit atop the cilia. These brushes are composed of protective molecules that keep both mucus and contaminants from getting to the respiratory cells beneath. These molecules also function as a second line of defense against viruses or bacteria that manage to penetrate the mucus.
Stephen Spiro of the British Lung Foundation said the findings could help significantly improve scientific understanding of lung function.
“Mucus has a complex biological make-up and forms a vital part of the lungs’ defense mechanism,” he said.
“Research such as this helps our understanding [of] how this system works, and of the complex mechanisms deep within our lungs which protect us from the atmosphere we breathe in.”
Rubinstein and his fellow researchers noted that their findings may also explain previously mysterious lung disorders from asthma to cystic fibrosis (CF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These diseases may stem from a collapse of the protective brushes.
“We found that there is a specific condition, below which the brush is healthy and cells are happy,” Rubinstein said. “But above this ideal condition, in diseases like CF or COPD, the brush becomes compressed and actually prevents the normal cilia beating and healthy flow of mucus.”
In such conditions, the mucus would then stick directly to the lung’s cells.
“The collapse of this brush is what can lead to immobile mucus and result in infection, inflammation and eventually the destruction of lung tissue and the loss of lung function,” Rubinstein said. “But our new model should guide researchers to develop novel therapies to treat lung diseases and provide them with biomarkers to track the effectiveness of those therapies.”
Human lungs ‘brush’ themselves clean of contaminants
Friday, September 07, 2012 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Human lungs contain a tiny network of constantly moving “brushes” that flush contaminants out of the respiratory system, according to research conducted by scientists from the University of North Carolina and published in the journal Science.
Scientists have known for a long time that the respiratory system protects itself by means of a coating of mucus, which is sticky enough to trap pollutants and keep them from reaching the body’s cells. When needed, the body can expel this mucus through a runny nose or a cough.
“The air we breathe isn’t exactly clean, and we take in many dangerous elements with every breath,” said lead researcher Michael Rubinstein.
“We need a mechanism to remove all the junk we breathe in, and the way it’s done is with a very sticky gel, called mucus, that catches these particles and removes them with the help of tiny cilia. The cilia are constantly beating, even while we sleep.
“In a coordinated fashion, they push mucus, containing foreign objects, out of the lungs, and we either swallow it or spit it out. These cilia even beat for a few hours after we die. If they stopped, we’d be flooded with mucus that provides a fertile breeding ground for bacteria.”
But until now, researchers have never understood why the mucus does not stick to or even infiltrate the respiratory cells themselves. The foremost theory, known as the “gel-on-liquid model,” posited that an as-yet-undiscovered watery “periciliary” layer kept mucus and cilia separate. The problem with this theory was always that to the best of scientific knowledge, mucus should eventually dissolve into such a watery layer, not remain separate.
“We can’t have a watery layer separating sticky mucus from our cells because there is an osmotic pressure in the mucus that causes it to expand in water,” Rubinstein says. “So what is really keeping the mucus from sticking to our cells?”
“Gel-on-brush”
To get to the bottom of the mystery, the researchers used modern imaging techniques to examine the interior of the lungs. They found a dense network of brush-like structures that sit atop the cilia. These brushes are composed of protective molecules that keep both mucus and contaminants from getting to the respiratory cells beneath. These molecules also function as a second line of defense against viruses or bacteria that manage to penetrate the mucus.
Stephen Spiro of the British Lung Foundation said the findings could help significantly improve scientific understanding of lung function.
“Mucus has a complex biological make-up and forms a vital part of the lungs’ defense mechanism,” he said.
“Research such as this helps our understanding [of] how this system works, and of the complex mechanisms deep within our lungs which protect us from the atmosphere we breathe in.”
Rubinstein and his fellow researchers noted that their findings may also explain previously mysterious lung disorders from asthma to cystic fibrosis (CF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These diseases may stem from a collapse of the protective brushes.
“We found that there is a specific condition, below which the brush is healthy and cells are happy,” Rubinstein said. “But above this ideal condition, in diseases like CF or COPD, the brush becomes compressed and actually prevents the normal cilia beating and healthy flow of mucus.”
In such conditions, the mucus would then stick directly to the lung’s cells.
“The collapse of this brush is what can lead to immobile mucus and result in infection, inflammation and eventually the destruction of lung tissue and the loss of lung function,” Rubinstein said. “But our new model should guide researchers to develop novel therapies to treat lung diseases and provide them with biomarkers to track the effectiveness of those therapies.”
Sources for this article include:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19357090
http://www.sciencecodex.com
http://health.usnews.com
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037099_lungs_contaminants_respiratory_system.html#ixzz25oTsdUCA
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037099_lungs_contaminants_respiratory_system.html#ixzz25oTcQn3Y
Mummies’ clogged arteries take smoking, fatty foods, lethargy out of the mix
By Tom Valeo, Times Correspondent
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:30am
You do everything right: You exercise every day, include lots of fruits and vegetables in your diet, never smoke, minimize the stress in your life and take medication to keep your cholesterol and blood pressure under control. You’re preventing modern life from ruining your heart, right? • Well, maybe modern life isn’t as much of a problem as merely living. CT scans of 137 ancient mummies from three continents show that our ancestors had plaque in their arteries, too, even though they never smoked, never tasted ice cream or pork rinds, and had no choice but to exercise vigorously every day of their lives.
According to the study, which appeared recently in the Lancet, at least one-third of the mummies, who lived as long as 5,000 years ago, had arteries that had narrowed as a result of atherosclerosis — the buildup of fatty deposits in the arterial wall. Apparently the cardiovascular system has a tendency to clog up over time.
“Our research shows that we are all at risk for atherosclerosis, the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes,” said Gregory Thomas, medical director of the MemorialCare Heart & Vascular Institute, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, and one of the authors of the study. “The data we gathered about individuals from the prehistoric cultures of ancient Peru and the Native Americans living along the Colorado River and the Unangan of the Aleutian Islands is forcing us to look for other factors that may cause heart disease.”
The diet of the mummies varied widely, but contained ample protein and vegetables (and presumably no cupcakes or pork rinds). Aside from the few Egyptian mummies who lived their lives as pampered royalty, these ancient people used their muscles constantly.
Yet, the atherosclerosis was found in mummies who died in what we today would consider middle age (almost none made it to 60). And just as today, their arteries became more narrow as they got older. CT scans of modern people have demonstrated that after the age of 60 for men and 70 for women, some degree of atherosclerosis is all but universal. One large study found that teens ages 15 to 19 showed early signs of atherosclerosis, and 50 percent already had conspicuous accumulations of plaque.
“All of us age in every tissue of our body,” says Dr. Donald LaVan, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. “It’s just a question of how rapidly it happens. There’s nothing you can do to stop aging. All you’re trying to do is prevent it from advancing faster than it should.”
The authors of the paper agree. “Although commonly assumed to be a modern disease, the presence of atherosclerosis in premodern humans raises the possibility of a more basic predisposition to the disease,” they concluded.
So what can we do to thwart that predisposition?
Above all, don’t smoke, says LaVan, and engage in regular physical activity.
“After that, we’re in the realm of treating disease,” he says. “If your lipids are up or you have hypertension, take care of it. If you have problems with rhythm disturbances, that must be treated, too, because it impairs the ability of heart to pump efficiently. We’re looking at common sense here, but getting patients to do these things is tough.”
http://www.tampabay.com/news/aging/lifetimes/mummies-clogged-arteries-take-smoking-fatty-foods-lethargy-out-of-the-mix/2114897
Your born with cancer cells!
Recent advances in the field of epigenetics have shown that human
cancer cells harbor global epigenetic abnormalities, in addition to numerous
genetic alterations (3,4). These genetic and epigenetic
alterations interact at all stages of cancer development, working together
to promote cancer progression (5). The genetic origin of cancer
is widely accepted; however, recent studies suggest that epigenetic
alterations may be the key initiating events in some forms of cancer
(6). These findings have led to a global initiative to understand the role
of epigenetics in the initiation and propagation of cancer (7). The fact
that epigenetic aberrations, unlike genetic mutations, are potentially
reversible and can be restored to their normal state by epigenetic therapy
makes such initiatives promising and therapeutically relevant (8).
In this review, we take a comprehensive look at the current
understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms at work in normal mammalian
cells and their comparative aberrations that occur during
carcinogenesis. We also discuss the idea of cancer stem cells as the
originators of cancer and the prospect of epigenetic therapy in
designing efficient strategies for cancer treatment.
Click to access 27.full.pdf
Researchers identify previously unknown gene fusion event in lung cancer
Smoking is a well-known risk factor for lung cancer, but nearly 25% of all lung cancer patients have never smoked. In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers have identified a previously unknown gene fusion event that could explain a significant proportion of lung cancer cases in never-smokers, and might serve as a target for new therapies.
Recent strides have been made to identify gene mutation events driving cases of lung adenocarcinoma in never-smokers, but the underlying genetic events leading to these lung cancers still remain unknown in a large number of cases. In this report, using a combination of genome sequencing and RNA sequencing, a team of researchers in South Korea has characterized a previously unknown gene fusion event in a case of lung adenocarcinoma striking a 33-year-old Korean male with no history of smoking or cancer within his family.
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20111223/Researchers-identify-previously-unknown-gene-fusion-event-in-lung-cancer.aspx
In the Long Cancer site I read there is a woman whose father and brother died from LC quite young, she now has it, never smoker, and two of her five children when tested and also found to have lung tumours, one only 10. She is currently taking part in research and there seems to be some evidence of a genetic component in LC, rare but very interesting. They all have adenocarcinoma non small cell LC.
Risks of smoking exaggerated
Eric Boyd
The risks of smoking are greatly exaggerated Too much is made of the 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke. We’re told these chemicals are so harmful that they are responsible for the deaths of millions worldwide. Untold in this “war on tobacco” is that each of the plants we consume consists of an equally daunting thousands of chemicals many of which are recognized poisons or suspected cancer-causing agents. Cayenne peppers, carrots and strawberries each contain six suspected carcinogens; onions, grapefruit and tomato each contain five — some the same as the seven suspected carcinogens found in tobacco.High-heat cooking creates yet more dietary carcinogens from otherwise harmless chemical constituents. Sure, these plant chemicals are measured in infinitesimal amounts. An independent study calculated 222,000 smoking cigarettes would be needed to reach unacceptable levels of benzo(a)pyrene. One million smoking cigarettes would be needed to produce unacceptable levels of toluene. To reach these estimated danger levels, the cigarettes must be smoked simultaneously and completely in a sealed 20-square-foot room with a nine-foot ceiling. Many other chemicals in tobacco smoke can also be found in normal diets. Smoking 3,000 packages of cigarettes would supply the same amount of arsenic as a nutritious 200 gram serving of sole. Half a bottle of now healthy wine can supply 32 times the amount of lead as one pack of cigarettes. The same amount of cadmium obtained from smoking eight packs of cigarettes can be enjoyed in half a pound of crab. That’s one problem with the anti-smoking crusade. The risks of smoking are greatly exaggerated. So are the costs. An in-depth analysis of 400,000 U.S. smoking-related deaths by National Institute of Health mathematician Rosalind Marimont and senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute Robert Levy identified a disturbing number of flaws in the methodology used to estimate these deaths. Incorrectly classifying some diseases as smoking-related and choosing the wrong standard of comparison each overstated deaths by more than 65 per cent. Failure to control for confounding variables such as diet and exercise turned estimates more into a computerized shell game than reliable estimates of deaths. Marimont and Levy also found no adjustments were made to the costs of smoking resulting from the benefits of smoking — reduced Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, less obesity, depression and breast cancer. If it were possible to estimate 45,000 smoking-related Canadian deaths as some health activists imagine — and Marimont, Levy and other respected researchers think it is not — then applying an identical methodology to other lifestyle choices would yield 57,000 Canadian deaths due to lack of exercise and 73,000 Canadian deaths blamed on poor diets. If both the chemical constituents of tobacco smoke and the numbers of smoking-related deaths are overstated — and clearly they are — how can we trust the claim that tobacco smoke is harmful to non-smokers? The 1993 bellwether study by the Environmental Protection Agency that selectively combined the results of a number of previous studies and found a small increase in lung cancer risk in those exposed to environmental tobacco smoke has been roundly criticized as severely flawed by fellow researchers and ultimately found invalid in a court of law. In 1998, the World Health Organization reported a small, but not statistically significant, increase in the risk of lung cancer in non-smoking women married to smokers. Despite these invalidating deficiencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization both concluded tobacco smoke causes lung cancer in non-smokers. One wonders whether the same conclusions would have been announced if scientific fraud were a criminal offence. When confronted with the scientific uncertainty, the inconsistency of results and the incredible misrepresentation of present-day knowledge, those seeking to abolish tobacco invoke a radical interpretation of the Precautionary Principle: “Where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activity should not proceed.” This unreasonable exploitation of the ever-present risks of living infiltrates our schools to indoctrinate trusting and eager minds with the irrational fears of today. Instead of opening minds to the wondrous complexities of living, it opens the door to peer ridicule and intolerance while cultivating the trendy cynics of tomorrow. If we continue down this dangerous path of control and prohibition based on an unreliable or remote chance of harm, how many personal freedoms will remain seven generations from now?
http://ericboyd.blogspot.com/2008/01/risks-of-smoking-exaggerated.html
Smokers and nonsmokers have similar lifetime risks for cardiovascular disease.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184016,00.html
First Lifetime Heart Disease Risk Assessment Developed
Monday , February 06, 2006
The researchers reviewed the medical records of 3,564 men and 4,362 women who did not have any record of cardiovascular disease at age 50.
The men and women were followed for several decades and all cases of heart attack, coronary heart disease, angina, stroke, claudication (pain in the legs caused by circulation problems), and death from cardiovascular disease were recorded.
When the researchers calculated the impact of modifiable risk factors such as body weight, smoking history, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure, they found that:
–Smokers and nonsmokers had similar lifetime risks for cardiovascular disease.
Why did you leave out the second half of the sentence. “, but smokers developed cardiovascular problems earlier in life and died an average of five years sooner.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/02/06/first-lifetime-heart-disease-risk-assessment-developed/#ixzz2Wy0ciyxy
Why did you leave out the second half of the sentence. “, but smokers developed cardiovascular problems earlier in life and died an average of five years sooner.
Because it is utter, utter rubbish. Cardiovascular problems are mostly due to AGE.
It would seem that this “lag-phase” quoted by the anti-smokers is convenient to them.
I would prefer to die 10 years “earlier” to vegetating in a prohibition orgy frenzied state. Unfortunately smoking is not going to kill me.
Smokers and nonsmokers had similar lifetime risks for cardiovascular disease, but smokers developed cardiovascular problems earlier in life and died an average of five years sooner. The researchers note that this might be due to other smoking-related causes such as lung disease and cancer.
Died of hat earlier it doesnt say from heart disease in the study groups now does it! It appears as usual they tossed in the usual tobacco caused their deaths anyay trash that we find at the bottom of all studies……..standard propaganda swill I call it!
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/02/06/first-lifetime-heart-disease-risk-assessment-developed/#ixzz2Wzmz2Lnb
Smoking lowers skin cancer risk
In what at first seems like a bizarre twist, lighting up a ‘cancer stick’ lowers your risk of melanoma, new US research confirms.
Men who had ever smoked had a significantly lower risk of melanoma (relative risk 0.72) compared to men who had never smoked, and current smokers had an even lower risk (0.52), according to the study involving 145,709 people pooled from two large national cohorts.
The same could not be said of women, the researchers from Harvard Medical School said, but when male and female data was combined, compared with never smokers, ever smokers had a lower risk of melanoma.
“We detected trends between lower melanoma risk and longer duration of smoking, intensity of smoking in current smokers and…
http://www.6minutes.com.au/news/latest- … ancer-risk
http://reason.com/archives/2006/07/05/a-pack-of-lies
A Pack of Lies
The surgeon general hypes the hazards of secondhand smoke
July 5, 2006
Jacob Sullum
According to Surgeon General Richard Carmona, secondhand smoke is so dangerous that you’d be better off if you stopped going to smoky bars and started smoking instead. “Even brief exposure to secondhand smoke,” claims the press release that accompanied his new report on the subject, “has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and increases risk for heart disease and lung cancer.”
Among smokers, these diseases take many years to develop. So if you got your health tips from the surgeon general, you’d start smoking a pack a day as a protective measure.
But you may want to look elsewhere for medical advice. Carmona is so intent on promoting smoking bans—a key element of the government’s campaign to reduce cigarette consumption—that he absurdly exaggerates the hazards of secondhand smoke, hoping to generate enough public alarm to banish smokers from every location outside the home.
As the report itself makes clear, there is no evidence that brief, transient exposure to secondhand smoke has any effect on your chance of developing heart disease or lung cancer. The studies that link secondhand smoke to these illnesses involve intense, long-term exposure, typically among people who have lived with smokers for decades.
Even in these studies, it’s difficult to demonstrate an effect, precisely because the doses of toxins and carcinogens bystanders passively absorb are much smaller than the doses absorbed by smokers, probably amounting to a fraction of a cigarette a day. Not surprisingly, the epidemiological studies cited by the surgeon general’s report find that the increases in lung cancer and heart disease risks associated with long-term exposure to secondhand smoke are small, on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Among smokers, by contrast, the risk of heart disease is between 100 and 300 percent higher, while the risk of lung cancer is about 900 percent higher.
Because the associations found in the secondhand smoke studies are so weak, it’s impossible to rule out alternative explanations, such as unreported smoking or other lifestyle variables that independently raise disease risks. Although the surgeon general’s report concludes such factors are unlikely to entirely account for the observed associations, the truth is we don’t know for sure and probably never well, given the limitations of epidemiology and the difficulty of measuring low-level risks.
Reasonable people can disagree about the meaning of these ambiguous data, and it’s not surprising that supporters of smoking bans like Carmona are inclined to see a clear causal relationship, while opponents (like me) are inclined to be more skeptical. But there is no excuse for the kind of scare mongering in which Carmona engaged when he implied that you could drop dead from the slightest whiff of tobacco smoke.
Even supporters of smoking bans, such as longtime anti-smoking activist Michael Siegel, faulted Carmona for gilding the lily (blackening the lung?) by saying things such as, “There is NO risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure.” This position contradicts the basic toxicological principle that the dose makes the poison. Since it’s hard to measure even the health consequences of heavy, long-term exposure to secondhand smoke, how could one possibly demonstrate an effect from, say, a few molecules? “No risk-free level” is an article of faith, not a scientific statement.
Speaking of which, Carmona was at pains to say he was merely summarizing the science, not making policy recommendations, even though he emphasized that smoking bans are the only way to eliminate the “serious public health hazard” posed by secondhand smoke. He is right about this much: The issue of what the government should do about secondhand smoke is independent from the issue of exactly how risky it is. Whether smoking bans are a good idea is a question not of science but of values, of whether we want to live in a country where a majority forcibly imposes its preferences on everyone else or one where there is room for choice and diversity.
In 1968 fourteen hundred British civil servants, all smokers, were divided into two similar groups. Half were encouraged and counselled to quit smoking. These formed the test group. The others, the control group, were left to their own devices. For ten years both groups were monitored with respect to their health and smoking status.So what were the results of the Whitehall study? They were contrary to all expectation. The quit group showed no improvement in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rates due to heart disease, lung cancer, or any other cause with one exception: certain other cancers were more than twice as common in the quit group. Later, after twenty years there was still no benefit in life expectancy for the quit group.
Over the next decade the results of other similar trials appeared. It had been argued that if an improvement in one life-style factor, smoking, were of benefit, then an improvement in several – eg smoking, diet and exercise – should produce even clearer benefits. And so appeared the results of the whimsically acronymed Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial or MRFIT, with its 12,886 American subjects. Similarly, in Europe 60,881 subjects in four countries took part in the WHO Collaborative Trial. In Sweden the Goteborg study had 30,022 subjects. These were enormously expensive, wide-spread and time-consuming experiments. In all, there were 6 such trials with a total of over a hundred thousand subjects each engaged for an average of 7.4 years, a grand total of nearly 800,000 subject-years. The results of all were uniform, forthright and unequivocal: giving up smoking, even when fortified by improved diet and exercise, produced no increase in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rate for heart disease or for cancer. A decade of expensive and protracted research had produced a quite unexpected result.
Im done and Frank check your Dungeon!
Hueper on Doll
Testimony of Dr Hueper 1957
“They manipulated the evidence. Anyone who introduces a corrective factor in his calculations to make the evidence fit a preconceived idea, I do not feel that this is valid scientific evidence.
“Do you feel, in view of what you said, that the application of a corrective factor means a predetermined manipulation in this case?
A.In this case I could not say, no.
Q I want to get clear on that.You asked me to read on. I will do that. This appears on Page 435 of your May, 1957 article and reads;
“However, even this estimate is heavily biased by the arbitrary assumption that the benzpyrene content present allegedly in cigarette smoke was about 12 times as effective in eliciting cancers as benzpyrene demonstrated in atmospheric air.
Only when such a “corrective” coefficient is applied was it possible to obtain proportional correlations between the total exposure to benzpyrene from both cigarette smoking and air pollutants and the relative incidence rates of lung cancer found in the industrialized metropolitan Liverpool area, an intermediary urban-rural region, and the rural area of North Wales”
A That is right.
Q That was your statement.
A I would like to have that on the record too.
Q All right. It is in Doctor”
http://tobaccodocuments.org/rjr/503243231-3367.html?zoom=750&ocr_position=above_foramatted&start_page=91
“To understand why Hueper pressed his attack so insistently, we need to look beyond methods to what he saw as the broader implications of the new epidemiology.”
“Just as fundamentally, Hueper’s resistance reflected his concerns about how the new epidemiology would become translated into clinical and medicolegal decision making.
If physicians came to agree that smoking was such a universal and important cause of lung cancer, even in their work-patients, then liability and compensation suits by workers in the industries that did cause lung cancer in workers, such as coke, chromate, or asbestos production stood in dire jeopardy.
If a worker happened also to be a smoker – which most blue collar workers tended to be – then companies would argue that he brought it on himself.
“Epidemiologists themselves did not argue that the new smoking evidence distinguished the influence of workplace exposures from that of smoking in any individual case.
Yet Hueper knew how defence attorneys and their medical witnesses would seize upon a plaintiff’s smoking to provide a “convenient escape for the guilty industrial part to pay compensation to the victim or to his widow and orphans.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1381166/?page=8
But not only was it subjected to a corrective co-efficient once but again when the government of the day got hold of it.
Fear of political embarrassment led to government cover up of link between air
pollution and lung cancer
Monday 9 December 2002
“Delegates attending an international conference in London today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Great London Smog of 1952, which caused an estimated 12,000 deaths, will hear how governments from the late 50s onwards deliberately downplayed the huge threat to public health caused by air pollution, and sought to shift the blame firmly onto cigarette smoking instead.
Professor Virginia Berridge of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s History Unit has researched papers relating to cabinet committee meetings in the late ’50s looking into smoking, air pollution and lung cancer. She asserts that although there were clear political reasons for obscuring the link between air pollution and lung cancer, other factors, including a shifting public health agenda, which focused on an individual¹s responsibility for their health rather then environmental influences, were also key in ensuring that the issue of air pollution was ‘damped down’.”
“A few years later, in 1957, the Medical Research Council was planning to issue a statement saying although smoking was a significant cause of lung cancer, up to 30% of cases might be caused by air pollution. But the Cabinet committee on cancer of the lung, fearful of another political embarrassment which could be caused by stressing the air pollution connection, asked the MRC to reconsider its statement. On 31 May 1957 a modified version was published, which asserted that although it was likely that atmospheric pollution did play a role in lung cancer, it was ‘a relatively minor one in comparison with cigarette smoking'”.
http: //web.archive.org/web/20110703141652/http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/news/2002/smogpollution.html
Incidentally
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
“1919-1920 Preliminary moves by Rockefeller Foundation to explore possibilities for a School of Public Health in London ”
“The new School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine was opened in its present building in Keppel Street, a gift from the Rockefeller Foundation. At that time, the term ‘hygiene’ was not restricted to its current meaning of ‘cleanliness’ or ‘sanitary science’, but was used in the wider sense of the establishment and maintenance of health – now more usually described as ‘public health'”
prospectus
“In 1921 the Athlone Committee recommended the creation of an institute of state medicine in London, this built on a proposal by the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a London based agency that would lead the world in the promotion of public health and tropical medicine. The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine was founded by Royal Charter in 1924.
The purchase of the site and the cost of a new building was made possible through a generous gift of $2m from the Rockefeller Foundation”
lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/history/building/
“I shall have a Rockefeller Scholar in my department who might be used on it at little cost. A much better alternative would be Richard Doll who has been employed by the Council in the survey of peptic ulcer (sic) in industry and which is coming to an end I believe
denialdelay.org.uk/prologue.htm
1933 Austin Bradford Hill appointed Reader at LSHTM
Rockefeller Foundation – Standard Oil.
Piece of luck for Doll that he found tobacco guilty, it would have been most embarrassing had he not.
No luck involved. He set out to find it guilty and he made sure that he did.
“The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.”
“Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims. ”
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.sfgate.com/
The practice of eugenics was over by the early 1950’s JUST when the lung cancer/smoking link was starting to be widely pushed forward by anti-smokers and scientists such as Doll. Easy transition from one to the other – using ‘faked and twisted data’ to serve their aims?
Rockefeller Medicine Men
BLAMING THE VICTIM: NEW PROMINENCE
FOR AN OLD IDEOLOGY
“A large-scale study of health behavior in California supported the view that a person’s “lifestyle” is a powerful determinant of his or her health status. Fuchs, ignoring contrary epidemiological evidence, asserts that “the greatest potential for reducing coronary disease, cancer, and the other major killers still lies in altering personal behavior.”
“The cost of sloth, gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking have now become a national, not an individual, responsibility, all justified as individual freedom,” asserts Dr. John Knowles, the influential president of the Rockefeller Foundation. “But one man’s or woman’s freedom in health is now another man’s shackle in taxes and insurance premiums.”
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030312brown/brown5.htm
Presidents
John Knowles – 1972-1979
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation
Put quite simply we have won the war……………..its simply a political coup that has brought on not only the smoking bans worldwide but the main component world wide control via UN TREATIES!
Nothing will end until the political players in the war on all of us is dealt a decisive blow and defeated soundly. Yes,all of us fighting the smoking bans or any of the spin off attacks against any of the sub groups of people in the world are defeating the political coalition pushing the world order where all this trash is born and pushed from! To destroy the EUORPEAN UNION is to win everyones freedom from nannying tyrants….
Sharing this:
WHERE DOES CHARITY MONEY GO??? —
Some interesting stats in this message.
The Terry Fox organization contributes $0.83 for every dollar raised to
cancer research.
The Canadian Cancer Society: $0.22 for every dollar raised.
Admin costs for the Terry Fox Run are low because most of the admin costs
are paid by its many volunteers. Only $0.17 is used for run promotion and
supplies. Every person organizing & managing absorbs all expenses other than
the run donor sheets and some signage.
Do you know that the CEO of Shriners’, the Imperial Potentate, makes $0.00
per year? How about that for a salary? There are 22 hospitals helping kids
in Canada , the USA and in Mexico . His salary is matched by the Provincial
Potentate’s income which is also $0.00 per year.
So the next time you see a Shriner in a mall, selling whatever, give
generously.
……………….
As you open your pockets for yet another natural disaster, keep the
following information in mind.
We have listed the charities from the highest (worst paidoffender) to the
lowest (least paid offender).
The worst offender, for the 11th year in a row is UNICEF,whose CEO receives
$1,200,000 per year, plus a Rolls Royce for his exclusive use wherever he
goes, and an expense account that is rumored to be well over $150,000.
Only pennies from the donations go to the UNICEF cause (less than $0.14 per
dollar of income).
The second worst offender this year is Marsha J. Evans, President and CEO of
the American Red Cross.
Her salary for the year ending in 2009 was $651,957 plus expenses. She
enjoys 6 weeks fully paid holidays including all related expenses during the
holiday trip for her and her husband and kids, and 100% fully paid health &
dental plan for her and her family….for life!
This means out of every dollar they bring in, about $0.39 goes to charity
causes.
The third worst offender, again for the 7th time, was Brian Gallagher,
President of the United Way. He receives a $375,000 base salary (US funds),
plus so many expense benefits it’s hard to keep track as to what it is all
worth, including a fully paid lifetime membership at 2 golf courses
(1 in Canada, 1 in the USA), 2 luxury vehicles, a yacht club membership, 3
major company gold credit cards for his personal expenses… and so on….
This equates to about $0.51 per dollar of income going to charity causes.
Fourth worst offender, in the fourth spot for every year since this
information has been made available since 1998, is amazingly yet again,
World Vision. Its President (Canada) receives $300,000 base salary, plus a
home valued in the $700,000 – $800,000 range (completely furnished, all
housing expenses, including taxes, water/sewer, telephone/fax, HD/high speed
cable, weekly maid service and pool/yard maintenance), fully paid private
schooling for his children, upscale automobile, and a $55,000 personal
expense account for clothing/food, plus a $125,000 business expense account.
And get this: because it is a “religious based” charity, World Vision pays
little or no taxes, can receive government assistance and does not have to
declare were the money goes.
Only about $0.52 of earned income per dollar is available for charity
causes.
……..
Of the some sixty-odd charities we looked at, thelowest paid
President/CEO/Commissioner was heading up a charity group in Canada . We
found, believe it or not, that it was…
Ready for this…?
I think you might be surprised…
It is none other than…
The Salvation Army’s Commissioner Todd Bassett, who receives a salary of
only $13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 billion dollar
organization.
Which means about $0.93 per dollar earned, is readily available and goes
back out to local charity causes.
Truly amazing…
If you really want to get the antismoking nut cases on the back foot – that will get a massive spike in fear and heart palpitations, tell them that the goal of tolerant, un-brainwashed folk of goodwill is to have all smoking bans everywhere revoked (and that is a reasonable goal) – save a few designated areas where neurotic antismoking bigots can congregate and whine away in smokefree surrounds. Make it the final statement; no further debate or comment.
Whew! LOTS of excellent stuff here! Too much for me… I’m about to head out the door and won’t be able to read it in detail till tomorrow probably. Scanned very quickly and have a few very quick comments:
1) Magnetic’s points are as good as always, including “While people are obsessed by only the detail of particular “studies”, important as that is, no-one seems to be asking about the symptoms and danger of moralizing, social-engineering fanaticism/zealotry/extremism. ” Anyone with *ANY* interest in this sort of thinking/approach at all should most definitely visit http://www.rampant-antismoking.com/ and download Rick Di Pierri’s book “Rampant Antismoking Signifies Grave
Danger: Materialism Out of Control.”
2) Barry, you’d asked me something once before somewhere and I couldn’t find an email for you. Can you email me? Cantiloper on gmail.
3) MikeF: re critiquing all their lies in a few paragraphs… Agreed, although the Net is a MUCH better medium for making the attempt than any sort of broadcast media. “Brains” was meant as a full overview and has worked pretty well in that regard, but the real tool for outreach that I’ve pushed the last few years is something much shorter and more likely to be read by the casual passerby: the Lies booklet noted just below.
4) Global Warming: Yes, they could learn a lot from our experience, and we could be helped if some of their scientifically literate critical folks looked over into our field once in a while. I did some good posting for about a year on one of their main boards, Alan Watts’ WUWT, but Alan kicked me off a few months ago because I wouldn’t delete my WordPress Link to my “Lies” booklet ( http://tinyurl.com/SmokingBanLies ) Hmph… he lets all kinda OTHER people link their pages… but I guess smokers aren’t really “people” … even to the folks aware of how science is misused. ::sigh::
OK… I’ve got 20 tabs here: I gotta close ’em out ‘n get a movin!
:)
MJM
Both Watts’ parents died of lung cancer, I believe. And he attributes this to their smoking, of course. He may run a climate sceptic blog, but his scepticism has limits.
Comments here today are awesome. I have nothing to add except to say Nannying Tyrants is in the middle of an excellent series of posts called ‘What We Are Fighting For’ at http://nannyingtyrants.blogspot.co.uk/
The weak point in the citadel?
Surely it must be the absolute necessity for them to get legislation. If they fail to get legislation they are f**ked. They become mere pressure groups.
The failure of TC to get plain packaging in England and Wales was an enormous setback for them. Much bigger than we might think. Is that the reason that the Irish Health Minister is now trying to rush through a smoking in cars ban? To keep the ball rolling? It must be clear even to the desperate Irish health minister that an such car smoking ban will have negligible effect on anything. A survey conducted in Dublin (?) had researchers watching traffic and noting the occurrence of smoking in cars. There was hardly any at all, never mind ‘with children present’. Thus, a ban on smoking in cars would be an empty gesture.
It seems to me that legislators are beginning to see that have been used; that they are beginning to see the unintended consequences of the social engineering; that they are beginning to see the slippery slope; that they are beginning to see the weakness of the evidence. Have we forgotten that the Zealots failed to get minimum pricing of alcohol as well as plain packaging? Some hospitals have brought back smoking shelters, the latest being Royal Bolton. The Blackpool park smoking ban was ridiculed out of existence.
As regards children, our best weapon is the question, “Whose children?” I listened to a radio programme a few months ago in which a Zealot (female, of course) kept saying words the effect, “We must protect our children”. Her opponent again and again demanded, “Whose children”. The Zealot became quite hysterical and, of course, refused to answer the question. When commenting on newspaper articles and such, we should take every opportunity to protect our children by pointing out the logical consequences of banning smoking near children. Are the perpetrators to be slung in jail? And what if the perpetrators are the children’s parents or grandparents? “WHOSE CHILDREN ARE THEY?” And are these children to be put into the care of the social services and rendered at the mercy of any passing paedophile? Who is guarding the guards? Further, TC is now venturing into areas were there are no big corporations to bully. They are now trying to be effective at the level of the individual. They will fail. Does anyone now care that the highway code says that smoking is a ‘distraction’? Did individual smokers at the Bolton hospital take any notice of the huge sign which stated ‘THIS IS A NON-SMOKING SITE’. TC in the UK has more or less exhausted its supply of corporate victims. Where can it go?