Given this craziness about houses where people have smoked in the past or even where people have smoked outside in the past (which, depending upon how you define the spatial limits of “outside,” could include every dwelling place in the world) Frank is letting me share a few pages from TobakkoNacht – The Antismoking Endgame where I examined some of the outlandish “Propaganda Research” that was referred to in the “Madness” blog entry and comments. I tried to show why the fault doesn’t lie so much with the press as with a deliberate approach by antismoking researchers and activists to actually mislead the press and public about the research that’s been done.
To that end, complete with references at the end, here are a few pages from one of the Slabs of the 150 pages of Studies On The Slab in TobakkoNacht:
===
The research, headed by Dr. Virender Rehan of UCLA, a principle investigator at Los Angeles BioMed, was published in the July, 2011 issue of the American Journal of Physiology[i], and it was, as usual for this sort of stuff, headlined all over the world. With “Thirdhand Smoke” abbreviated as THS here, some of the typical headlines were “THS Hurts Infant Lungs”[ii], “Unborn babies at risk from THS”[iii], “THS Dangerous to Unborn Babies’ Lungs”[iv], and “THS Affects Infant’s Lungs”[v]. Quotes from those stories included such notes as:
Prenatal exposure to toxic components of a newly recognized category of tobacco smoke … can have as serious or an even more negative impact on an infant’s lung development as postnatal or childhood exposure to smoke … long after smokers have finished their cigarettes … [THS is] a stealth toxin because it lingers on the surfaces in the homes, hotel rooms, casinos and cars used by smokers… babies [are] especially vulnerable to the effects of thirdhand smoke … The dangers of thirdhand smoke span the globe … more damaging than secondhand smoke or firsthand smoke … pregnant women should avoid homes and other places where thirdhand smoke is likely to be found to protect their unborn children against the potential damage these toxins can cause to the developing infants’ lungs.
A scary picture. An invisible stealth toxin. More “negative impact” than secondhand smoke. More damaging than firsthand smoke. Babies especially vulnerable. A danger that spans the globe! Several stories emphasized the concept that even touching a surface in a home where smokers might have smoked a long time ago could lead to a lifetime of respiratory pain and suffering for innocent children not even born yet.
None of the stories went into any detail at all about the actual research other than occasionally mentioning a few of the scary chemical names of the “stealth toxins” left behind by smokers. In order to find out more, I had to request a copy of the study itself from the researchers. Given all that I’ve seen, I should not have been surprised by what I found. Nonetheless, I was.
The study didn’t examine mothers touching surfaces in homes where someone smoked in the past. It didn’t examine mothers being hugged by smokers. It didn’t even examine mothers being touched by someone who might have once walked through a room where George Washington might have smoked a pipe before sleeping and leaving one of his ubiquitous signs.
The study once again simply examined rats. More specifically, it examined baby rats. More specifically than that, it examined tiny unborn baby rats who were bloodily ripped out of their mommy rats’ guts and then torn wide open so that their innocent little unborn rat lungs could be yanked out, thrown on a slab, chopped brutally into teenie-weenie one millimeter cubes, and then soaked with concentrated solutions of chemicals that can just barely be detected at nanogram levels in nitrous-acid filled rooms where people have smoked heavily. Some isolated cells in those little bits of tortured fetal rats’ lungs were then found to have undergone changes that could be related in some vaguely arguable way to abnormalities in human lungs that might sometimes correlate with conditions that were nebulously correlated in some way to asthma.
None of that information was given in the news stories. Almost none of it was provided in the study abstract. The little that was provided in the abstract would have been quickly overlooked by most reporters after they were hit with the following opening line:“The underlying mechanisms and effector molecules involved in mediating in utero smoke exposure-induced effects on the developing lung…”
If any reporters did manage to stay awake after that, rather than simply heading straight to the press release with all its juicy quotes (and no hint of rodents), they might have noticed the one mention of the word “rat” in the following excerpt: “Fetal rat lung explants were exposed to nicotine, 1-(N-methyl-N-nitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridinyl)-4-butanal (NNA), or 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK).”
Even that explicit mention would have been blasted out of almost anyone’s consciousness once they hit the phrase“breakdown of alveolar epithelialmesenchymal cross-talk, reflecting lipofibroblast-to-myofibroblast transdifferentiation.”[1]
No one, anywhere in the world, reading any news stories that I was able to find in English, would have had the slightest clue that this study had done anything other than observe the horrible effects of thirdhand smoke exposure on human children who had suffered from their mothers’ unwise visits to those George Washington tourist traps.
In case there is any doubt about how this research was misrepresented to the public, let me present a quote from ModernPregnancyTips.com,[vi] a source that you would certainly expect to be concerned about presenting such information accurately. It’s also a source that you would expect to be responsible about correcting unreasonable fears that might plague mothers-to-be. In the story on their website, though, not only did they quote the concerns of the original THS creator, Jonathan Winickoff, in warning about the danger of even “touching [the] toxic substances [on] contaminated surfaces,” but they then compounded the fear by explaining the study’s findings as follows:
The researchers on the study looked at the way that these tobacco toxins affected the normal lung development in infants. They found that exposure during the prenatal period caused significant disruption in the normal lung tissue growth, which can lead to serious respiratory ailments later in life…
Note the use of the word “infants.” Do you see anything there that even hints that they simply chopped up fetal rat lungs and poured chemicals on them? To make the irresponsibility stand out even more strongly, my attempts at adding corrective material for their readers – material that may have actually saved some pregnancies by relieving the emotional stress on expectant moms who read the article – were simply censored into oblivion by Modern Pregnancy Tips.[2] Did that censorship result in the death of any unborn children from the unjustified stress it surely caused some pregnant women? No one will ever know.
The final nail in the coffin that showed how the researchers wanted their research to be perceived can be seen in an article in Science Daily, where they state “[Dr. Rehan] said this is the first study to show (that) the exposure to the constituents of thirdhand smoke is as damaging and, in some cases, more damaging than secondhand smoke or firsthand smoke.”[vii]
So thirdhand smoke is now claimed to be more damaging (at least “in some cases”) than firsthand smoke??? By the time we get to fifthhand smoke, thermonuclear weapons will have been rendered obsolete! As a statement to the media by a professional, and supposedly responsible, scientific researcher, such wording is simply unforgivable. “The constituents of” may be an important qualifier to scientists, but as a media statement to the general public, the message was clear: a deadly threat from invisible traces left behind by smokers can be more dangerous than actually smoking.
When you look at the reality of the findings of the study compared to the ultimate social effects that this sort of misleading presentation will have on untold thousands, or even millions, of families, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the researchers engaged in outright criminal conduct roughly equivalent to screaming FIRE! in the middle of a crowded movie theater after seeing Humphrey Bogart take a puff in Casablanca.
[1] No, I did not make any of that up.
[2] If you happen to be near your computer you might want to compare http://tinyurl.com/iCytePage to http://tinyurl.com/CensoredPage – you’ll see where the corrective posting was removed by the webmeister. The “iCyte” page copy is a dated capture of the original, saved at the iCyte website, as will be explained in more detail later.
[i] Rehan V. “Thirdhand smoke: a new dimension to the effects of cigarette smoke on the developing lung,” American Journal of Physiology, Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, July 2011, Volume 301, Issue 1, pp. L1-L8. dx.doi.org/10.1152/ajplung.00393.2010
[ii] UPI. “Thirdhand Smoke Hurts Infant Lungs,” UPI.com, April 19, 2011. http://upi.com/Health_News/2011/04/19/Thirdhand-smoke-hurts-infant-lungs/UPI-49871303262530
[iii] Mandel H. “Unborn babies at risk from third-hand smoke,” Examiner.com, April 20, 2011. http://www.examiner.com/article/unborn-babies-at-risk-from-third-hand-smoke
[iv] California State News. “Thirdhand Smoke Dangerous to Unborn Babies’ Lungs,” california.statenews.net, April 20, 2011.http://california.statenews.net/story/771641
[v] India Times. “Thirdhand Smoke Affects Infant’s Lungs,” Indiatimes.com, May 12, 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-12/health/29450221_1_smoke-lung-childhood-exposure
[vi] ModernPregnancyTips. “Thirdhand Smoke Can Damage Unborn Babys Lungs,” modernpregnancytips.com.
http://www.modernpregnancytips.com/pregnancy-health/third-hand-smoke-can-damage-unborn-babys-lungs
[vii] ScienceDaily. “‘Thirdhand Smoke’ Poses Danger to Unborn Babies’ Lungs, Study Finds,” ScienceDaily.com, April 19th, 2011. http://sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419101231.htm
==
As you can see, this sort of insanity isn’t all that new at all: the Antismokers have been laying the groundwork for this attack for years, and they’ll just keep on coming unless and until we manage to expose them for the liars that they are.
Note: In footnote #2 the first citation is to an iCyte photo of the page as taken on May 16th, 2011. Shortly thereafter, Modern Pregnancy moved my comments from simply “invisible” (as in “not yet moderated”) to “non-existent” (as in erased from history.) You can see that by visiting either the present day page (the second citation in footnote 2) or the iCyte capture of that page today at:
http://www.icyte.com/saved/www.modernpregnancytips.com/882462?key=5b196f962a10206b18c8a93334f8be6dd6b9d4af
iCyte is a very useful tool for us in the fight against heavy-handed censorship. Unlike a screen capture, it lets you capture entire pages at a time and guard them against erasure. They’re stored on your own computer so you don’t have to worry about any heavy hitters leaning on a site to get rid of them and by clicking on the little + sign on the upper right of the Cyte you should see an expanded header showing the date/time the Cyte was recorded. Highly recommended as a tool for us given what we’re facing out there today.
– MJM
Funny several times I’ve found government sites with facts that destroy the fabled claims of TC and within a few weeks to months of using the reference it miraculously disappears.
Same experience here sometimes Harley. That’s why iCyte is so useful. Unfortunately it doesn’t copy ALL comments: it depends on the commenting engine that’s being used.
– MJM
iCyte itself now seems to be shut down. :/ I will have to search around to see if indeed I have those images save on my computer, but I have not looked for ages… and am just hoping they’re there somewhere. If I find them I’ll stop back and paste them or point to a new visible/permanent home for them.
Archivist, thanks as always!
:)
MJM
Michael, thanks for the bump and reminder read!
I hope you can find them. Then, select best hosting service. Let us know.
Slightly related, SingleFile will let you save a web page in a single .html file.
It’s an extension for web browsers:
https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
then, you know, most modern browsers allow you to save a page as a .pdf.
Regards;~ RdM
While you’re looking around your PCs,
the Stiletto and next two links at the end of
http://www.tobakkonacht.com/links.html
do not work.
Only the Amazon one does.
Excellent excerpt Michael. You clearly show how the Antis fabricate their research and then how dissent is censored. You are correct, it is essential to expose the tobacco control project and its adherents for the liers and fanatics they are…
MJM, please take a look at your Facebook private messages.
Reihold, I hope I got back to you on this. Sadly, FBook is an area I’ve had to largely forego due to time constraints. Best way for me is always Cantiloper on the gmail system.
Dr. Virender Rehan is a disgrace to his profession. Where is the peer review ? More junk science. I should publish a paper showing that candle smoke, oven smoke, and fireplace smoke are more dangerous than first class smoke. Or is first hand smoke this benign ? Looks as if FHS is relatively harmless. What’s all the fuss, Rehan ?
Well done Michael.
That’s why not a single disease entity is listed as caused by smoking. They claim caused but have no proof to back up the claim.
Leper, the Rehan study was better than most of the dozens I looked at in TNacht. As for peer review, it’s largely nonsense: you can nominate your friends as peer reviewers, and if the journal likes you then they’ll send it to those friends. Otherwise they’ll throw you to the sharks. See the story of the peer reviews Dave Kuneman and I got to our Anti-Helena study at http://www.icyte.com/saved/www.acsh.org/517035?key=d70211c7cf734b02a49183473f94c8e215711bbe The story behind that and about all the Helena clones and debunkings make up the largest of the eight “Studies On The Slab” in TobakkoNacht.
Since that ACSH article was published, DK and I have had our work fully supported and vindicated by a number of similarly large and well-referenced studies by people like Michael Marlowe and institutions like Stanford and the RAND Corporation. Our results were correct, our methods were sound, and our data, unlike most Antismoking data, were fully and easily available for our opponents and the general public to check for accuracy.
– MJM
That icyte thing looks rather interesting. I’m forever trawling the web and saving website urls and snippets that I read on them.
…icyte website doesn’t seem to be working.
For general website snippetting I’ve got two other Chrome apps that I use.
One is a tiny clickable envelope in my top bookmark bar that sets up a blank mail with the site title in the subject line and the URL as the first item in the body text. I highlight/copy/paste site text or my posting at the site into the body, type C in the “To:” box and it gets sent to me. Sometimes I’ll edit the subject line to highlight something (E.G. “Meth Labs” for that posting about the unimportant meth lab smell compared to the awful tobacco smoke.)
The other is called Dropbox and it takes a very quick ‘n easy screen shot just by pressing control/Prt and I get something like this:
Voila! A screen shot of this screen!
:)
MJM
P.S. Be careful with these things and email filings. I currently have.. hmm… 85,748 saved emails just from the last six years.saved to my gmail box. I had over 200,000 saved to my AOL mailbox in 2009 when it melted down and I lost half of them. AOL’s mail engine evidently can’t safely handle that sort of storage.
It’s almost as if the more batshit the crazy nonsense they come up with the better. A great expose of the mendacity of these people. They must think we’re all mugs.
Wobbler, they come at it from all different motivations. E.G. one of the other studies I examined in that book involved a series of newspaper articles warning parents about their children being poisoned by a “neurotoxic poison left on smokers’ clothing” (just in case smokey ol’ granma or granpa wanted to pick up their little grandchild…)
The “neurotoxic poison” was nicotine, and by the time I analyzed the amounts involved I found that, as usual, it would take hundreds of millions or billions or trillions of years of cuddling to have any effect.
After all that analysis though, I did a bit more background research. Guess who sponsored the study? LOL! A company looking to manufacture and market special (and probably VERY high priced!) smoke-repellent clothing that they’d sell to the nasty smokers who wanted to touch their children or grandchildren!
Nice, eh?
– MJM
When the 3rd hand crap first showed up it took about 3 days for our people and others to find out what they had actually done. Then the hoax was exposed.
Well now, that explains why old homes never have any rats/mice.
They died off decades ago.
There should be zero rats/mice in any smoker’s home.
According to tobacco control, yes.
In reality best invest in one or two cats….
If SHS lasts forever and becomes more toxic as it ages, mankind should have died off long ago.
There have been untold millions of building and wildfires over the ages,
More specifically than that, it examined tiny unborn baby rats who were bloodily ripped out of their mommy rats’ guts and then torn wide open so that their innocent little unborn rat lungs could be yanked out, thrown on a slab, chopped brutally into teenie-weenie one millimeter cubes, and then soaked with concentrated solutions of chemicals that can just barely be detected at nanogram levels in nitrous-acid filled rooms where people have smoked heavily
Well, they’d have to MJM, because of that pesky immune system that TC always edits out. The body never cleans itself, repairs itself and all passing exposures are cumulative.Mummy rat’s placenta would have protected baby rat, so mummy was toast.
Some isolated cells in those little bits of tortured fetal rats’ lungs were then found to have undergone changes that could be related in some vaguely arguable way to abnormalities in human lungs that might sometimes correlate with conditions that were nebulously correlated in some way to asthma
Which I suspect would have reacted in similar way had Dr Rehan merely stuck the chopped up bits on the end of his nose for a while.
Being minced does no good to anyone’s lungs and swift deterioration of the cells in various ways is to be expected.
But as we are on the subject, I would like us all to spare a moment to think of all the thousands if not millions of assorted rodents , dogs, rabbits,monkeys and other unfortunate animals, imprisoned, tortured and sacrificed in anti-tobacco’s long campaign to justify James 1st’s religious objections to tobacco with a veneer of science just as he tried to do himself.
Cages, steel harnesses, catheters into the heart, hourly injections, ever increasing doses and a raisin stuck to a lever with sellotape.
Nicotine Self-Administration in Monkeys
1967
Methods
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/74815/j.1749-6632.1967.tb13730.x.pdf?sequence=1
Quite true Rose. Meanwhile I’ve had people argue with me that just because dry asbestos fibers floating in the air settle in the lungs and cause lung cancer, that it’s unreasonable to extrapolate that fact to the untold millions of asbestos fibers floating through the air in tiny water droplets all around us whenever we shower with standard urban water tap water that is allowed up to 7 million fibers per (hmm… I forget at the moment whether it’s per gram or per liter but with 7 million of ’em the quantity is a bit irrelevant to my argument.)
I’ve also had arguments against my “secondhand alcohol fumes” argument because alcohol has only been shown to cause cancer when it hits the mucous membranes while being drunk. Supposedly it becomes non-carcinogenic when it hits the mucous membranes upon being inhaled.
And yet it’s fine to extrapolate all sorts of conclusions from something as foreign to the human body as chopped up fetal rats’ lungs and speak of those conclusions as though they’ve been derived directly from studies of human mothers with human babies.
The Fanatics, the Controllers, and the Greedy will basically say anything they want and use any means they put their hands on in order to grab the ends that they demand.
– MJM
Ahhhh! According to http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/csem.asp?csem=29&po=8 the figure is indeed 7 million fibers per liter of water certified as being fine. So when you shower and likely inhale at least a milliliter of water droplets, you are inhaling up to 7,000 asbestos fibers. Worse than that, if another person in your BUILDING showers, their little showery-squeaky-clean asbestos fibers are following the old paths of their buddy boy TSPs (Tobacco Smoke Particulates) and crawling along the electric wires to jump out at innocent children through electrical outlets,and even LIGHT FIXTURES (Yes, “light fixtures” is now a new wrinkle for the Antis out there…)
So, do your part, be a good hippie, and STOP KILLING BABIES WITH YOUR SHOWERS!
If human beings were MEANT to shower, we’d have been born with SHOWER NOZZLES ON OUR HEADS! Showering is unnatural, perverted, twisted, sadistic, and NSFWOH (Not Safe For Work Or Home)!
As a side benefit, after a few months of not showering, no one will mind the odd whiffed scent of tobacco smoke from you!
– MJM, dirty hippie to the end….
Well thank heavens I always opt for a bath MJM, the showers at school put me off for life.
Rose, thanks to you, billions of innocent children around the world will now breathe easier!
I agree about showers. I’ve always preferred baths. Long slow ones.
The trouble with showers is that they can easily flip from freezing to scalding (and back again). Many of them seem to have minds of their own. But a bath will stay at more or less the same temperature all the time (albeit cooling slowly).
“But a bath will stay at more or less the same temperature all the time (albeit cooling slowly).”
Actually, as Gary K has so nicely reminded us, if you save up a collection of secondhand skin cells from Stan Glantz, James Repace, Linda Bauld, Viktor Rehan, Georg Matt, Winnie-The-Cough, Debbie-Or-Nott, and a few others you might put them in a tub of cool water to start, light a fire beneath, and cook up a vat of uniquely repulsive cannibal soup for serving in smoke-free restaurants!
Yumz!
:)
Michael
You’ll need some sort of cruton to go with that soup, MJM… Fortunately in San Francisco…
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/toast-story-latest-artisanal-food-craze-72676
What nth hand do ya reckon you’re receiving from this smoker’s finger jabbing out this comment on an Apols! Pad? You’re immune, of course, but what if a completely smoke and smoker-free person saw it? Their eyeballs would explode! Literally
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=Literally
I will not be held responsible for the Antis’ desire for a supervillan, with super duper powers, to frighten the public around to their way of thinking. No that is very much down to them ;)
Roo, you wrote, “What nth hand do ya reckon you’re receiving from this smoker’s finger jabbing out this comment on an Apols! Pad? You’re immune, of course, but what if a completely smoke and smoker-free person saw it? Their eyeballs would explode! Literally”
They might get breast cancer! At the end of the Third Hand Smoke section of TNacht I offered a Scientific American posting from a woman who actually convinced a doctor to give her a BIOPSY because she was afraid she’d caught cancer from a smoker’s telephone:
“I’m a true believer in third-hand smoke, and I’m not even a child.
At work I had to share a telephone with a smoker. I developed
breathing problems, had a swelling in my mouth, and also had
a “suspicious” breast biopsy. I started cleaning the phone off
with ‘Wet Ones’ wipes. My swelling went away, plus my breathing
problems went away. Still have to be tested again to see if my
biopsy is benign, but I’m pretty optimistic.”
Thanks to the Antismokers, we are now living in a world where innocent people have been made fearful of “catching breast cancer” because they’ve used a telephone previously used by a smoker. It would be hard to find any examples of more extreme, hate-based disease paranoia even in the “coloured only” accommodations of the 1950s’ southern US or in the heart of pre-Kristallnacht Nazi Germany.
Heh, funny thing is that Scientific American accepts postings like THAT as advancing knowledge of science, while it has banned me entirely from its site. I evidently ran afoul of them by making an “off topic” post about smoking to an article titled “Is Sitting The New Smoking?”
Sad, eh?
– MJM
Tsk Tsk, that woman. Does she have any idea what her liberal use of Wet Ones could be doing to others using that telephone?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2358051/The-unseen-epidemic-Beauty-lotions-blamed-skin-allergy-surge.html
Did you put a link to TobakkoNact in your post? Just in case anyone new to all this is reading:
http://tobakkonacht.com/
Roo, my, my! The Threat Of The Secondhand Wet Ones! Coming soon to a theater near you! Hide the Children!!!
That is amusing. She may well be causing far more real harm than the imaginary harm she’s “preventing.” :>
Thanks for catching the lack of a TNacht link! LOL! Never been much of a self-publicist I guess. Aside from occasional self-quoting and sometimes noting my “competing interest” to posts I’ve never really done much to wave the books in the public eye. I guess I figure if they’re good enough for readers to pass on their enthusiasm to friends that’s what counts. And if they’re not, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!
:)
MJM
This is way grosser!
3rd hand smoke and children,
A baby licking the floor or furniture will get 39 times as much dead skin as 3rd hand cig smoke!!
The percentage of the dust in your home that is actually dead skin cells is approximately 75% to 90%.
According to The Boston Globe, 30,000-40,000 skin cells fall off you per minute, and on average 8.8 pounds of dead skin cells fall off your body per year.
http://tobaccosmoke.exposurescience.org/…/the-cigarette-is-…
the average amount of PM2.5 mass emitted per cigarette is about 14 mg.
14 mg of smoke.
20 cigs/day = 102,200 mg per year of cig smoke.
8.8 pounds of dead skin = 3,999,000 mg of dead skin per year.
A smoking Mommy will produce 39 times as much dead skin per year as she does cigarette smoke.
When her baby licks the floor or furniture, it is licking up 39 times as much of that Mommy’s dead skin as it does her 3rd hand cig smoke.
VERY nice call there Gary! Love it!
Oh yes! Excellent, Gary!
I wonder…. if one gathered and saved up massive quantities of dead skin cells and baked them into “Cannibal Muffins” — would it be legal to sell them? Or buy them? Or eat them? Given the weirdnesses of Antismokers, there might actually be a market for them at their conferences…
;>
MJM
Good news for lovers of nightshades (many of which are graft compatible, including tobacco) who minimal space to grow vegetables.
Following the success of the TomTato® now we have the Potatoeggplant.
” A new plant that can grow both aubergines and potatoes has been developed and has gone on sale in Britain for the first time.
Horticulturalists have spent years carrying out grafting trials to produce the dual-cropping plant named “Egg and Chips” which grows aubergines from its stem and potatoes from its roots.”
“The two vegetables belong to the same plant family, known as the Solanaceae or nightshade. It is said the hardy potato plant supports the more delicate aubergine far better than its own root system can in British soil.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/12085223/Egg-and-Chips-hybrid-plant-goes-on-sale-in-Britain.html
All of which contain solanesol and nicotine in tiny amounts.
As you can see, this sort of insanity isn’t all that new at all: the Antismokers have been laying the groundwork for this attack for years, and they’ll just keep on coming unless and until we manage to expose them for the liars that they are.
Indeed, the anti-smokers have invested heavily into lies which, if not believed the first time, keep coming up again and again and again.
Their first action was to freeze the opposition out of a “research war” which opened the flood gates for the anti-smoker nonsense we are being bombarded with. The scarier this nonsense the better for them. They know that there is little truly INDEPENDENT research available in order to combat these (idiotic) lies churned out on an almost daily basis.
No-one/not many people question the fact that a high number of anti-smoker spokespersons (e.g. Deborah Arnott) have NO REAL SCIENTIFIC background.
No-one/not many people ask simple, yet relevant questions based on common sense.
A real gem:
The little that was provided in the abstract would have been quickly overlooked by most reporters after they were hit with the following opening line:“The underlying mechanisms and effector molecules involved in mediating in utero smoke exposure-induced effects on the developing lung…”
If any reporters did manage to stay awake after that, rather than simply heading straight to the press release with all its juicy quotes (and no hint of rodents), they might have noticed the one mention of the word “rat” in the following excerpt: “Fetal rat lung explants were exposed to nicotine, 1-(N-methyl-N-nitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridinyl)-4-butanal (NNA), or 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK).”
Even that explicit mention would have been blasted out of almost anyone’s consciousness once they hit the phrase “breakdown of alveolar epithelialmesenchymal cross-talk, reflecting lipofibroblast-to-myofibroblast transdifferentiation.”[1]
In utero? REALLY?
Fetal lung EXPLANTS exposed to….. Now, this is interestingly amusing as it does not state the cell line(s) used and how it/they were cultured in order to obtain the sufficient number required to demonstrate this *giggle* nonsense.
The absolute winner:
“breakdown of alveolar epithelialmesenchymal cross-talk, reflecting lipofibroblast-to-myofibroblast transdifferentiation.”
THAT I would like to have explained – in GREAT detail!!!!! Especially HOW they intend to prove that “breakdown of alveolar epithelial-mesenchymal cross-talk”!!!
It looks like the “research” team was a little too busy enjoying torturing rat foetuses and the only receptors working were the money receptors, hence the cross-talk between the brain area dealing with accomplishments and common sense was bypassed/a breakdown was achieved.
In the end I do have yet another question: HOW come my generation is still VERY MUCH alive? After all, that third-hand smoke my mother encountered when pregnant with me gave me no chance. (?) Surely I am not the only one…..
BB (if I may call you that…. ;> ), you asked, “In the end I do have yet another question: HOW come my generation is still VERY MUCH ALIVE?”
The answer m’lady is simplicity itself if you’d only paid attention: There was a breakdown of your alveolar epithelialmesenchymal cross-talk, reflecting your lipofibroblast-to-myofibroblast transdifferentiation.which spurred your underlying effector molecules to mediate induced effects through your metabolic explants.
::sigh:: Maybe NEXT time you’ll pay attention in class instead of making googly eyes at that Frankie Davis troublemaker!
– MJM, Headmaster.
Sorry, seeeeer!!!!
My money receptors never have been activated…… It takes honesty to do that.
No googly eyes to anybody, either. At my age you value friends – and toss out the tossers.
Love life – now I am in power of the decision of encountering only the people I like – in my home! So far had a great time – and cheaper than in a pub! :)
Heehee…. indeed! :> Although I do miss the amount of pubbing I used to do: my more limited choices (at least I still have a few out there) are expensive enough in terms of traveling beyond bicycle range that I don’t hit them more than a couple of times a month.
So I’m stuck sitting here making googly eyes at myself… and the cost of all those shattered mirrors is starting to add up!
;>
MJM, premier demirrorstrater!
Although I do miss the amount of pubbing I used to do
Don’t we all? But don’t we all get fed up with the lack of atmosphere and relaxation in a big group? Also, we are welcome as PAYING customers, yet we are kicked out when we want to be made to feel comfortable and relaxed.
The pub owners do know that – they would ignore the tobacco control lobbied “law” if there was not this disproportionately high fine to pay.
Now most of my social gatherings these days happen in my house despite my non-smoking friend still offering a smoking room although caring for her elderly relative who needs oxygen and the healthists having nothing better to do than to plaster a big no smoking sign on her front door. I guess my friend and I do know that a cigarette does not blow up an oxygen tank in a room upstairs inside a huge house. (Must be patient with the healthists, the obvious limits begin to show.
Hmm… I wonder if the common advice nowadays is actually “no smoking in the house when oxy is in use”? And, if so, how they justify NOT saying “no cooking in the house when oxy is in use!”
the exposure to the constituents of thirdhand smoke is as damaging and, in some cases, more damaging than secondhand smoke or firsthand smoke. [Dr. Rehan]
Well, since it’s supposed to have the power to harm infants, thirdhand smoke *has got* to be far worse than the first hand variety, which, even according to current manufactured conventional wisdom, impacts no one under 35, and generally affects smokers only 60 years after taking up the habit (the modal age for LC being 75+), while incidentally non-smokers suffer from the same conditions and ailments as do smokers, at approximately the same age.
And apparently the phrase “in some cases” should be construed to mean “at a 300,000+ higher dose than secondhand or firsthand smoke”, thus unrealistically pitting ultra-high concentrations of “3rd-hand” smoke against highly diluted 1st hand smoke.
At this stage, Gene Ruyle’s “A half truth is much worse than a whole lie because it makes it even harder to tell the difference between the two” no longer applies: from the smoke encounters of the third kind episode onwards, TC storytellers seem to be through with using even half truths to bolster up their new lies, they’re merely chopping up and re-assembling old lies.
It may be a good idea to stop using terms pertaining to common logic (like “shoddy”, “absurd”, or “warped”) to evaluate this type of work, and just call it e.g. “runcible research”.
While I knew what it meant in rough terms I’d never bothered looking it up before:
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“Runcible” is a nonsense word invented by Edward Lear. The word appears (as an adjective) several times in his works, most famously as the “runcible spoon” used by the Owl and the Pussycat.
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MJM