Demonising The Competition

Dmitri draws our attention to third-hand smoke:

Harmful cigarette smoke residue may be lurking in rooms where no one has ever lit up, researchers report.

In a new study, scientists from Drexel University in Philadelphia found that in an empty, nonsmoking classroom, nearly 30 percent of the tiny particles in the air were linked with cigarette smoke — what is called “third-hand” smoke.

“We didn’t expect to see a nonsmoking environment having such a signature of tobacco smoke,” said lead researcher Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor of environmental engineering.

My response to articles like this is to wonder when Peter DeCarlo is going to be removed from his job as “associate professor”, and the “environmental engineering” department in which he works get closed down, and “Drexel University” demolished to make space for a car park or nature reserve or a maybe just a big round pond for kids to sail boats on.

What’s the point of any of them? Universities? Environmental engineering? Professors?

It doesn’t say who funded the study, but it’s a fair bet that Tobacco Control or Big Pharma is in there somewhere. These universities are prostituting themselves to produce “studies” showing whatever Tobacco Control wants them to show. And what TC wants is to ramp up the public fear of tobacco smoke beyond the panic levels that have already been achieved. If tobacco can be completely prohibited, the only antidepressants that anyone will be able to buy will be the ones that Big Pharma sells them, and in the case of nicotine it will be exactly the same drug re-branded and re-packaged.

You sell your product by demonising the competition’s product, and demonising the competition, and demonising the competition’s customers. So if ToyBoats™ sell toy sailing boats to children, you demonise their sailing boats as “potentially lethal” if not actually lethal, and you demonise ToyBoats™ managers and workers as corrupt, greedy, money-hungry swindlers preying on children, and you demonise the kids as “addicts” hooked on building sailing boats. And when you’ve driven them out of business, you sell the kids your own sailing boats, which capsize and sink with the first breath of wind.

And the same process can be applied to any industry. Drive the competition out of business, and step in with your own inferior and much more dangerous product. What’s been done with tobacco is now being done to alcohol, sugar, salt, fat, meat, chocolate. Soon they’ll start on tea and coffee. Pretty soon they’ll all be replaced by pharmaceutical tablets. People will just take tablets for everything. The tablets will contain the same stuff that was in the original, demonised product. So there’ll be nicotine tablets, and alcohol tablets, and sugar tablets, and fat tablets, and chocolate tablets. Any pleasure anyone ever took in smoking or drinking or eating will have gone.

It’s a world that I foresaw at age five, when I confidently told my father that one day everyone would just take tablets instead of eating food. Because for me eating was a chore. I had better things to do. Like build a three storey house for my cat. I was quite sure my cat would like to have a little house he could live in, just like us humans. Eating entailed sitting round a big table with plates and cutlery and glasses and have my Mum tell me to “eat up” and “finish it all” and “you’ve still got some potato hidden under your knife” and “you can’t get down until you’ve eaten all of it, including the celery” Eating sucked. It took far too long, and it entailed doing a lot of chewing. Wouldn’t it be so much quicker and simpler if you could just swallow a few tablets and be done with it?

But the trouble with tablets is that they’re actually more difficult to swallow than food. I always gag on tablets. The only way I can ever swallow them is to push them right to the back of my mouth, and perform an agonised gulp. And if they aren’t washed down with water I can feel them slowly descending towards my stomach like big, rusty, cannon balls. And they always taste weird.

But then tablets were never intended to be a form of fast food. They’re delivery systems for a variety of chemical compounds, most of which taste awful. They even taste awful when they’re sugar-coated, which most of them are.

Nobody’s invented the kind of fast food I wanted at age five, so I could get back to adding a fourth floor and staircase to my cat’s new house. What’s called “fast food” is just as slow to eat as ordinary food. It’s just that you can buy it quicker. You walk in and ask for a kebab or a burger and a minute or two later you’re handed one.

And that’s why my tablet food prediction was wrong. For if Sunday lunch came in the form of a jar of tablets, it would have been a far worse ordeal than it already was, and it would have taken far longer.

And that’s why Big Pharma plan to replace traditional foods with pharmaceutical tablets will never succeed. Because that won’t be an improvement. And people will go back to eating normally, because it’s easier, and it’s very enjoyable if the food is tasty and beautifully prepared.

It’s the same with environmentalism. They’re driving the competition out of business, by demonising them, and they’re replacing their products with inferior ones. For example they’ve replaced perfectly good incandescent light bulbs with inferior, dim, flickering ones. Next they’ll be selling us candles or oil lamps.

We’re living in a world where bad products are driving out good ones. And we’re all suffering as a result. We’re all getting poorer.

And if they’re not demonising the competition, they’re regulating them out of existence. What simpler way to drive someone out of business than stack the law against them? What simpler way to get people to buy NRT products than to make smoking illegal?

One day the demonisers will be demonised in their turn. One day someone will start saying that Big Pharma is a satanic industry selling poison. One day someone will figure out how many people they’ve killed, and they’re still killing. It will run to millions, and more likely hundreds of millions.