<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 8pt; font-family: Verdana;">Although Siegel is a proponent of smoking bans and he seems to believe a good chunk of the epidemiological trash science of antitobacco, he is still hard to dislike. Why?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 8pt; font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 8pt;">In Ohio, the hospitality industry gets slapped around by the government as the first wave of smoking ban fines is issued.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 8pt;">This European perspective on the US addiction to capital punishment is a must-read for everyone in the US. With imprisonment rates at a level that any tyrant would envy, execution methods that pet lovers and responsible veteranarians literally wouldn’t permit to be used on a dog, and ample evidence that innocent people end up being executed, the US persists in medieval sentencing practices.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="">Jews’ passports were marked with a J. Smokers’ property is marked with an X. More world-wide “progress” in hate against smokers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p>Conservative politicians in the United Kingdom want the government to refrain treating those who refuse to change their "unhealthy" lifestyles. Incredibly this healthcare proposal appears in a document entitled Restoring Pride in Our Public Services.</p>
<p>In the health care political realm, John Edwards, a candidate for president, upped the ante by proclaiming that under his plan for universal coverage every American would be <strong>required</strong> to visit the doctor. No exceptions.</p>
<p>Conventional wisdom shibboleths are falling by the wayside as reality demolishes the myths concocted by anti-tobacco. From lung disease, tax policies designed to reduce smoking and secondhand smoke abatement, the news of today slaps silly the lying face of anti-tobacco. Norman Kjono explains.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span style="font-size: 8pt;">The Toronto Film Festival, still apparently shaken to the core by actor Sean Penn’s obscene and deeply subversive act of lighting up a smoke at the event last year, has decided to kick off this year’s festival with some public bowing and scraping. Grant money is clearly at stake.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 8pt;">Pity today’s schoolchildren. The past certainly had its problems, but many, many adults have fond memories of teachers who were trusted and deserved trust, school policies that retained some respect for individual students and their parents. Today, in some schools, a child who takes an aspirin for a headache is treated like a criminal. Never mind tolerance for the "smoke pit" in the schoolyard that was a rite of passage for so many of us …</span></p>
<p>The UK is set to join the growing list of countries that afix manadatory graphic depictions of cancer patients and other "gross out" images on cigarette packs, with the pretext that this will lead people to quit smoking and thus save lives. In reality, of course, this is just a way to try to stigmatize the users of the product. Still, there are those who still bother to ask whether such tactics are at all effective.</p>