<p align="justify">One of the characteristics of our time is the growth of a long-standing and very unfortunate human trait: the belief that by repeatedly stating something that is not so it will become so, that is, that the objective reality that we don’t like will become an objective reality that we like, because we said so, so many times. </p>
<p align="justify">You would think, with all the media hype about global warming, that the U.N.’s first climate summit of world leaders would have been of great importance to the public and to the news media. To my knowledge, none of the TV news networks even mentioned the two-day summit last week or an important speech there.</p>
<p align="justify">The Tobacco-free Kids, their funding extorted from smokers, vow as Hitler Youth did never to touch tobacco. Of course they’ll have their say about the regulation of products their benefactors want to use. So these more than pesky kids, or more accurately their adult mind-benders, recently flew off to the nation’s capital at smokers’ expense, to campaign for Food and Drug Administration tobacco regulation. We, and the FDA chief incidentally, would gladly give these pests a bubble-gum cigar to go home and shut up.</p>
<p align="justify">Here’s an interesting bit from television we missed along the course of the SCHIP debate. Fox News contributor Jonathan Hoenig expressed in both words and action his fulsome disgust for the incessant targeting of smokers. As he puffed away on screen Hoenig suggested that his cameraman was doing the same. That you can’t see but we hope so.</p>
<p><span><span style="font-size: 8pt;">Here is Part II of the forum posting of Winston Smith on emerging collective patterns. The analysis is deepened and explained with the help of images.</span></span></p>
<p>"<em>No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State</em>."<br />
—- U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 10</p>
<p align="justify">As the House Committee on Energy and Commerce prepared to hold a hearing October 3rd on the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (H.R. 1108), the Competitive Enterprise Institute urged committee members to consider the negative effects the bill could have on public health.</p>
<p align="justify">As previously posted, President Bush has vetoed the Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill that would levy 61 cents additional tax per pack of cigarettes. Columnist Norman Kjono walks us through some interesting features about the bill as vetoed.</p>
<p align="justify">Vetoing SCHIP is good. Vetoing SCHIP is right. In fact, it’s the only moral thing to have done. Acting any differently would reinforce nauseating precedent: in the name of the children (and, in the future, for any old "good cause") it is fair and just to target a minority of the population with a super-tax to provide for the needs of those who don’t pay it — the non-smokers, or better yet, their children.</p>
<p align="justify"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><img hspace="4" border="0" align="left" alt="" src="/userfiles/video_button.jpg" />‘Free care for all without prejudice’: another socialist dream that failed. That is how the British National Health System was dreamily touted but what do we see? A financially, practically, and ethically inept system which uses epidemiological trash science to place the blame for its inadequacy on those who pay for it, its mistreated patients. Once again medicine becomes a tool for power and social blackmail.</span></p>
<p align="justify"><span style="font-size: 8pt"><img height="40" alt="Audio file with visual illustrations" hspace="4" width="39" align="left" src="/userfiles/audio_button.jpg" /></span><span style="font-size: 8pt">We are proud to commence our round table discussions by presenting the first of a what we plan as a long series of multimedia debates on various topics that may be of interest to all those who are public health targets or wish for a society that is "public health-free."</span></p>