Continued.
Remember addicts are not smokers out of choice. They smoke because they are too weak to quit. They smoke because they are too stupid to quit. They smoke because they are worthless addicts…. Don’t listen to any of the pukes that advocate smoking. None of them have the brains necessary to walk straight. They will be caged soon, with cartons of cigarettes outside their cells, just out of reach.
– Typical anti-smoker internet post, (circa 1993)
The anti-smoking industry represents the emergence of ruthless organized crime on a global scale, which far surpasses any degree of worldwide influence that the Sicilian or Russian Mafias ever contemplated. It even enjoys its own international base of operations at the World Health Organization—whose tentacles reach into the bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies that benefit the most from smoking restrictions, and redistribute that wealth to national lawmakers who decide whether or not to. . . impose smoking restrictions.
While all of this influence peddling and corruption takes place inside the hallowed halls of the WHO, brown and black children and families worldwide continue to die by the millions each year, due to easily curable hunger, disease and exposure. Yet anti-smokers claim they are waging the most widespread and pervasive campaign of persecution in history to “save the children” and “protect families.” In the name of the roughly 10,000 children who die each day from institutional neglect, while these arrogant anti-smoking hate mongers dictate the terms of other peoples’ existences out of their plush offices in the first world, I call bullshit on anti-smokers’ claims to give a damn about anyone except themselves. How dare they pick and choose the people they want to “save,” when we don’t want or need their hellish salvation, while they completely ignore those who would welcome their life-saving assistance with open arms (if they can even move their arms).
Damn every member of the multi-billion dollar anti-smoking industry for their pretentious faux sincerity. How many lies, and how much duplicity do we have to witness from these barbarians before legislators finally put anti-smoking gangsters out of business, and give smokers back their lives and their dignity?
It is noteworthy that the World Health Organization, as a matter of policy, prohibits the hiring of smokers, while the anti-smoking industry in general encourages the firing of smokers. Had the American government maintained such a bigoted, intrinsically counterproductive policy as it struggled to develop the atomic bomb before Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did, the Manhattan Project would have never benefited from most of the geniuses who participated in it—including chain-smoking Albert Einstein, who first suggested the idea to chain-smoking President Roosevelt when he signed his name to a letter written by a group of chain-smoking world-class physicists.
Anti-smokers frequently call smokers “stupid,” “idiots,” “fools,” or “lazy.” I’m confused. Why did TIME Magazine name such a stupid, lazy, idiotic fool as Albert Einstein its “Person of the Century”? For that matter, how do you explain the fact that photographs of the majority of movers, shakers, inventors, beloved entertainers, and geniuses taken from the day the camera was invented, often show cigarettes, cigars, or pipes in their hands? (Except, of course, for photos that have had tobacco paraphernalia airbrushed out in a juvenile revision of history).
Can any member of this legislature please explain to me, exactly how does anyone’s “health” improve by denying employment to smokers, or by making their workplaces miserable places to spend one-third of their lives?
Even worse, this anti-smoking racket appears to be led at the highest levels by some of the most mentally unstable, socially incompetent, ambitious, and dangerous sociopaths who have ever wielded influence over public policy in the United States of America. It is more on par with the gangsterism of Nazi Germany, where the modern anti-smoking industry and the rhetorical term “passive smoking” (passivrauchen) were originally conceived, to deliberately manufacture fear, suspicion, and division between smokers and non-smokers. Have members of this legislature ever studied the Third Reich at all, apart from vegetating in front of the History Channel? Many of the most arrogant and authoritative Nazi leaders were so incompetent as human beings, they would have had a hard time holding down a minimum wage job if wealth, propaganda and human manipulation, and brute force had never entered the equation. Have you ever studied the leaders of the anti-smoking industry, to recognize obvious similarities? For the love of God, open your eyes. These people ain’t Einstein, and they are meaner than a rattlesnake trapped inside a jackboot. Why are they determining public policy?
Anti-smoking leaders often defend the Third Reich because, after all, “it had a very progressive anti-smoking policy,” so it could not have been all that bad…. Why this never tipped legislators off about the true nature of the anti-smoking industry is something that future historians will need to assess, as they marvel at how easy it was for legislators to impose fascism on free citizens with impunity, barely half a century after an apocalyptic world war was required to defeat fascism. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Minnesota legislators’ working awareness of history appears to be limited to who won the latest round of American Idol.
If billions of “graphic warnings” are necessary to publicize the risk of something that has never been demonstrably proven in the first place, it naturally follows that millions of automobiles on our roads should be adorned with similarly grotesque images of decapitated human road kill. After all, the link between automobiles and violent death has been demonstrably proven, and the U.S. government has demonstrated its enthusiastic approval for exposing children to these kinds of traumatizing, grotesque graphic warnings. Last year, long before the year ended, I had already lost count of the number of teenage Minnesotans who died in violent traffic accidents. Yet I cannot find even one otherwise healthy Minnesota teenager who died from smoking a cigarette, or from smelling someone else’s smoke. Ever. It is ludicrous to mandate graphic warnings for cigarette packs, but not automobiles, if the goals were truly to “save children” and “protect families.”
Or is that unacceptable because government officials personally enjoy and benefit from driving, and they do not want to endure the same kind of shame and humiliation that they impose, by force, upon other, inferior human beings?
Smoking does not kill, and there are approximately 1.2 billion smokers worldwide who provide approximately 1.2 billion counterexamples to anti-smokers’ mystical theories, hair-raising alarms, and Ouija Board conclusions that smoking does kill. Since when are anti-smoking leaders alone, among all the human beings who have ever existed, exempt from fundamental rules of logic, where one counterexample is enough to falsify a hypothesis? The statement “smoking kills” is a lie, period. Illness kills, and disease kills, and it is possible that the cumulative effects of smoking may (or may not) contribute to the formation of certain illnesses and diseases. But smoking does not kill. If it did, I would never have survived high school, let alone be around decades later to write this letter, just as the vast majority of people in this world would be living in the dark long before they reached adulthood, if masturbation really did cause blindness.
Even in the worst case scenario, smoking merely introduces yet another low-level risk into the lives of sentient beings whose unique existence is defined, in large part, by their never-ending intellectual and emotional growth-inducing personal battle with risk and reward. No nannies needed (or wanted). Since when is “risk” something to fear, and since when does reward have any meaning at all in the absence of risk? The only people who are not subject to constant “risk” are dead, and only incompetent human beings fear the most popular risks that animate the living. Without the existence of risk, we are already as good as dead. Stop persecuting smokers based upon junk science prophecies of what is absolutely, positively going to happen to smokers and the non-smokers around them tomorrow, or the next day, or next year, or thirty years from now, or. . . someday—maybe (or maybe not), and devote all of those public resources instead toward curing the damned diseases. This legislature’s priorities are more twisted than a mutated strand of DNA.
The Dark Ages were supposed to have ended centuries ago. It is time for members of this legislature to evolve beyond the fearful, superstitious belief systems of medieval hate groups. Yes, even when delusional, doomsaying, dragon-fearing inhabitants of these dark and dreary dungeons of death and disease disguise themselves in the manner and attire of this generation’s inevitable pantheon of self-proclaimed saviors. I am quite confident that those who committed every human atrocity in the name of public welfare from the Crusades, to the witch trials, to human slavery, to the Holocaust, were similarly cloaked in the proper fashions of their respective times, with accepted credentials in one hand, and sacred texts justifying their crimes against humanity in the other. As if to deliberately repeat the darkest periods of human history, stoic, epicene anti-smoking leaders are dragging the human species toward the end of virile, exciting, civilized society with their business suits and lab coats, academic credentials, and volumes of published junk science that have only been reviewed by like-minded “peers” (when they are peer reviewed at all). Unstable people who are fanatically obsessed with death and disease are regulating, banning, and prohibiting every activity that makes life itself a truly significant experience despite its entire passage within infinitely less than a blink of eternity’s eye.
In the secure privacy of your own minds as you read these words, I ask Minnesota legislators to exhibit courage, set aside any personal prejudice you may have against smokers for a moment, and finally be honest with yourselves about the real threat that this generation is faced with. To be sure, it is a dreadful, overwhelming threat. Yet it should surprise no one that that our ancestors had to face this exact same threat, manifested in different ways, generation after generation—even centuries and millennia before tobacco was introduced into Western civilization. Tyrannical sociopaths and psychopaths who seek power and dominion over others have always posed the most serious threat to civilized humanity, ever since Kronos swallowed his own children to preserve his dominion (or since Cain slew Abel for similar reasons, if you prefer). The difference is that our ancestors fought and won against these tyrants, while our political leaders today serve them, instead. This tragic situation does not bode very well for the adult lives of all those children whom Minnesota legislators claim to care so much about. Unless trading in the freedom you inherited from your ancestors, so you may pass down tyranny to your descendents, seems like a fine gift that will elicit endless praise from posterity.
I for one would spit on the graves of any ancestors who consciously abandoned freedom in their own time, so that I would have to live under tyranny in my time. Fortunately, my ancestors did not behave this way, and I shed tears of sincere gratitude at the graves of my ancestors, instead. This legislature’s smoking ban and endless tobacco tax increases urinates on the graves of our American Founders and the millions of our courageous ancestors who graciously and voluntarily accepted the very serious risks associated with fighting tyranny and fascism, so that they might preserve our freedom and independence. The most cowardly members of this legislature are not even willing to accept the utterly trivial “risk” of smelling tobacco smoke inside a bar, restaurant, coffee house, or bowling alley that no one compelled them to patronize in the first place, to preserve that same freedom and independence for future generations.
Let us candidly consider the obvious for a moment. Anti-smoking research is not conducted by intellectually curious scientists whose only goal is to better understand the reality of the world we live in, regardless of the outcome. Indeed, when the elegant muse of genuine intellectual curiosity lands on their shoulders, they crush it, and mount the corpse on their office wall as a trophy. These people are not spiritual descendents of truly objective scientists like Johannes Kepler, who was even willing to disown his most indoctrinated personal beliefs when the empirical evidence demonstrated another reality. It is also interesting, in light of today’s out of control, wanton anti-smoking hysteria, that Kepler’s mother was accused of witchcraft by the credentialed institutions of his time. Some things never change.
Like the Bush administration’s zealous determination to provide justification for war with Iraq, whether the evidence presented was real or contrived, anti-smoking researchers deliberately set out to find “proof” that smoking causes all manner of harm, and they find that proof, no matter what it takes. This research serves a clearly defined political, social, and financial agenda. It does not serve the interests of the People, or public health, or science, or humanity. Again, as if to demand their unique exemption from logic and common sense, anti-smoking researchers even insist that, when it comes to them, correlation does imply causation, and data gathered for just one month following the implementation of a smoking ban provides enough raw data for establishing absolute, irrefutable proof of eternal truths about their effectiveness at reducing heart attacks. Unlike any other ongoing scientific enquiry, when it comes to research on smoking and health, once their research is published “the debate is over,” period. End of story. No further debate is needed—or allowed. The “facts” are irrefutable. Anti-smoking researchers know the mind of God even better than God Himself does. Their like-minded peers have reviewed (some of) these publications, and those who approach the issue from a world view that is independent of institutionalized academia are inherently suspect, and declared anathema, in the classic tradition of religious zealots.
In case the Minnesota public school system that legislators brag about so much never taught you the crucial life lesson of how to recognize a cult, please read that last sentence one more time.
Even thoughtful, reasonable, levelheaded suggestions of the possibility that alternative explanations for various diseases might exist, is tantamount to career suicide in the public health industry. In the minds of our generation’s most powerful Inquisition, tobacco just plain is responsible for, or is somehow “associated with” or “linked to” just about every conceivable biological, psychological, sociological, sexual, and economic ill that exists in this world. And it is impossible to convince these fanatics otherwise when they close their eyes, their ears, and their minds to even the possibility that alternatives might exist, even as we live in a universe that is filled with infinite possibilities.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
– Albert Einstein
This total absence of open-minded intellectual curiosity and concern for real truth helps to explain why anti-smoking research grant applications—which precede research—submitted to virulently anti-smoking funding sources, have been known to imply or explicitly state that a study to be conducted in the future will provide evidence that tobacco is significantly dangerous, ostensibly, regardless of where the evidence itself actually leads. This behavior represents far more than hiding an ace up one’s sleeve. This is the medical research equivalent of betting on a horse that you have fed steroids, after feeding sleeping pills to every other horse in the race.
This is not legitimate science, and we all suffer from it far more than we suffer from spending an evening drinking and dancing in a smoke-filled room.
In his 1998 U.S. District Court decision on a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s infamous 1992/93 report on secondhand smoke, Judge William Osteen determined that the “EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun” (emphasis added). The court also cited numerous instances of shady practices, including cherry-picking of data, academic and procedural misconduct, attempts to undermine tobacco industry criticism of the study, and deliberate suppression of relevant information that is necessary for citizens to make informed decisions. This obscene study provided anti-smokers with their long sought after Holy Grail: officially sanctioned “proof” that secondhand smoke kills non-smokers, and “scientific” justification for public smoking bans in a free country. (Even though privately owned establishments operating on private property are not “public” places, and prohibition is the polar opposite of freedom. But that’s just splitting hairs, right?).
Since the court’s decision was later vacated on a technicality, no one at the EPA was criminally prosecuted, and the EPA itself was not shut down entirely after being caught in the act of deceiving the American People. Equally unfortunate for all citizens, the media ignored this historically significant event, and anti-smoking researchers gained the bold confidence they had previously lacked to repeat this deception, over and over again. Now we have an abundance of studies on secondhand smoke that “miraculously” obtain results that are always consistent with researchers’ desired outcomes, which anti-smoking leaders now point to as the “overwhelming evidence in the scientific literature” that makes legislators’ eyes glaze over in stupified awe.
Ordinary people rarely peruse this pointless, contrived, esoteric “scientific” literature, let alone comprehend or validate it. What ordinary person would waste time reading fantasy fiction that is not even entertaining? For the record I ask Minnesota legislators, did you read, comprehend, and validate this “scientific” literature before you passed your statewide smoking ban based upon its conclusions? Or did you just accept conclusions that were reported in the news media, which merely regurgitated anti-smoking press releases without even attempting independent confirmation of anti-smoking researchers’ veracity? Science by press release, and reading the Cliffs Notes versions of scientific research in the mainstream media, does not justify the legal annihilation of basic civil and human rights, or the reduction of a distinct minority group to second class citizen status. Especially when those conclusions blatantly contradict the reality of human experience, and the evidence of our own senses.
Meanwhile, as this ridiculous EPA charade wasted so many people’s time and attention, the longest running and most comprehensive study ever conducted on secondhand smoke found no significant association between tobacco smoke and cancer among non-smokers. This study was based upon American Cancer Society data, no less. Yet this important news, too, was ignored by the mainstream media, because the anti-smokers who originally financed this study pulled their funding once the inevitability of these “distasteful” results became apparent. This action forced the researchers, Enstrom and Kabat, to rely on tobacco industry funding if they were to complete their career-long study at all. This deliberately contrived fiasco gave anti-smokers all the rhetorical ammunition they needed to publicly portray their own researchers as “tools of Big Tobacco.” Let that be a powerful lesson to any young person who wishes to become a medical science researcher when they grow up. It is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in legitimate science in the illegitimate world of “public health.”
And in case you cannot recognize the obvious, non-smokers suffer from this lack of sincere concern for health, every bit as much as smokers.
I should add here that the experience of having his career reduced to ashes by this cruel and malicious anti-smoking flamethrower inspired James Enstrom to devote his future efforts to lobbying for integrity in the field of epidemiological research. This admirable response on Dr. Enstrom’s part to anti-smokers’ vicious ad hominem attacks impressed me to no end—especially when I discovered that Enstrom was cognizant of historical precedents where junk science had been used to manipulate public policy (e.g., Lysenkoism—which contributed significantly to the Soviet Union’s decline and fall). We need more socially responsible, historically aware people like this to monitor the integrity of medical research, since the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General seems entirely disinterested in that responsibility.
But can you guess what Dr. Enstrom’s reward was in the twisted world of “public health,” for merely seeking integrity in this field? He was fired by the University of. . . you guessed it—California, the birthplace of the modern American anti-smoking industry. Moreover, prominent California anti-smoking leaders immediately launched a campaign to ban the use of tobacco funding for academic research. Anti-smokers sure do like to ban things in a free and open society, don’t they? If we didn’t know better, we might even suspect that this has nothing whatsoever to do with science or public health, and it merely reflect the ruthless will of tyrants whose motto is “it’s my way or extermination.”
Apparently it is fine for anti-smoking leaders to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from the tobacco industry (via the Master Tobacco Settlement) to serve their interests exclusively. But this same source of funding for academic research cannot be tolerated when even the possibility exists that this funding might be used to publicly discredit anti-smokers’ apocalyptic claims about tobacco. Somebody doesn’t want research like the Enstrom and Kabat study to be repeated. And if the only sources of funding are anti-smoking (literally, "opposed to smoking" rather than “opposed to disease”) organizations that have sworn an oath on the altar of Hatred to exterminate smoking (i.e., smokers) from the earth, it’s a sure bet they will make damned sure that legitimate studies never will be repeated again, despite Enstrom’s best efforts to inject even a token amount of respect for ethical behavior into a truly degenerate public health industry.
Personally, I prefer the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson’s oath, instead:
I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against
every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
This concludes my brief history of the anti-smoking industry’s “abundant, overwhelming evidence” that secondhand smoke kills non-smokers. I now defer that topic to rebuttal by anti-smoking industry leaders, who will surely sacrifice another rain forest to publish papers “proving” to you that all of this academic misconduct never really happened, it was all just a bad dream, U.S. District Judge Osteen was just a toothless hillbilly, James Enstrom worships the devil, the tobacco industry controls the world from secret bases on the Moon, and there really is no one hiding behind academia’s Paper Curtain, pushing buttons and pulling levers to keep The Great Secondhand Smoke Scare running at full power—and full profitability.
Because that is what tyrants who are committed to maintaining their domination and control over other people do. Legitimate scientists don’t.
Actually, we may expect two more standard responses from anti-smoking leaders: vicious ad hominem attacks against me, and charges that I, of all people, am somehow affiliated with the tobacco industry, which is about as plausible as suggesting that Thomas Paine was a secret agent for the British Crown. I have no time to waste refuting spurious claims such as this, so let me brush this inevitable charge aside in advance by promising you that after anti-smoking leaders have had their crimes against humanity exposed, and have returned to a degree of insignificance where they no longer pose a threat to the civilized world, tobacco executives and attorneys are next. Anyone who sells out their own customers to the highest bidder, merely to preserve their own wealth and privilege at the expense of the very principles and ideals that allowed them to enjoy lives of wealth and privilege in the first place, deserves to be held accountable for their actions in the court of public opinion. The American tobacco industry, which did such an exemplary job of supporting freedom, democracy, our troops, and America’s war efforts throughout two world wars, as an integral part of the American social fabric at the time, has behaved contemptibly throughout the rise of postwar anti-smoking tyranny. It has been one of the most embarrassing episodes in my life, to personally witness the mighty American tobacco industry that made many of our American Founders wealthy enough to successfully conduct the American Revolution, cower in fear before a bat shit crazy opponent, like Hercules turning tail and running away from a rabid skunk.
The tobacco industry has deserted its own customers, and has done nothing of consequence to stop American freedom from being devoured by its mortal enemies, so that it alone may survive as a sovereign entity, while smokers are persecuted and gradually exterminated. While I take no issue with the tobacco industry’s products, or even its marketing and lobbying practices in the context of how any large industry subject to the dictates of fiscal responsibility behaves, I am offended to the core of my being by the tobacco industry’s dereliction of duty as a corporate citizen of the United States of America. The tobacco industry has betrayed the American People. As far as I am concerned, tobacco industry executives and attorneys may share Hell with members of the anti-smoking movement, along with other traitors and backstabbers who have brought so much devastation and ruin to people who just wanted to live out their lives in peace. Heaven is for reserved for decent people who watch their neighbors’ backs, even at the risk of their own person and property.
Thanks in large part to tobacco executives’ fear-induced impotence and flaccid capitulation to anti-smoking banshees, smokers’ own money pays for much of this never ending academic shell game and political intrigue, usually without their consent, and almost certainly without their informed consent. At some point, legislators need to see the forest for the trees, and stop allowing the mere existence of anti-smoking rhetoric and tobacco industry surrender to imply that anti-smokers’ extraordinary, unsubstantiated claims are credible. I once spoke with a homeless man who claimed to have been abducted by aliens from outer space. Would you believe him too, merely because he possessed a doctorate in physics, and could spin a tale full of esoteric scientific mumbo jumbo that no ordinary person could either confirm or disprove? (By the way, the word on the street was that academic corruption and politics is what drove this physicist crazy).
At some point legislators need to open their eyes and recognize that no matter how much sound and fury emanates from anti-smokers’ war camps, it signifies nothing. We have five hundred years of compelling evidence that smokers and non-smokers got along together just fine, lived good lives, were not dropping dead like flies, and in fact transformed the medieval world into the modern world as the standard of living and human longevity only continued to increase, despite a simultaneous dramatic increase in the percentage of the population who smoked. Today, long after smoking rates dramatically dropped, cancer remains as least as much of a threat as it ever was.
What does it take to make Minnesota legislators recognize the obvious? Smoking and cancer are unrelated phenomenon, at least to any degree of significance that justifies the expense of hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and Draconian legislation that undermines fundamental human rights and obliterates tolerance and human decency from society. The vast disproportion between what is happening in the real world (i.e., the experience of life and death goes on for smokers and non-smokers alike, as it always did before) and the way smokers have been treated in recent decades (i.e., those who were perfectly ordinary members of society for 450 years are now effectively a few laws shy of a brand new form of Holocaust) defies all sensibility. It is insane. Legislators, wake up!
Unlike every other scientific discipline, anti-smoking researchers have “miraculously” found only evidence that supports their agenda, have “miraculously” never been wrong about anything, and have employed enjoyed similar “miracles” that allow them to summarily discredit or disregard the results of all research that contradicts or discredits their personal beliefs about smoking and health. Apart from the recondite mathematical hieroglyphics that anti-smokers deliberately use in their academic literature, to thwart comprehension by the common unwashed masses, anti-smoking research does not even resemble legitimate science, where the gradual ebb and flow of experimental results, constructive criticism, and fair evaluation of new and original ideas lead to genuine progress over several generations. For their part, anti-smokers claimed as irrefutable fact that smoking was exceedingly dangerous centuries before they even began to conduct their first modern experimental research on the topic, and they have never, ever wavered from this claim to possess absolute, irrefutable, effectively divine truth.
Anti-smokers even own the ten-dollar domain name, thetruth.com. Surely this provides undeniable, irrefutable proof that anti-smokers alone hold a monopoly on absolute truth, right? After all, why would internet regulators give anti-smokers thetruth.com, if they were liars? Unless of course, internet domains were distributed on a first come, first serve basis, where only the most fanatical people get up at 3am to hold their finger on a mouse button, waiting for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to fire the pistol to begin the race. I find it revealing that the anti-smoking American Legacy Foundation felt the need to acquire thetruth.com even more quickly than the Vatican, the Church of Scientology, Al Qaeda, schizophrenics with delusions of grandeur, a plethora of significant philosophers, or God could act. I find it equally revealing that legitimate scientists would never even want to own thetruth.com, because legitimate science is founded on the premise that we never can know the absolute, final truth, and there is always more to learn. Indeed, our inherent inability to know anything for certain is what makes legitimate science so fascinating and fun. That is what drives us to continuously progress, and move forward. Anti-smoking research ceased to progress around five hundred years ago, before it even began. It just repeats the desperate act of appearing to “prove” absurd claims that anti-smokers made in the 16th century, over and over and over again—at public expense, without moving our species toward anything at all except the shameful extermination of smokers.
Compared to humanity’s impressive legacy of legitimate science, more than anything else, anti-smoking research resembles a megalomaniac playing chess against a bound, gagged, and blindfolded opponent, where he alone creates the conditions that allow him to claim victory each and every time, without exception or refutation, independent of his skill, and technically, according to certain arbitrary rules of semantics (which he himself defines) without exactly “lying” as such (sort of). The truly revealing aspect of this sinister game is, if he engaged in this same activity for the purpose of scamming money from the loser, he would be prosecuted and imprisoned. Anti-smoking "scientists" who play this same rigged game are rewarded by the Minnesota state government, instead. Do you seriously expect competent residents of Minnesota to thank you for this kind of primitive, sado-masochistic public policy that ultimately hurts you and your own children as much as anyone else?
Published anti-smoking research is not reviewed by courageous, independent, impartial judges who exist outside the cult of academia. Peer review is not conducted by those whom the general public may rely upon to diligently look for evidence of research fraud, academic misconduct, greed, prejudice, institutional and political corruption, and other self-serving skullduggery that would publicly discredit their own fields—the very source of bread that feeds their own families. Even the most honest and decent people among anti-smoking leaders’ “peers” are too terrified of risking their own careers, their professional reputations, and their families’ livelihoods, to publicize the true origins of The Great Secondhand Smoke Scare, and the inherently fascist regime that benefits from this socially engineered mass hysteria. In true form for a cult, the few courageous anti-smokers who awakened from their delusion, and dared to expose, criticize, or condemn anti-smoking fraud and fundamentalist extremism have been ruthlessly excommunicated from the movement and its multi-billion dollar research funding machine for doing so.
Just ask Dr. Michael Siegel, who, after years as a leading “tobacco control” advocate, was instantly excommunicated from the anti-smoking movement for no greater crime than criticizing it. His productive career effectively ended with just one email notice sent out to other anti-smoking industry leaders by an anti-smoking kingpin, who ordered them to ignore Dr. Siegel henceforth, like a grade school bully orders other children to isolate and ignore a classmate whom he personally despises. Only cult leaders like Charles Manson exert this much influence over members of their groups, upon a single word. Or do Minnesota legislators believe this is how legitimate scientific deliberation is conducted?
Do you really believe that?
Skeptic Magazine summarized Dr. Siegel’s dilemma in 2007:
He’s a physician and a professor in Boston University’s School of Public Health. If the Movement had a College of Cardinals, he’d have been among the first to wear the red hat. These credentials availed him nothing, for he committed the Mortal Sin of Criticism against the Infallible ASH [Action on Smoking and Health] and its pontiff, John Banzhaf.
In stark contrast to its public image as a good-hearted, well-meaning “public health” benefactor and savior figure to the poor, ignorant masses who are unable to take care of themselves “properly,” in an interview Dr. Siegel described the reality of how the anti-smoking industry ruthlessly suppresses all criticism and opposition, even from within its own ranks:
There’s no question that my speaking out about these issues has taken a toll, and I think it’s taken both a professional toll and a personal toll. The professional toll has been that, essentially, I have been ‘expelled’ if you will from the anti-smoking movement. I like to say that I’ve been ‘excommunicated’ because it is kind of like a religious movement, and as I’m finding out that if you don’t believe everything—if you don’t believe one hundred percent of the established dogma of the religious movement, you’re not considered part of that movement. But it’s also—it’s been hard because I’ve been, in many ways blacklisted from the movement. I’ve been thrown off of list serves so that I can’t communicate with my colleagues. It’s difficult for me to present my point of view at conferences because people don’t want to hear this. And there are a lot of advocates [who] have said really defamatory things about me, suggesting that I’ve taken Tobacco money or have somehow—that I’ve gone off the deep end. . . .
So from a professional point of view, yes, this really has been damaging to my career. Any hopes of being a leader in the tobacco control movement—and I would say that there’s even a financial aspect to it because any hopes of getting continuing grants and funding from tobacco control organizations has been really hurt by this. It gonna be—it certainly makes it a lot harder for me to apply to some of these organizations for grants. . . .
There’s no question about that. There’s absolutely no question about that, that I’ve sacrificed a certain pool of grant money, grant funding, that is not going to be available to me because of the things that I’ve said that have been critical of some of these organizations, or that my view doesn’t seem to be resonating with the tobacco control movement. And so it is a—there are economic consequences as well as professional consequences.
What issues did Dr. Siegel speak out against that justified this "cardinal" of the anti-smoking “religion” being “excommunicated,” and damned to anti-smoking Hell for eternity? What did he say that “doesn’t seem to be resonating with the tobacco control movement”? (Read between the lines—Dr. Siegel is pathologically diplomatic in his speech). Among countless examples of anti-smoking hyperfanaticism, Dr. Siegel criticized the following common anti-smoking leaders’ proposals, which not only cross the line that separates the sane from madmen, but they are eerily reminiscent of the way Nazi Germany treated European Jews prior to its implementation of the “Final Solution.”
* All smokers should be fired, and should be banned from employment. (Note: this refers to approximately 18 percent of the adult human population on earth).
* The government should regard smoking as child abuse, and take children away from parents who smoke. (Note: this refers to all the children of approximately 18 percent of the adult human population on earth).
* Food and Drug Administration bureaucrats who have no experience with tobacco cultivation should regulate tobacco, rather than Tobacco companies, who must respond to public opinion by using their knowledge, experience and expertise to create “safer” cigarettes, as a simple matter of survival in a free market. (That is, if cigarettes need to be “safer” at all, and if tobacco was sold in a truly free market where prices were not artificially inflated by exorbitant taxation).
* Local governments that do not ban outdoor smoking should be sued by non-smokers who suffer heart attacks (Note: nice cowardly capitulation to a terrorist threat, Hennepin County)
But the one thing that really got Dr. Siegel in trouble, and got him excommunicated, was his criticism of this anti-smoking standard operating procedure:
* Shoddy and corrupt junk science should be allowed to proliferate for the sake of “the cause” of exterminating tobacco use.
Specifically, Dr. Siegel criticized the infamous Helena, Montana study that claims to have proven that smoking bans reduce heart attacks. That much I respect Dr. Siegel for, if only because I myself cannot find the words to describe what total, uncompromising garbage this study really was. There really are no words to describe it, except perhaps “surreal.”
In other words, unelected anti-smoking leaders wish to effectively outlaw the legal activity of smoking globally, by simply banning it everywhere even as tobacco technically remains "legal," by persecuting smokers at home and in the workplace, and while encouraging retaliation in true gangster form against those legislators who refuse to be manipulated into passing smoking bans. As this is being accomplished, anti-smoking leaders would prefer, if possible, to reduce approximately 18% of the adult human population on earth to unemployment and childlessness (which is eerily reminiscent of eugenics), while government regulators who know nothing about tobacco cultivation and processing are forcibly installed as the private tobacco industry’s de facto board of directors. That insane agenda is somehow supposed to improve our health and quality of life in this world. Anti-smokers even broadcast public service ads showing us how squeaky-clean middle class families living in perfect Aryan health will blow soap bubbles on a sunny day in smoke-free environments, to demonstrate where that barbaric lunacy is supposed to take us… someday.
Although I have not heard Dr. Siegel mention it, if I were he I would also have criticized a British anti-smoker who proposed that all smokers be executed—to be carried out, of course, by benevolent government. (My apologies for not remembering this sack of human garbage’s name). He only proposed this, of course, to “save the children” and to “protect families.” He assured everyone that it had nothing to do with raw, animalistic hatred or primitive barbarism. Yet this proposal is consistent with the anti-smoking movement’s shameful five hundred year history, where smokers have been imprisoned, tortured, permanently disfigured, excommunicated and executed by anti-smokers. But only when they have possessed the legal authority to do so—like the kind of legal authority over smokers that anti-smoking leaders are endlessly seeking, and being granted by legislators, today.
When a vicious hate group, led by arrogant “untouchables” who control hundreds of billions of tax dollars and effectively control public health policy, wields enough power in academia to prevent legitimate scientists from exposing academic fraud, misconduct, and motives that threaten civilized society itself, the People never hear a word that those legitimate scientists have to say. Instead, the People’s comprehension of reality is entirely at the mercy of heavily funded anti-smoking media whores who have no respect for mercy, or any other cornerstone of civilization, like tolerance, cooperation, or compromise:
It is often best, to walk away with nothing rather than to support a perceived ‘step in the right direction’ approach. Along the way, never accept a compromise that will prevent you from reaching that ultimate goal of 100% smokefree indoor public places and workplaces. Preemption, ventilation, smoking rooms, age provision, and ‘accommodation’ compromises, for example, create roadblocks to achieving 100% comprehensive smokefree workplace laws in the future.
– "Fundamentals of Smokefree Workplace Laws", (April, 2006) [emphasis added]
Fundamentals of Smokefree Workplace Laws is essentially a manual that trains anti-smoking leaders in the art of manipulating legislators, employing proven tactics that worked so well against the Senate during the days of the democratic Roman Republic, that the government rapidly descended into a dictatorial Roman Empire before anyone could stop it. Among the Fundamentals’ many anti-smoking sponsors is the American Cancer Society. I find it interesting that, unlike the ACS’s form letter calling for a $1.50 per pack tobacco tax increase, which is composed in a “dumbed down” writing style for the benefit of Minnesota legislators, Fundamentals of Smokefree Workplace Laws is written in a sophisticated style that provides comprehensive instruction to anti-smokers who are fanatically determined to carry out a clearly-defined agenda that opposes every meaningful principle that the United States of America was founded upon. (Fascism does not “promote the general welfare”).
Incidentally, it is worth noting that Dr. Siegel was excommunicated from the anti-smoking movement in 2006. That means he was already criticizing utterly deranged anti-smoking proposals well before the Minnesota legislature passed its statewide smoking ban in 2007 under the intoxicating influence of those anti-smoking warriors who carry out the strategies and tactics defined by Fundamentals of Smokefree Workplace Laws. It is a shame that Minnesota legislators appear to acquire the sum total of their knowledge about the world they live in exclusively from the anti-smoking mainstream media and wealthy special interest groups, while remaining oblivious to the breadth and depth of valid anti-smoking industry criticism and evidence of fraud and other criminal activity that exists. If you had bothered to pay attention to the most important aspects of this one-sided smoking “debate,” as it is conducted in the mass media, legislators could have easily avoided the shameful tragedy of Minnesota’s statewide smoking ban altogether. But you didn’t. You gave a vicious hate group Christmas in October, instead.
Anti-smoking research is conceived, funded, conducted, interpreted, reviewed, published, and publicized all within the same limited political, social and financial framework, which bears as much intimate relation to the reality of ordinary peoples’ lives as the British Royal Family does. Yet this unelected machine now controls ordinary smokers’ lives, and enjoys unfettered access to smokers’ collective wealth via exorbitant tobacco taxes and the Master Tobacco Settlement. This pseudo-academic anti-smoking House of Horrors utilizes the same strategy of politicized research and deliberation, cherry-picked data, and cultivation of myopia that the early Christian Church used to arbitrarily declare an inherently “irrefutable” distinction between sacred and holy books of the New Testament, and an unreliable Apocrypha. It uses the same form of ruthless, unethical propaganda, and divide and conquer strategy, that the Nazi anti-smoking program utilized to cleanse the Aryan race of perceived weakness and impurity. The modern anti-smoking industry is a twenty-first century manifestation of the exact same anti-smoking religion that King James effectively established with his Counterblaste to Tobacco, shortly before he commissioned his own scholarly peers to translate the more famous King James Bible in his own image.
This incomprehensibly profitable industry is not founded on legitimate science. Extraordinary anti-smoking claims routinely contradict the reality of human experience with the same confident, self-assured, reasoned sobriety of a homeless schizophrenic who insists that he is God, and therefore he should be granted the authority to tell every other human being on the planet how they must live their own lives—or else.
Why is this not a code red warning sign to responsible legislators? This is the domestic equivalent of Defcon One in a free society. Exactly what did you people learn in Minnesota public schools, anyway? Growing up in another state, I learned things like this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
– Amendment I to the U.S. Constitution (emphasis added)
Under your mean-spirited, unconscionable smoking ban, Minnesota smokers are prohibited, by government, from freely assembling in public places or within privately owned businesses, while engaging in a legal activity. They are legally prohibited from expressing their own unique identities in public places and privately owned businesses—a psychological crime against human dignity so damnably inconceivable that even the American Founders never felt the need to explicitly prohibit it. Business proprietors are legally prohibited from observing the Golden Rule, since it is impossible to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” when it violates the law to exhibit the same kind of hospitality, tolerance and respect that you wish to receive from others. And all of this occurred because Minnesota legislators essentially respected the establishment of an anti-smoking religion, paid for, in large part, by spoils seized from the victims of that religion’s relentless Crusade against smokers. In this land of anti-smoking health fascism, I am genuinely surprised that I still enjoy the freedom of speech necessary to write this letter, to petition this legislature for redress of grievances.
I mean that. I am really surprised that I still enjoy that one remaining freedom as a smoker. Or will you retaliate against me, as many Minnesota business owners reported retaliation when they tried to take a stand against the smoking ban that threatened everything from their family’s livelihood to their quality of life and unobstructed socialization with other members of their own species? For my part, I am still trying to reconcile the vicious retaliation that anti-smokers are known for with the very concept of a mature, civilized humanity that has evolved beyond other animals.
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