This editorial by the New York Times, notorious supporter of antismoking frauds and prohibition, gives us a sample of the childish mentality smoking haters have regressed into. If they continue this way we may expect ultimately to find them in a foetal condition. That would not be bad at all, for foetuses cannot talk!
Regressed minds, regressed NYT editorials. Read the title and chuckle: “Big Tobacco, Meet Big Philanthropy”. Wow … now Big Evil will meet Big Good, and we root for Big Good! … The opening lines: “Is it possible that the tobacco industry has met its match? After years of watching public-health groups and governments struggle to rein in the multinational tobacco companies, it was good to hear that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Bill Gates have joined forces to combat the smoking epidemic threatening many low- and middle-income countries.”
“Smoking epidemic”… “threatening”… but lift your hearts, here come Bloomberg and Gates! Tremble, defenders of liberty and self determination: Big Fraud now has white knights on its side! Knights who, no doubt, are very much like the public health breed: Bloomberg in cahoots with Big Pharma, and Gates whose Microsoft has collected more lawsuits for breaching laws and ethics than has any other corporation in the world. That is the sort of “morality” that antitobacco recognizes and appreciates.
The real point here is that Big Tobacco has not met its match: that meeting is another wet dream resulting from the torrid fantasies of sick minds. The European press has reported the same news, but with a more realistic approach than that of the la-la-land American media, as ever enamoured with epidemiological frauds and idiotic pseudo-moral pursuits of eternal health.
Gates and Bloomberg: two unethical people gang up for an unethical cause. Fortunately their pittance will have little effect next to the muscles of international Big Tobacco, and smoking will continue to grow. It is just a publicity stunt to please a misguided public.
The horsemen of the Epidemiolgical Fraud have put together 500 million dollars to be spent in five years over the entire world for their stupid crusade. Many Eurpean newspapers have fallen an inch short of defining that pathetic publicity stunt a “fart in a hurricane,” so to speak – and with good reasons. Figure this for yourself. Estimated number of smokers in the world: 1.5 billion. At the average of one pack a day smoked, that is 1.5 billion packs or 30 billion cigarettes a day. Even at a modest average cost of only 1 dollar a pack, the business turnover is 1.5 billion dollars a day, or 547 billion dollars a year from the sales of the cigarettes alone, never mind the corollary industries. That is: 62.5 million dollars per hour.
What can the 100 million dollars a year from two rich and unethical clowns do? Nothing, or next to nothing, and there is more: in the Third World much of the aid ends up in the pockets of corrupt local politicians, although that is not a big issue as antismoking funds really ARE intended for the pockets of corrupt politicians and health authorities of various stripes to begin with. How else can Tobacco Control be explained in realistic terms? Because politicians and "public health" actually care for the good of the people?… 
The European press is correct on all counts: it is nothing more than a pitiful publicity stunt, nothing much to worry about for the fighters on our side: smoking will go on and will expand as it is doing already, and the effort to suppress it will become unsustainable.
The futility of the stunt is also picked up, in part, by the CATO Institute in this article on the utter ineffectiveness of Tobacco Control efforts in recent years (stored copy), which would also explain the anger and the brutal violence of Tobacco Control, faced with its own failure to condition behaviour.
Disappointingly, however, CATO seems to yield to the concept that smoking is “bad.” Patrick Basham points out correctly that much of the money generated by tobacco sales is stolen (via taxes and settlements) by government and then used primarily for purposes other than Tobacco Control. Stealing is bad but Basham fails to recognize that any kind of money put to any kind of purpose is better spent when it isn’t spent on Tobacco Control. He would waste all of the ill-gotten gains on prohibition efforts amounting substantially to vilification of the smokers who got robbed, telling us, “It’s time for Congress – and perhaps the president – to step in and demand that the states live up to their promise to use the settlement money for effective tobacco prevention.”
Basham should know better than that. What “prevention”? From the “diseases” that are not scientifically demonstrable to be caused by smoking? Or perhaps Basham thinks that smoking is now “immoral”? A “healthy” (or “moral”?) society is a society that does not smoke, maybe?… Has Basham forgotten that it is all an epidemiological scam? There is no need for tobacco prevention when not even one death can be scientifically demonstrated to be caused by tobacco, thus the only thing to prevent is Tobacco Control – a killer of liberty, economy, science, and ethics.
It’s very disappointing to hear anti-liberty, effectively prohibitionist rhetoric, from CATO and and a purported Libertarian such as Patrick Basham. Read it again: “It’s time for Congress – and perhaps the president – to step in and demand that the states live up to their promise to use the settlement money for effective tobacco prevention.” Does he not know where "tobacco prevention" leads these days? If not he’s gone brain-dead.
The state, Mister Basham apparently now believes, must march with ever-greater force into the lives of citizens to engineer their choices to a single choice of smoking abstention – something that, inevitably, can be achieved only through false information. Is this what Libertarianism has become today? Is belief in freedom now simply a form of disagreement on how the state and institutions are to socially engineer the habits, lives and choices of citizens?
We sincerely hope that Patrick smoked the wrong stuff on the day he wrote this rot, but with the tornadoes of principles perversion that ravage society today, one does not have to be surprised at the spinning of weathercocks.
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