BBC in cahoots with Big Tobacco, suspects raving lunatic

I have always feared for Stanton Glantz's mental health, but it's only since he started blogging that I've realised that the guy is genuinely certifiable. His latest post is an absolute belter. It seems that the Welsh government is consulting on whether to allow television and film actors to smoke in the studio. This is because the BBC has opened a production centre in Cardiff—there is already an exemption for actors in England—and the corporation has kept some productions in England as a result of the über-draconian favoured by the sheep-worriers.

The exemption is ridiculously narrow. No children can be present (as ever, I urge you to think of the children) and no members of the public are allowed to watch the scene being filmed. The exemption will only apply if "the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for the performer to smoke."

The swivel-eyed professor of nowt has, of course, gone ballistic.

BBC lobbying to weaken Welsh smokefree regulations: Yes, this is real.

From Glantz's vantage point way down the rabbit hole, the BBC is a pro-smoking organisation.

...one wonders what else is going on in the shadows. After all, there is a long history of collaboration between Big Tobacco and the movie industry.

Nurse!

There is absolutely no evidence that any movie production moved from one place to another because they couldn't smoke.

But the BBC is saying exactly that, Stanton, and that definitely counts as evidence. As the consultation document states...

The exemption for performers ... would make Wales a more attractive place for programme making and would remove current costs involved with taking smoking scenes on productions being filmed in Wales to England. The smoking ban has been a major issue for a number of productions that have been filmed in Wales, especially period dramas set in a time when smoking was commonplace.

This means that you can believe one of two things. Either the Welsh Assembly and the BBC are lying because they're engaged in some kind of pro-tobacco industry plot to undermine the smoking ban, or they are telling the truth and the smoking ban is deterring the Beeb from filming more shows in Wales. If you look at the output of both the BBC and the Welsh Assembly in recent years, I think it's pretty clear that if they are are engaged in a pro-smoking conspiracy, it has been phenomenally well-camouflaged.

Glantz continues to rant on about his theories in his usual illiterate style...

Are we really to believe that the BBC has ignore [sic] the fact that it just opened a major new production center in Cardiff, Wales to take advantage of lower labor costs that exist in London just so they can favor actors [sic] generate secondhand smoke? I think not.

A prize to anyone who can explain what the hell he's babbling about.

It gets better...

Moreover, there would be nothing to stop BBC [sic] from having an actor wave around an unlit cigarette, cigar or pipe, then put the smoke in with CGI.

Yes, that's a much simpler solution, Stan, you old fruitcake.

The only beneficiary of this change would be the tobacco industry.

That's not quite true, is it now? If the BBC is lobbying for this unutterably trivial amendment, it would strongly suggest that they stand to benefit from it—by, for example, not having to spend hours pissing around with CGI. Companies don't generally lobby for policies that won't benefit them, y'see. The tobacco industry, on the other hand, is not lobbying for it and stands to gain—at best—the sale of a couple of packs of cigarettes to be smoked in some god awful period drama.

If the BBC wants to lobby to get smoking laws changed, they should be lobbying the government in London to remove the exemption that allows actors and other film makers to be poisoned by secondhand smoke at BBC studios in London.

Yes, yes. But as I've just explained, they're not going to do that because (a) they would not benefit from it; au contraire, they would be damaged by it, and (b) if they wanted to stop actors being, ahem, "poisoned by secondhand smoke at BBC studios", they would do so voluntarily. I know, Stan, that you struggle to comprehend the difference between public and private action, but not everything in life needs to be dealt with through repressive legislation.

I do hope someone at the BBC comes across Stan's blog. It might give them an idea of the type of crack-pots they've been giving such credulous coverage to all these years.

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An evening with the New Economics Foundation

Over at the IEA blog...

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2011: The ten best bits

Like all years, 2011 was mostly awful for those of us who have a fondness for liberty. However, I have managed to find ten highlights to bring you cheer as the year comes to an end.

10. EU consultation backfires

It all seemed so easy for the European Commission: quietly launch a public consultation on tobacco regulation, pack it full of responses from NGOs and fake charities and, voila!, the EU can declare huge support for plain packaging and huge opposition to lifting the ban on snus. Alas, for our penniless European masters, the NGOs barely turned up, but the public did. Result: very little support for more bans and lots of support for harm reduction policies.

Naturally, the EU disregarded the consultation and claimed to have suddenly found a bundle of supportive responses which they won't let anyone see. Ah, sweet democracy.

9. Junk scientist caught and sacked

All he wanted to do was come up with evidence to show that meat-eaters are anti-social louts, but things unravelled for "social psychologist" Diederik Stapel in October when an investigating committee found that he had "made up or manipulated data in dozens of papers over nearly a decade". The academic fraudster was finally exposed after his students noticed that his data fitted Stapel's pre-existing beliefs a little too perfectly. Sacked in disgrace, one hopes in vain that his example will act as a warning to other politically-motivated social scientists.

8. Malta gets mugged by reality

Having heard about the miraculous effect of smoking bans on heart attacks—arguably the most egregious case of systematic scientific fraud of the last ten years—the people of Malta were expecting great things when they conducted a review of hospital admissions. Alas, the country's heart attack rate had risen since the ban and they had neglected to employ a junk scientist to manipulate the figures to show otherwise.

Failing to twig that they had been tricked by the likes of Jill "let me smooth that our for you" Pell and Anna "pants on fire" Gilmore, the hapless Maltese issued the figures in a report with the unintentionally hilarious title "The Smoking Ban: The Malta Paradox".

7. BBC finally admits that drinking has been declining for years

In which the BBC admitted the truth it had been so carefully obscuring throughout the noughties.

It's difficult to open a newspaper without reading about the alcohol problems that exist in the UK. Recent headlines include "Binge drinking costs NHS billions", "Hospitals reel as drink cases soar" and "Alcohol abuse to cost NHS an extra billion"

And this week, figures from Alcohol Concern suggest the number of people being treated in hospital for alcohol misuse has more than doubled in eight years.

But behind these stories is an unexpected truth - Britons have been drinking less and less every year since 2002.

They didn't make a big deal of this admission—it featured in a little magazine article—and they made it up to their friends at the BMA by producing the most outrageously biased pro-temperance television programme of the year, but at least it was there. If we're lucky, maybe in 2012 they'll acknowledge that obesity hasn't risen since 2002 as well?

6. BMA caught pulling numbers out of the air

Of all the junk statistics that are used to justify a smoking ban in cars, the one you really don't want to cite if you're an "evidence-based" anti-smoking campaigner is the one that was debunked in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal in 2010. But when the British Medical Association earnestly informed the media that smoking in a car creates 23 times more smoke than would be found in a smoky bar, it apparently forgot that the Candian Medical Association Journal had told advocates to "stop using the 23 times more toxic factoid because there appears to be no evidence for it in the scientific literature".

The open and shut nature of the case forced the BMA to retract the silly claim. Having insisted that a single cigarette smoked in a moving vehicle with all the windows open creates 23 times more secondhand smoke than a pub full of smokers, they replaced it with the claim that ten cigarettes smoked in a stationary car with all the windows up and the ventilation off creates 11 times more smoke. Not quite the same thing, that, but it mattered not because the media had moved on and virtually no news outlets let their readers in on the cock-up.

5. Stanton Glantz roundly mocked for Smokefree Movies madness

It's always amusing when normal people suddenly become aware of deranged characters like California's mad professor Stanton A. Glantz (I can't say what the A stands for, but its an anagram of 'earholes'). In March, the paranoid mechanical engineer got himself in the news when he attacked an animated film called Rango which depicted people doing the worst thing in the world. It was true, said Glantz: "A lot of kids are going to start smoking because of this movie." Cue hilarity from across the media and blogosphere, of which the best came from the website Filmdrunk:

Let me be very clear about something: Stanton Glantz is not a real person. He can’t be. An anti-smoking advocate named Stanton Glantz who lives in San Francisco and makes conclusory doomsday statements like “A lot of kids are going to start smoking because of this movie” sounds like something even Michael Bay would dismiss as being too on-the -nose. No, I’ll not be fooled by this.

Look, I don’t want kids smoking any more than the next guy (provided the next guy isn’t Joe Camel). But these morons who take it upon themselves to try to eradicate tobacco use from the planet one city ordinance and petition at a time need to be stopped. I’m sorry if your enjoyment of the park is lessened because Johnny Motorcycle lit up a Marlboro Light and the smell of smoke just drives you batty. But tough sh*t. I don’t like country music, but I’m not going to go out and picket every Keith Urban concert. As I said up top, I can understand banning smoking in tight, confined spaces like bars or airplanes for the health of consumers and employees. But when your argument devolves into “ALL MOVIES WITH SMOKING SHOULD BE RATED-R REGARDLESS OF CONTEXT,” then you’re no longer doing a service to your cause.

And you’re an asshole.

And I hate you.

Quite.

Gobshite

4. Dutch government decides to treat electorate like grown ups

Wailing and gnashing of teeth were inevitable when the Dutch government decided to relax the smoking ban and slash funding of the neo-prohibitionist tobacco control outfit STIVORO.

A bunch of concerned advocates (ie. people who would be out of work if their governments also slashed tobacco control spending) wrote a tear-stained letter to The Lancet with the wonderful title 'Can the Dutch government really be abandoning smokers to their fate?' If stopping harassment and vilification is leaving people to their fate, then yes, they were.

The Dutch health minister, Edith Schippers, has said that "the state is not a nanny" and that she wants to allow "adults to decide for themselves over lifestyle decisions." Public health professionals across Europe looked at each other in bewilderment.

3. McDonalds outwits San Francisco food fascists

Bone-headed Californians decided that Happy Meals were the cause of obesity and so banned the practice of giving toys away with fast food. McDonalds duly obeyed and started selling toys separarely for ten cents while giving the proceeds to charity. The result?

Happy Meal sales haven’t slowed down, McDonald’s is making even more money, and parents are now spending an extra 10 cents per kid every time they stop by the golden arches.

Tee, and furthermore, hee.

2. Bigot crushed in Stony Stratford

Risible neurotic local councillor decides that there will be no more smoking on his watch and moves to ban people lighting up in the streets of Stony Stratford. ASH gives him their support but hundreds of more liberal-minded people flock to the town to register their disgust. Local residents disown him, the motion is rejected by 148 votes to 2 and Councillor Paul Bartlett - for it is he - may not be a councillor for much longer.

1. Alcohol Concern loses government funding

In October, there was terrible news for the nation's second least popular fake charity when the government decided that there was no need to keep shovelling hundreds of thousands of pounds at a temperance group which did nothing but slag them off. Having bit the hand that fed it once too often, Alcohol Concern was left without state-funding. Faced with the prospect of having to collect donations from the public like charities are supposed to do, its CEO, Don Shenker, immediately jumped ship. Shenker is now desperately hoping that any future employees don't Google his name.

Happy New Year.

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March of the morons

Some pitiful news from Australia:

Cancer sparks legal action over smoking fumes

Peter Lavac, a Sydney lawyer, fitness fanatic and champion surf skier, thought something was wrong when he was not breathing as freely.

Knowing smoke was getting into his air from a flat below where a chain-smoking couple lived, he tried to get them to stop. Unsuccessful, he then approached the body corporate, strata title management and the tenancy tribunal, but to no avail.

He consulted a respiratory specialist, Professor Matthew Peters, who told him to monitor his condition. "From this data and my symptoms, Professor Peters concluded on the balance of probabilities that my symptoms and decrease in lung function were caused by the second-hand cigarette smoke," he said.

No responsible physician would make such a statement. 15% of lung cancers occur in nonsmokers and there are 40 different risk factors for the disease—there is no evidence that being in a flat near another flat where people smoke is one of them. On the contrary, such a hypothesis flies in the face of both science and common sense. What kind of an idiot is this Professor Peters?

Professor Peters, chairman of Action on Smoking and Health, said there was no lower limit for exposure to smoking. "If you can smell smoke, it is hurting you," he said.

Aha! Not just any old doctor, then. This is a guy who has argued for smokers to be denied surgery, who shills for GlaxoSmithKline and who has taken pleasure from hounding smokers out of every conceivable 'public' place in the über-nanny state of Australia. Now, having lied to his patient, he intends to persecute two innocent people who have retreated into their own home—the only place left for them to smoke. Let's not beat around the bush here, friends, this guy is the lowest of the low.

Professor Peters told Mr Lavac, 65, and his wife to reduce their exposure. After living in their flat for 18 months in 2005-06, they moved. In March, 2008, Mr Lavac felt unwell. A CT scan detected a shadow at the top of his right lung, and a biopsy confirmed cancer...

Mr Lavac, who had never smoked, lost a third of his right lung. His surgeon and Professor Peters told him that, on the balance of probabilities, the lesion had been caused by passive smoking.

Yes folks. We live in a world in which professors of medicine tell people that they have developed lung disorders because they lived in a flat for 18 months above people who smoked. This is the state of hypochondria and intellectual retardation we have reached in the last days of 2011.

You can watch this cretin below, if you can stomach it. He mentions that his patient had never smoked and reported no secondhand smoke exposure and so, in his weird little world, it must have been tobacco smoke magically seeping in from a neighbouring building wot done it. At this rate, Australians will be burning wickermen and ducking witches before the end of the decade.




UPDATE:

I didn't want to say too much about Peter Lavac in this post as he has clearly suffered a brush with death. His disbelief at contracting lung cancer is sadly typical of people who think they don't "deserve" to suffer ill health because they have followed all the rules of public health

“How could this possibly happen to me?” asks Peter. “I was at the peak of my physical strength and power. I’d never smoked, I never drank alcohol, I never did drugs, I was an athlete."

However, as Mag points out in the comments, Mr Lavac has a back story himself. He is a member of the Non-Smokers Movement of Australia and lobbied parliament for a draconian smoking ban in 2006.

The coincidences are coming thick and fast, are they not? ASH and the NSMA are both small organisations with limited memberships and yet it just so happens that the "victim" of fourth-hand smoke (or whatever it is) is a prominent lobbyist for NSMA and the doctor who says his story checks out just so happens to be the chairman of ASH.

Gee, what a small world.

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Season of hate

I generally have zero interest in what random people choose to type beneath the line of news stories on the internet, but a couple of articles this week made me think that the intellectual climate is darkening at a worrying rate.

Take this item from the Winnipeg Free Press about an unfortunate woman who nearly froze to death after being locked outside a hospital.

It was a bitter winter night, -30 C, in December 2000, when a 54-year-old hospital patient slipped outside Seven Oaks Hospital in her hospital gown, pulling her intravenous pole behind her.

She wanted a smoke.

An hour later, she was found comatose in a snowbank. The woman had suffered hypothermia and frostbite to her hands and feet. Four fingers on her right hand had to be amputated. She was left with limited mobility in her left hand.

The door had locked automatically behind the patient and she couldn't find a way back in. 

It's hard not to feel sorry for a lady who had a near-death experience and suffered multiple amputations.

Or so you might think. In fact, the mental image of a woman having a cigarette alone in arctic temperatures unleashed a river of bile in the comments section.

Shouldn't be smoking in the first place. Maybe a little cold made the lady realize that smoking is not healthy for you and neither is hanging out in the cold in a hospital gown.

This is a disgusting, filthy habit, and for people who are already in the hospital for a smoking-related illness wanting to go outside and smoke some more is just sickening. It's one thing not to be concerned for your own health - that's your perogative, but don't put the other patients & children with weakened immune systems in the way of second hand smoke. There are hundreds of other places to smoke, and a hospital or the hospital grounds definetely should not be one. Take a walk down the street, across from the hospital to inhale your death stick. If you can drag yourself out of bed, with your IV pole and grown, down the elevators outside, then you can take a few extra steps to move away from the building. Yes, even if it's -40. It won't kill you. Or maybe it will.

It's a dirty blue collar habit. And as for the stereotype - it need only be confirmed by the appearance of them in mass aroud the door of a building in the winter.

Absolutely zero sympathy for anyone who defies a doctor's caution to stop smoking and gets lung cancer. In fact, they should be refused any treatment whatsoever.

Nice.

And how about this light-hearted little item in The Economist, in which a journalist notices that many airports around the world manage to accommodate smokers in some small way without inconveniencing other passengers.

Yes, smoking is bad for you. But if you are a smoker, a civilised cigarette makes all the difference between being an irritable passenger itching to burst out of the terminal doors and a calm, considerate sort who makes room for his fellow travellers.

... Smokers don’t ask much. Put a designated smoking zone in the shoddiest corner of the terminal and they will trek to it, thanking the authorities with every carcinogenic breath. It would make economic sense too: Heathrow worries about losing its place as Europe’s foremost hub for international air traffic now that plans for the airport’s expansion have been shelved. But why waste money on a third runway when you can build a little smoking room and watch travellers flood in?

This is very moderate and unassuming stuff. The risks of smoking are acknowledged and all that is being asked for is "the shoddiest corner". Will the readers of this article respond with similar  bonhomie and tolerance? They will not.

Smoking is a filthy habit that should be discouraged, not encouraged. "Kissing a smoker is like licking a full ashtray". I don't want to sit next to a passenger who has been chain smoking, whose head and arm hair and clothes stink of stale smoke, whose yellowed teeth exhale nicotine air in my ambiance as s/he coughs his lungs up. Not to mention the cost to clean up smoking lounge draperies, fabric chairs, carpet. Because smoking kills the olfactories, smokers have no idea how badly they smell and they cannot taste food. Get a life, save money, and quit!

Having someone who has recently been smoking sit next to you on a flight is almost as bad as having them smoking there. The stench of cigarette smoke hangs in that persons hair, clothing and (if you are close enough) breath for a very long time. Let's keep it as far away as possible. Those demeaning goldfish-bowl smoking rooms are one of the saddest sights I've ever seen at an airport. Do these people know just how ridiculous they look?

If I am going to sit next to someone on a nine hour flight I don't want them stinking of fag ash. I don't mind if people smoke in special smoking rooms as long as they are required to shower and change into fresh clothes immediately afterwards.

Why not facilities for other drug addicts whilst one is about it? Of course the rest of us do not wish to be in the plane with smelly smokers, let alone drug-addicted pilots, so we are looking at complete segregation here....

Remember how in the very recent past, tobaccophobes insisted that they were not against people smoking per se, they just didn't want people to do it around them. Now, it seems, their sensitive noses need protecting to such an extent that the mere presence of someone who smoked several hours ago is enough to stir their righteous indignation. In the first story, we see a woman who has done everything that is demanded of her by braving sub-zero temperatures so that not a wisp of smoke goes up the delicate nostrils of fellow Canadians and yet all that can be said of her is that it is a shame she survived.

Finding anonymous half-mad obsessives spouting drivel on the internet is the easiest task in the galaxy, of course. It is always possible that a handful of loons scour the search engines for any mention of their bête noire to make sure their peculiar voices are heard. And yet, there is something in the sheer hatefulness—and quantity—of these comments that suggests that the policy of 'denormalisation' is producing fruit.

This is the inevitable result of the state-sanctioned stigmatisation that the anti-smoking movement has been working towards for twenty years. The public health establishment might distance itself from such sentiments but when even the NHS produces adverts like the one below, they must take some responsibility for lighting the blue touch paper.

Governments have a responsibility to quell tensions and defuse conflict in society. In no other area of life does government deliberately create and inflame hostility. Like so many other failed tobacco control policies, the doctrine of denormalisation is counter-productive and damaging because it is the brain-child of a small group of emotional zealots, some of whom are operating at a sub-optimal level of mental health themselves. It's time for the government to put the tobacco control freaks behind them and chart a new course before things get really nasty.

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Liam Donaldson up to his old tricks

Liam Donaldson on the way to the bank

Remember Britain's former Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson? Under the last Labour government, this flabby old fear-mongerer epitomised everything that is wrong with the public health crusade. Evidence-free policy making, perpetual scare stories, junk statistics, sucking up to the pharmaceutical industry—Donaldson brought it all to a new level.

In addition to lying through his teeth in his attempts to bring in the smoking ban and minimum pricing of alcohol, Donaldson was consumed with the desire to do battle with a viral pandemic. In the search for his very own Moby Dick, the sweaty surgeon hyped up fears of first SARS, then bird flu and finally swine flu. Thanks to Donaldson, no country overreacted to this scare more than Britain and no country helped the pharmaceutical industry make more money, as I said in a post last year:

Donaldson described swine flu as the "biggest challenge [to the NHS] in a generation" and predicted that a third of the UK population would come down with the virus in the winter. In an act of near-insanity, the British government ordered 110 million doses of the swine flu vaccine Tamiflu, 50 million more than would be needed to treat every man, woman and child in the country. The Department of Health ordered 32 million face masks. The Home Office made plans to dig mass graves.

In the event—despite the coldest winter for 30 years—there were fewer deaths than in the average flu season. The final death toll was 450—0.7% of the 65,000 predicted in Donaldson's worst-case scenario. Of these 450 deaths, only 70 could be solely attributed to swine flu.

The big winners from the swine flu panic were the pharmaceutical companies who managed to offload vast quantities of anti-viral drugs that were not needed and will never be used. There is now a hefty body of evidence that shows that Big Pharma had a disproportionate and malign influence on the World Health Organisation while the 'crisis' unfolded.

Our investigation has identified key scientists involved in WHO pandemic planning who had declarable interests, some of whom are or have been funded by pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were drafting. Yet these interests have never been publicly disclosed by WHO and, despite repeated requests from the BMJ/The Bureau, WHO has failed to provide any details about whether such conflicts were declared by the relevant experts and what, if anything, was done about them.

"There was no scientific basis for the WHO’s estimate of 2 billion for likely H1N1 cases, and we knew little about the benefits and harms of the vaccination. The WHO maintained this 2 billion estimate even after the winter season in Australia and New Zealand showed that only about one to two out of 1000 people were infected. Last but not least, it changed the very definition of a pandemic.”

The world was suckered by the WHO and the WHO was—to put it most charitably—suckered by Big Pharma. No country was conned more than Britain and at the heart of the British scare was Liam Donaldson. Having coaxed the government into wasting millions of pounds on unnecessary drugs, Donaldson retired last year, with the risible promise to come back to the job if swine flu re-emerged as the plague he always claimed it would be. It hasn't, of course, so has the discredited quack drifted into ignoble retirement?

Of course not...

Liam Donaldson Takes Up Role With Lobbying Firm APCO

The former chief medical officer for England has agreed to advise a global lobbying firm with a string of UK healthcare clients.

In the new role, Donaldson will provide strategic advice for clients such as the British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.

As Paul Flynn says, "the wages of error are bounteous". But, as if that wasn't enough, he's also got himself a job at the WHO.

WHO Director-General names Sir Liam Donaldson envoy for patient safety

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has named Professor Sir Liam Donaldson as WHO Envoy for Patient Safety. In this role, Sir Liam, who served as England's Chief Medical Officer between 1998 and 2010, will help the Organization promote patient safety as a global public health priority.

What a cosy little club the WHO is. And Donaldson is showing no sign of toning down the scare-mongering in his new role.

"If you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any country... your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like 1 in 10. Your chances of dying due to an error in health care would be 1 in 300," Liam Donaldson, the WHO's newly appointed envoy for patient safety, told a news briefing.

This little statistic is a classic Donaldsonism, as Emergency Physicians Monthly has pointed out:

This guy was formerly England’s Chief Medical Officer for twelve years. England’s own parliament put out a report of England’s Health Committee in 2009 – while Donaldson was the CMO - showing that “around 3,500″ medical errors in the NHS each year involve the death of the patient.

Between 2009 and 2010, there were 14.5 million hospital admissions in England – at least according to the NHS’s “Hospital Episode Statistics” online. With one in 300 dying from an “error in health care” (according to Dr. Donaldson), then a total of roughly 48,300 patients in England would have died at the hands of us careless, lackadaisical, downright dangerous medical providers.

Same calendar year, but there is a big discrepancy between 3,500 patient deaths cited in the House of Commons report and 48,300 deaths cited by Professor Sir Liam Donaldson.

That discrepancy leaves me with three possible explanations.

First possibility: Those who created the statistics used in the Sixth Report of the Health Committee for the House of Commons were a bunch of incompetents and should all be beheaded. Remember, the report was created during Sir Liam Donaldson’s tenure as England’s Chief Medical Officer, so he is not without blame if this scenario holds true.

Second possibility: There was a MI5 cover up of nearly 45,000 deaths due to medical errors in England in 2009. Someone call Scotland Yard … and Geraldo Rivera.

Third possibility: Sir Liam Donaldson is blowing bubbles out his bum when citing statistics on behalf of the World Health Organization.

Liam Donaldson scaring the wits out of people with made-up statistics to enhance his own power and prestige? Nothing changes.

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The vile views of Chandran Nair

Following a link on Twitter, I ended up listening to a talk at the Royal Society of Arts by Chandran Nair who claims to be some sort of environmentalist. I had not come across Mr Nair before but he has written a book called Consumptionomics, is fond of Chinese Communism, thinks we need "massive carbon taxes" and wants governments to be "draconian" so you can probably guess what kind of environmentalist he is.

Rarely have I come across a speech that makes the case for anti-human, anti-progress, anti-liberty politics as explicitly and shamelessly as this, with not a word of dissent from the audience. With people like this around, is it any wonder greens get labelled watermelons?

Here are a few choice, but entirely representative, quotes:


On the joys of collectivism:

"In Japan, the individual doesn't matter. I have a home in a small village in Japan and everything has a rule and I love it—because it's about the collective. You can't do anything without having the permission of the collective."

On whether technology has a role to play (ie. in feeding people and reducing pollution):

"The Chinese tell you how many gallons of petrol you can have a week, how many miles you can drive and when your car will stop. And it will be recorded somewhere and you'll get a huge bill for what you do. I've talked to my friends at Cisco and they say they have the technology. So technology does have a role to play."

On government:

"We will need strong governments. We will need draconian measures to stop and restrain people."

On population:

"The Chinese model [one child per family] might work better in these issues than anything else."

On car ownership:

"The Chinese have intervened in car markets and two months ago imposed restrictions on car ownership. And I've always said that if they can mess with your reproductive system, they can certainly mess with your car."

On being green:

"I refuse to go to conferences any more that talk about 'greening'. I prefer to go to conferences that talk about constraining, restricting, imposing rules."

On liberty:

"Asian governments need to reject the Western model. They need to move beyond the rhetoric of liberal democratic capitalist systems which say that individual rights are sacrosanct."

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James Enstrom update

Some readers will be familiar with Dr James Enstrom who, for 34 years, was at UCLA before being sacked last August because his research was "not aligned with the academic mission of the Department".

It is rather unfortunate that the academic mission of UCLA is incompatible with objective research and academic freedom, although since the University is situated in California, I guess it goes with the territory. Enstrom received a barrage of intimidation in 2003 when his case-control study in the British Medical Journal showed no excess cancer risk from secondhand smoke (conducted with Geoffrey Kabat and recently mentioned by Peter Hitchens).

Enstrom received much the same treatment last year when his study of air pollution did not support the California Environmental Protection Agency's a priori conclusion that particulate matter kills 2,000 people in the State each year. Enstrom's estimate of deaths from the type of air pollution that Cal-EPA want to prohibit—at enormous cost to the haulage industry—is more like zero.

Enstrom was sacked from UCLA for conducting this inconvenient study (and, as I mentioned in a previous post, his secondhand smoke study certainly greased the wheels). Since then, a number of studies have supported Enstrom's findings, but Cal-EPA ignored them in favour of a study conducted by Dr Hien T. Tran which happened to find a serious risk from the very thing Cal-EPA wanted to ban. The problem with Dr. Tran is that he's a fraud who bought his PhD from an online University for $1,000. Cal-EPA have since accepted this, but Enstrom's trials go on.

The video below (from Reason.tv) tells the story. As Adam Kissel from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education says:

If Dr Enstrom loses his job because he has expressed his academic freedom then it's a message to other researchers that you'd better not knock the boat because you might be next.

Do try to find nine minutes to watch this...

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Meddlesome Ratbags

One of Viz magazine's characters is a woman called Meddlesome Ratbag who goes out of her way to engineer situations in which she can be offended, thereby demanding that her will be imposed. An example is here (via Pavlov's Cat) which relates to this story from 2008.

I was reminded of Ms Ratbag when I read this article from CNN about airport smoking lounges. It's an unusual article because it doesn't seem to have any real purpose and it's not inspired by current events. It is, however, a nice little piece about an obscure subject and reminds the reader that many people get a little bit of pleasure from having a place to smoke in the relentlessly tobaccophobic world of airline travel.

"Isn't this nice?" traveler Colleen Sherretta said of the concourse C smoking lounge at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, as others cycled through the sliding automatic door, filling the room to capacity...

"I'm glad they have one," Sherretta said cheerily during a recent midday connection from Savannah, Georgia, to Newark, New Jersey, as she stubbed out her Camel Blue. "They don't have these in Newark."

Indeed not. As the article states, there are fewer smoking lounges than there were ten years ago. New York has, unsurprisingly, clamped down on them.

"It's a necessity for people who have long layovers," a patron of Atlanta's concourse B smoking lounge said in between long drags of a Marlboro Red from a tar-stained plastic cigarette holder. "I don't think they'll ever go away."

"I love to people watch in here. You have all walks of life coming in here. Even though it's not accepted by a majority of the public you see all walks of life in here. I also love to listen to the soldiers' conversations. They really impress me. They're so clean cut. I'm surprised they smoke," he said.

Well, they do. And so do many other people, which is why the lounges exist as a place for people from all walks of life to take a break without bothering anyone in any way whatsoever.

But what we really need is the view of a licensed psychologist with a cool sounding name. Yes, you sir...

"As we're learning more about the tremendous dangers of smoking, fewer people are willing to tolerate exposure to second-hand smoke, which leads to smokers being pushed to the periphery," said licensed psychologist Clifford Lazarus. "But it is a right, people can smoke just like they can drink and have guns, it's just that the government is being a bit more controlling in terms of creating parameters in which people can engage in this marginalized behavior."

'A bit more controlling' might be a slight understatement, but it's certainly true that 'fewer people are willing to tolerate exposure to second-hand smoke' and that's why the airports have bent over backwards to stop that happening...

"We have four indoor smoking areas. Two designated smoking lounges and two restaurants that offer separate smoking areas," said Laura Cole, spokeswoman for Denver International Airport in Colorado. "All four are fully enclosed and DIA uses completely separate ventilated systems for the smoking areas. We believe that by using separate systems to ventilate the smoking lounges and the concourse we're creating a second layer of protection from second-hand smoke."

A sealed off smoking lounge and two entirely separate ventilation systems. What rational person could ask for more? So why do the airports go to all this trouble?

"Hartsfield-Jackson provides designated, specially designed smoking lounges on each concourse for the convenience and comfort of our passengers who choose to smoke," airport spokesman John Kennedy said in an e-mail.

Convenience and comfort. That's sounds like excellent customer service. And there would be practical considerations as well, I imagine?

"The Airport's layout and design does not allow for outside smoking areas in the sterile concourses and the smoking lounges eliminate the need for passengers wishing to smoke to exit and then re-enter the secured areas, or seek other alternatives to smoke inside the Airport."

This all sounds eminently reasonable. All the bases have been covered and Hartsfield-Jackson airport appears to be a picture of harmony and mutual respect. But hang on a moment, is that a meddlesome ratbag I see before me, coughing and waving her hands?

"We're optimistic that the trend is still going toward 100% smoke free, like the airlines. The question is who will be the last?" said Cynthia Hallet, executive director of Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, a California-based lobbying group. "The bottom line is this is a health issue. We know what smoking and second-hand smoke can do to us, and the safest policy is a smoke-free policy."

The bottom line, Cynthia my dear, is that these airports do have a smoke-free policy in every area except that tiny enclosed room into which you need never stick your sensitive nose. Seriously, could there ever be a more apt occasion on which to say 'mind you own fucking business' than when you're standing in a sealed off, separately ventilated smoking lounge that takes a fraction of one percent of the space of an airport?

And here comes another one...

"It's just disgusting. I can smell the smoke even though those doors are closed," traveler Cathy Urchin said as she waited in line at Seattle's Best Coffee, across from the smoking lounge.

Like a wasps at a picnic, aren't they?

"I used to smoke...

Yes, I detected the perpetual rage of the self-righteous ex-smoker in your opening remarks. Come to think of it, Cathy Urchin is an even more evocative name than Meddlesome Ratbag.

...Now I'm just glad I live in Minnesota, where you can't smoke in bars or the airport," she said. "I think they're becoming extinct. Or at least I hope they are."

The milk of humanity just pours out of these people, doesn't it?

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Plain stupidity

The UK government (you know, the new one that's against the nanny state) has apparently decided to legislate for the plain packaging of tobacco products. I wasn't going to blog about it. When things like this actually happen I try to distract myself with other things and pretend that the creeping nightmare of British idiocy is too preposterous to be real.

Fortunately, Dick Puddlecote has a very good account of the whole thing so I needn't keep you. One thing that caught my eye was a quote from some Australian lobby group which also wants to ban those evil colours and fonts that lure in the chiiiildren:

If we act quickly, Australia can overtake the British Government and become the first country in the world to mandate that cigarettes be sold in plain packaging. 

That sounded so much like a parody of the prohibition-as-sport mentality that I had to follow Dick's link to check these people actually existed. They do and they did say that. It really is just a game to these people, isn't it? A pissing contest for rent-seeking professional half-wits to decide who buys the champagne at the next international public health conference.

Not only that, they want the graphic warning to cover 95% of the packet. And, having challenged the Aussie government to be the first country in the world to pass this legislation, they say in the very next line:

There is good evidence that this would have a profound effect on young image-conscious teenagers.

Pray, where does the evidence for this world-first come from? The Martian Health Organisation? Venusians for Nonsmokers' Rights? How pathetic that it has come to this. How sad and risible that countries with the standing of Britain and Australia have been deceived and intimidated into tolerating stupid, senseless and illiberal measures for no other reason that a few well-funded and well-organised obsessives are saying "go on, give it a try."

The only silver lining to this particular cloud is that it has inspired the best blog post of the year thus far from the marvellous Ian B at Counting Cats:

The tide is eternally flowing in the opposite direction to that in which I wish it were flowing. I cannot think of a single new law, or new initiative, or economic policy, which I have approved of in more years than I care to remember. I feel as if I am living in a nation of aliens; or rather, that I am alone alien teleported into 21st century Britain and trying to understand and survive it. I increasingly feel like I’ve nothing in common with everyone around me. How can I be so out of step with public opinion? Is everyone else mad, or is it me?

I can see the world I grew up in being dismantled, bit by bit. There are times I wish they’d just get it over with. In a sense, it is the gradualism that is unbearable. There are times I wish they’d just ban everything - baccy and beer, burgers and bangers, and all the rest - once and for all. Instead, they creep forward one apparently tiny step at a time. It’s like being executed with a bacon slicer.

There's much more of this. Please do go read the whole sublime thing.

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Applied philosophy

Stanton Glantz:

"I'm 62 years old, and I tell people I didn't have a midlife crisis. I know a lot of people who reach 50 who sit around saying, 'What have I done?' I don't have that problem."

Bertrand Russell:

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts".

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The lonely road

Hands up if you're a fruitcake

For regular readers who require a little closure, I should report that long distance jogging anti-smoking über-crank Errol Povah finally made it to New York City at the end of November. To refresh your memory, Povah set off from Vancouver in May with the modest aim of "putting the entire smoking industry out of business".

Some of the highlights of his trip have been:

“It’s been a roller-coaster of emotions,” said Povah, who has experienced frustration, anger, boredom and loneliness on his eastward journey, which began on May 31.

October 13

Because he is doing it solo, he's worked out a complicated daily schedule in which he parks his van on the side of the road and runs or walks back five kilometres or so, then returns to the van and does the same in the other direction.

He then drives it ahead 10 kilometres and does the same thing all over again, for a total of 42 kilometres — essentially a marathon.

October 26

"I literally can't afford to buy new shoes," he said, after finishing a 26.2-mile walk on Tuesday from Warrensburg to Glens Falls. "I'm flat broke at the moment. I have to get some money organized."

November 17

This tale of woe had a suitably downbeat ending as Povah finally reached the East Coast after 182 days, having raised a mighty $6,000—just $534,000 short of his target :

On November 23, Anti-Tobacco Activist Errol Povah dipped his foot in the Atlantic Ocean, marking both one of his greatest accomplishments and one of his greatest disappointments.

“My Journey for a Tobacco-Free World ended with absolutely no media in New York City,” Povah said during a phone interview on his drive back to Victoria.

“I was so disappointed, but it’s been that way almost the entire journey. I’m trying to raise awareness about the devastation this horrible industry is causing worldwide, and it’s been an uphill battle,” Povah said.

In a post on his Web site www.tobaccofreeworld.ca, Povah posted shortly after he finished his trek, “the disappointment of ZERO MEDIA in New York City is still stinging, big time.”

But Errol has an explanation for this conspiracy of silence: the whole media is covertly pro-tobacco.

“When I was looking for sponsorships and endorsements before I began the journey the politicians and organizations I called were very receptive, until I told them I was setting out to shut down the tobacco industry. I am not anti-smoker, I am anti-tobacco. It’s a big difference. Once I made that distinction, no one wanted anything to do with it. People fear the tobacco industry,” Povah said.

Povah seems not to have considered the possibility that people's reaction changed because they realised that someone who thought that jogging to New York was going to "shut down the tobacco industry" was one sandwich short of a picnic.

“But the tobacco industry has clout and power over the media and politics. It doesn’t change my mission,” he said.

Povah said he finds the silence of the Tobacco industry during his run “fascinating.”

It's about as "fascinating" as a celebrity's silence when a fan sends them a letter written in green ink and blood. Why would you encourage loonies and stalkers by acknowledging them? And would does he expect the tobacco industry to do—come out and negotiate with him?

Of course, one definition of a loony is someone who keeps doing the same thing and expects a different result. To whit:

The Home-Coming Run (HCR) — a total of 123 km (1 km for each Canadian killed by tobacco, each and every day) — will take place over a period of 3 days, from Tue, Jan 11 to Thu, Jan 13, 2011…from about 7:00 a.m. til 3:00 p.m. each day. MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

CORPORATE SPONSORS ARE ONCE AGAIN BEING SOUGHT, ESPECIALLY HOTELS…TO PUT ERROL (and possibly a Support Crew of 2 or 3) UP FOR THE NIGHTS OF JANUARY 10, 11, 12 AND 13 (10th, 11th + 12th in the Lower Mainland, 13th in Victoria).

Stay tuned for more details.

ATTENTION MEDIA: Please contact Errol directly, at 778 899-4832

Take heed, tobacco industry. In ten days time you'll be out of business.

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John Banzhaf is a liar

I've just been over to John Banzhaf's ASH website to see if he's said anything particuarly insane since the last time I visited and I see he is now claiming that ASH is 'America's first antismoking and nonsmokers' rights organization'.

This happens to be something I know a bit about. So let's see...

The Anti-Tobacco League was formed in Massachusetts in 1850.

The Anti-Cigarette League was formed in Chicago in 1899.

The Nonsmokers Protective League was formed in New York in 1911.

Action on Smoking and Health was formed in 1968.


Now, I pick my words carefully when dealing with this notoriously litigious individual, but let me say loud and clear that John Banzhaf is a liar.

Sue me, fatso.



[PS. New CATCH up now at Frank's gaff]

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Detoxifying the brand

The BMJ's Tobacco Control blog provides a good example of why top-down prohibitionist campaigns struggle on the internet. No doubt they've all seen the memo telling them about the importance of engaging with the online audience, but when your movement is fundamentally elitist, engaging with the wider world has its problems.

There is the issue of not having very much to say, even though—unlike 99.9% of bloggers—that is your job. To be fair, this is also true of corporations which decide it would be a swell idea to start a blog. More serious, perhaps, is the problem that you and your colleagues are less-than-typical members of society. This can be ignored whilst chatting over the salad bowl at a public health conference, where views differ by only small degrees, but when thrust into the wider world, the chasm between you and civil society suddenly becomes visible. If you start blogging, not only will people see you in your less guarded moments, but they will also be able to talk back at you.

A recent feature on the Tobacco Control blog highlighted these problems. 'Word wars and tobacco control: choose the winner' (the first entry for six weeks, natch) invited readers to suggest words to describe tobacco controllers and their opponents. This led to problems. Firstly, a number of smokers and libertarians offered up less-than-flattering words to describe the, er, tireless champions of public health, and, secondly, a number of supporters responded with such enthusiasm that they almost seemed to be doing a parody of the stereotypical swivel-eyed anti-smoking zealot.

The comments system were swiftly deleted, but the zealotry remains online (at the time of writing). And perhaps it is a parody. How else can we explain gems like this?

Tobacco company - Suicide facilitation organization.

Growth (noun) - A measurement of suffering and death achievement as well as mortal collateral damage

Passive smoking - Collateral human and animal carbon life form lethal damage

Tobacco executive - Government Licensed murderer

Or this...

Change tobacco industry financial reports to 'disease reports'

Or how about something from an ultra-PC feminist dissertation?

Lezak Shallat: In my experience, there is a real clash of discourses between the language we use in tobacco control and the language we should be using to reach out to potential (and much needed) allies in the women’s movement. This raises a linguistic and ideological barrier that impedes greater collaboration. A case in point is the concept of tobacco “control”. For the TC movement, the word “control” encompasses a strategy to focus on a product and not its users (smokers) by setting limits that protect the rights of non-users. Within the TC movement, there is little talk of “anti-tobacco” measures or policies. This abbreviated terminology is reserved for headlines and journalists. Among feminists, however, the word “control” raises hives. It is located at the opposite end of the spectrum from autonomy over one’s body and the right to decide for oneself about work, education, reproductive life and more. This idea is central to feminism, and has been successfully exploited by the tobacco industry as a concept to sell cigarettes. The discourses clash. Control vs. protection; freedom to chose vs. informed choice; promoting vs. exploiting aspirations of “autonomy.” These words carry ideological subtexts that hinder greater dialogue with the feminists about how to address smoking as a women’s health issue.

Keen to find out more about the author of this riveting prose, I did a quick Google search which turned up this page, which happened to be hosting a particularly unfortunate, but possibly apt, banner campaign.

I also turned up this page which—if you'll excuse another cheap giggle—explained that:

Although she was named Leza K. at birth, she dropped the space and changed her byline to Lezak Shallat after discovering that, in Spanish, the word "lesa," roughly translated, means "idiotic."

A wise move since she "writes about social justice issues from Latin America" and lives in Chile. Of course, if she lived in the English-speaking world, the name Leza wouldn't be funny at all, would it?

And how about this from the real-life prohibitionist "Terence A. Gerace, Ed.M., M.A., Ph.D." (Who feels the need to put that many letters after his name on a blog comment?)

The terms Big Tobacco, tobacco industry, and major tobacco companies should be eliminated in favor of “toxic-tobacco companies” or “toxic-tobacco industry”. None of the former terms provides the true negative denotation that “toxic-tobacco companies” and “toxic-tobacco industry” do. Placing “Big” in front of Tobacco blunts tobacco’s negative associations. “Big” has a positive connotation as evidenced by McDonalds Corporation’s using “Big” in front of “Mac” and Frito-Lay placing “Big” before “Grab” to designate its large bag of snacks for individuals.

The idea that calling tobacco industries 'Big Tobacco' "blunts tobacco's negative associations" is plainly nonsense. The whole reason why the term Big Tobacco was coined by anti-smokers in the first place was to (a) perpetuate the David vs Goliath myth which portrays the anti-tobacco industry as brave pygmies against a behemoth, and (b) to rally those who instinctively dislike big business.

Getting rid of the 'Big' in Big Tobacco is fine with me. I've never understood why cigarettes from large companies should be worse than any others. But let's not pretend this is anything other than rebranding for the sake of it, and rebranding is always a sign of failure. Whether it's the post office changing its name to Consignia or socialists calling themselves liberals, the purpose of rebranding is to move away from a toxic brand.

The desire to rebrand is particularly urgent amongst tobacco controllers, since they are gripped by the delusion that the tobacco industry invented the very terms they are forced to use. This is sheer paranoia. I have heard it said that the industry invented the word 'anti-smoking' as a pejorative term. Apart from the fact that it is an entirely neutral word for people who are against smoking, the enemies of tobacco called themselves 'anti-smoking leagues' a hundred years ago. Lennox Johnson called himself an anti-smoker in the 1940s (see Chapter 4 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist). If anti-smoking has a pejorative context today, it is because the public have seen what anti-smokers say and do, and they don't like it.

The anti-smoking movement (sorry—'tobacco control movement') would prefer it if everyone called smokeless tobacco 'spit tobacco' because it sounds more disgusting. They would no doubt prefer the tobacco industry to be known as 'the swine' and cigarettes to be known as 'Satan's death truncheons'. Alas for them, 'tobacco industry' is a more informative, balanced and descriptive term for an industry that makes tobacco, 'cigarettes' are small cigars that gained popularity in Revolutionary France and most smokeless tobacco products don't involve spitting. And since language is there to describe rather than propagandise, that'll just have to do.

UPDATE: As Leg-Iron reported last week, Junican submitted a spoof suggestion which succeeded in being slightly less deranged than the genuine offerings and now seems set to win him the "prize" of a one year online subscription to Tobacco Control (God knows what the second prize is).

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The last anti-smoking volunteer walks on

Two weeks ago Smokles told us the tragi-comic story of Errol Povah (above). Povah is a very rare breed— a genuine unpaid anti-smoking activist. The 57-year old Canadian set off on a coast-to-coast run/jog/walk intending to raise $47,000 for his nutty pressure group and "put the entire smoking industry out of business."

Povah's ambitious plan involves arriving at Philip Morris's New York headquarters later this month where he no doubt intends to carry out some sort of protest (yes, he's one of those who dresses up as the grim reaper). As Carl Phillips pointed out, the choice of route holds certain problems since Philip Morris moved to Richmond (400 miles away) several years ago. And his problems don't end there...

Originally, he said, he wanted to raise $540,000 - a dime for each of the world's 5.4 million people who die from tobacco annually. But money has been tight.

This is so true. As of today, Povah has raised a little over ten percent of his reduced target, and when we last heard from him, the dearth of donations was becoming a burden.

“It’s a huge struggle,” Povah said from Ottawa Tuesday, adding the lack of support crew or sponsors is a major disappointment.

Forced to travel alone, Povah has had to conduct his marathan journey in a highly unsatisfactory, half-arsed manner:

Because he has to bring his van along, and has no one helping him, he has to walk forward a certain distance, then go back for his van. At the end of the day, having advanced 26.2 miles but having walked twice that, he drives the van another 26.2 miles forward to account for the miles he had to walk in the wrong direction.

Alas, things have only got worse in the last three weeks...

"I literally can't afford to buy new shoes," he said, after finishing a 26.2-mile walk on Tuesday from Warrensburg to Glens Falls. "I'm flat broke at the moment. I have to get some money organized."

This pitiful tale provides a stark reminder—especially to him—that the anti-smoking "movement" has not been funded by voluntary donations for a very long time. Aside from one or two sugar daddies (Povah hopes to rope in Mike Bloomberg when he gets to NY), it is funded by the state and Big Pharma while the public looks on in apathy.

Far from bringing down the tobacco industry, Povah's quixotic expedition is an embarrassment for anti-tobacco because it highlights the lack of support it has from civil society. If the public was supportive, they'd get their hands in their pockets and not let this man have to go back and forth to his van every day. You'd think the billion dollar anti-tobacco industry would throw him a few thousand dollars just to spare their blushes.

Instead this chump jogs his way towards an early grave to raise the kind of money that professional anti-smokers wouldn't bother to pick up if it fell in the street, while quack researchers pick up millions of dollars to sit around conjuring up voodoo science in California.

You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.

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Car crash TV

Excellent, it's on Youtube already. From last night's That Mitchell and Webb Look, an exquisite skewering of Diana conspiracy cranks:

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