James, smokers are seen as a defenseless minority.

The tax I spoke of above on rolling tobacco, the largest percentage tax increase in the history of the modern world may VERY soon be joined by ANOTHER, similar, tax, which will probably be explained by Biden in exactly the way Obama explained his rolling tobacco tax: As a tax not on any people that anyone cares about basically. Here's what's being shown over that the Tax Foundation site at the moment:

"The rate on chewing tobacco increases more than 2,000 percent, and the rates on pipe tobacco and snuff over 1,600 percent each. Vapor products, which have not been taxed at the federal level thus far, would be taxed at a rate of $100.66 per 1,810 mg of nicotine. That equals a federal tax on a regular pod-based product of roughly $2.25 per pod—more than the new federal $2.01 rate on a pack of cigarettes)."
https://taxfoundation.org/house-tobacco-proposal-...

Biden's tax will also be the opening salvo on vaping. As anyone who's read "Brains" knows, there exists a VERY sizeable percentage of Antismokers who -- now that they've used vapers' support in getting the final smoking bans in bars in places like New Orleans -- are going to throw the vapers under the bus with the smokers.

"If the Tax Foundation and my own figures are correct, the federal government wants to add a tax of OVER $1,000 per OUNCE of pure nicotine liquid for vapers!"

Amazing, eh? The black-market criminals will practically rule the world with the income they'll suddenly be getting! They'll do better with Biden at the helm than if they'd had the Mafia Godfather himself as US President!

- MJM, who just became aware of these figures this afternoon...

Unfortunately that sort of selective shaping of news and information and opinion is way too easy on today's Internet. As a Free Choice activist (in antismoking lingo that's a "pro-smoking" activist) I've seen it used for years on commenting sections of news sites. They call it "Shadow Banning" -- where you'll put your heart and soul and time into writing a post, post it up, revisit it over the next few weeks and find no one "Liked" it, or commented on it, or even "Disliked" it.... BUT... if you sign on from another IP or computer you'll find out why: Your post has been "Shadow Banned," so that it's still perfectly visible from your own computer and you'll keep clicking back to their site and raising their ad revenue, BUT... no one else in the world can see what you've written!

I'm quite sure you're seeing the same sort of thing with BREXIT on some sites. If your comments aren't getting responses, ask a friend to sign on from their computer to see if what you've written is visible.

I don't think I can paste images here, but if anyone would like to see an example, I've got time-stamped screen captures of some of my visible/invisible postings last week to the IndyStar.com site. AND... when I wrote to the Editor about it, the site tried to cover up what it had done by simply deleting the entire threads where I had answered others' postings! LOL!

These general sorts of Orwellian "1984" manipulations of news and opinions in media are very VERY scary, and they're the sort of thing that would make me, if I were British, vote to Exit the EU. Governments simply cannot be trusted to use their powers properly, and Governments with TOO much power are the worst. When I was younger and had more faith in Good Governments, Santa Claus, and The Tooth Fairy... well, at that time I would have been TOTALLY in favor of the EU as "A Solution To Wars." Sad to say, I can no longer support such a thing: the theft of our lives and freedoms by abusive governments has simply become far too clear to ignore.

An independent UK will help keep the abusive tendencies of an all-powerful EU hegemony in check. And the importance of that is astronomical unless you want to end up like a 1950s' vassal state of the old USSR.

- MJM

" the government should be doing everything possible to encourage our citizens not to smoke"

Malcolm two things are needed for this:

1) Simply treat people like lab rats. Electro-shock them in various ways when they don't conform properly to the desired behavior pattern (taxes, bans, nasty imagery, encouragement of hate against them -- e.g. see my "Wall Of Hate" at http://bit.ly/Wall-Of-Hate -- , denying them jobs, throwing them out of housing, taking their children in custody disputes, denying them the ability to foster/adopt, ridiculing them in ads etc.) and reward them when they do conform (subsidies from the extra cash from smokers' taxes, insurance discounts, grant money.

2) Lie about them in ways that will get them ostracized: this was the primary contribution of the 1975 "World Conference On Smoking And Health" where it was determined that to eliminate smoking there'd have an emphasis on smokers hurting those around them, particularly them families, rather than just continue with the earlier "educational" approaches aimed at smokers themselves. Back up the lies with $500 million a year in Tobacco Control spending with a sizable chunk aimed at press releases and repetition of misleading media ads, and you can worm the proper sort of thinking so deeply into people's minds that they'll never even realize that the thoughts weren't their own!

See? It's easy when you know how.

Unfortunately.

- MJM

They say "The power to tax is the power to destroy." It's even MORE true that "The power to license is the power to destroy." since the licence that allows the very existence of the licensee can be yanked at any moment by an unelected board or administrator.

And Sig is quite correct about the WHO study (Boffetta, 1998). Actually the study, which was SUPPOSED to be the "be all and end all proof of the deadliness of secondhand smoke" actually had only ONE statistically significant result in its findings: Evidently the children of smokers ended up later in life getting 22% *LESS* lung cancers than matched children of nonsmokers! Really. See the details at the bottom of this table of 130 ETS studies done from 1980 to 2000: http://bit.ly/ETSTable

- MJM

And neither are you able to offer any coherent criticisms of any of the points you found in my writings, Comp. Nice seque btw, from trying to discredit me for having a "vested interest" to trying to discredit me because I *don't* have a vested interest and am simply on what you call "a Mission from God."

I'm sure readers will be quite able to make up their own minds... that's one of the nice things about a relatively free press.

- MJM

Comp, you should do your research a bit more carefully. You'll find I was quite active in this area on the internet since the mid 1980s. Unfortunately the local BBS's and AOL boards are a bit too ephemeral to check, but if you can dig up Prodigy records or even just check out the old Usenet you'll see how silly your Ad Hominem is.

btw... thanks for mentioning Brains. If you enjoyed it, there's a much larger (175,000 words vs just 100,000) one out there you might enjoy: See my bitly link at http://bit.ly/TobakkoNacht

- MJM

"If smokers had chosen to show discretion and consideration with their public smoking and less in-you-face attitude," Actually, smokers did, in general, show discretion and consideration. I don't think I ever saw a smoker light a cigarette in a non-smoking restaurant, only twice in my life did I see one do so on mass transit. The "discretion/consideration" argument is often used by Antismokers although the ONLY "discretion and consideration" they would have considered adequate would be if all smokers had only smoked while hiding behind a dumpster in a back alleyway.

As for public recognition of annoyance, I think you should do some reading on societal inculcation of "disgust feelings." Unfortunately, people are very easily indoctrinated to believe and feel all sorts of things if they are bombarded often enough and strongly enough with information telling them (1) that is how they're *supposed* to feel, and (2) that Everyone Else is feeling that way -- so they should too! Throw in the fears that have been consciously injected into the populace to promote bans and the end result is almost inevitable.

- MJM

Heinlein, I would agree. But smoking was NEVER regarded as being enough of a "nuisance" to do more than often ban it inside stores themselves and offer smoking/nonsmoking sections in dining areas so you wouldn't be squished between two active smokers at adjoining seats.

IF votes had been taken on the basis of the "annoyance" factor, they would never have been passed: the health scare was needed to make them acceptable to people -- it didn't matter that it wasn't true, all that mattered was that there was enough money to drum it into people's brains through the media.

- MJM

"No pun intended, but this action is just a smokescreen to move the transients and bums out of sight. Second-hand smoke is an excuse."

Very true. This is how a number of these outdoor bans first got support in some of the "trendier" downtown areas as well as in some of the early bans in larger underground mass-transit type stations where the homeless used to camp in the winter. The courts stopped the cops from throwing them out for being homeless, but they were fine with having them thrown out for smoking.

:/
MJM

"there’s the dubious claim, offered by the council, that exposure to diffuse, out-of-doors, second-hand smoke or vapor causes adverse health effects. There is little or no evidence to support that claim,"

Correction: there is *absolutely* no (real) evidence to support that claim.

I have to throw the word "real" in there, because there is all sorts of nonsense/propaganda/faked "evidence" out there that falls apart completely once you examine it instead of just reading the press-released articles about it.

Quick example: Measurements of deadly elements many times higher than EPA "safe levels" in "cigarette smoke microplumes outdoors." What that means is they stuck a little nozzle from a sniffer machine right in front of a concentrated stream of smoke as it drifted off a cigarette. The measurement only lasted for a second or so, and that's why they call it a "microplume." Aside from just generalized cheating, they're outright committing what amounts to public fraud when they pull in the EPA measurements for comparisons to that. Why? Because the EPA values are AVERAGE values over a 24 hour period of constant inhalation. The EPA documentation itself WARNS against the improper use of their standards by trying to apply several hours (heh, or microseconds!) of readings to full 24 hour periods, and states that the only acceptable conversion is to average the time-concentrations over the full day.

The justifications and the pseudo-science experiments they use are so crazy, that when I wrote a satirical piece featured in my "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame" I found that I could pretty much describe their research just as it was done and it STILL sounded satirical!

Take a minute or two to read this: I think you'll enjoy it! It's a pre-finalized version of what I used in TobakkoNacht, but it's not much different: http://bit.ly/OutdoorSmokeStudy

They play the same sort of games in almost all of their secondhand and thirdhand and 13th-hand smoke studies, but that particular piece of work just caught my eye when I read the original research.

A final thought: I could measure the formaldehyde and other nasties in exhaled human breath, make some of the same sort of assumptions about concentrations and exposures used in these studies, and conclude that there's an urgent need to bar humans from all public places.

Hmm... in some places that *might* actually be an improvement...

:>
MJM