Smokers...YOU are NOT the Problem!

Gee, you know, it's a funny thing how we smokers are being blamed for nearly all the illnesses in the world! Don't you ever get to thinking there is something fishy about all these claims that smoking and second-hand smoke is causing so much havoc?

Here is an article which puts everything you think you know in a much different perspective.



A 911 Call On Facing Global Pollution
by Mathew K. Kiel

The massive and exponentially increasing amount of smog we are breathing, globally, but especially in the U.S., has grown to be an environmental "911 call" of enormous urgency for all of us. In the U.S., we have a president, administration and both bodies of the Congress all determined to utterly pollute our air, water and land without restraint. The EPA has simply been deconstructed, defunded, disempowered and deregulated to the point of nearly complete irrelevance and dysfunction since January of 2001.



Most Americans now live downwind or downwater, no matter in how seemingly rural, remote and pristine an environment, from a major source of toxic levels of air and/or water pollution that is directly and adversely affecting their physical health. These pollution levels were nowhere near so life threatening just a bit more than five short years ago, back when the EPA was still alive, well, and enforcing the clean air and clean water standards. But over five years of deliberately unleashing almost unrestrained environmental pollution from all sources have rendered almost every last square mile of the continental U.S. a hazardous wasteland filled with toxic particulates, vapors and soups.



It is impossible to overstate the negative impact of this new Free License to Pollute from the Bush administration on everyone's health. These last five years have seen the nationwide statistics for lung cancers, respiratory diseases and cancers of all kinds, in everyone from infants to the elderly and in every part of the country, rural and urban alike, soar upward at rates never seen before. But we aren't hearing about this from the media, the press or the government, and many of the newest environmental health impact studies are vanishing from U.S. government web sites almost as fast as they are published by the various federal health agencies still collecting the data.



Pollutants of all kinds are again being produced and released with pitifully few attempts either made or allowed to ameliorate the wholesale contamination spewing into the environment. After all, most of that toxic, radioactive and otherwise deadly pollution is coming from power plants, industries, refineries, mines, automobiles and plastics owned or produced by the same wealthy individuals and/or corporations who have paid a lot of money to put Bush into the White House and have him get rid of the EPA, enforcement, regulations and all.



The Pathocratic Elite's wealthy owners and corporations have always resented any demands that they clean up their toxic wastes. Since the dawning days of the American public's environmental awarness and the government's moves toward environmental sanity, from the mid 60s and early 70s onward, they have slavered with just as much ferocity, to first block and avoid then later to get rid of all environmental protections and restraints, as they have to do away with Social Security, and for exactly the same reasons: It interferes with the unbridled pursuit of their greed and of their lusts for power, privilege and prestige.



As one example of the new trend, the flood waters from New Orleans were pumped straight into Lake Ponchartrain without any filtration, and without any testing being done to see just how bad it was, and just exactly what all was in a toxic sludge so deadly that stray dogs were seen to be killed by less than 30 minutes exposure to it. That is a huge lake, in an environmentally sensitive and ecologically unique wetland, and it is also the primary aquifer for all of lower Louisiana and the surrounding bayou habitats of adjoining states. There were multiple millions of gallons of lethally toxic goo pumped into it for weeks, and those toxic substances and pollutants will eventually leach out into the Gulf of Mexico as well. There is literally no limit to how far the poison can and will be spread from Lake Ponchartrain over time. This is an environmental crime, a pure crime against the Earth and all living things, including all human beings, a crime that will cause sickness and death in countless ways for decades, if not centuries to come. Not one serious voice of protest was heard about it when it was being done.



The Bush EPA did the same thing to New Yorkers, declaring the post September 11, 2001 air quality to be "good" and "safe." To this day the people of the New York City area have not been officially informed of the simple facts by their government, neither federal nor state. The fallout from the demolitions of the two WTC towers and WTC Building 7 contained megatons of silicates, metals, heavy metals, such as mercury - from thermostats, light switches, dental fillings and vapour lamps, plastics, tons of asbestos, the toxic ashes of synthetic fibres from rayon, dacron, nylon and polyester onward, bacterial and organic compounds from incinerated or pulverized human bodies, airborne PVC fumes and particulates, and radioactive particulates and gases from thousands of incinerated and pulverized smoke detectors and other commonplace alarm devices containing radioactive sensor elements. Of course, there were also fuel vapors, soot and actual uncombusted fuel from the jets that crashed into the towers. As horrific as this list is, it is the tip of the iceberg of toxins present in the air of New York City and adjacent areas of New Jersey for at least ten days to two weeks after 9/11/2001.



But the bodies of New Yorkers, and especially their lungs, are telling them the horrid Truth of it these days. The death rates for those New Yorkers who were exposed to the fallout from 9/11 have also soared. If there were any serious federal or state environmental studies of their health problems being allowed, rather than prevented, it would be abundantly clear that many thousands more Americans were sentenced to slow, lingering and brutal deaths by the Bush EPA's lies as to the air quality on and after 9/11/2001. Many more emergency responders, and even their K9 rescue dogs, have now died from respiratory diseases caused by the airborne contaminants. More people from every walk of life, in New York City and also in those areas of New Jersey that were directly downwind of the initial ash and vapor clouds from the WTC, and the smoke of the burning that continued for the next two weeks, have since died from the toxic fallout, fumes and smoke released on and after 9/11 than from the attacks themselves.



An environmental crisis of the 9/11 aftermath's proportions now afflicts even the most remote boondocks of America. From the Smoky Mountain highlands, to the Blue Ridge valleys of North Carolina, to the Bayous of Louisiana, the foothills of Middle Tennessee, the Green Mountains of Vermont and the high plateaus of the Intermountain West, toxic air and water pollution have arrived like an incoming tide with no lines of retreat and are devastating the environment nationwide. There is no safe place left for anyone, "from the mountains, to the valleys, to the oceans white with foam", America is healthy no more.



We will look to the scenic, pastoral, world renowned summer vacation paradise of lower Michigan's 6 southwestern Lakeshore counties and their 6 adjacent inland counties for but one example. This strip, roughly 60 miles wide and 80 miles long was, and still should and could be, nearly pristine land, with much of it having now lain fallow to all uses for at least 25 years, ever since the collapse of Michigan's industrial and automotive generated economy, never to return again, in the mid 1970s to early 1980s.



So dire has the chronic air pollution exposure become for the residents of the area that they now have one of the highest incidences of respiratory diseases of all kinds, anywhere, and most pertinently of asthma, chronic obstructive airways disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema and lung cancers of all kinds. That is a short list of those respiratroy ailments and diseases nearly always referred to in medical literature published since 1980 as "smoking related" diseases. However, that region of Michigan has had a historically lower than average number of smokers due to the strong cultural influences and strict religious beliefs of the Dutch Christian Reformed Church members who became a majority of the earliest European settlers in the area. A large percentage of the surnames in area phone books are Dutch to this day, and Holland, Michigan, with its annual tulip festival, real Dutch windmill and skilled Klompen dancers, is but one of the shoreline communites suffocating in a thick layer of smog not of its own making.



The area's residents are also abnormally high, among the highest in the world again, for other cancers of all kinds, all of which show a strong statistical correlation with exposure to airborne pollutants from exhaust fumes and/or exposure to the toxins from plastics production or combustion and emissions from oil refineries. All of those polllutants and more are produced, in abundance, in and around the heavily urbanized belt of cities that extend from Portage and Gary, Indiana, to Chicago and Waukegan, Illinois, and on northward to above Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



The area of Michigan in question, on the other hand, makes its claims to fame as the "Fruit Basket of America," and as the "Blueberry Capital of the World." Not exactly two of the most air pollution producing of all "industries." So just why are these counties of rural southwestern Michigan among the highest in the nation and the world in the statistical incidences of what are always labeled as smoking-related lung diseases and cancers of all kinds? The area is dotted with some of the most picturesque, isolated, rural towns and villages in the country.

A careful study of the National Weather Service air quality reports reveals that the prevailing winds are from the W, WSW, to SSW directions for the entire center of the U.S. The winds blow from the prevailing directions for over 300 days each year, on average, in the southwestern quadrant of lower Michigan. In the past 5 years only when the winds have shifted to any other direction does the National Weather Service record a day for the area, as recorded in reports for one inland city, Grand Rapids, now and then, when the air quality is GOOD. The rest of the time, MODERATE or worse is the best it gets.



An area producing little to no pollution in its own right, in a state with some of the harshest anti-smoking taxes and bans in the nation, all widely and enthusiastically embraced by a vast majority of the citizens, is suffocating to death from the smog exported to it by a band of heavily polluting cities far away. Across the lower half of Lake Michigan no less, which has a significant "scrubbing" effect on the air that traverses its open waters, Chicago and surrounding cities that are up to two hundred miles away are exporting their pollution and killing the residents of small farming villages in rural Michigan. No pastoral locale, no matter how remote or insulated it may seem, is any longer far enough away from the sources or effects of pollution to be considered safe or protected now that the regulation and enforcement of environmental protections for air and water quality standards are gone.



Many of this nation's aging and frighteningly dilapidated nuclear power plants are leaking radioactivity into our ground water. In the case of southwestern lower Michigan, this too is a factor the residents live with. There are a number of nuclear power plants distributed around Michigan, but by far the most worrisome one, and the oldest, is the Pallisades Nuclear Power Plant, built in 1971 by Consumers Power Company. It emits its radioactive seepage directly into the waters of Lake Michigan, having been set up on the very shore of the Lake, just north of Benton Harbor, at Hagar Shores. It was in fact designed to draw the water used to cool its thermonuclear pile directly from the Lake, and so it does.



If ever there was a deliberate act of insanity, this is it: To set up a nuclear power plant on the actual shore of one of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes, of which Lake Michgan is the second largest, are the sole and total aquifer for the entire north central North American continent. All of the land, both Canadian and U.S., that lies between the Rocky Mountains on the west and the Smoky, Appalachian, BlueRidge, Cumberland, Green Ridge, et al chain on the east, and is north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan has the Great Lakes as its primary aquifer.



The Great Lakes contain more than one fifth of the sum total of our global fresh water supply. To deliberately build and operate into its total, company admitted obsolesence, a nuclear power plant directly on the sandy, southeastern shore of Lake Michgan has got to take some kind an of all time prize for idiocy. Or else for pure maliciousness.



A new Poster at the Signs of the Times Forum raised some crucial points, and they appear in the numbered segments below. I have shortened the writer's comments and somewhat rephrased them, for the sake of brevity and emphasis. But Honor says that even someone who wished to be anonymous should not be robbed, and this Poster is entirely right: More than most things, these demonstrate the heart of the matter. I am grateful for the contribution, and it could not have been more welcome or timely.



1. The EPA has now taken to violating the Clean Air Act in its own right. Part of the federal response to the damage hurricane Katrina did to oil refineries along the Gulf Coast was to temporarily remove the pollution control standards for those refineries hit by the storm.



(The measure received so little media or press coverage, that it is doubtful, even today, whether most Americans have any idea this was done.)



2. A few days later, after the initial removal of EPA controls from Gulf Coast refineries received no widespread complaints or notice, they removed ALL pollution controls from ALL fuel refineries, nationwide.



(This, of course, includes the ones surrounding Chicago. The 12 county area of Michigan mentioned above has not had less than a yellow alert on smog for any day of W, WSW to SSW winds since last fall. In all past years, there had been a break from the worst of the pollution for the winter months.)



3. The waivers initially issued by the EPA were supposed to expire on September 15, 2005, but since it obviously saved the oil-industry a ton of money in refining costs, they have decided to go against the Clean Air Act and make the waivers permanent. The link for the information contained in items 1, 2, and 3 is: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pre & entID=2498



4. In Sept. 2004 the National Institute of Environmental Health Science issued this statement: "Children who live in polluted communities are five times more likely to have clinically low lung function--less than 80 percent of the lung function expected for their age. New data from the Children's Health Study suggests that pollutants from vehicle emissions and fossil fuels hinder lung development and limit breathing capacity for a lifetime." http://www.niehs.nih.gov/o c/news/airpoll.htm



5. In January 2005 they issued this statement. "Among U.S. residents, 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will develop cancer at some point in their lifetimes. Research shows that environmental factors trigger diseases like cancer, especially when someone has a family history,[...]" http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/canceragents.htm



6. One division of our government (NIEHS) is willing to acknowledge and advise the American people of the amount of lung function and capacity we are losing due to airborne pollutants, while another division of our government, a so-called protection agency, intentionally makes the problem worse.



Now, let us think the above through and ask the obvious: How can this all be done without the public seeming to either notice or care?



Easily. With extensive enough and deep enough brainwashing and emotional conditioning, Mind Control in every real and pratical regard, the whole problem simply vanishes from the public's awareness, over and over, year after year, for sicker, and sicker, and sicker still, until all of us die from pollution.



There is a long standing, tried and true, public blindness and hysteria-inducing, nearly perfect programme of Mind Control in place, designed and implemented years ago to hide and deny the entire environmental holocaust being wrought and planned by the global PTB. It is comprised first and foremost of a False Belief System, grounded in a set of false "knowns" and "facts" that we have swallowed hook, line and sinker almost universally.



I am not ashamed to admit right here that I myself had absolutely believed that the "facts known" about the dangers of both smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke were all true, all real, and all solidly proved beyond a reasonable doubt, until about a year ago.



Please, for those of you who feel a powerful, knee-jerk reflex against this, maybe even an overwhelming desire to throw the computer out the window because of the turn this article has just taken, and for those who might now really crave to paste me square in the teeth for having pulled this "dirty" trick, please know that I have profound respect and sincere empathy for what you are feeling. That is exactly how I first reacted to the whole idea. Please stay with me now. Please have a cup of coffee, or a glass of milk, or heck, pour a sip of wine and let the steam back off for a bit. I know that's what I had to do. (The coffee was my choice.)



I have now been humbled deeply on this subject by months of research spent seeking the facts about it. I would never have questioned the subject at all except for some of the commentaries and other writings encountered through this web site. I initially set about to find out for myself, rather than to take their word for it, whether or not the Signs of the Times commentators were mistaken in their strong doubts about the actual dangers of smoking itself. While their arguments were certainly logical, I just could NOT accept the premise without a lot of solid proof found by my own efforts.



I had almost lifelong habits of questioning every voice of authority, every source of facts, and in taking no one's word for anything, no matter how persuasive it seemed, when I came up against this challenge. How odd it is then that not once, before encountering the Signs web site's commentaries and other writings on the issue, not once had I ever even thought to check out the facts about smoking and second-hand smoking for myself. That says just how totally and how deeply the conditioning is implanted in us and just how hardcore and set in is the brainwashing we have all received on this subject. I am appalled that this Programme had indeed taken me in, put me under its spell and kept me obliviously accepting its False Beliefs for almost 40 years.



Since the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking was released in 1964, my utter acceptance of its validity, and that of every subsequent report, was instant and unthinking. As I said, I have been HUMBLED by the results of my research, not the least of all at the new found awareness of my own susceptibility to this Programme for all those years.



The Programme is an incredibly artful construct, with a nearly absolute mastery of distraction, deflection, disinformation and scapegoating in place, and it is and has always been, from its beginning, brilliantly orchestrated and disseminated by and through the mainstream, corporate media and press. It has insinuated itself into the mental fabric of nearly all of humanity. It was gradually built up, ever so carefully, incrementally and persuasively at every step, and it has long since been firmly, deeply embedded in our minds and in our emotional reflexes. So far, it has worked almost perfectly, for going on 40 years, as the global PTB's "cure" for the exponentially rising and spreading toxic effects of global environmental degradation and pollution of every kind, air pollution and radioactive contamination most and worst of all.



The global PTB, starting in the United States before spreading the anti- smoking Progammming around the world, always at an ever accelerating pace and an ever escalating emotional tenor, have been succeeding in completely hiding from the public's awareness, from all of us, the Real causes, which are toxic pollution of the environment, in all areas, and all ways, and all kinds, for the ever increasing cancers, respiratory, neurological and other life and health destroying ills that now afflict us. The Global Lords of Illusion have achieved this masterpiece of mass delusion and deception through the use of a most literal smoke screen.



Only the results of almost a year's worth of deep digging online and through the public library's reference services has finally brought the whole, ugly Pathocratic Reality into sharp focus. What I have lost is massive denial and the blindness it brought. What I have gained is a much broader portion of the Truth. It was time well spent. If you have the courage to risk the pain of parting with some very deeply implanted illusions, read on. If not, stop here.







PART 2:



The Great Anti-Smoking Smoke Screen





We are now going to expose a conspiracy that is, in its own way, every bit as strange and chilling as that exposed in the Pentagon Strike video. Nothing could be any more appropriate than to now quote the quietly spoken but Earth-shaking phrase heard at the mid point of that Work:



"Welcome to the Objective Reality. Please stay focused."



Despite the overwhleming and all pervasive prevalence of the claims, almost universally believed to be "well established facts," telling us second-hand exposure to tobacco smoke is the same, "life-threatening" danger as smoking itself, there is a serious body of evidence to, at the least, soundly dispute, if not outright disprove, such assertions. In fact, though seldom questioned, the truth is that the proof of the dangers of smoking itself, far from being conclusive, is not at all certain, and even less certain are the proofs of the dangers of second-hand smoking.



In putting aside all of the previous, pat conclusions, then taking a close and logical look at the issue, one must ask some very basic questions. How were these conclusions drawn and from what sources? Where, when and by whom were the scientific, double blind, objective, large scale, independently verified and long term studies done to conclusively prove such claims? What and where are the hard data and the solid, factual evidence to support them, aside from that found in government conducted, funded or connected studies? How were the studies designed and who were the test subjects?



Going in search of answers to those questions has been a very revealing experience. I invite others do so for their own enlightenment. The inquirer will find that there were government "fingers" in the conducting, the mixing and the results of the few and closely related original studies and reports villifying smoking itself. In fact, most subsequent studies have drawn from the originals so heavily as to be virtual reiterations thereof, thinly disguised and presented as "new" when in fact the only things new about them were the dates of their compilations and completions and the names of some of the patients and doctors paricipating in them, but not even all the names changed. Since this body of evidence has been used to both terrify the populace about smoking and to villify and demonise smokers, it seems that a great deal of sweeping assertions have been made upon the basis of a very thin icing of "proofs."



Subsequent, truly independent studies have not been able to consistently reproduce the same results and to support the same conclusions. Others, the numerical majority of all such studies to be sure, have indeed supported the original conslusions, but have done so by largely being precise, deliberate repetitions designed to duplicate the original tests, results and all, and run by the same "laboratories" and other government controlled sources, among them the AMA, CDC, NIH, VA and many federally funded public medical facilities, hospitals, and public universities.



How any question is asked will inevitably have a great bearing upon what answer is received in response to it. In no area is that fact more significant than in the testing and surveys done to prove the case against tobacco, and cigarette smoking in particular. It is not inaccurate to say that the body of works upon which the entire anti-smoking mythos has been based and subsequently reinforced appears to be a pool of very limited and derivative types and sources of research, and that the original studies were weighted and conducted so as to reach the predetermined conclusion of smoking's universally harmful effects.



After examining the sources of the original conclusions regarding the ills of smoking and likewise the dangers of second-hand smoking, the very next set of searches proved most informative. Web searches on the topics of "U.S. Air Pollution Reports", "UN Air Pollution Reports", "Environmental Pollution Reports 1970 to 2000" and "Earth's Most Polluted Areas" yielded some fascinating and dreadful results. Note especially, in the official reports that pop out, the years when the first major reports and data about global atmospheric pollution were released by the WHO, and when the first studies for U.S. atmospheric pollution data came out from the brand new EPA.



The "coincidences" are striking between the years when the anti-smoking hype began or got ratcheted up another notch each time, and when the sounding of alarms came from environmental researchers about the severe threats to human health posed by the degradation of the global environment and the toxic levels of air pollution that had been reached in most urban areas worldwide.



The original U.S. Surgeon General's report condemning cigarette smoking itself, the one that got this whole Programme started, came out in 1964. One must not miss the precise correlation between that first report and the original furor that had just then arisen over Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 book, SILENT SPRING. She had sounded the first and loud wake up call about DDT and other pesticides poisoning and launched environmental awareness onto the world's stage singlehandedly, especially in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Suddenly, after the Surgeon General's report, the media and press dropped all coverage of the increasing public concerns related to the environmental revelations brought to light by SILENT SPRING, and the uproar over the dangers of smoking had begun.



This has been a precise, "repeat as needed to quell environmental concerns" pattern ever since. With a mere 3 to 6 months of objective observation, being Mindful that there IS a pattern, those who are reading this and doubting it cannot fail to see it for themselves if they will but look for it.



The punitive taxation, the anti-smoking legislation and the ongoing, utterly one-sided media hype and frenzy over the subject, in the U.S., didn't get ratcheted up to the long since customary roar until 1972 however, more than 8 years after that pivotal Surgeon General's report. Not until 1977 were cigarette commercials banned entirely from U.S. broadcast airwaves, and as late as 1988, smoking was still allowed in the very rooms of hospital patients nationwide so long as they were neither using oxygen nor in an specialized intensive care unit. How interesting that the launches, then the subsequent, incremental increases of the anti-smoking vendettas, have so precisely matched the releases of the first several waves of dismal reports and their soundings of serious alarms about the prevalence and dire health consequences of rapidly spreading and growing levels of toxic, global pollution.



Extensive digging revealed that the warnings about the perils of second-hand tobacco smoke had the same types of studies used as the foundational smoking studies, and the very same sources entirely produced several of the major U.S. studies on second-hand smoking. They again were done by and for the U.S. federal government, using the same government owned or controlled labs and the same list of federal health agencies. That alone makes their results and conclusions rather suspect. Another series of them were done by labs underwritten by the health insurance industry, again not exactly a neutral agency without major ties to the government.



In one key example of how the anti-smoking data has been skewed, the AMA, CDC, NIH, VA and all other public health agency studies have asked ONLY about patients' and test subjects' smoking and/or exposure to others' tobacco smoke. There are no questions asked as to whether a patient has been also exposed to other air born particulates, or to such things as gasoline or kerosene fumes, vehicle exhausts, solvents, paints, pesticides, household and industrial cleaning chemicals, aerosol sprays, dusts, moulds, pollens and other irritants and allergens, etc., but only whether and how much there has been of exposure to tobacco smoke.



It is very easy to assign the blame for the continuously rising incidences of respiratory diseases of all kinds, globally, upon one, and only one cause, smoking, when no other potential culprit, no other and even more prevalent exposure to possible toxins is included in the tests. Using the same type of testing, one could in fact "prove conclusively" that lung cancer is caused by drinking well water, and in heavily polluted areas it very well may be. But that question has not been asked of those patients suffering from respiratory diseases and being profiled by any part of the mainstream medical community and government testing establishments.



In VA hospital surveys done among veterans suffering from respiratory ailment, over the past 40 years, veterans who logically had to have also been exposed to many other dangerous, air born contaminants, from Agent Orange to Depleted Uranium, gunpowder residue, asbestos, vehicle and aircraft exhaust fumes, to ship engine exhausts, fuel and solvent fumes and many other air pollutants, in addition to any tobacco smoke exposure they may have had, ONLY their exposure to tobacco smoke was asked about and tallied.



The VA studies essentially attributed all cases of pulmonary and respiratory diseases as being the effects of smoking and/or second-hand smoking each and every time that an individual had indicated either a history of smoking or of exposure to the tobacco smoke of others, without any regard for their exposure to other possible causes. If exposure to tobacco smoke was confirmed in a respiratory patient's medical history questionaire, no additional questions were asked, and tobacco smoke was listed as the causative agent in the respiratory disease process.



No studies have yet been done by the VA to effectively determine if other contaminants might possibly have been more causative of the veterans' respiratory ills than their use of or exposure to tobacco smoke. Alternative causes were sought only in those rare instances when a patient indicated no sustained or significant contact with tobacco smoke, ever, not even for a very short period in the course of his or her entire lifetime. Which is to say virtually never. This same rule, of asking only about a patient's exposure to tobacco smoke, has been, and is, used in gathering the statistics compiled about the "causative" relationships between tobacco smoke and all of the respiratory diseases now routinely labeled as "smoking related."



The simple truth is that public agency, medical association and other government affiliated and/or funded and controlled studies have never included other pollutants on an equal footing with tobacco smoke, nor, indeed, at all in the vast majority of sources from which their statistical data and thus their conclusions are drawn. The questions about exposure to other contaminants are not to be found on any of the standard "medical history" questionaires either. Just check the one your own physician uses if you doubt this. The question simply is not asked, not by mainstream medical practitioners, or by alternative ones for that matter, nor by any other sources involved with gathering the data on the dangers of smoking.



The WHO statistics, from their first, 1968 - 1970, surveys on global air pollution, found more lung cancer among non-smokers who were long term residents of polluted urban areas than among heavy smokers who were long term residents of pollution free rural areas. That information, however, has never yet been covered by the mainstream media and press, having been almost completely suppressed since shortly after its initial release in 1970. It takes a lot of digging to uncover its trail, even on the internet, but the data is there for those who go to the necessary lengths to uncover it. Start with a Google search on "World Health Organization Reports 1968" and go on from there, year by year up through 2000. The journey is quite an eye opener.



The kind of research used to demonize tobacco smoking would not have qualified as a reliable basis for drawing a definitive conclusion in the clinical psychology laboratory, in the chemistry lab or the physics lab, and it should not have been allowed to influence the entire course of human societal programming as it has done ever since. Had it not been used as the basis for draconian governmental measures, not to mention profiteering through punitive tobacco taxations galore, and had it not been touted far and wide by a media intent on promoting the government's propaganda on the subject, we might have gained much. Had there been any serious attempt to present a balanced investigation of the subject by the mainstream media and press, the status of smokers in today's world would likely not be so dreadful as it has become.



A significant number of smaller but more objective scientific studies have been done by independent researchers and laboratories around the world, most of them seeking to reproduce and verify the results of the government and/or other studies attesting to the ills of second-hand smoking. They have failed to find reliable, globally applicable, statistical correlations between exposure to others' tobacco smoke and an increased risk of respiratory ailments and/or lung cancers of all kinds in either adult nonsmokers or children. The independent results have shown that for every study which seems to prove the contention that second-hand tobacco smoke is harmful, there is another in which those harmful effects fail to appear, or else are related to environmental contaminants other than tobacco smoke. Legitimate studies do ask those other questions that the rest do not.



When the same challenges, tests and analyses are applied to data on the relationship between exposure to concentrations of air pollutants and environmental toxins and the incidence of respiratory ailments and cancers of all kinds, however, the precise one-to-one correlation is well established.



In nation after nation, in every culture and climate, in areas either downwind or downstream in the water table from large cities, nuclear power plants, coal fired power plants, ore extraction and other metal industries, and other known producers of airborne particulates and toxic pollutants, despite all other factors and variables from diet and exercise onward to age, the same relationship exists: The one factor that IS most determinant of the likelihood for development of lung cancers and respiratory ailments of all kinds is exposure to air born radioactive contaminants, airborne particulate matter, airborne toxins, vehicle exhaust fumes and ground level ozone, in other words, air pollution, smog.



The statistical correlation's between such infirmities and environmental pollution of all kinds grow more pronounced, more solidly proven with every new study. Funny how we seldom hear about those results in the mainstream, corporate press and media, isn't it? Yet the hysteria about second-hand smoking continues to grow, and the myth that smokers are a threat to the health of all gets more firmly entrenched in the public's awareness every year as the result. It is anything but coincidental that the first "proofs" of the perils of smoking, and then of exposure to second-hand smoking, hit the airwaves and received every form of global dissemination, far and wide, immediately after the releases of major early studies and reports on the devastating and growing ill effects to all of humanity from environmental pollution of every kind, especially air and water pollution.



When Christopher Reeves' wife, Dana, recently died of lung cancer, it was at once loudly and soundly attributed, by the corporate media's many eager and enthusiastic medical pundits, not to her having lived in the heavy smog zone of the Los Angeles basin for the past two decades, but to her occassional exposures to second-hand smoking as a nighclub singer when she was young, in a career that ended more than 15 years before she was diagnosed with lung cancer. It does not take much objective consideration to know that something is very wrong with that assertion.



Yet what we have all been taught to believe is the case is that any exposure to tobacco smoke, even if when we were infants, is bound to then be the inevitable cause of our developing any and every kind of horrible respiratory ailments and even fatal lung cancers several decades later. It just is not so, and the outrageous scare tactics involved in the anti- smoking Mind Control Programme become quite obvious after the first perceptions of its pattern become clear.



The process of deflection and scapegoating continues apace. An amazing example of it is currently displayed by what has happened to the information regarding the weekly increases now being measured in global atmospheric radioactivity. This lethal airborne radioactive material is being inflicted upon us all by the illegal and massive U.S. use of Depleted Uranium munitions in Iraq. It was but very recently swept under the rug by the media's focusing our attention upon and reporting to us instead about the new plethora of smoking bans going into effect around the world. Naturally the first wave of those bans began just when the facts about the globally measurable increases in atmospheric radioactive particulates from DU munitions almost began to gain some widespread public notice.



Immediately following the one and only BBC feature on the topic, exactly 48 hours later, the new wave of UK smoking bans proposals and debates, then passages, then enforcement methods and issues, distraction and deflections, scapegoating tactics one and all, started being a daily topic presented to us as of the highest importance for the good of our health, and they have continued in that vein ever since. Frankly, anyone who cannot reason this out well enough by now to figure out that thousands of metric tonnes of Depleted Uranium particulates and gases now being released into the Earth's atmosphere comprise a far greater and far deadlier risk, to the health and the very life of every living thing on this planet, than does all the tobacco smoking done and all the tobacco smoke released into the atmosphere since time began, needs at least a mental battery charge or even a replacement, because the bulb in that head is getting very dim.



This is far more than a slight misdirection. It is a global and carefully orchestrated Distraction Action. Whenever a new case of shocking, massive destruction to the health of an area's citizens by air and environmental pollution has been revealed, always caused by one Pathocratic corporate or government entity or another's callous disregard for humanity and the Earth, along comes a fresh media blitz further extolling the evils of tobacco smoke and the smokers who create it, and, of course, a fresh batch of anti-smoking laws, or tobacco litigations, or medical announcements of even more doom to all who get near to smokers and/or their smoke, and or more tabacco taxes and regulations, and on and on. The global airwaves, the mainstream press and thereby the public's consciousness are hijacked, every single time, and the revelation of yet more environmental devastation having been visited upon the lowly masses by the global Pathocracy gets lost again, and still.



It is made far more difficult, in regard to the allegations of the evils of smoking and second hand tobacco smoke, to speak Truth to the Lies, than in any other venue of public discourse. Many, if not in fact most, members of the movements and organizations standing most firmly in what they believe is complete opposition to the global PTB, among them anarchists, environmentalists, NGOs, many spiritual fellowships and communities, vegans, churches, support groups and so on, have swallowed the anti-smoking propaganda hook, line and sinker too. They unthinkingly, passively and with great gusto do the PTB's work of "divide and conquer" for it by demonizing and ostracizing smokers even more resolutely than do the governments whom they claim to oppose. It is hoped that at least some will have sufficiently strong resistance to the anti-smoking propaganda and programmes running in their heads to go to the nearest computer terminals and do the minimal searches suggested in this article so as to see for themselves what is really going on.



Before embracing any bias, one must always locate and consider the validity of its premises and especially examine its sources, then ask that necessary and fundamental question "Who benefits from it?"



In the global anti-smoking conditioning and propaganda, this is as necessary as in all of the other negative assumptions embedded in the "values" handed to us by mainstream society. No other product and practice has ever before been so demonized as smoking while still being treated as a fully legal, personal preference that citizens everywhere may freely choose to engage in without the threat of going to jail for doing so. Other substances that have thus been demonized have also been outlawed, such as narcotics, amphetamines, marijuana, LSD, ecstacy and many other euphorics and hallucinogens, but not so with tobacco. Surely it is long past the time to carefully and deeply question both why that is and just who benefits most from it?



Certainly, to date, there have been NO demonstrable benefits whatsoever to the public's health from all the anti-smoking measures combined. All of the diseases so long claimed to be "smoking related" have only increased with and in each and every year since the anti-smoking campaigns first began. In fact, the stricter and more punitive the anti-smoking programmes have become, the more universally present those dieaeses and cancer become, and the faster and worse the public's health has gone downhill. That fact alone is sufficient to tell us, loudly, that something is very WRONG with the whole anti-smoking agenda and all of the long touted "facts" supporting it.



The inescapable conclusion seems to be that the great anti-smoking agenda has always been a major "red herring." It was clearly designed to serve the purpose of distracting the public. It has very successfully kept the vast majority from becoming consciously and constantly aware of the real causes of the precipitously rising incidences of all kinds of respiratory ailments and lung cancers worldwide every year. Enormous suffering and destruction of health has stricken more and more people, each and every year, exactly as was predicted in the first comprehensive WHO and EPA environmental reports, released in 1971 and 1972, on the effects of global pollution on human health.



Since it began, and continuing to this very day, the anti-smoking crusade has been used to prevent and deflect the public's wrath and its inevitable feelings of loathing and violent rejection toward anyone and anything causing such severe and global harm. The toxic, public negativity which should rightfully have gone, and still must go, to and toward the polluters killing us all has instead been artfully shifted onto tobacco smokers. Smoking has been keeping the public's attention, awareness and most of all its wrath away from the increasing global pollution and the alarming rises in deadly illnesses being caused by it.



Meanwhile, the biggest polluters and their best enablers, all of them members of that global Pathocracy of a few, ultra wealthy, ultra powerful, largely clandestine families, the real rulers of Planet Earth, have continued with little to no obstruction to pollute the planet wholesale in their pursuit of obscene, endless profits and power for themselves and their friends. Thanks to the anti-smoking smoke screen and the conditioning it has imposed upon the minds of most people over the course of the last 40 years, they have grown ever more wealthy and powerful, literally at the cost of our lives and health and the lives and health of all future generations, if any there shall be as things currently stand.



The anti-smoking programme was designed to keep even the most astute and the least gullible among the people, those most dedicated to working against the PTB, blinded to the truth of who and what is really to blame for their wheezing children and their own cancerous lungs, skins and digestive tracts. What a stupendously devious "bait and switch" it truly has been, is, and will continue to be if we remain fogged in by anti-smoking propaganda. Their first step, convince everyone in the world that some realtively harmless but very addictive consumer product is totally toxic to everyone who gets near to it, so as to guarantee there will always be at least a few hopelessly addicted users of said product around to for scapegoats and patsies. Next, cook the medical data, doctor the medical books and records, set up tests that will guarantee you the statistics and all else you need to make this appear to be true, unless very closely examined with great attention to details galore. Lastly, bury as much of the contradicting evidence as can be buried, and then, every time you commit another environmental crime, and lots more people get sicker than ever or even die, point to that highly addictive consumer product that is relatively, maybe even entirely harmless and shout "THERE'S THE KILLER! THERE'S WHAT'S MAKING YOU SICK!" Have an army of your own, personal media and press people in place the then shout it so loudly and convincingly after that to assure that it is heard and repeated around the world each and every time.



In all of these years, not one voice has been raised in public to ask how it can be possible for cigarette smoking, and in particular second-hand exposure to cigarette smoking, to still be responsible for all of these exponentially increasing ills, especially not at this late date. Fewer people now smoke less tobacco than at any time since 1951, according to the latest U.S. government statistics. It simply doesn't add up: There is no possibility that smoking alone could now account for, nor ever did account for, the huge and growing plethora of ills that have been hidden by the literal smoke screen that has been made of it. But they even have an explanation for that: you either smoked, however briefly, or were exposed to noxious and toxic "second-hand smoke" when young.



Since the inventors and purveyors of the anti-smoking agenda, its policies and its attitudes were and are the servants and members of the global Pathocracy, that alone should give thinking people more than sufficient cause to reconsider the entire issue. Now that we begin to truly know them for what they are, everything they've ever assured us is true needs to become highly suspect, at best, and to be carefully examined and researched. Through the members and actions of the current ruling class and political lords of the U.S., and especially in the members of the Bush administration and its followers, the ugly reality of Pathocracy has finally come out of hiding and shown itself to us all in a full and Dark flowering.



The magnitude and quantity of ills and wrongs the Pathocrats foisted off onto the backs of, first, U.S. smokers, and now the entire global population of smokers, has turned smokers into the scapegoats and patsies for heinous and nearly infinite Pathocratic crimes. Even worse, these Lies have made social pariahs of a very many good and decent people who, in the Light of Truth, can now be seen to have done very little, if any, real harm to anyone, let alone to all of this Earth's inhabitants. Yet they have surely born the blame for the crimes of environmental destruction and pollution. It is impossible to read any advertisments, from job opportunities to apartments for rent and not see, in an endless and heartbreaking litany on every page, "NO Smokers" "Smokers Need Not Apply" "Non-smoking ONLY" and the like.



HOW COULD WE HAVE BEEN SO BLIND AS THIS?

BRAINWASHING. CONDITIONING. MIND CONTROL.



The Great Anti-Smoking Smoke Screen is a most literal case of Smoke and Mirrors that has, until now, been effectively used to Deceive us all and to hasten us on our ways to massive numbers of deaths most foul caused by massive amounts of global, toxic pollution and environmental destruction, not by our far less toxic, and far less frequent, far less constant exposures to tobacco smoke from whatever source.



As some final food for thought, please consider a last collection of a few simple facts. Even for those of us who have smoked, or who still do, we do NOT smoke when sleeping, for but one of many cases in point adding up to many hours of the day and night when we are not taking the contents of our tobacco smoke into our own lungs and bodies nor broadcasting it out into the world around us. But, for all of us on this Earth, the toxic, airborne pollutants are still being drawn into our lungs with every breath, for all of the minutes and hours of each and every day, for our entire lives, even in our sleep, without ceasing ever. As True for smokers as for all of us, the Pathocrats' Poisons are in the very air we must breathe in order to live, utterly inescapable, and far more intimately with us and within us than any amounts of tobacco smoke ever was or will be.



For those who do not smoke and/or who intensely dislike smoking, or who have allergic reactions from being exposed to tobacco smoke, you CAN always walk away from someone who is smoking. Or, if you ask politely, the smoker will usually put out the offending source; I always do, even when asked very impolitely. But go out and ask any Pathocrat on this Earth, politely or otherwise, to extinguish the pollution pouring out from a source he or she owns or controls, or to stop any other kind of environmental devastation being caused by his or her pursuits and enterprises. You will, as have many others who have already tried desperately to do just that, many times and in many ways, wind up serving a very unpleasant stay in a jail or even in prison.



So, having failed to get a Pathocrat to stop polluting and destroying your own and only Earth, try your very best then to walk away, run away or even fly away from the poisonous emissions raining upon you from pollution of every kind. It is impossible. Their toxic pollution is carried for hundreds of miles on the innocent winds. Their toxic pollution permeates every cubic centimeter of the air inside your house, and the air and water out in your yard, and in your town, and in your entire world. Their toxic pollution is constantly increasing its presence in every fibre and molecule of your very own body, even as you read these words.



We all CAN walk away from tobacco smoke. And the Truth IS that we always could have. Without any anti-smoking measures to have ever been taken by anyone, those who objected to smoking were always Free not to participate in it nor to be near it. But there is no longer any means left now for any of us to escape from the runaway, Pathocratic, global pollution and environmental destruction, thanks to the Great Anti-Smoking Smoke Screen that has kept us all blinded for the past 40 years.



Had we addressed pollution, and the Truth that it IS the Real source of our increasing and terrible sicknesses, of our increasingly early but so very lingering and painful deaths; had we invested ourselves and our efforts in stopping polluters and pollution with all of our vigour and resources over the entire course of the past 40 years; had we given ourselves over to prosecuting polluters and all who would protect or enable them in their polluting, in every way possible, and given ourselves over to enforcing an end to their polluting with exactly the same absolute beliefs in it being the totally and most right thing to do, and using exactly the same measures and fortitude societally as we have done in going after smokers and attempting to eradicate smoking instead, how might the world have now been very different for us all?



"WELCOME TO THE OBJECTIVE REALITY."