I came back

I’m still here
I suspect no one out there in cyber space has noticed, but I’ve been away for a while. Last month I broke a promise to myself and accepted a position on the Board of Directors at the co-op in which I live.

The last bunch apparently thought they were running a Sunday morning social club instead of a 21 million dollar corporation with a 2.5 million dollar annual budget. Anyway, it will be my responsibility, as Chairman of the Board, to help stop the financial bleeding and put things back on track. Hopefully, after a flurry of activity over the past month, I’ll be able to get back to writing my web log.

It’s my choice
I’m not much of a joiner, on the web or off, but I recently joined an on-line club called MyChoice. It points out that smoking, no matter how despicable you may find the habit, is a matter of choice. The anti-smoker crowd is whipping the public into a frenzy which is reaching near hysterical proportions. People are now permitted to discriminate against smokers in a way that would not be tolerated against any other minority. And, to do it, they are using bullshit, bafflegab and outright lies.

Enough already. It’s time to fight back

WHO study withheld
This article is based on a story printed in the London Telegraph, and other newspapers including the Ottawa Citizen, back in 1998. So why are anti-smoking groups and politicians permitted to claim that a link exists between lung cancer and secondhand smoke? The evidence points in the other direction. And why does the national press, in both Canada and the US, allow the deception to continue? What, or who, are they afraid of?

The World Health Organization apparently tried to withhold from publication a study which showed that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The British press announced that the largest statistical study on Environmental Tobacco Smoke and lung cancer ever conducted did not generate the expected results. It was buried by WHO until a request for the study was made by the British press under freedom of information legislation.

The WHO was forced to make the report public, although some of their personnel at the time were denying the very existence of the study. The WHO study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in l998.

The WHO and its supporters continue to insist that statistically insignificant relative risk factors were significant.

A complaint was filed with the U.K. Press Complaints Commission against the Telegraph (London), who broke the story, alleging it had misrepresented the results of the WHO study. The Telegraph stuck by its story and by October l998 the Commission found for the Telegraph and rejected the complaint vindicating the newspaper.

For a synopsis of this disturbing episode in the history of the WHO, and more information on the study, visit davehitt.com