The Boldness of the Tobacco Control Industry Scoundrels

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the panic in tobacco control. I suppose panic and boldness can go hand in hand.

Sometimes we use the word ‘bold’ in an approving sense. Thus, we might say that a soldier acted ‘boldly’ by dashing forward and attacking the enemy. At other times we use the word in a disapproving sense, such as when a salesman tries to press us into buying something. That is the sense in which I use the word in this case – almost literally; In their panic, the scoundrels in TC are taking greater and greater risks. The attacks on e-cigs are a case in point.

I’ve been reading about the bare-faced (‘bald-faced’ if you are American) distortion of official figures in the USA about youth smoking. I can’t go into details because I don’t know enough, but you can read about it here:

Quick outsources to Rodu and Grant

Its that fellow Grantz (sorry, Glantz) again.

It seems that he and his mates have been double counting. I’m not sure, because it is not spelt out, but it seems that some students, who said in a survey that they smoke and also use e-cigs, have been counted as both smokers and dual users (of cigs and e-cigs), thus giving a total figure which is inflated. For example, suppose that I gave you these figures:

Smokers………..100.

Dual users……….20.

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Total……………120.

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You would assume that the total is indeed 120 persons. But, no, Grantz included the dual user cig smokers twice. He included them as smokers and also as dual users. The real figure should be 100, because the dual users were already included as smokers. The figures should have read: Smokers: 80. Dual users: 20. Total 100.

Normally, it would not matter very much if you are simply comparing one year with another without drawing other than obvious conclusions. For example, you could have this situation the following year:

Smokers……..200.

Dual users…….40.

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Total…………240.

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In that case, the double counting would not matter much. You could claim that youth ‘smoking’ has doubled.

The problem arises when the figures are used to try to prove a different hypothesis. In this case, it is the attempt to prove that e-cig use has led to an increase in cig use among youths. For example, in the above figures, suppose that the second group read:

Smokers……200.

Dual users…..60.

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Total………..260.

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In that case, it would be possible to claim that the dual users has increased, pro rata, MORE than would be expected. You could claim that, because dual users has increased, proportionately, MORE THAN dual users were before, then the dual use MUST include youths who started to use cigs AFTER using e-cigs.

Tricky stuff, isn’t it?

BUT….. By double counting, the authors have obscured the fact that the most of the dual users were already using cigs!

What that means, when corrections are made for the double counting, is that the actual number of youths who have tried an e-cig before starting to smoke cigs becomes minuscule, and far too low to draw a conclusion that the use of e-cigs leads to tobacco smoking.

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The trouble is that people like Grantz have gained control over the media. I don’y know how they have done it, but they have. Perhaps it is simply the issuing of scary press releases. Perhaps scary press releases are ‘NEWS’. But it is hard not to believe that some newspaper proprietors are hand-in-glove with the prohibitionists.

What is it about people like Bloomberg and Gates that they feel that they can financially support persecution? Why do they not simply spend their billions of dollars on providing clean water and sewers in Africa? Frankly, I think that they are caught on the horns of a dilemma – in order to improve the living conditions of millions of people in Africa, the Bs and Gs would have to encourage more burning of ‘fossil fuels’ in Africa. They cannot do that, and so they demand a reduction of the burning of ‘fossil fuels’ in the Healthy, Wealthy West.

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I must close for tonight. The most ridiculous thing is that the Earth is, itself, a source of unimaginable energy. Beneath our feet is am almost inexhaustible supply of heat. Such heat can boil water (without destroying it) and drive electrical turbines.

But the key discovery that mankind needs is a way to store electrical energy, in vast quantities, in a tiny volume. I am talking about a battery of AAA size which can power a bus for a hundred years, or provide enough power to drive the propellers of an aircraft or a ship for decades. You see, we do not necessarily need jet engines. In the atmosphere, we can use propellers. Going to the planets, or even just the Moon, will require some source of energy of even greater potential, but that discovery is way beyond us, at this time.

Mankind  needs to know what SPACE is. It exists, and therefore it is a THING’. It cannot be NOTHING. If it was NOTHING, it would not exist. But it exists, and therefore cannot be NOTHING. If it exists, and is not nothing, then it must have qualities and quantities. Einstein investigated and discovered the ‘bendability’ of space – sort of. Little effort has been made since about the properties of Space. `

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I have digressed something awful.

Goodnight.