| March 6, 2015 – Issue #795
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters |
 Retraction Watch: Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process. Scientists retract paper because they’re “not satisfied with the quality of some of the data.” The paper, “Cigarette Smoke-induced Oxidative/Nitrosative Stress Impairs VEGF- and Fluid Shear Stress-Mediated Signaling in Endothelial Cells,” came from the lab of Irfan Rahman, a lung disease expert at the University of Rochester. Glantz complains about research ethics. By Carl V. Phillips. Yes, the man whose superpower is an inhuman ability to willfully misinterpret study results and lie to the public based on that (and who is completely immune to the effects of evidence, logical argument, authors telling him he is interpreting their studies wrong, etc.) is complaining about research ethics. In particular, he is complaining about the recent Shiffman et al. paper which demonstrated that the prospect of interesting flavors did basically nothing to entice teenage non-users toward wanting to use e-cigarettes. Nicotine: Health benefits of nicotine rise as laws clamp down. The Michael J. Fox foundation, dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease (PD), is sponsoring the first human clinical trials testing nicotine as a possible treatment for PD. A connection was first uncovered back in 1966. At the time Dr. Harold Kahn was heading up the Dorn Study of Smoking and Mortality Among U.S. Veterans: Report on Eight and One-Half Years of Observation. Snus: “Inside Snusing”: Guests Snubie and CNashX talk about Swedish Reduced Harm Products. AND Heartland Daily Podcast. Dr. Brad Rodu: Tobacco Harm Reduction. Hathaway and Rodu talk about how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) corrupt the scientific process in academia, by refusing to fund studies which do not conform to the federal government’s stated vision of a “tobacco-free world.” Electronic Cigarettes: ‘Vape’ bans have little to do with public health. “Protecting workers is simply the polite fiction by which nonsmokers have imposed their will on an increasingly unpopular minority.” If simulated smoking must be banned in bars just to send a healthy message, then my God, think of all the actual drinking going on! If the worst that health officials can say about e-cigarettes is that they don’t like the way they look, then they ought to learn the public virtue of minding their own business. Obama Unveils National ObamaLaw Plan. President Barack Obama today introduced his plan for a progressive takeover of state and local policing. “We have a great opportunity… to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations,” he said Monday. “We need to seize that opportunity… this is something that I’m going to stay very focused on in the months to come,” Obama said, as he touted a new interim report from his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Obama also instructed his media allies to help federalize policing, and to sideline the critics of centralized policing rules. “I expect our friends in the media to really focus on what’s in this report and pay attention to it,” he instructed. Tokko: The Thought Police. Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu), often shortened to Tokko was a police force established in 1911 in Japan, specifically to investigate and control political groups and ideologies deemed to be a threat to public order. The Tokko had arrested 59,013 people, of whom 5000 had been brought to trial; about half of those received prison sentences. Prisoners were forced to write accounts of how they had become involved with “dangerous ideologies,” rewriting these essays until their interrogators were happy with the work. These works then were used to prove their criminal involvement. AND Do We Really Want “Thought Police?” Orwell projected a future society in which individual freedoms would be forfeited to full control by the state. UK: So, the smoking ban is popular? The article suggests that many of the remaining pub owners do indeed recognise that banning their core custom wasn’t a smart move. Smoking and drinking go together for a lot of people and the Healthies who don’t smoke… also don’t drink. So that idea that the pubs would fill with people who hate smoking was a non-starter from the outset. |
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