Race, Politics, America

Stuff that in your pipe!

You probably have it committed to memory by now, and without any effort on your part. I speak of the best piece of gross, crossover propaganda since that porn film classic with that actress who used to be on the Ivory Snow box ads.

Here it is: "Tobacco is the only product, available legally, which, if you use it exactly as the manufacturer intended, will kill you."

The claim has the status now of a New Age Universal Truth. Our Supreme Court has joined the fray, handing down, September 29, a condemning 9 - 0 decision that might pump billions of tobacco dollars into the B.C. treasury. The Court ruled that B.C. may sue cigarette companies for the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses.

The left-lib media that so boastfully bashes America at every turn, gloated at B.C.'s copy-cat initiative, modelled on lawsuits launched by various states in the U.S. against tobacco manufacturers. In the 1990s, tobacco companies agreed to pay a group of states almost $250 billion (US) over 25 years to defray smoking-related health costs.

The B.C. case is expected to be replicated across provinces. Again, the lefty media that was so cynical about national implications for public healthcare posed by a different Supreme Court ruling, earlier this summer, in favour of private insurance in Quebec, was all but urging other provinces to pile on against Big Tobacco in the B.C. ruling.

The tobacco industry that pays $9 billion in annual taxes may now have to cough up $4 billion in estimated smoking-related health costs across Canada. Not to mention 45,000 alleged tobacco deaths that will no doubt generate a whole separate class of legal action.

We got a preview, literally, within minutes of the ruling in the B.C. case. One class-action suit after another was filed in Quebec, seeking $17 billion here, $5 billion there, for "nicotine dependency", for "failure to inform" of tobacco danger....

But really, what good would the Supreme Court decision be if all smokers were magically to quit now? Where would tobacco taxes come from? And if fewer and fewer died from less and less smoking, the linkage with disease would be more and more difficult to make.

So let's match one schizophrenic slogan with another. How's this definition? Tobacco industry: the only, barely, but still legal industry, which, if it functions exactly as the government must now expect, will kill perhaps as many as 100,000 annually; incur some $90 billion in treatment costs, while also, of course, pumping trillions into government coffers.

The government must be just as death-invested as it alleges of the tobacco companies. So who will take up our class action against the government?

What's more, the tobacco ruling allows cost-recovery going back 50 years, in spite of tobacco "warnings" across that time, notices on cigarette packs about the "dangers" of smoking, smoking during pregnancy, dangers of second-hand smoke, and on and on.

B.C. Health Minister George Abbott hailed the unanimous verdict as a "landmark ruling in our attempt to hold the tobacco industry responsible for its detrimental products."

By-no-means a lefty, B.C. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell proclaimed the tobacco ruling "an enormous victory." No kidding.

The threshold of proof is so low as to allow "aggregate action" in recovering costs. That would mean B.C. would not have to prove specific harm to each individual.

And with that dismissal of the last scrap of individual responsibility, our top court imposed the most belligerently one-sided decision short of denying the other side access to court in the first place.

So again, with the diabolical slogans and venal definitions. Government: an instrument of mass suicide by death-inducing means like tobacco, provided for that very intent.

Why stop there? Never mind the bewildering hypocrisy that shields alcohol, gambling and other vices from the fate that has befallen tobacco. Let's go deeper in the bio-social dynamic. Here's the biggest catch of them all. Definition. Women: the only natural force in the universe, which, if men respond to them exactly as God (their manufacturer) intended, will drive men to rape, plunder, even murder.

Why don't the loony-left stick that in their post-modernist pipes, and blow!