Top Lies Of 2010

Apologies for being subdued in the past couple of days, I have a separate existence (since 2002) providing info for a subscription sports betting website, so while things are quiet politically (and righteously) I've been writing quite a lot of stuff for publication there.

I'd give you the info too but you'd only help to ruin the prices.

So, swiftly moving on, I thought this might be of more interest. I have two tags here at my tabloid corner of the blogosphere which are perennially relevant. "Lies", and "ASH Troughers".

You see, the anti-smoking industry is founded on telling lies. Everything you have ever heard about passive smoking is weapons grade bullshit. Quite a lot of what you read about smoking itself is bollocks too. It's not completely the liars' fault, they are paid to spout it by those who would seek to enrich themselves on the back of quite nonsensical science paid for by those who stand to make a lot of cash from the misdirection.

Take, for example, Great Ormond Street Hospital - an institution very much loved and respected by the general population - who were so misled by tobacco control fanatics last year that they uploaded a page on their website warning of the appalling consequences of 'thirdhand smoke'. It read thus:

"Kids are put at risk by smokers even if they are in a different room or outside, researchers say. Poisons in cigarette smoke get stuck in hair and clothes. This means smokers carry the chemicals around. But less than half of smokers knew the risks of what scientists call 'third-hand' smoke."

At the time, e-mails were sent to GOSH pointing out that the 'science' they referred to was nothing more than a phone poll asking, after a few leading questions, if those contacted believed it could be a risk.

It was, of course, an archetypal exercise in tobacco control funded scaremongery. Or, to be more accurate, lying. It still made the GOSH website though.

They were contacted about the daft claim and asked to take it down, but the reply was brusque and rude in its dismissal. They acknowledged that the science was flawed but insisted that the page would stay because, after all, what harm could it do?

The page has since disappeared. Even they couldn't say 'fuck off' for long when defending pure fiction.

The problem is that many, many people would have read that bollocks. It was cast-iron fantasy, and all shame on GOSH for publishing it in the first place, but its being posted has done its job. Around the country, there are now a few more fuckwitted morons who believe in a danger which has about as much scientific grounding as the wardrobe monster.

What is so very laughable about anti-smoking organisations is their insistence on painting the tobacco industry as hideous profit-led liars. Yet tobacco control - itself led by spite and the profits engendered by pharmaceutical cessation products - lie on a daily basis. They're not even good at hiding it anymore.

So much so that Michael Siegel, a tobacco control advocate himself for 25 years, has drawn up a shortlst of his top ten lies of 2010.

Note he doesn't say "inaccuracies" or "misunderstandings". No, these are lies, pure and simple. He had a hell of a lot to choose from too. To narrow it down to just ten takes a lot of effort and also noticeably relies on the cult of the now. The latest yarn is more fresh in the mind than the outrageous guff pumped out earlier in the year.

Anti-smokers lie every single day. Let alone a best ten of the year prize, we could almost point out ten every fucking week!

MPs, of course, are happy to believe all of them. They're in the same business, remember. Truth sits bobbing up and down on the Thames whilst those inside Westminster talk only about what might help them in their careers.

Read Siegel's nominations and you'll wonder how any sane-minded individual could possibly believe such nonsense. But politicians do.

Once you understand that they are so easily misled, it'll make you wonder why we invest so much power in those who exhibit the same independent intellect as a dry stone wall.