Thank you, Mr. Williams By Jane Gaffin The venerable academic and author Walter Williams, an economic professor at George Mason University, who comes with a long litany of credentials, is one of my favorite political syndicated columnists and is often an invited commentator on a number of radio talk shows such as Brian Wilson's Libertas Media Project. I admire Mr. Williams whose thoughts always make sense. I can comprehend, thus retain, what he said after he said it. That, to me, is the sign of a true academic; an unpretentious teacher who doesn't talk over the student's head. I could have done with a few more professors the likes of Mr. Williams during my school years. It is for all those reasons I saved his article Bizarre Arguments and Behavior to my document file for future reference, having come across this specific piece on the Lew Rockwell website under the heading The War on 2nd Hand Smoke. Other than UK writer Christopher Snowdon at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist website, it is not too often I come across anybody agreeing with my opinions about the bogus United Nations people-control tobacco-control tactics, based on so-called "researchers" snatching fake statistical numbers out of thin air, that were perpetrated on a gullible public while buying off the health-care system. One exception to Christopher Snowdon was another Christopher, the late journalist, debater and orator Christopher Hitchens, a smoker and drinker in his own rights. During an interview with Rhys Southan of Reason Magazine in November 2001, Mr. Hitchens explained, among other things, why he was no longer a socialist and why moral authoritarianism was on the rise. "I'm damned," Mr. Hitchens said, "if I'll be treated how smokers are now being treated by not just the government, but the government ventriloquizing the majority. The majoritarian aspect makes it to me more repellent. And I must say it both startles and depresses me that an authoritarian majoritarianism of that kind can have made such great strides in America, almost unopposed. There's something essentially unAmerican in the idea that I could not now open a bar in San Francisco that says 'Smokers Welcome' " If the truth were told, anybody with a grain of sense would find a moderation of smoking tobacco and alcohol consumption far safer than the health-care system's unrestrained habit of prescribing deadly pharmaceuticals that cause more illnesses than cures. Practitioners are conditioned to blame past or present smoking as the cause of all health ails while ignoring pills as a major culprit. When the dumb quacks find out the patient has never smoked tobacco, or anything else for that matter, they are up a creek without a scapegoat and indignant because they cannot collect their Big Pharma rewards for foisting nicotine and/or alcohol withdrawal assistance on the patient. Unless the patient is dumb enough to allow it to happen. "Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you'd have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously," was the attention-grabbing introduction sentence from Mr. Williams' March 26th column. Whereas the entire column must be read to appreciate all the examples he dredged up, toward the halfway mark is where he goes on a roll about the second-hand smoke fable. "Decades ago," he continued, "I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control.
I love it! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, all you doctors, enforcers, meddlers, connivers, snivelers, moralizers, influence peddlers, uplifters and other busybodies who care to stick your noses in other people's personal lives where you are not welcome. Thank you, Mr. Williams. Jane Gaffin is a freelance writer living in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. She can be contacted at janegaffin@northwestel.net or visited at www.janegaffin.wordpress.com.
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