Of course, the tobacco companies lied to us. It's just the American way of business and selling snake oil - a time-honored practice. But does that give us reason to give blanket condemnation for selling a product that we want? NO! American companies shouldn't be allowed to lie to us, they should be severely punished for that, but they do it everyday in advertising. How much of that is factual? Very little. It's mostly opinion and hype. There's truth in advertising laws that have little guts except for the most egregious violations. We've developed a resistance to it; that's why advertisers must keep on dreaming up new ways to hornswoggle us. To be fair, the law should dictate that anything produced for pubic consumption should be factual, and that includes the words of politicians and any government or private representative. Lying to the people should be a criminal act, as it is in the courts during sworn testimony. Acts of lying in private are another situation, and shouldn't necessarily have criminal penalties, but could be covered under civil law by private lawsuits.

We should have known better. Anyone with half a mind could have figured out that tobacco companies were lying. We've known for decades, if not for centuries, that smoking is potentially harmful. Breathing smoke of any kind can't be healthful. It doesn't take a medical expert to understand that. Hard proof is a bit more recent. I can't believe that people didn't know it is potentially harmful and I have no sympathy for those who complain or sue for their health problems caused by smoking. Everything is potentially harmful; drink too much pure water and you'll die. We need to accept personal responsibility for our lives and the risks we take. If we don't take risks life is hardly worth living. We don't need protection from ourselves; there's no one more capable of that than each individual. But it's the puritanical side of our society that comes out when we seek risky pleasures that makes somebody want to force you to follow their conception of good, and our guilt that we've been taught from childhood, to succumb to their meddlesome powermongering. And we've just lost another freedom and skewed the economy toward higher costs for all of us. But smoking doesn't kill everyone. Some people may have resistance to it or they lead otherwise healthier lives than average. It doesn't kill or impair health immediately; it takes years to do its damage. So to create a blanket smoking kills policy just isn't right.

If some of us want to smoke, as this author does, we have a right to do so. It doesn't matter if it's not healthy. We have a free choice even to destroy ourselves. It's a risk that we take for the benefits we perceive from it. It's stimulating and plesurable. The responsibility is on each of us, not on the companies that make potentially dangerous products. However, we should also have a right to factual information about the products we buy and use, only then we can make informed decisions. Private companies should not have a right to withhold information on their products from the public. They've been accused of making a defective product. What a joke!

The whole fiasco of blame and counterblame, denial of responsibility or knowledge, is just a power play by the lawyers and the greedy join in the game. Lawsuits abound when they smell the potential for making money by denying personal responsibility and shifting the blame to those with deep pockets.

Why don't we take a look at how the Europeans are handling this issue? These are as highly developed, progressive societies as ours. They have all the evidence against smoking that we do, but their anti-smoking campaigns aren't as rabid, all or nothing progroms that ours are. They look at smoking as part of normal human behavior and there's no need to become so self-righteous about it. It's a more relaxed, psychologically healthy attitude. Society can find ways of handling the issue without being heavyhanded. Smoking is part of the risk of living and indulging in some sensual pleasures that may not be healthy in one way, but in another are beneficial. Pleasure is beneficial. Only our residual puritanism makes us take issues as black and white, either/or - rigid, uncompromising, prohibitionist, meddling where we have no business. Why must we be so uptight?

Now, none of the foregoing should suggest that we shouldn't regulate the ingredients of cigarettes or where they can be used. We should have a right to know the ingredients of anything we use so we can make informed decisions how to use products or whether to use them at all. There are so many chemical additives, plus pesticide and fertilizer residues in commercial tobacco that haven't been researched in regard to health. Is it these that are the real health danger and not organic tobacco?

In some public and private places smoking isn't appropriate. But laws that forbid smoking in all private establishments, as in California and New York City, have gone too far; that decision should be left to the owners, otherwise it is a violation of their freedom. Here is an instance where the free market would work well to create smoking and non-smoking establishments. That way everyone is served.

I've one more beef: the high taxation of cigarettes - most of the price of a pack. Yeah, it's supposed to be used for educating kids on the perils of smoking and to offset medical expenses that may incur to society. But why should we be paying the medical bills of others? Shouldn't they be paying for their own mistakes? It boils down to this: government gets revenue and satisfies the self-righteous, puritanical meddlers who know better what you should do. It's a perfect setup for control freaks and money-hungry politicians.

I take issue with calling the victims of the World Trade Center terrorism heroes just because they were victims of extraordinary circumstances. Calling all of them heroes diminishes the ideal of heroism. Yet I am certain that some of them were heroes who attempted to save the lives of their fellow workers during the few minutes between the plane crashes and the buildings collapsing, and these selfless acts we will never know. Heroes do extraordinary things, take great risks and put their lives on the line. Dying in war or natural disasters isn't necessarily heroic, just sad and wasteful. That they are not heroes doesn't lessen the meaning or significance of their lives. The real heroes of the moment were the firemen, police and other public servants who rushed in within minutes of the disaster and lost their lives in the collapse. They were performing their jobs and may or may not have fully understood the danger, but they didn't chicken out.

I still want to know why the attack planes didn't cause concern when they veered from course. There were about 20 minutes that controllers should have had to report the deviations from course.

I fervently believe in Darwinism, especially natural selection. People have a right to make fools of themselves. Those who make mistakes should have responsibility for them and they should pay for their stupidities. Sometimes death is the result, sometimes knowledge is learned. Those who are so stupid should be allowed to off themselves. They often do. Others take calculated risks; sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. The responsibility and the joy or sorrow will follow.

There's a great website: The Darwin Awards that tells you just how stupid people can be, and you'll find it very hard to have any sympathy with these self-inflicted victims, mostly irritation or wonder just how lacking in common sense some people can be. Another good syndicated column on stupidity is "News of the Weird".

God CAN make humans out of monkeys, but only humans can make asses out of themselves.

Some scientists were surprised that the human genome has so few genes, even fewer than some "lower" species, and the news media blew it up to a big story. That the human genome may have only 30,000 genes is not the issue. It's the programming, stupid! Our genome has more compact code than Microsoft Windows!

I'm disappointed in my baby boomer generation - they copped out, gave up drugs, got regular jobs, married, had kids - they shouldn't have done that. Were they cowards or just grown tired? With our numbers we could have broken with the past, forged a new society - new ways of relating, new types of families, new careers.

Despite all the pro and con furror over cloning and threatening to pass laws forbidding human cloning, someone will do it and then another, and someday people will wonder what all the fuss was about. How it will ultimately be used we can't know now, but the ethics regulating it will be built by trial and error. This is the way with every potentially disturbing new knowledge and its resultant technology.

I've just been through the verication process switching long distance carriers. I'd like to meet the sadist who created this system. Whether I would kiss him in appreciation for his clever cruelty or strangle him because of it, I'm not entirely sure. Although such a system couldn't have been created by an individual, only a committee could be so dense. Whoever created it should be drawn and quartered - slowly. Grave levity aside, this system is for gathering information about you and protecting the carriers. It may be purposively difficult and time consuming to discourage you from switching carriers. It ought to be simple and easy. The politicians who allowed this system have lackeys to do it for them, so they don't understand the problem.

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