If you've been following the global warming debacle, which is an even bigger fraud than Obamacare, you don't need a lecture on the deadly mixture of science and politics. It has become obvious that the left is happy to make up the science as it goes along as one part of whatever it takes to advance its agenda. Too many "scientists," alas, are happy to go along with it to make sure they keep getting funding.
So this will not come as a big shock to you. Now that smoking has been banned almost everywhere because, you know, even a single whiff of secondhand smoke will make you fall over dead immediately, we learn, from The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, via Jacob Sulium at reason.com, well, maybe not so much:
The article describes a large prospective study that "confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke." The study tracked more than 76,000 women, 901 of whom eventually developed lung cancer. Although "the incidence of lung cancer was 13 times higher in current smokers and four times higher in former smokers than in never-smokers," says the JNCI article, there was no statistically significant association between reported exposure to secondhand smoke and subsequent development of lung cancer. "We don’t want people to conclude that passive smoking has no effect on lung cancer," says one of the researchers, Stanford oncologist Heather Wakelee. "We think the message is, this analysis doesn't tell us what the risk is, or even if there is a risk."
Our political discourse is debased. Our freedom is diminished. Science, whcih we depend on to tell us how the world works, is more and more discredited. Didn't these people used to call themselves the "reality based community" and sneer at conservatives for being anti-science?
