Smoked out
“Now public opinion and governments have turned against tobacco. But the anti-smoking jihad, born of science, is beginning to outrun it. …
“The strangest thing about the current round of smoking bans is its focus on pubs. All over the world, reporters have been interviewing bar patrons about the merits of expelling tobacco. ’It means I can drink and not come out [of] the bar stinking like an ashtray,’ one guy in Hong Kong told Agence France-Presse after a night of partying. There’s nothing more annoying than a stinking cigarette when you’re trying to get stinking drunk.
“Tobacco myopia isn’t just a British problem. … In Amsterdam, coffee shop patrons will soon be allowed to smoke marijuana but not tobacco, despite evidence that two joints cause as much noncancerous lung damage as five to 12 cigarettes.
“In the private sector, the tobacco crusade has turned personal. According to a recent survey, 1 percent of companies refuse to hire smokers. Some use random urine or breathalyzer tests to spot nicotine.”
— William Saletan, writing on “Kicking Butt,” Monday at Slate.com
Explaining nothing
“Darwinism supposedly explains how organisms become more ’fit,’ or better adapted to their environment. But fitness is not and cannot be defined except in terms of existence. If an animal exists, it is ’fit’ (otherwise it wouldn’t exist). It is not possible to specify all the useful parts of that animal in order to give an exhaustive causal account of fitness.
“If an organism possesses features that appear on the surface to be inconvenient — such as the peacock’s tail or the top-heavy antlers of a stag — the existence of stags and peacocks proves that these animals are in fact fit.
“So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation. It ’explains’ everything, and therefore nothing. It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason.”
— Tom Bethell, writing on “Darwinism at AEI,” Monday in the American Spectator Online at www.spectator.org
Peace studies
“Sponsored by Ohio Democratic [Rep.] Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 co-sponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to ’establish a Peace Academy,’ ’develop a peace education curriculum’ for elementary and secondary schools, and provide ’grants for peace studies departments’ at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence. …
“The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is co-editor of ’Marxism Today’ … Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that ’humans have been out of balance for centuries’ and that ’a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.’ ”
— Bruce Bawer, writing on “The Peace Racket,” in the summer issue of City Journal
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