I received a letter to the editor today in regards to the smoking restriction on tonight's City Council Agenda. The letter writer is unable to access my blog for some reason, and asked that I post her letter on the blog for her while she tries to figure out what is stopping her from posting herself. Unfortunately, this means that unless she figures out what the issue is, she may not be able to respond to any comments you have, but who knows, maybe she'll figure it out. Here's her (rather provocative) letter:
Re: Proposed Sierra Madre Outdoor Patio Smoking Ban
The proposed outdoor patio smoking ban is not a grassroots effort by Sierra Madre stroller moms: it is part of a statewide step by step progressive ban program funded by taxpayer money disbursed by the California Tobacco Control Program and organized by the California Center for Tobacco Policy and Organizing (www.center4tobaccopolicy.org), a political branch of the American Lung Association. Go to that website, click on "Community Organizing" and you will see how they manipulate your stroller moms, your community, and your city council.
Go to talc.phi.org, click on "Secondhand Smoke", click on "Comprehensive Secondhand Smoke Ordinance" and you will find your city's smoking ordinance already written and ready to stick under your councilmen's noses for their automatic signature. TALC is funded by taxpayer money disbursed by the California Tobacco Control Program.
If people are taught to hate a minority, any lie about that minority will be believed and any law can be enacted against that minority. In "California Tobacco Control Update 2006", the California Tobacco Control Program states that their goal is "A Tobacco Free California". It states that "California's strategy is to create a social milieu and legal climate in which tobacco use is regarded as unacceptable -- to denormalize smoking and other tobacco use." In plain speech this means that the California Tobacco Program proposes to teach the people of California to regard the smoker a threat to society and to make him a despised pariah. This was the strategy used by the German National Socialist Party against the Jews in the 1930's: it is the strategy the California Tobacco Control Program uses today against California citizens.
Their lies are too numerous for me to list and quote refuting experts here. Take only one "There is no safe level of second hand tobacco smoke".
Smoke is smoke. Tobacco isn't magic. It is just another organic material. All organic combustion, like that from cigarettes, campfires, charcoal braziers and fireplaces, generates over 4,000 chemicals, including toxic compounds and carcinogens. The smoke from your picnic area fireplaces contains carbon monoxide, methane, acrolein, benzene, tolulene, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, lead ... the whole scare mongering list you have been given for tobacco smoke. In addition, the EPA estimates that the lifetime cancer risk from wood smoke (I assume because wood is a dense solid) is twelve times greater than that from an equal volume of second hand tobacco smoke (www.burningissues.org).
If there is no safe level of second hand tobacco smoke, then there is likewise no safe level of smoke from your fireplaces, your campfires, your candles, your incense burners, because it is all organic smoke and contains the same array of toxic compounds and carcinogens. Do your little girls keel over dead from toasting marshmallows?
Why do you love the scent of smoke from a neighbor's fireplace in winter, yet complain that aromatic tobacco smoke stinks? Because you have been carefully taught. With tax funded propaganda, Californians could be taught to hate butterflies.
J. Sidney Sullivan
La Mesa, CA
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Wow. That's sure to be controversial. First of all, I don't for a second think that Sharon Pevsner and the other soccer moms involved in this ordinance are part of a big conspiracy, nor do I think they are operatives for the ALA or any of the organizations Ms. Sullivan mentions. I did go to the site about second hand smoke ordinances, and it does appear to be a fairly strict copy of the ordinance that is there. Not sure that's a bad thing. I think that chances are our City Attorney was probably trying to save the City money by just using an ordinance that was already in place rather than reinventing the wheel. But then, I tend to shy away from suggestions that everything that takes place in government is some big conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the comparison of the anti-tobacco folks strategies with the strategies of the German National Socialist Party: I know she will be accused of saying the anti-tobacco folks are Nazis, she didn't. Read closely. She said that both factions employ the same strategy. There is a difference. Not sure I'd have included that in my letter, if I were her, as I think that the perception of that one inflammatory comment is going to overshadow the other points she made in her letter.
Points that were made in her last three paragraphs. I had no idea campfires are more likely to cause cancer than smoke (I've not confirmed this, I'm taking the letter at face value). If, as stated, the same carcinogens are found in smoking as in other types of smoke, will we next prohibit fire-rings at Bailey Canyon? The portable backyard firepits that have become so popular the last couple years? BBQs?
Have at it. I suspect this one is going to really stir things up.
Judging from a comment just added to my March 6th post, it appears our letter writer has overcome the problem she was having posting to the blog.
ReplyDeleteMy God.. What a nutcase! Let's plant tobacco in place of all the demon ficus in town that public works is so fond of murdering oxygen giving plants. Let's plant tobacco and roll our own, just like the good folks in the canyon do!
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised someone all the way in San Diego would bother posting her(from B Coburn's reference)own manifesto as if this is an issue of paranoia by only mothers who she must think have nothing else better to do. Her alleged minority is not a recognized one that I know of, and so the supposed National Socialist persecution of, is such an outrageous metaphor, I can only think this person has even more nothing to do by sitting home talking herself into her own conspiracy theories. This issue is singularly and solely about, "I don't want to smell your cigarette smoke when I also want to sit outside and go to a dining facility, and I don't want to have to go inside or anywhere else to escape it.". Smokers can just go somewhere else or don't smoke(hey, there's a novel concept!) since when outside the local beer pub, or The Bean, etc., I am the minority...and there ain't no brainwashin bein done here, I made my mind up a long time ago when I decided not to smoke.
ReplyDeleteThe question has to be asked Bill, why would you put such a thing up on the front page of your site? Out of all the mail you've received, what is it about this letter that you found so appealing?
ReplyDeleteIn the first place, I don't get that much mail. What you see posted on my site is what I get, or at least what I get that is intended for publication. Secondly, I can guarantee you that if I received a letter and chose not to publish it based on the opinions of the writer, I'd hear all kinds of things about censorship. She has as much right to have her letter published as anyone else does. I don't use whether or not I agree with someone or what they've written in a letter as the basis for whether or not I will publish a letter to the editor.
ReplyDeleteThe letter was posted on your blog with all of the other mail you've received on the topic of sidewalk smoking, Bill. And you've received quite lot on this issue. Yet out of all those letters you chose to feature one that infers a similarity between stroller moms and Nazis. Why?
ReplyDeleteThe letter was not originally posted on my blog. It was sent as a letter to the editor of the Sierra Madre News Net site, so I posted it as such. If you scroll down the page a little, you will see that I have other (older) letters to the editor on the page, including one from three City of Hope doctors that is anti-smoking.
ReplyDeleteAs for inferring a similarity between stroller moms and nazis - she does not compare them at all. She discusses a strategy used by the California Tobacco Control Program and states that it's the same strategy used by the Nazis. Soccer moms aren't even part of the equation, though everyone is quick to twist it that way, as I predicted in my first comment. Suppose a historian was writing a biography of Eisenhower. In his research, he discovers that Eisenhower once blew up a bridge as he crossed a river so his enemies couldn't follow. And suppose his research shows that Goerring did the same thing. In the biography, he notes that the strategy employed by Ike in one instance was the same as the strategy employed by Goerring in another instance. Does that mean he inferred a similarity between Ike and a Nazi? Or has he just observed a similar strategy? BTW, I don't know my WWII history well enough to know if that ever happened, I was just using it as a for instance.
WILL EVERYONE STOP WITH THE NAZI REFERENCES FOR CHRISTS SAKE, IT'S IDIOTIC!!!
ReplyDeleteBill? The letter is posted on your blog. It is there for all to see. And to say that the letter writer was not inferring the connection you so energetically deny is absurd. It is the very point its author is trying to make. And your analogy is terrible. Apples and oranges. History writing and polemics are 2 very different things. History attempts to nail facts down in concrete. Polemics is the use of any tactic available to create an impression. And that impression was made. Why you would feature this letter and then try to defend it is troubling.
ReplyDeleteIt was originally added to my blog at the request of the letter writer, who at that time was unable to post it herself. She then added it herself apparently, after figuring out the issue that was preventing it. I thought the question was why I posted it on my News Net home page ("the front page of your site"). Must have misunderstood the question.
ReplyDeleteThe outdoor tables were put there for the smokers. I have never been drawn to sucking up exhaust fumes and traffic noise so they can have that area. Soccer Moms with gas guzzling SUV's should not be taking children to coffee houses. They should take them to the park and just ban smoking there. Kids should do there homework at home or the library or the park. I hate second hand smoke by the way.
ReplyDeleteSorry the outdoor tables are for everyone! The smokers "pee" all over them marking their territory by smoking so no one can breath -- including the people walking by.
ReplyDeleteThere is one singular anonymous poster, common to all the blogs addressing these issues, who is the same one polemically bedeviling Bill here over nothing. Bill, you've come across as nothing but completely reasonable in this.
ReplyDeleteI suspect this anon who won't reveal himself to be the heart not just of 99% of the vehemence and anger that's been whipped up over this nonsense, but of the very hysteria itself that has cause 85% of this city to turn against the other 15%.
And I believe this anon poster, on this site and others, is the Mayor's father. I was censored on another site for making this observation.
If it's not true, let him say who he is. I believe in uncensored comments, but I also believe people should have the ganas to be accountable for what they write.
Maybe we should bring a bill before the city that would ban obnoxious, anonymous posting on the local blogs? It is certainly a mindless irritant.
Josh, the people have spoken ... if you don't like it -- you are free to find a restaurant, coffe shop, bar etc that ALLOWS smoking on their patio .... it doesn't get any easier than that.
ReplyDeleteWho is this Sullivan person? Why are they so damn interested in Sierra Madre.
ReplyDeleteAre you connected to that awful paper of the disgraced Susan Henderson.
Smokers, grow up!
Interlopers, be gone!
AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteBigotry and hate are back.
ReplyDeleteActually Clean Air Is Back and we couldn't be happier!! We love for you all to join us ...just leave your cigarettes in the car...
ReplyDeleteIn response to the distortions by Maundry's minions in this comment column and elsewhere:
ReplyDeleteI am not precisely a pro-tobacco activist. I am a free choice activist: free choice on tobacco falls under that aegis. I got into this in 2006, when my city council voted that an 80 year old veteran, who fought for his country in World War II and Korea, could not sit in a park in his city and smoke a pipe. I began to research the claims about second hand smoke the city council based their decision on and discovered that they simply are not true. Smoking is a (much exaggerated) hazard to the smoker. It does not endanger the non-smoker.
I was invited into the Sierra Madre discussion by a friend because my own city debated a similar ordinance last year. I have never had contact of any kind with Susan Henderson. I would be proud to claim Josh Dintzer as my son, but he is not. (Keep your head up high, Josh, and dare to be different.) At this date I have spoken with Bill Coburn one time, by telephone, when we attempted to determine why his website would not accept a submission to his blog comments from my computer. Mr. Coburn predicted that he would be critized if he printed my submission as a "letter to the editor".
He did not warn me that freedom of the press in Sierra Madre is curtailed by a school yard bully and his sycophants or that exercise of my first amendment rights would evoke threats from Eric Maundry and his minions of ... intimidation by stroller mom??
Picture a terrified old lady, clutching her hat and her handbag, pursued over hill and dale by a torch and pitchfork wielding pack of stroller pushing stroller moms. With Sir Eric cracking a bullwhip at the laggards.
The intent of my letter was to make you THINK! In embracing backyard BBQ's and residential fireplaces yet quailing at a whiff of tobacco smoke you swallow a camel and strain at a gnat.
I said that the California Tobacco Control Board is using the same stratey on the people of California as that used by the German Nazis on the German people. I did not say that the stroller moms are Nazis: I said that both the stroller moms and the people of California, like the German people before them, are dupes of a state bureaucracy. The California Tobacco Control Board uses the methods of denormalization and dehumanization developed by the Nazis to turn you against a segment of your own people.
The Democracy Institute (www.democracyinstitute.org) just released a study which analyzes the California government's use of denormalization and predicts that it will be used in the near future against the obese, people who drink alcohol (not alcoholics, just 5 o'clock cocktails and wine with dinner), and any others whom government considers unhealthy and undesirable. I urge you to read it and THINK! This government manipulation is not science fiction, Orwell's "1984" and "Brave New World". This is California right now!
Don't kill the messenger because you don't like the message. State sanctioned hate mongering, whether the targets are smokers, homosexuals, Jews, fat people or redheaded women, is as shameful as segregation in the South or concentration camp imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens in California in 1941. You should be outraged at the government of California for permitting this, not at me.
J. Sidney Sullivan
Ms. Sullivan,
ReplyDeleteI'm so honored. Your letter was a brilliant debunking of all the myths and hysteria and idiocy surrounding this. It cut right to the core of what the law represents.
When I was 17, they installed the first red light camera in the LA basin, on Sunset and Whittier, in Beverly Hills. My best friend and I, feeling it was our responsibility, egged it the next night.
Now there's one on every corner. They've made it illegal to walk the streets without identification -- just like Nazi Germany; like in "Casablanca". The next passport they'll issue me will have a chip in it that will carry all my private information -- and it will be a felony to tamper with this chip.
Being a private citizen in America has lost all meaning, because personal responsibility has been shoved out the window by a press and bureaucracy that celebrates an unholy trinity of victimhood, police power and prison. The "with us or against us" mentality that brought Bush to power for a second term is alive and well in every facet of American society now. And the psychological draw of self-identification with victimhood, at the expense of other people's rights, is so potent that it's pretty much eradicated common sense and led people down the primrose path to bowing before an almighty police state that's a hair's breadth from an all-out totalitarianism; such that the police only need to flip a switch to bring us there.
You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what concerns me. I'm a grandchild of holocaust survivors whose entire families on both sides were wiped out. They came to this country because the free-thinking nature of the people here was the antithesis of the class-locked, feudal, fascist and communist authoritarianism that gripped Europe for so many centuries. To see these things become entrenched here makes me feel like I'm living in the fourth reich. You can't explain that feeling to these people with their narrow agenda, because they'll sacrifice any principle on the altar of what they want today. The paternalism that follows seems, right now, to get wound into the fabric of our society and in a couple years we're "normalized" into forgetting there was ever a tie when we had freedom from these strictures. It's a slow, silent coup and it's destroying our freedom and turning us into mindless sheep.
Alright, I've rambled on enough. I couldn't resist. I hope I can meet you sometime and exchange thoughts and ideas.
Best,
Josh
So much great material ... so little time.
ReplyDeleteAmen brother!
ReplyDeleteBAAAAAAA BAAAAAAAA!!!!
ReplyDeleteAmen brother...
ReplyDelete