In a message dated 2/15/00 4:27:06 PM EST, [log in to unmask] writes:

> Isoddhos, Good to hear from you, Fella.    Who are those "smoke nazis"
>  you talk about?

    Why, anybody that wants to use the violence of the government to force
others to live a certain way, Tony -- much like you.:-)

>    Are they the people throwing lit butts out the
>  window and burning things down?     Or maybe those puffer-in-the-facers,
>  including Good Old Mom and Dad?     Or maybe you're talking about my
>  ex-friend who kept smoking in the house after my baby was born
>  (supposedly on the sly with his buddies)?    The smoke nazi that put
>  that premature baby back in the hospital at 5 weeks.     And even then,
>  he wanted to fist fight to defend his "right to smoke" in his room that
>  vented into ours.

    I leave you to sort out your own personal relationships.

>  Yeah, you're a real Freedom Fighter, Fella.     And a scientist, too.
>
>  Let me call your attention to the fact that China existed at the time
>  Dickens wrote his novels.     And they were not smoking billions of
>  cigarrettes.      And most of the world was not under a gray haze, even
>  if London mght have been.

    And at that time China was an agrarian society controlled by a feudal
system, not an industrial society.  Are you attempting to make a point?

>  This gives the lie to your assertion that there supposedly is nothing
>  new about asthma and allergies.     Contrary to that, is the explosion
>  of a respiratory epidemic of all illnesses involving the respiratory
>  tract.     At the same time  the educated MD idiots of capitalist
>  medicine have gone off into an Alice-in-Wonderland world.
>
>  In Dickens' time they knew that air pollution caused allergies, asthma,
>  and worse.      Now MDs often say.....We don't know the cause for why
>  allergies and asthma are on the increase......    Hard to believe, isn't
>  it?       But true,  none the less.

    And bathing was extremely unhealthy, bloodletting was an excellent
treatment, and germs did not exist.  Please present some sort of study that
would show that air pollution is worse in London today than it was in
Dicken's time.

>  Sir, did I speak of any conspiracy?      All I have mentioned is an
>  inability of capitalist medicine to deal with capitalist caused illness.
>  It's not a conspiracy.     It's a Confederacy of Dunces.       And we
>  are becoming a population of partially cut up and chronically ill
>  pill-poppers.

     Actually, we are becoming a nation of oldsters with better health and
increasing longivity.  How frustating that is to the reactionary segment of
the Left.
Yours,
Issodhos