Tobacco Documents Research Methodology: Fill & Download for Free

First, you have to understand this proposed lawsuit. It is based on the same legal theory as a 1999 lawsuit against Big Tobacco during the Clinton Administration.The 1999 cigarette defendants: Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and other tobacco companies.The goal of that lawsuit was to force the 9 cigarette manufacturers and their co-conspirators to reimburse taxpayers for the billions of dollars it costs the American government to treat people who get sick from smoking.President Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice asked for another favor: “disgorge” the profits, i.e., seize them, because they were fraudulently obtained. The DOJ wanted $280 billion from these cigarette defendants.The U.S. v Big Tobacco Legal Complaint was 95 pages long, not counting the 45-page RICO “appendix”. The Complaint began:This is an action to recover health care costs paid for and furnished … by the federal government for lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other tobacco-related illnesses caused by the fraudulent and tortious conduct of defendants; … Medicare payments made by the federal government … and to restrain defendants and their co-conspirators. …The DOJ accused Philip Morris and its co-defendants of fraudulently deceiving the public, motivated by a desire to profit from the sale of products that cause cancer and heart disease.The DOJ pointed out that these companies knew “smoking cigarettes causes disease” and “that cigarettes are addictive”. Despite this knowledge, the companies did not disclose this to the public.They did the opposite. They lied. They said cigarettes are not hazardous to your health. They denied marketing cigarettes to children.The companies concealed their research and lied under oath at congressional hearings and in courtrooms. They did not tell the truth.All this because they wanted to make more money. Telling consumers the truth about cigarettes would make less.116 acts were committed by the cigarette companies under RICO. The campaign of deceit went back to January 4, 1954, with a full-page ad, run in 400 newspapers across the country, headlined "A Frank Statement To Smokers" in which they swore that cigarettes are not unhealthy.Here it is:This calculated pattern of lying to the public and profiting from those lies was not a First Amendment right to freedom of speech. It was RICO fraud.But how can you sue someone for an ad that ran in 1954? RICO wasn’t even a law on the books until 1970.The DOJ’s RICO claim was based on a long list of mail and wire fraud activities which have NO statute of limitations — 116 illegal acts committed in press releases, letters, testimony and public statements promoting smoking to relieve stress, urging pregnant women that smoking is OK, marketing cigarettes for children, and campaigning to protect smoking as a civil right.All this time, they knew smoking could be deadly.They discussed the strategic “disciplining of a company employee who admitted publicly that smoking plays a significant role in causing cancer.”They sent a letter to an Amherst, N.Y., teacher assuring her there is no evidence smoking is BAD FOR YOU and asked her to tell this to her students.Found guilty under RICO, Big Tobacco appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court: United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. - Petition. The DOJ appealed, too, unhappy with the court’s ruling against disgorgement of profits. SCOTUS denied both appeals.Now that you know this …HOW MIGHT YOU FRAME A RICO LAWSUIT AGAINST ‘CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS’?Could you? Maybe this RICO threat is a rumor?The website “Michigan Capitol Confidential” is owned by a conservative government watchdog, The Mackinac Center. They posted about this last March: The Real Story Behind the Feds Pursuing 'Climate Change Deniers'.The Mackinac Center blames the Obama Administration for global warming hysteria. As evidence, Mackinac pointed to a letter written to the U.S. DOJ by two California Congressmen, Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier, asking the Attorney General to investigate Exxon Mobil to see if it hadviolated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, consumer protection, truth in advertising, public health, shareholder protection or other laws.The conservative Cato Institute’s Pat Michaels was skeptical about the contemplated RICO liability:“In the tobacco litigation you had dead bodies,” Michaels said. “With global warming, you have people living twice as long as they were 100 years ago in societies powered by fossil fuels.It’s completely the opposite.”Actually, this is not quite the whole story. It wasn’t just 2 Democrats in California being suspicious of Exxon Mobil. Bernie Sanders made this a campaign issue in October 2015. He, too, wrote to Loretta Lynch.Bernie Sanders Demands DOJ Go After Exxon for 'Covering Up' Climate ChangeSanders cited research by InsideClimate News and documents that showed Exxon Mobil knows global warming is real and that fossil fuels raise the Earth’s temperature.But pollution is so profitable.Did Loretta Lynch investigate? Did she get anywhere?We don’t know.We do know there’s no RICO lawsuit against Exxon Mobil.We do know the legal methodology to go after Exxon Mobil under RICO. This is not the same as going after “climate change deniers”. It turns on proving FRAUD, a profits-driven scientific cover-up.We also know that Exxon Mobil’s CEO is Donald Trump’s top choice for Secretary of State.Thunderstorms expected.

It certainly is not true. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. Life insurance companies will back this up with actuarial statistics, and offer great rates to older airline pilots.Yes, there is some anecdotal evidence, and a couple of dubious studies that would want to prove otherwise, but the facts don't support this hypothesis.This dubious study on pilot mortality has been largely discredited, but is still used by those trying to make an argument that pilots don't live as long as the general population: (Balderdash and poppycock, say I!)https://flightsafety.org/fsd/fsd_jun92.pdfMany of us are unaware that most scientific research studies do not withstand the rigors of peer review unscathed, and their results can not be duplicated. Bias and flawed methodology are two reasons why the results of scientific studies can not be replicated. A "scientific" study can be manipulated to prove anything that the organization or persons who commissioned wanted to prove. Not all science is good science." That last study is an excellent example of that fact.The truth: Airline pilots live about 6 years longer than people in the general population. Well documented studies that were successfully peer reviewed do support this hypothesis.Use some logic, and form your own conclusions. The reason is likely due to the fact that airline pilots are subjected to regular physicals as a part of their employment requirements, and are typically in better health than the general population as a prerequisite to get hired by a major airline. They must hold an FAA Medical certificate, and maintain their blood pressure in a normal range, and receive annual EKG's beyond age 40.To remain employed, you must stay healthy. Most of us are careful with our diets, exercise regularly, and maintain our weights close to an ideal range. Very few of use tobacco, or drink excessively.Many airline pilots are former military officers, and that group is generally healthier than the general population, due to military induction requirements.Here is one study that was commissioned by the FAA, and supports an increased airline pilot lifespan, and is the one used by the United States Federal Aviation Agency to justify the current mandatory retirement age of 65 years old:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1012.2642&rep=rep1&type=pdf"There is a popular belief in the aviation industry that retired pilots die at a younger age than their counterparts in the general population. If this is true, research into factors associated with this career would be of interest to the FAA as indicators of possible health factors to be monitored in the pilot population. A sample of 1494 pilots who retired at age 60 from a major U.S. airline between the study dates of April 1968 to July 1993 were surveyed. The Life Table Method was chosen as the most suitable approach to analyze the pattern of mortality for this data set. Comparisons were made with the U.S. general population of 60 year-old white males in 1980. A difference in life expectancy of more than 5 years longer was found for our sample of retired airline pilots. Half of the pilots in this sample retiring at age 60 were expected to live past 83.8 years of age, compared to 77.4 years for the general population of 60 year-old white males in 1980. The authors concluded that the question of lowered life expectancy for airline cockpit crews was not supported by the results of these data." A Study of Life Expectancy for a Sample of Retired Airline PilotsShow all authorsRobert O. Besco, Satya P. Sangal, Thomas E. Nesthus, ...First Published October 1, 1994Research Articlehttps://doi.org/10.1177/154193129403800126

Here we go again, with someone quoting a political media source about a scientific question. Which reminds me of some recent research by social scientists, revealing that“Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the US was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.”So of course they lap up denialist claptrap from people shilling for the fossil fuel industry. Helped by the fact that most of them know zilch about science, scientific method, or critical thinking. They think “analysis” is like Sunday School, where the teacher presents you the conclusion and your job is to search the scriptures to support that conclusion. Which is fine for Sunday School, but it’s a terrible thing to try to apply to something empirically accessible—like climate.Let me, for the gazillionth time, quote the consensus of actual SCIENTISTS:“The overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change documents both current impacts with significant costs and extraordinary future risks to society and natural systems. The scientific community has convened conferences, published reports, spoken out at forums and proclaimed, through statements by virtually every national scientific academy and relevant major scientific organization — including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — that climate change puts the well-being of people of all nations at risk.“Surveys show that many Americans think climate change is still a topic of significant scientific disagreement. Thus, it is important and increasingly urgent for the public to know there is now a high degree of agreement among climate scientists that human-caused climate change is real. Moreover, while the public is becoming aware that climate change is increasing the likelihood of certain local disasters, many people do not yet understand that there is a small, but real chance of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts on people in the United States and around the world.”https://whatweknow.aaas.org/get-the-facts/…and over 87% of the AAAS’s member scientists concur with the leadership. The level of agreement is over 97% among climate scientists.The timeline is: global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions and other human factors was first broached in the 1820s as pure speculation. Over the next century we gained the tools to measure what was going on. By the 1970s tools, methodologies and computer capabilities enabled climate scientists to reach a tentative consensus. Late in that decade, scientists working for the big oil companies came to the same conclusion and communicated that to their bosses.The bosses did what bosses do: launched a PR campaign to deny truths that mist reduce short-term profits.At the same time the consensus of the general science community was building, and by 2005 all the major science organizations were on board. However, at the same time the fossil fuel industry put its denial campaign into high gear, following the model of the tobacco industry in previous decades, using the Heartland Institute to put out fake science to delude the public—a specialty it had honed doing likewise for the tobacco industry.By now the fossil fuel industry has spent roughly a billion dollars on this delusion campaign, which has been especially effective on Republican voters, who appear to be less anchored to reality than others (as the research I cited at the top of this answer demonstrates). It owns a political party (guess which) along with over 100 astroturf websites (i.e. ones set up and run by the industry but which pose as coming from “concerned grassroots citizens.”)It’s a little stunning that ANYONE in 2018 has questions about this. But at least half of Americans do (mostly the Republican half).Note that one of the Trumpublican adminstration’s goals is to muzzle the EPA, NASA, NOAA. and silence those Earth-facing satellites that keep telling us Inconvenient Truths. Truth is very inconsiderate, sparing no one’s feelings. No wonder so many Trumpublicans have given it up for mental soda pop alternative.