Michael Fumento

Just came back from a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. The volcanoes were terrific but the rain was incredible. If we'd looked at the sky for more than three minutes with mouths open we'd have drowned. As we got there Dana Reeve just died and suddenly it was "all Reeve, all the time" on CNN and other stations, with tons of talking heads and lots of callers. Reeve's lung cancer as well as those of callers or their deceased loved ones who had contracted cancer and claimed to be non-smokers were all blamed on passive smoke. The idea that anybody could possibly contract lung cancer without an airborne insult of some type occurred to absolutely nobody, yet until political correctness took over from science it's always been accepted that lungs so clean you can eat off them can nevertheless give rise to malignancies, and indeed studies such as one in 2004 have found clear distinctions between the types of malignancies in smokers and non-smokers, indicating that genetics were the culprit in non-smokers. Add to this that there is no good evidence that passive smoke causes any lung cancers.

All that said, if either me or my non-smoking wife ever contract lung-cancer we're going to blame it on breathing in vapors from Hawaiian volcanos and sue the National Park Service.