Obama Creates Thousands of New Jobs

The jobs are risky, but very lucrative for those willing to take the risks, and require no previous experience or special training. Almost anyone with a driver's license (or at least the ability to drive) can do this job.

This is very important legislation. It is obvious that tobacco is something a lot of people want to use (which is what the government is counting on), and will continue to use no matter what regulations are put in place, which the government knows perfectly well, but will now be able to increase taxes on and control the distribution of this almost endless revenue producing product.

And it will create two whole new classes of jobs: 1) the army of regulators that will be needed to control tobacco production, distribution, and sales, and 2) the army of tobacco smugglers that this much more profitable version of tobacco (like alcohol during prohibition) will create. Definitely a win-win proposition for employment.

For the government, the Smoking lies have been almost as good as the Global Warming lies, just not as big. Of all the so-called science proving all the terrible things smoking does, there is no hard-science at all. It is all exactly the same kind of junk-science (surveys and statistics) used to put over the Global Warming scam.

Almost everyone buys it. It's why fools like American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown can say things like, "The Senate vote is a significant victory for all Americans as we try to reduce the devastating toll tobacco use has inflicted on our communities." When you are driving around your community, keep a sharp eye out for all those heaps of dead bodies and collapsed buildings tobacco is inflicting on your town.

The truth does not matter to these people, especially if they can use their junk science to keep people terrified — don't smoke or you'll die from cancer or heart disease; don't go out in the sun or you'll get skin cancer and die; don't drive without a seat-belt or you'll have an accident and die. Does no one think that perhaps it is not too good for you to be terrified of every blessed thing that exists?

The primary truth is, it would not matter if smoking a cigarette would kill you without fail before nightfall, it is wrong for any government to prevent the production, sale, and use of anything that all individuals involved freely choose to do. There is ultimately only one reason cigarettes (and most other substances) are regulated at all and that is the belief that some people have a right to force other people to do what they think is best for them; and they cannot bear that some people might actually be enjoying their lives without their interference.

OH, and while you enjoy that smoke, be sure to have a nice glass of red wine. "The breadth of [its] benefits is remarkable—cancer prevention, protection of the heart and brain from damage, reducing age-related diseases such as inflammation, reversing diabetes and obesity, and many more."

Oh the hilarity. Another Moron Ping.

The information & links posted at the top (with numerous scientific references provided at the sites linked) are result of several debates I initiated in medical & nootropic (smart drugs) forums over the last couple years. Dozens of knowledgeable, bright researchers and graduate students in medical & biochemical fields, including doctors and researchers specializing in health effects of tobacco smoke, attacked my statement "Smoking is good for you" with everything they knew. Months long debates unfolded, arguments were offered, papers were brought up and discussed in depth. Amusingly, the strongest scientific experiments they brought up, appearing to show direct harm from tobacco smoke, turned out upon more careful reading (beyond the antismoking spin in the abstract & introductions) to demonstrate exactly the opposite -- the smoking animals live longer (~20%), while remaining sharper and thinner (by ~15%) into the old age, than non-smoking animals (another one here or here or here or here).

By the time those debates wound down, not only could none of these bright, knowledgeable folks produce a single scientific result demonstrating that tobacco smoke causes any harm at all to the health of smokers (let alone of non-smokers), but they could not name a single other substance, natural or synthetic, with as potent and as numerous therapeutic, protective and life-extending benefits as tobacco smoke. Nothing comes even close to this ancient biochemical miracle.

Ironically, some health conscious readers of those threads, who were strongly against smoking initially, started smoking after following up and checking the scientific references (or another here). Others, such as one smart woman mathematician, started their own sites on the theme "Smoking is good for you" (others here and here) and one moderator, who was ridiculing the idea initially, came back few weeks after the debate in his forum ended, acknowledging that he went out checked the references provided, then checked many of his own, and was left 'scratching his head'.

You can check one of the earlier such debates in a nootropic forum (part of imminst.org), later one here, or in another nootropic/health forum, or one in Dr Siegel's blog (medical doctor, university professor at BU & leading tobacco control expert; another one here)

In brief, all hard science of tobacco smoke (animal experiments, lab research at biochemical level, randomized human trials) supports position 'smoking is good for you', while the antismoking "science" (which was initiated by Nazis in 1930s), after nearly eight decades of intense research and vast resources spent, could not move beyond statistical correlations on non-randomized samples (self-selected subjects, not unlike web polls) i.e. they keep pointing out to this day that such and such diseases are more common among smokers. Duh. Namely, that kind of correlations on non-randomized samples, no matter how strong, are equally consistent with harmful or therapeutic/protective role of tobacco smoke. You need hard science to untangle the causal web behind such correlations. For example (more examples here), people who use respirators have shorter life expectancy than those who never used respirators, while former users of respirators fall in between (the same kind of associations hold for use of tobacco). Does that imply that respirators shorten lifespan?

Antismoking is enormously profitable scam masquerading as science (i.e. a typical junk science), largely produced and paid for by pharmaceutical industry. In return for its investments in battling this ancient medicinal plant (few billions every year for antismoking junk science, for creating and financing "grass roots" antismoking & diseases front groups, in bribes to politicians and "health" bureaucrats, buying antismoking laws and regulations,...), the big pharma profits not only from selling nicotine replacements and other smoking cessations products (which make them 5-7 billions annually), but vastly more from tens of millions in additional cases of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, asthma, allergies, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, obesity, diabetes,... all requiring years or decades of expensive drugs, and all largely result of frightening public away from this ancient medicinal miracle that has no equal, tobacco smoke (e.g. see some of the enumerated therapeutic benefits acknowledged by none other than pharma sponsored antismoking researchers here).

It's the insufferable puritanism that's gaining ground now that pisses me off.

Hey, there's no need to give the Puritans as a whole the bum rap:

The Social History of Smoking

G. L. Apperson

[...}"It is somewhat singular that the Puritans, who denounced most amusements and pleasures, and who frowned upon most of the occupations or diversions that make for gaiety and the enjoyment of life, did not, as Puritans, denounce the use of tobacco. One or two of their writers abused it roundly; but these were not representative of Puritan feeling on the subject. The explanation doubtless is that the practice of smoking was so very general and so much a matter of course among men of all ranks and of all opinions, that the mouths of Puritans were closed, so to speak, by their own pipes. A precisian, however, could take his tobacco with a difference. The seventeenth-century diarist, Abraham de la Pryme, says that he had heard of a Presbyterian minister who was so precise that "he would not as much as take a pipe of tobacco before that he had first sayed grace over it." George Wither, one of the most noteworthy of the poets who took the side of the Parliament, was confined in Newgate after the Restoration, and found comfort in his pipe.
Some of the Puritan colonists in America took a strong line on the subject. Under the famous "Blue Laws" of 1650 it was ordered by the General Court of Connecticut that no one under twenty-one was to smoke—"nor any other that hath not already accustomed himself to the use thereof." And no smoker could enjoy his pipe unless he obtained a doctor's certificate that tobacco would be "usefull for him, and allso that he hath received a lycense from the Courte for the same." But the unhappy smoker having passed the doctor and obtained his licence was still harassed by restrictions, for it was ordered that no man within the colony, after the publication of the order, should take any tobacco publicly "in the streett, highwayes, or any barn-yardes, or uppon training dayes, in any open places, under the penalty of six-pence for each offence against this order." The ingenuities of petty tyranny are ineffable. It is said that these "Blue Laws" are not authentic; but if they are not literally true, they are certainly well invented, for most of them can be paralleled and illustrated by laws and regulations of undoubted authenticity. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, in her interesting book, abounding in curious information, on "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," says that the use of tobacco "was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the houses were clustered round the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all on the Lord's Day, if the law were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed, poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fixed 10s. for each offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston the fine for 'drinking tobacco in the meeting-house' was 5s. for each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it; many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible. Four Yarmouth men—old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe—were in 1687 fined 4s. each for smoking tobacco around the end of the meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the tithing-man had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed."
On weekdays many New England Puritans probably smoked as their friends in old England did. A contemporary painting of a group of Puritan divines over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of Newbury, shows them well provided with punch-bowl and drinking-cups, tobacco and pipes. One parson, the Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of Charlestown, was very unconventional in his attire. He seldom wore a coat, "but generally appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth." John Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the Indians, warmly denounced both the wearing of wigs and the smoking of tobacco. But his denunciations were ineffectual in both matters—heads continued to be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and pipe-smoke continued to ascend. " [...]

Cordially,

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