RedMosesSC
Senior Member
Dabbed into Cigars a lil bit, "Punch", "Romeo and Juliet" are also great. I find ive had enough half way through the cigar so i dont get them too long but the longer ones are more comfortable.
Any Tabaki smokers here?
- Thread starter ixtlan
- Start date
ixtlan
Senior Member
History in Pipe Form.
At the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century it was common practice in Europe and other countries to award people pipes that were decorated with hand painted scenes and artwork. These awards were for public service, and retirements, and all types of occasions. These pipes became popular with the common populace as well and companies began producing them for the general market too. The Porcelain pipes were especially suited for this as the images could be fired on them and the pipes used. Although the use of porcelain as a pipe bowl material was not the ideal material because it transferred heat to the user and tended to crack when overheated it was none the less a popular fad for some time. There are some pretty fancy examples of these floating around even today.
This particular pipe is very rare.
Although not the fanciest; it contains the coat of arms of Bayern (Bavaria) which makes it an award for some type of government service.
However it is not the normal COA of Bayern.
This COA was designed by Otto Hupp.
What makes it unique is that it was only used from 1923 to 1933.
Prior to 1923 the COA of [SIZE=-1]the Wittelsbach family was used back to 1835.
After World War 1 and the collapse of the German Empire the region known as Bayern declared itself a free state. The political party in power was the Social Democrats, and the Independent Social Democrats. The Communist party came to power in 1919 and declared the [/SIZE]Bavarian Soviet Republic[SIZE=-1]. The German Government crushed the rebellion quickly and Bayern became again a state of the German Republic. That same year the National Socialist Party was created. This party was a Fascist party and became a strong influence in Bayern. In 1923 the NSP dumped the COA of the Wittlesbach family and adopted Otto Hupps design. The NSP staged a coup [/SIZE]d'état in attempt to overthrow the Federal Republic. This was known as the "Beer Hall Putsch" led by Adolf Hitler. Although unsuccessful and the party being banned by the Federal Government the party lived on as the Bavarian People’s Party later to be known in 1928 as the National Socialist German Workers Party or NASDAP. Better known as the Nazi Party. The party kept control over the state and kept the COA until 1933 when the NASDAP party took control over all of Germany; and all States were absorbed into the National Government. The COA was replaced at that time by the well known swastika.
History in a pipe.
At the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century it was common practice in Europe and other countries to award people pipes that were decorated with hand painted scenes and artwork. These awards were for public service, and retirements, and all types of occasions. These pipes became popular with the common populace as well and companies began producing them for the general market too. The Porcelain pipes were especially suited for this as the images could be fired on them and the pipes used. Although the use of porcelain as a pipe bowl material was not the ideal material because it transferred heat to the user and tended to crack when overheated it was none the less a popular fad for some time. There are some pretty fancy examples of these floating around even today.
This particular pipe is very rare.
Although not the fanciest; it contains the coat of arms of Bayern (Bavaria) which makes it an award for some type of government service.
However it is not the normal COA of Bayern.
This COA was designed by Otto Hupp.
What makes it unique is that it was only used from 1923 to 1933.
Prior to 1923 the COA of [SIZE=-1]the Wittelsbach family was used back to 1835.
After World War 1 and the collapse of the German Empire the region known as Bayern declared itself a free state. The political party in power was the Social Democrats, and the Independent Social Democrats. The Communist party came to power in 1919 and declared the [/SIZE]Bavarian Soviet Republic[SIZE=-1]. The German Government crushed the rebellion quickly and Bayern became again a state of the German Republic. That same year the National Socialist Party was created. This party was a Fascist party and became a strong influence in Bayern. In 1923 the NSP dumped the COA of the Wittlesbach family and adopted Otto Hupps design. The NSP staged a coup [/SIZE]d'état in attempt to overthrow the Federal Republic. This was known as the "Beer Hall Putsch" led by Adolf Hitler. Although unsuccessful and the party being banned by the Federal Government the party lived on as the Bavarian People’s Party later to be known in 1928 as the National Socialist German Workers Party or NASDAP. Better known as the Nazi Party. The party kept control over the state and kept the COA until 1933 when the NASDAP party took control over all of Germany; and all States were absorbed into the National Government. The COA was replaced at that time by the well known swastika.
History in a pipe.
ixtlan
Senior Member
Folks I know this is a bit long but it also applies to soooo many things.
Our cars are affected by this type of behavior also.
I had to post it up.
Good Read when ya have a few.
Bet you know some of these type people too.
There’s a smug alert in your neck of the woods.
By C. R. S. Lyles
It comes without mercy, and it comes without warrant. It can’t be reasoned with, negotiated, or swayed from its single-minded purpose to take from you what defines you as an American citizen: Choice .
Melodramatics aside, the singular focus of the health care crusaders parallels perfectly with the lampooning nature of the television show South Park, and more specifically one episode in which the writers address the issue of hybrid car drivers. Now, the nature of the episode leans toward the outlandishly excessive, but the message is clear: while the intent of the self-satisfied is noble, the means through which they seek to achieve their goals inevitably does more harm than good.
Which brings us nicely to the first point in our topics up for discussion: the mindset behind a health care crusader.
Individuals such as this, exampled through their unerring tendency to exert their beliefs and authority into private individuals’ lives, constitutes what psychologists term as "codependency".
Codependency, by definition, is "a tendency to behave in an overly passive or excessively caretaking way that negatively impacts one’s relationships and quality of life."
Health care reformists are not the only group that exhibits this trait; their ability to implement their own beliefs and their self-righteous mannerisms mirror those exhibited by the protesters seen holding signs outside the World Trade Center which blamed homosexuals for "God’s vengeance" and the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Their methods are the source material for the satirical "Green Police" commercial which aired during the 2010 Super Bowl, which portrayed Gestapo-esque militants arresting unsuspecting citizens for something as trivial as drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup.
The health care crusade, needless to say, is not the first time in American history that a minute group of private citizens takes up a cause they believe is right in order to subvert the power of the citizen and place that power in the hands of the American lawmakers.
Almost a century ago, this same tactic was used in order to begin prohibition, and look where that got us.
We are living on the cusp of the second age of prohibition, and it is the minority which is driving the engine of change right toward it. They may try to convince you that you, as smokers, are part of the small hold-out desperately clinging to arcane practices which single you out from a rational and technologically-advanced society that is desperately trying to save you from yourself, but they are wrong.
In the United States alone, an estimated 24.8 million men (approximately 23%) and 21.1 million women (approximately 18%) still smoke.
Among that number, approximately 44% of smokers are white, 43% are black, and 13% are of either Hispanic, Asian, or Native American nationality.
Now, while this percentage (41%) does lie in the outward minority, that still constitutes nearly 50 million individual adults who still smoke.
This information, taken from the American Heart Association’s website, shows that while the multitude of health care crusaders are trying to convince the American people to shun the last hold-out of individuals who smoke, there is much more than a "last hold-out" who continue to light up.
This revelation illustrates the controlling nature of the health care crusader’s psychology, meaning that "controlling people often demean or criticize others as a means of building themselves up and appearing superior and in control."
To put it in realistic terms, take the example of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s director, Thomas Frieden.
Frieden not only implemented a system to monitor New York City’s smoking rates, but also led the campaign to have smoking banned in the workplace. This ban gained ground in multiple states including California, where (to reference this publication’s interview) the cast of AMC’s Mad Men must smoke herbal cigarettes on camera rather than regular cigarettes in order to keep with the show’s 1960s aesthetic.
And tobacco is not the only issue that Frieden, as one of the primary figureheads of the health care crusade, takes offense with. Again in New York City, Frieden concocted a strategy to eliminate written consent for HIV testing, a plan which lays the framework for eventual forced testing for the disease. He also established an "involuntary, non-disclosed hemoglobin A1C diabetes registry that tracks patients’ blood sugar control over several months and report that information to treating physicians in an effort to help them provide better health care."
In addition to this , Frieden helped create the system through which all fast food and chain restaurants must now publish and post a "calorie-count" of all the food it sells and list its nutritional facts in a manner similar to those you find on the side of a cereal box.
In short, this evidence illuminates the highly-controlling nature of one of the health care crusade’s greatest champions, as well as illustrating the trickle-down effect that seems quite apparent to anyone who has had the pleasure of conversing with one of these charming individuals.
The definition of codependency and the very crux of a controlling personality has another, quite appropriate definition: "Controlling people often have difficulty dealing with problems objectively and will manipulate [...] others when their own mistakes are pointed out."
This truth is that self-satisfaction and self-righteousness leads a human being to believe that they are incapable of being proven wrong, that their cause is so noble, so just, that anyone who even slightly disagrees with it is greeted with hostility, animosity, and sometimes even outward displays of violence.
The rational and logical citizens of the United States have a common term for that: Jackass.
If you, as the aforementioned writers of South Park point out, "spew self-satisfied garbage" into the air, you are a jackass. If you feel the urge to intervene in strangers’ lives even when these advances are obviously unwelcome and blatantly rebuked, you are a jackass. And if you believe that abolishing smoking will lead to a better, cleaner, and safer world, then you are most definitely a jackass, because you obviously have not studied history or else you would understand what happens to human beings when they are not allowed to have something (which is not illegal, immoral, or proven harmful to anyone else around them) that they want.
America can’t suffer another prohibition , because if the worst thing that happened as an inadvertent reaction to the last one was the implementation of the mafia into American culture, just think about what would happen if there were to be a smoking prohibition.
Needless to say, there’s a smug alert on the horizon, and its effects can already be felt, leading one to wonder that if this is just the beginning of the smug crisis, what will the state of the nation be should its cause gain ground? Will citizens’ arrests for "green violations" be legalized? Will lynchings of smokers, who of course will be deemed as second-hand citizens, be implemented? Will random searches for "illicit contraband" or, even more frightening, non-disclosed medical screenings be allowed and, even worse, backed by the American lawmakers?
The slippery slope that leads to dystopian futures and fascist governments is paved with good intentions.
Again, take history into account: Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong all had good intentions for the betterment of their people in the beginning, and indeed won over a vast majority of them through propaganda and slogans. But it was, of course, the methods that they began using once they found that they had the majority that made them who history remembers them as, and, should the health care crusaders’ arguments be given credence and power, the shamefully belittling image of "The Eternal Jew" will be replaced with a menacing smoker, perhaps drawn to resemble Snidely Whiplash or the Boogeyman, shown persuading children to smoke or even laughingly blowing smoke into the faces of aghast and innocent bystanders.
The point is, you can take any issue and spin it to gain the backing of the majority. It’s called mob psychology, and the thing that leads to mob psychology more than anything else is a little thing called fear-mongering, which is exactly what the health care crusaders use when they stand out in the square with body bags and a megaphone screaming that the number of body bags lying before them is being used to portray the number of people who are going to die from smoking in that city today.
[This is the place referenced in the countless examples of a dystopian future; these are the limits of human control.
Since the 1600s, those in power have wanted nothing more than to bring the use of tobacco under their jurisdiction, either to control its sale or to eradicate it altogether. Beginning with James I, the tyranny of tobacco’s opposition has grown in its methods and goals, and yet the underlying motivation remains unchanged.
Last July, the University of Florida initiated a campus-wide ban of tobacco use on all of its properties, becoming one of the first major universities in Florida to do so.
The ban, stemming from an initiative put forth by the Healthy Gators Coalition, a branch of the Alachua County Health Department, outlawed "the personal use of any tobacco product, whether intended to be lit or not, which shall include smoking…, as well as the use of an electronic cigarette or any other device intended to simulate smoking and the use of smokeless tobacco, including snuff; chewing tobacco; smokeless pouches; any other form of loose-leaf, smokeless tobacco; and the use of unlit cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco."
Dr. Jane Emmerée, a former participant in the coalition, stated that "The mission of the coalition is to create an environment supportive of the development and maintenance of a healthy body, mind and spirit for all members of the University of Florida community"
Borrowing this mantra from Dr. Jill Varnes, the former vice chair of the Coalition, and Dr. Steve Dorman, the current vice chair, the statement itself, while understandably benevolent in its intention, begs the question, How does eradicating smoking develop or maintain a healthy mind or spirit for current smokers?
Yes, smoking is bad for the body, there’s been multiple reports and blah blah blah. That’s not the issue here.
The issue is that banning smoking on a public property is not only ill-advised, but can’t be enforced because smoking isn’t illegal.
Though the proponents of health care reform and the anti-smoking crusade would like nothing more than for tobacco to be illegalized, the fact remains that it is not, and the revenue it generates inadvertently pays for the aforementioned anti-tobacco proponents to continue with their vendetta.
Which, of course, brings up the issue of how to enforce a policy which is unfounded in any vestige of legality? The answer, simply put, is through fear.
For example, the other day a young student was caught by a police officer on the University of Florida campus while having a cigarette. The officer ridiculed and harassed the student for several minutes, reminiscent of a Gestapo-esque authority, before allowing the student, who had put out the cigarette when asked, to leave.
There was no citation given, no arrest, nothing. Nothing more than a lecture on the student’s personal health choices and how said choices were affecting the other students and, more importantly, the environment.
Since when did police officers have the authority to curb an individual’s behavior based on how that would affect the environment? Sure, if a student is opening up ten thousand aerosol cans simultaneously, then an intervention could be justified. But smoking? As referenced in the first part of this series, the self-satisfaction of the anti-smoking crusade knows no bounds.
Which leads into another component of their vendetta: the various advertising techniques that they choose to use in order to ensnare and confuse the smoking community.
For example, on January 12th of this year, the local independent newspaper of Gainesville, The Alligator, ran an advertisement which read:
"SMOKING STUDY: Do you smoke? Do you have a New Year’s resolution to QUIT SMOKING? The Alachua County Health Department is looking for young adults who drink alcohol and are interested in receiving a new treatment to help them quit smoking."
In researching why the advertisement specifically called for "young adults who drink alcohol", a representative of this particular division of the Alachua County Health Department stated that the program was designed to "look for a correlation between binge drinking and smoking."
Dr. Steven Pokorny, the head of this division, was unable to be reached for comment regarding this article in time for its publication, but the representative was able to provide a cursory background on the history of this program.
Beginning in July of last year (coincidentally coinciding with the campus-wide tobacco ban at UF), the program was designed to track how alcohol, and specifically binge drinking, affects smoking levels.
The program did stress that it is not encouraging students or young adults to binge drink, but is merely interested in tracking the correlation between the two.
This study is interesting for two main reasons: one, it is propagating the same myth begun over four hundred years ago by James I as an excuse to ban tobacco use, and two, it assumes (though not explicitly stated) that people who smoke are probably more likely to drink, and possibly to excess.
Smokers have a bad reputation, and always have, but to presume that a smoker is not only going to spew dangerous carcinogens into your children’s lungs but also drink to the point of blacking out is somewhat offensive.
The goal behind the initiatives at UF and the Alachua County Health Department are benevolent in nature, meaning they really do only want the health of our state and our nation to exceed the rest of the world’s because, frankly, America’s system of democracy makes it one of the few nations in the world that can become the healthiest. But the nature of being an American is having the freedom to choose, and while we have the capability to become the leader in world health care, it doesn’t mean we have the capacity.
People always will enjoy doing things which are slightly bad for them. Fast food, drinking, smoking, gambling…it’s the nature of freedom. We’re allowed to be a little stupid now and again, and the ability to do so is what smoking bans and health studies such as these detract from.
The people at the forefront of changing health care and how we treat our bodies are, in my experiences, kind, polite, and good-hearted people, but their participation in these endeavors is woefully misguided. As stated in the first installment of this series, smugness can be just as deadly as carbon-emissions, secondhand smoke, or chlorofluorocarbons.
But smugness, unlike those elements, brings a much more harmful effect than death with it. In lieu of mortality, smugness seeks to control the life choices and morality of the mass populous, all in the name of the all-mighty greater good.
Our cars are affected by this type of behavior also.
I had to post it up.
Good Read when ya have a few.
Bet you know some of these type people too.
There’s a smug alert in your neck of the woods.
By C. R. S. Lyles
It comes without mercy, and it comes without warrant. It can’t be reasoned with, negotiated, or swayed from its single-minded purpose to take from you what defines you as an American citizen: Choice .
Melodramatics aside, the singular focus of the health care crusaders parallels perfectly with the lampooning nature of the television show South Park, and more specifically one episode in which the writers address the issue of hybrid car drivers. Now, the nature of the episode leans toward the outlandishly excessive, but the message is clear: while the intent of the self-satisfied is noble, the means through which they seek to achieve their goals inevitably does more harm than good.
Which brings us nicely to the first point in our topics up for discussion: the mindset behind a health care crusader.
Individuals such as this, exampled through their unerring tendency to exert their beliefs and authority into private individuals’ lives, constitutes what psychologists term as "codependency".
Codependency, by definition, is "a tendency to behave in an overly passive or excessively caretaking way that negatively impacts one’s relationships and quality of life."
Health care reformists are not the only group that exhibits this trait; their ability to implement their own beliefs and their self-righteous mannerisms mirror those exhibited by the protesters seen holding signs outside the World Trade Center which blamed homosexuals for "God’s vengeance" and the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Their methods are the source material for the satirical "Green Police" commercial which aired during the 2010 Super Bowl, which portrayed Gestapo-esque militants arresting unsuspecting citizens for something as trivial as drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup.
The health care crusade, needless to say, is not the first time in American history that a minute group of private citizens takes up a cause they believe is right in order to subvert the power of the citizen and place that power in the hands of the American lawmakers.
Almost a century ago, this same tactic was used in order to begin prohibition, and look where that got us.
We are living on the cusp of the second age of prohibition, and it is the minority which is driving the engine of change right toward it. They may try to convince you that you, as smokers, are part of the small hold-out desperately clinging to arcane practices which single you out from a rational and technologically-advanced society that is desperately trying to save you from yourself, but they are wrong.
In the United States alone, an estimated 24.8 million men (approximately 23%) and 21.1 million women (approximately 18%) still smoke.
Among that number, approximately 44% of smokers are white, 43% are black, and 13% are of either Hispanic, Asian, or Native American nationality.
Now, while this percentage (41%) does lie in the outward minority, that still constitutes nearly 50 million individual adults who still smoke.
This information, taken from the American Heart Association’s website, shows that while the multitude of health care crusaders are trying to convince the American people to shun the last hold-out of individuals who smoke, there is much more than a "last hold-out" who continue to light up.
This revelation illustrates the controlling nature of the health care crusader’s psychology, meaning that "controlling people often demean or criticize others as a means of building themselves up and appearing superior and in control."
To put it in realistic terms, take the example of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s director, Thomas Frieden.
Frieden not only implemented a system to monitor New York City’s smoking rates, but also led the campaign to have smoking banned in the workplace. This ban gained ground in multiple states including California, where (to reference this publication’s interview) the cast of AMC’s Mad Men must smoke herbal cigarettes on camera rather than regular cigarettes in order to keep with the show’s 1960s aesthetic.
And tobacco is not the only issue that Frieden, as one of the primary figureheads of the health care crusade, takes offense with. Again in New York City, Frieden concocted a strategy to eliminate written consent for HIV testing, a plan which lays the framework for eventual forced testing for the disease. He also established an "involuntary, non-disclosed hemoglobin A1C diabetes registry that tracks patients’ blood sugar control over several months and report
In addition to this
In short, this evidence illuminates the highly-controlling nature of one of the health care crusade’s greatest champions, as well as illustrating the trickle-down effect that seems quite apparent to anyone who has had the pleasure of conversing with one of these charming individuals.
The definition of codependency and the very crux of a controlling personality has another, quite appropriate definition: "Controlling people often have difficulty dealing with problems objectively and will manipulate [...] others when their own mistakes are pointed out."
This truth is that self-satisfaction and self-righteousness leads a human being to believe that they are incapable of being proven wrong, that their cause is so noble, so just, that anyone who even slightly disagrees with it is greeted with hostility, animosity, and sometimes even outward displays of violence.
The rational and logical citizens of the United States have a common term for that: Jackass.
If you, as the aforementioned writers of South Park point out, "spew self-satisfied garbage" into the air, you are a jackass. If you feel the urge to intervene in strangers’ lives even when these advances are obviously unwelcome and blatantly rebuked, you are a jackass. And if you believe that abolishing smoking will lead to a better, cleaner, and safer world, then you are most definitely a jackass, because you obviously have not studied history or else you would understand what happens to human beings when they are not allowed to have something (which is not illegal, immoral, or proven harmful to anyone else around them) that they want.
America can’t suffer another prohibition , because if the worst thing that happened as an inadvertent reaction to the last one was the implementation of the mafia into American culture, just think about what would happen if there were to be a smoking prohibition.
Needless to say, there’s a smug alert on the horizon, and its effects can already be felt, leading one to wonder that if this is just the beginning of the smug crisis, what will the state of the nation be should its cause gain ground? Will citizens’ arrests for "green violations" be legalized? Will lynchings of smokers, who of course will be deemed as second-hand citizens, be implemented? Will random searches for "illicit contraband" or, even more frightening, non-disclosed medical screenings be allowed and, even worse, backed by the American lawmakers?
The slippery slope that leads to dystopian futures and fascist governments is paved with good intentions.
Again, take history into account: Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong all had good intentions for the betterment of their people in the beginning, and indeed won over a vast majority of them through propaganda and slogans. But it was, of course, the methods that they began using once they found that they had the majority that made them who history remembers them as, and, should the health care crusaders’ arguments be given credence and power, the shamefully belittling image of "The Eternal Jew" will be replaced with a menacing smoker, perhaps drawn to resemble Snidely Whiplash or the Boogeyman, shown persuading children to smoke or even laughingly blowing smoke into the faces of aghast and innocent bystanders.
The point is, you can take any issue and spin it to gain the backing of the majority. It’s called mob psychology, and the thing that leads to mob psychology more than anything else is a little thing called fear-mongering, which is exactly what the health care crusaders use when they stand out in the square with body bags and a megaphone screaming that the number of body bags lying before them is being used to portray the number of people who are going to die from smoking in that city today.
[This is the place referenced in the countless examples of a dystopian future; these are the limits of human control.
Since the 1600s, those in power have wanted nothing more than to bring the use of tobacco under their jurisdiction, either to control its sale or to eradicate it altogether. Beginning with James I, the tyranny of tobacco’s opposition has grown in its methods and goals, and yet the underlying motivation remains unchanged.
Last July, the University of Florida initiated a campus-wide ban of tobacco use on all of its properties, becoming one of the first major universities in Florida to do so.
The ban, stemming from an initiative put forth by the Healthy Gators Coalition, a branch of the Alachua County Health Department, outlawed "the personal use of any tobacco product, whether intended to be lit or not, which shall include smoking…, as well as the use of an electronic cigarette or any other device intended to simulate smoking and the use of smokeless tobacco, including snuff; chewing tobacco; smokeless pouches; any other form of loose-leaf, smokeless tobacco; and the use of unlit cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco."
Dr. Jane Emmerée, a former participant in the coalition, stated that "The mission of the coalition is to create an environment supportive of the development and maintenance of a healthy body, mind and spirit for all members of the University of Florida community"
Borrowing this mantra from Dr. Jill Varnes, the former vice chair of the Coalition, and Dr. Steve Dorman, the current vice chair, the statement itself, while understandably benevolent in its intention, begs the question, How does eradicating smoking develop or maintain a healthy mind or spirit for current smokers?
Yes, smoking is bad for the body, there’s been multiple reports and blah blah blah. That’s not the issue here.
The issue is that banning smoking on a public property is not only ill-advised, but can’t be enforced because smoking isn’t illegal.
Though the proponents of health care reform and the anti-smoking crusade would like nothing more than for tobacco to be illegalized, the fact remains that it is not, and the revenue it generates inadvertently pays for the aforementioned anti-tobacco proponents to continue with their vendetta.
Which, of course, brings up the issue of how to enforce a policy which is unfounded in any vestige of legality? The answer, simply put, is through fear.
For example, the other day a young student was caught by a police officer on the University of Florida campus while having a cigarette. The officer ridiculed and harassed the student for several minutes, reminiscent of a Gestapo-esque authority, before allowing the student, who had put out the cigarette when asked, to leave.
There was no citation given, no arrest, nothing. Nothing more than a lecture on the student’s personal health choices and how said choices were affecting the other students and, more importantly, the environment.
Since when did police officers have the authority to curb an individual’s behavior based on how that would affect the environment? Sure, if a student is opening up ten thousand aerosol cans simultaneously, then an intervention could be justified. But smoking? As referenced in the first part of this series, the self-satisfaction of the anti-smoking crusade knows no bounds.
Which leads into another component of their vendetta: the various advertising techniques that they choose to use in order to ensnare and confuse the smoking community.
For example, on January 12th of this year, the local independent newspaper of Gainesville, The Alligator, ran an advertisement which read:
"SMOKING STUDY: Do you smoke? Do you have a New Year’s resolution to QUIT SMOKING? The Alachua County Health Department is looking for young adults who drink alcohol and are interested in receiving a new treatment to help them quit smoking."
In researching why the advertisement specifically called for "young adults who drink alcohol", a representative of this particular division of the Alachua County Health Department stated that the program was designed to "look for a correlation between binge drinking and smoking."
Dr. Steven Pokorny, the head of this division, was unable to be reached for comment regarding this article in time for its publication, but the representative was able to provide a cursory background on the history of this program.
Beginning in July of last year (coincidentally coinciding with the campus-wide tobacco ban at UF), the program was designed to track how alcohol, and specifically binge drinking, affects smoking levels.
The program did stress that it is not encouraging students or young adults to binge drink, but is merely interested in tracking the correlation between the two.
This study is interesting for two main reasons: one, it is propagating the same myth begun over four hundred years ago by James I as an excuse to ban tobacco use, and two, it assumes (though not explicitly stated) that people who smoke are probably more likely to drink, and possibly to excess.
Smokers have a bad reputation, and always have, but to presume that a smoker is not only going to spew dangerous carcinogens into your children’s lungs but also drink to the point of blacking out is somewhat offensive.
The goal behind the initiatives at UF and the Alachua County Health Department are benevolent in nature, meaning they really do only want the health of our state and our nation to exceed the rest of the world’s because, frankly, America’s system of democracy makes it one of the few nations in the world that can become the healthiest. But the nature of being an American is having the freedom to choose, and while we have the capability to become the leader in world health care, it doesn’t mean we have the capacity.
People always will enjoy doing things which are slightly bad for them. Fast food, drinking, smoking, gambling…it’s the nature of freedom. We’re allowed to be a little stupid now and again, and the ability to do so is what smoking bans and health studies such as these detract from.
The people at the forefront of changing health care and how we treat our bodies are, in my experiences, kind, polite, and good-hearted people, but their participation in these endeavors is woefully misguided. As stated in the first installment of this series, smugness can be just as deadly as carbon-emissions, secondhand smoke, or chlorofluorocarbons.
But smugness, unlike those elements, brings a much more harmful effect than death with it. In lieu of mortality, smugness seeks to control the life choices and morality of the mass populous, all in the name of the all-mighty greater good.
Last edited:
I used to smoke.. quit about a year ago (best thing I ever did for myself.. lol)
I used to buy fresh from www.customblends.com
Unfortunately, the "PACT Act", which passed last year, prevents them from shipping across state lines. These folks have some of the best blends I've ever smoked. No added chemicals, FSC paper, or any of that crap.
I quit because of health problems (blood pressure).
Travis
I used to buy fresh from www.customblends.com
Unfortunately, the "PACT Act", which passed last year, prevents them from shipping across state lines. These folks have some of the best blends I've ever smoked. No added chemicals, FSC paper, or any of that crap.
I quit because of health problems (blood pressure).
Travis
mpf
forum member
hey, there is one that appears to have 2 bowls...or is that a carburetor on one, lol!
I do remember certain water pipes circa late 70's had a carburetor....
ixtlan
Senior Member
LOL
See the post about that one.
I assume your speakin of the ceramic one.
You could say in those days it was legal to smoke what you refer too.
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