Best movie of the last decade - Thank you for Smoking - Trailer

Witty. Clever. Honest. Refreshing. Thank you for Smoking is the werewolf's favorite film of the last decade. It is also one of the few examples of a cinematic translation usurping the book from which it is based on nearly all fronts. That is a distinction that is hard to come by. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and buy it. It's a keeper.

Barone: How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science.

Michael Barone has a great piece about the self-inflicted and fanatical wounds that gradually eroded the credibility of the climate change movement from within. The article itself is well-researched and meticulously cited, here are some brief excerpts: 

"Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority." Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever."

Does anyone else catch the irony in that last line?

Anyhow, the moral of the story is that transparency, accountability, and honesty are crucial to successfully pushing an effective issues campaign in this day and age. Information is readily available and easy to access. As the article suggests, the big question will be,  how did large swaths of society, especially governments and corporations become so enthralled with an idea driven by junk science at best and manipulative deceivers on a blind crusade at worst ? The werewolf thinks for governments it was about control and for corporations it was a short term play to try and find revenue opportunities. Not particularly flattering for either. Still, thank goodness for the vigilance of those who questioned the herd mentality on this issue.

Tobacco Control and Free Speech — An American Dilemma

An old nemesis of the werewolf sent him this article, "Tobacco Control and Free Speech - An American Dilemma" recently published in the The New England Journal of Medicine. It provides interesting analysis of how the attempts to restrict tobacco advertising in the name of public health have shaped up recently. For anyone with an interest in free speech, advertising, public health, tobacco, advocacy, and democratic societies this makes for a great read.

A few things struck the werewolf from this article.

-Public health officials hate the 1st Amendment and view it as an impediment.

-People assume that their something virtuous in European social democracies where censorship, conditional speech, and state supremacy all kick around the individual. We have a constitution that guarantees us scared rights and has been cornerstone of our civil society since it was founded. The Europeans lack the same sense of history, document, or tradition. This needs to be highlighted and emulating them needs to be avoided like a case of the clap from $5 Mexican hooker.

-Public health officials still hide behind yesterday's "save the kids" argument. This cynicism needs to end. It's dishonest.

-Tobacco companies have ceded too much of their communications authority over the years and are scared to fight back with full effectiveness. They should be able to transparently communicate efficacy of alternative tobacco products as a worthy substitute.

-A commenter posted that there needs to be an unapologetic tobacco company. The werewolf wholeheartedly agrees. The company should be called 6 Feet Under, have three brands Death, Tumors, and Black Spot, the packs should be black, and coffin shaped,  featuring the grim reaper on them, and the slogan should read "this shit is risky as hell and may kill you, make an adult F*CKING decision, and enjoy."It would usher in a new paradigm for corporate social responsibility.

-There seems to be a desire to obstruct communications about these products or else allow the narrow-minded folks at the FDA and health groups to monopolize all information. Information should never be trusted from a single source, especially when the motives are questionable. What ever happened to the free exchange of ideas and allowing room for debate. Instead of launching new studies and coming to new conclusions, there seems to be a dependence of the health officials on yesterday's data and thoughts. Instead of being permanently adversarial, have public health officials ever thought to partner with big  tobacco in way to shape honest advertising, that allows the market to operate in the interest of the consumer, explains the risk, and allows for inter-brand competition?

Those are just a few thoughts on the article. It is a great read. The werewolf can't get over how strange the times we live in are. 

Smokers: Social subversives and the threshold of societal tolerance

The werewolf can't even begin to list the reasons why he loves Jeremy Clarkson's latest Times of London column "The worst thing about the smoking ban." The article masterfully hits at several important themes about the erosion of society, freedom, individuality, tolerance of permissible decadence, the expense of having free-loaders bumming a stick off you, etc. However, one observation from the article struck the werewolf as particularly poignant:

Smoking, then, has become like freemasonry or homosexuality. We have our secret signs. Our equivalent of funny handshakes and gaydar. We use tricks and nods and winks to establish a bond with other smokers. We coerce them into lighting up first, to gauge the reaction, and then we huddle around the lone ashtray, feeling lost in the room but somehow emboldened by one another’s company.

That paragraph got the werewolf thinking about modern society's threshold and tolerance for certain behaviors and lifestyle choices. Why do some formerly taboo behaviors gradually gain acceptance, while others formerly in the norm get continually more marginalized? During the werewolf's lifetime, homosexuality has evolved into a mostly accepted societal norm (a good thing for the most part) while smoking has grown more subversive, taboo, and been pushed further out to the periphery with each passing year.

The werewolf isn't suggesting that there is a direct correlation between being gay and smoking; as one is a clearly human trait, whereas the other is a lifestyle choice. He is suggesting that modern society may have problems in terms of allocating tolerance with what it wants to deem acceptable, and where it feels the need to be punitive can get a little haywire. He is also not saying that the two generate the same negative externalities. Smoking clearly has the edge on that front. However, informal observation over werewolf's lifetime and his inner MBA sees a direct correlation to the advancement and mainstreaming of homosexuality and the stigmatization of smoking. To graphically chart it, one has increased drastically, and the other has decreased. It fascinates him.

The werewolf was privileged to grow up in the heart of Los Angeles. Growing up in Southern California afforded the werewolf two observational social extremes. One of being on the cutting edge of tolerance for gays, the other being at the epicenter for the no-fun crowd and anti-smoking zealots. As a whelp, the werewolf was raised around smokers. His mother was a relentless smoker, as was his aunt, plus his best friend's father, just to name a few. It was a normal behavior and it was still kosher to smoke indoors back in those days.

He also grew up a few miles from the west coast's most famous "gay ghetto" outside of San Francisco, West Hollywood. In the late 80's and early 90's there was no shortage of decent folks who fit the modern "flaming gay" archetype constantly in the background of the werewolf's neighborhood. You know, those who float instead of walk, wore frighteningly tight jeans, were a little too toned, sported names like Troy, have lethal lisps, and displayed a variety of softer traits that in no way conveyed a sense of masculinity. God bless them. They always made the young werewolf chuckle (still do). Also, they were always present in the background and therefore integrated into the normal acceptable bandwidth of what he grew to expect from fellow humans. Perhaps the heavy exposure to both from an early age created the sense of being perfectly comfortable with each of them as a facet of a fully functioning society.

As the years progressed California prided itself on being at the forefront of inventing Jim Crow for smokers by aggressively banning most indoor smoking, insane taxes, social stigmatization, and worst of all forcing us school kids to endure ridiculous seminars from no-fun mandarins on the perils/sins/evils/villainy of smoking at the expense of school time that should have been devoted to something meaningful. One of the werewolf's fonder memories about smokers getting squeezed was during a summer internship with a financial services firm located in a downtown LA sky-rise. The werewolf's manager was a crusty old chain smoking Vietnam vet who liked to have someone to speak with when he'd go out for a smoke which was about once an hour. Given that the young werewolf was the dip-shit intern with nothing of import to do, he'd frequently be grabbed by the old salt dog, take the elevator down twenty-three floors, and go to a special zone outside and listen to stories about how since smoking helped this guy kill the v.c. for his country, it would also help serve his clients better. The werewolf also realized that his manager collected about three additional weeks of annual vacation just by virtue of the time taken to get outside to enjoy a heater.

While all of the aforementioned was going on, California was on the forefront of celebrating an easy place for gays to be mainstreamed.

To the main point of this long rambling post, does modern society have a limited amount of tolerance it is willing to distribute, and does the advancement of one cause get equalized by the stigmatization of another? Have we created a new class of subtle subversives who are getting short shrift of what society has to offer while legitimately empowering another?

Are the new social agitators and freedom activists those who dare to light up? Is the rest of society beginning to feel so constrained by do-gooderism that we'll drive smokers to bankruptcy when we want to bum a smoke from them in an attempt to express solidarity? Have we eased the natural tension of accepting a broader sexual paradigm into the norm by restricting voluntary and formerly acceptable social behaviors? The werewolf knows there are two parallel themes running in tandem here, but he can't help but feel that something is amiss with society's distribution of tolerance.

Reason: Tobacco Truth Gets Smoked

This article from Reason magazine paints one of the most thorough and honest pictures of the alternative tobacco market landscape. It is a must read for anyone interested in how out-of-whack the government and public health officials are when it comes to understanding the war against smokers and peoples health. FYI, cigarettes can be very hazardous to your health!

Despite being a non-smoker, the article hit home for the werewolf on multiple levels. Let the werewolf declare it here, during the summer of 2008, the werewolf was officially a vassal in the tobacco castle. The werewolf spent his MBA summer internship working on alternative tobacco product marketing strategy and corporate social responsibility initiatives for one of America's largest tobacco companies. Being the misanthrope that he is, playing Nick Naylor lite for summer was a dream job. Anyhow, the article states all of the key take-aways from the werewolf's experience with both an eloquence and accuracy in its writing that the werewolf hopes to achieve someday. You'll be spared all of harm reduction, reduced risk mantra that became the werewolf's second inner dialog at one point in his life, as it is all spelled out in the article.

The werewolf has many amusing stories from his experience that he'll indirectly share at some point. (He'll have to be nuanced though, big tobacco NDA'd him out the wazoo) He will say that he learned just how vicious the folks in public health advocacy are and how their anti-smoking crusade is more like a jihad than anything else. One of the werewolf's responsibilities was performing corporate social social responsibility outreach, which involved communicating with hostile stakeholders (public health advocates). During a conversation with a senior apparatchik from a leading and well-known public health advocacy organization involving smokeless tobacco concepts, the werewolf was told to pound sand and that "we are more interested in driving you a**holes out of business than saving lives at this point." The hate filled rage, disregard for the organization's health charter, and blind questioning of yesterday's cause really shocked the werewolf and drained him of all respect for those who claim to be champions of health. When these guys win the war against big tobacco(and they will, sadly), I pity whomever they target next, because for them, it's about winning at any cost, not saving lives, nor helping people. Never forget that.

Power to the people: Blowing smoke in Bloomberg's face.

Although oddly placed in the style section of the paper, this interesting New York Times piece gave the werewolf a reason to smile. Although not a smoker himself, he has long thought that smoking bans aimed at independent businesses were one of the worst assaults on freedom, commerce, and the individual. The people of New York are starting to rebel against their imperial no-fun crowd chieftain, and super-nanny, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, by lighting up and puffing away. Open defiance instances like this are the small victories against tyranny we must savor in this struggle called life.

I am sure that within the next few days, legions of public health brown shirts will descend on the various venues mentioned in this article on a mission to fine these freedom loving transgressors and the proprietors of the bars. However, the sign that the law is being flaunted in an instance like this is a tell-tale indication of dissatisfaction with the intrusion of government into the details of our day-to-day lives.

The werewolf has always thought that a market based solution to the so called concern that non-smokers have about entering smoking establishments would be best. If you're a savvy entrepreneur, and notice that large segments of the socially active population are unhappy about smelling like an ashtray at the end of the night, the solution is simple. Open up a hip, and edgy bar that offers a similar ambiance to the popular smoking bars, only it's sans smoke! If people are truly concerned about their proximity to smokers, this business model should thrive, and we can enjoy a tolerant society, where smokers, and their non-smoking kinsman, can co-exist on the same active social circuit. Sadly, the no-fun crowd and their imperial army of nannies can't stand a society where people are free to make their own choices. Here's to the defiant New York hipsters!