Why Democrats MUST take the House back, keep the Senate and win in the states:
I link here and paste below the story entitled: “War on smoking: More diseases linked to cigarettes.”
In 1964 when the first Surgeon General report emerged that smoking was directly related to lung cancer, the for-profit-only tobacco titans tried to sow the seeds of connective doubt that it was. There is more than enough evidence accumulated now, unless people of first-world nations have been under a rock for the last 50 years, that if humans do smoke they will, most probably, die before their time, from a host of diseases not the least of which is lung cancer and heart disease. Adding other diseases to the list of suffering that inhaling tobacco smoke brings is, to me, no big surprise.
The unethical corporate many of tobacco land before 1964 closed their eyes to the smoking and health link, paid equally unethical scientists well to deny the link after it was known, sold the seeds of doubt to the populous and stuffed billions into their bank accounts as they peddled their poison killing millions.
The percentage who smoke should be reduced to zero but that will, of course, never happen. It will continue to cost the individual who smokes, their families and the tax payers huge medical costs many cannot afford to pay not to mention the emotional toll it exacts. The lesson to all of us should be, naturally, do not smoke – ever – or stop if you are smoking now.
The only ethical edict money possesses is that which humans attach to it and unethical humans plentifully exist, as they always have, to deny the obvious for the accumulation of great wealth. This was true over decades for the tobacco industry and it is no less true for the petroleum and fossil fuel industries as they feed the denial of human fossil fuel consumption and its existentially destructive-to-the-planet influence on climate change. They pawn the denial off on those who either lack the intelligence to see the truth or have a vested interest in not admitting to it even though ad infinitum weather catastrophes can be seen and experienced everywhere just as one could sense decades ago, even before the surgeon general’s report, some curious connection between smoking and cancer.
The issue of the relationship of human disease and tobacco is well known and it is the prism through which one can now view the relationship between the human over consumption of fossil fuels and its responsibility for the annihilative forces of climate change on the planet. Know-nothings and the unethical wealth hoarders who take advantage of them will not admit the truths of science if their lives depended upon it and all of our lives, in fact, do.
If the corporate interests do not even care about their own children how can we think they will care about us? Those who know, love science and desperately want to protect the only earth that sustains our lives will pay the price of the fossil fuel industry’s greed as our planet crumbles before our very eyes because of it. The arctic ice melt, intense heat, the massive droughts and fires they spawn, the plentiful extreme category hurricanes, floods, typhoons, tornadoes, and blizzards as well as the extreme temperatures of cold and ice are the layman’s sentient proof of that which science screams and 98% of climate scientists reinforce.
The blue marble, earth, seen majestically from space, is in trouble and the obviousness of that truth is in front of our eyes. One individual can save his/her life if they stop smoking but the reversal of climate change can only be stopped through a partnership between the captains of industry and the government power of many nation states. Our job as individuals is to demand that they look to see the truth before the midnight hour strikes and it is too late for any of us to do a thing about it!
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/war-smoking-more-diseases-linked-cigarettes-2D11944421
