It's been about five days since my first order of Swedish Snus arrived and I started trying out a selection of brands and varieties, trying to use it to replace my fifteen year addiction to Camel Filter Cigarettes. So not a lot of time on the Snus yet, but enough to feel more familiar with it and to report in on first impressions and general progress.
As an addict whose only form of nicotine delivery has ever been cigarettes, snus is taking some getting used to. I've never tried chew or dip. My father dipped skoal for many years before quitting, and I can remember many a long car ride where he'd put some in and the car would fill with the nauseatingly sweet cloying smell. That and the random Bud cans kicking about with spit in em was enough to form a permanent aversion to the stuff.
I've never had any sort of tobacco juice floating around in my mouth, nor really tasted tobacco that wasn't being incinerated and inhaled as smoke. Nor have I really had many things stuck up under my lip, especially my top lip, which just seems like an odd place to put stuff. So all-in-all this was a brand new experience for me. I'd read so many testimonials from people who absolutely love the stuff, swear by it, and quit smoking, chewing, or dipping relatively easily by using snus, that it was hard not to have high expectations colored by all the favorable commentary.
It took about a week for my first order to arrive from The Northerner. Not bad for overseas mail. I ordered on a Thursday and received it the following Thursday. By the time it got here I was looking forward to it so much, and getting more and more sick of smoking each day, that I "Woohooed!" when I opened the mailbox and it took a fair amount of restraint to keep myself from skipping back across the lawn to the house. So again, it was hard not to color my first experience with high expectations.
I went inside, ripped into the padded envelope and started pulling out the couple handfuls of small round cans, lining them up in front of me. I get a weird aesthetic thrill out of having any multitude of small things, strange, and hard to explain. It's amazing I don't have collections of random objects. I also enjoy design, so laying out these little cans and looking at the various packaging and labeling designs was a joy in itself.
Now to get down to it. I decided to start at the top, with a General Onyx portion. These are technically "White" portions, meaning the portion doesn't go through a final stage of wetting, where the teabag like portion material is saturated with tobacco juice, making it moist and speeding up the time in which you start getting the full flavor and juices from it. But the General Onyx portion material is black, and very smooth. The portions are also arranged in the can in a circular "fan" where they sit up on edge, instead of all just being tossed willy-nilly into the can. It's a pretty impressive package when you open the sleek looking chrome topped black can. The portions are also more tapered, rather than being a plump little pillow of snus. It seemed this might help it fit under the lip better, conforming to the contours of mouth and lip. Though after trying a variety out, I can't say the Onyx really sit up there easier or more comfortably than some others.
Finding the right spot under the top lip for the portion can be a little tricky at first. Really, there didn't seem to be an innate spot where it just fit and sat comfortably. Initially, all portions seem to feel bulky under the lip. You really feel like you've got a huge bump in the front of your face. It can be somewhat surprising to see that it's really not very noticeable, and if you can look at yourself unselfconsciousy, you'll probably realize that to someone who didn't know it was there, they would be able to tell. The biggest effect it has is that you lose some of the natural mobility of that side of your lip. When you talk or smile or laugh, the portion holds one side of your top lip more or less in place, resulting in a somewhat crooked smile, though still not anything too strange or deformed looking.
At first, the portion burned pretty well against the inside of my lip. This is often described as a "tingle" in snus instructions, but it was most definitely more of a burn. This tapered off some after a few minutes, to mostly be replaced with a salt and peppery taste, along with an unfamiliar tobacco taste as the portion "juiced up" as it got moistened with saliva. The juice wasn't really the tastiest thing ever, nor did it feel especially pleasant going down my throat. The sensation in my throat was definitely more of a "tingle" than a "burn", but really wasn't very comfortable at all.
So it wasn't an immediate love. It wasn't an "Mmmmm delicious" sort of experience. I stuck with the portion for about an hour though, giving it the full chance, and waiting for the nicotine to set in. Despite having a higher than normal 11mg of nicotine, I didn't get any sort of buzz off of it, though I certainly didn't find myself jonesin' for a smoke or anything either. For the most part I found myself wanting to get done with the portion, not because I didn't like it, but because I still had a multitude of other varieties to try out.
The real test came the following day, the first day of starting with Snus first thing in the morning and going through a workday with it. I have to say it worked well. I pretty quickly grew to really like the nicotine delivery of the snus, as it gives a much longer lasting appeasement to the addiction. I got a little wound up when I combined my morning coffee with a portion, the caffeine and nicotine together had me twitching along for a bit, but for the most part it seemed the more constant supply of nicotine gave me a more peaceful fix than the quick but short lived burst from a cigarette, that quickly leaves me wanting another cigarette.
As the days have gone by, I've gotten more and more used to the sensation and taste of the snus. I do find it much more enjoyable to snus while having some drink to sip on, and the flavors combine well with a variety of things. I've already decided that Roda Lacket for instance, pairs nicely with my morning latte, while Ettan or Onyx goes better with black coffee. Roda Lacket is so far my favorite, so I've combined it with more things, like Honey Ginseng green tea, delicious. And so far most of them have gone just fine with the dark beers I favor. Overall though, I probably primarily just keep a glass of ice water handy to sip on and keep the portion wet and my mouth rinsed. I've never been a big fan of drinking water, so am probably taking in the recommended amount of daily hydration for the first time in my life. Add that to only smoking about 4 cigarettes a day after so many years of at least a pack a day, and there are some pretty immediate indications that snus is going to be much healthier for me.
As far as quitting smoking, I'm sure that will come in time. From the first portion I tried, my smoking dropped drastically, and since then, like I said, it's been around 4 cigarettes a day. I still find it challenging at times not to smoke, mostly due to routines and habits, and those times when I feel the need for an immediate boost of nicotine. First thing in the morning, after a large meal, when I'm just sitting around with little to do, or most especially when I'm feeling particularly stressed. I'm sure any of these things would be fairly easy to overcome, except that I've still got cigarettes around. I had about two and a half packs left in my carton when the snus came, so until those are gone, I'll probably still find myself reaching for one at times. There've already been more than a few times I've found my hand going for them out of habit, then realizing what I was doing, and that I currently had snus in my mouth, and certainly wasn't craving nicotine.
Even without having entirely quit so far, just dropping to a few a day I've started to notice odd side effects. I've already been startled a time or two when I've sensed odd smells. I've smoked for over half my life, so I'm pretty used to the "normality" of only really picking up on strong, pervasive scents that were in close proximity to me. So it's still catching me by surprise, and giving me that "something is out of place" feeling when I'm in a familiar area, around familiar things, and suddenly smell something unusual, only to hunt it down and realize it's nothing unusual at all.
Cigarettes also are smelling and tasting worse and worse as I go along. Which is one of the reasons I was able to pretty easily get past my initial neutrality towards the taste and sensation of the snus. I knew that cigarettes don't really taste good, how could they? That when I started they were kinda nasty and we really just kept puffing on em to get that nice nicotine buzz. We always said we'd quit as soon as we stopped getting the buzz, that there'd be no point after that. Of course, once you stop getting that buzz, you're hooked. But we were 14, what the hell did we know?
So that's where this experiment is at. About five days in, I'm snussin' all the time, and only smoking a few times a day. Getting more and more used to and fond of the snus, more able to distinguish particular flavors in the varieties, and pick out my personal faves and not so much choices. Putting together a second order to try out some more of the many different types, and get some of the more heavily flavored and mini portions for Ariel to give a shot as so far she's not at all fond of the regular tobaccoey flavors.
Even having a portion in pretty constantly, I've barely made a dent in the first order of 10 cans I put in. That order ran me about $38 with shipping, which in today's market would get me what... not even eight packs of smokes. Obviously the cans I have will last me much longer than the eight days tops $38 worth of smokes would last. Even buying cartons would be $45 every ten days, and $45 worth of snus could easily last twice as long or longer. So the good things keep adding up.
I'll update again on the continued progress of this experiment, once I have a better idea of daily use and have been using it long enough to get more familiar with the flavors and such I'll list off some of my faves and give some tips for picking out varieties to start with.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Center Ice blackouts for NHLTV, another great cable ripoff
Being a hockey fan living in an area of the country nearly devoid of hockey fans, not to mention professional hockey teams, the availability to subscribe to Center Ice for the hockey season is a pretty enjoyable thing. When I first moved to Oregon in April of 2002, it was at the very beginning of that year's post season. I thought surely when I got here that I'd be able to find a channel that would broadcast at least some of the playoff games, or at the very least, a sports bar where I could watch them, or the Stanley Cup finals at the least.
No dice. I quickly came to the realization that in general, people in Oregon aren't interested in Hockey, and I pretty much gave up on being able to watch it. So for a few years I pretty much stopped following the game. Then one day in 2006, after having moved a few miles from Charter Cable territory into Comcast territory I realized there was a new channel in the listings, OLN, and that intermittently amidst a rather scattered and repetitious programming lineup, they actually broadcast some hockey games.
Moving forward, OLN was eventually replaced with VS, or became VS, or something of the sort, and I realized also that CSN (Comcast Sports Network) also was occasionally broadcasting hockey games. And then during the 07-08 seasons, I noticed that sometimes on Sundays NBC would broadcast a "game of the week". This was all pretty great news to me, being able to finally catch the odd hockey game was fantastic, especially during the playoffs when there was constantly hockey on.
But after a year of trying to follow along throughout the season, and finding that the teams we'd get to see were pretty random when it came to VS and NBC, and limited to "local" hockey teams on CSN (local as in mostly the Vancouver Canucks 425 miles away in Canada, which is a different country, btw. Or the occasional San Jose Sharks game, 565 miles away in California, which borders Oregon, but may still qualify as another country). I could care less about the Canucks, though after watching Vancouver's Hordichuk take a run at Dallas's goalkeeper Marty Turco last night, I'm hoping to get the chance to see Vancouver stomped into the ground in the playoffs. Hating hockey teams is almost as much fun as loving them.
I grew up watching Lemieux play, and have always been a Pittsburgh Penguins fan, and my sweetheart is a Texas transplant, and an avid Dallas Stars fan. So being stuck in the northwest and only being able to catch our teams play every great once in a while before playoff season pretty much just sucked. So this year we made the decision in October that we'd give ourselves an early Christmas present and sign up for Center Ice. At $160 for around 6 months of hockey, it wasn't a terrible deal, as far as cable deals go, though certainly not cheap, but hey, hockey almost every day!
Sometimes the programming has been tricky to follow, you can never be quite sure what broadcast you're going to get for a game. Sometimes you get the home broadcast, sometimes away, sometimes a choice of which one you watch, sometimes their more national and less biased, sometimes you have to sit through another team's whiny announcers who couldn't call a hockey game with any objective prospective if their life depended on it. And sometimes a game you know is on doesn't show up in the Center Ice listings and you have to scramble around the other channels to find it on VS. or CSN or NBC.
See, they have what they call "blackouts" for "local" networks. This makes some sense. If you have a local network that broadcasts the games, Center Ice doesn't compete with them and won't broadcast the same game as them in your market. That was pretty much fine and dandy for a while, as that just meant the game was to be found on another channel. Though really, this didn't seem to apply to CSN games. I've seen San Jose games being broadcast on two Center Ice channels, plus the Center Ice HD channel, plus CSN, all at the same time. Weird, but no problems.
Then came the NHLTV channel in the listings. It seemed that when it started off it was mostly playing "classic" games. Cool! But of course, we couldn't watch them. It turned out that channel was only available as part of a totally separate sports package. So, for some additional monthly fee, you could get that channel, as well as channels for a bunch of sports we don't care about. Not really worthwhile, but oh well.
But, in the last couple months, it's started to become a problem. All of a sudden, NHLTV is broadcasting games live, and they seem to be pretty random, as well as probably just feeds picked up from other networks, the same way they do with Center Ice. The problem is, that the NHLTV broadcasts are treated by Center Ice the same way local network broadcasts are, and they are "blacked out" from Center Ice. So now, on a random but more and more frequently occurring basis, when I go through the Center Ice listings for the day and look for the games I want to set the DVR to record, I find my games missing. I then search VS. for the day. When I don't seem it there I start to get worried/angry. I search NBC on the off chance they might actually show a hockey game on a weeknight. No. CSN ont he chance they're broadcasting something other than Vancouver or San Jose. No. So, feeling defeated, I go and check the NHLTV listings, and sure enough, there's the Dallas or Pittsburgh game I'd been looking forward to watching.
It's pretty clear this was done on purpose. Not to respect the broadcast rights of other networks in local markets as the others are done, but to push people to pony up for yet another package subscription. Not surprising really, Cable television gets more and more ludicrously priced all the time, and the packages are constantly redesigned with an obvious intent to drag people into higher and higher tiers. As it is I'm just waiting to see what the next bill is going to look like, since Comcast has promised rate increases, and has rearranged not just their programming tiers, but how they bill for things like extra cable boxes, digital outlets, and remotes. Should be interesting to see their new gouging schemes.
But seriously, I'm already paying a premium for the channels I have, for the DVR they gave me a couple years ago which they've now decided is an HD DVR and charge me $13.95 for even though I don't have an HDTV, and it was the ONLY DVR available when I got it. And I've paid a decent chunk of money to be able to watch the hockey team I love, and now I can't watch the Calgary @ Pittsburgh game tonight? We're nearing the end of the regular season, and these games are BIG! There's a huge chance this game will be a great one, but despite my weighty cable bill, I'll be reduced to listening to the game broadcast at best.
Bastards. Cable companies are just rotten bastards.
No dice. I quickly came to the realization that in general, people in Oregon aren't interested in Hockey, and I pretty much gave up on being able to watch it. So for a few years I pretty much stopped following the game. Then one day in 2006, after having moved a few miles from Charter Cable territory into Comcast territory I realized there was a new channel in the listings, OLN, and that intermittently amidst a rather scattered and repetitious programming lineup, they actually broadcast some hockey games.
Moving forward, OLN was eventually replaced with VS, or became VS, or something of the sort, and I realized also that CSN (Comcast Sports Network) also was occasionally broadcasting hockey games. And then during the 07-08 seasons, I noticed that sometimes on Sundays NBC would broadcast a "game of the week". This was all pretty great news to me, being able to finally catch the odd hockey game was fantastic, especially during the playoffs when there was constantly hockey on.
But after a year of trying to follow along throughout the season, and finding that the teams we'd get to see were pretty random when it came to VS and NBC, and limited to "local" hockey teams on CSN (local as in mostly the Vancouver Canucks 425 miles away in Canada, which is a different country, btw. Or the occasional San Jose Sharks game, 565 miles away in California, which borders Oregon, but may still qualify as another country). I could care less about the Canucks, though after watching Vancouver's Hordichuk take a run at Dallas's goalkeeper Marty Turco last night, I'm hoping to get the chance to see Vancouver stomped into the ground in the playoffs. Hating hockey teams is almost as much fun as loving them.
I grew up watching Lemieux play, and have always been a Pittsburgh Penguins fan, and my sweetheart is a Texas transplant, and an avid Dallas Stars fan. So being stuck in the northwest and only being able to catch our teams play every great once in a while before playoff season pretty much just sucked. So this year we made the decision in October that we'd give ourselves an early Christmas present and sign up for Center Ice. At $160 for around 6 months of hockey, it wasn't a terrible deal, as far as cable deals go, though certainly not cheap, but hey, hockey almost every day!
Sometimes the programming has been tricky to follow, you can never be quite sure what broadcast you're going to get for a game. Sometimes you get the home broadcast, sometimes away, sometimes a choice of which one you watch, sometimes their more national and less biased, sometimes you have to sit through another team's whiny announcers who couldn't call a hockey game with any objective prospective if their life depended on it. And sometimes a game you know is on doesn't show up in the Center Ice listings and you have to scramble around the other channels to find it on VS. or CSN or NBC.
See, they have what they call "blackouts" for "local" networks. This makes some sense. If you have a local network that broadcasts the games, Center Ice doesn't compete with them and won't broadcast the same game as them in your market. That was pretty much fine and dandy for a while, as that just meant the game was to be found on another channel. Though really, this didn't seem to apply to CSN games. I've seen San Jose games being broadcast on two Center Ice channels, plus the Center Ice HD channel, plus CSN, all at the same time. Weird, but no problems.
Then came the NHLTV channel in the listings. It seemed that when it started off it was mostly playing "classic" games. Cool! But of course, we couldn't watch them. It turned out that channel was only available as part of a totally separate sports package. So, for some additional monthly fee, you could get that channel, as well as channels for a bunch of sports we don't care about. Not really worthwhile, but oh well.
But, in the last couple months, it's started to become a problem. All of a sudden, NHLTV is broadcasting games live, and they seem to be pretty random, as well as probably just feeds picked up from other networks, the same way they do with Center Ice. The problem is, that the NHLTV broadcasts are treated by Center Ice the same way local network broadcasts are, and they are "blacked out" from Center Ice. So now, on a random but more and more frequently occurring basis, when I go through the Center Ice listings for the day and look for the games I want to set the DVR to record, I find my games missing. I then search VS. for the day. When I don't seem it there I start to get worried/angry. I search NBC on the off chance they might actually show a hockey game on a weeknight. No. CSN ont he chance they're broadcasting something other than Vancouver or San Jose. No. So, feeling defeated, I go and check the NHLTV listings, and sure enough, there's the Dallas or Pittsburgh game I'd been looking forward to watching.
It's pretty clear this was done on purpose. Not to respect the broadcast rights of other networks in local markets as the others are done, but to push people to pony up for yet another package subscription. Not surprising really, Cable television gets more and more ludicrously priced all the time, and the packages are constantly redesigned with an obvious intent to drag people into higher and higher tiers. As it is I'm just waiting to see what the next bill is going to look like, since Comcast has promised rate increases, and has rearranged not just their programming tiers, but how they bill for things like extra cable boxes, digital outlets, and remotes. Should be interesting to see their new gouging schemes.
But seriously, I'm already paying a premium for the channels I have, for the DVR they gave me a couple years ago which they've now decided is an HD DVR and charge me $13.95 for even though I don't have an HDTV, and it was the ONLY DVR available when I got it. And I've paid a decent chunk of money to be able to watch the hockey team I love, and now I can't watch the Calgary @ Pittsburgh game tonight? We're nearing the end of the regular season, and these games are BIG! There's a huge chance this game will be a great one, but despite my weighty cable bill, I'll be reduced to listening to the game broadcast at best.
Bastards. Cable companies are just rotten bastards.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Free Swedish Snus!
Good news for anyone curious about Swedish Snus, Snus in general, smokeless tobacco products, alternatives to cigarettes, or who just like free stuff; General Snus is offering free samples of a variety of their fine snus blends. Just go to generalsnus.com and look for the the samples link. Jump through some age verification hoops and give em your address and they'll send you some samples. Of course, they say 4-6 weeks for delivery, so you may have forgotten all about it before they get there. But surprises are always nice!
UPDATE: More free General Snus! For $1 shipping you can receive an entire can of General Snus for free. Getsnus.com is offering this great sample offer.
Seems like it's a good time to try Swedish Snus.
UPDATE: More free General Snus! For $1 shipping you can receive an entire can of General Snus for free. Getsnus.com is offering this great sample offer.
Seems like it's a good time to try Swedish Snus.
FDA regulation of Tobacco, what's it all mean?
Hot on the heels of my post about Camel Orbs leading me to the discovery and research into Swedish Snus, I received an email from RJ Reynolds yesterday.
"Stop FDA form making your tobacco products taste like 'lard'!" was the subject. The body of the email containing quite a bit of spin on proposed legislation to put tobacco products, which are currently mostly unregulated, under the oversight of the FDA. RJ Reynolds argues that this would allow the FDA to make any changes they wanted to products, potentially even making them taste terrible and jacking up the prices even more.
That's quite a bit of conjecture there. I didn't hear anything to the tune of "If this passes, it will have this effect on consumers." And the best reactionary headline they could come up with was to stop the FDA from making cigarettes taste like lard? That's it? Like that would ever happen.
I seriously doubt the FDA would care to control the flavor of tobacco products. What they would most likely do is require disclosure of the ingredients, tobacco levels, and amounts of carcinogens to be disclosed to consumers. Kinda like how if you look at a box of cereal you can see that it's made of high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and yellow #5 and contains 5% of your recommended daily dose of shits and giggles.
Pretty scary, isn't it? That they might actually be forced to tell us what they put in their products. And god only knows what might happen then.
But seriously, what is in our cigarettes? I'd certainly like to know. I mean, it's kinda late. For 15 years I've been burning and inhaling god knows what sort of substances into my lungs. Better late than never, but I cringe to think that besides the nicotine and tar, that there are a variety of other carcinogenic or simply toxic things I've been consuming on a daily basis.
For instance, I keep running across information stating that many cigarettes are somewhere around 15% sugar. I'm having a hard time digging up any really recent or reputable sources for these claims, but the info I do come up with is intriguing and frightening. Sugar and other sweeteners supposedly can be added to make a smoke smoother, but it is also reported that burning sugar creates a chemical reaction that makes nicotine even more addictive, as well as of course give you a pretty decent sucrose addiction as well, making it that much harder to ever quit the shit.
Ouch. That's not very nice! I've also seen statements to the effect that the sugar in cigarettes is really the most harmful part, that inhaling the burning sugar is basically pretty toxic and probably the main cause of lung cancer. True or not? I don't know. Is there really that much sugar in cigarettes? We don't know, because they don't have to tell us.
So. Ingredient, additive, and carcinogen disclosure. Doesn't really sound like a bad thing to me. Now, the FDA would also be given the power to potentially regulate additives, etc. This must be where RJ Reynolds gets their claim that the FDA could make cigarettes taste gross... Because cigarettes are sooo delicious? Really though, most likely the FDA would only regulate and restrict the levels of carcinogens, chemical additives with harmful health effects, etc. Which doesn't really sound like a bad thing.
In Sweden regulating tobacco like a food product brought about industry changes resulting in new recipes and manufacturing processes wherein tobacco for Swedish Snus is steam pasteurized, destroying most of the naturally occurring carcinogens in tobacco. In addition, you not only can easily find out what's in the product, but generally find it's a pretty short and simple list of ingredients.
Here's what we get for General Portion Snus:
You can also get a hold of the level of TSNAs in their products, which are supposed to be the really nasty cancer causing thingies. And something which is most definitely not readily available to find out about american tobacco products. Wouldn't you like to know just what you're putting in your body?
All-in-all, this doesn't seem like a bad system. Personally I'm pretty fond of the idea of disclosure, transparency, etc. I feel like if I'm going to be paying for something to put into my body, I deserve the right to know what's in it. The same as I like the idea of government transparency. The government gets paid by us, right, so it makes sense that we should get to have some idea of what they are up to. Especially since the majority of legislation is passed in this country without our direct input. We get to vote for people to represent us, but are they really making choices and voting in a way that represents us? Hard to say sometimes.
And when it comes down to it, it is hard to say what the effects of legislation putting tobacco under the regulation of the FDA would, in reality have. There are plenty of good arguments for it. There's plenty of potential to make positive changes that would allow for consumer awareness, education, and potential health benefits to the public. But the FDA certainly is not the most straightforward government agency. Nor, if you start digging around, do they seem to be the most moral, ethically, or well intentioned agency. As is often the case these days, personal agendas tend to take precedence over public health and welfare, personal agendas generally being similar in a singular focus on personal profit.
So would the FDA really make any significant changes for the better? Or would it just allow the FDA to take their cut of the gifts and bribes from Big Tobacco? Hard to say.
Personally, at this point I have more concern over whispers of legislation that would make it basically impossible to buy tobacco products over the internet. While I understand that it is mostly being considered for the sake of cigarettes, and because of concerns from many states and on the federal level about people dodging the incredible taxes on cigarettes by purchasing online. The end result of that sort of legislation could be to make it impossible to get products like Swedish Snus in most parts of the US. Leaving folks with only the products of domestic big tobacco companies.
I know that no tobacco products is healthy. I realize we'd all be better off quitting entirely, but if there's a product that's 98% safer than cigarettes that the millions of smokers could potentially quite smoking and switch to in a very short amount of time, does it make sense to make it a felony to have it shipped to your house?
But again, whether it's corporations or government, time and again the trend we see is profitability over the well being of the public.
So I won't be writing and phoning my legislators to tell them to oppose the bill for FDA regulation of tobacco. I'm not totally optimistic the FDA be at all altruistic in their regulation, but I don't think it can hurt too much. And I'm really really curious to see that list of ingredients for my Camel Filters. Especially after they changed the blend a year ago, since I'm sure the choice to change a classic and popular cigarette blend had to be driven by profitability.
However, I am trying to keep an eye on the various tobacco issues popping up these days, and will be writing, phoning, etc., if it seems that bills are coming forward that would restrict our access to better, safer alternatives to american tobacco products.
"Stop FDA form making your tobacco products taste like 'lard'!" was the subject. The body of the email containing quite a bit of spin on proposed legislation to put tobacco products, which are currently mostly unregulated, under the oversight of the FDA. RJ Reynolds argues that this would allow the FDA to make any changes they wanted to products, potentially even making them taste terrible and jacking up the prices even more.
That's quite a bit of conjecture there. I didn't hear anything to the tune of "If this passes, it will have this effect on consumers." And the best reactionary headline they could come up with was to stop the FDA from making cigarettes taste like lard? That's it? Like that would ever happen.
I seriously doubt the FDA would care to control the flavor of tobacco products. What they would most likely do is require disclosure of the ingredients, tobacco levels, and amounts of carcinogens to be disclosed to consumers. Kinda like how if you look at a box of cereal you can see that it's made of high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and yellow #5 and contains 5% of your recommended daily dose of shits and giggles.
Pretty scary, isn't it? That they might actually be forced to tell us what they put in their products. And god only knows what might happen then.
But seriously, what is in our cigarettes? I'd certainly like to know. I mean, it's kinda late. For 15 years I've been burning and inhaling god knows what sort of substances into my lungs. Better late than never, but I cringe to think that besides the nicotine and tar, that there are a variety of other carcinogenic or simply toxic things I've been consuming on a daily basis.
For instance, I keep running across information stating that many cigarettes are somewhere around 15% sugar. I'm having a hard time digging up any really recent or reputable sources for these claims, but the info I do come up with is intriguing and frightening. Sugar and other sweeteners supposedly can be added to make a smoke smoother, but it is also reported that burning sugar creates a chemical reaction that makes nicotine even more addictive, as well as of course give you a pretty decent sucrose addiction as well, making it that much harder to ever quit the shit.
Ouch. That's not very nice! I've also seen statements to the effect that the sugar in cigarettes is really the most harmful part, that inhaling the burning sugar is basically pretty toxic and probably the main cause of lung cancer. True or not? I don't know. Is there really that much sugar in cigarettes? We don't know, because they don't have to tell us.
So. Ingredient, additive, and carcinogen disclosure. Doesn't really sound like a bad thing to me. Now, the FDA would also be given the power to potentially regulate additives, etc. This must be where RJ Reynolds gets their claim that the FDA could make cigarettes taste gross... Because cigarettes are sooo delicious? Really though, most likely the FDA would only regulate and restrict the levels of carcinogens, chemical additives with harmful health effects, etc. Which doesn't really sound like a bad thing.
In Sweden regulating tobacco like a food product brought about industry changes resulting in new recipes and manufacturing processes wherein tobacco for Swedish Snus is steam pasteurized, destroying most of the naturally occurring carcinogens in tobacco. In addition, you not only can easily find out what's in the product, but generally find it's a pretty short and simple list of ingredients.
Here's what we get for General Portion Snus:
Declaration of Contents: Water, Tobacco, Humectants (E 1520), Taste enhancer (common salt), Acidity regulator (E 500), Flavour substances incl. Smoke flavour.Even the Humectants are standard and easy to find out what exactly they are. They are generally used to keep foodstuffs moist, so are pretty common. E 1520 for example is propylene Glycol, E 500 seems to be sodium bicarbonate. Yeah, baking soda. So, you've probably got more enigmatic and weird stuff in any sort of processed or prepared food and beverages you buy.
Analytical Data: Water 50%, Nicotine 8 mg/portion, Salt 2,5%
You can also get a hold of the level of TSNAs in their products, which are supposed to be the really nasty cancer causing thingies. And something which is most definitely not readily available to find out about american tobacco products. Wouldn't you like to know just what you're putting in your body?
All-in-all, this doesn't seem like a bad system. Personally I'm pretty fond of the idea of disclosure, transparency, etc. I feel like if I'm going to be paying for something to put into my body, I deserve the right to know what's in it. The same as I like the idea of government transparency. The government gets paid by us, right, so it makes sense that we should get to have some idea of what they are up to. Especially since the majority of legislation is passed in this country without our direct input. We get to vote for people to represent us, but are they really making choices and voting in a way that represents us? Hard to say sometimes.
And when it comes down to it, it is hard to say what the effects of legislation putting tobacco under the regulation of the FDA would, in reality have. There are plenty of good arguments for it. There's plenty of potential to make positive changes that would allow for consumer awareness, education, and potential health benefits to the public. But the FDA certainly is not the most straightforward government agency. Nor, if you start digging around, do they seem to be the most moral, ethically, or well intentioned agency. As is often the case these days, personal agendas tend to take precedence over public health and welfare, personal agendas generally being similar in a singular focus on personal profit.
So would the FDA really make any significant changes for the better? Or would it just allow the FDA to take their cut of the gifts and bribes from Big Tobacco? Hard to say.
Personally, at this point I have more concern over whispers of legislation that would make it basically impossible to buy tobacco products over the internet. While I understand that it is mostly being considered for the sake of cigarettes, and because of concerns from many states and on the federal level about people dodging the incredible taxes on cigarettes by purchasing online. The end result of that sort of legislation could be to make it impossible to get products like Swedish Snus in most parts of the US. Leaving folks with only the products of domestic big tobacco companies.
I know that no tobacco products is healthy. I realize we'd all be better off quitting entirely, but if there's a product that's 98% safer than cigarettes that the millions of smokers could potentially quite smoking and switch to in a very short amount of time, does it make sense to make it a felony to have it shipped to your house?
But again, whether it's corporations or government, time and again the trend we see is profitability over the well being of the public.
So I won't be writing and phoning my legislators to tell them to oppose the bill for FDA regulation of tobacco. I'm not totally optimistic the FDA be at all altruistic in their regulation, but I don't think it can hurt too much. And I'm really really curious to see that list of ingredients for my Camel Filters. Especially after they changed the blend a year ago, since I'm sure the choice to change a classic and popular cigarette blend had to be driven by profitability.
However, I am trying to keep an eye on the various tobacco issues popping up these days, and will be writing, phoning, etc., if it seems that bills are coming forward that would restrict our access to better, safer alternatives to american tobacco products.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Carinogens On Your Lips
Well, RJ Reynolds may finally have done the unthinkable. After more than 15 years of smoking, and smoking Camel Filters for all but the initial six or eight month Marlboro "training wheels" Reds period, it may very well be a Camel product that leads me to put down the coffin nails and try out that whole "breathing air" thing.
Surely it's a culmination of a variety of things. Matters of finances, lifestyle, and health adding up to lay more and more pluses on the side of not smoking. And these days, what can really be considered a plus to being a smoker?
Taxes have come and the promise of more coming. There's a market down the street that's always been the cheapest place around and a pack o' crack went from $3.75 to $4.95 overnight. Cartons from $35 to $45. For a smoking household of two, that's an instantaneous increase of $60 to the monthly expenses. $60 added to the $210 already being spent on cigarettes, that is. $3240 a year. You could probably do something better with that chunk of change.
You can't comfortably smoke in public anymore, which was always a lot of fun. At least in Oregon, and probably a few other places. The rest of you, your time is probably coming too.
The only real plus to smoking I can come up with is that greedy addicted one.
I LIKE IT I LOVE IT I WANT IT, GIVE ME A FUCKING CIGARETTE!
I mean, smoking isn't really even cool anymore.
But I digress.
At the same time as Oregon's statewide smoking ban was coming into effect on January 1, 2009. I began receiving emails from Camel about "What do you think of the concept of oral, smokeless tobacco products you could have anywhere?" Ooooooh. Yeah whatever. No really, it made sense. I thought it was good timing on their part, if they could pull it off.
Apparently though, by that point, they already had this stuff developed and out in test markets. So hot on the heels of their hinting at the idea of the thing, it started to appear. Camel Orbs, Camel Sticks, Camel Strips, and CamelSNUS. Innnnnteresting.
Now, I was curious about these products, not as a replacement for smoking, more as an add-on to smoking. Something for those times when you can't smoke, or are totally inconvenienced to go find a place where you can smoke. So when the displays and such started popping up, we inquired about them. Mostly we found out they were going to be around $5, while real live cigarettes were still $3.75. Still they seemed like they might be worth a shot if they weren't a daily habit, an emergency backup of sorts.
Camel solved any hesitancy for me though, when they sent us coupons to try their new Orbs out for free. So yesterday Ariel went out to replenish our cancer stick supply, and cashed in a couple of the coupons. She returned with some "Mellow" flavor Camel Orbs, in a futuristic "child-proof" tic-tac dispenser. Complete with instruction manual.
I probably should have held off on trying these things out until I started craving a cigarette, for science's sake, to be able to gauge how effective they were. But I didn't. I shook the thing around, pried it apart with two hands, and dispensed the little brown pill thing.
Popped it into my mouth and was immediately assaulted by horrendously sweet foulness slowly melting to grainy glop on my tongue. I probably should have spit it out, but I wanted to do it right, absorb it all, see if the result could somehow be worth the experience. I tried sliding it away from my tongue, up between my lip and my gums. This just seemed to distribute the flavor rapidly through my saliva to take over my entire mouth and further enhance the foulness. Ever so slowly it melted away on my tongue. I really wasn't sure at times that vomiting wasn't a possible outcome of this experiment.
As soon as it was finally over and done with, I started searching the net, thinking surely there would be people out there decrying the grand foulness of this product. I searched "Camel Orbs Taste", my google shorthand that I was sure would lead me to various instances of Camel Orbs tasting like crap, shit, poo, goat ass, etc.
The second google result was "CamelSNUS vs. Swedish Snus", followed by a snippet of commentary that included both "Camel ORBS" as well as words like "throw-away" and "disgusting". So I felt I was on the right track to the vindication of my new found hatred through the shared views of others.
As it turns out, these products are still pretty damn new, and possibly not available in all areas yet. So most of the commentary regarding them is still just speculative opinion. I found one livejournal post of a guy who tried the "Frost" flavor and seemed to be saying they were gross while concluding that he liked them. I dunno.
Where I ended up was snuscentral.org, and not directly to the page containing the throw-away and disgusting statements, as the forums are only open to members. So I pretty quickly got entirely distracted from my original mission and started reading about Snus.
WTF is Snus?
I'd seen displays for the CamelSNUS, and knew it had it's own weird little refrigerated display. But I had figured SNUS for a made up name of their own invention. Instead it turns out to be a tobacco product they've been making in Sweden for a couple hundred years. It's tobacco you hold in your mouth, but that you don't have to spit. It comes both loose, like chewing tobacco, or in "portions" little sacks made of tea bag like material that you can neatly tuck between your lip and gums and absorb the nicotine.
So it's smokeless, discreet, and not messy and gross like chewing tobacco. But here's the really big thing. Swedish Snus is treated as a food product in Sweden. Meaning it falls under the mandate of their version of the FDA and has it's production, ingredients, and health effects being looked at and having to fall under certain guidelines.
As a result of this, Swedish Snus is steam pasteurized, and in the process destroys most of the carcinogens found in tobacco. This results in a tobacco product that is 98% safer than cigarettes. Nicotine is still not a healthy thing to put in your body, it's bad for your heart, and possibly for your pancreas. But 98% healthier than cigarettes is a pretty big thing. The potentially cancer causing carcinogens in tobacco products are called TSNA's. The more there are, the more risk for cancer. Chewing tobaccos such as Skoal and Copenhagen range from around a 40 TSNA level up to around 130. Swedish Snus ranges from about 0.4 to 2.8.
Now as for the CamelSNUS, we don't know what the TSNA level is, nor what's in it, or how it is made. Tobacco products aren't regulated by the FDA in such a way that they have to disclose that sort of information to the consumers.
What we do know though, is that CamelSNUS will probably cost about $5 or so, and comes with 15 small "portions" to a tin. Swedish Snus comes in a few different sized portions, and contain as little as 4mg or currently up to 17mg or so, with most normal portions seeming to be right about 8mg. The standard seems to be 24 portions per tin, with tins being between $2 and $4.
Digging around it turns out a great many people have quit smoking by switching to Snus. Especially in Sweden and Norway, but also in the US. From their stories, it seems quite a few have simply picked up Snus and put down cigarettes. That easy.
Sure, they are still addicted to nicotine, but they've gotten rid of all the other negatives to smoking cigarettes. Like... smoking them. Smoke here, smoke there, smoke everywhere. Sucking burning shit into your lungs; something that should probably be reserved for recreational activity only. Not to mention smelling like smoke, not being able to smell to know you smell like smoke, and even if you could smell after years of smoking you can't really breathe deeply enough to get a good whiff of anything anyhow. Oh, and all the coughing, throaty, lung cancery shit.
As with smoking, people who've switched to Snus seem to vary in the amount of their daily usage, but the majority seem to be in the 8-10 portions a day realm. Of course, with various strengths of portion to choose from, that can amount to a variety of levels of nicotine intake. But, financially speaking, 8-10 portions from a tin of 24 means a tin lasts a couple to a few days, and at less than the cost of a pack of smokes, that promises pretty decent savings.
So I'm going to get me some. There's a fairly staggering variety to choose from. We searched local tobacco shops today to see if we might be able to find even a single kind to sample, but alas, no one even knew what I was asking for. So I'm ordering up a variety to try out. It's an exciting prospect. So exciting I've hit that rare point of being more hopeful than cynical.
Mostly, I guess, I'm really very curious to see what it's like to not smoke. I started smoking when I was 14, and I've never tried to quit. Ever. I'll be thirty at the end of this next summer, so having spent the majority of my adolescence and entirety of adulthood to date with a daily habit. With a cloud of smoke trailing me through my daily existence, I really wonder what life would be like without that.
So we'll see. The experiment could be a complete failure, but for a pretty meager investment it is certainly worth a shot. If nothing else, I cannot imagine it could in any way compare to the absolutely foul taste of failure that Camel Orbs left in my mouth.
Surely it's a culmination of a variety of things. Matters of finances, lifestyle, and health adding up to lay more and more pluses on the side of not smoking. And these days, what can really be considered a plus to being a smoker?
Taxes have come and the promise of more coming. There's a market down the street that's always been the cheapest place around and a pack o' crack went from $3.75 to $4.95 overnight. Cartons from $35 to $45. For a smoking household of two, that's an instantaneous increase of $60 to the monthly expenses. $60 added to the $210 already being spent on cigarettes, that is. $3240 a year. You could probably do something better with that chunk of change.
You can't comfortably smoke in public anymore, which was always a lot of fun. At least in Oregon, and probably a few other places. The rest of you, your time is probably coming too.
The only real plus to smoking I can come up with is that greedy addicted one.
I LIKE IT I LOVE IT I WANT IT, GIVE ME A FUCKING CIGARETTE!
I mean, smoking isn't really even cool anymore.
But I digress.
At the same time as Oregon's statewide smoking ban was coming into effect on January 1, 2009. I began receiving emails from Camel about "What do you think of the concept of oral, smokeless tobacco products you could have anywhere?" Ooooooh. Yeah whatever. No really, it made sense. I thought it was good timing on their part, if they could pull it off.
Apparently though, by that point, they already had this stuff developed and out in test markets. So hot on the heels of their hinting at the idea of the thing, it started to appear. Camel Orbs, Camel Sticks, Camel Strips, and CamelSNUS. Innnnnteresting.
Now, I was curious about these products, not as a replacement for smoking, more as an add-on to smoking. Something for those times when you can't smoke, or are totally inconvenienced to go find a place where you can smoke. So when the displays and such started popping up, we inquired about them. Mostly we found out they were going to be around $5, while real live cigarettes were still $3.75. Still they seemed like they might be worth a shot if they weren't a daily habit, an emergency backup of sorts.
Camel solved any hesitancy for me though, when they sent us coupons to try their new Orbs out for free. So yesterday Ariel went out to replenish our cancer stick supply, and cashed in a couple of the coupons. She returned with some "Mellow" flavor Camel Orbs, in a futuristic "child-proof" tic-tac dispenser. Complete with instruction manual.
I probably should have held off on trying these things out until I started craving a cigarette, for science's sake, to be able to gauge how effective they were. But I didn't. I shook the thing around, pried it apart with two hands, and dispensed the little brown pill thing.
Popped it into my mouth and was immediately assaulted by horrendously sweet foulness slowly melting to grainy glop on my tongue. I probably should have spit it out, but I wanted to do it right, absorb it all, see if the result could somehow be worth the experience. I tried sliding it away from my tongue, up between my lip and my gums. This just seemed to distribute the flavor rapidly through my saliva to take over my entire mouth and further enhance the foulness. Ever so slowly it melted away on my tongue. I really wasn't sure at times that vomiting wasn't a possible outcome of this experiment.
As soon as it was finally over and done with, I started searching the net, thinking surely there would be people out there decrying the grand foulness of this product. I searched "Camel Orbs Taste", my google shorthand that I was sure would lead me to various instances of Camel Orbs tasting like crap, shit, poo, goat ass, etc.
The second google result was "CamelSNUS vs. Swedish Snus", followed by a snippet of commentary that included both "Camel ORBS" as well as words like "throw-away" and "disgusting". So I felt I was on the right track to the vindication of my new found hatred through the shared views of others.
As it turns out, these products are still pretty damn new, and possibly not available in all areas yet. So most of the commentary regarding them is still just speculative opinion. I found one livejournal post of a guy who tried the "Frost" flavor and seemed to be saying they were gross while concluding that he liked them. I dunno.
Where I ended up was snuscentral.org, and not directly to the page containing the throw-away and disgusting statements, as the forums are only open to members. So I pretty quickly got entirely distracted from my original mission and started reading about Snus.
WTF is Snus?
I'd seen displays for the CamelSNUS, and knew it had it's own weird little refrigerated display. But I had figured SNUS for a made up name of their own invention. Instead it turns out to be a tobacco product they've been making in Sweden for a couple hundred years. It's tobacco you hold in your mouth, but that you don't have to spit. It comes both loose, like chewing tobacco, or in "portions" little sacks made of tea bag like material that you can neatly tuck between your lip and gums and absorb the nicotine.
So it's smokeless, discreet, and not messy and gross like chewing tobacco. But here's the really big thing. Swedish Snus is treated as a food product in Sweden. Meaning it falls under the mandate of their version of the FDA and has it's production, ingredients, and health effects being looked at and having to fall under certain guidelines.
As a result of this, Swedish Snus is steam pasteurized, and in the process destroys most of the carcinogens found in tobacco. This results in a tobacco product that is 98% safer than cigarettes. Nicotine is still not a healthy thing to put in your body, it's bad for your heart, and possibly for your pancreas. But 98% healthier than cigarettes is a pretty big thing. The potentially cancer causing carcinogens in tobacco products are called TSNA's. The more there are, the more risk for cancer. Chewing tobaccos such as Skoal and Copenhagen range from around a 40 TSNA level up to around 130. Swedish Snus ranges from about 0.4 to 2.8.
Now as for the CamelSNUS, we don't know what the TSNA level is, nor what's in it, or how it is made. Tobacco products aren't regulated by the FDA in such a way that they have to disclose that sort of information to the consumers.
What we do know though, is that CamelSNUS will probably cost about $5 or so, and comes with 15 small "portions" to a tin. Swedish Snus comes in a few different sized portions, and contain as little as 4mg or currently up to 17mg or so, with most normal portions seeming to be right about 8mg. The standard seems to be 24 portions per tin, with tins being between $2 and $4.
Digging around it turns out a great many people have quit smoking by switching to Snus. Especially in Sweden and Norway, but also in the US. From their stories, it seems quite a few have simply picked up Snus and put down cigarettes. That easy.
Sure, they are still addicted to nicotine, but they've gotten rid of all the other negatives to smoking cigarettes. Like... smoking them. Smoke here, smoke there, smoke everywhere. Sucking burning shit into your lungs; something that should probably be reserved for recreational activity only. Not to mention smelling like smoke, not being able to smell to know you smell like smoke, and even if you could smell after years of smoking you can't really breathe deeply enough to get a good whiff of anything anyhow. Oh, and all the coughing, throaty, lung cancery shit.
As with smoking, people who've switched to Snus seem to vary in the amount of their daily usage, but the majority seem to be in the 8-10 portions a day realm. Of course, with various strengths of portion to choose from, that can amount to a variety of levels of nicotine intake. But, financially speaking, 8-10 portions from a tin of 24 means a tin lasts a couple to a few days, and at less than the cost of a pack of smokes, that promises pretty decent savings.
So I'm going to get me some. There's a fairly staggering variety to choose from. We searched local tobacco shops today to see if we might be able to find even a single kind to sample, but alas, no one even knew what I was asking for. So I'm ordering up a variety to try out. It's an exciting prospect. So exciting I've hit that rare point of being more hopeful than cynical.
Mostly, I guess, I'm really very curious to see what it's like to not smoke. I started smoking when I was 14, and I've never tried to quit. Ever. I'll be thirty at the end of this next summer, so having spent the majority of my adolescence and entirety of adulthood to date with a daily habit. With a cloud of smoke trailing me through my daily existence, I really wonder what life would be like without that.
So we'll see. The experiment could be a complete failure, but for a pretty meager investment it is certainly worth a shot. If nothing else, I cannot imagine it could in any way compare to the absolutely foul taste of failure that Camel Orbs left in my mouth.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Who is John Galt?
I've recently found myself hit in the head with the flying WTF hammer. The pure absurdity of life in these times has staggered me again. It's probably my own fault for only half paying attention to what's going on out there that I get snuck up on by these things. But really, I never expected the writings of Ayn Rand to suddenly become all the buzz in mainstream media and politics. Much less did I expect the lengthy "Atlas Shrugged" to suddenly be hoisted as some sort of weird new banner of privileged republicans in this country.
I've read it, twice in fact, though it's been a long time. I read it when I was young and idealistic, and yeah, I loved it. By the time I read it I'd already read a handful of Rand's other books, Anthem, We The Living, The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged is certainly the pinnacle of Rand's works, and certainly espouses lofty ideals and philosophies, but is it really applicable or appropriate to these times and the current economic state of things?
More than that, is it really applicable and appropriate for the folks hollering about it's tenets to be doing so? I started hearing about it and was both dumbfounded and outraged. Here was what I considered a great piece of literature I remember fondly from my idealistic youth, being hoisted in support of views and ideals I can not rationally support. Here are people saying this books means things I never thought it meant. Well, maybe I just didn't get it.
Okay, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I've had experience in the past with finding groups online where Rand readers gathered, or Objectivists, or whatever and I had already been surprised and annoyed to find that all-in-all it was mostly full of Republicans and Conservatives. I shrugged and left. I didn't bother jumping into the midst of people so set in their ways and saying "I don't think that means what you think it means." I didn't forsee a lively but pleasant debate coming out of that.
So who is John Galt, why are rich republicans adopting him as their mascot, and why is that totally ridiculous?
John Galt, as a character in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, was the son of a garage mechanic in Ohio. He left home at twelve and went to college at sixteen. At college he met some of the other important figures in the novel, all of whom double majored in physics and philosophy.
Do you see any big parallels between most rich republicans and John Galt yet? No, me either. Though now that I look at it, I realize I was born the son of a garage mechanic, but I didn't start college until 2 weeks after I turned 17, and while I've read a lot of physics and philosophy, my degree was in Audio Production. Still, I oddly may have more in common with John Galt's background than most of those folks threatening to "Go Galt" out there.
Anyway, John Galt invented an engine that was powered by ambient static electricity or somesuch. I don't remember all the details, but it certainly sounds like clean, renewable, green, "alternative" energy to me!
Yet most of the republicans scoff at Obama's energy policies and push towards renewable energy. To hell with innovation, "Drill baby, Drill." In fact, in a little instance of total irony, I found that the person who has currently laid claim to www.whoisjohngalt.com and who actually posts under the name "John Galt" talks quite a bit of smack about the idea of creating jobs by creating a new alternative energy economy. I laughed, a lot. This guy posts as John Galt, but thinks we should continue relying on fossil fuels. Apparently he forgot that whole essential part of "Going Galt" where all the visionaries removed themselves to go live in a hidden valley that was able to exist off the grid due to Galt's alternative energy source. Hmmmm....
Anyway, the gist of Galt & Co.'s protests against the world was that the existing socio-political system was basically set up to where it rewarded mediocrity and such at the expense of the true visionaries, creative geniuses, and industry masterminds. So all the folks who had done really wonderful things and not gotten their due for it quit and left society behind. "We don't need you." They removed their skills and refused to benefit a society of "moochers and looters".
Now, today, we have all these folks taking up the Galt flag in protestation of Obama's tax increase on folks with incomes over $250,000. They say that they are being ripped off, that they are being punished for their hard work and success, that everyone else is mooching and looting off them. So basically they are saying THEY are the visionaries, innovators, etc in the story. That's really the key point to their argument, that they are using this novel as an analogy for the proposal to increase taxes on the wealthy while not increasing them on the people who think that a quarter million dollars a year would probably allow most people to live in relative ease.
The big PROBLEM with the analogy is... well, I should probably say the problems ARE, as I hardly know where to start. The problem with the analogy is that it disregards so many things, and draws parallels from the most insignificant aspects of the story. The analogy depends on everyone using logic that really isn't sound. Basically, we're asked to take it as a solid FACT, indisputable, that people who have lots of money have it because they WORKED harder than the people who don't have lots of money. That's their key argument really. "We are rich, so obviously we are successful, so obviously we worked harder than everyone else and asking us to pay a larger fraction of our wealth in taxes is punishing us for working harder than everyone else."
Anyone see any problems with this logic? Well, I do. The key one being an essential component of the whole Atlas Shrugged theme. That we don't live in a society where there is any direct relationship between how hard you work and how much money you get in return. That's big issue number one right there. Both because these people are asking us to believe that they have all the money because they worked for it, and are trying to use John Galt as their poster boy, when John Galt was pushing for a society where people DID get paid in relation to their work and contribution. So neither the logic of their argument, nor the tenets of their poster boy really back up their stand in any way.
My guess is that most of these people never actually read Atlas Shrugged, at best, they may have flipped through to the steamy parts.
Anyway, when I look at all the people hollering and waving this book around and try to make actual parallels between them and characters or contingents in the book, it quickly becomes clear to me, despite them hollering that because they make over $250,000 a year that they are the innovators and heroes, that they really pretty closely parallel the moochers and looters shown in the story. I don't see innovators. I don't see what great contribution these people make to our society. I see a lot of privileged idiots who can't make a rational argument that's based on fact to save their life.
I think beneath it all, these people aren't so much scared of their taxes raising as they are of a shift in the socio-economic system that would no longer allow them to mooch off the system and loot the people who are really contributing, actually doing the work.
Seriously, do you think the new University of Oregon baseball coach who is being paid $400,000 a year works harder than a coal miner? Or a public high school teacher? Or a trash collector? Really? Is he making such a great contribution that the foundations of our society would quake if he removed his skills and talents?
And all talking heads on TV? Do we really need them? I know THEY think they are pretty important, but really...
The best thing about this whole thing, the most absurdly amazing thing about this is that for the most part, the people screaming and hollering about "Going Galt" and how they are being punished for their hard work, and how they should be rewarded instead, are the folks who are in complete support of the government bailouts put forward by Bush & Pals. The bailout that was oh so necessary. The bailout that was a matter of absolute NEED. And why did we need that bailout? Because a bunch of big corporations with very highly paid folks running them, completely FAILED. That's right, they didn't do their jobs well, despite being paid huge sums of money. They sucked, and their companies should have gone under. But instead they got paid off for their mediocrity, for their inability to run a profitable business. Weird isn't it, how while that goes against absolutely everything that John Galt stood for, and was a prime example of everything he stood against... the same folks who supported it, are now trying to use Galt as their posterboy.
With hypocrisy that staggering, I can only assume either they are stupid, or they think most of us are.
I've read it, twice in fact, though it's been a long time. I read it when I was young and idealistic, and yeah, I loved it. By the time I read it I'd already read a handful of Rand's other books, Anthem, We The Living, The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged is certainly the pinnacle of Rand's works, and certainly espouses lofty ideals and philosophies, but is it really applicable or appropriate to these times and the current economic state of things?
More than that, is it really applicable and appropriate for the folks hollering about it's tenets to be doing so? I started hearing about it and was both dumbfounded and outraged. Here was what I considered a great piece of literature I remember fondly from my idealistic youth, being hoisted in support of views and ideals I can not rationally support. Here are people saying this books means things I never thought it meant. Well, maybe I just didn't get it.
Okay, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I've had experience in the past with finding groups online where Rand readers gathered, or Objectivists, or whatever and I had already been surprised and annoyed to find that all-in-all it was mostly full of Republicans and Conservatives. I shrugged and left. I didn't bother jumping into the midst of people so set in their ways and saying "I don't think that means what you think it means." I didn't forsee a lively but pleasant debate coming out of that.
So who is John Galt, why are rich republicans adopting him as their mascot, and why is that totally ridiculous?
John Galt, as a character in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, was the son of a garage mechanic in Ohio. He left home at twelve and went to college at sixteen. At college he met some of the other important figures in the novel, all of whom double majored in physics and philosophy.
Do you see any big parallels between most rich republicans and John Galt yet? No, me either. Though now that I look at it, I realize I was born the son of a garage mechanic, but I didn't start college until 2 weeks after I turned 17, and while I've read a lot of physics and philosophy, my degree was in Audio Production. Still, I oddly may have more in common with John Galt's background than most of those folks threatening to "Go Galt" out there.
Anyway, John Galt invented an engine that was powered by ambient static electricity or somesuch. I don't remember all the details, but it certainly sounds like clean, renewable, green, "alternative" energy to me!
Yet most of the republicans scoff at Obama's energy policies and push towards renewable energy. To hell with innovation, "Drill baby, Drill." In fact, in a little instance of total irony, I found that the person who has currently laid claim to www.whoisjohngalt.com and who actually posts under the name "John Galt" talks quite a bit of smack about the idea of creating jobs by creating a new alternative energy economy. I laughed, a lot. This guy posts as John Galt, but thinks we should continue relying on fossil fuels. Apparently he forgot that whole essential part of "Going Galt" where all the visionaries removed themselves to go live in a hidden valley that was able to exist off the grid due to Galt's alternative energy source. Hmmmm....
Anyway, the gist of Galt & Co.'s protests against the world was that the existing socio-political system was basically set up to where it rewarded mediocrity and such at the expense of the true visionaries, creative geniuses, and industry masterminds. So all the folks who had done really wonderful things and not gotten their due for it quit and left society behind. "We don't need you." They removed their skills and refused to benefit a society of "moochers and looters".
Now, today, we have all these folks taking up the Galt flag in protestation of Obama's tax increase on folks with incomes over $250,000. They say that they are being ripped off, that they are being punished for their hard work and success, that everyone else is mooching and looting off them. So basically they are saying THEY are the visionaries, innovators, etc in the story. That's really the key point to their argument, that they are using this novel as an analogy for the proposal to increase taxes on the wealthy while not increasing them on the people who think that a quarter million dollars a year would probably allow most people to live in relative ease.
The big PROBLEM with the analogy is... well, I should probably say the problems ARE, as I hardly know where to start. The problem with the analogy is that it disregards so many things, and draws parallels from the most insignificant aspects of the story. The analogy depends on everyone using logic that really isn't sound. Basically, we're asked to take it as a solid FACT, indisputable, that people who have lots of money have it because they WORKED harder than the people who don't have lots of money. That's their key argument really. "We are rich, so obviously we are successful, so obviously we worked harder than everyone else and asking us to pay a larger fraction of our wealth in taxes is punishing us for working harder than everyone else."
Anyone see any problems with this logic? Well, I do. The key one being an essential component of the whole Atlas Shrugged theme. That we don't live in a society where there is any direct relationship between how hard you work and how much money you get in return. That's big issue number one right there. Both because these people are asking us to believe that they have all the money because they worked for it, and are trying to use John Galt as their poster boy, when John Galt was pushing for a society where people DID get paid in relation to their work and contribution. So neither the logic of their argument, nor the tenets of their poster boy really back up their stand in any way.
My guess is that most of these people never actually read Atlas Shrugged, at best, they may have flipped through to the steamy parts.
Anyway, when I look at all the people hollering and waving this book around and try to make actual parallels between them and characters or contingents in the book, it quickly becomes clear to me, despite them hollering that because they make over $250,000 a year that they are the innovators and heroes, that they really pretty closely parallel the moochers and looters shown in the story. I don't see innovators. I don't see what great contribution these people make to our society. I see a lot of privileged idiots who can't make a rational argument that's based on fact to save their life.
I think beneath it all, these people aren't so much scared of their taxes raising as they are of a shift in the socio-economic system that would no longer allow them to mooch off the system and loot the people who are really contributing, actually doing the work.
Seriously, do you think the new University of Oregon baseball coach who is being paid $400,000 a year works harder than a coal miner? Or a public high school teacher? Or a trash collector? Really? Is he making such a great contribution that the foundations of our society would quake if he removed his skills and talents?
And all talking heads on TV? Do we really need them? I know THEY think they are pretty important, but really...
The best thing about this whole thing, the most absurdly amazing thing about this is that for the most part, the people screaming and hollering about "Going Galt" and how they are being punished for their hard work, and how they should be rewarded instead, are the folks who are in complete support of the government bailouts put forward by Bush & Pals. The bailout that was oh so necessary. The bailout that was a matter of absolute NEED. And why did we need that bailout? Because a bunch of big corporations with very highly paid folks running them, completely FAILED. That's right, they didn't do their jobs well, despite being paid huge sums of money. They sucked, and their companies should have gone under. But instead they got paid off for their mediocrity, for their inability to run a profitable business. Weird isn't it, how while that goes against absolutely everything that John Galt stood for, and was a prime example of everything he stood against... the same folks who supported it, are now trying to use Galt as their posterboy.
With hypocrisy that staggering, I can only assume either they are stupid, or they think most of us are.
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