No time. No news. So you get a video this time…
Nat fumando pipa
February 8th, 2010African_Pipe_by_dear_mr_echo
February 7th, 2010Slow news day. Pretty girl. Pipe. ‘Nuff said. (sorry Stan)
Shughart: Tax is no pipe dream
February 6th, 2010
This tax is no pipe dream
February 5, 2010
I am a college professor. My job description therefore requires that, among other things, I wear a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches, grow a beard, spend two days a week in the classroom, and smoke a pipe.
That last essential trait is now under attack. A bill before Congress proposes to increase the federal excise tax on pipe tobacco, making it equal to the recently enacted tax on loose cigarette tobacco purchased by smokers who “roll their own.” If passed, the bill would tax pipe tobacco at nearly $25 per pound, an increase of 775 percent over the current level.
Tobacco smoking is bad for one’s health. To my knowledge, however, no scientific studies have been conducted showing that pipe smokers (or cigar smokers, for that matter) have shorter lives than nonsmokers. There certainly is no evidence that nonsmokers who are exposed to environmental pipe or cigar smoke are harmed by it. Indeed, every person who smells the ambient odor of my pipe says that they are reminded of their fathers or grandfathers.
So, why are pipe smokers selectively being targeted by Washington? The answer is political opportunism. The federal government has been on a spending binge since George W. Bush occupied the White House. Over the past nine years, America’s taxpayers have been burdened with unprecedented expansions in the federal budget to finance new educational mandates (“No Child Left Behind”), new healthcare initiatives (Medicare Part D, to pay for granny’s meds), two wars on terrorism (Iraq and Afghanistan), failed economic “stimulus” plans and the bailouts of irresponsible financial institutions.
With annual budget deficits now running at $1.4 trillion, Washington is desperate for revenue enhancements (i.e., new sources of tax revenue). Rather than increasing taxes on a broad basis, which predictably would elicit broad-based opposition from already overburdened taxpayers, it is politically expedient to single out minorities who cannot bring effective power to bear in the legislative marketplace. And so we have seen proposals to tax those who have sacrificed wages in return for generous, “Cadillac” health-insurance plans, to tax the consumers of junk food and carbonated soft drinks, and to tax transactions in common stocks.
It is naïve to think that our elected representatives are attentive to the public’s interests. What presidents and the members of Congress do in practice is to transfer wealth to the special interests that are critical to their re-election prospects. It is therefore not surprising that they finance those wealth transfers by taxing groups that are not important to them electorally.
And so the tax burden falls most heavily on anyone, anywhere who is politically impotent, especially if they can be portrayed as the consumers of products that, on the flimsiest of scientific evidence, harm themselves or impose costs on others.
That mindset unleashes the nanny state to run amok. Pipe and cigar smokers are no threat to the public’s health. Even if smoking a pipe or a cigar harms the consumers of those products, that harm is borne privately and thus is not an issue of public policy concern.
But it unfortunately is if tax policy is predatory, with the aim at raising revenue from any group that cannot marshal effective political opposition to it. Perhaps it is time to add pipe tobacco, junk food and soft drinks to the agendas of the tea parties now being organized to oppose a government that is everywhere more intrusive.
William F. Shughart II, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, is F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi. He is the editor of Taxing Choice: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination (Independent Studies in Political Economy)
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E-Cig Circumvents State Smoking Ban
February 5th, 2010
February 04, 2010
by Scott D. Yost
County Editor
Guilford County may have banned smoking from area bars and restaurants at the first of the year, but technology is giving county health officials and other anti-smoking advocates fits. “E-cigs” – also known as “electronic cigarettes” – are becoming the nicotine dispenser of choice now that smoking traditional cigarettes has been declared illegal in most public buildings.
Electronic cigarettes are meant to simulate the experience of smoking a cigarette, and many designs look like the real thing, light up like real ones and release a puff of vapor. They’re battery-powered nicotine dispensers that “vaporize” the nicotine but, since there’s no tobacco and no combustion, e-cigs aren’t covered by state laws that ban smoking.
According to Guilford County Tobacco Prevention Coordinator Mary Gillett, the product can cause confusion when bar patrons light up their electronic cigarettes because, while it’s not illegal to do so, anti-smokers at bars can get upset with the fact that people are apparently smoking.
Gillett said bar owners can order patrons to put them out – or, rather, turn them off.
“They can do it the same way they can say, ‘No shoes, no service,’” she said.
Gillette said that, since the product is relatively new, there are a great deal of questions about the safety of the device and how it compares with cigarettes.
Health claims about the product at this point are all over the place – from “There’s nothing in the product that causes cancer,” to, “It’s just as bad if not worse for you than a traditional cigarette.”
And, though an e-cig does put off a “vapor,” that only happens when someone takes a drag on it – it’s not a continuous stream of smoke as with a lit cigarette, and advocates of the product say there’s no danger for those around the e-smoker as there is from secondhand smoke put off by traditional cigarettes.
The legislation that banned smoking in most public buildings starting at the first of this year defines “smoking” as, “The use or possession of a lighted cigarette, lighted cigar, lighted pipe, or any other lighted tobacco product.”
Electronic cigarettes aren’t the first loophole – if they are indeed one – in the law that someone has tried to use to get around the ban. Some argue that an ambiguity in the smoking ban allows clubs to ignore the ban simply by declaring an establishment a county club – as one Greensboro club owner has already done; and others may follow suit if the name-change maneuver holds up in court.
Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes said the law is the law, and he added that, since using electronic cigarettes isn’t illegal, it must be legal.
“The law is not supposed to be subjective,” Barnes said.
Guilford County Security Director Jeff Fowler said he hasn’t seen anyone smoking electronic cigarettes in the Guilford County Courthouse or in other county buildings.
“I did see someone smoking one in line,” said Fowler, who added that he did a double take when he saw it.
The courthouse lines often get very long and all the people with lengthy waits on cold mornings need something to occupy their time. (If Fowler and his guards do ever need to break up an argument between an e-cig user and anti-smoking advocate in line, they’ll soon have a pair of $7,000 Segways to whisk easily to even the very distant end of the line if need be.)
According to Guilford County Health Director Merle Green, as of yet, the health department has no stance on electronic cigarettes.
“The county hasn’t taken an official position on e-cigs,” Green said. “This has not been an agenda item on county board meeting agendas so far.”
The new cigarettes were invented about six years ago but are only now becoming popular in this country.
Companies marketing the electronic nicotine dispensers say it’s a product that can help people quit smoking, in much the same way a nicotine patch might help wean someone off cigarettes.
However, as traditional smoking becomes banned in more places, more and more smokers are apparently using e-cigs simply to get their nicotine fix in places where smoking real cigarettes isn’t allowed.
From Eternity to Book Club: Chapter Three
February 4th, 2010
by Sean
Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Next up is Chapter Three: “The Beginning and End of Time.” Remember that next week we’re doing two chapters at once, Four and Five.
For those who missed them, here’s the Science Friday discussion, and here’s the Firedoglake book salon with Chad. I should also point to some substantive review/discussions: Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, USA Today, and Overcoming Bias.
Excerpt:
For the most part, people interested in statistical mechanics care about experimental situations in laboratories or kitchens here on Earth. In an experiment, we can control the conditions before us; in particular, we can arrange systems so that the entropy is much lower than it could be, and watch what happens. You don’t need to know anything about cosmology and the wider universe to understand how that works.
But our aims are more grandiose. The arrow of time is much more than a feature of some particular laboratory experiments; it’s a feature of the entire world around us. Conventional statistical mechanics can account for why it’s easy to turn an egg into an omelet, but hard to turn an omelet into an egg. What it can’t account for is why, when we open our refrigerator, we are able to find an egg in the first place. Why are we surrounded by exquisitely ordered objects such as eggs and pianos and science books, rather than by featureless chaos?
This chapter is a fairly straightforward review of the modern understanding of cosmology, with a particular eye on those issues that will become important later in the book. We zip through the expansion, structure formation, and dark energy. There I got to tell a fun personal story of my wager with Brian Schmidt. At least I think it’s fun — including personal stories is not my natural tendency, but at the right moments it can help to humanize all the forbidding science. Hopefully this was one such moment.
A few topics go beyond the standard cosmology summary. I discussed the Steady State theory a bit, because it’s a relevant historical example when we will much later turn to the question of what the universe should look like. I also dwell a bit on vacuum fluctuations and dark energy, because those will pay a crucial role in my personal favorite explanation for the arrow of time. And we close the chapter with a very brief overview of the evolution of entropy. It has to be brief, because we haven’t laid nearly enough groundwork to do the job right. This is a conscious choice, which may or may not work: rather than simply progressing on an absolutely logical path from foundations to conclusions, I felt free to mention points that would be important later, on the theory that they would come as less of a shock if we had established some familiarity. Again, hope that worked.
Tom Levenson, who is an actual writer, advised me to omit “smoking a pipe” from the caption to Figure 7, on the theory that what is shown should not also be told. I left it in anyway. It’s my book!
