An Outbreak Of Common Sense In California, No Really!

I'm still very constrained by real life here in Puddlecote Towers and Puddlecote Inc, but I just had to find some time to report some great news from the usually madcap state of California.

State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) dropped a bill Wednesday that would have regulated electronic cigarettes after it was gutted by an Assembly panel to no longer treat vaping devises as tobacco products facing the same restrictions as cigarettes.

Senator Leno is a ridiculous pillock - allegedly funded by pharmaceutical interests - who knows the princely sum of fuck all about e-cigs, as we can surmise from his inept and hilarious pre-vote gobshitery.

E-cigarettes are tobacco products, and #SB140 ensures they fall under California's existing and effective smoke-free laws.

— Mark Leno (@MarkLeno) July 8, 2015

.@MarkLeno discusses #SB140. E-Cigarettes are tobacco products, should be regulated as such. pic.twitter.com/amqBWjaqrr

— CA Senate Dems (@CASenateDems) July 7, 2015

He seemed to think that just repeating the phrase "e-cigarettes are tobacco products" would drive his fellow legislators to crap themselves and vote for an unnecessary, and entirely idiotic, ban on their use in public. E-cigs are not tobacco products for the, some would say obvious, fact that they don't contain any tobacco and are mostly not made by tobacco companies. It's quite a big clue. He also makes a big noise about Philip Morris launching an "e-cig with real tobacco". The reality that it isn't actually an e-cig - but instead a device unashamedly heating tobacco not burning it and therefore a tobacco product not an e-cig - appears to have escaped his limited intellect.

The bill (SB140) being scrapped and Leno making an arse of himself is great news in itself, but the composition of those who stuck the knife in his back is quite telling.

Five Democrats voted with Republicans for the amendment, which was sought by the electronic cigarette industry.

As in the UK, the left - Democrats there and Labour here - tend to offer most opposition to vaping, arguably on the grounds of ignorance and incredibly lazy research (if they have bothered to do any at all). So Democrats shifting their view and siding with the angels is something of a surprise, maybe even an indication that times really are a'changing.

In the case of SB140, at a public meeting in April, over a hundred vapers lined up to publicly and personally object to Leno's madness while Mad Stan Glantz sat at Leno's side spouting his usual data-twisting bullshit. The people won, and a stupid politician advised by a self-serving and increasingly barking aircraft engineer lost. Badly. There can surely be no better result than that.

If the level of public support for e-cigs and harm reduction is starting to spook Democrats in the US, the dinosaurs of tobacco control who still push anti-vaping messages - despite overwhelming evidence going against them - will be rightfully marginalised even further as fundamentally untrustworthy cranks.

We've already seen evidence that high profile figures in the UK Labour party are beginning to understand that sections of the tobacco control industry have been lying to them, with Luciana Berger recently tweeting about the stupidity of Mark Drakeford's Labour-led ban in Wales. And quite right too, no-one except the most vile in society are that bothered about e-cigs, so any ban is unjust, unjustified and counter to every item of rhetoric an anti-smoking politician has ever uttered in the past. Plus, only the most vacant MP can ignore the unusually large volume of correspondence they receive from personally motivated vaping consumers and their friends and family. At the end of the day, politicians need votes, which I think California's Democrats have started to realise.

Leno's defeat should set alarm bells ringing in many jurisdictions over the issue of e-cigs. Most especially in Wales where Drakeford will hopefully soon be forced into a similar climbdown, as his pathetically blind bigotry and lack of political foresight transforms into humiliating embarrassment and an entry in the footnotes of political history as a crashing failure.

But for now, let's toast the vapers of California whose determination has seen off Leno's nonsense and sent a message around the world that, you know, e-cigs are really not tobacco products and politicians would do well to leave them alone if they value their careers.

On a side note, SB151 which would have raised the age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21 was also binned (perhaps influenced by an editorial in the LA Times). California politicians caring about personal adult choices? Whatever next!

It's Not The Onion, It's California

You may have read recently that Berkeley in California voted overwhelmingly in favour of a tax on fizzy drinks. If not, Snowdon wrote an interesting summary of it here.

Well, following hot on the heels of some other transatlantic madness, you might like to know what kind of weirdo-packed place the Graun reader paradise of Berkeley really is. Here is film of a sombre event in one of the town's supermarkets where political activists held a funeral this month for a "unique individual" ... a pre-packaged supermarket chicken.

No, it's not The Onion. It's Berkeley.

H/T American Thinker via NorCal David G

Jail For Smoking Outdoors? ++ Updated ++ And Vaping Too?

There has never been - nor will there ever be - a scientific study which says passive smoking outdoors is dangerous to passers-by. It doesn't stop one town from proposing a criminal record for smoking outdoors though, complete with a possible jail sentence.

Where is this place, you ask? Why, in California, of course.

NEVADA CITY (CBS13) — Nevada City is considering strengthening its smoking ordinance in its historic district to possibly make the offense a misdemeanor in addition to the hefty fine.

Just watching out for those bar workers, didn't they say? It was never about health.

UPDATE: Maybe that's a bit harsh on California. Check out what's happening in Arlington, Washington.

The proposed ordinance is modeled after a regulation in Marysville, though Arlington’s has been expanded to include trails as well as parks, and electronic cigarettes as well as tobacco products. 

People caught smoking or chewing tobacco in a park or on a trail could be fined up to $1,000 or get a maximum of 90 days in jail, according to the proposed ordinance.

Yes. Jail for using an e-cig in a park! These people are insane.

The World's First E-Cig Ban In Private Homes?

Do these people know how ridiculous they look?

Corte Madera Town Council members Tuesday voted 3-1, with Councilman Michael Lappert dissenting and Councilwoman Diane Furst absent, to ban smoking and the use of electronic cigarettes in both new and existing multifamily units. The ban will take effect May 2015.

Just when you think the 'looks like smoking' witch hunt couldn't get more absurd, eh?

It's worth rewinding a few years and retracing the history of home smoking bans to properly illustrate how utterly insane this Town Council is.

Back in 2009, the City of Belmont in California (natch) enacted the first ban on smoking in private homes, a move which prompted a lot of coverage from US website Reason. In a video from November 2008, they explain how far removed from even tobacco control junk science the justification for home smoking bans is.

Note especially the hysterical rhetoric from councillor Dave Warden equating smoking in an apartment with shooting a gun through a wall. In fact, the original footage of that meeting - which now seems to have disappeared from the internet - featured a quote along the lines of "if you smoke, it's like you are reaching through the wall and shooting a child".

This, despite studies on second-hand smoke - yes, even those fabricated by anti-smoking organisations - showing that living with heavy smokers for decades presents a negligible risk, if at all. The idea that a faint whiff of tobacco from next door is the same as a bullet fired from a gun is laughable. Anyone suggesting such absurdities are quite obviously so dense they could bend light and would offer nothing but a vacant stare if you were to mention Paracelsus.

So what would these looney tunes call the danger of using an exponentially safer e-cig? Firing a water pistol, presumably.

They did, at least, extensively apply their scant intellect to the issue though ... perhaps in between breaks from trying to understand the instructions for a Lego starter kit.

Council members struggled with whether the town should ban the use of e-cigarettes and e-cigars in multifamily homes and public places as part of the ordinance. 

While Condon and Councilman Bob Ravasio were completely in favor of banning e-cigarette use, both Lappert and Councilman Sloan Bailey were unsure it was the council's place to enact such a ban. 

Lappert said it should be up to the state to determine whether e-cigarettes are a health hazard.

Or even a health hazard for someone living with a fucking solid brick wall between them and the vaper, perhaps?

For Bailey, he wasn't sure there was enough proof that e-cigarettes are harmful. 

"I don't agree with the philosophy that in absence of proof, you ban something," Bailey said.

You're gonna love this guy's principled stance and stoic self-belief.

But after Condon, Ravasio and five members of the public spoke about the issue and referenced research on e-cigarettes, Bailey changed his tune.

Because he hasn't got Google to look it up himself, obviously.

I'd love to meet this Bailey character, I reckon I could have some fun. Perhaps I could let him know that he owes me quite a bit of money.

DP: So when are you going to repay me that loan?
Bailey: I am not sure I owe you anything
DP: Well, actually, I say you do.
Bailey: Oh OK. Maybe I do.

Incredibly, the citizens of Corte Madera are condemned to suffer these retards running their town. I couldn't think of anyone less qualified, they don't appear capable of running a tombola.

So, in answer to Reason TV's question as to how far smoking bans will go, just 5 years after they pondered it we are already onto the use of devices which Belmont City councillors will not even have heard of when they enacted their ground-breaking home smoking ban.

Future historians will look back on the times we are living through and write books about the stunning stupidity of our era, while Horrible Histories will lampoon politicians like those in Corte Madera for kids to laugh at.

We, of course, don't have to wait that long. We merely have to sit and watch as amused eye-witnesses to a once-proud tobacco control industry as it - and its superlatively gullible followers - inexorably descends into farce. Aren't we lucky, eh?

San Francisco Confirms It Has Never Been About Health

The second most viewed item on this blog last year was one detailing how e-cig use could be banned everywhere in California. It was picked up by news aggregator sites like Reddit, where commenters said I was an alarmist and being sensationalistic.

From SFGate.

Smoking electronic cigarettes in bars, restaurants and businesses will soon be illegal in San Francisco, after the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to treat the relatively new product like combustible cigarettes. 

The legislation by Supervisor Eric Mar is intended to limit children's use of the nicotine product, which he and other supporters contend has been marketed heavily toward young people, and to protect all members of the public from the secondhand aerosol emitted by the devices, he said.

Well, I did say that the myth of passive vaping would be added to the myth of passive smoking at some point, but I thought they'd at least have the courtesy to wait for the junk science to be produced first. These guys are in a hurry, though.

Under the legislation, San Francisco would include e-cigarettes in its strict antismoking laws, banning them in most public places besides curbside on city streets, requiring sellers to secure a special permit, and prohibiting their sale in pharmacies and other businesses where tobacco sales are banned. The board will vote on it once more next week, and it will become law in April after the mayor, a supporter, signs it.

April, you say? It was April last year when I published my piece about something that might happen in California. Less than a year later, and the process is actually starting to happen for real.

What a sensationalistic alarmist I am, eh?

Mar puffed on an e-cigarette as he presented the legislation. 

"Sorry for poisoning all of you ..." [citation needed]

Whereas Superviser Eric Mar is not an alarmist at all.

... but it's really important to show - I have a banana-flavored one and a peach-flavored one ... they are really targeted at young people and right now it's not regulated," he said, ...

Nor sensationalistic, either, because everybody knows that only kids like bananas and peaches. Adults never, ever touch them.

... saying the product could create a new generation of nicotine addicts.

Err.

Being San Fantasyland, the article wouldn't be complete without a rent-a-quote from the deranged conspiracy theory-addicted mechanic.

Just because they are safer than cigarettes doesn't make them a healthier alternative, [Stan Glantz, head of UCSF's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education ] said.

Course not, Stan, that would be completely illogical!

Do check out the comments under the line, where many are punching the air in delight at the full force of the law being employed so they no longer have to very occasionally experience a faint odour. Harm, you say? Who cares? It's only ever been about odours, not health.

I suppose we should take it as a positive that the pretence has finally been dropped.

State Control Of What You Eat - The First Foray

Things have been awfully busy in Puddlecoteville, so it's taken me a while to get round to highlighting this.

Yes, it's those lunatics in California again (emphases mine).

“This bill, known as the Public Health Epidemic Protection Act of 2013, would require the department, for every product intended for consumer consumption for which it has credible evidence that the product significantly contributes to a significant public epidemic, to conduct a risk assessment evaluation to determine whether the product contributes significantly to a significant public health epidemic, as defined, and whether the adverse public health risk would have a fiscal impact on the state of $50,000,000 or more. The bill would authorize the department to charge the manufacturer of the product for the reasonable costs of producing the risk assessment and would create the Public Health Fund, to be used by the department, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to fund the program. If the department determines that the criteria are met, the bill would require the manufacturer to create, for approval of the department, a public health impact report (PHIR) containing specified information, including a list of adverse public health impacts and a mitigation plan for those impacts. The bill would authorize the department to enforce the PHIR and would authorize the department to restrict or suspend sales of the product in the state if the PHIR is insufficient or if the manufacturer is not complying with the terms of the PHIR.”

I think you may have worked out what they are driving at here.

That means the initial targets in California would include food items thought to promote heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes.

Yep, lefty food snobbery at its most pernicious.

The implications of this proposed law are massive (cost for each of these risk assessments is rumoured to be in the region of $50,000 per product). Thousands upon thousands of jobs lost; businesses rendered insolvent overnight; and those who survive charging higher prices through increased cost of regulation plus the wholesale extinction of their competitors.

Of course, the businesses to survive would be big concerns with multiple outlets who would be able to withstand such a regulatory assault on their industry. Small operations would go to the wall almost instantaneously. Why are lefties so utterly moronic that they help big business while vehemently asserting in election literature that they ... err, hate massaging of big business?

In a far less damaging way, Puddlecote Inc. has witnessed this phenomenon before with dozens of our competitors being shorn from the sector due to ridiculous bureaucracy and over-regulation which can only ever punish the end consumer and taxpayer.

This, however, is different gear. This is the state appropriation of the fast food industry, no less. If you sell food unapproved by government, you will be financially crippled. If you sell mung beans and alfalfa soup, you have the freedom of the city.

Fundamentally, this is the Californian government undermining personal choice by forcing private businesses to only serve what the state approves. And with enormous sums directed from private companies to bureaucratic state departments, it's near as dammit the nationalisation of restaurant food supply.

And no, it's not a spoof. Here's the text of the bill, they're deadly serious. I can imagine some self-advancing UK-based food cranks getting a hard-on imagining the power this would bestow on them if/when the idea crosses the Atlantic..

'Highless' Marijuana - What A Bummer, Man

Here's a story about which it's hard to decide whether to laugh or cry.

While it's still full steam ahead to stamp down hard on the more popular type of smoke, the other kind - that is, marijuana consumption - has never enjoyed more of a groundswell of support for its decriminalisation and/or legalisation.

In the vanguard of the movement are those who argue that it is hugely beneficial for its pain relief properties. In hideous tobacco-hating California, for example, medical marijuana has been legal for quite a while, and recent moves have attempted to bring recreational use into the same category.

So a 'highless' marijuana crop developed by a team in Israel may come as a bit of a blow to the ageing lefty hippy generation of San Fran and environs who are campaigning so vociferously to enjoy their favoured magic smoke.

In this brave new health obsessed and medicalised world, drugs are to treat illness only, and only to be made by the pharmaceutical industry. Never must they also be enjoyed. D'you see?

Whilst I agree with their cause, perhaps the health angle isn't the best way for the pro-drugs lobby to approach cannabis legalisation anymore, now science has found a way of taking the fun out of it.

I can hear the sniggers from some of you from here. Keep it down, eh?

One More Friday Giggle At California

I did say it was a rich seam this week, as who could fail to chuckle at California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma?

After the drug death of a 15 year old, Ma decided that raves were evil, so naturally tried to ban electronic rave music. Why was she unsuccessful?

"We found out later on that, Constitutionally, you can not ban a type of music," said Ma. "Plus, I, like my opponents said, I didn't really know what was going on."

Incredible, isn't it, that she worked this out after having been elected into a position of authority.

Still, she has carried on ploughing her prohibitionist furrow, and has helped ban LED gloves, children's dummies and stuffed toys instead.

Reason TV explains all, complete with fruity young ladies.

All roads lead away from the Golden State these days, it would seem.

Friday: Laugh At California Day 14/10

Dipping into Californian idiocy has provided a rich seam this week, so how about this for starters from the self-proclaimed world leaders in green ideology.

Eco-friendly festival can't sustain itself

It was the first New World Festival of Eco-Friendly Science and Technology and quite possibly the last.

The event near the beach in Santa Monica, which had been scheduled to run through Sunday, was shut down abruptly Saturday afternoon.

Howard Mauskopf, the festival's organizer, said he needed to shut down because so few people had shown up. "We're in a position where we don't have the financial ability to continue," he said, adding that he would have needed eight to 10 times the crowd that was present to make ends meet. He said he is going to try to reimburse food vendors next week.

"I don't know why people didn't come," he said.

Err, could it perhaps be that most people aren't as enamoured with the idea of winding the clock back to the 1800s as you are, Howie?

Still, those who joined in are one big happy clappy collective. They'll take it on the chin if it leads to a world where more emphasis is placed on the planet, and less on money.

Rose Faranal, a vendor who sold organic pizzas and chili at the event, said customers purchased food tickets from the festival, which they could redeem at her booth and others. She said she was owed hundreds of dollars, but didn't know if or how she'd be reimbursed.

"This is what we got paid with," she said, holding up hundreds of paper slips. "Useless money."

Food vendor Shawn Deleo said he knew something was off when the festival began Friday and there was no hot water for food preparation. He also had a stack of paper tickets, and wondered how he would get paid.

"I kind of had a bad feeling from the start," he said.

Oh.

Clothing and jewelry vendor Kate Tevebaugh of Santa Monica said she didn't think the event was properly marketed — that people didn't show because they didn't know it was happening.

Oh, I dunno. They invested in a very funky graphic.

"This is a disaster," she said. "A complete disaster."

That's California for ya, love.