Conspiracy Theories Don't Get Dafter Than This

Without wishing to make promises (or perhaps threats), the blue-arsed fly around-running at Puddlecote Inc looks like abating soon, meaning that I may be able to actually write stuff on the aged self-reminders which have been backing up in my drafts folder for some weeks now. 

But for something recent, here's a very quotable statistic via Reason.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is so excited about that possibility that he goes off on an illogical rant that Siegel quotes:

Electronic cigarettes as marketed today—with flavors like bubblegum and strawberry—are targeted at young people with the very clear intent of creating a new generation of smokers. Without question, tobacco companies are using the same despicable tactics with e-cigarettes that they used in previous decades with traditional cigarettes to lure youth down a path of nicotine addiction and eventual death.

Leaving aside the demonstrably false notion that fruity flavors appeal only to minors, Blumenthal is so focused on condemning tobacco and smoke-free e-cigarettes as the latest incarnation of Big Tobacco that he does not pause to consider whether what he is saying makes any sense. It does not, as Siegel points out.

The clear intention of electronic cigarette marketers is to sell as many electronic cigarettes as they can, not as many cigarettes as they can. In fact, of the more than 250 companies now on the general market, only one even sells cigarettes in the first place. Blumenthal's assertion, therefore, is not only unsubstantiated but preposterous.

Quite.

This is for the USA, but it's quite staggering, isn't it, that anti-smokers truly believe 250 companies selling e-cigs are somehow doing so only to help the tobacco industry to entrap kids into smoking tobacco.

Not because they have seen the amazing potential for e-cigs and want a share of the immense profits on offer. Oh no, they have gambled their personal savings and worked morning, noon and night building their businesses up just to help out big tobacco.

People laughed at David Icke for more plausible conspiracy theories than this shite. Yet this is the kind of nonsense that is being spouted regularly by idiot politicians from advanced western democracies like the US right down to democracy free banana republics such the EU.

But, y'see, this is all the anti-tobacco - and now anti-nicotine (except made by pharma) - movement does these days. In fact, it is all it has ever done.

I'm sure it must have been about health at some point, but I haven't the time to research that many decades back.