I probably shouldn’t blog when I am angry. And I don’t get angry often these days. Just now I was catching up on some news and read about yesterday’s Food and Drug Administration announcement about the new cigarette packs. They are going to put these idiotic, gross, macabre photographs on the top half of cigarette packs.

I haven’t smoked a cigarette in years. I personally do not like them and believe there are better ways for me to enjoy tobacco. The new cigarette packs will not be part of my life. But that’s beside the point.

It isn’t even the intrusion on rights that has me so pissed off. I have sort of grown used to it. This time its just the utter stupidity of the government. The stupidity, arrogance, and bloated power-hungry nature of government bureaucrats.

I don’t like being lied to on my dime. I don’t like to be fed propaganda. Phoney studies and statistics irk me.

For those who haven’t heard, here’s what Nanny Samantha has in mind. On every cigarette pack, the entire top half, there will be a picture such as one of the following:

• Rotten teeth and gums
• Diseased lungs
• A sewn-up corpse of a smoker
• Smoke coming out of someone’s tracheotomy hole

Why do I care?

Why do I care? I’m a pipe smoker. Government does stupid things every day.

The reason I care is because the same people who came up with this hair-brained idea also pull the strings on a lot of other things that effect my everyday life. Do I want the same kind of people who consider this new cigarette pack thing a good idea deciding whether there is a distinction between pipe tobacco and roll-your-own cigarette tobacco?

Beware the myth of hyper competency!

One of the big mistakes so many Americans make is assuming people in government are significantly brighter, more competent, efficient, or otherwise super-powered. Granted, most of these people are probably nice, and they probably got good grades in school, they have been successful, and I’ll even submit that deep down somewhere, they really want to do good. We just disagree on how to accomplish the greater good.

The thing these people in government really excel at and rise head and shoulders above their fellow countrymen is their hunger for power. That, in my ever so humble opinion, is what actually pulls them to the top.

These people are perfectly capable of the most striking feats of stupidity, such as thinking you can get away with stealing classified documents from the national archives by stuffing them in your pants, or thinking you can, as a celebrity, get away with sending creepy pictures of yourself in your underwear to strangers. These are the deciders my friends.

Why this is so stupid

These people actually believe, or think you will believe, that putting those disgusting photos on cigarette packages will save over 200,000 lives a year. Easy as that. This is their claim.

They have been trying to convince you that 400,000 people die every year from smoking. Now they’ll have to cut that number in half or admit their dumbass cigarette pack campaign doesn’t work.

And what about the 433,000 tobacco-caused deaths per year? How do they arrive at that figure? When you die of lung cancer – if you ever smoked or smelled tobacco smoke it was a preventable tobacco related death. Never mind genetics, diet, obesity, stress, environment, bad luck, etc. or whatever causes all the other lung cancer deaths among non-smokers.

This is what a bag of chips might look like in a few years

The fact is, that 433,000 number is entirely bogus. There is no way they could have scientifically arrived at that number. They can not say with any scientific authority that smoking is the number one cause of preventable deaths. But they do.

People typically gobble up and repeat this propaganda because tobacco is “special.” Tobacco is easy to hate for those who don’t enjoy it. An easy target. What they don’t realize is the nanny state will move on to other areas.

Are you ready for pictures of the corpses of obese people on potato chips? How about decapitated victims of drunk driving collisions on beer and wine bottles? Is this the world we want to live in?

I encourage all cigarette smokers to invest in a collection of cigarette cases. There are a ton of them on eBay. Get them now because I predict the market for them will skyrocket the closer we come to seeing these cigarette packs hit the shelves.

Note: That’s me a few years ago before I lost 140 pounds.

I want to hear your comments. Will your vote in the next election be influenced by tobacco legislation? What is your opinion of the new warning labels?

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