The right wing just can’t do humor, and they just can’t seem to stop pushing tobacco, and climate denial.
A lot of humor depends on tweaking the powerful on behalf of the powerless – (afflicting the comfortable to comfort the afflicted, etc). Problem there for Fox is, if you are spending all your time defending the interests of the world’s greediest, most amoral and destructive corporate powers, you lose some of the empathic connection necessary for the best humor.
Something entirely lost on Fox News “comedian” Greg Gutfeld.
In the video above, Gutfeld takes the side of tobacco merchants against all those crazy left wing doctors who just want to tell us what to do.
ATLANTA – In just one year, e-cigarette use tripled among U.S. middle and high school students, according to a report today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). E-cigarettes have become the most commonly used tobacco product among this age group.
“Currently there is about 4.6 million students who report using any form of tobacco,” said Brian King, deputy director for research translation at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. “About 2.5 million of those are e-cigarette users.
Although e-cigarettes are “smokeless,” the devices use an aerosol mist to deliver nicotine, which is addictive.
“No form of tobacco — whether it’s combustible, incombustible or electronic — is safe for youth to use,” King said. “And that is primarily because we know nicotine can have adverse health effects on the developing adolescent brain. It can lead to addiction. And it could also lead to sustained forms of tobacco use.”
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Gutfeld, is, I guess, the right wing answer to Bill Maher. Except, kind of dumb, poorly informed, wedded to the right wing agenda, and not funny. Need more proof?
If you missed The Five today, you missed an EPIC rant by the great Greg Gutfeld. His segment was about New York City banning the use of electronic cigarettes in public places this week — Nurse Bloomberg’s last hurrah before ceding the mayor’s office to an even more dedicated leftist.
Why ban e-cigs, which deliver nicotine to the user and results in the harmless exhale of water vapor? Because it looks like one isreally smoking cigarettes … and that would send a bad message to anyone who happens to observe it. Seriously. That’s the mayor’s and city council’s justificaiton. That fact sent Gutfeld off the edge, prompting what is undoubtedly a righteous and hilarious Top 5 Greatest Rant from a master of the genre.
Heartland Institute, of course, is the prime example of the Tobacco/Climate nexus.
Below, see a boggling climate denial rant (I had many to choose from – caution, Gutfeld fancies himself a science buff..)
Headvise warning.
Head vice, indeed. I want to reach through the screen and do some strangling.
Amazing amount of irrelevancies and ad hominems.
““No form of tobacco — whether it’s combustible, incombustible or electronic — is safe for youth to use,” King said. “And that is primarily because we know nicotine can have adverse health effects on the developing adolescent brain.”
Yeah. In rats. In people? According to the NIH (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543069/), the big problem with young humans using tobacco is that the positive effects of nicotine are heightened, and the negative effects are smaller, than in adults, except perhaps for addiction rates.
Btw, cigarettes are banned for use in adolescents.
Meanwhile, here is what Discover magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/2014/march/13-nicotine-fix) had to say about nicotine (benefits that never seem to be mentioned by the CDC or FDA):
Nicotine is a pharmacological agent with drawbacks AND benefits to its use.
G baker is off on another one of his rants, and is farther away from reality in this one than is usual. He is so far off that one must wonder if he owns stock in tobacco companies. He certainly doesn’t understand the science, and may even have a reading comprehension problem.
How he ever concluded from reading the NIH study that “…the big problem with young humans using tobacco is that the positive effects of nicotine are heightened, and the negative effects are smaller than in adults…” is quite incomprehensible—did he not see this?
“Smoking during adolescence increases the risk of developing psychiatric disorders and cognitive impairment in later life. In addition, adolescent smokers suffer from attention deficits, which aggravate with the years of smoking. Recent studies in rodents reveal the molecular changes induced by adolescent nicotine exposure that alter the functioning of synapses in the PFC and that underlie the lasting effects on cognitive function”.
And he quotes to us from a rather breezy and ignorant article from a “pop” science magazine?
“…nicotine — freed at last of its noxious host, tobacco, and delivered instead by chewing gum or transdermal patch — may prove to be a weirdly, improbably effective drug for relieving or preventing a variety of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Tourette’s and schizophrenia. It might even improve attention and focus enough to qualify as a cognitive enhancer. And, oh yeah, it’s long been associated with weight loss, with few known safety risks”.
But GB carefully leaves off the last sentence of that paragraph—- “(Although, in truth, few safety studies of the increasingly popular e-cigarettes have yet been published)”, which is exactly the point the doctor made to Gutfeld.
And GB needs to pay attention to: “…Despite the potential benefits and apparent safety, researchers like Boyd want more evidence before they’ll recommend a nicotine patch for anything other than its FDA-approved (but seemingly useless) purpose, smoking cessation…To recommend something for which there is no good long-term safety data — it’s just wrong,” Boyd says”.
“Nicotine is a pharmacological agent with drawbacks AND benefits to its use.” is just wishful thinking by someone who doesn’t understand (or want to understand) the science. The POSSIBLE benefits for a small percentage of the population suffering from certain neurological diseases does NOT outweigh the permanent harm that nicotine can do to otherwise healthy adolescent brains.
You don’t know what you are talking about. I suggest you read the literature on this topic more carefully, and learn more about what an increase in “risk” means in this context, and what the actual studies in humans have or have not shown. Try not to confuse all that impressive biochemistry stuff in rats with with what happens in humans, and understand that almost everything psychoactive one ingests will have multiple biochemical and receptor effects that can sound very dramatic.
““Nicotine is a pharmacological agent with drawbacks AND benefits to its use.” is just wishful thinking by someone who doesn’t understand (or want to understand) the science. ”
Seriously? You think that statement is “wishful thinking”?? Maybe you need to smoke less crack and switch to cigarettes!
Part of the OP post is about NYC banning the use of e-cigs for everyone in public spaces, not just kids, who as I said pretty fracking prominently – are already not allowed to partake in cigs, e- or not.
“Part of the OP post is about NYC banning the use of e-cigs for everyone in public spaces, not just kids, who as I said pretty fracking prominently – are already not allowed to partake in cigs, e- or not.”
E-cigarette use triples among middle and high school students in just one year:
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p0416-e-cigarette-use.html
Adolescent exposure to e-cigarette tv ads increases likelihood of future use:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707152451.htm
Your arguments amount to a case study for rationalization over rational thinking. You personally smoke, and rush to defend it every chance you get here – ignoring the core meaning behind why Peter posts about it, that the same tactics used to defend smoking and tobacco sales are also used to defend climate change denial.
Get over it. You can smoke all you want to, no one will stop you, but the “health benefits” of smoking are clearly outweighed by its negatives, just as the “benefits” of increased CO2 emissions in the atmosphere are clearly outweighed by its negatives.
I don’t know what I am talking about, says GB?
I will second jimbill’s observation that “your arguments amount to a case study for rationalization over rational thinking” and add that they show us yet again that you suffer from the Dunning Kruger Effect when it comes to most science.
You suggest that I read the literature on this topic more carefully? LOL, in light of what you missed in the articles you linked If anyone needs to do that, it’s you, and you first need to go back to school and take a whole bunch of the math and science courses that you apparently missed. I have studied the topics of tobacco, smoking, addiction, psychology, health, and “that impressive biochemistry STUFF that happens in rats” for many decades, and used to teach about the health hazards of smoking and tobacco in the 1960’s (and rushed out at break time between classes to smoke a cigarette).
It is just proof of your ignorance to state so baldly “Try not to confuse all that impressive biochemistry stuff in rats with with what happens in humans, and understand that almost everything psychoactive one ingests will have multiple biochemical and receptor effects that can sound very dramatic”. Guess what, GB? “Biochemistry” is the SAME for all living things, since we are made of the same materials, have all evolved from the same ancestors, and share common chemical processes. There are small differences between species, but rats and mice are so close to humans that we use them as surrogates with great success, and look for both positive and negative effects.
Yes , “Nicotine is a pharmacological agent with drawbacks AND benefits to its use.” IS wishful thinking, in that you seem to think that a minimal positive result for some of the few people that have Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and other obscure neurological deficits outweighs the harm nicotine may do to developing adolescents. Read the freakin’ articles you linked until you understand them!!!
E-cigarettes benefit NO ONE but the tobacco companies bottom line. I will ask again, do you own stock in a tobacco company?
(And can the ad hominems—you waste our time and will convince no one of anything by using them—they are not “arguments”)
Parkinson’s (PD) originates from the decimation of the dopaminergic pathways in the basal ganglia. The thing about nicotine is it is something of a dopamine agonist, and may have the ability to mimic other dopamine agonists used in the treatment of PD (carbadopa/levadopa, ropinirole, &c.) which may or may not slow the progression of some of the manifestations of the disease, depending on which study you look at, but which certainly masks the symptoms. I would speculate nicotine isn’t a protective agent that reduces lifetime incidence of the disease (in early and middle onset patients), but instead masks the beginning stages of it, by subsidizing the dopaminergic activity that is organically being lost. It’s possible it may mask the signs of the disease in a person developing it so late in life that they die of something else before they have a need for clinical treatment, but similarly, it’s also possible that it reduces people’s lives enough, secondary to smoking related cancer, that people who would have normally developed the disease in the later stages of their lives, don’t live long enough to be afflicted by it.
Yep. Did you read the Discover article through to the end? It’s actually quite informative, and speaks to what you say here.
Oh, no I missed it. I just threw down some comments as I was going out the door for work. I’ll have to check it out tomorrow.
Good. And I feel confident that you will understand the material far better than Gingerbaker does, and will therefore likely NOT “…confuse all that impressive biochemistry stuff in rats with with what happens in humans…”.
Impressive biochemistry stuff, indeed!
The two Faux News clips are indeed “head vise” material—I had to get flat for a minute to recover from them. Gutfield is an incredible asshole, who was probably smacked around unmercifully as a child and is now trying to get even. It’s a good thing that an entity like Fox exists to employ ignorant and sick people like him and his co-hosts and allow them to make a living—-Fox is a “jobs program” for those who would be next to useless in almost any other line of work.
An observation for the racists out there—-here is an example of an intelligent, educated, literate BLACK man who made better points and arguments than FOUR white people, and could have taken on several more and outshone them as well. All I can say in favor of this group of Fauxies is that they at least let him talk and made feeble attempts to respond to his comments—-Hannity would have just talked over him the entire time.
And the blonde Fauxie is an example of the (slightly less than dumb blonde) type who can be trained to memorize all the right wing horseshit talking points and regurgitate them in a way that makes her sound reasonably “smart” (at least to the average Fox viewer, who isn’t all that clever). I found her smugness and self-satisfied ignorance to be more offensive than Gutfeld, and that’s saying something.
There is little hope for the country as long as Fox News exists.
The tobacco industry has managed to reignite the ‘tobacco controversy’ in places like Indonesia in an attempt to grow their businesses after slowly losing on the US front for the last few decades.
Good comments by several folks.
Here a few more items that may be useful:
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/01/28/familiar-think-tanks-fight-e-cigarettes
See Jenny McCarthy pitch e-cigs
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/07/02/thomas-donohue-sells-us-chamber-commerce-big-tobacco
recently:
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/smoking-declines-more-are-likely-quit-new-study-casts-doubt-value-promoting-e-cigarettes
and just today:
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/direct-evidence-e-cig-tv-ads-are-recruiting-kids-nicotine-addiction
Bottom line:
1) For most people, nicotine addiction only works during adolescent brain development, which varies, but ages 12-24 pretty well bound it. Nicotine is not good for developing brains.
2) Tobacco companies exist by addicting adolescents to something that will kill many.
3) E-cigs are incredibly variable, have a lot of surprises in them, are not just water vapor, and still have nicotine. For an addicted smoker, they are less bad, but the real downside is the rapid uptake amongst teens.
4) If someone believes that tobacco companies want people to switch to e-cigs to help them quit … and thus lower their revenues … I have an excellent selection of bridges for sale, cheap.
Thanks – I’m really happy you’re following this