Why cigarettes are like private campaign contributions: path dependence.

A couple days ago, after much work and careful deliberation, a federal court declared the obvious: 

A federal judge Thursday ruled that cigarette makers were liable for a decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of smoking but declined to impose financial penalties on the industry.

In her 1,653 page opinion, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote:

Cigarette smoking causes disease, suffering, and death. Despite internal recognition of this fact, defendants have publicly denied, distorted, and minimized the hazards of smoking for decades.

Why is this story even news?  The dangers of tobacco and the deceit of tobacco companies have long been obvious.  There has never been a more damning case against any industry.  See here. See also, the Executive Summary of Preliminary Proposed Finding of Fact in US v. Philip Morris, et al.

Cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke kills nearly 440,000 Americans every year. The annual number of deaths due to cigarette smoking is substantially greater than the annual number of deaths due to illegal drug use, alcohol consumption, automobile accidents, fires, homicides, suicides and AIDS combined. Approximately one out of every five deaths that occur in the United States is caused by cigarette smoking.

At the end of 1953, the chief executives of the five major cigarette manufacturers in the United States at the time – Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, and American – met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with representatives of the public relations firm Hill

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Huffington’s Orwell Awards

In 1946 (In Politics and the English Language) George Orwell wrote the following: [P]olitical chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. In Huffpo, Arianna Huffington has written a good post regarding government/media double-speak.   Here is the problem, according…

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Moral Values…hmm

 In 2004, George Bush was reelected.  We can debate endlessly over whether or not he stole that election, but it’s beside the point for this rant.  Besides, four million popular votes seems like a big wad to steal.

What we need to figure out if we want to have any possibility of turning this misdirected ship around is WHY SO MANY PEOPLE VOTED FOR THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT?  Not even just Republicans–there are decent Republicans that I would support (Arlan Spector comes to mind, as does a pre-2004 John McCain)–but the rabid fundie far right wing of the party, the wing that is destroying it and trying to turn this country into something like a theocracy. 

So what was it?

    The factor listed by most exit polls in Middle America was–is–Moral Values.  Not in California or the Northeast corridor, but in the Heartland.

    Moral Values.

    I had thought for a long time that the issues driving Bush supporters floated between abortion, school prayer, and taxes. I’m now not so sure tax cuts are that important–these people have got to realize that if Bush continues his policies, at some point a huge bill is going to come due.

    The furor over gay marriage in the last months of the campaign underscores the exit polls. Moral Values.

    If I thought the votes were driven by the deep morality stemming from a Kantian apprehension of the nature of the right, the good, and the universalizable as determined by a focused application of the categorical …

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Why you need to be the one to speak up

Each of us sometimes feels the pressure of being the lone dissenter in a group. It can make you sweat and it can make your heart pound when you have to go up against the group. How strong is the pressure to conform?  This topic was explored and well-documented in the 1950s by Solomon Asch, a social psychologist who pitted the human tendency to conform against the tendency to be truthful. 

Asch told innocent subjects that they were going to participate in an experiment on visual perception.  The subjects were to participate in groups of seven to nine persons per group.  The group was instructed to indicate which of the three “comparison” lines were closest in length to a given line. Each person in the group gave his or her answer in turn.  There was only one innocent subject per group, however.  Everyone else in the group was a stooge who had been instructed to follow a routine prearranged by the experimenter.

The test was actually rather easy and the first three trials were simply a set up for what was going to happen next.  On the fourth trial (and, similarly, on selected subsequent trials), where the given line was 1.5 inches long, the three “comparison” lines were .5 inches long, 1.5 inches long and 2 inches long. The experiment had been arranged so that each of the stooges were designated to give his or her answer before the innocent subject had a chance. On that fourth trial, the …

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Americans reach new levels of ignorance.

According to a new Zogby poll involving 1,213 people across the U.S., three fourths of Americans "can correctly identify two of Show White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices." Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 percent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only…

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