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I don't believe in the no-win scenario. He MUST outlast us all.
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I adore Leonard Nimoy and his directing of "Star Trek IV The Voyage Home" remains my favorite of all of them.
As for smoking, my stepfather, who is 93, stopped smoking over 30 years ago and most of my siblings and I never started. But we lost one sister from smoking when she was 58 and a brother at 54. The statistics of smoking deaths is chilling. If tobacco were a new product today, it would be judged far too dangerous for human consumption. And yes, it's a matter of choice, but what about the spouses and children of smokers who usually don't choose to smoke but may later have serious physical ailments linked to the secondhand smoke of their spouse or parent? It's a very complicated issue. I applaud CVS for announcing yesterday that they were taking cigarettes off their shelves, although they'll of course be easy to find elsewhere.
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On a more serious note, I've lost many loved ones to smoking, and they were all extremely intelligent people. In decades past there was at least the "excuse" that advertisers were essentially allowed to lie to the public about the addictive, deadly product. The truth is that the medical community noticed immediately upon the invention of the industrial mass-produced cigarette that the mortality statistics left nothing to doubt. It's a bizarrely corrupt, centuries-old one-hand-washing-the-other relationship between Big Tobacco and government that has permitted this extremely profitable mass killing to continue.
Is everyone here aware of the tobacco leaves carved in stone at the top of the columns of the U.S. Capitol?
I taped a BBC/Learning Channel documentary off cable which never fails to outrage me, whenever I watch it: "The Tobacco Wars." Check it out. You wanna talk about the threat of "chemical warfare"?
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