Beaufort parks look to ban grilling, balloons
Waterfront Park is the main attraction for tourists and locals. It's a place where folks can go for peace and quiet or walk the boardwalk. It is a place where families can go and make life long memories. This is why officials want to ban those things, and make folks register to throw parties in the park and other parks in the city. Folks will have to pay a small deposit, but officials don't have a dollar amount set yet.
"If you want to attract family, this is good. I think they should have a small designated area for grills where people can use them, and then when they're done they can go out and enjoy the smoke free area," said Janine Palmitessa.
Schmidt, a well known lover of menthol cigarettes, is not being overly prepared. The European commission is hoping to ban menthol cigarettes. The proposed ban on menthol cigarettes is only the latest example of the nannying instinct exhibited by many legislators in the European Union, which has already proposed or implemented bans on unsupervised childrenblowing up balloons, refillable olive oil jugs, and pictures of babies on baby formula.
Lalley was incensed to learn that bars and restaurants, many of whom don't appreciate voters interfering in their business decisions, are catering to smokers outdoors.
I have a vision of Lalley, like Colonel Kurtz from "Apocalypse Now", cowering under his outdoor restaurant table, wringing his hands and muttering, "The horror...the horror."
Mr. Lalley, exactly where did you think smokers were going to go? Did you think they were going to form 'smoker colonies' in the countryside after they were ostracized by voters?
Lalley is calling for a closure of this so-called 'loophole'. "If there’s no smoking inside, there’s no smoking outside where food and drink are served," Lalley writes.
Here's an off the wall suggestion, Patrick. Go INSIDE where smoking is prohibited. Is it too much to ask that you pick yourself up and move 15 yards? God forbid you should be inconvenienced in any way!
I'm absolutely sick to death of the anti-smoking zealots thinking they're the only people entitled to courtesy. Why should we pass further regulation when a little common sense is all that's needed?
Smokers are experiencing an ancient truth: if you concede the moral high ground, your opponents will have zero qualms about lying and claiming truths that simply “ought to be so” to drive home their advantage. For example: Did you know that there has been a study on the side-effects of lying on the human body? On average, each lie shortens your lifespan by 11 minutes.
Oops! Sorry, that’s actually the result (and now blindly held fact) of a 2000 study by Shaw, Mitchell & Dorling, subtly titled: Time for a Smoke? One Cigarette Reduces Your Life by 11 Minutes. Do a quick Google search for the phrase, it yields thousands of hits on government websites – but all the pages have been removed because it was…just plain false. I don’t know much about science, but this dubious conclusion sounds like what the big boys in lab coats like to call an “unquantifiable claim.” We laymen call it a lie. It was, and is, effective – because nothing is quite as convincing as the lie one desperately wants to be true.
PBS NewsHour: And do these arguments pan out?
I discovered the evidence was really weak. The evidence of harm to non-smokers on the beach or in a park from someone smoking is virtually non-existent. The evidence that fish and birds are dying because of cigarette butts is virtually non-existent. And even the evidence that seeing someone in a park or beach will encourage kids to smoke is extremely weak.
So I said to myself, what's going on here? What's the public health impulse that's involved that leads to these bans if the evidence is so weak? Because everyone in public health believes that what we do should be evidence-based.
As I thought about it, it became very clear that what was involved wasn't that we were trying to protect non-smokers from sidestream smoke on parks and beaches. We weren't really concerned about birds and fish. There wasn't really evidence that we were going to protect kids by disallowing smoking in parks and beaches.
What was involved was that we really wanted to make it less and less possible for people to smoke, because it's bad for them and we're trying to protect smokers themselves from a behavior that's going to increase the risk of disease and death.
I know Orgy isn't everyone's cup of musical tea,but like every song I post with every linkbank piece it's words mean something.
You might want to look at the lyrics to this song because if you're reading this I think the words will mean something to you too.
