From the 'old news is good news so long as it's ridiculous' department ...

Those who know better than you are gaining ground the world over.

Following Canada's customarily laughable lead, Australia will now require cigarette manufacturers to display images of cancerous and diseased limbs and organs, a step the EU had agreed to take lat last year. (Similar legislation failed to make it through the House last year, despite the efforts of the AMA.)

It's considered a success by fanatics in Canada who've recorded a 3% decrease in smoking, though Australian tobacconists are surely correct in calling the measure "a desperate tactic" that "will not alter smoking patterns."

It's not that I favor smoking or have ever even considered smoking (it never appealed to me, and I never tried).

It's the notion that the central government of any nation should be wasting its time with this kind of legislation, and that there are evidently legions of crusaders fighting the good fight against this most evil of threats against humanity.

Does it strike anyone as odd that support for the war on cigarettes seems easier to obtain than support for the war on terrorism?

I'm reminded of those obnoxious "Compliance Alliance" ads we're bombarded with on a daily basis in Pennsylvania.

Apparently it is a real organization that recruits kids to entrap retailers who sell cigarettes by using any means necessary to convince them to sell without seeing ID (if their ads are at all accurate).

Yet while they claim to be fighting Big Tobacco's manipulation of kids (their tag line is "Elimination of Manipulation"), they target $7 an hour cashiers, manipulating them into breaking the law. Their most insidious and distasteful ad is heard daily on the radio:

A girl asks a male cashier for cigarettes, and he tells her that he needs to see ID. She of course gives him some old line about forgetting it, but she always buys her cigarettes here or something. He sounds a bit awkward and uncomfortable at being pressured, but still unwilling to sell. Her friend pipes up claiming to recognize him from a party, and they giggle and say that they thought he was cute.

After flirtation and flattery he relents, but says that next time they need to remember their IDs.

They turn on him instantly, laughing at him and telling him that what he did was "not cool" and that he'd just broken the law. And then there's the ominous warning that "the law is real and there will be consequences." If this had been a "real" compliance check, they inform him, he would have been "busted" (incidentally, "Busted" is the group's official name). He of course sounds embarrased and upset.

This is obviosuly just a commercial, and all are surely just actors playing parts, but instilling the fear that big brother might come at any time in the guise of a teenage girl was intentional, as was the threat of legal action and subtle use of sexual humiliation.

The state of PA has done a masterful job of manipulation itself in hiding the fact that "Busted!" is their operation even in this press release. The only indication is the blurb that they work in conjunction with the PA Dept. of Health. Throughout the site they claim that the organization is run by kids, for kids. This farce is maintained in part by the intentionally amateurish look of the site, though the site was registered by (hence probably designed by)a professional tech company with a competent design department that has produced many professional looking sites.

There's no real information anywhere about how and when the group was formed, exactly how children organized and funded themselves, and why they cared enough to harrass minimum wage earners. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that the state has been behind the whole thing and has been trying to lend an air of "grass roots" legitimacy to it.

Things like this power point document
, or better yet this PDF of the Annual Report of the fiscal year july '02-june '03 which shows that the state spent well over $1 million on the program and "trained" the kids who "lead" the initiative.

I'm just wondering why they go to such lengths to hide state involvement and the fact that the state created the organization.