RELAX -THE METER WILL RUN BACKWARDS TIL IT MELTS

ENERGYWIRE —   September 11, 2020

1.  WILDFIRES: Solar power plunges as smoke shrouds California Smoke from California's monstrous wildfires has turned the color of the skies into a doomsday reddish-brown — and slashed the output of the state's array of solar power installations, by far the largest in the nation. ELSEWHERE IN SMOKING NEWS: THE WALRUS Commodity of Doom  Andrew Marzoni

The contradictions Inherent to the history of the cigarette, from the moralistic biopolitics of the nonsmoking movement and the anti-government populism of tobacco’s remaining loyalists... reproduce a prophetic narrative of capitalism in miniature: of accumulation, growth, exploitation, and imminent self-destruction...

Just as the smoker’s identity is defined by a relationship with an object, space, and as Klein shows, time, the nonsmoker is born in relation to others who may be unhealthier, lacking in discipline or fear of death, guided by different values and allowances of privilege

If emphysema, cancer, heart failure, or stroke don’t get you, neoliberalism will, as was the case for Eric Garner and George Floyd, murdered by racist police under the pretense of unlawful trade: selling loosies without tax stamps, buying a pack with an allegedly counterfeit bill.

Like Zeno, neither could have recognized his final cigarette for what it was, nor the figurative resonance that would transform their famous last words into a rallying cry for victims of a disease that is social before it can be physiological, no matter how many coroners are brought in to say otherwise.