Real Talk About Nicotine

Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer: 

It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.

Google found a bunch of links that apparently confirm my theory.

The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:

• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
• Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.

Kepone

Chlordecone / Kepone 3D by GYassineMrabetTalk

Over on Facebook I see that Sara Tagay, a Kurdistan Freedom Fighter, has 'liked' a post. The post includes some pictures of dead men, presumably ISIS soldiers. Most (all?) of the comments are in Arabic, but there is a translate button. The first translated comment looks like this:

مصير كل من يبيع نساء الكورد The fate of both sell women chlordecone

OK, that's weird. It's a machine translation so it's not perfect, but you don't get a word like chlordecone because of a typo. That's pretty specific. But what the heck is chlordecone? Turns out it's a really nasty insecticide. It was so bad that "In 1975 Governor Mills Godwin Jr. shut down the James River to fishing for 100 miles, from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay."

The stuff is persistent. It has a half life of about 600 years. A worldwide ban was set up in 2009. Banana growers in the French Antilles were using it up until 1993.

This is the kind of shit that gives big chemical corporations like Allied Signal,  the LifeSciences Product Company and, of course, Monsanto a bad name.

The world is really run by some remarkably stupid, vicious, short-sighted, people.