How To: Get Excited About Yourself (MetaPost 2.0)

        My favorite blogpost this quarter is "How To: Read the Fine Print", because writing that post really proved to me that I have become a more skeptical receptor of medias over the course of this year. In the post, I discuss a seemingly harmless two page photograph printed at the beginning of February's edition of  National Geographic. Because the magazine is circulated monthly, and because I am quite the fan of it, I probably read it three or four times cover to cover. It wasn't until I came back to this edition in April seeking inspiration for a blogpost that I finally noticed the caption, printed in small, nearly invisible letters on the bottom left hand side of the page.
        Instantly I was intrigued merely because I had not noticed the caption any of the times I flipped past the photograph before, but my excitement heightened after discovering (at least what I thought to be) the secret message lying beneath the romanticized photo of a shepard in Afghanistan.
        National Geographic probably receives upwards of one thousand photo submissions each day, yet the editors chose to include a relatively uninteresting photo of a man leading sheep through a mud wall  "who is (not coincidentally) in Afghanistan, a country the United States currently has soldiers fighting a war in."
        The reason I found this blogpost so exciting is simply because I noticed some type of modern anti-war propaganda on my own; I'm sure it's not as cool as I think it is. But isn't that the point?

How To: Move Backwards via Progression

       I don't have much to say about this video other than to urge you to watch it (in it's entirety). I know what my opinion on this style of living is, but I'm really curious as to what everyone else's is. What do you think about the philosophy of the people living these lives? Would you ever consider doing this yourself?

How To: Replace Old Victims With New Ones

        Unfortunately for Americans, each new generation will be the target of significant advertising from tobacco companies, because new smokers have to replace the old smokers who have either quit or been killed off by the habit, who are likely to have belonged to the lower class. Unless strict government bans and regulations on the sales and distribution of tobacco products are put into place, in addition to the ones currently in effect, smoking will forever continue to be the number one cause of preventable death in the United States. Today, the main argument keeping tobacco products from 100% illegality is that smokers should have the freedom to purchase and use tobacco products as much as they please, despite the irrefutable evidence that cigarettes will kill each user slowly and without mercy. Is the war against tobacco worth compromising our civil liberties?

How To: Procure Diseases Your Insurance Won't Cover

        Smoking cigarettes is an expensive habit, yet impoverished Americans who struggle to afford food purchase and smoke more cigarettes every day than the upper-class will in three. One of the main reasons this demographics’ smoking rates are so high is that America’s working class is much less educated than their hierarchical superiors. Over 728,000 Americans have GED certifications, and 45.2% of them smoke. Destitute high schoolers, if they graduate and are able to attend college, go to affordable institutions where they train for their future jobs and accumulate debt. The intention of this process is to acquire a job that will help pay rent, not to absorb knowledge and become a professor. These trade schools do not spend time discussing the harmful effects of smoking with their students, so the last anti-smoking appeal pitched at them would have been in high school or elementary school, along with the rest of their education that is no longer of much practical use.
        These members of the lower class are now “likely to report that smoking is allowed inside their workplace,”. This drastically increases the amount of time per day they are breathing in secondhand smoke, which “causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults,”. Then there’s thirdhand smoke, defined as “residual tobacco smoke pollutants that adhere to the clothing and hair of smokers and to surfaces,” which are carcinogenic and evidently more dangerous to nonsmokers than secondhand smoke, because they stick to surfaces for indefinite amounts of time. All these risks simply apply to nonsmokers who are often in the presence of smokers.
        The likelihood of these Americans dying from a tobacco related death skyrockets if they choose to take up smoking themselves, if they haven’t already. Americans living below the poverty line use cigarettes for decades longer than a smoker with a high socioeconomic status, start smoking at earlier ages, and are 55% more likely to take up smoking again three months after a quitting attempt. Smoking while living under the poverty line, like 28.9% of the currently impoverished (compared to 6.3% of Americans with graduate degrees), is a downward spiral towards lung cancer, as well as a multitude of other possible dangers directly caused by smoking.