There are many golfers who when they play badly, blames every aspect of the game right from their swing, balance, posture and tempo. These players misses one vital aspect of the game while they are busy blaming. Even though they might have spent hours in practice sessions, they can never master the game of golf if they are using equipments that are not suited to their style of play. This is one point that every golfer should keep in mind, if you are using unsuitable equipment you will never know that you are playing the bad game due to it.
It is therefore most essential that you know the following tips so that you may ensure that you purchase the right golf equipments at the onset
Beginners and juniors who are starting to play this game usually play with a set of pre-owned clubs. Before playing they should check the golf clubs. They should check every aspect of the clubs such as the shaft, club heads, and grips before checking the other parts of the club. They should know that grips can be quite easily changed. But what is important is that they should check the price and then if there is any damage to the shaft or the club head. If there is any damage they should not the clubs. They should also consider buying new golf sets as sometimes the pre-owned sets may not be so much cheap considering the fact that they must replace the grip and rectify other faults before playing with them.
However if you have considered to a set of pre-owned clubs or have a set of golf clubs which require re-gripping then you need to be careful. You should remember that the grip on the golf club is the only contact that you have with the club; therefore you need to be sure that they are gripped correctly. You can purchase sets whereby you can grip the kit yourself; you need to ensure that you align the grip correctly. If you are not comfortable with performing this yourself then your local golf store should be able to accommodate you. When choosing a grip ensure that your hand size is taken into consideration, having big grips with small hand or having small grips with big hands can be disastrous to your game. Always, always clean and change your grips regularly.
All golf players should avoid using golf clubs that are not well fitted and this may lead to wayward shots. All the players are different in many aspects. You should remember that golf clubs are manufactured and designed for average person of average size and features. Every golfer is different in a number of different aspects and golf clubs are manufactured and designed for the average person of average size and stature. So before making any purchase you should get your golf clubs checked, measurements are taken and the fitter should watch you take a few swings, normally with tape attached to the clubs and a swing plate on the floor. At impact the tape is marked by the club hitting the floor and the fitter is able to determine what lie angle is optimal for you. The shaft will also be checked to ensure that it is the correct length for you. Having a set of custom fit golf clubs is like having a brand new set of golf clubs and is probably one of the best investments you can make in this game, at the end of the process you will have a set of golf clubs which have been professionally modified for your individual requirements.
Another important point to watch out before buying is that the golf clubs match your skill as a golfer even though there may be wedges in it. There are varieties of golf clubs with different models. Some of these clubs are designed for low handicappers, some are designed for middle/high handicappers and some are designed for all skill levels. If you are a high handicapper then playing with a set of clubs which are designed for low handicapper will not help you in your game.
Sanjay Kumar writes content about Golf Balls, Golf Equipment and Women’s Golf Clubs .for more information visit at:
White sludge spews into Toney’s Brook A snowy, paint-like substance was pouring into Toney’s Brook this afternoon between Label and Walnut streets, and a risky materials squad tried to figure away what the gunk was and where it was coming from. Read more on
Okay, let’s grant this at the outset: no one needs me to tell them about the – let’s face it – unparalleled excellence of HBO’s The Wire, given that we’re dealing, after all, with a truth acknowledged by everyone who’s ever sat in front of a cathode ray tube in the hope of filling up the silence of the infinite spaces that surround them…
So, if any of you heart-wrenchingly attractive people still need my testimony to be convinced of the greatness of this show, then you are not only a friendless (if lovably eccentric) technophobic anchorite who’s spent far too much time with no-one to talk to but the tins of “Chunky Irish stew” that line your fallout shelter, but you’re also someone who needs to hear the following harsh truth the way you need a tin-opener and maybe some kind of gaming console:
YOUR FRIENDS ARE DELIBERATELY CONCEALING THINGS FROM YOU IN TO LAUGH AT YOUR CONFUSION.
Yes, the Illuminati are running this caper, ladies and gentleman, which is why your life is now, and forever shall be, one part The Truman Show, one part Emir Kusturica’s Underground. (Not a bad film concept, incidentally, as long as all the hierarchies of angels can somehow conspire to make the likes of James Cameron stay away from the thing….)
But, anyway.
The Wire is one of those shows, that despite being (at least now in its resurrected ‘DVD boxed set’ days) so popular that, if you’re a 20 to 50-ish vaguely middle-class person of the kind who’s seen at least one HBO drama, than you can safely bet your last marketable organ that at least two-thirds of your friends are, on any given night, sedulously watching the latest episode instead of attending your birthday party/wedding/stupefying Houellebecqian orgy as they mumblingly promised they would while drunk and/or attempting to seduce you with their endearing sensitivity. Believe me, then, when I say that even as you read this, people you know are already thinking of how they can bestpretend to be deadin not only to escape your Friday night drinks, but to indulge in the kind of Wire marathons that would make the Bayreuth festival look like the punch-line to a pun.
And don’t misunderstand me: I’m not just saying that your shy, housebound, irredeemably uncool friends are abandoning you in favour of watching the show, I’m saying that this is true even of the resolutely sociable and earnestly self-improving ones – the ones who purposely don’t own televisions. Trust me when I say that – all hyperbole aside –these people, are, even as we speak, finding the flimsiest of pretexts to drop in on your mutual friends (“Hi Hailey, Hi Amanda…just thought we’d stop by and see the new baby…ooh..how excit-ing…” in the hope of getting even a whiff of Omar Little and his merry band of social-realist-story-telling uplifted and transformed-by-a-panoramic-perspective, acute insights into systematic injustice and -larger-than-life character archetypes who, as in Dickens, play the role of putting flesh on structures that do, at least in a certain sense, and contra a famous May ’68 slogan: walk the streets. (Anyone who doubts me on that last point should read Joan Copjec’s book Read my Desire >until they…y’know…submit).
The Wire, at its heart is so vast, so baroque, so generally magnificent and has also had so many gazillions of words put forward attesting to its vastness and baroqueness, that it’s hard to know where to start. In deference to this, I’ve decided to try introducing my own commentary by means of one gratuitously over-extended knock-knock joke.
(As I believe Lao Tzu said: have blog, need gimmick: otherwise how else will I ever get to do that hipster froideur thing via which the more important doyens-of-the-blogosphere manage to patronise all the non-entities in their comment boxes? So, here we go:
Knock, knock.
“Who’s there…?”
“That was…”
“‘That was’ who…?”
“That was the American Dream abandoning this city like it was post-Katrina New Orleans on the day that it was announced that the city was being turned into a nuclear test-site which was to be entirely populated by the post-Apocalyptic (i.e. zombie) progeny of Glenn Beck and the Beckhams. As it drove off into the sunset (listen to those tyres screech, people) the Dream, of course, took with it the standard obscene CEO payout, a couple of the more attractive secretaries – that was the horn of the getaway car proposing to raise the dead of another city less lost than this one — and all the amusing stickers from the receptionist’s desk. Oh, and the ‘knocking’, sound? That was the Dream announcing that it had left a calling card on your doorstep whose glossy promise of secular transcendence will undoubtedly haunt (and in a strange way even edify) your short and brutish (if not always nasty) life, like the vengeful ghost of every promise of liberty, equality and fraternity once made by the founders of the Republic that now lies ostentatiously bleeding to death on an unregarded housing project corner. But, you know, take heart: the little calling card is still enough to tie some kind of subjectivity together into a mish-mash of affects sutured to actions by fantasies resilient enough to live as if it were not inevitable that the former should be distorted into psychosis and the latter crushed under the heels of the city of Baltimore like another of those ubiquitous discarded drug drug-vials that cake the shoes of anyone who visits the many depressed and posthumous parts of the city (East or West). And, I mean sure, you can even feel, on the odd night, your possibility of redemption, that you might be getting closer to the goal, that the cash, the girls, the house, and even the rap star ‘lifestyle’ isn’t far behind you:: you’re part of a good crew now after all, your star’s rising, people treat you with respect/ Bang/Huh? What was that?/Nothing. Just your pointless death. You’re a statistic now. It’s like fame only crunchy. And don’t worry it’s bad for “5-0″ (as in “Hawaii” or what the show’s characters call ‘po-lice’) as well – they’re ruled by numbers and quotas and corruption so all-pervasive that it’s as if the vestiges of civic virtue and government ‘by the people, for the people’ seem like the irritating parasite on the host organism of the corruption.”
Alternatively, I could have just summarised the above by taking a line from the first season:
Drug dealer (being dragged away in a police van and beaten en route) “You can’t f*!#ing do this, man: this is America!”
Random Police Officer: [laughing] “This is.West.Baltimore.”
But, as I say, you don’t need me to tell you that The Wire is to television what a cigar-chomping, gun-toting, Hegel-reading reincarnation of H.W. Fowler would be to the obscenely self-regarding Australian Press — no matter how much I just did this.
Also, given that I do agree with the prevailing excited consensus on the greatness of the show, I can’t attempt to offer you any shiny faux-contrarianism to take away the bad taste that’s left by so great an oxymoron as a “critical consensus.
So, instead of talking about the sheer ambition and daring of The Wire, its extraordinary writing, its frequently hilarious, frequently poignant vignettes coloured by those almost constant “I can’t believe this is happening” moments that will make you cover your eyes, and groan out loud to the gods even after you’ve watched seasons of the stuff and mistakenly think you’ve become desensitized to the show’s implacable “corruption squashes virtue” logic (a kind of scissors, paper, rock, without the paper and in which one side always uses the rock.)
And yet, if you’re a natural sceptic, you might still think that all of this nicely-packaged excellence is basically the familiar stock-standard “quality television” that can be found in almost any HBO show and that The Wire might be nothing more than The Sopranos with a little more incomprehensible Baltimore street argot thrown in to fulfill its ‘life on the streets’ authenticity quotient.
But, no.
Let me explain this by way of a remark that will also allow me to opportunistically explain something that I said in a previous post:
I recently made a video that went by the name, the Australian Middle Class Saves the World”. After I posted this video on Youtube and elsewhere, I started to squirm guiltily at the number of times the word ‘racism’ came out of the mouth of my idiot-hipster character ‘Maddie’ (who says this word — as she says everything — as if it meant ‘general badness which I oppose every time I go into a trendy bar as opposed to somewhere less hip.’)
Now, this squirming on my part, was and is, of course, stupid and pathetic, not to mention revelatory of any number of equally pathetic neuroses of the “oh, maybe I’ve said something that will lead to my beautiful soul being tragically misrepresented, thus leading to situation where I won’t get invited to all those parties that… I…er…don’t go to.” (Hmm. So, everbody wins after all…)
At any rate, at the time, I was worried that by making Maddie constantly invoke the term in her stilted, Xtranormal (and indeed “extranormal”) speech, some censorious and easily offended mythical reader of mine might somehow break through the ‘why would she give a shit?’ barrier and publically censure me for implying that racism exists only as a chimera in the mind of self-important morons. Now, of course: a) I never meant to say anything of the kind and b) no-one’s actually made such an accusation because well, you know, www.whywoudlanyonecare.com. But, to clarify this anyway, for narcissistic reasons: I wasn’t making light of racism, as much as I was attempting to satirise what I think is the prevalent ideological illusion that good and bad (and even the task of combatting present present social injustices stemming from historical ones) is in the end a matter of making sure the right people have the right attitude, that everything will be all right as long as the privileged groups have the right (“Aw…we like those people…they make nice food…”) aesthetic outlook on the victims of the injustice.
Now, what I’m worried about here is the potential for a kind of ‘consumerist’ distortion of what it means to hold ethical and political positions. The distortion operates like this: under the perpetual “Web 2.0″, “find celebrity or die” imperatives of the present, potentially any and all decisions (always conceived as choices from life’s extensive menu) can be perverted such that they are principally a means of ‘expressing ourselves’ through our consumer choices.
In an environment governed by the imperative to ‘make sure you show what kind of person you are at all times because this is somehow terribly important’ the danger is that even our most passionately proclaimed ethical and political can take on the appearance of (even if they don’t actually become this) nothing more than tribal tattoos which we desperately try to make intricate or distinctive enough to not be mistaken for everyone else’s (crappier, duller, less “edgy”) attempts to have their selfhood recognized and thus given substance.
I think you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about: the weird contexts in which even perfectly honourable moral and political positions that are supposed to be about solidarity, equality, justice and which are supposed to give rise to what Badiou calls the ‘tent-words’ under which an elusive ‘we’ might shelter together, and work together for a better world, suddenly becomes instead less about ending oppression or actually achieving certain goals than a convenient way for me to show the (apparently perpetually watching) world my latest kung fu move in the endless game of (to quote Fight Club) “which colour scheme best expresses who I am as a person: the fuchsia, the cobalt or the cafe latte creme caramel?”
Now, I’m not saying that I think that politics needs to be like this or even that it is like this most of the time: but I am saying that there’s at least a marked tendency given the way selfhood in our epoch is thought of (as a function of shopping and other gestures of self-display) that we will turn our political “alignments” as well as our attested to (as opposed to acted upon) moral principles into just another way of selling ourselves.
As an example, of this, I’d point to the Australian columinist Catherine Deveney, who is familiar to me chiefly for what seems to be her horrifying genius for spouting deceptively progressive sounding rhetoric in a way that must be incredibly comforting for the political right that she thinks of herself as opposing.
This is because, in her amazingly self-regarding discourse, ‘politics’ is persistently portrayed as if its main purpose was to provide an outlet for the smug self-assertion practiced by the inhabitants of the hipper suburbs, a self-assertion that consists in finding any opportunity to imply one’s both moral and aesthetic superiority to all of those crass, ignorant unenlightened types who don’t share Our Way of Life [sic] and who will thus be deservedly Passed Over when the revolution finally acknowledges that the aforementioned ‘let’s live in the interesting parts of the city with access to real life types’ are the saviours of muddled humanity….
Now, I won’t surprise anyone when I say that the ideology of “it’s all about your attitudes and choices” is particularly common to Hollywood and even more so to American television.
To explain: how many films have you seen where a problem of “race”, poverty and Imperialism” is portrayed largely as a consequence of the subjective nastiness or prejudice of individual imperialists/capitalists?
The recent apotheosis (or perhaps Apocolocyntosis) of this sort of thing is James Cameron’s Avatar, a film which though it does feature an undeniably pretty and pleasingly blue CGI jungle for its puppy-dog eyed, noble savages with sexy feline noses to frolic in, is, despite this saving grace, unbearably, pompously earnest in its constant, humourless attempts to portray the evils of Imperialist exploitation as ultimately the handiwork of psychopathic crew-cutted military fucknuts doing the bidding of smarmy, slump-shouldered, cynical corporate half-humans, who together constitute an alliance so evil that it wears a death’s head mask on either nipple and has a smiling corporate logo that says “we’re the bad guys” and goes on to explain how said alliance is dedicated to stomping on every flower that ever made an innocent child smile, even and especially when those flowers grow in magical, extra-terrestrial forests full of shiny blue indigenous people with carefully constructed super-sensual Angelina Jolie lips.
The unbelievable superficiality and childishness of Avatar’s moral outlook derives mainly from its cartoonish portrayal of oppression and exploitation as principally deriving from a lack of sensitivity and wonder, and thus as something that couldn’t possibly be abetted or perpetuated by normal, sensitive, beauty-loving people who don’t actively relish the sight of Arcadian innocence being summarily cluster-bombed by steroid-abusing thugs.
But, of course, the problem with this portrayal of capitalist Imperialism is it implicitly identifies the standard cinema-going audience’s rudimentary capacity to be moved by drama (“I’d be all like ‘Go blue cat people, I’ll> endure a cosmopolitan inter-species shag with Cat Woman Pocahontas if it stops those nasty U.S. marines from their ogre-like brutality”) as the key to solving the planet’s plunge into ecological degradation as well and at the same time as the best way to improve the condition of that inconveniently poor and dying billion people currently living who so recalicitrantly refuse to be ‘uplifted’ by what economists have long been telling us is the inevitable downward trickle of global wealth.
By doing this, i.e. by portraying exploitation as a reality that is in no way compatible with the existence of the average movie goer and his feelings, the film completely negates what is nonetheless its enormously inflated moral-political pretensions to ‘communicate’ an important message to the people via the multiplex. In the end, Avatar and its filmic fraternity will never be a call to arms for anyone to anything simply because (like Cameron’s much less watchable, and indeed execrable ) it feeds and flatters pervasive ideological illusions rather than dispelling them in the name of truths that might re-orient the field of what we think we know.
To make the more general point: there’s a certain way that people in general and Hollywood films in particular have with dealing with “Imperialism” (say, the British Raj) as if it were mainly the consequence of “Whig notions of the upward march of progress and civilisation”, as if racism, class-distinctions,Titanic and exploitation all comes down to someone saying explicitly “screw these savages/poor people/they’re not civilized so we can do what we want to them.”
Now, while of course, this was (and is) undoubtedly an element of the colonial mindset, the illusion here is that Colonialism would never have happened (or would have taken another rosier road) if only the Colonial Offices of say, the East India Company, were filled with the standard movie-going public of our time, i.e. with people who defined themselves by what is mistakenly believed to be the opposite of the “Whig” attitude: i.e. a capacity for wonder at the beauty at “difference” – at the cultural wealth and depth of ‘other cultures’.
The problem with this argument is that it is, of course, super-sized nonsense. In a bag. Where the bag has a full-body shot of James Cameron’s’ gripping his Academy Award and calling for a minute’s silence for the victims of the Titanic. (Yes, he really did that.)
Thus, I’m continually surprised and shocked by how many post-colonial studies types [yes, I just crossed myself ostentatiously] types who are supposed — surely — to take Edward Said’s Orientalism as their bible – seem entirely unaware that Orientalist attitudes (“ah, these blue cat-people have a spirituality and contact with nature that our grey ugly civilization has tragically left behind, but perhaps can regain if only it opens its heart to the mysteries of the East) goes perfectly well if not better with imperialist domination than a Whiggish sense of one’s own cultural superiority: in fact it’s the ultimate (not-so-dangerous) supplement to Imperialist ideology that makes the system function all the more smoothly: allowing the Company to sell the odd sari, and copy of the Vedas back in London along with the tea. Two words for you people who don’t get this: Lord.Curzon.
Along these lines, one of the really great things about The Wire is how utterly un-Cameronesque it is.
This is principally because more than any American television show that I’ve seen (even The Sopranos this a program that shows poverty and even a certain ‘not-what-is-usually-meant-by-the-term’ racism in a way that makes everything else I’ve seen from the U.S. look as sanitized as Tom Sawyer’s fence after his inaugural scam. Best of all, The Wire manages to achieve this without either sentimentality of the ‘every drug dealer in the projects is a hero in their own special way if he’d only discover the power inside himself to attract money with happy thoughts” kind or pandering to the inveterate belief of the well-meaning liberal audience of HBO programming that the main reason that bad things happen is that there are unenlightened, insensitive people in the world and that everything would be okay, as long as People Like Us could rule the world from our living rooms.
Of course, I’m not saying that outright bigots don’t exist; they obviously do, and (much worse) they’re seemingly self-consciously summoned into existence with alarming frequency by the prestidigitations of unscrupulous right-wing demagogues of the kind who seem to have unleashed the tea party on Obama’s America, Le Pen on France to start what would have to be a very long list. But a remarkable thing about The Wire, is how rarely individual sentiments (as opposed to individual actions) are portrayed as being in the least bit important to the on-going functions of the system. It’s not that the world is portrayed, as an arch-cynic might, as being totally devoid of individual virtue — we’re not talking about Mad Men after all — it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.
(For, any Lacan lovers among you, out there, I’ll just quickly say that The Wireconstantly shows the destitution of the imaginary – the sphere of ego and alter – in the symbolic, while at the same time showing the terrible actions of those who will not admit the existence of a ‘hole in the Real’: i.e. the properly capitalist-bureaucratic psychosis that equates what can be counted with what ‘is’. But, to spare the rest of you, that’s all I’ll say on the matter, for now.)
To put this another way, in The Wire, racism is not so much an attitude, as an organizing principle: it’s autopoietic, self-perpetuating, built into the heart of things like an inherited disease that is now encoded in every cell of the body, it’s like the information contained in every cell that dictates the direction in which the social body will grow.
Now, you might object here, that racism is, by definition, a subjective disposition/attitude that we usually infer from certain forms of speech and action. And you’d be right. However, it’s precisely these kinds of subjective dispositions that, in the world of The Wire seem, if not exactly irrelevant to the way “Baltimore” operates than something very close to this. It’s as if the series at once suggests that, yes, “life in the city” is, as neo-liberal economic theory would have it, simply the aggregate of all those atoms bumping into each other a la Democritus (or, in a different sense, Friedrich Hayek’s) binding together to handle a complexity beyond that which could be ‘managed’ by any government. And yet the show continually shows us how illusory is the neo-liberal notion that this social reality can ‘be anything at all’ in a way that would suggest these individual encounters and reactions are not already structured by the whole of which they form parts. Instead, what we see in The Wire is the tendency for an already existing pattern (of social injustice, inequality et cetera) gets perpetuated through, by, and very occasionally despite the seemingly isolated and autonomous actions of these same individuals. The point is not to suggest skepticism about the possibilities of human autonomy, but rather skepticism about ‘atomic’ social theory: as the philosophically inclined, among you, will already know, society may be made up of monads, but monads are most definitely not atoms.
Put differently, the fact that Baltimore is, as they tell us somewhere in The Wire’s third season, 65 per cent “African American” added to the fact the show’s universe has a black mayor, police commissioner, senators and generally no lack of prominent black, Hispanic, Polish and Irish citizens and that WASPS of any kind seem conspicuous only in their absence, doesn’t change the fact that Baltimore’s indigent and incarcerated populations are disproportionately African-American.
The show manages — without needing to invent a single easily despised, pot-bellied bigot to fuel audience indignation by coming over all Ku Klux Klan — to show that whatever the attitudes of individuals the fact stilll remains that the poorest districts on either side of the city are all occupied by people who are of the same colour, who speak the same language, and who are so used to and unlikely to escape the housing Project world into which they are born, that they even grow up amidst an urban lore which passes down legends of the great drug KingPins of yore down the generations. It is a fact that, as I like to say, is obscured by its very obviousness.
Thus, racism is here objective rather than subjective, such that although there are indeed many horrendous characters (and there are many of these in the show, most of them concentrated in the higher ranks of the Baltimore PD) this is peripheral to the fact that if you’re black you have a far greater (disporportionate) chance of being born in one of the “Towers” in which the show spends so much time, i.e. of coming from one of the many places where people are – to quote Charles Bukowski:
‘born like this/into this/as the chalk faces smile/…. As political landscapes dissolve/as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree/as the oily fish spit out their oily prey/as the sun is masked/ Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness/Into bars where people no longer speak to each other/Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings/ Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed/into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes…”
Also, in the name of chasing this elusive, frighteningly mobile, all-pervasive corruption, the narrative of The Wire across its seasons, operates by a device of continually pulling back the camera to encompass an ever more sweeping vision of the city, itself a microcosm of America: Baltimore is a teeming, thirivng thing: with its alleyways, and its corners (the sites where dealers hang out from dawn ‘til dusk) , its civic centres designed for clandestine political horse-trading, and its abandoned office buildings where the police use type-writers and old SLR cameras in a way that made me think, until half-way through the first episode that the show might be set during the 1980s (we hardly ever see a computer on any desk of the Baltimore PD.)
The fact that the shows narrative becomes increasingly panoramic as the seasons wear on is a feature that several commentators have rightly identified as the show’s curiously (especially for U.S. television) “Dickensian” quality. Like in Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House (the latter of which, I – admit to not having actually read) there’s a dust-heap (or a last will and testament) at the centre of everything: a money if not a paper trail that connects an endless panoply of colourful characters: police, gangsters, drug dealers, users, the frighteningly efficient members of one or more international crime syndicates with local dock-workers (“stevedores”)and their union, schoolteachers, politicians: an endless cavalcade of humanity that, for all the colour of the parade never verges on caricature: you never doubt that you’re witnessing characters drawn from life who echo and express the real life from which they came.
Most remarkably, when in later series the show achieves the remarkable feat of showing the interconnection of all aspects of life in the city via the vast self-propelling system of graft, crime, dodgy deals, and facts that are quickly obscured when they don’t fit with the various ‘target numbers’ of management-marketing bureaucrats it manages to do this without having to resort to any of the gimmicky jump-cut techniques of films like Syriana or Traffic, films which, as Fred Jameson once pointed out, tend to lose the very ‘globalisation’ they are attempting to portray in the manner of an elusive “something that has ‘had a trace put on it’ as we find in a certain kind of Hollywood action film, where the audience sees a map of the world with a light that bounces from LA to New York, to Paris, to Moscow, but then dissipates into the the aether like the argument of an ill-thought out thesis. [Actually, come to think of it, I think Jameson meant that, the vanishing from the map might be a better representation of the reality of globalisation then the attempts to ‘show the connections' a la Syriana. But let's save that for another girl, another planet.]
The first season of The Wire, then, tells what initially looks like the story of cops attempting to catch drug dealers and drug dealers attempting to evade cops: if you didn’t look closely enough, you’d be (as Brooker says) forgiven for thinking that this is “just another cop show”, albeit one with a strong cast and and the standard absence of Manichean distinctions which tends to graitfy all those nice, liberal-in-the-American sense, well-heeled and well-educated HBO watching types. But by the second and third seasons (and I’ve spent several months getting to this point in the show), there’s no question that you’re seeing something that goes beyond drugs, that becomes something like a biography, or better, an ethnography of a city.
The show’s quietly devastating second season, is, in the words of the show’s creator David Simon about the “decline of work”, (a theme which, incidentally, it shares with the excellent Australian movie The Boys).
The second season follows the characters from the first series through a series of complex plots that revolve around a dock workers’ (stevedores’) union whose charismatic Polish-American shop steward (is the term used in America? What’s its local equivalent?) Frank Sabotka (below) is desperately struggling to keep his union alive, while facing among other things, a vendetta stemming from a high-ranking police officer who will even allow a prohibited murder investigation to continue (oh, the irony) if it might humiliate Sabotka in revenge for some past slight.
Sabotka’s job is, as he, but also many of his fellow dockers see it, to keep his struggling men (and their families) waving, rather than drowning in an increasingly desperate economic situation in which the work which has for generations has kept these people alive is turning from a daily reality into a distant memory. In post-Fordist (but remember pre-financial crisis) Baltimore: the men (Polish, Irish and African-American) of the stevedores union are guys who would have grown up expecting to spend and even end their lives doing the kind of difficult, physical, full-time work that their fathers and grandfathers did. But now, they’re struggling. It’s hard to get more than a few hours a work a week, even with the help of the union (which everyone has joined because it’s a community, a multi-generational family, the only point of resistance against the brutal imperatives of capital). Thus we are introduced to a number of characters who, unable to pay their bills, and completely unaware of how they might go about getting any other kind of work thus find themselves in a situation very like that of the kids from the Projects, except for dock-workers lacking the dubious “advantage” of their contemporaries in not having been ‘born into’ a world on the fringes of the criminal shadowlands, and who thus are at once less resigned to this world as a condition of existence, but also less capable of surviving in it.
Of course whenever we see poverty attached to ever-present hopes of fulfilling the American dream (even in the relatively sober version of a small (possibly rented) house, a car, some medical insurance, some vestiges of dignity in regular work) the temptation that the dock-workers face is naturally that of finding an easier road than the hard week’s work that is, at any rate, becoming increasingly unavailable to them. Thus, the second season heads towards a devastating final act that will show us the consequences of these essentially decent (but, again, unsentimentally portrayed) being increasingly by crime and thus embroiled with criminals whose ruthlessness far surpasseswhat these characters are capable of imagining.
This allows the viewer to see even more of the vast networks that circulate money and influence (and ultimately drugs) through the Byzantine channels that connect “City Hall”, with the dealers on the corners of the previous season, to the young dock workers and their families, to our familiar “point of identification” characters who make up the few well-meaning ” po-lice”; to their obstructive, malicious, and vindictive superiors of the former group. In the second season all of this is also shown to connect with what also seems to be something like a pan-European crime syndicate that is not above the kind of casual murder that would make the druglords of the first season shudder.
The third season is (again I here quote from the show’s creators) about attempts at “reform”. Thus, it is also, given from the outset that it is a season that will show the kind of rocks upon which both the well- and not-so-well-meaning attempts to ‘clean up the system’ flounder: thus whether it is gangsters trying to convert their operation into a ‘legitimate business’ (a theme of course which recalls The Godfather), to various characters making quixotic attempts to clean up corruption everywhere from the police department to the mayoral office, or even just the admirable attempts of one tired, soon-to-be-retired senior cop who tries to come up with a strategy of simply containing (rather than eliminating) the everyday catastrophe that is the is the total, dismal failure of Baltimore’s (and everywhere else’s) “war on drugs” by coming to an accommodation with the dealers; the third season continually rubs in its audience’s face a stark, wince-inducing portrayal of an all-too-familiar aspect of modern life that was already burned through the audiences’ eyeballs in scene after scene of the previous two seasons: I’m talking here about the soul-destroying, ruthless, reign of numbers (not only money, but of particular pre-delineated ways of counting what is and isn’t reality) to which the show continually testifies. By the reign of number, I’m talking about the classic bureaucratic ‘if it’s on the page it’s fine, if it’s not on the page it doesn’t exist’ (No hole in the symbolic, in other words,: reality is what can be measured/counted accoridng to the ways we’ve counted, c.f. my Middlesex post). This, we all know is how institutions work whose bureaucracies have been infected with management and marketing principles that now serve as the only legitimation discourse of the instiutiton.
Baltimore, we see, is run, not only by a modern version of the Benthamite philosophy that forms the basis of Dickens’ Hard Times, but by that familiar-to-everyone-these-days combination of corporate Newspeak acting as the basis for legislation that pays no attention to reality, and that uses numbers and spreadsheet data (“is the murder rate up or down…if it’s too high we’ll have to pretend that a few of those murders didn’t really happen/or that we solved them, by arresting someone random from the streets who no-one will care about”): as the only guage for reality. Everything is subordinated to giving the higher echelons of the bureaucracy the ‘numbers’ they need, given that these numbers have now become the only legitimate way of finding out what counts as reality: all else is subjective psychosis.
Thus, some of what I found to be the hardest scenes to watch in the whole show (thus far) occur in the third season. These are not brutal gun fights that leave the streets bloodied (although this season in particular certainly has its share of such things). Instead, the really unwatchable scenes, for me, are the ones that involve smug, smarmy, insouciant, and cautiously corrupt higher-ranking policeman publically humiliating their subordinates for not making their ‘policing data’ turn out the way they’re supposed to and, in the process, being awarded with ever more promotions for their exemplary ‘management’. The worst thing about this, is that we know, from our own experience in considerably less desperate and tragic worlds than that of The Wire that the same kind of principles run the world at large: the university, the public service, and other once last bastions of a different logic, a different way of counting reality, are of course, no exception to this.
In essence: I’ve never seen anything to match The Wire for portraying corruption as so embedded in the heart of a city (and a social system) so capable of completely resisting the efforts of the few remaining honest men and women. At the same time, it’s important to note the way that this pervasive, systematic ‘corruption’ is portrayed.
Essentially, the show tackles corruption in a way that multiplies moral ambiguities at epidemic speed: it’s not just the usual “oh, we get to see the light and dark sides of both dealers and of cops thus humanizing them both” blather: instead, the audience is constantly being given unpleasant forced choices between varying degrees of corruption. Thus a character whom we have seen commit some act of unmitigated bastardry suddenly looks like a crusading hero when he’s moved for complex reasons to oppose the machinations of another character who will himself look like the lesser of two evils in a different situation in which he is not a power-broker.
This focus on systematic corruption means that there’s no evil in the show in the sense of a metaphysical (or naturalized) property attached to certain individuals: there’s no Joker figure continually motivated only by an obscure desire to cause mayhem. Instead, everyone is alternately decent and a monster according to the logic of different situations and how these characters perceive the extent to which their interests can be advanced or threatened. Obviously, the point here is not to deny the existence of human freedom, nor of the mind’s capacity for transcendence: the show -does- portray characters who nobly sacrifice themselves in adherence to principles and who refrain from letting their principles be dictated by the exigencies of a situation: but although these characters are (for certain obvious reasons) protagonists they are never 1) never portrayed as White Knights and more importantly 2) we get, very often, to see these good-guy through the eyes of their colleagues and superiors: i.e. as lunatics who are hubristically setting themselves up for disaster.
To give you a sense of how much this theme of all pervasive and yet graded corruption permeates the show, early in the first season we see one of the show’s most consistently sympathetic characters beating an adolescent with a night-stick, for the minor crime of having basically shoved one of her fellow police officers. It’s a brutal scene, that comes at the climax of an episode, and that places most of the violence off-camera such that we get the disturbing vision of the beating continuing as the credits roll in our living rooms. We’re just left with the feeling that even the show’s “good po-lice” still have their moments of relishing the violence that, it is, after all, so often part of their de facto if not de jure brief to inflict especially when it comes to one of the show’ frequent, futile ‘let’s appease the media’ with a few raids on the housing projects). Casual police violence to witnesses that would have led to a whole story arc in other shows are mainly shrugged off by even the most sensitive of characters: it’s the way things /‘battles have to be picked’ / and so on.
Last of all I suppose I should attempt some criticism of the show. The weakest character in the Wire is undoubtedly at least to my mind) its putative protagonist (despite the excellent performance by English actor Dominic West).
West’s character McNulty, though undoubtedly a likable Irish-American rogue is too much of a cop-show stereotype (hard-drinking, divorced, unable to quite make his alimony payments &c., dedicated to solving the case to the detriment of everything else in his life) to be of comparable interest to some of the other characters, despite the fact that he does have a 3-dimensionality that elevates him above his equivalents in more pedestrian programs. But even the relative blandness of McNulty is really a small flaw, because the show never seems to make the character more than a lynchpin: a familiar face that we can follow into unfamiliar parts of town with some sympathy, and some recognition. In this sense, the show is from its beginning, and ever more from its first season onwards, an ensemble piece where the ensemble recalls not only a modern Dickens but his inevitable French “version” (to say a phrase that would have me lynched in Paris) Victor Hugo.
Lastly, I should also say, at the risk of anti-climax that the show has one character, who, I’m tempted to say belongs to the literary-treasure house of the world, despite the fact that his presence in the show marks the intersection of the world of The Wire with something from a completely different genre. I am talking here about the character of Omar Little (played by Michael K. Williams).
Omar is a character, who among all of the rhythmic, poetic dialogue, has perhaps the most rhythmical delivery and poetic phrasing of any of the characters: it’s a delight to watch him saunter between one scene and the next, scattering his strange drawling in the argot of the Baltimore street like a kind of gangster Zen master whose always one step away from turning to the camera for a Shakespearean soliloquy that will have the audience in tears. Omar’s role is brilliantly, wonderfully preposterous: a scarred, openly gay, fearless, muscular, shotgun-carrying lunatic/urban-cum-avenging angel who makes his living (as he happily admits to anyone who asks) stealing drugs from other drug-dealers at shot-gun point, in between sleeping with handsome young men, and (later in the series) keeping together a tight family-like “crew” that includes gun-toting lesbian couples of a kind that might have sprung from a late night drinking session between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
If you think that this seems like a strange carry-over from the graphic-novel superhero story you’d be right. And yet (the Dickensian thing again) Omar is, like Estella, or Sidney Carson or Scrooge or Jean Valjean or Eponine or Monsieur Thernadiér or Claude Frollo is completely believable as much as he is ludicrously extravagant, and present for the purpose of delighting the audience. In fact, the poignancy of what happens to his character, as the show goes on is all the greater because it’s like seeing an Immortal character from a more comic-book kind of film (Clint Eastwood’s character from a spaghetti Western, or even “Iron Man”) suddenly being forced to realise that not even the man with super-powers is immune to the toll taken by everyday life on the streets of Baltimore. (Oh, and a propos of nothing, Williams should definitely be cast as ‘Thor’ in the upcoming film of the same name.)
Thus, for all of Omar’s extravagance and charisma, we never doubt that his prototype could have really once walked the streets of the real (as opposed to fictional) Baltimore. It is interesting on this note that, even the actor who plays Omar apparently has – more than anyone else in the cast — a background most similar to that of his character. One example of this is the fact that the enormous scar that marrs Omar’s face is not the result of any labour by The Wire’s make-up department.
What this demonstrates is the well-known principle that the legend is sometimes closer to the reality – that if you leave out the more extravagant, fanciful parts of reality and only to print what seems to fit the sober law of averages and bell curves, you miss part of realit just as much as if you had told a story that featured nothing but caricatures.
And no-one, believe me could ever accuse The Wire of “Romanticism” a word which, in the endlessly evocative ‘tattoo-across-the-soul’ Baltimore’ that it presents, probably means something like “hoping that your most diligent works might make even an iota of difference to anything or anyone.” On this theme, it’s possible that the show will be (or has been) criticized in some quarters for the ostensibly ‘pacifying’ effects of its pessimism.
But I’m not at all sure that this would be justified.
While, of course, watching The Wire is, in one sense, as ‘passive’ as watching any other television show (i.e. no-one has yet found, that I know of, a way to storm the Bastille from the couch, )I see no reason to suggest that the show’s attempt to portray systematic injustice unflinchingly (as opposed to the tragedy of this or that individual soul), yet with the dramatic nous that makes it a genuine pleasure to watch should be as a sign that the show contributes to cynicism, and thus to apathy or despair. This argument would make sense only if you were prepared to argue that any focus on structural problems as opposed to simply enumerating the rich possibilities for collective action inevitably had the lesson that ‘there’s no point in doing anything’: at, any rate, by this logic Das Kapital is ‘pacifying.’
Against this, I”ll suggest that there’s always something at least potentially emancipating in a gaze that is prepared to look for the truth of something. As long as we don’t make the classic cynical mistake of taking truth for merely the absence of illusions, it’s still possible to find that a gaze that tries to, in journalistic cliché, “stare unflinchingly at reality” may succeed at the important task of making what was previously invisible, visible. And every change in the distribution of the visibile and the invisible is one more step towards changes in what we take for granted as setting the bounds of the psosible. Anymore than this, is obviously, up to us, becomes genuinely political: hard to ask more of entertainmen, especially of the kind that by its nature tends to be consumed in (at least relative) isolation.
[Original article (includes pictures, parenthetical remarks and links to other websites can be found at http://http://prettycoolforaniconodule.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/born-into-this-in-which-i-review-three-seasons-of-the-wire-and-mention-avatar-with-the-lip-curling-scorn-it-deserves/]
Maladjusted is a philosophy PhD student from Melbourne Australia whose interest include Plato, Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, the history of political philosophy and contemporary Christian theology.? His second blog ‘pretty cool (for an iconodule)” is dedicated to? cultural criticism, satire and shameless auto-hagioraphy.
Smoking has become the affliction of a large magnitude of people and others seem to be joining the smoke bandwagon at an alarming rate. Smoking has become a very common sight with one out of every fifth person being a smoker. The trend of smoking has become very common among teenagers also. The problems one gets due to smoking are many, but they do not seem to encourage people to stop smoking or deter people for starting to smoke. The hazardous effects of smoking are many, but people do not seem to be paying heed; the tobacco companies seem to be the only one is reaping the rewards out of smoking.
Since tobacco was born, it has been a few companies dominate the tobacco industry. These companies control most of the production and distribution around the world. They are quick to adapt to their policies and tactics to conform to the regulations set by the government and cater to the needs of the ever-increasing number of smokers around the world.
Tobacco companies of the world
A few companies hold the tobacco production and control of tobacco; the three largest companies sell close to two thirds of the entire supply. The stagnation in demand has prompted them to explore new markets.
The government is in a predicament since the tobacco industry accounts for a vast amount of jobs, but it also has to protect the health of its citizens. The government has tried to cut down on smokers by increasing the taxes imposed on them. By increasing the taxes on tobacco products and leveling higher duties on the companies, the companies are forced to raise the prices, which indirectly reduce use; since higher priced goods will be used less often. There is not much the government can do since tobacco is not a banned product.
The large companies also diversify their business to keep abreast in the market. They use various ways the companies diversify.
By market segments: Products are usually divided into categories, from high priced premium cigarettes to low and middle class of cigarettes. Companies with big brand names sell premium high priced cigarettes but also expand in to lower class to protect them from susceptibility. A decline in of premium cigarettes will be ploughed back by the in the lower or middle brands of cigarettes.
By target group: Every cigarette has its target group. By creating a new target group, the company can raise its overall market share. Thus the need to branch out into women cigarettes and target young people.
This targeting of women and youngsters has been seen in bad light. The tobacco industry has long targeted young people with its advertising and promotional campaigns. One of the most memorable, “Joe Camel” campaign initiated by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, helped generate public outrage against tobacco company efforts to reach young audiences and it is no longer used. The reason is obvious, most people start smoking at an early age. Getting a hold on a new segment will increase its share in the market.
Women are also a segment that the industries try to win over. Cigarettes for women are put forward as a symbol of liberation and some even shown in the light of slimming products. Manufacturers produce (long, slim) cigarettes especially for women. Perfumed or scented cigarettes with exotic flavors are targeted at women. Cigarettes usually have the word “slim” or “lights” to attract women consumers. Minorities are also a target for the tobacco industry.
Diversification by tobacco products: cigarettes companies also try to branch out into other tobacco products. For example, Imperial tobacco has decided to branch out into the roll your own segment; it dominates both the tobacco and the paper for this segment.
Diversification by non-tobacco products: food seems to be the favorite for companies seeking to diversify. R.J. Reynolds bought Nabisco (which, in turn, was later acquired by Kraft) owned by Philip Morris. Japan Tobacco derives a (small) part of its from food. Logistics and wholesaling are another favorite
Austria Tabak, wholesaling of tobacco and other products (and the operation of vending machines) makes up a large share of turnover. Over 20 per cent of Altadis’ earnings originate in its logistics division. Skandinavisk Tobakskompagni owns the largest wholesaler of consumer goods in Denmark. BAT tried financial services (but, since 1998, is a pure tobacco company).
Diversification into food and other activities makes the tobacco companies less dependent on (slow-growing) of tobacco products. However, the profit margins in these industry are usually well below those attained in tobacco processing. Producing and marketing cigarettes remain the more lucrative activity.
Incase of diversification by geographical market, OECD-based tobacco companies are keen to reduce their dependence on their stagnant home markets and establish a presence in markets where growth is above average. After having started business in many markets in Latin
America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Central Asian republics in the 1990s, their center of attention is shifting to the Far East. All the major tobacco companies now have a presence in Poland, Russia and the Central Asian republics. Austria Tabak, which gained a presence in
Estonia when it acquired the cigarette activities of Swedish Match also has a 67 per cent market share in Guinea. The company was considering entering Asian markets when it was taken over by Gallaher in June 2001. Through this take-over and the acquisition in 2000 of Liggett-Ducat, the Moscow cigarette maker, Gallaher greatly reduced its dependence on the UK market. Similarly, Japan Tobacco became a world player when it acquired the international activities of R.J. Reynolds. Thanks to a relentless internationalization drive, Germany’s Reemtsma now sells less than one-third of its total in its home market (compared to over 60 per cent in 1991) (see also figure 6). It is now on the go in several Central and Eastern European countries and, in 1999, it acquired Cambodia’s Paradise Tobacco Company.
The government.
A predicament is generally faced by the Governments all across the world. On the one hand, tobacco-growing and processing can makes a large contribution to employment, tax revenue and foreign exchange receipts. In many developing and formerly centrally planned economies, the tobacco companies have made sizeable and most welcome investments when other investors were disinclined to do so. On the other hand, governments have the responsibility to protect the population’s health. Smoking is harmful to health and treating people for smoking-related illnesses is expensive. This can lead to heated debates within the same government as each sector defends the interests it believes it should represent.
The economic importance of tobacco growing and processing differs from country to country. At the national level, cigarette ( and import) tax can be a main source of government revenue. In Russia, cigarette tax revenue contributes around 8 per cent to the financing of the state budget.
When the government owns the industry, it receives profits in addition to tax. That is why, in so many countries, State monopolies continue to control cigarette trade and production. In China, proceeds from state-owned CNTC amounted to the equivalent of US$11,000 million in 1999. CNTC has been the Chinese State’s top revenue generator for years. Japan Tobacco earned more than US$400 million for the Japanese State in the fiscal year ending March 2000. The monopolies can also play a social function. In Italy, several of the state monopoly’s factories are to be found in areas of high unemployment.
Then there are balance of payments issues to mull over, many low-income countries rely on the export of cash crops such as tobacco to pay for the service of their foreign debt.
Tobacco exports made up close to 10 per cent of Cuba’s exports in 1997-98. In the case of
Tanzania it was 15 per cent, In Zimbabwe over 25 per cent and in Malawi tobacco exports made up two-thirds of commodity exports.
Citizens smoke. But, if they smoke domestically produced cigarettes, using homegrown tobacco or use imported cigarettes and tobaccos can make a large difference when foreign exchange is scarce. That explains why so many countries try to restrict the imports of cigarettes and encourage domestic producers to use local tobaccos, for example, by providing a favorable tax treatment to companies that use a minimum percentage of homegrown tobaccos. The cigarette companies have also been a key source of investment in the formerly centrally planned countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. When others were disinclined to invest, those companies saw the possibilities offered by a blend of pent-up consumer demand, outdated production facilities and the association with independence and “western style” living that so appealed to the people in these countries after many years of central planning and little consumer choice. After having lobbied successfully for the reduction of restrictions of Asian markets such as Japan and the Republic of Korea, the large tobacco companies are eagerly waiting for the opening up of the other economies (notably China) that continue to restrict imports from and/or investments by foreign tobacco companies.
Tobacco growing, processing and exports can thus make a significant involvement to national employment and national income. Yet, however important tobacco growing and processing may be at the national level, its full economic and social significance is best grasped at the micro or regional level. In some regions, tobacco is grown side by side with the crop, which is the main source of income; its contribution to overall income is modest. However, in many others, tobacco is a main source of income and employment.
Tobacco growing and tobacco processing may bring substantial economic and social benefits, but the treatment of smoking-related illness is costly. Cigarette smoking causes cancer. It is addictive. The WHO estimates that tobacco products cause around 3 million deaths per year. Cigarette smoking is the major cause of preventable mortality in developed countries. In the mid-1990s, about 25 per cent of all male deaths in developed countries were due to smoking. Among men aged 35-69 years, more than one-third of all deaths were caused by smoking. The costs of treating all these people are clearly enormous (WHO, 1997).
So far, smoking has not had the same impact on mortality among women and among people from developing countries. There is an approximate 30-40 year time lag between the onset of persistent smoking and deaths from smoking. The effects of the greater incidence of smoking between these two groups will thus be felt with a lag, but it seems reasonable to believe that its impact on them will not differ fundamentally from that on developed country males.
It may be argued that smokers willingly take a certain health risk when enjoying their smoke. They like the taste and all the other things that they associate with smoking. Nevertheless, this does not apply to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or “second-hand smoke”.
Smoke gets in your eyes your clothes. Moreover, it gets in your lungs. Non-smokers cannot escape from smoke in badly ventilated areas. To be exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke can be a nuisance in addition to being a health risk for non-smokers.
Governments and conflicting pressures: How do they get by?
In practice, governments have opted for several strategies (which are often followed simultaneously). A recent strategy consists of seeking compensation for the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. It has been followed with success in the United States, as we saw in section 3.4. Governments also set rules regarding the maximum content of hazardous substances in cigarettes. Most of all, however, governments try to discourage demand for what is, as the industry does not tire of telling us, essentially a legal product.
This is done in a variety of ways, with some governments applying particular vigor and others taking a more relaxed approach. Overall, however, the trend is clear: governments’ rules on smoking are becoming ever more restrictive. The use of tobacco products is being discouraged in several ways.
Limitation of the space where smoking is allowed.
This is done above all to protect non-smokers from involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke. Smoking is being prohibited in public places (particularly health care and educational facilities) and in mass transport. Legislation requires restaurants to reserve space for non-smokers.
Limitation by age group
It is prohibited to sell tobacco products to people under a certain age.
Limitations on points of .
The use of vending machines is being restricted because these cannot discriminate against to young people.
Health warnings stating that tobacco is harmful to health have become obligatory.
The warnings must be placed on packets and in ads, with the authorities prescribing the text and the minimum space allotted to the warning in the ad or on the pack. Governments sponsor education and public information programs on smoking and health.
Advertising bans. Restrictions concern the location of ads, the media used (no billboards, no ads in the printed media or in cinemas), the images presented (no young people, no cigarette packets), and the time when broadcasting is allowed (not during hours when children watch television).
The manufacturers are unhappy with these restrictions, and in particular with the ban on advertising. In their view, it is not proved that such a ban discourages demand for cigarettes (as its proponents claim). They are concerned about its effect on the value of their prime asset, the brand name.
Worldwide, the tobacco-processing industry employs hundreds of thousands of people. However, due to a combination of slow demand growth, consolidation, and higher productivity, this number is unlikely to increase by much in the near future. Fewer people are needed per unit of production. The industry is becoming less intensive in the use of labor. Tobacco growing, in contrast, gives work to millions of people. It continues to be a highly labour-intensive activity. The scope for productivity increases in tobacco growing would appear to be more limited than those in tobacco processing.
Over a million people are employed in the world tobacco industry
However, of this number a high percentage is employed in just three countries: China, India and Indonesia. The large number employed in China comes as no surprise in view of the large number of cigarettes (one-third of the world total) produced there. Still, the productivity gap with the United States is striking. China produces roughly three times as many cigarettes as the US, but it needs over nine times as many people to produce them. In the other two countries, the scope for productivity improvements would appear to be even higher.
THE SCENARIO TODAY.
The situation concerning smoking are scary, if global trends continue as they are doing today by 2030 more than 8 million people will die each year from tobacco related causes-80% in the developing regions of the World. In India per example where 120 million smoke 1 in 5 men will die for smoking. Smoking is on the decline in developed nations but is on a large-scale rise in developing or underdeveloped nations. The statistics are frightening, every eight seconds someone dies from smoking; about 15 billion cigarettes are sold daily. There are 1.1 billion smokers in the world today, and if things continue as they have, that number is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by the year 2025.
Smoking and use of tobacco products is on a decline in most developed countries. However, it is on a rampant increase in other developing countries.
In the US, there has been a decrease in the number of smokers. This can be attributed to the growing awareness of the damage smoking causes to the health of the individual. There is however a sad side to the story, smoking has increased to a drastic level in other countries and the figures are staggering.
China is home to 300 million smokers who consume upwards of 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year, or 3 million cigarettes a minute. As many as 100 million Chinese men presently under the age of 30 will die from tobacco use. There are approximately 120 million smokers in India today, and it is estimated that in the year 2010 alone, there will be close to one million tobacco-related deaths among men and women age 30 to 69 in India. Worldwide, tobacco use will kill more than 175 million people between now and the year 2030. Current tobacco-related health care costs in the United States total US $81 billion annually. Germany spends an average of US $7 billion, and Australia, US $1 billion each year on health care directly related to tobacco use. Health care costs associated with secondhand smoke total US $5 billion a year in the U.S. It is estimated that as many as 500 million people alive today will be killed by tobacco use. The statistics are chilling.
One reason for the sudden spurt in the numbers in these countries may be due to the arrival of tobacco companies. The lax stand of the governments in these countries makes it a good bet to start business. The anti smoking lobbies in these countries have not been able to combat the increase. Increased awareness has made it hard for tobacco companies to work in many countries and so the tobacco companies have shifted their sights to greener pastures.
These countries have a very small anti smoking lobby and the government restrictions o them are not so tough and the government is dependent on the revenues it earns from them. Setting up business in these countries has resulted in increased used of tobacco products.
The anti smoking lobby has been very effective in curtailing the spread and increase of smoking around the world.
Advertising related to tobacco has is banned in most countries. Warnings of the harmful effects of the product have to be printed on the packet. This statutory warning is mandatory in most countries. The WHO in its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into effect on 27 February 2005 has specified that all 168 countries should ban advertisements unless their constitutions forbade them to do so.
Today, we are aware of the hazards of smoking. Even though the people are aware of the harmful effects of smoking they rarely seem to pay heed. Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer, heart diseases and can shorten the life span of an individual. It is a highly addictive habit and smokers are at a risk of losing ten years of their life.
With so many smokers around the world, tobacco companies are the only ones gaining form the increase.
Smoking Joey-Heavy Smoker –
If you are smoking-try to quit- but in the meantime-smoke for less.
Ashton Maduro cigars are known for their full, sweet taste and complex aroma. Due to the fact that the Connecticut shade-grown wrapper used to make the Ashton Maduro is very limited in supply, this is considered something of a rare cigar.
The filler and binder are both of exceptional quality, and they are both grown in the Dominican Republic. The combination of Dominican filler and Connecticut shade-grown wrapper has made this a prized cigar the world over.
A large number of cigar reviews have noted that the Ashton Maduro is a fantastic example of how fullness is different from strength. When cigar smokers talk about fullness, they are referring to the pleasure a smoker derives from the taste and the smell of the cigar itself.
This is very different from strength. Cigar refers to the power of the nicotine content in the blend.
One of the hallmarks of a truly great cigar is one does not get a severe punch to the adrenalin that could ruin the essence of the moment. Instead, the smoker gets a smooth, relaxing feeling that goes down just like a neat scotchor, even better, is smoked with a neat scotch.
A full-flavor cigar like the Ashton Maduro is a sure win with both neophytes and veteran smokers for this reason.
When an Ashton Maduro is initially lit up, its taste is very sweet. As the cigar burns, the flavor turns into a very rich and nutty flavor. One begins to notice subtle hints of apple, and a finish that many cigar reviews have referred to as a detectable, very appealing, creamy taste.
This subtle shift of flavors is as smooth as the draw of the cigar, and is never a shock to ones palette. It is present thanks to the fermentation and aging process of the Connecticut-shade wrapper in Sherry-finished, French oak barrels.
Ashton ages these wrappers for a very good reason. The intent is the make the cigar wrapper as oily as possible. New smokers are often surprised to learn that an oily wrapper on a cigar is a not a bad thing. Contrary to the world outside the cigar lounge, an oily wrapper is highly sought after as a distinguishing characteristic of a premium cigar. This is because dry wrappers do not burn as evenly, nor do they taste as good.
Not only is the wrapper of an Ashton Maduro of exceptional quality, but the filler is as well. These cigars are carefully rolled by hand by only the very best torcedores at the Fuente factory. So expert is the constitution of these cigars that the final product always feels perfectly smooth and firm within the grip.
It is just tight enough to not fall apart while smoking. At the same time, however, it is not too tight. A cigar that is too tight has too hard of a draw, but with this premium blend, nothing can be easier than to draw a pleasing and exceptional flavor from within its truly impeccable constitution.
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The study of the economy of Cuba can be divided into four phases. The first phase consists of the occupation of the island by the Spanish, which led to the extinction of the aboriginals and the bringing of African slaves to work on the sugar plantations. At this point of time, Cuba provided for the highly profitable business of sugar cultivation and its exports. Sugar industry was the crux of Cuba’s economy and Cuba rose to become one of the largest producers of sugar in the world.
The second phase pertains to the years following the wars of independence against the Spanish and also the invasion of Cuba by the US. It is marked by the sweeping powers of intervention obtained by the US in 1902, with the Cuban economy being controlled by the growing investment of the US citizens in the sugar plantations of Cuba. Now, again, money and profits from the sugar plantation, sugar refineries and subsidiary sugar products such as rum went to the many American investors and a few Cuban elite. The other major industries also included tourism, tobacco, transportation, mining and the communication industry.
The third phase begins with the Cuban revolution and the beginning of Fidel Castro’s rule in the year 1959. All plantations that were more than 400 hectares became state owned and all industries including the petroleum and the telephones became nationalized. This lead to the US trade embargo towards Cuba. Cuba lost its traditional international market. However, Cuba found a trade and political ally in the USSR when the Cuban-sugar for Russian-oil package worked well. Cuba reoriented itself to the Russian and pro-Russian market and did over 80% of its international trade with them. The next 30 years saw tremendous improvement in health care, education and social welfare. Cuba boasts of a 97% literacy rate and the life expectancy increased to 76%. There was an egalitarian distribution of income and Cuba’s income inequality index became the lowest in the world.
All was well until 1989 when it became clear to Cuba that sooner or later Cuba would have to learn to do without any subsidies or trade relations with the USSR and the eastern European countries. The fourth phase begins here with the government dubbing it as the ‘Special Period in Peacetime’. The economic reforms include:
(i) the opening and gearing up of tourism as an industry
(ii) diversification of the agricultural sector by producing fruits and vegetables and rice along with live stock for local consumption that include the visiting tourists.
(iii) production of more of citrus food and less of sugar
(iv) focusing on that sector of fisheries which sent its fleets to nearby seas and exporting spiny lobsters to Japan
(v) State-owned lands have been converted to agricultural cooperatives that are managed to a certain degree by the workers. Retail outlets at a small scale have been allowed for the food market. In the field of food production, allowing the of excess production (which is above the state-fixed production quota) in the free market has brought down black markets, in addition to enhancing production
(vi) Foreign investments in various industries such as tourism, mining, telecommunication, construction and manufacturing sectors have been allowed
(vii) Self employment has been legalized for around 150 occupations.
Investment into biotechnology and pharmaceuticals during the third phase reaped returns when products of this industry were available for export now at the fourth phase.
The other Cuban industries include cement, steel, agricultural machinery and construction.
Fisheries, nickel and ore production, growing agricultural products such as fruits, tobacco are some areas that have shown growth in the export sector. Cuba now exports to European countries (50%), Canada and Latin America (20%), and Asia (20%).
Spain, France, and United Kingdom have invested in the tobacco and cigar production. Spain and Canada have invested in the exploration of oil off the shores of Cuba. Mexico, Canada, Australia, South-Africa, Netherlands, Brazil, and Chile are the other major countries that have invested in the various industries of Cuba.
Cuba has entered into an agreement with Venezuela whereby thousands of Cubans who are doctors, teachers and sports trainers, and engineers would move in to Venezuela to assist their development program in return for 53,000 barrels of oil per day being shipped to Cuba for the next five years.
“Energy revolution” where apart form changing the entire system of power generation and distribution, energy conservation is also aimed at, has been in vogue in Cuba for the last two years. The quality of life of the Cubans are improving with the volunteers of the government replacing on a door-to-door campaign, the existing electric stoves and lights with the ones that are more efficient and less energy consuming. Energy efficient refrigerators and television sets have been distributed and would be installed in all the thousands of housing units that the government is building. Energy efficient buses from China would soon be available for the Cuban public transport. It is just a matter of some time when power generation would take place at hundreds of units that are well synchronized, thus avoiding wastage of power while distributing it through very long distances. Generation of natural gas while exploring for oil at oil rigs is also considered.
Cuba has also legalized the US dollars. Further, the Venezuelan inputs for domestic oil production and upgradation of existing power stations have raised the level of optimism. Cuba is also hoping to find oil off its shores. Apart from the sugar industry and its related products, there are various industries such as tourism (also called the lung of the Cuban economy), fisheries, nickel and ore production, production of tobacco, Cuban cigar, citrus fruits, pharmaceuticals, coffee, besides basic manufacturing industries which have earned Cuba foreign exchange. Cuba has learned to manage its post-USSR economic condition and is steering towards a more prosperous economy.
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A few years ago, in 2006, the Nevada legislature imposed a public smoking ban.
The new rule doesn’t apply – as yet – to the storied casinos of Las Vegas, where smoking is still allowed on gaming floors. And of course Nevada is hardly the only recent state to impose restrictions on public smoking. Indeed, it joins over thirty states (at this writing) with such laws on the books. If you are reading this from the United States, it is likely that a similar law applies to your area: half the country’s population is currently under the jurisdiction of a public-smoking regulation of some kind.
But the idea of a smoking ban passing the Nevada legislature seems almost like a kind of spiritual defeat for cigar smokers: after all, what could more epitomize “cigar cool” than the mental image of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, cigars and drinks in hand, finger-popping their ways through the floor of a Vegas casino?
It just symbolizes a fact that’s made passionate smokers’ lives a little more difficult over the past decade: in the interest of public health (and out of consideration for asthmatics and others), more and more city councils and state legislatures are choosing to ban public smoking outright, or are limiting it to certain licensed facilities.
Arguments about the effectiveness or appropriateness of these bans to one side, we can all agree that they mean that smokers have to put a little more energy into planning vacations. For a person who loves the taste of a good cigar, for whom relaxation doesn’t become meaningful until there’s a stogie involved, there’s no point in a vacation where you can’t even smoke in your hotel room. With smoking bans underway in Atlantic City (and this ban extends to casinos) and similar one-time bastions of cigar culture, frustrated cigar smokers are turning to a new option: the cruise ship.
And why not? Cruise ship vacations offer the ultimate chance to “get away from it all,” a continuous expanse of blue water, and the opportunity to meet interesting people from all over the country (and world). Few cruises are completely smoke-free, with most offering, at the very least, designated smoking areas that might include cigar bars or lounges. So it’s hard to go completely wrong – wherever you book your passage, you’ll almost always have at least some chance to smoke.
More and more luxury cruise lines don’t allow smoking in living quarters – that’s one downfall. After all, the next person using your room might be a nonsmoker, and it doesn’t make economic sense for cruise ship directors to designate permanent “smoking” and “nonsmoking” rooms; such a move would involve logistical nightmares during booking. But luxury quarters often include balconies, where smoking is sometimes still allowed.
The recent case of a cruise line headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida gives smokers an indication of what they can expect. The cruise line, according to some reports, lost millions in bookings after instituting a partial smoking ban in 2007. But compared to those bans that have caused smokers such dismay in Atlantic City and Ottawa, the Florida-based cruise line’s smoking ban doesn’t even apply to the on-ship bars and casinos.
Indeed, the cruise ship industry seems to be following the opposite track of most US states and municipalities – as they grow more restrictive toward smoking, cruise lines are growing more permissive. One completely smoke-free cruise ship line went out of business awhile ago; another once-smokeless line changed its policies to allow some smoking on the boat.
Smokers will likely want to evaluate cruise line policies prior to booking as there are has examples of ships with almost smoke-free policies. Smoking on such lines may only be permitted in two designated areas – and if you light up anywhere else, you could be kicked off the boat! (That presumably doesn’t mean you’ll be forced to walk the plank, but it’s probably not worth finding out.)
Another rule of thumb mentioned by several travel writers: if you’re looking for company as you smoke, go for a cruise line with a high number of European and Asian clientele. Citizens of many of these countries often still smoke in higher numbers than do contemporary Americans, and there is a Spain-based cruise line that currently sports the least restrictive smoking policy out there.
provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.
Smoking has remained an integral part of young and old since the beginning of time. Ask a smoker what is the real charm of smoking and the twinkle in the eyes will speak a thousand words. Cigars enjoy mass appeal at all times. They are way to flaunt your style, monetary status, power, and passion. Your cigars are the integral part of each and every celebration, personal pride, and happiness. The cigars are available in many designs, colors and flavors. You just need to as per your taste.
Manufacturing of the cigars
Cigars are made up of tobacco leaves. Carefully collected and cleaned and packed manually, the taste of the cigars depends upon these small yet essential stages of manufacturing and packaging. The tobacco leaves are grown in parts of Poland, South Africa and Argentina. Depending upon the way each leaf is packed in the cigar you can categorize into mild, medium and full bodied. The amount of smoke produced in the mouth adds up to the value of the cigar, but this term is totally subjective. There are many brands available in the market and they are individually categorized into different categories for size, flavors, aroma and amount of smoke formed in the mouth.
Types of cigars
There are many world famous brands of which the Cuban cigars need special mentioning. The specialty of this brand is the fact that despite being banned by the government it is hot favorite of millions across the globe. Other than that the Macanudo cigars and Churchill, Robust, Corona etc are few of the worth special mentioning brands from the millions available.
Buying cigars online
You can now your cigars online at one convenient website. There are many agents who stock and supply the cigars of all reputed brands at heavily discounted prices. You simply need to click and . Within days your will reach your doorsteps. Also, these agents have collections of all related accessories at their online store as well. You can now compare prices and from the store of your choice.
GothamCigars.com provides the freshest selections of premium , humidors, cigar samplers and tobacco cigar accessories. It is your best choice for buying discount online.
In the last video I demonstrated how to roll a cigar using the whole leaf. The standard way. When you get into rolling cigars you will accumulate a lot of small scraps. Usually these scraps are tossed. In this video I show how to roll a cigar with those smaller bits of tobacco. Consider this, you will not only be using the tobacco that you would have normally discarded but the blends of fillers that you will be getting will be different with every cigar you roll. A new adventure every time you light one up.
What are some of your favorite cigar moments? Here are a few reasons to enjoy the experience, taste and aroma of premium and super-premium cigars:
1. After a wedding when the groomsmen are enjoying a moment amongst themselves, and celebrating the groom’s good fortune. 2. After the birth of a child, whether it’s your child, a niece, nephew, Godchild or the child of a colleague. 3. After the commencement ceremony for your favorite protégé or ward. 4. After purchasing your first home and evaluating the work and hope ahead of you. 5. After selling your first home for a handsome profit and remembering the rewards of work and the pleasure of work rewarded. 6. After burning the mortgage, and knowing that there will never be another payment. The place is yours, lock, stock and barrel. 7. After leaving the factory job for the last time. 8. After the best dinner you’ve ever had. 9. After the best and most complete play, concert or opera you’ve ever attended. 10. With the rest of the campers at the end of a hike in the woods or in the desert. 11. Beside the garden wall when there is a break from the labor of working with your hands in the good earth. 12. While standing and surveying the view of a field of harvest, full of the promise of work and the promise of prosperity, while remembering the planting of that field. 13. While working on a vintage automobile like a convertible Cadillac from the 1970’s. 14. After negotiating for–and getting–a vintage automobile.
As you can see, there is a wonderful tradition of celebration and the constancy connected to the smoking of a great cigar. The sentiment and sensation of cigars and pipes are part of understanding the cigar consumer. Therefore, the best way to give a cigar is by purchasing them either through reputable online stores, many of which will sell and ship them gift-wrapped, or by purchasing them through tobacconists and fine cigar and pipe stores.
Remember that quality cigars are hand-rolled and custom made. There are countless ways to find out what kind of cigars would be best suited as a gift. For example, select according to smoke time. A good cigar will have a smoke time of 20 to 60 minutes, depending on its size and style. Other factors are color and aroma.
Whatever the celebration and whatever the occasion, giving and receiving fine premium or super-premium cigars–or just enjoying them on your own–will top off the pleasure of each experience and enhance life’s special moments. The best part of the cigar experience is to discover what moments you can plan for cigar enjoyment. So start with giving and receiving premium cigars, and then let them accompany all your great life celebrations.
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— it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.