Smoking Is One Time You Should Be A Quitter

By: Jonah Jameson

There are a large number of tasks that people consider almost impossible. Whether it is climbing Mount Everest, or swimming the length of a river, one of the most difficult tasks for a person to go through is quitting smoking. Quitting smoking is difficult for a large number of reasons. Aside from the nicotine addiction, it is hard for a smoker to get out of the mindset of smoking.



They have been smoking for so long that not only does their body crave a cigarette, but they themselves legitimately want to smoke. If you have been thinking of quitting for a long time, here are some tips that should make it at least a little bit easier on you as you try to kick the habit once and for all.



The first thing you need to do is take your last pack of cigarettes, and get rid of it. Whether you have to light them on fire, or just simply chuck them into the trash, do what you must to get rid of it. This will help to get you into the mentality that cigarettes are no longer welcome in your life and that you are not a smoker anymore. Shaking yourself out of that mindset requires a great deal of will power, but is worth it.



The next thing you need to keep in mind is that you will most likely backslide and find yourself lighting up. Do not beat yourself up over this. Instead, keep a record of anytime you backslide into smoking, and write down what led to you smoking again. This way you will not how to avoid any future backslides. It is also very important for you to keep yourself constantly motivated to quit. Whether your reason for quitting is your family, your friends, or your health, use them to keep your spirits high and motivation constant. This brings you to the next point, to have someone to hold you accountable on your journey.



Quitting smoking is one of the most difficult exercises of will power a person can take on, so it is obviously not a task that you should completely partake of alone. It is important that you have a non-smoking friend who can hold you accountable. It is not impossible to quit smoking without someone to do this, but someone who can spot when you are sliding into old habits will keep quitting fresh in your mind. It is also a good idea to spend less time with your friends who smoke while they are smoking, and politely ask them to not smoke around you.

Check out Jonah Jameson's Bogalusa blog and e cigarette blog for more information.

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Bully Buttons - Big Brother's Latest Gadget

I would like to bring your attention to the new popular buzzword that is being promulgated as the panacea for all of society's ills: Accountability. In his classic work, 1984, George Orwell paints a futuristic society, Oceania, in which the government-"Big Brother"-watches over all. In other words, everyone is accountable to the government for all of their actions. While the populace is brainwashed into believing the government is their salvation, the government is really their enslaver and the cause of their misery. Its Department of Truth manipulates the language, Newspeak, to promote the government's agenda of total control.
We are increasingly headed in the direction of 1984, with the blessing of our own population, which loves to relinquish personal responsibility for our lives and hand it over to the government, in the naive belief that our government knows best and can take care of us better than we can take care of ourselves. Our latest Big Brother word is Accountability. What a great idea! Just make people accountable for their actions, and then they will do all the right things. All the ills of society will disappear when people are held accountable.
But people can't be held accountable for things that are not in their control. "No Child Left Behind" holds schools accountable for lack of students' academic success. But how can they be held accountable for this? Education experts have been endlessly trying to find ways to improve student achievement and the controversies over how to accomplish this never end. Is a law going to force learning to increase? What the law will do is encourage schools to figure out how to avoid getting in trouble with the law. So they creatively manipulate test scores to show educational improvement that isn't really happening.
Anti-bullying laws are holding schools accountable for the bullying that goes on between students. But how can schools be held responsible for making kids stop bullying each other when adults, even mental health professionals, don't know how to be free of bullying in their own lives, don't know how to get their own couple of kids at home to stop bullying each other? "Accountability" is not going to bring our society closer to Utopia. It will bring only bring it closer to Oceania.
Signs suggest, unfortunately, that Australia is nearly there: A company there is now marketing a video recording system called Bully Buttons. When kids feel they are being bullied, they press the nearest Bully Button and cameras start filming. (Australia is taking bullying increasingly seriously, which is not surprising in light of a recent lawsuit in which a school was ordered to pay over a million dollars for failing to stop a child from being bullied.)
Of course everyone thinks this is a wonderful idea. That is the beautiful thing about Big Brother. It sounds so good that no one can see any reason to object to it. How nice to have a Big Brother always available to watch over us and protect us from each other. The company, of course, doesn't want to be seen as Big Brother, but the fact that the company feels the need to defend itself in advance from such accusations speaks for itself: "We don't want it to be too pervasive or Big Brotherish," the company manager is quoted as saying. I guess they only want it to be adequately "pervasive and Big Brotherish."
But what does it do to our freedom...to our moral development... to our social relationships? You are no longer free to learn from experience in treating people different ways. Even if you can't stand someone, you had better make believe you like the person because if you show any hostility, it's on tape and you get punished. Mainstream society upholds honesty as a major value, but its Big Brother anti-bullying policies are promoting forced phoniness. Anti-bullying policies are meant to get kids to treat each other morally. But is where is the morality when the purpose of your behavior is avoidance of punishment?
As an adult, would you like to have all of your interpersonal interactions under the scrutiny and control of government officials? Why start kids on a course in childhood that we detest as adults? What kind of a world are we preparing them for with these Bully Buttons?