Freebase Nicotine

Interesting report about a recently published article examining levels of freebase nicotine in various brands of cigarettes.

"Brands were compared with a laboratory "reference" cigarette containing 1 per cent freebase nicotine. The results ranged from 1 per cent or 2 per cent to 36 per cent for a speciality brand called American Spirit. The popular Marlboro brand contained up to 9.6 per cent freebase nicotine. Other well-known brands included Camel (2.7 per cent), Winston (5 to 6.2 per cent) and Gauloises Blondes (5.7 to 7.5 per cent)."

The also found that the levels tended to drop quickly in some brands (Marlboros were ~10% on the first couple puffs and dropped to ~2%).

(no subject)

So I saw Wolfowitz (the deputy defense secratary and probably the pre-eminant hawk who pushed for us to invade Iraq for those of you not playing along at home) making the rounds of the sunday morning talk shows. The man's a snake with the morals of a dung beetle, here's an article summing up his bilous evasions; http://tinyurl.com/i9p6 where he essentially continues the bankrupt claims we had to invade Iraq to stop terrorism.

An operative quote:
"Stop and think, if in 2001, or in 2000, or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden, and we had tried to say it's because he's planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, you don't have any proof of that,"

And if things went more or less like they did when we did invade Osama would have gotten away, and he would have gotten the same group of Saudi Nationals (or cannon fodder replacements) to go hijack some planes and do the same thing. The only difference is he'd wind up with even MORE support and the international good will we squandered since 9-11 would probably have never materialized.

(no subject)

litchfield is the #7080 most common last name.
0.002% of last names in the US are litchfield.
Around 5000 US last names are litchfield!
source namestatistics.com