Last night, Asheville City Council unanimously took a bold stance against current policies and practices of the current occupants of the White House. They ruled that cigarette advertisements will be banned from the annual Bele Chere festival after this year. No doubt, affiliates of Project ASSIST would like to see the noxious weed banned from the festival altogether. Yet, in spite of a national obesity crisis with outbursts of type-2 diabetes, council did nothing to ban deep fried foods or super-sweet desserts. One could fairly hypothesize that Asheville has a microclimate that, bucking national trends, makes obesity more sustainable than lung cancer.

Perhaps it is council members’ love affair with lard that causes them to show so much partiality toward anything to do with beer, which has high calories. (Do not make fun of my English. Had I used an adjective, like “high calorie,” I would have been stigmatizing.) As was mentioned in a previous post, council proactively approved the sale of beer at Bele Chere; and that is on top of all the corporate welfare it has been giving to outside brewers to capture market share from existing microbreweries. Narry as I can figure, smoking cigarettes is like driving a conventional automobile. It stenches up the whole place. Drinking beer, however, is like driving an electric car because all the damage is done in the vicinity of the drinker or the coal plant. It would be almost impossible to inhale cholesterol – unless one is following a grease-fueled vehicle – Hey, why is greasiness never brought up in conversations about climate change?