The e-cig Affair -or- Practical Paranoia in the Pursuit of Pussy

They tried, Gods above know they tried.  They had the motives understood, but the scientific and technical understanding to support those motives were beyond their reach.  I’m speaking of course of the great dystopian writers: Orwell, Huxley, Levine and the like.  Now, if the good doctor Isaac Asimov had been one to write horror stories based on social deformities HE might have been able to foresee the potentials, he did have both the imagination and the academic scope to infiltrate and  expose the darker realms of science.  But sadly he just liked to write good science fiction yarns, the world never had the advantage of his perception in such terrestrial realms beyond the power of statistics wielded benign.  Rust in Peace, R. Daneel Olivaw.

Such science-horror stories are nothing new, of course not, Mary Shelly started it all back when what passed for science couldn’t pass a modern high school course on the subject.  The writers did what they could, it’s up to the rest of us to understand and actually mount a defense against the nightmares they presented being translated into reality.  Normally I’m not one to go paranoid just because I’m ignorant of something, that would be destructive foolishness for there must be a motive before the most lethal of things becomes a threat.


I, like everyone else, am essentially ignorant concerning most things.  We all know a little, very few to none can claim to know any major portion of it all.  But one thing I do understand is that if one man can imagine a thing there will be another man who will try and create it, and it really doesn’t matter if the imagining was a functional warp drive or a society of occult tyranny assuaging the insecurities of that perpetually psychopathic segment of society who believe themselves obligated to dominate their fellows in the name of some purportedly higher cause.

Let’s face the truth here: one by one all of the things we’ve been forewarned of have come to pass.  Oh, not exactly the way they saw them, but often very close.  C’mon, from a functional standpoint what’s the difference between televisions that watch you and the PC or smart phone where you’re reading this essay that watches your every move on the internet and extrapolates the content of your life from where you go?  Not enough to matter.

How many variations of the biblical “mark of the beast” have been construed as some facet of technology run amuk?  THEY are going to tattoo a bar code on your forehead, THEY are going to plant a computer chip under your thumbnail, THEY can erase your life by erasing your computer footprint… and of course THEY are NOT.   Why should they?  THEY talked YOU into believing you must have a cellphone on your body that does all of the above, and then some, and best of all you get to pay for it and do the maintenance and upkeep.  Why should they bother? You’re doing it for them.  It’s one of THEIR standard tactics… sell YOU on the idea of doing it FOR THEM thinking you’re being hip-cool-kink-connected, whatever.  It’s been a very successful strategy for them, it really has.  Compare the world now to the world of fifty, sixty years ago and it’s obvious just how successful.  Big brother is living the high life, he really is.

One of the last true barriers to Big Brother and his buddy Sauron (Sauron as a handle for the corporate collectives that believe the corporate citizen should be the lawful owner operator of the corporeal citizen, aka... you and me... BB&S for brevity) having their full way with the cultures of the world is, not surprisingly, human nature itself.  The foundations of the human critter are mounted on what was once an animal without much of an intellect and animals are inherently ethical in their behavior.  The law of the jungle, the laws of evolution, are harsh laws but fair, and there is no escaping them.  The animals may kill, but they don’t kill for sport, they don’t take slaves.  At this point in time those primitive attitudes and motives, primarily expressed in the evolved endocrine balances impacting the human psyche, are one of the last true barriers to BB&S realizing the age old dream of establishing the perfect dystopian world with them on top.

Witches at Work

One of the few major branches of science that hasn’t really had the chance to contribute to the advancement of such ambitions at any portion of their true potential are the  necromancers of neuroscience and their minions of micro-biology, they who are now the blackest of academia’s sorcerers almost totally dedicated to reducing all of human life to a set of chemical interactions and nothing more.  Where BB&S have long desired to recruit their services they’ve been stymied by a minor inconvenience, that being the besieged ethics of the medical profession.  These sciences came into their maturity as the servants of medicine, and for medicine to be required there must be a disease in need of treatment.  A battered bloody and besieged rampart indeed, but so far the noble Greeks under the command of their ancient general Hippocrates still hold a line.

Oh, they’ve tried, no mistaking that, but assault after assault the results have been at best hit and miss.  They got childhood declared a dysfunctional state compared to adulthood, and sold a lot of dope under the pretense of treating ADHD, they’ve successfully lumped the blahs and blues in with genuine systemic depression and sold a lot of dope to those who need the ultimate social authority, a doctor, to certify their preferred style of intoxication, but still.  Limited demographics, both of them, slow to create, slow to manipulate.  Not nearly enough return on investment to suit Sauron, and where Big Brother is concerned clumsy as a giraffe on glaze ice for any serious political maneuvering... not near stable enough to be redirected in less than several generations.  Quite a frustrating situation.  But courtesy of a new fad they’re fixing to get their chance.  They’re not likely to miss the opportunity, and if they pull it off?  Welcome to your brave new world. 

What could possibly allow the operatives of BB&S almost unlimited covert access to the blood chemistry of a wide spectrum of the American population with little to no chance of immediate detection, much less any legal consequences?  More specifically, access to the blood chemistry of that portion of the population where their lifestyle is proof they’re not prone to social approval producing compliance or preventing resistance?

Allegory of Addiction

The answer of course is you re-engineer an old vice fading, an old vice now considered distinctly un-cool, un-hip, very lower class vulgar, something the enlightened have been seeking to eradicate for fifty years or so.  In short, you do exactly what has already happened: you reverse the proscription against socially acceptable nicotine addiction subject to that addiction being based on e-cigs, vaporizers, (where you as the supplier of “juice” can exploit the controlled conditions of the vaporizer apparatus to control the ultimate chemistry your customers are exposed to) rather than on the tobacco plant where the ultimate chemistries produced by old school combustion are limited by the nature of fire.

Nicotine herself, in the flesh...
she won't kill you, not right away...

I invite any who know more chemistry than I to speculate on just how many different ways the controlled conditions within a vaporizer invite using it for a micro-reactor.  To begin with unlike combustion smoke you don’t need to worry about variables like atmospheric components, those aren’t present until after your mixture has been subjected to enough energy to activate your catalysts into a flash reaction while in the process of vaporizing it.  The potentials are all but endless.  You provide them a tar free source of nicotine, one of the most subtly addictive of substances known to man, and in the place of the tars substitute any psycho active compound you’re clever enough to create within such a micro-reactor working from the understandings those necromancers of neuroscience and micro-biology have identified as compounds influencing someone’s ultimate mental or emotional stability. 

Chemistry in Dark and Light

How do you get away with it?  Simple.  When the juice was sold it was not a psycho-active compound!  It wasn’t until YOU pushed the button to vaporize it that the reaction took place creating the compound, and hey, it’s on your head if you choose to imbibe what is already well known as a toxic compound!  Is that the most text book perfect case of plausible deniability or what? Neat, eh?

With just a little bit of practice it should be possible to produce any macroscopic mood swing desired in a target demographic.  Need a bit more aggression to help sell a beat the drum wave the flag national defense political platform?  Dial on a little more of compound A six months before the election.  Carefully now, we don’t need riots, not on this one. Need to suppress voter turnout in some region where the rebels might actually go to the polls to defend some issue of personal freedom?  Cut out compound A and replace it with compound C a year in advance and let it dig.  By election time they’re so depressed they’re not likely to give a damn, and as a perk they’re now vulnerable to your Shrink Battalion’s reprogramming efforts and making you money buying your anti-depressants and mood stabilizers.  You get the picture.  The scariest thing is if I can see the potential then it’s a total no-brainer that THEY have as well.  Heads up, world, it’s coming our way.

Democracy... the ultimate three way