Three things:
- I come from a smokers' family (and have never smoked myself, not because I find it repulsive - I don't - but because it was nothing special in our family, if I had wanted to smoke as a teen, my father would have handed me a pack, so I didn't, simple as that). Even as a child in the sixties I knew that it wasn't healthy and the chief cause of lung cancer. My parents both agreed with me (and continued smoking!). In school I always hung out with smokers, already in the early seventies jokes such as "here's for the lung" or "got to keep the cancer fed" were prevalent when people lit one. How can inhaling the smoke of something that is burning be healthy?
- I have successfully turned the smooth motion/DMM mode of my Loewe TV off! If it wasn't for this place here and our beloved Psycho - thanks! -, I would have never known there is such a thing.
- I have no issues with Ayn Rand getting cancer treatment paid by a collective. I doubt that she paid in as much (if at all, I don't know whether a freelancer like her was under the obligation to) as her treatment cost though. The balance must have been paid based on a concept called "solidarity of a nameless collective for an individual". Through George I now know that she was in favor of that, why it must been the red thread running through all her works, you live and learn! And I had thought she was a poor dying woman grasping at any - even collectivist - straw offered to her. How unheroic, average, yet at the same time utterly human.