Beyond the brotherhood: Skoal Bandits' role in the evolution of marketing moist smokeless tobacco pouches.

Background:Since 2006, "snus" smokeless tobacco has been sold in the U.S.. However, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco (USST) and Swedish Match developed and marketed pouched moist snuff tobacco (MST) since 1973. Methods:Analysis of previously secret tobacco documents, advertisements and trade press. Results:USST partnered with Swedish Match, forming United Scandia International to develop pouch products as part of the "Lotus Project." Pouched MST was not commonly used, either in Sweden or the U.S. prior to the Lotus Project's innovation in 1973. The project aimed to transform smokeless tobacco from being perceived as an "unsightly habit of old men" into a relevant, socially acceptable urban activity, targeting 15-35 year-old men. While USST's initial pouched product "Good Luck," never gained mainstream traction, Skoal Bandits captured significant market share after its 1983 introduction. Internal market research found that smokers generally used Skoal Bandits in smokefree environments, yet continued to smoke cigarettes in other contexts. Over time, pouch products increasingly featured increased flavor, size, nicotine strength and user imagery variation. Conclusions:Marlboro and Camel Snus advertising mirrors historical advertising for Skoal Bandits, designed to recruit new users and smokers subjected to smokefree places. Despite serious efforts, pouched MST marketing has been unable to dispel its association with traditional smokeless tobacco stereotypes as macho and rural. Public education efforts to discourage new users and dual use of MST and cigarettes should emphasize that "new" pouch products are simply repackaging "old" smokeless tobacco

Spherical mirror mount

A spherical mounting assembly for mounting an optical element allows for rotational motion of an optical surface of the optical element only. In that regard, an optical surface of the optical element does not translate in any of the three perpendicular translational axes. More importantly, the assembly provides adjustment that may be independently controlled for each of the three mutually perpendicular rotational axes

The Law of the Excluded Middle:Discourse as Casualty of the Post-Truth Extremist Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

The unprecedented World Health Organization orchestrated lockdown and public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic were enacted by virtually every government worldwide. In many countries, but especially the United States, long-standing political animosities congealed into a discourse of dehumanization between liberal establishment adherents and anti-state revolutionaries. Left out from the field were the plural voices fitting neither camp. Mikhail Bakhtin’s lens of Ideologiekritik offers a diagnosis, and the symbolic destabilizing tool of the carnivalesque provides a discursive tool to soften the political polarization and depoliticized technocracy of the coronavirus pandemic state of exception. The conflagration of the global coronavirus governmental response and the often violent counter-responses warrants examining the democratic dangers of dualistic discourses. Disrupting this explosive polarization requires reintroducing plural discursive spaces which widen the conversation to include liminal and oblique perspectives via spectacle and jest—the carnival—providing a potential nonviolent path forward.</p

Multiplicity and Welt

This article interprets Jakob von Uexküll’s understanding of different beings’ Innenwelt, Gegenwelt, and umwelt through Deleuzian insights of multiplicity, context, and particularity. This Deleuzian interpolation into Uexküll’s insights acknowledges the absence of a unitary ‘human’ view of nature, recognizing instead that plural viewpoints of cultures, subgroups and individuals understand and interpret natural signs variously not just because of ideology but because of physiology and contrastive fundamental ways of accessing the world. Recent formative research in comparative neurobiology suggests that universal anthropological claims of cross-cultural semiotic similarity are incorrect.Interpreting biosemiotics as the investigation of apprehending the Innenwelt of radically different others (species), such semiotic understandings themselves are not necessarily generalizable between different members of the same species in a group, same-species groups in different natural cultural contexts, or even (as with humans) the same animal at different points of time (based on new understandings, patterns, or events of meaning altering interpretations of self and events). Conjoining Deleuze’s insights of the complexity of multiplicity with Uexküll’s scientific-imaginative system of comprehending other creatures’ ways of understanding their world offers an increased self-reflexivity regarding the simultaneous levels of actual semiotic activity for biosemiotic inquiry

Colony Collapse and the Global Swarm to save the Bees:Sacred Relations with Bees in Film and Literature

Colony collapse disorder—the dominant term describing massive global bee die-offs—has garnered significant international attention and regulatory intervention. While dominant responses to anthropogenically imperiled bees can be interpreted as economic or narrow self-interested, the global response arising from a spiritual register is less discussed. Artistic expressions of the bee crisis—such as Starhawk’s novel The Fifth Sacred Thing and the film Queen of the Sun—illustrate spiritual resonances with bees, evoking emotions which lead to commitments of interspecies solidarity more compelling than most contemporary scientific and popular conversations around the issue. By examining these forms of artistic expression as closing the resonance and intimacy gap between our and their species, I argue that to pragmatically aid bee population regeneration, we must fundamentally reconfigure lifestyles to instantiate our spiritual commitments to ecological justice. As contemporary scientific analysis alone has failed to motivate this ecological reorientation, embracing the political and personal power that comes from acknowledging spiritual connection and commitments presents an alternate possibility.</p

How criminology can support environmental health:the case of PFAS

This commentary argues that the field of criminology can aid in addressing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) pollution, providing levers to achieve public health aims of drastically lowering and abating new PFAS emissions while addressing historic exposure. Based on a European example of the large DuPont de Nemours (now Chemours) industrial facility in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, we frame the history of PFAS exposures as a crime. We discuss how PFAS pollution emerged in part due to knowledge asymmetries, perpetuated by the close alignment of corporate and governmental interests, and the fragmentation of regulatory enforcement, both historic and contemporary

The Ensemblist Nature of Plant Plurality

A core misconception about plants underlying much of the work in both plant studies and biology to currently revise it, is the designation of plants as quantifiable individuals rather than interspecies ensembles. Despite the epigenetics revolution in biology, ushering in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, plants and other organisms nonetheless are often observed as individual specimens with which one can tamper. In distinction to animals, which are fundamentally self-contained (even if both exosemiotically and endosemiotically their composition and signals are thoroughgoingly interspecies and elemental), plants disabuse us of the metaphysics of isolated ontologies through their radical plurality. In a mature forest, for example, it would be a mistake to cleanly demarcate where one plant ends and another begins, or were the plant ends and its fungal symbionts begin. The lessons of semiotic and thus ontological plurality and porosity plants tender also in fluctuating ways to alter our understanding of human and animal ontologies as plural