155 Follow the Money

Philip Morris is one of the world's largest tobacco companies, worth $160 billion. Its stock price is $99.93/share, a 5-year increase of 30%.

Smoking-related illnesses cost the USA over $300 billion annually, $225 billion for direct medical care for smokers. Lost productivity from smoking-related illnesses was $185 billion; lost productivity from premature death due to second-hand smoke was $7 billion.

It's a long, tragic, smoky story...so light up and enjoy...

Philip Morris, it's said, got his start with land snatched from bankruptcies of God-fearing folks in the Bible Belt. Those lands had been originally purchased from money earned in the slave trade in the early 19th Century.

The Dutch were an important slave broker due to their ocean fleets, and the owners of those fleets profiteered from illegal confiscation of colonial lands owned by native oligarchs.

Those oligarchs had become rich by indentured servitude of thousands who were granted land to work in return for rooves over their heads; the crops they worked had resulted in a payoff-to-cost-of-housing ratio of 1,000:1.

In other colonies, child labor had allowed for the continuous flow of income due to the mining of coal, precious metals, rare earths, and precious stones; and in return, the children died in adolescence due to black lung and other occupational diseases.

The Church had funded the colonial expansion for the sake of proselytizing the world and financed this funding with tithes from the faithful for fifteen hundred years.

The really big donations from the faithful were from a practice going back to the Holy Roman Empire, where the larger the sins, the more indulgences cost.

The wealth of the Church also accrued from interest coming via investments and shrewd financial strategies originating from a meager sum of only the equivalent of $91.

This $91 was the appraised current worth of what 30 pieces of silver could buy circa 33 AD.

The owner of the 30 pieces of silver was a troubled zealot who hanged himself for ratting out his friend for the price of a kiss. Thereafter, said silver pieces were scavenged by unscrupulous Sadducees.

Thus, it took two thousand years for Philip Morris to make such fine, outstanding cigarettes for our smoking pleasure.

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Inspired by D.J. Reddall's sonnet, "The Traitor's Kiss," at https://vocal.media/poets/the-traitor-s-kiss.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

HOW TO SMOKE SAFELY:

It is assumed, when they say, "Each cigarette takes 8 minutes off of your life," that it's a future 8 minutes--on the tail end of your life. (It would be ludicrous to assume it's some past 8 minutes.) Thus, if you want to smoke safely, every time you want a cigarette, just wait 8 minutes, first. In that way, you're taking 8 minutes from the time you would dead anyway.

--From the Book of Rationalizations, 12:8-10

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Monday, June 3, Day 155 of the Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

Title-accompaniment photo was AI (Artificial Internment) generated, but the lung lesions were not.

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There are currently three surviving Vocal writers still participating in the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator

• Rachel Deeming

• Gerard DiLeo (some other guy)

Read them. Support them. And watch them wonder just how long this can go on.