First, smoking was bad for the smoker. Then, it was bad for anyone breathing the same air as the smoker. Now, it’s bad for anyone who sees it in the movies:

In the wake of a recent study which (cue bad pun) breathlessly warns that adolescents who see characters smoking on the silver screen are nearly three times more likely to start smoking, the usual suspects — Smoke Free Movies, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids — are once again demanding that every film depicting smoking in a positive or even neutral light to be branded with an “R” rating. To do any less, they claim in a recent full-page ad in the New York Times, is to participate in the “knowing recruitment of multitudes of new young smokers.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum has already penned a good take-down of the study, noting, among other things, that the survey of 6,500 10–to-14 year-olds it is based on “did not consider which came first, the movie viewing or the smoking, which you’d think would be a minimum requirement for drawing a causal inference.”

I hate to say this (because I hate the fact that it needs to be said), but correlation does not equal causation.

Kids who see people smoke in a movie are more likely to smoke themselves. I’m not at all surprised that it’s true (then again, as is pointed out later in the article, even if it weren’t, it’s not like a National Cancer Institute-funded study would say otherwise). It makes a logical kind of sense, in a way.

Here’re the facts as I see them. Lots of movies feature heroes (or, at least, sympathetic characters) who smoke. It’s a fair bet that most young people have seen movies where a hero smokes. Those kids who’ve never seen such a movie are probably in an environment where they never really have an opportunity to smoke without their parents knowledge. Certainly, a kid who hasn’t seen many movies with smoking heroes is probably living in an altogether different home environment than the kid who sees such movies on a regular basis. There’s enough difference there that one can’t single out the movie variable as having caused the smoking.

Varifrank writes that he’s still waiting:

It’s been 24 hours since Congress decided to “outlaw torture” and stop several provisions of the Patriot Act that have proven repeatedly successful in stopping terrorist actions in the United States.

I’m busily searching Google for any sign that Iran or Syria has decided to reciprocate these selfless acts of civilized good faith…

Some advice: Don’t hold your breath, man.

I’d decided I wasn’t going to go until the crowds died down, but one of my friends asked me to go to see King Kong last night, so I changed my mind.

Short review: It’s a really good movie, though a bit long, and well worth the time and money.

Longer review below the cut. But, first, some helpful suggestions:

If you didn’t catch it before, I’ll repeat: this is a long movie. Unless you absolutely can’t go without having something to drink, don’t buy a soda for the movie (and since they pile on the extra salt to encourage you to get a drink, that means no popcorn, either. Sorry). Go to the bathroom before the movie starts. If you have a small bladder, please don’t sit in the middle of the theater; sit near one of the aisles.

Also, if you’re incapable of keeping your mouth shut for three hours, don’t go to this movie. Those of us who know how to be civilized will thank you for your restraint. Seriously, when the five year old kid (who worried me when he first sat down, but he really wasn’t very disruptive) sitting beside me is better behaved than you, you should be ashamed.

More …

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

-Lao Zi (Lao-Tzu?)