>>>Or the one which amused me endlessly, "the surgeon general has decided that quitting smoking now greatly reduces your risk of cancer". I remember I had several questions...
>
>Yes, but you're willfully misinterpreting (as well as omitting caps, I suspect.) ;-)

Sloppy language often passes if the listener is a willful co-conspirator, which I'm not. There's a whole species feeding on such abettors - writers of contracts with small print.

>Placed after the modal or first axillary verb, "now" is an adverb of time that applies to "quitting smoking." In addition, "has" followed by a past participle is called present perfect tense that usually denotes continuation of an existing state- except for some words like "decided!" So if they intended to say it's a recent decision, it's better expressed as
>
>The Surgeon General has now decided that quitting smoking greatly reduces your risk of cancer.

Same effect, with a slightly different set of head scratchers:

- ah, he decided that now, not yesterday... what made him change his mind?
- and without his decision, what would happen with that risk?

>Plus there's context: the advice fluctuates, but stopping smoking has been the advice for at least 40 years to my certain knowledge. Nothing "now" about that. Current thought is that within 2-5 years of stopping smoking, risk of smoking-related disease drops to little different from the general population. The trick is to stop now rather than later because the risk rises so dramatically that stopping later makes it less likely you can make it through 5 years unscathed. Whenever you stop: if you make it through 5 years after that, you're not facing the usual catastrophic risk profile associated with smoking.

So you can't even change the lightbulb without context? Well, my reading of context is that in this propaganda war someone put that "now" in the sentence to instill a sense of urgency. As in the preceding example, where they didn't care about what they say as long as they can cram enough buzzwords ("real!", "now!"), the propaganda warrior formulated the sentence to convey a meaning of urgency ("now!"), authority ("surgeon general", not some clerk, "decided", not just concluded, not found out, not agreed with the findings of others), without caring too much about what happens with the meaning. The sentence probably works with those already ready to accept it. But as with any weapon, and slogans are just that in a propaganda war, the targets start developing defences over time. So I learned to listen carefully to what they say - you know the song, "never mean what they say, never say what they mean", having been bitten enough times when I was that willing abettor.