>>>- ah, he decided that now, not yesterday... what made him change his mind?
>>>- and without his decision, what would happen with that risk?
>
>This isn't the original version: but "has now" implies current status that optionally can be qualified by a "since" or similar. The meaning would be that the Surgeon General currently is satisfied with this statement, no matter when they reached this conclusion. The insistence on needing to know exactly when, is not part of the narrative so its absence is not ambiguous. Nor is it ambiguous to wonder why s/he reached this conclusion as there's copious explanatory material.

Ah, no, not a conclusion. That's part of the point. A decision. So we have a situation before the decision and after it, and the decision is so important that its price is included in the price of the pack. So someone at a position of authority makes a decision and uses the gov't apparatus to make me pay to be informed about the decision, which is as serious as it gets. Which left me wandering of the consequences of that decision, what does it change?

>>>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.
>
>Weapons? Slogans? I can see that your Chatter4u image proudly shows a cigarette... So rather than focusing on what "now" means, this is the sort of thing that allows the Surgeon General to express certainty:

Ah, and so it wasn't a sure thing until (s)he decided so?

>Small wonder that the Surgeon General is comfortable to advise people to stop smoking now.

The "now" is superfluous, completely fucking up the intent of the sentence. If it's so good to quit smoking, it should be good anytime. Why now? What about other times? Not so good? That's the other half of what's wrong with the sentence. And the obvious "when is that 'now'?" question - at the time when the sentence was composed, written down, printed, read for the first time, seen on a thrown away empty pack months later? It even isn't clear whether it's "quitting now" or "now reduces".