V for Vindicated

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=aa7796aa-e4a5-4c06-be84-b62dee548fda

“How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.”

Let me be among the first to say: I told you so.

Of particular interest were these VASTLY HYPOCRITICAL quotes from the same article:

“As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a ‘highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children’ and as ‘one of the most poisonous forms of pollution.’”

and

“Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the United States, under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.”

The article also asks the rather interesting question about what will happen when millions of these bulbs are being disposed of in landfills.

I've thought for a long time that environmentalists were batshit crazy. They have no real-world skills, so they try to pester the rest of us into tearing down the society we've managed to create, all to save a few snails or some such crap. Honestly, who's going to miss some snails, other than a few birds and the French?

See - the Left in general replaces debate with hysteria. They exaggerate the urgency in any situation because they think that the rest of humanity should be saved from themselves by the State. They want to replace ingenuity and competition with baseline metrics skewed to the lowest common denominator. As I've pointed out before, they champion Evolution in all parts of life except when it comes to people trying to make a living. Then the only solution they can come up with is Socialism. Below is a complete list of every country that ever thrived by implementing Socialism:







Of course, this crop of do-gooders thinks that the only reason it hasn't worked yet is that they weren't in charge. So not only are they assholes, they're hubristic assholes. When you need to buy something, which would you rather have: a plethora of choices offered by competing merchants who only stay in business if they offer the best merchandise, price, or service? Or having to go to one store that will stay in business even if their products fall apart on being exposed to air, cost seven times more than they should, and offer the same attention to customer satisfaction as the average DMV worker?

With the Left being so quick to jump on any hint of hypocrisy from the Right, and demand wildly disproportionate consequences, their smug superciliousness when it comes to their own actions makes me want to take one weekend and go club a few seals and shoot some eagles, then roast the carcasses over a few hundred acres of rainforest that I'd start burning with a napalm strike. Afterwards, because it's important to dispose of your campsite litter properly, I'd strip mine the whole area, and open a fucking Wal-Mart on the scarred, scorched Earth. I'd make sure they stocked both the CFLs and the regular, non-toxic incandescent bulbs, and step back to let the Invisible Hand do its thing. If people want to poison themselves, hey, that's their choice. And if they feel guilty about it, I'm sure that Al Gore sells mercury credits.