The Latest Fad

The Dictionary defines a fad as: “..passing fashion, or a craze.”  What’s the latest fad?  It’s EARTH WARMING!  It’s all the buzz around the news programs, Copenhagen, National Geographic even, and all of the ’approved’ scientific circles.  The earth is warming, and carbon dioxide is killing us.  We’ve got to stop burning coal, pass “Cap and Trade,” run everyone’s electrical bills through the roof, kill the coal industry, and make the air clean again. We’ve simply got to stop this hideous earth warming, or we’ll all roast like Thanksgiving’s turkey.  The earth will give up the ghost and burn like a cinder, and we’ll all die.  Or something like that, possibly a little less bombastic.  Seems to me that if we had too much carbon dioxide, the jungles and all plant life would sprout like they had taken Viagra.

Know what the fad of 1975 was?  THE ICE AGE IS COMING BACK, and we’re all going to freeze like a snowman.  Ice cicles will be in the tropics and glaciers will grow like Topsy.  A best seller in 1975 was “The Weather Conspiracy…coming of the new ice age.  In 1974, the National Science Board announced that “During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first, but more sharply over the last decade.”  Gee Al Gore…did you ever read that book?

Then there is the ozone ring, which was the fad, I can’t remember when. All the scientists said that the ozone ring was slipping away, and in order to stop it and save humanity, we had to stop using that nasty freon, which was in all our refrigerators and air conditioners.  Naturally, the goons in D.C. paid strict attention, and passed laws outlawing freon, making it necessary to obtain a license to do refrigeration work or repairs, and to capture every ounce of freon that may possibly escape from a unit, so as to save the universe and the world from the direct rays of the sun, which would cook us.

That fad, cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars, yen, pounds, francs, and pesos.  Every single refrigeration manufacturer, repairman, or purchaser, had to use the new freon, which wasn’t as efficient as the old freon, but it wouldn’t hurt that ozone ring.  What a bunch of horse puckey. All three of the fads were, and are, made of that previously described entity.  That ozone ring has been there for millions of years, and no one knows when it started.  It’s always been there, and showed no signs of doing anything but staying there, till a bunch of white coated jerks who called themselves scientists, discovered it, and decided that it was shrinking.  “Oh my goodness, we have to save the ozone ring,” was the proclamation all around the world, and sure enough, everyone bowed down and worshipped the ozone ring fad.  We all paid dearly for that fad, and we’re all going to pay dearly for the current earth warming fad, which is about as logical and true as is Santa Claus.

Then there was the cars puncturing ribs fad, when all the silly ’59 Cadillac fins had to be eliminated, because people might get hurt if they fell on one.  Not that they weren’t silly anyway, but did we actually need laws prohibiting them?  Then there is the car exhaust fad, which makes us all spend thousands of dollars more for each car, so they can have all sorts of computers measuring the oxygen and tail pipe emissions.  We have to have catalytic converters, which cost a bundle, and which have started a lot of fires.  We have to have air bags, which kill kids, break ear drums, and have probably saved not more than a hundred lives.  We have to pay and pay and pay for all the fads and nutty goings on in D.C.  The Congress will fall for, and legislate anything that comes their way, and heaven help those who refuse to obey their wacky laws.

Back in the 1950’s and 1940’s, the fad was to tear up all the city trolley lines and scrap thousands of perfectly good, quiet, streamlined trolley cars, and substitute stinky busses.  Gee, the ridership dropped.  Wonder why?  We fixed that fad, by now rebuilding what was destroyed.  The new trolley lines are called “light rail,” but they are merely trolley lines which were torn up, and are now being replaced with the same things under a different name.  In Washington D.C. where I grew up, by an act of Congress, there were to be no more streetcar lines!  The last cars ran in 1962, and I felt like crying as I watched men with acetylene torches destroying perfectly good PCC trolley cars, which were silent, comfortable, and collected their current from underground collection system.  Want to see what they looked like?  Google ’pcc cars.’  There were never any overhead trolley wires in D.C., but the absurd Congress outlawed and caused to be destroyed, an extensive, what is now called ’light rail.’.

There have been fads throughout history, but a fad would come and go, without anyone being harmed.  Not any more, because the Congress, in all it’s ’wisdom’ gets into any fad that comes along, and we pay through the nose for their idiocy.  See why we have to wipe the Congressional slate clean next year?  We’re about to pay through the nose again, when the inevitable current fad health plan is voted into law.  If you know of a Democrat, please e-mail him not to vote for it, although it probably will do no good.

There have been hundreds of fads, which cost us nothing, and they were fun.  Remember when everyone had to have a “Hula Hoop?”  In the 1920’s everyone danced the “Charleston,” and wore “Zoot Suits.”  Fads, but harmless, fun, and Congress never got involved.  “Pet Rocks?”  A fad, as were many other things.  There have been hundreds of dress fads.  Mini-skirts was one. The problem comes when Congress, in all it’s idiocy, gets involved and believes any silly fad concocted by pseudo science, or morons like Al Gore.  At a book store last week, Al left by the back door and wouldn’t take questions about the fallacies in his book. That’s two Nobel Prizes that were foolishly given.  Gore and Obama.