Thoughts about plastic bags and cultural dead ends … they say that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

 

I was a child when I first heard that saying in grade school, and I wondered “Why did he fiddle while that was going on? It makes no sense.” Such is the logic of a child looking at the world of adults and thinking that life is supposed to be Oh so much more logical when one grows up. Surprisingly, it is not, the optimist observes. The pessimist observes something else entirely, usually unprintable.

 

I wish to call the reader’s attention to a June 6 Janet Phelan article on New Eastern Outlook, in which she wrote about an alleged incident of retaliation against Richard Lambert, retired FBI Inspector in Charge of the 2001 anthrax investigation (AMERITHRAX), and former Senior Counterintelligence Officer with Oak Ridge National Lab. At first light, Mr. Lambert seems to be another honest individual who has been subjected to spurious attacks because he wouldn’t roll over. Google it.

 

Meanwhile, intellectuals in Los Alamos are sparring over plastic bags. Having lived in a community where my elderly mother kept six water-resistant fabric shopping bags in the car trunk, I discovered it was painless to reuse the fabric bags. Once a month, the insides of the bags could easily be cleansed with a baby wipe, or else thrown in the washing machine with the towels load and the sailboat canvas. Strangely, the bags were familiar and comforting and I grew fond of their non-matching sizes and designs, culled from different places, much as we get collectibles when on a summer trip. 

 

We carried them to a cart and tossed them in. At the checkout, we placed the bags in front of our groceries, and the clerk loaded the groceries directly into the bag, while first placing hamburger or leaky containers into a thin, transparent fruit-and-vegetables bag. Everyone seemed content with this situation. The reusable shopping bags were strong and never ripped from the weight of the load. Nothing punctured them. I’m not a tree-hugger and I have no duck in this race. I’m merely relating a true story. The reusable bags can be re-gifted, or placed in the casket when we pass on, or cremated with us. Owner’s choice.

 

What I detect is a cultural fight going on that is a proxy war for bigger issues. On one side, we have the Agenda 21-ers who are steadily advancing with their re-federalization of Los Alamos two decades after the DOE began to give the land back to the locals. Now a different agency wants to make parts of L.A. into a national park, and this will be adopted and steadily grow in size and territory. The UN will steadily take over, with their regulations, dogma and hegemony, even as those same well-paid ineffectual bureaucrats have turned their backs on the suffering of millions of civilians in the Mid East, eastern Europe and the Caucasus (who were in the past 10 years subjected to nonconsensual bioweapons testing by the Richard Lugar Lab in Tbilisi).

 

Every influential American church has turned a deaf ear to the injustice of full-blown institutionalized torture of unconvicted people and whistleblowers. And, American agnostics and pragmatists are content to worship at the altar of the Goddess of Carbon Footprints and tilt at the windmill of plastic bags, while they stand down completely on the fact that Yemen was nuked last week. Cowards, all.

 

You argue, “The devil is in the details.”

 

But, if there is a devil, there is surely an anti-devil … a just and loving god … so I do not doubt that a cosmic evaluation awaits us based on what truth and light we amplified while on Earth. As the tree-hugging liberals love to say, “We have an obligation to choose right.” Yet, they only care about the carbon footprint of their herd and forced immunizations that weaken basic human DNA, while they turn a deaf ear to institutionalized torture, frame-ups of honest officials, and mini-nuke attacks on indigenous Yemenis.

 

But, don’t even get me started about the so-called conservatives and how they pocketed the money from the sale of America’s nuke stockpile. That’s a different letter.