Doggone…

…I'm too mellow to be really bitchy tonight.
I had a good friend stay with me the past ten days. He does the butter sculpture at the "Big E", Eastern states Exposition, and comes here for that. Nice to have an old buddy around, I don't have to drink alone.

Still…
Repubicans don't have a lock on stupidity. One Democratic Senator, Kent Conrad, of North Dakota, said in the Senate Finance Committee that "Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and other European states have managed to contain costs and provide good health care without government-run systems." Except, those countries DO have government-run health care systems. You know, those "socialist" health-care systems.
C'mon, North Dakota, I know there aren't that many of you, but surely you can do better than this.
Unless it's the accepting of health care industry money that makes one stupid.

Maybe the Surgeon General should look into this.
And why is there a "Surgeon" General and not a "General Practitioner" General?
Which kind of doctor do YOU see more often?
I digress. Seems to happen fairly often.

I saw in the New York Times today about how the Dutch are working on preventing illegal shipments of trash from leaving Rotterdam, which they said was one of the biggest ports in Europe.
This trash goes anywhere in the world where it can be dumped. Which means, of course, poor third world countries where officials can be bought and people have no voice. Not too much trash gets dumped in Monaco, or near any Club Med-worthy locations. Of course, I understand that we have a fine old tradition in this country of putting waste in areas where people are essentially disenfranchised, either by ignorance or political malfeasance. Pretty hard for us to throw stones.

Some trash shipments make sense, like if a lot of plastic products are imported from China, say, it makes sense to send the broken, outdated and unwanted detritus back to China where it can be recycled into more plastic stuff. At least it's not being dumped near some village in Guinea Bissau or a similar location.

I think about trash and recycling a lot. I live in a town where this is fairly important, our dump fees depend on the efficiency of our recycling efforts. I feel guilty if I throw tinfoil into the waste basket instead of the recycling container and God forbid I should just throw away a plastic bag—and why do I have any anyway?
Six and a half billion people on this planet can generate a lot of waste. But isn't it funny that it is only the developed nations that have a problem with waste disposal? There aren't any illegal dumps in the US of A that I know of with waste from Guinea Bissau or Cameroon.
Just where do they put all THEIR used toasters and broken radios and ipods and out-of-style decorator lamps? We should ask.
Could learn something.

Alright. That's enough.
Good night.