One of my best friends thinks all government is inefficient and wasteful at the Federal level, he thinks they should manage defense and foreign policy and not much else. He thinks States should be empowered, and of course, he lives in the cesspool that gave us Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio. Florida. The one that bans books, abortions, and now owns Donald Trump too.

Yes, I have a diverse group of friends, including Greg Hunter, who I did a 24 minute video podcast for old times sake on Thursday. Greg has a degree in geological science and does environmental survey work for government contractors. We used to do a “crossfire” style video podcast for the now defunct Grassroots Dayton, with him being the R and me the D- until he switched over to the D side in Wyoming and ran against Liz Cheney for Congress in 2018.

I picked the topic, “What kills Americans” hoping to guide the conversation to our failure to efficiently manage and support healthy choices for Americans and a proactive health care system that’s not “insurance” but actual health care. Greg sort of took that theme all over the map. He’s convinced that local legend Charles Kettering’s invention of leaded gasoline gave us more serial killers among other things. Feel free to watch the trainwreck of a discussion. In 3 days it has 83 views without me pimping it to my readers here.

Saturday morning, the New York Times runs a major story about a federal government program encouraging municipalities “to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills.” NYT “Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals” 31 Aug 2024

The problem is, the sludge was full of PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl) the same chemical that’s been leaching into Dayton’s aquifer from firefighting foam used at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Dayton has been fighting/suing the feds over this for the last 10 years. PFAS is a forever chemical that just won’t go away and it’s toxic as all get out. Yet, the language to describe its dangers is still guarded in the NY Times, saying exposure to PFAS can “increase the risk of certain types of cancer and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children.” It’s also used “in everything from microwave popcorn bags and firefighting gear to nonstick pans and stain-resistant carpets.”

The reality is, in our quest to dispose of the waste created by our throwaway society, we’re poisoning the planet we depend on to nurture mankind. It’s not just global warming, microplastics, or toxic sludge, it’s the stupidity of unchecked capitalism striving to win at Monopoly while the real estate is being rendered worthless and toxic. We’ve potentially already rendered “nearly 70 million acres, or about a fifth of all U.S. agricultural land” toxic by spreading this sludge on it according to permits.

Even when we get things right, sometimes, we do more harm than good. “The 1972 Clean Water Act had required industrial plants to start sending their wastewater to treatment plants instead of releasing it into rivers and streams, which was a win for the environment but also produced vast new quantities of sludge that had to go somewhere.” This is where we need regulators who not only know what they are doing, but can see into the future to evaluate the consequences of their actions. It’s why sprawl is bad, public transit is good, and not paving over farmland or cutting down rain forests should be pretty obvious- no matter what the financial play is.

How can we trust the EPA to do the right thing if lobbyists can buy legislation? How can we have good leadership, when it costs a million minimum to run for Congress? How can we make sure that things like fracking, deep well injection, or toxic sludge have all been approved at one time or another by some bureaucrat who pocketed some payola or didn’t really give a shit about doing the right thing?

There are lots of things killing Americans, but also killing our planet. Someones still fiddling while the proverbial Rome burns- or as Pogo said “We have met the enemy and he is us.” If we want to stop killing ourselves, we need to stop fooling ourselves that our system is working- we’re just hamsters in a wheel running in circles for the entertainment of the 1% who are living a life far away from our reality- building spaceships to escape our planet once they are done destroying it.

Song: “Burning down our house” by David Esrati

Greg asked me to post a link to this article about long haul truckers as serial killers: Why Long-Haul Trucking Attracts Some Serial Killers which he believes is tied to lead in gas. He also wanted to share his PDF to correlate his position.