It’s coming faster than a speeding bullet. Starting Jan. 1, the government is taking away your light bulbs.
This sounds like a twisted plot to mate George Orwell’s Big Brother with the Taliban. But I could not make up this sinister state of affairs on a very large bet.
In a scant few weeks, a wicked psychosis is taking over the land of the free. From Tampa to TriBeCa, from Des Moines to DUMBO, the last vestiges of consumer liberty — not to mention your eyesight — will be damaged irreparably.
On New Year’s Day, Uncle Sam snatches the cheap, reliable and gentle-on-the-eyes 100-watt incandescent bulbs, by which hundreds of millions of schoolkids have done homework since Thomas Edison perfected them in 1879.
Then 75-watters, by which generations of adults have calculated extortionate taxes, vanish in 2013. By 2014, 40-watt lights will be history. And a Borscht Belt comedy staple is toast:
Question: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: None. Mom says, “Don’t mind me. I’ll sit in the dark. Not that I have any letters to read, anyway!”
America weeps.
The incandescent ban was hatched in 2007 by a nanny-fixated Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The overlords decided that expensive LED and compact fluorescent lamps should reduce energy consumption by 30 percent, thus saving the planet from global warming. What were they thinking?
No one cared that buzzy, dim fluorescents, which daily torture office dwellers, contain levels of mercury that, when discarded, harm the planet far worse than anything Edison devised. And that atmosphere-dirtying coal-fired plants are, as we speak, being built in China to meet America’s lighting needs, erasing any environmental benefit won by energy-efficient bulbs. Already, General Electric’s incandescent factory in Virginia has closed; American jobs destroyed.
Finally, has it occurred to government interlopers that headache-inducing light may cause postal workers to go postal?
As the days tick by to the darkest, literally, chapter in American history, there has been precious little panic — yet. Matt Mazzone, owner of Mazzone’s True Value Hardware in Brooklyn, hasn’t seen customers hoard bulbs as they did before the European Union’s 2009 ban. Few want to believe this kind of insanity will happen here. But it will.
Mazzone has seen a 10 percent hike in the price of compact fluorescents due a shortage of raw materials. The bulbs already cost $3 to $5 a pop, compared with 60 cents for an incandescent. (True, they last longer, but not as long as manufacturers claim.) As the bulb ban kicks in, the cost of lighting your house legally will continue spiraling.
“People will pay more for not having the kind of light they’re accustomed to, that’s the bottom line,” said Mazzone.
“Whatever they intrude into, the government will find a way to mess it up.”
Conservative speechwriter Lisa Schiffren says she’s “both unhappy and a little bit scared by the fact that this capricious, politically correct ban on the incandescent light bulb has not been rescinded
“The fact that Congress is meddling at such a granular level, for such specious reasons, that scares me.”
Schiffren added, “I have been collecting bulbs against the possibility that Congress will not reverse itself.”
The light lunatics are winning. Yet the country’s biggest environmental hypocrites are sticking by the collapsing belief that something good will come from this.
Ozone bozo Al Gore, for one, sings the praises of the bulb ban. But I have yet to hear of legislation in the pipeline that would force Gore to raze one of his energy-guzzling mansions in Tennessee and California.
And there has been no mention of compelling Hollywood’s warming elite (Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney) to quit using Gulfstream jets. One cross-country flight, in terms of Persian Gulf oil consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, equals a year behind the wheel of a monster Hummer, wrote the New Republic’s Gregg Easterbrook. What illicit lighting fixture can come close?
So hoard your bulbs, America. No telling what the government will come for next.
Au revoir and good riddance,you creep
The freaky frog lost his job, his political career and, for a time, his liberty for the thrill of sex with a stranger. Now he’s losing his meal ticket.
After playing Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s adoring doormat, wifey Anne Sinclair was quoted in a French newspaper as saying, “It’s enough.” About time.
Sinclair bankrolled DSK’s defense in the case of a Manhattan hotel maid who claimed he sexually assaulted her. The charges were dropped. Now she’s humiliated again as her hub brags that he’s by nature a sex demon who, I must conclude, operates under the influence of a Viagra drip.
In a new biography, DSK boasts that he attended swingers’ orgies and had “consensual but stupid” sex with maid Nafissatou Diallo. He even blamed Diallo, saying the lady stared at his commanding crotch, making him powerless to resist l’amour.
DSK claims compulsive sexploits are de rigueur among French 1 percenters. But without a wife to maim, perv, you’ll get no satisfaction.
Adding in$ult to injury
Betrayal runs deep in Brooklyn. Folks in Brownsville, one of the city’s most violent and economically ravaged neighborhoods, learned last week that their state assemblyman, William Boyland Jr., was indicted for soliciting $250,000 in bribes in exchange for political favors. Three weeks earlier, Boyland was acquitted of similar charges.
Now a federal judge has approved the use of taxpayer funds to pay Boyland’s top lawyers. So you and I will pay to defend a man accused of highway robbery, while a random alleged crook gets a public defender. Insane.
Singing nypd blues
The fatal 2006 cop shooting of Sean Bell has a scapegoat — Detective Gescard Isnora, a fine officer plunged into a nightmare.
Before Bell was shot to death outside a sleazy Queens strip joint, he rammed his car into the terrified Isnora, who heard Bell’s friend twice shout, “Get my gun!’’ There was no gun.
Yet Isnora, who was cleared of criminal wrongdoing, last week was convicted within the police force of panicking and firing his gun against departmental guidelines, which could get him fired in disgrace. Others who shot at Bell were allowed to retire.
I beg those I care about not to join the NYPD. This madness could happen to anyone.
Freedom fries and a toy, too
Government meanies banned free Happy Meal toys in San Francisco as a way to fight fat. And Mickey D’s is fighting back.
Rather than forbidding Buzz Lightyear from sullying the Chicken McNuggets, McDonald’s this week plans to thwart the free-toy ban by charging a dime per Barbie, and donating it to charity.
Kids are happy. The nanny state is apoplectic. Freedom wins.