Bad people and REALLY bad people.

For some reason, bad people are given more attention than good people. History books detail the evil deeds of people like Adolph Hitler, who personally caused death and pain to so many. But history ignores millions of others who spent their entire lives as good citizens, who dealt with their fellow man according to the kind of compact described by the philosopher Epicurus (342-271 B.C) 'not to harm or be harmed'.

But history also ignores - or incorrectly records - the deeds of those I see as really bad people. My all-time leader on that list is one Rachel Carson. Back in 1962, Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring. That book is often cited as the birth of the modern environmental movement. Rah Rah!

But the one thing Silent Spring really accomplished was the worldwide ban of the insecticide DDT. Carson advanced the not conclusively proven belief that DDT caused birds to lay eggs that would not hatch because the shells were too thin.

But, the ban on DDT gave a new lease on life to the anopheles mosquito, the conveyor of malaria. Before the ban, malaria was almost eradicated. Since the ban, millions have died from malaria. It is estimated that 1,000 African children die from malaria every day. That makes Hitler's death camps seem small by comparison.

Today, more really bad people are at work. Take the U.S. Congress' House of Representatives. That body just passed the so-called 'Cap & Trade' energy bill. The bill they passed was 1,200 pages with a 300 page amendment, that none of them had read. Not only was it unreadable, some experts are now saying it was not even written at the time of the vote. Some group of persons, with some kind of evil motive, sat at word processors and ground out 1,500 pages of gibberish which had no intelligent meaning. Then, those really bad people used the power we had in good faith given them, to advance that to become the law of the land! A fully enforceable law they would slam down on us.

How bad would that law be? That depends entirely on what the final bill will say. A few things are certain. We will never know who the final authors/editors will be. The president who would sign it will not have read it. Some people, somewhere, would become very rich because of it. More would become poor because of it. Not exactly the compact Epicurus had in mind.