February 16, 2018

Governor Phil Murphy

Office of the Governor

Box 001

Trenton, NJ 08265

RE: Pipelines and the horses’ asses who ride them

Governor Murphy,

Disciples of Ned Lud – Ned Lud? Send a SASE – are rejoicing in your decision to deny state permits of the PennEast pipeline, “a 120-mile pipeline that would bring fracked [italics mine] gas across the Delaware River – that’s the one that Washington crossed, remember? – and into Hunterdon and Mercer Counties”.

Trenton, our beloved state capitol, is in Mercer County. I have been out of New Jersey a long time but I thought there was enough gas there to last several lifetimes. 

Why stop at stopping one from being built? Why not tear out one that has already befouled and besmirched our fair state? 

A brief bow to Clio, the Muse of History, is in order.

You may not be aware but in 1942, to quote the great Churchill, “a time of limitless peril”, tankers filled with oil were being torpedoed up and down the East coast by Hitler’s kriegsmariners before they could reach New Jersey. Once it was refined – Bayonne, Bayway, Linden – it was put back on tankers and sent to fight Hitler. This country built a pipeline  from Texas to New Jersey in record time. Talk about “shovel ready jobs”! Nobody cared about the furbish lousewort or the Delhi smelt or the Raritan River narwhals. The country, even Hollywood after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, wanted to kill Hitler. It was called “The Big Inch”.

2 things of note:

#1 – We won that war

#2 – By Labor Day, 2018, we shall be free of dependence on fossil fuels, right?

It’s OK if I’m off by a few decades. By then, the new and improved Solyndra will stop fracking, right?

As soon as we figure out how to genetically modify our famed succotash bushes into giving us 3 crops of lithium batteries a year we can kiss high test goodbye. At least that’s what the ca-ca filled moon bats who identify as modern American Liberals tell us over and over and over and over, right?

Let’s show the world that New Jersey stands for something other than Taylor Ham, landfills, end zones filled with mobsters, and a past checkered by a racist Governor.

Mandate that all government vehicles must use either bovine, porcine, orvin, or equine eructations as their only fuel source

Shut down the “Big Inch” and close the petrochemical complexes that poison our children while keeping their parents in serfdom. You can show them how to get to Utopia, said Utopia being filled with all the delights of a pre-industrial society. “Utopia”? Send a SASE.

Full disclosure requires me to tell you that I fracked my first well in January, 1974. Both I and the Republic have survived. There aren’t too many guys from Bayonne who can say that.

I mention “fracked gas” in my first paragraph. I took it from the website run by wing nut boobs who oppose the pipeline. It was the original Doctor Johnson, Samuel, not Lyndon, who said, “Such stupidity, sir, is not to be found in nature”. I mention that because natural gas, particularly when it is in a moisture controlled, pressure regulated pipeline is as fungible a commodity as is imaginable. Of course, people who would be hard pressed to find their Homerically dumb asses using both their hands wouldn’t be expected to know that, would they?

It was another Irishman, Edmund Burke, who said, “Unfortunately, experience is the only school where some people will learn”.

Accordingly, I name you

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK

      Kevin Smith

PS – Even though I know that “anticipation is the greater joy”, I can’t wait. “Utopia” means “nowhere”. It’s where people who believe in Midnight Basketball and taxing your way to prosperity wind up.