I was somewhat pleased when April 22nd was declared to be Earth Day, being as that is my birthday.
Yes, I know: that makes me full of Taurus!
It was, of course, many years later that I learned about Ira Einhorn, one of the ‘founders’ of Earth Day, was a stone-cold killer:
Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.
A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself “Unicorn” because his German-Jewish last name translates to “one horn” —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.
But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up.
And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.
It wasn’t until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.
Mr Einhorn managed to flee justice, and wasn’t extradited from France until 2002. Nevertheless, he eventually was returned to the United States, tried and convicted in Pennsylvania, and sentenced to life without parole. Mr Einhorn took the stand in his own defense, and claimed that Miss Maddux was murdered by CIA agents who were attempting to frame him due to his investigations into the Cold War and “psychotronics”. He was sentenced to prison in October of 2002, and went to his eternal reward on April 3, 2020, dying of natural causes at the age of 79.
John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. Click to enlarge.
But, I digress. I have to wonder, on this Earth Day, just what the hard-core global warming climate change activists have been doing to reduce their own ‘carbon footprints’? We have President Biden’s ‘climate envoy,’ former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, using his family’s private jet, a Gulfstream G-IV private jet, with registration N57HJ, to travel all over the globe, to tell the rest of us to cut our CO2 emissions.
Of course, it’s up to us little people to bear the burdens of reducing our carbon footprints.
global warming climate change, but because I like saving a few pennies on my electric bill, and Mrs Pico has stated that she prefers it when the bedding has been dried outside, on the clothesline, for the fresh smell, rather than in the electric dryer. And so it is that when I buy light bulbs, I but the LED bulbs, not because I’m worried about the environment, but because they use less sparktricity and illuminate with little radiated heat.
There are many little things that people can do, and they needn’t be tied up in activism or worry about what other people have done, or in insisting that Other People follow mandatory rules and buy plug-in electric vehicles. But it sure would be nice if some of the activists told us just what they have done, what sacrifices they have made.