Daily Derp: More Plastic Please!

For those of you into B-flicks Irwin Keyes passed away in July.



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Research shows plastics are not dangerous...at all.

You can breathe now.

"...High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science. Despite weighing less than 5 grams, one bag can hold 17 pounds, well over 1,000 times its own weight. At about a penny apiece, the bags are cheap enough for stores to give away and sturdy enough to carry home two gallons of milk in the evening and still be up to the task of scooping Cujo's poop the next morning.

Yet almost as soon as grocers started offering their customers the choice of "paper or plastic?" these modern marvels became a whipping boy for environmentalists, politicians, and other well-intentioned, ill-informed busybodies. Plastic bags for retail purchases are banned or taxed in more than 200 municipalities and a dozen countries, from San Francisco to South Africa, Bellingham to Bangladesh. Each region serves up its own custom blend of alarmist rhetoric; coastal areas blame the wispy totes for everything from asphyxiated sea turtles to melting glaciers, while inland banners decry the bags' role in urban landscape pollution and thoughtless consumerism...."

"...But the definitive American litter study—yep, such a thing exists—reports much lower figures. The 2009 Keep America Beautiful Survey, run by Steven Stein of Environmental Resources Planning, shows that all plastic bags, of which plastic retail bags are only a subset, are just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide....Stein's study did find plastic bags in storm drains, but again, they made up only about 1 percent of the total litter.

"...As David Santillo, a senior biologist with Greenpeace, told The Times of London, "It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue..."

"...In 2010, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans threw away 690,000 tons of HDPE bags. Of those, approximately 30,000 tons were recycled. That means a total of 660,000 tons were discarded, mostly into landfills (approximately 82 percent of non-recovered municipal solid waste goes to landfill; 18 percent is incinerated). That same year, Americans also chucked almost exactly the same amount of "reusable" polypropylene bags (680,000 tons), of which zero were recovered. In other words, those polypropylene reusable bags actually constituted a slightly higher proportion of all bags going to landfills."

I pay the nickel with much pride to get a plastic bag to carry my groceries in. Outright bans are just a product of the typical irrational behavior that characterizes environmentalists all too much these days.

Like, say, the city of Seattle - arguably the front runner in economic illiteracy in the USA?

"...In 2008, officials in the deep blue city of Seattle voted to impose a 20-cent fee on both plastic and paper single- use bags. "There's a competitive side to seeing who can come up with the most progressive legislation," city councilman and former local Sierra Club leader Mike O'Brien told The New York Times. But industry rallied before the implementation date, spending $1.4 million on a citywide ballot measure to repeal the fee. The referendum campaign was a success; Seattle voters rejected the surcharge, which would have been the most punitive in the nation, in 2009. Still, three years later, Seattle became the fourth city in Washington State to approve an outright plastic- bag ban, along with a 5-cent fee on paper bags.

"...A 2011 survey published in the journal Food Protection Trends found coliform bacteria in fully half of the reusable shopping bags tested in a random survey of shoppers in Arizona and California. The same 2014 Edelman Berland study that found consumers frequently forgot their bags also unearthed the fact that only 18 percent of shoppers reported cleaning their bags "once a week or more." An article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases traced a 2010 outbreak of norovirus to nine members of an Oregon soccer team who had touched or eaten food stored in a contaminated reusable bag.

More plastic please!

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Conservative ads about Trudeau are right. He isn't ready.

He responded with his own video saying he wasn't ready either for a bunch of stuff.

As far as ad wars go, they're not bad and fall far from the attack ads theme we've seen in the past. The Cons made a fair assertion and the Libs responded in kind. End of story.

One thing Justin said that, naturally, caught my eye was on taxes:

He said he, 'will be ready to tax wealthy Canadians so our middle-class can pay less'.

This is a deliberate vague tactic so common among politicians it's become nauseating.

There is no clear and concise definition of what constitutes 'high income' for statistical purposes because it's not a zero-sum game.

Instead of increasing taxes for anyone (basically it's about 55% Fed and provincial in Quebec for high income earners and 50% for the 'middle-class'), seems to me the best way to help Canadians is to lower tax rates period.

Can we please knock it off with the Marxian mumbo jumbo blither-blather? 

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 NDP slogan: Tax me, take me!

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Mount McKinley gets a name change. Back to its original name of Mount Denali.

As an aside, a President has the power to do this?

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Graeme Leggat was one of the first soccer voices I was introduced to with Soccer Saturday (1986-2000).  He was the voice of the memorable World Cups in Mexico on the CBC.

He died at the age of 81.

Fulham paid their respects.

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Five million people left California over the last decade. Where did they go?

Yeah but, did progressives stay behind? The last thing other states need is to deal with California democrats (arguably!) who sent then state into a derpy tailspin.

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Scott Walker lost the plot. Trying to remain relevant he bit at the 'we need walls' meme Trump is pumping on illegal immigration. A topic GOP candidates were trying to avoid.

Walker, in response to a question about Canada, said the issues raises about the border and that a discussion about putting up a wall was valid.

On what level could it possibly be valid? The world's largest unprotected border remains as peaceful as it's ever been. Are conservatives that paranoid about illegal immigration and terrorism to even ponder the thought?

I understand this was probably nothing and as one American friend told me, 'I wouldn't be surprised that was just a 'on the spot' question and Walker took the bite like a fool'. And I further grasp America has the right to defend its borders any way they see fit. But this Canada, man. 

Remember Allen Iverson's 'practice' clip?



Just replace 'practice' with 'Canada'. That's how I see it.

Still. Is this the topic that galvanizes American conservatives?

Then again, I seem to recall when U.S. pundits and politicians actually blamed a 'porous' border on the Canadian side that could have led to the 9/11 attacks.

It was asinine as it was absurd to suggest it.

This babbling about walls really makes America look weak and whiny. World history's mightiest nation cackles on like a bunch of scaredy-cats on such issues. Man up and stop blaming other countries for your own mess.

I don't get the need to antagonize Canada. WE'RE ON YOUR SIDE.

It's all the more irritating given few American politicians make any official visit up here anymore. Maybe they should get up from their asses - starting with Obama - and actually engage Canada rather than taking the country for granted and saying stupid things.

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Americans should recall - Between Friends.

And what will become of the Peace Garden if the Les Nessman wall ever goes up?!

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Seinfeld and Son get lemonade stand shut down by cops.

It truly takes a special kind of piece of shit asshole to snitch on lemonade stands.

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Check these tweets out from journalist Michael Grunwald asserting Katrina was a failure made by the Army Corps of Engineers.

A comment I pulled from Reason magazine (I lost the link to the article):

"One of the great lies of this century is that New Orleans flooded because the levies were overtopped by Katrina. That is not what happened. The brunt of Katrina missed New Orleans and hit Mississippi. In New Orleans, Katrina was no worse than a Cat 1 hurricane. And the levies held through the storm. The city looked to be okay when the storm ended. Then, the levies failed and flooded the city. New Orleans flooded because the levies were defective. It wasn't FEMA's fault. It was the Corps of Engineers and the crooked Louisiana politicians who put pork over safety and built defect levies that flooded New Orleans. In one sense, Katrina may have saved lives by having the levies fail when the city was largely evacuated. They were going to fail at some point and it would have killed a lot more people if they had failed when the city had not been evacuated."

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The War on Coal is a favor for Soros?

Conservatives think so. Personally, it wouldn't surprise me.

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The human price Europe paid for both World Wars truly is immeasurable. The continent lost a lot of good men. To the point it simply destroyed its civilization.

Sometimes I wonder if the gaping hole it created gave rise to all this SJW nonsense we see among men today. Once long ago, they were brave. Now? They wear beards and tattoos, are vegan and rail against BBQ's and are encouraged to be stay at home dads in all their emasculated glory while wearing A&F t-shirts.

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Speaking of which...

"Columbia Univ. students offended by 'Consent is bae' posters"

All they do is bitch and moan and act with faux moral outrage about too many insipid things. 

They offend too easily because they're not tough mentally and Colleges across the continent give in because they don't want to lose Fed money because the Feds are the ones telling them to jump on this obscene SJW narrative. So, in this way, the Federal government is creating, or at least encouraging, a generation of sensitive idiots. Surprise, surprise.

Simple as that.