Posted on 05/06/2020 4:28:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
Recently, many politicians were in such a hurry to ban plastic bags.
California and Hawaii banned them, then New York. Then Oregon, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont passed laws against them. More than 400 cities did, too.
Why? Because plastic bags are evil, didn't you know?
"Look at the damage done by plastic bags! It is everywhere!" complained New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
A Washington state senator cited "videos of animals choked by plastics, tangled in garbage!"
So what should we use instead of plastic? Cloth bags! They're reusable! "Certainly the way to go!" said New Jersey's assembly speaker.
But now, suddenly, politicians are canceling their bans. Instead, they're banning the once praised reusable bags.
It's because of COVID-19, of course.
Reusable bags already brought bacteria into stores. We're supposed to wash them, but almost no one does. Studies found reusable bags crawling with dangerous bacteria. After plastic bags were banned in San Francisco, food poisoning deaths increased sharply.
But environmental groups, like Greenpeace, call those disease fears "misinformation."
"There are no studies or evidence that reusable bags are transmitting viruses," says Alex Truelove of the Public Interest Research Group, in my new video.
He's right. There are no human studies, but COVID-19 is so new. Millions of piglets died from swine coronavirus. The agriculture department concluded that reusable feed bags were probably the cause.
Still, even now, some politicians can't wait to ban plastic again. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says "as soon as this crisis is over we'll go back to all paper bags and reusable bags."
"Politicians are always just looking for something to do," complains supermarket executive Andrea Catsimatidis.
She points out that paper bags cost five times what plastic costs. "When you're talking billions of bags, it really adds up!"
And paper bags don't hold as much. They rip.
Plastic is more convenient. Why must politicians take away what's convenient?
"Over two-thirds of everything we use is not recycled or composted and ends up in a landfill," complains Truelove.
So what?
People think America is running out of room for landfills, but that's not true.
"All America's trash for the next century would fit in one landfill just 18 miles square," says environmental economist Ross McKitrick. Landfills take up so little space that "if you look the air you wouldn't even be able to see where landfills are."
And modern landfills hardly pollute. They're surrounded by layers of clay and plastic that keep nasty stuff in the garbage from leaking out.
But what about all that plastic in the ocean?
Plastic bags are sometimes eaten by animals. Some sea turtles mistake the bags for jellyfish and then starve. Islands of floating garbage have formed in the Pacific Ocean.
Green groups have convinced Americans that we are to blame.
But we aren't! Even if you litter -- and today, fewer Americans do -- your litter is unlikely to end up in an ocean.
Almost all the plastic in oceans comes from Asia and Africa. Less than 1% comes from North America.
In other words, banning plastic bags in America will accomplish roughly ... nothing.
What it will do is inconvenience Americans and make some of us sick.
Truelove says, "We should ... set an example for the rest of the world."
"That's posturing," replies McKitrick. "The rest of the world isn't looking to see what you do with your Starbucks cup.
"If we are concerned about other countries' waste going into their river systems," he adds, "there are better things we can do. We can share technology with them so they process their waste better. That's better than imposing on consumers' tiresome inconveniences in hopes that it will somehow change behavior on the other side of the planet."
Politicians "looking for something to do" routinely do more harm than good.
Too bad politicians are not bannable
“Virtue Signaling” has become the most popular form of “makes me feel good about myself posturing in the west”.
In actuality, it does more harm than good.
But, leftists don’t give a damn about that. They only care that it makes them feel superior to the Neanderthals who don’t follow along with them in this stupidity.
They still have plastic bags at supermarkets. You have to buy them though. That was the plan in the first place.
‘Politicians “looking for something to do” routinely do more harm than good.’
tell me again why we have full time politicians if they have to look for something to do...
And all this time I thought the plastic straws were the enemy.
Giving you mind over to people that are stupider than you
Liberalism kills. Literally.
But environmental groups, like Greenpeace, call those disease fears "misinformation."
"There are no studies or evidence that reusable bags are transmitting viruses," says Alex Truelove of the Public Interest Research Group, in my new video.
LIES, not only by Truelove, but Stossel himself:
He's right. There are no human studies...
To-wit:
The Spread of a Norovirus Surrogate via Reusable Grocery Bags in a Grocery Supermarket
Sourced from here after a 30 second web search for reusable grocery bags viruses study:
SPREADING VIRUSES IN THE GROCERY STORE VIA REUSABLE GROCERY BAGS
My analysis of this viral outbreak after 90 days is that Wuhan Coronavirus' effect pales in comparison to this other virus, Usadumbassavirus. Think about it.
John Stossel deserves to be excoriated for this and he should pull or heavily-amend his crappy piece. He normally does well; this was not a good example.
I've had CHY-na Flu, aka Wuhan Coronavirus Illness (I won't use the WHO "C-word"). I've told everyone that the illness was a pleasure compared to the Norovirus illness I had last October...one I'm certain was contracted from someone's filthy, virus-ridden reusable bag. Since I'm now immune and can see objectively the fear being projected by the rest of the media, it would do Stossel well to write a piece on the hypocrisy of communities such as mine which promote the fear/panic of wearing cloth masks to stop the spread (an oxymoron, epidemiologically) yet permit asshats to use these filthy-assed bags and touch my things with the same gloved hands.
They keep complaining that the lockdowns are insufficient because cases/deaths keep rising; I submit - as I've done for weeks, as others are now parroting on almost a daily basis - that we adopt Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt's “safer at home” order requiring all “vulnerable populations” to stay at home until April 30, except for essential travel such as trips to the grocery store or pharmacy with other restrictions, principally upon travelers from other states with high infection case counts & deaths.
In short, quarantine the vulnerable and, most-pertinently, New York/New Jersey (Well, Ok: I concede that the latter may be my own bias overriding the objectiveness of the fact that the NY problem was caused by Cuomo and the NY bureaucracy: The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City.
In either case, a sensible approach, compared to the dumbass clarion cries of the left that "ending the lockdown and/or not wearing a mask will kill more people."
I wondered why the war against plastic bags, we live in a rural area, and I never saw one blowing around, until I went into Boston a few years ago and they were everywhere, stuck in the trees, bushes, blowing down the street.
It occurred to me, the problem wasn’t the plastic bags, it was liberal slobs who throw trash around and don’t know how to clean up after themselves.
Exactly.
The morons, I mean City Council in Baltimore outlawed foam take out containers and cups because a bunch ended up in the Inner Harbor.
The harbor dead ends in downtown Baltimore, of course trash that ends up in the water collects there. It has nowhere to go.
So instead of mounting a campaign to discourage people from throwing their trash on the street, these idiots banned Styrofoam as though people will now never ever drop a wax coated paper take out container in the street and thus into the harbor.
Of course, the ever virtue signaling state legislature, officially known as the General Assembly and less affectionately as the General Asylum immediately followed suit and a statewide ban is coming.
No different than the kid at McDonald’s wearing the same cloth mask everyday that he is constantly adjusting because it keeps slipping or is hard to breathe in.
I won’t be going back to fast food, casual food or any other place I can avoid because of this.
To make it worse they wear plastic gloves which keep germs
wasnt it the whiny hand-wringing panty-wetting leftists that pushed plastic bags on us back in the 1970’s?
Their logic then was that paper bags were killing all the trees.
From the article: “Almost all the plastic in oceans comes from Asia and Africa. Less than 1% comes from North America.”
I’ve always wondered how much of that Asian plastic comes from “recycled” plastic that we send overseas for “processing” - I’ve read of whole boatloads of recyclables that we’ve sent to China and other Asian countries so greenies can feel better about themselves - once that stuff was outta sight, outta mind, we’d pretty much have no control over how they dispose of it.
“They only care that it makes them feel superior to the Neanderthals who don’t follow along with them in this stupidity.”
Virtue signaling is more than about making the signaled feel superior, it is also about guilting the sheeple into following their lead.
I believe the charge per bag was a scam to kickback money to the democrat party.
Interesting, I had something in November that removed 15 lbs in five days due to a non-existent appetite. Bad stuff. Didn’t fully recover for two full months. Not certain where it came from but I do meet and speak with numerous people continually. Doubt my habits will change as little has changed during this last eight weeks
I lost weight during mine as well (had to force myself to eat), but I was only ill 72 hours. Recovery: Energy & digestion also took me nearly 2 full months. I realized last week that things were mostly back to normal.
November is a bit early for CHY-na Flu here in the states, however, but I have a theory about that. Did you have all or most of the 12 symptoms I outline below?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3831003/posts
Had all but vomiting. Was worst case of flu ever experienced since youth
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