Guy Parsons is being somewhat cynical here, but that’s not to say he’s wrong.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when people who loved the Earth recoiled from milk in plastic jugs, preferring to pick up the glass bottles that had to be brought back to the store. In fact, we were going to come back to the store for more milk anyway and dropping off the bottles was not so much of a burden.
But if we didn’t want to drop off milk and soft drink bottles, there were poor people who would collect them for the deposits. It worked pretty well.
I guess you had to be there, though, because pretty soon the glass bottles largely disappeared and eventually nearly everything was packaged in plastic, which they assured us was recyclable.
Were they lying, or just incompetent? And what the hell difference would that make?
As for the greenwashing he mentions, sometimes someone will point out that you can get a doormat made from recycled plastics. Buying a doormat made from recycled plastics is like swatting a mosquito to end malaria: Far more performative than effective.
Anyway, I’ve already got a doormat. It’s made from coco matting and doesn’t even have a wire frame. I might have to get another next spring, because, after several years of rain, snow and mud, it’s starting to recycle itself.
I hope they’re still making coconut palm trees.
And while you should eat your salad, Matt Davies is right that you shouldn’t have to choke down yet another serving of word salad at the Mar A Lago Cafe.
To put it another way, is anybody swallowing this?
Jon Stewart did a split screen video of Trump repeating all his Biden insults but swapping in Harris’s name, which I have only been able to track down on Xitter, but if you listened to Trump’s alleged press conference from Bedminster the other day, you didn’t hear anything new there, either.
Ann Telnaes agrees: The boy needs some new writers, because he’s been spinning in circles. And it’s nice that vinyl is making a comeback so that younger voters will understand what we mean when we say the needle is stuck.
Though there have recently been complaints that Harris says the same thing in her appearances, but there’s a difference between having a standard stump speech and not being able to think on your feet.
Anyway, Trump’s Bedminster speech got fact-checked, but nobody expected accuracy, so why dwell on that? I just want to know if he really did take that box of Cheerios back to his cottage for some fun.
Though here’s a question for the September debate: “What does a dozen eggs cost?” I doubt anybody in that stratosphere does their own shopping, but we could grade them by how close they came.
Meanwhile, Morten Morland indicates that the whole world watched that Trump/Musk lovefest the other night, or listened to it, or tried to, and came away with the sense that they sure like each other but that neither of them had anything of substance to say.
Though Dave Whamond did indicate that, while the Close Encounter of the Turd Kind didn’t help either man’s reputation in the world, it may have provided a bit of critical insight for anyone contemplating playing guinea pig for Elon’s medical experiments.
Plenty of observers have noted that, while Elon has thrown money at people to develop a number of innovations, he has only really been in charge of operations one time himself, and his takeover of Twitter has been both a financial and public relations disaster.
To be fair, Musk hasn’t been proposing to inject chips into anyone’s brain himself, nor has he exactly taken credit for developing the chip, though my understanding is that the chrome rolling trashcan Cybertruck may have been his design.
I remember when everybody suddenly needed to have a Humvee. Okay, maybe not everybody, with the result being that I think my old Honda is worth more on the resale market.
I don’t know what Cybertrucks will sell for a decade from now, but perhaps only people with malfunctioning brain implants will want to buy one.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Today’s episode is brought to you by the buzzword “Bidenomics.” You don’t have to watch Fox or read Town Hall to know the Word of the Day, because the juxtapositions will pop up and let you know what’s hot.
Certainly, Harris was in the room for the past four years, but nobody dubbed her the Budget Czar, and two other factors are at work in attempting to saddle her with Biden’s economy.
The first is that, if you keep telling people something, you can expect them to vomit it up in the next polls. If you keep reporting that America’s greatest problem is giant penguins, you could expect polls to show that people view giant penguins as a major issue.
And goodness knows we’ve been hearing complaints about the economy, and about complaints about the economy, on an endless loop.
The other is that the economy could be doing better, but right now, while things aren’t magnificent, they’re not so bad, Deloitte reports, and the Fed is feeling increased pressure to cut rates, which is a positive sign.
In any case, we’re economically above average compared to other nations.
But a competitive election requires something more than a debate over tampons in boys’ locker rooms, especially since any man who played varsity sports in school remembers dressing in the girls’ locker room when we were the visitors.
We saw tampons there and somehow most of us not only remained heterosexual but managed to reproduce.
Instead of a vague screed against Bidenomics, Michael Ramirez (Creators) criticizes the move to reduce drug prices by trotting out the traditional Pharma explanation, which is that high prices pay for research into other drugs.
It’s not a bad excuse, except that nobody ever explains why Americans pay far more than double what people in other countries pay for prescriptions.
If the pharmaceutical companies need to generate profits in order to continue research and development, why not spread the cost around?
Or, to put it in less technical terms, how come we’re the pigeons in this con game?
I wonder where the visiting women’s team suits up…
Well, that’s the point of having tampons available in the boys’ locker room.
A grocery chain employee told me one of his jobs was to collect the bags from the recycle plastic bag bins at the front of the store and throw them in the dumpster.
“Save the Planet”? Give me a break – electric cars with lethal lithium batteries so costly no one can afford them, and no infrastructure to support them, fuel them or deal with their recycling. Now the geniuses in my city (Toronto) have decided to install bicycle lanes on all major thoroughfares by reducing the traffic lanes by one in each direction, killing parking and handicapped pickup or dropoff, making left turns impossible, and turning idling cars into a sport. I can’t wait for someone to die waiting for an ambulance, fire truck or police car unable to get to an emergency. (I have all three stations located less than a thousand meters from my home, but artificially induced gridlock is the best they can come up with). How much CO2 is created by traffic, idling instead of moving ? I guess if you want Amazon Prime or grocery delivery, you’re not concerned with all that diesel ? Our enemies need only take out a couple of Nuclear Power Generating stations and the grid fails across the continent. Save the Planet for sure.
Okay, that’s what we’re doing wrong. Now tell us what we should do to fix this mess, because it certainly isn’t in any serious doubt.
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/scientific-consensus/
It might surprise you to know that glass recycling is having a lot of problems. It’s been dropped in Tucson because of the cost: essentially, commercial glass formulas are very specific, and either you melt them all together and produce something virtually nobody will buy, or you have gruesomely labor-intensive sorting requirements. And if that makes glass recycling unworkable, all of those reasons x10 for plastic, plus sorting out the scores of plastic types which simply don’t recycle at all.
Glass _reuse_ still exists, but it’s basically just a couple of local dairies, and it’s expensive.
As to plastic, you’re lucky if it just goes in the landfill. For a long time it was being put in container ships and sent from the US to China to be “recycled”. Coincidentally, almost exactly halfway along that voyage…
So here in Tucson a former local councilman tackled both of those issues and found examples of solutions in other places which we’re now starting to implement. For plastic, there’s a company that takes any* kind of plastic, “recyclable” or not, and mash-welds it together into blocks. The blocks receive an exterior coating to keep from shedding microplastics. I think they’re currently not certified for load-bearing, but are being used for low-lying park structures. We haven’t been able to get our hands on any, but might build a tortoise house out of them.
Firm that turns plastic into building blocks to be in new Tucson facility by 2025
https://tucson.com/news/local/government-politics/tucson-recycle-construction-blocks-byfusion/article_bb399a04-00fd-11ef-beb8-17a7deb42d5d.html
Meanwhile, glass we are turning into…sand. That doesn’t seem like a good trade, but sand is actually becoming something of a scarce resource. For now it’s being put into the free sandbags the city gives out to homeowners to protect against monsoon flooding, but it’s used more dramatically in places like New Orleans:
Recycled Glass ‘Sand’ Could Help Protect Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-08-25/recycled-glass-sand-could-help-protect-louisiana-s-vanishing-coast
Our ward set up a drop off point, since glass is no longer picked up and the number of plastic “types” accepted in the recycling bin is shrinking, and they’ve been overwhelmed. I guesstimate that they’re filling a rolloff with glass somewhere < 1 week and a rolloff full of plastic on practically a daily basis.
It’s not about “exposing boys to tampons”, it’s about waste. If you just put the dispenser machines in girls’ bathrooms, you can cover twice as many schools / venues for the same investment.
Tampons are perishable in your neighborhood?
Tom Gillespie, what a peculiar comment! Is “perishable” your only sense of “waste”? The point was that installing twice as many machines (and stocking them, yes) is twice the expense, and wasteful if half of them are going almost entirely unused.
And then the girls teams will need replacement uniforms because when they’re visitors, they dress in the boys’ lockerroom. Bang! There go all your savings and the dignity of some nice kids.
Well, that is a very narrow response, based on a peculiar focus on sports and locker rooms. Fine, install in both locker rooms, for the sake of visiting teams using the contra-sex changing rooms. But that provides no argument for the dozen plain boys’ restrooms, throughout the school.
Which is okay because there isn’t even a rule about putting them in boys’ locker rooms, much less in single-sex male bathrooms. None. It’s a scary myth. All the rule says is to make them available where they’re needed.
Oh, no, Mike! You’ve introduced a real fact into an emotional, alternative factoid argument. Isn’t that breaking the rules?
Ann Telnaes and Matt Davies are right on about the interminable regurgitation of Doris’s Grossest Hits. For sport a few lazy Saturdays ago, a group of friends and I challenged ourselves to play the drinking game while enduring a replay of one of his rallies. Can’t recall which one, doesn’t matter – as has been well documented, they’re all interchangeable.
We each downed a shot of Sailor Jerry’s at every utterance of the immortal phrase “In the history of our country”. Needless to say, by the end of it, the bottle was empty and we were all HAMMERED.
Regarding BLOAT (Biggest Liar Of All Time), I’m hearing rumors that his damage may have some sort of brain.
The Daily Show’s video is also available on Threads.
https://www.threads.net/@thedailyshow/post/C-qNZuNvqtg
On a less consequential note, has anyone noticed that the turntable that Ann Telnaes drew is rotating counter-clockwise? At first I thought she might have been born after CDs displaced vinyl, but no, she’s older than I am. Or is the reversed direction part of the joke?
Do you remember the globe on “The Daily Show” which was rotating the wrong way?
Or the wrong-way rotation of the actual earth in the first edition of Larry Niven’s /Ringworld/?
Perhaps you had different turntables in your youth. This is how they turned in the many many years I had them.
All turntables spin clockwise (unless a DJ is using one for scratching). The tone arm is drawn on the wrong side of the center spindle for clockwise rotation.