This whole thing is just an environmental straw man

Late to bed and early to rise does not make a man...happy. Yeah, no cute Poor Richard rhyme for you this morning. I woke from a most interesting dream to go pee and was unable to go back to sleep. I shouldn't have had watermelon as a late evening snack.

What?

It involved camels, a McDonalds, flintlock muskets, Penn and Teller, a battle in the desert, and the Lennon Sisters. You don't want the details. It made sense in the dream, not so much in the cold light of dawn.

We went to local chain for dinner last night. It was a lovely evening, so we sat outside. The food was great, the service good. The only flaw in the evening was a big sign on the door parroting the "world is plagued by discarded plastic straws" nonsense perpetuated by a nine year-old 's science fair project. I promptly asked for a straw out of spite. I'm not going into a multi-paragraph rant on how silly it is to single out straws as the environmental villain when our world is filled with one-time use plastics of far greater volume than a little extruded tube.* Do you know how much extra plastic is used in automobiles due to Obama's fuel milage standards? The wackos are probably coming after my Kuerig pods next. No, get that idea out of your head. Pretend I did not write it.

Hold on, I need to go down and trash another plastic K cup. I might just attempt to drink my coffee with a straw just for the satisfaction of making a liberal cry. Too bad I drink my coffee black or I would use a plastic spoon to stir it. I will then collect this waste in a plastic trash bag that I throw out in a plastic garbage bin beside the garage. I do not pay extra to recycle. But if I did, that too would go in a plastic bin. Do you liberal progressive digger Leveller environmental weenies not see the irony here?

You do know that most of the stuff you rinse out and separate into the recycling bin goes straight into the landfill anyway? Much of the rest is loaded into containers and shipped to China.** The fuel cost far outweighs the environmental savings of recycling. Oh, and very little can be actually recycled, so it is buried in China or just tossed into the Yangtze where it floats into the Pacific. Just pitching that bendy straw in the trash at home is far more likely to keep it out of a turtles' left nostril than trying to recycle it anyway.

Look it up. The truth is often an ugly thing.

If I had any talent I would adorn this blog with a "ribbon" fashioned from a plastic straw. It would be my own personal "resistance" movement symbol. Feel free to join.

There you go. I wanted to complain about getting up early and an unresolved dream. Instead you got me off on a tangent about feel good limousine liberalism. Thanks. [sarcasm].

Have a great Saturday.



* OK I guess I am. Oh, and did you see what I did there with the title? A real post title that actually fits the content? Sorta.

**especially if you live in California