For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment | Intellectual Takeout

In 2008 I was invited to a conference called Australia Recycles! in Fremantle. I flew coach for 30 hours (we had to divert, at one point, to Auckland instead of Sydney because huge headwinds used up more fuel than expected) and landed in Perth and then was driven to Freo by one of the conference organizers. (If you are keeping score at home, that’s 2.78 metric tons of carbon for the flight from Raleigh-Durham to Perth and back.)

It became clear that I was the “tethered goat,” brought in for entertainment and to spice things up a bit. Apparently, someone had listened to my April 2007 conversation with Russ Roberts; that’s pretty impressive, because this was just over a year after EconTalk started, before EconTalk was a “thing” and before Russ started ignoring my emails and not returning my phone calls. 

I had a day before my plenary address, and walked around the conference hall. Everyone there, everyone, represented either a municipal or provincial government, or a nonprofit recycling advocacy group, or a company that manufactured and sold complicated and expensive recycling equipment. 

And what a wealth of machinery and equipment it was. Recycling requires substantial infrastructure for pickup, transportation, sorting, cleaning, and processing. I have sometimes suggested a test for whether something is garbage or a valuable commodity. Hold it in your hand, or hold a cup of it, or tank, or however you can handle it. Consider: Will someone pay me for this? If the answer is yes, it’s a commodity, a valuable resource. If the answer is no, meaning you have to pay them to take it, then it’s garbage. 

It’s useful to pause for a moment and consider some definitions.

Is Recycling Useful, or Is It Garbage?

 

The problem with recycling is that people can’t decide which of two things is really going on.

• One possibility is that recycling transforms garbage into a commodity. If that’s true, then the price of pickup, transport, sorting, cleaning, and processing can be paid out of the proceeds, with something left over. That’s how it is with real commodities, such as wheat or pork bellies, after all. It’s expensive and complicated to produce wheat or pork bellies, and then deliver them to the market in a form that they can be used. But people will pay you for the wheat or pork bellies. In fact, the “profit test” shows that people will pay you enough to cover all those costs and still have something left over.
• The other possibility, and it’s a completely different possibility, is that recycling isn’t a commodity at all. But it is a cheaper or more environmentally friendly way to dispose of garbage. After all, if you bury something in a landfill, it’s gone. And you still had to collect it, transport it, and process it into the landfill. Recycling might cost money, but if you can sell the stuff for any price you are getting some of those costs back. Further, recycling keeps things out of landfills, and we systematically underprice landfill space. The reason is that we don’t want people dumping garbage in vacant lots or by the side of the road. But that means that recycling may be cheaper, all things considered, than using the space in the landfill. The problem is that “all things considered.” You really do have to add up all the costs — resources, money, convenience, environmental damage — of landfilling, and recycling, and then compare them.

These arguments are often muddled and mixed together, by both proponents and critics. And “recycling” is, after all, not just one homogeneous activity, but a whole collection of possible streams of waste or resources, each of which has to be evaluated separately. Should we recycle aluminum cans? Probably, because the price of recycling aluminum compares very favorably to using virgin materials, the mining and smelting of which are expensive in terms of energy and harmful to the environment. 

Should we recycle toilet paper? We could, at some price. But it’s likely not worth it, because it can be composted, it would be awfully hard to clean and sort, and in any case paper products are actually a renewable resource, rather like wheat. You rarely hear someone saying, “Save the wheat! Give up bread!” But that kind of argument is often made for paper, even though the trees grown to produce pulp are simply a fast-growing crop grown on farms expressly for that purpose.

For recycling to be a socially commendable activity, it has to pass one of two tests: the profit test, or the net environmental-savings test. If something passes the profit test, it’s likely already being done. People are already recycling gold or other commodities from the waste stream, if the costs of doing so are less than the amount for which the resource can be sold. 

Voluntary “recycling” like scrap iron or aluminum businesses will take care of that on their own. The real question arises with mandatory recycling programs – people recycle because they will be fined if they don’t, not because they expect to make money – or “voluntary” recycling programs such as those at universities or other communities where failure to recycle earns you public shaming.

Read the rest:
For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment | Intellectual Takeout

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Silent Drill Platoon at Gallatin High School 2016

Hump Day Hunnies

The Mass Shooting Miasma

 

By Anna L. Stark

 

As expected and right on cue, the blame for a trio of recent mass shootings has devolved into a partisan blame game replete with profane language and vicious name-calling, in addition to calls for gun confiscation and the all too familiar ridiculous posturing by politicians.  Numerous Democrat candidates for president seized upon the opportunity, exploiting the tragedy while laying the blame for the El Paso shooting squarely on President Trump's shoulders.  Predictably, gun-grabbers blame the NRA and its millions of members, while media political pundits simply blame the other party.  Lost in the maelstrom is the obvious — the shooters are to blame, and it's a shameful American problem.

President Trump is no more responsible for mass shootings during his tenure in the White House than Barack Obama was for the shooting at the church in Charleston, nor the Sandy Hook school massacre.  On the precipice of a presidential election, it's convenient for Democrats and their media lapdogs to blame Trump.  The president's harshest critics and fiercest opponents easily defaulted to the "racist" canard, personally blaming the president's comments for the carnage.  At this juncture, the race card is all they have in their toolbox.  Combined with the noticeably fizzled and pitifully faltering campaigns of at least 20 of the 24 Democrat candidates, blaming Trump for the horrific events in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton will not reverse their inevitable demise.  "Beto" O'Rourke's vulgar performance in front of television cameras was par for course; he's prone to embarrassing himself. 

The increasing frequency with which mass shooting events are occurring also significantly increases the ferocity of those who demand that guns be outlawed altogether.  Disinformation and urban myths account for a majority of negativity directed at the NRA and its members.  The NRA does not support gun violence.  Furthermore, the NRA does not sell guns, and the NRA doesn't promote mass murder.  Far from it, but the overarching goal of the anti-gun lobby is to punish law-abiding citizens, turning  gun-owners into outlaws and leaving people defenseless against criminals.  Furthermore, gun confiscation will not make America safer — defenseless people are never safe.  Does anyone really believe that criminals who aren't supposed to have illegally obtained guns in their possession are going to willingly volunteer their weapons to law enforcement?  Apparently, strict gun laws don't prevent mass shootings, as evidenced by the most recent weekend of carnage in Chicago, in which 47 people were shot and 7 died

It's time that America address the truth — deranged, mentally unstable sociopaths are responsible for their heinous actions.  There is no debate, yet the insanity continues.  The cabal of news network media savants and their mewing minions have but one narrative: Orange Man Bad, and it's his fault.  Adding to the idiocy is declaring the motive for murder based on political party affiliation.  The predominantly liberal media are not alone in their armchair psychoanalysis of the criminal mind; numerous conservative media outlets were quick to point out that both shooters in El Paso and Dayton were adherents of Marxist ideology — according to their social media accounts.  And while musings on social media may provide law enforcement investigators a glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer, it's obscene to assume that political party preference determines mental well-being.

Finally, there are no easy answers or quick fixes on how to stop the mentally unhinged from obtaining guns and raining down mayhem on innocents.  It's an enormous problem that  plagues America and will require a multi-pronged approach to stop the carnage and prevent future mass shooting events.  Whether it's a single event, such as what happened over the course of the past 10 days in three different cities, or the ongoing reign of gun violence in some of America's crime-ridden metro areas, it must be stopped.  What also needs to end is the disingenuous assignment of misplaced blame, which does nothing to address the problem, nor does it add to the national conversation.  The American public is appealing to leaders who are willing to lay down their differences, come to the table, and participate in honest discussions.

Source:

American Thinker 

The mass shooting miasma

How to Tell If a Trump Supporter Is Racist

Every non-liberal leftist -- that is, nearly every Democrat running for president, New York Times and Washington Post columnist, CNN and MSNBC host, and your left-wing brother-in-law -- labels every Trump supporter and, of course, President Donald Trump, a "racist."

And they don't stop there. Leftists don't only label the half of the country that supports the president "racist," they label all whites and America itself "racist." If your son or daughter attends or recently attended an American university, it is close to certain he or she was repeatedly told that America and all whites are racist. According to the left, whites are divided between those who admit they are racist and those who don't admit it.

Every conservative and many liberals know this is a big lie. The great question is: Do leftists believe it? It is impossible to know. But this we do know: If you repeat something often enough, and if your Weltanschauung (worldview) and that which gives your life meaning are dependent upon believing something, you will eventually believe it.

So here is a way to show it is a lie.

Ask any white conservative, including one who supports Trump, the following three questions:

1) Do you have more in common with, and are you personally more comfortable in the company of, a white leftist or a black conservative?

2) Would you rather have nine white leftists or nine black conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court?

3) Would you rather your child marry a black Christian conservative or a white non-Christian liberal?

A white racist would prefer the whites in each case.

Read more: 

How to Tell If a Trump Supporter Is Racist

Florida’s New Board of Education Chairman is an Evolution Denier

Florida’s State Board of Education recently announced a new chairman: Andy Tuck.

When he was first appointed to the board, in 2014 by then-Gov. Rick Scott, Tuck was just a citrus grower who previously served on the School Board of Highlands County. He was a typical GOP nominee, supporting charter schools and vouchers. No big shock.

But when he was on that local school board in 2008, he opposed the teaching of evolution as a “fact” in the state’s new science standards.

School Board Vice Chairman Andy Tuck said Thursday, “as a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory.

“I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”

To be clear, scientists describe evolution as a “theory” because all the available evidence supports it, not because it’s just one suggestion among many possibilities. Gravity is a theory, not a suggestion. That’s not the nuance that Tuck was offering, though. He wanted evolution to be taught as an option — alongside Creationism and Intelligent Design and other myths.

It’s disturbing enough that he doesn’t understand basic science. But it’s downright scary how he thought the state’s science curriculum ought to be decided based on his personal faith.

When Tuck was appointed to the State Board of Education in 2014, reporters asked him about that comment. Who knows! Maybe he changed his mind since then…? Nope. He hadn’t learned a damn thing.

Tuck said his problem is that scientists can’t say for certain how the universe began.
“I guess the thing I struggle with is you’re teaching evolution to fifth-graders and you get done and one says, ‘Where did it start?’” he said. “And you say what?”

Tuck’s inability to answer that question apparently meant Florida teachers shouldn’t be required to tell kids the truth. (Evolution, by the way, is about a process. It doesn’t answer how or why everything got started.)

So that guy is now running the State Board of Education.

I guess we can expect to see a lot more Florida Man stories over the next decade given the education these students won’t be receiving.

Source:
Florida’s New Board of Education Chairman is an Evolution Denier | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

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Democrats Have Lost What Was Left Of Their Minds

Imagine being a Democrat right now. You have the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate is small. In the race for the presidency, you have every advantage with the exception of incumbency. Yes, the economy is booming but there isn’t a mainstream media or cultural institution that isn’t on your side and willing to anything to help you win. All you have to do is not act crazy and you’re 99 percent of the way home. And that’s the problem, there are no longer any sane Democrats.

The House hearing with Robert Mueller on Wednesday was supposed to be their shining moment, their chance to rally the country to their thus far rejected cause. Instead, it was another in a long line of flops. After watching it, I wanted to call a hotline to, as I put it in my podcast, report a shameless display of elder abuse.

It’s true that Mueller didn’t want to be there, but it appears everyone was wrong about the reason why. He’s not “above the fray,” as he was portrayed by liberals, he’s lost a lot of steps. Most shockingly, the hearing exposed that he was, at best, barely involved in the investigation. He was a name to put on the letterhead to give it gravitas and the appearance of bipartisanship.

The hearing left those who watched it with the realization he was an autopen to sign off on subpoenas, letters, and the final report. I’d feel pity for him were there not so much destruction in his wake. No matter how many steps he’s lost, he knew he was driving people into bankruptcy chasing a unicorn and he sat there, silently, hammering paychecks.

But Mueller’s embarrassing testimony wasn’t the only problem for Democrats. They had to polish that turd, no matter what. This was their moment in the sun.

Democrats are running out of silver bullets to take out President Trump. First, they thought he’d implode. He didn’t. They said he’d destroy the economy, it’s thriving. They swore he colluded with Russia. He didn’t. The promised the Mueller report would change minds. It didn’t. They switched their focus to obstruction of justice. No one cared.

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Democrats Have Lost What Was Left Of Their Minds

Hump Day Hunnies

Let’s Call The Liberals’ Second Amendment Militia Bluff

 Kurt Schlichter

 The Second Amendment is so clear and simple that only liberals, aided by a half-wit liberal law school professor-tariat that is to real lawyering as Jerry Nadler is to Chippendales, could pretend to be confused about its meaning with a straight face.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The whole “shall not be infringed” part is a real problem for the left, since collectivist Castro-channelers prefer that we Americans be defenseless serfs existing at the government’s (i.e., their) mercy when we should be armed, freedom-loving citizens with the personal firepower to veto their pinko utopian schemes. So, they fixate on the 2A’s passing reference to the militia, spinning a prefatory statement that recognizes that a militia is a good thing into a directive to cancel out the whole “citizens having guns” part of the Second Amendment. 

In other words, to defeat its very purpose.

It’s a silly interpretation, and one that’s not even remotely asserted in good faith, but why not put aside all the constitutional arguments supporting our right to pack heat and just call their militia bluff? Maybe we should reinvigorate the concept of a militia in our great nation, if only to annoy liberals. 

So, pick up your weapon and fall in. Let’s do this thing. America, let’s get our militia on.

What is the “militia” anyway? It’s not goofy dudes in camo playing army. It’s the American people. It was those farmers, blacksmiths and other assorted non-hipsters who the Brits tried to disarm and who got all shooty in response. Today, it’s us, you and me, regular citizens with military arms so they can cap criminals and tyrants like bosses just as Nature intended.

That “well-regulated” part is what the Second Amendment Truthers focus on, but their analysis here (as with everything) is all wrong. They think Congress can well-regulate the militia into oblivion, presuming to misuse the clause to regulate away any right of actual citizens to have firearms with the ultimate goal of a militia that can’t be militant. That violates the longstanding principle that you do not interpret Constitutional provisions in such a way as to negate them, but liberals hate the Bill of Rights so what do you expect?

Read more:

Let’s Call The Liberals’ Second Amendment Militia Bluff

The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard

Students Want Top Earners to Pay Their Tuition

Millennial Becomes Unhinged After Boss Corrects her Spelling of ‘Hamster’

 

Originally published at American Thinker

 

By Selwyn Duke

 

Being simultaneously comical and tragic, perhaps nothing reflects our descent into Idiocracy more than millennials who’ll insist their misspellings of words are correct. Just yesterday I read an eyebrow-raising story about this that was quite timely, as I’d experienced millennial spelling moronity just the day prior.

My case involved a leftist who emailed me with some deep, substantive criticism: He said I was “insane,” “nuttier than a fruitcake” and “f*****g” nuts.”  I responded to him. While I generally don’t play the spelling Nazi, leftists’ characteristic superciliousness inspired me to mention to him, kindly, that he’d written “you’re” as “your” three times in six sentences. His response?

“I am under 40,” he wrote. “Your vs you’re is interchangeable.”

But on to the far more interesting and dramatic story I mentioned earlier. According to The Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM) blog, it’s from a series of July tweets by a Georgetown University adjunct professor of public relations and journalism named Carol Blymire; it relates something she’d witnessed. As the blog presents it:

    In office space near a client, a young woman was meeting with her boss. She was (by my estimation) in her late 20s.

    The boss (also a woman) was giving her feedback and reviewing edits she had made on something this young woman wrote.

    They had been speaking in low tones, but their volume got louder toward the end of the conversation because the young woman was getting agitated about a particular edit.

    That particular edit was correcting the spelling of “hampster” to “hamster”. [sic] Apparently she had used the phrase “like spinning in a hamster wheel” in this draft (presumably) speech or op-ed.

    The young woman kept saying, “I don’t know why you corrected that because I spell it with the P in it.” The boss said (calmly), “But that’s not how the word is spelled. There is no P in hamster.”

    Young woman: “But you don’t know that! I learned to spell it with a P in it so that’s how I spell it.”

    The boss (remaining very calm and professional), [said] let’s go to https://t.co/n2ZU5Uuuy3 and look it up together. (mind you, this is a woman in her late 20s, not a 5th grader) [sic]

    The young woman insists she doesn’t need to look it up because it’s FINE to spell it with a P because that’s HOW SHE WANTED TO SPELL IT.

    The boss says, “Let’s look over the rest of the piece so I can explain the rest of my edits.” They do, and I can see the young woman is fighting back tears. The boss is calm, cool, and handles this with professionalism and empathy.

    Boss says, “I know edits can be difficult to go over sometimes, especially when you’re working on new kinds of things as you grow in your career, but it’s a necessary process and makes us all better at what we do.”

    Boss gets up from table and goes to her office and the young woman can barely hold it together. She moves to another table in the common workspace area, drops all her stuff loudly on the table top, and starts texting. A minute later, her phone rings.

    It was her mom. She had texted her mom to call her because it was urgent, and I’m sure her mother maybe thought she was in the ER or something. She then … PUTS HER MOM ON SPEAKERPHONE. IN THE WORKPLACE.

    She bursts into tears and wants her mom to call her boss and tell her not to be mean about telling her how to spell words like “hamster”. [sic]

    The mother tells her that her boss is an idiot and she doesn’t have to listen to her and she should go to the boss’ boss to file a complaint about not allowing creativity in her writing.

    The young woman kept saying, “I thought what I wrote was perfect and she just made all these changes and then had the nerve to tell me I was spelling words wrong when I know they are right because that is how I have always spelled them.”

    She then went on (still on speakerphone) to tell her mom I’m very great and office-inappropriate detail about how hungover she was and what she and her friends did with some guys the night before. Mom laughed and laughed.

    The colleagues in and around the workplace kept looking at one another and some even put earbuds/headphones in/on. It appeared as though this was a regular thing with her.

    She ended the conversation asking her mom how she should bring this up with the boss’ boss. “I mean, I always spell hamster with a P, [sic] she has no right to criticize me.”

Based on the way her mom spoke to her and they way they spoke to one another, it seemed as though this young woman had never been told she was anything but perfect by family.
 

Her boss seemed as dumbfounded through the conversation as I was in overhearing it.
 

I think I was most perplexed by the insistence of wanting to spell something the way she wanted to because SHE WANTED TO, ignoring the fact that there are rules and dictionaries. And seeming offended that anyone would suggest the use of an outside resource as reference.

Had I been the boss, I’m sure the young woman’s tears would have flowed much sooner and more profusely. It would have been the result of the dressing-down I’d have given her. I was never one to suffer fools gladly.

The FOTM mentions that this isn’t an isolated case, either. In fact, the blogger, who apparently has taught in college herself, related a story about what transpired when an undergraduate complained to her about a poor grade she gave him on a paper. After telling him that she had trouble understanding his work because it was riddled with errors, he replied “I don’t subscribe to the rules of the English language!” and marched from the classroom.

It would be easy to chalk this up to “inventive spelling,” a phenomenon of recent decades whereby, instead of correcting a child’s spelling, a teacher will allow him to misspell words based on his phonetic conception of them. But it goes far deeper than that.

First, we live in the post-Truth West. A study I often cite vindicates this assessment, showing that less than 10 percent of teenagers believe in Truth (absolute by definition) and that a majority of Americans are most likely to make what should be moral decisions “based on feelings.” 

Why is this relevant? If people believe Truth doesn’t exist and, therefore, that what we call morality (divine rules) is mere “perspective,” they probably won’t care much about man’s rules — especially since, by their lights, those rules can’t possibly correspond to anything transcending man. Their governing philosophy then becomes “If it feels good, do it.” This was evident in the young woman in the story, who, essentially, insisted she was correct because her feelings told her so.

Relating to this, there’s also the narcissism, the solipsism, the self-centeredness that results when you raise godless children on self-esteem bunk and treat them as if their body odor is a floral scent.

As for employees who are mere overgrown children, I’d respond to their antipathy for rules and their inventive spelling by giving them an inventive paycheck.

Millennial becomes unhinged after boss corrects her spelling of ‘hamster'

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

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