The story went on to say that, in some more progressive urban locations, these bins were starting to be monitored electronically, and that if you put material into the wrong bin, you were going to be fined by the authorities. *

This is micro level control at it’s finest! Training the rats to jump through hoops, or to push a roller across the table.

Recycling is a laudable goal—is, no doubt, beneficial, all well and good—but, you need to realize that recycling and, on a larger scale, “global warming” are just excuses, vehicles used to ultimately achieve the universal control and obedience that those on the Left want.

(One major indication of this lack of actual belief in the causes these Leftist activists espouse, this falsity, is the lives that those “activists” pushing, say, global warming actually live, their huge “carbon footprints”–their use of private aircraft, not uncomfortable, and full of grubby people commercial, their transportation by car, and not by crowded subway, commercial bus transportation, train, or ship, their huge and often multiple houses–lights ablaze—see Al Gore, see Bernie Sanders, who recently bought a very nice beachfront summer vacation home—his third house.

These activists above living up to and by the rules and lives they prescribe for all the rest of us “little people.”)

This is all really about the ability of those on the Left who want to be in charge to make you–supposedly for a supremely good cause, and to avert this or that “existential threat”—into a puppet—increasingly unable to question, to think, say, or do anything that is not regulated or licensed by them, not channeled into a very precise orthodoxy and direction–into a series of beliefs, statements acknowledging and adhering to their dictated theology, and actions that those on the Left dictate.

All about taking away your freedom, your free will, your ability to think for yourself, and to believe what you wish, to express yourself freely, your decision making power, and your control over your lives, how you live them and, very importantly, over your assets.

It’s all about convincing you that there is an “existential threat,” a huge Crisis, an EMERGENCY so huge, so urgent, that everything has to be dropped, normal procedures scrapped—no time for normal investigation, thought, debate and rumination—“the science is settled”—and you have to fall in line, to obey, or die.

Thus, we saw—the thoroughly propagandized, and no doubt scared sh!tless—gang of little 10 and 12 year olds who descended on Senator Feinstein’s office recently, yelling that “we only have 12 years to turn this around,” (or we will all die), and demanding that the Senator, commit, right then and there, to vote for AOC’s “Green New Deal.” **

* See https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/773376/brexit-eu-rules-recycling-schemes-billions-saved-european-union

** See https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/24/sen_dianne_feinstein_argues_with_children_over_green_new_deal.html

I like seriously overdiluted Crystal Light and also cucumber water. Seems to me you could make both using Sodastream, or an old-fashioned soda siphon IF that produces plain seltzer sparkling water and not club soda.

Thereafter, I didn’t bother to look anymore, because I already knew how much the city really cared about recycling.

We do try to be careful about recycling here in this country but, from what I have read, the vast majority of the trash created and not carefully disposed of around the world and that turns up–say, for instance, as the mats of trash that people report seeing floating in our oceans–are the products of just two major polluters–China and India.

Have you read or heard anything about these two major polluting country’s efforts to recycle? I haven’t.

One of the co-founders of Greenpeace was on Tucker Carlson tonight, savagely criticizing AOC’s Green New Deal and, in passing, he mentioned that many people likely thought that the food they bought in the supermarket–wrapped in plastic–was manufactured by that supermarket, and that they did not realize that that food came from farms which were some distance, sometimes many states away, or even overseas, requiring trucks, trains, aircraft, and ships–all using fossil fuels–to transport the food to that supermarket. *

People who don’t know how their food is grown, and where it comes from can, thus ,make very bad decisions, say, fall for a program that requires we give up all fossil fuels (in 12 years, no less), without anything to replace them.

That led to the thought of how many of our people today, especially those in our coastal cities, were disconnected from real life, from the land, from the farming that, at one time, was the occupation of the great majority of the people here in the U.S. and, thus, have no idea of what it takes to support the civilization that they enjoy, and so obviously take for granted.

Thus, their disdain for those who provide their food, and energy in “flyover country.”

This lead to another thought, about just how that remove from nature and–thanks to Disney and Smokey the Bear posters–that ignorance and unrealistic view of nature and of animals can lead to some bad consequences.

See, for instance, the story out in the last couple of days about the woman who crossed a safety barrier at a zoo to get close to a Jaguar to take a “selfie” with it, and who, in consequence, got her arm slashed open, and is pictured screaming in the video below.**

* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/03/greenpeace-co-founder-patrick-moore-drops-a-moab-on-aoc-and-her-green-new-deal-it-will-be-end-of-civilization-half-the-population-will-die-video/

** See https://pjmedia.com/trending/no-zoo-animals-dont-want-selfies-with-you/

As to your “irrational fideism”, I trust you have read John Paul II’s encyclical, “Fide et Ratio”. Powerful stuff from that Saint!

I really believe that Leftism is the religion* that replaced mainstream Protestantism in America as it drifted away from its faith and became de-supernaturalized.

As “theological liberals” took over the Protestant seminaries in the early 1900’s, the people who still believed in God reacted as conservatives always seem to: Instead of reconquering their own existing institutions through bareknuckle political infighting, they abandoned them, splitting off to form their own new parallel institutions in which they could reassert “the fundamentals of the faith” (like the literal existence of God). They thus became known as “Fundamentalists.”

This meant that the mainline Protestant churches (most especially the Episcopalians, but also the then-differently-named ancestors of PCUSA and ELCA) gradually bled out all their genuine believers, losing them to the newly-launched Evangelical churches and para-church organisations. Two generations later, the mainline leadership consisted almost entirely of persons who didn’t believe but felt that a church was a perfectly fine place to act out their personal inclination for moralizing and social meddling, governed less by Holy Writ than by emotionalism and left-wing politics.

In the last three decades, these churches have seen a profound collapse in membership. The reason is this: Half their remaining members said, “If these leaders don’t believe, why should I?” and started sleeping in on Sundays. The other half said, “If these leaders don’t believe, I’ll go find some others who do,” and departed for other churches: Mostly churches which had started out “fundamentalist” in the mid-20th century but had “softened” and become “more seeker-sensitive” by the dawn of the 21st century: The non-denominational Evangelical churches.

That swelled the ranks of Evangelicals and allowed them an outlet for their religious instinct.

But what about the folk who started sleeping in on Sundays?

They, too, retained a latent religious instinct. They felt unsettled if they didn’t have:
– a cosmology and metaphysics
– an ethical crusade to participate in
– an apocalyptic eschatology
– a set of rituals to practice
– a way to cheaply buy indulgences to alleviate their feelings of moral guilt
– a sense of community
– a diabolical enemy to struggle against
– a set of sermons to attend

So, their own functional religion evolved, in which those needs were met as follows:
– cosmology/metaphysics: reductive materialism coupled to a purely emotional “spirituality”
– ethical crusade: Save the Planet!
– apocalyptic eschatology: Global Warming Will Kill Us All In Ten Years!
– ritual system: Recycling, Buying Priuses
– buying indulgences: By promoting leftist political policies, I prove that I Am One Of The Enlightened White People, and get a pass on the sin of being white
– sense of community: Left-wing political activism and Following All The People On Twitter Who Exhibit My Same Tribal Markers
– enemy to struggle against: Republicans are demons, and Trump is the devil himself
– a set of sermons to attend: TED Talks and attending lectures during Sex Week on campus

I defy anyone to offer a better explanation of the above behaviors than as a surrogate for the religious instinct they inherited from their grandparents, but for which they had no other outlet.

This is why I think Democrats should be excluded from American politics: We want to prevent the establishment of religion.

* = Above, for simplicity, I used the term “religion,” but I think superstition is a better term. An honest-to-God “religion” takes pains to have internally-consistent doctrinal content, and shuns outright irrational fideism. (Witness the detailed thought of Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides in the High Middle Ages, Calvin’s Institutes and the Council of Trent during the 16th century, and today’s various systematic theologians and philosopher/apologists.)

But leftism doesn’t seem overly concerned with any such rigor, and belief in Separating Your Recyclables when they’re all just going to the same landfill falls closer to “lucky rabbit’s foot” territory than to Aquinas’ Five Ways.

You could get a $50 fine if the local police saw you toss an aluminum can into a city trash can, instead of a recycling bin.

So everyone dutifully started “offering incense to the emperor,” going to silly lengths to try to separate out recyclables and carry them around with them, or store them, until they could be gotten to a bin.

The argument was, “Well, we gotta start somewhere!”

But the dirty secret was: The contents of those Recycle Bins, and the contents of all the Trash Cans, were going to the same darned place.

That’s right: They had no separate system for what to do with the cans and the plastic bottles. They didn’t even have a fixed plan for how to invent that system. Five years later, it was the same: All the trash, whether marked “recycling” or not, was going to the same landfill.

That marked the beginning of my personal conversion from “the Left are people with different opinions” to “the Left are obnoxious, irrational busybodies who want to boss other people around, compelling them to mouth Leftist platitudes and observe Leftist pieties, all so that the Leftists in charge can strut and preen and feel self-satisfied.”

And that was 1993.

In the intervening years, I’ve observed absolutely nothing to make me revise that generalization.

There was some reporting a few years ago about a large landfill in Shenzhen in southern China, located about 15 miles from the ocean. Ocean barges packed with recycled materials from European cities were arriving at a nearby port and their cargoes (mostly of glass and plastic) were being trucked straight into the landfill. This was covered extensively by the BBC. I’m not a big fan of China, but it’s hard to criticize their authorities for stopping this sort of practice.