The Alligator News Roundup

Number 5. The Guardian. US court revives Mexico lawsuit against gun makers

At last, the solution, compliments of a Mexican lawyer and a Boston judge!

In a move certain to dramatically decrease cartel drug trafficking and virtually eliminate cartel-related gun violence, the 1st U.S. circuit court of appeals (Boston) reversed a lower court order. That lower court had ruled quite UNreasonably that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA, 2005), which shielded U.S. gun manufacturers from lawsuits, actually was intended to shield gun manufacturers from lawsuits.

Not so fast! said the Boston judge, sucking on his pipe stuffed with El Primo Loco Mexican weed. The PLCAA only protects somebody like Ruger if they sell a gun in America legally, and then the legal buyer decides to shoot someone in America illegally. In THAT case, he clarified, Ruger has NO liability for the dead guy, and cannot be sued.

But in THIS case, Ruger and others are responsible for actually smuggling guns into Mexico. Presumably they did this by taking legal orders from U.S. distributors, who sold the guns to legal buyers, who then sold them illegally to coyotes seeking to avoid an empty southbound backhaul, who then illegally transported them across the border.

But never mind about the details of these transactions, urged the attorney, because, he said, we have a big problem with lots of guns shooting people in Mexico, and if we get rid of 600,000 U.S. guns that we smuggle in each year — err, that is, that Ruger smuggles in each year — then nobody would get shot with a gun anymore.

And that is why we need $10 billion (dinero de Los Estados Unidos) to put this right.

When asked how exactly $10 billion U.S. from gun manufacturers would stop the illegal trafficking of legally purchased guns, the judge gently waved his pipe in the air with a contented smile, and said, “Next case!”

Number 4. The LA Times. California’s plastic bag ban is failing.

At least their heart is in the right place. True, they may have left their brain at home, but the heart is what counts.

When voters in the Land of Fruits and Nuts approved Senate Bill 270 in 2016, those lightweight plastic grocery store bags were in the crosshairs.

The very thin, light bags that we associate with one-time-use grocery bags are made of low-density polyethylene, or LDPE. California went through about 30 billion of those each year until they were banned by SB 270. That added up to about 8 pounds of plastic bags per person per year.

They were banned because, since they are so lightweight, they are not recyclable. The flimsy material clogs the machinery of conveyor belts and gears, and drifts away on a gentle breeze when you try to catch it.

Because recycling will save our planet, which is such an Obvious Moral Truth that only a deranged MAGA-ite would ever question it, Californians were urged to exchange their flimsy LDPE bags for the much heavier HDPE alternative: High-density polyethylene, which CAN be recycled. You know it can be, because each bag is stamped with the universal “recycle me” arrow logo.

But HDPE bags cost more than LDPE bags, so grocery stores started selling them to customers for 10 cents apiece. Because the bags are heavier, they can be reused. Customers were urged to bring their bags back to the store next trip, to save the planet and to save 10 cents.

Turns out Californians were no more concerned with saving 10 cents on a hundred-dollar grocery store trip than any of the rest of us are, so demand for the HDPE bags was about the same as for the LDPEs, except they are heavier. So now the average plastic bag waste per person per year in California is 11 pounds instead of 8.

Under the law that was intended to reduce plastic bag waste, plastic bag waste grew by 40% in 8 years.

But wait, there’s more!

While HDPE bags can be recycled, there are very few recyclers in California who have the equipment to do so. You cannot simply put the HDPE bag in your recycle bin to be picked up with your trash, because there, it will simply blow away. That’s why landfills have 20-foot-tall fences around them. Instead, you must take the HDPE bag to the grocery store where they have a special HDPE recycle bin. (The same grocery store you did not bring your HDPE bag to because it was too much of a hassle.)

The HDPE recycler then makes the rounds to all the grocery stores and picks up the bins. Except that secret studies using Apple tracking devices — I am not making this up — prove that the bins usually just end up either at the landfill with the conventional waste, or at a Mexico port waiting for shipment to southeast Asia where they will eventually be thrown in the ocean.

And wait, there’s more yet!

During COVID, the hair-on-fire contingent was convinced that if you bring your reusable HDPE plastic bag from home to carry your groceries, the potentially infected bag would kill everyone in the grocery store, so California banned reusing the bags. (Turns out, by the way, as we all now know, COVID is spread as an aerosol, not by touch.) But whatever… you had to go ahead and purchase a new HDPE bag for 10 cents. That was easier anyway.

And it created that much more HDPE waste.

So now, the LA Times recommends that you just go ahead and put the HDPE bag in the trash and let somebody take it to the landfill, where they have 20-foot-tall fences to catch the bags. But that will not stop well-intentioned bureaucrats from launching investigations into why California trash shows up in a Mexico port bound for Vietnam.

To finance such investigations, there is a strong temptation among politicians to confiscate half the 10 cents that grocery stores charge for the bags.

So… why don’t we just burn the plastic bags? Is that like, really, really bad? Even if we use an incinerator with very high temperatures that does not release smoke or particulates? They make those, you know. That’s how lots of slaughter houses dispose of animal carcasses.

Or maybe go back to paper bags? That would be really bad, too? Even though there is more forest now than there was 50 years ago? And even though thinning some of it would be better for forest fire management?

I guess my heart must not be in the right place.

Personally, I can’t stand the plastic bags, either LDPE or HDPE. Ever since one got caught on the hood ornament of a rented Cadillac on I-35 north of Ft Worth, I have hated them. That silly bag fluttered there for a hundred miles, until I finally stopped to get rid of it. And then it was so wrapped around the Caddy logo I had to cut it loose with a pocketknife.

So I’m pretty sure my heart is NOT in the right place. Let’s move on.

Number 3. Sat News dot com. SpaceX to deorbit 100 Starlink satellites

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has about 6,000 satellites in low earth orbit today. They provide internet service so that as many people as possible can tweet on X whenever they are not watching teenage girls on TikTok, and therefore the public interest is well served by his Starlink network.

If you remember the Mercury and Gemini programs, which came before Apollo and which almost no one remembers now, an object in orbit around the earth must travel about 18,000 miles an hour to stay aloft. If it is in a very high orbit, say 30,000 miles up, it will seem to move slower than the rotating Earth below it. If it is in a very low orbit, say 1,000 miles up, it will appear to move faster than the Earth below it.

If you want that 18,000 mile-per-hour satellite to stay in exactly the same spot above the earth so that you can, for example, bounce a radio signal off it from a fixed earth station, it must be exactly 22,300 miles high.

That’s just how the arithmetic comes out. I think Arthur C. Clark was the first one who came up with that, before he wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey. I am not making this up.

So it you want to access some cool website via satellite, but you live in Bugtussle Arizona where there is no fiberoptic telephone service, you will have to bounce your signal off that really tall-up-there satellite, and let it bounce down to the TikTok server after you hit ENTER, and then wait for it to make the round-trip back, and that will take more than half a second, and by that time your video will have moved and you will have missed the good part.

So you need a satellite a lot closer to earth than Arthur Clark’s 22,300 miles.

So DARPA invented cellular telephones.

Okay, that’s not exactly why. But the satellites in low earth orbit (1,200 miles or less) move fast, and they are over the horizon before you get to the juicy part of the video. The technology of cell phones allows the satellites to pass the signal off to each other so that you don’t miss a single… thing, from TikTok.

And that is why there are so many SpaceX internet satellites in orbit.

But they don’t live forever. They are maneuverable, but they all have batteries which will fail sometime, and then the orbits will decay, and one of these days one of them may come through your windshield while you are waiting in line at McDonalds and turn your Toyota into a small fireball and you will finally have made the evening news.

So Elon has made his satellites out of a special burn-me-up-when-I’m-done material, so that when the orbit decays, they flame out and disappear and you can eat your Big Mac in peace. Which will also kill you, but it may take a little longer, and it won’t be on the evening news.

And also, he has a plan for which satellites get burned up when. This year, it turns out his people detected some problem with a few of them. They will not say what problem it was, exactly, probably something like they all suddenly started broadcasting your social security number to Saturn or something, but they have to come down.

So his people are deliberately bringing them down a little at a time. This is called deorbiting. De-orbiting is sort of like when your draft board wrote to you after you de-enrolled in those college classes that were so confusing. Or like when your girlfriend suggested you begin de-dating for a while.

But not to worry. SpaceX can launch about 200 satellites every month, so you should see no interruption in your important surfing.

Two HUNDRED??? In a MONTH??? I remember when we took a 4th grade field trip to the teacher’s house across the street to watch a Mercury launch. One launch! And THAT was exciting!

Number 2. Cybernews. A I identified that men and women have different brains.

Researchers at Stanford University have come to a conclusion that fundamentally reshapes our perceptions of how nature works.

Having given up on more gnarly problems, like how the thermos bottle knows whether the coffee inside is hot or cold, which has vexed scientists for decades, this team has tackled the queen bee of problems: Why it is that men do not understand why women think the way they do.

What they found was this:

Men and women think differently, and this sometimes leads to misunderstandings between them, and it is all related to how their brains work.

I know… it is new information that is hard to digest. You might have to read that sentence several times.

Scientists learned this through the use a multi-gazillion dollar Artificial Intelligence robot that dissected two human brains of volunteer subjects.

They first verified the sex of the subjects by viewing their preferred pronouns on social media. Then, with the brains open on the table, they asked each person questions about their work, their children, how to make gravy, how a gear shift works, and so forth. They used meat thermometers to see how hot various chunks of their brains got when they answered.

From this, the robot learned that the man thought with different parts of his brain, and that the woman didn’t have to think at all because she just seemed to know the answers without thinking about it. There was some post-surgery discussion about who had programmed the robot, since all the people who built it had names like Bob and Jack.

Okay, honestly, that is not exactly how this article describes the test, but if I used all those words the article used, like differentiation, striatum, limbic, neuropsychiatric, and chromosomes, you wouldn’t understand it either. I think my explanation is simpler, and actually leads to the same conclusion: That men and women think differently, and this is due to how their brains are constructed.

Afterward, two of the researchers gave an interview on the experiment.

Scientist Ralph said: “This model worked really well because we were able to identify the specific region of the brain that became active in relation to certain patterns of behavior.”

Scientist Sally added: “Our team worked well together because last weekend I went water skiing with my family.”

On camera, Ralph replied: “Sally, that has absolutely nothing to do with this experiment.”

Sally then avoided eye contact, sniffed, and said she was done talking about it.

Number 1. The Daily Wire. Michigan urges citizens to secure and prepare housing for migrants.

Ever the most welcoming state in the union, Michigan is asking their residents to show their hospitality in tangible ways by assisting new immigrant arrivals whom they have never seen before.

Michiganders are asked to pick up their new friends at the local airport, take them home, offer them a spare bedroom, feed them and help them find jobs. The expectation is that this arrangement should stay in place for 90 days.

There is no word on whether the immigrants, mostly from equatorial zones, will be expected to help shovel snow in the driveway, which will probably become an issue, as this program began in February.

The opportunity to serve in this way is offered by the Welcome Corps, an initiative of the Office of Global Michigan, which is part of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Impoverishment, operating under the umbrella of Sensible Re-education for Forced Wealth Redistribution.

Residents are urged to first make application to sponsor a refugee, in order to be matched with an appropriate migrant, often a single adult male of military age with strong physical skills but no English, since that is most commonly the profile of the person now entering the U.S.

If the housing and job hunting arrangement does not work out for the host family, or if, through simple misunderstandings, the strong, youthful, well-fed and comfortably housed guest fails to vacate the premises after 90 days, when he is expected to move into a cold one-room apartment which takes the entire amount of his minimum-wage paycheck at his new job … well… the offer from the Welcome Corps of the Office of Global Michigan is not specific on what the new expectation might be.

But let’s not be a Debbie Downer about this. With an estimated 20 million new residents in the U.S. since 2020 (that number is an estimate because we actually have no idea how many there really are), and with another 20 million potential in the next 4 years, we have literally millions of opportunities to succeed.

So let’s get after it! For those of us who have a spare bedroom (or bedrooms), Michigan is showing us the way to our future!

And that’s The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, February 23, 2024. If you like this, share it with a friend, who may never speak to you again, and subscribe by clicking the button below! Don’t miss a single issue!