Raw Is War

Why is it that when it comes to environmentalism, there's all the pain but never any gain?  Because of greenstremism, we can't tap our domestic energy resources, resulting in ever higher prices at the pump and dangerous overdependence on foreign sources.  Because of greenstremism we have functionally lost the right to use private property as we see fit, undermining its value and rendering its ownership increasingly pointless.  Because of greenstremism we're being forced to sacrifice arable land and thus even agricultural self-sufficiency.  And because of greenstemism, we're being threatened with the effective government takeover of the energy sector resulting in skyrocketing energy prices and more or less permanent economic depression   All in the name of false choices (clean vs dirty air/water), a menagerie of irrelevant critters nobody ever heard of, and malevolent alarmist hoaxes like global warming/climate change.

As Patrick Star once plaintively asked, "Who are these people"?  How did they get, and what the devil entitles them to, such dominance over the economic fortunes of the United States of America?  And will they ever be satisfied in their maniacal, insatiable obsession with taking from us every last perq and comfort of modern society?

Yes, that question was rhetorical:

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for “soft” (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).

It’s a menace, environmental groups say — and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods. …

Toilet paper is far from being the biggest threat to the world’s forests: together with facial tissue, it accounts for 5% of the U.S. forest-products industry, according to industry figures. Paper and cardboard packaging makes up 26% of the industry, although more than half is made from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3%.

But environmentalists say 5% is still too much.

I have only one thing to say to "environmental groups" in this regard: GET OFF MY ASS!!!  If wiping one's avatar with a pinecone or a corncob or staple-laced pages from the Montgomery-Ward catalog was such a pleasant experience, we'd still be doing it a century later.  For that matter, why not come out next and demand the outlawing of indoor plumbing?  My mother has regaled me many times with her experiences of having to venture out to the [ahem] drafty outhouse in blustery below-zero blizzard conditions to sit her behind down on the freezing, splintered seat right above the gag-inducing aroma wafting up from the cesspit below, the only saving grace being that the flies that otherwise would be buzzing around (like during the rest of the year) had either perished from the stench or frozen to death.  BUT AT LEAST SHE HAD SINGLE-PLY BATHROOM TISSUE!  These neoBolsheviks would have taken even THAT from her.

The irony is that if they'd just wait a few more years, the print media will be dead and the 3% of "forest products" it consumes will be left in the ground.  Or at the very least that will eliminate a mode of being harassed about seeing to the least avoidable hygienic need via sandpaper and brillo pads.

But remember, my friends, who these people really are.  Ensign Morrissey argues that "They need to convince the consumers, not the producers, that rougher is better."  But environmental extremists aren't about persuasion; they're about coercion.  They don't want to convince anybody of anything; they want to use the police power of the state to FORCE consumers AND producers to do their bidding.  And that bidding is to roll the United States - except for THEM, of course! - all the way back to 1867 economically and technologically, right down to instructing us on the techniques for pooping without getting any of it on ya.  Or, failing that, wiping ourselves "organically" (i.e. with our hands).

Environmentalists will never consent to a primitive, disease-ridden cave existence - oh, sorry, living in harmony with nature.  If they won't embrace the life of Moon-Watcher, why should we let them be the killer leopard that eats us?